My family and I are on holiday staying nearby. I came out this morning to explore and try to find a couple of local geocaches while the children were still asleep. This was the first.
I needed to walk around the GZ a few times before I saw the cache, with its vantage point over this beautiful valley. Then it was time for a quick scramble up the tree to retrieve it.
Signed log and returned to its hiding place. TFTC/GPA; greetings from the UK!
“Thank you for using RSS.” “I love RSS.” A badge in the footer. A little heart, a blogroll. Community. Belonging.
I love TCP/IP. I love HTTP 1.1. I love DNS resolution. Where is my badge. Where is my directory. Nobody forms a tribe around plumbing. You use it. You don’t announce it. You don’t
put a sticker in your footer that says “I love packet switching”.
RSS is plumbing. A transport format. XML with angle brackets and escaped HTML and a version attribute and the CDATA hack. You don’t love it.
…
I feel targetted (if you subscribe by RSS you’ll know that I share my enjoyment of the format in my <description>s!).
Actually, I do love RSS!
I love it despite its faults; and it’s got plenty of faults. Its brittleness, sure, as unstory observes. But also its insistence upon RFC
822 dates, which are almost the worst imaginable standardised Internet date format. Also the fact that things you wouldn’t want to use it without borrowing features from a different, one might say competing, standard. Also the excessive HTTP-centricity,
which makes it theoretically a standards violation to, e.g. make a podcast that’s distributed by Gemini, for example.
But I love what it does. I love how it ties the Web together. And I love how it does it: just a resource, at a URL, that the subscriber can hit as frequently, or not, as they like.
Oh and:
The person with the heart in their footer would not survive writing one item by hand.
I totally would. I absolutely do. I rarely do, because I’m far more-inclined to write software to do it for me, but I still write “raw” RSS a couple of times in a typical
year.
I also love HTTP. Maybe I should sing about that more often, too. And yes, I actually love HTTP in the way that unstory gatekeeps “love of a technology”, like I do RSS: I can “survive
writing it by hand”.
I’m staying in the Thistle Hotel around the corner before a flight in the morning, and stepped out to find this cache – and some supper – before bed. Sorry to hear about your muggle
troubles, but this current (new) container is a good one: needed to say the hint out loud a few times before I worked out what I was looking for! SL, TNLN, TFTC.
This afternoon I’m scheduled to drive from West Oxfordshire to Heathrow Airport. I’ll only lose 15 minutes to divert by the backroads and see if this hashpoint is achievable.
Expedition
I’ve been looking for an opportunity to get out ‘hashing but one’s never shown up somewhere and somewhen that I can make it lately…
…but today, I had to travel from West Oxfordshire to Heathrow Terminal 5. Now there’s a perfectly good highway for that – two options, infact: the A40+M40, or the A34+M4… but I figured
that if I took neither route, instead hacking my way cross-country, it probably wouldn’t cost me more than about 15 minutes extra (spoiler: it took me about 30 minutes extra,
but it was a bit of a rat run for some commuters) and allow me to see about this hashpoint!
Abandoning the car.
Initial survey showed that it’s in a field, which doesn’t bode too well. I’m certainly not interested in trampling crops or hopping fences.
It was a bit warm for walking a road like this!
But to my delight, as I drove alongside the GZ, I saw that it corn had recently been cut and the bales stacked one field over. I turned up the lane alongside and hunted for a place to
park, eventually finding one about 700m away from the hashpoint.
Oh look, a footpath I can get lost from!
A convenient footpath gave me an excuse to start tramping through the parched cut field, until eventually I was upon the hashpoint.
The hashpoint’s out there somewhere!
It was a gloriously hot summer’s day and the rolling hills are especially delightful around here. I reached the hashpoint around 18:22.
Success! I’m out standing in my field!
And then… pressed on to my hotel in Heathrow for dinner, and sleep, and an early flight!
My living room TV is attached to an ageing Windows box that we use as a media centre and middleweight gaming1
PC. To better fill the room with sound (I hate those tinny flat speakers they like to put into TVs these days!), the TV is also attached to a soundbar.
The problem is that the soundbar keeps shutting itself down. If it doesn’t receive any signals for ~20 minutes, it enters sleep mode2. It automatically turns
itself on when the TV turns on, but it turns itself off all by itself.
This is annoying, because if we pause what we’re watching for a conversation or something, the soundbar switches itself off, even though the computer and television are still
switched-on. It’s doubly-annoying because we then have to get up and walk over to it to switch it back on again, because the
dog ate the remote3.
LED’s gone red again?5
Sigh. Whose turn is it to get up and press the button?
My solution is BeepAlive, a little Go program that runs in a Windows system tray and makes a very quiet noise once every 9 minutes.
I’ve tuned the noise so that it’s quiet enough that I can’t hear it unless I’m specifically listening for it… but loud enough that it the soundbar sees that there are still audio
signals coming in, so it doesn’t go to sleep.
Now, so long as the media centre computer and TV remain powered-on, the soundbar stays awake. And that’s how a hacky engineer like me can solve a hardware problem with a software tool.
Footnotes
1 Mostly the gaming’s done by the kids, and they’re likely-as-not to use the Switch or
Steam Deck instead… or, when we’re not at the Chicory House, Bee, the Bazzite-powered gaming rig I set up in the playroom… but in principle it’s equipped for gaming. I guess we sometimes fire a Jackbox Party Pack on it when we have guests?
2 It doesn’t even seem to save any power to be in sleep mode: my power checker tool says
it draws basically the same amount whichever mode it’s in!
3 It’s triply-annoying because our soundbar is the only infrared-controlled device in our
house that doesn’t follow the IrDA standard, which makes it incredibly difficult for me to automate switching it on from the TV remote, our Flic hub, any “universal remote” etc. I managed to pull off a replay using my Flipper
Zero, but that’s not a solution I want to put into the hands of the kids (or anywhere that the dog might eat it). I suppose I could buy a replacement remote, but I don’t feel like
giving any more money to a company that turned their nose up at IrDA.
4 Okay, so technically I solved this with software a few years ago, but I
misplaced the software and it, frankly, wasn’t very good. My thinking is that by doing it better, and open-sourcing it, I’ll be able to find it when I need it next. And as a bonus, it
might just maybe help somebody else, someday.
5 At our regular house, rather than the Chicory House, the soundbar lives
above the TV, close to the ceiling, and it’s hard to even see the annoying LED. So I mounted a tiny mirror, about a quarter of the size of a fingernail, to the ceiling above
it to improve its visibility from the sofa. Now that’s a hardware solution!
500g of white grapes are £2. 500g or red grapes are £2.20. So you’d expect 500g of half-red, half-white grapes to be… £2.10, right? But no, that’s £2 too.
So buying 500g of white grapes and 500g of red grapes is cheaper if you buy the mixed packs and then separate them. Why!?
RSS
Spotify
Pocket Casts
Apple Podcasts
YouTube
