Brinens and Things

Comments on my own posts:

[cw: illness] The one about sore throats and impending doom [two comments]


[cw: government bullshit] ""Fun"" fact of the day (March 1, 2024)


[fairly mild cw: illness] 2020s music, part 3

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Comments on other people's posts:

[cw: corporate bullshit] [Thoughts of Mine; Wayback] (OP by Mabel Schaefer) Fun with cell-phone-plan loopholes. [two or three comments, depending on how you count]


[cw: what it says on the tin] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by slavicafire) Food-disgust test.


[cw: food (with picture)] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by lnthefade) This is a thing that is now, unfortunately, not being offered at Disney World.


[fairly mild cw: discourse] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by mindstalk) A modest proposal for affordable food/housing.


[cw: illness] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by siderea) Changing mask tech for a changing world.

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Links:

[cw: death, (arguably) discourse] [New York Times - Wayback] (by Helen Ouyang; h/t swimmer) The race to reinvent CPR.


[Crystalverse; Wayback] (by Chase) How to grow pyramid salt crystals.

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

(part 1)

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Computers that I physically possess, for which I do not need permission before executing software on them, and on which nobody outside my household stakes a claim:

* My laptop
* Our TV's prosthetic brain (a thirteen-year-old ThinkPad running Linux Lite, with its A/V wired into the TV)
* My smartphone
* Possibly the other two remaining smartphones from my failed experiments with LineageOS, though they may no longer be usable enough: last I checked one of them had a broken USB port and could only be charged by swapping out its battery (which seems unsuitable for extended crunching projects), and I *think* the other one has started bootlooping though I'm not sure if it managed to pull out of that. (...oh hey, it *did* pull out of that. Interesting. I might be able to wring some more compute out of it if I strangle its fucking bloatware first. If it is to be one of my computers (particularly one crunching sensitive data), it will be *mine*, and AT&T gets no say in it whatsoever.)

((even if AT&T doesn't give a shit, it's the principle of the thing))


2022-09-25, 10:50 AM:
Successfully installed Whisper on the TV brain and got it to start crunching 2020-01-22, the first day. It's started outputting and everything! Looks like past-me is discussing electricity prices with her family.

I admit I did not especially understand the instructions I looked up on how to fix the "/home/netflix/.local/bin is not in PATH" errors, but I did successfully infer how to *circumvent* the problem of it not being in PATH:

/home/netflix/.local/bin/./whisper *.mp3 --model small.en --output_dir 2020-01-22-v1

(I realised pretty quickly that I should be labelling the transcript folders "v1", so that when I'm later upgrading them to higher-quality transcripts I'll know which days have been upgraded by how much.)


2022-09-25, 10:30 PM:
Me, last night: I'm pleased that it seems to already have a decent corpus of th-fronters

Whisper: We used to have 12 baddies, now we have a free.

("We used to have twelve bags, now we have three.")

Well, so be it. (And hey, I run into this problem with *people* sometimes too.)


2022-09-25, 10:45 PM:
Checked on the TV brain. Whisper does *run* on a thirteen-year-old laptop, and I appreciate that you're not *completely* locked out of using Whisper if that's all you have, but also it's been crunching for twelve hours and it's made it through about eight minutes. At this rate it's going to take...about four days to get through 2020-01-22, and that day was among the shorter ones.

The smartphones are loosely equal in specs to the TV brain, so I doubt they'd fare much better even if I can figure out an appropriate Termux setup. Definitely doesn't sound feasible to do on my real phone (even considering that I don't touch my phone many if not most days, there would be interruptions multiple times a week). Not sure it's worth trying to get it running on the other one.

...ooh, apparently (for compatibility reasons, I think) Whisper defaults to CPU and you have to explicitly tell it to use a GPU. I'll have to check what happens if I try that on my laptop, though I'll wait for one of the current two to complete rather than trying to throw in a third one. (I have *some* sort of dedicated graphics system, though it wasn't a priority of mine at the time so I don't have a clear sense of what (and, again, six-year-old business laptop, so whatever-it-is probably isn't that good: might be helpful vs CPU-only, though).)


2022-09-26, 8:04 PM:
I didn't leave my laptop running overnight, for...reasons best discussed in a separate post, but (unsurprisingly) the Whispers were undamaged by overnight suspension and one of the initial two has since finished.

I *think*, if I'm making the correct inferences from these error messages and help documents, that my GPU is incompatible because it's *both* old *and* AMD. New AMD (specifically, AMD with ROCm support) is slightly tricky but salvageable; old Nvidia might be salvageable; old AMD doesn't seem to have any salvage options.

Also, Mom says the TV brain is incapable of running Whisper and Netflix at the same time, which means an infeasible number of interruptions on *that* device too. And the AT&T smartphone seems to be locked down hard enough that I can't turn on USB debugging and strangle the bloatware. *God* I hate this phone.

I'll see if I can accumulate any castoff devices for Project House Community Grid, but at this rate I think I'm going to be starved for compute for the next...hmm...127 GB of data...28.8 MB/hour...implies an average of 4.5 hours of new data per day and about 4,400 hours to catch up on...three hours real-time to process one hour of data on my laptop if running two Whispers in parallel...three and a half years.

Well, with a figure like that I'll probably need a new laptop before then anyway. I will definitely be on the lookout for GPU specs next time I'm on the hunt for a primary computer.

In the meantime, I think I'll probably compromise by *not* attempting to catch up on the backlog, and just transcribe going forward for the time being. My poor computer deserves a chance to rest sometimes.

(...did Brother upgrade his gaming desktop's GPU a few months ago? He did some sort of desktop hardware upgrade; I think it might have been that. I wonder if he still has the old one, and what it would take to cobble it into a minimum viable desktop...)

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(edit: part 3)

always have some cash on hand, and always have your SIM card on a different provider network from your home Internet

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(Rogers, one of the Big Three networks of Canada, is out nationwide. has been for nearly 12 hours. still no word on what the hell's going on. *some* credit cards work at *some* stores, but overall the system of commerce is something of a trainwreck today. I should know: I was front-of-house at a restaurant over lunch.)

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(part 2)

Comments on my own posts:

[none suitable for this section]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by rustingbridges) Making your home's heating robust against electricity outages. (Despite what you might think, having a natural-gas furnace is actually pretty useless for this.) [three comments]

[cw: corporate bullshit] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by siderea) Tips on wresting control of your smartphone back from the corps.

[cw: poverty, (arguably) death] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by spacefroggity) Is the availability of cheap gemstones (thanks to lab-growing techniques) good? Depends on what jewellery is for.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by rustingbridges) Getting used to OpenStreetMaps.

[cw: poverty, homelessness, discourse (earlier in thread)] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by muchnerve; in response to togglessymposium) What would a world that outlawed long-term rental of living space look like?

[arguably cw: poverty] [Modern FImily; Wayback] (OP by Court and Adam) Self-knowledge is key to a fulfilling life.

(I mean also I kind of *do* feel deprived, but largely because I'm not saving *enough*, seeing as how it's not mathematically possible to save enough when you're only making like ten grand a year in the first place. But that's another matter, and not something I really wanted to get into there: I basically wrote that comment in character as probable-medium-term-future!me. And I *am* better off than in, like, 2017, so there's that.)

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Links:

[arguably cw: amnesia] [Medway Music; Wayback] (by Steve Cole) A guide on how to preserve your local music scene using the Internet Archive.



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

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Comments on my own posts:

[none this time]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[arguably cw: nsfw text] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by tototavros) Aspects and histories of hypno-kink.

[cw: nsfw text] [AO3; Wayback] (OP by Huitzil) Have I mentioned lately how great The Hentai World of Eilverra is? I'm not even personally into almost any of the sex involved, but the humour and worldbuilding are well worth it on their own.

[cw: apocalypse, (fairly mild) poverty] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by grayestofghosts) Resilient, sovereign computing (comms, information storage/search, crunching, etc) is important across almost any situation, not *just* in apocalypses and not *just* in the Global South. [two comments]

[cw: amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by k-vichan, though not exactly in response to anyone in particular) How to prepare for fanfiction.net's inevitable demise.

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Links:

[MarineTraffic] The bright side of that whole incident with the Ever Given is learning about this neat live map of ships. I did not know you could just...*do* that.

[Nature; Wayback] (by Jessica Morrison) Mantis shrimp likely see *fewer* colours than humans do, not more: their extra colour receptors are for making them *faster* at determining what colour something is. (On the other hand, these are presumably *humans* *telling* us this...)

[arguably cw: apocalypse] [Giving Green; Wayback] Giving Green applies effective-altruism principles to analyse charities fighting climate change, finding the places where money goes furthest. (Note: if you're a Canadian taxpayer (or a Canadian tax-filer who might owe within the next five years) who wants to donate to the Clean Air Task Force, check out RC Forward. They can help you get money more efficiently to some other generally-EA charities too.)

[F-Droid (or Google Play); Wayback] KDE Connect lets you connect your Linux (or *maybe* Windows or Mac) computer and your Android phone. You can receive SMS notifications on your laptop, use your phone touchscreen as a trackpad, and more!

[GitLab; Wayback] (by W1nst0n) Ever wanted to get rid of apps the phone manufacturer or carrier insisted on installing on *your* phone? Don't have the know-how or courage to hack into the firmware and rip them out by the roots? (can't say I blame you: I fucked up the cellular modem on a device attempting to do that sort of thing) Just want to know more about what all the system apps actually *do*?

Universal Android Debloater is a non-invasive built-in-app-removal method. Strictly speaking, it doesn't actually *remove* the apps per se: rather, it seals them off so that they can't run (they also stop showing up in the app drawer). It can unseal any or all of them again upon request, and if all else fails, nothing the script does to the phone runs deep enough to survive a factory reset. The app lists come with documentation describing what every built-in app on every known-to-W1nst0n device does, to help you decide which apps you want to seal off.

Laugh rule:
[Bloomberg; Wayback crawling forbidden] (by Matt Levine, though the part quoted is by Tom Neill)

I thought it would be fun to be the first meme website to sell itself as an NFT. Also to be completely honest, I thought it might make it into Matt Levine’s Money Stuff. Essentially, I was 'doing it for the gram'.

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

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Comments on my own posts:

[strong cw: amnesia, unreality] All that will be left is the terror of dying [two comments, not counting the postscripts]

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Comments on other people's posts:

[fairly mild cw: amnesia] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by scotchtapeofficial; in response to maryellencarter, sigmaleph, and arguably poipoipoi-2016) The tones that telephone buttons make, or possibly made. [two comments]

[cw: sexism] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by p_millerd) Electroshocks Georg; untrustworthy psychology research(ers).

[arguably cw: unreality] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by seat-safety-switch) The importance of repairability.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by andmaybegayer) "Things Mr. Welch Can No Longer Do During an RPG" has started updating again!

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Links:

[none this time]



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

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

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