It was simple at the start

HIS coming October, i.e. next week or this week, I think this site officially turns 24. Why in October? Because I still vaguely remember the day I started it, how it started, and why it began.

I was on a work shift at the time and I entertained the idea of copying a general template of my lecturer’s page (I no longer remember his name), giving some general background about who I was and more basic information. It still looks something like this.

I probably can pin-point the exact day/date of that, but it would require digging into very old E-mail archives, which I believe I still have. Or maybe my Palm PDA archives (todo), which I know I still have.

It’ll happen. Wait and watch.

oday I had a long conversation with a friend about sites we catch cheating and plagiarising with slop. I pointed out many of them cease to release new material, with some going offline.

That serves to affirm my expectation and observation that sites which become slopfarms commit suicide.

When the bubble pops, which is inevitable and already “in progress”, all those sites will vanish faster.

So long

oday we blacklisted two sites [1, 2], not only one, for using slop.

I blacklist sites when they become too risky to even consider for redemption.

My wife blacklisted these, I did the same, and even an associate has blacklisted what what not worthy of his time. As he put it, “if the slop blog feeds are commented out, then they are not fetched and that is a good thing, not just regarding RRRRRR’s speed, however the XML parser skips comments because it *cannot* process them by design which makes it harder to spot accidental re-inclusion” (we have tools to manage sites to curate).

Let’s go…

‘ve long looked forward to this day.

Today I’ll start a new series, having finished (yesterday morning) the 200-part series, planned since 2024.

We need to put an end to racism.

The word spreads

HE news about GNU/Linux generally gets better over time. If one looks deep enough, there’s already more of it than before. More and more people use the platform, and some bloggers adapt and react accordingly.

Heck, many bloggers are themselves moving to GNU/Linux.

I reckon that by next year GNU/Linux will be seen as a non-niche.

We’re drowning in seas of words

‘ve been typing and keeping personal stories since around 2002. It started when I sat at my office in Manchester Computing with plenty of time to pass, not much to do. Some of those stories predate that habit by a year or two. I thought to myself, one day I can turn those notes into publications, even though books were still more common at the time.

The world has changed somewhat since then. Quantity of text does not matter because of serial sloppers who do not value quality and who conflate plagiarism with “intelligence”.

People’s stories that are authentic still have real value; a high quantity of computer-generated garbage ‘stories’ will be culled and put in the digital ashtray sooner or later.

Application already in progress

t’s only 7:20AM and all the birds have already come and have been fed. Same for the fish. We’re leaving the house for today and we want to relax as best we can.

I’ve had a hyper-productive week, both online and offline. I think my health has improved since I began sleeping extra hours (January 2025), I certainly can focus a lot better that way.

Next month will definitely be uneventful, so further and improved focus on articles will be assured (as it seems at the moment anyway).

I now publish close to 1,000 articles/pages per month, or 1,300 if meta pages (like Daily Links) are counted and over 1,500 if news clippings get counted. Together with Rianne, it’s a total of over 2,000 per month. About 24,000 per year.

I’m just glad we managed to lower our budget requirements while keeping happy, productive, and still in love (in the fifteenth year of our marriage).

We are still hoping the Court of Appeal will agree to hear our pleadings next year. There are technical – not only legal – matters at stake.