Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

"Our" Democracy

The phrase “Our Democracy” is often repeated by politicians particularly when when claiming something is a “threat to our democracy.” The phrase is meant to scare because the people will assume that the “our” includes them. What if doesn’t? What if the “our” is not the country as a whole but just the Washington insiders? With this definition of “our” in mind, the phrase “threat to our democracy” make much more sense.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Friday, March 22, 2024

3 Seasons on a Streaming Service

When The Expanse was cancelled on the SYFY channel, I somewhat expected it as it was too good for that network (I was shocked something so good was ever on that channel in the first place). Then when I found out it was picked up by Amazon, I had mixed feelings. While it meant the show would continue, it also meant that it would not persist for more than 3 additional seasons.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Tuesday, October 10, 2023

Waiting to Start Watching a Show

When Netflix started its streaming service, people got used to binge watching a show. The trend increased when streaming services started their original series and would drop and entire season of a show simultaneously. In the past few years, these services started spreading out the release of episodes in a season for some shows but that doesn’t mean people will watch the episodes on the same schedule. Instead, most people will wait for the entire season to be available so as to not get caught up in the story and be stuck waiting for the next episode.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Thursday, September 21, 2023

New Internet Service

I got new internet service in the past month. Frontier ran fiber into my neighborhood and I’ve been enjoying the benefits ever since. As you can see I have symmetric gigabit. New Router This change did require that I get a new router. Previously I had a Netgate 3100 which was supposed to be able to handle faster than gigabit speeds but in reality it didn’t. It was even worse when you used VLANs, maxing in the ~600Mbps range.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Monday, December 12, 2022

App Disk Images

If you’ve ever installed Xcode via the Mac App Store, you know it can take an hour to install. The reason is not due to its size but the large number of individual files. What if it didn’t have so many small files? Could optimizations made here apply to other apps as well? Overview The idea is simple: instead of storing apps as a constellation of individual files, instead store a disk image with its own filesystem.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Friday, September 23, 2022