● 11.12.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 12/11/2022: Shufflecake Unveiled

Posted in News Roundup at 3:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Today we are excited to release Shufflecake, a tool aimed at helping people whose freedom of expression is threatened by repressive authorities or dangerous criminal organizations, in particular: whistleblowers, investigative journalists, and activists for human rights in oppressive regimes. Shufflecake is FLOSS (Free/Libre, Open Source Software). Source code in C is available and released under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or superior.

• “Shufflecake is FLOSS (Free/Libre, Open Source Software). Source code in C is available and released under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or superior…. The current release is still a non-production-ready prototype, so we advise against using it for really sensitive operations. However, we believe that future work will sensibly improve both security and performance, hopefully offering a really useful tool to people who live in constant danger of being interrogated with coercive methods to reveal sensitive information.

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

Server

• Contexts make it easy for a single Docker CLI to manage multiple Swarm clusters, multiple Kubernetes clusters, and multiple individual Docker nodes.

Audiocasts/Shows

• This C++ program is MUCH slower compared to Python because of this programming Mistake Speed comparison between a Python program and a C++ program.

Instructionals/Technical

• Most of the systems in a network receive their IP addresses and other networking-related parameters from a DHCP server. You might know how to find your system’s IP address assigned by a DHCP server. But do you know what’s the IP address of your DHCP server?

• Let’s briefly explain what a DHCP server actually is and how you can find its IP address on Linux.

• Use Nginx Webserver (LEMP) to install Moodle (LMS) server on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa Linux to set up your own open-source PHP-based learning management system. Moodle stands for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment.

• If you are looking for an open-source Learning management system for your educational institution then Moodle can be used. It has already been used by many schools and universities to enhance the learning experience of students.

• Moodle can be used free of charge by any educational institution. The possible applications of the learning platform Moodle range from school organization to pedagogical work with pupils. Teachers and students, but also parents or external partners, can be quickly involved in the activities of the institution. With the learning portal Moodle, you can easily set up different learning offers and learning scenarios.

• Fedora Linux users may notice that the DNF download speed can be slow compared to other distributions. This can be frustrating when you need to download and install many packages, which can occur regularly, given how Fedora pushes new package updates given the distribution type. Most users do not realize that a few minor tweaks to some configuration files can increase your download speed immensely.

• This is done by telling DNF to use multiple mirrors in parallel, as DNF will only use a single mirror, which can often be slow. However, if you instruct DNF to use multiple mirrors, it will download files from multiple sources simultaneously, dramatically increasing your download speed. Secondly, you can also try using a faster mirror that provides a list of mirrors sorted by country and bandwidth. Combined with multiple parallel downloading, it will super boost your DNF speed.

• Install and setup Zoneminder with Raspberry PI, configuring cameras (with alarms) for your self hosted video surveillance system

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Gitea on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Gitea is a free and open-source Git repository hosting platform. It allows you to work with version control software with other features including issue tracking, pull requests, user management, notifications, and more. It is very similar to GitHub. Gitea is written in the Go language and can be installed on multiple operating systems, including Linux, macOS, Windows, and architectures like amd64, i386, ARM, and others.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Gitea on Rocky Linux. 9.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• We present ten awesome KDE Apps for various use cases. Find yours!

• Continuing with the KDE Apps series, in this part 3 article, we look at some interesting apps from the KDE ecosystem. Some of them you already know about since they are popular. And some you probably never heard of. Here are the ten cool KDE apps for you to raise awareness of native desktop apps.

• If you missed the earlier articles, you could read them here.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Plan 9 is an operating system designed by Bell Labs. It’s the OS they wrote after Unix, with the benefit of hindsight. It is the most interesting operating system that you’ve never heard of, and, in my opinion, the best operating system design to date. Even if you haven’t heard of Plan 9, the designers of whatever OS you do use have heard of it, and have incorporated some of its ideas into your OS.

• Plan 9 is a research operating system, and exists to answer questions about ideas in OS design. As such, the Plan 9 experience is in essence an exploration of the interesting ideas it puts forth. Most of the ideas are small. Many of them found a foothold in the broader ecosystem — UTF-8, goroutines, /proc, containers, union filesystems, these all have their roots in Plan 9 — but many of its ideas, even the good ones, remain unexplored outside of Plan 9. As a consequence, Plan 9 exists at the center of a fervor of research achievements which forms a unique and profoundly interesting operating system.

• One example I often raise to illustrate the design ideals of Plan 9 is to compare its approach to network programming with that of the Unix standard, Berkeley sockets. BSD sockets fly in the face of Unix sensibilities and are quite alien on the system, though by now everyone has developed stockholm syndrome with respect to them so they don’t notice. When everything is supposed to be a file on Unix, why is it that the networking API is entirely implemented with special-purpose syscalls and ioctls? On Unix, creating a TCP connection involves calling the “socket” syscall to create a magic file descriptor, then the “connect” syscall to establish a connection. Plan 9 is much more Unix in its approach: you open /net/tcp/clone to reserve a connection, and read the connection ID from it. Then you open /net/tcp/n/ctl and write “connect 127.0.0.1!80” to it, where “n” is that connection ID. Now you can open /net/tcp/n/data and that file is a full-duplex stream. No magic syscalls, and you can trivially implement it in a shell script.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

• Free Download Manager (fdm) for Linux allows you to adjust traffic usage, organize downloads, control file priorities for torrents, efficiently download large files and resume broken downloads. Now available in the PCLinuxOS Software Repository.

Red Hat / IBM

• Retail is an incredibly diverse landscape of industries around the world. It can range from franchise operations to small shops selling essential food and supplies to multinational corporations manufacturing and selling products with global brand awareness. Some sectors of the industry are well known for making high profits from small volumes, but for the majority of retail businesses, profit margins are small and becoming even smaller.

• Red Hat Insights is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering developed to help identify and address operational and vulnerability risks before an issue results in operating environment downtime. Findings from your systems metadata analysis are surfaced on the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console.

• Although the Hybrid Cloud Console offers a unified and centralized view of Red Hat environments, organizations may want to get access to the data and findings from the solution and leverage them in complement to existing operational tools and workflows. Their main goal is to offer a faster way for users to get greater value from combined platforms.

• Organizations worldwide rely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as the core of their enterprise IT infrastructure. In a rapidly changing IT landscape, they require a flexible, stable foundation to support hybrid cloud innovation, manage applications and deploy workloads efficiently across various environments. RHEL is that foundation, helping organizations operate confidently and power innovation.

• The newest update for RHEL 8 is now here. With the full official release of RHEL 8.7, customers can automate manual tasks more efficiently, standardize deployments at scale and simplify the day-to-day administration of their systems.

• Red Hat is pleased to announce that it is prepared to act as a business associate for several of its Red Hat Cloud Services offerings to enable HIPAA covered entities in building healthcare applications. This is the latest milestone in Red Hat’s ongoing commitment to address regulated industry needs and offer customers greater choice in the cloud without limiting future capabilities.

• Technology continues to grow and expand the frontier of what can be achieved in healthcare. Digital health can help save lives and produce amazing innovation; however, as organizations transition to the cloud, information security and privacy are important considerations. The healthcare industry is particularly concerned with safeguarding protected health information (PHI), as many healthcare organizations are regulated by the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). HIPAA establishes the security and privacy requirements for storing, transmitting, using and disclosing PHI. As a result, cloud providers and software vendors offering services to HIPAA-regulated organizations must comply with various HIPAA-related obligations.

• Digital Transformation has been well underway for many organizations looking for ways to effectively modernize, drive operational efficiencies and improve production in the industrial sector. Organizations in the manufacturing industries in particular, have relied on proprietary solutions and vertically-integrated vendors to address their immediate computing needs, but that seems to be changing as leaders are leaning toward capabilities that help grow and respond to changing circumstances in a more agile way.

• Manufacturers need to reduce plant emissions and support resilient supply chains, as well as minimize downtime and detect problems before they impact production. As the shift to merging information technology (IT) with operational technology (OT) continues, for better transparency and more timely data analysis, manufacturers need an infrastructure that allows them to plan, adopt, and implement the technology components for successful transformation from a host of different sources, and run them at the edge or deploy on an open hybrid cloud.

• Red Hat and IBM have teamed up to build the first community open-source IT automation tool.

Debian Family

• Due to recent events around Twitter, I finally decided to give Mastodon a try.

• [...]

• For no particular reason, I went with the mastodon.social instance, so my handle is @venthur@mastodon.social. After my first steps, I realized that choosing the instance does have an impact, particularly if you follow the local timeline. mastodon.social is currently one of the biggest instances and therefore the local timeline is very busy and the topics naturally very random. Maybe I’ll try out a more specialized instance such as fosstodon at some point – one of the awesome features of Mastodon is that it actually supports the migration of accounts between instances!

• The Debian Videoteam has been sprinting in Cape Town, South Africa — mostly because with Stefano here for a few months, four of us (Jonathan, Kyle, Stefano, and myself) actually are in the country on a regular basis. In addition to that, two more members of the team (Nicolas and Louis-Philippe) are joining the sprint remotely (from Paris and Montreal).

• Debian will soon have WordPress version 6.1 I’m not really sure of the improvements, but there is a new 2023 theme as part of the update.

• They really weren’t mucking around when they said the 6.0.3 security release would be short-lived.

Open Hardware/Modding

• If you only need a couple of wires, it isn’t a big deal to just cut them and strip them yourself. But if you need dozens or even hundreds of wires, that becomes a very laborious task. That’s especially true if those wires need to be a precise length, which is ideal for clean wiring jobs. This machine built by Mr Innovative automatically cuts and strips wires in just a second to make such jobs much easier.

• Before someone calls us out: no, this machine doesn’t fully strip the wires. It just precuts the ends so that the user can quickly pull off the insulation. But it is still doing all the hard work and is very useful. Just load up a spool of wire, feed it into the machine, set the wire length and stripped lengths, and sit back. The machine will cut through the insulation at one end, dispense the desired length of wire, cut through the insulation at the other end, and then cut that piece of wire off so it lands in a collection bucket.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

• In just over a year, I’ve written three posts for this blog about functionals, specifically about their application to probability theory [LINK], finding their stationary points [LINK], and the use of their stationary points in classical mechanics [LINK]. As a reminder, a functional is an object that maps a space of functions to a space of numbers. This got me thinking about what the reverse, namely an object that maps a space of numbers to a space of functions, looks like. To be clear, this is not the same as an ordinary function which, as an element in a space of functions, maps a space of numbers to a space of numbers.

• As I thought about it more, I realized that this is a bit easier to understand and therefore more commonly encountered than a functional. An extremely glib way to describe such an object is a function of multiple variables. However, it may be more enlightening to describe this in further detail to avoid potentially deceptive images that may arise from that glib description.

• I have rewritten many tutorial pages that were way out of date. Today, the “How Easy works” part-1, has been completely rewritten. The last update was in 2018, so much was wrong in it.

• Not just that, it also contained technical details, such as excerpts from the ‘init’ script in the initrd, that probably just obfuscated what was attempting to be explained.

• Release Candidate versions are available in testing repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS / Alma / Rocky and other clones) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests, and also as base packages.

Rust

• Don’t write a Rust linked list library: they are hard to do well, and usually useless.

• Use VecDeque, which is great. If you actually need more than VecDeque can do, use one of the handful of libraries that actually offer a significantly more useful API.

• If you are writing your own data structure, check if someone has done it already, and consider slotmap or generation_arena, (or maybe Rc/Arc).

Leftovers

• Historians call ‘presentism’ the importation of present ways of thinking into the interpretation of artifacts and events from the past. Highly controversial, presentism is an especial temptation for an art historian because visual works, even if made long ago, are immediately present here and now. As Saltz says about a Roman sculpture he admires, “Time and distance collapse when you stand before it” (p. 195). The power of presentism, with its focus on the here-and-now, is amplified nowadays because frequently many of the highest market prices and much public attention goes to contemporary art. And Saltz’s focus is on this contemporary work. Sometimes, it is true, he looks at older art with passionate interest. The first artwork that attracted him was a Giovanni di Paolo in Chicago. He became a critic, he explains, thanks in part to seeing Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19). And allowing that he has no training in connoisseurship, he offers an amazingly confident judgment about the painting attributed to Leonardo that was recently sold at auction for a very high price. He looks at these older works as if they were just made, seeing them in relation to contemporary experience. Who else would compare one of Caravaggio’s saints to Sonny Liston when he was decked by Muhammed Ali or suggest that a saint-by that painter looks just like Saltz himself does when he feels inspired to write?

• In the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire played his fascination with the painting of modern life against a sense that the old masters had quite different standards of beauty. And so the role of Manet and the Impressionists was to create a synthesis, bridging the gap between tradition and contemporaneity. In Saltz’s thinking this aesthetic dualism has effectively disappeared. Now, it might be said, all art is contemporary art. When most people go to the movies, they don’t feel the need for bookish analysis- they just respond. And that’s what Saltz does in most of his accounts of gallery and museum works. The title of his short essay “The Tyranny of Art History in Contemporary Art” says it all. We don’t need historical interpretation to respond to contemporary art, he implies, any more than we need to read musicologists to enjoy pop music. Totally uninterested in academic theorizing, he is a well read autodidact. If a philistine is someone who denies the importance of visual art, Saltz is the polar opposite. For him, art is extremely powerful. When he compares seeing the paintings of Cy Twombly to “reading Virgil, Homer, Sappho, Keats, and others” (p. 239) you sense his overwhelming enthusiasm.

• This discerning ode to tasteful luxury interiors ranges from brooding contemporary concrete to crisp white Jugendstil stucco. Tar, with or without the accent, is not one of the construction substances of choice. We catch fleeting glimpses of roof tiles, but they are of old-world terracotta or the latest eco-friendly composites. Parquet floors glow through matte varnish in those places where they aren’t protected by the deep blues and reds of Oriental rugs. The countertops are to die for.

• Clocking in at a spacious two hours and thirty-seven minutes, the film gives both the well-healed apartment hunter and the merely curious plenty of time to look, lust, and count their Pfennigs.

• Energised by a bout of iconoclasm which saw Calvinists strike out against the religious images and totems of the Catholic orthodoxy – the high bourgeoisie and some members of the nobility used this weaponised Protestantism as a focal point for a revolutionary movement that was cultivated in both national and class terms during the Dutch Revolt.  The Spanish Empire was a glittering monolith; draped in blood, loot and silver from the New World, it might well have crushed the audacious burghers, the stadholders, the fiery Calvinist preachers, the roaming merchants, the intrepid seamen and soldiers – before their movement was ever able to coalesce.  The Habsburg power, however, had its hands full. It was involved in a perpetual series of skirmishes and wars which ranged from the conflict with Protestant England, to the battles with the Catholic Valois dynasty who were seated on the French throne, to the eastern reaches of Europe and North Africa where the Ottomans were the masters of the Levant and much of the Mediterranean Sea.

• In addition to fighting on several flanks, the Spanish Empire was also top-heavy, archaic and inflexible. The resistance fighters in the Netherlands, especially to the North, were aided by the topography of the land, the open floodplains, the deep woods, the canals, the estuaries and sea.  The Dutch Revolt began to take on the character of a guerrilla war in which the fighters, the “beggars” as they were known, ran the empire’s troops ragged, striking out suddenly and ruthlessly against any collaborators. Such erratic, unpredictable waspish-like attacks were maintained over decades of struggle and supplemented by sporadic but powerful uprisings that seemed to come out of the blue and engulf whole cities.

• Comrade: I was born in Tehran. And I still have a lot of family in Iran, mostly in Tehran, but also in other towns.

• Paul: What’s your perspective on the current regime? What’s your take on the Mullahs who took power following the 1979 revolution?

• All of this leaves some room for the pantomime element sovereignty might allow: the eccentric who declares his own principality; the refusenik determined to avoid the taxing authorities; the clerical error that might spawn a new creation. That such entities are permitted to exist, however, lies in an enduring conceit. No army in modern times – barring, exception – is going to expend its resources against daft declarations of sovereignty over randomly picked stretches of land. The problem lies, however, in the risks, or lack of them, such declarations pose to the central authorities.

• An exceedingly colourful personality, streaked with lunacy, is probably key to this. Take Louis Marinelli, a figure long associated with efforts to make California secede from the United States. Following the 2016 US election, Marinelli decided to open a foreign embassy in Moscow to represent the Independent Republic of California. The embassy shares the same office building with the Russian Anti-Globalization movement, which has also thrown in a measure of support.

• One study looking at newscasts and headlines over a period of 13 years, found that only a small proportion of the news was topically and geographically global. Typically, around 7.5% of the BBC’s and CNN’s broadcasts were global in nature. In 2019, CNN only mentioned 30 countries in its headlines at least once, during the entire year.

• Likewise, a study of the UK Guardian’s world news showed just how much more coverage the US and Europe are given compared to the rest of the world. Maps illustrating the study’s results showed the US and Europe both magnified to 10 times the size of Latin America, as a representation of “how the world looks through the eyes of the British people.”

• Obviously some commentators have been absorbed too much in the US system. where the leader is voted by the public, albeit by a somewhat convoluted process, which can end up with the winner receiving less public votes than the loser. However, in the UK the public has no vote to elect the leader of the country. They can vote only for their local representative, a member of parliament (MP), and it is the leader of the party with the most MPs who then becomes the PM.

• The party, not the public, chooses the PM and, in the case of the current majority party, the Conservatives aka Tories, normally the MPs select a shortlist of two and it is the national party membership who make the final choice. For a £25 annual sub you can vote for the PM. This is how recent PM number two, Liz Truss, gained office, the runner-up being the current PM, Rishi Sunak.

• I travelled to New York last week, like I do every Fall, to see the latest exhibitions. While there, I stayed with my old friend, Charlie Stuckey, controversialist, and former curator extraordinaire at the Art Institute of Chicago, National Gallery, and Kimbell Art Museum. Now in his late 70s and retired from the museum game, he’s a gentler man than the one I first met in 1986, but still funny and independent of thought. These days, he makes his living by his keen eyes, advising wealthy collectors on acquisitions, and matching galleries and auction houses with clients. It’s a side of the art world many scholars scoff at but few resist – the money is too good.

• The evening I arrived, we sipped cocktails in his modest apartment on the Upper West Side and talked about connoisseurship, especially in the field we know best – Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. Charlie curated (with two others) the great Gauguin retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1987, and the biggest ever Monet show at the same museum in 1994. He also assisted me on a Gauguin exhibition I curated in Rome in 2007. As we talked, we scanned online auction catalogues, stopping from time to time to focus on unusual results. He noted the low prices for some Degas pastels at the Ann and Gordon Getty sale at Christie’s, and a surprisingly high price for a Gauguin still life, Flowers and Books (1882), that sold for more than $1.6 million, three times the pre-sale estimate.

• Steel is scarce. Wood is not an option. And you need a boat now. These wartime circumstances drove innovation in all kinds of crazy directions, and one somewhat less crazy direction — concrete boats. As [Peter Sripol] demonstrates in the video below the break, making an RC concrete boat isn’t hard. Making a fast one on the other hand is. But that didn’t stop him from trying, and we think the effort deserves a look.

• Those interested in attending in-person or remotely can register for the event here.

• Aaron Swartz was a digital rights champion who believed deeply in keeping the internet open. His life was cut short in 2013, after federal prosecutors charged him under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) for systematically downloading academic journal articles from the online database JSTOR. Facing the prospect of a long and unjust sentence, Aaron died by suicide at the age of 26.

• EFF was proud to call Aaron a friend and ally. This year, several EFF staffers are speaking about work that carry his spirit and legacy: EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn; Special Advisor Cory Doctorow; Director of Engineering, Certbot Alexis Hancock; Investigative Researcher Beryl Lipton; and Grassroots Organizer Molly de Blanc.

Hardware

• This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi are still flying high on their post-Supercon buzz (and are a bit jet lagged) this week. We’ll start with some of the highlights from our long-awaited Pasadena meetup, and talk a bit about the winner of this year’s Hackaday Prize. Talk will then shift over to shaved down NES chips, radioactive Dungeons and Dragons gameplay, an impressive 3D printed telescope being developed by the community, and the end of the Slingbox. Stick around for a double dose of Dan Maloney, as we go over his twin treatises on dosimetry and the search for extraterrestrial life.

• If you’ve ever aspired to live off the grid, then it’s likely that one of the first things you considered was how to power all of your electrical necessities, and also where to uh… well we’ll stick to the electrical necessities. Depending on your location, you might focus on hydroelectric power, solar power, or even a wind turbine. Or, if you’re [Kris Harbor], all three. In the video below the break, we get to watch [Kris] as he masterfully rebuilds his wind turbine from scratch and reconfigures his charging solution to match.

• Quadruped robots are everywhere now that companies like Boston Dynamics are shipping smaller models in big numbers. [Dave’s Armoury] had one such robot, and wanted to give it a Pokemon Halloween costume. Thus, the robot dog got a Jolteon costume that truly looks fantastic.

• Folding phones are all the rage these days, with many of the major smartphone manufacturer’s having something in this form factor. Apple has been conspicuously absent in this market segment, so [KJMX] decided to take matters into their own hands with the “iPhone V.” (YouTube – Chinese w/subtitles via MacRumors).

• Stationary pumpkins and motionless skeletons aren’t enough to scare people these days. If you want to really create a fright on Halloween, you need something more convincing. This bike-riding skeleton from [rc jedi] might just do the trick.

• Laboratory automation equipment is expensive stuff, to such a degree that small labs are often priced out of the market. That’s a shame, because there are a lot of tedious manual tasks that even modest labs would benefit from automating. Oh well — that’s what grad students are for.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• Madigan was a very influential political player.  The Justice Department notes that, in addition to being Speaker, he had been a congressman representing Illinois’s 22nd District; Committeeman for Chicago’s 13th Ward; Chairman of both the Illinois Democratic Party and the 13th Ward Democratic Organization; and partner at the influential Chicago law firm, Madigan & Getzendanner.  It adds, he “used these positions to further the goals of the criminal enterprise.”

• The Justice Department states, “AT&T Illinois admitted that in 2017 it arranged for an ally of Madigan to indirectly receive $22,500 in payments from the company.  The company paid the money through an intermediary – a lobbying firm that performed services for AT&T Illinois.” The ally was Michael F. McClain who, the Justice noted, “carried out illegal activities at Madigan’s behest.”

Defence/Aggression

• I’m a civilian who, like many Americans, has strong ties to the US Armed Forces. I never considered enlisting, but my father, uncles, cousins, and nephews did. As a child I baked cookies to send with letters to my cousin Steven who was serving in Vietnam. My family tree includes soldiers on both sides of the Civil War. Some years before my father died, he shared with me his experience of being drafted during the Korean War and, while on leave, traveling to Hiroshima, Japan. There, just a few short years after an American atomic bomb had devastated that city as World War II ended, he was haunted by seeing the dark shadows of the dead cast onto concrete by the nuclear blast.

• The latest, including: – Russia retreats from Kherson. Why? – What does Russia’s withdrawal mean for the war? – Putin’s blunders left Russia with no other option – What about the annexations? – Preparing for new atrocities to be made public in Kherson – Biden’s advisers talking to Putin’s – Humiliation for the “progressive Democrats” who withdrew support for the letter urging negotiation – Prigozhin’s claims of Russian election meddling designed to help Trump

• Despite relentless pro-war propaganda, a majority of Americans are not on board with their government’s strategy of pouring endless weapons into Ukraine’s war with its nuclear-armed neighbor and hoping for the best. They are concerned about the costs of this war – more than 60 billion taxpayer dollars have already been spent, with much of that money filling the coffers of U.S. arms manufacturers.

• Americans are also concerned about the growing risk of nuclear Armageddon. In 2019, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists kept the Doomsday Clock set to two minutes before midnight following the United States’ unilateral withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Then on January 20, 2022, as tensions escalated between Russia and Ukraine, and also between the U.S. and China, the clock was reset to 100 seconds from midnight — on “doom’s doorstep.”

• Australia “should not face intimidation from so-called allies under the auspices of defense cooperation,” said one advocate.

• CounterSpin interview with Jake Johnston on Haiti intervention.

• Regardless of which party controls the House and Senate, one thing is certain. The war in Ukraine and the US intervention will continue in the short-term, as a lame-duck Congress considers another $50 billion for Ukraine, with much of the money earmarked for weapons, military training, and intelligence to escalate a war with no military solution.

• What is it like to be so ashamed of the company for whom you work that you cannot bring yourself to admit you work there? Ashamed of the products they manufacture, the innocent people those products kill, the hundreds of billions of dollars of public taxpayer money squandered in a gluttonous pursuit of profits?

• The US-led imperialist world system is in deep crisis, so it wages a new cold war to prevent multipolarity, while lurching toward fascism. The left must offer a true alternative path that opposes both the far right and the liberal pro-NATO chauvinists.

• What mysteries did they know that we did not but might befall us?

• Each year at Boston College I’m one of several guest speakers for Professor Seth Jacobs course, “America’s War in Vietnam, in which the students read a variety of sources from across the political spectrum. Every few weeks a Vietnam vet further enlivens the popular class.

Environment

• Her memoir, Chasing Lakes, is not only an account of a scientific expedition of discovery and understanding of the deeper nature of ancient lakes, but a revelation of new found faith in herself and humanity.  The urgency of her scientific findings is augmented with the belief that the release from selfishness can still bring us hope and reason for joie de vivre.

• The following interview by Zoom took place on November 1, 2022.

• Rapid and drastic cuts to global greenhouse gas emissions are necessary to curb warming and prevent the most dire climate scenarios from becoming reality.

• But a new study released Friday by the Global Carbon Project finds “no sign of the decrease that is urgently needed” as emissions remain at record levels this year, with fossil fuel giants and governments plowing ahead with new extraction efforts that could push critical climate targets out of reach.

• Environmental justice advocates welcomed the Biden administration’s Friday announcement of stronger regulations to curb methane pollution from oil and gas producers while stressing the need to go further to slash emissions of the potent greenhouse gas that endangers public health and the global climate system.

• “To meet global climate goals, we need to go well beyond this effort and actually sharply taper down fossil fuels.”

• For the Banaban people, the threat of being displaced from their homes by increasingly frequent cyclones reopens old wounds.

• When climate talks in Egypt turn to the future of food on Saturday, the U.S. government will be on hand to champion a new coalition of feed, livestock and agrochemical companies as the vanguard of transformational change.

• We can expect to hear a lot about how the Agricultural Innovation Mission for Climate, or Aim4C, will be harnessing new technology – from big data to precision fertilizer – to slow ballooning emissions from agribusiness, and fight worsening global hunger.

• On Sunday, November 6, the annual two-week UN climate negotiations kicked off in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, with over 35,000 delegates, NGO workers, journalists, and activists from around the world in attendance. One hundred and twenty heads of state will join, including President Biden, who attended briefly on Friday and will attend again after the G20 for the final days.

Energy

• Fifteen activists were arrested for shutting down the entrances to airports serving private jets across the United States on Thursday as part of worldwide climate protests led by groups including Extinction Rebellion, Scientist Rebellion, New York Communities for Change, and the New York City chapter of the youth-led Sunrise Movement.

• “Taking a private jet while the planet is on fire is utter insanity.”

Wildlife/Nature

• One hundred million (100,000,000) are killed per year, mostly for shark fin soup. In fact, the shark-fin trade is responsible for 75% of sharks killed each year even though more than 50 countries have some kind of shark finning ban in effect.

• Nevertheless, stealthy fishing techniques are used to clandestinely hook and de-fin sharks. This illicit practice of Chinese trawlers has been exposed by two separate investigations of massive illegal shark-finning operations, which are discussed in more detail herein.

Overpopulation

Finance

• Does anyone remember Dr. Simone Gold and the group of COVID-19 contrarian physicians who early in the pandemic branded themselves “America’s Frontline Doctors” (AFLDS) even though none of them were ever truly pandemic frontline doctors? The first time I ever wrote about these grifters was in July 2020, when they held a news conference that went viral in which they promoted the unproven (and at that time increasingly disproven) COVID-19 hydroxychloroquine. The group consisted of founder Dr. Simone Gold and a motley crew of misfit grifters including Dr. Stella “demon sperm” Immanuel and Dr. Joseph Ladapo, a pandemic minimizing antivax doctor who is now, unfortunately, Surgeon General in Florida, where he is making his COVID-19 denial and antivax disinformation official state policy. By 2021, America’s Frontline Doctors were suing over a “coverup” of deaths due to COVID-19 vaccines. Not long after that, AFLDS was caught in grift involving a prescription mill for ivermectin, which is about as effective as hydroxychloroquine against COVID-19, as in not effective. (As I like to say, ideology or not, it’s always also about the grift. Grifters just can’t resist.)

• I ride trains all over the world, and one of the features of Amtrak that distinguishes it from its global peers is that its schedules (aside from high-speed Acela trains) are padded with all sorts of layovers at intermediate stops, not to mention its endless delays (as freight trains take precedence over passenger service and deteriorating’s rails often limit passenger trains to intercity bus speeds).

• My New York to Harrisburg train, for example, spent ten minutes in Philadelphia, which is more time than is needed to unload and load passengers. Later on in my travels, my train from Chicago to New York paused in Albany-Rensselaer for almost ninety minutes while passengers smoked on the platforms and the train crew stared at their iPhones. It’s one of the reasons why, outside the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak has few business customers. Where’s the urgency of Casey Jones?

• Not surprisingly, these rail workers may strike. Twelve rail unions must vote yes on their contract to avert a strike on November 19. That ain’t gonna happen, because two unions already voted that contract down. That means if those two strike, the unions that ratified the deal, with 11,000 members approving it so far, would probably walk off the job in sympathy. That second rail union vote against the proposed contract came on October 25. It threw cold water on the Biden administration’s accomplishment a month earlier. That was when, “eleventh-hour deal-making by the Biden administration averted the threat of an immediate work stoppage” on September 15, as Politico reported October 26.

• In a blow to unions, labor secretary Marty Walsh said on November 5 that “without a deal he expects congress to step in and impose contracts on the unhappy rank-and-file members,” according to CNN November 6. Statements like this decrease union leverage at the bargaining table. By design. Not a good look for Walsh or the Biden administration. Who cares if Walsh justifies it by saying “my goal is to get those two unions back at the table with companies and get this thing done”? He could have taken another approach, like championing rank and file grievances and pressuring rail owners to make concessions. He chose not to.

• The Justice Department filed an appeal Thursday after a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas blocked the Biden administration’s student debt cancellation program nationwide, declaring it “unlawful” on grounds that legal experts criticized as laughable.

• The 26-page ruling by Mark Pittman of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas finds that the two plaintiffs who brought the case with the backing of the Job Creators Network Foundation—an affiliate of a right-wing, billionaire-funded business trade group—have standing to sue over the debt cancellation program because the Biden administration didn’t allow a public comment period before moving ahead with the plan.

• The Biden administration stopped accepting applications for its popular student loan forgiveness plan on Friday, a day after a Trump-appointed federal judge blocked the program on what critics are calling dubious legal grounds.

• “Republicans don’t want you to get debt relief and want their judges to do their unpopular dirty work.”

• Soon after the troubled cryptocurrency exchange platform FTX filed for bankruptcy protection on Friday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren implored her fellow members of Congress as well as federal regulators to crack down on the digital asset industry that has cost customers billions of dollars while wrecking the planet.

• “It’s time, once and for all, to silence the utopian-libertarian gibberish.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• She is wearing a t-shirt that bears the powerful slogan: O Brasil é terra indígena (Brazil is Indigenous land). The slogan echoes her brave campaign against the disregard shown by Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s 38th president defeated on October 30, towards the Indigenous populations of his country. In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, Bolsonaro vetoed Law no. 14021 which would have provided drinking water and basic medical materials to Indigenous communities. Several organizations took Bolsonaro to the International Criminal Court for this action.

• In April 2022, Cardoso wrote that the rights of the Indigenous “did not come from the kindness of those in power, but from the struggles of Indigenous people over the centuries. Though guaranteed in the [1988] Constitution, these rights are threatened daily.” Her political work has been defined by her commitment to her own Indigenous heritage but also by her deep antipathy to the “savage capitalism” that has cannibalized her country.

• In a hotel in downtown São Paulo packed with international press, Lula supporters waited with fingers crossed. The early election returns on October 30 showed the far-right President Jair Bolsonaro with a strong lead over the leftist former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. That was to be expected, since the first results came in from Bolsonaro strongholds. But you could feel the mood shift as the vote count reduced the gap. A few minutes before 8 pm, cheers broke out—the lines on the TV’s voter graph had met, and Lula proceeded to edge into the lead. The final tally for the election showed 50.9 percent for Lula to 49.1 percent for Bolsonaro.

• Intellectual curiosity can takes us in unexpected directions. This particular journey started with my learning that the word “Cajun” is a contraction of “Canadian”.

• The 2022 midterms were a major disappointment to Republicans, with the hoped for red wave turning into a pitiful red ripple. Before the election, Republicans had been dreaming of a clean sweep comparable to their victories in 1994 and 2010, when they used the unpopularity of newly minted Democratic presidents to gain substantial ground in Congress. As David Wallace-Wells reported in The New Yorker on November 4, just five days before voting finished, “The consensus among a number of G.O.P. pollsters and operatives I spoke to this week is that in the Senate races that are thought to be competitive, Republican candidates are heading for a clean sweep: Mehmet Oz will beat John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, and not just by a point or two; Adam Laxalt looks pretty certain to defeat the incumbent Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada; even less regarded candidates such as Blake Masters in Arizona will be carried into office by a predicted wave.” Wallace-Wells added that Republicans were expecting a “bloodbath.”

• One of the issues that drove America’s youth to vote in unusual numbers in the midterm elections, and to tilt heavily Democratic, is the climate emergency. It was up there with reproductive rights and gun safety as a key issue. A recent Harvard youth poll found that among these young people, “Democrats are moved by abortion (20%), protecting democracy (20%), inflation (19%), and climate change (16%). More than 7-in-10 young Americans (72%) believe that the rights of others are under attack, and 59% believe that their own rights are under attack.”

• Is the craziness of the Trump era over? While the final results may not be known for a while, such as the Senate race in Georgia, the ballyhooed Red Wave has not taken place, contrary to many of the pre-election polls. Traditionally, in midterm elections, the party in power loses 28 seats in the House of Representatives and four in the Senate. President Barack Obama’s party lost 63 House seats in 2010. These midterms have not followed that tradition.

• Trump announced that he would make a major announcement on November 15. His assumption was that he would triumphantly use the midterm Red Wave to position himself for the 2024 presidential race. Given the closeness of the House and Senate races and the obvious weakness of the Red Wave, the Trump wave could well be over too.

• Many of us no longer can imagine the “twice death,” much less know this apprehension that gripped the immigrant woman’s heart. For many, like me, more distant descendants of immigrants, the obliteration of an in-place local culture of connection and meaning, of a commons, occurred generations before we were born. By 1958, an intact peasant culture such as existed in East Utica – with its strict limits on personal freedom, its precedence given to claims of family and community (backed by patriarchy and its rule-bound, guilt-bestowing church) – was fated to to dissolve into assimilation. The special “mother province” of the heart, with its need for connection and meaning, dependent upon the whole village for its protection, was necessarily relativized. Until now, in the context of a capitalist economy and liberal, secular zeitgeist, the choice to refuse or limit personal freedom in favor of non-reactionary “sentimental” claims of the local, the unmediated, and the relational, was more or less unthinkable, except for the impoverished, a few dreamers and romantics, and in modified form, beatniks and hippies.

• However, the multiple threats coming at us today from the “wrath of Capital,” pose such a serious question to our way of life (leaving aside the uncertainty as to if we’re too late already); surely we’re

• The Red Trickle

• I listened to NPR and other radio outlets Election Recaps the last two days while driving 135 miles to and fro. They had the politicians, media hacks and useless pollsters lined up back-to-back. The gist of the endless hours of coverage was: “How did the Politicians, the Media and, especially, the Pollsters get it so wrong?”

• Spokespersons attributed the change to difficulties left-over from the pandemic, a need for translations into indigenous languages, uncertain financial resources, and extra time required for “technical” changes. Leaders of Santa Cruz department in Bolivia’s eastern lowlands, the nation’s largest, immediately demanded a census in 2023, not in 2024. Department governor Luis Camacho and Rómulo Calvo, president of the Santa Cruz Civic Committee, warned that without a settlement on the census, they would initiate a strike aimed at undoing the department’s economy, and thereby the national economy.

• In response, “over one million Bolivians mobilized” on August 25 in support of the government and against a regional leadership group that is the vanguard of opposition to Bolivia’s socialist and indigenous-led government. Even so, the strike began on October 22. Recent Bolivian suggests another coup may be in the offing.

• They stopped in grocery stores, diners, senior centers, libraries, and other community gathering spots to engage people in conversation about health insurance. They heard story after story of family members, friends, and neighbors who are having a hard time affording quality health care.

• The goal of this tour: to build support for a ballot initiative to help more South Dakotans get the care they need.

• A newly published work titled Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing and edited by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean is a valiant effort to remedy this situation. By highlighting a number of primary sources, today’s reader is able to consider the actual words and thoughts of the CPUSA with minimal filters that might reinterpret the meaning of the concepts being discussed. Burden-Stelly is the co-author (with Gerald Horne) of WEB DuBois: A Life in American History. Jodi Dean is the author of several books addressing communism in the modern era, including The Communist Horizon and Comrade. Their selections in this text include excerpts from various newsletters and newspapers, along with excerpts from CPUSA theoretical papers and meetings and a couple different books.

• Given that until recently, the majority of Black women in the United States were employed as domestic workers, a fair number of the pieces in Organize, Fight, Win discuss the nature of these workers’ exploitation and attempts to organize them. A phenomenon known as the Bronx Slave Market is mentioned more than one and there is even one article that details the mechanics of this endeavor. In essence, this so-called market reminded this reviewer of those street corners and Home Depot parking lots where undocumented and other workers congregate today in the hopes a homeowner will hire them. The selections tell of the job seekers underbidding each other in an attempt to earn at least some oney so they can feed their families and males offering them better pay if the women engage in sexual activity. In response to this exploitation, various attempts to organize the domestic workers are discussed, revealing varying limits of success.

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has announced the launch of a fundraising campaign to finance the world’s first fleet of naval drones for Ukraine. Donations will be collected via United24, a Ukrainian government fundraising platform.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin will not attend the Indonesian G20 summit, be it in person or remotely.

• The Ukrainian army has entered Kherson. Hromadske, a Ukrainian news publication, reports this, citing local residents and journalists, as well as a source in the regional administration.

• In a video address at the end of November 11, President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke about the liberation of Kherson and the Russian retreat from the city.

• Russian President Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that Russia’s withdrawal from the right bank of the Dnipro River will have no effect on the Kherson region’s status as an annexed “Russian subject.”

• The Russian Defense Ministry has reported that the withdrawal of Russian troops from the right bank of the Dnipro River in the Kherson region was completed at 5:00 a.m. on November 11.

• The restaurant chain “Delicious, Full Stop,” which replaced McDonald’s in Russia after the American company left the country in May, has announced that it will enter the Belarusian market.

• Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said in an interview Friday that it will take at least one week for Russia to withdraw its troops from the right bank of the Dnipro River.

• Russian senators have proposed adding “fundamental definitions” of concepts such as “traditional family values” and “actual caregivers” to the Russian Family Code, according to the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti.

• Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday evening rebuked outgoing Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, who had earlier claimed in an interview with The New York Times that the progressive congresswoman contributed little to campaign efforts and suggested her policy priorities—several of them popular with Democratic voters—are harming the party.

• “I do think that this is a signal that being outwardly antagonistic, including trying to defeat progressive candidates, trying to demoralize those bases, is not healthy for the prospect of democratic gains.”

• Earlier today, I deleted all of my tweets and left Twitter forever. While I plan on leaving a nightlight thread for a while, I will eventually close my account, assuming Elon doesn’t do it for me.

• The past week has been an emotional rollercoaster for me as I have watched everything play out.

• I was one of the original fediverse users when Indymedia UK stood up the indy.im StatusNet instance at the end of 2010. After some time, Evan Prodromou got bored with the StatusNet code base and started Pump instead, with the network losing the largest instance at that time, identi.ca. With the network fragmented as a result of that switch, I got bored of it and started using Twitter instead.

• Eventually StatusNet was forked by Matt Lee and a few other FSF staffers and became GNU Social. I was not really around during this time, but it was around that time that GamerGate happened, which created a network where half of the users were Indymedia contributors and the other half were the initial seeds of the alt-right.

• While I was not heavily involved from a development perspective in the early days of what we now call the fediverse, this began to change in late 2016 when Eugen Rochko started Mastodon. I was an early adopter of Mastodon, deploying Mastodon 0.6 on Heroku, using the mastodon.dereferenced.org domain for my account. But running Mastodon on Heroku (and later Scalingo) was expensive. I did not want to manage a Rails application by hand, and I hadn’t started using Docker or Kubernetes yet.

• John Fetterman was the only Democratic US Senate candidate to flip a Senate seat out of the Republican column, and the Pennsylvanian did so with relatively ease—winning by a little over 210,000 votes. That wasn’t a landslide, but it was a wider margin than in many of the nation’s most competitive—and, in several cases, still unsettled—Senate races. Fetterman’s margin was built with strong showings in the historically Democratic cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. But what gave him that wide margin of victory, after an intense, expensive, and at times bitter contest with Republican Mehmet Oz, was a steadily stronger-than-expected showing in the smaller cities, towns, and rural areas of Pennsylvania.

• On October 31, a delegation of student protesters—outfitted in cyan bandanas and “#DefendDiversity” T-shirts—gathered in Washington, D.C. That morning, the Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments for two cases: Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. University of North Carolina and SFFA v. Harvard College. The decisions could eliminate the use of race-conscious admissions—and decades of legal precedent—as the court’s conservative majority appeared skeptical of the necessity of affirmative action during the initial oral arguments.

• It seems obvious that the best way to support the troops is to make every effort to keep them out of harm’s way. That means engaging in military action only as a true last resort. In this vein, here are my Top 10 Veterans Day Songs paying tribute to those who serve. The list is highly debatable; songs about war and attendant suffering cut across musical genres. Old-timers will rightly bemoan the omission of hippie classics like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and “Give Peace a Chance.” Others could fairly say I’ve neglected an important sub-genre of vintage heavy-metal antiwar anthems like Motorhead’s “1916” and Metallica’s 1989 classic “One,” while also giving short shrift to the rich history of punk rock treatment of war. Sorry!

• + I don’t think a candidate I’ve actively supported has ever won elective office–or is likely to–so all of the satisfaction on election day for me derives from the anguish of those who’ve lost. This year’s top losers: the bi-partisan crime scare caucus, “Dr.” Oz, Phil Knight, AIPAC (which spent $4 million in a failed effort to defeat Summer Lee) and media punditry, which was so eager to blame their own contrivance of “wokeism” for the decimation of the Democrats.

• + However this election eventually turns out black Americans will have seen and lived it before: whether it’s a narrow victory by liberals who will ultimately betray nearly every promise or a rout by reactionaries who will directly target the rights, well-being and lives of all minorities.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The pro-Israel narrative has always been a mainstream media staple, but with the help of Honest Reporting, the gap in Palestinian voices in the news is significantly shrinking.

• The independent media outlets Proekt, iStories, The Insider, and Bellingcat, as well as jailed opposition figure Alexey Navalny’s investigative team, have launched a new mobile app to publish their investigations in a format accessible to Russian readers. The app’s name is Samizdat, which refers to the practice of self-publishing that helped spread prohibited literature during the Soviet era.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• For the Western press, the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party offered a number of signals which—if read in good faith—could have been perceived as reassuring.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Several employees at Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center attempted to cover up a brutal assault on a patient, according to a new report by the watchdog office within the Illinois Department of Human Services.

• The report by the IDHS Office of the Inspector General said that the “widespread attempted cover-up” around that incident pointed to a deeply entrenched “code of silence” among some workers.

• Javier Zamora’s journey demonstrates the realities of what refugees experience everyday.

• A federal judge on Thursday granted a nationwide injunction against an industrial cleaning company, ordering the company to end its use of “oppressive child labor” after an investigation found it was employing dozens of children as young as 13—some of whom were injured while working in meatpacking facilities.

• The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) requested the injunction in a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska after completing an investigation of Packers Sanitation Services, Inc. (PSSI) that began in late August.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• Byron was to’ve been manufactured by Tungsram in Budapest. He would probably have been grabbed up by the ace salesman Geza Rozsavolgyi’s father Sandor, who covered all the Transylvanian territory and had begun to go native enough to where the home office felt vaguely paranoid about him throwing some horrible spell on the whole operation if they didn’t give him what he wanted. Actually he was a salesman who wanted his son to be a doctor, and that came true. But it may have been the bad witch-leery auras around Budapest that got the birth of Byron reassigned at the last minute to Osram, in Berlin. Reassigned, yes. There is a Bulb Baby Heaven, amiably sati-rized as if it was the movies or something, well Big Business, ha, ha! But don’t let Them fool you, this is a bureaucracy first, and a Bulb Baby Heaven only as a sort of sideline. All overhead—yes, out of its own pocket the Company is springing for square leagues of organdy, hogsheads of IG Farben pink and blue Baby Dye, hundredweights of clever Siemens Electric Baby Bulb Pacifiers, giving the suckling Bulb the shape of a 110-volt current without the least trickle of power. One way or another, these Bulb folks are in the business of providing the appearance of power, power against the night, without the reality.

• Well, you are not alone. I am an outlaw myself. Email is regarded unusable by my family circle. This leads to me being pretty much ignorant about what they (maybe two dozen or so people) are up to. I don’t know, how the youngsters are doing (some education for their professional future?), or the little ones, or my brother and sister. All of them have bought into the Apple world, anything else does not exist.

• I have consciously decided to ignore their ignorance about this part of the technological world. They are not interested. They lack the categories that describe network technology. They are doing different things in their life, and they don’t want to waste any time while I desperately try to explain a danger, they cannot see, let alone understand. For them Whatsapp is the same as a car or a bicycle — a means to get something of immediate value done (exchanging some information pretty much now).

• Vitruvian’s first album “Devenir” has been released.

• There are game styles, some subcategories of story games, that are built around the idea that there are no secrets for players. There can be surprises and resolved secrets in play, through play, through creation, but not through revelation.

• But in D&D, the way I play it, of course there are secrets, exploration, and discovery.

Politics

• an extreme right wing Ultra religious (and racist) government was elected few weeks ago – they won – Israel lost – and by the look of it within 5 or 10 years Israel will be a religious state (a Jewish Taliban state) religious laws will be enacted by the parliament and supreme court will no longer be able to intervene in case of injustice or to soften the blows…

• When you Live in Israel you come accustomed to life here and to there weirdness… Israel is a country with a bankrupt welfare, health and education systems – the reason for this is that the money flows to “other” places – the state of Israel is unwilling to supply it’s citizens with health welfare and education – even when there is laws to force the state to give such services and systems to the public – the state “drys” them slowly by sub budgeting them and not funding them – this is why Israel public health system is collapsing and the welfare minister is neglected for years by the government and education does not teaches values such as “democracy” but instead the education is split between “secular” and “religious” sectors each one teaches it’s own values (the secular will push you for math and hi-tech the religious one will push you find your place among the religious sector and live a religious life funded by the state you won’t know English or math but you will know that the state will fund you and your family for life)

Technical

• Watching Twitter burn down has been entertaining, and got me thinking about how important production methods are.

• I don’t really mean ‘production methods’ – I mean something larger, but smaller than ideology. I mean how a full ecosystem cooperates with its own parts, now how a part (like a business) organizes itself.

Science

• Sometimes you wanna know the DC to fail at something.

• Subctract the original DC from 28 and there’s your new inverted DC.

• For example, our house rule when you drop a torch is a DC 12 Wisdom save or the torchlight is snuffed out.

• But what if you want the light to go out as you drop it? That’s a DC 16 wis save.

• I’ll walk through the reasoning behind that number.

• My favorite twisty puzzle is the 4x4x4 cube, also known as Rubik’s Revenge Cube. The even number of layers in the puzzle allows for trickier piece arrangements than on odd-numbered cubes, such as incorrectly-placed centers, an odd number of flipped edges, or a bad permutation parity among pieces. It’s much more challenging, and much more fascinating to analyze, than the standard 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube.

• The 4x4x4 is also the puzzle I’ve practiced speedsolving the most after the 3x3x3. Recently I purchased a stickerless version of the QiYi WuQue 4x4x4 by Mo Fang Ge, and it’s inspired me to begin practicing more regularly again.

Announcements

• New release! Blog already using it.

• - dropping go 1.18 support - support connection limiter – 256 by default - add more info to logs - remove remote address from logs

Programming

• Tappeto is a program I wrote to generate randomly generated wallpapers. It generates a random binary pattern and then tiles it and colorizes it to create the final image. It comes with an optional SDL GUI which allows easily modifying the generated image until something satisfying is produced. Enjoy!

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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