brennen
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tildebrennen

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        <h1>~brennen</h1>
        <p>           <a href="feed.xml" title="an atom feed of updates">feed</a>           | <a href="http://squiggle.city/">squiggle.city</a>           | <a href="http://tilde.club/">tilde.club</a>           | <a href="https://p1k3.com/" title="a blog">p1k3</a>           | <a href="https://p1k3.com/userland-book/" title="a book about the command line for humans">userland</a>           | <a href="http://squiggle.city/~brennen/workings-book/" title="a technical notebook">workings</a>        </p>
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    <section>
    <article>      <h2>December 2015</h2>
      <p>Ok maybe I will rethink the slidy-tile interface to this page.</p>
      <p>Also I put the lights back up.</p>    </article>
    <article>      <h2>A Sunrise</h2>
      <p class="huge centerpiece">🌄</p>    </article>
    <article>      <h2>A Crawly</h2>      <p class="huge centerpiece">𓆨</p>    </article>
    <article>      <h2>three things i kind of love</h2>
      <ol>      <li>        <p>I actually think the Marvel Cinematic Universe, for all its        considerable flaws and shallow CGI flash, has been really great. With        few exceptions, even the trivial movies are pleasant enough diversions        featuring people I like, while the better ones have real emotional        heft. Plus I can watch and talk about them with my 50-something        parents, who have them all on DVD and are completely up on who last        kicked Loki's ass etc.</p>
        <p>In the end, will its narrative metaproject succeed? Maybe it's not        likely. A longform story project on this scale with no clear endgame is        likely enough to collapse under its own considerable weight. But who        knows. So far they're pulling it off. They've managed to make me care        about a character literally named Captain America.</p>
        <p>(Parenthetical to Marvel: I think you have enough dumptrucks full of        money by now to give Black Widow a movie already. Hell, why not a        <em>series of movies</em>? Remember, I'm pulling for ya. We're all in        this together.)</p>      </li>
      <li><p>Two-slice toasters from the 1950s-70s having at most two controls.</p></li>
      <li>Dishes consisting of a gravy on rice.</li>      </ol>
    </article>
    <article>      <p>[ a dry, cold wind whistles through the streets of tilde.club ]</p>      <p>[ a tumbleweed skitters into the big pile under the mercantile's front window ]</p>      <p>[ a single flake falls from the slate-gray sky and drifts into the black water pooled in the old stock tank by the windmill ]</p>      <p>[ creaking noises ]</p>    </article>
    <article>
      <p><img src="images/frog.gif"></p>
    </article>
    <article>      <h2>some textfiles</h2>
      <ul>        <li><a href="textfiles/corn.txt">a news.tilde.club post about sweetcorn</a> (I            hope ~schussat (?) doesn't mind being quoted here)</li>        <li><a href="textfiles/vimpoems.txt">about writing poems in vim</a></li>    </article>
    <article>      <h2>Reverse Chronological Dated Entries Are Totally Fine But I Already Do That Elsewhere</h2>
      <p>And, thinking that, I decided to make my home on squiggle.city a stack      of cards about... Well, about whatever.  Some of them will have dates.      Some of them will change arbitrarily.</p>
      <p class=centerpiece><img src="hypercard.png" /></p>    </article>
    <article>      <h2>Thursday, January 22, 2015</h2>
      <p><a href="http://squiggle.city/~brennen/workings-book/#Thursday-January-22">RARGH GIT</a></p>    </article>
    <article>      <h2>Thursday, January 15, 2015 - wee hours</h2>
      <p class=centerpiece><img src="hypercard.png" /></p>
      <p>I have decided that my squiggle will now be more like a HyperCard      stack.</p>
      <p>Please use &larr; &rarr; arrow keys to navigate.</p>
      <p>Comparisons to PowerPoint will be vigorously disdained.</p>    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Wednesday, January 14, 2015</h2>
      <p>Some things I have been up to:</p>
      <ul>        <li>nostalgia-tripping a little bit on <a href="http://squiggle.city/~brennen/workings-book/#Monday-January-12-MS-DOS-AGT">DOS software</a></li>        <li>the third in a series of guides for Adafruit, <a href="https://learn.adafruit.com/an-illustrated-shell-command-primer">An Illustrated Shell Command Primer</a></li>        <li><a href="http://squiggle.city/~brennen/workings-book/#Tuesday-January-13-rtd-bus-schedules-transit-data">messing around with RTD schedule data</a></li>        <li>a <a href="http://squiggle.city/~paper/archives/squiggle.city.herald.1.2.txt">second issue of the local paper</a></li>      </ul>
    </article>
    <article>      <h2>Monday, January 12, 2015</h2>
      <p><img src="images/heart_keen.jpg"></p>    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Sunday, January 11, 2015</h2>
      <p>Some radio streams, ordered by time in my life when they were      important:</p>
      <ul>        <li><a href="http://wnax.com/">AM 570 WNAX Yankton</a></li>        <li><a href="http://129.93.42.12:8000/listen">FM 90.3 KRNU Lincoln</a></li>        <li><a href="http://www.kzum.org/">FM 89.3 KZUM Lincoln</a></li>        <li><a href="http://stream.kgnu.net:8000/KGNU_live_high.mp3">FM 88.5 KGNU Boulder/Denver</a></li>        <li><a href="http://www.radio1190.org/wp-content/themes/nextmagazine/listen_high_v3.html">AM 1190 KVCU Boulder/Denver</a></li>      </ul>
      <p>WNAX is one of the great old mid-American AM stations.  It's been      operating since 1922.  I remember it for the Five State Trader, the      Neighbor Lady, and being the kind of station that carried <a      href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Harvey">Paul Harvey</a>.  Also a      lot of weather and farm market stuff.  These days when I hear it (and I'm      listening to the stream right now), it's mostly right-wing talk radio in      the modern style, though it still sounds like itself during the ad      breaks.</p>
      <p>KRNU is the <a href="http://www.unl.edu/">UNL</a> college station.  I      first heard a lot of indie rock and deliberate weirdness there.</p>
      <p>KZUM is the community station in Lincoln.  It's deeply weird in the      way that all community stations seem to be, and idiosyncratic in the way      of volunteer-run broadcast media in smallish      urban-refuge-from-the-provinces markets.  I'm pretty sure it was the      first place I heard Democracy Now, but that doesn't really convey the      full character of the thing.  Like right now it's winding up two hours of      Native American drum-and-group-vocals stuff, and I have vivid memories of      driving to work and listening to this (daily? weekly? it happened over      and over again) U2-only hour.</p>
      <p>KGNU is Boulder's equivalent to KZUM.  It's both a more professional      exercise and perhaps a more predictable one, though it shares a lot of      the implicit politics of a KZUM.  Both stations, it pretty well goes      without saying, get deeply weird late at night.</p>
      <p>Radio 1190 is the local take on the low-power college indie radio      thing.  In keeping with type, it's often aggressively unlistenable in      precisely the way that its core demographic is always seeking.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Thursday, January 8, 2015</h2>
      <p>Wikipedia sentence fragment of the day:</p>
      <blockquote>        <p>groundhogs are the most solitary of the marmots</p>      </blockquote>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Tuesday, January 6, 2015</h2>
      <p>So I skim through ~schussat's      <a href="http://prettygoodhat.com/2015-01-03-EndlessLegend.html"      title="My Endless Legend Journal">Endless Legend journal</a>, which is      a writeup of a game with a bunch of screenshots. It looks neat, but I      know I'm never going to play it.</p>
      <p>What I keep wanting, really, is something that is like a game but is      not exactly a <i>game</i> so much as it's a little world in a box that I      can ramble around in like an itinerant traveler with no particular      agenda, or watch over like an indifferent minor deity.  The thing I want      is for interesting things to happen without me being obligated to      <i>do</i> anything.  I don't want to go on quests.  I don't want to      manage an empire.  I don't want to work my way through any decision trees      or max any stats or struggle to make any NPCs happy or deal with any      marauding hordes.  (I don't mind if there occasionally <i>are</i>      marauding hordes.  I don't even mind having the option to thwart them or      whatever.  I just don't want to be <i>compelled</i> to thwart them by      some ludic apparatus any more mechanical than my own reaction to whatever      they're doing in the simulation space.)</p>
      <p>Back when I still played a lot of games, I used to spend absurd      amounts of time flying around with all the cheatcodes on just looking at      stuff and trying to provoke the monsters into doing anything that wasn't      fighting me.  One of my favorite parts of Doom-engine games was the thing      where some monster would accidentally shoot some other monster and they'd      forget all about whatever hackneyed narrative they were part of and just      start slaughtering one another in a fit of pique.  I loved the little      villages and forests and rainclouds in something like <i>Black &amp;      White</i>, but I passionately hated that I was supposed to complete      quests and achieve goals.</p>
      <p>I don't want all my interactions with the denizens of whatever      world-in-a-box reduced to the nexus of simulated violence or simulated      feed-the-livestock quasi-benevolence.</p>
      <p>(Is there a mode in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_Fortress">Dwarf      Fortress</a> where everything just happens and I don't have to decide anything?      Because that sounds like it would be neat to watch.)</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Monday, January 5, 2015</h2>
      <p><a href="https://ello.co/brennen/post/EPBHcI7lPlBPdG-CCD_PCw">Cats think about murder.</a></p>
      <p>I <a href="http://squiggle.city/~paper/">founded a newspaper</a>.</p>
      <p>~imt made <a href="https://club6.nl">club6.nl</a>, "the first IPv6      only Public Access UNIX System". Get in while you still can, folks. It's      gonna be a landrush.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Saturday, January 3, 2015</h2>
      <p>It's snowing.</p>
<p class="huge centerpiece">      ❄ ❅ ❆</p>
      <p>I have talked some real shit about Ubuntu in the not-so-distant past,      and if I'm honest I have to admit it probably won't have been the last time.      Every once in a while it wouldn't hurt for me to acknowledge some of the      <i>good</i> work happening there.            <p>Specifically, I really like the Mono variant of <a href="http://font.ubuntu.com/">this      font family</a>. Looks great in the terminal and gvim both.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Monday, December 29</h2>
      <p>Leaving the decorations up too long is a family tradition.</p>
      <p>Recent notes:</p>
      <ul>        <li><a href="http://squiggle.city/~brennen/workings-book/#screencast-gifs-thursday-december-18-2014">screencast GIFs</a></li>        <li><a href="http://squiggle.city/~brennen/workings-book/#drawing-tools-friday-december-19-2014">drawing</a></li>        <li><a href="http://squiggle.city/~brennen/workings-book/#candles-amp-candlemaking">candles</a></li>      </ul>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Tuesday, December 16, early a.m.</h2>
      <p><img src=christmas_lights.svg width=500 /></p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Monday, December 15</h2>
      <p>Text editors I have known and loved:</p>
      <ul>        <li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfs:Write">pfs:Write</a> for DOS</li>        <li>DOS Edit / QBasic</li>        <li>Notepad<sup>1</sup></li>        <li>Pico</li>        <li>BBEdit</li>        <li>Some weird Windows thing that had a bunch of menus of HTML tags built in</li>        <li>The super-90s-Windowsy text controls embedded in mIRC</li>        <li>XEmacs</li>        <li>Vim</li>      </ul>
      <p>Games I really liked:</p>
      <ul>
        <li>That one where you were a little smiley face and you went around        the dungeon finding artefacts and sometimes typing things like        <tt>DRINK POTION</tt>.</li>
        <li>The first super-pixelly <i>Commander Keen</i>, with the little green        Vorticons running around.</li>
        <li><i>Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure</i></li>
        <li>That artillery game on the Apple ][ where you had little castles        shooting at each other.</li>
        <li><i>Scorched Earth</i>, where little tanks shot at each other.</li>
        <li><i>Worms</i>, where a bunch of little worms shot at each other.<sup>2</sup></li>
        <li><i>Bolo</i>, where little tanks shot at each other but it was        top-down and real-time and there was a Little Green Man to do your        bidding and it was <i>networked multiplayer</i>.</li>
        <li><i>Taipan</i>, where you had a merchant ship and shot at        pirates.</li>
        <li><i>Tempest</i>, which featured both shooting and abstract colorful        shapes.</li>
        <li><i>Spy Hunter</i> on the NES.  Also the version of <i>Spy Hunter</i>        at the Pizza Hut in Wayne, NE.</li>
      </ul>
      <p><small><sup>1</sup> Ok to be fair I never actually loved Notepad.</small></p>
      <p><small><sup>2</sup> I've never really warmed to subsequent entries in      this (enormously successful) series.  They all struck me as the wrong      kind of cartoony.  I think this is a lesson in how the constraints on      an aesthetic can force it into channels more broadly appealing than      the same artists will later find with bigger budgets and greater      technological capacity.  Either that or a lesson on how weirdos like      me often prefer low-res hackery.  Either way, there is probably an      analogy to country music and George Lucas somewhere in here.</small></p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Sunday, December 14</h2>
      <p>Here's an interesting little thing:      <a href="http://protocol.club/~datagrok/beta-wiki/tdp.html">Tilde      Description Protocol</a>.</p>
      <p>I have the following going in relation to this:</p>
      <ul>        <li><a href="http://squiggle.city/tilde.json">squiggle.city/tilde.json</a></li>        <li><a href="http://squiggle.city/tilde.txt">squiggle.city/tilde.txt</a></li>        <li><a href="http://squiggle.city/users.json">squiggle.city/users.json</a></li>        <li><a href="http://squiggle.city/users.txt">squiggle.city/users.txt</a></li>        <li><a href="https://githug.com/squigglecity/squiggle.city">squiggle.city repo with listusers.pl</a></li>      </ul>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Tuesday, December 9</h2>
      <p>A few sections in <a href="http://squiggle.city/~brennen/workings-book/">workings</a>:</p>
      <ul>        <li><a href="http://squiggle.city/~brennen/workings-book/#makecitizen-wednesday-december-3-2014">on            a script to make new users</a></li>
        <li><a href="http://squiggle.city/~brennen/workings-book/#single-board-computers">on messing around            with single-board computers</a></li>
        <li><a href="http://squiggle.city/~brennen/workings-book/#namespaces-scope">on namespaces            &amp; scope</a></li>      </ul>
      <p>In more interesting news, a bunch of people have asked for      squiggle.city accounts lately.  That's pretty cool.  I do wish I knew how      to encourage more people who aren't demographically within a couple of      degrees of me to sign up.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Saturday, December 6</h2>
      <p>I just started a new project that I'm going to host on squiggle.city:      <a href="http://squiggle.city/~brennen/workings-book/"><i>workings</i></a>      is an attempt at an ongoing technical notebook.  I plan for it to get huge,      and expect it to be really boring, if you're not me.  Hopefully it will      be useful for remembering stuff I do, and a place for the rough notes on      things I'm going to turn into finished writing later.</p>
      <p>This idea owes something to an experience I had in jr. high and      highschool of being required to keep a daily logbook for science classes.      (Ed Brogie, if you ever google yourself, here's a little ego bump for      you, which I will temper by observing that the <a      href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_taxonomy#Cognitive">Bloom's      taxonomy</a> trip you were on was really weird and probably super      counterproductive - but hey, at least you tried to get people to write every      day.)</p>
      <p>I could put this kind of effort into contributing on Stack Exchange or      something, but doing <a href="https://p1k3.com/userland-book/">userland</a>      showed me that I really like the <i>idea</i> of a book as a container for      effort, and anyway I can't stand all that gamified bullshit with roaming      packs of vicious procedure jockeys constantly assailing useful questions      and answers as incorrectly framed, categorized, or imagined.  This kind      of thing is also why I no longer invest time in the bureaucratic hell      that is the machinery of Wikipedia.  Life is just too short and time too      precious.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Tuesday, December 2</h2>
      <p>There's a list of updated pages on the      <a href="http://squiggle.city/">squiggle.city home page</a>, generated      from <a href="#2014-11-12">a script</a>.  For a while, I was updating this      by deleting it and running a vim command to pull it back in:</p>
      <pre><code>:r !perl listusers.pl      </code></pre>
      <p>I wanted to make this automatic.  In the old days, I would have      turned on Server Side Includes in Apache and written something kind of like:</p>
      <pre><code>&lt;!--#exec cmd="perl /var/www/listusers.pl" --&gt;      </code></pre>
      <p>Unfortunately, squiggle.city is running nginx, and while nginx is      pretty groovy these days, its SSI module only does includes, not execs.      What I settled on instead is this include directive:</p>
      <pre><code>&lt;!--# include file="listusers.html" --&gt;      </code></pre>
      <p>Coupled with typing <code>su www-data</code>, followed by      <code>crontab -e</code> and adding this:</p>
      <pre><code># m h  dom mon dow   command0,5,15,25,45 * * * *    perl /var/www/listusers.pl &gt; /var/www/listusers.html      </code></pre>
      <p>Which should refresh the list on minutes 0, 5, 15, 25, and 45 of every      hour. (The intervals are arbitrary.  I just kind of felt like those were      the right minutes.)</p>
      <p>There is pretty good <a      href="http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_ssi_module.html">documentation</a>      on enabling the nginx ssi module and writing directives for it.  I just had to      do this in <code>/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default</code>:</p>
      <pre><code>      location /index.html {              ssi on;      }      </code></pre>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Monday, December 1</h2>
      <p>I'm out on the plains for a few days.</p>
      <p>It's a strange season in a strange century.  The news cycle is still working      the kind of groove that feels like it would fit pretty well in the opening      infodump of a film about the collapse of civilization.  (You can practically      hear Godspeed swelling over the measured tones of NPR personalities and the      stridencies of ChristoRepubliFascistCatholiFamilyTalk radio alike, complete      with little bursts of punctuating static.)</p>
      <p>And then on the other hand, things are not so abnormal as all that.   My      cousins are having babies.  My sisters are getting married.  The people who      were my age when I first knew them are twice my age now.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Wednesday, November 27, 12:27 p.m.</h2>
      <p>It turns out there's now an IHOP attached to the Flying J  Limon, CO.      I think this is a relatively new establishment, but truck stops have a way      of aging in quickly, so it's hard to tell.</p>
      <p>I'm having the quick two-egg breakfast, eggs over medium, bacon, wheat      toast.  The eggs are pretty much actually over medium, which is a thing      you can't always rely on.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Tuesday, November 25, early a.m.</h2>
      <p><a href="https://github.com/stars/brennen">Things I have starred on GitHub</a>.</p>
      <p>A thing about lists like this:  They're often full of touchstones for      personal memory.  Here's me getting worried about e-mail.  Here's me      keeping an eye on the big boss.  Here's when <a      href="http://danacoalition.org/">Erik Winn</a> died.  Here's that <a      href="https://p1k3.com/2014/1/14">detour</a> into weird text editors.      Here's that <a href="https://github.com/sinker/tacofancy">taco thing</a>, when they      <a href="https://www.metafilter.com/125946/Google-Illiterate#4870602">closed</a> Google Reader, that <a      href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzL04B9WPQg">day with the model train</a>...</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Monday, November 24</h2>
      <p><a href="https://p1k3.com/2014/11/24">On not spamming</a>.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Saturday, November 22</h2>
      <p>So as we were drinking beers yesterday,      <a href="http://squiggle.city/~stilldavid">~stilldavid</a> pointed out      that you should be able to mail everyone on the server.</p>
      <p>I figured this should be pretty easy, but it took more googling and      grepping and general head-scratching than I really would have liked to      remember that <code>/etc/aliases</code> is a file which exists, and then      to determine that the version of exim installed here supports a line like      this one:</p>
      <pre style="white-space: pre-wrap; overflow: scroll;"><code>citizens: acg,ahava,ben,berkay,brennen,bri_huang,burnedboard,casey,danlyke,delio,drun,erik,fazol,frencil,hord,ianremsen,jbd,jenleelind,jimblom,joe,kache2k,kirstenrk,leducmills,mike,mshorter,nallen,nick,nightliz,pearcebot,randy,robacarp,sgmustadio,sibicle,skk,stilldavid,thcipriani,todd,tonicorinne,trevor,typexawesome,zinefer      </code></pre>
      <p>...which means that if you're logged into squiggle.city, you can write      to citizens@squiggle.city in your mailer of choice and we should all see      your message.</p>
      <p>Send some e-mail?</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Friday, November 21</h2>
      <p><a href="http://squiggle.city/~robacarp">Pretty good answer</a>.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Wednesday, November 19</h2>
      <p>Hey <a href="http://squiggle.city/~robacarp">~robacarp</a>, long-time      listener, first-time caller here.  I just have a couple of questions for      you and then I'll take my response off the air, thanks:</p>
      <ol>
        <li>Where the heck do you get lanolin?  Is this just a "now we have        the internet and you can mail order literally anything" phenomenon, or        is there a kind of store you go to and they have lanolin in a jar on the        shelf like some kind of normal thing that you would normally buy in a store?</li>
        <li>Second, and really Rob this is more of a comment, but second, isn't there an        "i" in "manifesto"?</li>
      </ol>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Monday, November 17</h2>
      <p>Here are <a href="http://squiggle.city/~brennen/drawrings/">some drawings</a>.</p>
    </article>

    <article>
      <h2>Saturday, November 15, evening</h2>
      <p>In which I install a MUSH engine:</p>
      <pre><code>
TOPICS
  Help available on the following Topics:
  $-COMMANDS               ARBITRARY COMMANDS       ATTRIBUTE OWNERSHIP  BEING KILLED             BOGUS COMMANDS           BOOLEAN VALUES  COMMAND EVALUATION       COMSYS                   CONTROL  COSTS                    CREDITS                  DROP-TO  ENACTOR                  EXITS                    FAILURE  FLAG LIST                FLAGS                    FUNCTION LIST  FUNCTIONS                GENDER                   GOALS  HERE                     HOMES                    LINKING  LISTENING                LISTS                    LOOPING  ME                       MONEY                    MOVING  OBJECT TYPES             PARENT OBJECTS           PARENT ROOMS  PIPING                   POWERS LIST              PUEBLO  PUPPETS                  REGEXPS                  ROBBERY  SEARCH CLASSES           SEMAPHORES               SPOOFING  STACK                    SUBSTITUTIONS            SUCCESS  SWITCHES                 USER-DEFINED COMMANDS    VERBS  WIZARDS                  ZONES
help wizardsWIZARDS
  Wizards are the people that help run the game and make sure that everything  is working properly.  They have special powers to tweak reality in ways  mortals can only dream of.  Be nice to them, they are going out of their  way to help keep the game running smoothly. And remember, if you have any  problems or just want to talk to someone, they will be there for you as  well.

      </code></pre>
      <p>Yesssssssssssssss.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Saturday, November 15, afternoon</h2>
      <p>If you have JavaScript turned on, <del>this</del> the background of this      page should be a silly <a href="http://p5js.org/">p5.js</a> doodle.</p>
      <p>For folks with squiggle.city pages, there are a few resources at <a      href="http://squiggle.city/js/">squiggle.city/js/</a> if you'd like to      include jQuery, p5.js, or syntax highlighting on your pages without cluttering      your <code>~/public_html</code> or relying on somebody's CDN.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Wednesday, November 12, 9:38</h2>
      <p>Here's <a href="tilde.club.listusers.html">listusers.pl output for      tilde.club</a>, just 'cause.</p>
      <p>Really, the way this should work is that <code>listusers</code> should be       a utility which outputs tab-separated values, and there should be another      utility that's good at making TSV into HTML tables.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2><a name="2014-11-12"></a>Wednesday, November 12, 9:00ish</h2>
      <p>The <a href="http://squiggle.city/">squiggle.city home page</a> now      has a slightly better summary of users' home pages.  I also feel better      that it now contains a table (used for tabular data, though - I should      really work one in somewhere for layout).</p>
      <p>I wrote a little Perl script to generate that list.  Here it is in      full:</p>
    <pre class=sh_perl><code>#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;use warnings;use 5.10.0;
# we'll use this to filter out people who haven't logged in.# pretty silly!my %whitelist;my (@lastlog) = split /\n/, `lastlog | grep -v Never | awk '{ print \$1; }'`;foreach my $user (@lastlog) {  $whitelist{$user} = 1;}
opendir(my $dh, '/home/')  or die "could not open /home/: $!";
my %dirs;my %titles;while (my $dir = readdir $dh) {  next if $dir =~ /^[.]/;  next unless $whitelist{$dir};
  my $index_html_path = "/home/$dir/public_html/index.html";
  if (-e $index_html_path) {    $dirs{$dir} = (stat $index_html_path)[9]; # mtime    $titles{$dir} = get_title_from_file($index_html_path);  }}close $dh;
sub sort_by_time {   $dirs{$b} &lt;=&gt; $dirs{$a};}
my $list = "&lt;table&gt;\n";foreach my $key (sort sort_by_time (keys(%dirs))) {   $list .= '  &lt;tr&gt;'          . '&lt;td&gt;&lt;a href="/~' . $key . '/"&gt;~' . $key . '&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/td&gt;'          . '&lt;td&gt;' . $titles{$key} . '&lt;/td&gt;'          . '&lt;td class=tiny&gt;' . $dirs{$key} . '&lt;/td&gt;'          . "&lt;/tr&gt;\n";}
$list .= "&lt;/table&gt;";
say $list;
sub get_title_from_file {  my ($filespec) = @_;  my $html = slurp($filespec);
  if ($html =~ m{&lt;title&gt;(.*?)&lt;/title&gt;}is) {    return $1;  }  return '';}
sub slurp {  my ($file) = @_;  my $everything;
  open my $fh, '&lt;', $file    or die "Couldn't open $file: $!\n";
  # line separator:  local $/ = undef;  $everything = &lt;$fh&gt;;
  close $fh    or die "Couldn't close $file: $!";
  return $everything;}      </code></pre>
      <p>This is by no stretch of the imagination a good script. Actually, it's      terrible.  As an exercise, maybe I'll write and explain a version that's      less dumb.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Monday, November 10, 1:58am</h2>
      <p>I like <a href="http://tilde.club/~schussat/slowblog-sat-20141108.html">~schussat's      slow-blog from Saturday</a>.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Monday, November 10, 12:55am</h2>
      <p><a href="http://squiggle.city/~danlyke/">~danlyke</a> has some thoughts about      design. These are harsh thoughts, but they are worth considering.</p>
      <p><a href="http://squiggle.city/~frencil">~frencil</a> has some thoughts      about nuclides and JavaScript. I look forward to seeing where this project      goes.  I should mess with D3 again.  It broke my brain <i>so hard</i> the      first time around, probably because I cannot math very well.</p>
      <p><a href="http://squiggle.city/~stilldavid">~stilldavid</a> has some      thoughts about science, and measurement, and value.</p>
      <p><a href="http://squiggle.city/~acg/">~acg</a> has a list of all the      things he's voted up on Hacker News, which is cool because I mostly can't      bring myself to follow HN on a day-to-day basis and Alan's interest in a      thing is often a pretty good filter for whether it will be worth my      time.</p>
      <p class="centerpiece">✵</p>
      <p>If you're logged into squiggle.city, you can run a few classic text      games now.  I installed <code>adventure</code> a while ago, using the      bsd-games package in Debian.  The other day I added <code>frotz</code>,      an interpreter which will let you play lots of the things at the      <a href="http://www.ifarchive.org/">Interactive Fiction Archive</a>.  I      downloaded a version of Zork there and made a <code>zork</code> command that runs this      in Frotz.  What I will do eventually is install a whole crapload of      adventure games and make a big menu for running them.</p>
      <p>I'd also like to install some development tools for this kind of thing.      I used to dabble in <a href="http://www.tads.org/">TADS</a> and such, and      it was fun even though I never wrote a game that anyone would actually      play.  I should probably take another look, because I'll bet the      <i>programming</i> side of this stuff would be a lot easier for me these      days, even if the structuring and writing of a serious game would still      be pretty daunting.</p>
      <p class="centerpiece">✵</p>
      <p>I'm on the tilde operators mailing list now.  I get the sense that some      interesting things are about to happen, and I should probably take some      action with regard to those things.  It's been difficult to do anything      requiring thought or planning or a working memory because I have been      <i>sick as a dog</i> for a bit over a week now, but I think I'm trending      towards functional.  I'm down to "coughing sometimes" and "feel massively stoned      even though theoretically sober" from "coughing relentlessly" and "the kind      of headache you think of in terms of how bad the tunnel vision is at any      given moment." This is promising.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Tuesday, November 4, 4:48pm</h2>
      <p>Oh also, I wrote <a href="https://p1k3.com/2014/11/3">a little bit about      quitting</a> SparkFun and talking in front of people.</p>
      <p>I'm going to bet this isn't the last I'll write about either of these things.</p>
      <p>The best tweet I saw today was      <a href="https://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/529706476315500544">this one</a>,      by Wm. Gibson, in tribute to everybody's favorite Colorado airport demon horse.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Tuesday, November 4</h2>
      <p>New on ~c:</p>
      <ul>        <li><a href="http://squiggle.city/~zinefer/">our first arcade</a></li>        <li><a href="http://squiggle.city/~stilldavid/">Dave is gonna write</a></li>        <li><a href="http://squiggle.city/~nallen/">Nick's face</a></li>      </ul>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Friday, October 31</h2>
      <p>Hi SparkFun.</p>
      <p>Here are some <a      href="https://p1k3.com/userland-book/slides/">slides</a> from the talk I      gave today on the command line.</b>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Tuesday, October 28</h2>
      <p>Last night's project: <a href="https://github.com/brennen/git-feed">git-feed</a>:      a simple tool for making Atom feeds out of git commit logs.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
    <h2>Monday, October 27</h2>
      <p>I'm doing a "lunch &amp; learn" at work on Friday that will attempt to      be a gentle introduction to the command line.</p>
      <p>I have <i>no idea</i> how to go about this, really. Some smart people      on irc.tilde.club suggested that I go with the "tell them what you're going      to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you told them" + "tell them      about three important things" approaches.  These seem like good ideas.  I      guess I will start by trying to decide what the three things should be.</p>
      <p>I used to be so very afraid of public speaking of any kind.  Like, physically      shaking, cold sweats, creeping numbness, inability to talk terrified.  I don't      really think I am any more, but I'm not sure how that changed.</p>
      <p>It's funny how what you're afraid of changes.  I used to be afraid to say      things in front of people.  Now I'm afraid that everyone I've ever loved is      going to die and everything I've ever done will be forgotten and it will      be as if I never even lived.  The defining difference between these two fears      is probably that the former wasn't even really <i>of</i> anything at all      and the latter is an objective fact.</p>
      <p>Anyhow, if you have any ideas about what the best thing to convey to      people right after you give them a shell account is, I would love to hear      them.</p>
      <p class="huge centerpiece">✵</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Saturday, October 25</h2>
      <p>Reading about nerd things:</p>
      <ul>        <li><a href="http://michaelcoyote.github.io/2014/08/15/my-fathers-tools/">my father's tools...</a> - on Awk</li>        <li>a lot of <a href="http://tilde.club/~ford/">~ford</a></li>        <li>a lot of things via <a href="http://tilde.club/~_/">~_</a></li>      </ul>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Friday, October 24</h2>
      <p>squiggle.city, while still far from heavily trafficked or populated,      stirs a little, and a few things emerge:</p>
      <ul>        <li><a href="http://squiggle.city/~robacarp">~robacarp</a> makes a squiggle follow your mouse</li>        <li><a href="http://squiggle.city/~thcipriani">~thcipriani</a> has a nice face up</li>        <li><a href="http://squiggle.city/~todd/">~todd</a> is all droney</li>        <li><a href="http://squiggle.city/~joe/">~joe</a> clearly understands the internet as well as anyone</li>        <li><a href="http://squiggle.city/~randy/">~randy</a> also has sound ideas</li>      </ul>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Monday, October 20</h2>
      <p>So for now, I'm going to mirror this on both tilde.club and      squiggle.city.</p>
      <p>squiggle.city is coming together pretty ok.  I'm maybe going to rethink      the Debian stable approach, because everything is <i>super old</i>.  On the      other hand, I'm not sure if I want to run testing.  I'm still pretty sure I      don't want to run Ubuntu but I guess we'll see.</p>
      <p style="text-align:center;">★</p>
      <p>Also, I just put up a new version of <a      href="https://p1k3.com/userland-book">userland</a> that feels more complete      to me.  I think I'm going to call this version 1.0.0 (except maybe for      adding more detail about how to run your own Linux) and wait until after      I've tried to teach out of it to make any more changes.</p>
      <p style="text-align:center;">★</p>
      <p><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3 is live again!</a> Well, minus the wiki part,      but I'll get that back up soonish.</p>
      <p>This is good: <a href="http://monkey.org/~marius/unix-tools-hints.html">Hints for writing      Unix tools</a>.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Sunday, October 19</h2>
      <p>Now open for business, in a completely unprepared fashion:         <a href="//squiggle.city">squiggle.city</a></p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Thursday, October 16</h2>
      <p>All of my personal internet stuff is still broken.  I spent an hour      earlier this evening trying to configure Apache on the machine where I'm      stitching p1k3.com back together, and <i>nothing</i> worked.  I had      almost forgotten the unbelievable frustration of the nothing works &rarr;      bash on config files &rarr; google errors &rarr; read docs &rarr; bash on      config files &rarr; nothing works loop here.  Apache at its worst is like      a special kind of stateful psychological torture device for web      nerds.</p>            <p>My working life is also a shambles.  For most of the workday I kept      task-switching between a few dozen utterly predictable nerd failure      modes:  Stare at the bug tracker.  Stare at the e-mail.  Stare at the      code just long enough to begin to understand it, then get distracted by      something blowing up in the logs.  Stare at the bug tracker.  Go for      coffee.  Open some browser tabs, forget what I was trying to research.      Close the wrong browser tabs, spend too much time trying to retrieve      them.  Review other people's code ineffectively and with misdirected      hostility.  Sit on the couch drinking beer and listening to the Velvet      Underground.  Stare at the bug tracker.</p>
      <p>My house is the kind of messy that usually indicates severe illness or      nontrivial substance abuse issues.  My clothes are all dirty.  My car      sounds like it's going to disintegrate.  I'm pretty sure I need to      advance my landlord the rent money for next month or the power's going to      get turned off.  I'm eating undercooked pizza at the unbelievably shitty      bar across the street from my driveway (where the same angry bartender      acts skeptical of my age and IDs me with focused hostility two or three      times a week, but also usually proves to be nice in the long run) instead      of just making a salad or something at home.</p>
      <p>Anyway, I just registered squiggle.city and pointed it at a      DigitalOcean VM.   I think AWS is maybe the standard thing, but I feel      this weird sense that there is a benefit to spreading the thing out      across providers.  I'm going to run Debian on it because Debian is one of      the longstanding loves of my technical life, and because I would rather      teach unixy stuff using it, if I've got the option.</p>
      <p>I in no way have the mental bandwidth or the temporal capacity to      sysop anything that actual human beings are using, on the off chance that      anyone uses the system I spin up, but I'm going to do it anyway, because      despite all the trappings of nostalgia, this feels to me somehow like a      thing that gestures at a possible future that I would like to be working      on, and I would really like to continue feeling that way for a      minute.</p>
      <p>All of these decisions may bite me.  I'm going to look at the existing      configuration stuff people are doing tomorrow and see how practical it is      for reuse, given my self-imposed constraints.  If anyone would like to      get on my list for an account, tweet me or find me on freenode #tildeclub as      brennen or whatever.</p>
      <p>This is fun.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Wednesday, October 15, 12:11 a.m.</h2>
      <p>On the rest of the internet, things are kind of loathsome right now.</p>
      <p>In the tiny part of it that I inhabit, I'm watching a bunch of people      rediscover things that maybe a lot of us didn't know were sincerely missed      by more than just ourselves.</p>
      <p>I've written a handful of posts to local newsgroups tonight.  This      doesn't feel like an exercise in nostalgia so much as it does an exercise      in <i>reevaluation</i>.</p>
      <p>It seems to me like this is an important distinction.  You can indulge      nostalgia for a little while, but you can't really trust it.  Sooner or      later it will deceive you really painfully.</p>
      <p>On the other hand, sometimes older patterns illuminate.  Sometimes the      nagging, pervasive sense that you have been sold a bill of goods can be      thrown into a useful kind of relief in the light of a time - or just a      mode - that didn't feel that way at all.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Monday, October 13</h2>
      <p>As happens every year or two, DreamHost just updated something and broke      <a href="//p1k3.com">p1k3.com</a>, which is where I put most of my writing.</p>
      <p>I think I'm going to take this as a sign that maybe it's time to move that site somewhere      less likely to arbitrarily quit working.  I just fired up a vm on      <a href="https://digitalocean.com/">DigitalOcean</a>, which was a fairly painless experience.      After DNS finishes propagating, I will have to figure out an Apache configuration for the      umpteenth time and install some Perl modules and muck around with SSL certificates.</p>
      <p>Once I get that done, I think I'll get serious about putting together a      tilde.club-alike shell server.  I have, right now, the following domains sitting unused:</p>
      <ul>
        <li>userland.club - I like this because it echoes my intent to make a space for playing        around with the stuff in <a href="https://github.com/brennen/userland-book">userland-book</a>,        but I don't want any confusion with UserLand Software.</li>
        <li>getyouashell.com - sort of speaks for itself, I think?</li>
        <li>lostsnail.org - I had this dumb idea one time about a service where you'd sign up        and you'd get handwritten letters in the mail (gift subscriptions available). For some        reason, despite never having done anything about the service, I haven't quite been able        to bring myself to give up the domain.</li>
      </ul>
      <p>I'm not really sure any of these are quite right, but then I'm also not sure that I need      to spend any more money on vanity domain names.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Saturday, October 11, 2014</h2>
      <p>Interesting things generally are happening in the      <a href="https://github.com/tildeclub/tilde.club/issues/">tilde.club      repo issues</a>.  Also, I      <a href="https://github.com/tildeclub/tilde.club/issues/33">asked about shells</a>.</p>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>Friday, October 10, 2014</h2>
      <pre class=art>       __________________________________       ( Time keeps getting away from me. )       ----------------------------------               o   ^__^               o  (oo)\_______                  (__)\       )\/\                      ||----w |                      ||     ||      </pre>
    </article>
    <article>
      <h2>October, 2014</h2>
      <pre class=art>       ______________       &lt; Hi everyone. &gt;       --------------               \   ^__^               \  (oo)\_______                  (__)\       )\/~                      ||----w |                      ||     ||      </pre>
      <p>I'm Brennen.  I also have <a href="https://p1k3.com/">this other web site</a>      and there is this <a href="https://p1k3.com/userland-book/">thing I am writing about      using the command line</a>.</p>
      <p></p>
      <p>I am keeping this in a git repository.  Here is <a href="git-feed.pl">a      Perl script</a> you can use to make a <a href="feed.xml">feed</a> out of a      git log.  (It needs a little work to generalize well.)</p>
      <p>Maybe tomorrow I'll try to find my old GeoCities stuff and put it up here.</p>
    </article>
    </section>
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