blog posts

I really thought that moving this site to a new provider would reinvigorate my interest in it. That simply hasn’t happened, for a whole gamut of reasons, mostly to do with Covid-19. I haven’t even had the energy to get my scripts for updating here working. I’ve tried, I’ve written and written words to put here, but simply haven’t. I will write here again, I hope, but probably to try to explain myself more.

Supporters of Fascism have claimed they are being forced to hide their support for the extremist ideology in parts of New York state. Fascists in the Hamptons, an affluent area in Long Island, have complained they cannot admit their allegiances publicly without fearing reprisals. “It’s like you have this disease and people want to run away from you,” a shop owner in Southampton told the New York Post adding that fascists and white supremacists in the area are “all in the closet” and have to lie to people around them.

Article 16.2 of the Constitution of Ireland outlines the requirements for constituencies. The total number of TDs is to be no more than one TD representing twenty thousand and no less than one TD representing thirty thousand of the population, and the ratio should be the same in each constituency, as far as practicable. It is important to note at the outset a key differentiator between Westminster (and indeed NI Assembly) Elections and the Irish Dáil Elections.

In which the author relates his recent adventures with XMPP for his readers.

Okay. So i’ve been a bit of an absentee landlord here at my homesite for the latter part of 2018. Time for that to change. I’m going to try to at least write one thing here every day in January, hopefully extend that further into the year as I go. I’ve been hanging out a lot in the Fediverse, and would like to find some way to integrate that experience with my homesite.

Hi Amit, Your blotpub is javascript, and my facility with that is fairly limited, so perhaps better to go through what my script does for crossposting. First, I take the content that’s to be syndicated and strip tags. Mastodon doesn’t appear to offer tag support, nor does it correctly handle markdown links, so the first step is to strip out links and place them at the end of the post. This can have other negative implications, as the character limit comes into play.

Was involved in a pretty dispiriting discourse on the indieweb irc channels earlier in the week. The specific issue of contention was the use of .io domains, and why you really shouldn’t do that, but the terms and process of the debate (such as it was) followed the standard path for seemingly all such discourse in recent years. please don’t use .io domains because of the security breach a few years back?

After posting Turning Unopened Pages - A memory of my Grandfather, a few people in different places asked about my shaving regime. I kicked the idea about, and finally came up with this. These are not recommendations, they are what I use, and why. I only came back to shaving in the last year, up until mid-2017 I had a full beard, the type that hipsters want, except I had mine before it was cool.

Self-described liberals have to stop losing their shit about the retirement of US Supreme Court Justice Kennedy. He wasn’t an ally, not even a little bit. He may have been “on-side” in a handful of cases, most importantly Griswold v. Connecticut, but he spent his time on SCOTUS in a continual vicious campaign of conservatism. To take just a few examples: whittling away at Roe v. Wade; attacking the Voting Rights Amendment; backing Bush and the GOP in Bush v.

“The Right has been in the ascendancy since the early Eighties and has done its damnedest to persuade everybody that its way is the only way, but some of the chickens are starting to come home to roost now and the point is not – and never – to give up hope. Capitalism has had it all its own way since about 1990 and the world is a demonstrably less fair, just and equitable place; alternative ways of running society need to be explored and I think more and more people are open to that idea.

Made a change to my website, well, a few changes, things I’ve wanted to do but lacked round tuits. Firstly, I changed to a darkmode. This is something I started doing a few times, but became horribly stuck while trying to use the solarized dark colourscheme. I could never get it to look the way I wanted, plus solarized fails to satisfy one of the most important motivations driving me towards that change - floaters.

Looking at the news coverage, and I think I know what happened in Singapore. Trumpy went into the meeting filled with Bolton’s lies - DPRK has never offered anything, they won’t “denuke”, they keep our war dead - so when Kim and the DPRK made their usual insincere “offers” - We’ll work towards denuclearisation (which they’ve been saying since 1992) We’ll send back dead soldiers (been saying it since Panmunjon) We’ll work with RoK for Peace (been saying that for decades) - Trumpy grabbed at that like a drowning man for a straw, and there was noone in the room could tell him this was the usual bullcrap.

Two utterly separate, but doubtless somehow connected pieces of news from the European Commission: The European Commission adopted Wednesday an update of the Blocking Statute, a 1996 regulation that allows EU companies to dodge US extraterritorial sanctions. and, released at the exact same time: The European Commission confirmed on Wednesday that the EU will start to impose in July extra duties on US products valued at up to €2.

Coming to the end of my first week with hearing aids, and I’m not sure how this is going. I knew, intellectually, that these would be shoving a digital version of all sounds around me into my head. The reality of that is quite different to my expectations. I’m finding the physical presence of the domes in my ear canals very difficult to adjust to. I keep getting spasm-like shakes.

I spent last night at Jury’s Inn Christchurch, and I cannot recommend it to anyone. I will allow that the bed was in fact very comfortable, and well supplied with nice thick soft pillows. This was fortuitous, as it meant I could wrap my head in them in a desperate attempt to sleep. I understand that space is money in hotels, but honestly, I think the only reason my room wasn’t actually in the elevator shaft was those pesky health and safety regulations.

A memory of my grandfather

I’ve started watching the Starz series Counterpart featuring JK Simmons and JK Simmons, and, two episode in, I’m loving what I’m seeing. For those not in the know, this is an “Alternate Universe” story, but it really is an AU story unlike any I’ve seen or read about before. The alternate universes in this story appear to have been created at a point in the past, two universes born of one incident following which they have slowly diverged.

I went on youtube looking for a meme-video I’d seen someplace, a kid playing with a leafblower. I found the video, and its funny, but the interesting thing to me is the list of videos recommended by YouTube for my attention. This is using a browser I don’t normally use and I’m not signed into Google’s services. Of the 12 videos, three are leafblower related, one of them even manages to be yet another funny leafblower video.

I’ve been circling around some of the arguments about Chrome’s https announcements on micro.blog and elsewhere, and I must confess I am no wiser as to the actual objections being raised. I’ve read most of what Dave Winer has written, and still don’t understand the objection. Today, I read this piece by Ron Chester, the piece is long, passionate and full of furious engagement, but I still don’t understand the objection.

The campaign against the Parkland Survivors has continued to escalate and has gotten bad enough that US Media outlets like the Washington Post are starting to produce hand wringing articles wondering how and why we have come to this terrible pass, and how we can move beyond it. The first part of the answer, as discussed in the excellent Mike Monteiro piece I linked yesterday is that we have come to this pass because developers and designers have been spineless and supine in the service of their employers.