Where to begin!?

It’s been so long, but I don’t think of this site as over. As difficult as I find it, or as uninspired as I am, I can’t bring myself to call this a failed experiment and give up on it – the intention is always to return here again.

As always, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Or the existant. I find myself believing that I can hold off writing while I build a new site theme, or switch from Hugo, or create something from scratch that meets all my needs.

So this is a new post, on my old theme, on clunky Hugo, manually uploaded like it has been for years, and I’m going to try to keep writing even when I would rather do it in another way.

“So what brings me back?” – I don’t hear you ask – and I answer: “nothing in particular”.

I feel lonely I guess. And not for lack of friends or company IRL, but because I sorta impulsively “noped out” of social media completely in a way I’ve never done before and lost a bunch of connections I value way more than I even realised I did.

Mastodon and aus.social were my homes for a while and I have to stress it wasn’t anyone or anything there that killed it for me. I was in a fragile state of mind when I left and I just wasn’t coping with my own self-imposed idea of what I wanted to be in that space. I’m back on elsewhere now, just to keep up with the tiny number of people I truly miss, but if you want to reach out, reach out here from now on.

I’m giving myself a theme this year: “out of my shell”, and in short I mean to push a little outwards to some of the goals I’ve put on hold or felt I was too unskilled to try. I have felt myself becoming more insular over the last three years and it’s left me feeling powerless, and helpless. So I’m not making grand sweeping goals, but I am publishing a new post for the first time in over a year¹.

I do miss interacting with people, so if you see this post out there in the rss æther please drop me an email if you can be bothered², or one day I might have a more public social media account you can say hello to. One reason I want to revamp my site is to get comments or post-pingbacks working like the good old days so I can use this as my outlet and still hear back from people.

I hope your holiday and new year have been joyful and relaxing and I hope to hear from you as I hope you’ll hear more from me this year!

I’ve scoured Soundcloud to find the best Christmas music I could find. It’s chock full of Christmas favourites that are guaranteed to:

1. Bring Christmas cheer
2. Not suck

This year I thought I’d write up my song choices and explain some of them. In particular, number 21 is special. If you’re interested, you can skip to the writeup after you hit play.

My 2022 playlist writeup

1. First up is a wonderful choral/orchestral version of O Come All Ye Faithful. I’ve included a Dan Forrest arrangement of this song in 2016. It reminds me a little of Murray Gold’s arrangement of the Doctor Who theme for Tennant, has this fast frantic chase in it. It’s good.
2. I’ve never included the Hallelujah Chorus in a Christmas playlist for some reason. It’s never been “Christmassy” - but it is right? As much as any of these carols deserve to be here? This Kazoo version by the CSUF Kazoo Ensemble made Mil laugh.
3. I like to include new songs or songs that aren’t the usual staples every year. This year I have This Is Not A Christmas Song by NEFFEX. It’s punky. I like it.
4. Deck the Halls by Cimorelli is another choral carol, in a neat arrangement.
5. This 8-bit version of Little Drummer Boy by Francisco Ramírez kicks off with the original Donkey Kong beat from my childhood, and if I’m not including an 8-bit track for myself regujarly, why am I even doing this?
6. I’ve included I Want a Hippopotamus For Christmas in some version almost ever year since I first heard it. Would you believe I never heard this song until I made the 2013 playlist? It has the same energy as I Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Clause, but I like it better, and this version by laughingstock embraces the energy.
7. There are so many good versions of Carol Of The Bells and I loved it as a kid when I heard it in Home Alone, so there’s a version almost every year. This version by Candice Boyd is brilliant.
8. We joke every year that Away In A Manger was the song my eldest would tear up at - which isn’t funny in itself - but that she would actively avoid listening to this song because it did. So I’ve made it my mission to find the sweetest saddest version I can every year, and this version by Phil Wickham fits the bill. Love you A!
9. Winter Wonderland is almost always filler. In Australia it doesn’t snow and my family hates carols that imply it’s not Christmas without a blizzard. However this Wes Reeve verson ISN’T the version you know and it’s quite sweet and is completely different song!
10. This is a funky acapella version of Angels We Have Heard On High by Just 6. And as I’m listening to it again writing this up, I feel like this is the hidden gem of this playlist hidden back here at number 10. It’s worth the anticipation though.
11. I’ve had some truly great versions of Star of Wonder on past playlists and this instrumental one by Craig Hamilton based on Sufjan Steven’s version which I had on my 2013 playlist.
12. Silent Night is a staple, and this acapella arrangement by AUGUST 08 is really good.
13. This loungy version of Joy To The World by Father Fortuna Music is groovy.
14. I try to include a little funk or electroswing or both in every playlist. Wolfgang Lohr puts out something that fits the bill every year, so they’re on these lists a lot. This is a very funky version of Frosty the Snowman with Odd Chap (another of my favourite artists) and Maskarade.
15. O Holy Night is my favourite carol hands down. I think it’s almost singlehandedly responsible for reminding me years ago that despite losing my faith I didn’t have to give up on the music and joy of Christmas. Getting to sing along to this once a year makes me happy, and this version by Flower Face is lovely.
16. This is another one of those songs that we’ve imported and makes no sense in Aus. But it’s a fun song, and it’s literally called The Christmas Song so it shows up in searches a lot. This bluesy, blousy version by SHEE is catchy.
17. Another one that made Mil laugh. This Reliant K version of Good King Wenceslas is dumb and funny.
18. I’m a sucker for a duet, and I’ve included a couple over the years. Jason and Courtney Tompkins version of Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas is sweet and well sung.
19. Not immune to pop-culture’s influence, and the fact my kids love the Guardians of the Galaxy, I’ve included I Don’t Know What Christmas Is (But Christmastime Is Here) by the Old 97’s from this year’s GotG Christmas Special.
20. I’ve included Dance of the Sugar Gum Fairy every year, and this makes less sence as a Christmas song than the Hallelujah Chorus, but so many artists do it, it must be Christmassy somehow. But I like it, and this version by B&B PROJECT is unique and I love it.
21. OK, this track is kinda special, in that it was on the first playlist I made in 2012, and it’s the ten year anniversary of my Christmas playlists. It’s a swwet version of We Wish You A Merry Christmas by a really young girl named Olivia. This year I was looking through my past favourites looking to see if anyone had done other songs I could use and found number 22 linked from this account.
22. This is Olivia again years later at 12 singing Ave Maria and it’s phenominal. Such a mindblowing change. What a great way to wrap out ten years of Christmas playlists!

This is also the first year I’m not including Jingle Bells! 10 years seems like as good a time as any to skip it, but I’ve included it in every other playlist. Go take a look at them too!

The whole Christmas Playlist That Doesn’t Suck (2022) is up on Soundcloud right now, go have a listen!

Thank you to all the artists who have shared their Christmas songs on SoundCloud for the rest of us!

Have you ever heard or smelled or tasted something that just dragged you instantly into the past? It’s like that scene with Anton Ego, the food critic in the climax of Ratatouille - everything drops away and you’re experiencing something your concious mind had forgotten, but is still living in your brain buried under a mountain of time.

I was chatting to my kids over dinner when something prompted the memory of an old song from my childhood. Like a lot of the songs I tell my kids about, they didn’t believe it could have been real, so as usual I had to get it playing for them. But the version blasting from Spotify wasn’t the version of the song I’d heard as a child and it got me wondering what had I been listening to all those years ago.

See, like a lot of people in the eighties we had car with a tape deck (and no air conditioner, which I still to this day cannot explain to my children how anyone lived without). And on this tape deck we wore out a lot of tapes driving our parents mad with the same songs over and over. We were a Christian family, the family of a pastor no less, so most of the tapes were Psalty the Singing Songbook (and that anthropomorphic hymnal could be a post in and of itself, but lets not get side-tracked). I’m sure mum and dad had their tapes too, and I recall a lot of Keith Green and maybe some Dion? Was that the ex-pop star turned Christian? This is already taking too long so I’m not looking him up.

But man cannot live on bread alone, and not every tape was dedicated to the glory of God. We had one tape that had popular music. There may have been more, but this is the singular one that has made an impression on my childhood brain. And not because it was unholy. Lets not forget, this was the mid-eighties, and my parents had stopped listening to secular music in the decade before I was born, so this “pop” music was taken from an era before my parents even met. Anything with lyrics was right out, so the tape we had, cribbed from an old record we may have not even owned (yes, I’m putting my parents at risk of being prosecuted for piracy some 35 years after the fact) was instrumental only.

But not just any instrument, no. This was not an album of romantic violin. This was no inspirational piano. Ask yourself, what instrument could elevate the hits of the 70’s more than any other? What could capture the spirit of daring, of whimsy - of new possibilities - like no other instrument before or since?

Why the Moog of course!

That slice of synth heaven from God himself, squeaking to your third ear like the voice of an electronic angel. Telling you music will never be the same and you will never be shackled to wood and string and reed again.

Frankly I’ve built it up too much now. I don’t actually normally enjoy the Moog too much. As a child of the eighties I have a soft spot for chiptunes produced on the Commodore SID chip, so I recognise it can take some rosy glasses of nostalgia to see the appeal of some sounds. In reality, this Moog album was my first, and in the intervening years I’ve never felt the pressing need to seek out more.

But that song I recalled, but didn’t recognise? I thought it might have been an electronic version from an album of synthesizer covers. The memory of the song Popcorn, another childhood favourite, rose unbidden to my mind and I knew it had to have been the same tape.

So I did some digging. It took a couple of tries, but I found it. In that moment I experienced that slow but wonderful excavation of buried memories that crystallise and lock the fragments of the past back into those places you’d made for them.

Which is all so much prelude to share this treasure from my childhood. I present Popcorn (and other switched-on smash hits) by Electric Coconut, also re-released a year later as Elektrik Cokernut’s Go Moog! I don’t recall which title we knew it as, but we probably just called it “the Popcorn tape”. Archive.org has the full album, and I swear as I listened to each song, deeply worn mental pathways covered in neglect reconnected and unearthed memories of brown leather seats three kids wide, big clicky radio buttons, and driving with the wind in your face skipping your hand against the current of air.

Moog may be an acquired taste, but the whole album is such a treat of 70’s hits.

Starting with “Popcorn”, this cover may be the one that most closely resembles the original. “Pop Corn” was written for the Moog in 1969 by Gershon Kingsley and the original is the classic synth tune that hit number one on charts all over the world. You may have heard a different version to me, and that might be your definitive version. Hot Butter’s version was also very popular and the Swedish Chef from The Muppets did a cute interpretation. I hope for your sake your childhood version wasn’t the Crazy Frog one.

Before diving into this album I’d never heard the original “Sampson and Delilah” by Middle of the Road. I don’t know if my parents knew it, or just fit the name of the song to the music as it played, but I recall a fair bit of “nah nah nah, Samson and Delilah, mumble mumble, huh huh huhh” in place of the actual lyrics as it played. Actually, some of the lyrics are literally “nah nah nah”, so that complicates it somewhat. There’s a little violin sting in there and it’s possible that planted a tiny seed of love for that instrument in my head.

Next is the song who’s very existence my children doubted. To be fair, if you told me there was a hit song in ‘72 whose sole lyric was the words “Mouldy Old Dough’’ spoken in a low growl, I’d probably not believe you either, but there you go. It’s an absolute banger, with tin whistle, a honky-tonk sorta marching beat and the privilege of being “the only British number one single to feature a mother and son”. That’s right, this band of groovy young men roped in front-man Rob Woodward’s mum Hilda to play piano for many of their songs, and you can see from video recorded at the time she was having a fun time playing with these nice young men. The Electric Coconut version is fun too, cemented in my head more than any other on the album except perhaps for “Popcorn” itself.

“Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” was a song whose known lyrics in that car extended further than the title, but not much further. Admittedly there’s not much more to it, but I think my parents knew the chirpy cheep bits and maybe the bits crying “where’s your mamma gone” but not much else. It’s probably for the best, as the 1970’s Middle of the Road hit topped the Guardian’s list of Top Ten Creepiest Songs.

Another 1972 hit “Wig-Wam Bam” by The Sweet is next, and listening to the original up against the Moog version, this is one of the few on Popcorn I might enjoy more. The lyrics of the original have a potentially problematic cultural appropriation issue, being based on The Song of Hiawatha, a poem from 1855. The poem took a bunch of Native American cultural concepts and fashioned them into a narrative but with made up characters that end with the natives accepting Christianity. None of that is in the song, but it’s got that same sort of messed up idea that non-white cultures have magic nonsense words that reminds me a lot of that Witch Doctor song (“ooh ee ooh ah ah, ting tang walla etc..”).

We’re half way through, and wrapping up side one is “Morning has Broken” popularised by Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) in 1972. This was originally a Christian hymn, and between this and “Samson & Delilah” probably accounts for the survival of this tape in our religious car for so many years. The Moog version definitely uses the Cat Stevens arrangement, as that piano introduction is so iconic, but the electronic version is almost unbearable to listen to in contrast.

Side two starts off strong with the only original Electric Coconut composition on this album. “Jungle Juice” is a really fun tune that reminds me a lot of Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2” which came out in… you guessed it, 1972. If there’s some other connective tissue between these two songs, or you think they’re not all that closely related and I’m imagining things, let me know!

“Seaside Shuffle” is the last song on the album that warrants its own paragraph. Released in ‘71 then again to better success in 1972 by Terry Dactyl and the Dinosaurs, I enjoy both the original and this Moog version. In 1995 when Shaggy released “In the Summertime” I could not for the life of me figure out why this catchy tune was so familiar, those mental pathways covered over with 10 years of moss. They’re not the same song of course - Shaggy was covering the 1970’s hit “In the Summer Time” by Mungo Jerry. Again, my ability to parse out musical cues may be off-target, but “Seaside Shuffle” and “In the Summer Time” certainly share some musical DNA. I can’t find anything sourced, but this post from 2012 claims Mungo Jerry played with the house band that went onto become Terry Dactyl, but they make no effort to back those claims, so take it with a pinch of salt. Regardless, the similarity explains why Shaggy’s hit triggered that little bell in my brain that elevates my opinion of new music when it reminds me of childhood memories and makes a song irresistible to me.

“Softly Whispering I Love You” is a slow and quiet track that hasn’t got a lot to recommend itself in an instrumental Moog version. It was written in ‘67 but wasn’t popular until covered in ‘71. None of these versions are my cup of tea. Track ten is “Jeepster” which uses the squishy electric sound to good effect, but T. Rex’s original is better. The penultimate track is Neil Diamond’s “Song Sung Blue”, and from the shallower mental pathways this song made (though they are still there) this was about the point in Popcorn (and other switched-on smash hits) the kids were begging mum and dad to fast-forward to the other side of the tape - if we hadn’t already asked at “Softly Whispering”. This side of the album really derails fast, and if you’ve made it this far you’re treated to a very forgettable version of Ringo Starr’s “Back Off Boogaloo”. I’m grateful now to have heard the original ‘cause it’s got some charm, but fast-forwarding at any of the previous three tracks and losing this one in the wash is not something anyone in the car ever regretted.

So there you have it, a tape from a record of Moog covers of 70’s hits, learned on road trips in the Queensland heat that buried their way into my brain in ways I could barely put into words before my kids reminded me of a ridiculous song about spoiled food. Digging through the songs I loved gave me some fun connections I wanted to share with you all, and I hope you can enjoy some of them too, through whichever version makes you happiest. I’ve included a link to a playlist of the original versions, and included links to the Wikipedia pages of each song in case you want to learn more about any of them yourselves.

Thank you for reading and enjoy yourselves!

Spotify playlist of Popcorn (and other switched-on smash hits)

Popcorn (and other switched-on smash hits) by Electric Coconut

Stalled

In parts one and two of this small series I tried to repair my childhood Commodore 64.

I’ve tried a lot since my last post and completely botched it, so all-in-all I’m feeling pretty confident in myself and happy with my progress.

Testing, testing

Step one was to try the test cartridge when it arrived. Plugging it in I got a completely different unique garbage pattern, and a green border instead of the usual blue. This said to me that parts of the test cartridge were working, but that something NOT tested by the cart was to blame for the garbled pattern. A bit of research suggested the logic chip can sometimes output this sort of nonsense, although I was unable to find any pictures showing either of the issues I’ve experienced. I ordered a new 74LS373 logic chip and a backup 8500 CPU just in case, and sat quietly in the corner of the room for them to arrive.

I’m not equipped for this

The new chips arrived - and as the CPU I have is socketed - it was a quick job to see if the new 8500 would help. It did not. The logic chip was not socketed, and so I made a trip to Jaycar for one so I could start the process of making the whole board more easy to use for testing chips.

I did not spend the money on a desoldering gun, and soon regretted it. I was not enjoying it, but I was at least making progress until the final pin of the old logic chip didn’t de-solder the whole way and pulled up the trace on the board all the way back to the previous thru-hole.

I tracked back to Jaycar and purchased some silver trace paint and some wire. The trace paint was a waste of time (although I could have been doing it wrong), so I’m glad I picked up some wire while I was there. Then I installed the socket and tried to hard-wire the pin on the broken trace back to where it needed to be.

One, Two, Three

My attempts had made things worse. With the new logic chip in place in the socket and my gross wiring, the display now cuts in and out. Mostly out. The crazy patterns are still there too, making it clear the logic chip was not the culprit so I also shoddily removed a potentially working logic chip. Finally, I thought it might have simply been a dodgy soldering job, so I rechecked my work, and in the process learned my soldering iron might be too hot for this sort of work, and I’ve melted parts of the socket and I’m worried I’ve damaged the PCB even further.

Time to give up

At this point I was ready to pack it in. Deep down I’m not ready to stop, but I reached the limits of my knowledge about three steps ago, and have little to show for it. I reached out to friends who gave me some further advice, but I thought I’d sit on if for a while and try to decide the next best steps.

Fortunately I may have some better news for the next post in this series.

I’ve scoured Soundcloud to find the best Christmas music I could find. It’s chock full of Christmas favourites that are guaranteed to:

1. Bring Christmas cheer
2. Not suck

The whole Christmas Playlist That Doesn’t Suck (2020) is up on Soundcloud right now, go have a listen!

Thank you to all the artists who have shared their Christmas songs on SoundCloud for the rest of us!

40-Year-Old Computers Are A Nightmare

Restoring my childhood computer is apparently going to take longer than I hoped. Restoration of a Childhood Icon Part One ended on a bit of a bummer, and (spoiler warning) this part is also not the conclusion I’m looking for.

On Mike, First of His Name’s advice, I ended up purchasing a set of new capacitors and a modern PLA replacement chip from Retroleum.co.uk, then waited patiently for them to arrive.

Like Riding A Bike

In preparation, I’d asked for a soldering iron for my birthday, and also grabbed myself some supplies so I could dredge my rusty soldering skills out of their 30 year hiatus.

With solder in hand, and solder sucker in… also… hand, I started by recapping the board. Fortunately, once you learn to solder it’s not difficult enough to forget, so I soon had new capacitors in place.

However on testing, the old boy still wouldn’t give me anything better than a black screen.

Light At The End

But fear not! I had the replacement PLA chip! And with this baby in place, I was…

Only slightly better off.

On testing, I’m getting somewhere with this new PLA, but it’s clear that the PLA was one of the issues with the old boy, but not the only one. Now instead of a black screen, I get the familiar blue border indicating not everything is borked, but I get a jumble of colours instead of the expected BASIC intro text.

At this point Mike offered to take the board and run some tests and repair it himself, but I’ve come so far and want to see the repairs through myself if at all possible. So on his recommendation, I’ve ordered myself this diagnostic and dead test cartridge to see if I can suss which chips are still not quite right.

The Pictorial C64 Fault Guide doesn’t show any issues quite like mine, so I need to do some digging of my own.

So stay tuned for part three, when I wire up my test harness and try and pry some chips.

The Pull of Nostalgia

Ever since sending my old Commodore 128 to a better place, I’ve been thinking of it’s older breadbin C64 brother I’ve got sitting in storage. I knew we mostly used the 128 because the 64 stopped working, but I couldn’t remember exactly what was wrong with it. Thinking it was completely dead, I felt like even just putting the shell to good use would be a win. There’s some great tutorials and components you can buy that can help you convert a non-functional Commodore 64 into a modern PC or USB keyboard.

However, after almost 2 years of thinking about it, I decided I didn’t want to gut the thing until I was really sure it was dead. My mum has one of those C64 Minis and what I discovered getting that running was that emulating the Commodore wasn’t the experience I wanted to capture (or recapture). The C64 full size upgrade appears to be a better experience, but is completely sold out everywhere.

I have this small piece of my own history sitting in a cupboard, and I’ve decided I wanted to try and do what I can to breath new life into it.

Problem One: Power Supply

Step number one was the power supply. Conventional wisdom is that you don’t ever, for any reason, do anything to anyone for any reason ever, no matter what, no matter where, or who, or who you are with, or where you are going, or where you’ve been… ever, for any reason whatsoever… plug an original Commodore 64 power supply into a Commodore 64.

The problem as I understand it, is that the 5V DC line on the power supply will eventually inevitably break and pump more voltage into the machine than its chips can handle. There’s also a 9V AC line that’s far more stable and doesn’t cause issues, but that DC line has killed more Commodores than time alone would be responsible for. So before I could see if the machine even worked, I would have to get myself an alternative modern power supply. There’s a couple out there, but I’m told the most reliable modern PSU is the C64PSU made in Poland. Getting a PSU shipped from Poland seemed like an expensive way to start however, as there could be many more things wrong with the board, and having a working PSU sitting around with the broken computer seemed like a waste.

Then, the astonishingly generous Mike, First of His Name¹ from https://chinwag.org offered to send me his C64PSU as a loner from his lockdown in Melbourne, kicking off my attempts to finally get this thing repaired.

Problem Step Two: Spring Cleaning

While I waited for that to arrive, I gave the whole thing a spruce up. The case got a clean in the dishwasher along with the keycaps, while the board got a brush down with a soft brush. The internals don’t look too bad, and I can’t see any capacitor bulges with the naked eye.

I’m happy with how it turned out, and I’m even oddly proud of the couple of melt-marks on its upper grill. In my research I learned that the marks are quite common on these machines, and weren’t caused by some sort of over-heated wire or soldering iron (as I’d originally presumed) but due to a chemical reaction between the plastic of the case and something in the cables a lot of people wrapped around their C=64s while they were in storage!

Step Three: Tuning Up

Finally the other night I was able to pull out my old CRT TV and plug in Mike’s power supply and see if the thing would even boot any more. The LED came on - which was a good sign, as I vaguely recall previously attempting to get it working and not even getting a light (leaving me fearing I’d pre-fried my chips!).

The CRT is the only TV in the house I still know how to tune via RF, as I’ve also since remembered that we never once had a proper AV cable for the Commodore, and always relied on tuning the TV to channel 3 and plugging direct to the RF port (prompting memories of swapping cables at the back of the TV any time we wanted to play games).

Problem Four: Nothing

Tuning the RF was successful after I worked out how to tune the TV with the sparse controls, but alas - I only have an empty black screen. As setbacks go, this is quite a big one - more research shows the completely black screen can be commonly caused by upwards of a dozen different issues, and tracing it to the real issue is going to take time… and money.

Speaking to Mike we think the next step will be to replace all the capacitors on the board and see if it makes a difference, followed by replacing the PLA². After that your guess is as good as mine. Some very clever people have dozens of tricks to determine the myriad ways a C=64 can be busted, and I’m hoping to learn a lot as I figure this out, but it may be slow going and I might not have anything to show for it for a long time, if ever.

And that’s where I’m leaving it for now. I’m looking forward to doing this, and trying to keep the cost to a minimum as I go. Getting the old thing cleaned up really confirmed my desire to get it working again. Wish me (and the memory of the 5-year-old I used to be) luck!

I want to share the album I was listening to while I figured out how to dockerise Hugo. It’s such an upbeat listen that I didn’t notice when it looped through and played again. I was listening on soundcloud through docker-tizonia but I’ll leave you the Spotify link for Thaehan - Mekatsune and the FULL LP on Youtube

My two fave tracks are Chapô Chapô and Goblins, but you make up your own mind.

NOTE: I added the above as sign off on another post a few weeks ago, but re-listened to some of their music again today and decided they deserved a separate post. I’m totally blown away by their music. And as an additional bonus for re-reading this post if you saw it at the bottom of the last one, here’s a newer trilogy track called Mechanical Heart.

Back in ‘87 the Gilstone company released the X488, a breakthrough in mesopliner technology that was soon forgotten to the mists of time. Today I’m building my own X488 and I’m going to do it with flamming!

Keeping inline with my desire to produce catchy titles I’ve named this post something nonsensical. The Gilstone X488 wasn’t a thing (was it?), but lately I’ve been getting all nostalgic for retro tech, and reading a bunch of excellent posts about technology and frankly I was feeling left out.

So I apologise if you came here hoping to learn more about flamming, or if you yourself have fond memories of the Gilstone X488, but that’s not what we’re doing today. Today I thought I’d share some excellent websites I’ve been enjoying lately, and hopefully you can find some good posts there instead!

Recently there was some discussion on EVERY SITE¹²³⁴⁵⁶ about RSS feeds - how hidden they are now, and how we need to promote and boost those sites that write about the things we enjoy reading about. Not every site has to pump out quality SEO driven articles about technical subjects to drive ad revenue, and the re-emerging indieweb of randos writing about topics that interest them is so nice to see.

Earlier today I put the finishing touches on a simple Docker/PHP combo script to grab my Miniflux feeds and convert them into a “follow” page here on The Geekorium. Eventually I’ll follow some of the excellent work put into the exact same problem by Jan-Lukas Else on his site to build his Miniflux blogroll, as solving the problem in Go seems more inline with my use of Hugo than a php script.

My Follow page has a super simple list of sites I’d recommend, along with their RSS feeds to make subscribing simpler if you’re into it. But right now I’ll break down some excellent posts I’ve enjoyed by a few of the people on that list.

Kev Quirk runs the fosstodon.org mastodon instance and posted recently about his experiences with Synology and Nextcloud. I was particularly interested because I’ve tried Nextcloud in the past, and while I love the idea of keeping full control over my data, I found Nextcloud to be slow and unweildy when I tried to encrypt the data and store it in the cloud. Turns out Nextcloud is just slow. Synology looks interesting, but I’ve found that Tresorit while expensive, meets my backup needs. Kev is a ‘metablogger’ who writes sometimes about his own experiences as a writer, and is also the brains behind #100DaysToOffload, a challenge to “Just. Write.” and power the old-school personal website revolution again. Also, Quirk is a kickass last name.

I originally read Guillermo Garron (ggarron)’s post Blogging is not dead on Hacker News. It was part of a longer ongoing discussion across a number of sites on whether old-school personal web logs were dead or dying. The irony of this discussion happening across multiple personal “blogs” was not actually irony at all, but rather a concerted effort to bring back something a lot of people miss, now that corporations lock us into their specific “social” platforms. GGarron has been consistently putting out new fresh posts on his own site, doing his part to power this resurgence, to take back control and give people a reason to find and follow new people. Hs posting has led directly to making me write my more recent entries, and directly inspired me to set up a feedreader and subscribe to more people. He was the first of my new subscriptions when I finally got set up.

Horst Gutmann (zerok) wrote about Domain Of Ones Own, a program of certain universities to offer personalised domains and hosting for their students instead of a generic institutional address. This gets the student set up for life “owning” their own identity early in their career and ensures they can continue using the same tools after academia that they’ve been using all along. This idea gels with my belief that people deserve, in fact need, to claim a domain and use it for at least their own email. Zerok also built webmeniond, a way to hook the indieweb webmention technology up to your site, that I must actually enable here some time.

Launching Keyoxide is a post by Yarmo Mackenbach on the really excellent Keyoxide service he’s built as an independent tool to “prove you’re you” across multiple important websites. For example, I have a Github profile, a Mastodon profile and a personal domain that you have no way of knowing are truly “mine”. By using my Keyoxide proofs page, you’re able to see that I’ve explicitly identified profiles on these services as being under my control. Yarmo writes a lot about, and is clearly passionate for, our independence from large corporations holding and monetising our data.

Mike Stone is another fosstodon admin, and writes the sort of geeky stuff I love reading. He’s covered the software he uses, the purchase of Keybase by Zoom and his adventures into Open Source AI. He’s always got something interesting to share, and I’ve found and tried multiple new programs I’d never heard of based on his recommendations. Just don’t try eDEX-UI - it’ll crash your desktop like it did to mine!

My most recent follow I found only after putting the finishing touches on this post! Katie McLaughlin (glasnt) wrote a post called Generating a pseudorandom string: the what and the how, and while I like linux geek posts, normally the “here’s a simple command that does x” sort of posts are skippable if I can’t immediately figure out how I’ll use them. Glasnt however uses the post as an opportunity to break down the command into its parts, teaching me about tr (and LC_ALL=C), fold, and finally why short and long commandline option/argument combos make no friggin’ sense to me in a way that makes friggin’ sense. I had to immediately subscribe and add her to this list for making a linux command-line post so much more informative than they usually are.

The last person on my list is someone I’ve followed since at least 2010 when “blogs” were a thing, the salmon protocol was about to take off, and Twitter was cool. Ruben Schade (Rubenerd) has been podcasting and writing since before both were things everyone did, and is still going years later (he’s up to 411 episodes of his show which is just insane). I’m not even going to try and link to a good example of his posts, as they’re so eclectic. His technical posts are the reason I titled this post the way I did, and I’m using Linux and Hugo directly because of him (although he uses BSD like a gentleman), and I have implemented or de-implemented tech on this very site due to his recommendations. If you search for mentions of his name here, you’ll start to wonder if I have a crush on the guy, but he’s just one of the few consistent writers I’ve follow - and he also doesn’t allow comments on his site and only uses Twitter, so I can’t give him feedback any other way!

So that’s just a small list and taste of the people I’m following. There are many others, but I can’t write paragraphs about all of them so I’ll throw up some good posts by randos here:

• Simbly Me - toot - a cli mastodon client I want to try
• rolisz - Pixel 3a - how I feel about the Pixel 3a in someone else’s words
• Jlelse - How I curate links for my blog - a similar breakdown to mine, for more excellent suggestions of who to follow.
• Hey Georgie - How to manage and avoid stress
• tttthis - If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
• Stan’s blog - NextDNS is my new favourite DNS service
• Max Böck - Whimsical Website Club
• Freddy’s Ramblings - 6 Beginner Privacy Tips for Lockdown
• James Routley - Bespoke software, and a really simple RSS aggregator
• Lazybear - Moving to main - Also his Vim weekly tips are great

I hope you can find someone new to follow, or are inspired to fire up a feed reader and start. And to all the people I’ve linked to here, and those who are on my list who maybe didn’t get a mention, thank you for writing, please keep going! Let’s write for pleasure and enrichment and keep the web personal and alive.

This is the third in a series of posts where I just plonk stuff I’ve been thinking about that doesn’t go anywhere else. It’s got a stupid title because my first thought is…

1. I have a real bad time trying to come up with good titles. I don’t try too hard, so I guess it’s to be expected, but I note that my titles have a similar quality to other posts I’ve read that strike me as amateur. If I could tell you what that meant it would put me closer to rectifying it.

2. I have subscribed to a number of new “blogs” recently - as an aside, I think the word blog is awful so I will from now on refer to them as as net-logs, or personal chronicles, or whatever fits.

   After a week of posts on Hackernews about the death and resurrection¹ of said personal chronicles, I thought I’d fire up the ol’ RSS reader and brush off the dust.

   The first thing that struck me was how unpleasant the PHP-based software I had been using was. So instead of dicking around with it, I put my new Docker/Nginx skills to work and fired up a version of Miniflux which is just so elegant and simple to work with. I’ve been slowly accumulating a bunch of low-key personal chronicles by people who write about FOSS and speculate about the same kind of issues that interest me. I’ll put up a list of them somewhere soon.

3. I’m looking for some diversity in my growing list - a lot of these people are other men about my age, which is a fine thing to be - I myself am a man about my age - but other view-points and ideas are also nice. I’m interested in FOSS, internet decentralisation/federation, programming, technology so I’m looking for personal chronicles with a similar bent. I’m not looking to subscribe to stuff that’s completely outside my interests (eg. sport, cars, gardening etc.) but someone who occasionally shares their passions for those things amongst the stuff I’m interested in is welcome². Share your linkrolls!

4. Today I did a big Mastodon harvest - finding and following a lot of new people. This was just to widen the number of voices I’m seeing there. I have to walk the line I failed to walk on Twitter though - while it’s important to be politically engaged, Twitter doesn’t do political nuance well, and Masto probably doesn’t either. I don’t want a lot of politics in my feed anymore. I also need to remember that hiding people’s boosts is a thing I can do.

5. I was going to say something about the protests and riots and police/military action going on in the US, but almost everything I wrote seemed flippant. I hope that whatever happens it leads to real lasting change (or the start of it).

That’s another round up of stuff that’s been on my mind that doesn’t deserve it’s own post. I guess it’s also the third in the #100DaysToOffload³ series I haven’t officially committed to.