Allen Versfeld

Urban Astronomer Podcaster
Director at Monoceros Digital Consulting
AWS gun for hire, Linux/Unix consultant
He/him

Sometimes I write articles for universetoday.com
Trying to expand Monoceros to provide a range of Mastodon services (Feel free to let me know of any you might want!)

Lapsed #astronomer, exhausted #dad, small business owner, reader of books, player of #games, wrestler of #python, #admin of systems.

#SouthAfrica

Public Key

npub19uzcgvyzrcxrrm2pr6l64jhyyedw4cdkfkns8dctuqvvsvnedr0sv6lxgg

NIP-05 Address

uastronomer_at_mastodon.monoceros.co.za@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsz7pvyxzppurp3a4q3a0a2etjzvkh2uxmymfcrku97qxxgxfuk3hcx3ddwy

Author Public Key

npub19uzcgvyzrcxrrm2pr6l64jhyyedw4cdkfkns8dctuqvvsvnedr0sv6lxgg

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Last Notes

2024-03-25 10:18:55

Hey question: are British ISPs still doing that thing where they sell you Fibre, but what you actually get is copper (with some fibre in the backhaul somewhere)?

2024-03-14 18:14:05

Real confessions of a Mastodon admin:
*deep breath*
I don't moderate trending topics. I turned that feature off, so they just run on their own.
Because it's a single-user instance. I never looked at trending topics on Twitter, and I never look at them here. I don't care what people I don't follow are talking about, because the people I follow aren't talking about it.
So I just let it go on and do its thing. Nobody sees it, not even me, so what's the harm?
#MastoAdmin

2024-03-11 11:04:57

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@npub1wuw…pjs5 Wow... I like to make it fail in the opposite direction: when asked to identify all the bridges, I'll click something that isn't, and skip one that is. It lets me through at least half of the time.

2024-03-03 12:04:02

In a minor act of independence, I updated my gmail settings to make ALL emails available via imap, not just the most recent ten thousand. I want local copies on my own hard drive that I can back up myself, that I can still access if they block my account for some reason, and that I can import into a new account on some other service if I perhaps feel like doing that one day.
That was Friday. Thunderbird is about a third of the way importing messages.

2024-02-21 05:21:11

After much pondering, here's my problem with the concept of "Light mode / Dark mode" on a frikken website.
I get that the cool kids all want l33t haX0r gothputers, and those with less-than-stellar eyesight prefer something they can read and these are two valid viewpoints and I value their contribution, there are no wrong answers.
But like... all it really offers is a limited Customization feature, right? Only, your choices are "Functional" and "This one uncustomizable customization". Weird!
Why not let people customize their own preferred view? Why not offer more themes? Why not let people write their own stylesheets if they really want to customize?
It just seems like so much unnecessary work to get Dark Mode working properly and looking amazing and also being usable, for so little return, ya know?
Windows 3.1 offered a whole heap of themes and colour sets, most of them trash (the after-image of Hot Dog is *still* burned into my retina, like an old CRT monitor), and at 7 floppy discs it was smaller than half the websites I have open right now, I mean if you're gonna do it, do it all the way right?

2024-01-22 14:16:06

Oh cool, my solar power provider (who I've said good things about before) have just given me a referral code!
Anybody in Southern Africa looking to get in some solar panels, or battery backups to manage load shedding should let me know - I'll get a small kickback if you go through Hohm Energy and use my referral link :)
#LoadShedding #Solar

2024-01-05 07:44:20

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@npub17lg…9uux Wait did... did they just total up all their regions and call it "Global"?
Is that supposed to mean that people globally spent 384.2 seconds on X, but locally spent much less time than that? Or is it meant to be a sort of average, but for people who need big numbers on the chart?

2024-01-03 08:26:59

A recent headline: "Energy experts have been caught off-guard by the sudden return of load shedding"
Some experts, we all knew this would happen, Eskom predicted it in their own releases, the respite was mostly due to everybody being on holiday and industry taking a break, OF COURSE there wouldn't be enough power when all the factories went back to work

2023-12-23 21:19:58

My wife has been watching makeover-but-for-your-home shows lately and we both agree that they promote far too much "here is a huge bookshelf with thousands of books packed wrong".
These people, lovely warm creative passionate people, don't seem to know what it is that people do with books. They think they're just decorative, they're statement pieces that tell visitors that you are intelligent and informed and probably know lots of big words.
Only, the way they stack those shelves rather spoils the illusion. Because if you ever intend to actually read a book from your collection, you'll want some way of actually finding it. If you've got thousands of books, like how they decorate these homes, you need a system.
Stack them alphabetically. Group them by author. By topic. Use the Dewey decimal system. Sort them chronologically. It doesn't matter, so long as it works for you.
There are only two wrong systems:
Sorting by colour (unless you're looking for Fighting Fantasy game books, which classically all had bright green spines) does not provide any clues to where a book might be because the printers colour choices are generally purely aesthetic.
And the other is putting them backwards so that you get a nice neat uniform minimalist look, with no messy words to distract from the designer's beautiful vision.
You have to choose what's more important between form and function. If it's all about form, then why not ditch the printed volumes and buy fake books, the ones made from a moulded piece of plastic that looks like the spines of old books. You can make the shelves 5cm thick, pack the fake books flat against the wall and save valuable floor space. I won't judge if you do, not everybody likes to read books, it is fine!
But if you do actually like books, for what they are and not just for the comforting way they look in your home, then you're going to need a system that doesn't actively stop you from reading.

2023-12-21 20:07:28

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@npub1wuw…pjs5 Oh wow! I remember absolutely blasting through many of those in high school! I still have some of the scenes from them burned into my memory.

2023-12-09 11:53:45

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@npub1cmg…rzd2 To add: "You have to know the conventions and iconography of a given user interface". It's why people hate switching from windows to Mac, or vice versa (or LOL, Linux). It's not that the other option is bad, it's that it's different and now they have to update their muscle memory to click the mouse slightly differently in different locations, understand different focus behaviours, all of that.
Change means learning, and people only ever want to learn things that interest them, which is why nerds who love tech will change but regular folk who just want to get their work done will not.
Anyway, I've drifted off topic. This is what the "Social media should work out the box intuitively" folk don't realise is actually happening. No social media software has EVER been like that, there's only "Stuff I've used for years and can operate in my sleep," and everything else.

2023-11-23 14:39:13

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@npub18lj…80hq It sounds like, once you get to a certain follower count, this place turns into 2016-era Twitter?
The misanthropes (who seem to be more in it for the cool vibe because 'humanity' seems to just be an abstract concept describing All Those Other Losers, Not Like Us Cool Kids), were all over my timeline. And the "I find your silence on *unrelated topic* extremely telling" crowd were a running joke for years!
And this is almost reassuring, in an odd way. These people are clearly everywhere, and apparently it's not abnormal 😊

2023-11-21 11:33:43

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@npub1wuw…pjs5 I've always found you can get the best results by not using Discovery ;)

2023-11-13 13:14:39

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@npub1gfd…7gg6 "Password must be between 8 and 12 characters long"

2023-11-11 09:06:29

Please don't laugh, but when exactly is Black Friday? So many adverts pushing so many variants on the theme (Black November, Black October, a whole rainbow thing where each day gets a colour with it's own deals) that I've forgotten how it's supposed to work.

2023-10-25 11:10:08

Oh wow! Turns out one of the Wikimedia Foundation's biggest donors is... *drumroll*
Elon Musk (or his foundation, at least)
https://wikimediaendowment.org/#benefactors

2023-10-21 13:31:48

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@npub1zdp…vqv8 I once had a vision of allowing smaller businesses to market themselves using the Fediverse. Part of the offering was providing them with their own branded instance, where they could control messaging, have intrinsically verified accounts, and integrate the whole thing into their existing websites. But it turned out that advertisers want tracking - they've gotten used to knowing very precisely who will see which advert, partly because it lets them target ads ever-more specifically (struggling to keep a straight face here, because in practice that promise is very seldom kept), but also because it allows them to do something that ATL ads never could: Track the effectiveness of the ad itself. Real data as to how many people actually saw each ad, and when they saw it, and whether they actually engaged with it, as opposed to statistical projections of how many people *might* see it, and professional intuition (ie. random guesswork from somebody who knows what the client wants to hear) about whether the ad actually worked.
So I tried to figure out ways of tracking ad performance, in a way that would work on Fediverse but would also respect individual privacy (This last not only because it's the right thing to do, but because decentralized moderation would absolutely murder any instance trying to do this the traditional unethical way).
Anyway. I'm not an expert in any of these topics, and I couldn't figure out how to make it work. Not technically, not ethically. And from the deafening silence of marketing specialists on this network, I'm guessing nobody else has figured it out either. So I gave up on the whole idea. This is not a marketing platform. The only thing you can ever hope for is small-scale personal endorsements. Those are the most effective, powerful tools in the marketing arsenal, but they tend to scale poorly :)

2023-10-06 18:53:39

XCOM: Terror from the Deep is basically the same game as XCOM: Enemy Unknown, only much harder and with different graphics and assets. They clearly didn't want to mess with a winning formula when they made the sequel. But, like, it's really hard. I very seldom survive past my first few missions before giving in up frustration.
And yet... I prefer it. It's better, somehow. The underwater aspect, starting with those retro diving suits that your aquanauts wear into battle, the coral reefs and cthulu-esque monsters... I guess I've always liked the aesthetic of nautical horror, with the ships and the mysterious depths and all that.
#DosGames #RetroGaming

2023-10-06 06:23:43

So I have a question about the current sweeping AI trend. We keep hearing about how much water it needs to cool all those enormous new data centres. Why does it need so much compute?
I mean, creating the models is pretty hardcore, but once it's done it's done. They aren't running a supercomputer for each individual chatgpt session, you can run it yourself on a reasonably beefy home PC. Creating the model is where the real work is, but once it's done you can just download it to your PC when you need it.
Right? Wrong?
The previous Big Sexy was blockchain. That was also a big data centre bad guy, only then we worried about how much carbon was being released to generate all the electricity they used. We got stories about how secret blockchain mining bunkers were using half a nearby town's electricity supply, but this iteration we don't mention that at all because it's all about the water.
And there's no push-back. No press releases about how the water cooling system at the new datacentre is actually fine because the water is returned to the system, or it's closed-cycle so they fill up a reservoir once and never take another drop of our water, or they only use undrinkable grey water or something. Or challenging the claims about how much water is being used.
So who is spinning these stories? Is there a PR agency somewhere being paid to ensure we don't blame the Microsofts and Metas of the world for global heating, and that's why we're griping about water instead?

2023-09-26 17:23:16

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@npub1hvz…mle9 No no, I agree completely. I know when I publish episodes, I individualise cover art for episodes in the web view, but keep it constant in the RSS feed, for exactly this reason. So people finding an episode by google on the show website, or who subscribed by email or something, get to see the covert art (usually a nice photo of the person I'm interviewing). But in your podcasting app, where my episodes are mixed up with all your other subscriptions, you see the show logo.

2023-09-14 12:33:50

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@npub1j54…2yme The fashion police are real?!

2023-08-06 09:26:38

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@npub1trd…ussx Any idea why? Maybe it's about security ("No cash on premises, not worth trying to rob us"), or cost ("Banks charge so much for cash deposits that we lose money on cash transactions")?

2023-08-01 08:18:24

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@npub1kja…e5gq @npub1sce…r0jl oh wow, i stand corrected.
But also not surprised. It feels like this stuff is still very new, I can't get it to work the way I want because none of the options do what I expect them to do. So I pay careful attention to anybody else talking about it so that I can try to pick up clues ☺️

2023-08-01 07:47:06

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@npub1kja…e5gq @npub1sce…r0jl If we're using the same plugins, I think that it's handled the same as if somebody leaves a comment or a pingback. So if I'm right, you should be able to turn off email notifications under the comments setup?

2023-06-27 07:36:17

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@npub1p8s…4tga That makes a lot more sense than what I've heard before.
Something I imagine is that this whole thing could just be about risk management.
I imagine the conversation going "Here's another new project. This one is showing good growth, could be a competitor in another 5 years so go ahead and put together a team to start preparing a response, just in case"
Ooh, another idea: Big companies hate to be left behind on The Next Big Thing, so they all flirted with cryptocurrency, AI, NFTs, metaverse... Gotta have an active project to show when the shareholders ask about it.
I'm sorry, you asked for mansplaining and I gave you uncertain speculation. I'll try to do better next time 😓

2023-06-26 08:21:59

I'm struggling to change my logging level. According to the docs on joinmastodon.org, I should be adding RAILS_LOG_LEVEL=$loglevel to my environment, where $loglevel is one of info, warn, error, fatal or unknown.
I've added export RAILS_LOG_LEVEL=warn to my init script but it's still pumping out info level stuff. Any suggestions?
#mastoadmin

2023-06-23 11:48:31

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@npub1sc5…u9cz MySQL is currently a revenue stream for them, as is Java (Current employer pays for MySQL support, previous paid for Java). There were other smaller products they wanted to absorb into their existing enterprise range - I was personally affected by OpenSSO suddenly changing it's licensing and all documentation suddenly vanishing behind the paywall.
I think Oracle didn't anticipate the Open Source nature of all that software being a problem because they wanted the brands, and the teams who did the bulk of the dev work. They did not anticipate mass resignations, entire teams leaving to start their own company and forking their product and continuing dev under a new name 😂
So OpenSSO became OpenAM, MariaDB was born, and probably a whole bunch of others that I don't remember because they didn't affect anything I used personally.

2023-06-15 11:43:11

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@npub1zdp…vqv8 @npub1lvu…3ua2 And then there's world-building. The genres I like are set in worlds that are slowly revealed through the story, worlds that are self-consistent and dynamic. Aspects of those worlds (nations, power structures, economies, resources, geography) all bounce off each other and work together to create something that feels like a real place. I just don't see how an LLM could even begin to do something like that.

2023-06-12 06:12:19

Starting to think very hard about de-googling myself.
This won't be easy.

2023-05-14 07:39:41

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@npub16fs…xw8z @npub1rxp…x40v @npub1sx0…tnk6 Great minds think alike!

2023-04-25 07:39:49

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#[0] I feel so exclusive 😃