Allen but one of the good ones

Urban Astronomer Podcaster
Director at Monoceros Digital Consulting
AWS gun for hire, Linux/Unix consultant
We do managed Fediverse hosting - ask me!

He/him (Linux)
He\him (Windows)

Sometimes I write articles for universetoday.com

Lapsed #astronomer, exhausted #dad, small business owner, reader of books, player of #games, #admin of systems, just wants to help.

#SouthAfrica

Space stuff: https://www.urban-astronomer.com
Work Stuff: https://www.monoceros.co.za
Age: Middle
This space: For rent

Last Notes

2025-09-04 16:41:27 UTC

So the new neighbours finally made good on their promise to install security lights.
And you know what this guy went and did?
He texted me to let me know that installation was happening today, and asked me to please let him know if they were too bright or causing us any irritation. Like a considerate human being.
So the sun goes down, I step outside, my skin starts bubbling and my shadow gets etched into the wall. I text back "Any chance you could aim it a little lower? Quite a lot of light is shining into the upstairs bedrooms and the kids might have trouble sleeping"
10 minutes later, he texts back to ask if it's any better. He's aimed his LED floodlight completely flat downwards, casting bright even shadow-free lighting in his own yard with not a single lumen spilling into my yard. Quite a bright glow reflecting off the wall directly beneath the light, but far less intrusive, minimal light trespass, minimal contribution to our already awful light pollution problem, it's a fantastic win-win result.
#LightPollution #GoodNeighbours

2025-08-09 08:57:14 UTC

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I'm a professional computer toucher, cut my teeth on msdos, currently have a constant internal evaluation on which is better for my needs (Linux or FreeBSD) and despite all that, you've just described me.
I don't much care what the interface looks like, I just want it to be left alone.
My own experience: The most optimal interface (whether we're talking about placement of gui widgets or keyboard layouts) is the one that you're most practiced at. When people invest years into learning the quirks of anything at all, and train up their muscle memory to be able to use it by instinct, ANY "improvements" are just getting in their way.
Oh your research has shown that new users prefer a narrower scroll bar? Your research is bullshit because now I am wasting more time having to line up my mouse cursor with the 1 pixel wide activation region that makes the damn thing unhide itself.

2025-04-01 09:35:17 UTC

Remember when April fools meant people in your life doing silly pranks like leaving a whoopie cushion on your chair or filling your office with balloons, and national newspapers would print Onion articles (very obvious jokes, provided you look past the journalist-speak veneer) and everybody was very excited to share which jokes they'd spotted and which had caught them out?
I miss those times.

2024-10-01 13:53:56 UTC

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I hadn't actually tried to suspend yet!
But a quick look tells me that S3 is not supported - only S4 and S5

2024-09-12 05:02:23 UTC

I grew up in a time when schools only taught feminine subjects like typing and cooking to girls but TV told us that the best cooks and typists were male chefs and hackers.
So i would never have dreamed of taking one of those girly classes but remained quietly determined to be amazing at both.

2024-09-03 13:44:02 UTC

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So call me naive but... they didn't have this before?!

2024-09-02 07:11:09 UTC

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Okay this is interesting. Starlink should be pretty easy to block - park a signal jammer near a base station and it should be trivial to remove it (and all starlink customers using it) from the network.

2024-08-30 11:05:22 UTC

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So it seems like the streaming companies aren't even the primary villains here. It's the labels, like it's always been?

2024-08-30 10:28:08 UTC

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I saw a Rick Beato video once where he tried to actually do the maths to figure out what artists actually get from streaming services, and found it extremely difficult because the rates are so variable depending on all sorts of factors like how many people share the copyright to a song, what the licensing regimes are in different territories, and so on.
His conclusion surprised me - if i understood it correctly it turned out to be approximately the same as with the old model.
See, you obviously can' compare rates because streamin pays for each time a song gets played, but you can never know how many plays come out of any given CD sale, or how many people happened to be listening to a single play on the radio. But you can look at how much money big artists are depositing into their bank accounts, and this was what appeared to be much the same as it was before.
But... I'm not sure I understood it correctly, and his analysis was on big hits not small artists and his point wasn't actually anything to do with streaming vs sales but rather how opaque streaming deals are
Anyway, video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY15RzKZeJ0

2024-08-28 11:18:45 UTC

So apparently bitcoin miners who've gone big, buying defunct power generation plants to feed their mining gear, have found that they can make significantly more money simply selling that power into the grid.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/08/27/why-texas-republicans-are-souring-on-crypto
In places where there's an actual market for electricity (unlike South Africa where the price is fixed by a state regulator, and is constant throughout the day and night), you can sell spare capacity back to the grid. If you've got rooftop solar, and your batteries are charged and are harvesting energy that you can't use, you can sell it back to your provider. And the power firms themselves are able to do something similar, and so wholesale prices fluctuate constantly as demand and supply shift. We all know this, from those amazing stories about electricity prices sometimes going negative in places like Germany.
So the bitcoin miners with their crappy old coal-burning generators have found they can play the market: when demand goes up because it's hot and everybody's running the AC, they can turn off all their mining rigs and sell the power to the grid for a pretty healthy profit - $32m compared to $8.6m in one example
In other words, bitcoin is a very inefficient use of power: The process of turning electricity into bitcoin caused an almost 75% loss in value, which is the opposite of how manufacturing usually works - you turn a thousand dollars worth of raw material into $5000 worth of refined material, into $10000 worth of manufactured goods (completely made up example numbers to illustrate the point).
Bitcoin gets it backwards!

2024-07-30 19:31:07 UTC

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The wikipedia page is a blast though, lots of fun snippets!
Like the ad they put out around 1900, with a picture of the pope drinking a giant mug of the stuff, with the tagline "The Two Infallible Powers – The Pope & Bovril". Classic.

2024-07-30 17:17:04 UTC

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All of the above, except for making it a drink! I'm strangely squeamish about that one...

2024-07-08 17:27:17 UTC

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Mmm. I live in a home built to South African standards, which essentially boil down to "WE ARE A HOT COUNTRY WINTER ISN'T REAL IT COSTS TOO MUCH TO MAKE WINDOWS CLOSE PROPERLY I'M NOT LISTENING LALALALALA"
I'm pretty sure we have a colder experience of winter despite objectively being much warmer than most countries simply because we let it inside our homes.

2024-07-08 16:48:56 UTC

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Wow.
currently 5ºC here, I'm wearing multiple layers in the hot room (where we keep the inverter and all the computers) and wishing I had a blanket 🥶