ATL is the transit Bizzaro Land we need to fix

Last time in this series, I talked about an organization called Better Atlanta Transit that counter to its name, wants to end all talk of having light rail alongside the Beltline Trail, the very popular, used-to-be-murder-tracks encircling central Atlanta that’s now a multipurpose trail, linear park, and real estate gentrification money printing machine.

Of course in a way only Upside/DownLand Atlanta could do, we somehow got the multipurpose trail part built first, and are behind in the light rail installation. We now seem to be on the precipice of bringing tracks to the trail but of course the NIMBYs aren’t done yet; under the guise of “making transit in Atlanta better,” they ask “should we be building an old-timey streetcar next to our beautiful trail?”

Tram on a patch of grass
Tram on a patch of grass by Philip Halling is licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0



Of course this was a rallying cry to all rail supporters around our beleaguered metro area, a place which hasn’t seen any serious transit expansion since 2000 when MARTA opened the Red Line northern extension and added Sandy Springs and North Springs stations. We’re not gonna talk about how we’ve added over 1.7 million more people to the metro area since then according to the US Census Bureau. That’s bonkers.

Luckily I’m not the only one all worked up; Nathan Davenport also wanted to get his points across as well, and put together a video to really give insight into what the group is actually saying, why rails on the trails is a smarter idea, and how to get involved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUzZB3fngXk

My take: Having the Beltline without tracks is like having a building with no door or airport with no runway and apparently even Ryan Gravel, the urban designer who dreamed up the city-shaping project as a graduate student at Georgia Tech, said rail transit is the "centerpiece of the Beltline's vision and funding” according to Axios. The opposition group says they’re still in favor of transit options along the corridor, then point at share bikes and scooters, autonomous vehicles and other “gadgetbahnery” to add transit there because “streetcars are old tech."

None of those concepts will offer the real throughput to move people around the corridor, don't help take the most cars off the road, but only help the able-bodied and well-heeled living immediately in the formerly-ghetto-now-ritzy areas around the trail itself. Most importantly isn’t the package we were sold 12 years ago when we voted on the measure.

Party like its 1700000000

A rollover event is about to take place and geeks, nerds and neckbeards around the world will be refreshing their datecommands tomorrow evening to check out the counter tick over from 1699999999 to a cool 1700000000 seconds.

The current Unix epoch time as I slave over a hot keyboard is:
The current Unix epoch time as I slave over a hot keyboard is:

Unix date epoch time is a way of measuring time that counts the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970 at midnight UTC time, not counting leap seconds. This point in time is called the Unix epoch. It is used by Unix and Linux operating systems, as well as many other applications and programming languages. ¹²³

I’ve got a bit of time to kill before the rollover happens around here. Might as well sleep, wake up, do a full workday and promptly forget about this even being a thing until after seeing it in social media at 1700000342 or something.
I’ve got a bit of time to kill before the rollover happens around here. Might as well sleep, wake up, do a full workday and promptly forget about this even being a thing until after seeing it in social media at 1700000342 or something.

To get the current Unix date epoch time, you can use different commands or functions depending on the programming language or environment you are using. For example, in Python, you can use import time; time.time() to get the current epoch time in seconds. In C#, you can use DateTimeOffset.Now.ToUnixTimeSeconds() to get the same result. ¹

Wonder why we don’t have clocks with 10 digits though...
Wonder why we don’t have clocks with 10 digits though...

The Unix date epoch time is useful for storing and comparing dates and times in a simple and efficient way. However, it also has some limitations. For example, it cannot represent dates before the Unix epoch, and it will reach its maximum value on January 19, 2038, which is known as the Year 2038 problem or Y2038. ¹²

1

  1. Source: Conversation with Bing, 11/13/2023
    (1) Epoch Converter - Unix Timestamp Converter. https://www.epochconverter.com/.
    (2) What Is the Unix Epoch, and How Does Unix Time Work? - How-To Geek. https://www.howtogeek.com/759337/what-is-the-unix-epoch-and-how-does-unix-time-work/.
    (3) What Is Unix Time and When Was the Unix Epoch? - MUO. https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-unix-time-and-when-was-the-unix-epoch/.
    (4) Epoch. https://www.epoch101.com/.
    I certainly wasn’t about to retype all that in myself!
    Happy Epoch Rollover Watching! ↩

Doin' too much": 💥😖 Time for a micro/macro blog rethink?

At some point yesterday, my Wordpress instance (thus the place where the thing you’re reading right now came from) ran out of memory.

🤔 I suspect it’s because I’m asking it to do too much:

And all on a tiny underpowered VPS instance.

Now if I could have things my way, I’d really prefer a clean install of GoBlog like I had before but with an easier way to post photos, follow people thru RSS/#Fediverse, and connect to different networks in the same manner. Something like a Wordpress|Tumblr|Friendica mashup (basically smoosh Firefish and Hubzilla together…) I decided to go back to using Wordpress instead becaus

  1. My skillset for Go vs PHP is smaller. Go as a language is easier though so it's only a matter of time...

  2. Since the above is true, I'm not sure how to keep it locked down and optimized; I've been dealing with Wordpress for like 20 years already so I understand this beast.

  3. I only have time for one impossible project at a time:

A line art picture of someone doing too many tasks. The boy has 6 arms flailing about juggling balls, papers and books. There are bystanders asking him to do these things.
My Wordpress instance trying to handle all I throw at it.
To remedy the memory issues, I could stary by using a minimal template¹ and throw some CSS at it to make it look like a TUI app in a terminal. Kinda like Jamie Tanna's site. Of course Andrés Cárdenas site is also something to aspire to as well as Tim Bachmann's. (Speaking of, did he ever get that one commenting plugin project off the ground?)

Next, I’ll make sure the thing is optimized. This also means not only the instance but the underlying supporting software too. I’m pretty good at that part though since my day job also demands it. I’m running this thing on Caddy (told you I was gonna force some Golang into my life!) and a very lean MariaDB container. Don’t be surprised if I wind up making a Nix declaration for this set up and make it so I only need to back up one thing everyday to get back up and running instead of the three I need to do now.

I’ll continue to optimize things around here and make it work the way I want it. I’ll make sure to get a colophon page going really soon so I can let y’all know how I did it; I still think this is the best way to enjoy the best of all worlds in the #fediverse and within the world of #indieweb enabled blogospheres.

If anyone has experience with any of the above, reach out to me via this post or just in general at @starrwulfe@starrwulfe.net, @starrwulfe@micro.blog or @starrwulfe@vivaldi.net

¹: Kinda started this just now with this new template file that I’m slowly adding custom CSS to… 

If this is the case—

Then how is that wacky NY Times poll from last week correct?!

Any way to practice a layout using a regular nonprogrammable keyboard?

I want to jump into the world of ortho keyboards and start trying to learn a more ergonomic key layout. I happen to have a small foldable bluetooth keyboard that is around a 40% size, is regular QWERTY layout but only has 60 keys so there's a Fn later that puts some of the symbols, all the F keys and media scroll keys on a different layer. I'm kind of used to using it after 6 years and realized "Hey, I can do a layered setup maybe!"

So I'm thinking I want to build a Corne 36 key with some sort of trackpad/thumbstick setup for precision mousing as I also need that level of control from time to time. My dream setup would be anything incorporating dual thumbsticks from a game controller as I actually use my X-Box D-pad to control presentations when I teach.

I have a true multi OS environment where I'm using NixOS, MacOS, and Windows 11 in a VM all the time. I also use tiling window environments (i3 & Hyprland in Linux; Yabai in MacOS) so having continual access to Super and Hyper is a big deal.

I'm thinking about starting with the default Miryoku setup with Coleman DH and see about modding on top as time goes on. Is there some way to change a regular keyboard to get some practice in while I source parts and build the board itself?

Izu Tsunami Advisory

In reply to Steve Herman: "Warning for #tsunami as high as one meter issued …" - Journa.host by Steve Herman.

Looks like it isn't going to do any damage... Always a bit vigilant every time I see anything about seismic activity around the Izu Trough.

Reblog via Jason L Gatewood

If I had this guys’s job, I’d need several smoke breaks too.