Centroid.EU Blog

(this blog is mostly encrypted - adults only)

Changed mail.centroid.eu certs to letsencrypt

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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