Tidbits and notions. Stuff and blither. News and snooze. This little gmiphloglet be short and more mirth than matter.
I read a bit about Little Rock, AR last night. There’s a composer I kind of like, Florence Price, who was born there in the 1880’s. She’s a very Americanist composer, more subtle than Copland and more traditional than Gershwin. Price’s 3rd symphony is very enjoyable, tells wordless stories. Her father was black, mother was white. They were successful middle class people in a mixed town at the time. “Pepper and salt” town, they called it. She went away for college and got married. When Price returned to Little Rock circa 1900, Little Rock had been segregated. It’s still de facto segregated over 100 years later, when it used to be a town where races mixed more or less contentedly. Eventually Florence Price fled to Chicago and never returned. I wanted to know what that was like for her. Her home town got worse and just stayed that way.
To this day, it’s said there’s no political will to change things in Little Rock. It’s even getting worse, with the schools more and more segregated and the black schools “somehow” get no funding. The civil rights movement changed nothing for Little Rock. How sad Florence Price might be to see that. Things just got worse and stayed worse. Her world shrank until she had to leave her home, her family, everything. No room to breathe.
The bullies won.
https://www.collision-recon.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/EDR-Supported-Vehicles-List.pdf
EDR’s often record every move a driver makes. Newer cars connect these to “telematics transceivers” which report this data for surveillance by car companies and their “partners”. This has been deeply underreported. And the cattle chew their cud…
I’ll never get to see Gordon Lightfoot in concert now. So strange to see that whole generation start to end. The lessons they take with them, the memory of a time which in some ways was better than this era. Lightfoot gave voice to Canada in some way. It’s hard to fathom what it truly collectively means when such standards are cut down.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
This was insanely terrifying, and it has nothing to do with platitudes about “kids these days” or “change happens”. Black box obfuscation has reached the point where children no longer know what a file nor folder is. That is, the cult of novelty plays handmaiden to power to the extent that the basic functions of computing and organization are alien to humans raised ensconced in the machine. These children have no ability to search, never mind research. Obtuseness has rendered them functionally illiterate. We are now beyond the point of human cultural continuity in the mainstream where children are fed preformed pap by the robotic teat. To prevent children from deep education afforded in a tradition of cultivation is child abuse. We are to that point now.
Courtesy of Solderpunk, a delightful reading of counterculture online tendencies in the GenZ era. It only entrenches my feeling that what smolnet/pubnix represent is less a counterculture than a demimonde: a lumpenspace standing apart, neither recuperated nor counter, from the mainstream hegemonies.
republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-18__Small_Internet_Manifesto.txt
I swear I’ve never read Spring before. But the resonance is undeniable; he says in a few sentences what it takes me pages not to quite say. Bravo. How weird that so many of us have drifted to this forum in similar interest, inquiry, and conviction.
I just stuffed my face with half again more than my daily ration of cornpone whilst watching a film on the Holodomor. In a winter like this, my ancestors would have eaten a handful of wild grains at best. If that isn’t progress, what is.
I pity kids now, on the whole, I really do. This shit is out of control. None of these parents knows how what they are doing is pure abuse and lacking in all sense for their family privacy. Morons skipping down the primrose path to totalitarianism.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/cubesat
https://swarm.space/product/swarm-m138-modem/
There’s no getting away from it now. Still, the price is amazing and that bit of spectrum is quite handy…
https://www.ebay.com/itm/325024155691
A harpsichord made by legendary Star Trek designer Wah Chang, for sale on eBay.
I’ve tried to enjoy Robert Frost, whose birthday it be, but I cannot somehow. I find him laden with a touch of the supercilious or sarcastic. The “good fences” and “road less travelled” gimmick. It’s a very modern smirk of morose fatalism masquing as wit. The more I tune it in, the more it puts me off.
And then there’s the cult of Frost, which largely ignores all this in favour of a self conscious Americanism. Acritical provincial mediocrity as the eternal refuge of scoundrels.
https://invidious.flokinet.to/watch?v=rTFr1BVyzFA&listen=false
Kikuchi Haruka plays flaming hot trombone in Tiger Rag.
“Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?'”
― Kurt Vonnegut, "Slaughterhouse-Five"
https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/17/heres-how-to-participate-in-mondays-oral-arguments/
Intellectual “property” is theft, and out of control.
“Tiny human friendly protocols like Gopher, Gemini, Finger, Spartan;
human friendly protocols like Gopher, Gemini, Finger, Spartan. They
are smol because they are smol because they are smol because they are
smol because they are smol because they are smol because
……(* 30)……
because they
Yow!”
republic.circumlunar.space/0/~joneworlds/three-gophers.txt
Joneworlds’ Three Gophers selects 3 random sentences from gopherholes at Republic.Circumlunar.Space, then mashes them together. A delight, and often quite silly.
https://www.dmarcly.com/blog/what-is-rua-in-dmarc-dmarc-rua-tag-explained
Primer on DMARC doohickey.
https://gist.github.com/howyay/57982e6ba9eedd3a5662c518f1b985c7
Setting up a postfix+dovecot dkim server combo. A lovely, clean tutorial.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/lasers-used-to-guide-lightning-strikes-to-a-safe-target/
Laser ion trail to help Lightning find somewhere nicer to strike.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47520122/bash-how-do-you-sort-within-the-lines-of-a-text-file
Sort.
https://www.howtogeek.com/775824/how-to-use-the-linux-cut-command/
Cut! Print() wrap.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/112194/identifying-and-moving-fields-in-a-line
https://www.howtogeek.com/812494/bash-string-manipulation/
Moving a string within a line. Perl and bash loops.
https://github.com/codenameyau/sed-awk-cheatsheet
The sed/awk cheat sheet. Lovely.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/525592/find-and-replace-inside-a-text-file-from-a-bash-command
Right Sed Fred. Options for find and replace strings in bash.
A smashing rundown on rsync.
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs
Don’t use ls in scripts because it’s intentionally b0rked not to allow this properly even though it’s probably the tool almost everyone at every level who uses *nix knows best. 🤦🏽♀️
https://legasovtapetranslation.blogspot.com/
English translations of Valery Legasov’s memoir samizdat tapes.
https://truthout.org/articles/the-nuclear-war-in-ukraine-may-not-be-the-one-we-expect/
We don’t deserve the power we have. It’s on our entire species, this responsibility, this wretched doom.
…is where the action is.
I’ve lately taken to calling smolnet/pubnix a counterculture. I was wrong. Small online communities are only truly valuable when they are demimondes. Countercultures live locked in mimesis; this is a highfalootin’ word for how 60’s hippies became 80’s corpo drones. Demimondes don’t even rise to the pretence of counterculture. Demimondes are obscure haunts for the lumpen, the untutored freaks. So too with we subterranean smolnet lumpendigirati. I think that’s QED. We here play with beloved, half-broken old toys while giants roar and the world burns. And thank the gods for that! It’s a last redoubt of simple, flawed humanity against its own monstrous posterity. Community scurrying in frightful shadow of the triumphant, insatiable hives. I am thankful. I am thankful.
A pox on all your houses, kiddies. Every two-bit ideology, every shuck and jive, every -ism. Rot them all to a dark, musty heat death. May all the gilded theories melt into thin air with all that is solid. May their true believers try to hold the centre and fail to even nudge the panhandle. May the clever tractates moulder into obscurity with the rest of all flesh, beyond even fable’s remembrance. May all of you find your mouths mute beyond all words, your hearts quiet beyond desire to speak. May all highfalootin’ ideas and goosestepping heroes find their inevitable, lonely end.
(NYT on European Hunter Gatherers (onion)
A new Nature study (behind a paywall to keep us proles uneducated) finds some finer grain in post-Neanderthal European hunter-gatherer populations, with a bottleneck around the Wurm, natch. Popular media are still representing WHG’s as dark skinned, which is an offhand supposition not very well supportable. Likely all these groups in Northern Eurasia faced hard pressure to adapt to the high latitudes. Hopefully we will learn better the peculiar diversity of mutations in time.
The Asimov.net Apple ftp server. The golden age of Apple warez, ripe for the plucking.
gopher://gopher.visiblink.ca:70/0/LXer/https:__linuxiac.com_pinetab2-linux-tablet-comes-in-april_
Pinetab2! Good for the Pine folk! The more Linux tablets the better. But the main issue isn’t hardware, but the OS. A bit more attention needs paying ($$, probably) to touchscreen interfaces before Linux tablets can take off. I hope they get the io done soon for PineTab, for instance. The good thing about Pi tablets: this works off the bench.
My Raspad is cooling his jets in sickbay, poor thing. I almost said “time out corner”, but his ailment is entirely due to mine own negligence. Meanwhile, I have been puffing up a new site for some new projects. I aim to be as organized as I can be, and thereby avoid too much drift and staleness. To that end, the projects will have clear, simple aims. If I wish to write a lot, I shall. But if that is not on, very well, I shall do the minimum, which isn’t much more than a ping and a pong. But I hope they do some decent good. So far I’m unduly pleased with myself, to see the new gophermap and index.gmi!
I messed up my Python3 install somehow. The massive CF which is the “print()” bug in Python 2>3 is not my fault. But accidentally remove-purging Python3 and apparently half of LXDE is my fault. I tapped enter, which apparently is as good as a y. So now I get to recline and reinstall from my old chip. Could be worse. But I don’t really have the bandwidth for such nonsense, personally or technically.
I got gophernicus working, in a “Hail Mary” after attempts which involved heaps pithy maritime vernacular. Molly Brown is unhappy, but I’m keen to see it work. A new fingerd is working. I intend to concentrate my folderol therein. All in all, I detest computers to-day.
I was up way too late, determined to get a new smolnet site running a bit. It needed a dollop of chmod finagling and config file wrangling. And then the new finger daemon wanted directories made by hand, but would not tell me this. Muddling with shears at yaks. But I’m glad I managed to get it done, just my bumbling self.
Safe space is merely a rhetorical weapon to enforce cruel conformity and mimetic regimes of mutual suspicion. If you join an organization and they tell you they are “like a big family”, run away quickly. If a hand wheedles into your emotions to say, “it’s ok, you can tell us, this is a safe space”, flee out of there. If a subculture trades in chest-thumping, grand ideas, call-out crusades, victimhood porn, status seeking, identity pimping, and neoVictorian rectitude, that society is ipso facto toxic. Don’t fall for their endlessly cajoling word games - the cash of the morally demented. These toys are only the red flags of cultish groupthink - a miasma peddled by narcissistic abusers and unctuous sociopaths - psychic parasites all. Run away.
The cosy living room is the best humans can do: A dose of intimate confidence moderated by quiet, caring prudence. A warm conversation sipped between flawed but empathetic friends. Anything more than convivial teatime or bedside care quickly becomes a wasteland of the heart. Find bosom friends; the body’s rest is a litmus test. Together withdraw from the voyeuristic gaze of bad faith society. It’s enough for the human being. Paul Tillich warned, “all institutions are inherently demonic”; by great Thunder, it is true.
gemini://ploum.net/2023-02-22-leaving-github.gmi
Ouch! Ploum justly takes us to task for GitHub addiction. I’ve been bad about this lately, drawn in unawares by the need to comment on projects there or track them. But it’s true: Micro$oft is eternally accurséd.
https://github.com/tobykurien/rpi_tablet_os
Toby Kurien has here a delightful write up on his fun DIY Raspi tablets. And even more, a script to install the more tablet-friendly gewgaws to a fresh Raspbian instance. I’m relieved to see I came upon similar solutions with my muddling, so I can’t be too far off course. Give his sites a looksee, Raspi pals.
https://github.com/robinsloan/spring-83
I just read about Spring83 and am quite interested. Web world gewgaws like css make my skin shiver a bit. But this seems on the right track for a smolnet weiphloging standard, if de facto. The trick for working with smolnet clients is to strip out the flashy css and such: put it on Gemini as a decent (optional, client styled) secondary layer. Like, I coo over GopherColour. But it should never be practically mandatory as a gate to text nets. Web has a way of bloating with such options. The terseness of gopher/Gemini/spartan/finger is a needful baseline. That said, the inspiration of Spring83 iin reducing weiblogging to a simple status broadcast is entirely, wonderfully smol.
I was outside after breakie, scrubbing the solar panels of snow, when a lanky posh bint in a horse drawn sled came by to offer me some Turkish Delight. Right nice of her, really.
Pound for pound, naught is as warm and cosy as a US Army woobie.
https://www.nordicom.gu.se/en/publications/teletext-europe
An entire book on the history of Teletext in Europe, by Moe and VandenBulck. The title alone makes my heart ache with delicious nostalgia.
C64 is to Varvara as gopher is to gemini. Smolness helps us muddleheaded types find lucidity. As such, smolness breeds agency.
https://qrpguys.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/afp_fsk_061921.pdf
Discussion on AFP-FSK, an optimal method for budget digital modes. Why did I never see this before? Braví, hams!
I’ve had my horns locked down on clearing out my Raspad todo list lately. Most of the obstackles have been “no armhf port” issues. Exec format errors can besar mi tukhas; when I say run, you run. My biggest coup in this regard is getting OpenJDK 19 running. I have little grokage as to what the actual differences are amongst the arm architectures. My system is 64 bit on Raspi 4B, and it seems to be able to handle aarch64 “sometimes”, if I respecify that as armhf. A deuce annoying ambiguity, but there it be. My mission is to have my Raspad happy as a field-serviceable, long term tablet. There is bally well no good reason that infotech can’t be like autos used to be: a 20 year upgrade option. In other words, time to pony up, Raspbian!
I remember a decade ago how devs were encouraged to support arm as the next thing. And yet still so much of posix land is in the Intel box. I spent all day trying to build a necessary client which had a cute appimage for every toy - except ARMHF.
Setting Linux brightness.
https://raspi.tv/2019/how-much-power-does-the-pi4b-use-power-measurements
Looking at ways to make a Raspad more power efficient, I’ve toyed with the idea of putting in a whole lower power motherboard. My preference is to keep the 4B inside. But the idling current draw on the 4B is insane. 0.575 amps is steep for presumably out of the box Raspbian idle. The above link doesn’t mention, never mind deal with, cpu frequency scaling. But my tooling about with that suggests a “simple” (if not for me) process daemon and GUI ought to make the 4B much more happy in portable use by dropping CPU Freq to 200mhz or so when the screen is off or after X seconds of no tty/mouse or whatever. I don’t mean a full blown dynamic scaler necessarily, so much as a “snooze” mode over the usual dynamic governors. Why this hasn’t been done before in posix for small computers is beyond me.
🤳🏼 Superhelpful Techytech Forums
🙋🏽♀️ Hi, I need to flip my gewgaw 45°. Please help?
👨🏻🎤 Why? I can’t imagine why anyone would ever do this.
💁🏽♀️ Because I need and want to. Can you help me?
👨🏻🎤 No, I just thought I should underscore my utter stupidity and lack of imagination.
Whenever I am sent down 7 levels of yaks to shave, I am remembered of the old Jerky Boys phone prank, wherein a harried florist keeps trying to find a person on the phone at their democile, but whichever voice she talks to always firmly insists that “First you must talk to Mr. Scott”. Is intentional dev trolling a commonplace?
🙋🏽♀️Oh, time to do snow chores. Wow, it is so cold this morrow. Too bad my thermometer broke so I don’t know the exact danger level.
🤶🏼Yes, come to my embrace, child.
(5 minutes later)
🙅🏽♀️Brrrrrr, ever… so… cold... out… there…
🤶🏼Put your hands under the bed covers.
🙎🏽♀️What’s… under the covers?
🤶🏼Pain.
🙎🏽♀️Nnngh…
🤶🏼You feel your flesh… crisping.
🙍🏽♀️The pain!
Modern social media feels so hollow and sad. I seldom come away from it with the feeling of satisfaction in sharing one may from Smolnet/Pubnix. Strange, that. Fediverse often feels like the masked Hellfire Club in Eyes Wide Shut: perverse psychological fast food, empty communal calories. I may end up deleting it. I warrant we have all seen enough of the internet to know that one can have pseudonymity and intimacy both. But parasocial media is for the birds.
https://invidious.lidarshield.cloud/watch?v=A-DPC2uBi7c&listen=false
噢，加拿大！天保護吾女王！
http://blankego.github.io/LyricPatterns/
https://github.com/blankego/LyricPatterns
Web front end for a digitally searchable 《欽定詞譜》， for finding the perfect style of 詞。
https://blankego.github.io/ids/IdsRetriever/
Ideographic Description Scheme is that lovely Unicode CJK organic combinatory pattern which really ought to be the standard for all composition and encoding of CJKVZ characters. This doohickey allows IDS lookup and character lookup as of a 字譜。
Snow. Wet, gloopy, biting snow. 春天在哪裡呀？在夓季！
5 - Charming
4 - Vexing
3 - Frightening
2 - Help!
1 - Alberta
https://invidious.lidarshield.cloud/watch?v=Q5M-5XFplo0&listen=false
Kilauea livestream. Bubbling lava!
https://invidious.lidarshield.cloud/watch?v=AiojgMBQPBM&listen=false
USGS monthly lecture (they provide a free public lecture each month!) on the Great Cascadia Earthquake of 1700.
I sometimes think about woman who wrote a book about her 6 months alone in the desert. She made the rounds. I heard her on NPR or CBC, I think. Oh, ye sweet summer babe. There’s a whole cottage industry of such Waldennabes: eat, pray, live in a tiny home, cash in. I’m not interested in joining that brigade of fame entrepreneurs. But when I do meet townies or make my necessary calls via tenuous radio links to the mainstream human world, the incredulity my casual explanations generate give me pause. Yes, I say, I am calling from a remote mountain and I’m quite snowed in. Many say they want to live in a cabin in the woods. But the thrust of society gallops in the opposite direction. I did not resolve to go Walden out of desire so much as by needfulness; it was finding a livable level. QED, the needful level of most humans today is an apartment complex. It makes me wonder for the seriousness of wistful primitivism, and just how much ecogenerative good such sentimental societal currents can do.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/device-translates-text-braille-real-time-180963171/
Good pure smol tech: a page scanner to braille display. Thunk it on a page of visual text and then read by finger. More of this, please.
Watching several videos by Case Western university on recent mitochondrialcentric theories, the camera operators flick back to show random audience members for no reason related to the talk. Why is this done? It’s more than a pet peeve: often the information on projection is needful to study, cut short by distracting cutaways to some schlump picking his nose. Is this some kind of allistic reassurance? Because when in audiences I don’t see people constantly checking to make sure other humans are still watching too. It’s difficult enough when videographers cut to focussing on the presenter. They really need to just set up a camera and knock it off. Put a small inset screen with the presenter’s face if humans need that irrelevance. But the main screens should present the chatauqua diagrams, pics, and charts.
Reich - A Tale of Two Subcontinents (Invidious)
A fascinating look at recent hominid paleogenetics by comparison of two similar subcontinental populations: Europe and India. Both are formed from recent amalgams of 3 divergent populations - autochthonous foragers, Neolithic farmers, and the steppe nomads. But these were very different populations, save the ANE/IE. “Western Anatolian farmers were as different from Ancient Iranian farmers as Europeans are from East Asians to-day”. Recent millennia mostly enabled a breathtaking amalgamation of Mesolithic genetic diversity.
Notable is what Reich is too politically tactful to explicitly state: the confirmation of a correlation between male replacement & relative diversity decline (due to mass sex slavery of native women by elite invaders), wealth inequality, rigid caste formation, absolute warfare, and the spread of the Indo-Europeans. (I don’t blame him for wanting to avoid headlines.) Institutional mass rape / polygyny was a recent innovation, a tool of genocidal warfare which assured the IE supremacy. In Iberia, rates of Y chromosome replacement approach 100% in a population now 40% ANE ancestry by genetic totals. The NHG invented total war, but the ANE/IE steppe people perfected it - by literal rapine. In India, where the steppe invaders faced a larger subject population, there is a strong 4.5ky long maintenance of steppe genes with higher caste, with steppe people’s genes between 30-70% depending on caste-population. The Laws of Manu represent the ideological justification for calcification of ethnic subjugation as a form of unequal armistice.
My major takeaway is strong support for the idea that after perhaps millions of years of sexually egalitarian hominid band cultures, technological development and population concentration in recent millennia has mostly enabled ruling gangsters to increasingly infest our gene pool with their demoniacal, psychopathic tendencies.
Snows are ablating and deflating slowly. I’m praying for a good blast of climate karma to melt the roads down. I ought to have gotten snowshoes this past year. I shall cut greenwood for some DIY variety to-morrow, likely. I’m alright holding out to spring per se, but meds begin a rationing countdown starting now, thanks to city slicker insurance bean counters. The lesson is: “self reliance” is only a state of slightly more organized dependence - on others, on conditions, on Heaven, on Earth.
I am in deep snow. I have food and water, but wood depends on being able to trek the snows. The snows are already a real grind to trek, up to my knees. Starting to think about evacuation and how to proceed from there. I am praying the snows do not continue to pile, and that
Mother Earth sends a dash of climate karma to melt what is on the ground. It’s already pushing winter on-the-dirt records here. My meds are on backup, 30 days starting now. I shall be rationing that down on next magazine fill up. Serious times. My mood is faltering under the Cascadian drear. Winter humbles when it doesn’t kill. I’m hoping to avoid the latter possibility another year or 30.
-EOF-𑗉-30-␃-