The rise and fall of Bookogs, Comicogs, Filmogs, Gearogs and Posterogs

Posted on Friday, 11. December 2020 by hmvh

About four months ago the sites Bookogs, Comicogs, Filmogs, Gearogs and Posterogs closed down.

What, you may ask, were Bookogs, Comicogs, Filmogs, Gearogs and Posterogs?

Bookogs, Comicogs, Filmogs, Gearogs and Posterogs were offshoot database projects by (and for the users of) Discogs (hence the names) launched successively starting in 2014. They provided some of the same features as Discogs (the audio recordings database) but (as their names suggest) catered specifically for the cataloguing of books, comics, films, audio gear, and posters, respectively.

Bookogs, Comicogs, Filmogs, Gearogs and Posterogs logos

In fact, requests for such facilities had long been voiced at Discogs, and when they finally did launch, its users (collectors and trainspotters that we are) were utterly delighted.

Posterogs is a user-built database of posters from the team behind Discogs. We are on a mission to create the most comprehensive database of posters in the world. The Posterogs database is currently focused on music posters, such as gig and concert posters, album release promo posters, music festival posters, as well as film posters.

Sounds promising, doesn’t it?

Indeed, the ventures were quite ambitious.

With your help we’ll list every turntable, audio recorder, amplifier, effects pedal, microphone, and every other piece of audio gear conceived. Any equipment that records, amplifies, mixes, or reproduces audio, belongs here.

Discogs members piled into the systems with sheer gusto in order to populate them with data or simply to goof around and test their limits. Features and supporting guidelines gradually got refined to their specific requirements. It didn’t take long before they had created and uploaded thousands of entries (read: metadata points) and images.

Crowdsourcing works; people want to contribute and share. It’s in their nature.

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Webris, netsam and the demise of Flash

Posted on Friday, 4. December 2020 by hmvh

Webris and Netsam are the names of two internet companies. This is not about them.

Instead, “webris and netsam” is a term I use to describe material and debris left over by internet-related tasks — you know, the kind of stuff you download during a specific project and hold on to in case you might need it later or because it’s too good to delete.

Then you either forget about it, never use it, or standards have changed.

Here, for instance, is a bunch of clip art and icon packs that I rediscovered in my “web design” folder. The oldest file is dated 1998, and the smallest of these 32px .GIF files is 453 bytes in size. These sizes were appropriate for current displays — twenty years ago!

A collection of 32px web-friendly icons and clip art

Back then designers cared about loading times or file sizes because nobody in their right mind would force a site’s visitor to download a huge photo only to display it as a small thumbnail due to the hosting and bandwidth constraints of the time. Conversely, excessive HTTP file requests on account of each of the multiple little icon files was to be avoided — hence image maps, and now CSS and Font Awesome. Things have progressed.

A collection of site-specific icons and logos

Then there are icon sets designed for providing attractive links to social media sites.

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Offline, online, offline, online

Posted on Wednesday, 11. November 2020 by hmvh

Hi! How’re you doing?

I’m fine. Thanks for asking. I’m better now.

No sooner had the ink of the previous post dried did the blog go offline for a day — at least that’s what the alert message said. A day later it came back, and then it went down again for three days.

All I know is that my hosting company were working on something on the back end because I had two hosting “products” at the time — one of which was a promotional goodie that went bad and took on a life of its own. I didn’t want it, I cancelled the trial.

That was in August. And that was just the beginning my troubles.

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Meta blogging

Posted on Thursday, 6. August 2020 by hmvh

This blog, in its present form managed via WordPress, is ten years old this year.

According to popular blogger Anil Dash, one of 15 Lessons from 15 Years of Blogging is that “Meta-writing about a blog is generally super boring.”

And he might be right.

Any housekeeping writing about how it’s been a while since you’ve written, or how you changed some obscure part of your blog, doesn’t tend to age very well and is seldom particularly compelling in retrospect. The exception are genres like technical or design blogs, where the meta is part of the message. But certainly the world doesn’t need any more “sorry I haven’t written in a while” posts.

Yet this is exactly what I’m going to ramble on about now.

When this blog (in its current incarnation) was launched, the web was quite different.

It was all about written content, with a few pictures added for fun and demonstration. Bloggers wrote about this, that, their hobbies and life in general, with no real regard about whether their words were read and with even less interest in becoming self-important influencers with huge hero images. Web pages were static, had a fixed width (or none at all), and text had a set size (or relied on browser defaults). Images were kept small because of bandwidth and loading time considerations.

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Civil unrest may be the second wave

Posted on Thursday, 25. June 2020 by hmvh

The coronavirus crisis is far from over.

While some people are relieved that they’re able to return to work, I have returned to working from home after a symbolic three-week stint at the company office.

Considering my current tasks, working hours and the risk that remains, it’s just plain stupid to do anything but work from home. Most any facility or service I need is either online or has re-opened. Some never closed, and I’ve not been close to running out of pasta or toilet paper either.

I suppose I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m also far too frugal to voluntarily pump time, money and exhaust fumes into unnecessary commuting rushes or conferences that can just as effectively be held online. This should be “the new normal”.

The unwashed masses, though, are dissatisfied.

#BLM FTW!! (photo by BP Miller / Unsplash)

Americans have taken to the streets wearing no masks and total disregard for social distancing in order to protest against racial injustice and police brutality by rioting, looting and destroying the property of innocent civilians. Even in The Hague this past Sunday peaceful protests against coronavirus clampdown regulations turned ugly. A scant few hours earlier, hundreds of drunken and unruly youths trashed the Stuttgart city centre following a routine drug check on Saturday night.

The vandalism as well as an unprecedented degree of violence targeted at police has been plastered all over social media. Every copycat kid wants to be the next Twitter whistleblower or TikTok star to launch an entire hashtag.

What may be worth observing is that a disproportionate amount of the arrested have migrant roots, not unlike those hundreds of factory workers recently infected with COVID-19 across German meatpacking plants: they’re cheap labour from Eastern Europe.

The district of Gütersloh, the site of the largest facility, is the current coronavirus hotspot and has gone back into lockdown. As a result, citizens are enraged: they may have to cancel their precious vacation plans!

Oh yeah, slavery and racism are alive and well in 2020 — albeit in different guises.

Society has a long way to go.

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A few thoughts on the current coronavirus crisis

Posted on Friday, 10. April 2020 by hmvh

Here’s to another day of “social distancing” and “home office”.

This is my fourth week of “lockdown”. City streets are deserted, roads are empty.

Nature is taking a breather.

After the German government suggested (and eventually enforced) the lockdown, it took two days at the office before I, too realised, “Balls to this. This is a crisis. This is not normal, this is not going to work, and this is not worth risking the health of family and colleagues over.” So I packed my stuff and left. I haven’t been back at the office since, yet have clocked up more working hours than on a regular day.

My dining table has become my temporary office desk (I need the space for the monitors). This may become the “new normal”. While I’m no stranger to “remote working” and some of the luxuries it affords on account of my job functions I still think this ain’t right.

Colleagues who, because of different shifts and geographic locations, hardly see each other under normal circumstances are now more disjointed. Ironically, when you do speak to them using the conferencing facility of your choice, there’s an eerie sense of situational unity in our separation from one another. By now, everyone has heard of Zoom.

So have hackers and pranksters. “Zoombombing” has become a thing. Criminals and opportunists have taken to targeting the desperate, the scared and the feeble-minded.

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Review: 2019

Posted on Wednesday, 1. January 2020 by hmvh

RIP, Tardar Sauce

Ah, 2019! The year that was until yesterday. So, how was it then?

Well, 2019 was a year full of anniversaries, astronomical achievements, cataclysmic failures and other maladies on a global scale disrupted by brief glimmers of hope for humanity. Let’s recap, shall we?

January 1st, 2019, for instance, was cause for huge celebration as troves of music, art, writing and film from 1923 finally entered the public domain.

Also on the first day of the new Terran year, NASA’s New Horizons (the same craft that gave us those wonderful images of Pluto four years ago) flew by the furthest object Earthlings had yet seen: Kuiper Belt Object 2014 MU69, better known as “Ultima Thule”. The following day, China landed its Chang’e 4 craft on the dark side of the Moon (the first time humankind had ventured there).

German authorities freaked out after they discovered that a 20-year-old had been publishing private details of politicians and local celebrities on Twitter.

A collection of 773 million email addresses and passwords was discovered on MEGA.

My father came to live with us. Woe betide!

Approximately 350,000 US federal employees were furloughed in the longest ever shutdown following fiscal disagreements over Donald Trump’s Mexican border wall. Additional stay-aways came as a result of an extreme cold snap caused by a polar vortex.

And that was just January.

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Christmas Wars

Posted on Monday, 23. December 2019 by hmvh

Robocop awakens on Christmas. He is your saviour. Bow to the machine.

Yesterday we wanted to see the new Star Wars movie. This was a mistake.

As we sat, stuck in traffic and in rain, it dawned on me: what the fuck was I thinking?

Never before have we witnessed such masses descend upon these holy temples of consumerist worship. You may know them as malls or shopping centres; I call it the place where the cinema happens to be.

And the place was packed. It was impossible to get anywhere close to it. We’d have missed the beginning of the movie — assuming we’d find parking and still get seats.

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