I have determined that an hour or so of self-indulgence in mid-afternoon goes a long way toward keeping me happy, calm, and unscreaming. Mostly I've been playing some old computer games. So far I've gone through Myst (courtesy of ScummVM reading my old CD-ROM!), Monkey Island 1, a smattering of interactive fiction, and some Baba Is You (which gets very hard much faster than I was expecting; how brainbending is the back half of this game if I'm flummoxed already?! But I make slow progress and feel quite pleased with myself when I do). ScummVM even supports and detected The Making of Myst feature on my disc, which I hadn't expected. Still need to get back to that one day but it will have to keep until after Christmas break is over and everybody gets back onto a regular schedule again.

Something else that will have to keep is Get Lamp, a landmark documentary about interactive fiction. I don't monopolize the TV when my family is home, but I got far enough into it to learn some things about IF and how I feel about it. IF sometimes was (is?) held up as a story you can participate in, which is catnip to a books-and-games nerd like me, but the reality is somewhat different. IF has story but the gameplay is not the story itself; the gameplay is puzzles, mazes, mapping, playing Guess The Verb. And those are things that I dislike, am notoriously bad at, or both. This was useful to discover, because I had felt stupid for being bad at stories, but it's not the text that stymied me.

(I think I am overusing commas again. Gotta watch that or I spin up strings of text so long and tangled that even I who write them cannot parse them out.)

I keep not checking Dreamwidth in timely fashion. I may have gotten a setup that works for me, if I remember to use it. (I used to have an icon on my phone that would open Dw in my browser, but frequently my browser would have a bunch of tabs already open and it would get overwhelming and I'd mass close them or forget about it for days. Now I have more browsers installed on my phone, so I have one that is pretty much just for running Dw, and I have a Dw icon that opens into that. As it happens, this means the Dw icon that is displayed is less jaggy than before as well, which is not terribly important but does help in some small way.)

I wish Dw had a night mode site skin that was small screen and touchscreen friendly, but I suspect this is one of those things where you ask support or a dev about making that happen and they say "Sounds like a great project! When do you want to start?" Which makes some sense, but I have little free time and the focus of a hypercaffeinated, phobic squirrel.

And on that note, I suppose the laundry isn't going to fold itself. Have a great day, folks!

Guess who has two thumbs and (temporarily) wrecked her website! It's me! (And I got it fixed too!)

Haha, I wanted to do one thing with my website, and then I found other stuff I should do with it, and somewhere in the midst of it all, I discovered that it was all running on PHP 5.6! (Current is somewhere in the sevens/eights, for reference.) Long ago, I had meant to keep one subdomain (a version of Legend of the Green Dragon) running a then-slightly outdated version because it wouldn't work on newer ones, but apparently now either everything would be running insecure PHP or everything would have to be upgraded in one fell swoop. I took a moment to say goodbye to my LotGD install, toggled the upgrade stuff in cPanel, and clicked a button to finalize it.

And then nothing on my website would load!

Because of a snippet of decrepit code dating back to 2003!!

And then my famously spotty rural internet cut out!!!

I got it worked out though! Eventually. I don't remember what all went into the repairs, so maybe some rare helpful gremlin took pity on my stressy self and slipped something back into place, instead of out of it.

So that's sorted. Now if I can just convince Jellyfin to let me play my Christmas playlist... (Hopefully that's simpler. Strongly suspect the playlist simply no longer has a valid owner, and manually editing one in may fix it. We shall see!)

I've been having some fun. Last year I set up a Jellyfin server on my humble home computer. It works pretty well—very well, for a totally free product that connects many sorts of devices to your self-installed server—but I had a few friction points that I wanted to satisfy more completely, so I have been trying some stuff.

(Not so much stuff, because a bunch of things that otherwise sounded neat turned out to require Java, and I don't particularly want to reinstall Java on my computer after taking a silly amount of joy in getting to remove it quite some time ago. But still.)

Anyway, I was hoping to find a free, open-source music server that would support the Subsonic API, so that I could use one of many Android apps to stream music to my phone and cache it there for future re-listens. (Jellyfin, especially Gelli, works nicely for music, but neither has any support for downloading more than one track at a time, and both only work when connected to a server - no playback from offline cache, unless I've missed something lately.) All the main Subsonic forks are Java based, but I stumbled upon Navidrome, a separate project that supports the same API. I'm liking it a lot. Mind, I turned out to have a loooooot of work to do sorting and tagging my music correctly so that Navidrome could parse it correctly (don't even talk to me about Starmen.net's Mother 1 soundtrack and its several embedded typos), but I finally seem to have got it all Picarded up.

After trying several Subsonic API clients, I think I've settled on Ultrasonic as my fave so far. It's not as pretty as Gelli (none of the Subsonic clients I found are; they seem to range from "maybe a little dated" to "this storefront's version has not been updated since 2013"), but it works for me and isn't years out of date.

The other difficulty I had with Jellyfin was ebooks. Jellyfin persistently misidentified a subset of mine: it thought that a slice-of-life humour comic book was a true crime story; that a Hugo-winning time travel novel was about football; that a copy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was instead a biography of Shelley; that a supernatural romance was a Mickey Spillane noir. I could correct these mistakes when I found them, but I could not prevent Jellyfin from doing the initital misidentification.

And then I updated my Jellyfin install, and it re-pulled metadata for everything, even the books it had gotten wrong which I had specifically ordered it to never do again. So I had to trawl through every subfolder, again, looking for and correcting mistakes, again.

And if I want a way to get Jellyfin to start automatically when booting my computer, it will require me to re-scan everything from scratch. Including all the books, which I would need to search and correct. Again. That's because of a mistake I made early on with Jellyfin, but there's no correcting it now without embracing the hassle.

So now instead of Jellyfin, I have my ebooks folder set as a Windows (SMB) share. I can access it on my phone through Material Files, which had already become my default Android file manager even before I found it would solve this problem for me. Pretty sweet. Not at all fancy, no metadata search, no browsing through covers - and no snarling at Jellyfin, because the only mistakes lying within are ones I made myself. Plus it also helps me keep space free on my phone, since anything I download to it can be promptly shunted to my much larger PC hard drive. (I am pretty sure I have some sort of linguistic badness happening in that previous sentence, but I'm too tired to figure how to fix it and I just want to get a thing written here so I can be done and stop.)

Technology can be a pretty good helper sometimes.

On my computer, in any web browser, the spacebar scrolls one screen down per keypress. Shift+Space similarly scrolls up.

On my phone with external keyboard, Space worked as expected but Shift+Space switched keyboard language (in my case, between English - US and... English - US. Whoever chose this effect was not wise).

Turns out the secret is to install another software keyboard and set it as the default (it's still possible to switch back and forth). So now I have Shift+Space back and also my newly default software keyboard is Graffiti Pro (also available as Graffiti on Amazon Fire devices), so from now on I'm either typing like a real computer or writing on my screen like it's 1999. This is awesome! Whee, nerdery!

o/' I love keys, I love typing things o/' <3

I do love those moments when you're trying to do A Thing, and your searching turns up a forum post along the lines of "I was trying to do A Thing and it turns out it's much easier than I thought! All I had to do was insert Tab A into Slot Z." Here I was, writing code to handle things manually, and it turns out that all I have to do is populate PmWiki's $AuthList array and it's done. I mean, I'm still me, so I fiddled with a bunch of other stuff and got my error_log quite long, but I seem to have cleared up all the errors and learned some new stuff. Whee! Also, in the name of programming, I indulged in an extra Djew and I am quite sure that it shows. No regrets! Only caffeination!

I do have some non-internet things that I want to get done today, and I think I have just enough time left to get them done.

Have a good day, everyone!

Ugh, I'm so sick of looking at login screens right now. I spent a couple hours today working on my latest pet project: single sign-on integration between a forum and wiki for my writing group. There are still some things to iron out, but I appear to have gotten login-logout tied together at last. I still need to confirm that rights levels are being set correctly and there's a fair bit of cleanup around the auth system no longer in use, but that will have to wait. It's past suppertime and I've not even got something cooking. Probably high time I fix that.

Spent a good chunk of yesterday feeling unaccountably lazy and thick-brained. Kept trying to understand a problem I wanted to tackle, without success. I have figured out why it was so difficult! It has some something to do with how tired I am, and cold, and aching, and my throat hurts and the back of my mouth is puffy and bright red!

So that's not good news, exactly, but it is definitely a reason. Based on my Google searches today, it's viral, so antibiotics wouldn't do anything except help breed superbacteria. It does mean that I'm missing on extended family stuff today—no way am I exposing toddlers or elderly folks to the creeping yuck infesting my throat—but it also means that I have nothing to worry about basically all day except taking care of myself. That's surprisingly pleasant. (Helps that the throat feels much better after swallowing, and my husband got me a big jug of V-8 so I have plenty of healthy fluid to drink, not just Cherry Coke... although yeah, also Cherry Coke, because caffeine withdrawal stinks and can be hard to differentiate from illness.)

Was that a parenthetical? I think I opened and closed one long parenthetical statement, but I am thinking through mud right now and I can't be certain.

If I spend the rest of the day(s) making bizarre statements on Twitter or something, this would be why. I'll try to keep it to a minumum.

(I feel a little like I'm in a moving elevator. Have you ever been on a chair while in an elevator? It must feel just like this: vaguely wobbly, but also somehow secure, or perhaps I'm just a little too out-of-it to care.)

Whee!

Yesterday I whiled away my afternoon touching up my CSS skills. I took the general look (and some specific graphics) from the default Phorum template, Emerald, and turned it into a skin for the Twine Encyclopaedia. I ran into some trouble with margin collapsing, but I got it sorted. The result is, I think, pretty good; what do you think?

I am very pleased with myself for making the pretty thing. It was a little disheartening at the beginning, and irksome in the middle, when I didn't understand where my problem lay, but I quite enjoyed the final leg and end result.

I made that. Neat. I'd forgotten how nice that feels.

(I would have sworn that I posted this last night. Oh well. This works too.)

Yesterday, my 3DS flashed a green light, meaning it was exchanging StreetPass data with another 3DS system. It's not like I've never StreetPassed before; my husband, brother, and several other people I know all have their own 3DSes, and I make sure to visit StreetPass relay points from time to time. But StreetPassing someone I've never met, without leaving my house? That is a brand new thing to me. I cherished this unforseen event, played all my StreetPass games so I wouldn't waste a precious StreePass, and was happy.

It happened again today. Same person.

Maybe it's just a neighbor's holiday guest... but maybe one of my neighbors got a 3DS for Christmas. Maybe we will keep StreetPassing! That would be lovely.

tl;dr I am weirdly happy b/c my video game system is doing exactly what it was built to do.

I'm not sure if I will get back to the update page this week, and I'm already overdue for Solstice greetings, so let's do this now:

Happy holidays! It's my sincere hope that whatever holidays you may have already celebrated this season were joyous, that whatever holidays you may celebrate soon will be wonderful, and that all your days will be as happy as you can make them.

As for me, I have lights on the tree and no major travel until the weekend, so I have a few days snug at home. Sounds pretty good!