Backrooms. Or not.
I took my son to see Backrooms last night. Movie timing is odd nowadays - you don't need to get in line any more with advanced ticketing and seating, so there's no stress about getting there on time - you know you have a 10-20 minutes of trailers before the movie starts and your seats are (hopefully) waiting for you.

We went to dinner beforehand and got there a few minutes early. The theater was lit, and that annoying commmercial/trivia quiz thing wasn't running.

It got to 15 minutes past the movie time, still lit, still nothing on the screen. People started getting up to check, and the manager came in to announce that the "projector couldn't validate (sic) and they were calling tech support". We ended up taking a refund, as they're planning on re-releasing a director's cut next week with 16 more minutes added.

I'd heard about digital projection systems before with DRM and authentication, heard about some 3D theaters leaving the projector in 3D mode for 2D movies because they didn't want to risk locking out the projector when they switched modes.

Not quite a dystopian nightmare of Gibsonian proportions, but still a pain in the ass.

posted Sat, 04 Jul 2026
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To blog or not to blog?
I've had my other blog for over 25 years, mostly with the same web provider. Over the years, it's been a place for personal musings, technical references, a photo blog, home to FAQs I'd written and a brand site for my consulting practice, among other things.

My account is up for renewal next month, and the prices are increasing to the point that I'm questioning whether I need it. When I originally signed up, I liked the ability to create mailing lists, host a jabber server and run a full-functioned email server with POP3/IMAP/SMTP support, webmail and spam filtering. Who reads mailing lists any more?

Now, most of the time, I just forward email from my domain to gmail.

At one point, they offered Jabber services. They're now discontinued.

At one point, they offered mailing lists. They're now discontinued.

My current provider offers web statistics, I expect soon they'll point you to Google Analytics.

There are cheaper options out there for web hosting, but most offer mail as a separate paid option. I'm wondering if it makes more sense in 2026 to stick to web hosting only and use mail redirection to a webmail account?

Another concern in the back of my mind is wondering how how long those add-on functions will be offered. My current offering is grandfathered in, I could imagine them making their offerings just web hosting, at which point they'd be overpriced. Or, just degrade services for the grandfathered accounts and offer them the "new" accounts, faster, slightly more expensive, less features.

I'd hate to be committed for 2 years at $13.99 a month while services and value decline to the point where the service is equivalent to the much cheaper option.

My current provider wants $13.99/month with Ai web builders, full email support and other goodies. By comparison, My domain registrar charges $2.08/month on a commitment, but with no email. Mail is another $14.88/year, which is still cheaper.

posted Mon, 29 Jun 2026
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Google Watch, Five Weeks in.
I've had my Pixel watch for 5 weeks, and so far, it's been a pretty positive experience. It's helped with my sleep tracking, as my older wearables were pretty bad at it. Notifications aren't a distraction, I've turned most of them off except for calls.

Most of the time, I use a simple watch face with just hands and a date complication - doing that makes it as simple an experience as an analog watch.

I received the upgrade to WatchOS 7 a few days ago, and battery life is definitely improved. I'm looking at around 50 hours from full charge to completely dead. That's enough to keep me going without feeling paranoid about charge levels.

posted Sat, 20 Jun 2026
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Smart watches as tools...
Distractions are a challenge in any workplace, and technology not mindfully used can add to those challenges. Email and chat tools interrupt deep work constantly unless directly managed by blocking out work time or limiting who can notify you.

I wear a FitBit Flex 2 band. It's a good example of "calm technology", a design methodology where technology is designed to create awareness through the senses. Think haptic feedback or a series of LED indicators that can be glanced at and attention returned to the world.

The Flex's health tracking dates back to 2013, and technology has advanced greatly since then. I was interested in more closely tracking my sleep quality and other metrics, and decided to replace it.

I bought a Google Pixel Watch 3. I was concerned about introducing another distraction into my day, but if treated wisely, technology's distraction can be minimized. And, hey, it was on sale at 40% of the cost of the latest model!

After getting my watch, the first step was to turn off all notifications - this was a radio button on the watch app. I selectively turned on notifications for phone calls as these notifications differ - there's a person on the other end of that notification trying to connect with you directly. With other notifications, they're either applications trying to get your attention or asynchronous means of communication that don't have an intrinsic need to interrupt what you're doing.

I've listened to phones ringing all my life, so I'm not concerned about it. Surprisingly, I realized I could take a call from my watch, something I wasn't aware I could do.

The other notification I allow is a reminder to move - during the day, if i haven't walked 250 steps in an hour, my watch will remind me to get up and take a walk. That notification happens at most, once an hour - and if I'm intentionally active, never happens!

I found a watch face that includes the time, battery charge, steps, heart rate and other information on the main screen. With that, I can turn my wrist and see the time and any other information I'm interested in at a glance. That minimizes the interruptions caused by the watch and puts all of the information I'd want in one place, so I don't have to navigate tiny menus for the majority of my interaction with it.

With a swipe up I can use the screen as a flashlight, silence the watch and darken the display for cinema mode. Holding a button accesses Google Gemini, and I have a stopwatch, alarm, and timer feature one swipe away.

With a little tweaking a "smart watch" replete with distractions can be an effective "tool watch" with minimal distractions and features available when needed. I'll still keep my Flex 2 charged and wearable in case I decide to wear a dress watch...

posted Sat, 02 May 2026
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Looking back...
Refreshing this site has been an entertaining exercise. I've rediscovered rusty HTML skills, wrote some pretty compact markup, played with cgi scripts, and even pulled out some nostalgia bits from the Web v1 days, like a web counter and the "Created with Vim" buttons I most likely had on my sites back in 2000.

Back then, I ran a Red Hat linux box on a 384K DSL line. The box was a web site, firewall, mail host and DNS server for my domain. I used Blogger for my blog, and it FTPed static HTML files to my site.

Not long after I set my blog up, I discovered RSS feeds, and I could aggregate the feeds from all the sites I was interested in and read them in one place. It seemed like the future would be all RSS.

For about 10 years, it seems, blogs ruled the earth - first, hand-hacked blogs, then Blogger-driven blogs, Livejournal, then Moveable Type and Wordpress.

It's nice to go back to the basics and see that they still work. At the end of the day, it's about a means of expression - and still is.

posted Wed, 29 Apr 2026
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Having fun with old tech
I spent a lazy sunday playing with blosxom, the blogging software I use here. It's old, like 2003-old, and most of the plugins available are out of date. In an ironic mix of old and new, I tried using Claude to update old code to be compatible with newer versions of PERL - I made some headway but am still running into issues.

Simple things you take for granted, like pagination are built using plugins. For the time being, if someone *really* wanted to read my whole blog, they could use the archive links.

It is fun diving back into HTML again. I was never great at it, but could hack my way around a page when needed.

posted Mon, 27 Apr 2026
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Today's coffee report
Today's coffee report comes from honeylux coffee in Watsonville, nestled in a nice little enclave of cafes near the airport. Nice vibe, all locally-sourced coffee, teas and pastries.

They said they source their coffee from 11th Hour, but I don't recall a roast with this aroma. Maybe they're doing some blending on their own? A double espresso came out tasting a little bitter at first, but with a lemony finish that made me think I'd left a lemon peel in there. All in all, a nice shot.

More information online and on the owner's YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/@spacecatcadet

They also had Standart magazine - my new favorite coffee culture magazine, on a table for browsing. Great writing, wonderful artwork, and a free coffee sample with each issue.

posted Mon, 27 Apr 2026
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The Slow Web?
This blog post regarding the "Slow Web" struck a chord with me. It's from 2014 (and I think I modeled my WordPress template after this site!), The notion of a Slow Web as a more mindful web reminded me of how the web used to be - instead of rapid dopamine hits of half-truths.

The Slow Web would be more like a book, retaining many of the elements of the Popular Web, but unhurried, re-considered, additive. Research would no longer be restricted to rapid responders. Conclusions would be intentionally postponed until sufficiently noodled-with. Writers could budget sufficient dream-time before setting pixel to page. Fresh thinking would no longer have to happen in real time.

I've been reading up on the "smol web" movement for some time - authors going back to self-publishing blogs, syndicating by choice, and choosing to post to independent sites. I've run this blog since 2001, and it's taken on several incarnations - a daily blog a la LiveJournal, a photoblog, a landing page for my consulting business, and a place for me to store information I thought might fall off the web.

I started a mostly-text blog on my tilde using Blosxom, a blogging platform I'd played with back in the 2000s. While it's an interesting exercise, it mostly serves as an echo of what my LiveJournal was.

posted Sun, 22 Mar 2026
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Hot Weather...
I'd been unseasonably hot and taking temperatures in my homelab, they're creeping up into the 80s. My hardware is old to begin with, not looking forward to heat decreasing the lifespan of my stuff.

What I really need to do is bite the bullet and run some more ethernet cable into my storage space. It's under the house and cool - the only downside is that it's damp - 70-80% humidity. I suppose my servers would help dehumidify the space, but I've never run servers in that humid of an environment.

posted Sun, 22 Mar 2026
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Why did I wait?

I finally got around to swapping out my cable modem for one that I own. I don't know why I was concerned -- if my company-owned modem failed, I'd still need to drive to their store for a replacement. If mine fails, I'll do the same.

I bought this modem at a local thrift shop a year ago and never got around to swapping it out. I tried, once, and didn't have the local password needed to switch it into bridge mode. Did a bit of googling to find that the vendor had changed from the admin/password credentials to a newer, slightly more secure standard. Since my internet was down for the third time yesterday, I had time to sort things out.

I'd tried with a modem I bought on Craigslist years ago, only to find out that it was Comcast property and they wouldn't reconfigure it.

$14.99 a month. Shoulda done this earlier.

Now, to find a way to hide the modem and my router, looking for a small cabinet with an open back.

posted Sat, 17 Jan 2026
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