greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • New AC, Better AC

    The good news is that the very (let’s not go into how) expensive new portable AC unit arrived on Monday, with just a couple days to go before the next (current) heatwave arrived. And it does good work! It’s designed for cooling about double the square footage of the old one, so one interesting effect of the upgrade is that sometimes this unit can get ahead of the heat enough to actually go into “fan” mode for a few minutes, periodically.

    One amusing feature: It has a little flap on top where the air comes out, and it auto opens/closes when the unit’s powered on/off. There’s even an oscillation mode for that flap, if you want that sort of silliness.

    The bad news, of course, is that we’re in another razzafraggin’ heatwave. It almost hit 100F again yesterday and today won’t be much better. Which means I’ve barely slept.

    Sigh.

  • I Don’t Have A Hover Problem

    I’d follow that title with an “I can quit any time” but if I quit having domains on Hover then this website would vanish. So, let’s not do that.

    After days of pondering and puttering and such, I made some decisions:

    1. I don’t want to join one of the really big Mastodon instances. I like things cozy.
    2. I can’t find a cozy Mastodon instance that isn’t geared toward hyper-niche interests.
    3. I don’t want to spin up another VPS on Linode to run my own. Last time I tried administering a Mastodon server it blew up during an upgrade and I couldn’t get it back.
    4. I’m willing to pay a few dollars per month to make this someone else’s problem.
    5. It’s been a while since I bought a new domain for a silly project, hasn’t it?

    And so, a trip to Hover and to Masto.host later, “Well, Duck Me” is up & running. I don’t yet know if I’ll open it up to other users, though if you’re a friend and have some interest I’ll probably let you join. Just give me a heads-up.

  • Builder Of Unwanted Things

    I love building things. Heck, I think I wrote about that here recently.

    Sometimes, people even appreciate and/or make use of those things. That sure feels good, doesn’t it?

    Usually, though, nobody really does. This goes back so, so far. Heck, my last really successful endeavor was when I took over the Anime Blog Muyo forum (well, kind of… I built my own and everyone migrated over when RadicalBender was done running his forum) and that lasted for… a couple of years? The Wayback Machine stopped indexing AEIOU’s content in mid-2008 and I genuinely don’t remember when we closed up shop there for good. We had some good times back then, the handful of us who remained…

    (Side note: Nailing down some of the details in the previous paragraph involved reading through a lot of my own blog posts of the time and boy howdy was that a dark couple of years for me. Yikes.)

    Then there’s stuff like the Mastodon server (I had two other users besides myself, and only one of them “tooted” more than a small handful of times). The home-theater computing rigs that only I would use in the household. Various purchased and/or assembled gadgets like that. Websites, forums, what-have-you. I ran a webcomic for four entire years with a readership of… half a dozen entire humans? Maybe?

    Never mind this website that almost nobody reads. (Ha ha, how meta.)

    It happens at work, too. A wiki almost nobody used. Fancy scripted automation stuff that only I ever actually use. Documentation nobody reads. (Well, I do: I don’t always remember how I did the fancy scripted automation thing the last time, after all.)

    I can’t help myself, though. Not really. The challenge of getting something built has its rewards, and what else am I supposed to do? Just… not make stuff? Be serious. This is why I’m probably going to fire up another Mastodon instance (the one I’m on currently is shutting down, which may be ironic, I dunno). It’s why I’m still hoping to do more GoPro-footage YouTube videos that nobody will watch.

    It’s fun to make stuff, dagnabbit. So… as much as some recognition would be (hugely) appreciated, I’m going to keep at it.

    The alternative isn’t worth considering.

  • The Gray Man

    Back to back movie posts? Apparently so. I’m not going to bother with spoiler protection, though, since there’s honestly not much to spoil in this one.

    (more…)

  • Weathering With You

    I am, at most, merely an intermittent sort-of-fan of Makoto Shinkai’s works. I recommended Voices of a Distant Star some years ago, and the few movies with his name on that I’ve seen since are decidedly hit (Your Name) or miss (5 Centimeters Per Second). (For the record, The Place Promised In Our Early Days is somewhere in the middle.)

    I noticed that one of his recent films, Weathering With You, showed up on HBO Max and figured I’d give it a whirl. Only, whoops, I couldn’t find a Japanese audio with English subtitles viewing option. The only way to get English subs was with the English audio. Hey, HBO folks? Are you… at all familiar with how anime is consumed in this country?

    So, anyway, a Blu Ray purchase later (hey, it seems to be well-regarded, and I got it on sale) I was finally ready to give it a watch.

    (more…)

  • I Love Making Stuff Work

    Most days, I’m just a fix-it man. Someone broke something, or entropy took its toll, whichever: I get the call and I (usually) find a way to fix the problem.

    On rare, delightful occasions I get to actually build something, though. That’s the best.

    Today at the office (as it were) I replaced the basically-defunct PHP Server Monitor setup with Uptime Kuma, which (if you install one extra piece of software) can send notifications to all kinds of things if a monitored website-or-whatever goes offline. Since our company lives in Microsoft Teams day in and day out, I set it to post alerts to a particular Teams channel. I showed the results to the VP and a couple of relevant coworkers and they’re all happy with it. Excellent!

    A couple of hours of just hunkered down, putting a new thing into service, learning its ins and outs, and getting useful results at the end? Absolute heaven.

    More of that, please.

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