The Geekorium

Hi folks! It’s been a long time since I last posted, and a lot has happened. No more than has happened to anyone else over the same time and none of it is newsworthy, but the passage of time seemed like something that that should be at least acknowledged. Which seems redundant now that I type it out loud.

One of the things keeping me from posting is just the sheer insanity of life. Things don’t so much get in the way as they make posting seem inadequate. How do you put mundanity mixed with chaos and frustration into words without boring people? How do you tease out the parts that made you happy without looking like you’re trying too hard.

And then there’s the site itself. Writing up Markdown and finding images and putting it all together in Hugo was never a fun way to write. I was tied to my desktop and although I tried to have a “workflow” the way Hugo changed from month to month meant every time I uploaded I had up to a half-dozen broken steps I’d need to work through to get it re-built.

So I ended up putting it off more and more, even though my drafts folder was growing (slowly - but growing), and now we’re here more than a year later and no updates.

This time I determined to build the website my way. It’s taken a minute but I now have a way to generate my site that’s built on technologies I understand and my own sweat and tears. More of that when I write up how it works and how and why you might want to try it, but for now - I welcome you to the new and improved The Geekorium!

I’m still dogfooding it as I go, and there are a couple of things I still know I need to do, as well as a few bugs I’m not aware of, but if I put it off until it’s perfect I’ll never release it.

You might see some items that look like this: {{< youtube xyzabc123 >}} or some links that still look like Markdown. Those are unfinished until I can port over the plugins I need to translate the Hugo exclusive tags. I have figures working, and my next goal is the youtube tags, but please be patient while I get them going.

You might also get old sites in your feed reader (if you’re still subscribed). I rewrote the Atom feed and it may not even work, so sorry if it makes your reader grumpy.

In the meantime I welcome feedback. I reached out to Georgie of Hey Georgie for design help and she graciously gave me some ways to make the site look better, but all bad decisions are my own. If you have any ideas for improvements I’m all ears, because I don’t really have an eye for design. You can get in touch via email at josh @ this.domain.au or on the fediverse at https://social.chinwag.org/@josh and if you notice any jank please let me know.

November will be this this site’s 20th anniversary. I hope this new format will make me more likely to keep it up-to-date. So here’s to 2025 and the new online me!

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.

I haven’t properly “blogged” here in so very long. With so many other social sites around like the Facebloops and the whatnots, it’s seemed a little pointless putting anything up here where no one would read it. I could post a pic of my kids on that site that everyone has an account for and get a bunch of interactions there instead, so putting the effort into this site seemed pointless.

The sheer lazyness of it is exactly what Mark Zuckerberg is counting on. Posting on Facebook takes no effort, it’s simple, and your pictures and rants and low effort posting gets seen and liked and commented on, and no one ever wants to leave, unless they held out for years and never joined in the first place. And if you want to chat to your mum, or your wife through anything other than SMS, are you really going to make them install something else like Telegram instead of just using Messenger?

But I can’t be lazy any more. I quit Twitter years ago (and finally deleted it a week ago), and this week I’m quitting Facebook. All the cool kids are doing it, but none of the cool kids I know do, so I’m the dumbass who has to look like a hipster wannabe rebel and close down my account. So I’m not “closing” it - I’ve simply deleted most of what information there was about me, unfriended everyone, and left a public message that people should email me or visit my site here from now on. I hope people don’t get too offended. I’ve already been told off my my wife for removing the fact that we’re married from her profile… I probably didn’t think through some of the side effects here.

I’m holding out for something new and federated. Something where I can own my data, but still share it in a way that’s easy and lets old friends and family I never get to see know I’m alive. There are promising beginnings out there, but they all suffer from not being easy to set up, or not having enough people, or just plain not being what I’m really looking for. And no, Slack isn’t it - it’s just as closed and proprietary as Facebook.

If you’ve come here from Facebook to see what I’m doing or get in touch, you can email me. My personal email is Josh (my name) at demands.coffee - I know it doesn’t look like an email address, but trust me it is. And if you want to instant message me, download and [add me on Telegram] - it’s the closest thing to Facebook Messenger I’ve found that actually cares about privacy, security of your messages, and is just plain useful. And if you’re really paranoid, I’ve got a Wickr account too.

When I started First Waves I wanted to keep my readers up to date with Google Wave news and keep on top of changes and updates as they happen. However, looking around the net I soon found many sites that already do a great job of keeping up with Wave news, and I hate the idea of rehashing the same stuff my readers could get at any number of excellent sites. So instead I have started to concentrate on larger news and “future direction” stuff here at First Waves, and I hope my readers are OK with the focus.

But I realise that many people do want up-to-the minute Wave information, so I’m going to lay out the sites and people I follow, and if you’re a hardcore Wave nut, you might like to follow them too. These people all have my utmost respect and admiration for their writing and dedication to Wave. I’ve included these sites in a Google Reader bundle called Best Google Wave Sites. If you trust my judgement, you can use the bundle to subscribe to all twenty-two feeds in just a couple of clicks! If you’d like to know more about the sites though, read on!

Wave Users - Hints and Tips

First and foremost, you cannot go past the Official Google Wave Blog - written by Googlers with news information and tips. If you only subscribe to one other site (ahem), this should be it. It’s kind of a no-brainer though so lets move on to some less obvious sites.

The Shiny Wave by David Cook takes a look at useful waves, gadgets and bots as well as the latest important technological developments that could impact Google Wave. Once a month he profiles the work of a talented Wave developer, and generally keeps a close eye on the Wave development community.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave Alright, this isn’t a site to follow so much as a book, but it’s written by the enormously talented Gina Trapani with Adam Pash. The site includes the entire book for you to read for free, or you can get it in PDF or full colour print versions for a very small fee. If you’re just getting started in Google Wave, there really is no other site you need to get your head around it.

Google Wave Information by Pooja Srinivas (a Googler) is a compilation of Wave guides Pooja has written. The focus is on brand new users who might find something like the Complete Guide (above) too complicated. It also covers some unusual and fun use cases for Wave.

Waving At You by Russell Tripp is where Russell puts all his tips and information on Google Wave to “ease the learning curve” as he puts it. Waving At You and Russell’s Twitter account are where I found a lot of my favourite Wave resources. His tips are simple, but always excellent.

Waverz uses waves themselves to create the articles. Using the wavearchive@appspot.com bot, an archived html copy of a wave is made (at http://archive.waverz.com). You can then embed this archive in a page using some simple javascript (or php or python on the back end). Beyond this technical marvel though is an insightful site written by a number of Wavers including one of my fave wavers Jon Blossom and Dragon Silicon, who’s work I’ve only just discovered while writing this article.

Google Wave Possibilities by Tim Brown is another excellent source of Wave news. Tim is a “Wave Watcher”

• a group of Wave helpers - and for good reason. His site is full of helpful information (like how to get started with particular bots), and Google Wave news.

Wave on Business is focussed on how businesses might use Google Wave. The site incorporates presentations, use case scenarios and information on collaboration.

Google Wave Book by Andrés Ferraté is a companion site to the books Getting Started with Google Wave and Google Wave: Up and Running. It is more than just a catalogue for the books though, and contains insightful posts with tips and ideas.

Riding the Wave by Prasun Nair has Wave news, but mixes in some news about other communications technology such as telephones. The posts cover Wave news and information on its future direction.

Google Wave Info. The latest news and information about Google Wave by an anonymous author. Some useful information.

Wave Developers

These sites are run by Wave developers for Wave developers and contain a mix of the technical and informative. If you would like to dive in to the nuts and bolts of Google Wave, these are a few of the best!

The Google Wave Developer Blog is the official blog for Google Wave developers. It’s full of tips and guides and helpful information for developers who are just starting out with Wave and for Wave gurus too.

Google Wave Samples Gallery is the go-to place for new robots and gadgets as they come out. Primarily a teaching resource, the extensions here are tagged with how well they will teach you the concepts behind developing for Google Wave. An excellent source of useful bots too!

On Top of the Wave by Kiwibcn is a site run by a team of developers to showcase their experiences developing for Google Wave. One of their most popular posts is how to Develop your first wave robot in Java and clearly demonstrates their knowledge and their ability to teach.

Wave.to by @waveDOTto is the home of the developers of the excellent Mr-Ray extension, plus many more. These guys clearly know their stuff, and they are passionate about sharing it with the developer community and the public.

With Waves are a team of four developers who have created a number of popular extensions including Amazon and eBay bots that insert product listings into waves when you mention them. They have also released their Extension Generator that they use internally to build their own robots. That’s generous!

Mastering Wave by Daniel Graversen follows the process of developing for Google Wave, as well as highlighting important Wave news and tips. This site is one of the first Wave sites I subscribed to.

Process Wave is written by seven software engineering students, and follows their process of developing from Invity, a group management bot, to a collaborative modelling tool integrating the open source ORYX software into Wave.

Go Wave hasn’t been updated for little while now, but has some good information about Robots, Gadgets and Embedding.

Google Wave Sites by Region

The following Wave sites are written for specific communities and are often in another language. This should not be a problem. I speak nothing but English, but thanks to modern internet translation software have no trouble reading and participating in these sites. If you subscribe to these sites in Google Reader you can use the built in translation function and you should have no troubles whatsoever.

Spanish

WAVEsfera by David Alviz. David was an enthusiastic commenter here on First Waves, so I followed him back to WAVEsfera and discovered his site was in Spanish. Realising I was missing out on some excellent tutorials and news I subscribed as soon as I remembered that Google Reader does instant translation! I’m glad I did

• David updates almost twice daily (!) and is an endless font of knowledge and excitement over Wave. Without David, I’d probably be missing out on all the other excellent non-English wave resources below.

German

Google Wave Surfer by Thomas Friebel has news and information with particular focus on the Wave experience and how it is changing over time. The site also includes a forum for users to share their wave experiences.

Wave Inside by Sascha Ahlers has shorter updates than Google Wave Surfer, but they are no less informative. A good resource for quick news.

French

Google Wave France is maintained by three authors who explore Wave use cases and report updates and changes as they happen.

Russian

Google Wave Russia by Vadim Barsukov has some in-depth articles from Q&A sessions with Lars “Google Wave” Rassmussen. Some of the content appears to be English articles translated to Russian, but there is some original content too.

Everything else

Of course, this list is not meant to be complete. There are authors I’ve not met, site’s I’ve not found and tweets I’ve not seen. There are sites like Smarterware or Read Write Web that often cover Wave news, but aren’t dedicated to covering Wave. As I come across articles like this, I’ll add them to my “Further Wave Reading” list over on the left. I also re-tweet interesting Wave articles from @firstwaves on Twitter. If you really want to be in the loop, follow my Twitter list of Wave Geniuses too!

I’ve also left off a lot of good resources and people that can be found on Google Wave itself, as that will take another post entirely. <a href=“https://wave.google.com/wave/wavethis?t=Contact+from+First+Waves&r=nunn.joshua@googlewave.com” title=“Contact Josh via Google Wave”>Ping me if you’d like to chat, and I’m sure I can help you find some great people, and useful resources.

If you know of some great Google Wave resources I haven’t covered, please let me know in the comments below!

I was visiting Pamela Fox’s personal website, and noticed she had a _Wave This I can’t find mention of the feature anywhere, and I’m not sure if it’s permanent, but a specially formatted URL takes a title argument, a content argument and passes it to a special new wavethis function as shown:

[snippet id=“843”]

Using a bit of PHP in Wordpress and a plugin called Samsarin PHP Widget (that allows php in a special widget) I created the _Wave This

The PHP I used was as follows:

[snippet id=“842”]

Simply install and activate the plug-in. Add the Samsarin widget to your sidebar and past the code in as you see it. It will only appear on post pages (not the front page).

I created a couple of button images you can feel free to use:

So that’s the new Wave This! button. Go ahead and give it a try. If you’re a developer I’d be interested in seeing other ways to implement this.

If one of my heroes - and a highly successful tech journalist and writer

• feels like this sometimes, maybe it’s ok that I do too.

Want to share a public wave with someone who hasn’t jumped on the Wave bandwagon? Need to publish a Wave in a way that keeps it safe from editors and wanna-be trolls? How ’bout this Wave Reader that takes a wave and displays it as a web page without the reader needing an account.

Take the URL http://antimatter15.com/misc/read/? and tack on the wave ID you want to publish, and BAM! a simple published wave. For example: “Things to do in Adelaide”, a wave put together by Taryn Hicks. It’s shiny and blue, and the information is easy to read without needing a Wave account. In addition the creator has made it possible to publish a private wave, simply by adding the gwavereader@googlewave.com bot to the wave!

A tool like this should be an official feature of Google Wave. One of my biggest concerns is that as wave becomes more popular, people will begin to publish tonnes of handy information as waves only (this has already begun). The problem with the current embedding tools are that they require the reader to have a Wave account, and just as importantly a browser that can handle Wave. Sadly this is the opposite of the open and free web the founders of the Internet envisioned. But with tools like the Wave Reader, we’re on the way to getting simple, clean HTML pages of information the way we’re accustomed to. To generate some clean HTML you can use to make a totally static page out of a wave, add &html=0 to the URL.

So head over to the Art of Wave Reader to get a good idea of how to use the tool and pick up a bookmarklet that will open your current wave in Wave Reader. You can also download the code. You may notice it’s now up to version 5.2 (the blog post was about 4.6) and is a marked improvement from even a week ago, now making extensive use of HTML5 and CSS3. Wave Reader is released under a GNU General Public Licence v3.

I can’t recommend Wave Reader highly enough and wish a feature like this was baked into wave. It’s fast, good looking, and very useful.

Google fan Lookon has created a Bot to post to his Posterous blog, and written detailed instructions on how to do it.

It’s straight forward enough, add the bot and log in to the form it gives you. The next time you add the bot to a wave, the first wavelet gets posted at Posterous and it returns the URL for you to check.

Posterous seems to have the most diverse posting options of any blogging software available, and the addition of posting from waves puts it again at the forefront.

Now the bot needs to monitor comments and return them to the original wave for even tighter integration.

How to write a blog using Google Wave Robot for Posterous [Western Bridge over Google Wave]

(via Kerrie Anne’s Fridge Magnets)

They do what on the Internet?

I recently spoke to a staff member at one of my schools who in all respects is a lovely person, but who shocked me thoroughly when we started talking about ‘the Internet’. The topic somehow came to MySpace in particular, and in general the idea of putting personal stuff out there for all to see. Now this person has a child, and their opinion was that they would never let their child do anything online that might expose them to the dangers of the Internet. This sounds good and proper

• but my shock was at what their idea of Internet danger extends to.

Do you believe that some people use the Internet for banking!?

they exclaimed.
As I was about to explain that actually the ’net is getting very good at keeping everything you put out there safe I was forced to cut the conversation short to reset yet another password.

Now this person isn’t so old you can forgive their scepticism - and even that’s not fair when you consider that my Grandma has been banking online for at least a couple of years now. More confusingly this person is fresh out of university - so they MUST be using the ’net at least occasionally.

Before we ended the conversation I tried to impress upon them that with a very young child about to grow up in an increasingly net-connected world, they have a chance (nay, a duty) to learn everything they can about this newfangled technology to better educate their children in its proper use. I’m not sure if I got through.

They grow up so fast

Since then, I’ve thought a lot more about our jobs as educators and technologists (and parents) to make this technology safer for our kids (and by ‘our’, I mean the ones we work with as well as the ones we own[^1^](#1sup)). I’ve kinda been interested in this area since starting to work with Al Upton who put me on to a couple of educators who think about this stuff. Until I talked to this staff member though, I never really seriously considered how important it all is.

Our kids are using mobile phones earlier, blogging younger, playing video games before they can walk, and MSNing before they can speak, but instead of teaching them, we’re banning them in classrooms and homes and hoping that they’ll get over it instead[^2^](#2sup). We block out everything new that we see (iPods, websites, phones) and never really re-evaluate it. It makes sense to hold back a little, to evaluate how safe these things are - but too often they are pronounced ‘too difficult to make safe’ and banned outright.

The ban-everything problem

The problem with the ban-everything-new approach is this: new toys, new ideas, new things cry out to be used and played with - every child who was dragged to church Christmas morning knows this. Every geek with a new computer/browser/new-mouse-button knows this. Everyone who’s bought a new mower or car knows that regardless of whether you need to or not, your new things call out to be used in some way. And if you cannot use them in the ways they were intended you find other ways to use them instead.

You get bored of your old software on your new computer - so you buy a computer game to make the most of it. You don’t need to drive anywhere fast, so you do burnouts up and down the block. You don’t need the new phone with the camera, and you can’t find anything constructive to do with it, so you take photos of your friends humiliating themselves instead, and then you post them to your ‘till-now-unused MySpace page. Why do we ban myspace? Because kids can do hurtful damaging things with it. Why do they do hurtful damaging things with it? Because they haven’t been given an obviously positive thing to do with it, and their friends are doing it, and they want to be a part of it, and it’s in our nature to default to the easiest and laziest things. Our kids want desperately to use this technology. They have access in their own homes and at their friends homes. They sometimes just don’t see how to go beyond the simplest and most juvenile uses for it.

But kids can be taught. That’s why we have schools isn’t it? Because they’re still learning and open to guidance (mostly)… Why do we find it difficult to encourage them to use tools productively instead of destructively? These tools are there, the kids will use them. We must keep up.

In the Air

I’ll leave my rant with a link to a story of a family that I think is amazing. Matthew is a very intelligent boy with a blog. He’s nine years old, and his goal is to interview 100 ordinary people. From his mum:

Despite having an above average IQ, everyday learning is difficult to The Boy. Out of all his challenges, I view the output and sequencing problems as the biggest obstacle. What would it be like to have so much knowledge, but not be able to organize it and express it clearly? Or to read well above grade level, but be unable to retain anything you just read?
…
The Boy has huge difficulties … with the most frustrating being the reading…not able to retain information from what he has read. Most times it feels like trying to put out a wildfire with thimbles full of water….you keep dumping and dumping, but it has no effect.

I’ve read this kid’s writing and I’m impressed that he continues to post even with such difficulty. But what impresses me most is that his mother has encouraged him to use the ‘net as a way to express himself. Unlike my staff member friend from earlier, this mum joins her kid at the computer and helps him understand what he’s doing from a more mature standpoint. She does her share of vetting, but not so Matt is left out in the dark, but guides and encourages her child to explore his world using the tools available.

Isn’t that our job as adults?

1. We don’t actually own children. ?
2. Kids don’t need to get over it. This very concerned adult thought that their younger relative needed to get over their computer games, and was put in their place by a 13 year old boy.?

When I started writing in my blog (infrequently as it is), I never expected anyone to read it outside my friends and family. And I’m talking across the span of my life - I expected family and friends to visit my site occasionally and get maybe a few visits a year. Primarily, NunnOne is so that I have a place on the web that embodies ‘me’ when someone Googles my name.

Of course, I kinda wished deep down that other people would find my little home and derive some small pleasure from reading about me and my thoughts, but I never seriously thought that it would happen. It still doesn’t really happen, but I do get a small number of visitors here that find me (mostly through Google) via a couple of topics that people seems to care about. One of them is Hercules Returns for which I still get many visitors (but few comments or repeat readers), and the other is my commentary on Fred Basset. These two topics are my most heavily found/read/commented-on posts but for different reasons.

Hercules Returns: PLEASE! was a post about a service I was trying to provide - getting Hercules Returns on DVD. Once that service had been given and visitors found their way to a copy, they no longer cared about my involvement or what else I have to offer here. That’s fine - I’m not complaining just illustrating.

My Fred Basset post was a rant on how pointless I find the comic Fred Basset. It’s entirely opinionated and completely rude, but it isn’t anything that my friends and I haven’t said to each other in private conversation - just that now it’s on the web. And I stick by the sentiment. On the other hand, I wasn’t writing the post entirely seriously and I don’t think that the author is a terrible person for writing a comic that they obviously enjoy writing (for some reason).

What I didn’t expect is how many people I would annoy by stating my opinion. I’ll re-iterate that I never expected people to read anything I write here, but thought it would be nice if people did. I just wish that they left opinions on posts that I actually bothered to think about before posting, and not some silly throw-away rant.

It makes me realise why so many people write ridiculous inflammatory stuff on their web sites - because not only do people read it, it makes them care enough to write! And when people write, the commenter feels like they are being heard. And it’s a nice feeling - being heard. It’s the typical negative reinforcement problem: being nice doesn’t get attention as quickly or in such volume as being naughty. Children learn it, trolls learn it, Dvorak learnt it.

I realised this myself after the most recent comment on my Fred Basset post:

also you dont need to make a friggin thesis on stupid comics. we all have our own opinions. if ur not happy with anyone elses then shut ur mouth and keep it to urself. so clearly ur thesis was ur own opinion. u were not necessarily ‘correct’
emma - dumbarse

I toyed with the idea of doing it again. Not specifically with Fred Basset, but anything else. Just saying shit for the sake of the traffic it makes, and the comments it could generate. But it’s not me. I usually only say what I think (maybe I go over the top sometimes but it’s normally a warped distortion of what I really think) and I want people to know me by what I say. I’d love to be able to share things with my readers that I’m passionate about and not have them wonder if I’m just taking the piss.

So rest assured gentle reader, that Fred Basset was a once off. I still think it stinks, but I don’t care enough about whether some random person who’s actually searching for Fred Basset to begin with disagrees with me to write about him or anything else I don’t enjoy again.

This is it. I’m online. I have a web presence. Yay.
It’s two days after Christmas. I’ve wanted to get online for a while, being an IT guy but I’ve kept not doing it. I suppose I’ve thought I’m not interesting enough, and I may not be, but now I don’t care anymore. So I’m here now. So I’ve spent about 5 hours getting my website setup, installing and uninstalling different options (as given to me by my provider).

I’ve settled on a ‘blog’ which is totally trendy… It seems the simplest way to quickly write things as I go, without worrying about html and such. I can use html, and I could possibly try to figure out my own php based system, but sheesh - I just got my own website, I don’t want to screw around CREATING it now… that would take ages.

I’ve installed a Firefox extension called ‘Performancing’ which I’m sure is not as amazingly cool for seasoned bloggers as it is for me.

That’s it… that’s my first entry. I hope it didn’t suck so bad. Have a nice day.