Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Weekly Notes: Getting Started

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So I noticed Cygnoir do one of these, and I really liked the template, and thought (as she did) that it might be a good way to help me reboot my blogging habits. So here we are! My thanks to Cygnoir (and to Jedda for inspiring her) for the template and inspiration!

  • 🌨️ This week’s weather meant that we ended up with one full snow day and two late-start half days…with an end result of the week just being weird and not feeling as productive as usual.
  • ♿️ I’ve gotten started on my Section 508 Trusted Tester certification training. In theory, you have 180 days to finish this program; I’m approaching it as “180 days or until the current administration gets around to pulling the plug” and doing my best to get through as quickly as possible. Hopefully because this program is hosted under Homeland Security it won’t be in the crosshairs as soon as others, but we’ll see….
  • 🚀 Norwescon and Seattle Worldcon 2025 planning continue to move right along.
    • We’re just about two months out from Norwescon, so this is when website updates start to ramp up, I start spending more time making sure my laptop music library is ready to go, and I make sure everything is set for the Philip K. Dick Award ceremony. There’s always something to do.
    • Worldcon is still about six months out, and I have less to do there, but there’s still a pretty reasonable constant stream of stuff, with website updates and queuing up posts for the con’s blog once they’re edited and signed off on.

📸 Photos

Not much of a week for photos. But since this is my first time doing one of these weekly notes, here’s a simple one from last week, showing my current set of laptop stickers.

The top of lid of a MacBook Pro with six stickers: A rainbow A11Y, the United Federation of Planets seal, Norwescon, a classic ranbow Apple logo, Seattle Worldcon 2025, and Gothic Pride Seattle.

That’s an A11Y (accessibility) sticker I got at this year’s Accessing Higher Ground conference, the seal of the United Federation of Planets, Norwescon, a classic rainbow Apple logo that I’d had stashed away for probably close to two decades (maybe more, I don’t know when they stopped producing these), Seattle Worldcon 2025, and Gothic Pride Seattle.

📝 Writing

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

  • Evil: We’re just starting season three, and continue to really enjoy this show. Smart, creepy, funny.
  • RuPaul’s Drag Race: About midway through last season, and so far Dawn’s my favorite, though I don’t know if they’ll win. Q’s costuming skills are impressive, and Plain Jane is a strong all-arounder (but I can’t stand her attitude).
  • Scrubs: We’re early in season five in our rewatch. When we started the rewatch we were pleasantly surprised at the solidity of the first few seasons; by this point, the show’s pretty much settled into its groove and is generally pleasantly amusing, but not as strong as when it started.
  • NOVA: “Dino Birds”: Neat look at recent science exploring the evolution of birds, their ties to dinosaurs (they are dinosaurs), when flight entered the picture, and so on.

🎧 Listening

  • I now have tickets to see Underworld in May and Nine Inch Nails in August (the night before Worldcon starts). Really looking forward to both, and kind of wishing I could time travel and tell my nin-obsessed 20-something self that it would take 30 years, but I’d finally get to see them live.

  • For Reasons™, I’ve recently added the Chipmunks’ The A Files album to my collection, where they cover a bunch of vaguely SF-themed songs.

    They do a cover of “The Purple People Eater” that I swear sounds like it could have been produced by the same team behind The Rednex’s “Cotton Eye Joe”, and they’d probably mix together disturbingly well.

    “Cotton Eye Joe” is always something of a guilty pleasure (except that I’m not fond of the “guilty pleasure” thing, and prefer to just enjoy things I enjoy without guilt, however cheezy they are), and now I’m sitting here being amused at how catchy The Chipmunks’ “Purple People Eater” is. If you’re into goofy ’90s technopop, it’s better than it has any right to be.

Linking

  1. WSDOT: Brick-by-brick: The quest to get a custom Lego model on a ferry

    Local artist Wayne Hussey is a lifelong Lego lover and architect. One of his creations now lives aboard our ferry Issaquah. Getting it aboard was also quite a puzzle.

  2. Blogroll.club: A categorized list of blogs, in something of a throwback to the “old school” days of blogging. I like that there’s a single RSS feed that aggregates posts from all the blogs in the lineup, and have subscribed to that for a daily selection of posts from random (to me) people. I’ve also submitted Eclecticism to be included whenever they get around to it.
  3. Culture, Digested: Neil Gaiman is an Industry Problem

    Even taking into consideration their years of exploitation and abuse, Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer remain models of artistic success in the 21st century. Gaiman created an extremely sellable brand — affable, “oh goodness,” harmless Britishness wrapped up in a “I have read a lot of books” kind of storytelling — and the publishing industry used that not only to sell a lot of his books but that of his friends as well. Amanda Palmer has crowdsourced her way into a perfect little Patreon pyramid scheme, where all money flows to her and she gives back vibes and requests for domestic labor. This is the ideal artistic arrangement these days, where stars receive 95% of Patreon/Substack/other crowdsourced forms of income and everyone else competes for scraps. Both are reliant on a dedicated, servile audience, willing to turn over their time and bodies and cash to get a piece of that bohemian existence that only millionaires can manage these days. It’s the bohemianism not of Weimar, which Palmer constantly references, but the bohemianism of contemporary Burning Man, full of tech billionaires wearing the worst outfits you’ve ever seen in your life.

Norwescon Thursday Dance Sneak Peek

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Video still showing Star Trek's Enterprise behind graphics of audio being played.

My Thursday night dance at Norwescon is going to have a “Star Trek vs. Star Wars” theme, so I put together a video to play behind me of starship shots from the movies. I alternated clips between franchises, and most of them have been in the 10-20 second range; a few as short as 4, a few as long as 40.

In my alternating, when I made it up to the refit Enterprise reveal in The Motion Picture, you may be surprised to read that I restrained myself, and did not just drop the full eight-minute sequence in there.

Cutting out Kirk and Scotty’s reactions and some shots that are mostly spacedock scaffolding got it down to two minutes, fifty-one seconds.
I’m biased, and I’m not even sorry about it. 😆

Here’s a two-minute sneak peek (originally posted to Facebook, and so is silent so as not to run afoul of their automated audio copyright bots; feel free to listen to whatever audio you wish as you watch) of my background graphic setup for the Norwescon Thursday night dance. This will be playing on the big projection screen/video wall on the stage behind me.

The background video is 2 hours and 12 minutes of mixed Star Wars and Star Trek spaceship and battle shots (space and space ships only, no on-the-ground battles, so no Hoth or Endor). Two hours of that goes back and forth between Trek and Wars, but the last ten minutes is all Trek, because I was only pulling from the theatrical films, and there are two more Trek films than there are Wars films.

The “vinyl” platters at the top left and right automatically update with the cover art for whatever track is being played, and rotate as if they were actual turntables.

The waveform display at the top is live waveforms of the audio being played; the top waveform is the left turntable, the bottom is the right.

The title and artist of the currently playing track at the bottom automatically update.

The graphics on the t-shirt that the mini-cartoon-me is wearing randomly change every few seconds, with a selection of mostly (but not entirely) Trek or Wars themed images.

Some slightly more technical details for those who may be interested:

All the elements are assembled in OBS, and when I’m DJing, I’ll be pushing that video stream out to the the on-stage screen behind me.

The turntables and audio waveforms are pulled from djay Pro using OBS’s window capture feature, cropping down to the elements I need, playing with the color levels, and adding an alpha channel to turn dark/black pixels transparent. Cover art with dark/black pixels that become transparent is accounted for by placing the turntable graphics over PNGs of black circles to act as “platters” and black out the background video.

The “now playing” text also comes from djay Pro; in this case, djay Pro automatically creates a “now playing” text file, and I tell OBS to read and display that text file.

The Norwescon and DJ Wüdi logos are simple static PNG files.

The cartoon me is a static PNG file with a plain black shirt. I point OBS to a directory with small square white-on-black images that it randomly picks from on a five second rotation to create the “print” on the t-shirt.

iPhone security: Hard locking and lockdown mode

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An iPhone showing the Lockdown Mode pre-activation warning screen.

IF YOU’RE GOING TO BE PROTESTING or in any sort of situation where there’s a higher-than-average chance of having potentially adversarial encounters with the police, and if you have an iPhone, please remember these two tips:

  1. Memorize how to quickly “hard lock” your phone. It’s easy to do, even as you’re pulling your phone out of your pocket or bag: hold the power button and either volume button for about two seconds. Your screen will flip to show the “slide to power off” toggle, along with the Medical ID and emergency call toggles. Once you’ve done this, Face ID/Touch ID is disabled, and you must enter your passcode to unlock the phone. (If you keep holding the buttons for five or more seconds, your phone will automatically call emergency services.)

    While there are some legal disputes over this, currently the police cannot force you to surrender your phone passcode, but they might be allowed to force you to use Touch ID/Face ID to unlock it. By hard locking your phone, you’re locking them out until/unless they get a warrant. If the police ever ask you to surrender your phone, hard lock it as you hand it to them.

    I also recommend switching from a standard 4- or 6-digit passcode to a longer, alphanumeric password. To set this up, go to Settings > Touch ID/Face ID & Passcode, tap Turn Passcode On, and tap Passcode Options and set your passcode. This is much more secure than a short numerical passcode, and if your phone ever gets confiscated, will make it much more difficult for authorities to gain access to your phone.

  2. Either before you join the protest, or if you see the police presence start to ramp up, TURN ON LOCKDOWN MODE.

    Settings > Privacy & Security > Lockdown Mode > On

    Note: This is not a setting that most people need to have enabled full-time. It’s designed, in Apple’s words, “for the very few individuals who, because of who they are or what they do, might be personally targeted by some of the most sophisticated digital threats.” Turning it on will severely restrict how your phone works in a number of ways (see Apple’s Lockdown Mode support document for details). However, it also makes it much more difficult for anyone to track you, intercept your communications, or otherwise gain access to your phone.

Make your voices heard! But keep yourself safe as you do.

Android users will have to do their own research for these or similar techniques. Or get better phones. ;) (Yes, I’m kidding. Use what works for you.)

(Image yoinked from AppleInsider’s Lockdown Mode post until I can make my own.)

Answering the blog questions challenge

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While I wasn’t specifically tagged (I’m not that well known), I saw Matthew Haughey do this (via his Mastodon post), and figured I’d jump in. Nothing like a little narcissistic navel gazing to distract from <waves hands around expressively>, right?

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

Trick question (kind of, unplanned): I didn’t even know I was blogging in the first place, because the “blog”/”blogging” terms hadn’t been coined yet! I created my first personal site probably sometime in 1995 (that archive is from February of 1996), and that site had an “announcements” page that was essentially an early blog, with short little updates mostly detailing what changes I’d most recently made, but also with occasional bits about my life. All hand-coded, of course, as this was well before any sort of website builder apps existed, let alone CMS software. It wasn’t until February of 2001 when I discovered the words and realized that I was “blogging”.

Screenshot of my 1996 website, titled 'Woody's World of Wonders'. It has a repeating gif background of my signature, and a 'Netscape 2.0 enhanced' warning at the top.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

I’m using WordPress (self hosted), and have been since November 16, 2006. At the time, I had been using Movable Type, which was the Big Thing for self-hosted blogging in the early 2000s. However, they’d been moving towards a more corporate model, and I figured I’d check out this new up-and-comer. Almost 20 years later, I guess it worked out.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Yup! Between WordPress and the previously mentioned Movable Type, I was also on TypePad (a hosted blogging platform originally by the Movable Type people, though I have no idea if there’s any relationship anymore); before Movable Type I used a system called NewsPro (which no longer has a web presence). I’ve also at times dabbled with Blogger, LiveJournal (no link because that account got purged), Tumblr, and others; I currently mirror this blog to a DreamWidth blog (like LiveJournal before the Russians bought it).

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

Most of the time, as long as I’m on my desktop or laptop, I use MarsEdit. If I’m mobile on my phone or iPad, I just use the WordPress web interface, because I haven’t found a good mobile app. (Yes, I know WordPress has an app; it just annoyed me when I tried to use it.)

The MarsEdit post editing window showing this post being written in Markdown format.

Sometimes I’ll start writing elsewhere as I get thoughts together; if I do that, it’s likely to either be in Apple’s Notes app or BBEdit.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

When I’m really excited about something or really ticked off about something. Other than that, it’s kind of random. And it’s been more random than I like for a long time (honestly, and unfortunately, my blogging frequency has existed in somewhat inverse relation to the rise of Facebook/Twitter and other non-blog forms of social media), but I’m in the midst of (yet another) attempt at making a real push to blogging here more regularly instead of pushing it all to Facebook. Facebook and its associated Meta products becoming an ever more overt dumpster fire and prompting an exodus is certainly helping with that.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

Usually I write, publish, and go. If it’s something I’m really invested in (due to the aforementioned excitement or rage), then I might take a little more time to work and polish it before pushing it live. But my general approach is to just dump it out of my brain and onto the pixels.

What are you generally interested in writing about?

Whatever catches my interest. This is definitely not a single-topic blog; hence the “Eclecticism” name.

Who are you writing for?

My first audience is me — in large part, because I so rarely know if anyone else is reading (few people comment, and I long ago turned off any sort of site statistic tracking). My secondary audience is friends and family or anyone who might be interested enough in my ramblings to read regularly, whether by stopping by my site, following the links I put on social media, or who have me in their RSS feeds. The tertiary audience is whomever else happens to stumble by for whatever reason.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

With 29 years of archives (34 if you include the earliest entries in my “beyond the blog” category that collects email list and usenet posts I made before I had my own website; the oldest one dates from October 17, 1991), that’s a difficult question to answer. However, I do keep a “Worth Reading” page that I’ll occasionally update with posts that I think are among the most…well, worth reading…and of those, I’d say my current favorite is the most recent addition: Change is good, where I advocate growth and learning and my own journey ever leftward, as occasionally evidenced by older posts here.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

Nothing solid. I do occasionally look at options for moving away from WordPress (most recently due to what I consider highly questionable choices by the primary face of WordPress), but so far, between having limited time and energy to devote to diving into my computer (my wife does appreciate actually interacting with me from time to time, after all) and not having found quite the right solution to move to, things are probably stable for the time being.

I do have a wishlist of what I’d like to have in a blogging tool (summarized as “early-2000s MovableType, only with some modern updates”) that, if I could find a solution that supported all of these, would get me off of WordPress in a heartbeat. But until someone builds my dream blogging tool, inertia is probably going to keep me with something that works, even if I’m not entirely happy with it.

Who else do you want to tag?

I haven’t got a clue! Especially since “tagging” as a way to notify someone is more difficult over multiple services. Of course, if anyone finds this and wants to jump in without being specifically tagged (like I did), feel free! Harken back to the pre-Facebook/Twitter days when blogs like this were how we kept up with each other and these were memes instead of silly text on an image!