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This is the full archive for 2021
Vergeside chuck outs
· Fremantle · scavenging · tools · exploring ·
I found a Disston hand saw, two wooden picture frames (one of oregon, one of some dark timber with an inner gilt rim), two ceramic electrical insulators, and a beech marking gauge. All from the throw-out pile in front of a place on South Street (I was walking home from a beer at Clancy's).
Private drafts
It's a bit odd: I've built this new blogging system with access control because I wanted to be able to write and not have posts be immediately visible to the world (unlike in MediaWiki). But now that I've got it up and running (mostly) I keep stopping myself writing random thoughts because I think that they're not ready for the public eye. I can just hide them!
I should look into adding a 'default view group' setting, so posts can default to private.
EMWCon Spring 2021
· Wikimedia · MediaWiki · videos · conferences · EMWCon ·
I've been listening to presentations from EMWCon this year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5BZTyzbx_4
The first talk by Håkon Wium Lie was good, and reminded me of the terrific fun I had from about 1996 onwards, and the amazement I felt about CSS when I first tried it in 1999 or so.
Then Yaron Koren with an overview of his plans for Page Forms (which I don't really use much these days, although the WMAU events system is still using it).
At 4:30 ish: panel discussion about 3rd party MediaWiki use with Yaron, Cindy, Brian, etc. which was mostly optimistic about the state of WMF enthusiasm for non-Wikimedia users of the software.
Then, in the second day:
Naming your extensions, Yaron again.
Firefox bookmarks' frecency
· Firefox ·
I've changed Firefox's places.frecency.defaultVisitBonus config to 20, instead of 0, in an attempt to make bookmarks sort themselves by popularity again. They stopped doing so at some recent point.
Smashing the computer
· backups ·
It should be possible to nuke ones laptop at any moment, and not be worried about backups and recovery. Of course, it's normally not quite that easy, but I feel like I'm reasonably close to that state most of the time. The main trouble is that testing the restore takes quite a bit of time, and so I don't do it very often. It should be a matter of booting from a new Kubuntu thumb drive, installing the OS, and restoring the files from an external (encrypted) backup drive. In those files should be a set-up script that installs all the required configuration.
New Bayswater installation at East Street Jetty
Fremantle
· art · East Street · Fremantle ·
Some art installations are being constructed on the foreshore near East Street Jetty:
Being comfortable blogging
· blogging ·
The internet used to be a place where I could be myself. Now I can't even write that sentence, without feeling like it'll be taken wrongly.
Actually, that's probably bullshit: I've never felt particularly comfortable online, not within discussions and things. I did used to post on this blog with more candour, because I was writing about the things I did elsewhere (things I did offline).
I follow a few people who do manage to write about their ideas and lives, and they seem not to worry so much about how they're perceived. I have no idea how they do it! But I'd like to get better at that. At the moment, I'm thinking that I could do so via YouTube videos about Wikisource editing — but I'm too shy to try.
Ignore everything and write code
I guess it's been said before, but: sometimes, writing code is the only way to find calm in the universe. It doesn't happen all that often, because generally writing code requires one to know what to work on, and that feels like a hard problem. But when it's obvious what to work on, and the work is to just figure out how to do it and express it in code, then the world recedes and the code flows.
That's why I like having personal projects to stuff around on, where I can just forget everything else and not worry about other people's opinions of my code and thinking, and settle to work on a thing that I have total understanding of and control over. It's a great relief. It's not realistic, it's not efficient, it's not community-minded, but without it I don't think I'd bother carrying on with programming as a job.