100DaysToOffload

My Favourite Tiling Window Manager

Sorry the title is totally misleading and referencing a conversation I had on Mastodon. I've never used a tiling window manager in my life so if you came here to read about my preference of them leave now!

This post is a bit about technology though. I've had a mini DV camcorder since they first became “affordable” last century. Pretty sure I paid just under £1000 for a Sony one in Dixons in 1999. I used to carry it everywhere and just filmed all sorts of random crap I saw. Also would film with friends and family gatherings. Nothing special or formal, just the everyday stuff. I must have a shoebox full of tapes I've accumulated. However I've literally never done them, never copied them, edited them produced anything with them. Just the recording of them seemed more fun than the laborious process of making something with them.

One upshot of lockdown in this household is we've been doing various chores we'd had near the bottom of the to-do list for a long time. One of them was sorting out a cupboard full of crap. In that cupboard was lots of tech stuff which I've pretty much just binned but in there was the camcorder and the tapes. So I decided to import the tapes onto my Mac mini and have a go at editing them. This turned out to be a lot less straightforward than I imagined. The output on the camcorder is a DV port (also known as an IEEE-1394) and I had a DV – firewire 400 cable. Which is pretty useless on a modern Mac. So after much searching online I ended up buying a firewire400 to firewire 800 dongle, then a firewire 800 – to thunderbolt dongle. It all arrived so I daisy-chained the cable and dongles from camcorder to Mac and turned it all on. And nothing happened. After checking and double checking and going through all the menus and options I could find it still didn't work. Not only was I crestfallen but I was out of pocket too as the dongles weren't cheap. In desperation I checked through the camcorder box for other cables and remembered that my original camcorder had broken in the last week of warranty so had claimed on the warranty. Due to some sort of mix up with couriers I ended up with a brand new camcorder and still had the broken one. Which had lost the functionality on the touch screen so couldn't set the menus or do any playback on it. Thinking I had nothing to lose I plugged that into my cable/dongle/dongle combo and it worked! Hallelujah! That feeling of making some tech work is brilliant. So I've been transferring hours of footage to my computer. Now I just need to do something with it. Which should keep me busy for the rest of lockdown and beyond.

100 Days to offload is a blogging challenge started by Kevin Quirk. Check out https://100daystooffload.com and see if you're tempted to join in yourself.

Outrage and RSS

#100DaysToOffload – Day 5

Brief today as my son is hassling me to play MarioKart with him and is impatiently waiting as I type.

Our over the road neighbours had people round yesterday ( which I posted about on social media) but I am still surprised at just how much it pissed me off. I was properly off kilter for the rest of the day. Not sure if it was anger, annoyance or frustration. Also not proud of myself for feeling it. So odd. Do remember hearing that all emotions are valid it is just what one does with them that counts. After I posted online had various replies along the lines of other people's neighbours were doing the same. FFS people do some social distancing.

A side effect of participating in 100 Days To Offload is that I'v logged into my RSS reader for the first time in months. Just been busy adding the blogs of people I enjoy seeing on social media and also the 100 Days blogroll RSS feed so I can see what everyone else is up to. Fingers crossed it won't all be technical posts about folk's Linux set ups.

Got to go; MarioKart awaits.

This post is due to my participation in a blogging challenge called #100DaysToOffload. Check out https://100daystooffload.com and see if you're tempted to join in yourself.

iPhone

#100DaysToOffload – Day 4

After about 3 years of faithful service my Moto G5plus is just too battered and too mangled to be useful as anything other than as a projectile or weapon. :) Give or take a few months I think I've had an Android phone for at least 8 years. My last iPhone was an iPhone3 so quite a while. The familiarity of the environment is great and I have it all configured in a way that just works for me. So naturally I decided to replace the G5 with an iPhone. Previously Apple products were evil and all about locking in users to their ecosystem or just very overpriced shiny things. However my main work machine has been an iMac for a few years now (the choice was that or a corporate set up Dell grey box running the highly restricted Windows image we produce). All my family have iPhones. I ended up buying a Mac mini for home as I really didn't want to have to be looking after a computer at home as that would be a busman's holiday. So it just seemed the logical thing to do to get an iPhone especially as I wanted a phone with a great camera, which is probably the only complaint I had about the Moto G5. Lastly these days I think I trust Apple with my data more than I trust Google. Never thought I'd say that but there it is.

Using it has been a nightmare so far, though obviously I'm not regretting it, as so many things such as gestures and keyboard are just muscle memory so I'm tapping and clicking in all the wrong places. Trying to remember the various accounts and logins for all the different apps and services has been quite a challenge so far.

So yeah my name is Luke, I'm an iPhone user and I hate freedom*.

(*Just a stupid joke from the excellent and far too infrequent Duffercast)

I am participating in a blogging challenge called #100DaysToOffload. Check out https://100daystooffload.com to see how awesome it is.

Books

#100DaysToOffload – Day 3

Reading is something that brings me a lot of pleasure and something I've always done. I'll read most types of books and am happy with non-fiction as well as fiction. Saying that I'm not sure I would read most types of books! Whilst not a book snob and definitely would read lowbrow as well as highbrow I would probably skip romance, fantasy and sci-fi. I'd say I read to be entertained, not challenged. Definitely prefer stuff that is easy to follow but not formulaic and also like books where I have no idea how it is going to end.

When I had an account on the pubnix host circumlunar.space my Gopher space was pretty much just used to keep a record of my reading progress. I liked that and should probably do similar again. Goodreads is a site I've used for ages, from before they got bought by Amazon. A friend once described it as being “like Strava but for clever people”. It's useful to see what friends are reading and track my own reading but goodness the users on there can be incredibly annoying. They seem to want to out do each other with hugely intellectual reviews of books that basically just show off how “clever” they are and are all very literary but with little of how much they enjoyed it or if they felt compelled to read it.

One upshot of lockdown is the libraries are shut. I'm an avid user of my local libraries and can be a bit evangelical about them. As they are now all shut I'm ploughing through my “to read pile” which actually isn't a pile at all but several shelves.

I am participating in a blogging challenge called #100DaysToOffload. This is my day 3/100. Check out https://100daystooffload.com for more info.

Platform B radio AKA Shazam FM

#100DaysToOffload – Day 2

I'm not even sure how we discovered Platform B radio. It's a local community radio station as I understand it and I think they got allocated the frequency of a different local radio station that went bust or got bought out by one of the big groups of broadcasters (like Capital). Anyhow it just appeared on our car radio and we started listening. The thing with Platform B is there is absolutely minimal talking, no adverts, no news, hardly any introductions to tracks etc. Just music. Most of the people involved are young; the “get involved” page asks for people between 16-25. The reason it got the nickname Shazam FM in my household is that 99.9% of the music they play you've never heard of before. This means you're constantly going “who's this?” and launching Shazam app on your phone to find out what the track is called. It's quite reminiscent of the French radio station FIP (which coincidentally had a pirate relay broadcast in my city for about 10 years).

If you're curious to listen they have a listen online page, make shows available through mixcloud afterwards and is even available through the Tune-In app which is great as I get to say “Alexa, play Platform B radio” and can get it on my Echo (because I hate freedom).

I am participating in a blogging challenge called #100DaysToOffload. Check out https://100daystooffload.com for more info.

100 Days of Offload – Day 1

Inspired by AndyC this is my attempt at the #100DaysToOffload challenge. In case you're curious I'm Luke on mastodon.sdf.org and Luke1972 on Twitter and have long neglected accounts and profiles on too many other networks and sites too.

I did have a fledgling blog over on luke.ingerson.org.uk which was a static site generated using pelican but the machine I used to generate the site on died and I never got round to setting it all up again. Since lockdown I'd been toying with the idea of starting all over but obviously write.as is such an easy and straight forward platform so the idea is this will get me used to doing it again without the tech side to even have to consider.