Opinion/Editorial/Life

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Blaugust 2023 Wrap-Up – What I Learned

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The last theme week for Blaugust is “Lessons Learned”. I can’t say I learned anything new, I’ve been blogging for a while, literally decades, and I’m already aware of well, all of that which comes along with it. As, kind of depressing as they are. But let’s pretend it’s all fresh and new.

Daily Updates

As much as I like the idea of updating daily, I am not cut out for it, not anymore. Maybe never, though this isn’t the first time I put effort into daily blogging. I like to think I have plenty of idea of things to write about, but I also don’t really have the time to write about all of them, and over time, I start to feel repetitive. Maybe a little repetition isn’t a bad thing. In theory, new people come to read the blog and most aren’t going to be reading through the archive.

I just kind of hate feeling repetitive. It doesn’t really matter though, with “lesson 2”.

No One Cares

They really don’t. I don’t really care that they don’t, really. I accepted years ago that I do this, write these dumb pointless posts, for my own outlet. I kind of hopped things would at least bump a little when I started posting daily, but it didn’t. That or WordPress stats are busted as fuck. The total views and visits for this month, are pretty much, to slightly lower, than the views and visits last month. Maybe a bit lower.

Last month, when I wasn’t posting daily and actively sharing some posts out into the world.

I really don’t care about how many people read this blog, but it’s kind of really disheartening. For the month, it’s around 100, people. Total. For the year it’s around 1500 so far. Let’s contrast this a bit, with something that’s not really a 1:1 comparison, but kind of in the same vein. I posted a short video from the Alanis Morissette show on TikTok a few days ago. Within 24 hours, it had essentially more views than my blog has gotten, all year.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It’s really really just like, you know, why bother?

Wrap-Up

Anyway, on that downer note, here are my posts from the month:

Honorable Mention to 10 syndicated movie posts from Letterboxd and 18 automated link digest posts.

I also did all of the little made-up achievements so that means “Going Platnum”.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Gmail’s Cloud Storage Problem

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Google needs to re-separate its main and drive storage again. This isn’t a problem that affects me, not directly. I imagine it affects a lot of other people though, whether they realize it or not. I also worry that it’s entirely intentional on Google’s part, in order to sell more cloud space to users. I should add, I don’t have a problem with Google selling cloud storage. I don’t have a problem with people using Google as their chosen cloud whatever. Personally, I use Google as little as possible, they are essentially a spyware/adware company as far as I am concerned.

I do take issue with what they have done to their Cloud Storage. Back in 2020, Google ended it’s unlimited photo storage option. Anything you had up there previously could stay, but essentially, starting from the end, anything up to I want to say 15GB, was limited, unless you paid for more. Like I said, I don’t really care about Google wanting to make money on its photo storage, they kind of need some alternative income streams to hoovering up everyone’s private data and selling it to advertisers (no wait, I mean selling their monopolistic ad service to advertisers, they just keep the data in a way that’s easily split down to a micro granular level).

My problem is, that they still share this total limit across drive and Gmail. My problem is, that by default, Android phones push all your photos and videos up to Google Photos, and even if you turn this off, they constantly nag you to turn it back on unless you use an alternative Photos app. If you are someone who takes a lot of random photos and videos, like half the people in the world these days, this limited storage fills up quick.

This means they can, of course, nag you some more, to pay for an upgrade.

This also means, your Gmail, stops working.

I’m actually going to use my own kids for this example, and why this is so broken for “normal-ass non-technical people”. And no matter how often I advise them otherwise, they never seem to get it, like “normal-ass non-technical people.” (FWIW, my kids are all young adults over 20)

Partly my daughter’s solution was to just, make a second Gmail account. Which sort of works. But like recently, I wanted to set her up on a shared to-do list, primarily for groceries we need in the house. I sent an invite link to the email on her Microsoft account, which is her old Gmail address. But she never got it. Her Google account is full. It can’t receive any more emails, it’s been like this, probably for years now.

They see “your Gmail is full” and the first thought is, “I need to delete some emails.” This might work, briefly, assuming your phone doesn’t have a queue of photos and videos backed up waiting for space on the Cloud. The reality is, for like 99% of people, you could delete all your emails, and it still won’t clear up as much space as deleting one video off of Photos.

This is partly my point here, for anyone having this issue, at the bare minimum, get your videos off of Google Photos. Download them if you need to, but store them somewhere else. If you want to use Google for backups, feel free to pay for it, but if not, don’t start on the emails, or even the photos, start on the videos. Here’s a comparison from something recent to me, I went to that Alanis Morissette concert, and I took roughly 50 photos and 3 videos. Those three videos, take up the same amount of space as those 50 photos. around 200Mb for each set, photos, and videos. For comparison, the average email is kilobytes in size. Let’s be REALLY FUCKING GENEROUS and say each email is 100Kb in size, though it’s going to be closer to 10Kb or 1Kb. In 200Mb, you could fit 2,000 emails at 100Kb each.

The real solution is that Google needs to re-split the storage for emails. It used to be separated, which was fine when you could store unlimited photos. It’s a huge problem now that it’s not. too many people rely on email for important things, reminders, bills, keeping in touch with people, and accepting ToDo List invites.

It’s too important to get cut off because people don’t understand size relationships across file types, or how to use alternative storage solutions for large files. It’s essentially holding your email for ransom at the end of the day.

My Computing Journey

My Computing Journey – Part 4 – Going Online

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The next phase of my computing journey would have been in High School. I am pretty sure this machine was some kind of Pentium, I don’t know a lot of the details beyond that. Like I mentioned last week, some of the specific details get a bit hazy for a bit here, though the next round is decidedly not hazy again.

While the main computer was still technically the family computer, I ended up with one of the older machines in my room at one point as well. There are a few key defining moments of this era in my computing cycle. I got a bit more experience dealing with computer hardware. I bought a 2.5 GB drive for the family PC because I needed more space. Which would lead to some fun because Windows 95/98 didn’t support a drive larger than 2GB. I actually don’t remember if I partitioned it or if it just, had .5GB unused.

I also got a ZIP100 Drive sometime around this time as well. These were like disks, but “huge” at 100MB each. I spent my own money on both of these things. I guess it was sort of the start of my digital hoarding life. I had a lot of disposable income around this time because I started working at McDonald’s at 16. Aside from the $20 each paycheck or two to fill my gas tank, I spent the rest on whatever. Usually VHS movies, CDs, and VHS Anime tapes. Sometimes expensive computer hardware. I had 10 of those ZIP disks and they cost me $100.

The bigger moment of this era was going online.

It was all done with dial-up, so it tied up the phone line and was slow slow slow. My dad worked for the phone company so our internet was through Ameritech, or SBC, or whatever it was called at the time. I had other outlets though, that I could use on my bedroom PC. I remember three specifically. One was some sort of message board for IUPUI, the university, though I was not in college at the time. Another was this dial-in BBS system for the Illinois Education system. My friends and I would post there and use the chat system. It was at that time I learned that things are not always as anonymous as one might think when this dude came to me at school one day and told me to stop talking to his girlfriend over the system.

How did he know that “Bevis” was me?? The world may never know.

I also posted some stories there that are, sadly, lost to time and the ether of the internet.

Lastly was this MUD, or MUCK, I don’t know which it was. I know I could dial in, and it was this text based RPG thing. You could go around town, or go down in a dungeon deeper and deeper. I never really left the town, but I became extremely rich. I found a bug of sorts. I believe the process was something like…

  • Go to the inn.
  • Murder all of the sleeping player characters
  • Take and sell their possessions
  • Give the gold to an alt
  • Wait a day
  • All of the dead PCs would be revived
  • Wash, rinse repeat.

After I amassed enough wealth, I had enough money to buy the “fancy room” that had dragon guards. No one was going to be murdering ME in my sleep.

Aside rom these side escapades, there was the “real internet.” I spent a lot of time browsing all sorts of websites about video games and anime. Eventually, I started my own couple of pages on GeoCities as well. At the time using Microsoft Page, an early WYSIWYG editor.

I also downloaded videos and music, though they were hard to find at the time. There was no Spotify or even places to buy wave files at the time. For anything large, it meant starting it before bed, and letting it run for hours to download. There were special programs you could use to pause and resume large downloads.

It was all the start of something amazing and wonderful in this perfect digital world of the Internet.

Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap-Up (08.20.2023 to 08.26.2023)

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Not a lot going on this week honestly, it’s been kind of blazing hot which really makes some things difficult to do. Go Climat Crisis. I did start on a new project. Well, continued one I sort of started on. I have way too many bookmarks, enough that navigating them later is not useful. They are well sorted, but I need to make them more useful. I came across the concept of a “digital garden” recently. It seems to be just a fancy term for “personal wiki”. Anyway, I’ve started building a sort of personal wiki of bookmarks and resources, though it’s just lists of sorted links in markdown files, that I’ll eventually post out to Github for public use.

I may also do the Wiki thing as well, for other bits of information I want to keep, though most of that is already in One Note.

I just have been pretty down lately and not really motivated for much.

On a gaming note, the Aurora Concert is back for the next week or so in Sky: Children of the Light, it’s pretty neat, but there are also just, videos of it on Youtube.

I didn’t buy anything new this week either, like I said, boring week. Ok, technically I did pre-order a few things, but I don’t really consider pre-orders buying until they come in, because I often end up canceling them later.

I didn’t listen to much new music either, though I did start building a sort of “monster playlist to shuffle” in Apple Music. We’ll see what comes of that in the long term.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Why Can’t I Hold All These RSS Feeds

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I’ve mentioned my woes with my RSS reader off and on in posts here, but I almost had another one. Thankfully, I learned my lesson last time. I ended up breaking my Fresh RSS install. I came across this post on Hacker News, where someone had asked for people to post their personal blogs. Someone had set up an OPML Feed for this list and stuck it on GitHub. I thought to myself, “Why not, I like these types of people, surely there are some good things in here”.

So I hooked the OPML up to my Fresh RSS. This tripled how many feeds I was subscribed to. It also broke my reader. I don’t know exactly what happened, but it stopped updating feeds, and would not even load the main page. I did some investigation and found that one of the SQL tables had become corrupted. THANKFULLY it was not the one with the feeds themselves. Literally everything else can be rebuilt if needed, easily, but recovering the feed list is paramount. I immediately created an export dump of the feed list. After some troubleshooting, I completely deleted the Fresh RSS database, then reloaded a months old backup, then reimported the recent feed list tables.

The only thing that was missing, I had added some categories since the last backup. I created some dummy categories, “Category 32, Category 33”, that sort of thing. Due to the relational way databases work, feeds automatically fell into these categories, which allowed me to figure out what the actual category name was. For example, one has some comic and book feeds in it, so clearly, this was originally my “Books and Comics” category.

Eventually, I’ll weed some of these feeds out. There are some in languages I don’t understand, nothing personal, but I have plenty to read without hassling with translations. Some feeds tend to post TOO MUCH and dominate the RSS reader. I’m pretty relentless about chopping these and Hacker News is pretty much the only one that floods, that I allow to remain. Techmeme and Slashdot are sometimes borderline but not usually, so they get to stay as well.

Everything is sorted into categories, and I usually read through in category chunks, and no, I don’t read everything, I skim for interesting headlines or updates from my favorites and read those. I can’t find a good number for how many feeds but I think it’s just over 1200 now, sorted out across categories. Currently, I use the following categories.

  • Anime/Japan
  • Books and Comics
  • Food
  • Friend’s Blogs
  • Games – Deal and Bundles
  • Games – Tabletop
  • Games – VG News
  • Games – VG Reviews
  • Language Learning
  • Lifestyle and Family
  • Movies/TV
  • Music
  • My Blogs
  • News – Conservative Bull Shit (Currently all Muted)
  • News – Illinois/Decatur/Local
  • News – Liberal Opinions
  • News – US News (Empty, they all end up in World)
  • News – World
  • PersBlogs – Tech Enthusiasts
  • PersBlogs – Toy Collectors
  • PersBlogs – Gaming
  • PersBlogs – Nerd Blogs
  • Photography
  • Science/Space
  • Second Life and Virtual Worlds
  • Tech – Coding and IT
  • Tech – Crypto Bullshit
  • Tech – General
  • Tech – Security
  • Tech – VR/XR
  • Toys – Transformers
  • Toys – LEGO
  • Toys – News
  • Uncategoriezed
  • Webcomics
  • Writing and Writers

This is essentially the gamut of my interests, and sometimes if a category becomes too unwieldy, I’ll break out some of the feeds into a refined category. Which is where the prefixes come from (News, Tech, PersBlogs, Toys).

I mentioned before, I mostly read in the category view. Anything I find interesting I’ll tag with either BI or Lameazoid tags, and then my news digest script goes to work, I think at 11 PM each night. I don’t always check it every day, which is fine, sometimes I check it 2-3 times a day. Often while eating breakfast, sometimes again in the evening.

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