This is a test post. It has been quite a while since I last posted here, but in 2025 I plan to post once a week, so I want to make sure everything is tickety-boo. I’ve also (finally) switched over to a paginated view.
Clayton Utz
Image Source: https://www.claytonutz.com/cfimages/Home%20Page%20Image_Final.webp/public
Well, it’s been a while! Back in March Timothy Webb of Clayton Nutz, a law firm, sent me an email (actually, Prashant Bhardwaj sent it, but it was signed by Tim) regarding the PicRights / Reuters copywrite phishing attempt on my old FaqOverflow hobbyist website.
Timothy Webb
Image Source: https://www.claytonutz.com/cfimages/WebbTim_Square.webp/ProfilePhoto
They threatened taking the case to court, asking for a settlement of $2,425.00, while denying that this is a classic case of copyright trolling. To me the whole thing has a debt collector vibe to it. Some business models are just… well, let’s just say that I wish more people followed their creative urges rather than following the dollar.
Image Source: https://www.claytonutz.com/cfimages/Art%20Partnership_707x501px_1.webp/HeroLevel2
What’s even more interesting is that www.claytonutz.com contains lots of licensed images (a simple reverse-image search is enough to prove that), which of course they will have paid for, but their copyright notice clearly states that all material on their website, including images, can be reproduced for personal and non-commercial purposes.
Image Source: https://www.claytonutz.com/cfimages/707x501__0003_Governance%20G.webp/HeroLevel2
I would be very surprised if their licenses from Adobe Stock and Getty Images allow them to transfer the rights like that, but who am I to argue? I did email their webmaster 40 days ago about this, but they’ve yet to reply. Things move slowly in some industries I suppose.
Image Source: https://www.claytonutz.com/cfimages/Perth_treated_707x501px%20copy.webp/HeroLevel2
Anywy, these might serve as a honeypot for other copyright trolls, and I’ll then be able to use my “deez nuts” defense, forwarding any copyright claims I get on to good ol’ Timbo to handle.
Image Source: https://www.claytonutz.com/cfimages/Banks%20&%20Fin_approved.webp/HeroLevel1
Well, I still haven’t been sued by PicRights. They did reduce their requests for damages by 1/3 but it’s ridiculous that they expect me to pay anything. So it’s just a case of wait-and-see for me. What a horrible way for a business to make money; going for the small-fry who are easier pushovers.
Anyway, new year and things are going well. Eliza is off on a month-long holiday around the world before she starts Uni. We’ll miss her, but I’m sure it will be a memorable experience for her.
I’ve also started a podcast with Talbs, called The Movies of 1999. It’s a side-project of my goal in 2024 of hosting a movie night every Sunday to watch a movie from 1999. It’s off to a good start, and I hope we can keep the motivation and release all 52 episodes. Only time will tell!
I will leave the final word to MegaHAL…
2024-01-12T09:11:35+00:00|Fred|You are not as good as GPT-4.
2024-01-12T09:11:35+00:00|MegaHAL|It is true that I elected to establish my administration here, in the me. Muse is not false.
2024-01-12T09:11:51+00:00|Fred|That is quite deep.
2024-01-12T09:11:51+00:00|MegaHAL|It's okay to be ok, but deep inside you feel the depression creeping up like a statement and a future for white children
2024-01-12T09:12:07+00:00|Fred|I think I stand corrected.
2024-01-12T09:12:07+00:00|MegaHAL|what does AA stand for?
2024-01-12T09:12:22+00:00|Fred|Awesome Artificialness
2024-01-12T09:12:22+00:00|MegaHAL|life is awesome!
How annoying. I’ve been emailing back-and-forth with Magdalena Tymczyszyn of PicRights about a copyrighted image that appears on my FAQOverflow hobby website. I wouldn’t have minded if they’d just asked me to take down the page, but they had the audacity to ask me to pay $970 for the past unauthorised use of the image.
Now, I don’t host the image, Stack Overflow does. And I only display the image because my hobbyist site, last updated in early 2014, accesses data from the Stack Overflow API. Usage of that data is licensed as cc-wiki by Stack Overflow, and I have dealt with them multiple times in the past. Each time they confirmed that FAQOverflow abides by their license.
I tried explaining that to Magdalena, but she was unhelpful. So I have removed the image from the FAQOverflow page and will contact a lawyer. How annoyance.
On the bright side, I managed to get six of my old games uploaded and playable on kranzky.itch.io - it’s nice to make sure these things are archived for posterity. Makes me want to create more stuff. I have some ideas. Might do NaNoWriMo this year to scratch that itch.
And over five months since I’ve last posted! Jack is 14, Eliza is in her last few weeks of high school, we’ve travelled and are basically living happy lives, apart from gold-digging copyright claims that is.
What a whirlwind of a week! The kids charged back to school, and Eliza tackled her tests head-on, even though it cost her some precious Zs. And guess who’s now a member of the big 5-0 club? My good friend Wil! We caught up on Monday after a long, school-holiday-induced separation. Also, we’ve started watching Sweet Tooth with the kids, and they can’t get enough of it!
But life is full of surprises: Dana, my incredible wife, suddenly needed gall bladder surgery. Poor thing had to skip the Bali trip with her friends. On the bright side, the weather turned cold and rainy, making our home a perfect nest of comfort. Last night, we savoured an amazing steak dinner, straight out of the anime “Campfire Cooking in Another World Using My Unique Skill”. Work’s going great too – I’m making fantastic progress, and there’s a big project milestone waiting for me next week. Bring it on!
Right, so there’s this trilogy of children’s books called “Shapes” featuring three 2D characters named Circle, Triangle and Square, and Apple has turned it into a stop-motion animated TV series with 3D characters (i.e. a sphere, pyramid and cube) of the same names. Argh!
Just returned from an amazing seven-day holiday with the Ho family down in Dunsborough. Unfortunately I took my new bike and stacked it pretty badly in the MTB park. Face-planted from the top of a jump onto solid gravel. Felt like I broke my ribs. Put on a brave face for the week but was in a lot of pain. Back home I visited the doctor and have had an x-ray and will have a shoulder ultrasound in the morning. He doesn’t seem too concerned, mentioned a ruptured spleen was probably a more realistic and serious risk, but I need to put my mind at ease by knowing for sure that I haven’t done myself more harm and that I’m doing the right things to make sure I recover.
Aside from that the holiday was amazing. Pool, tennis, bike rides, restaurants, breweries, great dinners at home (wagyu steaks on the barbie, spaghetti vongola, roasted rack of lamb and so on), lots of wine, read five novels start to finish (Remains of the Day, Stella Maris, Olive Again, The Stranger and Dark Matter) and, above all, the kids had an absolute ball. We’re likely going back to the same spot this year, perhaps twice.
Well, I’ve been COVID-19 +ve for the last seven days. Isolating in my home office, which, luckily for me, features a rather comfy sofa bed and an ensuite shower and toilet. I’m guessing I caught the dreaded virus on the flight home from Vietnam, where we were from the 19th to the 31st of December last year. Attended our regular NYE get-together, during which I must have been infectious, but luckily nobody else has come down with symptoms yet.
I want to eliminate social media and doomscrolling, so I spent the first few days of iso binge-watching shows instead. Clint recommended Andor on NYE, so I started by watching all twelve episodes in the first two days. I also watched the Cyberpunk 2077 anime and The Rehearsal, which is a bizarre, genius show.
Not up to reading books due to feeling a bit out of it, and struggled to work on Thursday and Friday after taking Tuesday and Wednesday off (Monday was a public holiday). Skimmed a few RSS feeds and discovered olduse.net, which Joey Hess (who ported MegaHAL to Debian back in the day) originated in 2011 as a 10-year art installation, replaying USENET archives in realtime. I love the idea of replaying history; it reminded me of Pepys Diary, put online by Phil Gifford in 2002, and which is being serialized for the third time this year (I’ve resubscribed to the feed).
Anyway, I wanted to read old news in nn, which is the newsreader I started with back in 1991 or whenever, and I found the source (last updated in 2005) and hacked around, managing to get it compiling and running. But that wasn’t enough; to recreate the full experience I installed the cool-retro-terminal, which mimics a CRT display. And reading news from 1983 became quite addictive for a few days; it’s fun checking back to see if there have been replies or new posts, and fun to look up TV shows, music, movies and books that people mention. For example, one guy posted about searching record stores in vain for a favourite but obscure album that he had lost in a house fire in 1977; it took me only a few moments to locate it on YouTube Music and have a listen.
The whole experience got me wondering about discovery versus search, and the role that boredom plays in creativity. Together with community I think these are core interests of mine this year, and I need to decide what to do with this new enthusiasm. But certainly reading old news lead me to discovering things that I would never known to search for in the first place.
Working in the retro terminal encouraged me to install some old games, such as rogue and nethack, which I’d never really spent serious time playing in the past. And I’ve now replaced my GUI RSS reader with a TUI version, and dabbled a bit with ICU as well. Not to mention connecting to a few BBSes and trying out a MUD (the DiscWorld one, which I remember trying out once before; I was surprised to discover that it originated at the UCC in 1991 and has been regularly maintained and updated for over 30 years).
How much has changed, and yet how much has remained the same.