Tag Archives: stuff

Written on by

supernaut updates supernaut

Last night I noticed the dilapidated state of my sidebar links. “Who uses them anyway?”, I thought, before answering myself with, “Me!”

In order of finding new blogs, the first and most common is from someone I already read who mentions another writer who may take my attention long enough to click through to their site. Getting from there to the ‘New Additions” folder in my RSS Reader (now using the quite beautiful yet assuredly beta Reeder), is a rarity, and from there to my sidebar is … well there’s scant connection really, it’s a rare thing when I go through all the links and add/subtract, and even then, with 300 or so in my news feed, my sidebar is only a few I like a lot.

So I added and subtracted. As usual, some blogs I loved very much have withered and passed the deadline of no longer updated (around 3 months before promotion to my ‘Dinasaurs’ folder), others have moved. Many new ones have arrived.

Excitement! I’ll not list all the new ones here, but there are a few, notably in ‘Art and Theatre Blogs’, as well as in ‘Asia and Central Asia Blogs’ and in the sciences categories. As for the ones that vanished …

I removed two sections. One for design as this stuff has moved mostly to my other blog (thingswithbits.info) and I don’t really get so enthusiastic about design as I do about, say, Central Asia or Kepler objects. The other to go, which is little more difficult to explain is the category for Trans* Queer Feminism stuff.

Without going into too much detail, there are still blogs I read in this field, but I find what turns up on these blogs is either irrelevant to me (e.g. cat blogging), the quality of writing does not have a level of rigorousness I find in other blogs I admire, or too often they are simply too American-centric. I’m also not so interested in spending a day in the echo-chamber finding the rare blog I would read.

So, for those who suffer distress when I blog infrequently, the sidebar should now assist you in feeling as I do most mornings: inspired by brilliant and passionate writers.

Written on by

something wicked this way comes

Yesterday, an arrival.

Three years, eight months ago, I took a photo. I wrote also,

“I have this strange compulsion that has overtaken me. I bought a ticket to Berlin and decided to live there, see what the dance is, see what the life might be like. Will it suit me? Will I feel something like home? Will I be able to stay?”

Those boxes. I saw their contents briefly early 2008, unpacking, repacking, again in Adelaide a month or so later for some weeks, not even bothering to really unpack. Before that, it was late 2004 that they were last in my company. Six years. What I paid to keep that all in storage likely is far in excess of what it’s all worth. Still …

Slightly battered after all that, but …

… still in Berlin.

2008 everything 2008 everything

2011 everything 2011 everything

Written on by

supernaut lightbox

When supernaut first began, there was barely much of the internet as it is now. I had decided to use Movable Type for my blog and WordPress was not even a year old – I don’t think I’d even heard of it. Besides the horrible static page method of publishing in MT, more generally handling images was a big episode of blah.

To get images to open in a pop-up window without the irritation of window baggage scrollbars, toolbars and so on) meant yucky JavaScript in the link tag. A perfect example of depreciated code staining the web is that almost seven years later, I’m still using this rubbish code.

Feeling rather frisky today (17h, still in bed), I decided it wouldn’t really be so difficult to implement the current joy-of-images, a jQuery Lightbox plugin. I expect it to be depreciated in a matter of a year or so, but in the meantime…

Click image and enjoy. The best thing is that it adds the necessary tag to the image link so works on all images. I suppose I should clean up the style a bit…

…

Written on by

return to blog

The last week has been chaotic. I came to Brussels slightly early – on Tuesday, to help with Dasniya’s Yoga and Shibari Workshop at Charleroi Danses, she arriving Thursday and some setting up in La Raffinerie, followed by three days of yokes and bindings with 20 others, and one long night of photography in an old stable somewhere south of Brussels. Yesterday some vagueness and attempts at ordering my life again, along with sorting—in a highly subjective manner, some 590 images I took over the three days. Hopefully I’ll be putting some of them up here later this week and writing about the workshop.

For now, continuing back into design work and trying to balance everything physical and computational. I’m not sure I manage this very well. Or perhaps I simply haven’t worked out how to a) sleep less, b) clone and reabsorb myself daily c) make myself attractive to wealthy philanthropists d) elongate seconds or minutes/convert former to latter/other temporal manipulations e) function in a highly regimented schedule… (and so on). I shall try though.

Mainly to say I’m feeling quite inspired at the moment, planning on a new performance, much enjoyment of reading, anxious to return to dance/climb/cycle/run/yoga and perhaps finding some progress in knee/hip/pelvis mess… Brussels for the remainder of the week, then Berlin again.

Some photos…

metro lemonnier metro lemonnier

sunset over parc forest sunset over parc forest

la raffinerie foyer - 1 la raffinerie foyer – 1

la raffinerie foyer - 2 la raffinerie foyer – 2

Written on by

ick bin sechs jahre alt (und na logo habe ich vergessen)

Ja, naturlich, immer ein weniger mehr und immer bisschen spät. Habe Ich heute mit Katrin geplaudert, und dann mir ging ein Licht auf… Ja, am April 7te war mein Blog Geburtstag. Sechs jahre alt, fast 1500 Posten, viele viele Fotos, am wenigsten seben Staaten, hier und da, da und dort, toll, geil, extra voll krass…

Happy birthday supernaut, I would give you a big kiss but you are still only ones and zeros but I love you anyway.

Just to remember where supernaut came from…

black sabbath - vol 4 black sabbath – vol 4

Written on by

vanished again

I was wondering vaguely why supernaut’s site stats where plummeting ever lower, though decided it was a post-hack/infrequent-blogging combination, even though new posts didn’t appear in my feed reader either.

Testing out some new caching plugins, I discovered… absence. Everywhere.

Besides the index page, supernaut seems to have evaporated. The database is still there, and all the content appearing in it, up to date, but somewhere WordPress is failing to pull the data into itself.

Poo.

Without knowing why or where things have gone wrong, and only having my stats to guess it’s something I did post-hack, the simplest thing to do it a clean install of WordPress, my templates and plugins, and the database. Taking about 5 hours just to confirm everything is working, and not really being in the mood for that right now, absence will continue for a couple of days.

Poo again.

…

Much thinking on the U-Bahn in the afternoon while going to Kreuzstanbul…

I tried a few things, thinking back also to when I dealt with supernaut being hacked, and thought the problem might lie in the .htaccess file I stitched together, using in part the Perishable Press 4G Blacklist, and other items I knew to cause issues with various bits of PHP.

After a few minutes, I narrowed it down to the excellent few lines that prevent hotlinking of images. The problem? The call to WordPress begins with ‘RewriteEngine On’, as it should. But the hotlinking code also requires it and I’d put it before. Shifting the WordPress code to the top of the document fixed the problem.

I feel a bit idiotic, as it’s been some months since I first added that code, and for the entire time, every page but the index has thrown up a 404 error… I suppose I should clean out the junk in my database now, just in case I can break something else and notice it in three months.

Written on by

hate/love apple

Lucky I was in London for the long weekend, and so enjoying the longest break from my laptop and the internet I’ve had in years. All the better considering it was in a shop, where I hoped it was being repaired.

By the time my last laptop, a beautiful 15″ PowerBook, had reached the end of its life, it was a decorticated zombie, battery, hard drive, DVD drive all dead, and case bearing the crumbling patina along the front edge, held together with an external portable FireWire drive that when I accidentally knocked the cable would bring everything to a graceful and irreversible crash.

As with my new MacBook Pro, it suffered from some distinct hardware issues. First, the peeling of the light case border, then the death of hard drive and the problematic Matshita Combo Drive. All variously and uncomplainingly replaced by MyMac in Melbourne for free, thanks to the joy of AppleCare.

My new laptop, after several months of far less harrowing use than that PowerBook began to exhibit odd behaviour, the trackpad and keyboard freezing, which after some messing around I realised was caused by the battery. Or rather, the topcase somehow didn’t get on well with the battery. For much of the last – more than a – year, I’ve been using it sans battery, and poking with my finger at the underside of the trackpad to bring it back to life on the occasions I did include non-mains power.

Not much of a laptop then, and despite being all over the Apple discussion boards, this finger-poking fix wasn’t ideal. I took it into one shop in Kreuzberg, and they said it would be difficult to prove I hadn’t damaged the case myself, so for a long time endured an expensive, hobbled device. Finally, as also documented numerously on the Apple boards, even the finger didn’t work.

Gravis is rather shiny and large, in Ernst-Reuter Platz, and I acquired a beautiful 500gb 2.5″ FireWire 800 drive from there for the unthinkably low price of €120 not so long ago. I’m still awestruck by the capacity and cheapness of drives now compared to eight years ago when 20gb was just beginning to pass from acceptable for a laptop. With my now completely paralysed laptop, and me feeling as though I’d had a significant portion of my identity eviscerated, I ventured there shortly before going to London, thinking at worst I could buy an external mouse and keyboard and get another couple of years out of another zombie laptop.

Not so attractive as a friend pointed out, when I keep people’s Macs running as a job, and should really be able to speak highly of them, instead of turning up with a Frankenstein.

At Gravis, they listened to my explanations, notes on the Apple boards, took my baby away for a few minutes, then came back and said I could pick it up this week. Today I did.

On why I hate/love Apple…

Yes, there is the exceptional software and hardware design, but there always seems to be issues that affect a lot of users, and having had two laptops with serious issues it is very easy for me to feel deeply frustrated with the only computer and OS I’d consider using. Really, if I had to use a PC running Windows or more likely Linux, I’d dispense with the hassle altogether and find something else to do.

As with my previous laptop, I bought AppleCare for three years, and as with that previous laptop, it paid for itself the first time I had to use it. My revitalised – and working with battery – baby has an entire new topcase, the price of which, including labour is greater than the cost of this insurance. The simplicity with which my problem was dealt with, fast, no arguing, pleasant, and most importantly, free are the reasons that even though there are problems with hardware and software (and had this one not been dealt with in such a good way, I would be far more pessimistic), I remain in love with Apple.

(Yes, there is a moral to this story, or rather a couple: Buy AppleCare, use the Apple discussion boards to diagnose your problems, and backup early and often.)

(I’ll stop now and caress my beautiful laptop for a while.)

Written on by

absence

Not much blogging the last months and I feel shame. Though I have excuses.

Firstly, the intermittent trackpad/keyboard freezing problem that has gone on with my MacBook Pro since around 9 months after I bought it became irreversible. The normal fix of not triggering it by putting my battery in, and poking with my finger at the underside of the trackpad to unfreeze it after I had – all endlessly discussed and documented on Apple’s own user forums – finally failed altogether.

So my Mac, data safely backed up thanks to an emergency intervention,is in a shop hopefully getting fixed under AppleCare. I on the other hand, am writing this on a venerable 13″ PowerBook G4, running 10.5, with my home folder on my external drive. Of course this does cause myriad problems and is buggy and crashy as all fuck. Somehow it is (marginally) workable, but I feel I’ve lost half my brain and bodily functions to a stroke.

In the meantime, I’ve just got back from London Festival of the Art of Japanese Bondage, which I shall write about soon.

Written on by

hacked

supernaut (and it looks like all of my wordpress sites) have been hacked my the brilliantly clever c99madshell. I’ve had to delete the entire site and rebuild, so it’s rather mediocre around here right now… trying to fix… enjoy the experience of disappointment.

…

Most of a night a day gone doing a complete rebuild, though I left the database alone (downloaded and searched for the pertinent strings, base64, gzinflate and so on though), but created a new unique database so if this all turns scabby again I can repeat today’s process with some additional WordPress hardening I’ve avoided so far (renaming the wp_ to something else, for example). Some formatting is still yuck though, probably from edting php outside the theme files.

So for now I shall wait and see if it comes back. If so, I’m at a loss as to how it has gotten in, and shall have to get serious.

For gory details, Derek Fountain has a comprehensive post on c99madshell, and those of you who know my love of scratching around in code will appreciate the inchoate horror I felt upon decoding the base64 mess and finding the unmistakable black, grey and red palette of a php injection wrapped in hacker’s colours.