Richard’s Blog, blogging since 1996

  • The Temptation to Give Up On Social Media

    I find myself tempted to give up on social media and focus on blogging instead. I am tired of social media after decades of use. I am tired that users, that provide all of the value are ignored, and that greedy boards of directors can sell users as if they were lumps of coal or […]

  • A Shift to PHP

    PHP has been around for decades but I learned of a way to experiment with it easily recently so that is why I am playing with it now. The main page is php as is my first “blog” although it was part of a column for the student newspaper, that I converted to an electronic […]

  • To Mastodon, from Jaiku

    Twitter was bought by an individual that many of us do not trust, and we fear that it may no longer represent the values that we cherish. That Twitter is bought is nothing new. Myspace was bought by Murdoch, many years ago. Jaiku was a great competitor to twitter but it was bought by Google […]

  • YouTube and the Million Follower type

    I used to really like YouTube. It was a place where normal people could share videos of their normal lives, for normal people to enjoy, and to discover organically. Today YouTube is a way of forcing people to watch adverts before watching content that has been seen half a million to a million times by […]

  • The Season of Muddy Shoes

    We are in a pandemic and I like to walk away from people. To do so I need to walk along muddy paths by the sides of roads, motorways and fields. In the process my shoes get covered in mud and I need to find ways of removing that mud. The challenge isn’t with dry […]

  • Taking Yet Another Twitter Break

    With the current situation at Twitter I have chosen to take a twitter break. Twitter hasn’t been fun during the last three years, which is part of the reason I went anonymous, private, and then public but anonymous again. It used to be about having conversations with people that I would eventually want to meet […]

  • Experimenting with PHP

    I have been following courses for three years now. Within the last week or two I decided to start experimenting with PHP using my website as a guinea pig. I have already converted a few pages to PHP. Some of them use for each loops and others use the include functionality. My aim is to […]

  • Quechua MH900 Shoes

    People who walk as much as me wear through shoes within a few months. The soles that were deep and ridged when new, become smooth as we walk, and wear away the soles. Usually I know that shoes are new, or that they need replacing the same way. They start to cause blisters, and I […]

  • PHP from the Command Line

    Recently I learned that PHP has a built in server. You don’t need xampp or any of the other solutions. All you need is terminal open, have the current directory be the one with the PHP files you want to serve and type: “php -S localhost:8000” This might sound obvious to some but it took […]

  • Version Control, Engineering and Rocket Engines

    Every Rocketdyne engine was fine tuned and perfected by hand, from plans, that were modified but not updated. This means that each engine was unique. It would take trial and error to build them again. With GIT and other forms of version control the entire process could theoretically have been logged and preserved, not so, […]