While tinkering with a new project last week that involved my old BBS tagline database I rediscovered the tagline that I used as the title of this post. I've been trying to keep up with my pattern of posting at least once every month but it's been hard, what with everything going on. Out of an abundance of caution I ran a post I'd been working on past my lawyer for advice and was informed that I should refrain from publishing it, even with multiple disclaimers because we live in a time that would have given Cardinal Richelieu an erection …
Note: I used the tag 'searx' for this post even though I've been using SearxNG for quite a while. There's enough compatibility between the two that the stuff I've written (so far) will work. However, I haven't decided if it's worth the hassle of changing the tag and possibly making things harder to find.
A constant problem when you have a sizeable external memory is finding what you need, when you need it. It's a problem that I've been poking at for a while and, which I probably don't have optimal solutions I've found a couple that work well enough …
We're just coming off of another heat wave in the Bay Area; temperatures have returned to a comfortable low-to-mid 70's Fahrenheit and humidity is hanging out around 30% (or so my weather station tells me). Temperatures in the 80's and 90's don't sound like much unless you don't have air conditioning (which many Bay Area homes don't) or insulation (ditto). This means that, under such conditions, life kind of sucks because there isn't much in the way of a breeze or a way to cool off unless you go somewhere that has decent AC (and if you work during the …
A couple of weeks back I wrote about migrating Windbringer to a new laptop, but something I didn't go into a lot of detail about was migrating the encrypted volumes over. There were a few reasons for this, chief among them that I didn't want to put more information than I already had in that post for the sake of organization. Web search is a clusterfuck these days and I wanted to make potentially helpful information as easy to track down as possible. Anyway.
Surprising nobody who's known me for longer than an hour, the hard drives in all of …
A couple of weeks back I noticed that Windbringer was starting to act dodgy in the way that Dell laptops do when they're getting long in the tooth: USB trouble, wifi getting weird (he'd only connect to the legacy 802.11b network), power cell not charging fully and refusing to doo so... Dell is remarkbly consistent in this regard. Not too long after that a good friend of mine visited with one of their System76 laptops and let me tool around with it for a while. This started wheels turning in my head because I new that I was going …
Some weeks ago when I was trying to get the bot that runs my weather station stable, I ran yet again into a problem that for various reasons I hadn't put forth the brainpower to come up with a solution for. Stability implies that a system of some kind doesn't crash, which Weather Station Bot was doing occasionally. Part of this wound up being due to the microSD card Clavicula 1 was running on wasn't well suited to being outside all the time, but part of this was due to bugs in my code that I hadn't quite shaken out …
A very common problem one has if one has enough files stacked up in one place, is whether or not those files have been copied to another system already. Have they already been copied off? To where on the other system were they copied? Sure, you can deduplicate them through various means but that tends to be kind of a sledgehammer thing to do, especially when one of the things with files is a mobile device. You could always upload the files to a provider's cloud1 storage, like Google Drive or iCloud or something.
I've been using Android phones for probably ten years now. Not because I have any particular loyalty to Google or the platform, but just because I can afford the phones. The last time I tried to text on a candybar phone using T9 I about went out of my mind because it was so different from what I'd been using for years. Additionally, my fingertips are just too damned big to use that form factor of keypad reliably anymore. I don't have any particular beef against Apple and the iDoohickey product lines, I just can't particularly afford them. I can …
Java was once the hottest thing since sliced bread. From the very beginning it was said to be platform independent (meaning, you could run it on Intel, Motorola, ARM, or whatever else you wanted) and architecture neutral (it was designed to ignore what it was running on top of). The dream was that you could take whatever software you'd written and compiled into Java bytecode, put it onto whatever system you had as long as it had a Java runtime environment, and it should work. "Write once, run anywhere" was the motto.
Not too long ago I got fed up with how good a job Duckduckgo's site search feature wasn't doing. No matter what I did I couldn't find dick around here. And, folksonomies being what they are, unless you plan them (and then they won't be folksonomies) you probably won't remember what tags you used. It's frustrating to get get lost in what amounts to your own house. So, one night I got well and fed up and decided to put some of my spare computing power to use. I did a walk-around of my exocortex and figured out that Jackpoint …
