What If Everybody Did It (WIEDI)?
Most people, I think, tend only to think about their actions and interactions as one-offs. That is, we think “what happens if I do this” and consider the impact from that perspective. But what if we considered the outcomes and impacts if everybody (or even a lot of people) do...
Why your talk was rejected (or maybe accepted)
I had a few snarky opening lines for this post, but decided that was a bit unfair. Let’s just say that people get very impassioned about tech events and getting talks accepted. If you’re on the conference committee, it can be… intense, sometimes, managing the needs of an event...
Tab sweep: eFanzines, data privacy, playlists between two artists
Been a lazy Sunday of doing some light pre-Spring cleaning/organizing and quality time with the cats. Here’s a few interesting sites, articles, and such that have been idling in tabs for a little while. Two on data privacy The Markup has an article about how grocers, specifically Kroger, are...
Mini PC review: Beelink SER5 Pro with AMD Ryzen 5 5600H
About a month ago I bought a Beelink SER5 Pro Mini PC and have been using it as a desktop and test machine. I thought I’d give a quick review in case anybody else is looking at one of these for their own use. The SER5 was a bit...
The right way to name music files and my Picard file-naming script
Last year I got deep into using MusicBrainz Picard to help tag music before I add it to my collection. The MusicBrainz database is fantastic, and it saves me a lot of time tweaking metadata. Most of the time I can just look up an album and it finds...
What’s the deal with night mode?
At the risk of sounding like a Jerry Seinfeld bit, what is the deal with night mode? I was in a meeting today where somebody touted night mode in a tool as a Really Good Thing™ and I’m perplexed. I’m not perplexed about what night mode (or dark mode)...
Tab sweep on music tagging
Have been adding music to my Plex server this weekend. Part of that is cleaning up metadata before adding to Plex. Curating my music collection is one of those things that’s relaxing but also frustrating....
Time to update your… cable?
Anybody else feel like the barrage of app and operating system updates is getting to be a bit much? Not only the pace of updates, which shows no signs of slowing, but also the continual expansion of devices that require updates. Keeping your computer updated was no big deal....
My new favorite GNOME extension: quake-mode
Guake has long been a favorite application of mine. If you’re new to Guake, it’s a terminal application for Linux that stays out of site until it’s summoned with a hotkey, like the console in Id Software’s Quake games. Hit F12 or whatever combo you set up for it,...
Blacklight: A real-time website privacy inspector
Ever wondered what kind of trackers are on any given site? Check out Blacklight, a web-based tool to reveal specific user-tracking technologies on a site. I stumbled on this via The Markup and thought it might be interesting for privacy minded folks. (See: “How We Built a Real-time Privacy...