Good morning. Hello. How are you this fine Friday? I am good. It is cold here. Ha ha. It is 34 degrees. Didn’t quite frost but close. I am an Alaskan I am supposed to not think of 34 as cold. And, I mean, I’m not cold, but my poor basil plants. I suspect they all died. Except the four I brought in for the winter. Man, I’m glad I got that chore done.
Look there’s a thing I need to clear up about Dune: Desert power is space power. Seriously. What is desert power? What are those suits you see Paul and the Fremen wearing in his visions? Don’t they look a lot like space suits? If you can go days, weeks, months without water, and you’re protected from the elements, from extreme temperatures, maybe you are a viable opponent to the Sardaukar. And, you know, the spice is in the desert. If you can master the spice flow and the spice visions, maybe your dependence on the navigator’s guild is lessened. Desert power.
As per uszhe, I have Friday off and I am gonna get some shit done. I gotta go to the bank and to the funny mall that is simultaneously a dead mall but also really good and see if the frame store is still in business.I hope those guys made it through the pandemic. Then I gotta go to two different pharmacies to sort out this Wegovy thing and get my COVID booster. Maybe Bed Bath and Beyond, I don’t know if we’ll have enough time.
Speaking of COVID, you know how I said I was gonna start tapping into my home tests on Sunday? My friend Doug alerted me that those 2X BINAXNOW kits are actually one kit. Like you’re supposed to take one test, then another one 36 hours later. But everyone uses them as two kits. I mean I swear to god I read the entire instructional booklet that came with that thing and I missed that. Nefariously clever. Now I need a bunch more kits. They’re in stock right now at CVS, by the way.
We got to the second to last season of Mythbusters yesterday, and the build team was unceremoniously sacked, absolutely no on-screen acknowledgement of it. Very sad. They brought back the original theme, instead of the Dandy Warhols version, clearly the Dandys wanted nothing to do with a Mythbusters without their bro Tory. Gonna be hard to go on but we will persevere.
The esteemed independent film director Hal Hartley is launching his latest box set of HD Blu Ray films, consisting of Flirt, Amateur, and Meanwhile. With this box set, all of Hal’s films will be available in HD, on Blue Ray, save one: No Such Thing. You can also get the music and the screenplays, and they come with documentaries and short films and I am very, very excited. I don’t know which big corporation owns No Such Thing, but they really need to get on it and give Hal the rights back or release a Blu Ray themselves. Particularly excited about Amateur, might be my favorite Hal Hartley film. If you are curious about these masterpieces, hit me up and I’ll add you to my Plex, they’re all up there. But also consider supporting Hal. His DIY ethos is very inspiring to me.
So, it took a week but I sorted out the QNAP and the Plex. There was a firmware update for the QNAP, I ran it like I always run the firmware updates, and all hell broke loose. The Plex library disappeared. It was probably a corrupted log, fine, sucked it up and rebuilt it. But on top of that, the Plex was suddenly unable to, like, look up Metadata or retain poster changes. And on top of that the Plex was acting funny, and my Backblaze backups weren’t working, it was giving errors on internet connections, even though it had one and said it was fine. And then two days later, lo and behold, another firmware update, and everything mysteriously got fixed. Now, I’m not gonna say it was a bad firmware update, but… you know what? I sure would not be surprised.
And then! Same thing happens with the WiFi mesh. We’re still getting little intermittent outages on the internet even after the new modem, but they’re different, they’re quicker, and they don’t obviously effect the wired machines — it’s hard to tell, they’re so quick. And then we had a giant power flicker – like “oh a car obviously just hit a transformer” big. Like “oh wow this literally blew out my UPS” big. And then the wifi got even more weird. So I figure a little preventative maintenance is in order, so I update the firmware on all of the mesh hubs and, once again, all hell breaks loose. Hubs won’t connect, the main hub is mysteriously showing two extra wifi networks. After a day of misery I think it’s more or less working, but not really. And I am so annoyed. Got burned by two firmware updates in two weeks. But what are you supposed to do! Not like you can call support for your problems, since the first thing they’re gonna say is update your firmware and reset everything. Maddening. I legit don’t know what to do to make these weird two extra networks go away save for resetting everything and I don’t want to do that. But maybe I will. Except I gotta do it, like, first thing in the morning, when Emma’s asleep, and who wants to deal with that shit at 7AM.
Ugh.
That reminds me I need to buy a new UPS. God. The irony is that Emma’s computer is not on a UPS and every time there’s a power flicker, her computer does better than mine. WTF!
The great Matt Levine: “The basic issue right now is that everything is dumb.”
One thing that is not dumb is I learned about this thing called the Solar Protocol. It’s a framework for routing internet traffic requests to the servers that are currently most green-powered. As the sun goes round the globe, some of your servers might be solar powered, while others are not. The Solar Protocol handles figuring this out and making your internet traffic as green as possible and I am here for it.
Our friends Ashley and Brandon bought Jane this little educational app set thing for the iPad and she fuckin loves it.
Okay let’s do a mix. Do I even have one ready? Nope! No worries it is Friday! Lots of new stuff today! Is that cheating? Maybe! Whaddyagonnado about it? Hrm actually I’m gonna use this live mix that was almost done. Just give it a few sprinkles on top. Here you go. Yes, I put Sting from Bring on the Night. That film and album will forever have a soft spot in my heart. This mix is too bro heavy I apologize. Will make it up in the next one I promise.
Okay! Have a lovely Friday, will talk to you guys next week. Hopefully I am a Stasis Device billionaire in No Man’s Sky by then.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? #522
I love that Sting love album. My mom has decided she is in love with Sting so we’ve been listening to A LOT of him the past few weeks. His 40th birthday at the Hollywood Bowl and 60th at the Beacon Theatre concerts should be records…