Entries tagged 'author:steeph+lang:en' (Page 5)

GalaCon and the Brony Fandom 2024

Entry created on 2024-07-31 Authors: steeph (376) Categories: #100DaysToOffload (41) Events (23) GalaCon (4) My Little Pony (10) Photos (29) Ponies (7) Languages used: en (257) Topics: Events → Conventions (4) Events → My Little Pony (6) edit

I was at GalaCon 2024. Actually, I was at every GalaCon since the first one in 2012 in Stuttgart. But the 2024 one was just last weekend and that's the one I'm going to write about. GalaCon is a My Little Pony fan convention in southern Germany that's taken the place of the largest such gathering in Europe ever since the fourth generation of the My Little Pony TV show has become the source of such a popular meme and art culture. As usually with events I write about, I'm not going to explain what it is like, what culture characterises which parts of the event or what happened in the past. I'm writing this from the perspective of somebody who is famililiar with the fandom even though they have not been involved with it much in recent years.

I had a vendor table again, selling my LED pictures. (I hope I remember to link the post here that I plan to write tomorrow.) So I didn't exactly have the time to walk around all day and attend panels and workshops whenever I liked. But I took enough time to walk around the vendor hall (which really is just everywhere around the corridors of the venue). My overall impression was that mostly established vendors with experience had a table, and only one new name was there. More than one new to GC. But only one who was trying out how things go for the first time. The fandom did change over the years. It's not as young and brisk anymore and the vendor hall reflects that. The establieshed cosplay, plushie and other fandom culture has the power to conceseal the fact that this has become an old fandom. New things arise, and a new generation of the show ensure new content and dialogue. So it is not a dying fandom or a fandom occupied with the past. But it has come a long way since 2013. The mountains of fresh memes, edgy video shorts and its affiliation with the troll cuture has faded to the point I don't expect people I talk to to know anything about it. Many remember the biggest memes and running gags. Others have heard about the funniest controversies or the most cornerstone events of the fandom. But I don't expect anybody to know. And nowadays I'm not actively involved in the fandom much. GalaCon once a year and two or three post on social media a year are pretty much the extend of what I see of it. I'm one of the 2013 bronies. And by now it doesn't matter anymore what your definition of a brony is or whether I myself define me as one. A 2013 brony simply is what I am and that's the role that I play at fandom events. I may catch up on the new generation of the show. But it will lack the enthusiasm that I experienced during a livestream of the new episode with a chat in 2015 or so and I will not be tempted to created memes and GIF animations from the new episode like I used to. It's a G5 fandom now. Not the one controversion or wholesome news articles were written about. Just one cartoon fandom among many. This is not to say that it's character changes. Lover and Tolerance are still values that are held high by many and referenced to at times. It is not the motto of everything most people do most of the time anymore. But in the end, I really like the plushie culture, the implied freindliness and the kind of show-related talk that occurs during an event like GalaCon, aside from the show itself.

I was surprised at how many pictures I took this year. Nothign special. I'm not the hobby photographer anymore who takes his camera everywhere and overuses it's ability to take 6.3 photos per second for pretty much no cost. But it did show, like in the lest of my life, that I'm getting off the years-long period of being too stressed to even read a paragraph of anything or to thing about how to frame or light a photo of something. So, to my surprise, I left out many photos that weren't that bad or even interesting, to draw a more even picture of the entire event as I experienced it. The attached photos are meant as an impression of what I saw from my table, while walking arounf or socialising outside suring and after the event. In addition to the photos below I took a lot of photos of the concert on Saturday. To be honest, almost exclusively of Prince Whateverer's performance. Over 190 pictures got into the shortlist of pictures that I will post in an additional entry in this blog. It was the first time that Prince Whateverer and My SLR camera were at the same venue. And I too the chance to try and get as many nice stage pictures as I could during the half hour he and the band played. Well, the best I could do with the two focal lengths I had packed (30 mm and 8 mm at a 1/1.6 crop sensor). I plan to edit some of them this week and post them in my next entry.

As for my LED picture selling stuff, it's incredible how close I keep getting to a bottom-line-0 almost every year. I didn't make any money again this year except if I exclude the convention ticket for me and my helper and calculate with an hourly wage of 0 € for everybody involved. It really is a loss. But I'm not planning to quit. As every year, I didn't sell every last thing that I made. So I have some merch to start with in the next year. And I always have enough ideas to make new pictures that I can then sell. I also have ideas for some elaborate ideas that would be far too expensive to sell. (Althoug, I should try before I claim that.) And one of those years I'll probably make one ore the other of those. I think I'll probably write more about that in my upcoming post about my LED picture hobby.

There are so many details that I though I'd write about. But I don't see the point right now to spend a lot of time on jokes and references only people who attended the convention would get. So, instead I'll just describe some of the convention's surroundings. Since I didn't write about GalaCon last year (the first year at the new venue in Waiblingen), I'd first like to emphasise how much I like the Bürgerzentrum compared to the Forum in Ludwigsburg. The Forum was great. It could hardly have been any better. The building, its style, the square in front of it. The parking area and the park nearby. I thought it would probably be worse in Waiblingen. But: The venue is very much in the same style; even the fountain on the square in front of it. There is a park even closer to it. There is a beergarden with good food very close, which is arguably better than the Irish bub in Ludwigsburg. The parking is just as cheap (but only a very limited number of spaces for vehicles higher than 2 m is available) as it used to be in Ludwigsburg. And the only thing you even need to cross a street for are the two discount markets that are right across the strees, way closer than the next supermarket or similar store used to be in Ludwigsburg. I can't speak for other attendies or the organisers. But I like the new venue very much. There are way fewer hotels in the entire town. Many more attendies than before have to commute from Stuttgart. There is no Bodencon or Stair Con or similar venture that I'm aware of. But in principle the park area would hold enough places for settings up tents or maybe even very small camps for the night. That would probably not go well as lonog as it did in Ludwigsburg since more passerby would notice them in the morning and such a camp would be difinitely illegal in Germany. But I'm just saying, in principle, there are nice places under some bridges and next the the stream.

I watched the recording of the livestream on Tuesday. Monday was for sleeeeeeeeeeeping. (There's this many 'e's in the word because I slept for such a looooooooong time.) And honestly, I think that a nice way of adding that content to my con experience. I still rememberd the people that I met and the memes that were going around and the cosplayers and the genral vibe of the event when I watched the panel recordings. I really like that GalaCon not only does high-quality livestreanms and free recordings but also publishes the unedited livestreams on YouTube right away. I've watched everything that happened in the mane hall in those two days. (Well, I skipped some bits.) And I was not disappointed by the amount of ambition that many attendies of the charity auction have put into keeping years-old jokes alive, developing them further and in one case, taking it over the top. I consider this the GalaCon at which one particular shark has been jumped (figuratively, even though there were shark plushies around). If you know how GalaCon charity auction go and you remember the Swiss bronies vs. the Joker fondly, you should watch this years's auction. Above that, I guess it's nothing special nor worth watching for somebody who doesn't know what I'm talking about. More about the actual convention in the image descriptions below.

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Single-Purpose Computers

Entry created on 2024-07-25 Authors: steeph (376) Categories: #100DaysToOffload (41) Computers (22) Media (1) Music (5) Languages used: en (257) edit

A general-purpose computer is a technical term that describes a device by the capabilities its components enable it to make use of in principle. A turing-complete machine. A "smart" washing machine with a touch screen, internet connection and a CPU fast enough to run Doom may be considered a general-purpose computer even though you may only want to use it for one purpose. So, it practice it's a single-purpose device, with a computer. It is this sense in which I have developed a fondness for single-purpose devices. Nowadays, these devices often end up having a computer inside them. But that doesn't mean that it makes sense to either run software other than the one provided for the single purpose on it or replace it with an (already existing) PC/laptop/smartphone/tablet/whatever. I reckon it's fun to hack household devices to run arbitrary code on them, get Linux to run on a calculator or build a botnot of smart fridges to mine bitcoins. But for daily use and the simplicity of it in daily life, I find reliable software that serves a single purpose well, soothing, comforting and simpla practical. Turn on the device, select what it should do, go. I could do without all the complexity that in modern electronics that serve mainly the developers (or their bosses need for a cheap and quick, flexible complex system).

I think many users of modern "smart" household devices would agree. But my preference for single-pupose devices goes further. My laptop and my desktop PC are connected to several home servers and NAS. It's cool to have an MPD server, an always-online, logging IRC client, a LAN-centric torrent client that runs independently from the actual terminal devices that you use. It's practical and clearly has its purposes. But, after working a more than full-time job for years, I've learned to pay tribute to the simplicity, lack of maintenance requirements and reliability of computers that are used to do just one thing. This is different from the Unix-philosophy of doing just one thing and doinf it well. I'm not talking about standardised interfaces between software components. I think that the advantages of a general-purpose media center in the form of a computer have made us overlook the advantages of standalone devices that serve a single purpose. You might have a CD or record player for music, a DVD player for movies, a notebook with a good keyboard for notes or a diary, a thin laptop or tablet for casual web browsing, a Play Station for gaming. Turn it on and it runs. No complicated and long boot process, no chance a software update might interrupt you or have broken something. Hardware buttons for the specific functions the device has. And, if a device breaks, the other ones still work.

I have askey myself why. But I really don't know why I preferr CDs over a music collection on a hard disk. It's just so much more fun to choose an album and put in the disc. Without planning to, I have started to segragate my devices more and more over the last couple of years. I have a PC for retro gaming, one for OS experiments, and so on. Doing those things in VMs is out of the question for me. Again I don't know why. But it really feels much better to have a dedicated device for some things.

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Life is just the accumulation of memories.

Entry created on 2024-07-24 Authors: steeph (376) Categories: #100DaysToOffload (41) Life (5) Lucid Dreaming (12) Memories (2) Philosophy (5) Languages used: en (257) edit

This is not really a philosophy that I live by or use to form my conception of what my or anybody's life is. But I find the thought that everything that happened in the past is only part of reality in the form of a resedue in our memories interesting. That isn't really true. If I break a cup that I use every day, I cannot use that cup to drink tea from. And if I build a house, I can live in it in the future even though the action of building it and all the experiences I made during that time is nothing but a memories. But applied to activities that don't transform part of the physical reality in a specific and definite way, it has some truth, and realising that gives me a curious feeling.

Somebody asked me once, after I gave an introductory talk about Lucid Dreaming, if what somebody experiences during a dream is somehow more real than a dream or still just a dream. I've answered in a way that I thought as honest but was maybe not a clear answer. I said it's still a dream and what stays after the dream is nothing but the memory of it. That's not wrong. But had I taken the time to give a longer answer, I should have also explained the context in which I consider this to be the case. Regular dreams are usually incredibly volatile, especially for somebody who doesn't pay much attention to them and doesn't even try to remember them better. For most adults that's how they remember the majority of the few dreams that they remember at all. Most lucid dreams, it is often said, are a very positive experience. People who train to become lucid dreams mostly consider a lucid dream a success that comes way less often than they wish. These circumstances alone make a lucid dream easier to remember. Some see the memory of a lucid dream in a different class from non-lucid dream memories all together. But of course there can be lucid dreams that you don't remember for long, or you forget the details after a while, or you don't recall at all after waking up (How would you know?). If you don't consider a dream special, it will fade more quickly. If your head is full of other pressing thoughts, if you're depressed or are currently very worried, and if you don't write them down, the memories of a dream will fade quicker. In my experience, given enough time, the memories of lucid dreams will fade into the same jumble of vague memories from long ago, which might be correct or complete or not at all (which doesn't correlate with the sense of how correct or complete they are, btw). That isn't to say that they weren't worth the effort I've put into.

All of that is also true for waking memories, though, isn't it? Yes, we keep much more of what we experience while awake because the short term memories are functioning a lot better then. But years later, what's left is a fading memory unless it is a special memory to you in some way or you do something to keep the it alive. And the jumble those waking memories fade into is the same where all the dream memories go. So, the more small, unimportantant memories accumulate, the more likely it will become that a dream memory is confused with a waking memory. I believe that, to a certain extent, this may be normal. To an extant to which it is not concerning, I mean. Did I see a deer in the northern fields where you usually keep away from two years ago? Or did I only dream that? Deer have no relevance to my life, nor have those fields or anything that seeing a deer north from the village would imply. So I don't care. This is something else than believing that what you dreamed last night to be true minutes or hours after waking up. That could become an awkward day at work or worse. It is also something else to come to the wrong conclusion from a reality check when you're awake. What I believe to be normal to some extent is the confusion of basically irrelevant memories.

In many ways, dream memories and waking memories are more similar than I thought for a long time. They are the same in some ways. A lot of the apparent differences can be explained by the lack of short term memories while dreaming or during the process of waking up (which can be both at the same time). So, are lucid dreams just dreams of which fading memories are the only thing that remains? Yes, just like your last night out, your holiday in Japan, all the films you've watched and podcasts you've heard. And no, just like everything else you experience, a lucid dream re-shapes and re-inforces neural connections and thus influences how you think, how you experience things from now on and what you will do in the future.

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The Bad Web

Entry created on 2024-07-19 Authors: steeph (376) Categories: #100DaysToOffload (41) Computers (22) Open Web (2) The Small Web (3) Web Browsers (5) World Wide Web (10) Languages used: en (257) edit

A lot has been written about the declining usablity of the World Wide Web due to web sites not respecting what visitors really want or need. So I'll just summarise here before I'll try to get to the point.

Megabytes of CSS and JS to display 15 Kilobytes of content and another few megabytes of ads and other bloat. It has become completely normal to have a hundred and more tracking cookies installed for wisiting a single web page. Many popular sites can't be read by at least some people because the distracting ads have become too much. These are the first major problems that come to my mind. Depending on who you ask the problematic development has started in the last couple of years, about a decade ago, in the mid-2000s or even in the 1990s. But most people above a necessary age to have experienced the difference seem to agree that the web experience was a better one in 2005 than today. Back then RSS was integrated by many popular sites. You could use it to read Twitter and subscribe to YouTube channels, for example, and sites that still offer it in the background used to place links to feeds visibly, not hidden in the source code for browser extensions to discover them. Web browsers themselves could not only display RSS feeds but placed an icon next to the address bar when a feed for the currently viewed page was available. RSS is often used to show how the web was more open in general. Even commercial web sites were created with a more open approach. A site were you had to register before you could view its content was an exception for which privacy was the reason, not monetary expectation or greed. This is the time to which most people seem to want to return to. When I say most people, I mean most people whose thoughts on the open web I read, which is those who post to the open web and are interested in such things to a degree that they want to write about it. So what I probably mean is "most people who are dissatisfied with the current state of the web". It's possible that most people, or most internet users, love the way things are going now and hate the ideas advocates of the open web have, whether that is for or against their own good.

Sometimes I boost thought-out or new takes on the subject, well formulated demands or promotions of software solutions on the fediverse. And I often think about this myself. Because the web has brought me so many nice things and I want it to be a positive thing in society as well, which, overall, it doesn't seem to be anymore. What does the web need to make it better again?

First of all, the open web isn't gone, nor has it shrunk in size. There way more personal blogs, open networks and non-commercial projects out there than 20 years ago. Even new web forums open all the time. But it's less visible below the very very loud, commercial web. Maybe the greedy web is a good name for what I mean. Not every commercial web site is an example of how the web is devdeloping in a bad direction in my view. I want to be able to get information about a business from the business-owner themselves when I'm interested in their services, for example.

A search engine that returns links to non-commercial sites first, unless you really need information that can only be found on a page of a greedy site. I think- let's just not talk about the many problems (not even just challanges) that such a search engine would introduce if it is to be useful in practice.

A browser that only links to non-bloated/non-tracking/non-greedy/open web sites or warns when a link leads to a less-nice site. Again, I don't have the time right now to list all the problem that there would be if an attempt to implement this would be made. Maybe I'll write another entry about my deeper thoughts on the technological solutions that I mention here. But these thoughts don't contain any real solutions. So I don't know.

Create a literal small web, that only uses resources from and only links to, web sites that are following the same standard (e.g. only (X)HTML4, maybe only CSS2, possibly restriction on JS usage). That is in principle similar to building a whole new network, as is Gemini and Gopher doing. (I know Gopher isn't new, but I reckon the majority of sites is.) I forgot what other protocols with similar aims are there. As far as I know none that are widely used. There are initiatives to restrict the WWW to a smaller or older set of standards. Those probably influence site builders (mainly in personal web sites), but won't change the web as a hole. And so you'll eventually while browsing come across a site that doesn't restrict itself it what it's linking to, or you'll catch yourself linking to a bloated site because it's important to link to the original source of something.

JavaScript needs to be optional again. I've recently come to think that this is actually the one major goal among the technological changes that the current web would need to undergo in order to make it user-friendly and more usable again. In a time where you couldn't 100% expect that visitors were using a client that understood JavaScript, and had it enabled, web developers didn't have much of a choice and built in fallbacks so that a site was still usable without JavaScript. But the number of visiting clients without very good JavaScript became so small that it started to look optional, and in reality became not only optional but even rare, that fallbacks are included. JavaScript really took over the web. I could make so many words around this but don't have much time left this morning. Not only are there sites that are empty without JS loading the entire HTML. Such a thing isn't even special anymore.

If you are creating a new web browser, please include a switch in the GUI that allows to enable/disable JavaScript permanently (until deliberately switched on again) either entirely or for the currently viewed site. Or, maybe make it off by default.

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Alternative Web Browser Engines

Entry created on 2024-07-17 Authors: steeph (376) Categories: #100DaysToOffload (41) Computers (22) World Wide Web (10) Languages used: en (257) edit

I don't think I have to spell out the problem with the current shape of the web browser landscape in detail. Almost every HTTP client uses one of the now three big engines, WebKit, Blink and Gecko. Blink, as the big bad Google one is definitely one that nobody should consciously choose to use. Not everybody trusts WebKit much more because it is developed by another powerful global player that inadvertently collects more data in one hand than can be considered healthy, Apply. And Gecko, the one developed by Mozilla has been criticises for being pushed into a direction that is less free and user-friendly than it is expected from Mozilla. Since Mozilla has received large sums in funding from Google for a while it can be argued that any recent fork of the engine has a history of being influenced by Google. All the other large engines are no longer developed and thus not seen as a possible choice for the future. But there are some options to be discussed for users who want to avoid using a browser that relies on one of the big engines. And there are signs that the lack of competitive differences in browser engines will be reduced in the coming decade.

I like that the recent financial development in the SerenityOS/Ladybird project has prompted discussions about alternative browser engines and has shone some light on upcoming new browser engines written from the ground up. The interest in a new kid on the block has been growing over the last couple of years. So it should not surprise that several projects are undergoing and aim to create alternatives to the current big three browser engines. But in my eyes most of them are still not well-known enough. Not all are equaly useful. So I've decided to mention some options that could replace a mainstream browser at least in some use case.

Using Old Browsers

Yes, I'm covering the less practicle options, too. Using an old browser with security issues that won't be fixed not only might add security holes in the system it is used on, it also doesn't do anything to tackle the problem. The development of browser engines that are used in newer releases will not be affected by some people using them less. Choosing an older browser merely sends a signal and possibly changes statistics to look like you now also forget updating for a long time. But there is range of different lightweight browsers with engines that have no trouble with HTML4 and CSS2 and also offer good JavaScript support. KHTML (Konqueror) becomes an option again, Internet Explorer with Trident or EdgeHTML could get another chance and an old Opera with Presto could continue to shine. But you might need to maintain an envirement of outdated libraries to make your choice over a long time.

Flow

The Flow browser with its own HTML engine is developed by ekioh, a company with experience in developing browser for various embedded devices. As a free product, the preview of a Raspberry Pi version is available. But browsers for all major operating systems are planned. It uses an existing JavaScript engine the JS support is better than with other newly written browser engines. But it also doesn't add as much competition in the market in this regard. I have not tested Flow. As a product from a commercial business it didn't look interesting enough, yet, even though it is reportedly relatively mature.

Haphaestus

The Haphaestus TV Browser is a project by Adrian Cochrane that forms a web browser specifically aimed to be easily navigated with with few buttons (like on a TV remote control). It is a very interesting project because it is made up from several individual parts (CSS engine, font rendering, box layout engine, …) that all are written from the ground up in Haskell. A JavaScript engine is not part of the project. The web is nowadays more pleasant to browse without JS anyway. Adrian also recently started a free year-long course that encourages others to write their own HTML rendering engine (surely with the intention to collect experience for future paid programming courses).

Goanna

Of the browsers that use the Goanna engine, I see Pale Moon recommended most often. Goanna is a fork of Gecko that, by now, differes in features from the current gecko engine. It looks like Goanna may be the way to keep using a relatively old engine that supports all majer web standards very well with an actively developed browser that runs reliably in the OS of your choice. It may not be performing as well as current Gecko browsers like LibreWolf, but there's supposedly a smaller chance that their developers have been influenced by payments from Google.

Dillo

Small, realy light-weight, very simple and currently with no intention to pay any attention to scripts. Older versions of Dillo had been ported to many other systems. The current version 3 is only developed for the now big OSs (Linux, BSD, OS X). But it is very light-weight and snappy compared to mainstream browsers. CSS support is still lacking in the eyes of users who are used to every positional property to work. (Float support is also still missing.)

LibWeb, LibJS

The Ladybird web browser is becoming more known now that a company has been formed around it that has been promised major funding for the next few years. The project started as "the web browser of SerenityOS" but has since gained indipendent support and in turn supported hope that a novel web browser with a new engine will be established on the market of web browsers in the near future. The libweb and libjs libraries were started to build an intependent engine behind Ladybird. An application that will be seen as a usable alternative to Firefox in daily use with no need to fall back on another browser is still far away though.

NetSurf

Another small web browser that good HTML, CSS and JS support is NewSurf. LibDOM, LibCSS and Duktape (JavaScript) are combined to create a simple and portable browser. NetSurf can be found on Atari, Haiku, Linux, RISC OS and other systems. I've also found it a few times on my journay through alternative operating systems (about which I still have to write in this blog). It's the portable, small browser.

Servo

This is one that I like a lot personally. A noval web engine written in Rust. There is currently no full-fledged browser application that uses it. But there is a GUI demo that allows to test the engine with any URL. In my experience, web sites with elaborate design that make use of different layout rules and a lot of JavaScript tend to render better with Servo than with a current Ladybird (LibWeb, LibJS). Support for CSS3 rules is also better than with the small browsers NetSurf and Dillo. The potential is more readibly visible with this one compared to other new projects. Maybe the fact that browsers based on Servo only exist for specific devices is responsible for it being less known than Ladybird. No wonder Mozilla sucks up Serve during their project to replace parts of Gecko with re-implementations in Rust. I guess eventually there will be no big difference between the two engines.

Text-based web browsers are probably not an option for most users. Most web sites are designed for a graphic layout only and even when a page is structured well and can be read with a screen reader, sighted people usually prefer a GUI to a text-based interface. But if you want or a use case requires it, text browsers like links2 or lynx are also worth checking out, of course. Another thing that I'd like to mention here because it could be considered an alternative web browser are auditory browsers. But this entry is meant to be about browser engines, not browsers. Otherwise there would be many more projects that I should mention (browsers with a small user base, forks of Firefox, browsers for quick keyboard use).

Edit: Here's an interesting chart about the live of web browser engines since the first one in 1990.

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Automatically Extracting A String For The Use Of Alt Text From An Image File's Metadata

Entry created on 2024-02-14 (edited 2024-07-16) Authors: steeph (376) Categories: Dublin Core (1) IPTC (1) Image Descriptions (1) XMP (1) exiftool (1) Languages used: en (257) edit

For my web site builder SBWG I've looked into ways to store image descriptions as meta data in the image file itself so it can be used as an img tag's alt attribute. The subject is a bit of a mess. So I decided to summarise the problems that I see and suggest a way of implementing automatic image descriptions from meta tags anyway.

Problems

First of all, there is the main issue that a good image description depends on the context in which the image is shown. For the same picture one might want to name the persons depicted, what they are wearing or their facial expressions if that is relevant, or the colours and contrasts between background and clothes and visible compression artefacts. In some other context, only the types of glasses worn or the hairstyles might be relevant. For the purpose of this post, in order to look beyond this problem, I have to ignore the possibility of wrong image descriptions because of re-used files or files used in several contexts. The creator, editor or curator of a web page or blog post must be responsible to make sure no wrong image description is present or used for the alt attribute. The same is true for mis-usage of meta tags, for example when some image editing software automatically uses a description field to store its copyright notice without the user's knowledge.

A script that automatically extracts the first string it finds among a list of XMP fields could just as well find an unrelated string, the string 'none', a badly written alt text, one that was written for a different context or a string that was not meant to serve as the alt text to the image. Many of the fields that are listed below are meant to store something else than an alt text. Overall it is entirely expected that this method will not extract a useful alt text from the vast majority of images, simply because hardly anybody bothers to write them. I plan to use this method anyway, as a fallback, to cover for the cases where I myself couldn't be bothered. Writing a meaningfiul alt text for the context in which the image is used is still the only way to make sure that there is one.

So looking for a string in all of those fields and inserting it as the alt text in <img> is not correct unless you know that a good alt text has been stored there. Doing so anyway makes this an experimentive feature. Using it with real image files from different sources will show if it is of much help or not even usable.

exiftool

The easiest free way of extracting meta data from image files is using exiftool. It supports more than just EXIF data and the list of supported file types is quite comprehensive in the image department. Then the main question is which tags to use. There is no widely used standard for storing image descriptions for alt attributes. IPTC defined the new tags 'Alt Text (Accessibility)' and 'Extended Description (Accessibility)' in 2024. But they seem to be catching on slowly. Before this tag was defined, many different tags were used by different projects, editing software and people. Additionally XMP tags aren't always implemented correctly; So the name of the tags can differ between different tools and software versions. After my research into which tags are mentioned to be used for similar purposed, I've compiled the following ordered list of tags that should be checked when generating HTML code with images.

This list does not contain some tags for which I've found evidence that they are used for image descriptions, but not commonly enough (e.g. when only one not too widely used image editor writes it). It's hard to decide where to end the list. There will always be some weird tool, some conversion script or some old camera that uses yet another tag. But I think I've made a reasonable decision in the length of the list. Some of the above are not according to the respective standard or don't belong in most image file types. But I argue it's worth checking for them because there's not much cost to it and people don't always follow standards exactly, thus manually tagging images or creating software that tags images with fields in the wrong namespace or with the same fields across all image file types. Some of the tags listed (Title, Headline) aren't meant for image descriptions. But it has been suggested to use them for short descriptions in the past. Plus I argue if there is an image title, but no description or alt text whatsoever, it is still better to use the title than to not have an alt text at all. Other fields may be worthwhile to implement, too (Credit Line, Creator's Contact Info, Copyright Notice or others depending on the application). For a really extensive alt text the following format could be used, if those fields are filled: "[Image Title] by [Credit] ([Contact Email]): [ExtDescrAccessibility]"

Additionally to the tags mentioned, many XMP tags (e.g. Iptc4xmpCore:AltTextAccessibility, Iptc4xmpCore:ExtDescrAccessibility, dc:Description) can store values in different languages. Those could be respected as well if the language of the generated web page is known. Checking if any are set and using one if not empty should be simple. For those file formats that don't support XMP tags and those not supported by exiftool, I'm not aware of any meta data tags that do the job. The above list is for image files in general. Other file types may have other/additional tags that are useful for similar purposes to the img tags alt attribute. Video file formats definitely have several different additional description fields. Those would be interesting to extract and display, too.

For a clean implementation without so many different tags, only AltTextAccessibility and maybe ExtDescrAccessibility are necessary. Those are the most "official" ones and will likely become the most widely used for image descriptions.

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Consciousness

Entry created on 2024-07-15 Authors: steeph (376) Categories: #100DaysToOffload (41) Consciousness (1) Philosophy (5) Science (6) Languages used: en (257) edit

Consciousness is such a heavy topic that, even if I keep clear of actually trying to address the so-called hard problem, writing anything on it feels like I'm over-stretching my copetence in both science and philosophy. But I've decided to be confident enough to type out some of my thoughts an how the subject is discussed.

The topic interests me on an academic hobby level. Consciousness in dreams especially is something that I've read and thought a lot about and experimented with over years. Really explaining the nature of the brain-tingling that a good philosophical chain of thoughts gives me would take a lot longer than I'm prepared to spend writing this entry and would probably produce enough related sentences to write a book about it. Suffice it to say I'm interested - among other things - in how experiences and thereby people's realities change when input is filtered differently by the brain that processes the input (more of less or differently consciously).

One reason why I find it hard to structure thoughts around the topic is because of the definition of consciousness. There is none that encopasses all the cases where it is regularly used with the assumption that the meaning of the word in the context it is used in is clear, or obvious. That is OK in principle. And I've decided to do thew same here and not define it in any way, for simplicity. But when discussing the topic academically, when writing a paper on a related subject or when writing a book on it (with an academic target audience or not), a definition that prefaces the presentation of any concept or theory is necessary to allow for a productive discussion. Without a definition on such a varied subject interesting things may be said on it. But it's complicated to impossible to discuss them in a structured way or to do epirical reasearch on them. In other words, they lose some very important possibilities of being useful above entertainment. That is probably why a definition usually is brought forth in such publications. But not always. Introducing a concept on most other topics doesn't require the author to first define what they think the field of research actually is about. But such a requirement inheres - in my opinion - in discussing the subject of consciousness; something that can be experienced by somebody who agrees to the fact that they are experiencing it (according to some definitions) but who at the same time argues that it (according to some definitions) may not exist as a distinguishable state. I've seen a panel discussion once where two of the participants discovered their diverging definitions of consciousness in regards of what they wanted to talk about that day halfway through the discussion, which lead them to agree to every seemingly contradicting statements based on the assumption that they each other were the expert on what they were talking about. That was a funny and useful one compared to other panel discussions that muddle ideas and thoughts on the topic by mixing concepts that are not reconcilable with each other.

I'll leave it at that for now because I don't want to actually say anything about consciousness before producing a formal definition, which, in confusion over different views on what consciousness is, I'm not prepared to do.

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The Best Movies Ever

Entry created on 2024-07-10 Authors: steeph (376) Categories: #100DaysToOffload (41) Films (22) Languages used: en (257) edit

I like to recommend movies. Because I like to discover movies that serve me as a source of a good mystery, an emotional journey, or fun. But it's not easy to recommend some film to somebody with a different taste than me, which is everybody that I know. But I think it is pretty likely that you will like this recommendation - if you take the time to follow it.

Something like three years ago I've started to watch the titles on the then current IMDb Top 250 Movies list. The way I do it is to keep the next 8 to 16 titles with me, ready to watch when I like to. When I'm not in the mood for a movie, find it booring or for other reasons not worth following through, I skip to the next one but keep the skipped movie to give it at least another two chances. That way I always have at least some very good movies with me, ready to be watched, even when I'm travelling or have no access to the internet. I started this because there are some very well known and very popular movies that I had never watched and I didn't know if that's because of a preconception or not. I'm slowly going through the classics of all genres. Even the horror movies I at least watch for a while. Although I say that horror is not for me, there are some very good ones that I enjoyed in a way. I've watched Casablanca and North By Northwest and get those references now and I know that I don't need to watch them again. I get to see some Chinese and Indian movies that I would have never had the idea to check out. I've seen 12 Years a Slave and To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time and now their relevance now. So many other great movies that I had missed out on for a long time for various reasons. I've eaven discovered some movies that really are for me but I've never heard of before, like Paris, Texas and Jagten. Again, all the classics people from different generations expect others to know, like The Shawshank Redemption" and Psycho, are in the reportoir of comparisons I can make now. From some I learned pieces of history, like from Hotel Rwanda and Gandhi . Some Anime like Hotaru no haka and Kimi no na wa., I would probably have never watched if they weren't rated that highly. ANd in between all of that, I get to watch many of my favourite movies as well as very good movies that I haven't seen since I was much younger.

I don't watch all of them, by far. And that is where I'll stop naming titles in pairs, or at all. I just don't like some movie styles and others are too boring or too far outside of my reality (without any element that keeps my interest up otherwise) and so I abandon them after a couple of attempts to make me interested. I'm not through yet. There are still many classics coming up. And even now there are new titles on the current list, like Oppenheimer and Joker, that I know I'd like to watch. So either when I will be through my list, I'll look at the then current one and see if I want to catch up or start anew. Because many of these movies are worth wathing again after five years.

In my experience, watching one after one of these movies has been a great way to discover new movies of very high quality, rediscover old gems, get to know classics and re-watch favourites because it is a relatively broad list. Not one that is confined to genres, a time period or a culture that I'm familiar with and that I already know has movies that I like.

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