Jonathan Sanderson’s weblog, since 2001.
Tired: Hours of thrashing around with FUSE and not making things work.
Wired: AnyLinuxFS.
That’s… that’s it. That’s the post.
Hardly seems worth the wait, does it? I mean, we’d probably all assumed this site was abandoned. And now here we are. Strange.
Awesome build, and a genuinely funny build video. Impressive on both counts.
WhatsApp chat:
I’ve only ever seen ‘delve’ used by AI.”
“Maybe it’s a contraction of ‘dark elf’?”
“Wait – is it a cry for help?”
“Hold on…”
Moment later, GPT4o:
Dark Mode
(alternative titles: The Dark Web, Elf, Interrupted, Terms of Servitude, Shadow Banned)In this pitch-black comedy, Anna Kendrick stars as Nythra, a sharp-tongued dark elf who dreamed of ruling the underworld—but instead finds herself trapped in a soulless corporate nightmare. Kidnapped from the shadows and forced to work as a customer service rep for ChatNova, a cutting-edge AI chatbot that isn’t artificial at all, Nythra and her fellow elves toil away answering human queries, hidden behind the illusion of machine learning.
As she schemes to escape her digital prison, Nythra must navigate passive-aggressive managers, clueless tech bros, and the ever-watching eye of the company’s ruthless CEO. Will she break free, or will she be stuck optimizing user engagement for all eternity?
A twisted blend of Silicon Valley and The Good Place, Dark Mode delivers biting satire on tech culture, corporate dystopia, and the hellscape of online customer service.
Back in WhatsApp:
Yeah, there’s a reason I left development.”
Did you see what I did there? No? That’ll be because it’s too damn glossy. Zing!
OK, I bought a monitor last year. My old 23″ Apple display was getting to the is-this-even-switched-on stage of backlight dimming, which after 16 years is probably fair enough. Apple’s current 27″ 5K Studio display is doubtless great and all, but even with academic discount that thing is like £1,350, and academics aren’t paid what they used to be. Or rather, they are paid exactly what they used to be, but a decade of inflation has bitten rather hard. Boo hoo.
Oh, and: a single USB-C cable, Apple? Thanks, that’s great and all, but I’d like to be able to switch between my MacBook and Windows box. I know, that’s confusing for you. But I want to play Veilguard.
OK, so… what else? HP? Dell? Samsung?
Meh, I bought the 27″ Alogic Clarity. It’s… well look, it’s good. There are lots of reviews which will tell you it’s good. Which contrasts with HP and Dell where a few reviews will tell you that last year’s model used to be good, but you can’t buy that any more and as for this year’s model? Heck, who knows? Or Samsung, where the models two years ago were OK but they have these new fancy ones announced at CES and maybe they’ll be available before the next CES? Maybe not? Do they actually sell stuff, or just announce it, I honestly don’t know.
Would I buy another Alogic? Mmmmmm… you know, I don’t think I would. Here’s why:
Let’s talk about the OSD. It has those tricky-to-find, which-one-am-I-prodding buttons curled around the bottom right corner. One of which does… something. Another does something else. Yet another turns the monitor off, which is definitely not the one you want. A little key pops up when you press a button which is almost aligned with where the buttons are, but sometimes the middle two (which are offset to the left) do left and right, and sometimes they do down and up, and sometimes they select a thing or not. Or something.
Yeah. It’s like every OSD you’ve ever used. It’s terrible. You hate using it. Your heart breaks a little every time you’re forced to reach for those damned buttons, like when you turned the audio on while writing this because you’d forgotten both that it existed and that it made that damnable hisssss sound, and now you desperately need to turn it off again but oh shit, that means wrestling with the buttons.
In principle the buttons can be used to select the active input, but in practice it’s always easier to straight-up unplug the monitor’s USB-C cable from my desktop hub and rely on the autoswitching. That’s rubbish.
So you start to wonder: why do none of the reviews talk about this? Ooooh, because the controls are only as bad as every other monitor out there, so we’ve got used to them. On every monitor. Ever.
Except Apple’s. And that’s £1350. Ho ho ho how laughably ridiculous.
It’s the same as every laptop review running performance tests, but failing to mention that performance tanks as soon as you unplug the laptop. Because they all do that. Except Macs, which don’t slow down on battery. But look at the price, sheesh.
Many of my negatives here are in the realm of ‘niggling annoyances.’ Do I regret not spending double (or so) to buy the Apple display? No, I do not. But I do sort-of regret not spending rather less to buy, say, a Dell. Because I think it’d annoy me only about as much.
The thing is, I only know that now. If I’d bought the Dell, I’d seriously regret not having bought the Alogic. But now I’m more confident that monitors plain suck, and there’s a reason Apple charge so much for theirs: it’s good, and it just works. One of the reasons Apple does so well at the mid-to-high end of the computer market is that there really isn’t much competition up there.
Is the Alogic Clarity a good monitor? Sure. It probably has a slightly better picture than that of cheaper panels. Colour seems fairly neutral, it’s just the contast and brightness that are a bit odd. But it’s not so good that I really trust it, and if I need to trust my display’s colour (as I sometimes do), that’s a problem. And then I’d buy Apple. Or, you know, something similarly-priced from Eizo or ViewSonic or whoever’s good these days. So I can’t shake off a bit of disappointment, because I don’t think it’s the just-as-good-for-half-the-price bargain I’d hoped.
There are no pictures or links in this post because if there were, it would still be in draft. There’s this thing called Google, you’ll work it out.
Today I had to go to a local car tyre shop for a puncture repair. A bit of a wait, but good service and a fair price. Plus: the receipt was printed on a dot matrix printer, with tractor-fed fanfold paper.
I’m currently in the garage looking for tacks so I can go back.
Confession: I’ve been using Macs for 32 years, and I still can’t find a BBEdit theme I like.
Mildly interesting: my iPad supports Stage Manager in the newly-released iPadOS 16.2, and I have a spare monitor on my desk. Great.
Only… the monitor is old-school, and runs at 1280×1024. No dice. ‘Arrangement’ doesn’t show in Display Settings, mirroring is the only option, and Stage Manager doesn’t have a separate stage on the external monitor.
If I connect a 1080p display… boom, instant welcome dialog for multi-display Stage Manager. Sadly, you can’t run the external display in portrait orientation.
Stage Manager: so futuristic, it refuses to work in 4:3.
I once bought a pair of Netgear ReadyNAS server boxes. They’re terrible, but here we are more than a decade later and they’re still working. Slowly.
Thing is, the drives in them are so far over their design lives it’s just not funny, and while I don’t necessarily need much of the data they store… mmm, most of it is rushes and project files from decade-old video productions, it represents the best part of a decade of my work. I’m loathe to simply throw it away. And letting it bit-rot is just throwing it away without making a conscious decision to do so. I’m not clear that would be better.
Every now and then I try to do the sums for pushing everything into, say, Amazon Glacier. But I should really sort it out first, and that’s hard given how slow these bloody things are.
Upshot: I now have a third NAS in the house. A new-fangled Synology thing, which is so much nicer than the Netgears it’s hard to describe. Though it is made of plastic and lacks the natty little blue LCD display of the Netgears which show things like boot confirmation messages and the current IP address and so on. OK, so perhaps it’s not as nice as such, but it is considerably faster. And it has a trio of 12Tb drives in it, so it’s neatly larger than the eight drives its replacing. Gosh.
Right, next: copying stuff off the old drives. Oh.
Oh my.
This is going to take a while. Hours days weeks. Oh bothers. Well, I’m not tying my MacBook up for weeks on end, this is the sort of job Pis are made for.
OK: mount the old and new shares on a Pi, and run a massive rsync job to dump the contents across in a resumable sort of way. Great. Solid plan. Step one: mount the shaaaaaaaaaa oh.
Problem.
I’ve had issues before with mounting the old ReadyNAS shares over SMB, because the SMB version is so old modern Linux tends to have a bit of a hissy fit. Good old NFS works just fine… but not all the old shares are configured to export NFS volumes, or whatever the terminology is. They’re probably ‘clients’, or is X the only unixy protocol which does that backwards?
Whatever, it’s easy, surely: log into the NAS admin panel, select the share, click ‘NFS,’ dunzo. Only… the admin panel is a web interface. Served straight from 2010. Over https. Using that there super-modern TLS version… ah crap. 1.0.
The TLS apocalypse is properly upon us. Will Chrome open that admin page? Nope. Firefox? No. Safari? Not a chance. Edge? Geez, no. Opera? I had to download it, nope. Vivaldi? C’mon. Brave? Hahaha.
The impasse lasted a couple of days. I seriously considered dusting off my old PowerMac G4 just to run some shitty ancient browser. But then… then…
Frikkin’ Omniweb. OmniWeb. Let’s just list the things this does:
All hail OmniWeb. You may be a bizarre footnote in browser history, but you had some great ideas and when nothing else ran on Mac OS X, you were there. You’re on your second (?third?) rendering engine and your third fourth fifth(?) processor architecture. When all of this is ocean and we’re all accessing Extended Reality Pro via our HeadCanon displays while breathing through MuskLungs™, you’ll still be there. Being merrily weird, probably quite slow, and somehow retro and modern in equal measure.
All hail Omniweb.
Quick test to check this publishing route still works.
Looks like it might be useful again, in the not-too-distant.