In many ways they never left. But often they were ignored, left to collect cyber-dust and possibly go horribly out of date, needing many updates as they are revived. But they’re coming back. The Great Centralisation that started in the early 2000s with the advent of Facebook seems to be coming to an end. At least in my circles. Old blogs are being revived. New blogs are popping up. People are talking about RSS feeds again. Platforms. Favourite way of doing formatting.
It’s really magnificent.
But then – how do you keep track of everyone’s blogs? How do you know what to pay attention to, if there isn’t an algorithm that manages it all for you?
There are ways. And here are mine.
Some blogs let you subscribe to a newsletter that sends when the blogger posts a new posting. I do this with a few of my blogs. Not this one, though. It’s a nice way of doing it if you don’t hate emails. I don’t actually get many good personal emails any more – it’s mostly notifications – so getting an email full of delightful content from people I like is really refreshing.
RSS. Really Simple Syndication. A standard that’s been around for 26 years (yikes!) and not changed in the last 16. It’s a standardised XML file of the content on a website. There are many ways you can subscribe to an RSS feed. Your browser can (or should be able to) create what looks like a bookmark folder that updates with all the latest postings from a website. You can get a special feed-reader app on your phone. Or a feel-collecting page on a website. Or in an email client in a similar way to the bookmark folder in a browser.
Or my favourite way: RSS-to-email. You can run scripts in Git Hub that will gather all the updates from a collection of RSS feeds, format them neatly into an email and send it to you however often you like. I’ve got my email set up to be delivered around 6am, so it’s there to skim as I’m waking up. It’s a bit of a fiddle to configure initially but having updates delivered daily, without me needing to open Yet Another App. I’m checking emails anyway.
I’m trying to collect a nice blogroll here, too. It’s a work in progress, obviously.
I don’t read a lot. I think it’s because I read slowly. I have occasionally posted reading-log (and one reading-slog) entries here. But I’ve moved that over to Futzle’s Bookwyrm instance.
Enshittification. noun Colloquial the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.
Macquarie Dictionary word of the year in 2024. Relevant.
I’m never moving to Windows 11. I can’t list all of the reasons, because I can’t remember them all at the one time, but here is a short list of reasons why I think the operating system, and maybe the company in general, is going to shit. Windows 10 is bad enough. And most of these things are Windows 10 related.
Telemetry. Microsoft are over-reaching with what information they collect. I don’t want an operating system that spies on me when I’m using it. Escaping this in all software is getting harder and harder (especially with even Mozilla/Firefox going down a privacy-invasion path).
The Start Menu. It used to be the place to launch programs that you wanted to use. But now it gives you search results, lists applications that you don’t have installed, the weather, the stock market, sport results, and services that aren’t actually on my computer.
Default Settings. A fresh installation of Windows 10 takes up 75% of the task bar with a search bar, weather (“Temperatures set to rise!” – what is this? SimCity??), stock ticker, a start button, and a system tray. It’s all to cramped that the programs you open end up as just icons. Two instances of one program running and they’re grouped so you have to hover on the icon to open the instance that you want. In Windows 10 this behaviour can be changed, but I don’t understand why anyone would want to have their computer work that way. It’s as though people at Microsoft don’t use their own products.
OneDrive and MS365. Everything is OneDrive. Everything is MS365. But not quite well enough. On my work computer where I have to use OneDrive, I have two Desktop folders. One is C:\Users\bitterswede\Desktop and the other is C:\Users\bitterswede\OneDrive – placeofemployment\Desktop. Just let me store things on my computer.
Anyway. I promised a non-exhaustive list, so that’s what this will be.
So, with support for Windows 10 ending, what will I do, since I’ve taken the stand to never move to Windows 11.
Linux.
This year is, indeed, the year of Linux on the desktop.
The only issue I have with moving is that I need to abandon Affinity’s suite of software. It’s no massive loss and there are replacements, but I spent good money on them.
I’m going to order a new M.2 drive, and then install Ubuntu on that.
There are a lot of ways to “do” media in a house. Plex seems popular. Jellyfin, too. In the end they all do vaguely the same thing, it’s just a matter of picking the one(s) that will do what you want it to do.
I’ve been a long term Kodi user for TV and Movies, which I believe started life as XBMC – Xbox Media Centre. It
I loved Logitech Media Server (LMS) too. LMS would run on my first NAS that I bought, and would serve music to Raspberry Pi players that I scattered around the house. Then an update happened, and I couldn’t run it on the NAS directly, so I moved it to its own Raspberry Pi. I could use a Spotify plugin. Then the plugin misbehaved. Then Daniel Ek showed his true colours. I moved to Tidal. Players were flaky. Raspberry Pi audio quality wasn’t great and I looked at buying a HAT for the Pi for better audio and then I gave up. Last I heard LMS was being shut down – Logitech had had a gutfull and weren’t interested any more. Turns out it was handed over to the Community, and it is now Lyrion Music Server. I’ve not tried it, because I rejigged some things. Which is what this is about.
Switch the TV on, and amp switches on because of magic signals over HDMI. Cool. Until you want the amp to stay on to always be able to play audio. That was change number one. The setup is now simplified to be:
Raspberry Pi/KODI -> Amp -> TV
and all the media sits on a NAS that has a simple CIFS/SMB share.
The amp is always on, and doesn’t care if the TV is or isn’t. It will always play the audio that it receives from the Raspberry Pi.
KODI handles everything. All of the media library stuff, grabbing movie posters, TV episode details, and music.
You can drive it from the TV remote control over CEC (which comes default embedded into KODI), or using a pretty snazzy remote control app on a device connected to the network. There are versions for Android and Apple.
I was standing right here, in one of my favourite places in South Australia. This is Razorback Lookup in Ikara–Flinders Ranges.
Standing right there when my OM-1 jammed. I’d fired off one shot and as I went to wind the camera on, I got partway through the wind then everything stopped. It felt stuck-stuck, too. Nothing flexible about it at all. I took the film out and put the camera away. I’d forgotten to charge my SLR, too, so all I had to document this place was my mobile. It did a passable job, I guess.
I’d had a jammy idler-gear with this OM-1 previously, but this felt different. And my patented percussive method of jiggling the idler-gear into the right spot wasn’t working. I took the film out of the camera, and set it aside in a bag. I actually thought it might have been the end of it for the camera. Curtains for the shutter curtains, you could say.
Feeling inspired today I began to pull the camera apart. I managed to get the camera un-jammed by jiggling the idler-gear. I was surprised.
The arrow shows the idler-gear, completely in the wrong position.
Here’s a video (with the lens off the camera…FOREBODING)showing the idler-gear in action.
I adjusted the little spring that keeps the idler-gear in the right spot, to make it a bit tighter. Tested the camera and it jammed again. I went through some basic trouble-shooting steps and it would sort itself out with the lens off. Fire perfectly with the lens off, and then not work again with the lens back on. The aperture lever felt fine – there was no way that it was causing enough resistance to jam the camera. Lens off: fine. Lens on: not fine.
Was it the lens? I put a different lens on and it worked perfectly. So it must be this 50mm f/1.8 lens causing problems somehow. The aperture levers felt the same on both lenses.
I played with the aperture ring. I played with the shutter speed ring. No better. Didn’t matter if it was set to 1/1000s or bulb. Then I changed the focus of the lens and when it wasn’t focused at infinity it was fine again. Tested it a few times. Back to infinity – no good. Away from infinity – good.
Turns out the rear element of the lens had come loose and was protruding a few millimetres further out than it should be and was getting hooked up on the mirror as it was trying to move out of the way. A quick tighten and we were back to normal.
The troublesome lens with the rear element no longer protruding out the back.
