Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

On This Day: Jan 1

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Since I’ll hit 20 years of blogging this November, this year I’ll post a daily list of anything I published on this day in the past. Here are my past posts for January 1…

There are 42 posts previously published on January 1st

  • 2024
    • Year 50 Day 244 I now have a complete* collection of Star Trek: The Original Series novels. ➡
    • 2024 Resolutions Yes, I make this same stupid joke every year, ’cause it makes me laugh. ➡
  • 2023
    • Bring Back Blogging I'm hopeful that the upheaval in online spaces will lead to something of a resurgence of people writing for themselves and in their own spaces. ➡
    • 2023 Resolutions Yes, I make this same stupid joke every year, ’cause it makes me laugh. ➡
  • 2022
    • We watched two films today. If we can keep up this momentum, we’ll watch 730 over the next year! To be clear, we are _not_ going to keep up this momentum. ➡
    • 🎥 No Time to Die Definitely one of the top two Daniel Craig Bond films, and a good end for his arc. ➡
    • 🎥 The Matrix: Resurrections While it doesn’t reach the heights of the first, there was more about it that I liked than that didn’t work for me. ➡
    • 2021 Resolutions Yes, I make this same stupid joke every year, cause it makes me laugh. ➡
  • 2021
  • 2020
    • Baby Yoda and ‘The Dark Crystal’ Prove We Still Need Puppetry in the Age of CGI: “Frankly, I don’t always want my entertainment to look effortless. Instead, I want to stand in awe of these feats of creation: painstakingly crafted miniature worlds, marionettes that fire arrows, extraterrestrial tots that beg you to scoop them up ... Read more ➡
    • Who are you? Where are you (virtually)? Community building: Let me know where your blogs and online spaces are! ➡
    • My New Year’s Resolutions Yes, I make this same stupid joke every year, ‘cause it makes me laugh. ➡
    • On This Day: Jan 1 Recognizing 20 years of blogging, here are my past posts from January 1 ➡
    • Happy New Year! She's Barbara Walters, and this is… ➡
  • 2019
    • 2019 Resolutions My resolutions for this year: 5120 x 2880 1920 x 1080 1668 x 2224 1125 x 2436 368 x 448 (That’s my retina iMac, its secondary display, and my iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch, respectively. Yes, I make this same stupid joke every year, cause it makes me laugh.) ➡
    • Happy New Year, all! I hope you all had a good and safe time last night, however you celebrated, and that the coming year is better than the last. ➡
  • 2018
    • Book two of 2018: Superman: Miracle Monday, by Elliott S. Maggin. 🌟🌟🌟 #superman ➡
    • Here’s my #2017bestnine! ➡
    • Book one of 2018: Superman: Last Son of Krypton, by Elliot S. Maggin. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ #superman ➡
    • Happy New Year! ➡
  • 2017
    • Book one of 2017: Geek Wisdom: The Sacred Teachings of Nerd Culture, edited by Stephen H. Segal. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ ➡
  • 2016
    • Considering making another stab at a photo-a-day run this year. Since I just thought of this now, you get a scruffy, tired me, in bed at the end of the day…being teased by my wife about posting naked selfies to the Internet. Seems as good a way to kick off the new year as anything ... Read more ➡
    • Hey @fredmeyerstores: Is $1.03 off really enough to count as “clearance” pricing? I’m afraid we weren’t terribly tempted by your sale techniques. ➡
  • 2015
    • In today’s episode of ludicrously unnecessary gendering: Bounce dryer sheets FOR MEN. Make sure all your clothes carry the scent of PURE SPORT FOR MEN. MANLY MEN DOING LAUNDRY. ➡
    • My 2015 Resolutions 640×1136, 2,048×1,536, and 5120×2880. Yes, I make this joke somewhat annually. But...it amuses me, so I'll probably continue to do so. ➡
  • 2014
    • Freshly shaved and all prettied up for the new year. ➡
  • 2013
    • Input-Only iPad As the iPad _does_ have the capability to be far more than just a portable idiot box, it's time to start taking advantage of that. I've got the iPad, a text editor, a nice little wireless keyboard, and a whole mess of lately underused grey matter rattling around in my skull. In theory, I should be able to put those together and, perhaps, get back in the habit of babbling on a semi-regular basis. ➡
    • Ranking Bond One of the gifts I got for Christmas was the 50th anniversary James Bond collection on Blu-ray. While it will take a while to get through them all, I figured I'd start ranking the films as we watch. ➡
    • Difficult Listening Hour 01 The first of a few old mix sessions I'm re-posting. I hope to have something new to post in the not-terribly-distant future, but for now, this will get things started. ➡
  • 2008
    • The Ratings Game #2 Seeing as how the point is really just about the silliness of the MPAA's ratings rationales, I'll just toss one up whenever I feel like it. I won't immediately give away which movie the rating comes from, but you can click through the rating to figure it out. It's all just for fun, after all! ➡
    • 2008 Banned Words or Phrases As compiled by Lake Superior State University... ➡
  • 2007
    • Goodnight, Dr. Frankenstein I do believe that 'The Post-Modern Prometheus' just vaulted to the top of my 'favorite X-Files episodes' list. ➡
    • Goodbye Vogue, Hello 2007 There've been both good and bad points to 2006, but overall, Prairie and I are _both_ looking forward to closing it out and getting a new year under our belts. Here's to that New Year. Hopefully this will be a good one for everyone. ➡
  • 2005
  • 2004
    • Cheaper By the Dozen Prairie's been reading it off and on all evening as I've been dinking around on the computer, and I'm constantly hearing her start to giggle (or out and out laugh) at one passage or another. I love it when something I loved so much when I was younger gives someone else the giggles as they read it for the first time. ➡
    • Exploring the new Seattle Library Thanks to a pointer from mahalie, I finally have some idea at what I've been looking at all these months — and not only does it make sense, but I really like what it looks like the end result will be. ➡
  • 2003
    • Happy New Year! Here's to you, here's to me, friends shall we ever be. Should we ever disagree — fuck you, and here's to me! ➡
  • 2002
    • Happy New Year! Welcome to 2002! We actually made it through, despite everything that went on this year...kinda cool, huh? I've been having a nice relaxing weekend...it's nice to have four days in a row that I could just kick back and relax, with no real plans or schedule. ➡
  • 2001
    • Happy New Year! Happy New Year, everyone, and welcome to 2001 -- the real new millenium. Woohoo! ➡
  • 1996
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Amused to realize that at the moment, thanks to my posts about books and Short Trek episodes, I’m kind of dominating micro.blog’s 🖖 Star Trek “discover” feed. Maybe once Picard starts broadcasting more micro.blog Trekkies/ers will show up?

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Trying an experiment which I hope I won’t end up regretting: Re-enabling comments on blog posts on my site (but leaving them set to auto-close after two weeks).

Don’t know how often they’ll get used, or whether it’ll just be spammers and trolls, but it’s worth an attempt.

Continuing my Instagram Lurker Status

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Last year, I decided to stop posting to Instagram as part of my ongoing (and some days more successful than others) goal of posting more to spaces that I control (specifically, this blog) instead of constantly pumping content into closed systems.

I’ve never entirely stopped using Instagram, though — I still check in fairly regularly to see what my friends there are posting — and over the past few weeks, as we’ve been getting closer to the new year, I’ve been toying with the idea of going back to posting there. There are ways to automatically cross-post between Instagram and this blog, so I figured that it might be worth uploading there again, as long as I cross-posted here, and participating again instead of just lurking.

However, a couple things over the past few days have me leaning back towards sticking with my lurker status. The first was Anil Dash’s post “Link In Bio” is a slow knife:

Links on the web are incredibly powerful. There are decades of theory behind the role of hyperlinks in hypertext — did you know in most early versions, links were originally designed to be two-way?  You’d be able to see every page on the web that links to this one. But even in the very simple form that we’ve ended up with on the World Wide Web for the last 30 years, links are incredibly powerful, opening up valuable connections between unexpected things.

For a closed system, those kinds of open connections are deeply dangerous. If anyone on Instagram can just link to any old store on the web, how can Instagram — meaning Facebook, Instagram’s increasingly-overbearing owner — tightly control commerce on its platform? If Instagram users could post links willy-nilly, they might even be able to connect directly to their users, getting their email addresses or finding other ways to communicate with them. Links represent a threat to closed systems.

Instagram’s lack of support for URLs in captions has been a hassle to deal with (admittedly, less so for my personal account, and more so when I was managing Norwescon’s account, but still a hassle), I just hadn’t put as much thought into it as Anil does in his post. As John Gruber summarizes it, “‘link in bio’ is fucking bullshit“.

The other thing was trying to update a post from a year ago that had been mirrored from Instagram, but at some point the image had broken. In trying to find a new link for the src argument in the img tag, I first found that there was no easy way to just grab the image (not in itself a bad thing, as it’s likely at least in part an anti-image-theft measure), so I figured I could just grab Instagram’s ’embed’ code and find the image link in there. However, their embed code is obfuscated in some way so that there isn’t a simple image link anywhere in there that I could find, and it ends up being a huge mess of code (check under the cut at the end of the post to get a sense of how much garbage code Instagram wants us to use when displaying an image elsewhere).

In the end, I just used Safari’s developer mode to extract the image and manually uploaded it to WordPress to add it to the post. I’ve also downloaded all my Instagram data so that I have a local archive I can use as a source for manually correcting any other now-broken Instagram cross-posts that I find in the future.

So the end result is that no, I won’t resume uploading to Instagram after all. But, for now, I’ll keep my account around so I can keep peeking at my friends’ lives, at least.

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On This Day

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I’ve just added an On This Day page, using cog.dog’s Posted Today plugin, listing any posts made on the current date in past years.

I’m also considering pre-scheduling have scheduled a daily “On This Day” post for the year of 2020, as I’ll mark 20 years of blogging on November 25, 2020 (though I didn’t discover the term “blogging” until a few months later). While each day’s post will duplicate the “On This Day” page, they’ll be static lists, and will be a nice retrospective of my babbling over the years.

But if you need it…

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The new Mac Pro is available for order today. I’m not even remotely in the market for one of these powerhouses, but for fun, I maxed out the configuration options.

A 2019 Mac Pro with a 2.5GHz 28-core Xeon W processor, 1.5TB of RAM, two Radeon Pro Vega II Duo video cards, 4TB SSD storage, an Afterburner card, wheels, and both the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad is a mere $52,748.

Tack on the new Pro Display XDR —- with nano-texture glass and stand, of course — for $6,998….

Grand total: $59,746 (before taxes).

Just in case you were wondering.

AI Dungeon 2

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I haven’t taken the time to try this yet, but this seemed like something quite a few people I know would be into: a Zork-style game with an AI backend, so you can do…well, anything, apparently.

I wrote earlier about a neural net-powered dungeon crawling text adventure game called GPT-2-Adventure in which gameplay is incoherent and dreamlike, as you encounter slippery sign text, circular passages, and unexpected lozenge rooms. A PhD student named Nathan trained the neural net on classic dungeon crawling games, and playing it is strangely surreal, repetitive, and mesmerizing, like dreaming about playing one of the games it was trained on.

Now, building on these ideas (and on an earlier choose-your-own-adventure-style game he built), Nick Walton has built a new dungeon-crawling game called AI Dungeon 2. Nick made a few upgrades, such as beefing up the AI to the huge GPT-2-1.5B model OpenAI recently released, adding a penalty for repetitive text, and expanding the dungeon game training examples to a bunch of modern human-written games from chooseyourstory.com.

I CAN’T STOP PLAYING THIS GAME

Here’s the actual game site: AI Dungeon. Have fun!

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Today’s geeky triumph: Figuring out how to use Automator to create a service that pipes selected text through pandoc to speed up converting old posts on my blog to proper markdown format from the current HTML/markdown hodepodge.