I just finished reading On Lying and Politics. It’s a short read that I started a while ago but it’s my backpack, loitering read and it took a minute.
It remains as relevant as ever for the present moment. The only thing that feels unrealistic is the Pentagon Papers themself. The notion that a government made colossal blunders and then commissioned people to figure out what went wrong feels like a far away fantasy.
Hoping the Framework 12 is a reasonable price in the budget computer space. I have trouble recommending their 13 and 16 inch models to people who don’t touch computers professionally or as a serious hobby.
Raspberry Pi Zero doesn’t support power switching. Cooooool. I wish I had thought about the possibility of power being delivered before I was in this situation.
Last night, I was catching up with an old friend on the phone. Sony and the PS5 going down had him curious about how DDoS attacks work. We got onto the topic of bot nets and IoT devices because taking over insecure devices is one avenue for creating a botnet. I said, “As long as you don’t have things exposed outside their home network and run updates, you’ll be fine.”
And he very quickly was like, “no one updates their devices. Absolutely zero people. Do you know how long I avoid phone updates for?”
I laughed really hard and have taken the feeback to reflect on.
It’s nowhere near done but I’ve put about 60 hours into a desktop application that takes a small selection of articles (RSS, read it later, direct links) and spits out an epub with a manageable amount of news to read. I then put the epub on my e-reader.
I’ve been using this as my primary means of article reading for about 10 days. On the days where I don’t finish an epub, I just keep reading the last one, and generate a new one when I’m ready.
Still needs a lot of work but this is the first thing I’ve written for myself that’s had such a satisfying feedback loop.
I read recently that an increasing number of Americans have never lived anywhere outside where they were born. This fact coupled with the decimation of newspapers and our global communications infrastructure that often focuses on elsewhere means it’s easy for propaganda to take hold of people’s perception.
On its face, this is something that would be easy to treat and inoculate people against. The simplest way seems to be to just have people go elsewhere.
The US is huge but each border within it can (at the time of this writing and so long as the Constitution of this country holds the power we grant it) simply be crossed.
Cities could foster camaraderie between regions by providing housing, work and education opportunities, or simply the opportunity to travel. Were I in charge of any discretionary funding in often maligned cities like New York, San Francisco or Chicago, I would be working to make this happen.
Were I a town seeking revival or people, I would be equally inclined to bring people to visit. Having outsiders see what ails small towns would build solidarity for wider state and national law making, but also because you cannot know where a person will fall in love with and decide to build a life.
Sure, you may get 20 people who spend their time and move along, but you might also get one that decides to move, put down roots, and build an institution that’s a vitalizing force for the town.
This idea isn’t far afield from the city diplomacy efforts done in Europe during WWII or how city diplomacy exists today. The difference this moment brings is that it we need programs to foster solidarity with our fellow citizens starting yesterday.
Finally, looked into Cura plugins. That there is a measuring tool is great news. Weird that this isn’t standard with the software.
There’s a very good chance that a computer I purchased used from a friend to get me through the latter half of college might get a battery replacement and some spec bumps and make its way into a third person’s hands as their daily driver.
I opened it up to see if it would be feasible, and it’s amazing. Everything can be replaced with a screwdriver. I can even swap the processor if we want.
The max capacity on the RAM is 8 GB, which I think is low for browsing the web today but it’d be do-able for their immediate needs.
I spend my workdays in Go and YAML. I’ve got a hobby project that I ended up choosing Python for. I haven’t done a ton of programming in it, but I do appreciate that I am able to eschew thinking about some things as I get a working prototype out. I’m sure these things I’m ignoring now will make my efforts at resilience harder when I go back through, but I’ve been having fun while programming for the first time in a while.
Hey #Fedi, Can anyone who’s written plugins for NickelMenu or Koreader point me in the right direction? I’m doing the standard search-fu & git trawling, but I figured I’d just ask for prior art if anyone has it.
While the getting is good, Warner Brothers has full-length movies available in a playlist on YouTube.
There is so much going on but God this is dire. Musk and his young fascist programmers have read and write access to the Treasury databases.
Officials within the Treasury are leaking to people like Nathan Tankus because they’ve got nowhere to turn internally.
This system processed 4.7 trillion dollars worth of payments last year. If we do not get Musk out of these systems, they could eventually grind society to a screeching halt.
The thing we have on our side is that Elon’s goons are young and don’t “know COBOL” they may be able to read syntax but understanding the business logic of the Treasury and agencies that interact with it will take time to figure out.
That buys some time but we should assume they’re working around the clock and are better funded than we’ll ever be.
I encourage reading these two stories and share them widely.
Imagining how well software would run if any given company’s developers weren’t on a treadmill of constantly learning new tooling. Tooling and having to solve problems in new ways can be fun, but sometimes it feels like a distraction.
Plagiarism is cool if you first launder it through the fossil fuel industry.
It’s been years in the making, but it’s happening. I’m in a long-running play by post campaign and each passing day more of our play flow is going through software, systems, and servers we either own or manage. My hope is that one day this can be done peer-to-peer and each of our devices acts as replica. I think the evolution of this architecture could make an interesting talk but I haven’t found the angle for it.
Good news for people running Rebble firmware on their old Pebbles.
Also, the original Pebble creator is starting something up again.
30 days from now, my Facebook account will be unrecoverable. I was expecting to be able to fully say good riddance but burning a directory of the places, people, and relationships I’ve had over the last 16 years actually feels pretty bad even considering everything. The harms and risks are at a point where they far outweigh the benefits.
May something better grow where Facebook was.
Fixed the toilet flapper and now I have one less thing to fix.
Anyone who gets joy from gardening, mending their own clothes, and generally doing things themselves, should at least take a crack at self-hosting one thing. It’s sometimes jank but immensely rewarding.
Pulled my FreedomBox out of storage and slapped YunoHost on it. My experience with YunoHost is good so far. I dislike that the software insists on a domain name during setup.
I’ve got other stuff I wanted to do tonight, but that’s in progress. Main motivation is that I wanted to try out GoToSocial. A task for another day.
If you’re going to be putting roots down somewhere new in the US, at least take a look at this work from ProPublica to help inform the decision.
When I left Denver a few years ago, I came up with similar results. Fortunately, I had ties to some of the most favorable regions that made them attractive options for me. That’s probably not the case for most people.
Final Draft 10 Users
As a result of security concerns for both our network and our customers, we will be discontinuing activation and deactivation of Final Draft 10 on June 30, 2025. Please note this will not remove Final Draft 10 from your computers or affect your files in any way. You will no longer be able to install or activate Final Draft 10 on a new computer, but you will be able to continue to use it on your existing computer unless you update your computer or remove Final Draft 10.
We will also be discontinuing email and chat technical support for Final Draft 10 on February 1, 2025. You will still be able to access the manual and our knowledge base, but our support team will no longer provide support or troubleshoot for Final Draft 10.
I have a license for this floating around and the stubborn part of me wants to go activate this right now.
I see reports that countries and companies are rushing to AI to help the economy. What if you simply invested in all the things required to mitigate climate change. There is so much work to be done. It won’t make three people fabulously rich but it would provide jobs, stability, and stave off our own extinction
I’ve gotten a lot of mileage and learned a lot as a developer because of Go. I decided to eschew it in favor of doing a larger project inside of Python. Partially, because this is a hobby project and many tedious problems have likely been solved, and partially because I haven’t written anything substantial in a less opinionated language in years. It’s rewarding to find the things I find that I enjoy and am annoyed by. It’s fun because it feels easy to make progress.
Printing something with a raft instead of a brim. This is my first time printing a raft and I’m watching the base layer wondering what in the hell is going on.
It’s a scaled down test so no real harm if it doesn’t work out.