Blog Posts

bike ride through bearspaw

Got to head out for a quick bike ride this afternoon. I only had an hour or so, so stayed pretty close to home. There’s some really great riding near my house…

the long tail of hippie hosting sites

There are now over 170 sites hosted on the Hippie Hosting Co-op server. Most are low traffic, low resources sites, with a handful of big sites.

The folks with big sites are paying more than the nominal fee, so it all works out. I was surprised to see how few large sites there are on the server. I was also surprised to only be #3 on the list. This whole Reclaim project wants to suck up drive space…

battling spam on the campus wiki

The University’s campus wiki, wiki.ucalgary.ca, is still run as a semi-stealth pilot project. This seems strange, after running it for 7 and a half years (first edit, December 11, 2004), but it’s something I initially snuck onto a server, and it kind of grew from there. It’s still running on an aging and borrowed/scrounged server, and I’m supporting it in my spare time. Which means, it’s basically self-supporting. Which is fine, because the people that have been doing awesome stuff with it are a pretty self-supporting group. I’m working on getting the wiki adopted by IT so it will be properly managed, but that process takes time.

Self-hosting video with WordPress and Hippie Hosting Co-op

I’ve been messing around with hosting my own videos, but that’s one area where the third party services have the functionality nailed. They magically transcode video file formats. They create thumbnails. They provided embeds to make it easy to use the video. But, Jim posted about how he’s having to take on some copyfighting, because YouTube is bending over for some pretty outrageous false copyright claims. The only way to prevent a third party from misusing your content is to not use a third party.

online video and learning science

Khan Academy is revolutionizing education. Gates is rebuilding education around video. And yet…

Derek Muller completed his doctoral dissertation by researching the question of what makes for effective multimedia to teach physics.

What did Dr. Muller find?

In experiments, he asked subjects to describe the force acting upon a ball when a juggler tosses it into the air. Then he showed them a short video that explained gravitational force.

In tests taken after watching the video, subjects provided essentially the same description as before. Subjects said they didn’t pay attention to the video because they thought they already knew the answer. If anything, the video only made them more confident about their own ideas.

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Owning Your Own Words – Is It Important?

An interesting discussion on owning your own content, ironically hosted on a private beta third party discussion service.

Gina Trapani, on maintaining control as future-proofing legacy:

For me, publishing on a platform I have some ownership and control over is a matter of future-proofing my work. If I’m going to spend time making something I really care about on the web–even if it’s a tweet, brevity doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful–I don’t want to do it somewhere that will make it inaccessible after a certain amount of time, or somewhere that might go away, get acquired, or change unrecognizably.

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back to FeverËš

I tried switching to Pulp as my RSS reader a couple of weeks ago. The interface was interesting, and it syncs across multiple devices (Mac and iOS) using iCloud, so there’s no Google-tracking. Sounded interesting. Worth a shot.

Yeah. Well. That didn’t work out so well. The iCloud syncing never worked well for me. Not sure if I subscribe to more feeds than it can handle, but there you go. Constant issues with getting feeds and state synced across a couple of computers. But, that’s not the end of the world. It was the interface just doesn’t work for extensive use. It’s like the Pepsi Challenge thing. It seemed great on the screenshots, and with initial usage, but it just didn’t work with lots of feeds, over a couple of weeks.

2012 Highwood Pass climb

The second annual climb for our growing group. Not a long ride (only 18km from the west winter gate to the summit), but a hell of a lot of climbing - 629 meters (2063 feet) climbed over those 18km. Awesome.

goaccess live webserver stats on hippie hosting

I just installed the GoAccess apache log processing application on the Hippie Hosting Co-op server, giving users a way to watch the stats for their sites in realtime, without having to rely on privacy-invading analytics bugging software. This software works on the command line, so just SSH into your account and type:

goaccess -f statistics/logs/access_log

That tells goaccess to load with the logfile at the specified location. You can feed it other logfiles, but the default one for a Hippie Hosting account should be at statistics/logs/access_log.

High tech civilization

Sharps punched a button on the phone console. “Larry. Get us some coffee, please.” He turned back to Harvey. “Damndest thing,” he said. “Whole nation depends on technology. Stop the wheels for two days and you’d have riots. No place is more than two meals from a revolution. Think of Los Angeles or New York with no electricity. Or a longer view, fertilizer plants stop. Or a longer view yet, no new technology for ten years. What happens to our standard of living?”

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still by FAR the best comment on sharecropping

Merlin Mann posted this gem back in April, in response to the announcement of Google Drive:

Imagine a guy who’s REALLY into panties who makes ALL his money selling data about panties. Now he offers to store your panties. Yeah—that.

— Merlin Mann (@hotdogsladies) April 25, 2012

I still chuckle about that one. So concise. Yes. We’d like to store your panties for you. Sure, you can trust us. Please. Give us your panties.

on Pulp

I saw the new Pulp app for Mac and iPad, and thought it looked interesting enough to try out. I started on the Mac side, importing a bunch of feeds that I’d exported from my FeverËš reader. It’s definitely different, but I think I like it.

Here’s the “home” front page - similar to the “Hot” section in FeverËš - it mines the items in the subscribed feeds, to find trends and more-linked-to items.