I withdrew from social media at the start of that whole global pandemic thing. Initially it was to bring my anxiety under control, and turned out to be the best possible thing I could have done for my well-being.

On the other hand, I came to miss having a place to dump things that may or may not be of value to someone somewhere. That's what this is!

I also wanted a little place that was mine -- hosted on servers I pay for, with software I control. The current wave of deplatforming should terrify anyone that has content hosted by someone else. I like cars, cats, and writing Python code. It's unlikely I'll ever become a target for any of that, but that's probably what all those people thought who were posting nudity on that site that was 95% nudity, and we all know how that one worked out.

I have a site. Actually I have another site as well. Those sites do what they do, and one of them gets non-trivial amounts of traffic doing what it does. I did not want to repurpose those. They might get updated with the things they should be updated with, but sometimes a thing should be allowed to be the thing that it is.

So here it is, something resembling a blog. I'll be migrating a bunch of stuff from my Markdown diary files. I have a lot of these, which I gathered in the hope of getting them into a static site generator some day. They didn't end up going into a static site generator, because I was overthinking the solution (and I'll probably post about that soon).

I picked the name "Exhaust" because this is a bit of a vent. Not "vent" in the sense that makes so much discourse ugly, but a place to dump the occasional thought, a thing that has happened to me, a picture, maybe the occasional story and anything else that crosses my mind. And I can do that without caring how many likes or shares it gets! As Todd Snider put it,

I might share some of my opinions with you over the course of the evening. I'm not gonna share them with you 'cause I think they're smart, or 'cause I think you need to know 'em; I'm gonna share 'em with you because they rhyme.

Perhaps this might become a series: lazy one-or-two sentence reviews of things from the Internet's reduced-to-clear aisle that I've watched in the last month. Or it might not! Ratings are out of seven:

The Hunt (2020): somehow all the conservatives who got angry about this film last year didn't notice that the "deplorables" in this film are the good guys. The whole film is basically just Betty Gilpin being a badass, and that's good enough for me ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Layer Cake (2004): didn't finish it, went to bed ⭐

Need for Speed (2015): mehhhh it gets a star because I have a friend who looks exactly like Imogen Poots and that's kind of neat ⭐

Postal (2007): thinks it's a satire, when it's merely a bit shit. Brainless enough to be mildly entertaining every now and then. Might not be the worst video game adaptation of all time (see above). ⭐⭐

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015): YOU WILL RIDE ETERNAL, SHINY AND CHROME ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Final Score (2018): good in a "mindless action film with no actual characters" way. Bonus star for the setting ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I bought Mazda Amy without caring about the mileage. I mean, there's a pretty low overlap between people who care about how many miles a car has done and people who buy completely rotten cars from 1987. But while cleaning the interior, after five years of owning this car I checked it on a whim. Just under 63,000 miles! That seemed remarkably low for a 33-year-old car, even if it did spent 13 of those off the road.

Today, I was looking at the history of my car on the government's free MOT history check website, and well:

That would explain that, wouldn't it. 😶

Hint hint: you should never trust any online advert in which someone hides the number plates; anyone who thinks about it for more than a second knows it's pointless, and there's a non-trivial chance they're not wanting you to enter its reg into a certain government website...

Off for final MOT prep at Setch MOT centre. She'll be back soon!

Some people feel like they're giving up by giving their project to someone else to finish - that it's less authentically "theirs" if they haven't done every bit of the work. I don't feel this way at all. This is this car's fifth year of being a project. It's come an awful long way, but seeing that interior looking as beautiful as it does made me want a working car this year, and hopefully this summer. That simply isn't going to happen if I only do this on my free time.

First, there's some jobs I just don't care to do. Those would be things like the oil changes (all four: engine, gearbox, transfer box, & rear diff). My excuse is that I am getting old; I'm too old to want to crawl under cars to change fluids. Been there, done that, had hair caked with grease and eyes full of whatever that is that always into your eyes when you're working on an old car. Buy me a four-post ramp and I might think differently.

There's also some stuff that I just can't do; I don't have the presses required for doing suspension bushes, and that's more crawling under cars that I don't want to do as well.

Then there's...the wiper blades! I'm weird; I rebuilt the engine on this car, but I still don't know how to change wiper blades. Also, there's a whole bunch of other tiny jobs where I just want to hand it off to someone else, receive a working car, go drive working car.

Finally, as anyone should who owns a car that has been off the road for a while, I want someone to check over everything. If you work on something enough you will develop blind spots. You want someone with a fresh pair of eyes - and an MOT-tester set of eyes, at that - to look over everything and find out if you've missed something totally stupid. That's why she is heading off on the back of a recovery truck and not under her own steam. (That and I don't want to use the fantastically fragile transmission until I know it's got fresh fluids in it.)

Onwards!

I'd paid almost no attention to the interior of Mazda Amy so far, because there seemed like little point in doing so while I might still be in and out of there with tools and boots. And of course I left a ton of crap in there because just in case I need it for a future job on the car.

That left me with an interior looking like this:

Yeah, not really proud of it, but now there's a point in making it look nice.

In the best case scenario, this would be the first clean since 2007 when the car came off the road. It was pretty foul in there. My approach, if you care, was just brute force:

• Everywhere: Lots of industrial hoover action!
• Plastics: Cloth and soapy water on the plastics to get off any loose bits, then ZEP foaming citrus cleaner, sometimes in the reverse order if those bits were nasty. For the faded black bits, especially the dashboard, I hit them with WD-40 electrical contact cleaner (not at all to be confused with regular WD-40), then went over them with Gtechniq C4.
• Carpets & seats: I used whatever worked; if I thought I could get a particular area clean with a damp soapy rag, I did. I used Vanish carpet cleaning spray in places. I had to resort to electrical contact cleaner where I saw proper oil. I was more careful about using water in these areas, of course, especially the seats.

Over four hours later:

Much nicer. Seeing the interior looking lovely (look at all the purple and the 80s bits!!) was enough to remind me why I have spent so much money and time (mostly money) on this thing.

The reverse view, with lovely Driftworks steering wheel:

Next to arrive (tomorrow) is a blanking plate for that hole in the middle where the stereo should be and then I can call this done. Maybe I'll actually get a stereo in there some day!

Mazda Amy may not be the most powerful car in the world, or even more than slightly quick by modern standards. Even so, it seems a waste to have a four-wheel-drive performance car, with an awful lot of grip and go-cart handling, running on the nastiest no-name ditchfinders (it's a terrible idea for any car - don't cheap out on tyres if you don't have to).

She's now running on Toyo Proxes TR1 supplied by Demon Tweeks and fitted by my favourite local tyre van. One more job down.

Onwards!

On my brief test movements with Mazda Amy, it always struck me that her gear change was always awfully vague. And not just "old car" kind of vague, but Land Rover "there's a gear around here somewhere" vague, with no clear stops on the X axis, and an enormous throw on both axes. That's one of those things I was prepared to live with as part of the "drives old shit" package, though I did have my mind on getting someone to do a short-shifter mod for me at some point.

Last month, word reached me that Jeff Sylvester, a chap from the USA who is a legend in the small global 323 GTX community, was offering a short-shifter modification for the GTX at a price I thought entirely reasonable. Things were arranged, money was paid, and I pulled my shifter out for a journey across the Atlantic. This is what mine looked like:

Those disintegrated pieces of black plastic next to the shifter ball are meant to be the stops on the X-axis, so that explains the vagueness!

This is what it looked like in progress. You'll see Jeff replaced the pointless plastic stops with metal ones (and the really eagle-eyed who have an eye for that sort of thing would have spotted a Corvette panel in the background):

The physics of a short-shifter mod should be familiar to anyone who has sat in an unconventional place on a see-saw; as I understand it involves cutting and shutting things to move the pivot point around to make the same amount of gear lever movement induce more movement on the cables, i.e. a shorter shift with somewhat more effort at the gear lever.

Jeff didn't stop there, though he could have; he cares about the quality of anything that leaves his workshop, so he cleaned everything up and gave it a coat of paint. Here's how it looked when it came back to me yesterday:

Refitting was dead easy. A bracket for the centre console tray, which bolts to the shifter assembly, needs to be gently (angle-grinder) modified to clear the slightly taller shifter, but that's all.

It feels lovely. I have gears in easy-to-reach and mostly predictable places now!

Now, about that manky interior.... Onwards!

Aside: why is it rather cheap for me to send parcels to the United States, but horrendously expensive to get anything sent in the other direction? I paid whatever it was I paid to ship it over there for modification, on a three-to-four day service. It cost me very slightly more to get it shipped back on a nominal three-to-four week service. This is not the only time this has happened; I did not order a Walbro fuel pump from the United States because the shipping cost nearly as much as the fuel pump, and previously I had to contend with £30 shipping for some decals. I would love to order more things from the US because there are far more GTX parts available over there than here, but the shipping costs are usually unreasonable enough to put me off the idea.

As a straight white guy from middle-of-nowhere Tory Brexitland I'm sure I am supposed to say something about political correctness gone mad, but this is worth a read and makes some fine points. Upshot:

It's fairly common to say whitelisting and blacklisting to describe desirable and undesirable things in cyber security. For instance, when talking about which applications you will allow or deny on your corporate network; or deciding which bad passwords you want your users not to be able to use.

However, there's an issue with the terminology. It only makes sense if you equate white with 'good, permitted, safe' and black with 'bad, dangerous, forbidden'. There are some obvious problems with this.

I agree.

From now on, the NCSC will use 'allow list' and 'deny list' in place of 'whitelist' and 'blacklist' on our website.

I propose not referring to notional "lists" at all. This will invariably make your writing clearer.

Let's take an example from the article. "An allow list of applications" is clumsy (let alone the alternative form, "an allow listed application"). It is much terser and accurate to refer to "trusted applications" for ones you know to be good, and "malicious" for ones you know to be bad. No lists required! (Adjust the terminology to your use case as required.)

For the example of passwords, of course you only ever check against a list of known-compromised ones; you certainly don't have a list of ones that are safe to use. Again, you can almost always get rid of notional "lists". Some examples:

• This password is blacklisted 🡒 This password is known to be weak
• This function checks the given password against a blacklist 🡒 This function checks if the given password is known to be weak

It is fine to refer to lists when there are actual lists; if your program is supplied with or downloads a set of textual rules for allowing & denying access to something, for example. Here again, though, you are discussing an implementation detail rather than what actually happens, which is generally not good form in anything but documentation dedicated to discussing implementation details.

I am reminded of a ticket from a few months ago in the Django project:

We'd like to add aliases for the trans and blocktrans template tags which do not have connotations to the transgender community. An initial proposal would be to add translate and blocktranslate as aliases.

The lazy counter to this would be that "translate" shares the same "trans" root as "transgender", and who is to say that it's only a valid contraction of one of them?

I say "lazy", because the reporter handed the Django a great opportunity for improvement: why pick a tag name like trans when it could cause confusion with something else? Even when there is no scope for confusion, we're not limited to MS-DOS filenames these days (and don't get me started on "i18n"). You can and should use whole English words; {% translate %} makes for better and clearer code than {% trans %}.

You should definitely improve your terminology to be more inclusive - it's a low-effort way of making the world a little bit better. And do use that opportunity to write stronger and more clearly while you are there.