💾 Archived View for gem.hack.org › mc › log › 2023-02-09.gmi captured on 2024-07-08 at 23:31:25. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

View Raw

More Information

⬅️ Previous capture (2023-04-19)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

2023-02-09

Evening! Almost midnight here.

Mom turns 75

Mom turned 75! It was kind of a thing. Me, P #1, and #3 went by the night train to Hudiksvall to celebrate. Didn't sleep that much on the night train, but perhaps a little more than usual. After our connection in Stockholm I slept some more on an ordinary train.

We stayed at a hotel but celebrated in mom's flat with some good food, wine, and brandy.

Skiing in Vemdalen

Me and #1 then went on a bus straight across the country to Vemdalen, Härjedalen (Vemdalsskalet, Björnrike and Klövsjö/Storhogna is one big system with a free bus between them) to ski for a week. P and #3 went back to Malmö. I had all my ski stuff with me so it was quite the trip. We rented for #1.

I don't think you're supposed to come by bus (or train) since we were dropped ~4 km from the cottage we were going to stay in in the middle of nowhere, with skis and ski boots, and stuff. Then the key to cottage was apparently in some contraption about ~2 km from the cottage. Nothing about this was visible when booking. I did managed to check that there was a grocery close to the cottage, though. But that didn't help me standing there, so I called a cab!

Skiing was fine. We had nice weather most days except one when it was too foggy to ski. We cooked nice food, watched movies, used the sauna, drank beer, and talked a lot instead. Life was good.

Temperature most days was about -10C to -5C except one day when it suddenly dropped to -15C. We didn't ski for long that day.

I had some idea I would spend some of the time in the evening working on my own computer projects, but I didn't touch it much!

Did I mention a sauna? We used it every day!

We went home with a night train as well. A little trip with a connecting bus from Björnrike and then on a very small train to Östersund where it connected to a loooong train coming from Åre. I think it was something like 14 carriages!

Managed to sleep even better this time, actually, but took Monday off anyway.

When I think about my time in the ski cottage I wonder why I live in the south of Sweden...

Even found a small coworking space in central Vemdalen village!

http://ivc-media.com/hyra.htm

An interesting historical note on that page tells us (in Swedish) about the "Härjedalens Telestuga" that was a sort of very local personal computer center founded in 1984. It provided access to computers and computer education to all sorts of people and they say that the Vemdalen village once had more computers per capita then any other place in Sweden!

Found some photos from the Telestuga in the -80's:

https://jlm.kulturhotell.se/items/keywords/telestugan/

Looks like Victor computers to me. They ran MS-DOS but weren't 100% PC compatible.

Movies

One of the evenings I watched first "The KGB, the computer, and me" about Cliff Stoll "stalking the wily hacker", a goofy documentary NOVA did with the real people from Cliff Stoll's "The cuckoo's egg". I've watched it before and I really love how Cliff himself is much closer to a hacker archetype than the one he chases! And I love the views of the machine room at LBL.

Directly after I watched "23 Nichts ist so wie es scheint", a movie mostly about Karl "Hagbard" Koch on the other side in the KGB Hack. I didn't have subtitles (I do now, thank you!) so I tried to follow along in German. It went pretty good, I think, even though I didn't catch every detail.

I know "23" has been criticised by friends of Karl for being erroneous and exploitive but I think it's a rather good movie in itself. I don't understand why they made up David from the real people Pengo and Urmel (who both even show up briefly in the NOVA documentary).

I would really love to hear the KGB Hack story from Pengo and Urmel's view. Anyone got any links? In German is probably OK.

X11 Window Managers

Many years ago I wrote a window manager for X11:

https://github.com/mchackorg/mcwm

Haven't touched it in years, mainly because I don't use X11 anymore.

I got a mail from nowhere that pointed out a memory leak in mcwm. We discussed for a while and found the likely leak. Nice to know someone uses things I did.

On the other hand, the same person rewrote the entire thing in what appears to be a very clean way in C++:

https://codeberg.org/Glowcode/cxwm

Have a look!

mc,

Setting Orange, the 40 day of Chaos in the YOLD 3189

mc

mc's gemlog