As for why I chose Blogger, I just didn’t want to fiddle with setting up a WordPress blog from scratch. The Blogger platform is easier to use and modify and I don’t have to worry about security updates and things like that, all of which are handled by Google. I don’t have the customization freedom that I did with WordPress, but I don’t really feel like fiddling at the code level any more. I just want to write posts.

Some time in the next few days, I’ll revamp the home page to point to the new blog, with a link to this one if people want to browse the archives. The rest of the site will be getting revised as well, but probably not until the new year.

So what does that mean for this blog? Well, it’s probably going away. DotEasy (my hosting provider) has been snarking at me about blog traffic, despite the fact that I haven’t updated it in ages. And I’m running an old, old version of WordPress that really must be updated.

My current plan is to back up the blog and try to install it locally on my PC. I really don’t want to lose the archives. Then it will come down from DotEasy.

I will then create a new blog, possibly under a different title, with an up-to-date version of WordPress. All of this requires that I learn more geeky stuff so it won’t be immediate, but my goal is to have it done by the end of this year. I have missed blogging and now I have the time to indulge myself.

Oh, and by the way, the rest of the Soltys.ca site will get a makeover. The Internet Resources for Technical Communicators part is horribly stale and the rest of it even more so. I may put up a photo gallery although I need to check my bandwidth status for that.

So stay tuned. Updates are coming.

SF writer Jerry  Pournelle has died. According to reports I read, he passed away in his sleep just after attending DragonCon over the Labour Day weekend.

I am truly sorry to hear that. I enjoyed most of his fiction, both his own and collaborations, especially those with Larry Niven. The Mote in God’s Eye, Lucifer’s Hammer, and Footfall, were both best sellers and true classics of the field. He was also a well known and influential columnist; his Byte columns were required reading in the early days of personal computing. His conversational yet informative style was a definite influence on my own writing. Perhaps his most important role will have been as a passionate champion of space exploration and development, especially during the Reagan administration.

I never met him, although we’ve exchanged emails several times, some of which he published on his blog. I didn’t agree with most of his political views, which seemed to become more reactionary and strident as he aged, and sometimes reading his blog could bring my blood pressure to dangerous levels, but I still kept reading him up until the end – the hallmark of a good writer. I will miss him.

A couple of days ago I got an automated message from my web host saying that my website had exceeded my plans resource limits (number of connections, server CPU usage) and it was causing connection problems. After some back-and-forth with (the very helpful) support group, we established that it was probably due to web crawlers like Google’s indexer running through the 10+ years of blog entries and bogging things down.

So … it’s time to do some maintenance on this blog.

In the next week or two, I’m going to set robots.txt to block (temporarily) all bots from all of the blog. Then I’m going to do a full backup. And then I’m going to try to upgrade my WordPress to the current version. That may or may not work without some serious under the hood tweaking, so it’s likely that the blog will be either down, at worst) or on hiatus for a while.

It’s been a long time since I got my hands dirty under the hood of this beast, so bear with me. I will be back (if nothing else, it’s too valuable a resource for me to lose).

And then it will be time to look at the rest of the site, which is pretty mouldy.

“Could it be otherwise here? Could any one sect obtain a working majority at the polls and take over the country? Perhaps not – but a combination of a dynamic evangelist, television, enough money, and modern techniques of advertising and propaganda might make Billy Sunday’s efforts look like a corner store compared to Sears Roebuck.

“Throw in a Depression for good measure, promise a material heaven here on earth, add a dash of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Negrosim, and a good large dose of anti-“furriners” in general and anti-intellectuals here at home, and the result might be something quite frightening – particularly when one recalls that our voting system is such that a minority distributed as pluralities in enough states can constitute a working majority in Washington.”
Jiminy!  Heinlein wrote that in the early 1950s! Is there anything he did not hit right on the head? Heck, he even nailed the dominionist “Prosperity Gospel” so popular among Ted Cruz types, promising fervid followers that their “material heaven here on earth” will come by righteously seizing the property of unbelievers. (Late note: a prosperity gospel preacher keynotes Donald Trump’s inauguration.)

Seriously, read his last paragraph (above) again.  Then recall that Heinlein portrayed Nehemiah Scudder taking the White House against the will of a majority, in 2012.  (He also spoke of America sinking into “The Crazy Years.”)

It is a very nice phone, fast and with a gorgeous display. Samsung’s TouchWiz skin is still a bit more intrusive than I’d like but it’s closer to stock Android than what was on my S5. I’ve dialed the resolution back to 1480 x 720; with my vision, there’s no point in pushing 4x the number of pixels around and it saves on battery life). The camera is much better than that on the S5, has manual exposure controls, and can save in RAW format.

My only real concern with the phone is the potential fragility of the curved glass screen. I have the phone in an OtterBox case and have added a tempered glass screen protector. Hopefully that will be enough.

I did have a few issues with the phone while I was getting it set up. I’m going to describe them and the solutions here. I’ll probably add to this as I go along, just so I have the information handy for future reference.

• While fiddling with display resolution and fonts, I somehow set something that made text with a dark or coloured background show up in outline, which made it almost impossible to read. This affected both content (tweets in my Plume Twitter app when I used the dark theme and text in some app menus and dialogs.  The problem was caused by turning on High-Contrast Fonts in the Accessibility options. Disabling that fixed it.
• I have the ES File Browser app installed. The first time I went to set my ring tone, it asked me what I wanted browse ring tones with, I selected ES File browser by mistake. After that, I couldn’t select ring tones or notification options.  (You should select Media Storage).
• The tempered glass screen protector does reduce the sensitivity of the touch display. I sometimes have to press more than once to get it to register.  Adjusting the pointer speed under the Language and Input option seems to help.
• My preferred keyboard is SwiftKey using the Holo theme and with the number row turned off.

Best Novel
The Obelisk Gate, by N. K. Jemisin (Orbit Books)

Best Novella
Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com publishing)

Best Novelette
“The Tomato Thief”, by Ursula Vernon (Apex Magazine, January 2016)

Best Short Story
“Seasons of Glass and Iron”, by Amal El-Mohtar (The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, Saga Press)

Looking at the detailed breakdown (PDF link) of the voting, it appears that the slates from the Sad/Rabid Puppies were well and truly trounced – Vox Day ended up below No Award, for example. N. K. Jennison won the Best Novel Hugo for the second year in a row and Seanan McGuire scored a hat trick, winning the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards this year.

• The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story, by Douglas Preston:  The story of an expedition into the rain forest jungles of Honduras to find a legendary lost city. Preston is a master storyteller and brings both the expedition and the history behind it to life.
• New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson: Near future SF about a flooded New York. The writing is brilliant and kinetic, just like the city it portrays. This may be Robinson’s best book and is sure to be an award contender next year.
• The Berlin Project, by Greg Benford: I had pretty much given up reading Benford after a series of turgid space exploration novels, but this is nothing like those. It’s an alternate history in which the US develops the atomic bomb a year earlier than in our timeline. Benford knew many of the people involved in the Manhattan Project and this gives the novel a verisimilitude lacking in many alternate histories. This too should be an award contender next year.

For Chrome, use Dark Reader.  For Firefox, use Owl – Dark Background.

The reversal of colours does take some getting used to and it may not be a perfect conversion on some pages; for example, Dark Reader doesn’t work on Google but Owl – Dark Background does.

Update: I found that both programs affect image quality by reducing contrast. In Dark Reader, you can fix this in the settings by adjusting the contrast. Owl-Dark Background doesn’t seem to have any customization settings so it may not be suitable for graphics heavy sites.

That uncertainty doesn’t bode well for Musk’s original Mars ambitions. Musk argued that the Falcon Heavy was impossible to test on the ground due to the machine’s complexity. And he said that development was far more difficult than SpaceX expected, admitting that the company was naive in its original projections. The simultaneous firing 27 orbital engines notwithstanding, launching a Falcon Heavy includes changing aerodynamics, heightened vibration, and an enormous thrust that pushes qualification levels of the flight hardware to the limit. Musk admitted on Wednesday that limited damage to former Apollo 11 Pad 39A would be a “win” in the aftermath of the Falcon Heavy test flight. Along with Musk, the audience laughed nervously.

According to Musk’s keynote this week, SpaceX is planning to scale down its Mars-bound spacecraft to a size suitable for a wider range of missions—missions that would help pay for its development costs. A size reduction would certainly have a large economic impact on manufacturing, but savings could be augmented by focusing all efforts on a single reusable vehicle that could serve both low-Earth orbit and deep space. And Musk also offered that building a base on the moon is essential to getting the public excited about space again.