In the last week I have started watching The Expanse. If I continue, this will be my 3rd watch. There aren’t many shows that I can watch again, fewer still more than twice. It got me trying to remember what I’d re-watched.

Several Viewings

Shows that I’ve seen 3 or 4 or more times, start to finish.

The West Wing

I’ve seen The West Wing at least 7 or 8 times, but possibly more. The kind of re-watchable TV for me. Perfectly entertaining actively watching or background TV. A new benefit is that it doesn’t startle the dog, if anything it seems to calm her down. I almost know every episode back to front at this point. It’s not my favourite show, but it is my most watchable.

The Wire

Everything else is far behind… I think I’ve watched The Wire 4 times and might be due another viewing soon. Truly wonderful show. I love how it’s shot and the characters are unrivalled. I admit that I’ve skipped the final season on a couple of run throughs.

Firefly

A bit of a cheat since there’s barely anything to it. A wonderful show you can get through in no time. If anything, it’s re-watchability is hurt by how memorable the episodes are and how few of them there are.

Parks and Recreation

Starting off as a Mrs Basil’s Re-runs (see below) but becoming something I would happily watch by choice so it gets its own entry here. The classic US comedy cliché: Season 1 is tripe.

Mrs Basil’s Re-runs

This is not counting the shows that Mrs Basil likes to watch over and over and over again, as a form of anxiety treatment. Parks and Recreation, Modern Family, Friends, Schitt’s Creek, etc.

Double Viewings

The Expanse

Soon to graduate up the list. I love the political complexity of the show and the near-ish future and semi-believable baseline of the world it builds. Clunky acting aside, I find it hard not to enjoy getting lost in it.

True Detective S1

A bit of a cheat, but each season lives on its own, so I decided it counts. I re-watched this for the first time last year and was blown away again. Forgot how just incredible it is. I will probably watch it again but likely not for many years.

Band of Brothers

I remember being blown away by this the first time. I’ve only re-watched once but another soon might be on the cards. Although I’ve never seen The Pacific so perhaps that should happen first.

The ones I’ve forgotten about

There’s almost certainly some I’ve forgotten about.

Sort of Double Viewings

Kind of almost more than one viewing, but not really.

The X-Files

I “re-watched” this recently. I’d seen most of it in my childhood but on terrestrial TV so likely missed plenty and forgot even more. A lot of it was like watching for the first time. Will I ever re-watch again. I’d say probably not.

Yes Minister

I’ve probably seen most episodes more than once, but never at once or in any kind of order.

Black Books

I’ve seen most of this at least twice and the bulk of the first 2 seasons 2 or 3 times, but I tend to cherry pick favourites nor and again.

I’m using this month’s topic for indieweb carnival as an excuse for full scale reminiscing. Reminiscing about the relationships I’ve had that have been largely or wholly digital and how technology affected my analogue relationships.

The good old days

Internet service availability started to become ubiquitous in this part of the world as I started secondary school in 1996. I think I started to use the internet daily in ‘97 or ‘98. Either visiting a friend’s house or in the computer labs¹ at school. My internet use was mostly browsing at this point, finding anything interesting or funny and sharing it with friends². I joined a few forums but mostly lurked.

During those years, my digital / online communication was pretty much exclusively with people who I already knew. IM via MSN Messenger or SMS messages at 12p a time³ with the Nokia 3210 that every single teenager owned.

First online community

It wasn’t until 2001, in 6th form college and armed with a PC to call my own, that I started to post a little more on forums and chat with fellow pirates on Napster. This was also when I embedded myself in an online community for the first time and started to forge some fuller digital relationships for the first time. I joined DeviantArt and jumped in with both feet. I spent almost every free evening there, or talking with people I met there.

This all fell by the wayside when I went off to university. Leaving home and living with 5 of my closest friends lessened any motivation for finding a community elsewhere. The emergence of MySpace, and later Facebook, made internet socialising an accompaniment to my existing relationships rather than a conduit for making new online friends.

I’m about to carry a bag of sand

Around the time I graduated, microblogging was being born. Sometime around 2007 I signed up to Jaiku. There I found a community of nerds and spent many an evening interacting. I stumbled upon the Linux Outlaws community and was indoctrinated. Google came along and bought Jaiku, and not waiting for Google to inevitably do what Google does, the community I had become a part of moved, almost completely en masse, to identi.ca.

Here is where, for the first and probably only time, I made some honest to god, full fat digital first, friends. I spent an enormous amount of my idle time on Identica from 2008 until probably around 2012. Entire evenings spent abusing a microblogging platform as a public chatroom (the XMPP support certainly helped). It was a really great and amusing time, and the only time I’ve ever been to the pub with people I’d only interacted with online.

All good things come to an end. People moved on as the platform struggled with some technology changes and my online life once again reverted to the mainstream social networks, meaning news consumption on Twitter and sharing posts with real world contacts via Facebook and WhatsApp.

ActivityPub & Indieweb?

Roll on 2017 and I hear about Mastodon, that it might be the natural successor to Identica. I dip my toe back in, as do many Identica old-timers, but obviously it’s not the same. Slowly I have started to build up a decent timeline… perhaps sped up by lock-down, and definitely enhanced by independent blogging and participation in things like 100 Days to Offload.

After a post lock-down lull, I am definitely in a phase of high online engagement by my standards. Not to the same extent as my Identica peak, but certainly more broad. With Discord communities around football podcasts, proactively trying to curate relationships via independent blogs, and recently signing up with omg.lol. I’m always on the lookout for my people these days.

I like to hope I’ll maintain this effort but I do seem to be prone to pendulum swings in this behaviour. Time will tell.

Tomorrow morning Mrs Basil is heading off to Rotterdam for a week to attend the “Rotterdam Lab” at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

It’s a 6am flight, her hotel doesn’t allow check-in until 3pm, and the event begins at 2pm and lasts until late evening… She’s going to have a bit of a day.

That’s on top of her usual anxieties when attending professional events like this. It will be a rollercoaster of emotions for her as ever.

Seven Dog Day Afternoons

Me, I’ll be left dealing with my shithead chaos goblin or “Our dog, Scout” as Mrs Basil likes to call her.

Tomorrow I might try in vain to take her out to some pubs. She’ll ruin almost every minute of the experience but I’ll try anyway.

By the end of the week I’ll be tired, bored, frustrated, and miserable.

Here’s to the next seven days.

After seeing it crop up a few times, either from people I interact with on the fediverse and/or folk who’s blogs I read, I’ve signed for an account with omg.lol.

I don’t really know what to describe it as… A “small independent hosting collective” is the best I can come up with.

I thought I’d perhaps use it as an un-anonymised alt to my usual semi-anon online presence here.

As part of the £15 a year membership you get some light web hosting (a profile page, a now page, a basic markdown blog, a very old school microblog), a text pastebin and image pastebin, a mastodon account at social.lol, an email address (cutts@omg.lol), plus a few other bits and bobs.

Given how elaborate and daft my main website is, and how likely any alternative is to sit dormant, requirements for said alternative would be:

• be super basic
• be close to free
• be near zero maintenance

It ticks these boxes and has the added benefit of being a bit daft and fun.

Also I’m looking forward to telling someone my email address is Cutts at oh em gee dot ell oh ell.

In Other News, It’s Windy

A storm arrived in the UK and all the usual British things happened. Wheelie bins and trampolines littering the streets, etc.

Our barbeque, thanks to it’s rain cover I’d imagine, took a little trip but stayed in the garden. Other than a few panels of the greenhouse, no other damage as yet.

The fence, however, is not long for this world. It may have seen its last winter.

I accidentally ended up being too helpful at work and it’s backfired.

I’ve been lumped with a load of work that never seems to end, without the authority to actually make any decisions about it. Happy days.

The work in question is the configuration of a complicated web app (A validation lifecycle management system).

Four things are making it difficult:

• the system is maddeningly complicated and bizarre
• the system and its configuration is poorly documented
• the configuration file is an Excel workbook
• our computer system validation process, which is being computerised, poorly defined and muddled.

The folk who will be the primary users of this system were really struggling with it and making next to no progress on it, so I decided to help out. Sure enough, now it’s become my responsibility to make any progress at all.

I can’t wait to put it behind me. Of course, the original deadline was December 2023.

It’s often amusing watching people try and define their processes within the restrictions of an existing system. It really does often highlight that the process is largely bollocks and that they are mostly winging it.

I’d suspected as much of this particular process, so it’s nice to have it confirmed at least.

Huzzah! It works.

I finally have obsidian-git working on my phone. Meaning I can blog much more easily without my laptop.

Zettle Notes

Until now I’d been using Zettel Notes to push changes to my site, it’s a pretty impressive little app, but as a day to day tool for blogging it simply doesn’t work. First because the UX is a bit clunky, and second because I rely too much on my obsidian configuration for adding content.

In the end I was simply using it for ad-hoc tweaks and fixes or, very rare, high friction blogging.

Assumptions

To be honest, for the longest time, I didn’t even try to use obsidian on my phone. I just assumed that the obsidian-git plugin wouldn’t work.

When I did happen to look over the docs, there were some instructions for setting up the plugin on obsidian mobile, so I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong. However, upon following the docs, obsidian would crash every time I tried to clone my repo.

Once more unto the breach

Today I decided I wouldn’t take no for an answer. Met with the same problem, I downloaded MGit from F-Droid and used that to clone to my repo to my phone.

Once done, I was able to set up an obsidian vault and pushing and pulling the repo with obsidian-git worked just fine.

So here we are, in obsidian, on my phone, writing a daily note.

I had one of those painful family tech support moments today. It involved a parent and a printer. The horror.

Thankfully, last time I was with my mum, I had written instructions on how to request remote assistance in a text file. And I was confident, because my mother can work a computer. She used to be a typist, she taught me how to use MS-DOS and Word Perfect.

However, my confidence was misplaced.

The first 3 steps in the instructions were as follows:

1. Open the start menu
2. Type “invite”
3. Click on “Invite someone to provide you assistance” that should be at the top of the menu

We were unable to progress to step 3 without a WhatsApp video call. I’ll spare you the rest.

Mrs Basil has been out of the country for work (In Jordan, to be specific) and so I have been a single dog dad for a while. She returns home tomorrow, and I’m looking forward to not having to constantly deal with the dog.

I always get a bit glum when I’m stuck on my own for more than a few days, I feel like I just get in a rut. Wake up, tend to the dog, go to work, walk the dog, back to work, walk the dog, feed the dog, cook dinner, eat, wash up, settle the dog, rest for an hour, go to bed, repeat.

Was able to meet some mates in the Pub on Friday night, which was grand, and a BBQ on Sunday but I am looking forward to a return to some normalcy.

Even prior to this week I was having a little break from my site… was probably spending a bit too much time on it, I’ve never been good at self moderation so going to try and pick it up again but not as intensely.

Yesterday, I was able to bunk off work early, which was helpful, because I needed to go and do some auditing of parts of the National Cycle Network for Sustrans. I’d allocated the task to myself at the start of the month, but then July of the never-ending rain began.

I’m a shadow of my former self

I thought I’d be able to get this all done in one big ride, but after loading the route in my cycling computer, I was informed that it was 80km. Which, with current functional equipment and levels of fitness (plus stopping to do the actual auditing) I figured would have taken me about 6 hours.

So I did 40km of the planned route and it was still a slog, a very humbling ride, that took over 4 hours. I was consciously taking it easy and I was riding an inappropriate bike, but even so, I could feel that it was more difficult than I was used to.

Moreover, in order to cut the loop short, I had to ride across a valley. I knew the climb that was in my path, and already knew it would be beyond me before I got there, and so it was. When I arrived at Clockburn Lonnen I gave what I had, but inevitably… “Sometimes hiking, always biking”.

I felt ok in the aftermath aside from having very sore arms and hands. That is, until I had to do a few hours work in the garden, and now I am actually deceased.

Tinkering with Zotero

Today, aside from killing myself in the garden, I’ve been playing around with my “knowledge base”. Specifically, having a look at Zotero, which I had an inkling that I’d seen before and ignored because of it’s intended use case - researchers tracking references.

However, given I’ve been reading How to Take Smart Notes and thinking about how I can apply a subset of what it talks about to just hobbyist nonsense, I took a longer look at Zotero than I otherwise would have.

I quickly figured it would be a good place to record the books I’ve read, if nothing else, and it can link well into obsidian. I then realised that you can add web pages to its database as well as books and journal articles.

This got me to thinking, I could maybe use it as a tool for tracking blogs / online articles that I’ve found interesting or think I might find interesting. I’ve tried and failed doing this before, of course, from del.icio.us to pocket and everything in between. Perhaps now that I’m making a conscious effort to read more and write about what I’ve read, this could be a great tool… Folly? Almost certainly.

I had a little look on the internet to see if any other non-academics were abusing Zotero in this way, and pretty much the first link I find is this blog by @jbaty. It’s always funny to see a familiar face in a search result but it made me realise… it’s likely that I had seen Zotero before, and that this post is likely the reason why.

Today’s work was mundane, more boring tasks revolving around computer system validation documentation. More on-boarding of a new contractor.

I have a call with the new contractor tomorrow to give them a walk-through of the system we want them to write a test suite for. I am dreading it because I find the communication so difficult.

One depressing element to this particular ongoing task, is that he is based in Odesa, and so I was genuinely worried about his safety after he didn’t reply to an email this morning.

X

The main news in the online world was the half arsed twitter re-brand with what appears to be a Unicode character. Musk’s obsession with this brand name seems really rather unhinged. We’ve all sat on domain names that we always wanted to use for something really good, but this is a bit extreme.

I just saw the new logo referred to as a sans-serif swastika. Which may be the winner for joke of the day.

Delivery Curse

I’ve had a lot of issues with online orders recently. I can’t remember having many issues before now, the odd delivery here and there over the last few decades.

Lately, seems I’m cursed, four of the last five things I’ve ordered have been either incredibly delayed or have gone MIA.What are the chances? (As an old colleague would say, the chances are 50/50, either it happens, or it doesn’t)

I did manage to get through some of the book I got on Friday, it’s mercifully short so I may even finish it. It isn’t all that relevant to me as it’s heavily aimed at those doing academic research and the like, so I’m not sure it’s going to be of any use to me at all, but I will see what nuggets I can take from it nonetheless.

What reading the book certainly has done so far, is given me the urge to carry around a little notebook everywhere with me again. Which is pretty daft, because I never have anything to note down. I don’t what the name is for this personality quirk I have, but it’s rather silly.

It’s been raining near non-stop for days here, but today the intensity has picked up. The dog is not happy about it, and so, I am not happy about it. I donned all my “waterproofs” and set out this morning for a 90 minute walk. Turns out they aren’t all that waterproof. I got soaked and the Bluetooth earbuds in my pocket had a little bath, and are no longer with us.

I still can’t CSS

It turned out that the code blocks added to the site on Thursday were breaking any list pages they were present on, so this one.

I don’t know why but the the code block div just wouldn’t shrink below a certain width, causing the rest of the content to overflow. I couldn’t get it to work with the layout I had, so I had to change the layout slightly. This is usually what happens when I CSS. Everything works and seems to make sense and then, out of nowhere, bamboozle. It took about 3 hours to “fix” it.

Anyway, it works and looks fine, that’ll have to do.

Google gonna keep on Googling until all there is to Google is Googled

Google are up to their usual bullshit again with this Web Environment Integrity. It all just sound hideous and this lot just aren’t going to stop until everything is ruined.

I stopped using the word “Google” to mean search the internet a long time ago, I might start using it to mean destroy something.

The most noteworthy thing that happened today was that the postman shoved a book through the letter box and the dog didn’t make a peep. Almost came downstairs to check if she was dead. The book was another to add to the pile I’ll probably never actually read - How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens.

Mrs Basil is at the Cinema, perhaps I’ll read chapter 1.

Website Shenanigans

Living off yesterdays work some more, I’m happy with the progress I made this week with the hugo config / css tweaks.

Block quotes

Blockquotes were added using a shortcode that I stole from this repo.

“Your block quotes are beyond compare.”

Code blocks

The code blocks just needed turning on in the config, but came with some css tweaks needed.

// Code blocks look ok too
type Cup struct {
	liquid      string
	temperature int
}

func PourLiquid(liquidType string) *Cup {
	return &Cup{liquid: liquidType, temperature: 60}
}

func main() {
	cup := &Cup{}
	cup = PourLiquid("ambition")
}

Diagrams

Mermaid diagrams aren’t a feature of hugo but there’s a very simple tutorial in the hugo documentation. It works ok, but the diagrams aren’t built with the site which kind of sucks.

sequenceDiagram
    participant D as Dolly
    participant B as Jolene
    D->>B: Please don't take my man.
    B->>D: ok
  

What’s next

Still loads of css to do. I need to make the Ruminations page and the Observations page. I need to style the article headers for all the long form pages. I need to style the article backlinks. etc etc.

In terms of content I need to start writing more notes, and not just daft daily blogs. I need to write the Now and Colophon pages.

In therms of functionality I want to setup in a webring, sort the feeds out and add a blogroll. Then maybe tweak the gotosocial-hack stuff to be less manual for new blog posts.

Today, despite my protests, I was part of an interview panel. We are hiring for a software tester and today was the first interview. To say it was a bad interview would be underselling it. The poor woman being interviewed should never have made it to this stage and the only explanation is an admin error.

It was a complete cringe educing wreck from almost the first 5 minutes. Since it was clear she wasn’t suitable after 10 minutes, I spent most of my effort trying to steer the interview in such a way that didn’t make it too much of an ordeal for her. A delightful experience for all involved.

Website Progress

Updates to the site include getting mermaid diagrams to render, getting code-blocks to format correctly, and umpteen more small typesetting tweaks. We are well into the long tail of it now.

Silly Domains

I had to add another daft domain name to my collection. I had completely missed that .fyi was a TLD and to my surprise, nobodycares.fyi was available. I have no clue what I’ll use it for, perhaps a wonderfully dismissive email address… sure@nobodycares.fyi.

Completely done-in today. Absolutely manic at work. The lead dev’s final day. Sitting in on interviews for a junior tester, submitting drafts of specification documents, configuring Azure DevOps permissions for new contractors. Not a single line of code written.

The main calamity is the discovery of an oversight in the requirements. The (outgoing) dev, system owner, and the PM don’t seem to care that we keep scoping and delivering work that isn’t fit for purpose. As long as the system is completed on-time and they have a document signed by someone to absolve them of any blame regarding any suitability of requirements, they seem content.

Finished work, had a beer, ate some pie, and read my book.

Made some minor tweaks to the css for the site this evening, sorting out the font sizing and line height for blog posts, but there’s a million more to do, and my css is already in the inevitably disorganised state.

I’ve attempted to setup Zettel Notes on my phone to have low friction note taking on the move. I honestly can’t remember if the draft flag in Hugo just works or if it’s something I have to configure. I believe it’s the former.

Day Drinking

Yesterday was spent day drinking in Ouseburn with mates. Unfortunately there was some kind of festival on which made for lots of crowd dodging. We were able to find a few quieter spots after an hour or two.

On-boarding Contractors

The day job is going to be annoying this week. Lead developer’s final day is tomorrow. A new automated test writing contractor is starting today, which we were informed about at ten minutes to five on Friday. Not only does this mean lots of introduction and on-boarding work, but needs lots of thought and discussion about what they should and shouldn’t have access to, and how to achieve said access.

It’s also going to be a new challenge attempting to communicate with someone from Ukraine whose English is good but not fluent, given I’m based in the North East of England and my English is good but not fluent. 😅

Pipes

A big part of the knowledge handover at work if for the Azure Pipelines used for our build / test / deploy nonsense. I’m really struggling with it all. It’s a hard thing to get my head around, not helped by Microsoft doing what they usually do: name things badly and soft deprecate entire feature sets in favour of new different but similarly named features.

Currently trying to figure out the differences between Classic Pipelines, Release pipelines, and YAML pipelines as well as Resource Groups, Deployment Groups, Environments. And of course Artefacts are not to be confused with artefacts.

Website content files are re-organised and sed scripts added to hugo deployment to translate the Obsidian links into web links (section/file.mb => /section/file/). Now I need to write a bunch of redirects for anything I moved or renamed.

An afternoon of the dog sleeping on my legs after a thunderstorm passed over.

Writing the redirects in my Caddyfile took all night. Praying I never have to do that again.

New Books

Two new O’Reilly books arrived.

• Efficient Linux at the Command Line
• bash Idioms

Will I ever read them, that’s the real question.

Main task for today has been re-organising the content structure. As in, splitting the blog into YYYY/MM subfolders. I had always avoided this because I knew I’d never write enough articles for it to matter, but If I’m aiming to publish more regular rambling stuff like this then it needs doing.

It’s going to need a lot of redirects configuring for the old posts, not that anyone would notice, but I hate link rot.

I also made some progress to the blog list page after deciding to print out the blog in full. Think this works better for shorter ad-hoc content like this.

And as I’m purging the bookmarks section I’ve just gone through and grabbed some I want to come back to later:

• http://brandon.invergo.net/news/2012-05-26-using-gnu-stow-to-manage-your-dotfiles.html
• https://www.paritybit.ca/blog/how-i-manage-my-dotfiles
• https://quickref.dev/
• https://www.pelliclemag.com/home/2020/5/25/it-takes-a-bridge-inside-newcastles-legendary-free-trade-inn
• https://zerokspot.com/weblog/2020/05/15/working-with-textbundles/

Continued on from yesterday with writing up the problems I’m having (and potential solutions) with publishing these notes to hugo but it was getting long so they now live here

Tomorrow I might finally merge this notebook with my website content. Implications to ponder other than those in the notes above:

• managing draft status of daily blog
• url redirects in caddy for any broken links

Mrs Basil and I are off out for a meal at Miso in Newcastle. ✌️

Made a fair chunk of progress on the website CSS in the last few days, homepage looks decent. Getting into the meat of it now and can already see that long tail coming… that’s when it gets hard.

A big ah-ha moment (that seems obvious now) was realising that a regular html page will be rendered perfectly fine by GoToSocial if you just rename it to .tmpl file. So after my hugo site is build and I rsync all the sub-folders to my web server, I can copy index.html to index.tmpl in the gotosocial templates folder and it just works.

Finally looked into templates in Obsidian so I can stop manually adding all of the YAML every time. Something to write up.

What I now need to figure out is how to get Hugo to render backlinks …. maybe that’s not going to be possible.

Yeah, it would appear I’m writing a golang script to build a json file of link relationships that can then be rendered at the bottom of each page. It involves regex, so, I’m obviously delighted.

Before building the site (in pipeline not local), will also have to run these sed commands

find . -type f -name ".md" -exec sed -i 's~](foo~](/foo~g' {} + find . -type f -name ".md" -exec sed -i 's~.dm)~/)~g' {} +

to turn markdown links that target blog/file.md to target /blog/file/ instead.

This is a bit of a mess, need to think on it.

Today I Learned

That you can define your own separator in sed in the event “/” would cause confusion.

Think I’ve finally got if set in my head how I want my website to be organised and some kind of writing flow that will hopefully keep me writing, time will tell.

I’m now trying to figure out if I should just throw the content into a the content folder of the site or maintain a separate repo as a sub-module. The latter is neater but can imagine it will complicate things a lot