greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Dear Readers

    During my last eye exam, the doc advised picking up a pair of readers. As in, non-prescription eyeglasses with just a bit of magnification to help with reading stuff relatively close by. I rolled my eyes a bit, but followed his advice anyway because it made good sense. (The eyerolling was because I have a strong “you’re not the boss of me” streak, not because I disbelieved his verdict.)

    In fact I bought two pair: One regular off-the-shelf pair of 1.5x cheapo readers plus a moderately pricey pair of extremely lightweight “blue-blocker” readers (same magnification), ideal for helping make sure I can get to sleep not too long after reading stuff on my tablet before bedtime.

    (As an aside: The age of the monocle is long past, yet we still refer to buying reading glasses in pairs, as if we might some day decide to only buy just the one eyeglass. Huh. It’s like the idea that someone would buy just one pant.)

    Over the last month or so I’ve gone from using the readers only for actual-reading (like, e-books on my tablet) and looking at stuff on my phone (because some apps use very tiny fonts, am I right?) to wearing them pretty much any time I’m reading text on any screen, including the monster 4K displays attached to my desktop PC.

    Just look at what getting old entails, y’all. And now I fully understand why people buy bifocals, after donning and doffing my readers five times in the span of ten minutes this morning as I got set up for work.

    (No, bifocals wouldn’t actually help me in my particular environment. But I get it now.)

  • Summer Doldrums

    Not a lot of posting this month? Blame the weather. Summer heat means I’m not on my computer as much, nor doing as much to write about.

    I have a big Satisfactory project in the works… or will, once things cool off a bit. 90F+ temperatures aren’t exactly conducive to computer-centric projects.

    At any rate, I hope wherever you are, you’re staying cool (or warm, if you’re in the southern latitudes).

  • 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.

  • No Such Thing As Unskilled Labor

    Literally every working person I will ever meet possesses skills and knowledge which would take me some notable amount of time to fully grasp, if I even ever could. Yes, even garbage collectors. Maids. Clerks. Delivery drivers. Agricultural workers. Even the migrant ones.

    The fact that it took years (decades?) to realize this is a tribute to the social stigma about “unskilled labor” and similar class-divide-enforcing concepts.

    If you want to look down on someone, look down on the idle rich who have money to (figuratively, and possibly literally) burn and all they do to get it is… have money to burn.

  • Satisfactory – Harnessing The Atom

    If you’re going to play around with nuclear fission, it’s probably best to do so on a distant planet where (almost) zero humans are endangered by your efforts.

    (more…)

  • Re-ripping The Classics

    On my way to the grocery store yesterday morning I discovered that one of the songs playing on my phone was misbehaving a bit. It skipped forward randomly for most of the first minute or so before settling into something resembling normal playback. In a moment of brilliant forethought I made note of the glitch (thank you, Obsidian) to check on once I got home.

    Sure enough, that song (and indeed every song on its particular album) had been ripped with a barely-out-of-beta version of the Ogg Vorbis codec, which means it hadn’t yet been optimized for decoding in mobile device environments. Then I checked a number of other albums by the same artist and… all but a few were ripped at basically the same time with the same (new then, but obsolete now) codec. Clearly at some point in 2002 I was super busy ripping CDs.

    Guess what I spent yesterday afternoon doing! Ripping CDs again!

    On the upside, I have dbPoweramp‘s CD Ripper software on hand and a solid & reliable LG optical drive to work with. On the downside, some of these CDs are quite old and are showing their age. (Plus, in some cases, there’s actual physical damage. The kids got into my CD collection once when they were very very young…)

    Overall the operation went well, and the only three tracks which indicated failures in the ripping software were tracks I don’t particularly need. (The first is a duplicate bonus track available in remastered form on a different album, and the remaining two are live versions of songs I can probably source elsewhere.)

    Why even bother, then? Because this time I have more advanced codecs available, at higher bitrate (thus slightly better overall quality), and if anything went horribly wrong with my source CDs (further bitrot or an actual physical catastrophe of some sort) I want the (reasonably) best available archival copies I can get. (No, I didn’t FLAC these albums. They’re not important enough to me to justify the vastly increased storage requirement.)

    And now when those songs come up on my phone in the random playlist, they shouldn’t go all glitch-y on me. Priorities, y’all.

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