A good explanation of the Solarwinds hack using candy.
Author: Carl Page 14 of 151
I recently posted my review of the iPhone 13 Pro, which I thought was a fun review, but didn’t rack up the same number of views as I had hoped it would. When I mentioned this on Twitter, someone mentioned that they expected people were burned out on reviews of the phone already, so they weren’t looking for another one. They were totally right, too! I personally watched a bunch of reviews of the new iPhones when the embargo dropped, but I’ve skipped the rest in my feed that happened after the embargoed ones dropped.
Why Reviews are Hard for Smaller Reviewers
I saw this post by Matt Birchler earlier today and it struck a chord with me and I replied to his post on Micro.blog but also wanted to share it here because it’s something I’d like to see more of in the review world.
Everyone and their 7th cousin is out there writing unboxing and Hot Takes™ on the new things.
Who is out there writing the “I’ve had this a week or a month and here’s how it feels” posts?
What about Here’s the X things I felt right when I got it. And here’s how I feel now after using it for a 2 weeks?
The world is flooded with people giving their First Looks. But there’s much less real world experiences. How does it actually feel to use day-to-day. Maybe it’s because the views aren’t there for it? Or maybe it’s not sexy because the First Lookers have already abandoned their device for the New Thing™.
I don’t have an answer but the first one out of the gate can tell me what I can see with my own eyes. I want something more.
- Tell me what annoys you that you did not think would matter?
- Tell me about a feature you were excited for but haven’t used since Day 1?
- Tell me about something you didn’t know about and how can’t live without?
- Tell me something that made you smile.
- Tell me something that made you mad.
- What’s something you didn’t know about until a friend’s friend told you? Or you saw in a Tiktok comment on an unrelated video that changed everything for you?
There’s such a gold rush to be first and earliest and loudest out of the gate. But you’re also saying the same thing as everyone else. Give me your impressions as a consumer.
At the end of the day, I trust and enjoy the reviews of people people with devices instead of the Tech Reviewers who have already moved on to the next device, computer, phone, gadget.
We promote people into management and we just hope that they figure it out. And then we stand, mouth agape, when things go sideways. And this isn’t just a problem for our new managers. We are 40 years into this strategy and now the overwhelming majority of the workforce came up through this same form of occupational hazing. Here’s a new job. It’s very high stakes. It’s totally different from what you’ve done to date. And the skill set isn’t intuitive at all. You’re smart. You’ll figure it out. And if not, you’re fired. Good luck.
Anne Helen petersen’s How to Actually Build a Better Boss
I love when one of my favorites writers interviews some of my other favorite writers. I love Raw Signal’s work and when I saw they were being interviewed I was delighted to read more of their work from someone also deeply interested in work and work culture.
One popular trend is to implement a what I would consider a software development pipeline and not a blogging system. I love technology as much as the next nerd, but I do not understand this trend of increasing the dependencies and technical infrastructure for turning Markdown into HTML.
The Modern Complexity of the Simple Blog – Macdrifter
This is why I still use WordPress despite the block editor being hostile to wanting to type words in Markdown. I look at the plain text options of the world and wonder when it became so hard to turn text into slightly different looking text.
I don’t want to be a developer or install Docker and 15 tools. Hugo, Pelican, Jekyll are all needlessly complex ways to make blog posts out of words. There’s a reason WordPress powers the blogging web outside of walled social mediums.
I want to write words.
I want to style them with Markdown.
I want to add the occasion picture.
I want to publish those words with pictures.
WordPress makes that easy.
I saw Mike over at Initial Charge link to Listenbox Turns YouTube Channels Into Podcasts. This is a neat idea and something I’ve been doing sparingly with longer-form Youtube content that is mainly audio.
However, I don’t need to pay a subscription for another thing in my life I’ll use on occasion. So I tweaked my Youtube-dl setup to pull audio from Youtube videos instead of the video itself.
First, I have to thank Jason for his youtube-dl setup which I replicated in a container on my server at home. He’s updated his configuration to support M1 Macs and some fancy iPhone shortcuts.
I have mine running on Ubuntu sitting in a container in proxmox in my office.
I’ve created a small shell script called music.sh. The contents are below, which I’ll explain.
# YTDL-Music Playlist - Audio Only - Goes to Music folder
/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl \
--extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --embed-thumbnail --ignore-errors \
-o "/mnt/Youtube/Music/%(title)s.%(ext)s" \
--download-archive /var/www/video/music.txt \
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9C818BCBDA822A24The first line is a comment reminding me of what this is and does.
/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl – The location where I have youtube-dl installed.
--extract-audio – Downloads only the audio and discards the video.
--audio-format mp3 – Sets the format to MP3 for compatability.
--embed-thumbnail – Embeds the thumbnail from the Youtube video. Sometimes useful, sometime not. But it’s nice to have some kind of artwork on the file.
--ignore-errors` – Skips errors like if a video is removed or not able to be downloaded for some reason.
-o "/mnt/Youtube/Music/%(title)s.%(ext)s" – The -o stands for output and tells youtube-dl where to save the file. In my case, I have it saved to my NAS mounted through NFS at /mnt/Youtube/Music.
The title and extension are pulled right from an example output. I don’t know what the lowercase s means. I just used it because the examples showed it.
--download-archive /var/www/video/music.txt – I write a log of everything I download so if I delete it after watching it, it doesn’t get pulled back down every single time. The file logs the youtube ID as opposed to the title or something human-readable but it’s better than nothing.
Finally, the URL links to the Youtube playlist where I want to download from. This makes triggering the downloads as simple as adding a file to that playlist and letting youtube-dl do the rest.
How does youtube-dl know to check the list for new videos? I have a cron job set to run the script every 10 minutes. So anything newly added to the playlist will get downloaded.
*/10 * * * * sh /var/www/video/music.shOnce I download the audio, it gets picked up by Plex. Plex is set to watch that folder and add new content it finds to the library as audio. So I can download music, podcasts uploaded to Youtube, or technical shows where the content is largely audio.
It works well other than the hiccups any self-hosted setup can run into and it costs my nothing additional since I’m already paid for the computer and pay for the electricity/internet anyway at home.