This year's Blurry theme brought to you by: MAIN Fashion Optical, Bergenfield NJ. "No refunds, I don't know what you want." I could point out they explained over the next 2 visits in extreme heat and dozen phone calls that thing I could have wanted was the progressive lenses converted to either distance or reading. Except the prescription couldn't do either, and I don't need any lenses at all for distance and the CVS frames worked better at reading. (or the phone's camera to magnify small text if I don't have the glasses on me) $600 I'll never see again.

I tried reinstalling the original OS on the iMac, did not complete, does not boot, First Aid reports "error 8" on the drive. The backup might now be the only usable copy of my anime collection, except trying to back up the laptop to the same backup drive also failed without a comprehensible error. First Aid seemed to run until the drive fell asleep, then hung. Was trying to back up the laptop to see if 10.15 can fix the WindowServer slowdown issue but expecting it would break something else. Should probably make a bootable usb drive in advance, because that's my last working Mac. Ordering more, faster drives to re-backup everything.

2019-12-29

I'm giving up on NetBeans for a while. I just can't get everything working at the same time, and if I have to burn everything down to rebuild it again, might as well just burn it down and try VSCode's php handling. The extensions I'm starting with: Auto Close Tag, Auto Rename Tag, Beautify, Bracket Pair Colorizer 2 (genius!, but could use more colors), Code Runner, ESLint, Gitlens, HTML CSS Support, IntelliSense for CSS class names in HTML, jshint, Liquid, PHP IntelliSense (there's anther described as lighter weight), Todo Tree (so I can ignore them more efficiently). Could use NetBeans HTML/CSS support, though I also like Bracket's approach to that. NetBeans still has more features, and much smaller memory footprint (at only 1GB!). Biggest complaints: things get added to the command palette but not the menus, npm's install philosophy, a lot of the advertised functions don't work in my files or are hidden behind obscure key combos, my php install doesn't understand things like "$_RE^ ", $ as part of a variable name, or put return types in the docs.

2019-12-22

Fall 2019 Anime Review: Generally low tier, though Average, Iruma would be the better of the CR new series, with Fire leading continuing. The biggest loser is Crunchyroll itself, which still hasn't fixed the queue system on the website. I could dust off the PAT and make a local storage version.

Downgraded netbeans to 8, because 11.0 would either give me readable text, or a working find all, but not both. Everything hates me.

https://lexic.co/barfblog/the-mac-pro-and-apple-s-slide GM's transition to an auto loan company is also perhaps a sign of Apple's future. Whatever is going on with the WindowServer is still driving me nuts. Getting a faster, newer MBP is only going to drive me nuts faster. On the other hand, Window's mic is still dead, even though I tried installing new drivers. Windows ignored it in favor of the nonfunctional MS ones again.

https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/12/chinas-trackless-trains.html That's my idea for my parking garage infrastructure city's busses.

2019-12-15

It comes at night: Mostly jump scares in dream sequences, then shouting.

The Dragon Prince #3: some questionable king-ing, but I liked the relationship.

Now the keyboard is at 100%, but still fails at random.

2019-12-08

https://believermag.com/under-the-weather/

The Rover: Super grim. Apocalypse type 253-a most every one just gives up one day. Or Extremely Peeved Max.

Steam Halo: looks good, plays well, though the menu system hasn't aged well, it makes you log in to MS anyway, and the movement is so slow compared to Warframe. Also only includes Reach, which was not readily apparent when paying for it.

2019-12-01

Watership Down 2018: the animation lacked the character of the hand drawn.

I had assumed the mystery slowdown is caused by Steermouse and Karabiner, but closing one and resetting the other during the slowdown didn't stop it. Plus iTunes' channels just "forgot" a bunch of podcasts. You can't forget, that's my thing.

Music: Mimi Page

2019-11-24
Iron Sky: The Coming Race: weaker

Related: https://qz.com/1752676/the-job-quality-index-is-the-economic-indicator-weve-been-missing/ https://vocal.media/theSwamp/a-visual-history-of-the-yang-media-blackout

Upgrade: possibly a perfect movie: short, to the point yet with multiple twists, and nuance on second viewing. None of the tech even irritated me (after the twist, at least), and the ultraviolence was top notch.

Music: Cuddle Formation

2019-11-17
Year of Linux on the Desktop:
Date: Fri, 5 Feb 88 01:52:55 EST
To: NeWS-makers@brillig.umd.edu
Subject: X and the future
From: maximo!mo@uunet.UU.NET (Mike O'Dell)
The astonishing baroqueness of X is the greatest threat to the general sucess of UNIX to have come along since System V hit the streets. If you try to give an X system to a real human being, not a computer hacker masquerading as a normal person, they will croak. If X doesn't instantly burn out their eyes and brain, causing them to throw their UNIX box out the nearest high window, it will drive them straight into the arms of the Macintosh II. With the toolbox under AUX, all the windowy programs on the MacII will have a clear, understable, and universal user interface. With other alternatives, we face the very real prospect of each window (program) having a different user interface. That, friends, will be the death of UNIX.
The Ol' Curmudgeon
-Mike O'Dell
"Nature neither seeks nor abides opinions."

2019-11-10
Now even rebooting the machine is not fixing Netbean/Java's mouse issue.

Kengan Ashrura #1,2: a lot of shouting, and a goodly bit of the animation is literally the storyboards, but entertaining. The storyboards let them focus all the money on the fights, which is the correct decision. The CGI works well with the fights: the unnatural easing on the movements are too fast to see.

Midnight Diner #2: good stuff.

2019-11-03

There is a new Philter.no album, which is now a different Apple music account from philtermusic.com. Both are good, but only one has the pink rabbit.

Glitch #3: intense, solid ending.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/is-peter-barbers-london-public-housing-the-future.html This sort of thing would be vital for building the proper neighborhoods on top of the infrastructure levels for my city.

Apple Store visit: The new-ish Mini seems slower than the 2012 i5. (I forget which chip was in there, but I don't think it was the i3.) Also, larger than I was expecting. The iMacPro was noticeably faster than the mini or MBP, but given loading, inspecting a web page still wasn't instantaneous, I don't know that it would be $4000 faster. Not any better than the Ryzen 7, anyway. Related: Java stopped responding to mouse events, even after restarting the app, so I updated it. (which was a mistake. Rebooting the machine fixed it. Truly, MacOS Vista.) Now the Mac Native Swing UI sees the dark mode, but some of NetBeans does not, leading to a lot of black on black. I switched to the Aqua-style Nimbus UI. I like it. Sometimes the old ways are best.

2019-10-27

https://digg.com/2019/city-living-struggles

2019-10-20

Samsung is canceling Linux on Dex. Dex is still going forward, but not the ability to run a real desktop when in desktop mode. Such disappoint. People have recommended the Purism phone, but I don't know if it has a separate mobile/desktop view, or if the desktop is just bigger, also their chip is much slower. Still need to build my fanless pc, though I found https://www.quietpc.com/tranquilpc-mmdpc-001-v1605b, which is lower power than what I wanted, but the sealed case would be easier to leave on the floor in the draft.

Cannon Busters: not Vash

Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress: The Battle of Unato: Good stuff, though not enough foxy engineer.

The kanji for fox 狐 is made up from 犭+ 瓜, which means "dog + pumpkin".

https://www.team-aries.com/en/weavy/help.html Site builder tool: I like it except the quoting requirements, also it doesn't add anything more than my text file. Though I bet it handles utf-8 better.

Dark Crystal 2019: I think they are re-making the movie, except longer and more complicated, but not better. Never explains why the Chamberlain talks like that.

Warframe: I've twice nearly solo-ed Eidolons at 72%-78% total damage. I feel this in an accomplishment. Although all the effort spent on grinding out a 222 amp and getting a Rubico and Chroma seems wasted when people are bringing MK-1 gear and no amp at all. Although Chroma is too advanced for me. I had been bringing Volt for more utility, until I got into a 4 Volt group, then I switched to Rhino. At 80% chance to resist mag damage! Need 21 more kills, then I can buy wisps for cores, make a 223 amp, hit mr16, and possibly be done. I'm doing the bee mount, but until I get Vulperans, I'm kind of done with WoW too. I am so tired.

https://reasonstobecheerful.world/spains-happy-little-carless-city/

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191011-what-happens-when-a-city-bans-car-from-its-streets "In the Great City Chengdu Master Plan, everything is walkable. There are no cul-de-sacs and there is a high number of intersections which make it very easy to get around by foot or bicycle. There is also vertical connectivity, with bridges between high rises. The Great City suburb, which was designed to house 100,000 people, is only one square kilometre across and it would never take more than 10 minutes to walk from one point to another." So China did think about these things, but then did not do any of them. Also: "Given a blank slate, Crawford describes a city of interconnected nodes, each of which would have a central tram stop or light rail surrounded by dense housing, shops and offices" How do you move house in this scenario? How do you leave the city? Layered transit systems can provide all things to all people, and at the cost of building a city sized parking garage. (a bargain compared to NYC's billion$ a mile subway.)

My brain is falling apart.

The iMac seems to have died. I didn't start it all summer because of the heat. The Finder dies, and there are many unresponsive processes, like SystemUIServer, and dozens of mdworkers. I was not able to complete the backup, or even start Time Machine. Also it smells funny. The laptop still has the issue where the WindowServer and SystemUIServer run at 100% for no apparent reason.

2019-10-13

The Blacklist #6: some nice capers, the middle bit was lazy: they clearly weren't ending the show in the middle of the season.

Music: Ghost - Satanic Death Metal Lite. Wordburglar - Nerd rap. Marco Polo(in cyrillic, iTunes doesn't copy text? or handle unicode urls) - semi-traditional Russian

After going from 100% to 20% and triggering low battery warnings for months, now it just drops the connection at 100%.

Anime Fall 2019

Also: PSYCHO-PASS 3, no license ATM. I'm not really liking anything new on CR, plus the new video player isn't recording played status, so the queue is broken. Time to break out the PAT Anime Tracker again.

2019-10-06

https://www.curbed.com/2019/9/30/20885226/best-pedestrian-mall-design The problem with all the malls is that they privilege that space at the cost of the surrounding area. Add in the racial and class overtones of what the mall is designed for, and it is doomed with America's current demographic trends. I want the "Mr. G. envisions bands of superhighways girdling the perimeter of the island, and, just behind them, extending to Third Avenue on the east and to Eighth Avenue on the west, ribbons of multiple-decked parking lots covered over with gardens and broad walks, and, at intervals, apartment houses a hundred and fifty stories high.", except reasonably sized buildings on top of and integrated with the psuedo-subterranean garages. You should be able to take an elevator to the car, bus, or bike, or never leave and live your entire life in the mixed use building. Anyone should be able to run a business in their house, with the house given extra space for that purpose. Sidewalk vendors as well should have sufficient space, and pop-up stores. " "The chief means of travel will be walking," said Mr. G. "Nothing like walking for peace of mind." " As I have walked a good bit of Manhattan thanks to the subway breakdowns, Mr G. is entirely incorrect there. But the only way to have superhighways, freight, mass transit, bicycles, and all these pedestrian spaces in a sufficiently dense city is to layer them. And the way to avoid the cycle of boom and bust that accompanies any commercial space is to not make one space that holds all your commerce. Let it arise naturally out of the junctions of the transit network, but let the current hot spot move around the city as it wills. (Trivia. Literally trivium: Times Square before the renovation, but not after.)

2019-09-29

Shanghai Fortress: pretty bad. The mothership explosions were nice, but the rest was marvel-tier.

Summer 2019 Anime round-up: GRANDBELM was a surprise, but not CCS or Madoka tier. Daughter was cute but pointless, or at least way too slow, as it is extremely obvious she is the missing demon lord and they are not even close to addressing that. Pick Up Girls has a fox-woman in it, so bonus points. Symphogear defeated God. Dr. STONE was mostly shouting. Are You Lost was more science based, and more fun. Sacred Beasts only occasionally achieved Mega-Angst, but did try. Fire Force turned out well, one of the shows where the animators just do their thing and it is glorious. I still have Yaiba queued, so I can skip the shouty bits.

The laptop shut itself off again.

NPR's interviews with Republicans have been terrible. They repeat the talking points as the hosts try and define acronyms and occasionally point out these are total lies. Plus: Nobody mentions Manafort's Ukraine connection, that the call started out with staying in Trump's hotels which is exactly the sort of thing the Emoluments Clause is there for, the conspiracy theory about the emails, or that the defense funds Trump blocked are being used against Russians, because surely Trump hasn't been compromised by Russians. Hunter Biden didn't have oil industry experience, but he wasn't brought in to sell oil. Getting paid lawyer money to do lawyer things seems insane to the average American, but only because that's what a wealth gap looks like. I make half that, hourly, though I don't have a lawyer's concept of billable hours so my total isn't nearly as high.

Carole & Tuesday: nice, though the Mermaid Sisters were the most unforgettable act.

2019-09-22

We Have Always Lived in the Castle: not quite Iain Banks levels of Mega Angst, but close.

Time Trap: title is a little spoilery since they seem to think it would be a surprise, but decent.

2019-09-15

The Bad Batch: Super weird. I suppose the end is the sort of decision making that got them sent there to begin with.

https://hackaday.com/2019/09/10/why-ada-is-the-language-you-want-to-be-programming-your-systems-with/ Interesting: offers some of the features of Rust but also goes further in preventing you from making unwarranted "optimizations" by not letting you access any memory directly, and has a lot of focus on threads/cores. Looks like pascal.

Big Sky: good, liked it better than Transcription, though the wedding bit seemed unnecessary.

https://i.imgur.com/fRFmIE9.jpg

2019-09-08

2019-09-01

The 100 #6: I had thought this had ended happily with the space ship, but only the dead know peace, apparently. So many dead.

Various modifier keys are getting virtually stuck now. This is a thing that can happen to Karabiner sometimes, apparently, but it didn't used to do that, and it is usually the mouse, not the keyboard. It's incredibly annoying.

https://thewalrus.ca/we-are-garbage/

2019-08-25

I, Zombie 5: I know the ending irritated people, but it mostly seemed like they slammed the end down super quick. It seemed nice enough.

https://theweek.com/articles/859408/american-cities-need-phase-cars

2019-08-18

2019-08-11

She-Ra #1-3: extremely modern, but worth it for Tuxedo Catra.

The latest Windows update broke the mouse scroll direction, as have all previous, except this one didn't overwrite the registry item. It seems to be ignoring the registry now. I installed another mouse tool to fix that, but now random apps scroll in different directions because apparently Windows has 2 different, incompatible UI systems. Plus the mousewheel is bad, so rolling in one direction might cause it to scroll a bit in other direction. I can keep scrolling in the same direction and have it scroll back and forth, or the wrong direction, or suddenly reverse for a bit then continue. The official Microsoft docs on all this say go to your trackpad settings which don't exist because I don't have a trackpad. The analog mic still doesn't work. Both Warcraft and Warframe can be run on Linux... [Update: another update fixed the mouse. Still no mic.]

2019-08-11

Jupiter Ascending: stupid, but I liked it. Sort of Warhammer + Warframe, and slightly furry.

I'm getting loads of these https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/01/apple-phone-phishing-scams-getting-better/ At first I thought Apple was going to recognize my disorganized ramblings or something. But even that wouldn't be worth returning a call, and the voicemail on my iPhone is broken or something.

"For example, the Japanese term for seahorse is "tatsu no otoshigo" (竜の落とし子), literally meaning "illegitimate child of dragons"."

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/aug/05/suburb-in-the-sky-how-jakartans-built-an-entire-village-on-top-of-a-mall My complaint is noted: "It's just there is no kaki lima [street food cart] here". I want the upper level neighborhoods connected to the city. No roads either.

7SEEDS: 7 sheeds to plant inshide of meEe. Much better than Dr. Stone and Are You Lost? combined, although the girls are mostly idiots at one point or another.

Another Life: seemed cheap, extremely drawn out between occasional intense interactions, and I only watched the first episode and the last ten minutes. Which did contain Muse, so points there.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/andrew-yangs-horrific-debate-answer-climate-change/595267/ It's Robinson Meyer that does not get the point: yes, its possible that the US could invent technology to de-carbon everything. The Paris Accord's best case assumed this would happen. It won't, though. And if it did, American's would still roll coal and cut down old growth for toilet paper. Without technology bordering on magic and societal changes as yet unimagined, it is most definitely going to get much hotter. So yes, the UBI would not pay you to rebuild your house in the flood zone. But it would allow you move some where else, knowing that even if you didn't immediately find a job, you wouldn't be homeless and starving. "Protection from vulnerability is basically what wealth is." That's exactly what a UBI is, depending on the size of the vulnerability. Almost no Americans have that wealth any more. (All the surveys showing how few people could cough up the cash for a minor emergency, let alone walking away from a house.) Andrew Yang is not preaching the end of carbon, but the end of the kind of wealth carbon produced. "It is certainly not a collective adaptive approach to the challenge of climate change." No number of normal persons can do anything about climate change. You could not fly, or even drive (I don't), but your entire life wouldn't offset a single climate conference. Entire nations are eclipsed by a single bunker fuel burning cargo ship. You can only survive it, and sunk-cost investment into something that is literally sinking is not helping, and yet this seems to be what Meyer requires: "Asked about climate change on national television, Yang said that climate change is an inexorable problem, that the U.S. can’t do much of anything about it, and that if the seas take your house—that is, if a problem outside your control deprives you of your most expensive asset—then the government shouldn’t do anything specifically to help you. That is quite an argument." It's not the argument though: you knew you lived near a rising sea. It was nice while it lasted. Having the tax payer rebuild it and the related infrastructure so it can be washed away again is madness. Take your UBI (which is not "do[ing] anything specifically to help you", apparently) and move. Free yourself from that anchor. (I could also point out the value of an American home is vastly inflated due to the US requiring transparency from Swiss banks while also requiring none at all in American real estate investing. My condo is worth 3 times as much as what I paid for it (if you believe the tax assessor, and I do not), or twice as much from the comps. That's way beyond inflation and population growth. Real estate's value across the world has not changed dramatically over centuries, except now, here, and places like London and Vancouver.) [Also: https://earther.gizmodo.com/andrew-yang-is-the-most-dangerous-presidential-candidat-1836881500 same points, but even more histrionic: article: "Yang’s scary geoengineering visions of dimming the sun to cool the Earth" -> linked source: "Invest in any idea that has the potential to reverse the damage done to the environment, for example cloud-seeding technology to increase the atmosphere’s reflectivity." You mean like the studies on contrails after 9/11? That's some mad science there. Article is against not rebuilding, but also seems to want to move people without individual choice, the worst of both worlds. Yang might be the most dangerous candidate, but only because he is a threat to the status quo.]

2019-07-29

Shacks: "Belden Lane, in his book Backpacking with the Saints (Oxford University Press, 2014), compares a certain kind of hike to a "death lodge," a sort of symbolic place to which the wanderer retires to say goodbye to his old life. "A death lodge is a place for acknowledging that a chapter in one’s life is closing," Lane writes, "with a new one beginning to open.""

The Space Between Us: nice enough

I made the mistake of asking the Finder to copy 1 folder that turned out to be nearly a million files and 44GB. ETA: 8 hours at, for no reason, 300KBps. Why must everything hurt me?

I haven't gotten the new Slack yet, but the new Twitter is just not good. The images seem shorter and there's much more competing content on the screen (fox pictures are 99% of why I'm there), the translate option is gone. (Not that it was good, but still better than trying to learn kanji.) If I could move to a shack, it's just another thing I wouldn't miss.

2019-07-22

Is it just me shaking my fist at clouds, or is Nova infected by reality tv's repetition and NPR's definition disease. "15 solar masses, or 15 times the mass of the sun" twice. Like NPR's "guest: 'the IRS...' host: 'the Internal Revenue Service' guest: '...uh yes uh' host: 'you were saying ...'" If you didn't understand "solar mass", "mass of the sun" is not going to help. Demonstrate it visually! What would the sun look like if it was 15 times bigger? "Internal Revenue Service" is _less_ meaningful than the more commonly used abbreviation.

Dark #2: suffers a little from "middle part of a trilogy"

2019-07-15

Summer 2019 Anime:

2019-07-08

I got fancy new glasses. They are substantially worse. I can't see anything out of my right eye (one very specific distance is clear over the left 30%, but it is right up against the presbyopia zone, which this did nothing to fix), and while spots in the left are much clearer, I can't read an entire line of text left to right, or looking up or down without all the horizontal lines bending, or look down at something close then up at distance, or read the right monitor without turning my entire body. They assure me this is normal for progressive lenses. The only part the lens that works better is the distance, which, and fans of irony will appreciate this, was the only thing I didn't need the previous glasses for and only makes it marginally better than my natural vision. As a plus, maybe now I can buy off the shelf sunglasses for outside, reading glasses for up close. A $600 lesson in trying to have nice things. I may rethink my desk to bring everything into the working distance, or go back to low-dpi monitors.

Spring 2019 Anime Review: Ended up not watching possibly too many shows. Demon Slayer had a few moments, but also a lot of shouting. AMAZING STRANGER, Yatogaame, Joshi Kausei was at least entertainment. Sarazanmai was super weird, but as it eventually settled down into a story, it became more normal and repetitive. The first episode, at least, needs to be experienced. As a questionably human fan of animal ear girls, I'm going to say Helpful Fox Senko-san was the best of the season.

2019-06-30

Saw another road kill fox.

Apple Music Cool and New playlists have gone solid anime music for me. You'd think this would be pretty on brand, but I don't actually listen to all that much general anime music, and this is all in English. Dubbed anime music!

The MacOS PHP no longer includes the process functions. When did that happen? Also is 2 versions old.

2019-06-23

Rampage: the other sign language movie, terrible, but not sorry that I watched it.

A Silent Voice: good, though most of the characters are extremely punchable.

revisions: way too much shonen jive in the beginning, but a nice concept.

Related: I liked Fish's defaults, but it seems to go out of its way to break shell scripting, to the point where it tells you you were doing it wrong, because it didn't use those characters for anything new, it just had to use a different character for the same thing.

~/.zshrc: Basic 2-line zsh prompt and terminal title, with Emoji machine ID, flags for exit errors, root, and background processes. The title is the just the ID and path. It makes sorting through terminal window easier than the default bash, which lets ssh set the title, but then never unsets it. Does not have all the Git features, super fancy fonts, but has a very small footprint. (Does require a font with the Box Drawing characters.) Customize it with your own emoji, and replace the 'green', 'red', '223' with one of the term Colors. I had an RPROMPT=" %F{red}%0(?..EXIT%?)%(!.ROOT.)%1(j.BG.)%F{green}─╯%f", which completed the wrap around ascii art, but found it added issues with the line editing. (Also, uploading this may have mangled the unicode.) 

setopt PROMPT_SUBST
((cols = $COLUMNS - 2))
PS1='%F{green}%$cols>>─┬─%{🦁%2G%}─%*─%F{223}%~%F{green}─%F{red}%0(?..EXIT%?)%(!.ROOT.)%1(j.BG.)%F{green}────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────%>>─╮
 ╰──┨%f  '
ZLE_RPROMPT_INDENT=0
setopt    EXTENDED_HISTORY
setopt    HIST_IGNORE_DUPS
setopt    HIST_IGNORE_SPACE
setopt    HIST_REDUCE_BLANKS
setopt    HIST_VERIFY
setopt nobeep
setopt    AUTO_CD
PROMPT_EOL_MARK=''

#title
autoload -Uz add-zsh-hook
function xterm_title_precmd () {
        print -Pn '\e]2;🦁 %~ %(!.ROOT.)%1(j.BG.)\a'
}
add-zsh-hook -Uz precmd xterm_title_precmd
add-zsh-hook -Uz preexec xterm_title_precmd

http://www.jacklmoore.com/zoom/ - Prob: in a mobile view, the click to zoom mode is being triggered by the drag-scroll gesture. According to the github issues, this has been addressed twice, and yet I'm still having a problem, possibly related to the slick slider eating drag motions for its own needs. Solution: track drags|clicks internally. Replace the "settings.on === 'click'" block with 

} else if (settings.on === 'click') {
var touchstartf=function (e) {
	e.preventDefault();
	if (!touched) {
		touched = true;
		start( e.originalEvent.touches[0] || e.originalEvent.changedTouches[0] );
	}
	touchmoved = false;
},
touchmovef=function (e) {
	e.preventDefault();
	touchmoved=true;
	zoom.move( e.originalEvent.touches[0] || e.originalEvent.changedTouches[0] );
},
touchendf = function(){
	if (!touchmoved && touched){
		touched = clicked = false;
		$source
		.off('touchstart.zoom',touchstartf)
		.off('touchmove.zoom',touchmovef)
		.off('touchend.zoom',touchendf)
		stop();
	}
};
$source.on('click.zoom', function (e) {
	if (clicked) {
		// bubble the event up to the document to trigger the unbind.
		return;
	} else {
		e.preventDefault();
		clicked = true;
		start(e);
		$source.on(mousemove, zoom.move);
		$source
		.on('touchstart.zoom',touchstartf)
		.on('touchmove.zoom', touchmovef)
		.on('touchend.zoom', touchendf)
		return false;
	}
});
and add the "if (settings.touch && settings.on !== 'click') {" just below that to halt the normal application of the touch listeners and add "var touchmove = false;" at the top. This quite possibly breaks a non-touch use of on:'click', but not my problem: on:window.innerWidth>749?'mouseover':'click' (Ideally actually know if it as touch environment or not. I have another function that tests for the presence of touch events, but I don't think it is any more reliable.) Tap to zoom in, tap again to zoom out. Drag while zoomed to scroll the zoomed image, while not zoomed to let the window scroll up/down, or let slick scroll through its slides right/left. In other, related news, a Shopify site I worked on was noted as a top new site for 2019. It wasn't this one, though, for which I did the entire theme, and in my opinion, has the better tech stack.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/work-peak-professional-decline/590650/ https://www.addastories.org/earth-wood-dry-hay/ #shacklife

Fall by Neal Stephenson aka Nakamoto Satoshi: Entertaining, though I'd argue with most of the choices made. Dust-jacket level spoiler: Why did they not use T'Rain for the virtual environment? That would have lent itself to Unsounded's magic system, paid off its use in the previous books, and fixed a key issue as a programmer: who launches v0 of a program with no input or output or logging? You run anything, most of all an experimental human brain, with literally no way to talk to it? Also: isekai. My own unpublishable SF story would take place after this, with the still human-ish population looking up at the dead consuming solar system.

2019-06-16

Wreck-it Ralph 2: Nick cameo, and the Princess bit was fun, but mostly a grind.

zsh seems to have issues with tab complete letting characters get forgotten: "ps\t\tRightArrow\t^W" will (depending on what ps expands to for you) leave character the arrow skipped over floating out in space. I thought it might have been the double width emoji or the unicode art in my prompt, but it does that with the default prompt, too. (Update: I think its the RPROMPT.) It doesn't have a persistent history, either, which would be annoying if I ever closed a terminal window, but is something I'd need if I change the servers to zsh, too. (I think Apple's default shut it off.)

Chrome broke its password manager? The wiki site, which needed a password but no user name, doesn't work at all any more, and many suggested passwords don't seem to remember the site, as the suggestions are including random accounts.

2019-06-09

I am Mother: suffers from people doing stupid things to move the plot along.

Rim of the World: seemed cheap, cliched, did not finish.

I'm glad the Mac Pro exists, but it is absolutely not the thing I needed. We'll have to see if iPadOS really lets it be a dev machine, or if an ARM Mac comes out first.

2019-06-02

I realize this is 2 years late, but https://blog.ycombinator.com/new-cities/

Elevator pitch: build a series of connected parking garages, then drop a city on top of it. The city is viewed a single organism that builds all its own buildings, grows its own food.
  1. What should a city optimize for? - it should not, except perhaps to optimize for change. Any optimization would preclude other options. The ideal city is all things to all people. Individual blocks, buildings, or floors should be able to cater to more specific needs. Speak ASL? Here's an area for you. Work a nightshift? The lights in this windowless building are off during the day and on all night.
  2. How should we measure the effectiveness of a city (what are its KPIs)? - the happiness of the citizens and the effect on the environment. If people want to live there, then it has done its job of being a place people want to live. It isn't poisoning people, or smushing them with cars. Even if they are stacked 30 floors deep, they are still surrounded by fresh air, greenery, and occasional views. For a minimal effort, people shouldn't be homeless or starve. Their home/food might not be the best, but they should be able to work to raise their standards, or not, if that's what they want.
  3. What values should (or should not) be embedded in a city’s culture? - it should make people happy, but exactly what that means is an individual choice. If I'm a introvert, or a nudist, or want to live in Wakanda or Rivendell, if enough like-minded people get together, we can reshape the floor/neighborhood/block to match. I might not feel comfortable knowing doormen are watching me leave, but you might have high security entrances on the entire block, to let your kids run around inside the block in perfect safety. Maybe our choices mean you wouldn't want to live or even go there. That's fine. The city has space for you to do your thing, too. These choices couldn't block people from the foundational levels, and things like the nudism would require that building accomodate the views from the surrounding area. Beyond that, though, a man's home is a castle, and it is entirely up to you, your wallet, and the city engineer's approval if your castle has a moat.
  4. How can cities help more of their residents be happy and reach their potential? - same: if people can make a choice about what they want, and then work to accomplish it, the city should enable that. Even, perhaps especially, if these things are mutually contradictory: I might go to bed at 9 and need quiet, while you want to party until 3. The city should not zone away nightlife to make me happy. With a little planning, the club's neighbors might be empty at night, or as loud. With a little expense, the building's materials dampen sound. My quiet apartment could be in the same building as the club, but with enough of a buffer between us. Everybody gets something, because equality and happiness was prioritized over the bottom line or quick fix.
  5. How can we encourage a diverse range of people to live and work in the city? - housing and opportunities should range from a $5 a day box and occasional part time work to estates and as much of the 1% that might still exist. Anybody should be able to operate a small business, either out of their housing or in space set aside for sidewalk vending up to block-sized industrial sites. Opening a slaughterhouse or oil refinery would have a very burdensome regulation on the smell pollution ("none"), but once you integrate into the city's air exfiltration system, the city is prepared to provide you all the transit and employee infrastructure you could need.
  6. How should citizens guide and participate in government? - as much as possible, be the government: volunteer/part-time, write position papers, hold elected advisory positions, even though some other positions that might be elected elsewhere are city employees and expected to meet standards. The city wouldn't have "leadership" as much as "executing the agreed plan".
  7. How can we make sure a city is constantly evolving and always open to change? - see #1. For example: * don't sell actual real estate. A housing contract might stipulate you get so many square meters and such a quality view and only so far from an elevator near an express bus, but if necessary, the city can move your house so that area can be repurposed. The city itself should own the buildings. * by building in multiple redundant pathways, any one could be taken down for upgrades without destroying the system. * not having zoning laws lock in/out business/people. * related, mixing people/businesses of varying types levels as much as possible. That investment bank might not like the crackhead housing block opposite their front door, but the solution is not removing the housing, then you just end up with homeless crackheads and it's still the city's problem. Maybe the bank would _want_ to pay directly for social workers rather than general taxes for which they don't see a direct ROI.
  8. How can we make and keep housing affordable? This is critical to us; the cost of housing affects everything else in a city. - All the things that have been zoned out of existence. A crime-ridden SRO wasn't crime-ridden because it was cheap housing, but that people who make poor life choices had nowhere else to go. Zoning that away just makes homeless people. Industrial scale building techniques should also reduce per unit prices. Housing options should be anything from a windowless box for $5 a day to an entire block for more money even Han Solo can imagine.
  9. How can we lay out the public and private spaces (and roads) to make a great place to live? Can we figure out better zoning laws? - as noted, zoning laws are generally reflections of people's neuroses. Take the story about Disney spending as much time on the lines as the rides. If the city is building all the buildings, it also is building the space in-between them, and should put as much effort into that. Allow people to own their neighborhood walls, run businesses out of the front of their homes, or live in their offices. The only real restrictions should be pollution (chemicals, smells, but also noise, light) and actions that might impact the structure: weight, vibration, too much flammable material per unit volume. Another key point is it doesn't cost that much to enclose more empty space. The interior sections of a wider building should include space for storage rooms, cargo pod storage, and freight elevators. The actual cost for a windowless, industrial room is minimal, but the psychic value of having an attic would be worth it.
  10. What is the right role for vehicles in a city? Should we have human-driven cars at all? - layers: if the entire city is buit on a multi-level parking garage, vehicles are physically close, but emotionally distant, and not so close as to touch a pedestrian. Rather than spend 1 billion $ a mile on subways, just paint off a section of an upper level and devote it to self driving busses. (horizontal elevators, basically, not even modern self driving car tech.) Paint off a different section for high speed bikes, human speed bikes, through-roads. The spaces between blocks can trees or highways. Having the "street level" be the pedestrian promenade makes that the first class level. The cars are down with the morlocks, but now benefit never having to deal with pedestrians. Parking surrounds each elevator, halving the walking distance. The ghost of Robert Moses can put a superhighway through the middle of the city, and nobody need notice.
  11. How can we have affordable high-speed transit to and from other cities? - trains, like the rest of the planet, or self driving busses on dedicated roadways. Rail, both passenger and freight, would be just another layer in the foundational parking garage. It doesn't have to be that smart if it never crosses pedestrian or automotive traffic.
  12. How can we make rules and regulations that are comprehensive while also being easily understandable? Can we fit all rules for the city in 100 pages of text? - APIs: you might not know all the regulations and people you need to talk to, but you know where to go to get the person/app that does. Absolutism: as with the point about the smells, the regulation can be in its entirety that all your air pollution has to be not toxic and sent into the city's ducts at a certain pressure, no exceptions.
  13. What effects will the new city have on the surrounding community? - the city absolutely needs to extend far beyond a traditional city limit, both so it can control its own watershed and pollution absorption nature area, also so that local farmland is the city's responsibility. Ex: people should be able to work part time on a farm, but still live in the city, rather than force immigrant labor to work inhumane hours. Just take a bus out for a couple of hours, get a work-out, and come back to your own bed. Just as nobody thinks it novel that an apartment comes with running water any more, it should come with fresh air, ducted in from upwind. Rather than a window that doesn't open and looks out on to somebody else's window, the unit might not have a real window, but would have controlled fresh air and LED RGB lighting to simulate daylight. The city's CO2 and stench would fall downwind on a forest set aside to absorb it.

https://placesjournal.org/article/a-city-is-not-a-computer My new city idea is inspired by a computer, but not in the way everybody else means: not information about people, but people as information. High speed interconnects, various engines to store or process data-people. The data bus is an actual bus. It doesn't have to impose a rigid uniformity to the neighborhoods/software or be a locked down police state/iOS, though. I want your "application/house" to be a personalized as possible, but also provide the "internet" infrastructure to connect you to the "services" (still the same word) around you efficiently as possible. Just as 3D interconnects are something Intel is working on (and AMD will probably do first, given Intel's recent track record), I want a new city built the same way, with layered pedestrian and auto traffic.

Colony #3: kind of soap opera-ish, but also a lot more SF content.

Music: Mitsugu Oyama, Kalafina

2019-05-26

FLCL: Progressive is meh, particularly with its treatment HH as an antagonist, but I liked Alternative, with Pets.

Jean-Claude Van Johnson: truly insane concept, loads of inside jokes.

Thought: Apple's streaming service, while still stupid, is the least terrible not-Neflix streaming, as they aren't pulling content away from existing providers and aren't a one trick pony like CBS. Of course, it has yet to demonstrated their pony has any tricks at all.

2019-05-19

You can use GTM to inject unfiltered javascript into pages. I thought it just did tracking, using dataLayer.push-ed objects.

2019-05-12

Music: Julia Kent, Zoe Keating

Killer Elite: If there's one thing the Trump administration has shown, is that we need more elite shadowy secret societies actually running things.

A Wind Named Amnesia: Weird secular tract that ends with a bang. Subtitles are terrible. I get that the translator might have only heard "Rockies"/"Rocky's", but nobody else in the production process watched it?

Night on the Galactic Railroad: Weird religious tract that literally kills a kitten, looks at its watch and abruptly ends. Undercuts its own messaging, unless that message really is life is suffering, kill yourself to be with Jesus or your mom.

Technotise: Edit and I: good but rough. animation is alternately cool and extremely cheap.

No Game No Life 0: very good. unexpectedly deep

The Highwaymen: so sweaty. Walk into a random gun store and get a BAR.

Sally being crushed by a dinosaur
Sally still has a way to go before she can ride one of these.
Sally on her new mount
Sally got a driver's license! They grow up so fast.
Sally
I forgot to visit the Vulperans!

Music: Nadia Carolina

2019-05-05

The Wandering Earth: Good. Few recent SF films have had this sort of scope. Patriotic, but didn't make me break out in belt and road initiatives. All the small scientific details I noticed were scientifically accurate or at least defensible, which I appreciate.

Ash vs Evil Dead #3: groovy

Speaking of which, we need an Electron environment, but for Terminals. New Terminal protocols even? Sub-windows, like the alt-screen, but on top/inline. Ability to set font attributes. Inline svg rendering, inside one character, or across blocks of characters. Mouse actions, but not hover to cut down on traffic (not including title=""). One could do picture blocks, but XWindows shows that if you give that to people, they just run the whole thing through it. Take this BBEdit window, for example. There's the main text, but everything else in the window is also just text or small glyphs. There's a hover on the Open Document list column size bar, but I could live without that. Have an HTML/Electron like DOM, but all the blocks are text, all the measurements are percents or 'ch'. Could natively render simple HTML like lynx. Or render to "text" via 1 long scrollable svg block.

Samsung Dex has a Linux app. I can't run it on the ancient tablet and it doesn't seem finished but it seems a nicer concept than Chromebook's semi-integrated Linux: more portable with terminal access on the go, and a full desktop when you plug it in to a monitor.

My window manager idea: I don't want tiling, nor with the reduction in usable space from 2K to 4K retina can afford that. However, MacOS is click to select, not XWindows' click through. All you need is enough of a window to click on, to see that it is there. That why the new windows traditionally cascade down, so you can see the titles or corners. That's also a waste, though. 4 sets of 2 semi-side-by-side windows cover more space, showing more window. Put 2 windows along each of the 4 edges. Part of the outside edge is always visible. (I should point out I have a 4K monitor and the 2K laptop (both hiDPI), so the biggest I can really have a window is the 2K size (~720px) on the 4K screen (~1024px) so there's the gap left over.) I haven't found a window manager that will do that, so I made one with Hammerspoon. (I started with Mjolnir, which would have been better for my limited usage, but the screen lib errored out.) Install http://www.hammerspoon.org open the config from the menu, then: 

local eightfoldPath = {
	tl = function(f, max)
		f.x = 50
  	f.y = 20
  end,
	tr = function(f, max)
		f.x = max.w - f.w - 50
  	f.y = 20
  end,
	rt = function(f, max)
		f.x = 0
		f.y = 50
  end,
	lt = function(f, max)
		f.x = max.w - f.w
		f.y = 50
  end,
	rb = function(f, max)
		f.x = max.w - f.w
		f.y = max.h - f.h - 50
  end,
	lb = function(f, max)
		f.x = 0
		f.y = max.h - f.h - 50
  end,
	br = function(f, max)
		f.x = 50
		f.y = max.h - f.h
  end,
	bl = function(f, max)
		f.x = max.w - f.w - 50
		f.y = max.h - f.h
  end,
}
function mover(fn, win)
  local f = win:frame()
  local screen = win:screen()
  local max = screen:frame()
	fn(f,max)
  win:setFrame(f)
end
hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "alt", "ctrl"}, "1", function()
  local win = hs.window.focusedWindow()
  mover(eightfoldPath.tl, win)
end)
hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "alt", "ctrl"}, "2", function()
  local win = hs.window.focusedWindow()
  mover(eightfoldPath.tr, win)
end)
hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "alt", "ctrl"}, "3", function()
  local win = hs.window.focusedWindow()
  mover(eightfoldPath.rt, win)
end)
hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "alt", "ctrl"}, "4", function()
  local win = hs.window.focusedWindow()
  mover(eightfoldPath.lt, win)
end)
hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "alt", "ctrl"}, "5", function()
  local win = hs.window.focusedWindow()
  mover(eightfoldPath.rb, win)
end)
hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "alt", "ctrl"}, "6", function()
  local win = hs.window.focusedWindow()
  mover(eightfoldPath.lb, win)
end)
hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "alt", "ctrl"}, "7", function()
  local win = hs.window.focusedWindow()
  mover(eightfoldPath.br, win)
end)
hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "alt", "ctrl"}, "8", function()
  local win = hs.window.focusedWindow()
  mover(eightfoldPath.bl, win)
end)
hs.hotkey.bind({"ctrl"}, "`", function()
  local wins = hs.window.orderedWindows()
  if wins[1] then
	  mover(eightfoldPath.tr, wins[1])
  end
  if wins[2] then
	  mover(eightfoldPath.tl, wins[2])
  end
  if wins[3] then
	  mover(eightfoldPath.rt, wins[3])
  end
  if wins[4] then
	  mover(eightfoldPath.lt, wins[4])
  end
  if wins[5] then
	  mover(eightfoldPath.rb, wins[5])
  end
  if wins[6] then
	  mover(eightfoldPath.lb, wins[6])
  end
  if wins[7] then
	  mover(eightfoldPath.br, wins[7])
  end
  if wins[8] then
	  mover(eightfoldPath.bl, wins[8])
  end
end)
Use ^` to set the first 8 windows to an edge, or move the front window to location# with the number keys+ctrl,opt,command. Some of what it picks up are not real windows. The moljnir thing I did had better support for windows by size, but using those functions might have been why it wasn't working (also the version of lua isn't supported any more, for years), so I left it alone. Really should only pick up on the 2K sized windows, leaving smaller windows, not-visible windows, hover things alone. Windows don't hit the bottom of screen or the top of the dock, either. I'll see how much I use it before debugging all that. (also: needs to not position windows on top of each other, moving out the >8 windows. Or move windows that are already in position.)

2019-04-28

"A program of de-engineering is under way to reduce the amount of space devoted to automobiles. In the centre, at Lujiazui, the city has given up on the street level entirely and created a huge, circular, above-grade walkway accessible by escalator and connecting to all surrounding buildings. It breaks every rule of contemporary city planning and is a great success, full of liveliness and an endless selfie opportunity." https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-welcome-to-shanghai-the-capital-of-the-future/

The Disco Dingo seems to have killed Weyland. I first went to the settings to see if the fractional scaling was in there yet, but everything was very slow, no CPU load. Only Weyland, though. Somebody suggested they only do the LTS GUI releases, to focus effort on creating the Year of Linux on the Desktop. That is a good idea.

Verizon is supposed to give me free Netflix to distract from how overpriced the service is, except both the link is wrong (missing a . in wwwverizon), and doesn't work when fixed.

There goes Elizabeth Warren's campaign. I'd have voted for her over the consumer protection issues, but paying student loans is just a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class (because who else pays taxes) to for-profit educational institutions. Almost as if they learned nothing from the GI Bill.

2019-04-21

Philter is my new favorite work music. I'd like to be able to share the things I find on Apple Music, but I don't want to link into the walled garden. Have to do things the old fashioned way. Some other things: Zola Jesus, Juno Reactor. They only have Paprika's sound track from Susumu Hirasawa, but also 2 2015 P-MODEL albums I didn't even know existed.

2019-04-14

Spring 2019 Anime

LOST SONG: girl of destiny repeatedly does the wrong thing and kills people. High point is the inexplicably ripped drummer. The plot twist is a big one, but still.

I re-thermal-pasted my 2013 MBP. Temps are staying in the 55-65 range with video, launching many apps, and not hitting 80 with scrolling text up and down. Even 55 seems extremely high compared to a desktop, and the GPU is not covered by the heat sink at all, which seems insane. It will hit 90 if I push it hard enough with Netbeans and 4K video, so I'll leave the fan controller running. Even an inaudible increase in fan speed is enough to stop it hitting the 80's. A success in that I didn't drop a tiny screw into the battery pack or something, but it didn't fix the structural problem. Next to try the iMac. (It's a low power GPU, but are heat sinks even necessary if it there is a ducted air flow on the die that's fast/cold enough?)

2019-04-07

I got another credit card declined letter, this time to my actual address. This is more worrying, in that it is as least data that is more than 15 years old. (Unless the bank figured out the new address on its own?) I still have frozen credit and a fraud warning. Anybody giving credit away despite that will get what they deserve. I looked up what NordicTrack requires: 2 phone numbers, email, employer, monthly income, and TD Bank didn't verify any of that as legit.

2019-03-31

Arrested Development Finale: Conflicted; it is funny, and the cast is great, but the interview hangs over the proceedings. Also do not like what happened to Maeby.

If truthiness was the word for the Republicans during the Bush II era, sadopopulism is the word for the current era. Speaking of the recent Incomparable episode on Travellers, my fan theory is Trump is a Traveller. Wait, listen: he has poor health and his doctor seems to be a lunatic and thus is an obvious candidate, the traveller was willing to debase himself to appeal to a party Trump had not previously belonged to but could acquire the votes needed. Once in office, he shuts down international travel, revives the coal industry, and creates a space force. What did the Travellers prevent: international epidemic, nuclear disaster, and an asteroid strike. Alas, due to Trump's unrecorded brain issue, the Traveler has not been successful, thus the Director has written off this timeline as unsalvageable.

Anime Winter 2019 round-up: Dororo is great. Shield, Neverland, Spec-ops, Cat, and even ENDRO! were all good. Price of Smiles was generally kind of irritating, aiming for Love And Peace solution to violence, but not, like Vash, willing to bleed for it. KOTOBUKI was fun, but also kind of aimless. I enjoyed Ueno-san, while MYSTERIA was possibly too low key for its own good. WATATEN! seemed unhealthy. Domekano wobbled between being unusually mature for anime and over the top soap opera. Kemurikusa. was slow, and I don't think it was as sugoi as boy!serval seemed to think everything was. It could be on the same level "Lost" is except the cast is so small (or better, in that it has an actual secret it got to in only one season), but we've moved past that. (see also L,D&R) It was, however, #YesTatsukiYesTanoshi. I did not see season 2.

Love, Death & Robots: I've reviewed a number of Twilight Zone style shows as being too long and self indulgent. Here's an idea: what if they were 15-20 minutes, and bonus, some were stories by Alastair Reynolds, Ken Liu, and John Scalzi?

2019-03-24

Into the Badlands 3: the teen stars have gotten older. Correlation or causation: the story is also better.

Detective Dee 4 Heavenly Kings: Chinese Batman again. Hitting the propaganda pretty hard at the end. I almost broke out in belt and road initiatives.

Miraculous appliance healing, sort of: I had the iMac on because that's where all my tax documents live, also the monthly backup. The weird screen lines are gone! Replaced by something like bad backlight bleed in one corner! It looks like the display was installed not parallel to the glass, which is exactly the sort of thing I was too afraid of to ever actually open and remove the display. It does make the monitor usable again, though the hard drive (which Apple is still selling) now seems so very slow to me. It also seems loud, though it was the quietest computer I had when I got it. Still need to build the fanless. If I get the full set of screwdrivers for the laptop, I should be able to redo the iMac, too.

The new iPads have true tone displays, but I want true audio: if my refrigerator turns on, the computer can turn up the audio to match, an activity I currently do manually.

New weirdness: Safari windows have vanished, but they are still there, absorbing mouse clicks and the status bar url thing pops up, but there's no visible window. Coincidentally or not, this happened right after an hour of working with html templates in Netbeans, so long lines triggered the fans a lot. In other news, something in my fridge is leaking water, and the oven stopped working. I think it might be less the age of the equipment and possibly is demonic possession.

https://github.com/ruby-concurrency/concurrent-ruby If you want a round-up of modern concurrent programming features. Does not have 0MQ/NNG's socket weirdness, but that's less of a language feature than promises or channels.

2019-03-17

Tried XFCE. Better than WM, in that it consistently works and has pretty much all the same features, but I do miss the chonky Nextstep look and consistant menu locations. Also the whisker menu is nice. Still not sure how much of the slowness is the emulator or Linux's GUI. Running it in full screen seems faster.

Free idea: take a Mac Mini, stretch it up like G4 Cube, putting in a projector, maybe battery or one of those laser keyboard things. Most of the time, it would be connected to a real keyboard, monitor, but when you go to presentations, all you need is a blank wall and drive the keyboard & mouse off a phone.

https://vorpus.org/blog/notes-on-structured-concurrency-or-go-statement-considered-harmful/ Surely a traditional threadpool would have been easier and offered the same benefits? As with the bits about C# having but ignoring Cancel parameters and Rust threads ignoring exceptions, it is the implementation that's a problem, not the language design. I do like the point that stacktraces and certain exception handling is too close to assembly, as was goto, to be useful in a modern language. A call tree or super flat event/actor system would help both. I also appreciate the work on cancelling jobs.

Behind the Curve: speaking of crazy things people go off on, I was struck by the whitewash: none of the rapper flatearthers made it into the film, even though they most definitely started the modern meme. It's rock all over again. It's the CIA GPS Warner Brothers Music Industrial Complex, sheeple!

MacOS rant: While it is also fun to simply complain about things, I do also have positive ideas. Software design: 1: stop building things into the operating system. Use the UNIX model. (Example: continuity camera. Great idea, but has only been implemented in a random assortment of apps. Should have been another userland app, that can be quit, (not yet another coreduet.) and use established copy/paste, drag/drop methods to communicate. (maybe services and share, too?) More over, it established a link that now has no other use: can I use the phone's mic? Sensors like a Wii-mote? File transfer like a reverse air drop? trigger a Workflow? If it had been built in pieces, all that could be possible over the same secure link.) 2: stop hiding the things already in the OS. Just make a manual! Have a evangelist twitter account. I just today discovered a whole bunch of services that are unchecked by default, at random. It does so many cool things that just never see any publicity. A while ago I was struggling with the Script Editor, and remembered Automator is a thing. There's nothing in Script that suggests there's this other, newer thing. There's no "so you want to do things in bulk" guide. I just wanted to use preview to resize images, turns out there is already an action for exactly that, if you look at the right place. 3: start building cloud stuff. This includes the obvious like stop ignoring the cloud stuff they already have, but also... 4: add the cloud to the OS. Probably not what you are thinking. I already mentioned the "established communication methods". Apple is uniquely positioned to write the tricks of the cloud servers' back end into the OS, then tie that back into either Apple's own cloud, or the local cloud concept (more below). Every app should have easy access to multi-server message queues. Every app should not only be 2 threads, BeOS style, but >=2 processes, one lives where you are, and the rest where the data/gpu/speaker/3d-printer/whatever is. 5: software and device management This ties back to 2 again as a lot of these things exist already (such as in the San Bernadino case). The cloud management with ChromeOS is a major selling feature for schools, which Apple has a lot of but neglected to tell anyone about. Hardware design: 1: more brands, more skus. It's fine if Apple.com doesn't sell everything that runs MacOS. A subsidiary or shell company could make Mac "clones", but targeted for the sorts of things Apple has seemingly abandoned, like plastic lowDPI totally-not-chromebooks for the edu market, or workstation boxes, or rack-able servers, or 5s sized phones. It's nice that Apple has 1 machine with a real GPU in it, but pro/non-gamer GPU's are in another class entirely, plus some tasks use several at a time. It would not take anything to sell a MacOS blessed eATX board, and less than nothing to stop messing with NVidia's drivers. 2: local cloud hardware. As somebody subjected to constant fan hum for years, I really do appreciate the quiet of Apple hardware, and the portability. But as somebody who sometimes does come close to maxing out a Ryzen 7 for work (still never actually done it, the Evo970 usually gives up first), Apple's hardware is pretty anemic in general, and terrible for specific uses. My solution to this is generally applicable to anyone with enough technical knowledge: run all the hard stuff on a computer on the other side of the room/country. Apple could round up existing technology, put a just works face on it, and now any Mac/iP* with a network connection is a super-computer. Edit 8k video or render 3D at 120Hz on a iPad, or both at the same time. Why not, all the real work is being done on the SAN and compute cluster in the basement. 3: As in the hierarchy-of-needs article, stop inflicting courage on the entire product line. Don't not have courage to drop ports or make a new keyboard, but do it as part of a vision for specific products in new markets. Sell the public on wanting a wireless headphone world by creating that world first, don't remove the jack then find out that's how people are playing music in their car stereo, noise canceling headphones, speaker dock, or just plugged one of those weird Japanese mascot things in to it. Don't remove all the ports on a laptop and find out when you release it that there are no shipping docks that can supply enough power. I understand that thunderbolt 2 and 3, or usb a and c, have different ports, but don't promote thunderbolt as the new hotness then release a laptop without it. It suggests it might not be worth investing in it at all. 4: heat It might be fine that the cpu is basically unregulated, because it will shut itself down before it melts, but all the components around the cpu, such as my iMac's monitor, probably don't appreciate the nuclear inferno going on next to them. Just turn the fans up a bit! Either it doesn't happen that often, or the user is doing something that needs the power. The user paid for that cpu, might as well let them use it. Related, it is disingenuous to sell an i9 in such a small case. Yes, they fixed the bug where the base clock speed was dropping by 50%, but put the same chip in a better cooled machine, and it could use its 20% burst clock that no MBP owner will ever see, but expected when they heard 'i9'. Vision: 1: Microsoft may be making only incremental progress with the Hololens and the Surface, but the news about Apple's new projects are TV shows and a car? 2: It's nice that Apple makes a super thin laptop. But it seems like that is the vision for the entire product line. Y tho? Did all the time invested in the Mini gain anything over just slapping a Apple label on any random ITX box? It isn't even close the 7cm^2 mini PC, so if size was the goal, they lost. Is there anything (other than the custom cabling for the 5k) gained by not just having the iMac be a Mini clipped to the back of a monitor? 3: The only real goal all of Apple's computers seem to have is to not be computers any more. For example, the iOS TOS forbids being able to compile code. The iPad Pro has the power to implement the Samsung Dex concept, but instead forbids mouse actions or local storage.

https://sixcolors.com/post/2019/03/prioritizing-the-macbook-hierarchy-of-needs/ Apple is willing to do its own thing despite shedding entire industries in the process. It will eventually drop us, too, as our needs get increasingly particular and the competition more diverse.

New Matrix ending: Warframe: Mr. Anderson becomes the dreamer, spawns all the frames, levels the Matrix. Also, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zo-MIQR9x60 is possibly the best explanation of the themes of the sequels.

[Totally forgot about Ruby, which I use all the time, but only in small fragments for Shopify. It also has native threading, is probably already installed everywhere, and works on Haiku. I still want to implement my job queue example because I think it should be the future of Mac Pro hardware, but Ruby seems the obvious choice to the problem that started all this, so very long ago.]

Also: Swift, the last time I looked at it: had few non-iOS libraries and had just had a major version change, making example documentation confusing.

Still PHP, but using a job queue and process manager: instead of starting 8 goroutines on a channel, start 8 php apps all listening to the same queue, and to assuage concerns about php's long term memory (is that even still a problem?), have each process quit itself after N requests, then the process manager sees that and starts a new one. Would need a job queue. I've been against RabbitMQ ever since one of their versions dropped Mac support in the compiled Mac binary, which was mentioned in the release notes for that version, a version many revisions ago. The SO question about it had the answer "well, didn't you read the release notes?"

Golang: More feature laden, like maps, 'defer', the multiple assignment thing, but also farther away from C, Rust's bare metal memory management. Incredibly anal about formatting, the way Rust is about everything else. The if x, ok := abc(); ok {} thing is cool, though still verbose. Has something approaching exception handling but without exception types. I generally only use generic exceptions to carry a text message anyway. The goroutine being basically a shell's & or JS's setTimeout (if that was actually multithreaded) makes it easy to use and comprehend. Also has JS's closures. The ability to do this sort of processing is why I was looking at these languages, so I appreciate the go doc not waiting until chapter 16 and glossing over it. (after reading both docs, I can do basic math and comparisons in Rust, and write a multithreaded webserver in Go. They take about as many lines of code.)

Rust-lang: like C, but with a compiler that won't let you do anything, and some classes that let you do some of the things again. The Rust docs note there's nothing in Rust that you could not do in C with the right patterns and discipline. I like that 'if' is an expression. || doesn't return the first true value, but there are methods for that sort of thing as part of null pointer replacement class. I like the match as a concept, but I think the default ('_', oddly) is just going to produce the same issues switch/default generate. The intro book barely mentions threading, and it is generally more irritating than Java was 20 years ago. Plays games with the ';' which will confuse me. Assignment doesn't return anything, but there is a 'if let' construct in which both the let and if do. Probably a good enough language for people like myself who generally work in non-GC languages, because it will complain if you do it wrong.

Javascript: slow to start and memory hungry, plus npm weirdness, widely supported (though the only 1 of the 4 that doesn't run on Haiku). While it is not actually multithreaded, it can process multiple http requests at a time.

PHP: can do multiple http calls at once (https://www.phpied.com/simultaneuos-http-requests-in-php-with-curl/), but only in chunks. So something like get a course, then get its students, then get the students' grades, would still be 3 distinct blocks, though it could get all of each type at once. This would probably cause the rate-limit to kill it. Can be recompiled to use threads, but might be a lot to ask of the client. Has an asynchronous JS-style thing that is just weird.

I do a lot of JS work for one client, with some server stuff in php, but they also have occasion need to move massive amounts of data, mostly via remote api calls, so it is mostly just waiting for network responses. Thus, having way more than one network request active a time is a big boost. This prompted a massive review of newer programming languages.

More discontent: I've been feeling squished by the move from 2K to 4K HiDPI, but I didn't see a Mac window manager that would put windows 2 per side, so a bit of the edge of each window is always visible. I don't want them tiled, just slightly visible.

In which I achieve maximum smugness:

The Harvard Business School alumnus who told Duhigg he was wasting his life added, "If you spend 12 hours a day doing work you hate, at some point it doesn't matter what your paycheck says." (This man's paycheck says $1.2 million a year.) "He had received an offer at a start-up, and he would have loved to take it", Duhigg wrote, "but it paid half as much, and he felt locked into a lifestyle that made this pay cut impossible."(https://newrepublic.com/article/153205/save-americans-hell-work)
I may have worked for 20 years to save $1.2 million, but I also now work 20 hours a week, and don't even need to do that. Which of us is actually rich? Also: "A culture that worships work is "setting itself up for collective anxiety, mass disappointment, and inevitable burnout."" - and big trouble when it finds out robots have taken all the jobs.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9k4x8p/fix-apple-mac-battery-yourself

What I really want is a luggable: a super heavy laptop designed primarily but not exclusively for desktop use, but also using the mobile tech or 35W chips to keep the heat down low enough to run fanless, at least some of the time. Something along the lines of the ServalWS, but not quite so much of everything, or a Chromebook, but more of everything. For example: MacBookPro, but double the height. Use the extra space to channel heat to the palm rest or the bottom of the case. (which would probably need to be raised up a bit, more metal. Perhaps streacom's finned cube, but only the one side, and not a 65W chip.) Given that everything that pushes the CPU at all causes the CPU temp to instantly spike to >80C with this laptop, and this now turns the fans on, I know how often a day that happens. It's not a lot. The heatsink doesn't even need to dissipate a full 65W, if that chip's cores can be off most of the time. (but be there if needed) Do it sort of iMac style: some (normal) screws through the bottom, lean the bottom out a bit, undo all the connectors to the top's IO, then unfold it so you are looking at all the replaceable parts, but at the back of the motherboard. (or on the other side, at the bottom of your easily repairable or upgradeable (removable bluetooth?) keyboard.) To replace the cpu's thermal paste, unscrew the heatsink mount from this side, then pull it away. The fan could pull air in, over the cpu side, then around and over the back side, then out the top. I should also point out I'm not interested in this because of the MBP's fan noise: I can't hear it over the tinnitus at 1200 rpm. (the PC's GPU, on the other hand). After having 2 Macs fail due to cooling issues (that could be easily fixed if they were simple enough to open), and having heard new Minis and Pros are even worse at that, I'd just like to complete the move from disks to SSD and go fully solid state.

There's a Cringley prediction that Apple will become a hedge fund and financial services company, like GE. Probably. I'll add: then die, like GE. Financial services don't unite people the way products do. Also insert rant about how fintech has already absorbed so many people who should have gone on to create science, instead of to create math justifying and code implementing some crack addled decision to create credit default swaps or whatever. It might just be continuing seasonal depression, but I'm assuming the Mac Pro will be awful. Apple has been clearly willing to shed entire industries, even things like education that were a core priority. I shouldn't be surprised that they'd be willing to shed me, as well. Or I could stop complaining, buy a dock and tape over the touch bar or something. Or get the screwdrivers necessary to repair the two overheated Macs and just never upgrade anything again. Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L65fw9ubjQ

2019-02-24

Fox 8, by George Saunders: like Watership Down, except better because it has foxes in it.

Free SciFi idea: like Seven Eves, but only 4 men survive off-planet. They have the technology to clone themselves, but each clone has to be gestated like a skin tumor. Also no animals or soil to grow plants in ("This is my body. Take it, and eat of it."). While their struggle is hard, after hundreds of years, they succeed in recovering a DNA vault. Will they discover the value of diversity when they have only ever known those other 3 people? Or will they learn that most of their problems were caused by their own damn fault and everything would be fine if you stop arguing on the internet all the time.

Also, embedding chiplets in a heat sink: you could do micro fluid channels into the metal block, then integrate that with heat pipes. The liquid-vapor loop would reach right down to micrometers off the circuits.

Also related: If the Windows Linux thing worked perfectly, http://www.litestep.net is still a thing, if not updated in 7 years. http://www.winstep.net/xtreme.asp seems updated. Can't remember the file browser thing's name. That could give me pro tools and a UI that isn't completely terrible, and a cooling system that won't stand by while the machine melts. Add in fanless and it would be great. Insanely great, one might say.

Related to the last bit: A personal cloud or NAS is $50 to $125 a TB, plus electric, but AWS is $4 (glacial) to $23 (S3) every month (not including bandwidth, maybe, the pricing is complicated). A local NAS could be profitable in 4 months (assuming you buy a second one to back up the first one, and don't have to pay $ for admin costs.) The guts of the PC were somewhere around $500, not including the fancy case, but including the video card and NVMe drive, which were perhaps excessive. This is where virtualization pays off. That's 8 years of service from our VPS, at the cheapest level. The full 16 threads are 8x more powerful, but also hard to max out doing any one thing. It's hard enough for me to one entire thing at all, let alone 16 to keep the CPU busy 24/7. The awkward conclusion is it is cheaper to store data locally, but cheaper to process it remotely.

2D vs 3D Stacking: Intel's plan to beat Zen 2 from Corteteks: Interesting point about the memory bandwidth, which was kind of RISC's problem. It didn't matter how fast the chip is if it starves. CISC microcode is just getting instructions from a second memory channel, thus faster. It then goes off on a tangent out gaming, and that most current gaming is all heavily server dependent, and all has extremely modest client requirements, and this will move chip markets. I realized this matched my own move. While I only had to move because the iMac overheated and got weird lines on the screen, once I was on the laptop, I then moved a bunch of functions off the laptop onto a virtualized (because the Windows Linux layer is still kind of annoying (but getting better. I have hopes.)) linux server on the PC. It might as well be the cloud as far as the laptop knows. Also, I said this 20 years ago: take the chiplets, turn them sideways, stuff them into a heatsink, then slam that down on to the pins on the die. It might be too tall to be practical, much like myself, but I think its a workable idea.

All the new ChromeOS Linux stuff is looking tempting, though I don't know about inspecting things on screen that small. And you only get 4 desktops. I'm at 10 across 2 monitors.

I got an email from equifax from when I tried to register the account. (Feb might be the shortest month, but still that was a month ago) Because I couldn't answer the garbage security questions, they mailed me the PIN, but the letter was return as undeliverable. Surprise! The address they have is also garbage. I can mail them all sorts of identity documents just to get the freeze put on, or I could not do any of that. Really not my problem that some random company with a call center in India that thinks I live at a fake address but is still worth thousands of dollars on credit. The amount of trust people put in them in entirely unwarranted, and if you issue credit to my stolen SSN based on their say-so, over the fraud warning, that's entirely not my problem. Also, TDBank's mortgage department is massively and demonstrably racist. That had nothing to do with this, but is a true thing.

The NeXTStep menu kind of makes me want the Windows-NeXT shortcut menus I had again, except radial and wheel support. I think I had open windows+urls+sshs in a popup menu, with apps, prefs, running apps, important dirs, and more urls in the main menu. Another thing I've wanted is the UI from William Shatner's Tekwar TV show. It had a band running the whole way around the edge of the screen with a fullscreen app in the middle for the phone size, or multiple windows for the desktop. You could put a Mac dock at the bottom, NeXT doc or Windows taskbar and tray on the sides, BeOS titlebars or Chrome tabs around the top or side. Every open window would have a tab floating around somewhere on the edge. Clicking the tab brings the window up. It is a step towards the Mac ideal of having everything thing you can do be something visible you can click on with one button.

The chorded mouse clicks change the context menu to mouse up, not down, which is a bit of lag. It doesn't have that issue with left click. I had to move the paste and back functions to the wheel down, which is always tricky. I should just get a mouse with more buttons. Also consider grafting half a playstation controller to the top of a mouse, 2/3 finger triggers, a thumbstick for 2D wheeling and 4 thumb buttons. Or a trackpad with real buttons.

I'm being tempted by the Karabiner scripts that remap the space bar to a modifier key. I'm pretty sure that would destroy my typing because my sloppy typing already as an issue with the shift key and adding a second ap in a word (It took the H and C as arrow keys because I didn't release the space in time.), but the more things I add to the modifier keys, the worse it is for my pinky, and it shifts my hand way to the left. Perhaps both shift and space? Ctrl+space for a second set? (Plus, not every keyboard will have the 5 (6, if count caplock as not shift or control) modifier keys, but I'm pretty sure it would have a space bar. Though perhaps the modifier keys below the space bar?) It's probably the ultimate step in making my computer incomprehensible to normals. Now I have both opt and mouse-4 + wheel for screens, mouse-7,8 for windows (but only in the same app). It isn't great in that it uses opt, as it also has ctrl+arrows to switch spaces and Expose, and command+numbers for tabs. Also Mouse-5 plus wheel to change tabs (ctrl+tab). And ctrl/4,5 to switch windows in an app. I added 2 more desktops to make switching desktops more important than expose or switch hidden windows. Using chording with the back/forward buttons killed the back/forward, but gives me a lot more right hand only abilities. From my recent Unix tests, I added button 5+ left/right as copy/paste. Now all I have to is remember all this.

2019-02-24

I tried Window Manager. Certainly not modern looking, but more features than the default. Some bugs and things not set up. I really liked the mouse/desktop controls. I added something similar to SteerMouse, but it needs the option key down. That isn't the most convenient key, but control is zoom, and it doesn't see fn. Also is still only Expose's pokey switch and has no window+app switching ability. I had the menu bound to the top right corner for my Windows NeXT menu, which was nice but didn't seem to be an option. Some things were broken to start with, some other things I broke. If the font rendering wasn't incredibly horrible, I'd prefer it absolutely. (that might also be do to the VM. I was having problems getting WM to display anything except at certain resolutions. Plus the 23 inch 1440 monitor is not great at regular text in general.) I'd forgot about the window roll-up. I had a System7 app that did that.

News about a bronze age civilization that lived with foxes and dogs.

https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-tamed-the-feral-internetand-thats-too-bad/?mbid=synd_digg You can have web 1.0 if you try hard enough, and believe me, I put very little effort into this site. Also, Wired ended up with Suck.com? I stopped reading when it started doing long format snark free political reporting, but I'd like to pretend suck duck wong influenced my writing.

The corporate website WP 5.1 upgrade broke the post editor, and we were going to redo the site anyway so it isn't worth fixing and now there's no place for my quarterly blog post, which I had already written. So I'm dumping it here:

Javascript considered as Cooperative Multitasking

Back in the dawn of time (the 90's), when desktop computers started running more than one program at a time, there were 2 visions: cooperative and preemptive multitasking. Preemptive requires no support from the software developer and thus is the better solution, but modern browser based JS very much resembles cooperative, without a few of the lessons learned.

The yield function was very handy and could provide benefit for browser responsiveness and repaint cycles. When an application gets a mouse event on a button, it starts doing things in response. With cooperative multitasking, it has full control over the cpu until it finishes. If that task requires any significant time, the human can notice this locks up the entire computer. The solution to that is to voluntarily yield control back to the OS while running. The other programs can run, and then the original picks up where it left off. Something like that would be helpful for the browser, as a way to announce that you are still working on something, but that it is OK to repaint the screen, or possibly even put that library load on hold for a bit so other more vital events can be processed.

Event based programming would also be worth resurrecting. Obviously there was a mouse event then and there is the onclick handler now, but to support something like Applescript or Laravel's jobs (which when combined with a message queue are loads of fun and how all heavy-lifting software will be written in the cloud services world of the future. Even right now, I need to use a PC to supplement the laptop, but I use ssh and command line apps to bridge the gap. Ideally, every app will be able to do that on its own via message queues.), the click handler should just create another, more specific, named event, and possibly disable/flash the button. This meshes nicely with some of the browser's threading restrictions, and the secret to BeOS's super responsive UI. The browser worker threads can only get custom events, so the main thread should only spend its time generating custom events. Unfortunately, the main thread is the only one that can write to the DOM, so even if it creates an event that isn't processed immediately, anything that changes the page will have to run in a way that blocks the UI sooner or later.

That brings us back to the yield function. If the browser can't do an async event queue or worker thread, at least being able to throw yields into strategic locations would allow big DOM changes or larger library loads to announce "Hey, this is taking forever, and I'm being loaded asynchronously any way, so here's a good place where we can stop for now so you can repaint the screen." For example, adding more than some hundred items to a list will crush Angular (1, at least). If it was able to stop in the middle of that process, catch its breath, it would still be terrible, but it wouldn't be unresponsively terrible.

Mostly what prompted this is something in how I was delaying Shopify's trekkie library broke, and I had to hack in something else. Shopify's god-tier CDN can load a complete page, including javascript execution, in 200ms, but the ad tracking and terrible app libraries take 2,000ms or more and locks up the browser. All I want is to load my junk before that happens, so the customer is looking at a finished page, including my javascript rendered bits, immediately. Ideally, that it also not make the page unresponsive for several seconds, but a human brain can't react so fast, so as long as there's something to look at, it's good enough.

Identity theft update: I got another batch of letters forwarded. They also tried an Ikea card (declined), and TDBank sent me something about the call, to prove my identity (little late, guys) but due "within 14 days of today's date". Assuming they don't mean now() (Lain: Present Day! Present Time!), from the date on the letter that was 5 days ago. (Maybe it's just the Trump administration, but I don't think anybody is really doing their jobs. Poor NordicTrack is now out $3,241 because TD Bank thinks business is better offering extremely loose credit than validating literally anything beyond the name and I'm assuming SSN. Again, they already know where I currently live, but didn't think twice about opening a credit card at an old address to ship a product to a third address. How can you have a capitalist society if banks can not be trusted?) The Ikea letter said my credit score was 445 (out of 999), but the credit report I got said I had only a debit card and no debt. 45% is all living debt free in Modern America is worth? I tried equifax again, to see if their stupid identity questions might include my data this time. Can't even log in: "We are temporarily unable to complete this request." None of this is dated after the fraud alert went out, so I'm assuming that nothing new will be approved.

I found an HP version of the Mac Mini. No TB3, but USB-C, 3, and enough A ports. I'm considering getting it, attaching a full cpu cooler to it and seeing if it can run fanless with the cooler sticking up out of the case. I'm also considering doing the same with a laptop. It wouldn't be portable, and wouldn't have an AM4 mount, but it would have a built-in UPS. The main reason I'd buy that instead of parts is they have low power Ryzens+Vega, which don't seem to be for sale to consumers.

Speaking of general dissatisfaction: I just noticed that if you scroll with the trackpad, the scrollbar remains visible much longer, and never fades if the cursor is over it. That's so much easier than trying to catch the thumb with the mouse-wheel version. So somebody saw the problem and fixed it, but only for their use case. Mostly I suppose I'm just nostalgic for the time when technology made me happy and had a promise of a better tomorrow. Speaking of which, one of the NeXTStep-based XWindows Window Managers is still going. I'm not sure if you can run it on top of Ubuntu's normal stuff, or possibly next to. If not, I'd just run the WM alone. I am not impressed with modern Linux desktops. It's more consistent than Windows, but just less of everything.

I was playing around on the Linux desktop VM. The Netbeans and Eclipse snaps don't work. It doesn't have a lot of things in the app store. Some things, like Karabiner's fn key magic, is not possible. Such disappoint. Also the place where the password was written down seems to have not gotten saved, which I blame on Mac's auto-saving document having trained me to not bother to save constantly. Haiku-os's Otter Browser is nice, usable, but the gui is slow and choppy (which might just be the VM, because the OS was supposed to prevent that), and the OS doesn't have nodejs (although somebody is working on it). The mouse-wheel/desktop switch is a nice feature. Expose is just too slow, and the 30Hz isn't helping at all. Now I'm wondering if I could build a fanless hackintosh, or use a real MBP or Mini and replace the fan, case.

So there's a text generating AI that is "too advanced" to release, because it's markov chain text seems to stay on track. But on IQ2US, IBM's Project Debater is having a live debate with a human, and it is quoting statistics and responding to arguments.

"Alexa, louder"

2019-02-17

Land of the Lustrous: super weird vision, well executed, lovely butts.

The Ruins (movie): could have been more gruesome (was already R, right? Why not get a little closer to the effects they already created?), and less moving plants (which didn't look great), more plants having grown every time you blink. Still think Pathways Into Darkness should get a movie.

Polar: very comic book.

2019-02-10

The Endless: Would have been happy if there was a car crash at the end, loopy-er.

A thought on smart advertising: it would seem the ultimate expression of AI tracking is to present to you only the ads meaningful to you. If it did that, could it not go the next step and find those products for you? So you could tell Amazon you could spend $100 every month and it would present things you'd want to buy, or just order them for you. There's no ad dollars there, though. This is the secret to smart ads: ads only work as a profit center when there's a difference between how effective the people paying think they are, and the willingness of people to buy, or even look at the ad. For example, Facebook's recent outright lies about its engagement.

NPR hosts are so willing to break in to define relatively common acronyms and names, but in the face of politicians spouting lies, getting called on it, and then spouting the same lies again, there's not enough time to continue.

Swiss Army Man: possibly #shacklife, certainly weird

Banana Fish: maximum gay, but has an engaging plot.

2019-02-03

https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/31/sex-censorship-killed-internet-fosta-sesta/ That's why I have this site, even though I'm aware nobody reads it. (And I make it unreadable.) Not because I'm pushing forbidden knowledge, porn, or even strong language, but if you don't control the means of production then you work for the system.

Yet another sign the financial industry is out of touch: the credit agencies also want copies of bills to prove my identity, even as they have no problem accepting all this other crap is me with no basis at all. After all, if somebody froze your credit that would be ... mildly inconvenient and not cost anyone any money? And surely nobody could print out a statement with some things changed? Nobody can edit html, right?

Also ironic: the headline on the NordicTrack/TDBank card's letter: "A new you starts now.".

Ironic: Clues That Someone Has Stolen Your Information: "Debt collectors call you about debts that aren't yours." I silenced my cell because of all the calls Jeremy Rubin was getting about his real estate taxes. I silenced the land line because of the Indians (who were kind of amusing and I did lead them on) and the robots. Do your worst, future collection agents. Having checked out of society has some advantages.

I think somebody has stolen my identity. Not any of the vast wealth I've bragged about here, or any of the rotating 16 character usernames and passwords, but instead opened with an old address a Nordstrom (declined, thank you, I think. Am I not good enough for Nordstrom?) and NordicTrack/TDBank credit card (Not declined, even though TDBank would have reason to know where I live). I just happened to get 2 letters forwarded. However, when I tried to review my credit reports, all the "your last transaction" questions are total garbage going back to 2014. Those could have been trick questions, or my credit reputation is permanently hosed. Equifax and Experian won't give me a credit report or freeze it because I can't identify the auto loan or mortgage or other people living at my address(?!), and TransUnion says I already have had my 1 free report per year. If there are other frauds that go to collection I can at least point to the identitytheft.gov report on these 2, and I'm not going to worry about it. The credit freeze can stay there forever. I already have paid for a car with cash, and my shack land would not be mortgaged. My eternal problems with the IRS would make filing for a refund pointless. Just another way to check out of society.

Struggle: unexpected appearance of "Bob". Art, but suddenly, nazi. Then "Bob" again. This is where the yeti thing comes from, sort of.

2036 Origin Unknown: nice enough, but makes a number of unsupported plot twists.

2019-01-27

World's Most Extraordinary Homes: Liked the homes in ridges, the 3 streams house. Still a lot of concrete.

OtherLife: meh. Had some concepts, but low energy.

2019-01-20

The fans on the laptop keep coming on. Just scrolling text in Terminal will push cpu temp to 80+ in seconds, even though it doesn't show any abnormal CPU load. Given the iMac's issue, I can but assume that the thermal regulation on the laptop is failing. I preemptively started the fan controller, but all it's been doing is just turning the fans up more aggressively. It still cycles on and off. Still need to build the fanless.

Re:Creators: Extremely talky, but I like the foxy faced one, the foxy haired one, and the surprisingly popular character.

2019-01-13

Transcription: I'll never think about eye related expressions the same way.

Winter 2019 Anime

Made in Abyss: While I was on Amazon for kemurikusa., I'm catching up on things I missed. MiA is lovely. I loved every bit of it, even the bits that are incredibly hard to watch. I'm still not sure if it is Post-post-apocalyptic, or just so old that the high technology epoch was discarded as a bad idea that long ago.

Solo A Star Wars Story: found the beginning boring and unconnected, did not get a lot of the references as I have not been keeping up with the new EU. Such as: the guy at the end. Although that did reframe the unspeakable acts in a new way, but then the Incomparable episode, which I just now listened to, says no, it's just mobsters and crime. Whateves. (I then listened to the Magicians #3 episode, which I had forgotten was in the spoiler queue. There's one more episode in the queue, but I've forgotten what it was spoiling. Should have just listened to it back then, as I would have forgotten the contents by now.)

Godzilla Planet Eater, aka #3: spoiler, does not eat a planet. Was expecting a Friend to All Children ending if Haruo accepted Godzilla into his heart as his personal savior (which they did seem to be setting up), but not really sure what the ending is saying. The Landru Lifestyle? Eternal stasis and no woolen clothing?

American Circumcision: I've rarely wanted to punch somebody as much as the old man's smug smile at the end.

A Series Of Unfortunate Events #3: NPH is a national treasure or something.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/01/07/on-being-a-woman-in-america-while-trying-to-avoid-being-assaulted/ If she gets triggered to "read a novel written by a man in which a woman walks home alone, late at night, in America, without having a single thought about her physical safety", I get triggered by "walk through the parking lot with my keys out, bright points spiking between my fingers, in case I require a weapon". The 3 day self defense course should have pointed out that will do more damage to your hand than anything you are punching. If all you have is fear and ignorance, then all you'll ever be is afraid. Why would you not think about your safety? At all times? If you step into an elevator, always evaluate the person in there for sanity, hygiene. It could be a rapist, or somebody driven mad with fear and paranoia who has a gun. Or some keys.

2019-01-06

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work

HERO MASK: might have been nicer as a taut 70's political drama. Instead, the action scenes are terrible, and every episode kills time until it gets to the cliffhangers they are obviously structured around.

Prodigy: cheesy, no Elfen Lied. Bonus points for having a fox.

https://postlight.com/trackchanges/r-i-p-c "Every operating system is a batch-card processing retro-mess underneath." Haiku OS: at least the retro-mess is only 30 years old. I still think it would be a contender for Linux on the Desktop, and its exactly because the UI doesn't date back to the 70s. On the other hand, it lacks all the GPU work modern OSs have, so it doesn't look great. "You've got a super-machine and most of the time it's just sitting there." That's the core concept of my fanless concept PC: it only has to be fast enough to run the UI, and push occasional hard stuff off into the cloud (or the gaming pc).

NetBeans 10: mostly just the end of the move to Apache. Not a compelling upgrade from 8, unless you need php7.3 hints. Also has to be launched from the command line, which seems like a Mac team may not actually exist.

Binchou-tan with a scarf
I have an electric blanket, at least

Project Binchou-stan update: I'd love to move to the Delaware River area, but I'd love more to live someplace without freezing weather. I don't really want to move to the South, or Florida, but it may be inevitable. (though it is as cold in GA now as it is here) I may, after spending a whole 2 days camping last year, see about a longer trip to an area I could live in, or even buying some land for camping, but not a shack. There is/was a property in NJ, near the river. It was an oddly shaped corner in a division wedged into parkland, so there was nobody on 3-ish sides, but would also have the possibility of power and phone. There were a number of nice houses, including a nice one right on the river, but more than I could do on a whim.

This year's theme is celebrating my rampaging presbiopia. (Or doesn't show up at all, depending on your browser.) It is also supports Safari's dark mode but not normal mode. Somebody, as a joke, said that 12px system font would be a css trend in 2019. I'm ahead of that curve.

2018 Drivel

My sole remaining career goal is to live in a shack in the woods. No more resumes!

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Patrick Phelan, now more than ever.
w____\\W//___w       Te Hupenui
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