published on gemini – Page 9

Reply to The ethics of syndicating comments using WebMentions

This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.

In his blog post “The ethics of syndicating comments using WebMentions”, Terence Eden said:

…

I want to see what people are writing in public about my posts. I also want to direct people to the conversations which are happening elsewhere on the web. But people – quite rightly – might not want their content permanently stored by my site.

So I think I have a few options.

Do nothing. My site; my rules. If you don’t want me to grab your hot takes, don’t post them in public. (Feels a bit rude, TBQH.)

Be reactive. If someone asks me to remove their content, do so. (But, of course, how will they know I’ve made a copy?)

Stop syndicating comments. (I don’t wanna!)

Replace the verbatim comments with a link saying “Fred mentioned this article on Twitter” . (A bit of a disruptive experience for readers.)

Use oEmbed to capture the user’s comment and dynamically load it from the 3rd party site. That would update automatically if the user changes their name or deleted the comment. (A massive faff to set up.)

…

Terence Eden

Terence describes a problem that I’ve wrestled with myself. If somebody comments directly on my blog using the form at the bottom of a post, that’s a pretty strong indicator of them giving their consent for their comment to be published at the bottom of that post (at my discretion). If somebody publicly replies somewhere my post is syndicated, that’s less-obvious, but still pretty clear. If somebody merely mentions my post publicly, writing their own post and linking to mine… that’s a real fuzzy area.

I take a minimal approach; only capturing their full content if it’s short and otherwise trying to extract a snippet that contains the bit that mentioned my content, and I think that works great. But Terence points out an important follow-up: what if the commenter deletes that content?

My approach so far has always been a reactive one – the second in Terence’s list – and I think it’s a morally-acceptable stance for a personal blogger. But I’m not sure it scales. I find myself asking: what if a news outlet did this, taking my self-published feedback to their story and publishing it on their site, even if I later amended, retracted, or deleted it on my own? If somebody’s making money out of my content, that feels different: I’ve always been clear that what I write on my blog is permissively-licensed, but that permissiveness is based on the prohibition of commercial use of my content.

Perhaps down the line this can be solved technologically: something machine-readable akin to the <link rel="license" ...> tag could state an author’s preference for how their content is syndicated by third parties they’ve mentioned, answering questions like:

Can you quote me, or just link to me? Who do these rules apply to? (Should we be attaching metadata to individual links?)
Should you inform me that you’ve done so, and if so: how (WebMention, etc.)?
If you (or your site) observe that my content has disappeared or changed for an extended time, should that be taken as revokation of consent to syndicate it?

Right now, the relevant technologies are not well-established enough to even begin this kind of work, but if a modern interconected federated web of personal websites takes off, it’s the kind of question we might one day have to answer.

For now my gut feeling is that option #2 (reactive moderation of syndicated comments) is ethically-sufficient for personal websites. But I’ll be watching the feedback Terence (who probably gets many more readers than I) receives in case my gut doesn’t represent the majority!

Announcers and Automation

Duration 4:24

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

Nowadays if you’re on a railway station and hear an announcement, it’s usually a computer stitching together samples¹. But back in the day, there used to be a human with a Tannoy microphone sitting in the back office, telling you about the platform alternations and destinations.

I had a friend who did it as a summer job, once. For years afterwards, he had a party trick that I always quite enjoyed: you’d say the name of a terminus station on a direct line from Preston, e.g. Edinburgh Waverley, and he’d respond in his announcer-voice: “calling at Lancaster, Oxenholme the Lake District, Penrith, Carlisle, Lockerbie, Haymarket, and Edinburgh Waverley”, listing all of the stops on that route. It was a quirky, beautiful, and unusual talent. Amazingly, when he came to re-apply for his job the next summer he didn’t get it, which I always thought was a shame because he clearly deserved it: he could do the job blindfold!

There was a strange transitional period during which we had machines to do these announcements, but they weren’t that bright. Years later I found myself on Haymarket station waiting for the next train after mine had been cancelled, when a robot voice came on to announce a platform alteration: the train to Glasgow would now be departing from platform 2, rather than platform 1. A crowd of people stood up and shuffled their way over the footbridge to the opposite side of the tracks. A minute or so later, a human announcer apologised for the inconvenience but explained that the train would be leaving from platform 1, and to disregard the previous announcement. Between then and the train’s arrival the computer tried twice more to send everybody to the wrong platform, leading to a back-and-forth argument between the machine and the human somewhat reminiscient of the white zone/red zone scene from Airplane! It was funny perhaps only because I wasn’t among the people whose train was in superposition.

Clearly even by then we’d reached the point where the machine was well-established and it was easier to openly argue with it than to dig out the manual and work out how to turn it off. Nowadays it’s probably even moreso, but hopefully they’re less error-prone.

When people talk about how technological unemployment, they focus on the big changes, like how a tipping point with self-driving vehicles might one day revolutionise the haulage industry… along with the social upheaval that comes along with forcing a career change on millions of drivers.

But in the real world, automation and technological change comes in salami slices. Horses and carts were seen alongside the automobile for decades. And you still find stations with human announcers. Even the most radically-disruptive developments don’t revolutionise the world overnight. Change is inevitable, but with preparation, we can be ready for it.

Footnotes

¹ Like ScotRail’s set, voiced by Alison McKay, which computers can even remix for you over a low-fi hiphop beat if you like.

Note #20856

Things The Other Child Did Wrong That Lead To The Fight that I’ve heard so far today:

Clapped too loudly
Sang too loudly
Sang too quietly
Sang the wrong words
Put their feet too close to the dog
Ate the last grape
Ate the wrong grape (!?)
Finished brushing their teeth first
Clapped too loudly, again
Called somebody “buttocks”
Said somebody had buttocks
Expressed interest in going a different route to school
Put shoes on in wrong order

The Far Side in FreshRSS

A few yeras ago, I wanted to subscribe to The Far Side‘s “Daily Dose” via my RSS reader. The Far Side doesn’t have an RSS feed, so I implemented a proxy/middleware to bridge the two.

Browser debugger running document.evaluate('//li[@class="blog__post-preview"]', document).iterateNext() on Beverley's weblog and getting the first blog entry. — If you’re looking for a more-general instruction on using XPath scraping in FreshRSS, this isn’t it.

The release of version 1.20.0 of my favourite RSS reader FreshRSS provided a new mechanism for subscribing to content from sites that didn’t provide feeds: XPath scraping. I demonstrated the use of this to subscribe to my friend Beverley‘s blog, but this week I figured it was time to have a go at retiring my middleware and subscribing directly to The Far Side from FreshRSS.

It turns out that FreshRSS’s XPath Scraping is almost enough to achieve exactly what I want. The big problem is that the image server on The Far Side website tries to prevent hotlinking by checking the Referer: header on requests, so we need a proxy to spoof that. I threw together a quick PHP program to act as a proxy (if you don’t have this, you’ll have to click-through to read each comic), then configured my FreshRSS feed as follows:

Feed URL: https://www.thefarside.com/
The “Daily Dose” gets published to The Far Side‘s homepage each day.
XPath for finding new items: //div[@class="card tfs-comic js-comic"]
Finds each comic on the page. This is probably a little over-specific and brittle; I should probably switch to using the contains function at some point. I subsequently have to use parent:: and ancestor:: selectors which is usually a sign that your screen-scraping is suboptimal, but in this case it’s necessary because it’s only at this deep level that we start seeing really specific classes.
Item title: concat("Far Side #", parent::div/@data-id)
The comics don’t have titles (“The one with the cow”?), but these seem to have unique IDs in the data-id attribute of the parent <div>, so I’m using those as a reference.
Item content: descendant::div[@class="card-body"]
Within each item, the <div class="card-body"> contains the comic and its text. The comic itself can’t be loaded this way for two reasons: (1) the <img src="..."> just points to a placeholder (the site uses JavaScript-powered lazy-loading, ugh – the actual source is in the data-src attribute), and (2) as mentioned above, there’s anti-hotlink protection we need to work around.
Item link: descendant::input[@data-copy-item]/@value
Each comic does have a unique link which you can access by clicking the “share” button under it. This makes a hidden text <input> appear, which we can identify by the presence of the data-copy-item attribute. The contents of this textbox is the sharing URL for the comic.
Item thumbnail: concat("https://example.com/referer-faker.php?pw=YOUR-SECRET-PASSWORD-GOES-HERE&referer=https://www.thefarside.com/&url=", descendant::div[@class="tfs-comic__image"]/img/@data-src)
Here’s where I hook into my special proxy server, which spoofs the Referer: header to work around the anti-hotlinking code. If you wanted you might be able to come up with an alternative solution using a custom JavaScript loaded into your FreshRSS instance (there’s a plugin for that!), perhaps to load an iframe of the sharing URL? Or you can host a copy of my proxy server yourself (you can’t use mine, it’s got a password and that password isn’t YOUR-SECRET-PASSWORD-GOES-HERE!)
Item date: ancestor::div[@class="tfs-page__full tfs-page__full--md"]/descendant::h3
There’s nothing associating each comic with the date it appeared in the Daily Dose, so we have to ascend up to the top level of the page to find the date from the heading.
Item unique ID: parent::div/@data-id
Giving FreshRSS a unique ID can help it stop showing duplicates. We use the unique ID we discovered earlier; this way, if the Daily Dose does a re-run of something it already did since I subscribed, I won’t be shown it again. Omit this if you want to see reruns.

Far Side comic #12326, from 23 November 2022, shown in FreshRSS. The comic shows two bulls dressed in trenchcoats and hats browsing a china shop; one staff member says to the other "I got a bad feeling about this, Harriet." — Hurrah; once again I can laugh at repeats of Gary Larson’s best work alongside my other morning feeds.

There’s a moral to this story: when you make your website deliberately hard to consume, fewer people will access it in the way you want! The Far Side‘s website is actively hostile to users (JavaScript lazy-loading, anti-right click scripts, hotlink protection, incorrect MIME types, no feeds etc.), and an inevitable consequence of that is that people like me will find and share workarounds to that hostility.

If you’re ad-supported or collect webstats and want to keep traffic “on your site” on this side of 2004, you should make it as easy as possible for people to subscribe to content. Consider The Oatmeal or Oglaf, for example, which offer RSS feeds that include only a partial thumbnail of each comic and a link through to the full thing. I don’t feel the need to screen-scrape those sites because they’ve given me a subscription option that works, and I routinely click-through to both of them to enjoy their latest content!

Conversely, the Far Side‘s aggressive anti-subscription technology ultimately means that there are fewer actual visitors to their website… because folks like me work to circumvent them.

And now you know how I did so.

Update: want the new content that’s being published to The Far Side in FreshRSS, too? I’ve got a recipe for that!

When Twitter Loses, WordPress Wins

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

…

You know who’s having a killer month? Automattic. Everyone who’s leaving Twitter seem to fall in at least one of these three camps:

They have gone back to the blogosphere. (using WordPress, or WordPress.com)

They have gone to Tumblr

They have gone to the fediverse (of which a fairly large percentage are WordPress installs)

In all of these cases, Automattic wins.

…

Alex Standiford

Some smart observations here by Alex. A fourth point worth noting is that Matt has openly suggested that former Twitter engineers might like to come join us in Automattic and help make the web a better place. We’ve changed our careers pages a little lately but we’re still the same awesome company!

Alex went on to say:

I’ll be downright shocked if Matt isn’t working very hard to get Tumblr on the fediverse ASAP. He has so much to gain in supporting this movement, and very little to lose.

That’s definitely on his mind too, which I can safely say without leaking anything because he’s hinted at it himself. Exciting times.

Spring ’83 Came And Went

Just in time for Robin Sloan to give up on Spring ’83, earlier this month I finally got aroud to launching STS-6 (named for the first mission of the Space Shuttle Challenger in Spring 1983), my experimental Spring ’83 server. It’s been a busy year; I had other things to do. But you might have guessed that something like this had been under my belt when I open-sourced a keygenerator for the protocol the other day.

If you’ve not played with Spring ’83, this post isn’t going to make much sense to you. Sorry.

Introducing STS-6

My server is, as far as I can tell, very different from any others in a few key ways:

It does not allow third-party publishing at all. Some might argue that this undermines the aim of the exercise, but I disagree. My IndieWeb inclinations lead me to favour “self-hosted” content, shared from its owners’ domain. Also: the specification clearly states that a server must implement a denylist… I guess my denylist simply includes all keys that are not specifically permitted.
It’s geared towards dynamic content. My primary board self-publishes whenever I produce a new blog post, listing the most recent blog posts published. I have another half-implemented which shows a summary of the most-recent post, and another which would would simply use a WordPress page as its basis – yes, this was content management, but published over Spring ’83.
It provides helpers to streamline content production. It supports internal references to other boards you control using the format {{board:123}}which are automatically converted to addresses referencing the public key of the “current” keypair for that board. This separates the concept of a board and its content template from that board’s keypairs, making it easier to link to a board. To put it another way, STS-6 links are self-healing on the server-side (for local boards).
It helps automate content-fitting. Spring ’83 strictly requires a maximum board size of 2,217 bytes. STS-6 can be configured to fit a flexible amount of dynamic content within a template area while respecting that limit. For my posts list board, the number of posts shown is moderated by the size of the resulting board: STS-6 adds more and more links to the board until it’s too big, and then removes one!
It provides “hands-off” key management features. You can pregenerate a list of keys with different validity periods and the server will automatically cycle through them as necessary, implementing and retroactively-modifying <link rel="next"> connections to keep them current.

I’m sure that there are those who would see this as automating something that was beautiful because it was handcrafted; I don’t know whether or not I agree, but had Spring ’83 taken off in a bigger way, it would always only have been a matter of time before somebody tried my approach.

From a design perspective, I enjoyed optimising an SVG image of my header so it could meaningfully fit into the board. It’s pretty, and it’s tolerably lightweight.

If you want to see my server in action, patch this into your favourite Spring ’83 client: https://s83.danq.dev/10c3ff2e8336307b0ac7673b34737b242b80e8aa63ce4ccba182469ea83e0623

A dead end?

Without Robin’s active participation, I feel that Spring ’83 is probably coming to a dead end. It’s been a lot of fun to play with and I’d love to see what ideas the experience of it goes on to inspire next, but in its current form it’s one of those things that’s an interesting toy, but not something that’ll make serious waves.

In his last lab essay Robin already identified many of the key issues with the system (too complicated, no interpersonal-mentions, the challenge of keys-as-identifiers, etc.) and while they’re all solvable without breaking the underlying mechanisms (mentions might be handled by Webmention, perhaps, etc.), I understand the urge to take what was learned from this experiment and use it to help inform the decisions of the next one. Just as John Postel’s Quote of the Day protocol doesn’t see much use any more (although maybe if my finger server could support QotD?) but went on to inspire the direction of many subsequent “call-and-response” protocols, including HTTP, it’s okay if Spring ’83 disappears into obscurity, so long as we can learn what it did well and build upon that.

Meanwhile: if you’re looking for a hot new “like the web but lighter” protocol, you should probably check out Gemini. (Incidentally, you can find me at gemini://danq.me, but that’s something I’ll write about another day…)

Oxford Geek Nights #52

On Wednesday this week, three years and two months after Oxford Geek Nights #51, Oxford Geek Night #52. Originally scheduled for 15 April 2020 and then… postponed slightly because of the pandemic, its reapparance was an epic moment that I’m glad to have been a part of.

Matt Westcott stands to the side of a stage, drinking beer, while centrestage a cross-shaped "pharmacy sign" projects an animation of an ambulance rocketing into a starfield. — A particular highlight of the night was witnessing “Gasman” Matt Westcott show off his epic demoscene contribution Pharmageddon, which is presented via a “pharmacy sign”. Here’s a video, if you’re interested.

Ben Foxall also put in a sterling performance; hearing him talk – as usual – made me say “wow, I didn’t know you could do that with a web browser”. And there was more to learn, too: Jake Howard showed us how robots see, Steve Buckley inspired us to think about how technology can make our homes more energy-smart (this is really cool and sent me down a rabbithole of reading!), and Joe Wass showed adorable pictures of his kid exploring the user interface of his lockdown electronics project.

Digital scoreboard showing Dan Q in the lead with 5,561, Nick in second place with 5,442, and RaidIndigo in third with 5,398. — Oh, and there was a quiz competition too, and guess who came out on top after an incredibly tight race.

But mostly I just loved the chance to hang out with geeks again; chat to folks, make connections, and enjoy that special Oxford Geek Nights atmosphere. Also great to meet somebody from Perspectum, who look like they’d be great to work for and – after hearing about – I had in mind somebody to suggest for a job with them… but it looks like the company isn’t looking for anybody with their particular skills on this side of the pond. Still, one to watch.

Dan, outdoors on a grassy path, wearing a grey hoodie. On his head is a "trucker cap" emblazoned with the word "GEEK" and, in smaller writing "#OGN52". — My prize for winning the competition was an extremely-limited-edition cap which I love so much I’ve barely taken it off since.

Huge thanks are due to Torchbox, Perspectum and everybody in attendance for making this magical night possible!

Oh, and for anybody who’s interested, I’ve proposed to be a speaker at the next Oxford Geek Nights, which sounds like it’ll be towards Spring 2023. My title is “Yesterday’s Internet, Today!” which – spoilers! – might have something to do with the kind of technology I’ve been playing with recently, among other things. Hope to see you there!

Finger Portal to WordPress Blog

Finger Primer

The finger protocol, first standardised way back in 1977, is a lightweight directory system for querying resources on a local or remote shared system. Despite barely being used today, it’s so well-established that virtually every modern desktop operating system – Windows, MacOS, Linux etc. – comes with a copy of finger, giving it a similar ubiquity to web browsers! (If you haven’t yet, give it a go.)

If you were using a shared UNIX-like system in the 1970s through 1990s, you might run finger to see who else was logged on at the same time as you, finger chris to get more information about Chris, or finger alice@example.net to look up the details of Alice on the server example.net. Its ability to transcend the boundaries of different systems meant that it was, after a fashion, an example of an early decentralised social network!

I first actively used finger when I was a student at Aberystwyth University. The shared central computers osfa and osfb supported it in what was a pretty typical way: users could add a .plan and/or .project file to their home directory and the contents of these would be output to anybody using finger to look up that user, along with other information like what department they belonged to. I’m simulating from memory so this won’t be remotely accurate, but broadly speaking it looked a little like this –

$ finger dlq9@aber.ac.uk
Login: dlq9                           Name: Dan Q
Directory: /users/9/d/dlq9      Department: Computer Science

Project:
Working on my BEng Software Engineering.

Plan:
    _______
---'   ____)____
          ______)  Finger me!
       _____)
      (____)
---.__(___)

It’s not just about a directory of people, though: you could finger printers to see what their queues were like, finger a time server to ask what time it was, finger a vending machine to see what drinks it had available… even finger for a weather forecast where you are (this one still works as shown below; try it for your own location!) –

$ finger oxford@graph.no
        -= Meteogram for Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, United Kingdom =-
 'C                                                                   Rain (mm)
 12
 11
 10                                                         ^^^=--=--
  9^^^                                                   ===
  8   ^^^===      ======                              ^^^
  7         ======      ===============^^^         =--
  6                                       =--=-----
  5
  4
  3        |  |  |  |  |  |  |                                        1 mm
    17 18 19 20 21 22 23 18/11 02 03 04 05 06 07_08_09_10_11_12_13_14 Hour

     W  W  W  W  W  W  W  W  W  W  W  W  W  W  W  W  W  W  W  W  W  W Wind dir.
     6  6  7  7  7  7  7  7  6  6  6  5  5  4  4  4  4  5  6  6  5  5 Wind(m/s)

Legend left axis:   - Sunny   ^ Scattered   = Clouded   =V= Thunder   # Fog
Legend right axis:  | Rain    ! Sleet       * Snow

If you’d just like to play with finger, then finger.farm is a great starting point. They provide free finger hosting and they’re easy to use (try finger dan@finger.farm to find me!). But I had something bigger in mind…

Fingering WordPress

What if you could finger my blog. I.e. if you ran finger blog@danq.me you’d see a summary of some of my recent posts, along with additional addresses you could finger to read the full content of each. This could be the world’s first finger-to-WordPress gateway; y’know, for if you thought the world needed such a thing. Here’s how I did it:

Installed efingerd; I’m using the Debian binaries.
Opened a hole in the firewall on port 79 so the outside world could access it (ufw allow 1965; utf reload).
The default configuration for efingerd acts like a “typical” finger server, but it’s highly programmable to make it “smarter”. I:
1. Blanked /etc/efingerd/list to prevent any output from “listing” the server (finger @danq.me).
2. Replaced the contents of /etc/efingerd/list and /etc/efingerd/nouser(which are run when a request matches, or doesn’t match, a user account name) with a call to my script: /usr/local/bin/finger-to-wordpress "$3". $3 holds the username that was requested, so we can act on it.
3. Created /usr/local/bin/finger-to-wordpress – a Ruby program that either (a) lists a selection of posts or (b) returns a specific post (stripping the HTML tags)

In future, I might use some extra tags or metadata to enhance finger-friendly WordPress posts. The infrastructure’s in place already (I already have tags that I use to make certain kinds of content available only via certain media – shh!). You might rightly as what the point is of this entire enterprise, of course, and you’d be well within your rights to ask such a question. But I think the best answer available is “because Dan”.

If you want to see my blog in a whole new way, give it a go: run finger blog@danq.me on your computer and follow the instructions.

Note #20645

Unable to sleep, I found myself wondering whether anybody with a retro-hipster vibe had built a smart pocketwatch. All your smartwatch features, but in pocketwatch format.

Then I realised I was describing a mobile phone on a keychain.

Note #20639

Just when I thought I’d seen every conceivable XML data format with an approved MIME type (!) I discover @mamund‘s Maze+XML, a format for describing orthoganally-connected squares of a maze.

Note #20578

Kids: We want porridge for breakfast.
Me: How do you want it?
Kids: Surprise us.

Presenting… oatmeal, honey and sultanas with a toasted marshmallow.

Note #20517

Was a 10th century speaker of Old Saxon a “Saxophone”? 🤔

Covid Brain

I managed to dodge infection for 922 days of the Covid pandemic¹, but it caught up with me eventually.

Lateral flow test, with "DAN" written on it, showing a solid control line and a very clear solid test line: a clear positive result. — Well, shit.

Frankly, it’s surprising that it took this long. We’ve always been careful, in accordance with guidance at any given time, nd we all got our jabs and boosters as soon as we were able… but conversely: we’ve got school-age children who naturally seem to be the biggest disease vectors imaginable. Our youngest, in fact, already had Covid, but the rest of us managed to dodge it perhaps thanks to all these precautions.

Vials of Covid vaccine scattered across a red background. Photo courtesy Maksim Goncharenok. — The vaccine provide protection, but it’s not a magical force-field.

Luckily I’m not suffering too badly, probably thanks to the immunisation. It’s still not great, but I dread to think how it might have been without the benefit of the jab! A minor fever came and went, and then it’s just been a few days of coughing, exhaustion, and… the most-incredible level of brain-fog.

Dan with the dog, in the garden. — Today, for example, I completey blanked the word “toilet” and struggled for some time to express to the dog why I’d brought her into the garden, while she stared at me expectantly.

I’ve taken the week off work to recover, which was a wise choice. As well as getting rest, it’s meant that I’ve managed to avoid writing production code with my addled brain! Instead, I’ve spent a lot of time chilling in bed and watching all of the films that I’d been meaning to! This week, I’ve watched:

Peggy Sue Got Married (y’know, that other mid-1980s movie about time travel and being a teenager in the 1950s). It was okay; some bits of the direction were spectacular for its age, like the “through the mirror” filming.
Fall. I enjoyed this more than I expected to. It’s not great, but while I spent most of the time complaining about the lack of believability in the setting and the characters’ reactions, the acting was good and the tension “worked”: it was ocassionally pretty vertigo-inducing, and that’s not just because I’ve been having some Covid-related dizziness!
RRR. Oh my god this Tollywood action spectacle was an adventure. At one point it’s a bromantic buddy comedy, then later there’s a dance-off, then for a while there’s a wonderful “even language can’t divide us” romance, but then later a man picks up a motorcycle with one hand and uses it to beat up an entire army, and somehow it all feels like it belongs together. The symbolism’s so thick you can spread it (tl;dr: colonialism bad), but it’s still a riot of a film.
Cyrano, which I feel was under-rated but that could just be that I have a soft spot for the story… and a love of musical theatre.
Also, at times when I didn’t think my brain had the focus for something new, I re-watched Dude, Where’s My Car? because I figured a stoner comedy that re-replains the plot every 20 minutes or so was about as good as I could expect my brain to handle at the time, and Everything Everywhere All At Once which I’ve now seen three times and loved every single one: it’s one of my favourite films.

Dan lying in bed, giving a weak "thumbs up". — See, I’m fine! (Feel like I’ve spent a lot of time lying here, this week.)

Anyway: hopefully next week I’ll be feeling more normal and my poor Covid-struck brain can be trusted with code again. Until then: time to try to rest some more.

Footnotes

¹ Based on the World Health Organisation’s declaration of the outbreak being a pandemic on 11 March 2020 and my positive test on 19 September 2022, I stayed uninfected for two years, six months, one week, and one day. But who’s counting?

How Not to use A Pizza Oven

Clearly those closest to me know me well, because for my birthday today I received a beautiful (portable: it packs into a bag!) wood-fired pizza oven, which I immediately assembled, test-fired, cleaned, and prepped with the intention of feeding everybody some homemade pizza using some of Robin‘s fabulous bread dough, this evening.

Fuelled up with wood pellets the oven was a doddle to light and bring up to temperature. It’s got a solid stone slab in the base which looked like it’d quickly become ideal for some fast-cooked, thin-based pizzas. I was feeling good about the whole thing.

But then it all began to go wrong.

Animated GIF showing the fire blazing as seen through the viewing window on the front of the oven. — The confined space quickly heats up to a massive 400-500ºC.

If you’re going to slip pizzas onto hot stone – especially using a light, rich dough like this one – you really need a wooden peel. I own a wooden peel… somewhere: I haven’t seen it since I moved house last summer. I tried my aluminium peel, but it was too sticky, even with a dusting of semolina or a light layer of oil. This wasn’t going to work.

I’ve got some stone slabs I use for cooking fresh pizza in a conventional oven, so I figured I’d just preheat them, assemble pizzas directly on them, and shunt the slabs in. Easy as (pizza) pie, right?

Pizza on fire in oven. — Within 60 seconds the pizza was cooked and, in its elevated position atop a second layer of stone, the crust began to burn. The only-mildy-charred bits were delicious, though.

This oven is hot. Seriously hot. Hot enough to cook the pizza while I turned my back to assemble the next one, sure. But also hot enough to crack apart my old pizza stone. Right down the middle. It normally never goes hotter than the 240ºC of my regular kitchen oven, but I figured that it’d cope with a hotter oven. Apparently not.

So I changed plan. I pulled out some old round metal trays and assembled the next pizza on one of those. I slid it into the oven and it began to cook: brilliant! But no sooner had I turned my back than… the non-stick coating on the tray caught fire! I didn’t even know that was a thing that could happen.

Flames flickering at the back of a pizza oven. — Hello fire. I failed to respect you sufficiently when I started cooking. I’ve learned my lesson now.

Those first two pizzas may have each cost me a piece of cookware, but they tasted absolutely brilliant. Slightly coarse, thick, yeasty dough, crisped up nicely and with a hint of woodsmoke.

But I’m not sure that the experience was worth destroying a stone slab and the coating of a metal tray, so I’ll be waiting until I’ve found (or replaced) my wooden peel before I tangle with this wonderful beast again. Lesson learned.

Staying Sane with GEMSAW

I’ve been having a tough time these last few months. Thanks to COVID, I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

Times are strange, and even when you get a handle on how they’re strange they can still affect you: lockdown stress can quickly magnify anything else you’re already going through.

We’ve all come up with our own coping strategies; here’s part of mine.

JTA, Dan and Ruth shopping for a Christmas tree, wearing face masks — Only people who are highly-allergic to pine needles normally look like this when they’re shopping for a Christmas tree.

These last few months have occasionally seen me as emotionally low as… well, a particularly tough spell a decade ago. But this time around I’ve benefited from the self-awareness and experience to put some solid self-care into practice!

By way partly of self-accountability and partly of sharing what works for me, let me tell you about the silly mnemonic that reminds me what I need to keep track of as part of each day: GEMSAW! (With thanks to Amy Blankson for, among other things, the idea of this kind of acronym.)

Because it’s me, I’ve cited a few relevant academic sources for you in my summary, below:

Gratitude
Taking the time to stop and acknowledge the good things in your life, however small, is associated with lower stress levels (Taylor, Lyubomirsky & Stein, 2017) to a degree that can’t just be explained by the placebo effect (Cregg & Cheavens, 2020).
Frankly, the placebo effect would be fine, but it’s nice to have my practice of trying to intentionally recognise something good in each day validated by the science too!
Exercise
I don’t even need a citation; I’m sure everybody knows that aerobic exercise is associated with reduced risk and severity of depression: the biggest problem comes from the fact that it’s an exceptionally hard thing to motivate yourself to do if you’re already struggling mentally!
But it turns out you don’t need much to start to see the benefits (Josefsson, Lindwall & Archer, 2014): I try to do enough to elevate my heart rate each day, but that’s usually nothing more than elevating my desk to standing height, putting some headphones on, and dancing while I work!

Dan dancing at his desk (animated GIF) — Warming up. Things only get nuts when the bass drops, but I’ll spare you having to watch that.

Meditation/Mindfulness
Understandably a bit fuzzier as a concept and tainted by being a “hip” concept. A short meditation break or mindfulness exercise might be verifiably therapeutic, but more (non-terrible) studies are needed (Vonderlin, Biermann, Bohus & Lyssenko 2020). For me, a 2-5 minute meditation break punctuates a day and feels like it contributes towards the goal of staying-sane-in-challenging-times, so it makes it into my wellbeing plan.
Maybe it’s doing nothing. But I’m not losing much time over it so I’m not worried.
Sunlight
During my 20s I gradually began to suffer more and more from “winter blues”. Nobody’s managed to make an argument for the underlying cause of seasonal affective disorder that hasn’t been equally-well debunked by some other study. Small-scale studies often justify light therapy (e.g. Lam, Levitan & Morehouse 2006) but it’s possibly no-more-effective than a placebo at scale (SBU 2007).
Since my early 30s, I’ve always felt better to get myself 30 minutes of lightbox on winter mornings (I use one of these bad boys). I admit it’s possible that the benefits are just the result of tricking my brain into waking-up more promptly and therefore feeing like I’m being more-productive with my waking hours! But either way, getting some sunlight – whether natural or artificial – makes me feel better, so it makes it onto my daily self-care checklist.

Bright sunlight in an almost-cloudless blue sky. — 10 minutes of overhead, unoccluded sunlight is the minimum therapeutic dose. That translates to about 30 minutes of winter sun at my latitude or 10,000 lux full-spectrum sunlamp.

Acts of kindness
It’s probably not surprising that a person’s overall happiness correlates with their propensity for kindness (Lyubomirsky, King & Diener 2005). But what’s more interesting is that the causal link can be “gamed”. That is: a deliberate effort to engage in acts of kindness results in increased happiness (Buchanan & Bardi 2010)!
Beneficial acts of kindness can be as little as taking the time to acknowledge somebody’s contribution or compliment somebody’s efforts. The amount of effort it takes is far less-important for happiness than the novelty of the experience, so the type of kindness you show needs to be mixed-up a bit to get the best out of it. But demonstrating kindness helps to make the world a better place for other humans, so it pays off even if you’re coming from a fully utilitarian perspective.
Writing
I write a lot anyway, often right here, and that’s very-definitely for my own benefit first and foremost. But off the back of some valuable “writing therapy” (Baikie & Wilhelm 2005) I undertook earlier this year, I’ve been continuing with the simpler, lighter approach of trying to no more than three sentences about something that’s had an impact on me that day.
As an approach, it doesn’t help everybody (Zachariae 2015), but writing a little about your day – not even about how you feel about it, just the facts will do (Koschwanez, Robinson, Beban, MacCormick, Hill, Windsor, Booth, Jüllig & Broadbent 2017; fuck me that’s a lot of co-authors) – helps to keep you content, and I’m loving it.

Despite the catchy acronym (Do I need to come up with a GEMSAW logo? I’m pretty sure real gemcutting is actually more of a grinding process…) and stack of references, I’m not actually writing a self-help book; it just sounds like I am.

I don’t claim to be an authority on anything beyond my own head, and I’m not very confident on that subject! I just wanted to share with you something that’s been working pretty well at keeping me sane for the last month or two, just in case it’s of any use to you. These are challenging times; do what you need to find the happiness you can, and hang in there.