NWS WXK27 Service Disruption

Turned on the Austin TX weather radio WXK27 just in time to hear an unusual message:

Public Information Statement
National Weather Service Austin/San Antonio TX
117 PM CDT Thu Jun 5 2025

...NOAA WEATHER RADIO OUTAGE DUE TO A SOFTWARE UPDATE NEXT WEEK...

The Austin/San Antonio National Weather Service office will be conducting a required, scheduled update to their Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) system from Monday, June 9th through approximately June 11th. The NWS uses the AWIPS computer system to display and integrate weather and water information, and to send life-saving information, such as weather and water warnings, to the public.

During the time of the update, forecast operations will be conducted in conjunction with our service back-up office in Corpus Christi to minimize any potential interruption to services. No impacts to our core services of forecast products and weather watches, warnings and advisories are expected during this period. However, all NOAA Weather Radio transmitters maintained by NWS Austin/San Antonio will be off air through the time of the install.

This includes the following transmitters: Austin, Carrizo Springs, Del Rio, Dilley, DHanis, Gonzalez, Kerrville, Lagrange, Llano, San Antonio, Seguin, and Uvalde.

The forecast office in Austin/San Antonio will remain open and staffed throughout this period for public and partner phone calls and additional functions that can be completed without AWIPS.

Source as of 1:17 PM CDT Thu Jun 5 2025

Since January, I’ve been terrified of the NWS weather radio system being permanently turned off and dismantled. Lord knows the Apps want it that way. They want it so hard.

So I get a bit touchy when there’s any disruption, like, “Oh god, this is it. They did it.”

I think this is required because with the software updates going on in the regional office in San Marcos, the transmitters would be running headless, without anything sending them updated conditions and forecast messages. I’m not sure why the backup office in Corpus Christi can’t take over that role, but I guess system upgrades are hard, especially in government.

The message states it’ll be back on the air by midweek, but I’m half wondering if there’s some upper-level bureaucrat at the NOAA toeing the party line who will say, “See? They were off the air and nothing bad happened! Let’s save some money!”

Everything precious about this Rome thing we call the United States of America is but a candle in a window sill, so easily snuffed out by any crude bastards with an agenda.

VLC Recent Albums Flow

I use VLC on Android to listen to music because it’s kinda neat. My one annoyance is that it doesn’t have anything like the Recent Albums cover flow like Plex does. Really annoying. I pick up a lot of music and really miss being able to look at my recent CD stack to remind myself what I just got. Other apps do it. So why doesn’t VLC?

Guys. Y’all. It’s been in there the whole time.

Select the Music tab. Tap Albums view.

Tap the 3 dots.

Tap Display Settings.

Tap Sort by Insertion Date, Newest First.

DONE. OMG.

The downside is that it sorts things by when I copied them to my phone, so there’s old stuff in there, but I should expect that.

Kill All Serial Scrapists

Yesterday, I saw this site was timing out with HTTP 503 (Service Temporarily Unavailable) and I couldn’t access my WordPress blog. Whut?

I logged into my shared hosting shell, looked at the server logs, and saw I was being hammered by some scraper bot. So of course Apache’s mod_security was throttling my site and returning 503’s to everything.

So, what to do? Edit the .htaccess to tell the bot to fuck off.

# scraper bots
#"Scrapy/2.11.2 (+https://scrapy.org)"
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Scrapy [NC]
RewriteRule . - [F,L]

Essentially, if the user agent starts with “Scrapy” (No Case sensitivity), tell it that it’s Forbidden (HTTP 403) and end the request. (see a full example)

That’s the first bot I’ve had to block with mod_rewrite, but I get the sinking feeling it won’t be the last. At least it’s honest enough to announce a unique user agent string instead of saying it’s Mozilla or some shit.

Nobody obeys robots.txt anymore. Nobody.

I fucking hate AI. Assholes Incorporated. But AI didn’t do this; humans did this to the Web. We did it. Humans. We did it to each other. We did it to ourselves. Humans.

F.U.M.

In Neal Stephenson’s epic sci-fi novel “Cryptonomicon”, we read of a character in one of the modern timelines who is a techie and a new business owner. This guy has a running gag where he has an app he wrote that sits in his PC’s toolbar that checks his bank accounts and his investments and calculates how long it’ll take until he makes “Fuck You Money”. It’s a dollar amount at which he’ll feel free enough that, if someone were to tell him no or otherwise crimp his style, he could say, “fuck you” and continue on with his life without damage. He keeps checking it throughout the story.

That’s a great running gag.

But now we’ve seen exactly what “Fuck You Money” looks and acts like. It’s ugly, cruel, and dangerous. Absolutely unhinged. Inhuman.

The joke’s not funny anymore.

Oops! All Side Quests!

Work has me exhausted; I can’t work fast enough to finish one project before two tasks, three manager questions, and four support requests come in. So much context switching, and I lose time and energy. So much energy. The stack keeps deepening.

People ask me, “Hey Shawn, why don’t you play games to unwind?”

“Well,” I explain, “my end goal is to get through the Golden Gate, but I need the red key, but only the old sage knows where to find the red key, but he’s hard of hearing and needs a unicorn horn to hear through, but only the villagers know where the unicorn is, but I have to find the unicorn in the forest, but then I have to fight the unicorn and win, but then…”

No. Gaming is exactly like work. Absolutely no.