Brinens and Things

Comments on my own posts:

Comment and Link Roundup: April 12, 2021

[arguably cw: apocalypse, poverty] Shining a light on the availability of energy efficiency [three comments, not counting the postscripts]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by ms-demeanor) Discord is going downhill, like so many instant-messengers before it.

[cw: death, apocalypse] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) The inherent value of life.

[cw: apocalypse, drugs, (arguably) discourse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by rustingbridges; partially in response to cthulhubert and alarajrogers) Gold and disaster-hedging. [four comments]

[cw: amnesia, (fairly mild) death] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by the fittingly-named existentialterror) qntm's fiction is very good at being the kind of thing that it is, and that is the best that can be said about it. (Read his time-travel meta, though.)

[arguably cw: amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by eightyonekilograms) Audio-processing while exercising.

[Blogspot; Wayback] (OP by Michael Mock) Unpacking the references in tea names.

[cw: scrupulosity] [AO3; Wayback] (OP by cthulhuraejepsen) A possible ending to A Common Sense Guide to Doing the Most Good.

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Links:

[none suitable for this section]



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Comments on my own posts:

[mild cw: amnesia] (not that the tag was ever meant to be interpreted literally)

[cw: food, apocalypse, poison, (fairly mild) unsanitary] The one about gardening and whether high-effort food tastes better [two comments on Dreamwidth, three comments on Tumblr]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: apocalypse] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by siderea; in response to katuah) At the moment I don't *directly* have any prepping book recs, but I do have a website rec that in turn has book recs.

[mild cw: amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by argumate; partly in response to eightyonekilograms) Authenticator apps with actual backup systems, unlike *some* (Google) apps we could mention.

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Links:

[cw: flashing gif] [Wayback] (by Kate Davis Jones) The history of Space Cadet Pinball. (Surprised to learn that it was a thing for several versions of Windows starting with 95. I thought it was XP-specific: I don't remember ever seeing it in Windows 98.)



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Comments on my own posts:

[mild cw: amnesia, corporate bullshit] One year of lifelogging

[cw: venting, unsanitary, aging, (arguably) sexism] if you want something done right you have to do it yourself

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: food] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by maryellencarter) Tips on what flavourings to add to beans.

[cw: food, apocalypse] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by lydamorehouse) The practical usefulness of rotated stockpiles. [two comments]

[cw: abuse, kidnapping] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by alarajrogers) Not all magic portals lead somewhere good.

[Reddit; Wayback] (OP by /u/GoonieGangGeneral; in response to /u/ForbiddenText) Geometric Weather is a great weather app, once you know how to handle its quirks.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by ms-demeanor) How to make a smart TV without the corporate bullshit.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by tototavros) Advice on effective alarm clocks.

[cw: murder, amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by chongoblog; in response to maryellencarter) BBC Sherlock got pretty batshit in its later seasons.

[cw: heterosexism, cissexism] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by yvannairie) Queer people and oversharing (or possibly ""oversharing"").

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Links:

[Hackaday; Wayback] (by Lewin Day) A car transmission modelled in Lego.

[Commute Time Map] (by Geoapify) A map that shows which parts of your area you can reach within a given timeframe, using a given means of transportation.



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Comments on my own posts:

The one about Signal [four comments]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by reasonableapproximation) Radical self-expression through clothing.

[cw: embarrassment squick] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by rustingbridges; partly in response to sigmaleph) The confusing proliferation of names in Worm. [two comments, three if you count the tags]

[cw: food] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by BagelofDeath) Honest Chinese food reviews from a Chinese restaurant owner. (Also, advice on how to get good chicken fingers in Canada.)

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by grayestofghosts) Sometimes reading less is a reasonable response to changing circumstances.

[cw: food] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by moral-autism) Some types of professionally preserved foods we highly recommend trying.

[maybe cw: stalking] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by nerviovago; in response to plain-dealing-villain and moral-autism) Hiding secret passageways inside fake clothes dryers.

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Links:

[cw: nsfw text, (mild) death] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (by arihi) A new repository for mind-control erotica, one that is *not* built on 90's tech with 90's limitations.

[Rock Paper Shotgun; Wayback] (by Nate Crowley) I thought this was going to be about priest-based Age of Empires builds, but the thing it actually is is neat too.

Three laugh-rule entries:
[Bloomberg; Wayback crawling forbidden] (by Matt Levine)

Or combine the last two approaches: “At the end of each trading day from now on, the number of Tesla shares will be adjusted, via split or reverse split, such that each day’s closing price is $420.69.” A share of Tesla could represent a variable percentage interest in the company, but always be worth $420.69. Elon you can live this dream if you want it enough.

[Kiwix; Wayback] (by Stéphane Coillet-Matillon)

I wish I could tell you how we did it, but it involved some C++, Typescript, and sacrificing a few chicken. Only two of these three worked, and there’s still some discussion about which.

[cw: politics] [The Guardian; Wayback] (by Lauren Aratani)
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Comments on my own posts:

preference utilitarianism ftw, I guess

[mild cw: apocalypse] Comment and Link Roundup: December 23, 2020

[fairly mild cw: politics] why does this have to be hard [two comments]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[arguably cw: apocalypse] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by grayestofghosts) In which we grit our teeth and set up Bridgefy (or at least try to). [three comments]

[cw: apocalypse, (arguably) death, (arguably) murder] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by poipoipoi-2016) American tech companies keep setting up their offices in ridiculously dangerous parts of the country, which sucks if you're trying to work for them.

[cw: food] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by soaringsearingphoenix) How to perform feeding enrichment on yourself.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by wingedcatgirl) "Cis" is a Latin prefix, not an acronym.

[cw: embarrassment squick, rape] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by glumshoe; in response to jadagul) The unwittingly erotic games children play, or in some cases freak out about.

[cw: paralysis, (mild) amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by worldlypositions) On writing through coded blinking, and composing posts in your head.

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Links:

[Bloomberg; Wayback crawling forbidden] (by Matt Levine) Breaking news: Money Stuff is back! I haven't had a chance to read it yet because it just came in while I was drafting this post, but I thought y'all deserved to know about it.



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Apps that think the distinguishing feature of a walkie-talkie, as opposed to a cell phone or VoIP line--the thing that makes you say "what we need right now is a walkie-talkie"--is "push to talk" rather than "infrastructureless": no, go away.

(honestly, I'm not actually firmly attached to being able to "talk" *at all*. it's a nice bonus, might come in handy occasionally, but text-only would be fine.)


Briar: Aimed at dissidents getting their Internet shut down by the government, so the level of security is overkill for my needs and sometimes comes at the cost of features more useful to me (like having multiple devices under the same account). Doesn't seem to have multihop even in group chats, *severely* limiting the range (can't even communicate with someone two floors down in the same house). However, can make use of Internet if it's available to both parties. Has a Linux client in beta, which is nice: if I have to choose one OS for offline texting to work on, I'll pick Android for its portability, but being able to type on my laptop keyboard would certainly be good.

(Also, drains the battery pretty hard, at least in Bluetooth mode. I'm lucky to get 24 hours of standby time out of it, when usually I can get nearly a week of standby. Admittedly this probably says more about how many of my smartphone's capabilities I normally keep turned off than it does about Briar, and someone who was going to have Bluetooth on anyway might not find the difference significant.)


Serval: Great idea, well aligned with my needs and desires, but it's still in alpha after nearly a decade of development. Apparently it's not completely abandoned, but progress is very, *very* slow. I have subscribed to their blog and will be following them with interest.


Firechat: People talk wistfully about it, but nobody seems to know where to find a reputable APK. It's not on Google Play anymore, and it was never on F-Droid.


Bridgefy: ...okay, I guess *technically* an offline-messaging app that *requires Internet during the installation process* is not 100% useless, but it's *far* less useful than it could be, and I am deeply uncomfortable with the fragility implications of "during a disaster, the mesh is irreplaceable and inextensible". As I've said previously, I generally consider it a dealbreaker in *any* software to require Internet during the installation process, unless the whole purpose of the software is to interact with the Internet. I might grudgingly use it if there were zero other options, but I'll pick almost anything over a cloud-dependent version.

Also their data-collection policies felt kind of shady to me, certainly by comparison to the utopian non-profits making most of the other stuff on this list.


IPFS: Despite the talk about "diversely resilient networks that enable persistent availability — with or without Internet backbone connectivity", from what I can tell IPFS in its current state is *not* distributed, merely decentralised. That is to say, you can talk to your peers rather than going through a server, but you must talk to said peers over the Internet. Distributedness is #4 on the IPFS team's long-term to-do list: for scale, note that in 2019 they attempted one item off the to-do list and didn't manage to complete it by the end of the year. It was a big project and I'm not blaming them, but I do figure the completion of item #4 is going to be a while.

I like how they think, though: their planned Internet fails gracefully not just in the face of loss of connectivity, but in the face of linkrot as well. I have installed a node on my laptop, which I expect to be very occasionally useful at first and gradually more useful over time. (They say file-sharing works well right now: I might make use of that.) I have also subscribed to their newsletter.

(There are two IPFS apps for Android, one of which crashes immediately on startup and one of which requires Android 8+. That's the first app I've encountered to require an Android version later than my current 7. If *I* can't afford an Android version later than 7, it's going to be a while until people living in shacks on little Pacific islands--Serval's initial target audience--can do it.)


Berty: In alpha--actually, maybe not quite even that--but development seems to be more active than on Serval. Very similar to Briar, but without the ability to use Internet if available. Unclear whether it's going to have multihop, the only way it could be better than Briar. (well, okay, not the *only* way, I guess there's *something* to be said for iOS and Windows compatibility) I have subscribed to their newsletter.


goTenna: Why do I need a whole other piece of hardware--that costs as much as a smartphone itself! each!--when there are so many transmitters already packed into an ordinary smartphone? None of those--nor the *combination* of them--were good enough? *Really*?

(And excuses about "longer range" are going to have to be pretty damn good excuses, given that for the kind of money they're charging for a two-pack I could buy...*checks*...six cheap smartphones to use as mesh nodes, *and* I'd be able to recruit Android-using neighbours into the mesh just by offering them an APK to sideload.

Actually, no, no excuses about "longer range" are good enough. Dedicated long-range mesh hardware should *complement* smartphone-based mesh nodes, not replace them.)

Also, buggy as hell apparently.

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Iron star for Most Usable As-Is: Briar. Plan to keep it Internet-connected as much as possible, but unlike other Internet-based texting apps it fails *somewhat* gracefully in the Internet's absence.

Mithril star for Closest Match Between Their Aspirations and Mine: IPFS, with an honourable mention to Serval.

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(edit: update on Bridgefy)

Comments on my own posts:

Doing the hermit-crab shuffle [three comments, not counting the postscript]

Ask me about my special interests [four comments, two of which are new]

Blog formatting skills

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by lydamorehouse) The costs and benefits of smart-home assistants.

[mild cw: death] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by ilzolende) Blog recs.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by rustingbridges) The hostile fee structure of Paypal.

[cw: nsfw text] [AO3; Wayback] (OP by Huitzil) Hey, remember that porn-worldbuilding giftfic I got a few years ago? The author wrote a revised and expanded version! I highly recommend it, as well as the chapters that *weren't* inspired by me.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by siderea) Various ways to follow a Dreamwidth blog (in this case, siderea), and the circumstances in which one might pick one over another.

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Links:

[cw: food] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP is technically by extrajordinary, but the bulk of the thread is by petermorwood; h/t ilzo-misc) Restaurants in ancient Rome.

Two laugh-rule entries:
[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by siderea) The Great Chain of History.

[Bulwer-Lytton; Wayback] 2019 winners of the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest, in which one attempts to write the worst opening line for a novel.

I read through the Superpower of the Day archives today, courtesy of ilzolende.

When I got to this one, a thought occurred to me. That *would* be a neat easter egg, wouldn't it? A way to play with the online medium?

I checked the Internet Archive.

There was no pre-takedown interview in the Wayback Machine: no copy of the post at all, in fact, before I got there. The author *wasn't* thinking along these lines. This post is done in the usual way of writing "we were forced to take this down" fiction, where the original never exists at all out-of-universe.

But it *would* be an interesting way to do it.

Comments on my own posts:

[none suitable for this section]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by maryellencarter) Ebook recs.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by siderea) Circumventing phone-number-demanding online accounts by using VoIP numbers.

[mild cw: amnesia] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by xenosagaepisodeone, though my post is more *inspired* by hers than actually responding to her) Tech-literacy and (supposed) digital natives.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by nudityandnerdery) Fuck cloud dependence; also, tips on harm-reduction DIY smart TVs.

[cw: poison] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by outofcontextdnd) A D&D item that on first glance looks useless, on second glance looks helpful, and on third glance looks dangerous.

[cw: food, dieting] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by rustingbridges) Optimising your diet for nutrients you wouldn't otherwise get enough of. [four comments]

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Links:

Laugh rule:
[cw: hacking] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (by feotakahari) A rather meta scamming attempt.



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