● 07.03.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 03/07/2022: GNU/Linux Steam Surge, GitHub Breaks the Law

Posted in News Roundup at 3:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• We cover events and user groups that are running in the US state of Georgia. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.

Audiocasts/Shows

• On this episode of This Week in Linux: Accessibility in Linux, Vim 9.0, EndeavourOS 22.6, Thunderbird 102 Email Client, Software Freedom Conservancy Says Give Up GitHub, GNOME Web 43 Gets WebExtension Support, Potential RISC-V Laptops, Shotcut 22.06 Video Editor, all that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!

• Welcome to Hardware Addicts, a proud member of the TuxDigital Network. Hardware Addicts is the podcast that focuses on the physical components that powers our technology world.

• In this episode, we’re going to be talking about the ethics of AI…what do we do when the robots we create become sentient? How close have are we getting to true sentient AI in robotics? Then we head to Camera Corner where Wendy will discuss back button focus.

• So Sit back, Relax, and Plug In because Hardware Addicts Starts Now!

Instructionals/Technical

• Tech people have always had a certain attraction to building their own blogs instead of using a canned platform. Not every tech person, by any means (there are plenty of people who use readily available platforms because they have better things to spend time and energy on), but there’s generally been enough tech people that there have been tendencies and trends. Back when I started Wandering Thoughts, the in thing to do was to build a dynamic blog engine. DWiki, the engine behind Wandering Thoughts was such a dynamic engine, and it was somewhat modeled on others that I saw at the time.

• With rsync up and running, it’s time to take a peek under the hood of rsync to better understand how it works.

• Now that we know what to use rsync for, how can we best integrate rsync into monitoring and alerting, and on which operating systems does it work?

• Mozilla Firefox is one of the best browsers available that combines strong privacy protection features, good security, active development, and regular updates. A solid alternative to Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Vivaldi.

• The “df” command is a staple in the UNIX and Linux world for checking the amount of free space on your local drives.

• I found the reason. At line 369, it tries to perform an operation on script ‘grub4dosconfig’, to fix a syntax error in that script. However, Easy no longer has the ‘grub4dos’ package, and that causes the ‘momanager’ script to hang at line 375.

• In this guide, we will learn how to setup secure private docker registry on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy jellyfish) using self-sign SSL certificate and htpasswd.

• Private docker registry is the repository for container images and it supports both uploading and downloading operations. It is strongly recommended one should always secure private registry to mitigate security risks.

• Once we setup secure registry then we can use it in our deployments on Kubernetes cluster or may be in RedHat Openshift Cluster.

WINE or Emulation

• Another two weeks have gone by so the Wine hackers have put out their latest development work with Wine 7.12 now available.

Games

• The latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey is out for June 2022, putting the Linux user share at one of its highest ever points and likely thanks to the rise of the Steam Deck and SteamOS. As shown on our dedicated Steam Tracker, it’s been trending upwards for quite a while but this latest figure is a pretty good showing.

• Now on to how to describe. This is something I’ve had to learn in the last two years, since we started playing most of our sessions over video, since before that I relied heavily on the actual room we were in. Before video, I would do a very larpy style, show in the room how things were connected etc, make short or long hand gestures. When things were extra tricky, I’d have them leave their chairs and walk with me in the room. I wanted to convey a sense of space. We were playing in basically a ten by ten room so as far as larps go, it was pretty darn semi (as in, relying on the life changing magic of imagination).

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Now I could reboot and choose XWayland from the login screen instead.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• A brand new beta release of Icaros — a distribution of AROS (an open source operating system that is API-compatible with Amiga) — has just been released.

Devices/Embedded

•  MYIR has released a System On Module (SOM) built around the Allwinner T507-H industrial processor along with a compatible carrier board. The MYC-YT507H module is AEC-Q100 certified which is convenient for automotive electronics, industrial controls, IoT applications, etc. The SOM starts at ~$34.90 while its carrier board costs around ~$119.

• The processor system integrated on the MYC-YT507H SOM is the Allwinner T507-H which combines a four-core Arm Cortex-A53. In addition, there is an Arm Mali-G31 MP2 GPU enabled to support OpenGL ES 3.2/2.0/1.0, Vulkan 1.1 and OpenCL 2.0.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Phoronix is reporting the first production RISC-V laptop, (code?) named ROMA, with “a quad-core RISC-V CPU (although clock frequencies are not noted), a GPU/NPU accelerator [and reportedly other features], up to 16GB of LPDDR4/LPDDR4X RAM [and] up to 256GB of storage.” This sounds great, except that I was seriously underwhelmed by the Allwinner D1 in the DevTerm R-01, so the lack of CPU specs is not encouraging. There are also two distinct process nodes for the System-on-Module, 12nm for Pro and 28nm for Normal, so there may be a wide gulf between configurations. On the other hand, it does prominently claim to be upgradable, possibly by swapping out the modules. Strangely, it advertises itself with an ARM SC300 secure enclave, which seems a bit odd as well.

• This new challenge will embrace the old time of RTC modems with a monthly time budget. Back in these days, in France at least, people had to subscribe to an ISP for a given price, but you would be able to connect only for 10, 20, 30, 40… hours a month depending on your subscription. Any extra hour was very expensive. We used the Internet the most efficiently possible because it was time limited (and very slow, 4 kB/s at best). Little story, phone lines were not available while a modem was connected, and we had to be careful not to forget to manually disconnect the modem after use, otherwise it would stay connected and wasting the precious Internet time! (and making expensive bills)

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Licensing / Legal

• Historically, dual licensing models were almost always implemented with GPL2 as the open source choice; most other licenses lack the conditions to drive private businesses to the proprietary licensing choice. Once GPL3 and AGPL3 were released, those licenses took their place as part of the dual licensing model, because they imposed more conditions on the exercise of the license than GPL2.

• But that is not the only limitation of the dual licensing model. If the software is intended for uses (such as supporting SaaS, monitoring or development tools, or software intended for end use) that would not normally require distribution, then GPL would not drive anyone to take a proprietary license. So, the dual licensing model waned in popularity over time. AGPL was potentially more effective in such cases, but again, only for pieces of programs, not whole ones. Today, pure dual licensing models are not so common, and have given ground to the “upsell” model described below.

• GitHub is enabling copyleft violation ✨at scale✨ with Copilot. GitHub Copilot encourages people to make derivative works of source code without complying with the original code’s license. This facilitates the creation of permissively-licensed or proprietary derivatives of copyleft code.

• Unfortunately, challenging Microsoft (GitHub’s parent company) in court is a bad idea: their legal budget probably ensures their victory, and they likely already have a comprehensive defense planned. How can we determine Copilot’s legality on a level playing field? We can create legal precedent that they haven’t had a chance to study yet!

• A chat with Matt Campbell about a speech synthesizer gave me a horrible idea. I think I know a way to find out if GitHub Copilot is legal: we could use its legal justification against another software project with a smaller legal budget. Specifically, against a speech synthesizer. The outcome of our actions could set a legal precedent to determine the legality of Copilot.

Programming/Development

• On the 30th of April 2022, ****Anaconda, a company widely known for its data science products in Python and R programming languages, announced that it had just released a framework that would help users create python applications using HTML.

• This publication will help you get started writing PyScript, a JSFiddle-like Python framework.

• Your ability to respond to change (not just technologically but organizationally) will be one of your primary competitive advantages. How fast can you synthesize customer feedback and incorporate changes back into your software? If setting up a project quickly is part of that — due to prototyping changes or the like — then fine, setup time is important. But don’t lose sight of why it’s important.

• Given an array arr[] of length N, The task is to find the maximum and the minimum number in the array.

• A Stack is a temporary memory address space that is used to hold arguments and automatic variables during the invocation of a subprogram or function reference. The size of this stack is called the stack size.

• Async execution and promises are not easy to understand in any language and JavaScript is no exception. In this post, we will dissect how JavaScript Promise.all function works visually and with a real-life code example, let’s get started!

Leftovers

• Stanley Kubrick also employed him for ‘The Killing’ and ‘Paths of Glory,’ and he was unforgettable as the god-like Tyrell in ‘Blade Runner.’

• The S.E.C. investigation has focused on whether there were serious discussions between the leadership of Digital World and Trump Media before the special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, went public in September and, if so, why those talks were not disclosed in regulatory filings. SPACs, which raise money to go public in the hopes of finding a merger candidate, are not supposed to have an acquisition target in mind when they raise money from investors. Regulators have also requested information about trading activity in securities of Digital World before the merger announcement in October. A few weeks before the merger announcement, there was a big surge in trading of Digital World warrants — a type of security that gives the holder the right to buy shares at a specified price.

• Popular online discussion forum Reddit has announced that it is acquiring MeaningCloud, a natural language processing (NLP) company specialising in extracting meaning from unstructured content.

Science

• According to the best measures we’ve got, a set of benchmarks called MLPerf, machine-learning systems can be trained nearly twice as quickly as they could last year. It’s a figure that outstrips Moore’s Law, but also one we’ve come to expect. Most of the gain is thanks to software and systems innovations, but this year also gave the first peek at what some new processors, notably from Graphcore and Intel subsidiary Habana Labs, can do.

• The once-crippling time it took to train a neural network to do its task is the problem that launched startups like Cerebras and SambaNova and drove companies like Google to develop machine-learning accelerator chips in house. But the new MLPerf data shows that training time for standard neural networks has gotten a lot less taxing in a short period of time. And that speedup has come from much more than just the advance of Moore’s Law.

Hardware

• The basic idea is that system builders are already able to integrate components like sensors into their products, so why not expose some higher-level information about the environment in the same form factor? For example, a person sensor might have a pin that goes high when someone is present, and then an I2C interface to supply more detailed information about their pose, activities, and identity. That would allow a TV manufacturer to wake up the display when someone sat down on the couch, and maybe even customize the UI to show recently-watched shows based on which family members are present. All of the complexity of the ML implementation would be taken care of by the sensor manufacturer and hidden inside the hardware module, which would have a microcontroller and a camera under the hood. The OEM would just need to respond to the actionable signals from the component.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• But “way less risky” is not “zero risk.” There’s still a chance of catching COVID even at an outdoor event — especially as the virus continues evolving to become more transmissible and to break through prior immunity from vaccination or earlier cases.

• “With the more transmissible variants, it’s likely that shorter periods of close contact will result in transmission,” says Dr. Preeti Malani, an infectious diseases physician and a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan.

• That means activities that once seemed pretty safe are potentially riskier – and that includes outdoor activities.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• Even me, a technical person, can’t avoid cesspits like Facebook and WhatsApp. Well, I could, but I don’t want to become a complete pariah.

• What we’re watching: In a letter to be sent as early as this week, Biden will say the FTC should not tolerate unfair or deceptive practices related to reporting, surveillance, sharing or sale of personal information — including sensitive health-related information — in any state, the official told Axios.

• McLaughlin’s message, which was posted on the day Politico reported the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion on Roe v. Wade in early May, has since been retweeted more than 59,000 times. The Supreme Court handed down its official decision on Roe v. Wade on June 24.

• Abortion-rights advocates are ringing alarm bells not just about the use of menstruation-tracking apps, but the potentially incriminating digital trail of geo-location data, online transactions and web-search histories.

• New York state passed a law on Friday banning guns from many public places, including Times Square, and requiring gun-license applicants to prove their shooting proficiency and submit their social media accounts for review by government officials.

• The law, passed in an emergency legislative session, was forced by a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week that struck down New York’s restrictive gun-license laws. The court’s conservative majority ruled for the first time that the U.S. Constitution grants an individual the right to carry weapons in public for self-defense. read more

• A lot of people still share the expectation that cameras will be obvious, standalone components of a system. Even though phone cameras and webcams are smaller, they still have a noticeable physical presence, and often come with indicators like red lights that show when they’re recording. What is clear to me from my work is that these assumptions aren’t going to hold much longer. Soon imaging sensors will be so small, cheap, and energy efficient that they’ll be added to many more devices in our daily lives, and because they’re so tiny they won’t even be noticeable!

• What am I basing this prediction on? The clearest indicator for me is that you can already buy devices like the Himax HM01B0 with an imaging sensor that’s less than 2mm by 2mm in size, low single-digit dollars in cost, and 2 milliwatts or less in power usage. Even more striking are the cameras that are emerging from research labs. At the TinyML Summit the University of Michigan presented a complete system that fits on the tip of a finger.

• Swedish Radio News’ reporters also built a program which, automatically, thousands of times a day, visited the made-up pharmacy, filled in e-mail addresses and telephone numbers, searched for symptoms and illnesses, but unlike the other pharmacies that Swedish Radio News had previously reported about, it also passed on information about prescription medicines.

• After four days, 25 000 fake visits from customers had been registered with Facebook. But they had neither shut down nor warned the owners of the made-up pharmacy – Swedish Radio News’ reporters. When the reporters log into their account, they see that Facebook has stored the type of sensitive information that they say their filter is built to delete again and again.

Defence/Aggression

• Many who escaped being killed, however, suffered severe injuries and are currently living with disabilities inflicted on them by the invaders, especially in the notorious attack of 2018 New Year’s eve.

• The Paris Court of Appeal (Cour d’Assises Spéciale) on Friday July 1 sentenced a 27-year-old former gendarme who had converted to Islam to 15 years in prison with a two-thirds security detention. He was charged with advocating armed jihad in Western countries. The former gendarme had been arrested in January 2018 “in view of the risk that a possible act of violence was imminent”.

Environment

• I had challenged myself to purchase a week’s worth of food without bringing home any plastic in my grocery bag. That meant no jugs of juice, yogurt containers, cellophane windows in chip bags, plastic packages or even stickers on some produce.

• Why did I do this? Because very few of the plastic packages and containers we use once get recycled. Because there’s growing concern about the harmful health effects. Some research suggests that ingesting microplastics could disrupt hormone production or be associated with problems like asthma and learning disorders.

• Though scientists have not confirmed the link, I just don’t love the idea that I may consume a credit card’s worth of plastic in a week.

Energy

• The government has admitted almost all rooftop solar energy in Australia may be double-counted – a massive emission reduction free ride for Australia’s largest corporations. Callum Foote reports.

• In correspondence exchanged in January, senior officials within the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources admitted that almost all small-scale solar installations, the kind you put on your roof, are being double-counted by the government. This has happened through the misuse of the Clean Energy Regulators’ data on small-scale energy sold into the grid and the way that emissions are calculated by the Department.

• It’s part of its #ibike campaign to promote cycling culture in the Greater Copenhagen Region, a hotbed for leading biking solution brands and sustainable innovation, which is co-hosting the greatest race in the world, the Tour de France, for the first time in history.

• But as the slogan reminds us, the race will leave these shores on the evening of July 3, but its imprint hopefully won’t: “Biking is not just a sport. It’s a lifestyle.”

• But Meta’s apparent need for truckloads of GPUs will likely serve as an affirmation to Nvidia and other chip companies that some of the world’s largest tech companies will continue to need more accelerator chips to fuel their most important businesses as the global economy cools down.

• As detailed by The Verge earlier this month, Meta plans to use its discovery engine to create a version of the Facebook app that closely resembles TikTok’s addictive feed of videos. Not a big surprise given that copying competitors has long been Meta’s strong suit.

• Starting June 1, Germany’s new budget travel pass, available for €9 ($9.60), can be used around the country. We’ve compiled some information to help you understand how to use it.

• By making public transit cheaper, German leaders hope to limit car travel and help phase out Russian oil imports. Last year, Germany was the largest buyer of Russian oil in Europe, and it is now looking to make drastic reductions. On Monday, EU leaders agreed to an embargo that will “effectively cut around 90 percent of oil imports from Russia to the EU by the end of the year,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen tweeted.

Wildlife/Nature

• Homero Gómez was often called “the butterfly guardian” because of his work in Ocampo’s El Rosario butterfly sanctuary, and most agree that he was killed for was his conservation work there. The new series will also be named El Guardián in honor of his work.

• A local from the Ocampo community, Gómez was a dedicated defender of the area’s migratory monarch butterfly population and their habitat, which spans almost 140,000 acres across Michoacán and México states and hosts over a billion butterflies each winter along their migratory journey back to the United States and Canada.

Finance

• I’ve witnessed five US recessions and have studied them as a historical phenomenon as a hobby. Here’s what I think about Bitcoin.

• If you look at the fake coins bloodbath and bankruptcy proceedings going on right now, that alone is another dotcom bubble, and Bitcoin and clones turned out to be Flooz 2.0.

• Remember Flooz? If you’re much under 40, you probably don’t.

• There was going to be an “Internet Currency” that you could exchange USD for because online merchants weren’t established to take credit cards and stuff yet.

• I got some as part of a promotion and used them to buy some cigars from cigar Web site through the mail when I was underage. I think the statute of limitations is up on that. It was over 23 years ago.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The greatly expanded crossbench elected to federal parliament has reacted furiously to the Albanese government’s cuts to its staffing allowance. But the well-financed independents are well placed to make a virtue of the new austerity and remind us why they are at the vanguard of fresh thinking in politics, writes Mark Sawyer.

• Of all the misdeeds of the Morrison government, this one seems to have been the least publicised. Who knew, outside those involved and a select few in the Canberra bubble, that the crossbenchers that served in the 46th parliament had been allocated extra staff?

• Media outcry? What media outcry? Vital government services being cut here there and everywhere, as the taxpayer funds more fancy-pants advisers and strategy gurus for the bloated political class?

• Footage has emerged of the Uzbek authorities cleaning up a huge amount of blood after suppression of protests in Nukus, Uzbekistan.

• After recording the video, Khan attempted to defuse the situation by trying to reason with Mullah and the crowd, which had become increasingly aggressive. Khan helped the truck driver get back into his vehicle to escape the scene. As Khan himself began to depart, Mullah cried out to him saying that he was a part of the extremist group Jammat-ud-Dawa, that he had “fought in Kashmir”, and that he has connections in “high places,” insinuating that the matter won’t end with them departing.

• Khan has not reported the incident to the police and has yet to be contacted by provincial government authorities, whom he tagged when he uploaded the video on Twitter.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Deutsche Welle is German public, state-owned international broadcaster, funded by German taxpayers. Voice of America is run by the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), a government agency which is funded by the US Congress. The two websites have not been accessible in Turkey since Thursday.

• DW said in a statement that it did not comply with the rules because “licensing would have allowed the Turkish government to censor editorial content.”

• It was not initially clear what triggered the attack, with some suggesting that it was over a QR code introduced by Samsung, the South Korean electronic giant, that allegedly had blasphemous content against the Prophet. Earlier this year, a man had threatened to set a Pepsi truck on fire over a similar issue.

• However, it was later clarified that the alleged blasphemous content was shared through a WiFi device that was located inside the outlet.

• An OnlyFans creator who goes by the name Kitty Lixo said on the podcast “No Jumper” that after her Instagram account got banned, she managed to get it reinstated by systematically having sex with Meta employees (formerly known as Facebook employees).

• Lixo didn’t say what got her banned in the short clip podcast host Adam Grandmaison posted on Twitter yesterday. But she did say that the first time it happened, she started sleeping with a friend at the company to get the account restored.

• Later on, when she got banned again, she said she approached things even more organized manner.

• “I went on his LinkedIn and I searched up [his connections] in the integrity department,” Lixo said in the clip. “We met up. I fucked a couple of them. I was able to get my account back two, three times.”

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• On May 13, two days after the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli Occupation Forces, as her loss still dominated international news cycles, thousands of Palestinian mourners gathered to pay tribute to the woman who had given them voice for so long. They came to lay her body to rest.

• Zubair was arrested on Monday for the crimes of hurting religious sentiments and inciting enmity under Sections 153 and 295 of the Indian Penal Code.

• In 2018, Zubair posted a tweet which depicted a hotel having its name changed from “Honeymoon Hotel” to “Hanuman Hotel.” Hanuman is a Hindu god. Delhi Police arrested him based on a complaint over that tweet, which alleged Zubair tweeted a “questionable image with a purpose to deliberately insult the god of a particular religion.’

• Despite a growing recognition of the problem, the United States continues to see newspapers die at the rate of two per week, according to a report issued Wednesday on the state of local news.

• Areas of the country that find themselves without a reliable source of local news tend to be poorer, older and less educated than those covered well, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications said.

• Nevertheless, the current economic downturn isn’t the only factor to blame for the recent flurry of layoffs in the media industry. Just a week ago, streaming giant Netflix laid off 3% of its workforce, or about 300 employees, in its second round of layoffs following its disastrous first-quarter results. But Netflix’s woes have little to do with the broader macroeconomic picture and more to do with the streaming landscape and management’s shortcomings.

• Big media mergers and acquisitions have also resulted in layoffs associated with restructuring and rebalancing. Earlier this week, it was reported that CAA and ICM’s merger would result in roughly 105 layoffs. And around 1,000 employees at Warner Bros. Discovery are also getting axed, according to reports. At the time of the merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery, management said it would be looking to create $3 billion in cost savings. Though layoffs are always difficult, post-M&A layoffs are often par for the course.

Civil Rights/Policing

• A picture with Ms Kling’s tweet showed an error message on the BA website saying “Title and gender do not match. Please try again” above Dr Kling’s attempt to input her details as a female doctor.

• The comment prompted hundreds of infuriated replies on social media.

• British Airways has been beset by IT problems in the past, including a number of IT failures that have caused flights to be delayed and cancelled.

• The one-man grand jury charged the defendants with misconduct in office, perjury, willful neglect of duty, obstruction of justice and more than nine counts of manslaughter. The defendants argued that Michigan law requires a prosecutor, not a judge, to issue indictments in a public courtroom so that a defendant is aware of what he’s being charged with and has an opportunity to present evidence to defend himself. The State argued that a preliminary examination would be redundant because the judge must already decide if there is probable cause.

• Ultimately, the Michigan Supreme Court found that if a court uses a one-man grand jury, the defendant is entitled to a preliminary examination, and that a judge may not issue an indictment authorizing criminal charges. The cases were remanded to the state district court.

• In 2014, Flint managers appointed by Snyder took the city out of a regional water system and began using the Flint River to save money while a new pipeline to Lake Huron was being built. But the river water wasn’t treated to reduce its corrosive qualities. Lead broke off from old pipes and contaminated the city’s system for more than a year.

• Lyon’s lawyers led the challenge that resulted in a unanimous Supreme Court ruling Tuesday that a judge sitting as a one-person grand jury had no power under Michigan law to return indictments.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• It’s raining heavily here. Not a torrential pour like earlier, but a dense drizzle. I was sitting on my balcony observing it, absorbing it, smoking and sipping coffee. Fireworks went off in the distance, or so it sounded. I couldn’t see anything.

• The only thing over-riding the noise of the fireworks was my neighbor, “A”, throwing a tantrum, fighting with her cat, being a complete and total pest like she always is. I know she has some series of mental health issues with her, as do many, including myself, but I don’t verbally, audibly, and physically lose my mind and dismantle my apartment every other night like she does. Everything she owns and is not glued down gets thrown and slammed here and there.

• The two hardest things to do as a Catholic are 1) Give up your sins, 2) Confess your sins when you fail to give them up.

• [...]

• Which indicates that the person making that silly claim doesn’t know Catholic theology. In order to be forgiven in Confession, you need to make a “firm purpose of amendment.” In other words, if you just intend to commit the sin again, then your sins are not forgiven in the confessional. While yes, we fall, you must go to Confession with the intention that you will *never commit that sin again.*

• [...]

• Many Catholics stay “Catholic” while denying Catholic teaching. Either they state that they don’t believe their sins are really sins, or that Jesus never meant for people to confess their sins to a priest, only straight to God. I find this dishonest, because once a Catholic does this, he no longer is Catholic. He is embracing Protestantism.

• The other thing that happens to many Catholics that abandon Confession is that they abandon belief in God. And it really happens in that order. Once they can no longer fight Satan in Confession, by speaking truth, in defiance of the Father of Lies, they state that, “Well, there isn’t a God anyways. There is no sin.” But the cause of the abandonment of belief in God is the fear of Confession.

• I’ve seen both many times over my half-century of life.

Politics

• I wouldn’t complain about someone just skipping to 3. I can’t argue with a blank stare, and when people tell me about how the oils used in Peanut Butter damage the rainforest, I probably look like a mannequin. But I’m not about to start lecturing people that the asphalt on the roads sometimes contains trace amount of animal parts, so we may as well eat battery-chicken eggs, and someone once killed a cow, so now we’re all polluted by vegan-original-sin forever.

Technical

• Every since watching this nifty video on boot sector games, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of optimizing for code size, i.e., making the compiled code as few bytes as possible.

• [...]

• Something which challenged me recently was trying to reduce the compiled code size of a small program I wrote in Mecrisp Stellaris Forth. The program was supposed to read the function bits of the RP2040 GPIO CTRL registers, and output the current function that is set for each GPIO pin, in a human readable format. There are nine function options for each pin, and there are 29 pins. The exact function in a slot varies, however, for each pin, e.g., function 1 for GPIO 0 is SPIO RX, but for GPIO 2 it is SPIO SCK, and for GPIO 8 it is SPI1 RX.

• [...]

• That sounds good, but I don’t know how to accomplish that without either rewriting the whole GPIO_FNS’ word in assembly, or coming up with a fancy Forth compile-time word which somehow builds the array and all the other branching code. Both ideas sound daunting, but perhaps this could be my next mini-project…

Science

• The existence of a mechanical calendar that was built over 2,000 years ago is a valuable reminder: humans are clever and resourceful, and when given the opportunity to do so, we can create wondrous things.

Internet/Gemini

• I just noticed that today marks exactly six months since I started this gemlog. Looking at the commit history for this capsule’s text content, its anniversary was actually yesterday, and the server, smolver, goes back even further than that. Regardless, I view the gemlog as more of a milestone, at least in the nontechnical sense. Getting the server code correctly serving basic gemtext was a satisfying milestone as well, but the gemlog seems a more scalable one, so that’s what I’m going with.

• Looking at the dates on my gemlog posts, it is obvious my enthusiasm was strongest at the start, but I am definitely still interested. This has become a nice creative outlet for me in a way that is simultaneously hard to describe, and surprising to my overly analytical brain.

• Here’s to many more Geminiversaries to come!

Programming

• I am current rebuilding the chess section of my capsule. The new code will be written in Python, and for practice, I’m re-implementing the other CGI scripts on my capsule to use Python instead of Bash.

• So far I’ve rewritten two scripts: my age in miles and the capsule guestbook. The age in miles script was extremely easy to rewrite, but I wanted the guestbook script to follow the same principles the chess site will. To that end, I write each entry in the guestbook to a SQLite database, then regenerate the guestbook gemtext page from the rows in the database.

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