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October 3rd, 2019
I have done this change allowing my mom's ipad to work again. I recently
upgraded that ipad to version iPadOS 13.1.2 and mail stopped working for
her. I have also updated the DANE TLSA RR's in DNS for all mail. I'm
reusing the same certificate for POP3 and SMTP mail. I hope that's not
a bad thing to do.
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This year the heat will be turned up later than last year
October 2nd, 2019
I'm already happy about this. I'll use less electricity for this year.
Last year
I turned on the heat on October 3rd. It looks like now that the weather
is warmer this year than that. And perhaps there is hope for a "golden
october" next week? Unfortunately the price of electricity keeps getting
raised due to taxes (such as CO2). Eventually the savings I'm making with
the city works as my electric company will even out and I'll be able to
pay similar as one of those green electricity suppliers. Looking forward
to it, but it'll probably cost a lot more. I'm fearing my electricity
bill will go up 50% to roughly 3000 EUR per year. We'll see what the
future holds.
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You agree to getting a cookie by clicking here
October 2nd, 2019
Yesterday on the ARD Tagesschau german news I saw some law being passed about
cookie warnings. So I have warnings now. You don't get a cookie automatically
by clicking on an article but are warned if you write a comment a cookie
is made for the captcha. Thanks!
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The (unexplored) side-effects of Wifi
October 1st, 2019
Wifi is great. You don't even know it's there and it gives you instant
Internet. Here is a story
of someone who'll differ. She self-diagnosed radiation sensitivity.
Today
I'm a little more careful with my wifi. I have cabled almost every room in
my apartment so I don't need wifi. My wifi access point is off and I can
turn it on when I need it. For example when I want to upload photos from my
ipod to my Mail account. But out of experience I remember two things. Once
when I had Freifunk, someone would download large amounts of data and I'd
feel a sort of soft stinging in my legs skin. I later correlated that this
was related after I looked out and saw that someone was on the freifunk with
a laptop.
Another observation I had was that during times of intense
email discussion at the freifunk organization the pattern of data going through
my freifunk router was different. I usually felt pretty drained and hot
headed after these moments. But, could it be that modulation, or controlling
the packet flow of wifi signals had an impact on my brain? The freifunk
system was a layer 2 bridging system and anyone in the region would have
felt it, and anyone in the region could have sent broadcast packets to cause
traffic on my local wifi link. This is brief sum-up of what the technology
is and how it could have been used. Someone could have been monitoring email
and just as discussion heated up start sending broadcast signals in a certain
pattern. Everyone in that region would have been irradiated. It's not a
lot of effort.
I don't want to dirty talk freifunk, it's a great concept. I wish it will
be able to be extended using cables instead of just wireless. But in terms
of my health I'm being a bit more careful with wifi signals. I still have
to turn my parents signal off at off-times at the router. That is possible.
Something like between midnight and 5AM no wifi. That gives a relatively
small window of no signal, but it would be beneficial as sleep can get it's
own REM pattern without radiation influence. Might make a diff.
Other than cabling there is alternatives. Lifi is trying to break into the
household but it's having a hard time getting through. Not sure why. Lifi
uses visible light, and can't be misused/abused by hackers when the curtains
are shut. And I'll put another vapour ware forward for wireless perhaps in
the future there will be quantum entangling something. Then you can be any-
where on earth and just communicate with the spinning state of an entangled
atom or particle. That's likely safer than radio. But who knows? It's
probably not as fast bandwidth wise as wifi though.
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Red Maple II - a few days later
September 30th, 2019
We have a very windy day so these leafs aren't gonna stay very long, thought
I'd give another photo to you from it. It's more red now.
If it were my tree I'd probably try sapping syrup from it, dunno if it would
hurt the tree though, it's still pretty young.
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What does Free Software mean to me?
September 30th, 2019
In the autumn and winter of 1995 I first installed Linux on my 486 computer.
I was living in College Residence at Humber College at the time and I had
closed myself off from friends because I, "wanted to learn UN*X" it was a
career striving. I didn't stay long at Humber College and was out of the
residence by Christmas 1995. After crashing at a friends for 6 weeks I got
a job and a 1-bedroom apartment at Bloor and Jane in Toronto. Here I
persued my MUD playing habits and I was pretty much out of it. Linux was
then not good enough anymore and I installed FreeBSD, it was spring 1996.
My brother who sometimes visited me liked playing Doom on Linux and I had
to disappoint him when I had FreeBSD installed, it wasn't the same on X11.
Anyhow that's the history of me and using Open Source Operating Systems
in the mid 1990's.
I was actively learning C then because at Humber first
semester we learned only Pascal. I had a K&R The (ansi) C Programming
Language book and it was a fairly hard read. I did this as alone so there
was no exchange of ideas and support. In turn I didn't learn to read C
much. But I learned to use a debugger and somehow compiling things worked.
I systematically learned systemcalls out of section 2 of the BSD manual over
the years and I explored the system with great interest. Important for me
to know was how the password system worked, how to do socket programming
including raw sockets which allowed spoofing. OK so I had a bit of a hacker
in me, but I never used these skills for hacking. So as the story goes it
is now 24 years later, what can I conclude?
I can conclude that having compilable open source is great to have, EVEN IF
I will never read that code. There comes situations where you're forced to
take a look anyhow, and that is when the access to the source code pays off.
99% of the time I don't read code. And in that 1% of the time 99% is spend
trying to make sense of it all. So 0.01% of the time is spent doing any
actual change. It would disturb me pretty much if for example OpenBSD said
they will keep the source code secret and only distribute binaries. It would
be the end of OpenBSD for me. Even though I don't use the source, I will want
it around.
I have several projects written in C that I share. In fact only one is
maintained by me (delphinusdnsd) and it sorta works where the others may not
work at all. But it would inconvenience me a great deal if I had to read
back all of that source code in order to find a backdoor that a hacker may
have put in. I wrote that code so I trust it. But I don't remember every
little detail of it, the daemon was written since 2005. In order to add
things to it I have to backread things too, but it usually is faster than
reading someone else's code as I have my own style.
So I have touched on
the Open Source side of Free Software but not the Free (as in beer) side.
I think software should be shared and free. This makes hardware manufacturers
the only employers for software, since everyone else relies on free software.
Obviously in todays world it doesn't work like that. Microsoft despite free
software is doing better than ever. Why that is is beyond me. Some people
still believe in Microsoft I guess and never went away. This is probably
the only reason free software hasn't killed proprietary software. I personally
think that even hardware designs should be free, but we're a long way from
that. In fact in my imaginary world of perfection people would build their
own smart phones or digital assistants if they must. Right down to the last
logic gate. It's a dream and so far from the present model that it will never
be attainable.
Today, many kids probably think the smart phone they're holding
is associated with magic. Even when told that it is a machine. Try it out
on your kid. I don't have kids, in that I can try this on them, but I think
I'm right here. The computer is magic, and it shouldn't be. If it were
not magic, on the other end of my view it is hard gruelling work to get
anything done right. In that regard programmers and hardware designers are
under-appreciated.
I would do a few things differently if I had a chance to go back to 1995. What
exactly would be different I don't know yet. I'm proud of the learning curve
I had. But I'm not proud of not being able to put up my own fixes to problems
I find with the OS. There often isn't time to get the fix done in a timely
manner, or I'm lazy at those moments. But I remember when I found a panic
condition in the radix tree of the routing lookups in OpenBSD. I found it
with a program that I had programmed in Y2K/2001 and had I not that
preparatory work with all it's demises this bug would have been found at a
much later date if ever.
Closing paragraph: I think Free Software is needed to shape the world into
something that is better than what it is today.
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The answer to Life, the Universe and everything
September 28th, 2019
Well D.N.A. (Not the double-helix, although that comes into play perhaps, but
Douglas N. Adams) was right. In his story the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy
he writes about earth being a supercomputer built by mice designed to answer
the most question of questions, the answer to life, the universe and everything.
Well I have had this question run through my head for a matter of decades now
and I think I came to a conclusion. The supercomputer (earth) is the 3rd
planet from our star, the sun. Mars then is the 4th planet and Venus the 2nd
planet. You might guess by now but the answer that the supercomputer gave
back were the position of orbits to the answer of life, the universe and
everything. 4,2.. mars, venus. Then to elaborate...I think what the super
computer wanted to say was:
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.
In other news... I saw a reporting from the "what da math" on youtube today
reporting that scientists think that Venus had liquid water around 250 million
years ago, but something went awry. Temperatures were modelled to be between
20 and 50 degrees celsius there. Well I'm going back to bed. Good night.
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Understanding Psychosis presentation
September 28th, 2019
I just watched Tara Niendem PhD in a talk at University of California at Davis
regarding her talk about "Understanding Psychosis" on Youtube and I thought
it was well said. Now I'm trying to remember parts of it and she said that
Psychosis
affects 2% of the population, which is higher than the 1% that I've been
learning about, maybe there is a rise? She talked about the 2 G's which
are Ghosts and Genes. She used Ghosts as an example and I found myself
shuddering at her examples of seeing ghosts. She explained someone who is
psychotic will see these on a frequent basis, not just once which is common
to happen to many. Genes, she said is that we carry 10% likelyhood of genes
having something to do with a psychosis. Interesting. I did kind of disagree
that psychosis is a solely a brain disorder because we do have a 2nd brain
in our tummies. It may not have the functionality of a full brain but offloads
it. But she's the doctor, I'm the patient.
So hats off to Tara for a great talk. I don't think she'll ever hear of me
because I have google blocked from reading this blog but who knows. We're
seperated by 6 degrees of seperation anyhow (and some say less). One more
thing I want to say about the Drug use in patients who suffer psychosis where
she said "don't do drugs" she's completely right. I've been drug free for 19
years now, where I had 1 joint or something in 2000, or thereabouts. The long
break from marijuana use has done me well I think. I hadn't had many relapses
in 17 years where I had acute symptoms of psychosis 17 years ago.
Oh yeah I was saddened a great deal by the figure that 50% of people with
psychosis attempt suicide and 10% succeed. That means out of 100 people
50 attempt suicide and 5 succeed. That's very troubling. I think I'm past
this point, I can live with Schitzophrenia well, given reduced stress
environments but I mourn every life lost to this illness. Thanks Dr. Niendem.
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I have purchased two books from Lehmann's
September 28th, 2019
One dealing with routing protocols and another with machine learning for email.
I hope this will be the last of books for the year, I'M approaching 12 books
bought, which is near the average for the past few years. If you're interested
in seeing the books I purchased see here.
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I'm back IRC'ing
September 28th, 2019
I've been back at IRC for a few days now. I finally gave in to my cravings
of using this communication tool. I think I'm still addicted to chat. But
if I didn't have this chat I would be talking to myself, which I'd rather
not. On to some great IRC'ing days!
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