Now with IPv6

March 4, 2012 – 3:32 pm

Moved my web stuff around, now this has IPv6.

By Michael Magin | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

I’m still here

January 28, 2012 – 5:38 pm

I’ve become disillusioned with the constant churn of websites-controlled-by-other-entities which I’m somehow compelled to participate in. They’ve developed a very effective value proposition for introverts like me who are otherwise likely to lose contact with friends over time, but I really tire of it being a constant cycle of replacing one proprietary system with another. I know I tend to use Google Plus more than the others, but there are people I know who I’ve never seen on there. And then there’s the offensive way in which some of the most successful of these insist on “real” names. Not that I’m bothered by “sticky” identities with reputation, nor do I even mind using my “real” name that much, but it is quite a break with the traditional internet culture I value.

I’m toying with the idea of setting up my own Diaspora “pod”. They’re one of the first things since email and Jabber that gets the model somewhat right — not in the control of a single entity[*], based on a loose federation of independent agents. Part of what bothers me about the proprietary services is that I start to feel that I’ve left pieces of myself cluttered all over — kind of the disconcerting feeling you might have when you’ve left physical possessions behind in the real world.

[*] Okay, you can argue that the DNS is subject to some autocratic control, and you’re even largely right, though there are some workable proposals for decentralizing that (Namecoin, etc.)

By Michael Magin | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

My 3 most used pairs of headphones

September 15, 2011 – 8:06 pm
  1. Sony MDR-V600 I bought back around 1999. I used these constantly until the hinge on the headband failed after 5 or 6 years. The earpads were significantly trashed at that point.
  2. Some unidentifiable earbuds that came with a cheap Sandisk MP3 player I bought on Woot. I’ve used them fairly regularly for the past 4 years, they sound okay for little earbuds, they don’t cause me discomfort, and they are useful when it’s too warm to have closed-ear cans over my ears without getting annoyingly sweaty. Strangely durable too.
  3. Sennheiser HD 280 pro (64 Ω). I’ve had these for 4 years or so, they’ve been my replacement for the MDR-V600, and they’re what I tell anyone to buy who wants a decent pair of headphones for about a hundred bucks. The only downside is that if I’m having a little bit of sinus trouble, I find I like to be sure to adjust them so most of the ample tension is on the cranium, not on the soft tissues. I’ve replaced the ear pads once on them, but the rest is still in great condition.

I think that if you’re going to spend more than $10 on headphones, they might as well make music sound really good. Those headphones with the band that goes behind the head are just for folks that are afraid to mess up their hair.

By Michael Magin | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Dependence on the “cloud”

September 5, 2011 – 2:33 pm

I’ve been thinking a lot about “cloud” services I’m at least partially dependent on. And they fall into three general categories:

  1. Services I use to make my own personal computing easier (Evernote, Dropbox, Newsblur, Google calendar).
  2. Services I use to share things publicly or with a set of contacts (Flickr)
  3. Services I use generally for communication (Google+, Facebook, Twitter, various IM services.)
  4. A possible fourth category: virtualized linux hosts that I pay for.

If you know me, it wouldn’t surprise you that this bothers me. It bothers me a bit to not own my own tools — it bothers me a little to use the ones where I have a clearly defined business relationship with the service provider where I pay for what I’m getting; but it bothers even more when I’m getting something for “free”, because they’re typically getting something of even greater value out of me than a few bucks a month: marketing data, patterns of who I associate with, etc. In some sense, the users of these social networking services are merely a means of crowdsourcing content to be used by the provider.

I prefer the old vision of personal computing: once you’ve bought the hardware and software, you can do things indefinitely with it, no one has the power to take it away from you, you are independent of outside interests. With that perspective in mind, I’m attempting to untangle myself from some of these services. For the moment, short of devoting a lot of time to trying to get distributed social networking off the ground, I’m not even going to try to seriously touch #3. Also, #4 is mostly unoffensive to me, though it’s not clear that even today that virtual hosts offer the same legal rights (fourth Amendment) as hardware which you own.

So some plans: Flickr is slowly dying, I’d like to go back to some kind of self-hosted photo gallery software. I don’t really like a lot of the options out there, I may roll my own. Dynamically-generated content is dumb for everything but commenting, everything else should be static HTML, thumbnails.

I only use Google calendar because it’s an easy way to sync my iPhone to a calendar server, and it is an easy way to share my calendar with Tien. On the first part, I think I could solve my problems by running a CalDAV server. Not sure about whether it would accomplish the sharing too.

Dropbox, while I just use the free 2GB account, is darned convenient — I use it for 1password syncing, and I use it as a place to put low-security documents so I can easily share them between computers. It is amazing how long it took to give people what they want in a network filesystem — even though it would have cost more years ago, none of it was impossible (though the market was probably much smaller.) Most of the self-hosted open source alternatives to this are pretty fiddly.

Evernote is the one I’m least likely to want to give up. It’s been so useful, and this is why I’m more dependent on it than almost anything else I listed. I frequently shoot photos of small pieces of text with my iPhone and add them to my Evernote account. I use it to remind me of food or drink I enjoyed. I use the desktop version to replace my former use of things like Eaglefiler (and before that, a directory full of text files.)

For the photo gallery (and an eventual move away from WordPress), I want to cook up my own open-source, self-hosted equivalent of Disqus. I just need to find a little more free time…

By Michael Magin | Posted in Programming, social networking, Uncategorized, Web | Comments (0)

Fixing sagging wood fence gates

May 28, 2011 – 12:43 pm

In my opinion, fixing poorly designed wood fence gates (no diagonal cross-brace) with those cable and turnbuckle kits just delays the problem slightly. It just slowly bows the gate, if it doesn’t have a lot of rigidity to start with. Jack it up somehow until it’s square and install a 2×4 diagonally across it, screwed with good screws into as much good wood as you can.

As an aside, I think it’s marginally better with a weak worn-out gate to make the diagonal cross-piece from the high corner of the hinge side to the low corner of the free side, but it really depends on the condition of the gate.

By Michael Magin | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)