Fine tuning

Since late last year I've started to get interested again in hardware hacking and the 'maker' movement, up to the point that I've been upgrading my home facilities for woodwork, metalwork, and electronics.

This resulted in my deciding to add a couple of new domains to my stable. One being a cetral resource for those looking for information (which, naturally enough, includes myself!) which is starting to take life at openhax.com in the form of a wiki. Once I've developed suitable templates for each typoe of link — and created some for the stuff I've already found — I'll open it up to others to add stuff too.

The second is another blog for myself, but focussed on my making and hacking. It could have been added here but I reckoned that it was a rather more 'special interest' topic so would suit a separate location. Anyway, if you'd like to see all that wander along to shehacks.com , though I'm still fine tuning the css!

Initially I was planning on using Concrete5 (again) for the new maker blog, but a poassing comment from someone at a meeting last week caused me to re-evaluate that decision and, eventually, I decided to return to Chyrp as is used for this blog. And to not re-use the existing fork but to update it to the latest version — four years after I last touched it! So far I've managed to upgrade three of my modules, and I'll be getting around to updating the rest shortly. They will all, of course, remain GPL'd as Open Source.

Enough being sufficient

ok, I'm admitting a level of defeat here and making it harder to post a comment. I really don't want to (you don't want to jump through hoops and I'm not a lion tamer) but the sheer volume of spam and ddos attacks here mean that I currently need to take some pretty drastic action.

And for the moment that means locking down commenting to only verified users. Registration is still there but I need to confirm the registration before you can comment. I've also killed all active sessions.

I don't like it, I don't want it. You don't need it, but it seems I do.

When I get some time I'll rewrite the spam-detecting/rejecting interface. At the moment it has slumped to only stopping around 85% …

Goodbye to Vox

The closing.vox.com/Vox blogging service from SixApart is closing down at the end of this month. An attempted spin-off from its then Livejournal offering (later sold) nearly four years ago it never seemed to me that it achieved a substantial-enough market share to remain viable, indeed they are asking their customers to transfer to their TypePad service. It is always sad to see a service fold though.

I used Vox briefly when it first launched so, in the hope of never losing anything I write, I might copy across a couple of the posts I made 'way back when'.

Subtitles

No, not the ones which are ever-so-useful to many people on the television or at the opera, but the one on this blog. Initially I set it here to Mostly Harmless, a term used by some friends many years ago to describe me (long before the late Douglas Adams had used it) to someone who had asked them what I was like. Now I've used something much more reasonable for a blog: caveat lector.

Heed this advice, dear reader!

To backdate or not to .. etc.

I've been writing an online diary — a 'blog' in the vernacular — in one form or another since 1995, though this particular one only appeared to the world wide populace quite recently. This leads one to the question prevalent each time one starts all shiny-and-blank-canvas anew as to whether to populate the fresh tabula rasa with content from the older editions. Should one provide links? Copy and update content? Trust that anyone really interested in one's musings will avail themselves of search engines — which, of course, may fail to find some older pocket lint as it may no longer be extant or discoverable — even if one used the same nom de plume (de ma tante) throughout one's wanderings around Tim Berners-Lee's hyperlinked universe. Which I didn't, and leads one to ponder whether one should inflict some past content on others when the world has so clearly moved on. Yet at heart we are all the sum of our experiences, and I have certainly had some interesting experiences! Maybe I should select random entries from the past propositions and comment refreshed on them. Ah, life can be so difficult on "teh interweb" …