koldfront

Feedbase year 6 #feedbase

In the beginning of this year, I completely forgot the annual "state of Feedbase" post!

It has been a couple of strange years lately, so that's my excuse, and I am sticking to it.

In 2021 Feedbase got nntp-connections from 479 unique IP-address (down from 536). Of these 155 were IPv6 addresses (down from 240). However, 138 addresses only connected once (up from 113).

I wasn't the user connecting the most times, in fact I connected 2.7 times fewer times than the most connecting user, and the third most connecting user connected 2.8 fewer times than me. The number of addresses with 3 digit number of connections was 15. IPv6 and DHCP may be skewing these numbers somewhat.

At the end of 2021 there was 3.1 million articles (up from 2.3) and 159 follow ups (up from 133 last year). All the new follow ups are by me.

The number of commits stayed at 21. Most of the commits were bugfixes or normalization improvements, however LIST NEWSGROUPS was implemented as well.

SOS #music

This is the best ABBA cover ever: SOS.

"Found" when I visited the Portishead website after coming across a recording of their recent performance at the War Child UK benefit concert in Bristol on Youtube and wondering if they might be going on tour.

If they do, I must go.

Convoy (1978) ★★★☆☆ #movies

Danish National Broadcasting has Convoy on their website for a week.

The first many times I saw it on TV the movie started out being compressed to 4:3 format, so all the trucks in the beginning looked very narrow and tall. After the text in the beginning I think it switched to pan-and-scan, which also wasn't great. However this version is full wide screen and, as far as I can tell, the correct ratio all the way.

The movie is a classic, the quintessential trucker movie, replete with country music and trucker radio slang. As it was directed by Sam Peckinpah, it has many slow motion action sequences of fights and collisions.

What it doesn't have, however, is any kind of coherent story. Which I guess is a shame, but the movie is charming nonetheless.

It is full of classic gags - the black truck driver blowing a tire in a tight turn and rolling over in a white truck, and after being dragged out yelling: "God damn white truck, I knew I should have bought a black one!"

Or how about the cop Dirty Lyle commandeering a car from a couple of teenagers busy trying to swallow the weed they were smoking when he headed for their car, only to get run off the road and flying through a church sign saying "Welcome to church" and through the roof of said church!

Another classic is the cop car being mashed between two trucks until it is so broken that it is left in the roadside. Lyle calls for a replacement car, and new trousers for his passenger.

The convoy is joined by a small bus off jesus freaks, and the reverend declares "Nowhere in scripture have I come across thou shall not put the pedal to the metal!"

As the trucks move along more and more trucks join the impromptu convoy, leading to the gag of "18 wheel Eddie" coming on the radio damning the speed limits and joining the convoy, in spirit anyway, as he is driving a golf cart.

As the convoy pulls over in a field and everybody takes a communal bath, a photographer funnily wears a jacket that advertises "Copenhagen snuff"!

Convoy has been described as a western only with trucks, and that's not inaccurate.

The main character Martin "Rubber Duck" Penwald is very reluctant to lead anything, he just wants to drive - while the girl he picks up along the way wants him to change the world. I don't know if it is a slight reference to Bob Dylan being called the spokesperson for a generation and not wanting to be that, with Ali McGraws character being a parallel to Joan Baez? Not sure, regardless, the story is weak. Still, it's a trucker classic and who doesn't like a good dose of cb radio slang? I give it 3 stars.

Excuses, excuses… #unsubscribe

It seems kind of silly that the post after the first post I have embedded a tweet in is this one. But, whatever, I have deactivated my Twitter account. I don't know if the new ownership of the company is going to make any difference, but it was as good an excuse as any to cut Twitter out of my routine.

I am going to miss some of the stuff I was following - ideally I would like equivalent Atom/RSS-feeds (so I can read them in Gnus via Feedbase), which is usually easy for people using/switching to Mastodon/ActivityPub, but I guess I shouldn't be holding my breath.

Anyway, this means one less distraction - you can still find the new approved Danish firstnames over on kammeratadam.dk.

Gimme Danger (2016) ★★☆☆☆ #music #movies #hardware

While recovering from COVID-19 I have been scouring Danish National Radio's website for programs to watch.

After chain watching a couple of seasons of Art Quiz, I watched the documentary "Gimme Danger" about Iggy Pop and The Stooges, mainly because it was made by Jim Jarmusch.

The movie starts out with Jim Jarmusch clapping in front of the camera filming Iggy Pop, and Jarmusch declaring that he is now "interrogating" Jim Osterberg about the greatest rock and roll band in the history of the world. I guess it's good to declare your allegiance up front.

I think it is well made, there is a lot for the eyes - references are illustrated with clips, but I didn't really get interested. It's probably more worthwhile if you really like The Stooges and/or Iggy Pop, I don't know their music and wasn't drawn in.

I liked the sequence in the beginning where Iggy Pop explains that he picked up the instructions "25 words or less" from a childrens TV-show, and used that as a guide to write songs - "I didn't feel like I was Bob Dylan: blablablabla, blablablabla, blablabla. I thought, keep it really short, and none of it will be the wrong thing."

The other little story that was interesting to me was that after the band imploded, the guitarist worked in a recording studio for a while, and hated recording music he didn't like, but got interested in electronics - and then became an electrical engineer at AMD and Sony in Silicon Valley for the next 27 years. That was a twist I hadn't seen coming! When The Stooges started playing again 30 years later, he agreed to join them even though he hadn't really played in the meantime, because they were his friends.

Had I been part of the group this movie was made for, I would probably have thought it was great.

BBC podcasts delay - a trend? #podcasts #radio #bbc

During the last months the podcasts I subscribe to from BBC have been running an internal advert along the lines of "From next month, you can get this programme 28 days before everybody else, by using the BBC Sounds app."

While I (sort of) understand that BBC wants to get people into their app instead of using the open format that podcasts still are distributed by (if you can find the actual RSS URL, it's becoming increasingly hard), what is really annoying to me is the "spin", as it were. Call it dishonesty.

Don't tell me that it's an improvement that the weekly topical "The News Quiz" is going to be delayed for four weeks if I continue to subscribe to the podcast rather than switching to an app. That is obviously not true. You're degrading the regular podcast infrastructure users to second class citizens to get more people to use your app.

I would have a lot more respect for you if you just came out and admitted that. I would keep a moderate amount of respect if you at least didn't try to tell me there is going to be a 4 week delay from now on and it is a good thing for me. Don't piss on my head and tell me it is raining.