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A circular halo of light around the sun, with a silhouetted traffic signal.

Two views of a 22-degree circular halo around the sun that I saw on a walk this afternoon.

Halos are a lot more common than I used to think. Then I started actually looking for them. Even on a warm day like today, there can still be ice crystals higher in the atmosphere of the right size and shape to cause a display like this (or even more complicated ones).

A circular halo of light around the sun, with a silhouetted jacaranda tree.

Usually I just go for a utilitarian, “got a picture of the halo,” but this time I tried about five different things to block the sun, trying to compose an interesting shot as well. I’m going to have to keep that up!

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To keep myself from getting distracted by too many notifications on my phone, I ask myself the following questions whenever a new category pops up:

  • Will I need to act on it? (Likes/favorites are nice, but I don’t need to respond.)
  • How time-sensitive is it? (“Your ride is here” is more time sensitive than planning a get together for next weekend.)
  • How important? (“Server down” is more important than a project update. A conversation is more important than a newsletter.)
  • Is it actually for me, or is it an ad for the app service?

Then I turn off what I don’t need, turn off sound on the less urgent ones, and customize sounds for the most important ones.

So I hear when a text or instant message comes in, but not email or social media. When I pick up my phone I see emails, mentions & replies, but not favorites or boosts, etc.

It helps me a lot with alert overload. YMMV.

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I’ve been thinking about what it means to self-host a service, and that there are degrees even within that.

I have a self-hosted WordPress blog in the sense that I manage an installation of WordPress, but I run it on a VPS at a web host. It’s not as self-hosted as someone running a server on a Lollipop Cloud or FreedomBox, but it’s more self-hosted than someone using WordPress.com. It’s also more self-hosted than someone using the managed WordPress hosting at the same web host.

The key advantages of self-hosting are privacy and control. Unless a service uses end-to-end encryption, the admins at each level can probably read your stuff – you have to trust that they won’t do it unless they have to.

And of course when you run your own service, you don’t have to fear losing control when Google Plus shuts down, or Flickr changes their pricing structure, or Tumblr changes their TOS, or MySpace botches a server migration.

The obvious disadvantage of self-hosting, of course, is that you’re on the hook for all the maintenance. Spam filtering, moderation, security updates, server migrations – those are all on you.

And unless you’re using your own software, even on your own box there’s still the risk that a project is going to shut down & leave you without security fixes, or pivot to a new direction that no longer fits what you want. (So glad WP’s block editor is still optional!)

I’ve settled on a balance where I manage the top-level web apps, but my webhost handles the hardware, the virtualization and the LAMP stack. (And email. Ugh, I’d forgotten how much of a pain a mailserver can be to handle until I tried to set one up on a Raspberry Pi a couple of months ago.)

I guess I’m kind of splitting the difference. 🤷

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Sign on a pillar proclaiming "Internet WWW Access."

Oddly enough, I did find gopher access down the block:

Close-up of a light-brown gopher's head, sticking up out of a hole in light-brown sandy ground with a few twigs and dried leaves around it.

Update May 2024: Coffee Cartel still has the sign outside, though of course they’d already switched to WiFi long before I took these photos. Come to think of it, I have no idea whether they ever did have a computer for guest internet access, though they’ve been around long enough. Despite all the other changes (and coffee shops) in the area, they’re still the kind of local place you want to hang out at, not just a trendy spot with walls that echo every chair movement.

(To be fair, I haven’t actually been to the Hi-Fi Espresso across the street, only the other location in Hermosa Beach, and the CBTL that used to be around the corner felt a bit more like someplace to stay a while than the Starbucks across the street, and was bigger than the Peet’s across the other street. And last I was down this way, Offset Coffee around the other corner hadn’t opened yet.)

Plus Coffee Cartel has outdoor seating within range of that WiFi, which is more important now than it was in 2019.

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Huge swaths of orange in a night sky view that wraps around the constellation Orion.
Photo by Andrew Klinger via Astronomy Picture of the Day

The first time I saw a picture of Barnard’s Loop (the arc running through Orion), I was astonished at the scale of it in the sky. I always had it in my head that (aside from the Milky Way, anyway), most of the astronomical features we see in photos are not just too faint but too small to see with the naked eye. The fact that I could instantly see the scale, because it wraps through a constellation I know, really drove home the fact that a lot of features don’t need telescopes, just long exposures. (And the right film/sensors and filters.)