Finished Masters of the Air. A wonderful treatment of the US Air Force story of WWII. Those men would hardly believe what has become of their nation more recently. 📺

Have installed a couple of Thermacells on the balcony. Let’s see how they do! Mozzies be gone. 🚫🦟

MOS for Smooth Mouse Scrolling on macOS

MOS brings macOS' smooth scrolling to any mouse:

The biggest (only?) issue with using a non-Apple mouse on macOS is losing that smooth scrolling, also known as kinetic scrolling.

It might seem like a silly detail, but it’s such a nice feature that I really miss when it’s not there.

A few years back, when I swapped out my MacBook’s trackpad for a cheap mouse, I found a solution in this quirky, free, open-source app called MOS.

I’m a user of SteerMouse to provide full functionality to my Logitech MX Master mouse, but it doesn’t help with smooth scrolling. MOS does it! Game changer!

Binge watched Behind Her Eyes. What a great show! 📺

This cold/flu whatever it is came out of nowhere. Sore throat yesterday, total blech this morning. Better not be COVID.

My mac mini server with Thunderbay drive array is back in a cupboard, as God intended servers to be located.

My Indieweb Friends are Fighting and I Don't Like It

There has been a disturbance in the indie blog force this week.

Typically, I stay out of online arguments. This is something I learned when I was a mere youngster toying around on BBSs and Usenet. Arguing didn’t amount to much. Even when you “win”, do you really? Trophies are yet to be presented.

So when this week’s ruckus broke out, my standard rules applied. Stay out of it. Don’t pile on.

Writing this now is challenging, because I worry that it won’t help, it will create more confusion, and, selfishly, perhaps sticking my head above the parapet will lead to it being blasted off. Or even just caught in a ricochet.

I’m not even certain I am fully understanding all aspects of the argument at hand. Yet more reason to stay quiet.

So why write something now? Why get involved? Because I have skin in the game. I’m a user of all three platforms/services in question: micro.blog, omg.lol and Tinylytics/Shoutouts. Beyond that, I have connections with all three of the owners. I have corresponded with Manton over many years, I have semi-regular chats with Adam, and I’ve had online chats with Vincent and he helped me with some coding challenges.

So all of this feels more personal than it typically might. I feel like a friend watching his other friends have a fight, and as the friend I don’t know whether I should let them work it out, or if I should step in and shout at everyone to “break it up!”. In a friendship circle, disagreements happen. Arguments can be cathartic and educational. Growth can come from finding middle ground and seeing different perspectives. We can improve our own selves by seeing the perspective of others.

I have reached out to be both Adam and Manton privately, as a friend should. Now I’m writing this piece.

I wasn’t going to post anything public.

I wonder if this will be a mistake.

Words are hard. What I’ve written in the paragraphs above isn’t perfect. I don’t think it’s expressing the nuance of what is actually in my head.

Laid over the top of the challenges of the back and forth this week are cultural differences. I have an Australian perspective. This disagreement is between Americans. Australians are renowned for being “laid back”. Traditionally, we aim to find the middle ground and leave each to their own if that fails. That culture is being challenged in the internet age.

I’m a 47 year old man that grew up in the 1980s where societal norms were different. I was raised in a religious environment. I was taught what was right and wrong according to the values of God as they were presented in that setting.

I feel generationally split as I see a younger cohort grow up beneath me with completely different mindsets and societal norms. I live and grow and work hard to avoid becoming calcified and conservative. Background, culture, upbringing, and the ability to accept and consider new thinking all affects how we adapt to the reality of now. None of this is easy.

As I was growing up, a societal challenge was for gay and lesbian people to be accepted. With my upbringing noted earlier, that was a challenge for me. It took time. It was a journey of mine that required consideration, introspection and an assessment of values in my own life against those I was taught as a child.

Now we are onto the next era, which is about progression of the broader LGBTQI+ community. I’m not an expert in the experiences of that collective. It’s not something that has directly affected my personal life, so in a sense, I’ve had the option to keep it all at arm’s length. However, I approach it in the same way I did with the LG era; by listening, thinking, and not judging.

I imagine younger generations might also be open to their own journey of growth through this LGBTQI+ era, in the same way that I had my journey through the LG era. It may take them time, experience, and communication. And it may result in a few missteps and miscommunications along the way.

Ultimately, what I hope for is that we keep our lines of communication open, and take a compassionate view as people learn and grow.

This post has turned into a bit of a random walk of thoughts. At this point I should probably end.

I hope this somewhat confused post doesn’t lead to more anger, frustration, or cancellation.

I hope we can find a path forward, even if that path is zigzagged.

Nightbitch, 2024 - ★★½

Strong start, faded in the third act.

You can continue to doomscroll the news reading US politics, or you can consider whether salad excites you. If you choose the latter, Hemispheric Views E129 is for you!

Pizza shop stools.

I hate anxiety, especially the work-induced kind. Neither my parents nor grandparents held senior positions across their working careers. It makes me consider how impacted they were by similar challenges. I wonder how I am managing to hold it all together and even why I continue trying to do so.

I’m not sure I will be able to deal with another 4 years of Trump news. Not my country, not my President, but I can’t help but think Australia will suffer at least some collateral damage. Get ready for the era of US oligarchs, featuring tech bros.

I’ve been re-engaging with my blog, and the micro.blog community, over the past few days. Still the nicest place on the internet.

Severance S2E01 was weird! Not that I should be surprised by that.

I’m playing around with Pixelfed. Have set up my account and posted a single photo.

Good Friends and Dead Websites

I’m really not qualified to own and manage a website. 🤷

In attempting to tweak a few things last night I broke everything. The site was down and dead. 💀

I was stuck. I couldn’t fix it. 😬

Enter my pal @Burk. While I slept in my Australian timezone, he worked to fix it in his US one. 🤖

Also enter micro.blog founder and owner @manton. He responded to my help email overnight and also worked on it like the internet greybeard wizard he is. 🧙‍♂️

I woke up and the site is back. 🔙

Thank you, friends, Jason and Manton. I’m fortunate to be connected to you both. 🙏

Blog Question Challenge 2025

Thanks for the tag, Gabz.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

It is so long ago, it’s hard to remember why. Was there even a why? I was a nerd interested in technology, and blogs were the hot new thing. There was a cool platform called Movable Type and I wanted to try it out. So I started a blog. This was all a very long time ago.

My blog varies between a diary, an opinion platform, a software review centre and a place to dump thoughts, photos, audio and video. A blog in incredibly versatile!

What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why do you use it?

I use micro.blog and I can’t picture myself moving away from that platform for the foreseeable future, even though my friend Adam is building a cool new thing called Neato, and my friend Vincent has Scribbles. For my purposes, micro.blog is perfect.

Have you blogged on other platforms before? 

I’ve used Wordpress, Blot and Movable Type.

How do you write your posts?

However I feel like it. Sometimes I use the micro.blog app. Right now I’m drafting this in Paper. I might use iA Writer or Ulysses or MarsEdit. I might use Drafts. That’s the beauty of Markdown. It doesn’t matter what I use and I can bounce between them freely. I love that.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

I love all my children the same.

Looking at what my readers like, my Duel of the Defaults post that stemmed from the viral podcast sensation which was Episode 097 of Hemispheric Views is clearly the favourite with 2,464 views over the lifetime of me tracking stats with Tinylytics. That one page accounts for 16.7% of all my website traffic.

Any future plans for the blog?

Nothing really. I haven’t changed anything for quite a while. It’s doing its job and I’m okay with that.

Who will participate next?

I would like to hear from Rach Smith and Scotty Jackson.

I couldn’t be bothered walking back from the pub where I had dinner.

My 9-year old is asking how consoles work. This is testing my ability to teach computing hardware principles based on my knowledge that was established 30 years ago. Do I still talk CPU, GPU, RAM/ROM? HDD v SSD?

Our @hemisphericviews with a Tight 45 on the button for 2024.