Thoughts and things - a tinylog

author: @skf

avatar: 🕯

licence: CC BY 4.0

2025-05-22 16:31 +0200

A troll in the White House.

2025-05-08 07:07 +0200

The surface air temperature for April 2025:

2025-04-21 08:16 +0200

Once again I have lost focus. To many urls in the .newsboat directory. To many 'read later'-bookmarks. To many semi-finished scripts. Purging the evil. 😜

2025-04-16 12:50 +0200

bacardi55 has updated the Tinylog RFC so from now on I will use +0200 instead of CEST as my time zone offset.

Have also added licence to the additional information.

2025-04-16 08:33 CEST

And the lies continues coming:

2025-04-15 08:08 CEST

Just been skimming through

Believe I have to carefully read it through the next couple of days in order to get beyond the scary words that catch my eyes: floods, loss of ice, extreme heat and drought.

2025-04-09 10:23 CEST

The average global surface air temperature for March 2025 was 1.6℃ higher than the pre-industrial March average.

2025-04-02 10:45 CEST

Two weeks since I switched from Firefox to Epiphany/Gnome Web as my gui web browser. So far without regrets. It will take some time to get used to bookmarks with tags but its a minor thing. It uses less resources than Firefox so my old laptop is happy. Thumbs up for now.

2025-03-21 09:39 CET

Freedom of speech in Turkey is getting more of a rare commodity.

authorities in Turkey have arrested dozens of people for "provocative" social media posts.

2025-03-18 13:07 CET

Things in U.S. domestic and foreign politics are happening so fast now it is really hard to keep up with everything. Just read that U.S. has left or is about to leave the ICPA (International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine). Does the current goverment mean that Putin not going to be held responsible for the war? I'm confused.

2025-03-15 09:15 CET

February was yet another month with an average surface air temperature over 1.5℃ compared to the pre-industrial February average for 1850-1900.

2025-03-11 18:38 CET

For some reason gnome-calculator has stopped working on my laptop so I have been using bc for a week now and I have to say that it is liberating to use a command line tool for my calculations.

2025-03-06 08:05 CET

As a low income citizen in a country inside the EU and with little to none knowledge of how it is to live in the United States but full of fear, anxiety and despair of what is going on in the world since Donald Trump took over as president, Bernie Sanders words in the linked video gives me hope. I just hope that his speech reach enough americans which will get together to fight for democracy and refuse to give up their rights to a handful of oligarcs.

2025-02-28 07:59 CET

The Global surface air temperature report from Copernicus Climate service for the month of january 2025 is not a pleasant reading. It was the warmest january on record.

2025-02-20 08:01 CET

The american president are an idiot. But with the power that comes with the presidency he is a really dangerous idiot. His lack of true statemanship, where obvious lies are trumpeted out over the world (via social media?!) are a true threat to the world. When he attacks Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyj he also becomes an useful idiot. Unfortunately, unless he makes a complete mess of the the united states economy, there seems to be no way of stopping him from continue to act as and be an idiot on the world stage.

2025-02-18 16:09 CET

The henchmen meet up in the Kingdom of S.A. And the winner is: Putin.

2025-02-09 15:55 CET

Yeah, that was a bit confusing...

2025-02-09 10:22 CET

The despots, fascists, oligarks and all of the rightwingers do not care as long as they can rape the nature and the gold keeps coming in and filling their pockets. Why listening to science when it is so much more lucrative to "drill, baby, drill" and blame the opposition when the world is burning?

In Sweden we have to get rid of the current government and their allies. Sadly, in my opinion, the largest part of the opposition, the Social Democrats, are trapped in a state of populistic retoric instead of standing up for democracy. The climate is in need of sane democratic voices with a really thought trough prepared organized plan for the future that the voters can relate to.

World wide: We can not fight the global climate crisis with bombs, fracking and lies.

End of the sunday drivel.

2025-02-08 12:30 CET

Bernie Sanders is a brilliant speaker:

2025-02-08 08:17 CET

Good. And not a day to soon:

2025-02-06 17:44 CET

Slowly coming back. This winter my anxiety and depression has been more difficult to cope with than usual.

2024-12-05 10:49 CET

Bookmarked here as well, thanks!

2024-11-11 17:24 CET

Updated some programs on my Debian 12 machine yesterday via apt. Today my firefox started to not working properly. Found a zombie process that just said

[firefox-esr] <defunct>

Eventually I turned of gnome shell integration and gnome javascript which seems to be the root of the problem. The zombie is gone.

2024-11-05 14:00 CET

Never again HP.

2024-10-30 13:24 CET

At the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21) the Paris Agreement where negotiated and was signed in 2016. One part of the agreement was that the global surface temperature should be kept well under 2.0℃ and and with a goal of 1.5℃ above the pre-industrial levels. By May 2019, 185 countries had ratified the agreement. Are we on our way to reach this goal? No, on the contrary the temperature levels globally are rising over the agreed goals. It seems that the countries that has signed the agreement just did it to push any political unpleasentness forward in time. How long can we put our heads in the ground and pretend everything is fine? Shame on you politicians that do not make any real attempts to save our world.

Do I do enough? Of course I don't. I do not take part in any climate activism and I am not going in to politics. I just moun about the problem and write futile postings in my tinylog. Shame on me.

Finally a link to a really good text:

2024-10-06 18:00 CEST

Seeing Trump and Musk on the same stage in Butler in a news clip is really scary.

2024-09-19 10:17 CEST

Read an shellscript example which included the curl command (only used curl in its simplest way before) and wondered what the flags/options -s and -d meant so I opened the man page for curl and became dizzy allmost immediately by all the options, it was just to much (have a cold and a bit of fever).

Ran

man curl | grep -E -c '^[[:space:]]{,8}-'

which gave me a count of 244. It's going to take some time to read and hopefully understand the man page.

2024-09-06 10:10 CEST

Copernicus: The August 2024 report on surface air temperature is out.

The average temperature in the world was 16.82°C, the same as for August 2023. In the report we can also read that the boreal summer (June to August) was the warmest "on record globally by a large margin".

2024-09-02 05:47 CEST

Edited both this tinylog and my swedish equivalent with the right time zone abbreviations. Wasn't aware that there are two time zone abbreviations for Sweden and in a number of other central and western European countries: CET for standard time (wintertime) and CEST for daylight-saving time (summertime).

2024-08-26 12:22 CEST

Wanted a new font for the terminal because the monotype fonts installed didn't view certain (wide) characters well in my (Debian 12) gnome-terminal. Downloaded a bunch of fonts and decided to use a nice looking font called Hack.

2024-08-28 17:53 CEST

The end of summer. The soft intro to the darkness and for me the hardest time of the year. Even when the sun is shining I can feel that autumn lurkes behind every bush, every stone and every cloud. A diminutive melancholic feeling spreads through me and I watch the skies with sadness in my eyes.

2024-08-10 07:57 CEST

The average surface air temperature for July 2024 was 16.91°C which is 0.04°C lower than for July 2023. Though the positive temperature change is tiny it marks the end of the 13 months we have had with average temperatures higher than the corresponding months a year earlier.

Source:

2024-08-03 17:30 CEST

My old Toshiba laptop have really got a new boost since I upgraded from Debian 10 to Debian 12. The overall performance is just great, the fan doesn't have to work nearly as hard now. Happy.

2024-07-19 12:10 CEST

As I do not know much about the subject I wonder: Do not cyber security companies test their code in a safe environment before sending it out to customers?

2024-07-08 09:12 CEST

The month of June had an average surface air temperature of 16.6°C which is 0.16 degrees more than June 2023. For 13 straight months the temerature has been higher than for the same month the year before. Source:

"A little less conversation, a little more action please"

2024-07-07 08:05 CEST

Spent almost all of my computertime yesterday on reading parts of the GNU Mailutils manual. Though I don't use mail.mailutils that much I really enjoyed myself. You never know when it is comming in handy.

2024-06-26 23:34 CEST

Debians support (LTS) for Debian 10 (Buster) is coming to an end in the end of June so I feel compelled to upgrade the operating system on my old laptop. I like Debian and going to see if my laptop will manage to run Debian 12 with the Gnome desktop in a way that is satisfying. Otherwise I'll have to pick up a lightweight distro. Am in the process now of double checking that I haven't missed to backup any important stuff. Exiting times indeed. ;-)

2024-06-17 09:18 CEST

Surface air temperature for the month of May 2024 were 0.19°C higher than May last year. This was the 12:th month in a row with higher temperature than for the corresponding month the year before. Source:

2024-06-17 09:10 CEST

Shingles is a lot of pain. Get vaccinated.

2024-05-08 09:56 CEST

So, the global surface air temperature in april, 2024, was the warmest recorded according to Copernicus. This was the 11:th month in a row with the warmest measured temperature. Source:

2024-04-24 12:38 CEST

We have to put an end to fossil fuel subsidies in Sweden and the EU. The Swedish government and their right wing friends in Sverigedemokraterna are proposing even more tax credits for aviation travelling at the same time as they want to dismantle much of the already established enviromental legislation.

Sadly, I believe that the upcomming EU elections will be a pure catastrophe for the enviroment and the struggle against global warming. I'm scared.

2024-04-21 08:15 CEST

The best way to start ones sunday turns out to be with a cup of coffee and Ploums text

2024-04-18 21:30 CEST

More then a month since I wrote something here. Due to health issues in the family I have put this tinylog more or less on hold. I wish that I could say that things now have gone back to normal but that would not be true, but I'm hopeful.

2024-03-11 02:47 CET

Fell asleep much too early so now I'm fully awake in the middle of the night. Have to search through the bookshelf after something readable, yet tiring.

2024-02-14 12:13 CET

I was just a bit blue when I wrote that. There is so much more to it than just nostalgia for me. Flexibility, less resource use and a lot more freedom. Even with access to the source code I do not have the knowledge to alter a GUI application. With pipes and a bit of shell scripting I can almost do everything on the command line. That is freedom for me.

2024-02-11 09:10 CET

For me as an outsider it is a total enigma how Trump once became president and are now on his way to win the next election it seems.

2024-02-07 18:20 CET

Maybe my love of the command line just is nostalgia. Happy memories from the early eighties of my schools computer with terminals (Norsk Data), 8 inch floppies and Basic. I wish I had said "I want to learn more".

2024-02-07 21:15 CET

My Swedish tinylog is up:

Edited: Sometime I have the need to express myself in Swedish online. I do boycotts all social media on the www so this is my solution to that.

2024-02-03 16:40 CET

Martin wrote: "I don't consume much. I live in an urban area, don't own a car, bike everywhere, don't buy inpulse purchases" - It is vital to be reminded often that you're not alone in trying to do as much as possible for the planet. To somehow feel that the things you do matter even though the road to safety is so long. Sometimes I even feel kind of hopeful.

2024-01-22 13:00 CET

Edited. I am so disappointed in the Swedish Social Democrats. When the Green Party and the Center Party requested a vote of no confidence against the government's environment minister, they, unlike the left party, chose to abstain with a very poor explanation. With this victory the government can continue to dismantle the environmental policy we have had and at the same time lie about how good their environmental policy is.

2024-01-12 12:30 CET

Global warming: We are close to crossing the 1.5 degree limit, there are signs that this will happen already this year, 2024. Yet we, mankind, continue to increase emissions, use more natural resources, increase our purchases of unnecessary things, participate in armed conflicts and so on.

We are about as stable in our environmental thinking as a pair of maracas filled with nitroglycerin.

2024-01-07 20:50 CET

Some days, like today, the number of aha experiences is on another level. Happy.

2024-01-05 13.00 CET

I stopped using social media a while ago because I'm too sensitive to deal with rudeness, lies and so on. Until very recently I have seen Gemini as a sheltered place which was naive of me. Hopefully the level of stupidity is kept so low that the pleasure of reading interesting gemlogs is not lost. Again, I'm naive.

2024-01-04 12:25 CET

Read a gemlog post. It did upset me. It was about the war between Israel and Hamas. The author claimes that Hamas and the Palestinian people are "essentially" the same thing. Thats utter garbage. Untrue. A lie.

2024-01-01 11:10 CET

Edited: Happy new year. My new year's resolutions: none at all. I would just break them and as I'm not a politician it would just be simply lying.

2023-12-29 15:40 CET

Got sidetracked again. Why is it so difficult to stick to the plan when sitting in front of the computer?

I'm like a three-year-old... Except that a three-year-old learns faster.

2023-12-26 19:45 CET

Why do organizations and companies use bad technology and ill-conceived solutions on their websites? Today, I have had to fight, among other things, to be able to donate money to the Red Cross and Amnesty and to be able to buy movie tickets online. Surely the meaning is that contributors/customers should have a pleasant experience?

2023-12-21 12:40 CET

Having the flu, rearranging the furniture, Christmas is relentlessly approaching. Happy times, yes indeed.

2023-12-13 17:45 CET

COP28: The agreement is, as expected, a big disappointment. The oil producing countries and the oil industry won as usual. The biggest loser is humanity, led by the island nations.

2023-12-13 09:15 CET

An interesting subject and most interesting reading. Yet again, someone that has got too much attention without getting his facts scrutinized.

2023-12-11 20:49 CET

Thought I had an idea on how to solve a problem using a bash script. After two hours I suddenly discover that I was completely wrong from the beginning. Well, now I know how not to solve the problem.

2023-12-09 15:45 CET

Just spotted the receipt for my laptop when going through a box with papers. My trusted and beloved Toshiba was bought 2012-03-24. It's still going strong (knock on wood). For a command line user as myself it's still completely sufficient but I'm taking backups weekly. I dread the day I will be forced to replace you.

2023-12-07 18:45 CET

Found my old CD's with classical music yesterday. Have started to convert them to .mp3 from the command line (ffmpeg) but it's a bit tedeous. Task for tonight: write a shell script to automate the process.

2023-12-05 10:50 CET

Used awk today for the first time in months. I've got a memory like a goldfish so my own documentation of awk came in very handy. If I don't document what I do on the computer I would have to start from the beginning and learn it all again. By the way, markdown rules.

2023-12-04 18:30 CET

From permacomputing.net: "In a time where computing epitomizes industrial waste, permacomputing encourages the maximizing of hardware lifespans, minimizing energy use and focusing on the use of already available computational resources."

Never heard of permacomputing until today. Better late than never.

Found permacomputing via

A gemlog post by ploum i enjoyed reading.

2023-12-03 11:50 CET

COP28: A declaration from 20 countries to triple the nuclear power capacity by 2050. I feel sick.

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