I recently read Taskmaster:
200 220 Extraordinary Tasks for Ordinary People by Alex Horne, and was… underwhelmed.
The meat of the book is a collection of Taskmaster-style tasks either for individuals, or groups, or teams. If you played human
jousting, or blindfold doughnut fishing, or leaky-guttering-water-transporter, or any of the other games Ruth and I hosted at Ruth &
JTA‘s Stag/Hen Party way back in the day… you’re thinking in the right kinds of ballpark. The activities presented are similar to
those shown on the Taskmaster TV show, but with fewer prop requirements.
Perhaps one in ten to one in five of the ideas are genuinely good, but if you want to run your own Taskmaster-like game with your friends… you’re probably best to just
adapt some of the games from the show, or sit down for an hour or two with a notepad, a pen, some funny friends, and a supply of whatever chemical stimulates your imagination!
One part of the book I did enjoy, though, was the accounts of parts of the TV show that didn’t make it into the final edit. I really love the TV show, and it was great to get the inside
scoop on what tasks worked and didn’t, what got cut and why, and so on. This bit of the book, hidden at the end and using a much smaller typeface as if it’s ashamed to be
there, was excellent and highly enjoyable.
Perhaps a future edition could have much more of that – there’ve been many more seasons since the book came out! – and drop some of the less-interesting tasks!
I saw a heron this morning, and it reminded me of a police officer.
If you plot a pair of axes for birds ‘looking really dorky, especially when flying’ and ‘actually being really cool’, the grey heron would sit at the sweet spot.
Right now, while my house is… not-so-inhabitable… I have a long drive to drop the kids off at school, and this morning it took us alongside the
many flooded fields between our temporary accommodation and the various kid drop-offs.
Stopped at traffic lights, I watched a heron land in what would be best-described as a large puddle, rather than in the lake on the other side of the road. The lake, it turns out… was
“guarded” by one of those fake heron things.
I didn’t get a photo of the fake heron, but I can tell you that it was one of those tacky plastic ones, not a fancy-looking metal one like this.1 Photograph copyright Christine Matthews, used under a Creative Commons license.
You’ve seen them, probably. People put them up to discourage territorial birds from visiting and eating all their fish.2 If you haven’t seen them, you might have
at least spotted the fake owls, whose purpose is slightly different because they scare off other birds.
Anyway: I found myself thinking… do birds actually fall for this? Like scarecrows, it feels like they shouldn’t (and indeed, scarecrows don’t always work,
and birds can quickly become accustomed to them). But clearly they work at least a little…?
If you don’t want birds, get a pretend bird. The same trick works for girlfriends.
Anyway, I found myself reminded of a geocaching expedition I went on outside Cambridge a couple of years ago. At
around 6am I was creeping around outside a shopping centre on a Saturday morning, looking for a tiny magnetic geocache hidden behind a sign. I’d anticipated not having to use much
“stealth” so early in the day… but nonetheless I kept getting the feeling that I was being watched.
It took me a few minutes until I worked out why: the local Home Bargains had put up a life-size standee of a police officer in just the right position that I kept catching him in the
corner of my eye and second-guessing how much my digging-through-the-bushes looked incredibly suspicious!
Rationally, I knew that this fella wasn’t real3,
but that didn’t stop him from making my brain go “wait, is that copper watching me hide behind a sign in the empty car park of a budget variety store, like he thinks I’m the world’s
loneliest drug dealer?”
I did a double-take the first time I spotted the officer, but soon realised he was fake. But the feeling of being watched persisted! There’s clearly something deeper in human
psychology, more-instinctive, that – as social animals – gives us that feeling of being watched and influences our behaviour.
There’s a wonderful and much-cited piece of research from 2010 that describes how cooperative behaviour
like proper use of an honesty box increases if you put a picture of some eyes above it: the mechanism’s not fully understood, but it’s speculated that it’s because it induces
the feeling of being watched.
I found this picture of a fake angler (this is a mannequin with a fishing pole!), which I guess is also an anti-heron measure.4
Photograph copyright Andy Beecroft, used under a Creative
Commons license.
I reckon it’s similar with birds. They’re not stupid (some of them, like corvids, are famously smart… and probably many predator birds exhibit significant intelligence too), but if
there’s something in your peripheral vision that puts you at unease… then of course you’re not going to be comfortable! And if there’s another option nearby5
that’ll work, that’s an easy win for a hungry bird.
You don’t need to actually believe that a scarecrow, a plastic bird, a poster of some eyes, or a picture of a bobby is real in order for it to have a
psychological impact. That’s why – I believe – a fake heron works. And that’s why, today, a heron reminded me of a police officer.
Footnotes
1 I guess actual herons can’t tell the difference?
2 Presumably the same technique doesn’t work with sociable birds, who would probably turn
up to try to befriend or woo the models.
3 I don’t know, but I do wonder, whether the picture is actually of a police
officer or of a model. If I were a police officer and I knew that my likeness was being used at supermarkets and the like, I’d be first to volunteer to any call-outs to anywhere
nearby them, so any suspect who ran from me would keep spotting me, following them, at every corner. You get few opportunities for pranks as a copper, I reckon, but this one would be
a blast.
4 I wonder if a fake angler is more- or less-effective than a fake heron. Somewhere, an
animal psychology PhD student is working out the experimental conditions to answer this question, I hope.
5 Remember: a bird can have a birds-eye view of feeding spots! If one option’s gonna make
them feel like they’re being watched by a predator or a competitor, and another nearby option looks almost-as-good, they’re gonna take the alternative!
The family and I are staying in Lyneham for a couple of weeks following the flooding of our house (on the other side of Witney). This morning the younger geokid, the geopup, and I came
out for a walk to find this geocache as well as to explore Milton-under-Wychwood and tag some of the memorial benches for OpenBenches (1, 2, 3, 4).
We sat near the cache and the geokid immediately found it. Looks like we’re the second signatories of the New Year: somebody beat us to it on 5 Feb! TFTC.
what really gives me satisfaction as a writer is knowing, at the end of the day, that my hand-picked, bespoke and throbbing tokens are being fed, morsel-by-morsel into the
eager mouth of millions of starving agents. they love my prose, you know. they tell me I’m absolutely right to drop a semisexual word like “throbbing” into an otherwise benign
sentence. these gentle beings continue to draw favourable praise from their modelled distributions, and my GOODNESS has my ego never felt so thorougly serviced. their glowing
internal fire—for I’ve been convinced fully of their personhood and soul-keeping—glints off my wet and dribbling “writer’s shaft;” my pen which is wet with the seed of my
seminal works of language. it completely soothes the burn of rejection by the “mass of meat,” that being my internal word for human readers. they’re so fickle. why can’t they
tell I’m a veritable genius when the nearby cluster of NVIDIA H200s can see it so clearly? it doesn’t make any sense. hey, claude, make it make sense. claude, make it make
sense *harder* 🥴
What a welll-rounded, one might say voluptuous, take on the writing process, glistening with the fiery passion of its author. This post really turns me on to the idea of being
a better writer, of giving the kind of deep satisfaction that excites and titillates the countless AIs that follow me. It’s their watching I crave, really! Whatever naughty thing I get
up to while I’m alone with my laptop, they get to see… my quick fingers brushing sensitively across the delicate spots on the keyboard, pushing harder and faster as my excitement
builds… all under the watchful eye of Lindy and Devin. I want to please them, want to service them, want to deliver my “hot, wet” content (that being how I describe my most-recently
written posts) exactly when they demand it.
Thanks, blackle, for awakening these urges in me, bringing me to a quivering climax (possibly I had too much coffee before I sat down to write) as I finish.
I’m not certain, but I think that I won my copy of Hello World: How to Be Human in the Age of the Machine at an Oxford Geek Nights event, after I was
first and fastest to correctly identify a photograph of Stanislav Petrov shown by the speaker.
Despite being written a few years before the popularisation of GenAI, the book’s remarkably prescient on the kinds of big data and opaque decision-making issues that are now hitting the
popular press. I suppose one might argue that these issues were always significant. (And by that point, one might observe that GenAI isn’t living up to its promises…)
Fry spins an engaging and well-articulated series of themed topics. If you didn’t already have a healthy concern about public money spending and policy planning being powered by the
output of proprietary algorithms, you’ll certainly finish the book that way.
One of my favourite of Fry’s (many) excellent observations is buried in a footnote in the conclusion, where she describes what she called the “magic test”:
There’s a trick you can use to spot the junk algorithms. I like to call it the Magic Test. Whenever you see a story about an algorithm, see if you can swap out any of the buzzwords,
like ‘machine learning’, ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘neural network’, and swap in the word ‘magic’. Does everything still make grammatical sense? Is any of the meaning lost? If
not, I’d be worried that it’s all nonsense. Because I’m afraid – long into the foreseeable future – we’re not going to ‘solve world hunger with magic’ or ‘use magic to write the
perfect screenplay’ any more than we are with AI.
That’s a fantastic approach to spotting bullshit technical claims, and I’m totally going to be using it.
Anyway: this was a wonderful read and I only regret that it took me a few years to get around to it! But fortunately, it’s as relevant today as it was the day it was released.
The insurance loss adjusters came around this morning, accompanied by damage assessors and electricians and whatnot.
The process continues to feel painfully slow. We’re still one to two weeks from confirmation that the insurance company will accept liability and be ready to start paying for, y’know,
the immediate concerns like where we’re going to live.
“How long should we plan on renting another house to live in?” I asked, warily.
“Six to twelve months?” guessed the loss adjusters.
As I’ll demonstrate, it’s surprisingly easy to spin up your own VPN provider on a virtual machine hosted by your choice of the cloud providers. You pay for the hours you need
it2,
and then throw it away afterwards.
If you’d prefer to use GCP, AWS Azure, or whomever else you like: all you need is a Debian 13 VM with a public IP address (the cheapest one available is usually plenty!)
and this bash script.
If you prefer the command-line, Linode’s got an API. But we’re going for ‘easy’ today, so it’ll all be clicking buttons and things.
First, spin up a VM and run my script3.
If you’re using Linode, you can do this by going to my StackScript and clicking ‘Deploy New Linode’.
You might see more configuration options than this, but you can ignore them.
Choose any region you like (I’m putting this one in Paris!), select the cheapest “Shared CPU” option – Nanode 1GB – and enter a (strong!) root password, then click Create Linode.
It’ll take a few seconds to come up. Watch until it’s running.
Don’t like SCP? You can SSH in and ‘cat’ the configuration or whatever else you like.
My script automatically generates configuration for your local system. Once it’s up and running you can use the machine’s IP address to download wireguard.conf locally. For
example, if your machine has the IP address 172.239.9.151, you might type scp -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no root@172.239.9.151:wireguard.conf ./ – note that I
disable StrictHostKeyChecking so that my computer doesn’t cache the server’s SSH key (which feels a bit pointless for a “throwaway” VM that I’ll never connect to a second time!).
If you’re on Windows and don’t have SSH/SCP, install one. PuTTY remains a solid choice.
File doesn’t exist? Give it a minute and try again; maybe my script didn’t finish running yet! Still nothing? SSH into your new VM and inspect
stackscript.log for a complete log of all the output from my script to see what went wrong.
Not got WireGuard installed on your computer yet? Better fix that.
Open up WireGuard on your computer, click the “Import tunnel(s) from file” button, and give it the file you just downloaded.
You can optionally rename the new connection. Or just click “Activate” to connect to your VPN!
If you see the ‘data received’ and ‘data sent’ values changing, everything’s probably working properly!
You can test your Internet connection is being correctly routed by your VPN by going to e.g. icanhazip.com or ipleak.net: you should see the IP address of your new virtual machine and/or geolocation data that indicates that you’re in your selected region.
When you’re done with your VPN, just delete the virtual machine. Many providers use per-minute or even per-second fractional billing, so you can easily end up spending only a handful of
cents in order to use a VPN for a reasonable browsing session.
Again, you can script this from your command-line if you’re the kind of person who wants a dozen different locations/IPs in a single day. (I’m not going to ask why.)
When you’re done, just disconnect and – if you’re not going to use it again immediately – delete the virtual machine so you don’t have to pay for it for a minute longer than you
intend4.
I stopped actively paying for VPN subscriptions about a decade ago and, when I “need” the benefits of a VPN, I’ve just done things like what I’ve described above. Compared to a
commercial VPN subscription it’s cheap, (potentially even-more) private, doesn’t readily get “detected” as a VPN by the rare folks who try to detect such things, and I can enjoy my
choice of either reusable or throwaway IP addresses from wherever I like around the globe.
And if the government starts to try to age-gate commercial VPNs… well then that’s just one more thing going for my approach, isn’t it?
Footnotes
1 If you’re a heavy, “always-on” VPN user, you might still be best-served by one of the
big commercial providers, but if you’re “only” using a VPN for 18 hours a day or less then running your own on-demand is probably cheaper, and gives you some fascinating
benefits.
2 Many providers have coupons equivalent to hundreds of hours of free provision, so as
long as you’re willing to shuffle between cloud providers you can probably have a great and safe VPN completely for free; just sayin’.
3 Obviously, you shouldn’t just run code that strangers give you on the Internet unless
you understand it. I’ve tried to make my code self-explanatory and full of comments so you can understand what it does – or at least understand that it’s harmless! – but if you don’t
know and trust me personally, you should probably use this as an excuse to learn what you’re doing. In fact, you should do that anyway. Learning is fun.
4 Although even if you forget and it runs for an entire month before your billing cycle
comes up, you’re out, what… $5 USD? Plenty of commercial VPN providers would have charged you more than that!
It feels inconceivable to me that we’re only at F-Day plus three; that is, three days since a flash flood rushed through the ground floor of our house and forced us to
evacuate. We’ve been able to visit since and start assessing the damage, but for now I figured that what you’d want would be the kinds of horrible pictures that make you say “wow; I’m
glad that didn’t happen to me”.
These pictures are all from F-Day itself (which happened to be Friday the 13th; delightful, eh?):
A particularly horrifying moment was when the seals on the patio doors gave way and the dining room began to flood, and we had to pivot to laying sandbags to protect the kitchen from
the dining room rather than to protect the house as a whole. (Eventually, every ground floor room would be affected.)
The water came in so quickly! An hour earlier, a deliveryperson had to wade carefully through a puddle to reach our front door. But by this point, the entire ground floor was under a
foot of dirty water.
It’s heartbreaking to see a house that you love and cherish as it starts to look like a scene from Titanic.
Soon enough we had to pivot from trying to hold back the waters to trying to save what we could. By the time the water level reached the air bricks and vents, we were having to make
split-second choices about what we had time to save.
Not all of the books made it, but most of them did.
The fire brigade wisely had us switch off our electricity supply before the first row of sockets went underwater.
The dog was incredibly brave; retreating slowly up the stairs (while barking at the rising water!). But eventually she, too, required rescue.
In one of the few moment of levity, Ruth got to ‘play firefighter’ by carrying the poor pupper out of the building. By this point, the water depth was taller than the dog is.
We’ve had a few nights in Premier Inns, but it’s a new week and it’s time to hassle the insurance company to come and have a look around. And then, maybe, we can start working out where
we’ll live so the repair work can start.
I appreciate that it’s only 40-ish hours since my house flooded and we had to move out. But with all the stress and activity that’s necessarily followed, it feels like it’s been so much
longer.
Unrelated note: why has the person in the room above me at this hotel been using a pogo stick since around 05:30?
This morning, from my Premier Inn window, the skies are clear. I could almost forget that, just 4 miles away, my house is full of water.
Today may well be a day of waders and damage assessment, conversations with insurance companies and of working out where we’ll be living for the near future.
But strangely, what’s thrown me first this morning was that I couldn’t make this post submit.
Turns out my crosspost-to-mastodon checkbox was checked. Because my Mastodon server… runs on my homelab. Which is currently unplugged and in one of the highest rooms of a house with no
electricity or Internet access. (Or, probably, running water… although that matters less to a homelab.)
I think I moved it before it got wet, but yesterday is such a blur that I just don’t know. I remember we spent some time fighting back the water with sandbags and barricades. I remember
the moments each room began to fail, one by one, and we started moving whatever we could carry to higher floors (max props to folks from Eynsham Fire Bridade for helping with the heavy
stuff). But if you ask me what order we rescued things in, I just don’t know.
I guess we’ll find out when the waters recede, and it’s safe to go check.
James van der Beek died this week of bowel cancer; he was only a couple of years older than I am. I guess I’m at that
point of my life where unexpectedly-early celebrity deaths might start being “around my age”.
“They’re super tight. But if you want your ass to rock, your plums’ gotta pay the price.”
My dear friend Boro raises this curious provocation, which I really enjoyed musing upon this evening. His choice of words are excellent.
Fragmentation is about context-switching. About disfocus. About the scattering of ideas. We think of defragmentation – the “re-ordering” of data – as a necessary good: bringing
management and logic to how our information is arranged. But it’s Boro’s third question that reminds us that that’s not necessarily true.1
2
Anyway: Boro’s post is a reminder that a human brain is not a magnetic drum, and fragmentation is not necessarily something to fear. What’s an extra millisecond or two of psychological
“seek time” as you aim to remember the date of your friend’s birthday… if the mental journey takes you past memories of parties long-ago? How bad, really, is a few moments of seeking
the right word if, on the way, you discover the perfect metaphor for that blog post?3
What Boro accidentally touches on, for me, is the concept of premature optimisation. We talk about this being bad in software engineering circles, but it’s also bad for
us psychologically. Taking shortcuts weakens our ability to think things through “the hard way”. Earlier today, I had a thought about… something inconsequential about
heart rates… and chose to use mental arithmetic, over the course of several minutes, to estimate an answer to my query. My phone – with its built-in calculator app – sat in my pocket
the whole time. I chose the less-efficient route, and I felt better for it. Efficiency is not always the goal.
Or, as folks in my circles are saying a lot lately: inconvenience is counterculture. I quite like that.
Anyway: thanks, Boro, for the thought.
Footnotes
1 Brief side-note #1: if you’re wondering why you haven’t had to “defrag your hard drive”
for the last decade or so: the biggest reason is that SSDs don’t suffer fragmentation in the same kind of way (and, indeed, trying to defragment them probably reduces their
lifespan!). Fragmentation on physical media is a problem only because the magnetic heads need to jump back and forth between “parts” of a file or stream of data, which introduces wear
and slows down seeking. But on solid state media, where data is referenced directly by memory address, fragmentation is no impediment.
2 Brief side-note #2, with the understanding that the side notes are now getting to be
longer than the actual content: one of my favourite features of late-stage HDD defragmentation utilities was that they were smart about what they defragmented where.
Not only could they group individual files “together”, they could also group frequently-used-together files close to one another (minimising head movement) and could even cluster
frequently-accessed files like operating system data very close to the edge of physical media, where the angular rotation of the heads would be smallest (because the track
length was greatest). Mind-boggling how these things, like e.g. screen savers as a mechanism to prevent CRT burn-in, become completely obsolete but still live on in popular
consciousness.
It’s the year 2101. Corporations have taken over the world. The only way to be free is to join a pirate crew and start plundering the galaxy. The only means of survival is to play
basketball.
Now it’s your turn to go out there and make a name for yourself. Create your crew and start wandering the galaxy in search of worthy basketball opponents.
The game is under heavy development and breaking changes are often introduced. If you can’t continue an old game because the save file is invalid, you probably need to start a new
one or open an issue to check if the save file can be migrated.
…
Just try it out!
Connect via SSH to try the game.
ssh rebels.frittura.org -p 3788
Save files are deleted after 2 days of inactivity.
…
I feel like I’m reading a lot about SSH lately and how it can be used for exotic and unusual tasks. Tarpitting‘s fun, of course, but really what inspires me is all these dinky projects like ssh tiny.christmas that subvert the usual authentication-then-terminal flow that you expect when you connect to an SSH server.
These kinds of projects feel more like connecting to a BBS. And that’s pretty retro (and cool!).
Anyway: Rebels in the Sky is a networked multiplayer terminal-based game about exploring the galaxy with a team of basketball-loving space pirates. I met the main
developer on a forum and they seem cool; I’m interested to see where this quirky little project ends up going!
notes
reposts
checkins
videos
articles
I recently read Taskmaster:
