Category: Tech

In Brightest Day, In Blackest Night

The Hubble Space Telescope, taking pictures of non-existent stars?

Last week I caught a comment on a news item about the drone sightings over New Jersey that made me wonder if it was for real or just a troll’s idea of a joke. Some guy ranted the government is lying to us about everything, including the space program. His proof? All of those fake space photos that don’t have stars.

Apollo 17

Replying to something like that can go one of two ways, depending on the assumption about the comment being genuine or a joke. If the person making the comment isn’t joking, do they simply not know, or do they have a political axe to grind?

As the saying goes, you’re entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts. The quote has been attributed to Patrick Moynihan, but it dates back much further than that.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/03/17/own-facts/

So, what are the facts explaining why some space photos don’t have any stars?

Chrome Chimes In

Why did my Windows 11 laptop start chiming? I don’t know, but through the process of elimination I figured out they were notifications coming from Chrome.

Notifications about what? Don’t know, don’t care. Checking the settings in Chrome, I stopped site notifications.

The chimes stopped, but this morning they’re back. The setting had been reset.

Grrr…

P.S. I pulled this post to do more testing, and there is no doubt that Google Chrome is the culprit behind these annoying chime notifications.

One of My Good Questions

Brent Butterworth, whose audio reviews I first read probably 35 years ago, answers a question I submitted to Audio Unleashed, his podcast with Dennis Burger.

Brent is wearing Audio-Technica ATH-M20x headphones. The same ones worn by Jon Stewart on his podcast, as I have pointed out.

For $50 the ATH-M20x has excellent sound quality, but the earpads are the most uncomfortable of any headphones I’ve ever owned. Brent must agree, because he did what I did and replaced the pads.

Dennis is wearing AKG K371 headphones. I also have a pair of those. (Uh… what did I say in the previous post? Something about wanting to have fewer physical possessions?)

Audio-Technica ATH-M20x
AKG K371

Tape Heads

Bismo and I were rhapsodizing last week about recording Star Trek as kids, by holding tape recorder mics up to TV speakers. My tape recorder was an Aiwa TP-32, a Christmas gift from my parents when I was ten years old. I soon leveraged my mastery of the prized possession into an audio-visual aid gig at school.

The TP-32 in that video is slightly different from the one I had, which looked like this.

Every so often I check eBay to see if there’s a TP-32 worth buying. Sometimes I see one, but in keeping with my goal of having fewer physical possessions, I never bid.

Trouble in Blogland

It was exactly three years ago that I finally whacked down the technical moles that were crippling my WordPress installation. In the aftermath of my struggles, I was left with some residual problems on older posts that I occasionally fix on an as-needed basis.

Now there’s a different sort of WordPress trouble. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg isn’t happy with WP Engine, a large hosting service that caters to business customers, rather than hobby bloggers like myself.

WP Engine is not WordPress

His complaint is that WP Engine, which is owned by a private equity firm, takes advantage of the free resources available from WordPress.org, without contributing very much of anything in return. This goes against the idea of being an Open Source software participant.

Mullenweg cut off WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org, and WP Engine sued in response. A judge has decided that Mullenweg must restore full access to WP Engine.

https://www.techradar.com/pro/court-orders-wordpress-parent-company-to-stop-blocking-wp-engine-access

Mullenweg’s hosting service is WordPress.com, so I can understand why he isn’t pleased with a competitor that wants the freebies without playing by the rules. I am neither on WP Engine nor WordPress.com. I’m on the third leading service specializing in WordPress, which is also owned by a private equity firm. Here’s hoping all is well between the respective parties.

Follow-up: It’s getting extra nasty!

“It’s hard to imagine wanting to continue to working on WordPress after this.” – Matt Mullenweg

https://www.404media.co/wordpress-wp-engine-preliminary-injunction/