Remake, Recycle...

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A curious thing, but all my Indonesian traffic through here has dried up this week. The last time this happened Hong Kong came back from the doldrums briefly, to be replaced by Indonesia again when that glut disappeared for the second time. I can't figure the dynamics of all of this. I did try and sign up for Google Analytics to glean some more detailed metrics on the traffic through this site, but the hoops you have to jump through to get anywhere with it remind me of the early days of using the internet.

The setup of even the most simple things used to be so painful that even a much younger, geekier self often struggled to configure stuff without assistance. It seems that some things are just resistant to change and the sort of streamlining into black boxes that is necessary to render processes accessible to a mass user-base. Just because I want to know more about my site's readership dynamics shouldn't mean I have to learn the instructional equivalent of War & Peace any more: if I want geekery, I'll install a CLI-only bistro of Linux and be damned.

I appreciate the converse as well: struggling to make a banal web-app dashboard do exactly what's required can be equally tortuous, with so much going on beneath the hood that is beyond personal control. A bit like Apple's (Disclosure: I am, as I've said before, a very-long-term-Apple-user and fan) closed ecology and it's now completely black-boxed hardware. Steve Jobs always intended that Apple hardware should be un-configurable by the end-user. That ethos has returned to the company in spades with their current line of gear, laptops in particular: it got Jobs and Apple into hot water with the original Macintosh back in the mid-eighties: it could prove to be the company's undoing this time around.

I appreciate the design purity of the Apple philosophy, but given the planets current, precarious state and the need to return to a pre-inbuilt-obsolescence era, we need to allow for upgrading and customisation. I once kept a Hoover washing machine going for around fifteen years by simply repairing it myself whenever it broke: even to the extent of re-skimming the commutator of the motor by hand with abrasive cloth. We only got rid of it when vital, structural metalwork started to fail completely - If I'd had the tools at the time that I have now, we'd probably still be using the old bugger! We need more recycling of kit than ever before.


Comments

  1. Joe Stoner21 October 2021 at 12:50

    Your Indonesian traffic are Chinese users using a VPN service which the Chinese gov (Prop Mao MkII) wil be destroying as fast as they can. "Know your enemy" was said by a very wise Chinaman: one Sun Tzu and ANYONE who is anti-free-speech IS my enemy!
    My record for keeping a washing machine going is 20+ years and it's ONLY lack of spares and electronics dying that have defeated me.
    Keep meaning to sort out a "Home Brian" to run ALL variable programmable (some forced!) devices and a resurgence of infra red (HILARIOUS ad on teleshopping where a woman pours water over a LIVE 2kW unit from a (luckily) plastic watering can) makes this my next project when I've sorted out Plank's Konstant!
    ATB
    Joe

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