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.

Denke immer nie

Looking forward to the end of this semester of German II. I’m burned out. Given my struggles this semester, I’ll never achieve competence level A2. German I and II are considered A1, and I’m a middling student at it. Immigration wants higher than A2, so there goes that. At this point, I can’t even remember words or how to speak it. There are so many tiny little pieces and rules and it has blown out past a point where I can hold the pieces together in my head straight enough to form a sentence.

I learned how to speak English over a decade of my childhood, picking up pieces along the way, incorporating them into what was already automatic. But learning a new language in my 50’s is terrible. I’m having to take my own understanding of language apart, to pull the wires up from the works and start labeling the parts of speech. It’s blowing it all out as I unpack it, and even my grasp on English is slipping. I just don’t want to talk anymore.

I need a rest.