40 years of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, my unrecognised screen background
So 40 years after the release of what I thought what was one of the most recognisable album covers of all-time, I have that image based on pulsar activity as my screen background at work. Three people so far this week have asked what it is, one asked, “Oh, is that something you’re working on.” Nobody recognises it, and when I explained, one just said “Who?
Spotify just decided to play Roxy Music's [Virginia Plain] (<https://www.last.fm/music/Roxy+Music/_/Virginia+Plain>) for me. Last night RRR's Superfluity opened with the same track
Sort of loosely associated with the whole Skyrail thing has been some upgrades and changes to Oakleigh train station. Last year the station changed from three rail lines to two – although most people believe that what really needs to be done is to upgrade the entire Dandenong line to four lines. The old platform one is fenced off and passengers now use the island platform only for inbound trains, with access via the pokey tunnel with ramps that are apparently not compliant with modern standards.
Being one of those people who never tends to throw anything out, over the years I’ve kept far too many receipts, printouts and old pieces of paper. Periodically I get the urge to purge, I’ll round up some related paperwork and scan it then shred it. Last weekend I found a bunch of receipts of my Amiga 1000 from 1986 onwards. Ouch. What a lot of money it seems! I wonder what happened to my old A1000, I can’t remember who I sold it to or how.
There are a few low bridges around Melbourne that people periodically manage to drive trucks into, these are inevitably reported in the news and people usually react by shaking their collective heads and asking themselves, “How on earth can you just drive into a bridge?” Well, I can’t answer for all of them but here’s an example of how some of them occur:
Yesterday my son and I were standing in the bus interchange at Chadstone and heard a massive bang/clang.
I like it, seems to work fairly well. Downside, there’s no linux version which is a major minus for me, and it’d cost me $US100 a year for the privedge of looking at my own photos. Nope, back to the drawing board
A mention in a podcast and a few comments at work got me interested, just how many ssh login attempts is every single PC, webcam, smartdevice, being subjected to?
A quick check of the fail2ban(1) logs on my home PC and I found that for yesterday alone there are 266 failed login attempts from all over the world. Poking around with a little awk(1) and some shell and I find:
Sitting in my chair, I’d put my foot on the headphone cord, I lifted up the headphones to put them on and they came to a sudden halt then swung around and smacked me across the bridge of the nose. Ow. Ow. Ow.
Fantastic sunny Sunday so number one son and I went out for a ride, north through Oakleigh to Scotchman’s creek and then along to the Huntingdale Wetlands. Some fun zooming around on the gravel road and slippery mud single track and then stopped to watch the pukeko1 and work out where next…
He suggested checking for nearby geocaches and I was suprised to find that we were within 50m of one!
Read an Ian Rankin Rebus novel, listening to a Rebus-inspired Spotify playlist
So much of the character of John Rebus revolves around his music, firmly places his age and style. Curiousity got me, a quick search and I found a playlist someone had created, whether of albums & songs mentioned, or just inspired by… of course now Spotify will think I’m an old boomer too from a day or two of the Stones, Black Sabbath, Nazareth, Velvet Underground and Joni Mitchell
It looks as though the badly implemented lack-of-bike path through the newly rebuilt Huntingdale station precinct is now being rectified. For years the old railway car park had the “Station trail” bike path come in one end, then left it to cyclists to mingle with parking and un-parking motorists for 200m or so, then rejoin a new section of bike path at the far end of the car park. By bureaucratic sleight of hand this was referred to as part of a “continuous off-road bike path” regardless of the hazard it presented to anyone from commuter cyclists to families with small children who tried to ride through there.
Well it was fun while it lasted, and the most fun of all seems to be the interpretations of the decision by Strava to disconnect Relive from accessing data:
Strava’s email to Strava/Relive users Many of us at Strava have enjoyed using Relive over the last few years, but because of Relive’s recent updates, unfortunately, we have decided to end this integration. The current version of Relive violates several of the terms that we ask of API partners.
Browsing through old photos and old blog posts I came across some of my photos of Richmond from 1998-2004 when I lived there, and more importantly, from 2003 onwards when I had my first digital camera.
How much has changed since then? Time to go and take a look, perhaps a revisiting of all the pubs of Richmond is called for….
An easier first target is 500 Bridge road, fifteen years ago it was a beautifully craft-filled shop, “The Violineri” – what has it become now?
I stood up from my desk, had the headphone cord wrapped once around my ankle, jerked to a halt and catapulted a quarter of a mug of tea across the floor and in the direction of colleagues
Some time ago I added the RSS feed of my blog to my own feed – I’d suggest everyone do that, one of Murphy’s laws seems to be that no matter how much proof reading you do, something always seems to slip through and is only visible after you hit the “publish” button.
Today I’m sitting at home wheezing and coughing so I took the opportunity to browse through a backlog of ancient entries; check the spelling, does it make sense, is it embarrassing enough that I’ll cut some fragments.
While the sane world specifies dates in the form dd/mm/yyyy, with the units going from small-medium-large, the Americans insist on specifying their dates as mm/dd/yyyy, so medium-small-large. Sometimes I realise while I’m reading a date, sometimes I don’t, sometimes it takes too long to sort it out, especially when it comes from some non-American company who wouldn’t normally use the US format, but they’re using some software that does it for them.
Argh! The Cycliq Fly12 hasn't recorded any video since [2019-05-10 Fri]!
I plugged the Fly12 into my laptop this afternoon to see if I could extract the video of me catching up to, then overtaking, the motorist who choose to drive hugging the kerb and blocking the bike lane in Gardiner road yesterday. Frustrated that once again the Fly12 has failed me, this time there’s just not a single video since [2019-05-10 Fri]. I suspect that the SD card has failed, that’d be the SD card supplied with it that the camera has always periodically decided it can’t write to.
Surprise again! Oakleigh station car park partly closed for crane work on shops – but blocking bike path again
Every time they take the easy way out, rather than leave a footpath width aisle at the south side of the car park to keep the Djerring trail open, they close off the entire end of the car park and force pedestrians and cyclists out to make their own way – either through the shopping centre on foot, or under it through the tunnel with bus, car and truck traffic.
Vanity site? Technology experiment? Learning tool? Blog? Journal? Diary? Photo album? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you…
I experiment. I play. I write and I take pictures. Some of the site is organised around topics, other parts are organized by date, then there’s always the cross-references between them.
Its all been here a fairly long time. Like the papers on my desk, or the books on the bedside table, the pile just grew… and it all grew without much plan or structure. I try not to break URLs, so historical oddities abound.
Long ago it started as a learning experiment with a few static HTML pages, then I added a bit of server-side includes and some very ugly PHP. A hand-built journal/blog on top of that PHP, then a few experiments in moving to various static publishing systems. I’ve never wanted a database-based blogging engine, so over the years I’ve tried PHP, nanoblogger, emacs-muse, silkpage and docbook before settling on Emacs Org mode for writing and jekyll for publishing. But the itch remained… I never really liked jekyll and the ruby underneath always seemed so much black magic. So now the latest incarnation is Org mode and hugo.
