We have 5 cats, nearly all with human names - Abbie, Albert, Ollie, Parker, and Wren (because of her coloring).
We have two turtles, Stinky - because we took her from an abandoned house. She hadn't been fed for months and was living off algae growing in her tank of disgusting water and according to the vet was near death. The other is named Shelley. If we ever get another, I'm calling it Fluffy, because I can.
Not the first suspension bridge by a long way. The first was Menai in 1816. Clifton Suspension Bridge was opened in 1864. It was built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel who had a long association with the city. SS Great Britain was built in Bristol. Brunel built the huge lock gates for the Floating Harbour and of course the GWR ( properly the Great Western Railway but commonly God's Wonderful Railway) ran between the city and London.
Under the river, just this side of the bridge, is a hot spring which gives the whole district it's name - Hotwells.
The city is great but the traffic is attocious. There's three rivers running through the city so it's difficult to do anything with the roads.
There is something weird going on. For a forum of around 500 people it's odd I see references to my home city of Bristol in the UK popping up. Sam is a member here and emailed me and Saturday saying they're from Bristol and then there's the posts about the Small File Photo Festival. The very first set of photos I clicked on in that - https://unthinking.photography/projects/smallfile/gallery/ exhibits in my old haunts like the Tobacco Factory.
I'm not creeped out or anything, just thought it was an odd coincidence for a smallish community.
I was wrong! Yes, I know! I was shocked myself when I realized it. Size does matter!
I forgot why I started hosting my own sites in the first place. The site was first hosted by Freeserve in June 1999. By October, I had used all 15Mb of space they gave. The site was split between them and Lycos Tripod who offered 20Mb of space. In May 2000, I'd filled all 35 Mb of space on both hosts and moved part of the site to Bravepages.
In October 2000, Tripod increased the user space to 100Mb, but by 2003 I was using 8 free hosts and the sites were getting out of hand. The hosts were also changing, too many ads, some were pig slow and others started using iframes that completely screwed up the site navigation. That June I made my first server and started bringing the site pages back together. By 2006, the only thing left on the free hosts I used was a redirect to my own server.
The size on disk doesn't really matter. Mine is 18.9Gb but that's hundreds of pages and hopefully no one is ever going to ask for it all at once. Now and then I get site scrapers that do, but they're rare.
Optimizing everything really is important. There's plenty of other sites to go to if a particular site takes more than a minute to fully load or at least enough to be useable. None of our sites are worth skipping though! Here's what I do:
All the images are optimized. It's surprising how bad an image has to be before it looks awful on a website. A printer would just laugh at you if you gave them web optimized images.
The JavaScript and CSS files are minified. I tried to do that with the HTML files as well but some of them didn't display properly the last time I tried that.
After that, because I run my own little server there's some techy stuff that can be done but one of the biggest impacts was enabling GZip. My server GZips everything before it's sent. There's a tradeoff doing that and the browser unpacking the files and the time taken to actually transmit them, but it's usually worth it.
I've run loads of different tests against the server and the pages it serves. I think it's impossible to pass every test, and it's taken a while to get everything more or less right but the server is about as secure as I can make it without becoming unusable and the average page loads in less than a second and a half.
There really are some very clever people around. I'm in awe of what some can do, and not just with computers.
There's some sites I've been following for years. Boston Dynamics and their robots are just amazing, their responses are getting better than human almost monthly. As for the Voyager spacecraft. I've got watches with more computing power than those things. It will be a sad day when the hydrazine generators that power them finally run down.
One piece of software I'd like to see perfected is the one you mentioned, 3D image rendering. I've got loads of photos, most not very good, of HMS Gambia. On day the software will be good enough for me to enter all the photos I have and get a good 3D rendering of the ship.
Over 40 years ago, in 1981, I managed to save the money to get to BAHX-VDNKh in Moscow - https://brisray.com/holidays/russia1981/russia3.htm. 32 years after that, in 2013, Jens Mondry found the photos because the exhibition had been neglected and was falling apart and they were going to reproduce it digitally and wanted them. I don't think they got as far along with the project as they wanted - http://lostexhibitions.net/vdnkh.shtml - but the rendering software would have been so much help to them.
The web is a risky place, but it always has been. It was common even in 1990s to find tech forums (usenet newsgroups) where the advice given to unwary users who had computer problems was to find system32 in the Windows directory and delete it. Or install something like a renamed DeleteAll - a utility used to wipe disks - and type something like "myfriend -nv *.*"
The -nv switch or whatever it was meant non-verbose and users had no warning at all what was happening except for a lot of disk activity as every file was being deleted and overwritten so it couldn't be recovered. The program was a TSR (terminate and stay resident) so it could even delete itself from the disk.
Open source is supposed to be safe because everyone can look at the source code and inspect it. But how many want or can look through code and see what's happening? The Ubuntu kernal has 30 million lines of code in it! Anyone remember Heartbleed? The vulnerability was in OpenSSL for years, unfortunately the bad guys found and used it before the good guys knew it was there.
Linkrot is an odd thing. Loads of sites go offline everyday so links stop working. The worst to find automatically are ones that have been repurposed as they still give a valid server 200 (OK) response. The funniest I saw was on a college site I was rewriting. One of the links was supposed to go to some academic site but the domain had changed hands and went to a Japanese porn site instead.
If anyone wants to see what software is on the cutting edge then check out the Microsoft and Google sites at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/ and https://research.google/. I'm sure there are others but these companies are developing stuff that may become common in a few years.
The Microsoft site was where I found ICE (Image Composite Editor) that at the time was years ahead of anything Photoshop or GIMP could do.
That's an interesting list. It made me look at what I use most. I really don't use much that doesn't come as standard with Windows except for the full Adobe Creative Suite that work pays for and which I use at least two of the apps, sometimes more, every day. The nice thing about that is you can use two copies, so one for work, one for home.
There are some utilities I like, some I can use the Adobe programs for but these can be quicker to open and use:
Apache Web Server - I'd hate to use something else after all the years I've been using this Audacity - one of the best, free or otherwise, audio editors ever made Bulk Rename Utility - because I keep changing my mind about what I call files and get files from all over the place that need renaming Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera - to check what I write looks good for almost everyone Dia - diagramming software InkSCape - handy to have even if I do have Illustrator OpenShot - video editor for when I don't need to open Premiere. Even quicker is the original Microsoft Movie Maker which is difficult to get hold of now but still works on Windows 11. WinSCP - File transfer utility
Apart from that, a working knowledge of batch files and PowerShell. For repetitive tasks, like splitting rotating Apache's log files, looking after the SSL certificates, backups (I use Windows RoboCopy from batch files).
One piece of software that I have never found, at least that works properly, is the equivilent to Google Reverse Image Search for personal use. That would be so useful and I miss their online version. Lens is mostly linked to buying things.
"I've recently bought a cheap DVD player and started burning some of my favorite movies and TV shows on disks."
So long as you realize that anything on self-made optical media might not last forever. I've got 20 year old CDs that are barely readable and some can no longer be read at all.
Here's something I found really useful for video tape. If you are in the US (that used NTSC) or anywhere that does not use PAL but somehow have a load of PAL VHS tapes you want to digitize, then try and get yourself a medical recording tape recorder. I use a Mitsubishi MD3000 that came from an ultrasound machine, and use the RCA conposite connection output to either a video capture card or device like the Elgato Video Capture.
US medical devices used PAL because that had a better video quality than NTSC (625 lines vs 525). You're not going to get really good quality recordings from any VHS tape, but they can be cleaned up a little bit.
Members of the family have given us hundreds, if not thousands, of old photos and want me to do something with them. I don't like paying for things like that and fed up with the free sites changing their TOS or just disappearing, so it looks like I'll be self-hosting a photo gallery.
So far it's down to LibrePhotos, Lychee, PhotoPrism, or Piwigo. With runner's up NovaGallery and PhotoFloat.
I just revisited the page and no wonder I recognized it. I even said before that it looked like Digital Research's GEM and that's because it is!
GEM was included on the first oomputer I owned, am Amstrad 1640, but before that it was put on Amstrad CPCs, a sort of console, and Amstrad PCWs, a series of word processors.
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