The Trouble with Tumblr…and other stuff
So.. I’ve been thinking about two things in relation to Tumblr, the popular image-blogging site.
1) Why is it so hard to get an image in the original size? Sure, this may be theme related stuff, I’m not tumblr’d enough to say. But when you see a thumbnail on a site, shouldn’t you just be able to click it, and get the original, right? This has been the kind of.. use case since the very early days of the internet. The point of the thumbnail is to, one, decrease load times by displaying a smaller ‘preview’ image first, and letting the user decide whether he wants to load the larger image, and two, to save layout space on your site by not covering the entire screen with one image. The case in Tumblr is often that I’m clicking on an image, and then I’m taken to the comments page, where I can either click the “source” link under the image, or the link for the person (‘via xxxxx’) who reblogged the image from the original poster. Then I might get the large, original picture. Or not! I find this extremely disturbing. If it is a theme issue, then okay, fine. But then most people are using very broken themes. It also might signify that most people have no idea how to fix the theme, or even what makes up a ‘theme’ on Tumblr. Which might, or might not, say something about the blogger on Tumblr. But enough about this angle! I digress!
2) Who provides the original content? Pick any tumblr, save for say, the official Tumblr page for a celebrity or so. Look at the images. Are they all reposts/reblogs of some other image? In some cases the reblog chain for an image is stuponfuciously long. Is there original content on Tumblr, or is like, everything a reblog of a reblog of a reblog of a reblog of some picture someone found somewhere, which was still not the original source?
Okay, I realize this is a silly thing to get annoyed over, but that’s me.. for you.
On to other things!
I’m moving. Again. I seem to live in one apartment for two to three years. But this time, it’ll be different! It’s a sweet pad. Built 2011. Four rooms, a big washroom and sauna. 98 m^2. Huge living room (I’m looking into the crystal ball and I’m seeing, yes.. a projector…). And, again, a hacking room. Same as in my last apartment. I missed that place. A room that I can fill top-to-bottom with hardware, books, whatever. A place where I can sit down, close the door and do whatever. I’m getting fuzzies just thinking about it. It’ll be great. Also, nobody will be disturbed by the humming. It’ll just be there, and it’ll be sweet.
What else what else. Didak has posted some new pics of his famous Home Office, version 7. They are the sweetness. Check them out. Waiting for a writeup or something, or a making of article. I’ve really enjoyed those in the past.
I wanted ESXi 5.5 on some Dell and HP boxes. I had no joy booting from a USB that was made using Unetbootin or Win32DiskImager. It simply wouldn’t boot. Now note, that the same image would eventually boot correctly via ILO/iDRAC using the virtual media feature. It might be a problem with the USB media I was using. Or the software that I’m using to create the bootable media. Or the specific server hardware, or the BIOS/UEFI settings of them, or UEFI in general. I googled for a solution, and I found one. Here it is! Following those instructions, I now have a proper bootable (on any machine I’ve encountered so far) media, with ESXi 5.5 on it. It might be helpful for you. Also, remember to use the vendor specific media for both HP and Dell, and not the generic VMWare Image. They contain diagnostic tools, drivers and other stuff that will be useful later. You can find the vendor specific bootable media for HP and Dell in those two links there. These may or not be current, but they’ll take you somewhere. For Dell, google for the esxi version, and then A0x, where x is a number. When I was installing, the latest was A01.
What I’ve been reading lately: Tom Clancy’s Threat Vector (his last book?). Okay for a Clancy, and pretty eerily realistic. After that I started on Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. Which has been moving a bit slowly at times. It goes from okay to excellent between chapters, so sometimes I’m reading twenty pages in one go, and sometimes it’s more like sixty or eighty. It’s a curious book, that. There are absolutely brilliant parts, and then some parts that are, to put bluntly, boring. But I’ve been meaning to read that for a while now, and I’ll be happy to finish it soon. Snow Crash was excellent, and so was Reamde. After this I will either read The Baghdad Blog, by ‘Salam Pax’, or another Clancy perhaps? I have like five books on my reading shelf.