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a Spinal Tap sequel
Wednesday, September 17 2025
It's important to me to make it so all the web apps I create work great on old Chromebooks. I spend a substantial fraction of my web time on these apps, and it's possible that fraction will increase. So if I can keep my code working on older Chromebooks, then the four or five of them that I have (and the millions owned by others) do not have to be eWaste. If retaining this compatibility were difficult to do, maybe I wouldn't bother. But it is easy, especially if you are not using web frameworks and limit your dependencies on the works of others.
One dependency I am using, though, seems hell-bent on maximizing the production of eWast, and that dependency is the Google Maps API. This makes sense, I suppose, since Google wants people to buy new Chromebooks, and Chromebooks are particularly vulnerable to being rendered obsolete by evolving Javascript standards. This is because Google can unilaterally cut off OS upgrade paths to specific Chromebook hardware, at which point their browsers are stuck with whatever Javascript existed when those upgrades were turned off. It was possible that getting around this issue was going to be difficult and I was just going to have to live with maps not working in my ESP8266 Remote Control system when using an old Chromebook. In the past I might've left things there, since Googling a solution to this problem and implementing it would take days. But now that I have ChatGPT, something that listens in detail to my questions and can answer in detail, including blocks of working code, it costs little to ask it what to do in this situation. So I asked what other mapping APIs are available that will work on older Chromebooks. It came back with a number of suggestions, the best of which was to use Open Street Maps. I then pasted in the content of my existing map.js file (which uses the Google Maps API) and asked it to redo it using OpenStreetMap. The resulting code didn't work, but this was only because ChatGPT bungled my system for passing various time-slice parameters to the backend. Once I'd fixed that, the OpenStreetMap worked great and actually looked better than Google Maps. But now there was no satellite view.
So later, once I got home from work, I asked ChatGPT how to implement a satellite layer. It immediately came back with a way to show satellite tiles that I'd never seen before (these were taken in the growing season and were very green, whereas the Google Maps satellite tiles looked to have been taken in late winter or early spring). Then it turned out that adding back layers from Google maps was also possible, though of course these will only work in newer versions of Chrome (that is, not on old Chromebooks). By this evening I was able to flip between five or six different layers, two of which were satellite views taken in different seasons. This provided a much better sense of the landscape than Google Maps alone. I was delighted that my insistence on supporting old Chromebooks had taken me down a surprisingly-painless path that had greatly increased the functionality of the mapping component of what has become a generic data logging and visualization web app.
Soon after getting home from work today, I took Charlotte for a boring walk up the Farm Road. Near its southern end, I gathered some nice well-weathered bluestone pieces from very close to the road that had been lightly concealed beneath accumulated leaf litter. As I was doing this, I realized there is essentially an endless supply of such stone right there in a particularly convenient place. On the side of the Farm Road, I stacked up a pile of about as much as I feel safe carrying in the Bolt and later tonight returned to pick it up.
Tonight Gretchen and I would be going to the Hudson Valley Mall (which is now just a hollowed-out husk containing a handful of businesses) to see the new Spinal Tap sequel (the original having come out in 1984). Before that, though, we dined at La Florentina, where we had the sformato with tahini sauce (the only entrée we ever get there) after first sharing a salad and a steam-filled bread. I also had a glass of red wine, though they no longer have the Montepulciano I normally order there. We arrived at six and were the first of the dinner crowd, followed by some people with a dog in a familiar-looking "service animal" vest (we have one for Neville, though it has yet to succeed in getting him into places where dogs are not allowed). The sformato, by the way, was noticeably inferior to the way its been in the past. It needed much more tahini.
As for the new Spinal Tap movie, The End Continues, Gretchen's hopes were very high, so it was inevitably a disappointment. The heroes of the first movie are played by the same actors, now men in their mid-70s. They looked like rock stars at the twilight of their career, and much of their material was unchanged from the 1984 movie (in keeping with how this works with real rock stars). But the jokes were less frequent, with too many lingering shots. Some of the best laughs were actually reprises of jokes from the first movie, such as the intro to the song "Stonehenge." In an effort to goose buzz for the movie, it included a fair number of cameos of real rock stars such as Questlove, Lars Ulrich, Paul McCartney, and Elton John. Paul McCartney in particular spends a lot of time on screen, but those scenes are the least funny and he adds nothing to them. I'd anticipated the disappointment I was feeling and had smuggled in a flask of scotch, which I began sipping the moment the theatre went dark. In keeping with the ongoing death spiral of movie theatres, there were only three other couples in the theatre watching the movie with us.
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