freeform goodness

Jul 09, 2024

Jun 27, 2024

Jun 18, 2024

iPad Air 2024

Did a bit of a “treat yo self” because Jacob’s iPad was out of space — gave him my 3rd-gen Air and got the current (M2) model. Thought (seriously) about the 13-inch model but ultimately decided on portability. Went high-end on the keyboard and Pencil. Pretty pleased so far.

posted at 12:43  · 

Jun 17, 2024

Jun 03, 2024

The Return of Musical Freeform Goodness

Back in prehistory, I maintained a radio station on a long-lost streaming radio platform, Live365. (Note — there is a business operating under that name currently, but it bears no real resemblence to the service that operated there previously.)

The idea was pretty simple — I programmed the station according to my own whims, which meant that it wasn’t formatted by genre. I listen to a crazy amount of music, and I’m not particularly bothered about using genre to set moods. If I feel like hearing free jazz next to ambient country, English punk, Detroit techno, Mississippi blues, and Swedish organ music, then that’s what I’m going to do.

All that preamble is here to say that I’ve resurrected the idea as a streaming playlist. Generally speaking, I’ll update a 25-song freeform playlist once a week on Apple Music and Spotify. I’d love it if you’d take a listen.

posted at 16:30  · 

May 31, 2024

So there’s kind of a lot to do

Among other things:

  • I still haven’t decided if I’m going to try to do anything with the old archives.
  • I have to decide whether to stick with this template, and if I do, how much effort I want to put into customizing it.
    • With the old blog, half of the fun was coding up little applet-izers and nonsense for the sidebars. I don’t yet know what that sort of thing really entails when I’m working with a statically generated site.
    • I really don’t understand this blog engine yet. PyBlosxom (and Blosxom before it) were really, really simple things to deal with conceptually. Drop HTML in a folder structure, crop some photos, and forget.
  • The machine I’m running this on is comically underpowered, like 2010-cellphone-level underpowered. Of course, that may actually be good enough for serving static webpages to a tiny handful of browsers a day.
  • Probably won’t bother with comments. I don’t see very many still active bloggers who bother with them and all the annoyances that come with them. If there’s a way to link them to some other discussion platform, maybe. I don’t really like Disqus and the like.
  • There aren’t feeds yet, because I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing and I don’t want to keep messing with people’s feed readers while I’m still working out what permalinks will look like, whether or not I can support Etags, etc.
posted at 16:45  · 

May 30, 2024

Is this thing on?

a tumbleweed, blowing down the aisles of a server room

So meet the new blog, same as the old blog.

Uh, not really.

So for about the last half dozen years or so, my blog had been running on PyBlosxom, and hosted on a really cheap web hosting platform not to be named.

Long story short, one day the web host, well, disappeared, and PyBlosxom has never been updated to support Python 3. Running an unmaintained blogging platform written in an EOL programming language on a no-longer-extant hosting provider is no way to live, son.

So for now, think of this as a placeholder. It’s a bunch of static pages hosted on a Raspberry Pi, hanging off of a cable modem, to give an idea of my level of commitment here.

As of right now, that means none of the old content (which would need to be cadged together from out-of-date backups. the Internet Archive, and faulty memories), a default template, ugly fonts, and none of the fun sidebar crap I used to have fun with.

Hey, at least the main page doesn’t 404 anymore.

posted at 12:00  ·