This is (almost*) the entire contents of the site, all articles and blog posts from newest to oldest, with preview excerpts.
- You can see just the articles: on the Articles category page (not to be confused with the /Latest news page, which is more conversational than a list of posts and may include personal news about me in addition to site news)
- Just the blog posts: on the dedicated Blog or nearly-identicalBlog Posts category page.
*Individual movie reviews won't get posted on this page. I write too many of them, it would drown everything else out.
- How I Learned Duane Hanson Isn't Alexander Calder, and Leonard Nimoy Really Is Not Spock (Whitney Museum, New York City, 1978?) • 700 words
- Forever In Their Heart (The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, 1970s) • 350 words
- Her Luminous Eyes (The Mütter Museum, Philadelphia, 2012 • 2150 words)
- Panic At The Explo (The Exploratorium, San Francisco, 1996) • 1200 words
- How A Chance Scientific Injustice Launched My Career As An Author Of Doggerel (The…
Hampshire College Is Closing
Coming from an alternative education background, I'm saddened to hear that Hampshire College is closing. I looked at attending Hampshire, and the friend of mine who I heard the news from went to the same orientation as I did and wound up going.
I didn't end up going there but always felt an affinity for the place. I believed in the model and in the need for small, funky schools, offering more self-directed education than traditional schools, for students like myself who didn't thrive in more conventional educational settings. (AKA "underachievers". I believe I'm the only person I know with a C average in high school, a teenage arrest on my record, and a degree in physics. Cowabunga, man.)
Obviously this is the result of bigger economic and societal currents that I have no wish to comment on. But it's a loss.
A uBlock Origin custom rule to hide “Related Videos” (and more) on YouTube
If you're like me, you loathe and despise the toxic mental ordure that YouTube often plasters up and down the right side of each video page, such as POLITICAL DEMAGOGUERY in MIXED CAPS to PIQUE your OUTRAGE enough to KEEP YOU WATCHING YOUTUBE instead of doing something PRODUCTIVE! [insert thumbnail of someone looking amazed here.]
At a certain point, I started to notice that there was more likely to be things I didn't even want to know existed in that section than anything I actually wanted to see. So, I added a simple rule to the uBlock Origin browser plugin that hides that section of the page:
[code]!https://www.youtube.com www.youtube.com###related[/code]
And that's it. That's all you need to add. No more "related videos" section.
While I was at it, I added a rule to block the "suggested videos" thumbnails that appear at the end of videos, by…
Detect SYN flood slowing down server with netstat
If the web server is slow, detect a SYN flood by netstat -ant | grep :443 | grep SYN_RECV to show the IP addresses leaving it hanging. Hint: If you're behind a reverse proxy, and that shows IP addresses that aren't the proxy's, then your IP is being hit directly. To find out how many IPs are hanging, do netstat -ant | grep :443 | grep SYN_RECV | wc -l. If you do it a few times and the number is increasing, you may be under attack. If it's over 100, that's suspicious, but manageable and the server can usually handle it, especially if you have SYN cookies activated. If it's over 1000, you're under attack.
Indieweb Carnival March 2026 – The Soap Lady, And Other Museum Memories
Once a month, someone in Indieweb hosts the "Indieweb carnival", a monthly theme which a bunch of bloggers all write about the same theme, and the links to posts are collected in a page together. This month's theme: Museum Memories (see the announcement post, and the roundup and recap of all submissions.)
Like many people, I have many fond memories of museums. Here are some recollections.
Sections:
Bonus Gallery: Museum Memories Extra Images
Here are some additional images I created while working on the featured image for March 2026 Indieweb Carnival piece "Museum Memories".
Article syndication: Fediverse
Automatic SQL tuning recommendations with mysqltuner.pl
Run this on the server for sql tuneup recommendations to my.cnf.
[code]wget http://mysqltuner.pl/ -O mysqltuner.pl perl mysqltuner.pl[/code]
Gmail Pushing My Emails Out Of The Way To Tell Me What My Emails Say
Well, this is a new one. Today my gmail has started moving my emails out of the way to prioritize giving space to "AI Overviews" telling me what the email says. The summaries are longer than the actual email.
Imagine I started this three-sentence post with a "summary" that spent four sentences telling you what the post says. That's about how this strikes me.
Thoughts following “The Colonization of Confidence”
This is a draf. Almost done. Check back in a few days.
I just read the piece "The Colonization of Confidence", a short story by Robert Kingett about the homogenizing effect of relying on technology for "cheap, fast, and easy" artistic expression, and it reminded me of a few things. What's interesting is that there is a strong parallel here to things that have happened before.
The most immediate thing that leapt to mind is the 13-page '80s Alan Moore comic book story "In Pictopia", which you can happily read in full at Forgotten Awesome, a response to that era's commercialization of comics, in which the residents of a seedy comic Metropolis full of superheroes and cartoon animals are one-by-one either removed or replaced by slicker versions of themselves, as an ominous, dark industrial mass closes in on the horizon.
The second is the work…
Hide comments from blocked users on Reddit with uBlock Origin
Reddit collapses comments from blocked users so you have to click to read them, but does not hide them.
Add this custom rule to uBlock origin to completely hide comments from blocked users.
! https://www.reddit.com - hide blocked user
www.reddit.com##shreddit-comment.relative:has(.text-neutral-content-weak:has-text(Blocked User))
Things That Don’t Get Firefox To Start Loading Pages Again When It Decides It Doesn’t Want To
Firefox as of v 148 (actually a bit earlier than that, but that's what I'm on right now) frequently decides not to load pages anymore. You enter a URL or click on a link and get the status message "Waiting for [URL]..." and you can wait as long as you care to.
When this begins, your only choice is to restart Firefox.
Here is a list of "solutions" to the problem from around the web, which I have tried and found do not fix the problem:
• Turning off DNS-over-HTTPS in Firefox Settings
• Flushing MacOS's DNS cache.
• Going to about:networking and clearing Firefox's DNS cache
• Going into about:config and changing network.dns.disableIPv6 from false to true
• Opening in "troubleshooting mode" or disabling all extensions
• Turning VPN off
• Turning VPN on
