Brinens and Things

Comments on my own posts:

Tips on Offline-First Smartphones, 2023 Edition [one comment on Dreamwidth, one comment on Tumblr]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by nuclearspaceheater) General life improvements of weightlifting.


[cw: illness, (fairly mild) venting] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by mindstalk) The spirit (and not just the letter) of mask rules.


[arguably cw: amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by unprettyextra; in response to etirabys) How to help archive Imgur. (Though Imgur has since started its deletions, the archiving project continues.)


[cw: embarrassment squick, (arguably) discourse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by hjartasalt; in response to nuclearspaceheater) American hegemony and (sort-of)-multi-currency cash registers.


[cw: amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by sigmaleph) How to (maybe) know your sleep latency.

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Links:

[arguably cw: amnesia] [Baturin; Wayback] (by Daniil Baturin) A review of a Windows-ripoff Linux distro from 2003.


Laugh-rule entries:
[WordPress; Wayback] (by Bret Devereaux)

This is the third part of the second part of our three(ish) part look at the governing structures of the Greek polis (I, IIa, IIb). At some point I promise I will write a series whose organization does not look like a parody of itself.

[Mastodon; Wayback] (h/t Seebs)

(here's the alt text on that image in case you want to stick it into Google Traduction:

ARRÊTEZ L'ANGLAIS – L'ANGLAIS N'EST PAS CENSÉE ÊTRE UNE LANGUE INTERNATIONALE – DES ANNÉES D’ANGLAIS et pourtant AUCUN INTERÊT parce qu’on peut regarder la version du film doublée par Kev Adams – Tu veux dire des trucs en anglais pour rigoler? On a un outil pour Ça, Ça s'appelle «GOOGLE TRADUCTION» – «Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Will, will Will will Will Will's will? All the faith he had had had had no effect on the outcome of his life» – Indistinguable d'un AVC REGARDE ce que les Anglais te demande de Respecter, avec tous les cours & voyages linguistiques qu’on fait pour les comprendre (Ce sont de VRAIS mots anglais, parlé par de VRAIS Anglais): Embezzling ????? gobbledygook ??????? discombobulated ????????????????? «The bamboozled children skedaddled»
Ils se sont foutus de notre gueule putaingue

[WordPress; Wayback] (by Crow)

In promoting her new book, the author also made a few choice memes. I can’t think of any other way to describe them.



They immediately without context are my kind of humour. Clickhole could post this and I’d send it to all my friends. Levelling is, as a reminder, a sometimes used term to describe killing god. These stock photos are very persuasive in getting me to love god, I’ll admit. I’ll say the unlevel memes are also quite tumblr ‘I dreamed of this meme and now it is real’ style.

[Know Your Meme; Wayback]






[cw: illness] [Armbrust; Wayback] Review of a terrible surgical mask.

"And look at the stare in his eyes. I mean, the woman is intense, but this dude, like something's going on there, man. It's the face of someone actually receiving the coronavirus into their body."

[AO3; Wayback] (by seasparks) I don't go here, I was just wiki-walking, but:

seasons of crappy Netflix that were deemed sufficiently bad to allow Canadian access to them

Comments on my own posts:

[fairly mild cw: food] Comment and Link Roundup: August 9th, 2021

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: apocalypse, scrupulosity] [My Own Advisor; Wayback] (OP by Mark Seed) A gentle correction of one of the most important omissions I encountered on my wiki-walk through Canadian personal-finance blogs, climate-crisis individual-action edition.

[arguably cw: bugs] [Mastodon; Wayback] (OP by monsterblue@dragon.style) Today in spreading the good word of PPE: wearable mosquito nets.

[arguably cw: apocalypse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by tarhalindur) Laptop recommendations for an erratic-supply-chain world.

[cw: food] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by rustingbridges) Peaches, the easy way(s).

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Links:

[strong cw: war, murder] [Data Secrets Lox part 1; Data Secrets Lox part 2; Wayback part 1; Wayback part 2] (by Chevalier Mal Fet) I don't read Data Secrets Lox much, but every once in a while I take a look at what's won the Alexander Prize for Effortposting. Turns out in May and June one of the people there wrote a whole-ass history book on 20th-century South Korea, with a focus on the Gwangju Uprising of 1980. Well-written, and a good look into a time period from after most history lessons stop.

(Note: I did not proofread a whole book, but the bits I double-checked seemed accurate.)

[Patagonia; Wayback] (by Sakeus Bankson) Zippers: the bane of high-quality, low-waste clothing manufacturers.

Laugh rule:
[arguably cw: unreality] [gwern.net; Wayback]

The lion-hunting paper was duly accepted for publication, with one editorial alteration: our footnote to a footnote was ruthlessly removed.<sup>4

4</sup>Monsters! —Editor. ↩

[cw: unreality] [Wikipedia; Wayback] Not a laugh-rule link, but it needed to be after that one: while we're talking about H. Petard, take a look at Ong's Hat.



There is a blanket [cw: illness] on the rest of this post.

( Read more... )

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)

(previous post)


God knows how I managed to get zimmer working on my previous computer, but I can't seem to replicate that success here. Fuck it: I'll just use wget. The resulting files are more broadly compatible anyway, 7-zip is very good at compressing collections of HTML files down, and I haven't been personally compiling any wikis for which the ability to use the results without first decompressing them is important. The reject flags will need some tuning, but I can handle that.

(Also I'm going to switch these from monthly to quarterly: I don't think I really need them to follow the live versions *that* closely, and I suspect wget is going to be even more time-consuming than the ~20 - 30 minutes/wiki that zimmer was. Yeah, it's just compute/bandwidth time and not active-monitoring time, but as I write this part of the draft I'm waiting for a one-off (or maybe annual) game-guide wiki scrape to complete so I can boot over to Windows and finish installing the Windows stuff.)

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The tumblr-utils cron job quietly failed, apparently because Ubuntu 20.04 is moving away from Python 2. Installed the python2 package and replaced all instances of "python" in the command with "python2": manual invocation seems to be working now, and we'll see how the cron job goes.

[a couple days later]

Yep, that seems to be ticking along just fine.

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(I just *heard* WinFF complete the latest batch of lifelogger files by the way the fan slowed way down. An advantage to only having four threads (and thus having WinFF take up a larger proportion of [the CPU usage the laptop is designed to withstand]), perhaps. Even when it's running, though, this fan *is* significantly quieter.)

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My list of which programs to install on a new computer is much more thorough now: it was a good start, but I found some things I'd overlooked. It's been helpful to be able to look at my previous computer and see how things are set up there, but one doesn't always get that opportunity when migrating and I'd like that to affect things as little as possible.

(For that matter, I plan for the list to eventually contain not just notes of which programs to seek out but, where feasible, *the programs themselves*. Clouds are useful, but I don't like to be dependent on them.)

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The food-diary file takes much less time to save on this computer. The file is stored on the HDD, too, so it's not an SSD-vs-HDD thing (at least not when it comes to the file itself; I think the LibreOffice *software* is on the SSD).

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Migrating Thunderbird to a new computer by sticking the old ".thunderbird" folder into the new home directory continues to Just Work. It doesn't even need to be a fully up-to-date copy as long as you're using a synchronise-with-server setup (rather than a download-and-delete setup†): it will catch up automatically.

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Not migration-related, but: apparently GNOME SoundConverter *does* have a 64kbps setting. I think I was thinking of 32kbps, which I was using back at the start of my lifelogging.

WinFF can't handle my podcast files for some reason: rather than the usual progress display, it talks about "frames" as if I'd handed it a video or something, and it never seems to make any progress no matter how many frames it goes through. I think I'll just stick with my current methods.

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The command-line replaygain software I was using doesn't seem to be in Synaptic anymore. Apparently music player Quod Libet has a replaygain function, as well as a metadata editor and podcatcher. I didn't like its podcatcher setup (too much clutter of old episodes, and I don't think there was an option for "check for new episodes only when I say so"), but the rest of it might replace the stuff I was previously using for those things. I'd been having trouble with my previous replaygain not seeming to react to the reference-loudness flag, so perhaps this is for the best.

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Turns out the biggest storage-drives-with-USB-interfaces-installed we have lying around are 80 GB (also 17 years old, and therefore probably not very trustworthy even *if* 80 GB sufficed). I thought we had a 500 or two, but maybe not.

Dad mentioned something about "Mom's old computer", and I realised that was a good point. Once the hermit-crab shuffle completes I'll try using the TV's prosthetic brain as a backup drive, at least in the interim until I can get something more dedicated.

(I'll have to encrypt them, of course: there's no question of whether to rely on the "token authentication" of having access to the drive if I'm putting them on an explicitly communal computer. P7Zip has an encryption option: I expect that'll do.)

(Not airgapped, admittedly, but it's something. Perhaps I'll keep them on the secondary partition, add an extra layer of remove.)

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I haven't used Scuttlebutt much, but I think I *will* go ahead and save a copy of my client data. Best to reserve the option of picking up where I left off, if I ever end up returning to it.

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†The lies-to-children way of putting this is "IMAP vs POP", but apparently both protocols allow for both setups (though with different defaults). ↩

This seems like something some of y'all might have advice on, so before I go digging into it I'll ask around:

Anyone have recs for self-hosted quantified-self loggers?

I'm sure one *can* get quite a bit done with a basic spreadsheet, but I'm also sure there's a lot of room for improvement there for things like "automated analysis" and "offering ideas for things you didn't even *know* you wanted to know". (Even a spreadsheet *somebody else wrote* could be helpful.)

Some considerations:

• Must be able to export the data.


• [Ubuntu/Android intercompatibility] > [Ubuntu] > [Android]. I probably cannot be bothered with the hassle of Windows software.


• Should not store data on some megacorp's cloud, even if it *also* stores on mine.


• I don't currently own a fitness tracker, but I might very well someday. (And hey, if you know any good privacy-friendly fitness trackers, let me know.)


• I suspect any software that meets the above criteria is not going to cost money, but if you happen to know of one that does I suppose it's not a dealbreaker.

I've pretty much outgrown my Dropbox free account, and they don't seem to offer any paid plan smaller than 2 TB (I am *not* paying $16/month for a space that I'm not even going to use 95%+ of for the foreseeable future).

Specs I'm looking for, in no particular order:

• Must have read-write access through both Ubuntu and Android (many providers do not do Linux; SpiderOak effectively does not do Android).



• Must sync entire cloud drive to both of the local computers, either by default or as a flipped-switch setting (none of this "short-list of favourite files to store locally: you can just pull any other file from the Internet as needed, right?").



• I would rather not use Google Drive.



• No more than $7/month, preferably less. (Monthly payment would be preferable, but I'm willing to consider annual.)



• However, should not be $0 either (or at least, should have *some* tier that is more than $0 but less than $7, even if the $0 tier would suffice for my current needs): I would like to be able to give them some money, so that they will feel the level of obligation towards me that one feels towards a customer.



• Linux client must have option for continuous sync. Android client must have option for "sync whenever I press this button (and at no other time)".



• I'm fine with having to keep files in a particular folder in order for them to be included in the backup.



• Android client must have option to store on SD card. (Being able to store part of it on the SD card and part in the main storage drive would be even better, but I can do without that.)



• *counts up data, including things I've been syncing manually to my phone because there isn't space in my Dropbox* ...30 GB would *probably* be enough to grow on for a while, though 40 would be preferable. I wouldn't say no to more than 40, but nor would I be willing to pay extra for it.

(edit: next post)

Comments on my own posts:

The first part of the Runescape liveblogging [three comments]

The one about Ed Sheeran

The one about accumulating software prerequisites

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Comments on other people's posts:

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by tilthat; in response to sophus-b) The Pope Rap continues to be great.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by inu-fiction; in response to maryellencarter) Consider Wordpress for image hosting. (Though since my new DW images are sharing storage space with my Tumblr backup, I *am* worried I'm going to run out of media-storage space on my account, after 7+ years of Tumbling. I've mentioned in Tumblr tags a couple times that I'm a lot more reluctant to reblog posts with images now, proportionately to how many images and how many frames they have: I have to think about whether it's worth the space.)

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by rustingbridges) Did you know they make shaker bottles of finely ground salt, the better to stick to popcorn kernels?

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by gasmaskaesthetic) Have you ever set yourself on fire for fun? (No.)

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by sophus) I inspired somebody else to start making sure the Internet Archive had copies of all their links! (And Sophus uses the laugh rule, too, so that's *two* blogging practices they got from me! I love being a positive influence.)

(For those of you who don't know, I invented the laugh rule. (Quite possibly other people in other places have invented it independently, but from the timeline of events† I strongly suspect that every laugh-rule-using rationalist can trace it back to me.) It's been very gratifying to see other people picking it up, to see the positive impact I've had on the community, to know I've inspired people to make the world a bit more joyful.)

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by ilzolende; in response to contrarianarchon) Approaches to browser tab management. [three comments]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by nuclearspaceheater; in response to rustingbridges) Left vs right shift keys, long-ago typos, and different approaches social-media websites can take. [three comments, two of which are new]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by redbeardace; in response to rustingbridges) The first-degree-ask bug remains unfixed and poorly documented; also, reblogs without commentary don't use up the bugginess. [two comments, one of which is new]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by feotakahari; in response to archonofquandaries) There is a time and a place for reading hot political takes, and it is *not* while looking for porn. [two comments, one of which is new]

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) Dreamwidth and angle brackets, it turns out, do not mix.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) Bloxp is glitchy, but sometimes useful (at least in theory). [two comments]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by moral-autism; in response to serinemolecule and theopjones) The relative usefulness of laptops and smartphones in different situations. [five comments, four of which are new]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by voxette-vk) How to operate a doorknob with no hands.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (in response to agapi42) Lying about your age for fun and profit. (If by profit, you mean chocolate.)

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) Wife-husband team Ursula Vernon and Kevin Sonney make some very nice podcasts.

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Links:

[Uncanny Magazine; Wayback] (by Vina Jie-Min Prasad; h/t flakesesomlys) A mostly-fluffy short story about a sapient robot getting into fandom.

[Atlantic; Wayback] (by Ed Yong) Appetite suppressants originally intended for humans might also work on Aedes aegypti?

Highlighted comment:
sophus uses music jargon to explain why Ed Sheeran sounds so different in different songs.

Laugh rule:
youzicha shares a Reddit thread about people who may or may not be Eliezer Yudkowsky.

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†Back when I was the only person I knew of who did it, multiple rationalists cited it as a thing they particularly liked about my blog.

Word on the Runescape technical-support subforum is that the version of the Linux client I eventually ended up with works on and off, usually on the scale of a few weeks. The client maintainers say that the problem seems to be on the server's end and there's nothing they can do about it.

Sure enough, yesterday it started working. Presumably at some point it will go back to [immediately crashing on startup] for a while, but I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

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On one operating system or another, I've been having fun playing again. I think I might do a quest tonight.

Not wanting to risk going through all the effort of coaxing Ubuntu and Runescape into cooperation only to find my hardware insufficient, I tried Runescape on my Windows partition first.

Turns out, the minimum available graphics settings for Runescape are very minimal indeed. There should be no question (at least hardware-wise) of whether I can play-the-game-at-all, only how pretty it will look while I do it.

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There's still the software issues to deal with, of course. I mean, I guess I could play on Windows? But I know from experience that rebooting twice (there and back) every time I want to play a game is annoying, and camping out on the Windows partition for the entire duration of being-in-the-mood-for-that-game is even more annoying. My Windows partition is *not* set up for long-term habitation, and I don't even really want it to be.

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(Writing these posts out, especially the first, *does* seem to be helping me sort out my thoughts on the matter.)