geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

📚 Debtors’ Planet by W.R. Thompson

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70/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

This one surprised me in good ways. I wasn’t optimistic at first, with its focus on Ferengi, who can be annoying (especially in the pre-Quark days), and with it bringing back an (intentionally) annoying character from the show. But it handled both of these elements surprisingly well; the primary Ferengi antagonist is a little more thoughtful than most of the era, and the returning character is actually given some depth and is able to use his traits and quirks in ways that advance the story. Add in some amusing Worf/Riker bits and Wesley actually being treated like a worthwhile character as he forms a friendship with an alien ensign, and this (notwithstanding some confusion over how the Federation handles money and an “offscreen” sexual assault that wasn’t really necessary) is definitely an above average entry in the series.

Me holding Debtors' Planet

📚 The Rising by James Doohan and S.M. Stirling

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69/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to read military SF about a Scotch/Irish former fighter pilot who turned spaceship engineer after being wounded and losing a hand, written by a former soldier and pilot turned actor who played a Scotch spaceship engineer after being wounded and losing a finger, then this is definitely the book for you! Aside from the rather amusing list of similarities between Doohan and his protagonist, and the curiosity of reading SF co-authored by Doohan, it’s fairly standard military SF, combining interstellar war with a “who’s the saboteur” mystery.

Me holding The Rising.

Year 50 Day 227

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Me holding a dusty five-port Ethernet switch.

Day 227: Well, this is a first. In the midst of troubleshooting some ongoing network issues at home, I realized that this lil’ five-port Ethernet switch was failing. I don’t know how long I’ve had it, but while I didn’t know these things could fail (I mean, sure, entropy happens, and there is the eventual heat death of the universe to consider, but they’re just so plug-and-play, set-it-and-forget-it that they seem eternal), it seems this one’s time has come. Its new seven-port replacement is in place and doing just fine.

Apple Music Grumbling

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(That’s both “the Apple Music service” and “using Apple devices to listen to music”, to be clear.)

For all the things Apple does well that I like and appreciate, and that keep me as a customer, some things absolutely drive me up the wall.

I have a big music collection, so I’m particular about how I keep things arranged on my computers and my iPhone. I have a bunch of custom smart playlists, keep my phone set to only sync certain playlists, and do not automatically sync my entire library. I simply have too much music to do that, and I don’t want to have to scroll through every playlist to find one of the few that I use on my phone.

Because of this, for a long time, I avoided Apple Music. (For other reasons too, including that I am particular about my metadata and have spent ridiculous numbers of hours making sure it’s correct, and Apple has a particularly annoying habit of overwriting user-defined metadata if you give it full access to the on-device library.) I finally signed up a few years back when the Apple One collection of services hit a good cost/usefulness ratio. It has come in handy (particularly for my wife), but I make sure to keep the “sync library” setting turned off, so that I know that I’m the only one managing the music on my phone.

For a long time, this worked fine. 95% of my phone-based listening was from my on-device library; the 5% of the time that I actually used Apple Music (I like their “Get Up!” playlist when I’m making breakfast in the morning, and will sometimes pop on their “Chill Mix” or a downtempo or trip-hop station as background music when I’m reading or relaxing before bed) was a nice way to get a mix of stuff I knew and stuff I was unfamiliar with. I’ve found some good new (or new to me) tunes that way as well, so even when it’s only a small part of my listening, Apple Music has been helping with music discovery as well.

So this was working. When I listened to Apple Music and heard something I liked, I’d “favorite” it. This would both help to train Apple Music so it would find more stuff I liked, and allowed me to go back and find the things I liked so that I could then go back and actually buy the full tracks or albums from the iTunes Store. As someone who doesn’t trust streaming services and regularly purchases the media that I enjoy so that I know I have a copy and don’t have to worry about it magically disappearing when licensing agreements change (I want to own my media, not rent it while being told I’m buying it), this seems like exactly the kind of use that Apple and the studios and artists would want. Streaming, like radio, is a way to find new things that I then go and spend more money to own (and send a more reasonable number of pennies back to the artists).

Unfortunately, for some reason, they’ve made an obnoxious change with iOS 17. Now, every time I try to “favorite” a song, I’m told that I have to turn on the “sync library” setting. Apparently, Apple no longer really considers your Apple Music library and your on-device library to be separate things. The first time this happened, not realizing what would happen, I made the mistake of turning on the “sync library” setting, and while I could then favorite tracks in Apple Music, it also completely screwed up what was on my phone. I had every playlist that I have on my computer on my phone instead of just the ones that I manually select, but for some reason, they were all empty, and therefore useless. There was still a lot of music on the phone in the “Downloaded” list, but the playlists didn’t show anything, and it was incredibly difficult to figure out what was actually on my phone and what was in the cloud somewhere without digging through that “Downloads” list. That got disabled again after a couple days of trying to figure out a way to make it work.

I really don’t understand this change, and why Apple Music can no longer learn about my tastes without completely screwing up the systems I’ve had working for years for keeping just the music I want on my phone. But the end result is that Apple Music is now far less useful to me than it has been, and I’m less likely to use it (but, of course, Apple’s unlikely to care, because I’m just going to keep paying for it as part of the Apple One subscription…).

Apple does a lot well. But I really wish they’d put a little (well…a lot) more thought behind the entire music experience, especially for people like me with large libraries that we’ve put a lot of effort into sorting, tweaking metadata, and generally futzing with to make sure they’re set up just as we like.

Searching for a Postalicious replacement

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Hey WordPress plugin people: Does anyone know of a working and supported plugin that does what Postalicious used to?

Ideally, I’d like to return to something I used to be able to do: post a daily “here’s what I found interesting today” roundup post. Way back when, I used del.icio.us to save links; those would get picked up by Postalicious, and once a day, they’d be aggregated into a single post (example from 2009 here).

Is there a similar plugin, or other known way (some sort of IFTTT integration, maybe?) to do such a thing? Conceptually, it seems rather simple, but I don’t know what bookmarking services have open APIs or other ways to hook in, and I don’t have the coding chops to create my own.

📚 Sins of Commission by Susan Wright

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67/2023 – ⭐️⭐️

Much of the plot revolves around an alien race that broadcasts emotions that affect everyone around them, which means nobody is acting the way they should, so it’s hard for me to tell whether people acting out of character and making decisions that don’t make sense was intentional or not. But by the end, I wasn’t really sure what the reasoning or motivations were for many of the actions taken. Plus, some of the key points (like a small breakthrough in understanding the new aliens) were far too obvious to not be thought about by the characters until halfway through the book. This one is quite forgettable.

Me holding Sins of Commission

Not a Spotify Wrap-up

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Okay, so lots of people are posting their end-of-year Spotify wrap-ups showing off their listening habits. I don’t subscribe to Spotify (they don’t pay their artists nearly enough, and they have a history of supporting podcasters I have issues with, so they don’t get my money), but I do have Apple Music (who, really, should also pay their artists more, but they’re at least better than Spotify), and Apple does an end-of-year “replay” thing.

Of course, even this is a very small peek at my listening habits, because I really don’t use Apple Music all that much. I get it as part of a subscription bundle, and only really use it briefly in the mornings before work, or occasionally in the evenings before bed. Most of the time I listen to songs from my local collection.

That said, though, here’s what Apple says about the, oh, 10% (if that) of my music listening that it knows about….

Top Artists

Top Artists 549 total artists 1 The Orb 137 minutes 2 Nine Inch Nails 136 minutes 3 4 Dolly Parton 128 minutes Orbital 124 minutes 5 Underworld 89 minutes 6 Bonobo 71 minutes 7 Hooverphonic 69 minutes 8 Imperative Reaction 64 minutes 9 Velvet Acid Christ 61 minutes 10 Apoptygma Berzerk 51 minutes 11 VNV Nation 50 minutes 12 Seabound 50 minutes 13 Front Line Assembly 46 minutes 14 Rotersand 44 minutes 15 Icon of Coil 44 minutes

549 total artists

  1. The Orb 137 minutes
  2. Nine Inch Nails 136 minutes
  3. Dolly Parton 128 minutes
  4. Orbital 124 minutes
  5. Underworld 89 minutes
  6. Bonobo 71 minutes
  7. Hooverphonic 69 minutes
  8. Imperative Reaction 64 minutes
  9. Velvet Acid Christ 61 minutes
  10. Apoptygma Berzerk 51 minutes
  11. VNV Nation 50 minutes
  12. Seabound 50 minutes
  13. Front Line Assembly 46 minutes
  14. Rotersand 44 minutes
  15. Icon of Coil 44 minutes

I’m quite amused that Dolly landed so high on this list, particularly how out of place she looks. But her recent Rock Star album is great, and it has been getting a lot of plays since it came out. Worth it!

Top Songs

Top Songs 872 total songs 1 BAD GUYS FEELIN' ALRIGHT ELLE KING Feelin' Alright (from... Elle King 8 plays 2 Wide Open The Crystal Method 6 plays 3 Cuts You Up Peter Murphy 5 plays 4 Came Back Haunted Nine Inch Nails 5 plays 5 Dial8 Velvet Acid Christ 5 plays 6 Modern Love David Bowie 7 5 plays HOOVERPHONIC 2Wicky Hooverphonic 5 plays 8 IMMA ATE Express Yourself (Edi... Madonna Madonna 5 plays 9 The Night (feat. Aliso... Röyksopp 4 plays 10 Underworld I Exhale Underworld 4 plays 11 12 13 14 15 SOME NIGHTS INVNATION AUTOMATIC Spock VCMG 4 plays Eraser E Nine Inch Nails 4 plays Some Nights E Fun. 4 plays Gratitude VNV Nation 4 plays Funk 4 Peace... Fort Knox Five 4 plays

Again, I’ve listened to many of these tracks far more times this year than is represented here, and have listed to a lot of other stuff as well, probably far more than the 4-8 times shown in these screenshots. That said, it’s not really that bad of a sampler of what I listen to.

So…it’s a weird list, and only somewhat representative of my tastes. But hey, since I have a limited sample size to work from because I don’t stream much of what I listen to, it’s what we get.

ABBYY FineReader Amazement and Disappointment

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I’ve spent much of the past three days giving myself a crash-course in ABBYY FineReader on my (Windows) work laptop, and have been really impressed with its speed, accuracy, and ability to greatly streamline the process of making scanned PDFs searchable and accessible. After testing with the demo,I ended up getting approval to purchase a license for work, and I’m looking forward to giving it a lot of use – oddly, this seemingly tedious work of processing PDFs of scanned academic articles to produce good quality PDF/UA accessible PDFs (or Word docs, or other formats) is the kind of task that my geeky self really gets into.

Since I’m also working a lot with PDFs of old scanned documents for the Norwescon historical archives project, tonight after getting home I downloaded the trial of the Mac version, fully intending to buy a copy for myself.

I’m glad I tried the trial before buying.

It’s a much nicer UI on the Mac than on Windows (no surprise there), and what it does, it does well. Unfortunately, it does quite a bit less — most notably, it’s missing the part of the Windows version that I’ve spent the most time in: the OCR Editor.

On Windows, after doing an OCR scan, you can go through all the recognized text, correct any OCR errors, adjust the formatting of the OCR’d text, even to the point of using styles to designate headers so that the final output has the proper tagging for accessible navigation. (Yes, it still takes a little work in Acrobat to really fine-tune things, but ABBYY makes the entire process much easier, faster, and far more accurate than Acrobat’s rather sad excuse for OCR processing.)

On the Mac, while you can do a lot to set up what gets OCRd (designating areas to process or ignore, marking areas as text or graphic, etc.), there’s no way to check the results or do any other post-processing. All you can do is export the file. And while ABBYY’s OCR processing is extremely impressive, it’s still not perfect, especially (as is expected) with older documents with lower quality scan images. The missing OCR Editor capability is a major bummer, and I’m much less likely to be tossing them any of my own money after all.

And most distressingly, this missing feature was called out in a review of the software by PC Magazine…nearly 10 years ago, when ABBYY first released a Mac version of the FineReader software. If it’s been 10 years and this major feature still isn’t there? My guess — though I’d love to be proven wrong — is that it’s simply not going to happen.

Pity, that.

📚 Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

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66/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1993 Hugo Best Novel

Technically a time travel book, but the time travel itself is kind of the least important part, little more than a hand-waved MacGuffin necessary to get the characters in the right places. From there, you have the dual stories of near-future and historical pandemics. And, of course, any pandemic-centric tale can’t help but be read somewhat differently now than it would have been five years ago. In some ways, the near-future part seemed rather prescient, referring to a prior flu pandemic that would have hit in the mid-2010s, only about a decade off from our COVID reality, or the presence of protesters blaming the government; in others, it now seems sadly naïve (now that we know that most people’s reaction to a pandemic too quickly turns to “meh” or outright denial rather than taking it seriously). Both stories are excellently handled, often with a subtle dry humor in the “present day” portion balancing the tragedies of the historical portion.

Me holding Doomsday Book