Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (Books 2020, 7)

I decided I needed something SF-y that I knew I’d enjoy: a reread, in other words. Something with spaceships. Prowling my shelves, this is what I came to. No spaceships, but fast skateboards and faster motorbikes, katanas and glass knives; and of course, the Metaverse.

I was struck by how little of it I remembered, but it is something like 26 years since I read it (published 1992, so I’m guessing I read it in 94 or so).

Hiro Protagonist, the fantastically-named hero, is a hacker.1 He’s also the greatest samurai swordsman alive, supposedly. And he’s delivering pizzas for the Mafia. Which fact is the first view we have of how the world – or at least America – has changed. There is almost no government, no laws; and everything is split up into ‘burbclaves’ and franchises, run by companies, churches, or criminal organisations.

But there is the Metaverse. Nothing we have today is close to what it is like, but it’s what virtual reality wants to be, and maybe will be one day.

The internet is everywhere (which of course wasn’t the case when it was written). Though phoneboxes still exist, and using them is one way to get into the Metaverse. And if you want mobile access, you have to ‘go gargoyle.’ Which is to say, wear your special goggles and carry a computer around with you, strapped to your body. There are mobile phones, but the conversion of them into pocket computers is not something that Stephenson foresaw. Or at least, not something he made use of here.

The Ending

I had the impression that everyone thought that early Stephenson had problems with endings. I mean, I had that impression myself, and have alluded to it here before. And I thought that this was one with a slightly weak ending.

But it isn’t at all. The bit that I remembered – the climax that takes place in the Metaverse – comes at the end of a tense chase/fight sequence, and while it depicts a scene that might be anticlimactic for the people in-universe who witness it, it’s fully satisfying and sound to us, the readers. Then the last couple of chapters wind things up neatly back in the outer world.

The criticism that might be levelled at it, especially in SF terms, is that we don’t see how the world has been changed by the events of the story. But I think that can easily be left to our imaginations.

A genuine classic.

  1. Interesting to note that even programmers for the government are called ‘hackers’ here. In the positive sense, of course. ↩︎

Lying Sack

Nice to see the gentle description of Mary Wakefield in Wikipedia this morning:

The start of Mary Wakefield's Wikipedia entry, this morning

In case you don’t know, Wakefield is married to Dominic Cummings. She works for The Spectator, and wrote the now-famous piece about her and Cummings’s experience suffering from Covid-19. All without mentioning their drive across the country.

Hence the delightful opening – now removed, predictably – in Wikipedia, describing her as “a lying sack of potatoes”.

The Beat(les) Generation is Slipping Away

Sad to read in The Guardian that Astrid Kirchherr1 has died. She was 81. That’s not a bad age, and it’s not like I had followed her career. I just knew her as a photographer who had worked with The Beatles, and been Stuart Sutcliffe’s partner till he died.

But from my early reading of Beatles books – like The Beatles: An Illustrated Record – onward, I was aware of her as part of their story, their mythology.

More than that, though, as the article above, as well as her obituary, will tell you: she was the one who gave them their early look. She made them the “lovable moptops.” They’d have been successful without the haircuts, of course, but there’s no denying the importance of that early image.

I think I’m saddened more because of what her death represents. I was born the year The Beatles took America. They had long split up by the time I developed any musical awareness.2 But they were the first band I really got interested in, when my sister gave me a tape. They were my favourites until punk came along, and I love them still.

But that whole generation is ageing – well, who isn’t, of course – and will soon be gone. And mine not too far behind it. So what it all comes down to is that Astrid’s death reminds me of my own mortality, and there’s no excuse for that!

Brilliant photos, though.

  1. I note that I always thought her name was Kirchnerr. But there’s no “n” to be found. ↩︎

  2. Though I did shock my grandma when I was very small, by singing “Obla-di, Obla-da.” She thought I was “swearing”. And it might have been The Marmalade’s version that I’d heard at that time. ↩︎

Tip: How to Snooze iPhone Alarms Using Hardware Buttons

I don’t know whether people know about this iOS feature. I discovered it by accident a year or two back. Before that I used to snooze my alarms by drowsily scrabbling for my phone, prying my eyes open, then trying to tap the correct onscreen button.

Then one morning the alarm was too loud – or it might have been too quiet, I don’t recall – and I tried to change the volume. When I pressed the volume button, the alarm instantly stopped. I thought I had cancelled it by accident, until it rang again the customary nine minutes later.1

Since then I’ve always snoozed my alarms that way. But nearly every time I do, I think, “Do people know about this feature?” Because I don’t think I’ve ever seen it written down. And I’m going to post this without DuckDucking first, so that the existence of some article in The Verge or somewhere doesn’t spoil my flow.

I had thought that pressing the power button cancelled the alarm, rather than snoozing it, but I just checked, and it also snoozes it. So if you reach out, eyes closed, and press anything on the side of your iPhone, you’ll get another nine minutes.

In the interest of fully informing you, dear reader, I’ve just checked what the Home button does; and it appears that does cancel the alarm. So keep your presses to the sides.

I should note that I still have an iPhone 7. I’ve no reason to believe the behaviour is significantly different on more recent models, but obviously on the 10-series phones (X, XR, XS and the various 11s) you don’t have the Home button, so something different might happen. Let me know if you find out.

  1. Why nine minutes, I’ve always wondered? Presumably ten is just a bit too long, and anything else would be too short. Why isn’t it configurable? Because, I assume, Apple have always been a highly opinionated company. ↩︎

Homemade Rolls

Not to blow my own trumpet, but I made these rolls today. They are the closest thing I’ve ever had this side of Scotland to the rolls I grew up with.

My New Rolls

I used this recipe that was published in The Scotsman. It involves overnight fermentation in the fridge, and the trick to getting the crispy outside is coating them with a mixture of plain flour and rice flour before baking.

Main problem is 500g of flour makes only eight rolls! And it’s kinda hard to get bread flour at the moment.

This Is No Time to Unlock

Boris Johnson’s update to Britain’s – or in fact, only England’s – lockdown conditions has confused people. But even if it hadn’t, it’s too soon for us to be opening things up again.

By “us” I mean everyone: the human race as a whole.1 Everywhere in Europe, to go by the papers, there’s talk of easing lockdown conditions. In Australia people can meet in groups of up to ten.

But the virus hasn’t gone away. It’s still out there, being breathed out and in. Waiting for our preventative measures to fail. Not to anthropomorphise it.

It’s not over. It’s not close to being over. It won’t be over till there’s a vaccine. Or a cure, but a vaccine seems more likely.

  1. Don’t get me started on how politicians, at least here and in the US, have been referring to a “national emergency,” when it’s so much more serious than that. ↩︎

When Harry Met Sally..., 1989 - ★★★★

Somehow I’d gone this long without ever seeing this. I’m glad I put it right now. The dialogue is glorious! Nora Ephron may be my favourite screenwriter after Aaron Sorkin, where dialogue is concerned.

The ending flops a bit. In fact, I think I’d have enjoyed it more if they hadn’t got together, but hey, what can you do?

See in Letterboxd

Returning Blogs

Here’s a reason (another reason) why feed readers are great: Tom Coates of PlasticBag.org has written his first post in seven years. There’s no reason to unsubscribe from blogs that haven’t posted for a while – no reason even to notice that fact normally – so up it pops in NetNewsWire1 today.

The post itself is good – a bit meta (entirely meta) – but there’s nothing wrong with that.

I keep seeing suggestions that blogging is undergoing a renaissance, and I think it might be true. Of course, lots of us never went away, either as readers or writers. But it’s good to welcome Tom back.

  1. Other feed readers are available. ↩︎

No More...

Sad to hear of the death of Dave Greenfield from Covid-19. The Stranglers were not really like other punk bands. But they were the band that got me into punk. I heard ‘No More Heroes’ on the radio one weekend, after hearing my school friends talk about punk, and I never really looked back.

I never saw them live, and I didn’t follow their career after the first three or four albums; but there’s a lot of good stuff in those early ones.

Greenfield is, I think, the first musician of that generation to die from the pandemic.

Ayoade On Top by Richard Ayoade (Books 2020, 6)

This is Richard Ayoade’s detailed analysis of the 2003 film View From the Top, directed by Bruno Barreto and starring Gwyneth Paltrow. It is, by all accounts, a masterwork.

By Ayoade’s account, at least. I haven’t seen it. Ayoade is a comedian. The book is pretty funny. The film, I suspect, is quite bad.

Static Leads to Static

I’m almost beginning to wish I hadn’t switched my site to static generation. Not really, though. I’m very pleased with the way the site is performing, with how it looks, and with how easy it is to change things.

It’s just the non-static parts that I want to get working that are complex. By which I mean comments, of course, and Webmentions.

Comments are obvious. And the “obvious” way to make them work with a static site – and one that has good support built into Nikola, the generator application I’m using – is Disqus. But Disqus is known to track its users and show ads, and I don’t want that for anyone who might comment here.

So I’ve been trying other options. But none of them work as easily as you’d hope. There are always complexities, difficulties, bits you have to glue together or even build yourself.

So far I’ve tried:

  • Isso: you have to run a service on your site. I couldn’t get the service to respond.
  • Staticman: I couldn’t get its service to start. A problem with configuring the private key setting.
  • Remarkbox: at the time of writing this is still active, but I’m not sure I’ll keep it. It works like Disqus, in that the comments are hosted on a third-party site, which is not really in keeping with the whole static site/indieweb ethos. It’s not advertising driven like Disqus, but it behaves a bit strangely, at least on here. We’ll see, though.

Lots of blogs manage without comments, of course, including many of the most successful and long-running ones. But I’ve always had a fondness for them. They were building communities online long before there was a Facebook or a Twitter.

The other way to join the conversation is to send and accept Webmentions. I won’t try to explain those here, but again, there’s a certain amount of infrastructure needed to get them working, and I’m not quite there yet.

Still, it all means I’m learning things, which is good. And my posts and pages are just text files, which is as they should be.

Repairability Is Good

It’s good when you can repair things. We had a problem with the switch on the kettle the other day, and I was able to open it up, put various bits back in place, and get it working again. It tripped not one but three circuit breakers in the house and blew the fuse in its plug, all while it was failing, but that’s what safety devices are for, I guess.

And today I’ve just fixed the switch on our hoover. Actually it’s a Miele, and this video by an Australian repair person was really helpful. He’s dealing with a different model, but it’s the same problem – the switch wouldn’t stay on – and the same construction and even part number.

I was able to get the footswitch off following what he did, and order a replacement part online. It arrived today, and all went back together really smoothly, and now our hoover Miele vacuum cleaner1 is working again.

Oddly the part number on the replacement is different from that on the broken one, which matched the number the video guy quotes.

Anyway, while I’d have tried these repairs under normal circumstances, it’s especially useful at the moment, when it’s not like you can go shopping, or get someone to come in and fix things.2

  1. I’ve never taken to calling them “vacuum cleaners.” I grew up with Hoovers, so that always seems like the right word. ↩︎

  2. If there even are still people who do that. ↩︎

Tate and Tennant Killing It

I see that, unlike Little Britain, Catherine Tate is still very funny when she brings back old characters for charity. Especially with David Tennant’s help.

“Being Scottish is not an underlying condition!”

Misbehaviour, 2020 - ★★★½

Good wee film about the women who protested at the 1970 Miss World show. Based on what actually happened. 

Surprising to learn that the phrase “Women’s Liberation” only originated then.

See in Letterboxd

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (Books 2020, 5)

I’ve never read Greene before, except for I think one short story, and a chapter or two of his autobiography. This is fascinating. It’s the story of a Catholic priest in Mexico at a time when the church was banned. I had no idea that such a time existed: I think of Mexico as a very Catholic country, so such oppression is surprising.

The genius of it is that all the characters are so convincing. From the “whisky priest” himself – sinful, still believing, considering himself damned, yet trying to do what he can for people he feels are his parishioners; through to the hardline atheist lieutenant of police that is trying to find him. No-one is entirely good or bad, but there is sympathy for them all.

It’s justly considered a classic.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, 1988 - ★★★

Well this is a lot funnier than the title would suggest. I think I had always thought it would be kind of bleak, but it’s not at all. There’s betrayal, attempted suicide, attempted murder, and a lot of property damage; but it’s very lighthearted.

See in Letterboxd

Sunset Boulevard, 1950 - ★★★½

Good to watch an old movie for a strange. Great example of starting with the end and telling the whole story in flashback. The voiceover gets a bit wearing, especially when it’s telling you things you can see perfectly well happening on screen.

It’s quite a strange film, and another example of Hollywood telling stories about itself.

See in Letterboxd

Website Changes

Abstract/TL;DR

I’m changing my site. Everything should go on working, but comments will disappear for a while.

Details

I’m changing both the server my site runs on, and the way it’s built. I’ve been using WordPress for the blog since I started it in 2006 (before that I used LiveJournal, and at some point I imported those posts, so the earliest entries go back to 2002). Just recently, though, I started having a problem with it.

Everything was still running OK, but I couldn’t post to it from external sources. So I couldn’t use MarsEdit, which is my preferred way to post, or the Micro.blog app for status updates, or even services like IFTTT, which has been adding notes and ratings for all the films I’ve watched over the last few months, from Letterboxd.

I’m sure I could have tracked down the cause and fixed it. But then there’s also the fact that I recently got round to upgrading to WordPress 51. I had avoided that because I didn’t like the new editor when I tried it out before. I don’t know quite why, but eventually I bit the bullet and upgraded.

And I hate it. I never really cared for the online editing experience at the best of times, which is part of the reason I preferred using MarsEdit. But I just have a visceral bad reaction to the new editor.

Add to that that static sites are a) much faster to serve and b) what “all the cool kids” are using nowadays. I started to look into moving to a static site.

The two big players here are Jekyll and Hugo. I’ve used Jekyll before, when I was at SAHSU. The documentation for the RIF2 is hosted at GitHub Pages, and that uses Jekyll, so it’s worth having a local implementation for testing, which I did.

But as a programmer, there can be times when you want to change the tools you use. Jekyll is written in Ruby; Hugo is in Go. I don’t know either of those, and while I like learning new languages, that wasn’t the purpose of this exercise.

In short, I wanted something that is written in Python, and I found it in Nikola.3 For reasons too boring to explain, I had trouble with it on my existing server, so I’ve set up a new one at Linode. I’ll be switching over to it later today. You shouldn’t see any changes, except:

  • All the comments on the blog will disappear. They’re not lost, and I plan to get them back, but I need to find the best way to do that. For now, comment via Twitter or Micro.blog.
  • The Atom feed may be broken. I’ll try to get that fixed. The RSS feed should still be fine, and at the same location as before. Anything that uses it should carry on working without any fuss.
  • If you follow me via WordPress.com (Hi Andrew), sorry. That’s going away. Try my RSS feed instead. Or Twitter; all posts automatically get Tweeted to my timeline.

  1. Which may have in part caused the problem. ↩︎

  2. Rapid Inquiry Facility. ↩︎

  3. Named after Nikola Tesla. ↩︎

The Last Bike Ride

I came off my bike today. Don’t worry, I’m not hurt, beyond a couple of scrapes. But as I was going down – you know how people say things go into slow motion? It wasn’t quite like that, but I did have time to think, “Shit, I hope they don’t have to call an ambulance.” And once I was down and realised that nothing was broken, I thought, “I hope no-one comes running to help, cos I’ll have to wave them away.”

No-one came to help, of course – mainly because there was no-one around. But all this is ironic, given that I read a piece a week or so back by a keen cyclist, saying he wanted to ride, but wasn’t going to, because if he got hurt then he’d be taking much-needed resources from the NHS.

“That’s very noble,” I thought, and then proceeded to completely ignore the implied advice.

No longer. From now until this is over, I’ll be exercising indoors, or at most, in the garden. It’s a shame, because I do love to get out on the bike, especially in the spring. But everyone has to put up with limitations during this, and this is a pretty minor one.

Howl's Moving Castle, 2004 - ★★★★½

I read the book to the kids years ago, but I wasn’t sure whether I’d seen this. Turns out I hadn’t, though I must’ve seen a few scenes, because I was familiar with the imagery.

Anyway, this is wonderful. Right up there with the best of the Studio Ghibli fims.

See in Letterboxd