Music Playlists

Whenever I post a music video I add it to an annual playlist. Here is a list of such lists:

• Pergelator 2026
• Pergelator 2025
• Pergelator 2024
• Pergelator 2023
• Pergelator 2022
• Pergelator 2021
• Pergelator 2020
• Pergelator 2019
• Pergelator 2018
• Pergelator 2017
• Pergelator 2016
• Pergelator 2015
• Pergelator 2014
• Pergelator 2013
• Pergelator 2012 A
• Pergelator 2012 B
• Pergelator 2011
• Pergelator 2010

I don't know why there are two for 2012. Gimme a break, it was 14 years ago. I tried checking to see if all the songs in the lists are also in the blog, but that exhausted my patience very quickly. Might be able to get AI to do it for me, but I'm not sure I want to get that involved.

I probably should put this list in the sidebar, but I haven't made any edits to this blog's layout in a coons age and I don't see me changing my ways any time soon.

There were also two playlists for 2013 but one had over 60 videos, and not all of them were music videos, so I changed the name. 

Bloggity, bloggity, bloggity

Latest Posting Date From BRM Blog Roll

Google notified me that my Google Drive is getting full - over 75%. Naturally, they want to sell me more storage space. What have I got in there that's taking all that space? About a zillion files, that's what. I know there are some in there that I want to keep, but I took a look and there is a whole lot of garbage, so I set about cleaning house. 

Then I came across a blogroll I copied from Bayou Renaissance Man back in 2017. I had started checking if they were active, but I hadn't finished, so I spent a couple of hours checking the rest of them. Out of 252 entries in the list, 178 still exist. The rest have gone away. Only 16 have posted in the last week, and 23 have posted this year. I stored all this in a spreadsheet and then asked Google to graph it, and that's what you see at the top. That flat line in the center is from the 35 blogs that stopped posting in 2017.

Since we're doing graphs, here's a graph of this blog:

Pergelator Stats for All Time

There's something wrong with Blogger's numbers. Look at the most recent month and the biggest number is something like 20K on May 27th, not 150K. 500 a day seems more typical. I also have no idea what causes my numbers to spike like that. I check my stats occasionally, and there are always spikes in the number of views, but when I look back to see what I posted on that day, it seems to be the most mundane kinds of posts. It's so weird that I attribute the whole thing social media whiplash, and of no real importance.

Title inspired by Old Town Road

P. S. I realized after I posted this that all the blogs that 'died' in 2017 might be because I checked them back when I first started on this, back in 2017. They might all still be going.

Fixing Old Blog Posts

Looking through some old blog posts this morning, I noticed that one post was missing an image. Fixing a broken post used to be easy, but somewhere along the way Blogger made some changes and now it's a bit of a trick. Here's my procedure:

• right click on the title of a blog post and select 'Open link in a new tab'
• go to this new tab, copy the title of the blog post (highlight the title and press Ctrl-C)
• right click on New Post (somewhere in upper right corner) and select 'Open link in a new tab'
• go to the new post tab, paste the title in the search box and press Enter. If there are several results you might have to look through them to find the one you want.
• click on the title of the post you want to edit
• edit the post
• when you have finished editing, click on Update
• go back to the previous tab, which should still show the original, broken version of your post. Click the refresh symbol (the circular arrow in the upper left corner). The repaired version of your post should appear.

Clickety, clickety click. All because Blogger took away the edit button.

Font Size

Finally got tired of the small type on this blog and went looking for a solution. Found nothing in the Blogger setup page, so I asked for help and the answer is to edit the html. So I did. I changed the value of the first instance of "font" from 

value="normal normal 109% . . .

to 

value="normal normal 125% . . . 

Just in case you were wondering.

Blog List

I just updated the list of Blogs I Read. For some reason it only shows the first ten, you have to click on Show All to see all 24 of them. There are other blogs I read occasionally, notably According to Hoyt. I generally like what she has to say, but she's not on the list because her posts are too long for me so I seldom read them.

I also added a list of media sites that I follow. ZeroHedge is written by Tyler Durden, the lead character in Fight Club. If you haven't seen that movie you should go see it. 

I used to read Aljazeera, but ever since the massacre in Israel this fall it's been all evil Jews all the time. Aljazeera is funded by the government of Qatar, and Qatar is rumored to be providing safe haven for Hamas leaders. It's too bad because they used to have some good stories. I wonder who is going to be willing to protect Qatar when the Israelis come calling. Will it be Russia or the USA? I suspect Israel won't care, as soon as they finish with Hamas stooges in Gaza they will be going after the Hamas leaders wherever they are.

Housekeeping

Email Subscriptions

I got a notice back in August from follow.it telling me that feedburner was not going to continue providing that service, so I might want to try follow.it. Today I finally got around to changing the widget. You can find it in the side bar.

Online Tools and Old Web Links

I took a bunch of stuff from the sidebar and moved it to an Old Stuff page. I checked all the links and deleted all the dead ones.

Statitistics

I deleted the stat counter. The one that was on here quit working a long time ago. I thought about adding a new one, but then I realized whenever I wanted to know my stats, I went to the Blogger stat page. My current all time count is 3,244,108. 

My first post was on February 20, 2002 which was 7,974 days ago, which averages out to 400 visits a day. I typically get around 200 visits a day, but a couple of weeks ago I wrote a bit about a couple of shows we watched on Netflix. I took the URL of those posts and put them in comments on the YouTube trailer. The next day I got 25,000 hits. No comments though.

 Labels

My list of labels has gotten ridiculously long. I should do something about that and maybe I will one of these days.

 

 

Spam

The Wizard of Oz | 75th Anniversary "Wizard Revealed" | Warner Bros. Entertainment
Warner Bros. Entertainment

Comment notification email - note little triangle by 'me'

I've been getting notifications that some laptop repair center in Delhi, India, has posted a comment on my blog. It's spam, but when I go to the target post, the comment isn't there. Okay, fine, saves me having to delete it. Today I decided to look a little closer and when I click on the little triangle next to 'me' this pops up:

blogger.bounces.google.com

Look like the great and powerful Google has rejected the comment. Funny, they don't tell me that, but Okay. So now I mark it as spam by clicking on the spam icon.

 

Spam icon is one highlighted with the gray circle

Now this message pops up:

Report spam & unsubscribe

Yes, I want no more notices about spam comments that you have rejected. Unfortunately, what Report spam & unsubscribe does is unsubscribe you from ALL comment notifications.

Well, that is NOT what I want, but since it's done, I'll probably have to go wade into the bowels of Blogger and reset the flag. That's probably what happened last time, I just didn't notice.

Go ask Google about this bounces.blogger.google.com address and nobody will tell me straight up what the deal is. What I deduce is that apparently Blogger keeps track of spammers and rejects them out of hand.

P. S. Should have included a little border when I was capturing the popup messages, would have made it easier to distinguish screen captures from my comments.

Comments

I used to get an email notifying me if someone commented, but at some point I quit getting them. I didn't notice because I didn't get comments very often. I will try and pay more attention now. Looking at Blogger Help, it seems other people have run into this problem, but those inquiries have received no response and the questions have been locked. Maybe it's time to abandon Blogger and move to one of those new-fangled platforms like Quora or Twitter. I don't like Twitter because it is targeted at Smartphones and Smartphones have tiny screens. Yes, I know they have more pixels than god, but they are still tiny. I like big screens, the more bigger, the more better. Maybe Substack would work, though it seems to be for people who write pages of stuff.

Warning! Danger Will Robinson!

 Got a couple of notices from Blogger this morning that a couple of my posts 'violated community guidelines'. The first one contained a link to a site that Google has identified as a malware site, the other one, well, I don't know exactly why I got a warning.

     Hello,

     As you may know, our Community Guidelines 
(https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy) describe the boundaries for what we 
allow-- and don't allow-- on Blogger. Your post titled "Drugs & Money" was 
flagged to us for review. This post was put behind a warning for readers 
because it contains sensitive content; the post is visible at 
http://pergelator.blogspot.com/2014/05/drugs-money.html. Your blog readers 
must acknowledge the warning before being able to read the post/blog.

     We apply warning messages to posts that contain sensitive content. If 
you are interested in having the status reviewed, please update the content 
to adhere to Blogger's Community Guidelines. Once the content is updated, 
you may republish it at 
https://www.blogger.com/go/appeal-post?blogId=4261262990290532740&postId=2454714956865209232. 
This will trigger a review of the post.

     For more information, please review the following resources:

     Terms of Service: https://www.blogger.com/go/terms
     Blogger Community Guidelines: https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy

     Sincerely,

     The Blogger Team

The post in question is from 2014 and is a speculative post about the economics of the illegal drug business. Could it be that I'm not allowed to talk about the American Drug Cartel?

Update a week later: Deleted the link to the compromised website from one post, did nothing to the one about the illegal drug business, resubmitted them to the great and powerful Oz and both were reinstated.

Oregon Governor's Race, Part 1

State Sen. Betsy Johnson of Scappoose

We're talking about the 2022 election. I labeled this post 'Part 1', just in case I write another one. No telling if that will happen. If I read the linked article correctly, Ms. Betsy is an airplane pilot as well as a helicopter pilot, so two points for her. She talks about being a centrist, and that might appeal to some people, but I am pretty sure most of the people who pay attention to politics don't want to be agreeable, they want to fight, and being agreeable is not conducive to fighting. I would like to see a centrist elected, but I'm afraid some king sized, rabble rousing jackass will claim the spotlight and launch some kind of 'war'. Of course this is Oregon, so the war will probably be something around the flavor of the glue on envelopes. You know, something of the first importance.

And then there's always the problem with the complete disconnect between what politicians say on the campaign trail and what happens when they get elected. It would be nice if we had some analysts we could trust. Whatever, here's my contribution to the public forum.

P.S. While Blogger's image handling is pretty good, the lack of information bugs me, so I sent some feedback:

It would be nice if we knew how big the image we just inserted was. I want them to be as big as possible, but no larger than their original size. If I load an image that's 1,000 pixels wide, it would be nice to know. That way, I wouldn't need to enlarge it full size to find out that it's too big to fit in Blogger's format. Likewise, if the image is like 500 pixels wide, I don't want to blow it up. Generally I don't like expanded images, I used them occasionally, but I want to know what I'm doing.

YouTube Embed Code

After much mucking about with embedding YouTube videos, I finally decided that the way to do it was to make a template and just copy-paste it into Blogger. Maybe this will be useful for someone. Here it is:

YouTube Embed Code

I started with the embed code YouTube provides, then changed the dimensions, added the center tag and the carriage returns (the br tags) at the end and changed the video ID to XxxxxxxxxxX. Do this in a text editor and save the file under a name like, oh, I dunno, YouTubeEmbedCode.htm

Change Blogger to html mode, paste this block in, get the ID from the url of the YouTube browser tab (just double click on the ID to highlight the whole thing and then type Ctrl-C), and paste it over the X's. Add the title, and whatever else you want and you're done. You can go back to compose mode and write your text.

I don't know if it's any simpler, but it sure feels like it.

Blogger's New Editor

Roman Colosseum

Because FU Blogger

I am not happy with Blogger's new editor. Seems like every time I write a post I run into some new-fangled crap that gets in my way. This time it's the menu you get when you right click on a highlighted piece of text. Used to be, back in the good old days, back before these dad-burn whipper-snappers started running all over my lawn (get off of my lawn, you dad-burn whipper-snappers) you would get a little pop-up menu that included 'Search Google for blah-de-blah'. Now you get some other menu that does not include the search function. I don't know what any of the other menu items are, and I don't care, all I want it is the search function and now I have to point and click twice as much to get what I want. Bah, double bah and humbug.

Yes, I could move to some other Blogging platform, but that would be a lot of work and take a bunch of time and it probably wouldn't help because they are probably engaged in a feature war with Google and I'll have to deal with the same kind of crap over there besides having to learn my way around their oh-so-intuitive interface.

Eventually I imagine I will either subconsciously adapt, or if something bugs me enough I will take steps to learn how to make it work like I want. Why can't they just leave things alone? The old one worked well enough, why did they have to change it? Cretins.

 

Searching for Nuggets

I've been trying to do a better job of labeling my posts, but sometimes a single label doesn't help, especially when there are hundreds of posts with that tag (like videos or music videos). So I've been wondering if there is a method to find posts that has two labels attached, like "Cars" and "videos". Turns out there is. A search for all posts with a single label generates a URL that looks like this:

https://pergelator.blogspot.com/search/label/video

To restrict your search to posts with both labels, append a plus sign and the second label to that string:

https://pergelator.blogspot.com/search/label/video+Cars

Capitalization is important. This URL returns nothing:

https://pergelator.blogspot.com/search/label/video+cars

Thanks to DarkUFO

P.S. Pasting a URL into blogger automatically turns it into a link, which is fine, except that if you edit the visible text, it doesn't change the link. For that, you have to go to html mode and edit it directly.

Fast Forward

My computer display screen has been acting a little weird, so I consult with the cloud:

I've been hearing about 4K video for a while now. I ignored it when it first came out because, like any new technology,  it was expensive. (Just for a baseline, anything that costs more than a dollar and a half is expensive.) But now you can buy a 4K computer display at Costco for $300. That might be worthwhile, especially if this display is flaking out.

P.S. I tried copying the discussion from the forum, but Blogger has it's own rules about how to handle things and the copy-and-paste didn't work so well. So for my next trick I took a screen shot of the forum discussion, cropped it with Pix and inserted it here. I tried resizing it a couple of times by changing the height and width parameters in html, but I ended up with the original dimensions of the image. As the best compromise between being a readable size and fitting on the page. It looks like shit right now. It's all fuzzy like it was compressed and then expanded. Stupid Blogger, why can't you just render the image as it is? Maybe it will look better on the finished page, but I doubt it.

Me & Linux

I just spent an hour cleaning out old files on my Linux box.  Lately I had noticed that sometimes the web browser stalls while the hard disk is getting hammered. Looking in Files (the Linux file management program) I see that I have about 5 GB of space left. I have tried deleting some things, but it hasn't made a noticeable difference, I still had only about 5 GB of free space. I could have opened my Linux reference book and read up on the subject, but hey, we've got the internet, so I posted a question on the Linux Mint Forum and I quickly got several helpful responses, one of which included this bit of Linux weenie cryptography.

sudo du -chd1 / --exclude={proc,dev,sys,media,mnt,run,tmp,lost*,cdrom}

It's a command-line command, copy it (using normal browser controls)  and then paste it into a Terminal window (using special Terminal window controls) and I quickly have an overview of who's sucking up all the space. It's me, of course, and all the crap I have been dragging around with me every time I change computers. Changing directories (using the cd command) and repeated applications of

sudo du -chd1 .

(the dot means operate on the current directory) allows me to track down the biggest offender, which turned out to be about six levels down. Deleting a bunch of ancient crap makes me feel better, but it doesn't do anything for my bottom line, which still shows only 5 GB of disk space. (5 GB!?! Back in the day when I got started in this business we were lucky to have 10 MB.) Empty the trash, silly, and suddenly we have 30 GB of free space. That should be enough room to play with for a couple of months or so.

Now I'm looking at the forum and I realize my avatar is a blind snowman standing in front of a concrete wall. Not exactly putting my brand out there. We ought to do something about that, so I root around and find a copy of the image to upload, but the forum doesn't support uploading. They want a link to a photo that is already on the web. Well, I am the master of my internet browser, I should be able to deliver that, except I can't.

I try using the link to the avatar from this blog, but it goes nowhere. Stealing the link from the page source works, but the image is too big. I try uploading the photo to Google Drive, but it won't provide a link to the photo, but it will export it to Imgur, except it won't. So enough screwing around with these fancy web services that don't work, let's fall back to old reliable (sort of) Blogger, so that's how we come to have this post with the tiny little picture of me at the top.

Update 2 minutes later: using the link to the picture from this blog post worked!

What version of Linux am I running?

c@c-H97N ~ $ uname -a

Linux c-H97N 4.4.0-53-generic #74-Ubuntu SMP Fri Dec 2 15:59:10 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

c@c-H97N ~ $ uname -r

4.4.0-53-generic

c@c-H97N ~ $ lsb_release -a

No LSB modules are available.

Distributor ID: LinuxMint

Description: Linux Mint 18.1 Serena

Release: 18.1

Codename: serena

c@c-H97N ~ $

This question keeps popping up, and while the last time I went down this road I was trying to find out whether I had the 32 or 64-bit version of the operating system, now I need to know the version-version. I only installed this thing a week or two ago, you'd think I'd remember, and I think I do, but do I really? With computers, thinking that you know something is often the prelude to a long, tedious, wild goose chase through a swamp filled with aligators. Better to find out for sure before you start hunting in the past for something that hasn't happened yet.

There are two commands in the above terminal session:

• uname
• lsb_release

The -a suffix I believe means all. You will notice that the -r suffix on the uname command returns a subset of what it returned with the -a suffix. There are probably other suffixes that can tell you all kinds of things, like what brand of undies your grandma wore, but we have enough for now, so we'll move on.

Reconstructing the terminal session so it was actual text (instead of a fuzzy screenshot) took some fiddling. I finally figured out that using the div tag instead of span would fill out the lines all the way across the page and make the black block contiguous.

Start by pasting the text from the terminal session. Highlight the first line and set the font, text color and background color. Now go into html mode, change the span tag to div.  Move the closing div tag to the end of the block of text, and presto, the whole block has white text on a black background.

Now you can highlight the prompt (c@c-H97N ~ $) and change the color(s) there.

Blogger Posting

I just discovered that the number of posts per page was still set to 105. I set it to 105 to facilitate creating a backup copy of my blog before I left. I THOUGHT I had reset it to seven, but either I failed, or Google failed to record it. Anyway, it should be set to seven now so it should not take forever and a day to load.

Mike's New Bike

"9k miles. Guzzi brand flat plexi windshield, matched hard bags, got me home aok in the dark and cold last night, light throttle, comfortable maintained 80 whatever. Going out, I hit 90+ getting on a ramp, slacked rpms to cruising at 75, then 5 miles down the road finally realized I was still in 4th. Upshifted and laughed.

"Pimpedout chrome tank, no tach, linked brakes, fuel injected, electronic ignition, one of 17, 80th anniversary. $199 a year to insure.

"No centerstand, has floorboards (see pic).rear tire is a 140/80-17, so I might be able to break that bead myself if I need to. Spokes AND tubeless. Shock stiffness is apparently variable, but no adjuster apparent, and I didn't buy it to wrench on. Raining today, and if I had a new set of Battleax's I'd be out there.

"Simply lovely."

Mike's very happy. I'm not. My favorite size for pictures is 600 pixels (width) and Picasa and Blogger are conspiring to thwart me. I can do 400 or 800, but not six hundred. Loading off the disk gives me html that I can edit to adjust the size, but it starts with 400 pixels, so anything larger is just going to be blurry.

Update January 2017 replaced missing image.

Hunter-Lecturer

From Other Pictures

Meta-Problems

My brother Andy sent me this picture. It arrived in my email with a file name of "noname" and no file name extension. I took a guess that it was a picture (it's 53 KB) and gave it at extension of JPG. Windows Picture and Fax Viewer had no problem, it displayed the image right off. Let's try editing it so we can save it in a known format. MS-Paint won't open it. Try again with all the different file name extensions Paint supports: GIF, TIF, PNG & BMP. Okay, I didn't try ICON format. No matter what I called it, the results were all the same. Windows Picture Viewer would display the image, but Paint would not.

Well, leave it at GIF and let's see if we can get it into Blogger. Loading it as a file off my hard drive, Blogger shrinks it down to 400 pixels, which makes the text unreadable. Editing the html to set the picture size back to the original size does not help, it just blows up the shrunken image so the text is larger, but now it's blurry.

Fool around with several different methods, none of which work. Finally I upload it to Picasa and get the embed link from Picasa, put that in this post, and presto, we have a full scale image, which you might be able to read. I still don't know what format the image is stored in, but calling it a GIF worked.

Wet Spring In The Midwest

Via Tam. I do not understand why this picture looks so fuzzy. I suppose I just hit a bad scaling factor. Blogger can be difficult when it comes to scaling pictures.

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.