abnib

Digital Dustbusting

tl;dr: I’m tidying up and consolidating my personal hosting; I’ve made a little progress, but I’ve got a way to go – fortunately I’ve got a sabbatical coming up at work!

At the weekend, I kicked-off what will doubtless be a multi-week process of gradually tidying and consolidating some of the disparate digital things I run, around the Internet.

I’ve a long-standing habit of having an idea (e.g. gamebook-making tool Twinebook, lockpicking puzzle game Break Into Us, my Cheating Hangman game, and even FreeDeedPoll.org.uk!), deploying it to one of several servers I run, and then finding it a huge headache when I inevitably need to upgrade or move said server because there’s such an insane diversity of different things that need testing!

I can simplify, I figured. So I did.

And in doing so, I rediscovered several old projects I’d neglected or forgotten about. I wonder if anybody’s still using any of them?

Hosting I’ve tidied so far…

Cheating Hangman is now hosted by GitHub Pages.
DNDle, my Wordle-clone where you have to guess the Dungeons & Dragons 5e monster’s stat block, is now hosted by GitHub Pages. Also, I fixed an issue reported a month ago that meant that I was reporting Giant Scorpions as having a WIS of 19 instead of 9.
Abnib, which mostly reminds people of upcoming birthdays and serves as a dumping ground for any Abnib-related shit I produce, is now hosted by GitHub Pages.
RockMonkey.org.uk, which doesn’t really do much any more, is now hosted by GitHub Pages.
EGXchange, my implementation of a digital wallet for environmentally-friendly cryptocurrency EmmaGoldCoin, which I’ve written about before, is now hosted by GitHub Pages.
Sour Grapes, the single-page promo for a (remote) murder mystery party I hosted during a COVID lockdown, is now hosted by GitHub Pages.
A convenience-page for giving lost people directions to my house is now hosted by GitHub Pages.
Dan Q’s Things is now automatically built on a schedule and hosted by GitHub Pages.
Robin’s Improbable Blog, which spun out from 52 Reflect, wasn’t getting enough traffic to justify “proper” hosting so now it sits in a Docker container on my NAS.
My μlogger server, which records my location based on pings from my phone, has also moved to my NAS. This has broken Find Dan Q, but I’m not sure if I’ll continue with that in its current form anyway.
All of my various domain/subdomain redirects have been consolidated on, or are in the process of moving to, to a tiny Linode/Akamai instance. It’s a super simple plain Nginx server that does virtually nothing except redirect people – this is where I’ll park the domains I register but haven’t found a use for yet, in future.

It turns out GitHub pages is a fine place to host simple, static websites that were open-source already. I’ve been working on improving my understanding of GitHub Actions anyway as part of what I’ve been doing while wearing my work, volunteering, and personal hats, so switching some static build processes like DNDle’s to GitHub Actions was a useful exercise.

Stuff I’m still to tidy…

There’s still a few things I need to tidy up to bring my personal hosting situation under control:

DanQ.me

This is the big one, because it’s not just a WordPress blog: it’s also a Gemini, Spartan, and Gopher server (thanks CapsulePress!), a Finger server, a general-purpose host to a stack of complex stuff only some of which is powered by Bloq (my WordPress/PHP integrations): e.g. code to generate the maps that appear on my geopositioned posts, code to integrate with the Fediverse, a whole stack of configuration to make my caching work the way I want, etc.

FreeDeedPoll.org.uk

Right now this is a Ruby/Sinatra application, but I’ve got a (long-running) development branch that will make it run completely in the browser, which will further improve privacy, allow it to run entirely-offline (with a service worker), and provide a basis for new features I’d like to provide down the line. I’m hoping to get to finishing this during my Automattic sabbatical this winter.

A secondary benefit of it becoming browser-based, of course, is that it can be hosted as a static site, which will allow me to move it to GitHub Pages too.

Geohashing.site

When I took over running the world’s geohashing hub from xkcd‘s Randall Munroe (and davean), I flung the site together on whatever hosting I had sitting around at the time, but that’s given me some headaches. The outbound email transfer agent is a pain, for example, and it’s a hard host on which to apply upgrades. So I want to get that moved somewhere better this winter too. It’s actually the last site left running on its current host, so it’ll save me a little money to get it moved, too!

My FreshRSS instance

Right now I run this on my NAS, but that turns out to be a pain sometimes because it means that if my home Internet goes down (e.g. thanks to a power cut, which we have from time to time), I lose access to the first and last place I go on the Internet! So I’d quite like to move that to somewhere on the open Internet. Haven’t worked out where yet.

Next steps

It’s felt good so far to consolidate and tidy-up my personal web hosting (and to rediscover some old projects I’d forgotten about). There’s work still to do, but I’m expecting to spend a few months not-doing-my-day-job very soon, so I’m hoping to find the opportunity to finish it then!

Easy Socialising

This weekend I invited over a bunch of our old university buddies, and it was great.

We still didn’t feel up to a repeat of the bigger summer party we held the year before last, but we love our Abnib buddies, so put the call out to say: hey, come on over, bring a tent (or be willing to crash on a sofa bed) if you want to stay over; we’ll let the kids run themselves ragged with a water fight and cricket and football and other garden games, then put them in front of a film or two while we hang out and drink and play board games or something.

14 adults, 8 children, and a dog stand on/in front of a garden climbing frame: Dan is in the centre. — Every one of these people is awesome. Or else a dog.

The entire plan was deliberately low-effort. Drinks? We had a local brewery drop us off a couple of kegs, and encouraged people to BYOB. Food? We threw a stack of pre-assembled snacks onto a table, and later in the day I rotated a dozen or so chilled pizzas through the oven. Entertainments? Give the kids a pile of toys and the adults one another’s company.

We didn’t even do more than the bare minimum of tidying up the place before people arrived. Washing-up done? No major trip hazards on the floor? That’s plenty good enough!

A man wearing a cap pours himself a beer from a 10-litre box. — The intersection of “BYOB” and the generosity of our friends somehow meant that, I reckon, we have more alcohol in the house now than *before* the party!

I found myself recalling our university days, when low-effort ad-hoc socialising seemed… easy. We lived close together and we had uncomplicated schedules, which combined to make it socially-acceptable to “just turn up” into one another’s lives and spaces. Many were the times that people would descend upon Claire and I’s house in anticipation that there’d probably be a film night later, for example¹.

I remember one occasion a couple of decades ago, chilling with friends². Somebody – possibly Liz – commented that it’d be great if in the years to come our kids would be able to be friends with one another. I was reminded of it when our eldest asked me, of our weekend guests, “why are all of your friends’ children are so great?”

A group of adults stand around on a patio, socialising. — It’s not *the same* as those days long ago, but I’m not sure I’d want it to be. It is, however, fantastic.

What pleased me in particular was how relatively-effortless it was for us all to slip back into casually spending time together. With a group of folks who have, for the most part, all known each other for over two decades, even not seeing one another in-person for a couple of years didn’t make a significant dent on our ability to find joy in each other’s company.

Plus, being composed of such laid-back folks, it didn’t feel awkward that we had, let’s face it, half-arsed the party. Minimal effort was the order of the day, but the flipside of that was that the value-for-effort coefficient was pretty-well optimised³.

A delightful weekend that I was glad to be part of.

Footnotes

¹ That Claire and I hosted so many social events, both regular and unplanned, eventually lead us to the point that it was the kind of thing we considered whenever we moved house!

² Perhaps at the Ship & Castle, where we spent a reasonable amount of our education.

³ I’m pretty sure that if I’d have used the term “value-for-effort coefficient” at the party, though, then it’d have immediately sucked 100% of the fun out of the room.

Bramble

Fresh D&D campaign with some Abnib folks! I’m playing a Harengon Barbarian.

I’m a fierce bunny rabbit!

Watch Together with WhatsApp on the side

A virtual party

This weekend, I threw a Virtual Free Fringe party for some friends. The party was under-attended, but it’s fine because I got to experiment with some tech that I’d been meaning to try.

The Abnibbers and I have experimented with watching things together, but apart, before, but this is the first time we’ve watched stand-up comedy this way.

If you ever want to run something like this yourself¹, here’s how I did it.

My goals were:

A web page at which any attendee could “watch together” a streaming video²,
A “chat” overlay, powered by a WhatsApp group³ (the friend group I was inviting were all using WhatsApp anyway, so this was an obvious choice), and
To do all the above cheaply or for free.

Selfie photograph of Dan, in a bar with a rooftop view of daylight out the windows in the background, looks concerned as he stares at the a frothy, bubbling flask of yellow liquid he's holding. — I’m a big fan of experiments. Contrary to this picture, though, they’re usually *software* experiments.

There were two parts to this project:

Setting up a streaming server that everybody can connect to, and
Decorating the stream with a WhatsApp channel

Setting up a streaming server

Linode offers a free trial of $100 of hosting credit over 60 days and has a ready-to-go recipe for installing Owncast, an open-source streaming server I’ve used before, so I used their recipe, opting for a 4GB dedicated server in their London datacentre: at $36/mo, there’d be no risk of running out of my free trial credit even if I failed to shut down and delete the virtual machine in good time. If you prefer the command-line, here’s the API call for that:

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
-X POST -d '{
    "authorized_users": [
        "[YOUR LINODE USERNAME]"
    ],
    "backups_enabled": false,
    "booted": true,
    "image": "linode/debian10",
    "label": "owncast-eu-west",
    "private_ip": false,
    "region": "eu-west",
    "root_pass": "[YOUR ROOT PASSWORD]",
    "stackscript_data": {
        "server_hostname": "[YOUR DOMAIN NAME]",
        "email_address": "[YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS]"
    },
    "stackscript_id": 804172,
    "tags": [],
    "type": "g6-dedicated-2"
}' https://api.linode.com/v4/linode/instances

The IP address got assigned before the machine finished booting, so I had time to copy that into my DNS configuration so the domain was already pointing to the machine before it was fully running. This enabled it to get its SSL certificate set up rightaway (if not, I’d have had to finish waiting for the DNS change to propogate and then reboot it).

Out of the box, Owncast is insecure-by-default, so I wanted to jump in and change some passwords. For some reason you’re initially only able to correct this over unencrypted HTTP! I opted to take the risk on this server (which would only be alive for a few hours) and just configure it with this limitation, logging in at http://mydomain:8080/admin with the default username and password (admin / abc123), changing the credentials to something more-secure. I also tweaked the configuration in general: setting the service name, URL, disabling chat features, and so on, and generating a new stream key to replace the default one.

Now I was ready to configure OBS Studio to stream video to my new Owncast server, which would distribute it to anybody who tuned-in.

Next up, we need to make WhatsApp appear on the stream with a little bit of CSS hackery.

Decorating the stream

I configured OBS Studio with a “Custom…” stream service with server rtmp://mydomain:1935/live and the stream key I chose when configuring Owncast and kicked off a test stream to ensure that I could access it via https://mydomain. I added a VLC source⁴ to OBS and fed it a playlist of videos, and added some branding.

With that all working, I now needed a way to display the WhatsApp chat superimposed over the video.For this, I added a Window Capture source and pointed it at a Firefox window that was showing a WhatsApp Web view of the relevant channel. I added a Crop/Pad filter to trim off the unnecessary chrome.

Next, I used the Firefox debugger “Style Editor” to inject some extra CSS into WhatsApp Web. The class names vary frequently, so there’s no point we re-documenting all of them here, but the essence of the changes were:

Changing the chat background to a solid bright color (I used red) that can then be removed/made transparent using OBS’s Chroma Key filter. Because you have a good solid color you can turn the Similarity and Smoothness way down.
Making all messages appear the same (rather than making my messages appear different from everybody else’s). To do this, I added:
- .message-in, .message-out { align-items: flex-start !important; } to align them all to the left
- [aria-label="You:"]::after { content: "Dan Q"; height: 15px !important; display: block; color: #00f !important; padding: 8px 0 0 8px; } to force my name to appear even on my own messages
- [aria-label^="Open chat details for "] { display: none; } to remove people’s avatars
- [data-testid="msg-meta"] { display: none !important; } to remove message metadata
- A hacky bit of CSS to make the backgrounds all white and to remove the speech bubble “tails”
Removing all the sending/received/read etc. icons with [data-icon] { display: none; }

I aimed where possible to exploit selectors that probably won’t change frequently, like [aria-label]s; this improves the chance that I can use the same code next time. I also manually removed “old” messages from the channel that didn’t need to be displayed on the big screen. I wasn’t able to consistently remove “X new messages” notifications, but I’ll probably try again another time, perhaps with the help of an injected userscript.

A little bit of a shame that more people didn’t get to see the results of this experiment, but I’m sure I’ll use the techniques I’ve learned on another ocassion.

Footnotes

¹ Or, let’s be honest, if you’re Future Dan and you’re trying to remember how you did it in last time.

² We were to watch a show by one of my favourite comedians Peter Buckley Hill, the man behind the Free Fringe. I’ve written about him previously… here, there, also several times in 2012 when I also helped make an official digital map of Free Fringe venues. I was especially delighted to have my photo taken with him in 2006. I might be a bit of a fanboy.

³ This could probably be adapted for any other chat system that has a web interface, so if you prefer Telegram or Slack or whatever ever, that’s fine.

⁴ OBS’s VLC source is just amazing: not only can you give it files, but you can give it URLs, meaning that you can set up a playlist of YouTube videos, or RTSP security camera feeds, or pretty much anything else you feel like (and have the codecs for).

On This Day In 2005

Looking Back

On this day in 2005 (actually tomorrow, but I needed to publish early) I received an unusual parcel at work, which turned out to contain a pan, wooden spoon, tin of spaghetti hoops, loaf of bread… and an entire electric hob.

This turned out, as I describe in my blog post of the day, to have been the result of a conversation that the pair of us had had on IRC the previous day, in which he called me a “Philistine” for heating my lunchtime spaghetti hoops in the office microwave. This was a necessity rather than a convenience, given that we didn’t have any other mechanism for heating food (other than a toaster, and that’s a really messy way to heat up tinned food…).

It was a different time: a time when the lives of many of my friends were still centered around academic persuits (Siân was working on and handing in her dissertation, as was Liz, Claire was getting results back, Ruth was stressed out by a useless student on her team, Paul took things too far, and even JTA was suffering: struggling with his wordcount of an essay that he considered handing in late). It was a time when our evenings were being consumed watching Knightmare (my blog posts mentioning: the first series, first half of second series, second half of second series, Ruth’s commentary) or at the Ship & Castle (both, sadly, without Sian). It was a time when Andy worked at the cafe under The Flat, like we were all in some kind of sitcom or something.

It was clearly a time when we were all blogging quite regularly: apologies for the wall of links (a handful of which, I’m afraid, might be restricted). Be glad that I spared you all the posts about the 2005 General Election, which at the time occupied a lot of the Abnib blogosphere. We were young, and idealistic, and many of us were students, and most of us hadn’t yet been made so cynical by the politicians who have come since.

And, relevantly, it was a time when Paul was able to express his randomness in some particularly quirky ways. Like delivering me a food parcel at work. He’s always been the king of random events, like organising ad-hoc hilltop trips that turned out to be for the purpose of actually releasing 99 red (helium) balloons. I tried to immortalise his capacity for thinking that’s not just outside the box, but outside the known Universe, when I wrote his character into Troma Night Adventure, but I’m not sure I quite went far enough.

Looking Forward

It seems so long ago now: those Aberystwyth days, less than a year out of University myself. When I look back, I still find myself wondering how we managed to find so much time to waste on categorising all of the pages on the RockMonkey wiki. I suppose that nowadays we’ve traded the spontaneity to say “Hey: card games in the pub in 20 minutes: see you there!” on a blog and expect it to actually work, for a more-structured and planned existence. More-recently, we’ve spent about a fortnight so far discussing what day of the week we want out new monthly board games night to fall on.

There’s still just enough of the crazy random happenstances in my life, though. As I discovered recently, when I once again received an unusual and unexpected parcel in the post. This time, it wasn’t from Paul, but from Adam, who’d decided to respond in a very literal fashion to my tongue-in-cheek suggestion that he owed me tea, and a keyboard.

I got the chance to live with Paul for a couple of years, until he moved out last month. I’m not sure whether or not this will ultimately reduce the amount of quirkiness that I get in my diet, but I’m okay either way. Paul’s not far away – barely on the other side of town – so I’m probably still within a fatal distance of the meteor we always assumed would eventually kill him.

We’ve turned what was his bedroom into an office. Another case of “a little bit less random, a little bit more structure and planning”, perhaps, in a very metaphorical way? Maybe this is what it feels like to be a grown-up. Took me long enough.

This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone by.

Hash Abnib

When I relaunched Abnib the other week (which I swear I didn’t expect to have to do, until people started complaining that I was going to let it die – this genuinely wasn’t some “marketing” stunt!), I simultaneously brought back Abnib Chat (#abnib), the IRC channel.

I blame Jen for this. She told me that she missed the long-dead #rockmonkey chat room, and wanted it (or something similar) back, so I decided to provide one. Hell; if Jen wanted it, maybe other people wanted it to? And it’s an easy thing to set up, I thought.

Personally, I thought that the chat room would be a flop. I’d give it a go, of course, but I didn’t hold up much hope for its survival. When Abnib first launched, back in 2003, the Abnibbers were all students first and foremost. Now, they’ve all got jobs, and many of those jobs aren’t of a variety compatible with sitting on an IRC channel all day. And at night? We’ve got money, nowadays, and homes, and spice, and all kinds of activities that consume our lives on an evening. Many of us get what our younger student selves would call an “early night” every day of the week, and there’s always so much to do that shooting the breeze over a laborious IRC channel simply isn’t compatible with our lives any more.

Looks like I was right. Here’s the channel activity for the first fortnight of the new Abnib Chat:

Sure, the 1st of the month was busy, but not very busy: in actual fact, many of the people who were “around” were only around briefly, and one of those – Guest1332 – didn’t even identify themselves.

We’ve all got new ways of communicating now. Some folks are using Twitter (I occasionally read the feeds of those who write in a way that I’m permitted to see, but I don’t “tweet” myself). Others use Facebook (for a given definition of “use”, anyway). Others still continue to blog (that’s the medium for me: I think I’m just a little too wordy for anything less). In any case; we’re like Abnib: The Next Generation, and we’ve got reliable transporters and replicators and all kinds of cool shit, and hanging around in an IRC channel just feels kind of… backwards.

Perhaps I’ve been watching too much Star Trek recently.

Anyway – unless people object to that, too (seriously?), I’ll be turning off Iggy later this month: so if you’ve got something important to say to him, say it soon! I’ll leave the “Chat” button on Abnib because it’s lazier than removing it, and you never know if somebody might find a use for it, but I think it’s time to declare the channel “dead”.

Abnib Lives On

Okay, okay, I get it!

After my blog post a few days ago about the imminent death of the oft-neglected Abnib, I received a surge of complaints by IM, email, and comments. It turns out that a higher-than-expected number of you are actually using the site on a daily basis.

So I’ve extended its life by a further two years, at least. I’ve also done some quick hacking to put together a new, more-maintainable framework for it. I give to you all: Abnib 7.0!

Abnib 7.0. It's survived being shot in the head twice now, so we can be sure that it's not a zombie.

Features not in 6.0 but now present include:

Easier to maintain; so when new blogs appear or old ones disappear, there’s a chance that it’ll be kept up-to-date.
Really ugly new skin thrown together in a few minutes.
Combined RSS and OPML feeds, to make it easy for you to switch to a better aggregator, as I assumed you all already had.
It’s a little faster to update itself and a lot faster to use.
Abnib Tweets, for those of you who are of the twittering persuasion. I’m not, so if there’s anybody I’ve missed you’ll have to let me know.
Abnib Rockmonkey – a random daily snippet from the long-dead Rockmonkey wiki.
Abnib Chat, the return of the abandoned chat room. Hey; if people still want Abnib, maybe they still want this, too… but I shan’t hold my breath! And no, the old Rockmokney bot, Iggy, isn’t there, so there’ll be no random cries of “Surfboard!” unless you bring them yourself.

Update: Wow. So far the chat room’s seen Matt R, Ruth, Bryn, Claire and me. Just not at the same time. It’s just like old times (although Iggy, who I just reinstated, is yet to say “surfboard” even once…)

The Death of Abnib

Next month, Abnib will die.

It’s been unmaintained for several years now, just ticking along under its own steam and miraculously not falling over. Nowadays, everybody seems to understand (or ought to understand) RSS and can operate their own aggregator, so there doesn’t really seem to be any point in carrying on running the service. So when the domain name comes up for renewal next month, I shan’t be renewing it. If somebody else wants to do so, I’ll happily tell them the settings that they need, but it’ll be them that’s paying for it, not me.

“But I still use Abnib!” I hear you cry. Well, here’s what you can do about it:

Option 1 (the simple-but-good option): switch to something better, easily

RSS aggregators nowadays are (usually) free and (generally) easy to use. If you don’t have a clue, here’s the Really Simple Guide to getting started:

Download the Abnib OPML file (https://danq.me/abnib.opml) and save it to your computer. This file describes in a computer-readable format who all the Abnibbers are.
Go to Google Reader and log in with your Google Account, if you haven’t already.
Click Settings, then Reader Settings.
Click Import/Export.
Click Browse… and select the file you downloaded in step #1.
Click Upload

Ta-da! You can now continue to read your favourite Abnib blogs through Google Reader. You’ve also got more features, like being able to not-subscribe to particular blogs, or (on some blogs) to subscribe to comments or other resources.

You don’t have to use Google Reader, of course: there are plenty of good RSS readers out there. And most of the good ones are capable of importing that OPML file, so you can quickly get up-and-running with all of your favourite Abnib blogs, right off the bat.

Option 2: switch to something better, manually

As above, but instead of downloading and uploading an OPML file, manually re-subscribe to each blog. This takes a lot longer, but makes it easy to choose not to subscribe to particular blogs. It also gives you the option to use a third-party service like FreeMyFeed to allow you to subscribe to LiveJournal “friends only” posts (which you were never able to do with Abnib), for example.

Option 3: continue to use Abnib (wait, what?)

Okay, so the domain name is expiring, but technically you’ll still be able to use Abnib for a while, at least, so long as you use the address http://abnib.appspot.com/. That won’t last forever, and it will be completely unmaintained, so when it breaks, it’s broken for good. It also won’t be updated with new blog addresses, so if somebody changes where their blog is hosted, you’ll never get the new one.

Goodbye, Abnib…

It’s been fun, Abnib, but you’ve served your purpose. Now it’s time for you to go the way of the Troma Night website and the RockMonkey wiki, and die a peaceful little death.

Dan’s April Fools’ Jokes This Year

After JTA and I’s monster plan for a great April Fools’ joke got rained-off this year (maybe another year), I just had to go ahead with two smaller April Fools’ gags this year.

The Photocopier Prank

A nice simple joke at the expense of the people in the office building I work in (and far less complex than last year’s prank against the same): I found a document online, printed it out, and stuck it to the photocopiers.

It instructs users that the photocopier has been upgraded with voice controls, so you can just “tell it” to copy, collate, staple etc. and it’ll follow your instructions. The document goes on to explain that it’s in “learning mode” right now and it might not get everything right while it learns your voice, so be patient and take the time to repeat yourself slowly and carefully.

I haven’t got eyes on the copier, so I’ve no idea how many – if any – people it caught.

The Abnib Announce/Joke Of The Week Prank

For the last few years, I’ve run two a text-message based mailing lists (I’ve got unlimited texts as part of my mobile contract, so it’s as-good-as free for me to do this). The first, Abnib Announce, lets people in Aber know about Troma Night, Geek Night, and similar events. The second, Joke of the Week, goes to a far wider audience and shares, every Friday, the best (by a loose and arguable definition of the word) of the jokes I’ve heard over the previous seven days.

This morning I sent out the following message to both lists:

Abnib Announce/Joke of the Week Update:

Bad news, everyone. My network has been in touch to say that running these regular bulk SMS lists is a violation of their Fair Use agreement, so I can’t run them from my “free texts” package any more. The good news is they’ve offered an alternative. These lists will now become subscription-based SMS services. This will cost you no more than 15p per message received, and a maximum of £1 per week (so £2 per week if you’re on both lists). I’m supposed to ask for your permission before subscribing your number, but I know you’ll all agree anyway. If for some reason you DON’T want to continue receiving Joke of the Week or Abnib Announce at 15p per message, please text me back BEFORE the first message, this afternoon. Ta!

I’ve had a handful of great responses, so far, including:

Nice try.x

Them: The rotters, what a bargain, keep the jokes coming please sir
Me: Seriously? When I made up those prices this April Fools’ Day I should have put them higher!
Them: Hahaha, got me, first one too. Love to the crew

Halfway through a serious response to this i remembered what day it is…

April fool?

Totally not falling for that, sorry! Happy April Fools

Them: Hey dan. Sorry i cant do that on my phone as my mum Pays my contract
Me: Happy April Fools’!
Them: Hee.very good

Them: I dont want to pay thanks. I have enough problems with arguing with orange over my phone bill at the minute, thanks. Hope you are good.
Me: April Fools’!
Them: Is it april already?! Damn i fell for it again! Nice one :-)

Them: Take me off the lists please! Ill get info from [other subscriber] and jokes from sickipedia
Me: Tell you what: because it’s you I’ll negotiate with your network: you’re on Orange, right? I’ve kidnapped the dog of the CEO of Orange; I’m pretty sure I can get him to waive the charges in your case.
Them: Is vodaphone, and their ceo only has a parrot and 5 fish.
Me: =op

Them: Im confused, if its 15p per message why is it £2 a week?
Me: NO MORE THAN £2 a week (well, £1 per week per list). So 4 Joke Of The Week messages would be 60p, 8 would be £1, 20 would be £1. Remember that it’s usually a multipart message spanning 4/5 messages each week. Full terms and conditions apply.
Them: Lol, sounds confusing, being a poor student i’ll have to pass i think, though i’ll miss moaning at your messages ;-)
Me: Really? You’re actually going? And, even more unbelievably, you’re actually falling for this obvious April Fools’ gag?
Me: Gotcha ;-)
Them: Yup and yup lol :-P

Happy April Fools day!

Them: oh arse, i can’t as i don’t pay the phone bill. is it possible for you to put them online?
Me: April Fools’, dummy!

Lol, good one. Did you manage to snare anyone?

Them: Textin back.no joke
Me: Gotcha! April Fools’.

Man, I love this day of the year.

Claire Goes To Pisa

So, last weekend Claire moved out of The Cottage and into her new flat, the top floor of a somewhat-slanted building on Queen’s Road which I’ve tken to calling Pisa. I gather she’s planning a flatwarming party in the afternoon – if you’re on the Abnib Events SMS list, you’ll already have heard about this, and I’ll let you know more as soon as I have it.

For those of you for whom this comes as a surprise, I apologise. I’m aware that in some ways it’s become my duty to keep those of you who’ve left Aber for brighter pastures up-to-date about every little bit of gossip about what’s going on back here in the West, but between all of the things that have been keeping me busy of late – not limited to helping Claire gather all 700 pairs of her shoes, or however many there are (it certainly feels like somewhere in the region of 700), into boxes for her to transport to her new home – I’ve simply not had time to put regular effort into keeping you all up-to-date.

Claire stars in a video tour of her new place, if you want to look around.

To provide answers the questions I anticipate, before they’re asked:

No, nothing else changes. We’re still together, and, in fact, our relationships (already too complicated for some of you, I know) are all still just the same as they already were. I’m still right where I was in the middle of a wiggly W-shaped chain of people in a series of more-open-than-not relationships, with all the same people you’re used to. If you’ve been on another planet for the last couple of years, that is:

Sting (no, not really) – Claire – Dan – Ruth – JTA

Yes, everything still happens at The Cottage. Well, everything that already happened at The Cottage: that is – Troma Night, Whedon Night, and the ocassional Geek Night at those times when both (a) Rory is elsewhere and (b) I am not. And, as usual, my door is open for guests just about any time.

So, why the change? That’s a question sufficiently-complex to not be answerable with anything as short and catchy as this blog post is planned to be. The short answer is that Claire wanted some space that was “hers”, as in – hers alone, not something shared with me and, for half the week, with somebody else!

And how do I feel about all this: well, a little poorer, for one – it’s obviously more expensive for the pair of us to have a house and a flat than just a house, especially as this change coincides with a (long-overdue, to be fair) rent increase at The Cottage: we’re both going to have to budget significantly more carefully than we did previously. It’s also a significant change – after six and a half years of living together – that’ll take some getting used to, and it’s sometimes hard to remember that this isn’t a step backwards. But that apprehension aside, I’m still supportive of Claire’s wish to have a place to call her own.

Beth Sends Her Love, Aberites

While I was out having lunch at SALT with Ruth, JTA, and Claire, I missed a message from Beth, who’s currently out in Indonesia. She writes (or click the piccy, above, which also includes a great photo showing exactly what she seems to want to say to us all):

greetings!

you’ve left yourself signed in and buggered off I guess. Well, love to all Aberites xx

So, there we are, Aberites: I’ve passed on Beth’s love to you all. Never say I don’t give you anything.

Abnib Quotes

It only occurred to me the other week that there are lots of people who would probably want to know about Abnib Quotes – people, even, that are quoted on it – that don’t. And that’s probably my fault for not blogging about it.

So yeah – there’s an Abnib Quotes. It replaces the long-defunct RockMonkey wiki quotes pages, and it’s got cool Web 2.0 features like tagging and voting and Facebook integration and all that bollocks, and you, yes you, should be using it. If you haven’t already, go take a peep. If you haven’t in a while, go vote on the dozens of new quotes that have appeared since you last visited, and don’t forget that you can subscribe to the feed and get updates in your favourite newsreader.

Abnib Events

Abnib Events, Inline In order to reduce the amount of time my blog spends being used to organise events like Black Red Dwarf Adder Nights and whatnot, I’ve launched Abnib Events, which aims to centralise the organisation of such get-togethers. You’ll also find that the next upcoming event appears on the Abnib front page, in the upper-right – like the upcoming Eurovision Night.

Obviously I’ll still end up mentioning these events here sometimes, but this still feels like a step forwards.

You’ll find that you’re able to subscribe to the XML or ICal feeds for the list of upcoming events, so if you use Google Calendar or similar software, you’ll be able to have Abnib Events appear right alongside your existing appointments. I’ll sort out RSS/Atom feeds for you newsreader fans at some point soon.

Right now, Paul and I are administrators of Abnib Events. If there are events you think are worth publicising to the Abnib community at large – Troma Night or other related film or TV series nights, barbeques and bonfires, house parties, nights out, board game or poker nights, for instance – get in touch with one of us two.

IRC Doesn’t Kill People – People Do!

There’s just been an interesting debate on the RockMonkey ChatRoom (#RockMonkey on Freenode) about where the channel is going, where power should lie, and all that jazz. It’s pretty much inevitable that this kind of discussion takes place on a channel, but this is the first time I’ve seen it happen on such a small one (and at a pleasantly low temperature, too). Changing times, eh?

Among many users of the channel, I’m sure it’s no secret that there are a few… personality clashes. That’s healthy, and can leads to great debate (or blazing arguments). The concern I raised was that channel operators (effectively: moderators of the chat room) haven’t been using their wizard-like powers in a responsible manner.

Jon asked me to blog it, but I soon realised that any blog entry I wrote would inevitably sound bitchy. So instead, I’ll just provide a link to some fantastic channel guidelines which explain what Freenode think is good practice when participating on, and, particularly, running and IRC channel. It says, far more eloquently than I would, exactly how I think the channel would be better run, and why.

Abnib

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