This search was a real trip down memory lane, and we even got a sighting of the rare double half-rims:

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More than usual, I mean. I’ve been playing with the static site generator Hugo as a way to move this blog and its comments out of Movable Type.

After clearing the initial hurdle of incomplete and inconsistent Open Source documentation (pro tip: if a project starts numbering versions from 0.1 instead of 1.0, it’s safe to assume that there’s no tech writer on the team), the next step is adding a theme to render your site. There’s no default theme, and half a dozen different recommended ones of varying complexity and compatibility. Short version: I’m not sure Hugo currently has layout functionality equivalent to Movable Type 2.x from 2003, much less any of the modern tools; it might, it’s just that hard to find out.

There’s some support for basic pagination, something that’s always been missing here (and which is partially responsible for the long delay when adding comments), but the built-in paginator includes a link for every page, which is pretty painful when you have 200+ pages. If I get the time, I’ll have to dust off my Go and send them a patch to make it behave sensibly with large numbers.

Rendering all ~3,800 entries (counting quotes and sidebar microblogs) and ~3,500 comments takes about 12 seconds on my laptop, but that’s still too long for iterative testing, and the OS open-file limit makes it impossible to test with the live-rebuild feature of the built-in web server.

So I wrote a quick Bash script to retrieve N random articles from Wikipedia and format them the way Hugo expects, as Markdown with TOML metadata. Why Bash? Because the official Wikipedia API for efficiently retrieving articles and their metadata using generators and continues is either broken or incomprehensible to me, since I spent two hours at it and got a never-ending list of complete and partial articles. So I just looped over the “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random” URL and piped the output through Pandoc. Rather than pulling in the real metadata, I just generate dates and categories in Bash. Now I can quickly generate a small site with multiple sections and simple categorization, and it’s trivial to add more features like series, tags, authors, etc. [in fact, I did!]

(relevant only to Hugo users after the jump…)

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It’s been a while since I’ve seen someone use footage from Hyper Police and DearS. The extensive use of AsoIku came as no surprise, of course.

I don’t care for the music, but… catgirls!

Ever since I first got the back yard landscaped with lots of plants and ground cover, it’s been a popular daytime hangout for the neighborhood cats. After I had the front porch extended and put some chairs out there, I discovered a group of young cats who liked that even better than the back yard.

Some of them still come by occasionally, and I’ve gotten used to the sound of disappearing cats when I open the front door.

Recently I decided to install some cameras outside the house, mostly to watch for package deliveries and solicitors, but also to keep track of porch cats. I went with the Arlo Pro kit based on a friend’s recommendation (actually, he has the older Arlo; I went with the Pro because it adds local USB storage). Good hardware, easy set up, usually-quick notification of events (~5 seconds), iOS app is a little flaky and sometimes falsely claims that my system is offline. I like it enough that I’m probably going to add some more of the first-gen cameras for the garage and rear entrances after I’ve had it for a month or two.

To reliably detect cats, I had to set the porch cam to the highest sensitivity, which unfortunately generates occasional false positives due to wind hitting my bamboo, but I’ve caught two of them so far, one of whom I hadn’t seen before.

Orange cat has been a regular daytime visitor since he was half-grown, and always sits in the left chair, which gets plenty of sun. He used to sit in the bamboo pots, but gave that up after I added them to the drip system:

New cat comes mostly at night, always sits on the right chair, and vanishes instantly when I open the door. I’ve got some low-res night-vision shots of him, but the best picture I’ve managed so far was a quick out-of-focus snap through two panes of glass as he was making his escape through the back yard.

Clearly I need to hide a camera in the bamboo, so I can get close-up shots with better focus.

I’ve been a big fan of Patricia McKillip’s stories since the ’70s, and I’ve been generally pleased to see her stuff come back into print.

But I’m not going to pay premium prices for reprints, and even more for a DRM’d ebook, so “fuck you, Random Penguin”.

Once upon a time when I shared a house with Doug and Rory, we were all in the habit of drinking one specific flavor of Arizona Iced Tea. Naturally, whenever we went to the grocery, we cleaned them out. Over time, the store we frequented starting stocking more of that flavor, and since there were three of us, we still cleaned them out.

Finally, after several months of this, I happened to be there late at night when only the restocking crew was working, and as I filled the conveyor belt with the distinctive oversized cans, the cashier looked at me and said, “You! You’re the one!”.

Fast-forward 20+ years, and these days my bulk buy is Splenda-sweetened Grapefruit-flavor Refreshe Ice. There are half a dozen different private labels for this bubbly-fruit-water, and I don’t know who actually makes it, but the Safeway and CVS brands seem to taste better than the others.

Naturally, I clean them out. For a while, they responded by upping the stock, but I can’t take credit for the peak period when they had dozens of bottles at the end of multiple rows and stocked it in single-flavor cases (with the Morgan Hill store sometimes having half a dozen cases just inside the front door, which I typically bought two of).

These days, the stock has died down to a more sustainable level, but the stores I frequent generally have twice as much of the Grapefruit as the other flavors.

So it should come as no surprise when on a recent midnight visit to the nearest Safeway (technically, 11:45PM, and a no-prize to someone who correctly guesses why I deliberately arrive at that time), the kid restocking the soft-drink section said, “Oh, hey, I just put some out for you.”

He then offered to see if he could get them by the case again…

A common tactic of activists opposed to US military engagement (often falsely mislabeled as ‘anti-war’) is to libellabel their opponents ‘chickenhawks’, insisting that if they’re not personally going over to fight, they lack the courage of their convictions.

So, a ‘social justice’ activist who wants the government to forcibly silence their opponents surely can’t be called a ‘warrior’. ‘Chickenhawk’ has a nice cognitive dissonance to it, don’t you think? I mean, if you’re not going to personally put a gun to my head to keep me from disagreeing with you (a proposition sure to end in prison or morgue time), how dare you demand that someone else do it for you?

Mental substitution of other C-words is acceptable, of course.

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