A couple of weeks ago I had an invitation to take a lunch cruise on San Francisco Bay aboard the Hornblower.  It was a work sort of thing, a quarterly fun-thing to do after putting in longer hours than usual organized by one of my cow-orkers.  As luck would have it, that was one of the rare days that it rained in the Bay Area.  You might think that it would put a damper on things but it doesn't rain much out here these days so any change of weather is not only noteworthy, it's a pleasant change of pace for a lot of us.

Anyway, here are the pictures I took.

"Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen.  Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white.  Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation.  Your map is about to go nova.  Cool it down.  Up your scale.  Each pixel a million megabytes.  At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta..."

    --From Neuromancer by William Gibson

While wandering around downtown San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, I came across an art installation in the lobby of an office building that ostensibly displayed a realtime visualization of Internet traffic as a 3D map of the city.  I'm not entirely sure that's accurate because that would require an immense amount of access to network infrastructure they probably don't own.  My working hypothesis is that it's a visualization of activity of their customers run through a geoIP service with a fairly high degree of resolution (probably correlated against customer service records) and turned into a highly impressive animation.  I didn't record any video footage, I just took a couple of pictures.

Here's a gallery of those pictures.

A Google feature that doesn't ordinarily get a lot of attention is Google Alerts, which is a service that sends you links to things that match certain search terms on a periodic basis.  Some people use it for  vanity searching because they have a personal brand to maintain, some people use it to keep on top of a rare thing they're interested in (anyone remember the show Probe?), some people use it for bargain hunting, some people use it for intel collection... however, this is all predicated on Google finding out what you're interested in, certainly interested enough to have it send you the latest search results on a periodic basis.  Not everybody's okay with that.

A while ago, I built my own version of Google Alerts using a couple of tools already integrated into my exocortex which I use to periodically run searches, gather information, and compile reports to read when I have a spare moment.  The advantage to this is that the only entities that know about what I'm interested in are other parts of me, and it's as flexible as I care to make it.  The disadvantage is that I have some infrastructure to maintain, but as I'll get to in a bit there are ways to mitigate the amount of effort required.  Here's how I did it...

Longtime readers have probably seen the odd post about my getting fed up with Firefox and migrating my workflow (and much of my online data archive) to Chromium, which has been significantly faster if nothing else than Firefox lately.  Of course, due to Windbringer's screen resolution I immediately ran into problems with just about every font size being too small, including the text in the URL bar, the menus, and the add-ons that I use.  On a lark I went back to my font sizes in Keybase article and give it a try.  Lo and behold, when I used --force-device-scale-factor=1.5 it worked - I can see everything now.  I could complain about the size of the text in the bookmarks bar, but I'm willing to deal with it because now I can read everything.  For the record, here are the contents of my ~/Desktop/chromium.desktop file, so you can do it yourself:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Chromium
GenericName=Web Browser
Terminal=false
Icon=chromium
Type=Application
Categories=GTK;Network;WebBrowser;
MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml;text/mml;x-scheme-handler/http;
    x-scheme-handler/https;
Exec=chromium --force-device-scale-factor=1.5 %U

Some time ago I wrote an article of suggestions for archiving web content offline, at the very least to have local copies in the event that connectivity was unavailable.  I also expressed some frustration that there didn't seem to be any workable options for the Chromium web browser because I'd been having trouble getting the viable options working.  After my attempt at fixing up Firefox fell far short of my goal (it worked for all of a day, if that) I realized that I needed to come up with something that would let me do what I needed to do.  I installed Chromium on Windbringer (I'm not a fan of Chrome because Google puts a great deal of tracking and monitoring crap into the browser and I'm not okay with that) and set to work.  Here's how I did it:

First I spent some time configuring Chromium with my usual preferences.  That always takes a while, and involved importing my bookmarks from Firefox, an automated process that took several hours to run.  I also exported everything I had cached in Scrapbook, which wound up taking all night.  I then installed the SingleFile Core plugin for Chrome/Chromium, which does the actual work of turning web pages open in browser tabs into a cacheable single file.  I restarted Chromium, which I probably didn't need to do but I really wanted a working solution so I opted for caution and then installed PageArchiver from the Chrome store and restarted Chromium again.  This added the little "open file folder" icon to the Chromium menu bar.  The order the add-ons are installed in seems to matter, add SingleFile Core first if you do nothing else.

Now get ready for me to feel stupid: If you want to store something using PageArchiver, click on the file folder icon to open the PageArchiver pop-up, click "Tabs" to show a list of tabs you have open in Chromium/Chrome, click the checkboxes for the ones you want to save, and then hit the save button.  For systems like Windbringer which have extremely high resolution screens, that save button may not be visible.  You can, however, scroll both horizontally and vertically in the PageArchiver pop-up panel to expose that button.  I didn't realize that before so I never found that button.  That's all it took.

Here's what didn't work:

I can't import my Scrapbook archives because they're sitting in a folder on Windbringer's desktop as a couple of thousand separate subdirectories, each of them containing all of the web content for a single web page.  I need to figure out what to do there.  It may consist of writing a utility that turns directories full of HTML into SQL commands to inject them into PageArchiver's SQLite database which, by default, resides in the directory $HOME/.config/chromium/Default/databases/chrome-extension_ihkkeoeinpbomhnpkmmkpggkaefincbn_0 (the directory name is constant; the jumble of letters at the end is the same as the one in the Chrome Store URL) and has the filename 2 (yes, just the number 2).  You can open it up with the SQLite browser of you choice if you wish and go poking around.  Somebody may have come up with a technique for it and I just haven't found it yet, I don't know.  I may not be able to add them in any reasonable way at all and have to resort to running an ad-hoc local web server with Python or something if I want to access them, like this:

[drwho@windbringer ~]$ python2 -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

If you've been around for a while you may remember a certain magazine called Mondo 2000 from the 90's.  It was a time when using the prefix cyber- wasn't done in irony and computers were still weird and edgy and nobody actually knew what the hell they were doing.  Psychedelic explorers like Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna were still alive (though Leary died in '96 and McKenna four years later), raves required you to go on quests to find map points so you could get your wristband to get in, and we all knew - we just knew - that the Net would usher in an age of understanding because people from vastly different kinds of lives could communicate openly with each other and learn to see eye to eye.

Go ahead and laugh, get it out of your system.

If you've never run across it before, a fair amount of M2k as well as the 'zines that eventually lead to its creation have been uploaded to the Internet Archive so you can read them for free.  Unfortunately, Mondo 2000 ceased publication late in the 90's after a perfect storm of multiple things going sideways within a fairly short period of time.  Frontbeing R.U. Sirius has been around the entire time, working on multiple publishing projects at the same time and keeping his neurons in the game.  I would like to announce that his latest project is the return of Mondo 2000 as a blog featuring articles from many of the original contributors, some classic articles with commentary for the twenty-first century, and insights from some new minds from the other side of the millennium rollover.

Take a look at it and see what you think.  If you like it, please circulate the URL to get more eyes on it.

Reece Markowsky is a friend and colleague of mine from work who lives and works in British Columbia.  Late last week he received word that his brother passed away after a protracted period of hospitalization.  As one might imagine he's devastated by this.  Unfortunately his sister-in-law Shari is now a single mother of two young boys who is now on a single income, trying to pay for the funeral, and trying to get by until she can find a job.  Reece has started a crowdfunding campaign on her behalf.

If you can spare it, would you please donate to their Gofundme campaign to help the family get back on their feet?  If not, could you please spread the word?

Thank you in advance.

I've been a fan of the band Alphaville since I was quite small.  They seem to have a knack for catch hooks and lyrics that never fail to make you think about when and why they were written.  If you're not familiar with them, you've probably heard Big In Japan and Sounds Like A Melody, so that should job your memory.  So, when I heard that they'd be coming to the States to tour for the first time in eleven years I bought a ticket immediately.  It caught my attention that Christopher Anton (former frontman for InSoc) had assembled a band and would be opening for them.  I'm sorry to say that Anton did not put on a show of the caliber I've come to expect; they did four covers of classic InSoc songs... they did pretty much all covers, really, and not particularly inspired ones.  It was plain to see that Anton and his band were trying to ride on the notoriety of InSoc, even jibbing at them on their t-shirts.  On the other hand, Alphaville killed it.  They played a wide selection of songs throughout their entire stage career and threw in some new tracks from their latest album, entitled Strange Attractor.  It was like a walk down memory lane for me, finally getting to hear all the songs I heard in the car as a child driving around with my grandparents.  Another concert has been knocked off my bucket list.

Anyway, here are my pictures, taken from halfway back in the crowd and here's their setlist if you're curious.  I'm sorry that they're not the greatest quality, I couldn't afford front row seats (which were sold out, anyway).

Because I don't have it in me right now to do a full writeup, here are some pictures from the iVardensphere and VNV Nation concert on 18 August 2017.  They were taken at the San Francisco show of the Automatic Empire tour, in which VNV played both the Automatic and Empires albums back to back.  iVardenSphere was a solo act this time around, and performed an all-improvisational set on his equipment, something that one person carefully characterized as an industrial algorave.  VNV Nation took the stage with their usual aplomb and Ronan spent an unusual amount of time talking with the crowd.  He explained that earlier this year VNV Nation had been invited to play a concert to raise money for a German youthclub the night before playing a sold out show in an abandoned factory in Munich.  The youthclub didn't have much in the way of a PA system or lighting but was packed just the same, and it reminded him of how the band got it start in the late 1990's.  This is why many of the shows on this tour are being played in little hole-in-the-wall clubs instead of the usual larger venues.

quantum budget superposition - noun - A bank account's state of existence during the time in which you're waiting for your landlord to cash the rent cheque so you don't actually know how much money you have at a given time t.  Spend too much and your rent cheque bounces.  Spend too little and you put off important bills for too long.