I've done most of my video production on Linux for a while. Lately, I've had issues with Audacity crashing or refusing playback during editing projects. So, with my latest project, I switched to using my Mac but using the same FLOSS software for the production.

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

For unrelated reasons, I connected my MBA to my keyboard, mouse, and monitor at my normal desk. Having a 27 inch screen to do video editing is going to be a huge benefit.

Sometimes I write on my Mac. Sometimes I write on my main computer (Linux). Since setting up the typewriter (which is where I'm typing this from), I do the greatest amount of word count from a several-years-old, underpowered since the day before it came off the production line, Dell laptop.

I've got no GUI running on it. Despite the fact that the “refurbisher” sent me a unit with a practically dead battery, the laptop can get from 100% charge to low 70s in 5 hours of typing.

There are a lot of solutions out there for low-distraction writing. Most of them are more expensive than a $100 (or, occasionally cheaper) educational laptop running Linux.

That's not a solution for everyone. Especially not Alpine Linux. I can't get a USB drive to map on this thing. The only way I'm getting my writing off of it and onto the rest of my network is my existing NAS and a Unison profile.

It doesn't have constant nagging from Microsoft or Apple. There are no applications begging for or demanding my attention.

With the caveat that it requires a significant amount of technical knowledge to make it work in the first place, this is the cheapest and most effective way for me to do distraction-free writing.

Using this method, I was able to write just shy of 60K in the month of February. Most of that on this computer. In the shortest month of the year, without trying to, I completed a novel's worth of writing by February 22.

That's the power of cutting out distractions.

The options we as writers have for off the shelf devices to accomplish similar goals are expensive, inflexible products. I think we deserve options that aren't expensive or inflexible and don't require my level of Linux expertise to set up and maintain.

#Technology #PersonalEssay

In the late 90s and early 00s, a casual stroll through the internet could spawn dozens or more pop-over and pop-under ads. Browsers helped us fight against intrusive pop-up ads.

Today, we're in a similar situation to what we faced in the early 00s except this time, our browsers have betrayed our trust.

Simple to complex

In the earlier days of the web, websites were relatively simple. You could scroll and read. You could click on links that took you to other places. By the time I was using a web browser, graphics were displayed on the websites directly. That's an innovation that didn't exist in the earliest browsers. Adding images? An improvement. I suspect that's where ads really kicked off, but we'll get there.

Eventually, people and companies wanted to do more with their browsers than just read, scroll, click, and look at images. Eventually, we'd want to do everything in our browser that we could do in our computers. That's a story for another day but it's not just a bunny trail. Nope, we're stopping at this sight seeing spot for a reason. In the mid-90s, Javascript was invented.

The Pop-up War

HTML isn't a programming language in the same way that Basic, C, Perl, etc. are. It's a markup language, designed to format and display hypertext. Javascript let you run programs in your browser. At first, they were simple. But not too simple to avoid the creation of one of the first great menaces of the internet: the pop-up ad.

You're browsing a site — perhaps several — and suddenly a new window pops up. It's got an ad in it. Extremely annoying. You close it. Maybe it opens another. Soon, you're playing whack-a-mole with pop-ups.

Eventually, the pop-up ad was replaced by something even more nefarious: the pop-under. Unless you're watching your taskbar closely, you don't even realize that a casual stroll through the internet is spawning dozens of ad windows you'll have to deal with once you've stopped your session. It was a menace that users couldn't effectively control themselves. Outside intervention was needed.

That intervention came from the browsers themselves. According to Wikipedia, by 2004, even Internet Explorer had pop-up blocking.

Like the flu, pop-overs and pop-unders haven't really gone away. Nefarious advertisers on the seedier parts of the internet use all sorts of tricks to get around the protection that every browser offers today.

The war is over, though. With browsers as our champions, users won.

All Your Data

Our current battle has been going on for a while. Ads are a vital part of revenue for the web but they're out of control.

The advertisers have fancy new tools to ensure that they can tie everything you do on the internet to a profile they can use to advertise to you. It's a surveillance state that would make Jeremy Bentham blush. But don't worry! The only thing they want is to sell us things! And sell our data to others. And manipulate our vote. But that's the absolute limit, we swear!

What else is there?

As if those things weren't reprehensible enough, they've also made most news sites unusable. Try reading an article while the page moves around underneath you as ads load in and out. Random videos play without any interaction. Trying to select some text to highlight it takes you to new pages.

The most popular browser, Chrome, is owned by one of the largest advertising companies in the world. Chrome doesn't want you running a real, effective ad blocker so they've shut down the interfaces that allow a plug-in to be effective at ad-blocking.

Safari at least gives you an option to use Reader Mode so the page doesn't move around on you while you read. It's also pretty far behind and incompatible with much of the more recent web developments.

Peanut Butter Jelly Time

It's time for browsers to stop betraying their users.

You can have ads. They can't be abusive, though. They can't continue to J. Edgar Hoover our private data and track us. They can't bog down our browsers so much that we have to close them to get our computers' fans to stop blasting hot air continuously. They can't render websites unusable by loading in and out or click hijacking.

Browsers, it's time to implement ad-blocking. Not for ads that respect the privacy of readers and behave themselves in the browser. Pop-up blocking was never about blocking ads. It was about the bad behavior.

Until browsers turn things around, get yourself a browser that will work with an ad blocker. I like Ad Nauseam. Among other things, it lets me see ads on sites that don't use trackers, rewarding sites that are behaving themselves.

Shameless self-promotion

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#Technology

Image by Gianni Crestani from Pixabay

It's interesting watching a technology that felt new to me (even though it was quite old at the time I was using it) suddenly get renewed attention.

I still remember the first cassette album I owned. I'm sure it wasn't literally the first cassette tape I owned and I'm not sure whether I bought it with my allowance or if it was a present. I would name drop it but it turns out not all the artists from my youth listening to CCM became queer affirming. Some of them became pretty rancid!

The album meant a lot to me at the time. It's hard to think of that album without hearing the slightly imperfect warble of the tape speeding up and down just slightly as it played in my headphones.

Image by WikimediaImages from Pixabay

Eventually, we got CDs. I only had two to start with. One was Moonlight Sonata. Legend has it that the 74 minute runtime of the redbook CD was chosen to allow Moonlight Sonata to fit on a single disc. As far as I know, this isn't true but it's a great story. The other was Rich Mullins's A Liturgy, A Legacy, & A Ragamuffin Band. I still have that CD although I backed it up to FLAC when I backed up all my CDs over again.

Cassettes remained a part of my life for a little while. I used them to record songs of the radio. Particularly songs that would have been difficult for me to get albums of. Eventually, writable CDs became affordable enough to make my own mix CDs instead of mix tapes. Around that same time, I was getting into MP3 pretty heavily. The very first MP3 I ever heard was one I encoded myself. It took hours to encode that one song to 128Kbps and, when I played it on a 120Mhz Pentium Acer, I couldn't run any other software at the same time. It was so small, I carried that song on a 1.44MB floppy disk. Today, some pedant would tell me it was a 1.44MiB disk. I'd go pull one of my floppies from the protective case I store them in and offer them the use of my loupe to read the size on the label.

The last gasp of cassette tapes in my life was my four track recorder. Which only recorded two tracks at a time and required a special type of tape to really do its business.

Image by Gianni Crestani from Pixabay

A lot of ink has been spilled on why it is that people go for, say, vinyl long after it has passed its expiration date. The original releases of old music had better dynamic range (i.e. they haven't been compressed to hell and back) but tended not to have as much going on in the lower end. There may be something to that audiophile convention about analogue sound. Most professionally produced sound from the 80s onward was produced digitally at some point in the chain before it reached the listener.

To the extent that they may have a point, you'd have to listen to some really old recordings on some pretty old gear to know it for sure.

Why are folks reaching for the old stuff? I've heard it's because this stuff was the province of older siblings and cousins. Maybe there's some truth to that.

But maybe it's because there's 900 channels and nothing good on. I don't mean that literally in either direction. There are a lot more than 900 “channels” so to speak and plenty of the new stuff is really good. Maybe we have too many choices and too many distractions.

Image by blitzmaerker from Pixabay

I remember just listening to an album. I've always been me so I probably read a book or something while I was doing it but the activity was listening to the music.

Last year, I bought an inexpensive FLAC player. It can do more but, it's so convoluted to use, it's really best at playing an album or a playlist. Maybe it could hop on the internet for something other than syncing its clock. It says it does some streaming thing that makes my eyes glaze over whenever I think about figuring out what that means. It's a chore to get music onto it. Managing playlists for it requires either manually adding songs from the player one by one ... or reverse engineering their not-at-all-M3U file which still has the extension M3U.

It's not for everyone. It's barely for me. But it lets me listen to the music without too much messing with it. In fact, the more messing I have to do with it, the more tedious it is to deal with.

It's more inconvenient than popping a tape in and then turning it over when the side finishes. Unless, of course, you live in 2025 and you have to first find a tape player and then find or record a tape. And then you've got just one tape. Battery will need recharging on my little FLAC player before it runs out of music on the 256GB micro SD card I've half filled.

I still haven't just listened to an album in a while even with a good book.

I think I'll do that soon. I'll let you know how it goes.

#Personal #Essay #Nostalgia #Technology #Music