A Little More Web Kipple
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.
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?
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!
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.
As part of moving away from other people’s flaky, terms-of-use changing sites (cough… Flickr!) I have started to add various image galleries to this site.
This first – a set of shots I took at the Cotswold Falconry Centre in Summer 2018 – can be found here.
The Falconry Centre gallery was build with w3school’s Responsive Image Grid tutorial for the page’s image grid and the Lightbox functionality is provided by the Fancybox javascript Lightbox libraries.
I’ve long understood that working with java can be a bit of a chore, but recommending the NHS page on suicidal thoughts seems a little over the top. Still, if our all knowing overlords at Google deem it necessary, then who am I to argue?
(Please don’t down rank me!)
The first two blog posts on this site have concentrated on the technical aims of starting this website – to improve and expand my linux, nginx, and other associated skills.
Now it’s time to talk about another reason:
It’s been fairly obvious now that, after nearly two decades of tech expansion and growth combined – paradoxically – with the mass centralisation of user activity, there is a very good chance that, come the next tech recession, large chunks of people’s online presence risk being lost to the Official Reciever and the world’s various bankruptcy courts.
In some instances this may be a benefit – the loss of a million cringe-inducing MySpace profiles probably helps some sleep at night – but others (the slow slip of LiveJournal into the Russian sphere, the coming purge of millions of images on Flickr as various owners try – and fail – to make the site sustainable) qualify as material risks to online presences that may now stretch back two or more decades and provide value to the people concerned.
Operating my own domain allows me to hedge against these kind of events.
That’s not to say that this site will stay up – or will even always be available – but, thanks to the collapse in costs in personal hosting, I stand a far better chance of dictating the length of this site’s existence than I would were I to commit my content to someone else’s platform.
Domains name registration, DNS resolution services, hosting; these are all commodity activities that can be swapped at will – as long as I have the relevent authorisation.
And I will never have that relevent authorisation for Flickr.
Or Reddit.
Or LinkedIn.
As part of relearning both linux and nginx, I need to create and manage content on this site. For this I will be using the Jekyll static templating application to pre-generate the pages I serve. I will be using generated but static pages for two important reasons:
This is the homepage for www.chrisrcook.com – a toy website to built to ease me back into linux/nginx use.
This site is currently hosted on a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ running the latest release of Raspbian.