Petra's Space

Sewing Time

2026-02-05T21:30:00+13:00

It’s amazing what you can do with a bunch of old sheets

I’ve had a post in my head for the last few months. It’s about my recent turn into sewing, as hinted in my previous measurement-related writing.

In this post I was going to talk about saving up for a sewing machine, and then receiving a 50-year old Globe Cub 3¹ that belonged to my late grandmother and which had been sitting in an aunt’s sewing cupboard for years. This happens to be the same model as my mother’s, the machine I learned on,² and so I would have gushed about how this was exactly what I wanted and is vastly more satisfying to use (at least to me) than a modern computerised system. At this point we were at serious risk of a digression on prices and inflation in the 1970s and the following decades, because it wasn’t until I started plugging newspaper ads for the Cub 3 into the calculator on the Reserve Bank website that I realised quite how wild that must have been.

Back on topic—but still on the subject of prices—I’d have next bemoaned how the money I had saved for the big-ticket item I no-longer needed to purchase had instead immediately disappeared into a black hole of fabric and miscellaneous equipment. This despite most of the fabric that I’ve actually used being old sheets that had been sitting in the flat kitchen, allegedly for cleaning. Then it would have been time to wax poetical about the meditative power of hemming rags.³

Maybe about here would be a good place to talk about why this attracts me, and the outlet for creativity it provides—and why the computer-based stuff I usually do just wasn’t cutting it. This would then have been a good opportunity to segue into the things I’ve actually made, from coasters and washing bags to stuffed animals, and the trials and tribulations thereof. And then maybe (at least, now that this post has been more than a month in my brain, and I’ve continued experimenting⁴) I’d talk about the projects I’ve risked with the fabric I’ve bought, and plan in the future.

But this brings me to why I never did manage to write the thing: I’ve been having too much fun. It’s not like I’ve only been sewing, but I’ve certainly been Computer Touching a lot less—and been happier for it.⁵ This has included writing, which I should really get back to. The hope is that now that I’ve written the above in whatever tense this is called I can do that, which would be useful right now because this summer is just so damn hot already.⁶ Like, ironing was already not my favourite part, and right now it is to be avoided. Maybe I should be doing more with knits…

Will this be a sewing blog from now on? Probably not exclusively, but also probably at least a little bit. There’s a certain kind of tradwife buy-my-custom-fabric-prints vibe I very much do not want to go for, but there are still things I suspect I will want to report back on. Next project is a fitted shirt from a pattern I printed off of freesewing.eu—this will either be a great success or a complete disaster. Let’s find out!

The Cub 3 was sold under the Globe brand in NZ, but more or less the same machine seems to have been a Waltsons Celestial Cub 3 in Australia, a Frister & Rossmann Cub 3 in the UK, a Privileg Compact 930 in (presumably West) Germany, and a Kenmore 158.1050 in the US. I’m not sure what the exact arrangement was here, but I think Globe at least was already a zombie brand by the 1970s.↩︎
Save that mum’s has a thread cutter on the shank, but I can live with using a separate tool.↩︎
I’m slowly weaning us off using paper towels for everything.↩︎
In fact, while drafting this post I took a couple of days to make a pair of oven mitts, and then a (too-small) hat. And in the month or so this sat in my drafts since then I’ve made a couple of skirts, a better hat, a bag, two stuffed plesiosaurs…↩︎
Though I suspect I’ll change my tune a little bit when it turns out I’ve left a bunch of stuff unpatched.↩︎
I wrote this in early December, and the monkey’s paw has curled—we’ve had a completely erratic summer. One of the skirts I made was lined, which has been very helpful on the colder and wetter days in particular.↩︎

This Was Inadvertent

2025-12-04T12:30:00+13:00

Policymaking, a masterclass

Some excerpts, from various sources:

20 January 2025, my submission:

I am responding to the Ministry of Health public consultation about puberty blockers, and wish to express my not-inconsiderable concern about the prospect of additional restrictions on the use of these medications by transgender youth.

I am a transgender woman who transitioned in my early 20s, too old for adolescent gender care. However, I feel obliged to respond to this consultation for two key reasons: because I wish to preserve the access to needed medication for future generations more fortunate than myself; but also for self-interested reasons, as the distinction between gender affirming treatment for adolescents and adults is much less than has been implied and so changes here will have ramifications for my own treatment.

[…]

What is your main interest in the consultation topic?

Other: I am an adult transgender woman who takes the same class of drugs for the same basic purpose under the same legal framework.

17 November 2025, Order in Council, explanatory note:

These regulations, which come into force on 19 December 2025, amend the Medicines Regulations 1984. The first amendment inserts a new regulation that restricts authorised prescribers prescribing prescription medicines that are gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogues. The prescription medicines may not be prescribed for the treatment of gender incongruence or gender dysphoria. The second amendment makes it an offence, punishable on conviction by a fine not exceeding $500, for an authorised prescriber to breach the restriction.

1 December 2025, Order in Council, explanatory note:

The Medicines (Restriction on Prescribing Gonadotropin-releasing Hormone Analogues) Amendment Regulations 2025 restricted authorised prescribers prescribing prescription medicines that are gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogues. The prescription medicines may not be prescribed for the treatment of gender incongruence or gender dysphoria. This was not specifically limited to puberty suppression, and could also include adults undergoing transition. This was inadvertent.

The original version of the regulation did include a grandfather clause, meaning that I was not about to lose access to my medication: it’s not for myself that I’ve been so upset about all this, and what remains after the amendment is still awful legislation. But when there’s a little oopsie like this it’s hard not to wonder if what you submit to consultation actually gets read.

As and when legal challenges ask for support overturning this, please help them.

A Decimal Inch

2025-09-25T22:45:00+12:00

Surprise on the back of a tape measure

Sewing adventures continue, but unfortunately I’m having far too much fun to chronicle how much fun I’ve been having. Here’s something adjacent, both to that and my previous post.

It turns out you need a whole bunch of things besides fabric and a machine to make anything, some more critically than others. Some of those I have bought specially—most notably scissors—but many others I acquired in the form of a cheap sewing kit in order to short-circuit the part of my brain that would obsess over finding the best quality seam ripper (and then be afraid to use it for fear of causing unnecessary wear). In the form of tired/wired/inspired, or perhaps an abridged version of the American Chopper argument meme:

A bad workman blames his tools
Quality tools can actually be a significant help and working with inferior equipment can even be a hindrance to learning
Any old hammer will do if you’re not mastering carpentry

In this kit turned out to be a tape measure. I had actually bought a nicer one separately, but that was metric-only and the reverse of this one had what seemed to be inches. Despite my afore-stated position on imperial and US customary units I still filed this away in my mind for when I inevitably needed such an item.

More recently a flatmate and I were talking about display sizes, which is one thing that is measured in inches here.¹ Their own tape measure (metal retracting carpentry type, vs the tailors’ I’m talking about) was metric, so while they were doing the conversion to get the size of their existing screen I rushed to grab mine… and proceeded to get embarrassingly wrong results.

I had previously noted two Chinese words by the measurements that were now causing me grief. I couldn’t transcribe them at the time, but they have since proven to be 市寸 and 市尺; I keep failing to learn any language that isn’t English and so the best I could do was vaguely recall that 市 had something to do with ‘city’, while waving my phone camera at the characters suggested that 尺 might mean ‘ruler’ (as in measurement, rather than leader). Perhaps I should have looked deeper, even just at the markings which clearly divide the units into tenths rather than eighths and sixteenths. Oops.

As should be apparent 市寸 is the ‘Chinese Inch’, or cùn/tsun, defined (at least in this case, there are other definitions because there always are) as being 33⅓mm or more than 30% longer than what I thought it was. No wonder I was so far out, I wasn’t the target audience for these bonus measurements and had just blithely assumed they were what I was already familiar with. Those tenths are important: the 市尺 (chi) marks appear every ten 寸, as part of a whole decimal system that I was completely ignorant of.

The upshot is a) I don’t actually have anything that measures inches longer than a foot (but I can just do the conversion if I really can’t avoid the things); b) if I ever do need to measure something in the market system I have A Thing For That (very satisfying); and c) I need to stop myself coveting a better quality version like this one (a result of the same acquisitive impulse mentioned above, and which makes having Things For That satisfying in the first place). Hardly a big issue overall, and a funny story.

While I’m here, while browsing for other items I recently saw a store listing for cotton batting (intended to fill quilts) which was 100 inches wide, “Sold by the metre”. Truly, commerce brings us miracles.

The Wikipedia article on the process of metrication in New Zealand currently claims without a citation that this is a regression starting in the 1990s, and speculates that the practise might not be strictly legal. If you’re a law graduate looking to get your name in the newspaper with a frivolous lawsuit maybe you should find out?↩︎

Give Them an Inch

2025-09-02T23:15:00+12:00

Enough with US units please

I posted the following snippet from an old sewing teaching manual on Mastodon recently:

[A tape measure is a strip of painted tape, usually one] and a half yards in length, divided up into inches and the parts of inches. As an intimate knowledge of the tape measure is required to perform the work outlined in the following pages, pupils are urged at the outset to learn how many inches are in a yard, a half yard, and a quarter yard, and what fractional parts of a yard are represented by 27, 18, 9, 4½, 2¼ inches.

— Home and school sewing, Frances Patton, 1901, via the Internet Archive.

I included the caption “I would simply learn and use a system of measurement that made sense”. This was intended as a joke, but it’s also something I feel unusually strongly about—and I have the itch to over-explain.

Consider the humble inch. At 25-and-a-bit millimetres it’s a good length, I have nothing against it, but it’s not inherently better or worse than the centimetre for what it does. Still, it’s fine.

I actually kind of like the whole ½ inch, ¼ inch, ⅛ inch thing. Powers of two aren’t just for computers, they have other applications like folding cloth and suchlike, so a unit you can halve repeatedly is kind of neat.¹ And of course you can double it like anything else, to make 2 inches, 4 inches, etcetera.

But eventually you need another unit in the hierarchy, a word for some multiple of an inch that we can use at a larger scale. If I were building up the system from the basis we’ve just established I’d throw one in as early as 8 inches or as late as 1024. But the foot,² as we all know, is… twelve inches.

Recovering from the shock of the additional prime factor, twelve isn’t that bad. We still get whole numbers of inches after folding it in half—twice—but also if we fold in thrice, famously an issue in a strictly decimal context. So I can see the attraction, I just kind of wish we had a base-12 number system to begin with if going that route.

So what’s next, 144 inches to the next unit up? No, a yard is just three feet, or 36 inches. A yard is also where I fall off when it comes to this unit series, as I know feet and inches almost entirely due to older relatives asking me how tall I had become as a child. The yard, for reasons that are beyond me, is never part of that system, and so people are five-foot-ten or six-foot-four, and never one-yard-two-foot-ten or two-yards-four. A yard, to me therefore, is just a metre that gave up at 90% of the way there.³

Next—and I always have to look this up—next is the mile, which is one thousand seven hundred and sixty yards.⁴ This distance, which I tend to think of as a rather long kilometre, has a prime factorisation of five much-needed 2’s (at least for my quixotic scheme), a 5, and an inexplicable 11. Who came up with that? Answers on a wax diptych, presumably.⁵

I’ve avoided ascribing inches and miles and so-forth to the “Imperial System” in this rant thus far, because that’s honestly a big part of the problem. My (now alas quite elderly) relatives grew up with and still sometimes default to the system of that name that was standardised in Britain in the first half of the 19^th century. The non-metric values I come across these days, mostly via the internet, are overwhelmingly American and thus using the system that is never named for some reason: US Customary Units.

This is not complete pedantry. While the length and weight units are the same,⁶ volume is a mess. A ‘cup’, for example, in a recipe could be 250 mLs, 240 mLs, or 237 mLs, or multiple other possibilities. I’m glad I don’t bake, where I hear precise ratios are kind of important. Goodness knows what a ‘fluid ounce’ is supposed to be.

At about this point people usually mention the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999, famously caused by American unit-related confusion. That is all very well and good but this is not a logical rant. In truth I am more bothered by the American exceptionalism of it all—I strongly suspect that even the partial failure to metricate in the UK would never have stood if the Americans hadn’t backed out of their already belated transition 45 years ago. Only the dominant commercial and geopolitical power could get away with half a century of using an incompatible unit system to the rest of the world, for it is in trade and commerce (even, I contend, above science) that a seamlessly comparable world-wide system is most critical. Any less-powerful country would simply find itself locked out of the whole network.

I know we have more important things to worry about, but it bothers me to see untranslated customary units that aren’t in historical documents. I hate to generalise (or I would normally, except now I’m in the flow of it) but Americans seem to feel it’s their right to be catered to on this and the rest of us have to figure out whether ‘60 degrees’ is dangerously hot or quite temperate.

Maybe I should just stop consuming American media entirely, but as hinted above I’ve been looking at sewing materials. I’ll forgive public-domain manuals like the one at the start of this post, silly though it may be, for predating the switch in most English-speaking countries. Unfortunately though it looks like it’s non-trivial to buy a sewing pattern here that isn’t from the US ‘big four’, and thus fails to consistently state metric conversions of inch/foot/yard values on the English side of the front paper (at least you can check the French/Spanish). Maybe the liquidation of their parent company will make space for alternatives, but I kind of doubt it.

It’s late and I’ve run out of rant, thank goodness. Nevertheless, this is something I feel remarkably strongly about. Maybe seeing my contemporaries hold on to feet and inches just makes me feel old? Unit choice isn’t something that has historically been a bottom-up choice, so I guess I can’t blame individual people for choosing to use them.

Still going to judge though.

I’ll return to the topic of sewing another time. Right now I’m all grand plans and no results, which has been the story of my entire winter, alas.

And I like the pattern the divisions make on a ruler, not that I’ve ever tried to use them in anger.↩︎
Another issue with the ‘foot’ is that feet are real things (most people have one), but they are rarely the right size.↩︎
Actually a percent or so more, but I only remember that because I know that six feet is 183 cm, because see above.↩︎
Yes I know that there are fathoms and chains and whatever in the middle, but while the yard is sometimes omitted the fathom seems to be reserved for boats and historical fiction and the intersection thereof.↩︎
Though Today I Learned, from double checking this, that the Roman ‘mille’ for which this unit was ultimately named was defined as a thousand paces, or five thousand of Marcus Agrippa’s feet. Goodness knows where the extra 280 feet came from in the system the English ultimately ended up using.↩︎
Though only since 1959, with the (imo, at least) hilariously-named International Yard and Pound Agreement, which defined them in terms of the metric system anyway.↩︎

Garbage (Phone) Time

2025-07-18T12:00:00+12:00

What if phone was bad, on purpose?

I’m hearing all the cool kids on their tick tock are doing “no phone summer”, reading books and playing old portable videogame handhelds instead of scrolling. This is a worthy trend as they go, but not one that I intend to follow.

For one thing, if you ever see me at a bus stop with an ereader or a DS it’s very important that you realise that this is not cool, it’s weird and in a specifically uncool way—I have a reputation to maintain here. Secondly it’s extremely winter right now which makes the relaxing outside on the balcony¹ part of the equation quite difficult.

But the biggest problem with the idea of using my phone less is that I’ve recently (and arguably quite foolishly) increased the number of phones I’m carrying around. You see, a few months ago I decided that I needed a dedicated work phone. I don’t work in sales or on call, in which case my employer would (hopefully) comp me a phone and that would be that, but it’s still convenient to have access to Teams² and Outlook in certain situations without booting an entire laptop—at the same time though having these apps on my personal phone is not healthy and comes with unwanted software and notifications, hence the need for a separate device.

This presents a conundrum: how do I get a second phone without doubling the amount of Phone? I’m very aware that convenience is how we all got into this smartphone mess, so I had the idea to make it as inconvenient as possible. This dovetailed well with another priority, which was to avoid spending very much money on this if at all possible.

There are a few ways to go about buying a cheap, bad phone. I’d have loved to get a dumb phone, but that would have defeated the point—even KaiOS doesn’t seem to have a Teams client. A refurbished flagship phone of yesteryear might have been a good option, but I didn’t want to play the lottery on that. Instead I went with the cheapest,³ but new (as in unused), Android phone I could find.

The TCL 403 is an objectively terrible device here in the middle of the 2020s. It runs Android 12⁴, which officially hit EoL in the same month that I received it, and it’s SoC is apparently from 2018 when 2GB of RAM (some models seem to have only the one gigabyte!) went a lot further. It has a 480p screen⁵ and bezels for days, but unfortunately the screen isn’t physically small—you can just imagine the resulting dot pitch. It has a single rear camera that is a prime example of why the number of megapixels is no-longer used to imply quality. Worst of all, it charges via ye olde USB Micro-B. At least I still have a few of those cables lying around.

But it has 4G VoLTE (3G turns off here at the end of the year) and a headphone jack,⁶ and even a user-replaceable battery. It came with a clear case and a plastic screen protector, and I found no shortage of alternatives for those on AliExpress. With a working Google Play Store, letting me download those apps I bought it for, what else could I actually want?

That’s a very different question to asking what you could possibly want. If I had been subjected to this setup involuntarily it would be unbearable, and I strongly suspect that most readers would not find the funny side. For one thing Teams and Outlook take 10 seconds to load on a good day, and when the endpoint management software decides a couple of times a week to re-verify the device it’s time to put the whole thing down and come back later.

But personally I’m looking for every reason to put it down. I’m extremely vulnerable to the instinct that compels people to check if the news is different on a different screen, and so what I’m looking for is a pager that I can use only when needed. If said pager is slow and temperamental, well, so much the better. I’m no doctor, so for me if it was worth doing it was worth waiting.

I paid a hundred NZD for the phone—which is far too much for the actual hardware in 2025—but it came with a SIM card and enough credit to last for months so I’m not complaining from a financial perspective. Physically I don’t welcome an extra thing to cram into my handbag alongside my real phone,⁷ but it does fit.

It’s been months now, and I have to say this tomfoolery has worked out great. It works for what I need it to do, and I have no desire to use the thing otherwise. Charging is a little annoying but since I barely use the thing I only have to do it twice a week at worse. Overall this terrible phone is a huge success.

But I’m still going to try to use my real phone less too.

My ‘balcony’ is the roof of the garage, but it kinda works.↩︎
As I’ve joked elsewhere, if Discord is Slack for gamers then MS Teams is Slack but Lotus Notes. Specifically IBM-era Lotus Notes—if you don’t know you don’t want to.↩︎
Carrier-locked, obviously.↩︎
I’m not sure if it’s Android Go Edition or not, it’s certainly the right specs. From my research, regular Android 12 became unsupported before I bought the device, but the Go version lasted a couple of extra weeks.↩︎
That is, 480x960. Are 1:2 screens common? I have no idea, I don’t buy a lot of phones.↩︎
And therefore an FM radio, which I feel should be compulsory.↩︎
…and my keys and my mask and my card wallet and my ereader and my DS… You get the idea, I have real space issues.↩︎

Do I Like RPGs, or Do I Just Want To?

2025-06-29T16:15:00+12:00

Playing two different games called Final Fantasy III

I think I’ve mentioned before that the videogames I had as a kid were largely simulationist, and for that matter exclusively PC-based. I’m talking the Sim City, Civilization, and Age of Empires franchises in particular, which all do have some kind of story and cast of characters—in places—but that very much is not the focus.

In the last wee while I’ve been doing something to change that. I played Link’s Awakening last year and Link to the Past earlier this year, and followed that up with the first Golden Sun, all of which I enjoyed greatly.¹ But there have been plenty of others that I never did finish. The most recent addition to that latter group (for now) is Final Fantasy VI, known of course as III in the SNES version I’ve been playing.

I had actually tried this game a couple of years ago, and made it up to about the Battle of Narshe before losing interest. I started it from the beginning back in about April and had a great time speeding though those first few hours once again. But now that I’ve reached around the half-way point I’ve put it aside again—why?

I’m not entirely sure, but I think that replay of the first section might be a clue to part of it. You see, I’ve been using a walkthrough quite extensively, and while I have no issue with that kind of thing I was having to rely on it to such a degree that it was no-longer fun. Yet when it came to replaying the opening I knew where to go, and suddenly the game was much more fun…until I ran out of familiar territory.

This compounds with another aspect: FFVI has so many characters to keep track of, each with their own mechanic. I managed to get used to Sabin’s “Blitz”, memorising a few of the most useful combos, but Gau’s Rage is impossible to keep track of and by the time we’re Dancing and Sketching and playing the Slots I’m out.

The winter of 2025 is stressing me out—as did the same period last year, but for different reasons.² Accordingly I’m not in the mood for mastering complex systems or investing time to advance story, and instead I found myself booting up the game, playing a few random encounters with a particular party I enjoyed playing, and then saving and switching it off. Effectively I’ve been grinding for no reason, just to avoid checking the walkthrough for what I’m supposed to do next. Eventually this progressed to the point of crisis: Am I even having fun anymore? Do I actually like this kind of game or do I just want to be the kind of person who plays RPGs?

It’s been a time, is what I’m saying.

Ultimately, I decided on an answer to the first question at least: no I wasn’t, and so I put it down. But what about the second, the title of this post?

I think it would be too harsh to say that I don’t like RPGs (or JRPGs in particular). Certainly, I liked Golden Sun and Pokemon, but recently I’ve definitely been looking for something less complex and more pick-up-and-put-downable. To test this theory I decided to play… Final Fantasy III.

For those not familiar, the metalore with the early Final Fantasy games is that a about half never made it out of Japan in their original run—hence why VI was originally known as III elsewhere. RHDN does have translations of the Famicom version from as early as the late 90s, but the real III was only officially released outside of Japan in 2006³ with the remake for the Nintendo DS. Having not played the original it’s this version that I decided to pick up.

Looking up information about games for the DS online is fun because this was prime forum era and you can find any number of threads from people at the time sharing their experiences. People seem to love this game or hate it, with the criticisms including lack of in-dungeon saves⁴ and a certain amount of grinding being required. But I’m prepared to cope with the former problem and as I’ve already mentioned I grind reflexively.

I’ve been enjoying myself so far. I’m not using a walkthrough at all, everything is fairly intuitive and even if I’m not being perfectly optimal I can still bluff my way through. The characters are vastly less complex, having apparently slightly more personality than in the original but still ultimately being cyphers that the player can pour anything they like into. The job system is perfectly workable (and helps with the former), and I’m not missing the saves—yet, we’ll see how I feel in that final dungeon. Contra the claim in this RPGamer review that the DS version “isn’t a beginner’s game, no matter what the touch controls and chibi artwork may lead one to think”, I’m doing fine.

Will I finish the game though? Who knows. Judging by the save file on the cartridge I bought I wouldn’t be the first, but that’s ok. I’m coming to see completion as not being necessary, but if I manage it here I’m actually tempted to take a look at the original at some point. I just think it’s neat.

Shares feed updates will resume soon, I hope. I’ve barely had time even to read lately alas.

There have also been a number of Pokemon games, which ought to count, but don’t in my mental calculus for whatever reason.↩︎
Really the whole last few months have been a struggle to do anything other than work, which is why I haven’t been writing.↩︎
Or 2007 in this part of the world.↩︎
You can quicksave, at least, meaning that you can turn your console off—but you can’t reload from those after a party wipe as they’re deleted when loaded.↩︎

An Archive of Your Own

2025-04-21T18:00:00+12:00

Keeping a copy of Wikipedia on your local network with Kiwix

hey can i factcheck something on your copy of wikipedia real quick

what do you mean, my copy

well the live site is overrun by chuds, i want to check the pre-2025 version you archived

i didn’t do that

what about all those urgent toots you boosted about downloading a copy

i was encouraging other people to do it, i don’t have free terabytes just lying around

it was only 19 gigs!

why didn’t you do it, then?

i thought everybody else would!

so did i!

—@pho4cexa@tiny.tilde.website

So I was setting myself up a little local intranet¹ a couple of months ago—calibre on http://ebooks.local, media on jellyfin.local etc, etc—and the power went a little bit to my head, culminating in installing an entire local copy of (English-language) Wikipedia. I don’t regret it.

I had about a thousand words here about the Interesting Times we live in,² the way this is making many people worry for the few remaining public goods on the still American-administered internet, and the ways this can and can’t be resisted. I still have those thoughts, but even after a month of sitting on the first draft of this post they’re not particularly coherent and (while I’m happy to help you cross-check things should our horrible future eventuate) the fact remains that I did it because I could.

There are a few options for a Wikipedia mirror that I can think of. You could scrape the site itself, but aside for this being inconvenient for you it’s also just really rude. Wikimedia does offer database and source dumps for its wikis, which is a much more reasonable prospect, however setting up my own real Wikipedia (or developing a custom way to render that data) sounds like a lot of work. Instead, you can take advantage of mahi already done by other projects over the last couple of decades.

One of systems you see mentioned is XOWA, which unfortunately does not seem to be updated anymore.³ The more well-known alternative is Kiwix,⁴ which was originally intended to provide on-device rendering of Wikipedia in developing countries with poor internet but which has expanded to include many other sites and includes a server—allowing what I want to do, which is install it on one machine and read from others.

I had already installed the desktop version to play around with, and used it to download a zim file of the top 100 articles. This works perfectly but was more than 300MB, which is a bad ratio considering that there are nearly 7 million of the things these days! That implies a total size circa 20TB, which I don’t have in any form. So how do we get down to 19GB, per the quote at the top of this post?

Basically, those top 100 are longer than average and lavishly illustrated, including videos in some cases. Ditching all media gets that file down to just 15 megs. The full Wikipedia, including thumbnail-sized images, can be had for just 110GB, and this is what I went for.⁵

The CLI programs you’ll want for the server are in the kiwix-tools repo (I just installed the version in the debian repositories). kiwix-serve, aside from letting you pick the port etc, has an option to let you include your own main page to replace the default which I’m not a fan of. After setting up a service⁶ and the mDNS and all the other stuff that I’m deliberately trying not to get into⁷ I get this pretty neat setup at wiki.local:

As you can see I have a number of other local website copies, including Project Gutenberg⁸ and Bulbapedia;⁹ you can also see that I’ve marked them with their date, with the Wikipedia archive having already been a year old when I installed it—this isn’t a deliberate choice on my part, they just don’t update it that often.

Now, pros and cons before I waffle on again. The two most important aspects to me are whether it’s a good citizen, playing nice with other things on the same server, and whether I actually use it. The answer is yes to both: it uses negligible CPU and RAM on the second-hand (and now decade old) mini-PC that I use for a home server, and it has replaced a lot of my use of the real websites it hosts even two months later. I don’t usually miss the larger pictures (if I need to track them down I can), and the site is fairly snappy and overall a great experience for going down rabbit-holes in particular.

There are cons, but they’re not deal-breakers to me. For some reason article titles are not rendered at the top of pages,¹⁰ meaning that if you come to them via a redirect or the random article button it may be take you a second to figure out where you are. Cross-wiki links, particularly from Wiktionary to Wikipedia, don’t connect internally and instead point to their original URLs. Article titles in italics are slightly garbled in search results, though not so that you can’t read them.

Search is where the biggest issue is, in that it’s not as tuned as we’ve come to expect over the last few decades. For example I wanted to know what the airport code YVR corresponded to, and the top five results for that search were:

YVR Sustainability¹¹
YVR–Airport station
Templeton station
Vancouver International Airport
YVR Skylynx

The answer is Vancouver International Airport, but despite “YVR” being a redirect to that page it’s not the first thing on the list. Instead this search seems entirely generated from the full text, which is actually extremely impressive given how fast it is. There is a secondary search system that works on article titles and which does place the redirect we wanted first, but I can’t figure out how to use it outside of the CLI and the drop-down on the search bar. Ultimately I think it’s fine, and I’m happy to retrain myself out of always expecting the first item given by a search to be exactly what I was looking for.

An additional piece of jank comes from our mDNS .local domains, in that not every device can access them. For example some older Android 12 devices I have—along with, more concerningly, my flatmate’s Windows 11 desktop—don’t work with that system, and instead need to be pointed to the ip address/port directly. Otherwise they work fine, and I should note that text based browsers like w3m and lynx handle it quite well not least because there is less preamble before the start of the articles proper¹². Old graphical systems may have issues with the images due to their use of the modern webp format to conserve space, but don’t let that stop you.

Should you do this? If you’re the kind of person who reads this site, then probably—I expect it’s something you could set up in an afternoon and then forget about. An alternative though is to find an old android tablet or phone, either from an e-recycler or your own cupboard of obsolete electronics, and install the Kiwix app on that with the files stored on a cheap microSD card much like this person has:

I have Kiwix and an offline copy of wikipedia on my phone, and my local Gen Z was so surprised and excited by the concept that I thought we should have a dedicated thing for it. Cheap e-reader plus 128GB SD card plus no wifi.

—@ancientjames@mastodon.social

This would be more useful to have in an extended powercut (or in the post-apocalypse, if you’re worried about that) than my desktop server solution. It’s up to you though.

What you shouldn’t do though is abandon the public internet to the chuds. An old copy of Wikipedia will still be useful, at least for some purposes, for many years, but we deserve the up-to-date version that—by some miracle—has survived more than two decades. You don’t need me to tell you to make your own website or tip your instance admin, but maybe we all also need to volunteer to edit some articles from time to time.

Without going into details, I adapted this post more-or-less wholesale to allow the same physical server be pointed to by different mDNS .local domains, except for the subdomain aspect.↩︎
We’re not even done with the last set! I call BS.↩︎
Assuming the software itself still works you should be able to construct an up-to-date copy of the files needed from the aforementioned database dumps, but that’s a lot of work that we shan’t be bothering with.↩︎
One thing that bugs me about Kiwix is that I don’t know why it’s called that, save as a play on ‘Wiki’. I’m inherently suspicious of anyone using a Kiwi (the bird, not the fruit; that’s a whole other can of worms.) for a mascot without a clear connection to Aotearoa New Zealand—in this case the project appears to originally be French.↩︎
I can’t actually find a 19GB copy of the Kiwix ‘nopic’ file; the current version is 50GB which seems way too large. You can get a download of approximately that size as compressed XML but then you’d need to do some processing, and you can also get much smaller files that only include the introductory sections of every article or only the articles in a particular category. But I had space for the big one and I suspect so do you.↩︎
The ExecStart on my systemd service looks something like /usr/bin/kiwix-serve --library -p 8097 -z -c /path/to/kiwix/index.html -t 2 -L 6 /path/to/kiwix/library.xml, where --library means it points to an xml library file created with kiwix-manage rather than a list of zim files, -p 8097 is the port, -z shortens URLs to remove the date part of the filename, -c /path/to/kiwix/index.html is the handmade front page, -t 2 limits the threads used by the program, -L 6 limits the number of connections per IP, and /path/to/kiwix/library.xml is the aforementioned library.↩︎
Feel free to ask me for details however.↩︎
About 85Gb, if you’re wondering. The rest are much smaller.↩︎
Yes I have a direct link to the type chart, I’m not remembering that thing.↩︎
This differs between wikis, with many others not having this limitation. Perhaps an over-zealous attempt the get the file sizes down?↩︎
As it happens the first item, “YVR Sustainability”, has been merged with and redirected to Vancouver International Airport since this copy was created.↩︎
If you’ve previously tried to browse Wikipedia—or many other websites—this way you know what I mean.↩︎

The Legend of Linkle

2025-03-16T15:45:00+13:00

On finishing an RPG

I don’t finish a lot of games, I’ve noticed. This didn’t use to be a problem, on account of growing up with non-narrative games, but as the unfinished RPG saves have piled up in more recent years it’s become undeniable—so it’s important to mark when one is completed.

For the last few months I’ve been playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past for the Super Nintendo, on my definitely real SNES with my definitely real cartridge. Of course, if I were emulating I’m sure my sync scripts would have been very useful for shuttling saves between my TV and handheld, but of course I would never do such a thing officer. Regardless of hardware though it’s been a fun time, they should make more of these.

I did have some things to put down though (minimal spoilers). First: I’m still bad at boss fights, even in this game not known for its difficulty. I used a walkthrough fairly extensively when it came to the bosses, which meant I only had to get help with the Moldorm, but watching someone who actually knows what they’re doing just pick up the controller and ace it (and then apologising, not realising that was exactly what I wanted them to do after my better part of an hour of struggling) was enlightening. I’m not picking up a Souls game any time soon, give me an all-puzzle Zelda instead.¹

I can’t help comparing it with the only other game in this series that I’ve ever actually finished, which was Link’s Awakening sometime last year. I missed the more flexible saving and the miniboss teleporters from that game, but the SNES game is just more. I’ve also played maybe half of Breath of the Wild but famously that’s very different. Stunning vistas are cool and all but I found I was just messing around after a while (the same problem I had with Skyrim—a total disregard and in that case ultimately contempt for the plot, in favour of playing it as a camping simulator). This game was pretty but not distractingly so.

I’ve never played Hyrule Warriors, or any other game with Linkle in it, but they did give me the option to name my character and who am I to say no?

I don’t really want to know the lore, when it comes down to it, but I really don’t understand what the difference between Ganon and Ganondorf is supposed to be. Is one of them a pig for some reason? Which one was I even fighting? And for that matter, is the Dark World also the Past in the title of the game? Shouldn’t Oracle of Ages be called that instead? Mysteries abound. Maybe I should have paid more attention in the cutscenes.

Next up on Petra Actually Finishes Old Games: a completely different kid-saves-the-world RPG, which I may or may not talk about when I’m done. But I felt this one was important.

That said, I used the walkthrough on puzzles too from time to time, I’m not going to claim to be good at videogames in any form.↩︎

5 Years with FreshRSS

2025-03-07T12:15:00+13:00

Time to read

Did you know: Google Reader has been dead longer than it was ever alive?

Actually, we passed that milestone a while ago: being shut down on the first of July 2013, GR lasted just shy of 7 years and 9 months, and it’s now been solidly over a decade since the party ended. In the intervening period a lot of news sites have stopped maintaining their RSS feeds properly, while the old Blogosphere has withered and in many cases been replaced with paid email ‘newsletters’. Still, there are those of us that never got over the format (seriously, you want to get this stuff in your email client?) and had to search for a new place to read our remaining feeds.

Five years ago now I wrote Adventures in the Twilight Years of RSS about my journey to that point—from alternate web services to self-hosting, via an extended digression in an ereader-based system. I had just spun up a FreshRSS server a few months earlier and was still feeling things out.

Well, I’m very happy to say that I’m still using that same system, five whole years later. It’s going great!

Fundamentally, it’s a web-based feed reader (functionally meaning that you can access it, synchronised, between devices) while lacking the subscription restrictions and ads you tend to get on centrally-hosted services. I’ve enjoyed watching development over on the github repository—it’s one of very few pieces of technology I look forward to improvements in anymore—and if only I knew any PHP I’d chip in.

The UI hasn’t changed much in all that time, but why should it? Actual features have certainly improved—including running requests in parallel, more powerful searching, and better extraction of full text—and that’s what we’re here for. The community is fine,¹ there are a large number of compatible apps due to supporting two common APIs, and you can follow as many feeds as you like (I have more than 500). Ultimately these are all the features I strictly need, though others are still appreciated like the one that powers my shares feed.

Performance was perfectly fine on the rather oversubscribed linode I used to host it on; now on my home ‘server’ (a now decade-old mini PC under my monitor) it may as well not even be running for all the CPU it seems to use.² On the client side Firefox tells me that a FreshRSS tab with an article open uses 64MB of RAM to render, which may seem like a lot but it’s only about three times what a page on my entirely non-interactive website needs so I’ll call it a win; the actual page size is in the tens of kilobytes so this is definitely ancient MacBook compatible.

Nothing is perfect of course: I’d like some better tools to manage subscriptions for one, but that’s improved over the years and I’m sure will further. And while there are so many apps, I’ve grown used to the specific ergonomics of the no-longer-developed Android app Readably³—but that’s not the fault of FreshRSS.

There is one extra drawback though to using any self-hosted solution: I want to recommend RSS readers to almost everyone, but a setup like this (while neat) is not something I can suggest to almost anyone. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve had that problem… well, I could pay for a month or so’s hosting, for sure.

Recently though I’ve been using Inoreader for a few things that I follow for work, and which therefore need the mental cordon away from the rest of my feeds. I picked this service pretty much at random, there’s plenty of others out there: Feedbin, Feedly, The Old Reader, etcetera (and of course there are local programs, but not on a work laptop). Inoreader, on a free account, is… fine!⁴ Absolutely usable in a way I’d be prepared to recommend to someone else. I strongly suspect the others are similar.

This is great, because I’m only more convinced that RSS readers are more important than ever in these unprecedented times.⁵ People love to scroll, and this is a better scrolling.

It’s also better for a web kept out of the hands of big companies run by what seems to be a crystallising class of (primarily) American oligarchs. In the name of spam prevention, email is controlled by a few big enterprises—being subscription based the same incentives do not apply to RSS, making it vastly easier for independent tools to survive. Blogs backed by RSS are much more portable than “newsletters” backed by emails, and that is going to matter.

I signed off the earlier post with I hope that RSS will continue to linger in its perpetual twilight. Now I need it to do more than that, and so I need us to get it there. We need to encourage writers to include proper feeds, and we need to encourage readers to use them. And we also need to catch up on reading the sites we follow, so I should probably get on that.

This is a problem in open source.↩︎
FWIW the only “migration” I did was to download the OPML backup and uploaded it to the new server. Backing up the SQL database itself is an option, but not necessary, as favourites and other feed-specific settings carry over without it.↩︎
I’m baffled that swiping back and forwards between articles seems to be so rare.↩︎
Between draft and publication of this post they seem to have launched an “Inoreader Intelligence” tool that summarises articles for you, which as an LLM-minimalist I’m not super fond of, but we’ve reached the point in the hype cycle where companies have realised that these things cost money and so it doesn’t seem to affect the free tier—save for a large and useless button at the top of every article. If I decide it’s too annoying I’ll just switch to a different reader.↩︎
No, not the These Unprecedented Times of five years ago, these ones.↩︎

Civilization: Revolution

2025-02-23T10:30:00+13:00

is plenty addictive enough

I’m hearing there’s a new Civilization game out—when did they get up to seven? Presumably sometime after six, which I barely played,¹ so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that I’m not going to be buying it any time soon. And yet I did buy a Civ game recently, and I’ve been playing it a fair bit. 2008’s Civilization: Revolution for the Nintendo DS, to be precise.

“My” childhood Civilization game was III, which originally came out in 2001—although I only got it in the latter part of that decade, well after IV was already out. It was a birthday present from a friend, presumably from a bargain bin and without expansions, and over the next few years it joined a small rotation of games I played endlessly. In comparison with later iterations Civ III is incredibly simplistic, being before the introduction of such staples as city-states and religions, yet it is definitely A Civ. To the point where I had to learn not to dehydrate myself while playing.

My DS context, meanwhile, is… not having one until last year. I’ve got a lot of catching up on the classics to do.

Civ Rev came out closer to V than even to IV, and yet it feels more like a simplified version of III to me. That may well have been quite disappointing to players at the time but I really like it. It has no city states, no religions, but also no unit maintenance, or workers (which I hear VII has also removed, but for different reasons), or even tile improvements at all beyond roads between cities. I’d like more nuanced diplomacy options and some level of map customisation,² but you take what you can get.

So what can you do? You pick from a (small) list of civs/leaders, along with a difficulty level, but that’s all.³ You’re dropped into a map at 4000 BC with a single settler, as per usual, and assuming you don’t do anything funny you’ll auto-advance turns until your first warrior appears and you can start exploring.

The map is top-down 2D with square cells, which I don’t think Civ has done since the second game went isometric, and is topologically cylindrical with irregular ice walls at each “pole”. The layout of the main continent is a maze of twisty little little peninsulas and isthmuses, all alike (seriously, it gets quite monotonous after a few games). I get the vibe of a Perlin noise algorithm with minimal additional tuning to avoid overtaxing the tiny DS CPU.

You explore and expand more-or-less as normal, but with such a limited subset of mechanics most of what remains is the conflict. At least in my experience the other civs are constantly trying to extort you for your technology or financial reserves, however they often back down if you call their bluff. When they don’t it becomes extremely confusing to determine which players you’re actually at war with. With a diplomacy system so impenetrable you might just want to stay fighting everyone all at once, provided you’re not a democracy. That government, otherwise completely OP, has for its drawback a prohibition on the declaration of war—not stated is that if ever offered peace without strings attached the senate⁴ will force you to take it. If you want to stay at war without random interruptions you should probably switch to Monarchy. I always enjoy the mechanics given to government types in these early Civ games, they have such a ‘baby’s first social studies class’ vibe.

If you prefer to give peace a chance you can still win via your standard Technology, Cultural, or Economic victories: in this case Economic merely requires becoming sufficiently rich, and then building the World Bank;⁵ Cultural requires the construction of a certain number of wonders/acquisition of a certain number of Great People/culture flips of enough cities, followed by the construction of the United Nations; Technology of course needs all the techs plus launching a multi-component colony ship. And you can win on score if the game goes on too long, I guess.

Domination, though, is more fun, which means that (even though I tend to be a fairly pacifist player in games that give me the option) I’m quite aggressive here. And ‘fun’ is the operative word: despite the lack of features I really enjoy this game. The typical loop is a period of exploration, a period of scrambling to defend against a bellicose neighbour when, and then a period of snowballing to conquer the whole world. This is all I really want out of a Civ game. Extra mechanics are just gravy, dubiously worth the hundred dollars they cost new.

Civilization games aren’t really historical simulations, and I’m not sure they even could be if they tried. The extra features of the PC games have diminishing returns, and it turns out that you don’t need any of them for Civ’s primary function: making you forget what time it is in pursuit of Just One More Turn.

One more turn to find them; one more turn to bring them all and in the darkness bind them… Uh, you get the idea. It’s incredibly easy to lose upwards of 45 minutes between tasks when you have a good game going, and were only intending a quick break. What do they put in these games?

Regardless, I don’t think I’ll be buying Civilization VII, certainly not any time soon. I have what I need, on a pink DSi I can fit in my pocket. The real struggle turns out to be putting it down.

Steam claims I played less than 12 hours of VI, and for that matter just shy of a hundred hours of V—pathetic numbers.↩︎
If you know anything about the Game of the Week maps, especially a way to load them the better part of 20 years later, let me know.↩︎
Despite all that III as a kid I’ve never had much luck with a difficulty above Warlord—but it might be time.↩︎
A mechanic otherwise unmentioned anywhere else in this version of Civ, as far as I can tell.↩︎
What does that say? Quite a lot, with extra irony in 2025.↩︎