Fold-out circular table

This is a series of pictures of our dining-room table.  The cool thing about it is how it folds out — so most of the time it’s a modest little table that four people can sit around.  But folded out, we’ve crammed twelve people around it.  Also great for poker.  This series of pictures shows how it’s put together.

Here’s the table, in it’s 4-person folded-up configuration.

Continue reading →

Broadband connection improvements — avoiding DNS-interception and “buffer bloat”

This whole saga started when I read an Ars-Technica article called “Small ISPs use “malicious” DNS servers to watch web searches, earn cash.”  Here’s the lede that got my attention:

Nearly 2 percent of all US Internet users suffer from “malicious” domain name system (DNS) servers that don’t properly turn website names like google.com into the IP addresses computers need to communicate on the ‘Net. And, to make matters worse, the problem isn’t caused by hackers or malware, but by the local ISPs people pay for access to the Internet.

Continue reading →

Mikey in the high branches.

This is a post that most readers of this blog are going to scratch their heads over.  I volunteered a fair amount of my time to ICANN (the organization that works on the domain-name and numbering systems that underpin the Internet).  Until yesterday.  I got pretty cranky over an email exchange that I (as a working-group member at the bottom of ICANN’s bottom-up policy-making process) had with a couple Big Kids on the Council that manages our working-group-based policy-making process.  I loudly resigned over this — here’s a link to my grouchy email to the community. Continue reading →

Music workstation

Here’s a series of photos of my music workstation evolving into my music studio over the years. Click on the photos for ginormous versions.

Cool Picture – Aug 5, 2019

This is a chronicle of the music workstation.  It begins with a picture in 2005 and continues up to…  who knows when?

August 5th, 2005

I started podcasting with a site titled Sex and Podcasting, which was a blatant lift from Lorenzo Milam’s Sex and Broadcasting (seen, just peeking into the far-left corner of the picture, right where Lorenzo would have wanted it).  My idea was to explore how my experiences with community radio might map over into this new “podcasting” thing.  Imagine my surprise when the attention-getting “Sex” in the title catapulted me into the Top-100 podcasts ranking for a time.  Marcie just came across this photo (in early 2022).

January 14th, 2011

Six years later, podcasting had faded into the background (although Geezercast, my sequel to Sex and Podcasting ain’t dead yet, it’s just sleeping) and I was on the upward slope of keyboards and midi gizmos…

Continue reading →

WordPress gallery can’t save or link to external URLs

UPDATE:  Several years have passed and this problem still exists.  However now there is a nice simple plugin that fixes it.  It’s called WP Gallery Custom Links.  It’s working for me.  Hopefully it will for you too.  I updated the first of the three images in my broken example gallery to an external URL as a test.

Sorry about this lame-o post right in the middle of my blog, but this is a bug that’s best documented with a post so’s the WordPress folks can see what’s going on.

I’m running the current version of WordPress here (3.1.3 as of this writing) Continue reading →

Online privacy tips

A friend asked Marcie about reducing her exposure to ads on Facebook and I decided to write up the answer as a blog post so it would be easy to send to others (and update with new stuff). So here is a list of stuff that I do — your mileage may vary.  I update this about once a year with new/improved plugins/tips. Continue reading →

Domain-names — Develop? Park? Sit tight?

Photographer: Gregory Szarkiewicz

I have a gaggle of terrific domain names (bar.com, pub.com, grill.com, etc.) that I’ve had Since The Beginning.  Over the years I’ve pondered what to do with them and always come back to “sit tight” as my strategy.  I saw a great article today that lays out the reasons why.  Here’s the link:

http://www.domainnamenews.com/domain-development/mass-development-flawed-model/8058#more-8058

Panorama shots of the farm

Here’s a series of Morning Walk panorama shots — a nice perspective on the farm.  I have a new camera that has this cool setting where it takes 100 pictures as you swish it across a wide scene and then immediately stitches them together for you.   Not technically-better pictures.  But really neat pictures…  Click on the thumbnails so you can see the big versions.

Continue reading →

Whit Diffie is the new VP of info-security and cryptography at ICANN! Kewl!

Very neat news today out of ICANN.  Whit Diffie is this monster figure in the crypto world — he’s one of the founding folks in that circle.  He worked at Sun for ages and now he’s joining ICANN.

Click HERE for the ICANN press-release.

Click HERE for a starter-page at Wikipedia.

Click HERE to watch him on an episode of Cranky Geeks (with John Dvorak) to get a feel for what’s he’s like in person.

I’m really glad to hear that he’s joining the ICANN gang.  It’ll give us some depth that we badly need in this area.

New blog front-page photo

I take lots of pictures, and every once in a while I get a lucky break.  This shot resulted from some great clouds and evening sun coming together while I was sitting on the couch at the farm.  I ran outside, took this photo and 2 minutes later the sun went away.  You can click on it to get the full-sized version.