Category: General

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But I got the new printer set up on just about everything, and I bought and downloaded the latest Humble Bundle full of Java reference books, and I fixed the .htaccess on this site to force access over HTTPS.

Regarding the printer: When CUPS works, it’s more or less automatic, and stays out of the way. Perfect! When it doesn’t, it’s a freaking pain to get working.

I’m really not liking this new editor, by the way. I mean, yeah, it’s cool than you can do stuff like setting the colors for a paragraph, and setting drop caps, and all that, but for what I actually want to do, it’s overkill. And it takes forever to load the editor page if something else is downloading at the same time (like all those Java books and supplements).

Anyway, time for bed.

zzzzZzzzzzZZZZZZzzzZZZzzzzzZzzzzzz….

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Most social networks don’t give you the ability to backdate your posts. That’s good, because it provides a trail that you can point to, saying “Yes, I did in fact post this before it became common knowledge/was plagiarized/etc.” But other publishing platforms do. It’s helpful for things like transferring an archive from another site — though it seems a little weird (and vaguely dishonest) to backdate a new post.

That said, I do backdate posts on this blog from time to time, generally when:

  • The post is imported from another site (Instagram, LiveJournal, a comment somewhere, a Twitter thread, etc.), and I keep the original posting date. Basically it’s a smaller scale version of transferring an archive. Sometimes I’ll make a note, sometimes I won’t. But the post was already online somewhere on that date, even if it wasn’t here.
  • I’m splitting an old post into two or more smaller posts, in which case I’ll usually keep the date but adjust one of the times.
  • I’ve got an old draft that I never got around to posting, it’s no longer relevant today, but I’d like to make it available in its original context. In that case I’ll add a note that it was backdated.

There’s also the accidental backdating that sometimes happens when I create a draft in the mobile app and it decides to keep the upload date as the posting date. I try to fix these as soon as I notice. But that’s not really the same thing!

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I’ve had the “Google Assistant” on my phone for a few weeks now. Since I don’t use the always-on voice activation, this means it’s pushing extra notifications based on what it thinks I want/can use. Fortunately it doesn’t do audio alerts, so it’s a lot less intrusive than it could be. I figured I’d give it a try and see if it turned out to be useful (or creepy).

The alerts I’ve gotten fall into the following categories:

  • Estimated commute time based on current traffic. This would be more useful if it wasn’t based on the freeway, which I never use to get to or from work because it’s such a pain. Though on a trip to San Francisco, it popped up transit delays, which would have been helpful if I’d actually been going anywhere beyond walking distance that day.
  • Weather changes. This is kind of useful, but I have a widget to show the same info.
  • Hours and offers for stores I have just left. At least three times, I’ve walked around a grocery store or Target for 30-40 minutes, consulting my shopping list on my phone all the way, and it has popped up with info when I load up the car. What’s the point of that?
  • Potentially useful information for someplace nearby, but that I’m not going to. I work near an airport, and it’s repeatedly sent me the terminal layout. (The one time I actually went to the airport, I was already on a shuttle to the remote terminal — which isn’t on that map, incidentally — before it sent me that one. Better than the return trip, though, when it sent me a map after I’d boarded the plane.) Once it tried to help me with a mall restaurant while I was at a different restaurant. Another time it sent me info about a hotel I had driven past.
  • News articles about Trump. As if they’re hard to find. No further info in the notice, just “There is a new article about President Trump.” (Or something along those lines — I don’t recall the exact phrasing.)
  • Premiere dates for two TV shows that I watch. This one impressed me, since it correctly picked out two of three returning shows that I watch, and has not tried to plug anything else. It makes me wonder what it’s mined to figure that out, but I’m impressed it caught the nuance of which two DC/CW shows I watch. (OK, Flash is easy, but it somehow figured out that I was interested in Supergirl but not Arrow or Legends of Tomorrow.)

At this point, I think the experiment has run its course. The only category that’s been consistently useful is the TV premiere schedule… and that only comes up a couple of times a year.