Broken Comments

It happened again. I read an interesting blog post from a fellow reviewing a unique bit of ham radio equipment and I wanted to leave a comment thanking him for the review. But it didn’t work. Despite having a button that said “Press to Comment” nothing happened. This is an all too common occurrence and it’s annoying as hell. It’s bad enough that many of the management systems (Wordpress, Google, etc.) require you to have an account and log-in to comment, but it adds insult to injury when those don’t work.

I stopped doing commenting here years ago. It would be a lot of work to incorporate it into my site since I don’t use a standard CMS and when you couple that with the maintenance necessary due to spam comments it just wasn’t worth the effort. Still, if you’re going to “advertise” that comments can be added to your blog you might want to check that function to make sure it works on occasion. Here’s a hint: it’s broken on more than half the ham radio sites I visit.

AI Apocalypse

K9ZW recently commented on the impact of AI as a scraper of copyrighted content. That’s one problem. I think the far larger problem is that the planet will soon be flooded by (even more) auto-generated misinformation at a rate that will make the maintenance of a democracy like America impossible to maintain. This New World experiment will crash down like a crumbling old barn in a tornado and I don’t know what anyone might do about it. Cockroaches and 75 meter phone nets could be the only thing to survive and I wouldn’t look to science for a solution given that more than 30% of all scientific papers are already fake. Sigh.

Linux Still Rocks

Last time I looked at my site stats I saw that readers using Linux make up just over 10 percent (10.7) of all visitors. That’s not much different than a decade ago, but I’m impressed to see folks still using Linux on the desktop (Android reports separately). I rolled my first Linux kernel back in about 1993. I don’t recall the exact date, but it was pre-1.0 from a Slackware distribution. Those were my own halcyon days of personal computing and I quickly became one of the zealots predicting “total world domination” — and that did eventually happen, though not the way we expected. These days I still use Linux for all kinds of things other than my desktop. This Web site runs on Ubuntu.

KE9V Unplugged

Let’s just say that Wayne Green, W2NSD has inspired me. Again. Yesterday’s post mentioned my re-reading of several old 73 Magazine editorials from the 1960’s while stranded in hospital rooms last week and I’ve decided to pivot a bit here and follow his lead. I believe in open web publishing without paywalls or advertisements. But much more than that, I want to write whatever I want, without restrictions and without concerns for offense.

That likely means some will be offended. Sorry. Not sorry.

Look, I’m an old retired guy who can’t be canceled because someone doesn’t like something I said. I have no job, no social media accounts, there’s nothing to cancel. That doesn’t mean I intend to suddenly turn rude, but you know how it’s become in our culture sensitive world, a lot of folks dance around what they really want to say for fear of offending someone or of reprisal. How much freedom is that? Those hypersensitive to the truth probably won’t like it here anymore, if they ever did.

Life is too short for political correctness.