When I saw the title of this piece by The Nerdwriter pop up in my RSS reader, the first words that grabbed my attention were “time travel movie”. I’ve a bit of a thing for time travel
stories in any medium, and I love a good time travel movie1.
Could I be about to be introduced to one I’m not familiar with, I wondered?
Before the thumbnail loaded2,
I processed the rest of the title: the movie doesn’t move. At first my brain had assumed that this was a reference to the story spanning time but not space,
but now suddenly it clicked:
Like many people (outside of film students), I imagine, I first came across La Jetée after seeing it mentioned in the credits of Twelve Monkeys, which adapts its
storyline in several ways. And like most people who then went on to see it, I imagine, I was moved by that unforgettable experience – there’s nothing quite like it in the history of
film (if we’re to call it a film, that is: its creator famously doesn’t).
Anyway: Nerdwriter1’s take on it doesn’t say anything that hasn’t already been said, but it’s a beautiful introduction to interpreting this fantastic short film and it’s
highly-accessible whether or not you’ve seen La Jetée3. Give his video essay a watch.
Footnotes
1 Okay, let’s be honest, my feelings go deeper than that. Time travel movies are, for me,
like pizza: I love a good time travel movie, but I’ll also happily enjoy a pretty trashy time travel movie too.
2 Right now I’m in a rural farm building surrounded by olive groves in an out-of-the-way
bit of Spain, and my Internet access isn’t always the fastest. D’ya remember how sometimes Web pages used to load the text and then you’d wait while the images loaded? They still do
that, here.
3 There’s spoilers, but by the time a film is 60 years old, I think that’s fair game,
right?
I’m on sabbatical from work right now, so I’m hoping to be able to get out to this hashpoint while the kids are at school.
Expedition
After dropping the kids off at school, the geopup/hashhound and I set out for the hashpoint. Coming up the “short side” of the bridleway from Botley would be a shorter walk, but we
opted to park in Cumnor and come up the “long side” of Harcourt Hill to avoid Oxford’s traffic (and the inevitable fee for parking on the city’s side of the hill).
Harcourt Hill (like my village of Stanton Harcourt) doubtless gets its name from the Harcourt Family, who supported William the Conqueror during his conquest of Great Britain back in
1066 and were ultimately granted huge swathes of land around this part of the world in recognition of their loyalty. To this day, you find “Harcourt” in a lot of place names in this
neck of the woods.
The hashpoint was so easy to find, we almost walked right over it: it’s right in the centre of the footpath/bridleway. Even my dog, who often doesn’t like long walks or muddy paths,
didn’t get a chance to complain before we got there. We arrived at 09:35 and took the requisite photos, which can be found below. We also kept a GPS tracklog and vlogged our experience,
all of which you can see below.
I’ve not properly hashed in a long while, so it was great to get back out there!
What’s the point of this crossing? Do rabbits pass very fast through this junction?
View East from the hashpoint (plus dog).
View West from the hashpoint.
Right in the middle of the circle of uncertainty.
Silly grin/silly tongue-sticking-out.
From safely outside of its predicted path, just around the Yucatan coast, Hurricane Milton seems like a forboding and distant monster. A growing threat whose path will thankfully take
it away, not towards, me.
My heart goes out to the people on the other side of the Gulf of Mexico who find themselves along the route of this awakened beast.
The YouTube channel @simonscouse has posted exactly two videos.
The first came a little over ten years ago. It shows a hand waving and then wiggling its fingers in front of a patterned wallpaper:
The second came a little over five years ago, and shows a hand – the same hand? – waving in front of a painting of two cats while a child’s voice can be heard in the background:
In a comment on the latter, the producer promised that it’s be “only
another 5 years until the trilogy is completed”.
Where’s the third instalment, Simon? We’re all waiting to see it!
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, coding would be it. The long term benefits of coding websites remains unproved by scientists, however the rest of my advice has a
basis in the joy of the indie web community’s experiences. I will dispense this advice now:
Enjoy the power and beauty of PHP; or never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of PHP until your stack is completely jammed. But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look
back at your old sites and recall in a way you can’t grasp now, how much possibility lay before you and how simple and fast they were. JS is not as blazingly fast as you imagine.
Don’t worry about the scaling; or worry, but know that premature scalability is as useful as chewing bubble gum if your project starts cosy and small. The real troubles on the web
are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; if your project grows, scale it up on some idle Tuesday.
I can’t say I loved Baz Luhrmann’s Everybody’s Free To Wear Sunscreen. I’m not sure it’s possible for anybody who lived through it being played to death in the late
1990s; a period of history when a popular song was basically inescapable. Also, it got parodied a lot. I must’ve seen a couple of dozen different parodies of varying quality in
the early 2000s.
But it’s been long enough that I was, I guess, ready for one. And I couldn’t conceive of a better topic.
Y’see: the very message of the value of personal websites is, like Sunscreen, a nostalgic one. When I try to sell
people on the benefits of a personal digital garden or blog, I tend to begin by pointing out that the best time to set up your own website is… like 20+ years ago.
But… the second-best time to start a personal website is right now. With cheap and free static
hosting all over the place (and more-dynamic options not much-more expensive) and domain names still as variably-priced as they ever were, the biggest impediment is the learning
curve… which is also the fun part! Siloed social media is either eating its own tail or else fighting to adapt to once again be part of a more-open Web, and there’s nothing that says
“I’m part of the open Web” like owning your own online identity, carving out your own space, and expressing yourself there however you damn well like.
As always, this is a drum I’ll probably beat until I die, so feel free to get in touch if you want some help getting set up on the Web.
Part of the joy of the collaborative Internet is that people can share their passion. Today’s example comes from this YouTuber who’s made an hour long video demonstrating and
ranking the 35 elevators in the first five games in the Myst series.
Starting with a discussion of what defines an elevator, the video goes on to show off some of the worst of the lifts in the series of games (mostly those that are uninspired,
pointless, or which have confusing interfaces) before moving on to the well-liked majority.
I only ever played the first two Myst games (and certainly haven’t played the first since, what, the mid-1990s?) and I don’t think I finished either. But that didn’t stop me
watching the entirety of this video and revelling in the sheer level of dedication and focus it’ll have taken on the part of the creator. When I made my
(mere 15-minute!) video describing my favourite video game Easter Egg I spent tens of hours over the prior weeks researching the quirk and its background, configuring a copy of the
(elderly) game so that it’d play and record in the way I wanted, and of course playing through the game far enough to be able to fully demonstrate the Easter Egg. Dustin’s
video, which doubtless involved replaying (possibly multiple times) five different games released over a 12-year window is mindblowing by comparison.
I don’t really care about the Myst series. I care even less about its elevators. But I really enjoyed this video, if only for its creator’s enthusiasm.
This promotional video for Aberystwyth University has been kindly archived onto YouTube by one of the undergraduate students who features in it. It was produced in 1984; approximately
the same time I first visited Aberystwyth, although it would take until fifteen years later in 1999 for me to become a student there
myself.
But the thing is… this 1984 video, shot on VHS in 1984, could absolutely be mistaken at-a-glance for a video shot on an
early digital video camera a decade and a half later. The pace of change in Aberystwyth was and is glacial; somehow even the fashion and music seen in Pier Pressure in the video could pass for late-90s!
Anyway: I found the entire video amazingly nostalgic in spite of how far it predates my attendance of the University! Amazing.
This week, Parry Gripp and Nathan Mazur released Young Squirrel Talking About Himself.
You might recognise the tune (and most of the words) from an earlier Parry Gripp song. The original video for the older
version is no longer available on his channel, and that’s probably for the best, but I was really pleased to see the song resurrected in this new form because it’s fabulous. I’ve been
singing it all day.
This post is also available as an article. So
if you'd rather read a conventional blog post of this content, you can!
This is a video version of my blog post, Length Extension Attack. In it, I talk through the theory of length extension
attacks and demonstrate an SHA-1 length extension attack against an (imaginary) website.
After “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” ended, Graham Chapman worked with an up-and-coming young writer named Douglas Adams on a new sketch comedy show for the BBC. It was called “Out of
the Trees,” and it bombed. Only one episode was made, and that aired only once, on January 10, 1976.
Once the Beeb gave up on “Out of the Trees,” they did to it what they did to so many other programs of that era: they erased it.
…
Chapman had recorded the show on one of the very earliest home videotape formats… it took two years to build a compatible player.
It’s neither Chapman nor Adams best work, and you can see how it got canned after only a pilot episode. But it’s not terrible.
But the lesson here is one about the challenge of archiving non-print media. Anything that needs a device to “play” it, whether it’s as simple as a vinyl record or as complex as a
videogame, is at greater risk of being lost forever. And the faster the pace of technology moves, the more stuff gets left behind as technology moves on. Is a digital dark age looming?
Are we already in it, but that won’t be known until some future date?
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.
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:
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.
The same technique, of course, could be used to superimpose any web page or whatever other content you like onto a stream.
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.
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).
