Random Thoughts

Look at this relic I found up in the storage loft! (I’m doing some in-depth tidying.) After the crash in 2008 (when the Dow Jones went from 13K to 8K) I bought these four books and mounted them into a frame and hung them on the wall. (I was the CTO of a small stock brokerage.) Amazing times. But the Dow Jones is at 50K now, so I guess it’s time to throw these out. That joke isn’t funny any more.

A month ago, I posted a request for people to send me their magazines about comics so that I can scan them and incorporate them into the kwakk.info search index. I got a response from Ben Hansom from the UK. And today the magazines arrived! Thanks, Ben! It’s like 12kg (approx 79 pounds according to ChatGPT 2.4)! Non-epic unboxing sequence. There’s a whole lot of Comics Inter

I’ve been rooting around in The Cupboard Of Mystery this week and getting rid of stuff that’s not useful any more (giving away, selling or taking to the recycling). But what do you do with gadgets like this? OK, the MP3 Sony Walkman is probably not going to be useful… but… it’s small and inoffensive and well… The Nokia E72 — OK, I can trash that, but I should probably get it powered up enough to wipe it, I guess? But who has connectors to these gadgets? Mua-ha! I HAVE! Behold my organisational…

Very mysterious. They’re really good, though, so it’s probably worth it! (I was at that concert, by the way…)

I’ve got a few headless servers around the apartment (for normal stuff), and… I’ve gotten real fed up with the headlessness. That is, every five years when something goes critically wrong, I have to hook up a screen to the thing and see what it’s complaining about. (It’s usually “No keyboard detected; press F1 to continue.) So I have to pull out a monitor from somewhere, and then find the cables, and then find an outlet, and all of that takes (at minimum) half an hour. Especially the “finding…

So, I’ve had these Pozidriv screws for a while, and I’ve never found a bit that actually fits them. They all seem “too pointy”. And if you try to google this stuff, you find a gazillion pages saying “well, Philips is different from Pozidriv”. YES! I KNOW! Why isn’t there a checkbox on google that goes “no, I’m not a moron, filter out all answers to idiotic questions?” But today I bought a new bits set, and it has several PZ2 bits. They’re all marked S2 (which is the steel quality) and PZ2…

I mean, seriously. Why does an NVMe to USB-C adapter need all these lights. C’mon. And there’s too many screws and stuff. TSK TSK But at least it’s ridiculously slow. Instead of 400MB/s (which is what you’d expect), you get 60MB/s. And the enclosure gets ridiculously hot. IcyBox gadgets, man…

My screwy drawer has gotten progressively fuller over the past decade, so in a (possibly) deranged fit of spring cleaning, I’ve now cleared out the screws (and nails and stuff) that looked way too duplicated. I’m sure I’m not going to regret this. This comes to 3.3kg, which ChatGPT 3.2 tells me is 49.3524 pounds. (Can that be right? *does math in head* Yeah, looks accurate…) But don’t fear for me, Internet — somehow the screwy drawer is still full of screws (and nails and stuff)! How did that…

A while back I bought some pages of Carol Swain artwork, and it’s taken me just three months to get them into frames and onto the wall. New record! My procrastination is failing! Such gorgeous pages and a perfect little story. You can get pages here.

Since the beginning of time, man has yearned for a way to avoid forgetting what she was going to shop. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for, but I had an idea yesterday while cooking some fish. But first, let me enumerate the shopping list ideas that don’t quite work for me: Have a shopping list on paper, including a pen, tagged to the wall somewhere. This is definitely the classic, and works well for many people — and for people who like to go shopping themselves (instead of having…

Music I’ve bought in April. I haven’t really bought a lot of stuff… Black and Blue is the only Stones album I really like, so I wondered whether the one that came right after it is any good… And it’s OK, I guess? But far too many pointless blues workouts. You can have hours of fun with the sleeve, though.

The other day, I started idly wondering how much work it would be to collect the data from all my movie blog posts and then, like, do something with it. Something frivolous. On the movie blog I’ve got this thing, which has a kind of stark quality to it, but I’ve been blogging more about movies on this blog… My “series” blog posts usually follow some sort of template, so surely it would be easy enough to write some code to parse those, and then make something fun and useless? Like… more…

I’ve been a fan of Talking Heads since I was a child, but I didn’t know about the special edition of Speaking in Tongues until, like, last year. Designed by Robert Rauschenberg. And I was shocked to find that it was still cheapish!? So I bought a copy which finally arrived today, and… Err… that’s a lot of yellowing… Perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to make it out of very plastickey plastic…

I’ve read some comics over the past… three weeks? These are early-2000s issues of a long-running Norwegian anthology — I never picked up any Norwegian comics at the time, and I don’t quite remember why… Because it’s really good. There’s a great variety to the pieces, but I guess you could sum them up with “early 20s comics” — they’re either humour, or they’re very serious indeed. You know. “Profound.” And I like both, so I spend a very comfortable evening reading these books.

I’ve got one of those foldy phones, and I like the format. The one inconvenience, though, is that, like, you have to unfold it. The phone doesn’t even have *sproing*. Why doesn’t the phone have a button you press end then it goes *sproing*? And you have to do a lot of unfolding if you’re walking around a strange city, looking at Google Maps. However, there is a screen on the front, too, and on the Samsung Galaxy Flip 7, it’s gotten so big that it should actually be useful. I mean, while walking…

After putting the Beau Travail installation in the hall, I decided to try something I’ve been thinking about off an on for a while — what about having a ton of pictures on one wall? Does that look nice? I don’t know, but it’s obvious that that… hole… over the TV is an eyesore. I could move all the pictures down, but then there’s be a lot of re-hanging going on. And the TV is resting on the floor. So… perhaps it would be nice to have a… plinth? Like… 10cm high? That’s also a practical advantage,…

I got new comics the other day, so perhaps today is a good day to get into a proper comics daze. After Diamond’s collapse, it’s just hard to know what’s actually being published, so my comics buying has trickled off, but I think that perhaps I’ve now got it right at Goshenite, so I’ve been … Continue reading Comics Daze

After being wonky for some weeks, my Control key finally popped off the other day. (Yes, I know, there’s a key marked “Ctrl” to the left of it, but I’ve remapped that to Fn, and this key (which is marked Fn) to Control.) So I tried using the real Ctrl key as Control, but that … Continue reading My new career as a Lenovo laptop repair man

I’ve got a Samsung Flip 5 phone, and the other day when flipping it open, it said BBZZZCHT quite loudly, and then the screen died. Well, that is, when I open it, I get the above. So now what? Android is, like most Google products that aren’t ad related, a half-assed product. The sensible work … Continue reading Wherein my phone calls a bunch of people dozens of times

After a bit of a break, I’ve been futzing around with kwakk.info (the comics research site) again. I’ve been trawling the various archives for more stuff to add, and I’ve also randomly happened upon various web sites that have collections of scanned magazines, like this great site that has all the issues of Comixscene/Mediascene (which … Continue reading Send Me Your Magazines About Comics

I was listening to all of Barbara Morgenstern’s albums chronologically today (she’s fantastic), and as usual when Night-Time Falls started, I paid extra attention, because I just can’t believe those lyrics. I mean, Morgenstern usually does a mix of earnestness and bizarre, almost psychedelic dead-pan humour in her lyrics — constant shifts between reality and … Continue reading Somebody on the Internet is wrong

I’ve written previously about the problem of screenshotting web pages (which I think is a bit important for web preservation) and how my solution was to use the Easylist/Ublock block lists to remove annoyances like cookie banners (that often just obscure the entire page). And it seemed to work pretty well… except on sites like … Continue reading Web Page Cleanup Redux

I’m still tweaking my Easter project a bit. Beau Travail (from where I gratuitously stole some frames) is in 1.66:1, while my sideways TV is 9:16. Fortunately, Denis Lavant mostly keeps to the middle of the frame, but sometimes he dances off to the edges. I briefly contemplated editing this myself, manually, by using video … Continue reading Calm and in the Centre

While falling asleep yesterday, I was thinking about frame rates for the hall er installation. I was playing the pixilated imaged at a six frames per second frame rate, and it does look kinda cool. But I wondered — the original film is 24 fps. Would it be possible to interpolate the images and then … Continue reading Smooth Pixels

A few years back, my OLED TV started displaying some problems — the middle section of the screen was much darker than the parts to the left and the right. I tried running all the OLED “refresh” things, and upgraded the firmware, etc, but nope — the middle bits remained stubbornly burned in. It’s all … Continue reading My New Interior Decoration Blog

Music I’ve bought in March. Hey! After a couple of slow months, I finally bought a whole bunch of new albums. I bought the Black & Blue box set: It’s fun reading the reviews of this set, because they all add exactly the same sentence somewhere: “Of course, this is nobody’s favourite Stones album, but…” … Continue reading March Music