Category: Geekery

Squishing Time Into A Quick Rectangle

Not much happening lately, but my GoPro HERO9 showed up last week. I set up a couple of tests to get the hang of how it works.

I did not, in fact, realize I’d be pointing at the sun in that test but… it didn’t turn out too badly.

And if I’d realized just how simple this model kit really was I’d have selected a more frequent frame interval. Ah, well, live and learn!

12 April, 2022
Add Dejah Thoris To The Roster

Over at Cat Valente’s Discord, someone posted this image:

Almost everything about this amuses me on some level or another.

And yes, at first glance it’s kind of ridiculous and definitely hilarious on at least one level. Then I got to thinking.

Dejah Thoris is the titular (ahem) Princess of Mars. (She’s Princess of Helium, which makes one wonder if she talks with a weird squeaky voice, but that’s beside the point.) The Disney corporation released a movie, John Carter, based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian novels, and Dejah is in that movie.

Therefore, Dejah Thoris is officially a Disney Princess.

And that cover you see above tracks better than it really ought to.

6 April, 2022
Music In A Minute: Get To Know Me
I’ve done little mixes before, some of which may even still be playable in the old blog archives. (I resist calling this thing a “blog” but let’s be honest here for a moment.) My music tastes are well known if you know me at all: Old pop, older prog rock, random J-pop, some heavy metal and EDM and so on.

My library grows nonetheless, and in some odd directions on occasion. I’m glad that even at the half-century mark I’m still getting into new stuff. To give you a clearer picture, perhaps, here’s a brief sampling of what I’m listening to nowadays:

I should run these down so you can explore further if you’re so inclined…
- Public Service Broadcasting, “People, Come Dance” (from Bright Magic, 2021)
- Battle Tapes, “Valkyrie” (from Polygon, 2015)
- toconoma, “N°9” (from Newtown, 2017)
- Midnight Oil, “Gadigal Land” (from The Makarrata Project, 2020)
- The HU, “Sugaan Essena” (from the soundtrack to the video game Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, 2020)
- Sparks, “Music That You Can Dance To” (title track of album, 1986)
- Assemblage 23, “Welcome, Apocalypse (Alpha Quadrant remix)” (from Mourn, 2020)
- Pet Shop Boys, “What are we gonna do about the rich?” (from Agenda EP, 2019)
- Garbage, “No Horses” (bonus track from No Gods No Masters special edition, 2021)
- KONGOS, “Keep Your Head” (from 1929, Pt. 1, 2019)
Of course, here I am the morning after assembling this mix and realizing I didn’t get any of the Sawano Hiroyuki “[nZk]” stuff in here, and that’s a grave oversight. There’s a stunning lack of Mono Inc and VNV Nation as well.

Decisions had to be made, couldn’t fit in everything, etc. Maybe next time.
11 March, 2022
Satisfactory: Solo v Cooperative

I’ve been back on my Satisfactory you-know-what since late last year with no sign of letting up, aided by the kick-off of a co-op savegame with my daughter, who saw me streaming the game one day and expressed some interest. As of last night our multiplayer savegame is at the furthest point along the tech progression I’ve ever been in the game, and today that makes me ponder the differences between the solo Satisfactory game experience and the cooperative.

So let’s talk about co-op play’s pros and cons. (Not to be mistaken for prose and cones.)
(more…)

28 February, 2022
Square, Not Squiggly

Sophos’ excellent Naked Security blog posted an advisory about a vulnerability in PHP, the code engine that basically drives WordPress sites like this one (among other things), so this morning I decided to update.

And then I decided to upgrade.

See, we’ve been running on PHP 7.4 since the latest server migration. That’s two major releases back from the current, as PHP 8.1 came out late last year. In due time, nobody was going to be checking for security problems in that version anymore so I figured it’s better to upgrade now rather than find out that I should have after something’s gone horribly wrong.

Of course a version bump always includes the chance that some older piece of code won’t work right, and sure enough several of the sites I host fell down after the change.

Quacked Panes fell down because there was still a set of squiggly brackets instead of the now-required square brackets in a part of the Webcomic plugin. (If you’re curious: Line 426 of webcomic/lib/transcribe/filters.php in the plugins directory. It’s a five-second fix of a short, simple line of code.)

My son’s website fell down because of a YouTube plugin that hadn’t been updated in seven entire years. I simply removed that plugin directory from the WordPress file structure and huzzah, the site loads again.

Both of our PmWiki sites fell down because, well, they were a bit out of date and that’s on me. A quick unpack of the latest installation files into the website directories solved that in a hurry.

My Foundry VTT server wasn’t affected because it doesn’t use any PHP. On the downside, every server reboot results in my having to manually launch the silly thing, which… isn’t the worst situation, it’s just annoying. pm2 save, my ass.

While I was goofing around in the server anyway, I also updated some backup settings (can’t ever go wrong making sure that your backups are good!) and performed some general tidying-up. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday morning… other than the moments of panic when I realized how many websites had fallen down, of course…

19 February, 2022
In That Quiet Ordinary World

Let’s be clear: The following is of extremely limited amusement value. Laser-targeted, you might say, to a small handful of individuals on the planet.

And yet here we are.

With apologies to current and past members and fans of both Genesis and Duran Duran.

Thank you for your time and please enjoy the rest of your day.

12 February, 2022