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Moving the Blog...

Moving the Blog…

…to peterbickford.com Thanks to wordpress.com for creating a great product, and for many years of solid service when enabled countless creators and writers to speak freely. I wish you all the best. The decision to move to a self-hosted blog is purely out of a need to maintain my independence of thought. Like many others, I’ve been shocked by the urge to engage in politically-correct censorship…

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Of Covid-19, Lockdowns, Masks, and Fatality Rates

Here’s the best overall wrap-up of the actual data that I’ve seen. Worth checking all the linked articles, particularly the Financial Times piece on Sweden, and Daniel Horowitz’s wrap-up of the data on masks and their actual (vs. theoretical) effectiveness in preventing virus spread. In case you want the TL;DR version re: masks, see this review of the CDC guidelines summary. In short: N95 masks…

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Solved: Keeping Windows Forms from Resizing when Dragging them to a Monitor with a Different Resolution

Standard disclaimer: This is one of those “how to overcome an incredibly geeky tech problem which has been bedeviling me forever” posts. It’s meant as a virtual breadcrumb for anyone who faces a similar issue. If you find it and it helps, please give it a “like”. If this isn’t the sort of thing that interests you, by all means skip on to the next comic, music, or pop culture-related post.

Anyo…

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#.Net #DPI #Windows Forms

Things I'm Learning as I Learn to Livestream

Things I’m Learning as I Learn to Livestream

I recently decided to start up a ComicBase Livestream, so that I (your friendly neighborhood ComicBase creator) could reach out to the folks directly, and answer your questions live through the magic of internet broadcasting.

In the interest of aiding all who are considering setting up their own broadcast, here’s a few of the bits of technical trivia I’ve learned in the past two weeks as a…

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#ComicBase #Livestream

A Bit of Good News: Edifier R1280T Powered Speakers Review

Several days ago, I decided that I needed to rearrange my entire office space in order to set it up for better videoconferencing–maybe even a podcast. As such, having a giant window immediately behind me as I sat at my desk was hardly ideal, since it turned every videocam shot of me into a backlit silhouette. While this sort of picture has its uses–particularly when portraying informants against…

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Apocolarping

Apocolarpers stocking up on toilet paper and bottled water

“LARPing” is “Live Action Role Playing” — basically getting together with a bunch of like-minded folks and dressing up as warriors or wizards or vampires etc. and acting out a live game of Dungeons and Dragons (or Vampire: The Masquerade, or what have you).

In our current state, it looks like we’ve decided to engage in a…

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#Apocolarping #Coronavirus #COVID-19

Moving Away from AWS

Way back when, Amazon realized that as part of their project to act as the world’s online all-in-one shop, they’d need to build one hell of a data center operation to cope with the demand. And they did it. Quite brilliantly, in fact. Then they realized that by building worldwide data centers sufficient to cope with the worst of the peak demand (think: Christmas), they’d inevitably be…

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Attack of the Script Kiddies

For the past few weeks, we’ve been engaged in a big move of our servers back down from the Amazon cloud to on-premises servers. While Amazon runs an amazing service, the bandwidth bill for ComicBase is a killer, and we can afford to throw _way_ more processing power and disk storage at it if we simply buy the hardware than if we rent it from Amazon. By using on-premise hardware, we get to go way…

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TV Man: My Favorite Weird News Story (Art Project?) of the Year

https://www.engadget.com/2019/08/14/tv-man-leaves-televisions-virginia-doorsteps/?utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=morningafter

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The Funniest Thing I've Ever Seen From Congress

The Funniest Thing I’ve Ever Seen From Congress

Possibly the first time I feel like I’ve truly gotten my tax dollar’s worth in pure entertainment:

Not only is this just an amazingly funny takedown of a breathtakingly stupid piece of proposed legislation–but it also introduced me to what is apparently a whole line of quite–umm–striking work from artist Jason Heuser,…

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#Comedy #Green New Deal #Jason Heuser #Mike Lee

Breaking HTTPPostAsync When Debugging in IIS Express, or "Wasting 5 Hours in Programming's Version of a Really Crummy Escape Room"

Breaking HTTPPostAsync When Debugging in IIS Express, or “Wasting 5 Hours in Programming’s Version of a Really Crummy Escape Room”

It’s 3AM, the day after Daylight Savings Time threw everyone’s internal sleep clocks into absolute chaos. (I say “chaos” based on both my own personal feelings, as well as the flood of fire service calls we’ve had today, including an overdose, a suicide attempt, and numerous other ways that our local residents have signalled their general lack of fervor at the idea of getting up tomorrow).

Wor…

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#Atomic Avenue #ComicBase #Programming

Aww! My first bomb threat--Spammers are soooo cute!

Aww! My first bomb threat–Spammers are soooo cute!

From my email yesterday:

From: Riley Mitchell <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2018 11:59 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Rescue service will complicate the situation Hello. My recruited person carried a bomb (Hexogen) into the building where your business is located. My man assembled the bomb according to my instructions. It is small and it is hidden very carefully,…

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The Surveillance State of the Web (And A Better Alternative to Chrome?)

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m getting increasingly creeped out by the constant surveillance that we’re all under, particularly in the Google/FaceBook environment. To summarize but a few of the highlights:

Your physical movements are being constantly noted and aggregated via your phone’s GPS and location services–even when seemingly opt out of those services.

Even if you’re not…

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Uh Oh...

Uh Oh…

High Court: Online shoppers can be forced to pay sales tax

https://apnews.com/332abb7455cb4b60b2effc0852ff3c89/High-Court:-Online-shoppers-can-be-forced-to-pay-sales-tax

For anyone but the very largest retailers (think: Walmart, Amazon), this has the potential to unleash an absolutely ruinous storm of neverending tax paperwork on us from literally every state (and possibly county) in the…

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Thought for the Day...

Thought for the Day…

If your design isn’t fully baked, don’t give it to end users and expect them to do anything other than spitting it out while making “gak!” sounds.

The only exception to this rule is if you’re making chocolate chip cookies. If your design can be fairly compared to a chocolate chip cookie, go ahead and show it as early as you want, even if it’s just raw dough.

For everything else, the design has to…

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Bickford's Law for Large Project Development

Bickford’s Law for Large Project Development

If you haven’t tested a particular part of your project recently, just assume you did something to the rest of the project which broke it.

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Two Musicians and a Projector = Magic

Uncool confession time: I hated punk rock when it first came out. I thought it was badly recorded, atonal garbage, and failed to see why anyone would want to pay attention to a bunch of untalented hacks who couldn’t actually play their instruments.

At the time, I was an overly earnest musician who had become entranced by multi-track studio production techniques and increasingly technical hi-fi…

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