It’s just dawned on me that, after my discussion about NetNewsWire last week, I have yet to enable a feed for this site.
Well now I have – at the bottom of every blog page there should now be a link to this site’s RSS feed.
Category: Uncategorised
Twitter Deathwatch
After looking over some stats related to Twitter, I have created a Twitter Deathwatch page to track its demise.
It’s going to take a while but, hopefully, over the next few years we will get there and then the world will become a slightly better place.
NetNewsWire
Huzzah! NetNewsWire – the first RSS reader that I ever really used in anger – is back as a modernised and updated open source project! A lack of external sync services marks it out as still quite far from a usable initial release, but, as soon as some of these are added I shall look at moving away from the moribund Reeder and back to NNW as my desktop RSS reader of choice.
Now all we need is for Google to retask the now defunct Google+ team to resurrecting Google Reader and we can all start RSS’ing like it’s 2007 again! After all, without Google+ (or a similar replacement), there is no need for Google to try and kill off the open web in favour of their own walled garden.
(And for anyone searching; the new NetNewsWire agent string is “NetNewsWire (RSS Reader; https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/)”)
Clarus the Dogcow
A 512 Pixels article (and video) on Clarus the Dogcow; Apple’s unofficial mascot from back when computers were still fun and not just second cousin to your fridge.
512 pixels also does us the favour of covering the history of the Dogcow in actual human readable text – each character lovingly rendered in quickly skimable prose. After all, sometimes you’d rather just deal with the topic on hand than listening to someone else speak.
Photography
Two more sets added – Porthleven at Dusk (Winter 2016) and Llyn y Fan Fach (Summer 2018) – and I’m now up to 72 images migrated from Flickr. I have years of backlog to get through (far more than ever made it to Flickr!), so it’s fairly likely that I’m going to blow through their new limit of 1000 images in short order.
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.
Photography
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.