Posted around 14 Dec 2023 from the Let's form a band. Let's take a stand. department · Link to this post

I bought quite a few games recently, including one that doesn't look very good, but the name was so long and ridiculous, that I bought it anyway, just to see if it broke the formatting of the inventory page. it didn't, but the page looks weird now. Throughout 2023 I've spent a lot of time and energy re-evaluating how I interact with the world wide web. I've determined that, for me, the Web has become almost unusable. I've been tempted to just withdraw from it entirely. I still might do that, but I have other plans.

Posted around 11 Aug 2023 from the Serve it with a shovel department · Link to this post

I know just enough about databases to be dangerous. In an effort to fix that, I've started playing with them more, and to do that I decided to install phpPgAdmin on a FreeBSD workstation. It took a bit of effort, so I wrote down my notes so I could refer to them the next time I need to do this. I also wrote down some notes on a workaround I had to implement because a recent Firefox update decided to quit playing sound. I added a few books to the book list again. I'm running out of shelves.

Posted around 17 Jul 2023 from the I think they'd understand my plan department · Link to this post

A while back I wrote about respecting your visitors' computing resources, and I recently decided to follow my own advice by moving all of the XSLT processing for this site to the server-side. This means a few things:

• You no longer have to trust your browser with my scripting skills
• You should be able to browse my site with pretty much anything that understands basic XHTML
• Linking to the anchors on the transformed pages should work now

It turns out that setting nginx up to handle this wasn't too hard, but it was tedious and not documented well. I wrote down my notes because I will forget how I did this immediately if I don't, and I don't want to look it all up again.

I also added several more books to the book list against my better judgement.

Posted around 6 Jun 2023 from the Like all that's sweet's gone sour department · Link to this post

After I wrote about the terraforuming of the Internet in January, I decided to spend February without looking at any internet comments. It was harder than I thought, but the experience was interesting enough that I'm still processing it. I had thought about making No Comment February an annual thing. I still might do that.

An unintended consequence of me taking a month-long comment break is that I took a longer-than-anticipated break from updating this site. Readjusting how I interact with the Internet takes time, but it seems like it's going to be a worthy pursuit.

Posted around 11 Jan 2023 from the With these picky rules and odd jigsaw rhymes department · Link to this post

I recently discovered that this site doesn't seem to show up in any search engine, not really. I've done the things that webmasters are supposed to do, added HTTPS even though this site doesn't really need it for anything, I added a sitemap, I submitted URLs to be crawled. Everything disappeared. I guess that makes this site part of the dark web for now.

Since I'm on the dark web, I decided to weigh in on whether you need to have comments enabled on your blog to call it a blog. But, like just about everything I write it took a turn and I realized that there were deeper questions I wanted to explore.

Posted around 2 Jan 2023 from the X because it's extra, baby department · Link to this post

It's a new year. Things are happening, I'm assuming. I've performed the annual archiving of the bchlog, but you can find it in the sidebar if you're so inclined.

In the interest in moving away from platforms owned by big companies and/or entities, I ended up setting up a Pleroma instance (Note), and that got me more interested in the Fediverse.

Despite what it says on the Social Media page, I do have a Twitch account that I never know what to do with. Even though I've been playing video games in one form or another essentially constantly since the mid-1980's, my streaming style just isn't very compatible with the kinds of people who hang out on Twitch. At some point recently I became aware of Owncast and was intrigued enough to spin up my own Owncast server to do streaming on my own terms in my own style. I also wrote down what I did just in case I ever needed to refer to it again, but maybe you'll find it handy, too? I don't have a streaming schedule or anything like that yet. Baby steps.

I had actually done the Owncast setup last week, but I didn't want to post the article and then blank the page a few days later, so I'm linking to it now, and I don't make New Year's Resolutions, but with social media kind of falling apart, it is a good time for me to start paying attention to my own websites again. I'm not calling it a resolution, though, because if I do, I'll forget all about it and then go do something else in two weeks.