greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Linkage

  • On Social Media

    Well, just by typing that subject line I’m going to have a particular Pet Shop Boys song stuck in my head for a while.

    There are worse things.

    Anyway: Since that-which-was-Twitter continues its slide toward both irrelevance and hostility toward the masses who made it what it was, I should mention that I’ve (more or less) moved elsewhere. If you look on the sidebar you’ll see the “Find Me Here” link list. Other than the webcomic and the self-referential link to… the website you’re reading now… no, I don’t know why that’s there, honestly… you’ll find the social-media-ish things I’m inhabiting (to greater or lesser degrees) in the meantime.

    I wouldn’t say that any of them are my exclusive hangout. Even Twitter was never my exclusive hangout, just… where the bulk of my time & energy went. (Maybe I should thank the emerald edgelord for freeing me from that? Er, no. No, never, never will I thank that jackwagon for anything, ever.)

    Anyway: I can be found at “the fediverse” (on a Mastodon server), Tumblr, Bluesky, and I really ought to pick my Pixelfed account back up again, plus potentially whatever else may come down the pipe later. (Technically I have accounts at Spoutible and Cohost but… eh. I haven’t touched those in months, not going to bother linking them.)

    Things are a hot mess, aren’t they? Find me somewhere and we’ll chat about it.

  • Watchlist – Summer 2023

    In lieu of more interesting content, let’s do a quick rundown of a few of the shows I’m watching lately:

    (more…)

  • Satisfactory: The Flowchart

    I’ve reached endgame for my “ChooChooingScenery” game of Satisfactory, the point where I gear up to send off the final Space Elevator shipment consisting of four products: Assembly Director Systems, Magnetic Field Generators, Nuclear Pasta (which, despite its name, contains zero radioactive source material), and Thermal Propulsion Rockets.

    The math is all sorted out, source materials (almost) entirely in production, and I have a vague notion that I’m going to build a gigantic factory in the “dune desert” to house this last great project. But I want to make it nice and neat for a change. I want to build a set of machines that not only fit together well but looks good doing it.

    And I can’t do that if I’m not absolutely clear on the exact order of what things I need to go into which other things to make the next things.

    (more…)

  • Migration Yet Again

    It’s amusing to look back on previous server migration posts and realize how long I’ve been a Linode (now Akamai, oh boy) customer. And yet, only a couple of years after the last round of server changes I decided to do it once again.

    Why?

    Mainly because I wanted to get away from the Apache webserver. While it’s the workhorse driving a lot of the World Wide Web even now, it’s showing its age and, well, there’s the whole naming optics thing, isn’t there? And after seeing an online friend rave happily about this thing called OpenLiteSpeed (including how much less of a pain in the backside it is to deal with versus NGINX, the other leading option) I figured, you know what? It’s time for a change.

    So change I have. This site, along with nearly all of my other web-based projects, lives on yet another new Linode/Akamai virtual server, this time without the usual Apache webserver setup. My thoughts on “OLS” itself will have to percolate a bit before I can craft them into a coherent post but in short: It’s quite slick, but its documentation has some glaring holes and it isn’t always easy to search online for fixes to weird problems. Additionally, certain WordPress plugins don’t like it very much. (Or OLS doesn’t like them. Take your pick.)

    It is downright peppy, though, and a breeze to administer. Setting up the reverse proxy for my Foundry VTT rig was actually simpler than it had been under Apache… not that OLS’ documentation made that any easier to figure out, mind you.

    I still have some things to move over before shutting down ‘node3’ but considering I only spun up the new host Saturday morning, to be here midday on Tuesday with nearly everything sorted and settled? I’m happy with this result, yeah.

  • dBpoweramp: Big Thumbs Up

    This afternoon I pulled up an album in MusicBee that I hadn’t listened all the way through in years, Depeche Mode’s Music for the Masses. Partway into it I noticed one song (Little 15) had a bit of a skip. I scrubbed back, listened to that part again, and sure enough… skip confirmed.

    Well, great. How long ago did I rip this CD anyway?

    Checking the codec properties for that song’s data file revealed that while it wasn’t made with the beta versions of the Ogg Vorbis codec (thank goodness), it certainly dated back to roughly 2002, thus a very early release version. This means the skip glitch could be on account of a newer playback decoder disliking something about early Ogg Vorbis encoding, but is more likely just a result of the cheap fast CD ripper software I used back then.

    No time like the present to freshen the library up a bit, then, is there?

    (more…)

  • A Blog Old Enough To Drink

    Sweet mercy, it’s been twenty one entire years as of today since journal post number one landed in a database on a long-forgotten web host somewhere. It wasn’t the start of my blogging experience, as I’d been running Monaural Jerk on a workstation at the office called Zero previously, but it was the start of this grey duck dot net experience, such as it’s been. The software and the memes and the hosting environments have changed along the way, but the silly man behind the keyboard remains the same… older, but relatively unchanged, for good or ill.

    More than two decades later and I’ve still managed not to figure out what I’m really doing here, but I intend to keep doing it anyway.

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