Writing
- People
- Date
- Location
- Content
- Camera type
- Photos of various serial numbers we need when making warranty support phone calls
- Lots of pictures of IP addresses as reported by computers, printers, switches, and the like
- Bar code stickers with asset information for the organization we work for
- ctrl+Shift+t - Reopens the last browser tab that was closed. Really handy when you accidentally close the wrong tab. (on a Mac it's command+shift+t)
- Get a great music recommendation each day and don't rely on your streaming services algorithm loop: https://1001albumsgenerator.com
- Don't support Google -> Stop using Chrome. Try Firefox with the uBlock (ad-blocker) extension, it's awesome!
- Don't support Google -> Use https://duckduckgo.com/ or try another one, they're in general pretty good these days.
- Temp emails, great for throw away accounts on various services: https://10minutemail.com/
- Get past paywalls: https://archive.ph/
- I always complete my emails and look over them before I put the destination email addresses in. Prevents me from accidentally sending something I don’t want to send.
- I pay for an email and domain service with the catchall redirected to my own email address - when I sign up for a service I set my email for that service to be [servicename]@mydomain.com, this way when I see spam coming in I know which bastard service sold my details, I then never use them again.
- Use https://cooked.wiki/ to view just recipes -- skip the long, meandering essay that leads up to what you really want. It's like a super-power.
- If you put swear words in your search, you won't get the AI generated answer.
- Learn to paste stuff using ctrl+shift+v It strips away any bold, italics, or colors and some other formatting options. Besides being useful removing crap from the clipboard and making your life easier when pasting for example data to excel it might be helpful when pasting data that came from an a.i. that could be detected and get you in trouble.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇 - The cult of tradition. This is the belief that the truth is already known once and for all. Fascists believe there is no need to advance in learning.
- The rejection of modernism. Fascists reject the Enlightenment and its evidence-based rationality.
- The cult of action for action’s sake. Fascist leaders act impulsively, without thinking or planning ahead.
- No analytical criticism. Fascists ignore nuance and see any disagreement as treasonous.
- Fear of difference. Fascists fear diversity. Thus they are racist by definition.
- Appeal to a frustrated middle class. An economically frustrated and/or politically marginalized middle class is easy to stir to anger.
- Obsession with a plot. Because the followers must be made to feel besieged, an internal “enemy” is provided: Immigrants, Muslims, Hispanics, Blacks. (Historically the Jews were often made to be “the enemy.”)
- Anti-elitism. The followers are made to feel humiliated by the wealth and strength of the educated “elite.” This is used to create resentment.
- Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. Fascists believe that life is permanent warfare. Therefore a desire for peace is treasonous.
- Contempt for the weak. A fascist leader despises his underlings, who in turn despise those under them. They all either mock or ignore the poor, the sick, and the disabled.
- The cult of heroism. The Fascist is eager to die a hero’s death. In his impatience, he frequently sends other people to their deaths.
- Machismo. Fascists show disdain for women, disregard for chastity, and condemnation of homosexuality.
- Selective populism. Under fascism, the “voice of the people” is not the democratic majority, but only the voices of those who support the leader.
- Ur-fascism speaks Newspeak. Just as in Orwell’s 1984, Fascists use an impoverished vocabulary and an elementary syntax to limit complex and critical reasoning.
RSS in an Integral Part of the IndieWeb Experience
In 2023, I was recovering from an illness and bedridden. I picked up my old iPad and opened my feed reader, which I hadn't done in years. Many of the blogs I'd initially followed circa 2014 were dead, but there were still a few actively posting. Out of boredom, I began to clean out the dead feeds and look for newer and better ones to replace them. That experience led to this blog post. I found so many interesting independent blogs that I decided that even someone like me could get in on the action.
In case you are wondering, RSS is a method of content delivery where information created by bloggers and publishers is delivered to a special program or website that you set up. You can subscribe to RSS feeds, usually for free, and whenever that blog or website is updated, the new information shows up in your feed reader.
Many people I now consider to be my good Internet friends are people I first discovered by seeing them on someone else's blogroll. I spend part of every day looking at my feed reader. Aside from the basic RSS mechanism I describe above, there are ways to use the protocol to do all kinds of things. The best site I have found to not only educate you on RSS but to provide you with access to a huge variety of tools and services is GitHub - AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS: A list of RSS related stuff: tools, services, communities and tutorials, etc.
I encourage everyone from newbies to co-inventors of the protocol to have a good look around. Click on a few links. Try out some new tools for discovering interesting content.
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This Week's Bookmarks - Famous Literary Couples, Stalingrad Incident, Web Design Museum, Unusual Landscapes, Eternal Helpdesk, Film Mistakes, Crucial Musical Tracks
F.Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
Famous Literary Relationships from Best to Worst ‹ Literary Hub - There have been plenty of great legends about literary love affairs over the years, though of course a great legend doesn't always mean a great love affair. In fact, it often means just the opposite. Here, I've collected a few of the worst (and a few of the best)—from what we can tell from our outside vantage, at any rate. You never do know what goes on in other people's homes. But you might have a better chance if they happen to be writers.
The Stalingrad Incident - In a historic depression, a black american seeks freedom from discrimination and professional limitations in an unlikely place: Russia. The forces of racism follow him overseas, putting his reputation and life in danger.
Web Design Museum - Discover old websites, apps and software - Web Design Museum exhibits thousands of screens and videos of old websites, mobile apps and software from 1990s to mid-00s
24 of the world’s most unusual landscapes - While there are plenty of awe-inspiring man-made destinations around the globe, nothing is as creative as nature. From trees that resemble monsters, to colorful sinkholes, towering rock formations and waterfalls of molten lava, these are some of the most unusual and fascinating landscapes in the world.
The Alabama Landline That Keeps Ringing - If you sit at the James E. Foy Information Desk in the Melton Student Center at Auburn University, answering the phones on a Wednesday night, you might be responsible for answering a question like this: “If you died on the operating table and they declared you legally dead and wrote out a death certificate and everything, but then you came back to life, what are the legal ramifications? Do you technically no longer exist? Do you have to be declared undead by a judge?”
FXRant The Movie Mistake Mystery from Revenge of the Sith - Not just Star Wars - this site has mistakes that made it on to the screen of Goodfellas Aliens, Glory, The Dark Knight, The Abyss and more
Crucial Tracks – the songs that made you - There are points in your life that are defined by music. Whether it’s a song that introduced you to a genre of music that changed the direction of your tastes and style, or a lyric that made you think about the world in a different way. Songs represent relationships. Songs trigger memories. These are all crucial tracks.
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A Beautiful Three Day Hike on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia
I'm often asked to recommend hikes along the Appalachian Trail, a national scenic trail in the Eastern United States that stretches from Georgia to Maine, touching 14 states. My suggestions are typically conditional. If I don't like you, I'm definitely going to suggest you go to Pennsylvania, a state notorious for its extremely rocky conditions that makes hikers curse the slow going and their painful feet.
If you are a stone badass, I'll tell you to head for New Hampshire and Southern Maine. It's often said that 80% of the hard hiking on the AT occurs in that final 20% of the trail.
If you're a good friend in average shape, then I'll advise you to head for the area near Roanoke, VA where you can find a 37-mile loop that will take you to Virginia’s Triple Crown of hiking.
You will hit three beautiful and iconic locations:
Tips for Organizing Photos
One of my ongoing projects is organizing a lifetime of digital photos. My collection includes all the smartphone photos taken by my wife and me, the DSLR photos we've saved and scanned photos of multiple generations. The images have been gathered from iCloud. Google Drive, Amazon Photos, family photo albums and many different backup drives accumulated over time. The process includes the removal of duplicate images, renaming, adjusting date information, performing face recognition , tagging and backing everything up. I realized soon after I started that I also need to segregate images that aren't personal, meaning illustrations for blog articles and the many, many photos I've taken at work that still have some usefulness but aren't appropriate to be included in a family collection.
The ultimate goal of organizing photos is being able to quickly find what I am looking for based on these criteria:
So, if I want to find a picture of my brother holding a parrot from a beach trip in 2014 that I took with my iPhone, I have multiple ways to narrow down the search. For people willing to let Google, Amazon or Apple have complete access to their photos, this is simplified by letting their powerful servers do a great deal of the hard work. If, like me, you want to have more privacy, you have to do a great deal of the organization manually or find applications that can do the work on your computer without relying on the Internet.
I decided to use a free and open-source image management program that works on Mac and Linux called Digikam.
I am temporarily using another application with local AI, called Peakto, which can find photos according to subject without using the Internet.
Here are a few tips on photo management
The Ultimate Guide to Organizing Your Photos Tips and Tricks - Are you tired of scrolling through endless photos on your phone or computer, trying to find that one specific picture? Organizing your photos can seem like a daunting task, but with the right tips and tricks, it can be a breeze. In this ultimate guide, we’ll cover everything from creating folders to utilizing software programs, so you can finally have all your memories in order.
What are the best practices for photo organization - Organizing your photos is not an easy task. Where do you start? What is the best way to proceed? Often, we wait until we need to find those photos for a birthday album, website or book before we realize that our photos are disorderly and difficult to locate. Rather than wait till the last minute, only to find ourselves frustrated and annoyed, we could be proactive and follow the advice of experienced photographers.
How To Organize Your Photos, From Backing Up To Tagging Life Kit NPR - We take hundreds and thousands of photos these days because we can. Long gone are the days of film rolls limited to 24 shots. Storage is trending cheaper and more infinite. You don't want to miss any of your dog's cute moments or your kids' as they grow up. But when we have so many digital images and we want to cull them down a bit and get organized, where do we even start?
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Past Me, Present Me, Future Me
The person who causes me more unnecessary work and aggravates me to no end, is that jerk, Past Me. Let me tell you how much he has complicated one of my current projects.
I got an Aura frame for Christmas. It's one of the best gifts I've ever received. It's an electronic picture frame to which my kids can add photos from an app on their phones. I get regular updates on what they are up to. Wonder Woman will sometimes just sit in our living room and watch the photos flow through, commenting on each one as we relive favorite memories. Don't judge me, but there are more than one computer screen also visible in our living room. I got the idea to have them scroll through our entire photo collection using either a screen save or one of several apps. I would rather not curate a collection for it to use, so I just set it to shuffle our library.
Wonder Woman is always doing favors for future Wonder Woman. One of the things she does id quickly delete any non-keepsake photos or memes that end up in her photo library. There is no version of Lou that can be bothered to do this regularly. As anyone in IT can tell you, there are certain types of photos that populate our photo collections. The usable life span for these images is about five minutes, just long enough to get back to a computer and enter information from the photo into some sort of tracking system or management console. These images include:
As a 21st century citizen active on the Internet, I also find it pleasurable to find and share memes that are funny and though provoking. I've done this thousands of times. I know this because I have thousands of undeleted meme in my photo collection. The mad girlfriend meme is represented no less than 22 times in different versions. As humorous as this is, it's not something I want to show up while I am trying to enjoy photos from old trips or my family.
I'm also one of those people who take pictures of my food. It doesn't have to be remarkable or beautiful food either. It's just a way to tag my location when I go out to eat. I have so many damn pictures of fried eggs sitting on top of SOS on toast. I could make an entire album out of just taco pictures. Haha, funny, except Wonder Woman doesn't think so when they scroll past her.
The other categories of strange photos, of which I have way too may, include random shots I took at particular venues to geotag a location for later use. There are also many images from the grocery store that I took, so Wonder Woman could give me the assurance that I was purchasing the correct product. A life-long bad habit of mine is writing down phone numbers but not recording who the number belongs to. I compound this by taking a picture of the naked number and leaving it in my collection. I have dozens of sticky note photos to demonstrate this.
AI is getting better at identifying objects in photos, but it is not good enough to quickly find ALL of anything, especially in large collections like mine. No matte how many times I scan my photos for pictures of bar codes or grocery carts, there are always remnants still lurking about. If I were a smarter man, Present ME would start doing future Me the favor of regularly culling this stuff from my phone. The problem is that Present Me is too busy cleaning up after past me to have the energy or motivation to worry about Future Me, mostly because without any evidence, I tend to think that gentleman will have unlimited time and resources. He is wonderful!
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What I've Learned on the IndieWeb
My White Collar Job
The one thing I haven't learned on the IndieWeb is how to spell it. I prefer the variation that uses "Indy" like the car race, the Indy 500, but it seems like the reluctant consensus, as evidenced by IndieWeb.org uses a different spelling, so for once in my life, I'll be compliant and go along with the crowd.
The first time I blogged, back in the 90s, the audience I interacted with the most were all older than me. I was in my late 30s , but my blog was about the Vietnam War, in particular its effect on families. Most of the people I corresponded with were veterans, which was fine, although I was trying to connect with people like myself who were in the next generation. I was glad to lend an ear to the men and women who wrote me. I'd been around those people all my life.
When I blogged my way down the Appalachian Trail, I really didn't have the time or energy (or the connectivity) to form relationships with people online. If someone left a nice comment on our guestbook or sent me an email, I'd respond, but mostly I just told the story of our unlikely honeymoon. A lot of what I wrote was to keep the memories of that time and place fresh for me whenever I wanted to time travel.
So, then I took a 12-year break from blogging. I was on Facebook a lot. I never left Reddit. I dabbled with Twitter and Instagram, but never anything serious. I had photographs on Flickr and SmugMug and a few other sites, but mostly, I didn't spend much time or energy being creative or writing for an audience any larger than myself and the voices in my head. When I became less mobile because of health issues and desperately needed a productive pastime, I luckily landed in front of my laptop with some ideas.
Here's what I have discovered since January 2024 when I wrote my first post on Micro.blog.
There are still friendly people
Since I've been around for a while, I know enough about Internet culture to avoid being a reply guy I also tend to be someone who is quick to hand out deserved praise and to treat people like I want to be treated. Lo and behold, using those "few simple tricks" seems to be the key to mostly avoiding toxicity. I lucked up be quickly finding OMG.LOL, the Mastodon instance I call home, which has puts people first. It's costs $20 a year, and that keeps out the cheap-ass trolls who spoil things for other people. I participate in other communities and have blogs on four different platforms, but the one closest to my heart are the smart, lovable weirdos who habituate OMG.LOL
The US is just a part of the world
The person who inspired me to get involved in Indie Blogging is Robb Knight, who is from England. The IndieWeb scene is decidedly International, and I count that as a Very Good Thing because my own country is a bit of a mess right now. I regularly interact with people from Germany, Portugal, Sweden, Spain, Japan, Scotland, Canada and beyond. It's taught me to look at things differently, to explain things in a bit more detail sometimes and to read with much interest the little tidbits of other people's homelands. If I ever have to take an English driving test, I am quite prepared for multiple questions about trams, as I am told the licensing folks put a lot of those on the tests.
It's OK to be honest
I am absolutely uninterested in creating an online version of myself, who doesn't talk about certain subjects, who has few faults, hasn't made many mistakes and knows all the answers. Instead, I'm the real me, who says what's on my mind, not to be shocking or provocative, but just because life is easier that way. In real life, I am a recovering alcoholic (16 years sober) and I've lived with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder for nearly 40 years, so that's the man I'm going to be online. I readily admit having been married more times than most people, and to have struggled with being a the father I wanted to be. I lack formal education, and I'm not ashamed of it. The people who decide not to interact with me over any of that stuff are not missed.
There are no perfect bloggers
I happen to be a prolific writer, a virtual fire hose of prose, if you will, but that does not make me anything apart from a person who has many files to keep up with. The people who craft one or two gems per month are 100% some of my favorites. IndieWeb blogging is not a competitive sport. It's not about Follower counts, monetization, or page views. As much as I admire clever web design and aesthetics, it's not about that either. To me, IndieWeb blogging is about community, honesty, and creativity. It's being a good neighbor and a helpful and hopefully inspiring presence because, damn, don't we all need a friend and some inspiration?
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The Blog Questions Challenge - TV Edition
What TV Character from a Beloved Show Do You Wish You Could Be Best Friends with in Real Life?
I would really have enjoyed living in the world of Halt and Catch Fire, a show about a ten-year span of the early to mid-80s into the early 90s and the birth of the Internet. My brief interaction with corporate tech culture fell far outside the world of Halt and Catch Fire where the characters worked on cloning the original IBM PC, video games and an early search engine. My favorite character was Cameron Howe, a prodigy of a programmer, a genius and an anti-social, but fiercely loyal teammate. I've worked with some talented women in my career and enjoyed it. I would have loved to live in the era of this show, working at Cameron's video game startup, Mutiny. I love an inspiring, hardworking leader instead of someone who goes home early every day and reeks of their self-importance. Cameron was outspoken, driven, and unpredictable, all qualities I aspire to.
If You Could Binge-watch an Entire Series Again for the First Time, Which One Would You Choose and Why?
When Hill Street Blues had its run on NBC in the 80s, there was no such thing as binge watching. The best you could hope for was that your favorite show would get picked up for syndication. That would not have been a good fit for the show, as it had storylines that lasted throughout the season. Every time I missed an episode, the chances of me ever having a chance to see were slim. Then I got a job working during the show's airtime and totally missed the last seasons. By 2020, when I retired from the public school system, the entirety of the seven season run was available to stream. The only thing I liked about that period of my life was the 90 minutes a day I spent immersed in the fictional world of the unnamed American city where the show took place. It broke so much new ground for TV drama in general and police shows in particular. One of the lead characters was the recovering alcoholic police captain, played by Daniel J. Travanti. The other characters were all believably human. The writers were top-notch. Like many shows from the past, it couldn't be done today. The language was too raw and the topics too fresh. That's a shame.
Name a TV Show that Changed Your Perspective on the World or Taught You Something Valuable
Because I was the kind of kid who paid attention to the news, read the papers and listened to the radio, I grew up with a distinct, but distant familiarity with places like the Shankhill Road, the Falls Road, Derry, Omagh and greater Belfast. All of those places in Northern Ireland were the locations of bombings, demonstrations, attacks, and counter-attacks during The Troubles, the 30-year civil war that came to an end in 1998. Not until much later in my life did I come to know anyone from Northern Ireland, a place I later studied and toured. The show Derry Girls, about three Catholic Girls and their English cousin, was a coming of age comedy made ever so poignant by its setting during the last years of that era. It did a good job humanizing the struggle and the people affected by it. The first episode has British soldiers boarding a school bus to look for a bombing suspect. There were other episodes featuring attempts to bridge the gaps between Catholic and Protestant youth and even one that featured Irish Travelers.
Final Thoughts
I appreciate good TV. When I was too poor to afford cable, I told myself that avoiding television was good for my mental development, That may have been true, but I missed some good shows! I have fond memories of a great many TV moments, nevertheless, from the afternoon sitcoms of my youth (Andy Griffith) to the much anticipated shows of the 70s (Happy Days) and finally the golden era of the 21st century (The Wire).
Inspired by JoelChrono's Post answering the same questions
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Internet Life Hacks
Every once in a while, there is a post on Reddit that gets enough high quality responses to warrant being bookmarked and referred to time and again. Such is the case with this recent classic.
# What’s a personal internet hack you use that makes life easier but isn’t widely known ?
Some of the suggestions:
This Week’s Bookmarks - Nachos, Seth Rogen, Satellite Pollution, Radical universities, Internet history, Photo Awards, Book bans
Subway's Doritos Footlong Nachos Are Here -- and Honestly, We're Into It - It all begins with a tray of Nacho Cheese Doritos, topped with shredded and liquid nacho cheese after a quick stint in the oven. When ordering at the counter, your local sandwich artist will chop red onions and tomatoes to incorporate into the mix before adding jalapeños and a drizzle of Baja Chipotle sauce. You can request steak or chicken for no extra charge
Seth Rogen's criticism of Trump's cuts to science edited out of science awards show coverage - A pointed criticism of President Trump's policies on science by Seth Rogenwas edited out of the filmed coverage of an annual science awards show, it has emerged.
"This is my radical proposal for universities: Act like universities, not like businesses. Spend your endowments. Accept more, not fewer students. Open up your campuses and [bring] education to communities. Create a base. Become a movement."
An Ars Technica history of the Internet, part 1 - Ars Technica - In a very real sense, the Internet, this marvelous worldwide digital communications network that you're using right now, was created because one man was annoyed at having too many computer terminals in his office.
2025 Winners and Shortlist Galleries | World Photography Organisation - The Sony World Photography Awards is World Photography Organisation's principal programme. Established in 2007, it is one of the world's biggest and most prestigious photography competitions; celebrating the work of leading and emerging practitioners and attracting tens of thousands of visitors annually to its exhibitions worldwide.
Library Study Shows It’s Just Politicians And Activist Groups Trying To Get Books Banned | Techdirt - What's been noted before has been confirmed yet again: there is no widespread concern about the books kids have access to in public libraries. Instead, there's just the concerted, but effective, efforts of a small group of people who feel everyone else's rights end where their morality begins.
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Kids and Cereal
One of my recent pleasures is perusing old blog posts from when I used to sit at my desk in the family dining room in the days before I had a laptop and write stories about my children, a constant source of inspiration and entertainment in those more innocent times. They all grew up to be pretty awesome, so they are still inspiring but starting a business, getting massive promotions or conquering the frozen north aren't as funny as the stuff they did as adolescents. We didn't have a ton of money in those days, so having little people to make me laugh was economically necessary. These days I can afford Netflix. Here's another tale from the 90's.
Cereal Boxes
Late last year the cereal companies slashed prices by over a dollar a box on most brands. Suddenly, the lie I had been telling my children since their birth became obvious. When I said, "We don't eat Captain Crunch. All that sugar is bad for you." I meant, "We don't buy Captain Crunch. It costs four dollars a box." Now that the generic box of corn flakes (white box, black letters, CORN FLAKES) and the multi-media hyped Puffed Toast Cinnamon Crunch Smacky Flake Treats cost roughly the same amount, a new cereal culture is evolving at my house.
Any boxes of "sticks and grass" cereal purchased mistakenly or with an eye towards incipient diabetes are ignored or converted to bird food. After 2.5 children ate 4 (yes 4) boxes of cereal in one weekend, I had to lay down the one bowl per child per day rule. How did this go over, you ask. I can tell you in two words, Jethro Bodine. Yes, I caught my oldest daughter, Anna, with the mixing bowl normally used to make brownies for the church youth group (11 high school kids). She hoped that a quart of milk and half a box of Frosted Mini Wheats could forestall starvation one more day.
Some of the trends from the good old days are still with us for nostalgia's sake. No one will eat the last half bowl of cereal left in the box. I usually discover this when I venture into the kitchen after midnight looking for a satisfyingly quick snack. In quick succession I grab one and then another box of sugar coated vapor in an abortive attempt to find an entire bowl of cereal all for myself. I'm usually left with a mongrelized mix of stale Fruit Loops and Grape Nuts. There is always plenty of milk though. I buy milk two gallons at the time to lessen the number of trips I have to make to the grocery store. You may not know it but children cannot tolerate a closed milk jug in the fridge. Both jugs must be opened and it normally makes the most sense to the juvenile mind to use the jug that expires last----first. It is also a kid's rule to always, always, always leave on the counter the little locking strips that come on the caps of milk jugs. If a countertop is unavailable, the strip may be left on the floor or under the counter beside (NOT IN!) the trashcan
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Infinite Mac Lets You Run Vintage Mac Operating Systems in Your Browser
It's hard to believe that Apple was once a scrappy little company, just fighting to stay alive and true to its roots, instead of the largest company in the history of capitalism. The fondness that many people have Apple products is tied into the myth and memory of the old Apple. People who long ago chose Macs, usually did so out of a genuine fondness for the company and the products they made. The alternative was Microsoft Windows at its most ruthless and domineering.
I's been a long time, probably more than 20 years since I last used Mac's classic operating system, meaning OS 9.2.2 and below. I spent many, many hours of my life on those machines, installing KidPix and Apple Works for public school kids and their teachers. I could image one of the original bondi blue iMacs in about 90 seconds using a FireWire 400 drive. I also imaged many older Macs by booting from a CD and imaging from a SCSI drive. Good times.
If you ever get sentimental for those days, or, if you aren't an old like me, and you just want to investigate what the experience was like, just hear on over to InfiniteMac where you can run one of many virtual Macs right in your web browser.
The site describes itself like this:
Infinite Mac is a collection of classic Macintosh and NeXT system releases and software, all easily accessible from the comfort of a web browser.
Pick any version of System Software, Mac OS, Mac OS X or NeXTStep from the 1980s, 1990s or early 2000s and run it within a virtual machine. An “Infinite HD” disk with representative software from that era is also available. You can also run a custom version with your choice of machine and disks. On some operating systems files and disk images can be imported and exported using drag and drop and virtual CD-ROMs can be mounted – refer to the welcome screen in each machine for more details.
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The Walter Miller Homepage - The Funniest Website That Ever Existed
Warning: This Goes Way Back
Back in the days of accessing the Internet over a 56,6K modem, someone, probably on AOL told me about "The Walter Miller" homepage, the terribly mis-spelled and grammatically incorrect plain text website of the finniest stuff I have ever read. I'm serious. Con't click the link at the bottom of this post and start reading if you ae trying to drinnk something. You might choke to death or spray expensive red wine across the display of your MacBook.
A snippet from the landing page
ABOUT ME
Im orignally from California but now I live in rural Texas-a lonly area 2 hours from the nearest big city. Ive been here since last December. I moved here because Iam only 20 years old and divvorced and I owe the whole world money. So my family takes over my bills and debits in exhange for me to look after and take care of my granfather. Lets just say I have to haul him up on the crapper whenever he has to go-which isnt often and contributs to him bein cranky most of the time.
Our home consists of a trailor, some outbuildings, a toolshed, asorted shacks, and 2 halfs of a moduler home that were never put together and sit 50 yards apart with plastic sheets drapped over the open parts. We live in the trailor-the other buildings house the varied colections of My granfather. He has 170,000 hupcaps which maybe the bigest colection in Texas. He also colects apliances, spark plugs, books, plumming fixures, beercans, Indian blankets, cooky tins, furnoture, glasware, old typwriters, bottles and car parts, plastic bags, coffe cans, antiques, trashcan lids of pre-World War 2 era, manhole covers, rusty tools, stufed animals, basebal cards, 55 galon drums and steyrofoam. These are just a small sample of his colectibles
Theyre stroon across the whole area like a junkyard. The county has come after him many times. He also has 14 dogs and dog crap is eveywhere. Also the stuffed animals and indian blankets are outside-when it rains they get rancid.
The page is long dead, but it is preserved by the people doing the Lord's Work at The Wayback machine. When you click on this and other links within the site, you might think nothing has loaded. It has. Just scroll down a few dozen lines and pure vintahe Internet comedy genius will overwhelm you.
A vicious rumor - THE WEB'S ANONYMOUS | TIME
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Unlimited Internet, Ad-Free TV, Boneless Wings - Three Signs of the Apocalypse
Sign 1 - Unlimited Internet Is Not, In Fact, Unlimited
My Internet service provider sent me a nastygram today, or rather they sent a snitch letter to Wonder Woman because technically the account is in her name. They wished to inform us that we (meaning me) had FAR exceeded the normal amount of bandwidth during our current billing cycle. As a result, according to the nastygram, they will be throttling our connection speed during "congested hours" until the cycle renews. Did I mention that we pay an extra fee each month for an upgrade to our connection speed? Or, that our plan is called "The Unlimited Ultimate Plan"?
I went and looked at the data usage for the month. It's a lot, slightly over 3TB. I haven't been downloading torrents. You think I'm 12? What I've been doing is retrieving my data from Amazon and Google, primarily a lifetime of photographs, but also over 1,000 book purchases, split almost evenly between Kindle and Audible formats. After removing the limits that Amazon tries to impose on usage through digital rights management, I uploaded all the information to European servers.
Well, I guess a billion (trillion?) dollar bloodsucking corporations stick together because Verizon is now discouraging me from making full use of the service I pay them for.
Sign 2 - Ad Free Television Actually Contains Ads
I quit watching ad supported television a long, long time ago. Only once, in 2015, did I watch regular TV and that was only to follow the (almost) undefeated season of the Carolina Panthers. The amount of adverting in a football game, along with the collusion against Colin Kaepernick and the epidemic of brain damage put me off the game shortly thereafter. I pay less for the premium streaming channels than I paid for cable television, even with all the price increases. I opt for the ad-free experience because life is short, and I just don't want to waste it enduring marketing. Now that the fascists are in power and corporations can do anything they like without repercussions, one of the things they are doing is inserting advertising into the feeds of people who pay to opt out of it. What are we going to do? I know what I'll do. I'll go right back to the Lou of the early 21st century and start sailing the high seas again. I gave up the pirate life in 2006, but war is war, and I'll not be trifled with by Peacock, Hulu, Netflix, or anyone else.
Note to "Steve", the anonymous coward who left a comment and thinks that my mockery of torrents and my planned re-embrace of them are worthy of a confused face emoji. You might have a point. I haven't needed torrents in almost twenty years because I am willing and able to pay for the entertainment I consume - as long as I get what I pay for. If the mega-corporations who take my money don't deliver what they promise, then all bets are off.
Sign 3 - You Can Choke to Death on the Bones in Boneless Chicken
Dissenting justice: “The question must be asked: Does anyone really believe that the parents in this country who feed their young children boneless wings or chicken tenders or chicken nuggets or chicken fingers expect bones to be in the chicken? Of course they don’t.
“When they read the word ‘boneless,’ they think that it means ‘without bones,’ as do all sensible people.”
Yeah, a man in Ohio had a bone from a plate of "boneless wings" served to him in a restaurant get lodged in his throat, causing a serious infection. A jury, using what we normal people call common sense, found in his favor when he sued the joint for false advertising. Not to be deterred from protecting pretend people (corporations) from actual real people with, you know, families and jobs, the Republican majority on the state appeals court decided that "boneless wings" describes a cooking style and is not offered as a description of the food you are paying for. They took away the damages that a jury of his peers awarded him in a decision decided by a one-vote majority, One of the dissenting justices was pretty scathing in his critique of how much the court Republicans suck.
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The Most Important Tech Skill for Every Single One of Us
What's the most important computer information you've ever lost? Was it pictures, something you'd written, your contacts or your entire phone or hard drive? It's a rare (or dishonest) person who can claim to have never suffered some kind of data loss. I have been asked to help recover wedding videos, a master’s thesis, decades of lesson plans and the accumulated files from an entire ministerial career.
Wherever you have information that is important to you, on your iPhone, Android, Mac or PC or even in a cloud service like Google Drive or Dropbox, do you know if you have taken the right steps to back up your data? A backup means at least two copies, three is better, with one of those stored offsite. Saving your files to a thumb drive or an external drive is not a backup if that is the only copy of them. Even keeping your files in iCloud or Google Drive is not a backup, if losing access to that account would cut you off from your data. People lose access to their online accounts seven days a week for all kinds of reasons. Do all those Google Docs that only live on Google Drive mean anything to you? If they do, then learn how to back them up today.
Back up iPhone - Apple Support
How to Back Up Your Android Phone WIRED
How to back up your Mac - Apple Support
Those 1 AM Thoughts That Keep You Awake
Some people are so selfless that they seem almost saint-like. They aren't common, but they aren't rare either. There are usually one or two in most work situations. They are the people who seem to have endless patience for answering questions and never seem too busy to lend a hand to people who need it. There isn't a time in anyone's memory when they hurt someone's feelings or made them feel bad. I have never been one of those people. I'd like to think that I'm just an average guy, one who gets a little impatient sometimes, a little stressed at others and who slips up from time to time and says things he wishes he could take back. I have a mental playlist of those occasions that just decides to start running through my brain from time to time.
Once a co-worker made a mistake setting up a school's computer image for a new year and didn't find it until she had erased and reinstalled the software on hundreds of devices. It happens. She was far from incompetent. She just made an unfortunate error and as a result had to do a lot of extra work. It could have happened to me a hundred times over. I was laughing about it with a couple of people on my team, nothing mean spirited, just being glad it didn't happen to me. Yeah, the problem was the person I was talking to was on the phone with her, and she heard every word I said. Ouch. I spent the next five years trying to make it up to her. I felt horrible. Still do when it pops into my mind.
Like many tech people, I joke about being my family's go to for computer issues. I write about it on this very blog. Because I've done this work for so long, it's a rare, rare day when a issue causes me any stress. It might be aggravating, but I'm up to most challenges given enough time. I forget that normal people don't have that mindset. All they know is that this expensive piece of equipment they rely isn't working, and they have no idea why or how to solve it. It is no joke. One Thanksgiving, I was at my poor sweet Mother's house when she came and told a group of us guys that she needed some help with some tech issue after lunch. I started joking with my brother and broth-in-law that they would have to help her because I just didn't have the patience for it, which was jerk of a move and made my mother cry, since what she wanted was in no way a big deal. Man, I wanted to crawl into a hole. I don't know what possessed me to be so callous. Thankfully, I have tried to be the most patient person who ever lived with every tech problem she's asked me to look at since that day. Lesson learned.
Let me be clear. I don't think I am some kind of monster. We all have our ups and downs. I have just as many good memories of having been helpful at work and supporting loved ones in tough times. I think we evolve to have these memories of our mistakes as a way to help us grow. Having a conscience is a survival skill, unless you are some kind of sociopath.
The difficulty in 2025 is that half the country have stopped evolving. They've stopped having a conscience. They no longer feel any empathy for those whose suffering they've contributed to. In fact, they seem to take some perverse pride in it.
Even during times when the economy has been in the dumps and I didn't have much extra money, I was still fine as far as having my basic needs met. I never wanted the state (my employer) to take money away from child nutrition or health care programs just so I could have more disposable income. I think it's a good idea to use tax money to do research on breast cancer and sickle cell anemia, even the chance of me getting those illnesses is minuscule. In no way would I ever think that winning the cosmic lottery and being born a middle-class white American makes me deserving of anything, rather than a poor immigrant whose struggles I cannot even comprehend. Only a sociopath would be uncaring in the face of suffering. Yet, here we are.
In the movies, generally, the bad guys know they are bad people. These days, we are surrounded by horrible people who seemingly have no comprehension of their own rotten souls. The head of the Southern Baptist Convention recently gave an interview explaining why empathy isn't Christlike. How do these people even sleep at night? I feel bad about hurting someone's feelings 15 years ago and my fellow Americans are celebrating their president taking away aid from a country under attack from an invading marauder. I just don't get it.
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The Ingredients of a Good Day
What are the qualities of a good day for you? I'm talking about an ordinary good day, not the birth of a child or getting promoted kind of good. What has to happen for you to go to bed with a smile on your face?
For me, good days almost always come after a good night's sleep. Although I can almost always fall asleep easily, I'm turning into one of those old people who can't seem to string together eight hours to save my life. Today, I managed to sleep until almost 4:30 AM, which is the latest I've been in bed all week.
Although the presence of coffee does not guarantee a good day, the absence of it almost assuredly means getting anything done will be extra challenging. Today, we had coffee, so there was no crisis. I also just ordered one more shipment of Barry's Tea before our Amazon Prime subscription expires in a couple of weeks. Somehow, I ended up with four boxes of this delectable nectar from the Emerald Isle. I switch over to drinking it mid-morning and continue to make a brew every couple of hours throughout the day.
I like being productive. These days, in retirement, I can pick out my projects. The primary one I'm working on now is organizing nearly 100,000 photos, a lifetime's worth from several generations. It gives me a unique opportunity to come up with new technical solutions while being submerged in the great memories old photos bring back. That's digital photos going back to the 90s, the quantity of which drastically increased when we got smartphones. It's also massive amounts of DSLR shots from a time when I spent many hours a week pointing and clicking at anything remotely interesting, including trips all over the country to take photos. Finally, there are scanned family snapshots going back decades for both my wife and me.
I like my solitude very much, but I also relish family time. One of our daughters and her husband are going to a concert tonight (Disturbed) and we agreed to watch their kids overnight. They live a couple of hours a way, but made the drive all the way here to drop off their offspring. I was prepared with plentiful snacks and drinks. As soon as their folks left, I proposed a trip to the old school arcade in town, to which they instantly agreed. We spent a couple of hours playing pinball, skee-ball and trying in vain to extract loot from claw machines. Nobody whined or complained. My granddaughter, age five, got a little teary when she failed to win a stuffed animal, but her heroic high school aged brother deftly cheered her up immediately by giving her all his tickets for her to redeem at the prize counter.
The evening was spent eating food I didn't have to cook in a house remarkably calm despite the presence of young people. The only loud noise was the kids laughing at each other. Wonder Woman went to bed early since she has to work tomorrow. In the morning I'm taking the kids out for pancakes at my favorite diner, which is right down the street. I'm eagerly awaiting another good day.
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Fascism is Here, Evidence Included
The Italian philosopher and novelist, who came of age in Mussolini's Italy, penned a list of the 14 characteristics of fascism, all of which are currently present in the United States.
Smart People Say We're There
The rise of end times fascism Far right (US) The Guardian - The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them
American Fascism Then (1939) and Now (2025) Columnists insightnews.com - Historian Heather Cox Richardson reminds in a recent article that there was a time in American history when the Nazi Party, while still somewhat on the fringe, enjoyed a level of "normalization" in the run up to the start of World War II in 1939 that bears eery resemblance to the modern push for fascist extremism in the United States.
How the US Went Fascist Mass Media Make Excuses for Trump Voters – BillMoyers.com - Trump's racism and xenophobia violates America's core beliefs — yet the media and many Americans are okay with it.
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This Week's Bookmarks - Anti-Fascist Films, Ancient Graffiti, White House Rumors, 1995 and The Web, Best Browsers, Middle-Class Income Needs, Apple and Developers
The 40 Best Anti-Fascist Films of All Time - In light of recent events, it might be a good time to remember a very simple truth: Nazis are ALWAYS the bad guys.
A Tour of Ancient Rome's Best Graffiti: "We Have Urinated in Our Beds ... There Was No Chamber Pot & More| Open Culture - Apart from the likes of bravo and pizza, graffiti must be one of the first Italian words that English-speakers learn in everyday life. As for why the English word comes directly from the Italian, perhaps it has something to do with the history of writing on the walls — a history that, in Western civilization, stretches at least as far back as the time of the Roman Empire.
10 rumors involving Trump's press secretary, Karoline Leavitt So, the question is, does she spread more rumors from the White House podium than are spread about her because of her wackadoodle behavior and inexperience.
1995 Was the Most Important Year for the Web - The History of the Web - 1995 is a fascinating year. It's one of the most turbulent in modern history. 1995 was the web's single most important inflection point. A fact that becomes most apparent by simply looking at the numbers. At the end of 1994, there were around 2,500 web servers. 12 months later, there were almost 75,000. By the end of 1995, over 700 new servers were being added to the web every single day.
These Are the 7 Best Browsers That Aren't Google Chrome - STOP USING CHROME!! Chrome was once a great browser, but it's known to be slower, battery-draining, a memory hog, and collects massive amounts of user data. If you want something better than Chrome, you don't have to pick one. Each option excels in certain situations; you should try them to find what best suits your needs without much compromise.
The Income Needed to be Middle Class in Every U.S. State (2025) - Middle class is defined as earning between two-thirds and twice the median household income.
The Dark Side of Apple Development: Why Developers Are Struggling On Apple’s Increasingly Hostile Platforms – Magic Lasso Adblock = "They would rather have a ChatGPT or TikTok than an OmniFocus or Magic Lasso. Apple is too big to fail, which means it's too big to care." - Ian Betterridge
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Horses
One of the joys about being a prolific reader is the opportunity to become fascinated and informed about all kinds of things that are totally outside your lived experience. In the 70s, as a fifth grader, I read the book The Black Stallion by Walter Farley. This led to an immediate and long-lasting fascination with horses, even though I've never seen thoroughbreds race and have only ridden about a dozen times. Actually, as a pre-school child in a time before I have clear memories, my mother bought me a book about horse breeds which I promptly memorized. I think my parents used me as a party trick to show off that particular skill.
The 70s were a good time to be interested in horses and racing. Secretariat had won the Triple Crown in 1973 in a fashion so dominating that it may never be matched. He won the final race, the Belmont Stakes, by an unimaginable 50 lengths. He was the first to win all three races in 25 years. Many sportswriters went so far as to name Secretariat as one of the 20th century top athletes. Then in 1977 and 1978 there were Triple Crown Winners in back to back years for the only time ever. The person who rode Affirmed to victory in 1978 was a teenager, Steve Cauthen, who became the only jockey ever named Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the year.
I asked for and received figurines of famous horses for Christmas. I read every book the library had about them. I was especially interested in thoroughbreds, but anything horse related was worth investigating. I studied my grandfather's collection of World Almanacs for the lists of names of the horses who had one the famous US races. I knew as much about Man O' War, the legendary horse from the early 20th century, as I did about Babe Ruth, the ultimate star of my other favorite sport, baseball.
Although I did not get to see them until I was an adult, I read all the books I could find about the feral horses of the islands on the eastern seaboard, including, most famously, Misty of Chincoteague. I am always happy to see the horses on Ocracoke Island and other coastal areas of North Carolina where I visit. I was pleasantly surprised when the book, Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand became a bestseller and read it eagerly. by One of the highlights of my Appalachian Trail thru-hike was the day we hiked Grayson Highlands state park in Virginia where a delightful band of feral horses greets lucky hikers. I've been back there several times to see them.
These days, I'm lucky to have a granddaughter who has several years of experience riding and competing in horse shows, including dressage and jumping as well as cross-country. She's worked hard to develop her skills and recently got promoted from the junior level to the senior level of competition. She rides an American Quarter Horse named Say Pepsi Please, who she is naturally very fond of.
Unfortunately, the so-called sport of kings that sparked my interest in the whole scene has been ruined (like baseball and professional cycling) by rampant use of performing enhancing drugs, resulting in an epidemic of death among the equine athletes. Attendance at famous tracks has declined sharply, and the allure and mystique of the entire scene no longer interests me. Like most Americans, I only pay attention to the Triple Crown races, and then only superficially.
Still, I love an opportunity to watch or spend time with horses, even if it's just an old mare eating grass in a pasture. It is good to have things you enjoy, don't you think?
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The Roth Memory Course
Have you ever seen or read about the people who can memorize the exact order of multiple decks of cards? Those people are freaks and they scare me, so I'm not advocating those kinds of skills, but who wouldn't like to be able to retain information more easily? Several years ago I came upon a free PDF version of The Roth Memory Course by David M. Roth, first published in 1918. Written in the stilted and formal British English of the era, Roth presents seven lessons and techniques to memorize more information than you ever though possible, using methods you could teach to a child. I read the book and learned the techniques and, while I kept my skill sharp, could easily recite lists of 100 random words in order. That's a neat party trick, but not very useful otherwise. The practical use was learning dozens of technical acronyms and terms while studying for IT exams.
It's an easy read and a fun self study exercise. If you look around, you can find the PDF version, although hardcover and kindle versions also exist.
Roth Memory Course A Simple And Scientific Method Of Improving The Memory And Increasing Mental Power by David M. Roth
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