Linkspam

short but sweet link on why someone has gone back to running a personal website – rather than rely on the mess that is social media and external hosting.

The web was better in 2004 than today; it was more personal and more compact yet, somehow, oddly bigger too. Today I see the same layouts, the same themes the same themes, the same algorithmically curated content on so many pages.

And it’s not like the algorithmically curated content is any good; if I’ve just bought a toaster or a USB cable or a hoodie then it’s unlikely that I’m going to want another one tomorrow. Yet, again and again, the same thing appears in my feed and follows me around the internet.

Of course the internet has far more users today than it did back then (from hundreds of millions to 3-4 billion today), but most people end up in a corner that reflect’s them and theirs and there is no reason that these small corners cannot multiply and thrive away from the big content providers.

MSDOS 6.22

I’ve added a new section and created the first content to go in it – a short tutorial on running MSDOS 6.22 in QEMU on a Raspberry Pi. Alas, it’s a little rough and ready, but quality should improve as I get more practice.

I think that the next one I do will be a Windows 3.11 tutorial as I can build on the DOS 6.22 work I’ve just done.

Slow-mo Flicker

So June should bring us this year’s WWDC with all the usual chintz and glitz that we’ve come to expect. This summer, however, one thing I would like to see in IOS 13 would be a form of flicker reduction for slow motion videos. The video below – a short piece of some rain on a wet platform – is a prime example of this; a dull video of raindrops on standing water is reduced, thanks to overhead artificial lighting, to a headache-inducing mess of flickering images.

Will no one rid me of these troublesome flickers?

Brucie Bonus

In the long distant past – before he spend his time pissing Kevin Smith off – Bruce Willis apparently released a single; a cover of ‘Respect Yourself’ by the Staple Singers. It even reached the dizzying heights of no. #7 in the uk singles chart.

And it’s absolutely awful!

Amazon Lockers

Apparently the fastest way to make an Amazon package appear in a locker is to head out, do your jobs near and around said locker and then head home. The package will then be delivered as soon as the first shoe comes off.

Prettier Blog Listings

The Jekyll’s introductory tutorial suggests using…

<ul>
  {% for post in site.posts %}
    <li>
      <a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a>
    </li>
  {% endfor %}
</ul>

…as liquid code to display a programmatically generated, bullet-pointed list of blog posts titles each with a link to the post in question.

However, a more useful list of blog posts titles can be generated with a little extra effort.

The following code block will generate a bullet-pointed list of posts with a link to the post in question. Next to the post title it will add the canonical date of the post – formatted in a human friendly style – and, below, will append a generated excerpt from the post to tease any potential reader.

<ul>
  {% for post in site.posts %}
    <li>
      <a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a>  ({{ post.date| date: "%B %d, %Y" }})
      {{ post.excerpt }}
    </li>
  {% endfor %}
</ul>

The end result is something like this:

  • Photography (January 30, 2019)
    As part of moving away from other people’s flaky, terms-terms-of-use changing sites (cough… Flickr!) I have started to add various image galleries to this site.