Guild Wars2: MMORPG of the year!

Scroll to bottom after following link MMORPG of the Year .

Awesome work ArenaNet!

FancyZones Hack!

I often remote to another Windows desktop machine (or something that looks like one!).

A common problem is how do I remember what machine I am currently using?  They tend to look terribly similar.

Introducing my FancyZones hack.  Basically you install MS PowerToys and start using FancyZones.  

• Create a layout that is two zones:  one is most of your screen, and the other is a small strip along one side.  I chose the right side for the thin vertical strip.  
• Set your desktop background colors to something obviously different on each machine:  I have blue for home and red for one of my remote sites.  
• Put all of your windows into the big zone (using shift-drag on the title bar).  This will leave a colored outline around your desktop and you can quickly see which machine you are on.  
• Bonus - take the second small zone you made and put Wordpad in there and in big vertical letters put the name of the machine.

I remember back in the day we would do something similar with coloring the title bar, but Windows changed so that it's harder to edit the title bar color and it tends to lose its color when it is not the selected window.  This new approach is more "in your face" which I find helpful.

Goal!

I realize I failed to mention my goal before I started posting about the optimizations to my process in support of that goal (skipping labels, fewer hyperlinks).

My goal is to post a new entry every day during 2023.

Well, more likely to post a new entry every day on average during 2023.

Here's a guy who posts every day:  Seth Godin.

I guess he's a marketing guy?  Somehow he comes up with these pithy posts every single day.  I imagine he has some stored up in case he misses a day.

He had a cameo on the TV show Billions.  Seth's blog was recommended to me by KM (formerly KB).

One trick I have in my back pocket is that if on a day where posting seems like too much work then I'll just dig through my 50,000 photos using Google search and just post a picture and call it a day.

Oh - it's not 2023 yet?  Yeah, I thought I better get a running start and work out the bugs in my process.

Credit (or not)

As a rule, I think it is beneficial for people to get credit for their work and ideas.

But the current Internet is not necessarily a friendly place and privacy is increasingly important.  (That is one of the benefits of micro-blogging on Facebook - limited reach.)

So as I blog I will frequently refer to people by their initials rather than their full names.

A series of tubes

It's not just the Internet that is a "series of tubes".

Labels

Another feature of blogging on Blogger that I won't be using:  labels.  It just takes too much time.  One reason I switched to making little blogs or notes on Facebook is that I didn't worry about any of that.

Simplification FTW!

Guild Wars 1 uptime

Guild Wars 1 Uptime (clip from Extra Life) - I don't have a complete list of outages ... but I believe that the total Guild Wars 1 downtime since launch is about 30 hours.  I wonder if a fan knows the actual number?

(More fun GW1 clips from Extra Life.)

SCW shoutout

I got a shoutout!

Here's the official status update on Guild Wars from February, 2022.

BTW, the clip is from the awesome Extra Life effort from ArenaNet.

Links

Back when I blogged a lot I was quite proud of all the links I would put into my posts.  "See, I'm talking about a real thing! Just follow that link!"  Now, with over a thousand really old posts in this blog, many posts have links are that broken.  So mostly I'm dropping the effort to put in hyperlinks unless it is a link likely to survive the decades (like a link to Wikipedia).  As it is, if you use Chrome, you can highlight a term, right-click, and choose "Search Google".  That's a good enough link substitute.  

Manufactured Landscapes

Manufactured Landscapes is a documentary about the human impact on huge swaths of the earth; such huge swaths are so large they can be considered landscapes.

I first saw this film many years ago (it came out in 2006) while channel surfing; or more likely, now that I think about it, my TiVo thought I would be interested in it.  It starts with an eight-minute, slow tracking shot through a factory in China, which left at least one viewer, me, stunned at the scope of the endeavor.  Later, like a year ago, I remembered that tracking shot but that was all I remembered about this movie I had seen oh-so-long-ago, and my attempts to google various terms to find it failed.  As often happens, sometimes months or years later, I'll try a search like that again, and the result pops right up.

If you liked Koyaanisqatsi I think you'll like Manufactured Landscapes.

Weed!

This photo just hit 33,000 views on Google Maps!

How fun is that?

This next picture was previously my most popular currently at 23,000 views.

That's in Fredericksburg, TX.

reddit math error

 

I agree it's saying something.  I think it is saying there is a math error, because I can't imagine that whatever karma I earned put me in the top 11%.

This one I believe:

Toxic resistance is a requirement for survival.  Kewl.  But ... how did they know to add a beard to the bunny suit?

 

Nintendo Power!

All issues of Nintendo Power are available at archive.org.

I used to own all issues but the first ten.

I gave them away to a kid whose mom drove across the Cascades to get them for him.

I love how some forward looking person had a multi-year plan for the spines.

10,000 Enya

We go to sleep to music almost every night.  It's Enya on repeat.

We started in 1991 when we had a kid and put the kid and ourselves to sleep to it.

Let's conservatively say we listen to Enya's debut album Watermark 10 months of the year.  Let's assume about 30 days in a month.  That's 300 "listenings" a year, minimum (probably more, since the music is set to repeat).  That's about 30 years of Enya, 300 times a year, or 9,000 listenings.  Probably over 9000!

That's a lot of Orinoco Flow.

Sail away!

The most wonderful time of the year

I was listening to some Christmas music and it seems I never really paid attention to the lyrics before.

There'll be parties for hosting

Marshmallows for toasting

And caroling out in the snow

There'll be scary ghost stories

And tales of the glories of

Christmases long, long ago

It's the most wonderful time of the year

from It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

I thought I heard that there will be scary ghost stories!  WAT?  Since when?

I mentioned this to my family and they said, WAT, no, it can't say that.

I guess one benefit of HD music is you can really understand the words.

When I was a kid, I listened to music on a 3" by 3" by 1" blue Sony portable radio that ran off one 9V battery ... and I loved it!  But I probably appreciated the music more than the words, since I have learned over the years I misunderstood many many lyrics.

And this business about the tales of glories of Christmases long, long ago.  What, was there fighting?

It was better when I didn't know the lyrics.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious NFT

 As best as I understand things, an NFT - "non-fungible token", is a string put into the blockchain.

Art NFTs are URL strings which point to the JPEG (or whatever).

The URL might break - what you really "own" is the string.  Actually putting the JPEG picture into the blockchain is very expensive because of the size.

I thought … why not put words or phrases into the blockchain?  Then you own that actual string.

My first choice for a word:  supercalifragilisticexpialidocious .

Ideally Disney issues the NFT for supercalifragilisticexpialidocious so it has a valuable origin.  (Anyone can issue a token for a word, but the whole point is to own the "official" token issued by the IP owner; as far as I can tell [I am not a lawyer] there is no trademark on supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.)  Fans would love it!  Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious has the benefit of being unique in Disney lore and instantly recognizable, so it's a good one to start with.  Other obvious choices would be "hakuna matata" and "The code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules."

I thought this ideas was genius, and I hope someone at Disney agrees.  So far all of the computer savvy people I've bounced this off were unimpressed.  

But maybe they just aren't Disney fans.

  

The battle lines have been drawn

Recently there was a story in the news about takedown of the plunder obtained by a ransomware hooligan:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/colonial-pipeline-ransom-payments-hackers-seized-united-states/

Washington — The federal government has recovered millions of dollars in cryptocurrency paid in ransom to cybercriminals whose attack prompted the shutdown of the country's largest fuel pipeline and gas shortages across the southeastern U.S. last month, the Department of Justice announced Monday.

And I thought ... how hard would it be to make a "tainted BTC address list"?  Certainly the people paying a ransom know where it is going, so the first address in the money laundering chain is known, even if the owner is not.  And then one can follow transactions via the immutable blockchain and see where this money ends up.  I'm sure the FBI already does this.

But then ... I read about a service coming at the problem from the other side!  How do you make sure your money laundering is going well?

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/08/new-anti-anti-money-laundering-services-for-crooks/

A new dark web service is marketing to cybercriminals who are curious to see how their various cryptocurrency holdings and transactions may be linked to known criminal activity. Dubbed “Antinalysis,” the service purports to offer a glimpse into how one’s payment activity might be flagged by law enforcement agencies and private companies that try to link suspicious cryptocurrency transactions to real people.

I think in the early days cryptocurrencies were probably pretty useful for money laundering, but I think those days are ending.  Which is probably a good thing, as ransomware has done a lot of damage to real people.

Update:  I just read this from Bruce Schneier:

In a chain swap, the criminal transfers the bitcoin to a shady offshore cryptocurrency exchange. These exchanges are notoriously weak about enforcing money laundering laws and — for the most part — don’t have access to the banking system. Once on this alternate exchange, the criminal sells his bitcoin and buys some other cryptocurrency like Ethereum, Dogecoin, Tether, Monero, or one of dozens of others. They then transfer it to another shady offshore exchange and transfer it back into bitcoin. Voila­ — they now have “clean” bitcoin.

A static digression

 After finally passing on various web site creation tools I figured I would do the simple thing:  post a static web site.

AWS allows you to use an S3 storage bucket as a static web site.  Sweet! What could be simpler?  I have a tool that allows me to map an S3 bucket into a Windows folder, so all I would have to do is update the folder to publish changes.  Even better, you can put Cloudfront in front of it which ensures HTTPS as well as HTTP requests are handled.

Sounds good ... but

1. The instructions (at least at that time) left out the key fact that your bucket has to have the same name as your domain.
2. My file uploader wasn't setting the metadata correctly.  That was fixable.
3. It's a bit confusing to pick the right kind of certificate for HTTPS (wildcard or root only).
4. "index.html" is only returned by default for the root bucket; so, for instance, https://www.above-the-garage.com/piano doesn't work - you have to specify https://www.above-the-garage.com/piano/index.html ; this broke some existing links out in the wild.
5. DNS

Now let's see if I can explain this.

In the beginning, web sites tended to have "www." in front, like this:

http://www.above-the-garage.com 

"www." specified the protocol - world wide web.  You could have file transfer ("ftp.") or actually any prefix you wanted.

About a year ago Google announced they would stop displaying the "www." part.  Sounded good.  I made sure the following variations would link to my site:

1. http://above-the-garage.com
2. https://above-the-garage.com
3. http://www.above-the-garage.com
4. https://www.above-the-garage.com

Unfortunately, one of those doesn't work!  It's #2.  And the reason is the certificate doesn't match.

And it turns out it can't match.

Here is an email from April 2019 from Pair Domains, my DNS provider, that explains things:

We are contacting you because there is a problem with DNS records for your

domain above-the-garage.com.

There is currently a CNAME record for @. DNS rules prohibit other records

from sharing the same host name with a CNAME record. With a record for @,

this means that MX records would not work and there could be e-mail

delivery problems for the domain.

We recently changed our DNS software, and the new software is more strict

about DNS rules. Before, CNAME records and MX records could coexist, but

not everyone would be able to actually deliver the e-mail. The new

software does not allow this, so if there is a CNAME for @, e-mail won't

work on the domain.

Well, I also use above-the-garage.com for email, and I want that to work, so I had to drop the CNAME which allowed www.above-the-garage.com to point to above-the-garage.com; and my cert was for above-the-garage.com (without the www.).

So what to do ... change DNS providers?  No, it looks like they are implementing the standard.  Aha!  Make the cert for the www version; and redirect any hits to the homepage to the https://www.above-the-garage.com name; the cert matches, and everything is great.  Except, sadly, case #2 above, where browsers see the https: label, and really want the cert to match the exact domain name.  It doesn't, so the redirect doesn't happen, and people get an error after it times out.  In general, this is probably not a big deal; but in the long run, people and browsers might enforce going to https://above-the-garage.com . Maybe I can put a second cert on there and all is well.  

The most important thing is what happens when you just type in "above-the-garage.com" to your browser address bar:  works in Chrome and Edge!

So, static web site mostly works.  w00t.

[Update 2024-05-06] What could go wrong with a static web site served out of an S3 bucket?  

Answer:

https://medium.com/@maciej.pocwierz/how-an-empty-s3-bucket-can-make-your-aws-bill-explode-934a383cb8b1 .  

Oh, and since the bucket name had to match the web site name ... my bucket name was effectively public.

So rather than worry about that potential nightmare (AWS says they are working on a fix - that's good) I quickly copied everything out of the bucket into a small AWS Graviton instance and fired up nginx.  One and a half hours later I was moved over.  I still have the same DNS problem.  Ugh!]

[Update 2024-05-07 DNS issue fixed!  Did I really need CloudFront in front of my never visited web site?  NO!  Dropping CloudFront from the mix removed all the CNAME records and I can use A records and MX records together.  w00t!]

A further digression

As I surveyed the accumulated blogging from the past many years, I remembered now why I really didn't like Squarespace; it was too hard to delete old posts!  

I think a blog like mine that has a lot of stream-of-consciousness in-the-moment material probably needs pruning, rather like forest overgrowth. There are 1,100 or so blog posts here! Many link to sites that don't exist anymore, and without that context, the post itself doesn't make any sense. 

I have (somewhere) a list of all my blog URLs; with Squarespace I could click on one to see the blog entry, decide if it had even a little bit of value, and delete it if not. Except it took way too many key presses to do the deletion.  Like I had to start in a different mode, search for the page, then delete it.  Too hard for something so unimportant! With Blogger it's just a couple of key presses, which is about the level of effort that seems appropriate for sweeping up some detritus. 

I don't know, now, if I have the gumption to go through 1,100 posts, but I probably will do it in small batches. Probably half of my posts should be deleted, even with the very low bar I've set.

Talk about a digression

Today is September 12, 2020, and the western part of the state of Washington is shrouded in smoke that has blown north from California and Oregon.

Even with the global pandemic, it was possible to go outside in our yard or walk around the neighborhood (with proper physical distancing).  Not today!

(Source)

So, stuck inside, I brought this blog up-to-date.

I started blogging at my personal site Above the Garage in ... 1997?  The earliest archive of the site on the Way Back Machine is in 1998 and it looked like this:

There was a subdirectory of articles called "Random Blts"

My first edits were with Hot Dog because HTML was hard.  Except after producing a few articles with Hot Dog I saw that HTML was actually pretty easy.  Later I used Word and exported as HTML - this was before Word bloated the shit out of HTML.  I switched to Blogger in 2004.  Blogger had a little browser-extension button you could use to grab some text from a site you were visiting and use as a starting point for a post.  I did that a lot.

Facebook became a thing - I joined in 2007-ish.  At first it was very twitter-like - short posts.  Later you could mail pictures to it from your phone.  Eventually it consumed all of my posting time.  But I was still interested in blogging and I searched in vain for a new way to do it.  In 2012-06-12 I posted that I was moving to a MediaWiki blog.

Talk about your digressions!  I built a MediaWiki site and started writing articles with a hypertext structure to them.  Apparently I like linking, as I can see in this post.  In 1983/1984 I worked at a company called DayFlo; this was in the early days of the IBM PC and DayFlo's claim to fame was a hypertext editor.  It was built on a database and generally speaking links had to work.  The genius breakthrough of the modern Web is that links don't have to work.  If they don't have to work, you don't need a central database to make sure they work.  Thus the modern distributed web.

(Yet another aside - Roy Fielding and I had the same Ph.D. thesis advisor in college!)

I enjoyed the MediaWiki approach to blogging until I realized how much work it was to manage a MediaWiki site.  I had thought, how bad can it be?  Wikipedia uses it!  Never challenge worse, my wife says.  It was a matter of applying constant bug patches and dealing with weirdness with MySql which was a lot of sideways effort to the mission at hand.

So I looked for a WYSIWYG editor that could also embed audio and video clips, which was quite awkward back-in-the-day, requiring evil Flash plugins.  Squarespace fit the bill.  I imported the site from Blogger (basically abandoning everything that happened in the meantime on MediaWiki) and started onward from there.

Except ... for all that hassle and upgrades from Squarespace 5 to 7 ... I barely blogged at all.  Because of Facebook.  I posted some "Notes" on Facebook that in the past would have been blog entries.

Now Facebook is a cesspool, so I think I'm motivated to return to blogging.  I can't even remember all the blogging sites I have tried over the years that have come and gone.  (Here's one:  https://drstephencw.wordpress.com/ ) But blogger, in spite of Google's penchant for destroying great products, is still here!  And I was able to import the old blog archive and it worked!  Amazing!

I just now, today, while stuck in the smoky house, ported over the 17 articles I had written in Facebook (they have dates ranging from late 2012 to 2013 and I used their original dates).  I'll probably port over my Facebook notes too.*

And then we'll see.