There is a Stargate movie, three TV series’ and some feature length specials. It is not necessarily obvious what order to watch them in. There is a suggested order available on several websites, but they are usually hard to read because of ads.

This is just a table designed to be easy to read.

The strategy for handling the overlapping seasons of SG-1 and Atlantis is to alternate episodes, while keeping two-part episodes together.

I have four blogs running the same theme that each feature a letter as the favicon. I hoped they would spell out a word.

This is of course the motto of the Ankh-Morpork Post Office.

Neither rain nor snow nor gl om of ni t can stay these mes engers abo t their duty.

If you’d like to more consider Going Postal by Terry Pratchett.

• Read
• Listen
• Watch

I have now imported posts from my very first blog, which was in fact the very first content I hosted on OliverBrown.me.uk.

It is almost entirely personal content with evidence of some of my early attempts to make money online.

As with the LiveJournal content, it is available in its own section I decided to call phpdiary. I didn’t really give it a name at the time but it was implemented as a bunch plain text files for each post rendered with a PHP script called diary.php.

Somewhat awkwardly the posts did not have titles and Hugo (or at least this theme) does not work well without them. So they are titled after the date of the post (and often the time since I tended to post several times a day).

I don’t think I have any more older posts to add, so it seems this post from December 2003 will stay my oldest post, meaning I now have over 20 years of content.

Before I hosted my own content in various forms, I maintained a LiveJournal which is still available at https://galaxiaguy.livejournal.com (although I warn you, when I looked at it today it was full of Russian Bitcoin related ads).

I have finally imported the missing posts from this.

There weren’t many so I just did it manually. I even went to the effort of updating my theme to include “mood” and “music” in my post front matter and it add it to theme (these were very important to LiveJournal back in the day).

The posts are all part of the normal flow (and currently start around page 56). There is a bit of duplicated content as I posted some content to both places for a few days. Either way, the imported content is available in isolation in the LiveJournal section.

One interesting consequence is I have changed the copyright start year for the blog from “2005” to 2004".

My blog has been through a lot. At some point I may try and make a coherent timeline, if only for my own benefit.

Content has been migrated from platform to platform, and format to format. Some of it got broken along the way. This resulted in some of the posts just being blank. I finally went back and found them all and manually reinstated the content.

I doubt this will be of any interest to anyone except me or people who know me, but it may be nostalgic for anyone else who was doing web development in 2005.

Personally, my writing style from back then makes me uncomfortable, and it is not helped by the fact I’ve left some of my spelling errors intact.

After realising that I’ve been blogging for nearly 19 years, and that I have lot of old content with many broken links, I decided to add support for Wayback Machine links.

The Wayback Machine (part of the Internet Archive) archives web pages for posterity, and importantly, tries to archive many versions over time.

At the bottom of each my posts is now a section that links to the archived version of the page, as of the date of the post. This will attempt to show the latest archived version of the page before that date.

In practice many pages did not get archived, or the archived version may not contain the exact content on the day I wrote the post, but it is better than nothing.

To keep this service alive (along with other activities of the Internet Archive), please consider donating.

Some time ago I migrated my blog from WordPress (hosted on WordPress.com) to Hugo (hosted on Azure Static Web Apps). Over the past week I did the same for my wife’s blog.

The process went well. The Hugo site has pretty good docs for migrating to Hugo from various other platforms. The exact steps I took were:

1. Export content from Wordpress.
2. Generate Hugo content from the export using blog2md.
3. Upload to GitHub.
4. Create an Azure Static Web app (which as detailed before creates a build pipeline and deploys to an autogenerated Azure domain).
5. Browse the site and fix any broken content.
6. Add any custom functionality desired to the theme files.
7. Update the domain to point at the Azure instance.

The new blog is available at www.luliriisi.me.uk (the original is still available at luliriisi.wordpress.com).

Sharing themes

That “custom functionality” is of course optional, and a potential rabbit hole depending on your exact needs. In the case of my wife’s blog, because she is a hand-knitting pattern designer I added some templating for sharing her patterns easily.

And, because the core theme is shared with this blog (and Games with Gravitas), that functionality is also available here - which is why I can easily add one of her patterns to this post.

The phrase “GNU Terry Pratchett” originates from one of the Discworld novels, “Going Postal,” where it is used as a code or message passed between characters to remember the deceased.

Specifically, there is a communication system known as “the clacks”, and there part of the way that system works involves additional metadata messages being sent (known as “the overhead”).

I only recently discovered that people have been embedding that message in all sorts of things as a way to memorialize Terry. One of the places they do this in the headers of websites.

So, you will now see an additional header in all the HTTP responses on this site:

X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett

After investigating Star Trek episode titles with interesting characters, lets look at ones with interesting words.

Numbers

I already included this as a side note in the previous post, but many episodes have numbers as words, with each series having at least one.

Ordinals

Non-English words

This is probably the collection that caused me the most difficulty in deciding what should be included.

I settled on:

• Actual words (no 11:59 or E²)
• Real word languages
• Not proper nouns (especially names of characters)

Considering all that, there are in fact only two non-English languages used in the titles of Star Trek episodes:

French

Latin

Honorable mentions

One Klingon word, and one Vulcan word that is only probably a proper noun.

Character names

Who has the privilege of being named in an episode title? Again, there are surprising edge cases so I’ve split it up into several groups.

• Q appears in the most titles.
• Two titles mention two characters: Datalore and Ménage à Troi (which I assumed, in the spirit of the episode, is a reference to both Deanna Troi and Lwaxana Troi).

Direct character references

Definite direct references to characters in Star Trek.

Other characters

References to people, either fictional or real that were not actually characters in Star Trek.

Indirect

Indirect references to characters that are awkward in some way.

Accidental

Character names that are not intended to be references to Star Trek characters. Mainly The Doctor from Voyager, but also Q2 which was the script name for the member of the Q Continuum in the TNG episode Deja Q.

One

There is one special character name that is clearly not intended to be a reference, but comes up a lot - One from Voyager.

Q

And finally, the letter Q appears a few times while clearly not being a reference to Q.

Just the character

One bonus list considering all the above - titles that are just a character name.

New audio versions of all* of the Discworld books are being produced. I’ve made a few posts tracking the release dates. Since then I’ve updated the blog to support nice sortable tables.

So here are the the books listed on Audible as of 21st May, 2023 in a single table (now with primary narrator). All columns should be usefully sortable.

If you don’t already have an Audible membership, you can get a 30-day free trial (UK).

New Discworld audiobook release dates

* There are 41 Discworld books. The website says “40 magnificent new recordings”. The one that seems to be missing is “The Last Hero”.