Thran

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No. 51 Vol. 1Since 2018 A.D.Price: 0/0d

NAQs

I've read too many Frequently Asked Questions online that were clearly never asked by anyone. So a more honest title is NAQs, or Never Asked Questions. Here are answers to questions no one has ever asked, but regardless, I felt like answering.

Q:/> What does Thran mean? Explain your name!

A:/> No. If I did what you wanted, that wouldn't be thran.

Q:/> Which editor do you use?

A:/> I use Vim, in Ex mode, with Caps Lock activated.

Q:/> Which is your Linux terminal emulator of choice?

A:/> It can only be DOSBox. Give me command.com or give me death.

Q:/> How did you learn to program?

A:/> The CIA doesn't want you to know, but I was personally tutored by Terry A. Davis.

Q:/> How old are you?

A:/> I can't remember the collapse of the Soviet Union, but I can remember 9/11.

Q:/> What is your real name? Who are you? I demand to know!

A:/> Error reading device in drive A.

Abort, Retry, Fail?

Q:/> What is the greatest album of all time?

A:/> I haven't listened to them all yet, but of those I have heard so far I can confidently proclaim that honour belongs to Guided By Voices's Bee Thousand.

Q:/> Have you ever done anything illegal?

A:/> When using Windows 98, I was often informed that "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down", so there's that.

Q:/> Why are your website designs so dated?

A:/> Don't be boring!

I'm not trying to have a "retro" theme; a lot of "nostalgia" is embarrassing and gets old fast. Rather these are simply elements of web design I've liked. I've built these websites to show that anything is possible. I think there should be more individuality on the web and self-ownership of one's own web space; this includes the style. So I used the resources available to me in the time I had and these are the styles I produced. They may resemble an older style and draw from it as an influence, but that's not the intent.

Q:/> Why don't you include a comment section? Are you afraid of rebuke?

A:/> No. This website is built using Pelican, a static HTML blogging system. No code is executed by the server. What this means is that there is no means for the website to take your comments.

Notwithstanding that, I don't fritter in the face of debate. A suitable commenting or discussion system may be installed in the future.

Q:/> Why is your topic selection so scattered? Pick one thing and do it well!

A:/> I'm partial to the 'do one thing and do it well' rule because that is the Unix philosophy. The philosophy works well for small and well-defined software tools. Now, I don't consider myself a tool, software or otherwise.

Besides, though I am a programmer by trade, who says my opinions have to stop at programming? I'll apply curiosity where I please until I dry up my restless, inquisitive side.

Q:/> Why don't you just give in and join WordPress or Medium? Think of the reach!

A:/> Because I like owning things. I like owning my own blog template. I like owning my own words. I hate advertisements. I hate needless over-engineering.

I couldn't stay sane offering my effort and passion to the closed, corporate web. Hence, this site. Proudly independent for as long as I can support it.

Q:/> What is your proudest moment?

A:/> Proudest? I haven't given enough years to truly judge that. I'll instead share some moments that make me proud:

RATM

In 2009 I was one of the 502,672 people who helped ensure Rage Against the Machine was the U.K. Christmas Number 1, beating the X-Factor off the chart for the first time in a half-decade.

I remember the MP3 download was priced at 29p on Amazon MP3. Perhaps we had a man on the inside?

It is an outstanding moment because it was the first time I noticed the power of spontaneous self-organisation. I was a small part of something we really wanted to happen. I enjoyed every moment of it.

The Pigeon

In January 2016 I found a red-feathered pigeon with a bloodied wing. It couldn't fly. So I caught this pigeon and rescued it from being a cat's lunch. Over the period of a week, I applied antiseptic to the wound and fed it a steady diet of barley. It lived in the back room and sat watching as I played various PC games, as I did back then.

During its lodging with me, I discovered that in addition to cooing, pigeons can growl and purr too. Growls for when I invaded its personal space, purrs for when it found the barley every morning. After a week, I noticed the pigeon become more energetic and less tolerant of any handling. I knew it was time. The pigeon was released in our back garden, and after finding its bearings, flapped up to the roof and took off, never to be seen again, but I am sure always grateful.

Online achievements

During 2006, I purchased 'unlimited' web hosting on eBay. This web hosting was used for many, many sites through the years. Blogs, forums, gamer clan websites, PHProxy scripts, flash game portals, photo galleries and experimental social media platforms. Bizarrely, until 2023 this server was live and I still had access to it. I'm not sure how, but that is a contract worth £40 honoured for almost 17 years. It hosted an archive of some of those sites. I'll tell its story in full another day.

In 2012, I sent my old Cassiopeia A-20E to one Stuart Ashen. He swiftly reviewed it on YouTube, making proud mention of one of my pre-chewed biro lids that I was using as a stylus. The review is here on YT. It is quite entertaining, and worth the empty space in my collection.

More recently, through 2020-2021 I designed this website's layout entirely afresh. I use the Pelican engine to build my pages, so I had to design and format the theme carefully to ensure it met the Pelican's standards.

A lot of people have used an article I wrote to learn what to expect from the PineTime. It also includes a setup guide. The article is here: Fine Times with the Pine Time. I am quite fond of this hackable smartwatch and was only too glad to say good things about it.

Then I had a go at building my own static website generator. This I used to build the WMW (Well Made Web) section of this website. I made the website builder reasonably generic so others may make use of it too. See the details at Thransoft. RSRU was used in OSDC 2023 as an example to set up GitHub actions.

I have a published solution to a cybersecurity challenge on RootMe. It was solved using good old C.

I am the maintainer of a package for the Void Linux distribution. If you have ever run $ xbps-install wmix, you've me to thank.

Technically, the most served content on this website is gay pornography. This is because I weaponised it against petulant script kiddies, but the link was shared to a wider audience and many lulz were had. I will leave you to discover what and where.