i am republishing everything temporarily in order to use mirroring software to pull it down. i expect this post to be taken down within 24-48 hours. i would request you refrain from unwanted moderation in that time frame, so i can take my site down from here and upload somewhere that cares more about speech rights and less about conservative value systems.
sunday, may 1, 2022
suppose an historical average is x.
now, suppose your data points are x + 5, x + 4, x + 3, x + 7, x + 9, x + 1, x + 8, x + 6, x + 5, 15 more @ x+1, x - 20, x - 20, x- 15, x-10, x-5, x.
averaging that out gives x + (5 + 4 + 3 + 7 + 9 + 1+ 8 + 6 + 5 + 15 - 20 - 20 - 10 - 5 + 0 )/30 = x + 0.25
that suggests that the data over the period was very average. but, in fact, 80% of the data points were above average.
what that does is demonstrate how one minor cold snap in a month like april, brought on by something like a ssw event, can skew the data very badly.
as stated previously, averages are not a helpful way to analyze temperatures in months like march and april because you expect dramatic temperature swings - you expect hot snaps and you expect cold snaps. an extra cold snap in april may muddle up the data, but all that can do is obscure the trends and confuse the analysis.
you could use medians or modes instead, but they have their own problems, and none of them are substitutes for human beings looking at trends and pulling them out. you'd often want to use something like a regression analysis, but that doesn't help here, either.
averages are a little more useful in months that don't have large amounts of temperature variation, like august. even january is pretty crazy in much of the world, and a single brutal cold snap could obscure the reality of an above average month.
i know i'm making the opposite argument you generally hear from climate scientists, but i'm also identifying the opposite phenomenon. the ssw in march was a weather event that mildly distorted the longterm increase in average temperatures.
so, it's easy to look at the average temperatures and say "april was only negligibly above average in southern ontario.", but that doesn't reflect what people actually experienced - which was consistent above average temperatures, a couple of bizarrely hot snaps that you don't expect and two or three days of colder weather, which is something you do expect.
there aren't many honest statisticians out there, so you should note that my major was in pure math, not statistics. sorry. but, this is pretty elementary, and it's the kind of thing you need to watch out for when reading mainstream media, which is notorious for skewing data in this manner.
15:31
i just want to keep up with the narrative.....
i got slowed down a little on the weekend by some unfortunate excess sleeping, which i'm hoping lifts in the upcoming week. the smell has been...it's background. but, i've been getting knocked right out; these are sleeps i'm not able to avoid.
after doing a little bit of filing and more thinking about how i want to design the rest of the studio before i buy a few things this week, i stopped to eat on friday evening, when i wanted to stop closer to noon, and eventually ate my salad in the studio (because the table in the tv room was still flipped over). so, there were some posts here while i was eating.
i crashed hard about 90% of the way through the salad, woke up a few hours later and completely flushed my system via my asshole, as i did previously. i'm certain i saw what i just ate, which is unusual, but reflective. that's twice, since i brought in the hot peppers, and i'm starting to deduce a cause, but i'm going to at least finish the package because i wonder if it might actually benefit me to flush myself right out. i'm not exactly into pseudo-science hippie purges, but i've long suspected that capsicum has anti-parasitic qualities, and it's a part of the reason i eat so much hot sauce. i've tested for ova and bacteria and it's come back negative but i remain suspicious, and i want to see if i can just clear myself right out repeatedly, to see what happens. unfortunately, it might backfire in the short run: food i'm clearing out violently is food i'm not absorbing. but, i think it's a useful step, to see if i can find anything.
to be clear: i wouldn't expect this to be a long term treatment. it won't cure me of anything, if there's anything in there. i'll need to get antibiotics. but, repeated internal enemas may flush something out, and i may find something in there, in the process, that evaded detection. or not. let me finish the package and go from there.
but, i cleared myself right out, to the point that i had to take a shower, then didn't finish the meal until the morning.
i then spent the rest of the morning finishing the research i started on friday about music software choices moving forward, to make sure i was making the right decision, moving forward. i then reassembled the tv room, disassembled the tray for the usb keyboard (it's an unnecessarily obtuse setup that will probably just cause problems; i'll be typing in the other room.), took a shower and intended to get out to do some bloodwork by the end of the day, but i just didn't get out in time and had to put it off, instead. so, the goal was to finish the usb filing first and take it from there.
unfortunately, i crashed very hard a second time, which was a lengthier sleep - i was out from around 19:00 right until close to 3:00. like, out. you couldn't wake me up. when i did get up, i got to finishing my coffee and mostly finished the filing, before i stopped to make eggs this morning, finished watching the second lecture, stopped to do some more filing, took some iron, made some coffee and finally finished with this usb filing.
i had two usb keys floating around for many years. the first had my appspot site on it, which i wanted to be mobile for flexibility reasons. i did not intend to strand that site, and it is not the same thing as the blog, but i may have to turn it into a blog. it is not clear to me if google will allow me to keep the site up or not, given that i cannot give them a credit card (it's free tier; it's stupid). for now, it's still there. if it comes down, the biggest annoyance is going to come in updating links. the second was a general file transfer usb key that i wanted to use to take files between computers and in and out of the house.
i bought a third usb key when i purchased the first chromebook, for intended use as an external drive attached to it. for various reasons, that didn't pan out, and i ended up cutting the thing up pretty badly when i tried to use it to reinstall linux (something i've been unable to do, as i can't get it to boot into developer mode). i may still try to reclaim the hardware in that manner, but it's sort of a triviality to me, for the moment, as i am using the device strictly as a tv. i mean, even in that restricted use, it would still be better to put linux on it, at this point, but it seems like a lengthy, difficulty process; i suspect i'll have to reprogram it. i haven't tried that for the dell, yet. you'll recall that i decided to log in as guest on that machine to try to get around the constant attacks by the cia; the lack of a hard drive, and flexibility around guest mode, was actually ideal. when the typing machine comes in, the main role of the dell in the studio will be to upload music to the internet, so it's going to be focused on youtube & bandcamp rather than on blogger & gmail. the dell is intended primarily as a mobile device, and is being used in it's current role more as a stop-gap. but, in the long run, converting this into a linux machine will obviously make more sense, as well, as it was purchased expired. that key has been sitting unused for quite a while because i can't read it on xp and the windows 7 machine has been unbootable. so, what's the use?
i bought a fourth key last year to replace the one i was using for the appspot site, because it was developing a crack in it. see, i formatted that one with fat32 years ago without thinking about it, and formatted the other one as ntfs so i could transfer large files (and not lose much of the partition). the smaller one is only 4 gb, whereas the bigger one is 16 - a large usb key for the time. what has happened since is that i've found myself printing pdf files directly from usb on public access printers, and they don't read ntfs. so, i've been using the smaller key, and it's just exhibited some wear and tear. it currently requires some packing tape.
since then, i've been sitting in front of a chromebook connected to the internet and a desktop production machine that i'm actually working with and needed to frequently transfer files between them, so i've had chaos in usb keys, with all three devices having all kinds of music and document files dropped on them for art and legal reasons - there's wav files for uploading, mp3 files for downloading, pdf & doc files for court, jpg & html & txt & doc & pdf files for the blogs & the journals, bloodwork stuff, etc, etc. it's just been a giant mess of hundreds of files and gb worth of data, scattered all over the drives in no coherent way. i don't like such things.
i was initially considering have keys isolated for each room, but i've decided that makes little sense. if the idea was always to have my web page stored on an external usb for portability, i now have multiple blogs, and i should file data related to them in that space, along with the appspot site. further, i should reclaim the transfer key for it's intended purpose - but restrict it for inside the house. that leaves the slightly broken fat32 key for use as a fat32 key - and you'd be surprised how necessary that still is, if you ever tried to use public printers. i have a printer, but the price of ink that will dry out after one use is ridiculous; i just use it as a scanner. if i need to print documents for legal stuff or blood work or whatever else, i print it at the library, which is basically across the street. then, it makes sense to use the other key as the external hard drive on the chromebook, again. i should have some additional keys around, though, even if they don't have any use.
so, this was a bit of a project - two years wort of scattered files across four keys had to be organized and put away, but it's done. the tv room is set back up. i've done may 1st cleaning - almost. everything is ready to go...
i need to buy some of the things i've been talking about, today, and then i can get back to loose ending tonight or tomorrow.
18:21
Lenovo M93P (ThinkCentre) Small Form Factor Desktop Computer
• Intel Core i5-4570 Quad Core Processor running at 3.2GHz
• 8GB DDR3 RAM
• 500GB Hard Drive
• 8 x USB ( 2 x USB 3.0 front, 4 x USB 3.0 rear, 2 x USB 2.0 rear)
• Front Headphone & Mic Ports
• Rear Line In, Line Out & Mic Ports
• Serial Port
• VGA Port
• 2 x Display Port
• Gigabit Ethernet Port
• DVD RW Optical Drive
• Windows 10 Professional Edition MAR License
===============
$167 + tax
yeah.
the hp that this is meant to replace was an i5-2xxx @ 2.x ghz that i had recently upgraded from 4 to 8 gb of ram, that had a 500 gb hard drive, that had the then standard 3 usb ports, mic & headphone, vga, overhead, hdmi, ethernet, wireless, dvd-rw, sd card & windows 7 home.
so, i've added a $8 sd card to usb interface, which is very necessary because it's partially for video editing.
i've also added a 120 gb ssd hard drive for $33. the ssd drive will be for the os, and the sata drive will be for files. i have long had a 2-way partition on my typing machine. this is more space than i've ever had.
167 + 33 + 8 = $208.
with tax, it's $234.
free shipping.
now, i'm taking a minor chance with this. it's a refurbished product. i might have to replace a drive, and it might be a little scuffed up. but, it's grade A, and it's microsoft authorized. i'm pretty technical - i can work through some minor details.
i actually sought this processor out:
that site compares over a thousand processors. the i3 is what is going in the 64-bit production machine, and it's still top 60. the i5 is going in the typing machine, and it's just behind it.
but, the typing machine is also going to do video editing.
as you can see, the i5 will outperform on parallel processing, while the i3 is more powerful on single threads.
so, the cpus are roughly comparable, overall, but each does what it's intended do a little bit better than the other.
the full comparison is here:
i am baffled by this - according to my nerdy senses, which are perpetually tingling, that should cost $2500, not $250. my 32-bit production machine should cost more than $250. the processor, alone, in this new computer should cost more than $250. the value for the cost is simply astounding.
but, the market is flooded with i7s, so who wants a measly i5, and refurbished at that?
it's absurd, but nobody ever accused capitalism of being rational, and sometimes the nonsense can work out in your favour.
if this works out, that machine should last for 30 years without needing an upgrade, with the potential exception of minor hardware swaps, which is something i can deal with.
i have had to replace most of the non-motherboard components of the 90s pc, although it still has the original video & sound cards. i have only had to replace one of four hard drives in the 2007 tower. total. i think. yeah - everything else is still running, including the original ram.
so, if i have to replace a few parts in a few years, that will be ok. but, it's not necessarily a given - if the machine gets here in good shape, i might not have to, we'll see.
is it missing anything? i don't think so - not for what i want to use it for. i have a keyboard for it, although i'll want to get a ps/2 keyboard if i can find one. i need to buy extra mice, regardless.
22:32
monday, may 2, 2022
i had to sleep.
but, i just also bought 3 unboxed surplus ps/2 mice ($10/each), an unboxed ps/2 keyboard for $15, and 6 16 gb usb 2.0 thumb drives for around $5 each, including shipping.
and, that's it for a few more weeks, until i'm done with groceries for the month.
6:14
ok, i bought some small midi cords for $4 each, and i'm going to get a tarp and a carpet for the hihat at the dollarstore next time i'm out.
the other things in my list include a second plastic organizer for cords & cables, a sewing machine and....that's it. really. if they're each around $30-40, that should be an easy buy at the beginning of next month.
i still have a list of stuff from last year, but it's not a dominant priority. these are the items i needed to actually finish organizing the studio, so i can get back to using it. i think. if other things come up, i'll note them.
it's easy to second guess yourself when you buy computers, especially when you don't have a lot of money, but i have a good track record regarding doing research myself. i didn't buy this broken hp; it was given to me as a gift. i bought the compaq, but i think i can still fix it.
i've said this many times: the hp was designed to break. it had fancy specs and looked nice, but it's just a shiny coat of a paint on a flimsy device. and, they even market them this way - they present slim devices as a selling point. it's insanity. the consumer market is high price but low quality, because you're just supposed to throw it out and buy a new one. i don't want to do that.
this lenovo is an office computer, and you can tell - it has a dvd drive and no wireless connection. it has ps/2 connectors. i still mostly use usb 2, so the usb 3 drives are a step beyond what i need, let alone do i have any need for usb c. etc. it's built like a server, actually - it folds in and out. this is designed to sit in an office for 20 years and be serviced by it professionals; it's made to last, and that's what i want, given that i can't be replacing computers all of the time, even if i'd want to. it's bad for the environment.
so, i think i'm for real ready to go. it'll be a few days before stuff gets here and can be set up, but this detour is officially coming to a close.
1) studio is reorganized and ready to physically record in.
2) tv space is set up
3) typing space is redesigned.
i haven't been this organized since period 2 closed in 2017. this is good. i feel good. let's go.
7:45
i've learned this about myself - i'm not a continuous function. i don't work at a constant rate; i work in short, steady bursts.
the last steady burst was 2014-2017 and closed when the electrical interference started to overwhelm me, my equipment started imploding and my living situation became unstable.
2018 was a bust, but i got some writing done over 2019 and 2020, i bought a lot of new equipment over 2021 and i got a few releases finished in late 2021 and early 2022. so, i've set things up for another burst - even if it has to start here and finish elsewhere.
7:49
tuesday, may 3, 2022
abortion rights in the united states have always been tenuous, and these backwards religionists that want to turn back the clocks and take them away have never gone away, especially in the deep south, where there is even frightening talk of "great awakenings". they're going to wake up alright - they're going to wake up in a third world theocracy, like iran. and, people wonder why religion is seen by so many as being inherently harmful to society?
let us not be naive about this: let us put on our critical legal analysis hats and analyze this like grown-ups, not get lost in language that nobody has taken seriously for centuries, if they ever did in the first place. i, too, am somewhat of an 18th century-liberal, in the sense that i would have been a liberal of a certain sort in the 18th century, before the industrial revolution brought the socialization of production upon us. i share many broad aims with the 18th century liberals. but, let us be real about this.
in the united states, judges are appointed by ideologically driven presidents, with the explicit instruction to uphold the ideology of the president that appointed them. that is what is real, today. so, a justice like amy coney barrett is interested strictly in advancing the ideological interests of the president that appointed her, and will search out the appropriate case law to twist and warp into an opinion that reflects the ideology she was appointed to advance, and not the other way around. this idea of "settled law" was always naive, for that reason; justices do not abide by stare decisis, so much as they manipulate existing rulings to advance their own opinions, which reflect their ideological biases, which are selected for by the president, who is democratically elected. the judiciary is a tool to implement majoritarian power, it is not a check upon it. sorry, liberals,
now, somebody might argue that republicans lost the popular vote, and that support for abortion is not universal amongst republican voters, but tell that to the electorate. they knew what they were voting for, and they voted for it, anyways. this is the consequence of it.
now, again, i need to remind you that hillary clinton doesn't support abortion, either. she pretends she does sometimes, but what she actually supports is a constitutional amendment to limit access, and that would actually be worse than what's being talked about, because it would be federal. if texas bans abortion, you could still technically go to california. the changes that were talked about by clinton would have applied everywhere.
there was really no way out - both of the major candidates were anti-abortion. don't let the media confuse you, or rewrite history. regardless, while trump does not appear to be opposed to abortion himself, as an individual (unlike clinton, who does appear to have a personal aversion to it), he very clearly broadcast his intent to stack the court to carry out the aims of the republican party, whether he supported the issue or nor. the candidate's intent was clearly broadcast, the consequences were very apparent and americans voted for it, anyways - even though many don't support it. if the end result is that the court changes the law, it is not a deficit of democracy, but the application of it. blame it on the electoral college if you'd like, or blame it on uninformed voters voting against their own viewpoints, but stay real.
so, in the united states, the role of individual judges is to advance the interests of the president that appointed them, not to act as a check on power or to protect the rights of the minority from the majority. we have a majority on the bench that is made up of individual judges that were appointed by republican presidents, and they are advancing the interests of the republican presidents that placed them there. that's majoritarian democracy (however systemically imperfect) at work; it's not something else.
but, what is the issue at law in the united states? it reduces to property rights.
now, i'm a strong abortion rights advocate because i believe in self-ownership. that goes back to sharing ideas with liberals, without identifying as one: we own our selves, so we get to make sovereign decisions about our own bodies. in canada, the constitutional clause was the right to security of the person, which is much closer to a liberal concept of self-ownership than this specious, goofy idea of property rights that is at the root cause of so many of the problems in the united states. abortion is not safe here, either, but the legal decision is at least coherent and self-consistent: women own their bodies and therefore have the right to do what they want with them (even if that's not exactly what the case said). ok.
but...property rights? what?
the clause used by the supreme court in roe v wade is the same idea used in legislation for procedures like eminent domain - if the government is going to take away your rights, it needs to give you due process, first. trying to make sense of this in the abortion context has really been famously difficult, because the ruling really is legitimately incoherent. you have to get to some idea of having an abortion being some kind of property first, and then argue that taking that away without due process is a property rights infringement. it's truly mental gymnastics; it's legitimately difficult to parse. i think a better argument would be the separation of church and state, but there's no case law advancing that argument, to my knowledge.
and, this has been the problem for many years - it's been clear for decades that the ruling doesn't actually stand up, and nobody wants to touch it for that reason. there's been lots of opportunities to write a law about it, but that would actually take away the right to an abortion, and reduce it to another issue around state's rights. the only way to overrule the local legislatures was for the court to declare abortion a right, and that only worked so long as the court could confirm it, by deferring to itself - it relied on self-review. flipping the balance on the court pulls the rug out from under it and sends the whole thing falling down.
i don't have a good suggestion at this point other than to be creative in finding ways around what's coming, and in coming up with novel arguments to get around it. but, let's begin by understanding the enemy, which is religion.
18:42
james madison was a fascist piece of shit. i don't give a fuck what he thought at all.
19:46
wednesday, may 4, 2022
so, i need a narrative update. i guess these will end up in the travel blogs, eventually.
the last one was sunday night, and i was sitting down to buy a new computer, which i told you about. i slept over night, woke up in the morning, got something to eat, bought a few more little things and got ready to finally go out to get my blood work done.
here's my chart update, minus a number of items that i'm no longer checking, as i am content i am absorbing and regulating (i will revisit that later, as i work through the diet construction):
| 2021 | 2022 | |||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| m | a | m | j | j | a | s | o | n | d | j | f | m | a | m | j | j | a | s | o | n | d | |
| cholesterol | 3.93 | - | - | - | 3.99 | 3.8 | 4.15 | 4.01/3.83 | 4.14/4.02 | 4.14/3.67 | 3.54/3.8 | 3.78/3.68 | ||||||||||
| triglycerides | .87 | - | - | - | .95 | .89 | 1.41 | 1.05/0.94 | 1.09/1.32 | 1.86/0.73 | 2.26/0.75 | 0.69/1.02 | ||||||||||
| hdl | 1.69 | - | - | - | 1.84 | 1.59 | 1.73 | 1.42/1.55 | 1.37/1.42 | 1.51/1.74 | 1.75/1.72 | 1.74/1.69 | ||||||||||
| ldl | 1.85 | - | - | - | 1.72 | 1.81 | 1.78 | 2.11/1.85 | 2.28/2.00 | 1.79/1.6 | <0.8/1.75 | 1.73/1.52 | ||||||||||
| non-hdl | 2.24 | - | - | - | 2.15 | 2.21 | 2.42 | 2.59/2.28 | 2.77/2.60 | 2.63/1.93 | 1.79/2.09 | 2.04/1.99 | ||||||||||
| wbc | 8.7/8.4 | 9.9/9.0 | - | - | ? | 7.0 | 7.6 | 6.9/6.9 | 7.8 | 11.3/8.2 | 6.7/6.4 | 7.4/7.1 | 5.3 | |||||||||
| rbc yellow: 4 normal:4.2 | 3.97/4.25 | 4.11/4.38 | - | - | 4.17 | 4.12 | 4.33 | 4.47/4.2 | 4.28 | 4.55/4.19 | 4.3/4.22 | 4.42/4.26 | 4.4 | |||||||||
| hemoglobin | 132/140 | 133/142 | - | - | 139 | 136 | 141 | 138/138 | 139 | 144/131 | 141/133 | 140/136 | 145 | |||||||||
| hematocrit | .382/.404 | .394/.424 | - | - | .405 | .398 | .418 | .417/.402 | .405 | 0.431/0.393 | .409/.396 | .417/.404 | .412 | |||||||||
| mcv | 96.1/95.1 | 95.8/97.0 | - | - | 97 | 96.8 | 96.6 | 93/95.7 | 94.6 | 94.7/94 | 95/94 | 94/95 | 93.7 | |||||||||
| mch | 33.1/32.9 | 32.4/32.5 | - | - | 33.3 | 33.2 | 32.7 | 30.9/32.8 | 32.5 | 31.8/31.3 | 32.7/31.5 | 31.7/32 | 32.9 | |||||||||
| mchc | 345/346 | 338/335 | - | - | ? | 343 | 338 | 331/343 | 344 | 335/333 | 344/336 | 336/337 | 352 | |||||||||
| rdw | 13.3/13.5 | 13.0/13.1 | - | - | ? | 13 | 12.3 | 11.7/12.9 | 12.6 | 13.4/12.0 | 13.2/11.7 | 11.7/13 | 12.8 | |||||||||
| platelet | 199/187 | 171/171 | - | - | ? | 175 | 167 | 168/150 | 155 | 188/185 | 159/184 | 187/175 | 166 | |||||||||
| reticulocytes | - | -/42 | - | - | 53 | 56 | 46 | 35 | 33 | 33 | 39 | 41 | 43 | |||||||||
| vitamin d | 87 | - | - | - | 109 | 72 | 64 | 72/83 | 78 | 64/71 | 61/74 | 74/80 | 102 | |||||||||
| estradiol | 363/388 | - | - | - | - | 563 | 443 | 432 | 777 | 343 | 578 | 416 | 307 | |||||||||
| testosterone | 0.9 | - | - | - | - | - | <0.4 | <0.4 | <0.4 | <0.4 | <0.4 | <0.4 | 1.4 | |||||||||
| progesterone | 1.9 | - | - | - | - | - | <0.5 | 0.7 | 0.5 | 0.9 | <0.5 | 3.7 | 62.5 | |||||||||
| fsh | <0.2 | - | - | - | - | - | 0.2 | 0.1 | <0.1 | - | <0.1 | 0.1 | 0.5 | |||||||||
| lh | <0.2 | - | - | - | - | - | 0.1 | 0.1 | 0.1 | - | 0.1 | <0.1 | <0.2 | |||||||||
| ferritin | 12/9 | 6/17 | 21 | - | 29 | 43 | 28 | 40 | 42 | 59 | 33 | 28 | 59 | |||||||||
| tibc | - | 69.5 | - | - | 65.7 | 62.9 | 64.7 | 58.9 | 58.2 | 63.2 | 57.4 | 58.7 | 57.9 | |||||||||
| iron | - | 9.6 | - | - | 22.7 | 37.3 | 19.3 | 28.3 | 37.3 | 32.5 | 13.1 | 14.8 | 28.2 | |||||||||
| iron sat | - | 0.14 | - | - | 0.35 | 0.59 | 0.3 | .48 | 0.64 | 0.51 | 0.23 | 0.25 | 0.49 | |||||||||
| transferrin | - | - | - | - | - | - | 2.59 | 2.29 | 2.38 | 2.49 | 2.31 | 2.39 | 2.42 | |||||||||
| pth | - | - | - | 5.5 | - | 6.2 | 5.9 | 6.2 | 5.5 | 8.0 | 6.3 | 5.7 | 6.9 | |||||||||
| tsh | 0.92 | - | - | - | - | 0.94 | 1.22 | 1.67 | 1.48 | 1.07 | 1.39 | 0.97 | 1.26 | |||||||||
| calcitonin | - | - | - | <0.6 | - | - | - | - | 0.6 | - | 0.8 | - | ||||||||||
| alp | 61 | - | - | 63 | 59 | 50 | 60 | 59 /55 | 47 | 50 | 60 | 58 | 55 | |||||||||
there's no cholesterol this month. the calcitonin is pending.
the things i'm still concerned about are iron, hormones & bone stuff, and i'm really convinced i've solved the iron issue, up to the question of actually taking the pills; it's pretty clear that my iron goes up when i take the pills and goes down when i don't. but, what about the bones & hormones, which are interconnected to each other?
the good thing is that my d is high. now, i pointed out here previously that i lost my experimental control over the winter because the soy changed without me realizing it in the fall, although i've decided that i might as well just take the pills. they're cheap, and there's no serious downside, excluding concerns about renal function. if my calcium comes down, that's fine. the bottom line is that i'd be taking the same thing in my soy milk, anyways. that is, the soy milk companies basically crush up vitamin d pills. but, it's not the winter anymore, and i got a sunburn last weekend that is still peeling. so, i don't know if that result is due to pills, sun, both or even just randomness. i wouldn't read too much into it, but i've decided to keep the intake stable with the pills, regardless. that could come down next month, and i wouldn't be worried about it. i'm also clearly absorbing the liquid progesterone far better than i was the pill form.
the bad thing is that the bone numbers are not moving with the d, and i tried to isolate it. let me explain this, first.
so, i want my estrogen over 450, minimum, which i've been struggling with. i want my levels to come up, and i've succeeded in doing so by increasing my consumption, but they won't prescribe me any more. i may have to buy some online and supplement that way. i'm on 4 mg every 12 hours and want to up it to 4 mg every 9 hours. i also want my pth below 5, and i'm finding it frustrating that it won't go down, even with more than sufficient d. so, i wanted to test the following: if i pull back a little on the hormones and boost the d, does the pth go down or stay constant? i did this by missing a cycle on my hormones, and by reducing my cyproterone - i went from 2x1/2 to 1x1/2 about a week prior to the test, and then forgot to tell anybody. i was told by the endocrinologist that i could go off the cyproterone altogether after my testicles came out, which was clearly very bad advice, so i've been slowly trying to ramp down while thinking the testosterone is just going to stop and instead dealing with unwanted consequences from it rebounding.
we see the result - d alone is not sufficient to reduce osteoclast activity in the form of high pth, but rather requires the presence of estrogen.
i also got an unexpected result from the decrease in cyproterone, namely an increase in fsh for probably the first time in 20 years (if ever). that boost in fsh seems to have increased my testosterone as well as my tsh. now, remember - i don't have any testicles, so this is happening in my adrenal glands, and, in fact, this result - testosterone over 1.0 - is the exact result i was attempting to prevent in getting my testicles removed, in the first place. this testosterone reading is unacceptable to me.
so, i have immediately put myself back on the initial dosage i was on - which is 2 x 1, daily - and do not intend to alter it further. if i thought i could go off the cyproterone by removing my testicles, that would seem to be incorrect - i will require perpetual suppression. forever. this is no longer a debate. this may be different for others, but i didn't get my testicles removed and done away with to suffer from a testosterone boost, and i'm not interested in experimenting with lower doses at the cost of detransitioning. this is an emergency that must be dealt with, and no further experiments in reducing dosages are desired. my interests right now are resuming rapid refeminization, which means i want my testosterone as low as possible, and am no longer interested in getting off the cyproterone. at all.
i may find myself in a fight about this. but, this is worth fighting about, and potentially worth finding another doctor over.
so, the hormones...they're bad results, but i can largely explain them, and i think i can resolve it by adjusting. the more profound takeaway is that pth does not depend solely on d - i need the high estrogen, as well. so, i may have to look elsewhere to maximize my estrogen to get my pth down, because the doctors i'm dealing with are focused on rules rather than data, and won't let the data redefine the rules. that's fine. i'm not putting my health in the hands of others.
i will talk to the doctor again on thursday, with the intent to get that dosage back up, and we'll see how he reacts.
and, the last thing is to do with the reticulocytes, which remain stubbornly low. i have iron. my testosterone even spiked above 1.0. yet, my reticulocytes just won't come up. should i be worried about that? i will see a specialist at the end of the month regarding it.
so, if the iron and d issues are dealt with, and the progesterone is back up, the last thing to deal with is getting the cyproterone back at previous levels to reduce the fsh, the tsh and the testosterone and increase the estrogen, which should hopefully reduce the pth. then, maybe, i'll finally get everything right, next lab.
i spent the rest of the day monday out grocery shopping and got most of what i need for the month, and then some. kale was again a problem, and i made an impulse buy i regret; i had to throw 75% of it out. so, i'll need to get some more, soon. everything else is pretty much done, until mid to late month. i also got some tarps and carpets for under the kit (the carpet i used to have under the kit had to be thrown out due to the stench emanating from it. i'm not sure exactly what it was, but i had to throw it away.), some electrical tape and some extra tupperware. and, that was the day...
i came in latish on monday night, made some salad and passed out until the morning, when i made some quinoa, did a little work on my production machine (why was my maudio card not seated, randomly, when i came back?) and booted back into the chromebook. i've been sort of half cleaning all day, as i wait for the recycle bin to dry. i think i wanted that done by now, but it's going to be a few more hours.
so, that's the narrative update. the ssd hard drive for the new computer came in today; the computer itself should be in by the end of the week. i need to get the phone up and running, as a priority. but, i'm otherwise about to reboot right into the loose-ending.
1:07
also, this is my xp services list - and i will want my 7 services list to be almost as minimal.
1:09
this is another example of misleading temperature data.
we've all seen this graphic:
it would seem to suggest that it's cold this week and will get hot next week. but, is that correct?
well, that is the average temperature between may 5th and may 18th, which dramatically increases over the time period. the result is that the average is inflated for the first week and minimized for the second. in fact, if you check this next week, it won't seem like the temperature is so far above average anymore - because the average will have increased.
this is a constant phenomenon from about mar 1st to about july 1st in canada. it perpetually seems like it's below average this week, and will warm up next week and it's because they're constantly inflating the average by including the temperatures for next week. it's true that, in any given year, the temperatures may fluctuate, but also that the longer term trend is pretty monotonic - increasing temperatures from late winter to early summer. if you ever see a graphic like this in spring where this week's temperatures are above the line, what it means is that it's even warmer than it should be two weeks from now. an actual average temperature for any specific day would necessarily be below the trend line, for the whole spring.
if you were to correct that, and use a reasonable set of error bars, this week's temperatures would be very close to average, and next week's temperatures would not be very far above it, either.
but, regardless, 25+ degree days in early may are unusual. 15-20 degree days are normal. 22 is a nice day. 25 is weird. but, if this rain storm is suggestive of the ssw event burning off, this warm snap next week will be that one that locks in, after a few false starts - which is a very early summer, here.
1:48
i think it's actually rather comical to watch nato get prissy about the russians comparing zelensky to hitler, when western propaganda has been speciously comparing putin to hitler for decades.
the russians aren't the ones targeting people by ethnicity, the ukrainians are. but, of course, the irony is that hitler's argument for invading much of europe was that the slavs were oppressing the germans. so, you can't win - you sound like hitler either way.
and, that's the real lesson of godwin's law - that hitler comparisons are generally neither right nor wrong but actually meaningless.
what is the objective analysis? it's that you hear the same thing from both sides, and it's not accidental, it's symmetrical. i think the americans came up with this taunt first, but the russians will always "i know you are, but what am i?", as the americans will, in turn. it's not helpful to try to figure out what is true, when what you're dealing with is a tit-for-tat name-calling, as symmetrical propaganda warfare.
but, it's baffling to see specific actors get their noses out of joint about it, as though they don't understand what they're actually saying - as though justin trudeau doesn't actually remember comparing putin to hitler, which he has done hundreds of times over several years, and i believe did just last week.
2:05
there used to be a discernible concept of canadian culture and identity, but that no longer exists due to heavy levels of immigration. where this was once an exercise in protecting a cultural heritage that could be debated on its merits, it's now just a form of protectionism and should be flat out abolished.
there should be special grants for legacy cultures - the indigenous cultures, the acadian culture, metis, franco-ontarians and the quebecois. but, the idea of the government ordering foreign companies to run media that features canadians, simply because of their place of birth, is actually flat out racist and should be opposed by any clear-thinking person.
12:53
canadians don't tend to have difficulty competing for space as artists. we are well-respected globally for our music and literature. we don't need help competing.
but, we need more grants to ensure that artists can create freely without having to adjust to the market.
so, let's get rid of cancan and create more subsidies, instead.
12:57
the primary issue affecting artists that actually need government attention - not movie stars making action movies, or old women with dozens of literary awards - is the cost of living in this country. if the government wants to help actual artists on the margin, it needs to address cost of living concerns.
but, is there anything canadian about the handmaid's tale, or about super-hero action movies? the former is clearly about the united states, and the latter is clearly a strictly american genre. i see no discernible reason why either should be reclassified as canadian content - the current definition has it right. the xfiles was about fbi agents working on the us eastern seaboard, but is it somehow canadian because it was shot in vancouver? this is not canadian content in any discernible way, and what you're talking about isn't about canadian culture, it's about a form of corporate welfare intended to act as a protectionist economic measure. artists themselves should oppose handouts to multinational corporations that want to set up shop here, and tell them to go film their american bullshit in the land of bullshit, instead.
13:06
i have long used the plastic bags for garbage bags, and i unfortunately may end up having to buy plastic bags, now, in order to put my garbage in. further, you can recycle the plastic bags at store drop-offs. i've strenuously avoided accepting the cloth bags, because i have no discernible use for them.
a couple might be useful, but this is a policy that is going to cause more problems than it solves.
the idea of reusing grocery bags is not a very intelligent one. i mean, i use a school bag, and i walk or bike, so i've never taken a lot of bags, anyways. what actually makes sense, because bags are inherently disposable items, is to make the bags biodegradable, such as by using corn. that's a good way to get rid of useless corn, too.
a government mandate to enforce biodegradable bags would have been a step forward, as it is a workable solution, in the long run. telling people not to use bags and expecting them to listen was obviously foolhardy. this law would have clearly benefited from some sober second thought.
worse, it hasn't really made a substantive difference. if you go into a store, there's still produce bags everywhere, which are at least recyclable. limes and avocados and a number of other items are still being sold in bags that should be photosensitive and are not.
this government does not operate on research and study, it operates on specious symbolism and carefuly gathered polling results. it wants a twitter meme, and considers it a win when it gets one; it doesn't care about actual substantive policy. that is the difference between this party and the old liberal party - the old liberals were smart; they studied things thoroughly before legislating, and they made sure they got it right before pushing forwards with it. these new liberals are dumb - they just ram things through to check off boxes and enforce some positive reinforcement on their voters, without doing the proper analysis and empirical research. the results of badly formed and rushed policy by incompetent delinquents are going to reverberate for decades to come.
13:46
again: i don't want to pick a side in a war between the yankees and the russians. i don't like either of them, and i hope they both lose, somehow - although i'd like to see the russians win this battle in ukraine. pan-slavism is something to strive for; nationalist divisions don't help anybody.
what i actually want is a return to non-alignment, which was a movement led by the indians and the cubans, and that canada was actually an integral player within. i'd rather build alliances with south america to look beyond failing american hegemony then get trapped in the conflicts of the past.
i get the impression that a part of the reason that biden pushed this was that he wanted to recreate the cold war. i've made these accusations quite explicitly, here - biden is a cold warrior, and he seems to think bringing back the cold war is going to recreate a fleeting "unity" in the west that never actually existed. fundamentally, he's trying to make the american empire great again. this is a major miscalculation, and the peoples of the world need to reject the polarization into pro and anti-american camps and push towards a non-aligned, third way, instead.
some of the older players involved have been quiet; a lot of the younger players seems to have forgotten, and are being manipulated into reviving a system that was never real, in the first place. so, let me put out a call to the elders: remind us of the non-aligned movement, remind us why it offered us a means of hope and light in the darkness of the cold war between the two barbaric superpowers. show us why it was the way out, and teach us how to rebuild it.
14:05
as mentioned, the right in canada is for the security of the person, which really does seem to have been intended to mean and has mostly been interpreted to mean the right to self-ownership and the right to bodily autonomy, by the courts.
so, the idea that there isn't an abortion right in canada is wrong, much as the idea that there isn't a health care right is. the explicit statement "right to have an abortion" isn't mentioned, but suggesting that that doesn't imply that a right exists in the context of s. 7 is both disingenuous and an expression of willful ignorance. the article suggests that the case law has evolved, but that's the same mistake the americans made. luckily, it's far more fundamental than that. let's try an example.
the criminal code does not expressly prohibit necrophilia. however, s. 182 and s. 46 prohibit various vaguely worded bad behaviours with corpses that very much ought to be interpreted as criminalizing necrophilia, although i'm not exactly sure why anybody would give a fuck - they're dead. who cares. so, one could argue that necrophilia is not illegal in canada because there is no law explicitly banning it (something i've done, previously), but they would be missing the fact that necrophilia is an example of a set of behaviours that is generally prohibited and no explicit prohibition is required for that reason. you couldn't carry out a sexual act with a corpse without desecrating it unless you have consent from the deceased before hand, which i don't suggest putting in your will because you'd be giving people an excuse to kill you, so the general prohibition against desecrating corpses is a superset of the specific act of desecrating one and the ban on necrophilia would follow logically as a corollary to that. that point should be obvious to most.
likewise, a specific right to abortion would not be necessary in the presence of a general right to bodily autonomy, and explicitly stating that you have a "right to an abortion" would consequently not be necessary, so long as the right to bodily autonomy is truly upheld. it is true that there has been case law since and it has helped clarify the point, but as the the right itself is to bodily autonomy, that's secondary to the actual basic point.
it's important to keep in mind what the initial ruling was actually about, in canada. canada wasn't dealing with a situation where abortions were banned, but rather with a situation of required individual ministerial approval. you had to ask for an abortion, and the minister had to process it; women weren't being denied access to abortions, but there was a huge backlog of requests and it was making it difficult to access the abortions, which were in fact being provided. it's pretty clear that the elder trudeau didn't foresee the kind of demand that developed when he set that system up in the late 60s, but the status quo at the time in canada was simply not one where abortion was criminalized (in canada, we passed a federal law to decriminalize abortion in 1968, before roe v wade) but one where access to it was difficult. what was happening was that women were waiting so long for approval - and so long to get access to strained health care resources - that they missed time windows, and ended up having children they didn't want. so, it's true that the ruling didn't overturn a ban on abortion, but it's because there wasn't a ban on abortion to overturn, and that that wasn't the question before the court. the question before the court was whether forcing women to ask for permission to get an abortion was constitutional, not whether abortion should be legal or not. as the question before the court was about the constitutionality of the specific question, the ruling was framed in those terms.
does that mean that a law could be brought in that might reassert the need to ask for ministerial approval, so long as sufficient resources are dedicated to it? well, in theory, but it's proven impossible up to this point to actually propose such a thing in a way that would be constitutional. it's well understood that the conservatives tried to pass an abortion law, and that it was vetoed by the senate, but it's not explained that the senate is not an elected body in canada, and that for the unelected senate to block legislation in this manner is exceedingly rare in this country. the senate has only blocked a handful of laws in this manner over the last hundred years, because it's not seen as a legitimate body - it's there as a patronage body, and it only really acts in the case of an abuse of power in the house, which is the sole institution of democratic expression in this country. and, what was the reason they blocked it? they said it was unconstitutional - that it interfered with the right to bodily autonomy.
the actual truth is that the constitutionality of abortion-banning legislation has never been tested in this country. we do not have a comparison to roe v wade; morgantaler was about a different issue, and the constitutional framework around it is dramatically different.
but, virtually everybody - including the senate in those days after morgantaler - can see clearly that any sort of restriction on abortion is a non-starter, as it is an obvious breach of s. 7, which is the right to self-ownership and bodily autonomy. if you can come up with some sneaky way around it, many people would like to hear it; people have been trying for decades, now, and nobody's come up with anything yet. under harper, some backbench conservatives were trying to float the nonsensical idea of a half of a person. like, that's the kind of thing they're reduced to talking about to get a foothold around s. 7.
so, the state could bring back a system like the one that was brought in in 1968 in theory, but it could only pass a charter challenge if it was a rubber stamp, and then what's the point? more to the point is that access to abortion on demand is readily available in most of the country, with the exception being some of the more sparsely populated regions in the east and the north.
rather, the danger posed to existing abortion rights in canada has more to do with the notwithstanding clause, which could allow the government to just discard the constitution - and which could potentially be stable, if voters decided to stick with it. sneaky ways to make it harder to get an abortion might also be implemented, but the constitutional right to self-ownership and bodily autonomy in canada means that (1) the government can't stop you from controlling your own body directly and (2) can't pass legislation that prevents you from controlling your own body indirectly.
an explicit right to abortion is not required, in the presence of such a robust framework around self-ownership; it follows as a corollary. so, the right does exist by proxy; security of the person is incoherent without encompassing a right to abortion and any attempt to deny a right to abortion would be an infringement of s. 7, by definition.
unfortunately, that underlying framework does not exist in the united states, where the right to property is enshrined in the constitution, but the right to self-ownership is not. and, that is the difference - as is so often the case, the major legal obstacle is this american insistence on this goofy idea of property rights.
15:40
thursday, may 5, 2022
i don't understand why joe biden is focusing on reducing the deficit, given that he was elected to increase spending.
the united states needs a third party. there's no value or utility in voting democrat.
21:56
the united states can print as much money as it wants; it is not subject to fiscal discipline. there is no sense in reducing the deficit, and no benefit in doing so.
21:57
i am not an american and am therefore not an american voter, but i would consider biden's rhetoric on the topic to be a concerning signal, and a strong disincentive to voting for him.
the united states needs massive investments in infrastructure, in education, in social services, in transportation, etc. the last thing it needs is deficit reduction - and i would explicitly vote against anybody running on deficit reduction.
but, maybe there's a cynical reality underlying this. the fact is that biden ran on massive spending promises, then couldn't pass any of it. so, not only has he not increased spending like he promised, but he is such a failure as president that spending actually decreased. the decrease in the deficit is consequently a mark of his ineffectual leadership, which is so pathetic that he's now running on his failure to get anything done.
22:02
if you run on a trillion dollar infrastructure bill and then utterly fail in implementing it, what do you tell midterm voters?
you tell them you reduced the deficit.
22:05
if i was a leftist american, and i voted for a trillion dollar infrastructure bill and got deficit reduction in return, i'd be pretty fucking pissed off about it.
22:07
so, will you reward mr. biden for reducing the deficit?
i sure wouldn't.
i'd tell him to take his deficit reduction and fuck off with it.
22:09
no, let's be real.
what has joe biden accomplished? nothing. at all.
so, what wins can he bring to voters? none. not any.
deficit reduction is a bullshit victory, in a fight none of his voters care about. but, it's something to brag about, at least.
maybe the two joes - manchin and biden - should get together and switch parties. then, they can run on a joint republican ticket and brag about reducing the deficit, together.
but, the left needs a new party. this is ridiculous - we vote for massive spending, and we're asked to reward deficit reduction.
22:15
there is one type of spending that has gone up under biden, though: war spending.
with democrats like this, who needs republicans, right?
22:22
i never thought i'd ask this question: are we going to have a worse president than george w. bush, not just soon but already?
is biden going to end up worse than dubya, in the end?
23:23
joe biden very well might be the worst president in the history of the country.
23:24
may 2, 2019
i want to make my viewpoint clear on this.
how bad is trump? or how not so bad is he, really?
these are the presidents over the last fifty years - a list that both jfk and lbj are no longer on.
- nixon
- ford
- carter
- reagan
- bush I
- clinton
- bush II
- obama
- trump
where does trump fall in the list?
well, it's not such an impressive list, is it? you can be a really shitty president, and still end up somewhere in the middle. that's the real problem we're facing in trying to understand trump: his contemporaries were not very impressive.
who were the really, really bad presidents that you put at the very bottom? nixon has a bad reputation, but he had nader on his ass, so you got things like the epa out of him. i would not put nixon at the bottom of this list, or even near it. of the presidents in this pile, bush II is in sole contention for the bottom of the list. so, you take him right out - he was probably the worst the country's seen, and may be the worst the country ever does see. pointless wars, collapsed economy - nobody comes close to this.
are there any near the top? no. i don't think any of these presidents are worth identifying as having done a good job.
are there any that kind of just sat on the throne for a while, keeping it warm? if doing no harm is better than creating harm, you put the caretaker presidents at the top.
so, it follows that the best president of the last fifty years would be gerald ford, because at least he didn't fuck anything up. you'd need to put carter in as a close second, because he didn't accomplish very much, either. the next least memorable president would be obama.
that leaves nixon, reagan, bush, clinton and trump left to place in the middle.
reagan and bush may not have been the disasters that dubya was, but i can't think of a single good policy that they did while in office, and there was certainly a lot of bad, so i'm going to list them together at 7/8. at this stage in history, i can't think of any positive policy that clinton pushed through either, and he really only tweaked the bush-reagan legacy, so he barely comes in at number 6.
trump, on the other hand, may end up with a positive trade legacy - it's hard to say. he has a mixed bag on the military front, but if he ends up being responsible for a serious withdrawal from the middle east, that's more than clinton - who bombed the fuck out of iraq - can claim. if he gets through his term without bombing latin america, he could be the most pro-peace president in the list, with the potential exception of carter.
but, neither clinton nor trump can compete with the positive legacy of nixon, even if he was being pushed by nader, and even if it was on the tail end of the lbj administration. nixon may be responsible for the direction the republicans took in later years, but his legacy in terms of positive policy still stands out in this particular list. if it weren't for all of the terrible things he did, if we were to measure him solely by his positive contributions, he'd clearly be the best in this list.
so, here's your answer. here's a ranking of the presidents of the last fifty years:
1. ford
2. carter
3. obama
4. nixon
5. trump - tentatively
6. clinton
7/8. bush-reagan
9. bush II
how bad is trump? or how not so bad is he, really?
these are the presidents over the last fifty years - a list that both jfk and lbj are no longer on.
- nixon
- ford
- carter
- reagan
- bush I
- clinton
- bush II
- obama
- trump
where does trump fall in the list?
well, it's not such an impressive list, is it? you can be a really shitty president, and still end up somewhere in the middle. that's the real problem we're facing in trying to understand trump: his contemporaries were not very impressive.
who were the really, really bad presidents that you put at the very bottom? nixon has a bad reputation, but he had nader on his ass, so you got things like the epa out of him. i would not put nixon at the bottom of this list, or even near it. of the presidents in this pile, bush II is in sole contention for the bottom of the list. so, you take him right out - he was probably the worst the country's seen, and may be the worst the country ever does see. pointless wars, collapsed economy - nobody comes close to this.
are there any near the top? no. i don't think any of these presidents are worth identifying as having done a good job.
are there any that kind of just sat on the throne for a while, keeping it warm? if doing no harm is better than creating harm, you put the caretaker presidents at the top.
so, it follows that the best president of the last fifty years would be gerald ford, because at least he didn't fuck anything up. you'd need to put carter in as a close second, because he didn't accomplish very much, either. the next least memorable president would be obama.
that leaves nixon, reagan, bush, clinton and trump left to place in the middle.
reagan and bush may not have been the disasters that dubya was, but i can't think of a single good policy that they did while in office, and there was certainly a lot of bad, so i'm going to list them together at 7/8. at this stage in history, i can't think of any positive policy that clinton pushed through either, and he really only tweaked the bush-reagan legacy, so he barely comes in at number 6.
trump, on the other hand, may end up with a positive trade legacy - it's hard to say. he has a mixed bag on the military front, but if he ends up being responsible for a serious withdrawal from the middle east, that's more than clinton - who bombed the fuck out of iraq - can claim. if he gets through his term without bombing latin america, he could be the most pro-peace president in the list, with the potential exception of carter.
but, neither clinton nor trump can compete with the positive legacy of nixon, even if he was being pushed by nader, and even if it was on the tail end of the lbj administration. nixon may be responsible for the direction the republicans took in later years, but his legacy in terms of positive policy still stands out in this particular list. if it weren't for all of the terrible things he did, if we were to measure him solely by his positive contributions, he'd clearly be the best in this list.
so, here's your answer. here's a ranking of the presidents of the last fifty years:
1. ford
2. carter
3. obama
4. nixon
5. trump - tentatively
6. clinton
7/8. bush-reagan
9. bush II
======
i would hold to that list, at this point, except to point out that nixon was on his second term in 1972 and that he consequently needs an asterisk.
where does biden end up on this list?
right now, it would seem as though biden is presiding over a historical collapse of american hegemony, and essentially fiddling while washington burns. the country faces historic problems, and he has utterly failed to address any of them. we are now looking at a historic backtracking on women's rights, and he wants to focus on reducing the deficit. this is a level of incompetence that few leaders have demonstrated, and puts biden in a small list of ineffectual dunces that includes the likes of nero, alexios IV and neville chamberlain.
however, it is still too early to really know how things turn out. if the upcoming elections somehow give biden a supermajority he can use, things could flip over quickly, although you have to understand that biden really is more on joe manchin's side, and that manchin is really just being used as a scapegoat. biden got what he wanted. still, stranger things could happen. the supreme court could get hit by a terrorist attack, and biden could have to replace five or more judges.
but, this is obscure and i'm being optimistic. more likely is that biden will be remembered as a singularly ineffective leader who watched on the sidelines while his country collapsed. what remains to be seen is whether the carnage is as bad as that left by bush, or not quite as bad, in the end.
so, here's the updated list of presidents of the last 50 years:
1. ford
2. carter
3. obama
2. carter
3. obama
--------------
4. nixon*
4. nixon*
--------------
5. trump
5. trump
--------------
6. clinton
7/8. bush-reagan
6. clinton
7/8. bush-reagan
---------------------
9. biden
10. bush II
10. bush II
23:55
friday, may 6, 2022
i have to wonder if, some time in the future, mr. obama may acknowledge that his first serious decision - picking biden as his running mate - was also his biggest and most regrettable blunder.
0:12
if you remove nixon, who is an enigma in this context, you get:
this has been sitting in my inbox since the first and comprises my analysis of the third lecture in the quantum entanglement series.
i understand that susskind insists that this has no physical relevance, but his comments in the video suggest to me that he might not be fully following the underlying geometry. further, his analysis of the relevance of the underlying geometry may ultimately be more general than i'm suggesting - i suspect we could come to an agreement, if i were to carefully explain what i mean and what i don't.
one of the things that a proper geometric analysis might help with, for example, is making sense of the double slit experiment. it seems like there's some curvature going on there, right? i'm happy to reject locality, but let's get the geometry right, first.
i will pick up on some concrete reformulation in the next lecture. for now, this is commentary. take it for what you will.
=====
so, the observables should be real because observations are real numbers. hermitian matrices are still coherent in a generalized system. however, the matrix stuof observables cannot exist in a euclidean real/complex vector space, but rather must exist within a "hyperbolic real/complex vector space" because euclidean space is not reality and cannot actually be observed. if the idea of a matrix of observables is that the geometry has to be real (notwithstanding diversions into the complex plane) because you're essentially digitizing a snapshot of real space in real time, it cannot be euclidean. euclidean space is make-believe. hyperbolic space is real. then, in order to do the math that is being done, you need to generalize the underlying algebra of the "state vectors" to "hyperbolic state vectors". you can't multiply "hyperbolic space vectors", which must be used to coherently represent a matrix of observables in space, with "euclidean state vectors" - the idea is just not defined, mathematically. you have to do matrix arithmetic on objects in the same space. so, if you're going to encode/digitize the observables correctly by realizing they exist in hyperbolic space, you have to adjust the state vectors so that they are in a "hyperbolic vector space", as well.
as mentioned, these ideas are being worked out on the margins. the idea of a generalized "hyperbolic vector space" has been developed by abraham ungar, who calls it a "gyrospace". everything that susskind is doing here should be converted out of naive euclidean real/complex vector spaces and into generalized hyperbolic gyrospaces, instead. that's just a question of being truly empirical - we know space is curved, and that assumptions of euclidean orthogonality are entirely untenable.
you then have to adjust to use hyperbolic trig functions in hyperbolic polar co-ordinates, which should really be done in the formality of a metric or topological space. the distance function on the unit circle in polar co-ordinates has no actual geometric meaning in real space so everything has to be converted to minkowski spaces, which susskind knows how to do. he can't disagree with me - he knows that this critique is correct, but he'll still go ahead and make naive euclidean assumptions about the nature of space that he knows are wrong and then decide the contradictions are profound, rather than the mathematical consequences of using a classical concept of geometry that does not reflect the reality of the actual space the observable matrices exist within. then, he'll say relativity is wrong, anyways. it's an exercise in circular logic, and really takes us back to the same mistake newton made in the first place - we may have better engineering assumptions, but we're no better off, epistemologically. physicists should be concerning themselves with what is actually true, not just determining applications for materialist use in the industrial economy. physicists have a higher philosophical bar and should take the responsibility seriously.
it follows that none of these formulas really holds. scalars are actually a problem, so this constant hand-waving regarding them is entirely wrong, if the correct geometrical assumptions are to be made and enforced. inner product orthogonality holds, but it's messy. etc. you can do this, but it doesn't cancel out anymore, and you end up with cross terms you have to drag along with you. i'm not going to do the math, here. i suspect somebody already has. while messy and non-symmetric, i am certain that those cross terms hold the answers to the specious paradoxes that stupid people think are profound, and which are not actually profound but are really just the result of bad math. the universe is not profound, and when you find something that looks profound, it's just evidence that you've made a mistake. when you find so-called paradoxes, you should be realizing you've done something wrong, not deciding that the universe works in mysterious ways.
and, the inner product in a complex vector space is not commutative, in general.
i just want to clarify the issue regarding orthogonality, because the discussion confused me at first. the question was confusing, and the answer by susskind actually demonstrates that he was also confused by it, which resulted in a confused answer.
you don't want to redefine the term orthogonality. orthogonality is the multi-dimensional generalization of being perpendicular, which is a two-dimensional concept. you can't just decide to redefine that because you think the result is confusing. the correct concept of orthogonality holds in all cases discussed here, you just have to understand how and what it means.
what we are doing is linear algebra in a real/complex vector space with an underlying euclidean metric (pythagoras' theorem). i guess it's technically a hilbert space, then; i guess i'm really critiquing the utilization of hilbert spaces in building a model for quantum physics, which seems to be standard. a non-euclidean hilbert space would not be a hilbert space (because you can't scale it). rather, it would be helpful to start with the realization that what we're really doing is creating two separate vector spaces and combining them together into a superspace, via the union operation:
1) there is the vector space with the hermitian that represents the digitization/encoding of actual space in reality2) there is the abstract vector space of quantum states.
that should be your initial definition, and how you start with this - start with two separate vector spaces, first, and then join the union of them, second. as we're multiplying elements of these two spaces, we have to do so in a combined space, so the state vectors and space vectors have to be elements of the same superspace, but this is just a mathematical formality; conceptually, you want to keep the two spaces separate, and if you do so this will help eliminate the kind of confusion that susskind is introducing in just throwing them all together in this ill-defined vector space.
first, the eigenvectors of the hermitian are the basis vectors for the matrix, which form a vector space of their own (of which the matrix is an element). these eigenvectors are orthogonal in the correct meaning of the term - they meet at right angles, whatever the rank (dimension).
second, if the state vectors are orthogonal then they themselves certainly meet at right angles. so, if <a,b> = 0 then a and b certainly meet at right angles in the state vector space. the correct concept of orthogonality is not lost here at all.
however, the question was whether the directionality of the electron is determined by taking the inner product of the state vectors, and that is false because it's incorrectly conflating the two independently correct concepts of orthogonality in the two different subspaces as the same. the orthogonality of the state vectors in the state vector subspace would need to be properly mapped to the orthogonality in the space vector subspace to construct an appropriate relationship, or the system would have to be set up that way in order for it to just happen coincidentally.
we consequently do not have two different types of orthogonality, and the words should not be redefined. what we have is a somewhat poorly set up example, followed by a slightly confused question that sought to conflate legitimate applications of orthogonality in two separate subspaces, without the appropriate mapping between them.
====
there's a point in this video where he derives <aMb> = <bMa>* and then decides that if a=b the thing is called an expected value (which is not a true average, but a weighted average. it's more like a centre of mass, really.). you're not supposed to think about this, but what is he doing, geometrically?
what he's doing is showing that the co-ordinate system doesn't matter - that the operation is space invariant, so long as you do the proper mapping. you can apply b to M and then a to Mb over here in this part of space, then apply a to M and b to Ma over in some orthogonal component of space, and you'll get the same thing, up to the conjugate. so, you don't have to worry about how you're labeling things.
this is true in euclidean space, and is a fundamental property of parallelism. but, it is reliant on parallelism. space invariance does not necessarily hold in a curved space, due to the curvature. that idea needs to be generalized.
=======
curvature at the microscopic level has been recently measured:https://www.space.com/space-time-curvature-measured-atomic-fountain
===
see, and when you realize that the space around the electron is curved, and the instruments you're using are trying to measure it orthogonally, and the theory you're using assumes space is orthogonal, then it becomes obvious that you can't measure in two orthogonal directions at the same time without disturbing the system. it would be like placing a ruler on the surface of a lake. your uncertainty principle is just general relativity - the ruler is just disturbing space-time, and it would be impossible to get around it.
==================
this has been sitting in my inbox since the first and comprises my analysis of the third lecture in the quantum entanglement series.
i understand that susskind insists that this has no physical relevance, but his comments in the video suggest to me that he might not be fully following the underlying geometry. further, his analysis of the relevance of the underlying geometry may ultimately be more general than i'm suggesting - i suspect we could come to an agreement, if i were to carefully explain what i mean and what i don't.
one of the things that a proper geometric analysis might help with, for example, is making sense of the double slit experiment. it seems like there's some curvature going on there, right? i'm happy to reject locality, but let's get the geometry right, first.
i will pick up on some concrete reformulation in the next lecture. for now, this is commentary. take it for what you will.
=====
so, the observables should be real because observations are real numbers. hermitian matrices are still coherent in a generalized system. however, the matrix stuof observables cannot exist in a euclidean real/complex vector space, but rather must exist within a "hyperbolic real/complex vector space" because euclidean space is not reality and cannot actually be observed. if the idea of a matrix of observables is that the geometry has to be real (notwithstanding diversions into the complex plane) because you're essentially digitizing a snapshot of real space in real time, it cannot be euclidean. euclidean space is make-believe. hyperbolic space is real. then, in order to do the math that is being done, you need to generalize the underlying algebra of the "state vectors" to "hyperbolic state vectors". you can't multiply "hyperbolic space vectors", which must be used to coherently represent a matrix of observables in space, with "euclidean state vectors" - the idea is just not defined, mathematically. you have to do matrix arithmetic on objects in the same space. so, if you're going to encode/digitize the observables correctly by realizing they exist in hyperbolic space, you have to adjust the state vectors so that they are in a "hyperbolic vector space", as well.
as mentioned, these ideas are being worked out on the margins. the idea of a generalized "hyperbolic vector space" has been developed by abraham ungar, who calls it a "gyrospace". everything that susskind is doing here should be converted out of naive euclidean real/complex vector spaces and into generalized hyperbolic gyrospaces, instead. that's just a question of being truly empirical - we know space is curved, and that assumptions of euclidean orthogonality are entirely untenable.
you then have to adjust to use hyperbolic trig functions in hyperbolic polar co-ordinates, which should really be done in the formality of a metric or topological space. the distance function on the unit circle in polar co-ordinates has no actual geometric meaning in real space so everything has to be converted to minkowski spaces, which susskind knows how to do. he can't disagree with me - he knows that this critique is correct, but he'll still go ahead and make naive euclidean assumptions about the nature of space that he knows are wrong and then decide the contradictions are profound, rather than the mathematical consequences of using a classical concept of geometry that does not reflect the reality of the actual space the observable matrices exist within. then, he'll say relativity is wrong, anyways. it's an exercise in circular logic, and really takes us back to the same mistake newton made in the first place - we may have better engineering assumptions, but we're no better off, epistemologically. physicists should be concerning themselves with what is actually true, not just determining applications for materialist use in the industrial economy. physicists have a higher philosophical bar and should take the responsibility seriously.
it follows that none of these formulas really holds. scalars are actually a problem, so this constant hand-waving regarding them is entirely wrong, if the correct geometrical assumptions are to be made and enforced. inner product orthogonality holds, but it's messy. etc. you can do this, but it doesn't cancel out anymore, and you end up with cross terms you have to drag along with you. i'm not going to do the math, here. i suspect somebody already has. while messy and non-symmetric, i am certain that those cross terms hold the answers to the specious paradoxes that stupid people think are profound, and which are not actually profound but are really just the result of bad math. the universe is not profound, and when you find something that looks profound, it's just evidence that you've made a mistake. when you find so-called paradoxes, you should be realizing you've done something wrong, not deciding that the universe works in mysterious ways.
and, the inner product in a complex vector space is not commutative, in general.
i just want to clarify the issue regarding orthogonality, because the discussion confused me at first. the question was confusing, and the answer by susskind actually demonstrates that he was also confused by it, which resulted in a confused answer.
you don't want to redefine the term orthogonality. orthogonality is the multi-dimensional generalization of being perpendicular, which is a two-dimensional concept. you can't just decide to redefine that because you think the result is confusing. the correct concept of orthogonality holds in all cases discussed here, you just have to understand how and what it means.
what we are doing is linear algebra in a real/complex vector space with an underlying euclidean metric (pythagoras' theorem). i guess it's technically a hilbert space, then; i guess i'm really critiquing the utilization of hilbert spaces in building a model for quantum physics, which seems to be standard. a non-euclidean hilbert space would not be a hilbert space (because you can't scale it). rather, it would be helpful to start with the realization that what we're really doing is creating two separate vector spaces and combining them together into a superspace, via the union operation:
1) there is the vector space with the hermitian that represents the digitization/encoding of actual space in reality2) there is the abstract vector space of quantum states.
that should be your initial definition, and how you start with this - start with two separate vector spaces, first, and then join the union of them, second. as we're multiplying elements of these two spaces, we have to do so in a combined space, so the state vectors and space vectors have to be elements of the same superspace, but this is just a mathematical formality; conceptually, you want to keep the two spaces separate, and if you do so this will help eliminate the kind of confusion that susskind is introducing in just throwing them all together in this ill-defined vector space.
first, the eigenvectors of the hermitian are the basis vectors for the matrix, which form a vector space of their own (of which the matrix is an element). these eigenvectors are orthogonal in the correct meaning of the term - they meet at right angles, whatever the rank (dimension).
second, if the state vectors are orthogonal then they themselves certainly meet at right angles. so, if <a,b> = 0 then a and b certainly meet at right angles in the state vector space. the correct concept of orthogonality is not lost here at all.
however, the question was whether the directionality of the electron is determined by taking the inner product of the state vectors, and that is false because it's incorrectly conflating the two independently correct concepts of orthogonality in the two different subspaces as the same. the orthogonality of the state vectors in the state vector subspace would need to be properly mapped to the orthogonality in the space vector subspace to construct an appropriate relationship, or the system would have to be set up that way in order for it to just happen coincidentally.
we consequently do not have two different types of orthogonality, and the words should not be redefined. what we have is a somewhat poorly set up example, followed by a slightly confused question that sought to conflate legitimate applications of orthogonality in two separate subspaces, without the appropriate mapping between them.
====
there's a point in this video where he derives <aMb> = <bMa>* and then decides that if a=b the thing is called an expected value (which is not a true average, but a weighted average. it's more like a centre of mass, really.). you're not supposed to think about this, but what is he doing, geometrically?
what he's doing is showing that the co-ordinate system doesn't matter - that the operation is space invariant, so long as you do the proper mapping. you can apply b to M and then a to Mb over here in this part of space, then apply a to M and b to Ma over in some orthogonal component of space, and you'll get the same thing, up to the conjugate. so, you don't have to worry about how you're labeling things.
this is true in euclidean space, and is a fundamental property of parallelism. but, it is reliant on parallelism. space invariance does not necessarily hold in a curved space, due to the curvature. that idea needs to be generalized.
=======
curvature at the microscopic level has been recently measured:https://www.space.com/space-time-curvature-measured-atomic-fountain
===
see, and when you realize that the space around the electron is curved, and the instruments you're using are trying to measure it orthogonally, and the theory you're using assumes space is orthogonal, then it becomes obvious that you can't measure in two orthogonal directions at the same time without disturbing the system. it would be like placing a ruler on the surface of a lake. your uncertainty principle is just general relativity - the ruler is just disturbing space-time, and it would be impossible to get around it.3:14
this is crude, but if you take a ruler and put it up to an electron, what happens?
the answer is that the space-time between the ruler and the electron bends, due to gravity. the electron consequently becomes a moving target and of course you can't actually . the euclidean grid is just a social construction; the actual physics are happening in the geometry, and you'd better get a grasp on it if you want to predict it.
if you can't, or you don't realize it, you're forced to guess.
bell's theorem is, of course, also based on euclidean assumptions. if you bring in relativistic effects, you're redefining the question of locality.
===
this is crude, but if you take a ruler and put it up to an electron, what happens?
the answer is that the space-time between the ruler and the electron bends, due to gravity. the electron consequently becomes a moving target, unless you understand the relativistic effects, before hand. so, it would seem impossible to measure it, unless you're measuring it at an angle that is invariant to the relativistic effects. the euclidean grid is just a social construction; the actual physics are happening in the geometry, and you'd better get a grasp on it if you want to predict it.
if you can't, or you don't realize it, you're forced to guess.
bell's theorem is, of course, also based on euclidean assumptions. if you bring in relativistic effects, you're redefining the question of locality.3:57
listen, you know i don't believe in god; there's nothing and nobody to roll the dice. however, if the (observable) universe started with the big bang, and it did, then randomness really doesn't make any sense. we can have perceived randomness, and we can use probability theory as a practical tool to grasp at things we don't currently understand, but actual randomness is impossible in a universe without a god making arbitrary choices. a truly empty universe requires some concept of causality, necessarily; otherwise, we need to explain why things are random. it's not merely some default you can get to by giving up on causality, it needs an answer. randomness is more than the negation of causality, it is it's own condition, and requires arguments on it's own merits. this is a huge part of why i want to push back - we couldn't prove that the universe is defined by causal laws, so we just gave up and decided it's random, rather than attempt to positively prove randomness, as it's own condition. if we decide to sit down and prove randomness as it's own condition, for it's own reasons - rather than as the negation of causality, and arrived at by giving up on causality - we're going to run into an entirely different set of problems. so, do we deduce it must be causal, after we've given up on proving randomness? maybe we should be less defeatist.
the idea that you really can never predict an outcome with certainty if you have enough information is really truly incoherent. it's the end of science, if taken to it's logical endpoint. we'd might as well chant a spell and throw something at the moon.
i get it - we can't figure it out, and we want to build things, so we take guesses instead and it's broadly useful. but, it's not good enough.
i'm not going to tell you that god doesn't play dice; that phrase does not mean anything to me. but, i'll tell you that a truly random universe - a truly random universe - does not make any sense, and that it is not a satisfiable or acceptable solution.
the issue of the geometry has not been thoroughly evaluated. i think it's quite promising. we''ll have to see.
===
listen, i don't believe in god; there's no creator to roll the dice. but, if the universe has some naturalistic starting point, randomness really doesn't make any sense. we can have perceived randomness, and we can use probability theory as a practical tool to grasp at things we don't understand, but it's impossible as an end point in a universe without a creator making arbitrary choices. a truly empty universe requires some concept of causality, necessarily; otherwise, we need to explain why things are random. it's not merely some default you can get to by giving up on causality - it needs an answer. randomness is more than the negation of causality, it is it's own condition, and requires arguments on it's own merits. see, and this is a part of why i want to push back - we can't find causality, so we give up and decide it's random, rather than attempt to positively prove randomness, as it's own end. if we decide to sit down and prove randomness as it's own condition, for it's own reasons - rather than as the negation of causality, and arrived at by giving up on causality - we're going to run into an entirely different set of problems. so, do we deduce it must be causal, after we've given up on proving randomness? maybe we should be less defeatist.
the idea that you really can never predict an outcome with certainty if you have enough information is really truly incoherent. it's the end of science, if taken to it's logical endpoint. we'd might as well chant a spell and throw something at the moon.
i get it - we can't figure it out, and we want to build things, so we take guesses instead and it's broadly useful. but, it's not good enough.
i'm not going to tell you that god doesn't play dice; that phrase does not mean anything to me. but, i'll tell you that a truly random universe - a truly random universe - does not make sense to me, and that i'm not satisfied with it as an answer to physics.
the issue of the geometry has not been thoroughly evaluated. i think it's quite promising. we''ll have to see.
4:17
causality is descartian, newtonian - it has been held up by religionists, but it does not require intervention, and it has no need for a deity.
randomness, on the the other hand, is arbitrary, whimsical, irrational - and that sounds like it requires a deity, to me. that could not arise naturally.
if a god does exist, however unlikely, she's quite clearly a psychotic, irrational bitch and randomness sounds about right. needless to say, i'm a little skeptical.
given that the universe certainly began with some kind of explosion, if the universe is truly closed (that is, nothing outside of the universe can interfere with what is inside the universe), which is the standard position taken in contemporary physics, then it cannot be random, by definition. this is really a base contradiction at the conceptual level - you cannot have true randomness in a truly closed universe, as there is no source of real entropy. you can have perceived entropy, and use probabilistic models to try to understand it, but that can only be done with the understanding that the perception of entropy is an illusion and that, because the system is closed, there is no actual randomness at all. so, perhaps the universe is not a closed system, then; perhaps energy can pass back and forth through the (observable) universe from inside to outside of it and back, and perhaps the evidence of such a thing happening is right in front of us in the form of black holes and other similar phenomena. that loophole aside, a universe that is both random and closed is simply not a coherent idea and is simply not a satisfactory answer to understanding the universe.
====
causality is descartian, clockwork, newtonian - it has been held up by religionists, but it does not require intervention, and it has no need for a creator.
but, randomness is arbitrary, whimsical, irrational - and that sounds like it requires a creator, to me. that could not arise naturally.
if a creator does exist, however unlikely, it's quite clearly a psychotic, irrational bitch and randomness sounds about right. but, i'm skeptical.
if something is set in motion at the start (and let us suppose there is naturalistic phenomena outside of the universe that we can't understand directly), and there is nothing to interfere with it, how can randomness occur?
i can answer my own question: perhaps the universe is not a closed system. perhaps energy and matter enters the universe from outside of it. that would require a major rethink.
but, that loophole aside, a universe that is random and closed is not a coherent idea. it's not a satisfactory way to end this - it just demands a better answer.4:30
1. ford
2. carter
3. obama
--------------
4. trump
--------------
5. clinton
6/7. bush-reagan
---------------------
8. biden
9. bush II
i think that list is stable, until 2026 when carter and obama take over the top spot, and potentially flip - we'll see how time unfolds.
that potentially pulls trump up into the top 3, especially if biden wins re-election and the existing trajectory continues, but he remains in his own category. in a lot of ways, trump is the new nixon - an enigma in lists of these sorts, because you need to weigh the good against the bad, which is quite difficult.
the other two categories are, i think, stable: reaganism is a historical low point in american history, and clinton was a reaganite, but it is a separate category from the free-fall collapse under bush II and, now, under biden.
0:22
my write-up at the stanford site has unfortunately been corrupted by fucking aristotlians, who have censored language that they deem to be "heretic". stupid creationist nonsense about first causes has been inserted, the term "creator" has been utilized repeatedly, which i would avoid like the plague, a reference to god as female has been deleted, a statement about the universe being closed was replaced with an assumption that the universe is an open system (presumably because it was deemed heretical), etc. another tipoff of manipulation is that the post is dated to 3:14 in my email, which is unlikely enough to strongly suggest backend manipulation. when i date posts to 3:14 in my journals, it's tongue-in-cheek; this is *actually* dated to 3:14 in my email, randomly, and that's almost impossible. i did some light editing before i realized the depth of it and i've been forced to leave the result here in strike out for now before i get to completely overhauling it. some posts will be archived in two forms - before and after light editing.
this is another example of malicious, unwanted editing that makes it clear that i'm being censored by some kind of islamic clerical society, which can promptly fuck off. your religion is retarded, your prophet was a fuckface, your allah never existed and you will lose this attempt at idiocy, albeit at the clear expenditure of far too much wasted time on my behalf and yours.
not only do i not stand by this at the moment, i expect to directly contradict it.
frankly, this is frightening and unsettling stuff. this is an accusation that she raise alarm bells.
so, the observables should be real because observations are real numbers. hermitian matrices are still coherent in a generalized system. however, the matrix stuof observables cannot exist in a euclidean real/complex vector space, but rather must exist within a "hyperbolic real/complex vector space" because euclidean space is not reality and cannot actually be observed. if the idea of a matrix of observables is that the geometry has to be real (notwithstanding diversions into the complex plane) because you're essentially digitizing a snapshot of real space in real time, it cannot be euclidean. euclidean space is make-believe. hyperbolic space is real. then, in order to do the math that is being done, you need to generalize the underlying algebra of the "state vectors" to "hyperbolic state vectors". you can't multiply "hyperbolic space vectors", which must be used to coherently represent a matrix of observables in space, with "euclidean state vectors" - the idea is just not defined, mathematically. you have to do matrix arithmetic on objects in the same space. so, if you're going to encode/digitize the observables correctly by realizing they exist in hyperbolic space, you have to adjust the state vectors so that they are in a "hyperbolic vector space", as well.
and, the inner product in a complex vector space is not commutative, in general.
what we are doing is linear algebra in a real/complex vector space with an underlying euclidean metric (pythagoras' theorem). i guess it's technically a hilbert space, then; i guess i'm really critiquing the utilization of hilbert spaces in building a model for quantum physics, which seems to be standard. a non-euclidean hilbert space would not be a hilbert space (because you can't scale it). rather, it would be helpful to start with the realization that what we're really doing is creating two separate vector spaces and combining them together into a superspace, via the union operation:
that should be your initial definition, and how you start with this - start with two separate vector spaces, first, and then join the union of them, second. as we're multiplying elements of these two spaces, we have to do so in a combined space, so the state vectors and space vectors have to be elements of the same superspace, but this is just a mathematical formality; conceptually, you want to keep the two spaces separate, and if you do so this will help eliminate the kind of confusion that susskind is introducing in just throwing them all together in this ill-defined vector space.
second, if the state vectors are orthogonal then they themselves certainly meet at right angles. so, if <a,b> = 0 then a and b certainly meet at right angles in the state vector space. the correct concept of orthogonality is not lost here at all.
so, the observables should be real because observations are real numbers. hermitian matrices are still coherent in a generalized system. however, the matrix stuof observables cannot exist in a euclidean real/complex vector space, but rather must exist within a "hyperbolic real/complex vector space" because euclidean space is not reality and cannot actually be observed. if the idea of a matrix of observables is that the geometry has to be real (notwithstanding diversions into the complex plane) because you're essentially digitizing a snapshot of real space in real time, it cannot be euclidean. euclidean space is make-believe. hyperbolic space is real. then, in order to do the math that is being done, you need to generalize the underlying algebra of the "state vectors" to "hyperbolic state vectors". you can't multiply "hyperbolic space vectors", which must be used to coherently represent a matrix of observables in space, with "euclidean state vectors" - the idea is just not defined, mathematically. you have to do matrix arithmetic on objects in the same space. so, if you're going to encode/digitize the observables correctly by realizing they exist in hyperbolic space, you have to adjust the state vectors so that they are in a "hyperbolic vector space", as well.
and, the inner product in a complex vector space is not commutative, in general.
what we are doing is linear algebra in a real/complex vector space with an underlying euclidean metric (pythagoras' theorem). i guess it's technically a hilbert space, then; i guess i'm really critiquing the utilization of hilbert spaces in building a model for quantum physics, which seems to be standard. a non-euclidean hilbert space would not be a hilbert space (because you can't scale it). rather, it would be helpful to start with the realization that what we're really doing is creating two separate vector spaces and combining them together into a superspace, via the union operation:
that should be your initial definition, and how you start with this - start with two separate vector spaces, first, and then join the union of them, second. as we're multiplying elements of these two spaces, we have to do so in a combined space, so the state vectors and space vectors have to be elements of the same superspace, but this is just a mathematical formality; conceptually, you want to keep the two spaces separate, and if you do so this will help eliminate the kind of confusion that susskind is introducing in just throwing them all together in this ill-defined vector space.
second, if the state vectors are orthogonal then they themselves certainly meet at right angles. so, if <a,b> = 0 then a and b certainly meet at right angles in the state vector space. the correct concept of orthogonality is not lost here at all.
codifying abortion at the federal level in the united states would not overturn local laws to restrict it. the laws passed at the local level would have jurisdictional precedence.
that is the reason that roe v wade was necessary in the united states - only a judicially recognized right would overpower local state legislatures, in their ability to pass local laws, and force people to abide by them.
rather, if the federal government wants to make an issue out of this then it is going to need to actually physically go to these states and set up federally funded clinics and then make a constitutional crisis out of it. and, it's up to the federal government to decide if that battle is worth fighting or not.
12:03
i've got a narrative update coming, let me just take a shower with the intent to settle in for a few days, first.
the computer came in today, which is what i was waiting for. i haven't turned it on yet, but it is visually a brand new computer - no rust, no failing hinges, etc. it said grade a quality, and it looks exactly like that. great.
first, i'm going to wait for it to warm up. then, i'm going to reset the bios. then, i'm going to test it offline. does the ram work? is it the amount advertised? is it the right processor? etc.
next step would be to flash the bios, if possible.
i bought an ssd for it, so i'm going to unplug the internal drive and try to install to the ssd immediately. then, i'll low-level format the hdd and move my own files on to it.
it was not supposed to include a mouse or keyboard, but came with a wireless set. that might be useful in the long run, but, for now, i want to keep with the ps/2s. i bought a ps/2 keyboard yesterday and have some ps/2 mice coming in the mail.
this week was not productive, like i hoped, as i had to go out repeatedly, and that's always a time consuming thing for me. but, hopefully the weekend will be.
14:00
this is essentially the same backwards view on abortion that the mullahs have in afghanistan or iran.
the only countries in the world that have laws like this are despotic islamic theocracies.
17:54
there's a spectrum reversal going on in the english-speaking world, where left and right are exchanging talking points and policies. boris johnson is really the worst kind of liberal; it's hard to identify his pandemic rhetoric with anything describable as toryism, to the point that he actually had a left anarchist (myself.) on his side for a while. libertarianism has a tradition on the right in the united states, but even thatcherism was not socially libertarian in the way that boris johnson is. as a social libertarian and economic socialist, i find myself in the strange position of preferring the contemporary "right" on social issues (because they're more liberal than the fake left), while being absolutely aghast at their frightening economic policies. for years, it was the other way around.
even on abortion, one wonders how the spectrum falls in five years, as the democrats struggle with a base of southern blacks and the republicans increasingly become the choice of disaffected liberals.
so, if the tories are winning areas that traditionally vote liberal and losing seats in traditionally conservative regions, it is reflective of the exchange of ideas in the parties being finally felt on the ground. one would really expect social conservatives to prefer keir starmer, and social libertarians to prefer boris johnson; the pandemic has just finally made that truth actually clear.
the uk is a conservative country. if labour is the new choice of conservative voters, the country could be facing a lengthy future of right-wing labour governments.
18:35
so, i'm out of the shower and am sitting down with a coffee. here is the promised narrative update.
that was a scattered week, slowed down by the need to go out repeatedly and the need to plan around cleaning. i've become very sensitive to any outdoor smell at all in this city; windsor is downwind from stinky detroit, remember. while windsor isn't the worst place for air pollution in canada anymore, it's not ottawa, and even going for a walk around the corner requires a shower before i'm able to get into bed and, now, sit on the couch to eat. so, if i come in and need to do a lot of cleaning, that can screw me up for a few days at a time. i came in after a brief trip out yesterday afternoon and am only getting out of the shower, now. that happened twice this week, which badly distorted my work flow, as it forced me to repeat the cleaning process required to re-enter the space.
everything did come together, in the end. sort of. i certainly got less done than i wanted to get done. so, i'll need to pick up the pace over the weekend to compensate.
the last narrative update was early wednesday morning. i was waiting for the recycle bin to dry before i put it away so i could finish cleaning in the kitchen and ended up sitting down for a minute to let my stomach settle (necessary, as i had just taken some iron) while i was waiting, and then unfortunately unintentionally passed out for several hours, instead. when i got up, i just focused on finishing cleaning, before i stopped to eat breakast, eventually took a shower and then realized i'd spent the whole day cleaning and it was time to stop to eat again. so, i decided to just eat the salad first (so i could take my hormones) and then stop for coffee, but instead passed out halfway through. i was then up early thursday morning, finished the salad, watched the rest of the 4th quantum physics lecture and fell asleep again. i kept sitting down because i was bloated and then kept accidentally passing out.
i should say something about the bloat. i'm sure it's the iron, but i have also increased my dairy content, recently. whatever is going on, i have frequently been very bloated recently, but i don't seem to be gaining actual weight. instead, what happens is that the bloat results in gas that needs to be pushed through, which produces some minor discomfort. i mean, maybe it's the combination of the fibre and the iron, or maybe it's something else, but the result is the repeated need to sit down for a few minutes to let it pass, and the repeated unintentional consequence of actually falling asleep, instead. so, i wanted to be up all night on wednesday and have some things done by thursday morning, but frequent attempts to get the day going were derailed by the bloat and i just wasn't able to get the day started or even to stay awake for more than a few hours at a time. i didn't actually wake up until close to noon on thursday.
i then called my doctor and got my cyproterone acetate (the testosterone blocker that i've been on for 20 years) rx dosage increased back to what it was before i had my testicles removed. great. after that, i went to go pick up that ps/2 keyboard at the grocery store down the street and again needed to clean when i got back - including putting the new tarp and carpet under the kit - before taking a shower and sitting back down for a few weeks. after making eggs, i intended to sit down with a coffee last night, do some ranting online, finish the write-up for lecture three, finish cleaning, take a shower and then get to the next thing; instead, i had to sleep after finishing the write-up, and didn't even finish cleaning.
so, i got up early in the afternoon, finished my coffee, took my iron, got to doing the cleaning i needed to get done, retrieved my new pc from the front porch (more on that, soon), ate breakfast, took a shower, made some more coffee and am now sitting here ready to type, once again.
so, it's the week that had two false starts, but now everything is cleaned and organized and i'm ready to get to loose-ending. however, now i have a new pc to set up, first.
i'm actually going to set up the phone in the other room as the first priority. i'm having second thoughts about connecting the new pc to the internet, so it might be a few days or weeks before that's actually set up, but i at least want to boot into it and reestablish the division of typing into the other room. however this works out, what it means is that all of the blogging and reading and analysis and commenting gets moved back into my bedroom, where it's usually been. i'm currently typing on the new (expired) dell chromebook in the studio, which i don't want to do anymore; it will be reduced strictly to a music upload device for bandcamp and youtube, primarily, although it's primary role will remain as a sporadic mobile device. i'm toying with getting a third chromebook for the other space, to insulate the new pc from the network. it's one thing to have my dedicated typing and video processing machine back, it's another to actually connect it to the internet. i'm not excited about connecting anything valuable to the internet any more; i just want dumb terminals, strictly. i was intending on using the broken hp as an external processor, remember; if this new desktop replaces it, it wasn't supposed to connect. old chromebooks are so cheap; it's really probably the better approach. but, i'm still toying with it.
so, i am going to need to set this pc up this weekend, but the first thing to do is set up the phone, and i hope it's not difficult.
22:39
let me get it set up first and see, but i want this machine to be stable and functional for many years and it just doesn't make sense for me to try to connect it to anything, given previous experiences.
i use a lot of google services, and the dumb terminal is really honestly quite ideal.
23:59
saturday, may 7, 2022
you don't hear pop songs like this one anymore, do you?
maybe we should have more pop songs like this one. i think they were helpful.
and people think phil collins wasn't punk rock. pfft.
15:04
btw, if you haven't seen this.
it is true that attacking stupid, piddly prog rock as escapist garbage had some value as a form of social activism.
just, recognize specious strawmen when you see them, too
15:09
no, that was the sanitized version.
this is the uncensored hardcore version:
15:16
what i'm getting at is that liberals have been too tolerant of religion recently - too politically correct - and where has it gotten us?
we have a generation of brainwashed children coming up. we gave up - we lost.
we need to go back to being more aggressive, again. reversing roe v wade is just the first consequence of a society lost in politeness and political correctness that will not criticize ideas that endanger it, under fear of offending people.
15:19
it really is the power of lard.
(lard was the singer for the foundational hardcore band the dead kennedys with the seminal 80s industrial-punk band ministry backing him)
15:27
so, i'm setting up this phone, and i'm going to get it to work, but i didn't realize the absurdity of what's required. it's an ip phone, so it has to connect to the voip server directly, meaning it's going to replace the softphone, and meaning that i won't have to use the 90s laptop for anything at all, once it's set up. i thought it was going to essentially act as an external microphone, but that's not right.
so, i started to ask the question: why don't i just get a usb phone? the answer is that i thought the phone was a cheap solution (and it seemed like it was, until i realized that the power cord cost more than the phone). so, should i get a usb phone, too?
and, this idea - a usb phone - doesn't actually seem to exist.
you'd think this is pretty simple, and should be very cheap. i have all of the phone functionality working in the software, so the usb phone should really just be a cheap soundcard - all it needs is to have a microphone on the bottom and a speaker at the top. maybe it connects to a keypad, and maybe it doesn't. that should be $10 and available everywhere, right?
it doesn't seem to exist. at all.
it makes you wonder. is it because the ciscos of the world have prevented it? is it because the ubiquity of cell phones eliminates the market, which ends up otherwise reduce to headsets for work applications? did i miss a time frame?
so, i'm going to get this to work, but it's going to lack a few features i actually liked about the software dialers (like automatic recording) and i'm wondering how long it's really stable for.
19:52
ok.
i can get videophones that do what i'm imagining, but they're $1000 and offer little functionality beyond a webcam.
there might be one or two models in the $200+ range, which is not interesting to me at this time. so, that voip phone will need to hold...
you'd really think that a usb handheld device to avoid speakerphone when using google voice, if nothing else, ought to be a hot seller. i guess not.
20:01
i'm not a phone person, i'm an email person. i haven't had a phone you could reach me at since about 2010, and, even then, i almost always had it turned off. it was a flip-style cell phone, and i actually generally left it at home when i went out. people knew to send me an email, because my phone was always off.
i just need an answer to the problem. i was waiting for the price to come down and it did; this doesn't work the way i thought it did, but so long as i can get it to dial out, it will be fine. i found a few comparable usb models, but not at acceptable prices. it looks like i'd be buying something manufactured c. 2005, which is when the technology seems to have stopped.
i'd throw this out there to google - if they want to provide google voice services, they should manufacture a cheap plug & play handset. speakerphones and microphones aren't an acceptable replacement for an actual phone.
that said, i may find new functionality in these devices. i take it that they're pretty powerful.
20:44
there's one model that might be acceptable.
let me get the one i have working, first, and let me see if i like it.
20:51
remember this?
filibusters are a tool to slow legislation down.
sometimes, you might agree with that. sometimes you might not. but, as a tool, it's worth maintaining.
americans need to vote in larger numbers.
21:33
sunday, may 8, 2022
so, i've spent the night fighting with this damned phone and i'm concluding that what i'm trying to do is not possible using windows xp.
these cisco phones are apparently notorious for being impossible to service without a proprietary backend. it really is ridiculous - they are completely milking their clients, by forcing them into arcane service arrangements. so, to flash the firmware, the phone needs to boot into a tftp server, which will find the configuration files and auto-update, and you have to finish the process once you've started it (which i have) or it bricks. that's supposed to be done deep on some backend through some cobweb of network switches, not on an ancient windows xp laptop from the 90s. all i can get the 90s laptop to do when i plug the phone into it is tell me the cable is unplugged; it's clearly looking for an ip address to connect to rather than presenting an ip address to the phone, as intended. i don't know how to tell it not to do that; worse, it seems like connecting to this tftp server is required.
the device itself seems to be ok. i can get an ip address from the router. i can ping the device; it responds. it responds to the reset combinations, but flashes red, indicating it can't find the files (i think). i think that xp just doesn't allow for this kind of connection by default, and if there's a way to get it to do it, i don't know what it is.
i suspect i won't have those problems on the typing machine. so, i'm going to have to shift focus; i'm going to need to set the new machine up first, and then get the phone flashed from there.
the virtual dhcp server is running, and i was able to get a static ip into staying put with the cable unplugged by modifying the registry, but xp just doesn't want to get it; i keep plugging the wan connection into the laptop, and all xp does is look for an ip address from the phone, when it's supposed to be letting the phone get the ip address from the virtual dhcp server. then, it tells me the network cable is unplugged.
i think 7 or 10 should know how to deal with this, but it seems like xp just doesn't get it.
5:19
i had to sleep, unfortunately.
it seems like the server is running. it seems like the phone is responsive. but, i can't get xp to understand that it's supposed to act as a server on the subnet instead of as a client.
let me put it down and set up the new machine, instead.
14:28
the computer came installed with a password on it, which required resetting the cmos, and it doesn't have a ps/2 port (i thought it did), so i'm down a usb mouse until my ps/2 mice come in and i can replace the one on the kvm. i have two good usb mice that were in the studio and a slightly shorted out one that is connected to the old chromebook. so, i've had to move one of the working mice to the new pc, for now. in the end, i should have the two workable usb mice plugged into the two chromebooks, and the pcs all using ps/2s.
i'm also missing a connector for the new hard drive, so i can't plug it in, yet. i'll have to order a part, if i can find it, or just tape it to the bottom. it's an ssd, so i can really just duct tape it in there, right?
that aside, it seems like the device is really what they sold me - an i5 3.4 ghz quad core with 8 gb of ram and 500 gb of hdd space for under $200. it might hit $300, when i get all of the extra parts. the log in the bios suggests the device hasn't been turned on since 2017, when it suffered from a broken fan. oh dear.
the device was also set up to boot from the network, which i find concerning, so i'm going to flash the bios first and go from there.
19:42
so, i've got the pc up and the install was so fast that i barely realized it happened at all.
windows experience index is stupid. but, this things scores 7.6/7.9 on processor speed, indicating it's about as fast as you can get, on a windows machine. this cost less than $200, before upgrades.
so, i'm really torn about this. i do not want this machine on the internet. but, i need a blogging solution, too. i'm toying with bringing the dell over, and i'm toying with getting another one, although i wonder if i can do just a little better for a little more, if i want the thing to last that much longer. it's not the specs. it's the expiry date. why must chromebooks expire? can i find a linux distro that acts like a chromebook and doesn't expire?
but, the i5 is replaced. it's going to take some time to set up.
i'll have a more detailed post about it soon; i thought i'd have time when it was installing, but it was done before i even sat down.
22:22
monday, may 9, 2022
so, let me sit for a minute and collect my thoughts. the operating system in the new pc is not updated yet, and it could be quite a while before it goes online, if it ever does at all. but, i've got the bios flashed and i've got windows 7 installed, for now. yes, 7 - it's temporary.
all i wanted to do was flash the bios, but nothing's easy these days.
the machine came pre-installed with windows 10, which is something i didn't fully understand the meaning of. did that mean it had an oem-style recovery partition? what it meant is that it has a product key on the side of it and a big 500 gb drive without a recovery partition, and i'm supposed to boot into the install program and finish the customization - which seemed to be server side. hrmmn. i don't know exactly what the people that set it up did, but i noticed by booting into the windows 7 disc (later) that the operating system had files dated to 2019 and 2022 on it, as well as a couple of different user accounts, so i didn't bother even trying to boot into this thing, once i realized it was trying to immediately connect. no thank you.
for now, what i wanted to do was flash the bios, then reinstall windows 10, after i figured out what that meant. when i tried to get into the bios to flash, the first sign of a deepening problem was that it had a password on it. that's not a good sign - i just bought this, i don't want to be entering in passwords, even if i can find out what they are. and, i thought i cleared the cmos...
it turns out these lenovos have a different process for clearing the cmos; you have to actually turn them on with the jumper flipped. so, now i know that. that got rid of the password. to be clear: i don't know where that password came from. it was installed in 2019, and it could have been an it manager; these are clearly office pcs, even if this one seems to have recently been upgraded. but, it could have been a shady entity, as well. there's no purpose in taking chances.
once in the bios, i went looking for a flash utility, and there was none. you want to flash a used machine like this, even if you just end up replacing the existing bios, because you don't really know what the last person did to it. if it came right from the office, it's probably fine; if it took a detour, who knows what was done to it. i'm used to easy flash options from the bios, but that doesn't exist in this bios, so i had to go over to the dell to check the website...
the lenovo site presents three options: boot from usb key into fake dos, boot from a cd image into fake dos or do it from windows. these are decreasingly attractive ways to flash a bios. guess which one actually worked?
i don't know why it didn't boot from usb; i used my fat-32 utility key, i even wiped it down, but it just wouldn't boot. no os on the disk. that might be an issue moving forwards, or it might just be that there was something wrong with the files provided by lenovo (i keep wanting to say ibm, and i keep thinking i'm buying ibms, but ibm sold off lenovo quite some time ago, now. this is the second thinkpad/thinkcentre i've bought, now. i'll probably never not think they're ibms...). but, it seemed clear it wasn't going to work, and i decided i'd be better off with a dedicated flash dvd, anyways.
when i bricked my asus, i could never get the boot block to kick in, so i had low expectations around flashing from dvd. however, after giving the old dvd-rw that came with this thing a few tries to start spinning (perhaps for the first time in five years), it did eventually boot into fake dos, where it said something like: your bios is too old to flash from dos. flash from windows, instead. the absurdity of the suggestion that i can't update from dos because it's too old and must therefore update from windows instead aside, and the dangers of flashing from windows notwithstanding, this presented me with somewhat of a problem: i was flashing the bios first because i didn't trust the pre-installed os. the correct sequence of events is flash first, then format, then re-install.
i was hoping to launch it from the command line after booting from the windows 7 dvd (shift + f10), but there was no such luck - no subsystem installed. but, i can now access the hard drive from the windows 7 install environment. what can i figure out about this?
that's when i started sorting through the drive and realized that there was an operating system with drivers and accounts pre-installed on the machine. i don't know exactly what i was going to boot into, but i suspect it was a new user account setup. so, you're going to sell me a new computer, put a password on the bios and expect me to set up a user account on it? fuck. see, i could tolerate that from an entry level model, but this is a very fast computer that will easily upgrade into a startlingly fast one, and i'm not dealing with that, even if the intentions were more patriarchal than evil. this partition clearly had to go.
i just wanted to make sure i could download install media, first, so i went over to the dell to check and easily found download links for both windows 10 and 11. great. i'll try 11 first, and i do believe the key should work fine.
but, it's 5.5 gb. da fuck? i'll have to nlite that, clearly - and i'll have to do it from the 64-bit windows 7 i'm about to install.
so, that means that wiping the partition is safe; i have install media and i have a key. great. so, i wiped out the three partitions (the boot partition, the os partition and this weird msr thing), started the install, went to urinate, sat down to type and...
the machine is beeping. uch-o. why is it...
oh, it's done.
wow.
10 minutes, tops. probably closer to 5.,
so, i got my windows flash files over, copied them to the desktop, unpacked them to the drive, launched the command prompt and...
the drivers are unsigned. like, get real.
lenovo, we need to talk about this.
so, i downloaded your cd flash utility because i fucking well know you should be flashing from dos, and the fucking punk program tells me to flash my bios from windows. that is, broadly, absolutely terrible advice - you never want to flash your bios from windows. but, what else can i do? so, i formatted the drive and reinstalled to it and foolishly tried to flash from windows on your poor advice, and you don't even fucking sign your drivers, forcing me to flash my bios not just from windows but in an unsigned windows environment?
that is a death wish - that is playing with fire, that is a massive risk. what are you thinking? c'mon.
but, i did it, and i'll tell you why - because i decided i might be better reprogramming it with the bus pirate, anyways. i almost hoped i did brick it.
but, i did not brick it - the utility ran smoothly, it rebooted twice and it booted back into windows, without a problem. please note, however, that it is never recommended to flash from inside windows, unless you know how to reprogram a board.
the bios revision date is dec, 2021, indicating that these devices are actually still being serviced - because they're office devices. they get fancy warranties, immense love by it departments and support well into retirement. and, opening this device - which appears to have been kept spotlessly clean - makes that point obvious.
so, the bios is flashed, the hardware - 8 gb of ram and 4 physical 3.4 ghz processors - has been tested. the hard drive has been formatted. windows 7 has been installed, for now. what is next?
as mentioned, i'm currently downloading two large isos - one for windows 10 and one for windows 11. i'm going to start with windows 11, but i am going to want to remove a large number of features from it first, and the size if the iso just gives me an excuse to do it, immediately. i do not need any remote or advanced networking on this device, and i only need one version of windows on the iso. i should be able to cut down and rebuild the iso in the 64-bit os.
but, i want to install it to an ssd, not to the hdd. the hdd is for files. i thought there was an enclosure inside the device, but that seems to only exist within certain machines. so, i thought i was going to have to buy a hard drive assembly, but then i got to thinking about it...
the board has four unused pci slots in it. i could put a sound card in one of them, possibly; i have an extra audiophile that i was supposed to use for that purpose, although i'm not sure if it has windows 10 drivers. i'll probably mostly use headphones, but there's no good reason i can't set the system back up, either. that leaves three slots sitting there. i'm not going to install an extra video card, the onboard graphics are fine. could i just get an adapter and plug the hard drive into one of the pciex slots?
i spent quite a while researching this, and the adapter does exist, but it's not cheap. however, there's also an entirely new line of hard drives that i hadn't really looked into previously that essentially connect as pci cards, and i really thought they'd just connect via a pciex connector; it turns out that they use special slots, and this board doesn't have one. but, if i have to buy a connector anyways, would it make more sense to just get a pci-ex adapter for one of these pcie hard drives instead? and, the answer is that i could do this for less than $50, but i'm not actually convinced that i want to. what i really wanted was to plug my sata II ssd into the pciex_16 slot. why is the connector $100? can't i find one for $10?
once again, that option does not seem to exist, despite the fact that it should. everything i seem to want at the moment seems strangely and unjustifiably expensive. so, i'm hardly going to buy into it.
but, do i actually need an enclosure? can't i just duct tape it to the bottom of the case? it's an ssd - it just has to not actually touch anything else, right? where can i actually just place it, carefully?
so, i started looking at the board and realized something very strange: it has four sata ports and two power plugs. worse, the psu is not expandable (or at least not obviously so). so.....what? it seems like there ought to be five power plugs, but three of them aren't installed, making me wonder if...
this is, in fact, clearly a design error. this device is obviously only intended to have two sata ports - one for the dvd and one for the hdd. there's not any actual place to put a second hard drive, and most office machines wouldn't actually require one. nor is there any obvious use for an esata at all. i might guess the extra sata ports are tentatively there in case one of them breaks, but are really some combination of lazy design with the fact that it's just cheaper to overlap design elements on disparate boards. sure - they might have added the extra power connectors. but, the truth is that the extra sata connections really aren't supposed to be there in the first place.
so, now what?
i was thinking about maybe taking the dvd out and just using an external dvd. yes - i want physical, optical media. i'm an old nerd, it's a comfort thing, and you can be sure i'll use the dvd drive to install when i need to, whether i can get the device to boot from usb (something i've yet to prove is possible) or not. but, it has the option to boot from external dvd in the bios, and that's maybe more logical, in the long run, as a stable solution. that drive might not actually last me very long, as it is (i have others...). in fact, i have a usb dvd drive from the broken hp. that would solve everything, right?
but, then i asked the obvious question: what have other people done when faced with this problem? and, i found this:
...so, that's the way to do it - you get a splitter, and you just screw it to the inside. some extra electrical tape is probably helpful. that's actually super easy, and very cheap - i just bought a splitter for $6.00 that should be here within a few days.
so, now i know how to get the hard drive in. the windows 10 and 11 discs are finished downloading. so, what's next?
i bought a usb sd card reader, but i didn't realize there's a specific option for it, and i'm going to want to look into it. the sd card is important because the machine needs to do video editing. i also just bought a $15 ps/2 card, which goes directly into the back of the board - and will be for use with the ps/2 mouse in the mail and the ps/2 keyboard i bought at the grocery store the other day. and, as mentioned, i'm wondering about the sound card.
but, i think that's otherwise it. this machine is ridiculously fast, and will be incredibly useful to me moving forwards.
i will need to wait until the splitter gets here to install. so, the two things up next, immediately, will be to get those images reduced in size and to see if i can get the phone to boot into a tftp server over windows 7 or not.
and, what am i doing about the internet on that device?
for now, i'm waiting. i'll see what i can google.
i need to eat.
4:00
the m-audio audiophile's last driver set was in 2012 and was for windows 7. the drivers may or may not work in windows 11, but the other production machine will be designed around 7, so i should leave it in there. i don't currently have a strong drive to spend money on dacs for this machine, given that it's for typing and i'll spend most of my time listening through headphones. i'm going to want to figure out what the internet solution is, first; i'll probably be mostly streaming audio over the internet in that context, anyways.
i've been thinking about getting a stylus pen for a long time....not the kind you see frequently, but explicitly for use in scrawling out mathematical formulas. i went through this a few weeks ago. there are cheapish usb peripherals. i might want to seriously look at that, if i'm building a serious long-term typewriter.
it has 2x4 gb of ram, and can come up to 4x8. how much is 2x8 gb of ddr3 ram nowadays? that would give me 24 gb of ram, which is ridiculous. i don't think it would cost much.
i need some better video processing software, and may finally be ready to pay for it. maybe. i need to look into it.
and, i think that's probably it.
so, it's currently:
pc + ssd + card reader: $234
ps/2 mouse $8
ps/2 keyboard: $15
ps/2 connector: $15
splitter: $6
16 gb extra ram: ~$50
usb pen input: ~$50
external chromebook for internet access: $100
=================
<~$500
6:05
this ruling doesn't threaten to merely be an annoyance, or an inconvenience that can be easily be gotten around. this is a fundamental reversal of the basic human right to bodily autonomy - a severe, foundational threat to the concept of individual liberty, moving forwards in the united states.
the response from the white house is horribly tone deaf; it needs to dramatically alter it's messaging, and fast. this is not the kind of thing that a society "peacefully protests" about. this is the reversal of a basic human right, and a state that wants to return to slavery by asserting it's ownership over human bodies. this justifies a revolutionary response.
when governments take authoritarian positions like this, it breaks the social contract and justifies violent revolt. certainly, no law that attempts to tell people what to do with their own bodies can ever be in any way legitimate, and no state that ever attempts to enforce such laws can ever be seen as legitimate.
the united states has fought civil wars over issues of this sort, in the past. the white house should be understanding the depth of the threat to human liberty that this ruling poses, and citing lincoln at this hour - not telling people to go home and be quiet.
as the social contract is being broken, and foundational human rights are being taken away, the americasn people have the obligation to a revolutionary response over this, although what that means is unclear - it may mean succession, it may mean insurrection and it may mean mass civil disobedience until the laws are done away with. but, these laws are not legitimate and they should not be followed, whatever the cost of it. the one thing that should not and cannot happen is for america to wake up the day after the ruling and shrug it off - that is not going to happen.
the left has always understood the need for revolution, in times when the bourgeoisie seeks to assert it's power and control in unjustified and tyrannical manners. this is one of those times. the white house needs to sign up or shut up and get out of the way.
13:16
overturning roe v wade is the single greatest threat to american liberty since the civil war.
americans must - and will - arise to the occasion, in tearing down governments that take away their rights. the white house needs to understand the seriousness of the situation, and adjust accordingly.
can the white house overturn the hyde amendment via executive order, for example?
13:30
what can the international community do if the united states relegalizes female apartheid, in undermining abortion rights? let us not even give the court the deference of being able to decide this matter at all; they cannot take away abortion rights, they can only write laws that take away the natural right to self-ownership and individual autonomy, and any such laws will and must be temporary in nature and scope. such silliness can only exist for as long as it takes to abolish it.
should this occur, the united states will be in abrogation of basic concepts of human rights, and should be punished for it with south africa like boycotts and punishing economic sanctions.
i would call on the world to unite against the united states on this front, and make it suffer for it's religious extremism. laws of this sort cannot and should not be tolerated by civilized countries.
14:36
in western culture, governments do not have any sort of inherent right of governance. that seems to be a point of confusion. we did away with rights to govern by flushing them down the toilet into the waste heap of history, in the great revolutions of the enlightenment, which followed a period of ignorance and darkness where governance was enshrined as a right. the role of religion in all of this is not trivial.
so, when a government institution breaks the social contract - which is the unwritten agreement that the state will carry out necessary, unavoidable administrative tasks via the consent of the governed in a way that is not tyrannical and respects the rights of citizens, in exchange for the acceptance of the authority of the state in doing so - it loses any claim to authority in governance and any laws it passes are no longer legitimate, nor should be followed, because the state has broken it's side of the agreement, meaning the people are no longer bound by their side, either. the result is a period of revolution, until the perpetrators can be removed from power and the rule of law can be re-established.
this is not obscure, if it has been forgotten; this is locke, this is paine, this is rosseau, this is the foundation upon which the united states was created, and the culture underlying the institutions that make up the government. if you deny this, if you try to take it away, then the united states no longer exists - it is instantly reduced to any other backwards third world dictatorship.
the court is supposed to know it's own bounds, and it's supposed to know when not to cross them. there are a few true believers on the court that cannot be swayed with reason. but, i would call on the somewhat less extremely right wing justices to remember their lockean theory, before they trigger a justified civil war, and end up vilified by history.
15:03
ugh.
i'd rather bomb iran than russia, granted. the russians pose us no harm; the iranian government is a legitimately tyrannical, despotic state that needs to be torn down. i've stated here many times that i wouldn't necessarily oppose a strike on iran, for the reason that the naive theory often applied in iraq (that the people will rise up and liberate themselves) might actually work in iran.
but, i'm not exactly keen to do it, either. the iranians clearly have an incentive for a deterrent. despite the fact that i'd like to see the government in iran burned down, and for the people to rise up in self-determination, it might actually be helpful to take the iran issue off of the table.
how about this: why don't we let the iranians build a bomb, and bomb the saudis, instead? just because they're assholes, and deserve it.
16:06
iran is currently in a military alliance with russia. ukraine may slow them down, but the russian military is highly capable. in a sense, this is what i warned the russians about: they take the decoy in ukraine, and the americans can walk into central asia. but, that's naive, and the state department would be committing a major blunder on that.
a more likely outcome of a war with iran is that the russians step in, and you have a major world war on your hands.
16:11
but, is there something to the idea that the americans suckered the russians into ukraine so they (the united states.) could operate more freely in central asia?
yes - i pointed that out in my discussion of the withdrawal from afghanistan, and in my analysis of biden's public baiting of ukraine, as canon fodder.
16:14
is the iranian revolutionary guard a terrorist group?
yes - clearly, it is. and, the united states should clearly be restricting it's access to funds and weapons, as best it can. hamas and hezbollah are also clearly terrorist groups.
16:28
i would broadly prefer the liberals to the conservatives at the provincial level - something i'm no longer sure about at the federal level - but i'm very, very vote-shy right now due to the left's embrace of fascism and open attack on liberal values during the pandemic. it's easy to blame the lack of freedom i've experienced over the last two and a half years on the conservatives, but i strongly doubt it would have been much better under the liberals, who have broadcasted that it might have even been worse.
after listening to them talk during the pandemic, i will probably never vote for the ndp ever again. this is probably permanent, for them.
you can take a lot of these things seriously, because they broadly did an excellent job during their last stint in government. and, there's a lot of great things here that are popular and that they probably will pick up at the provincial level, even if the words coming from justin trudeau and chrystia freeland are entirely void of any meaning, whatsoever.
the problem in ontario is that the demographics have changed, and it's created a crisis for the liberals, who need to find ways to win ridings with dominantly recent immigrant social conservative voters, and that in the last election took a hard shift to the right on issues like sex ed. i voted green in 2018 because i felt that the liberals needed a time out, after digesting their election messaging, which was in a lot of cases openly racist. but, the bottom line is that there's a developing problem: the liberals have to find a way to win immigrant voters in toronto that just aren't very liberal and that would rather vote for a strong man like doug ford. this is a cultural change in the heart of what has historically been one of the most liberal jurisdictions in the world and that isn't going to switch back any time soon.
is this enough?
i don't know - i don't have data. this is novel.
they seem to like trudeau better, and it's no doubt because he's broadly presented himself as much more of your typical right-wing, pro-market, pseudo-fascist, bourgeois capitalist on a wide variety of fiscal and class issues. trudeau's messaging has consistently been openly randian: it's about wealth generation for the middle class, and has little interest in things like wealth redistribution. conversely, the liberals in ontario at the provincial level have recently been dominant because they've held to the far left of the centre, even arguably being the province's real worker's party. you can see that in the platform, but it's a big part of what swung immigrant voters to ford in the last election. people don't come here from the other side of the world to concern themselves with subsidized housing for the local population, even if they find themselves in need of it. they want to get rich. they want rhetoric about markets and money, even if it's stupid and delusional.
i've been drawing attention to this for a long time, and i don't have an answer, other than to point out that it's not some kind of accident. the toronto that exists today was created by jason kenney by manipulating immigration policy in a very purposeful attempt to steal the city for the conservative party. rather than reverse kenney's immigration policies, the federal liberals have swung hard to the right on fiscal policy and embraced the rhetoric of free markets in order to appeal to the new voting base, and it seems to be working for them - leaving behind a previous base of disgruntled lower class liberals that have just ended up disenfranchised. it's a juggling act - it's not sustainable, and it's going to kill them in the end. the provincial liberals are not doing that, out of (justifiable) fears that they'll get destroyed by the ndp. but, the fact is that they just don't have the votes anymore in the new right-wing toronto that kenney created and it's not clear how they're going to win an election any time soon, with the ndp sitting on 20% of the vote.
i've been clear that i don't intend to vote this cycle, because i can't vote for a party that i fear might take away my rights in the next round of pandemic restrictions, and i am convinced that all of the parties in ontario will do exactly that and also that the party i broadly like the least is the one that will restrict my rights by the least. but, i usually vote liberal, provincially. and, i have to state rather clearly that these are broadly the best ideas of those presented by the three major parties.
you will hear almost nothing from me about this election.
22:06
after the open season on liberalism by people that were supposed to be defending it, it's going to take a long time to rebuild a level of trust between liberal-minded voters and self-identified liberal politicians.
i have to call for all liberal parties at all levels to completely clean house and start from scratch. fire the janitors, even.
everybody is suspect; everybody is tainted, trust is non-existent.
22:37
for months and months, we heard words coming from fake left politicians that are anathema to liberalism and, in many cases, anathema to democracy, itself.
i will not forget that for a very, very long time.
and, i will not be participating this cycle.
22:40
tuesday, may 10, 2022
so, today seems to be the first day of what promises to be a lengthy, sustained period of unusual heat in southern ontario. the highs are in the 25-30 degree range all week, here - and we're not going to get the temporary push back into spring that we did a few times back in march and april. so, are we looking at a sustained, blistering hot summer from may 10th to nov 15th, or later?
i'd say it looks like that, yes.
i want to define this up front so that i have a margin of error, because we might get some cloudy day in june where it's 19.5 degrees. so, if i define summer as sustained over 20 degree temperatures, i have to give myself a few degrees error. that means i have to define it as more like 17 degrees. but, we're past the blurry part at the start, and looking more towards the end of the year, where a 14 degree day in december is still pleasant, and may signal an extra extended summer if we get streaks of 10+ days going late into november or early into december. but, i picked mid-november as the cut off because the sun is just too weak here to keep summer gong past that point. still, let me avoid ambiguity - i'm defining summer as above 20, with a margin down to 17, if it's brief. but, that gets blurry at the end of october, where 17 starts to fall to 16, and move a tad below 15 into mid-november, and then bottoms out around 10 by saturnalia - a date far too advanced for an extended summer in canada. i think i can put down over 20 until very late october, and then not wavering far from it until mid-november. but, it won't be more than a few more years before those sustained 20+ degree days do linger into november without a break, and then fall suddenly sometime around the start of december.
what that means is that, where i am, the start date for a sustained hot summer is actually may 7th, and the blurry days go back to the 4th.
going back a few weeks, the temperatures for may have been:
10th: 27
9th: 21
8th: 18
7th: 17
========
6th: 15
5th: 15
4th: 15
---------------------
3rd: 11
2nd: 13
------------------------
1st: 21
30: 17
======
29: 13
so, that kind of dip on the 2nd & 3rd (as well as the last week of the previous month) is your variability - maybe it stays above 15 in a year without an ssw, but variability is inevitable, and it seems to be the last dip into spring that we're going to see here, this year. april was, overall, a hard to analyze month, because it both had unusually hot days (25+ degrees) and a few days that were slightly below seasonal. that is normal in april, but the extremes this year were exceptional in both directions, due to the blobs of freezing air falling downwards and the record heat in the atlantic.
the blobs of cold air are gone now.
now, the heat sets in.
15:17
well, if the yankees aren't happy with our spending commitments, maybe we should go our separate ways on defence, then.
i'd be happy to pull out of nato, tomorrow.
we have important domestic considerations to concern ourselves with, regarding spending. sorry, america.
15:35
if america wants to be an empire, let it tax it's own citizens to pay for it.
15:38
hey finland and sweden, are you paying attention?
it's a protection racket.
and, it's an alliance that has never been tested - and that i wouldn't count too heavily on actually protecting you. frankly, i can't say i'd be too excited about protecting finland, which has historically often been a part of russia, from reintegration into russia.
15:44
...nato or no nato.
15:45
if the russians invaded lithuania tomorrow, would nato forces rush to it's aid?
no.
and, we shouldn't, either.
15:57
i don't even want to talk about this - it's a complete waste of time.
i have to oppose it. but, does the parliament not have more pressing concerns to spend it's time on?
18:43
so, it took a few tries, but i have in fact unbricked that phone and got the sip firmware i need to use it as a voip device installed. now, i need to figure out how to configure it for that purpose.
i want to do a narrative update first, as the last one was on friday night. well, that's not true, is it? there's been a few long posts, since. but, let's do it, formally. it'll help me order my ideas, later.
so, i went to the tv/phone room after i finished the last narrative update, plugged the phone in and saw it boot up, looking for an ip address. as this is a second hand device, i wanted to flash the firmware - as i do for all electronic equipment that comes in here second hand - as a first step. i googled it and found a hard reset code and a soft reset code. i figured that was good for a start, but that i now needed to find a way to actually push a new bios into it.
it worked out in the end, but this process bricked the device. it's easy to second guess that, but the fact is that you always want to flash the bios on any secondhand device you purchase, and that you don't want to use any secondhand device before you do - even if you end up bricking it more than twice in the process of doing it. i simply didn't realize i had to set up a server for the phone to boot into to replace the config files, nor did i realize that cisco ip phones will instantly brick (clearly as a security feature) if you upgrade them without setting up a file server for them to boot into, first. but, i still made the right choice in resetting the device! these are old devices now, and it was not difficult to get this done once i got windows 7 up and running, but the fact that i wasn't able to get it to boot from xp demonstrates the initial point of the security feature; the requirement of needing to boot into a live server with an obscure protocol to turn the device back on is probably at least enough to alert somebody about a hacker in the building, and cameras can then be checked. so, it's not like it didn't make sense, some time c. 2005. however, as a contemporary user with modern consumer networking equipment, this is more of an annoyance than a security feature.
nonetheless, the unbricking of this will certainly be a problem for very novice users, or users with old hardware.
i started by following the instructions in the embedded video:
the result was that i was not able to get the phone to boot from the tftp server, and that windows merely stated that the network cable was unplugged, but i started with a version of windows xp on my old 90s laptop that was running a total of five windows services and quickly became convinced that it wasn't connecting because i removed so much of the os that it just couldn't. i was, however, able to at least determine that the phone was being picked up by the router if plugged in directly to the switch, indicating that it seemed to be trying to connect, but just wasn't able to connect over the networking software present in the xp install.
i slept early on saturday morning, was up in the afternoon, made some quinoa and eggs and posted the following in the evening:
----
so, i'm setting up this phone, and i'm going to get it to work, but i didn't realize the absurdity of what's required. it's an ip phone, so it has to connect to the voip server directly, meaning it's going to replace the softphone, and meaning that i won't have to use the 90s laptop for anything at all, once it's set up. i thought it was going to essentially act as an external microphone, but that's not right.----
so, i started to ask the question: why don't i just get a usb phone? the answer is that i thought the phone was a cheap solution (and it seemed like it was, until i realized that the power cord cost more than the phone). so, should i get a usb phone, too?
and, this idea - a usb phone - doesn't actually seem to exist.
you'd think this is pretty simple, and should be very cheap. i have all of the phone functionality working in the software, so the usb phone should really just be a cheap soundcard - all it needs is to have a microphone on the bottom and a speaker at the top. maybe it connects to a keypad, and maybe it doesn't. that should be $10 and available everywhere, right?
it doesn't seem to exist. at all.
it makes you wonder. is it because the ciscos of the world have prevented it? is it because the ubiquity of cell phones eliminates the market, which ends up otherwise reduce to headsets for work applications? did i miss a time frame?
so, i'm going to get this to work, but it's going to lack a few features i actually liked about the software dialers (like automatic recording) and i'm wondering how long it's really stable for.
19:52
ok.
i can get videophones that do what i'm imagining, but they're $1000 and offer little functionality beyond a webcam.
there might be one or two models in the $200+ range, which is not interesting to me at this time. so, that voip phone will need to hold...
you'd really think that a usb handheld device to avoid speakerphone when using google voice, if nothing else, ought to be a hot seller. i guess not.
20:01
i'm not a phone person, i'm an email person. i haven't had a phone you could reach me at since about 2010, and, even then, i almost always had it turned off. it was a flip-style cell phone, and i actually generally left it at home when i went out. people knew to send me an email, because my phone was always off.
i just need an answer to the problem. i was waiting for the price to come down and it did; this doesn't work the way i thought it did, but so long as i can get it to dial out, it will be fine. i found a few comparable usb models, but not at acceptable prices. it looks like i'd be buying something manufactured c. 2005, which is when the technology seems to have stopped.
i'd throw this out there to google - if they want to provide google voice services, they should manufacture a cheap plug & play handset. speakerphones and microphones aren't an acceptable replacement for an actual phone.
that said, i may find new functionality in these devices. i take it that they're pretty powerful.
20:44
there's one model that might be acceptable.
let me get the one i have working, first, and let me see if i like it.
20:51
after trying multiple approaches to getting the phone to boot from the tftp server on the laptop, what i ended up doing was installing a full version of windows xp sp 3 on the 90s laptop late on saturday night, in the hope that the problem was that the underlying networking interface was broken by the custom install and would rebuild on the fresh install. but, i more or less got the same set of problems.
i posted the following on sunday morning, before falling asleep:
---
so, i've spent the night fighting with this damned phone and i'm concluding that what i'm trying to do is not possible using windows xp.
so, i was able to get the phone to pick up the dhcp server on the laptop by putting a switch in between the devices, and even screwed up the chromebook's internet connection, but i can't get the phone to find the tftp server running on the laptop at the same time.
these cisco phones are apparently notorious for being impossible to service without a proprietary backend. it really is ridiculous - they are completely milking their clients, by forcing them into arcane service arrangements. so, to flash the firmware, the phone needs to boot into a tftp server, which will find the configuration files and auto-update, and you have to finish the process once you've started it (which i have) or it bricks. that's supposed to be done deep on some backend through some cobweb of network switches, not on an ancient windows xp laptop from the 90s. all i can get the 90s laptop to do when i plug the phone into it is tell me the cable is unplugged; it's clearly looking for an ip address to connect to rather than presenting an ip address to the phone, as intended. i don't know how to tell it not to do that; worse, it seems like connecting to this tftp server is required.
the device itself seems to be ok. i can get an ip address from the router. i can ping the device; it responds. it responds to the reset combinations, but flashes red, indicating it can't find the files (i think). i think that xp just doesn't allow for this kind of connection by default, and if there's a way to get it to do it, i don't know what it is.
i suspect i won't have those problems on the typing machine. so, i'm going to have to shift focus; i'm going to need to set the new machine up first, and then get the phone flashed from there.
the virtual dhcp server is running, and i was able to get a static ip into staying put with the cable unplugged by modifying the registry, but xp just doesn't want to get it; i keep plugging the wan connection into the laptop, and all xp does is look for an ip address from the phone, when it's supposed to be letting the phone get the ip address from the virtual dhcp server. then, it tells me the network cable is unplugged.
i think 7 or 10 should know how to deal with this, but it seems like xp just doesn't get it.
5:19
...and then the following after i woke up:
i had to sleep, unfortunately.
it seems like the server is running. it seems like the phone is responsive. but, i can't get xp to understand that it's supposed to act as a server on the subnet instead of as a client.
let me put it down and set up the new machine, instead.
14:28
sunday night was then spent setting up the new pc, which required unboxing it, opening it up, looking at it carefully, putting it back together, plugging it into an existing widescreen monitor and turning it on, with the intent to wipe the bios out first, just like the phone.
the first thing i found was a password, which i didn't like much
---
the computer came installed with a password on it, which required resetting the cmos, and it doesn't have a ps/2 port (i thought it did), so i'm down a usb mouse until my ps/2 mice come in and i can replace the one on the kvm. i have two good usb mice that were in the studio and a slightly shorted out one that is connected to the old chromebook. so, i've had to move one of the working mice to the new pc, for now. in the end, i should have the two workable usb mice plugged into the two chromebooks, and the pcs all using ps/2s.
i'm also missing a connector for the new hard drive, so i can't plug it in, yet. i'll have to order a part, if i can find it, or just tape it to the bottom. it's an ssd, so i can really just duct tape it in there, right?
that aside, it seems like the device is really what they sold me - an i5 3.4 ghz quad core with 8 gb of ram and 500 gb of hdd space for under $200. it might hit $300, when i get all of the extra parts. the log in the bios suggests the device hasn't been turned on since 2017, when it suffered from a broken fan. oh dear.
the device was also set up to boot from the network, which i find concerning, so i'm going to flash the bios first and go from there.
19:42
so, i've got the pc up and the install was so fast that i barely realized it happened at all.
windows experience index is stupid. but, this things scores 7.6/7.9 on processor speed, indicating it's about as fast as you can get, on a windows machine. this cost less than $200, before upgrades.
so, i'm really torn about this. i do not want this machine on the internet. but, i need a blogging solution, too. i'm toying with bringing the dell over, and i'm toying with getting another one, although i wonder if i can do just a little better for a little more, if i want the thing to last that much longer. it's not the specs. it's the expiry date. why must chromebooks expire? can i find a linux distro that acts like a chromebook and doesn't expire?
but, the i5 is replaced. it's going to take some time to set up.
i'll have a more detailed post about it soon; i thought i'd have time when it was installing, but it was done before i even sat down.
22:22
i then sat down to eat, and started typing up a very long post that i didn't finish until sunday morning:
------
so, let me sit for a minute and collect my thoughts. the operating system in the new pc is not updated yet, and it could be quite a while before it goes online, if it ever does at all. but, i've got the bios flashed and i've got windows 7 installed, for now. yes, 7 - it's temporary.
all i wanted to do was flash the bios, but nothing's easy these days.
the machine came pre-installed with windows 10, which is something i didn't fully understand the meaning of. did that mean it had an oem-style recovery partition? what it meant is that it has a product key on the side of it and a big 500 gb drive without a recovery partition, and i'm supposed to boot into the install program and finish the customization - which seemed to be server side. hrmmn. i don't know exactly what the people that set it up did, but i noticed by booting into the windows 7 disc (later) that the operating system had files dated to 2019 and 2022 on it, as well as a couple of different user accounts, so i didn't bother even trying to boot into this thing, once i realized it was trying to immediately connect. no thank you.
for now, what i wanted to do was flash the bios, then reinstall windows 10, after i figured out what that meant. when i tried to get into the bios to flash, the first sign of a deepening problem was that it had a password on it. that's not a good sign - i just bought this, i don't want to be entering in passwords, even if i can find out what they are. and, i thought i cleared the cmos...
it turns out these lenovos have a different process for clearing the cmos; you have to actually turn them on with the jumper flipped. so, now i know that. that got rid of the password. to be clear: i don't know where that password came from. it was installed in 2019, and it could have been an it manager; these are clearly office pcs, even if this one seems to have recently been upgraded. but, it could have been a shady entity, as well. there's no purpose in taking chances.
once in the bios, i went looking for a flash utility, and there was none. you want to flash a used machine like this, even if you just end up replacing the existing bios, because you don't really know what the last person did to it. if it came right from the office, it's probably fine; if it took a detour, who knows what was done to it. i'm used to easy flash options from the bios, but that doesn't exist in this bios, so i had to go over to the dell to check the website...
the lenovo site presents three options: boot from usb key into fake dos, boot from a cd image into fake dos or do it from windows. these are decreasingly attractive ways to flash a bios. guess which one actually worked?
i don't know why it didn't boot from usb; i used my fat-32 utility key, i even wiped it down, but it just wouldn't boot. no os on the disk. that might be an issue moving forwards, or it might just be that there was something wrong with the files provided by lenovo (i keep wanting to say ibm, and i keep thinking i'm buying ibms, but ibm sold off lenovo quite some time ago, now. this is the second thinkpad/thinkcentre i've bought, now. i'll probably never not think they're ibms...). but, it seemed clear it wasn't going to work, and i decided i'd be better off with a dedicated flash dvd, anyways.
when i bricked my asus, i could never get the boot block to kick in, so i had low expectations around flashing from dvd. however, after giving the old dvd-rw that came with this thing a few tries to start spinning (perhaps for the first time in five years), it did eventually boot into fake dos, where it said something like: your bios is too old to flash from dos. flash from windows, instead. the absurdity of the suggestion that i can't update from dos because it's too old and must therefore update from windows instead aside, and the dangers of flashing from windows notwithstanding, this presented me with somewhat of a problem: i was flashing the bios first because i didn't trust the pre-installed os. the correct sequence of events is flash first, then format, then re-install.
i was hoping to launch it from the command line after booting from the windows 7 dvd (shift + f10), but there was no such luck - no subsystem installed. but, i can now access the hard drive from the windows 7 install environment. what can i figure out about this?
that's when i started sorting through the drive and realized that there was an operating system with drivers and accounts pre-installed on the machine. i don't know exactly what i was going to boot into, but i suspect it was a new user account setup. so, you're going to sell me a new computer, put a password on the bios and expect me to set up a user account on it? fuck. see, i could tolerate that from an entry level model, but this is a very fast computer that will easily upgrade into a startlingly fast one, and i'm not dealing with that, even if the intentions were more patriarchal than evil. this partition clearly had to go.
i just wanted to make sure i could download install media, first, so i went over to the dell to check and easily found download links for both windows 10 and 11. great. i'll try 11 first, and i do believe the key should work fine.
but, it's 5.5 gb. da fuck? i'll have to nlite that, clearly - and i'll have to do it from the 64-bit windows 7 i'm about to install.
so, that means that wiping the partition is safe; i have install media and i have a key. great. so, i wiped out the three partitions (the boot partition, the os partition and this weird msr thing), started the install, went to urinate, sat down to type and...
the machine is beeping. uch-o. why is it...
oh, it's done.
wow.
10 minutes, tops. probably closer to 5.,
so, i got my windows flash files over, copied them to the desktop, unpacked them to the drive, launched the command prompt and...
the drivers are unsigned. like, get real.
lenovo, we need to talk about this.
so, i downloaded your cd flash utility because i fucking well know you should be flashing from dos, and the fucking punk program tells me to flash my bios from windows. that is, broadly, absolutely terrible advice - you never want to flash your bios from windows. but, what else can i do? so, i formatted the drive and reinstalled to it and foolishly tried to flash from windows on your poor advice, and you don't even fucking sign your drivers, forcing me to flash my bios not just from windows but in an unsigned windows environment?
that is a death wish - that is playing with fire, that is a massive risk. what are you thinking? c'mon.
but, i did it, and i'll tell you why - because i decided i might be better reprogramming it with the bus pirate, anyways. i almost hoped i did brick it.
but, i did not brick it - the utility ran smoothly, it rebooted twice and it booted back into windows, without a problem. please note, however, that it is never recommended to flash from inside windows, unless you know how to reprogram a board.
the bios revision date is dec, 2021, indicating that these devices are actually still being serviced - because they're office devices. they get fancy warranties, immense love by it departments and support well into retirement. and, opening this device - which appears to have been kept spotlessly clean - makes that point obvious.
so, the bios is flashed, the hardware - 8 gb of ram and 4 physical 3.4 ghz processors - has been tested. the hard drive has been formatted. windows 7 has been installed, for now. what is next?
as mentioned, i'm currently downloading two large isos - one for windows 10 and one for windows 11. i'm going to start with windows 11, but i am going to want to remove a large number of features from it first, and the size if the iso just gives me an excuse to do it, immediately. i do not need any remote or advanced networking on this device, and i only need one version of windows on the iso. i should be able to cut down and rebuild the iso in the 64-bit os.
but, i want to install it to an ssd, not to the hdd. the hdd is for files. i thought there was an enclosure inside the device, but that seems to only exist within certain machines. so, i thought i was going to have to buy a hard drive assembly, but then i got to thinking about it...
the board has four unused pci slots in it. i could put a sound card in one of them, possibly; i have an extra audiophile that i was supposed to use for that purpose, although i'm not sure if it has windows 10 drivers. i'll probably mostly use headphones, but there's no good reason i can't set the system back up, either. that leaves three slots sitting there. i'm not going to install an extra video card, the onboard graphics are fine. could i just get an adapter and plug the hard drive into one of the pciex slots?
i spent quite a while researching this, and the adapter does exist, but it's not cheap. however, there's also an entirely new line of hard drives that i hadn't really looked into previously that essentially connect as pci cards, and i really thought they'd just connect via a pciex connector; it turns out that they use special slots, and this board doesn't have one. but, if i have to buy a connector anyways, would it make more sense to just get a pci-ex adapter for one of these pcie hard drives instead? and, the answer is that i could do this for less than $50, but i'm not actually convinced that i want to. what i really wanted was to plug my sata II ssd into the pciex_16 slot. why is the connector $100? can't i find one for $10?
once again, that option does not seem to exist, despite the fact that it should. everything i seem to want at the moment seems strangely and unjustifiably expensive. so, i'm hardly going to buy into it.
but, do i actually need an enclosure? can't i just duct tape it to the bottom of the case? it's an ssd - it just has to not actually touch anything else, right? where can i actually just place it, carefully?
so, i started looking at the board and realized something very strange: it has four sata ports and two power plugs. worse, the psu is not expandable (or at least not obviously so). so.....what? it seems like there ought to be five power plugs, but three of them aren't installed, making me wonder if...
this is, in fact, clearly a design error. this device is obviously only intended to have two sata ports - one for the dvd and one for the hdd. there's not any actual place to put a second hard drive, and most office machines wouldn't actually require one. nor is there any obvious use for an esata at all. i might guess the extra sata ports are tentatively there in case one of them breaks, but are really some combination of lazy design with the fact that it's just cheaper to overlap design elements on disparate boards. sure - they might have added the extra power connectors. but, the truth is that the extra sata connections really aren't supposed to be there in the first place.
so, now what?
i was thinking about maybe taking the dvd out and just using an external dvd. yes - i want physical, optical media. i'm an old nerd, it's a comfort thing, and you can be sure i'll use the dvd drive to install when i need to, whether i can get the device to boot from usb (something i've yet to prove is possible) or not. but, it has the option to boot from external dvd in the bios, and that's maybe more logical, in the long run, as a stable solution. that drive might not actually last me very long, as it is (i have others...). in fact, i have a usb dvd drive from the broken hp. that would solve everything, right?
but, then i asked the obvious question: what have other people done when faced with this problem? and, i found this:
...so, that's the way to do it - you get a splitter, and you just screw it to the inside. some extra electrical tape is probably helpful. that's actually super easy, and very cheap - i just bought a splitter for $6.00 that should be here within a few days.
so, now i know how to get the hard drive in. the windows 10 and 11 discs are finished downloading. so, what's next?
i bought a usb sd card reader, but i didn't realize there's a specific option for it, and i'm going to want to look into it. the sd card is important because the machine needs to do video editing. i also just bought a $15 ps/2 card, which goes directly into the back of the board - and will be for use with the ps/2 mouse in the mail and the ps/2 keyboard i bought at the grocery store the other day. and, as mentioned, i'm wondering about the sound card.
but, i think that's otherwise it. this machine is ridiculously fast, and will be incredibly useful to me moving forwards.
i will need to wait until the splitter gets here to install. so, the two things up next, immediately, will be to get those images reduced in size and to see if i can get the phone to boot into a tftp server over windows 7 or not.
and, what am i doing about the internet on that device?
for now, i'm waiting. i'll see what i can google.
i need to eat.
4:00
the m-audio audiophile's last driver set was in 2012 and was for windows 7. the drivers may or may not work in windows 11, but the other production machine will be designed around 7, so i should leave it in there. i don't currently have a strong drive to spend money on dacs for this machine, given that it's for typing and i'll spend most of my time listening through headphones. i'm going to want to figure out what the internet solution is, first; i'll probably be mostly streaming audio over the internet in that context, anyways.
i've been thinking about getting a stylus pen for a long time....not the kind you see frequently, but explicitly for use in scrawling out mathematical formulas. i went through this a few weeks ago. there are cheapish usb peripherals. i might want to seriously look at that, if i'm building a serious long-term typewriter.
it has 2x4 gb of ram, and can come up to 4x8. how much is 2x8 gb of ddr3 ram nowadays? that would give me 24 gb of ram, which is ridiculous. i don't think it would cost much.
i need some better video processing software, and may finally be ready to pay for it. maybe. i need to look into it.
and, i think that's probably it.
so, it's currently:
pc + ssd + card reader: $234
ps/2 mouse $8
ps/2 keyboard: $15
ps/2 connector: $15
splitter: $6
16 gb extra ram: ~$50
usb pen input: ~$50
external chromebook for internet access: $100
=================
<~$500
6:05
so, i got the thing booted up on sunday night and then spent monday morning figuring out how to fill it out, before finally falling asleep on monday morning, which seems to be my schedule the last few weeks. i was up in the afternoon, got something to eat, ranted on the dell and stopped to research and install drivers, which i only got most of the way done before i stopped for a salad.
monday was consequently an annoyingly short day, but i did manage to get all of the drivers updated and in the process learned that the lenovo has a laptop-like internal speaker that is fine for voice but isn't going to cut it for music. it's a business machine. i got the audio, video, chipset and network card drivers installed, ranted somewhat as i was doing so, and....that was it. it was time to eat, and i crashed hard midway through the 5th lecture.
i wasn't up until the afternoon, and had to start again, but i now had the network card drivers installed for the phone, so i was at least ready to go. step one was to get the software installed, and i actually initially ran into the same problem as i did with xp, which was related to the lack of a working adapter to bind to. in xp, i was able to get the dhcp running by using a switch, but it wouldn't pick up the tftp. what i did in 7 was take advantage of the vlan in the network card, which at least gave me a working ip. but, it still didn't actually launch until i turned off the tftp client.
when it started working, it was obvious that it was, and i was able to boot this phone up cleanly, into what it labelled as an unprovisioned network. what i'll need to do next is figure out how to interface the phone with a voip server, which i believe involves editing the config files. i'll figure this out.
so, these are the extra suggestions for the above video:
1) don't use windows xp. i don't know if vista works, but 7 works. this actually makes sense, as xp treats you strictly as a client that dials into things, whereas 7 places you as a component in a network. you could probably force xp to work, but you'd need to install some kind of more advanced network awareness as a service, or otherwise utilize ipconfig in ways i don't understand. 7 worked as plug and play, with a minor hack.
2) you need to hack an existing network adapter, so you need to be able to connect. i tried it with a switch on xp, and i at least got the dhcp to work, but the tftp wouldn't launch. i was trying to get it to work on a windows 7 operating system that had not yet connected to the internet, so it didn't have a functional adapter. the result was that i got the same error message from the tftp server as on xp, but i fixed it by setting up a virtual lan in the adapter. if you're having issues, you can try that.
3) disable the tftp client. you don't need it. you just need the server.
and, now it is time for another round of quinoa.
i want to point out, though, that i've decided to go with a chromebook with gallium arch as the internet device attached to the new pc. this will let me buy an inexpensive, replaceable device to use as a front-end for the new pc that will keep the pc off the network. i can blog, transfer files, stream audio and read email in linux, while doing video editing and word processing on the lenovo. this combination is probably going to be how i set up all of my pcs, moving forwards. but, i don't plan to set up many more pcs.
so, the lenovo replaces the i5 and the linux chromebook will replace the compaq, which will be converted into the effects unit, like i wanted to. i will make a minimal attempt to save the hp, but it will likely be put away somewhere, and might be disassembled for parts. i have no clear utility for it any longer, even if i can find a way to fix it. but i still want to fix it...
22:06
wednesday, may 11, 2022
i want to strongly suggest to the political opposition in canada that it is in their interests to frame chrystia freeland as an agent of the ukrainian state.
...because it seems to be true.
our government seems to have been captured by a foreign agent, and that cannot continue for any longer than is necessary to undo it.
15:38
so, i suggest to google that they should sell usb phones and they tell me to turn on 2-factor authorization, instead, which is perhaps the actual answer to the question of why usb phones do not exist - the government doesn't want citizens connecting over voip because it's harder to trace. it's not actually harder to trace in theory, but they don't have the infrastructure to do it. the surveillance state assumes we all have sim cards connected to mobile devices that can be easily tracked from place to place using already existing systems. i've been over this before - the cops don't know what to do when they can't trace my cell phone and, my politics aside, i strongly suspect that the real reason they think i'm a spy is that they can't track me over wireless. to them, that's such an anomaly that it's a red flag. if they can't trace me by cell, i must be hiding my signal, and i must be up to no good, right?
in fact, i'm just poor and cheap and have identified a smart way to save a substantial amount of money. it's an intelligent, practical decision to not spend money on an unnecessary service that i really neither need nor even want and is overpriced and not worth it. the average monthly cell phone cost in canada would be a substantial proportion of my fixed income that i'd rather spend on anything else, including beer. i can't afford it, and i'd be stupid to pay for it if i could.
but, is 2-step authentication effective as a security feature? the answer is that it's the opposite, because all somebody needs to do to get access to your entire identity is steal your phone. it's perhaps the single biggest security mistake you could imagine creating, if you were to sit down and brainstorm ways to make stupid security mistakes. rather than put your entire identity in a single, easily hackable or stealable place on a cheap mobile device (that is easy to steal for five minutes and then put back, such as for example when you're sleeping), it is a far better idea to routinely clear your cookies and cache, which is what they're trying to force you to stop doing because it makes it harder to trace you. the reason i'm having problems with accessing online banking and other things is that i'm taking the smart step of routinely resetting my devices, and it's pissing them off because it's wiping out the tracking cookies. they're telling me that my security-informed behaviour is insecure, and trying to coerce me into doing something that is distinctly insecure instead, then calling it secure.
so, 2-step authentication as a security feature is just another orwellian term in our era of orwell; the technology is inherently insecure, and is designed to track you, not to keep your data safe. it's the worst thing you could do, security wise. if you're concerned about security, you should do the exact opposite - you should consistently make it harder to track you by wiping everything when you're done using it, not make it so the government can uniquely identify any device as yours every time you pick it up.
i'm not aware of any examples yet, but what this focus on confirming identities is going to lead to is identity theft, and a reality where it's going to be difficult to argue against people fraudulently using your identity, with or without your consent. if somebody steals your phone and authenticates as you, then they are legally you, and you will be legally responsible for their behaviour. you will have no argument. you'll be fucked.
so, as an anti-capitalist political dissident, what are my concerns here? what i'm imagining is that the government might be able to easily set up a fraudulent security handshake by claiming some transaction or behaviour is traced to your unique identity, and throwing you in jail for something you didn't do, as a result of it. and, i'll remind you that i was recently arrested and charged with a crime i didn't commit, as a consequence of a false accusation made by a state prosecutor. i'm still trying to figure out what really happened, and why. so, it's a pretty real concern, to me.
i would advise you to not use any sort of "security feature" that relies on any sort of unique identifiers. that is entirely backwards. if you're security-minded, you want to focus on ways to maximize anonymity, and ways to make it difficult to trace your behaviour. you certainly don't want your phone to be a magic passcode to unlock everything about you.
15:55
"For maximum security, always use multifactor authentication solutions with government furnished equipment" - nsa security advice.
16:08
i was able to get the config files to upload to the phone last night, and able to get it to boot from the tftp server running on the new lenovo, but the settings get deleted every time i reboot, which seems to be necessary to change the ip in the phone from the one used by the dhcp server in the tftp program to the static ip assigned by the router.
so, i don't know if the answer is to try to hardcode the setting into the config file or to change something on the router. further, i need clarification as to whether i need to load this tftp config file on every boot or not. that would be a limitation that i might not be able to resolve easily, as i don't want listening devices sitting idly on my network like that.
so, that's today's task.
if i learn that i need to load the config file from a static tftp server on every boot, and i can't get the 90s laptop to run the tftp server on demand, then i'm going to need to at least put this aside until i get the new linux chromebook running.
the phone will not be on at all times, anyways. i will only boot the phone up when i use it for outgoing calls. i do not want the capability to accept incoming phone calls. i am nobody's slave, and will not respond to attempts to gain my attention by ringing bells. you can leave me a voice mail, and i can decide to return your call at my convenience, if i choose to - or ignore you altogether, if i decide, as well.
there will be no pcs on the network, and i'm not installing linux over top of the chrome os. the chromebooks are intended to act as dumb terminals, so they can be easily reset. if i must connect to a tftp server on bootup, it will either need to run on the ancient xp laptop on demand or as something i can turn on and off on the linux machine that is coming. and, it will need to run on a switch behind a nat.
the usb phone i was looking at is likely the better option, and i'll need to decide whether i'm aborting use of this cisco phone or not within the next 24 hours.
16:33
yes, you're all slaves to your phones. deal with it.
16:37
how much more time am i going to waste on this phone?
not much.
i'll have an understanding by the end of the day, i think.
17:32
ok.
it turns out that there's a known issue with voip.ms and the newer firmware. so, i need to find an older firmware version - 8.5 or older.
17:35
no, i'm never going to find the old firmware files for this device, as cisco seems to have disowned it.
the workaround is to disable nat at voip.ms.
but, does that mean i have to plug the thing in directly?
17:41
ok.
so, the first thing i want to do is see if i can turn off dhcp and manually assign the device an ip. i think that should stop it from looking for a config file when i take it out of the network and plug it back in.
i'm getting these two ideas - provisioning and registering - a little blurry, though. provisioning is getting the settings installed. registering is connecting to the voip.ms server. i don't know if the device is overwriting these settings during registering or provisioning, as it's occurring between when i disconnect from the first ip (for provisioning) and when i try to switch to the second ip (for registering). hardcoding the local subnet ip address will help answer that question.
19:53
i'm deciding i cannot avoid having a tftp server running if i want to use these phones on any network at all.
i'm going to try to set it up to work with the tftp server on the local 7 machine through the switch as a proof of concept while blocking it access to the wan via the router. i don't see any good reason why the tftp needs wan access.
22:39
i should be able to do this easily if i can figure out the right tag for the alternate tftp server.
i'm learning how these devices work, and it's not complicated, but it's incredibly obtuse. like, i get it - it's a series of security features via obstruction. if it's frustrating to unpack the network then it's hard to use it, unless you're authorized. but, i mean, this is all stock. you learn it once, and you can break any cisco network very easily. that's not helpful, in the long run.
it's really more along the lines of forcing clients to buy extra hardware.
let me find the tag, hardcode it into the configuration file and get it to boot by connecting it to the tftp server via the switch. i'm going to do this one thing at a time to prove it works step by step.
22:48
i think i found the tag. i haven't tested it yet.
but, i was able to get it to boot from the new lenovo via the switch, indicating it can pick up the tftp from there.
the next thing i'll try to do is turn off the dhcp and see if it can find the tftp without the dhcp running. if it can, i'll then plug the router into the switch and see if it picks those two things up simultaneously: the tftp server on the lenovo + the static ip address handed out by the router.
i'm concerned about separating these two things. but, i'm not going to install the tftp server on the router, and i'm not going to use internet connection sharing in windows (unless i can do it in xp?). so, if this does not work, as a proof of concept, i'll probably have to give up on this, as the required topology is too undesirable.
if i can get the phone to recognize the ip & the tftp together, i can work on fixing any nat issues.
23:02
thursday, may 12, 2022
so, i did have to connect the lenovo to the network, temporarily, but it does allow me to connect to the tftp server running on the local machine and the ip address at the router simultaneously, so long as the windows 7 ip address (in which the tftp server is bound) is on the same subnet as the phone, ie. is an ip address assigned by the router. i can actually even edit that information on the phone itself. i guess that makes sense, as the tftp server would need to on the local subnet.
it is currently not able to connect to the voip server. i believe that is a known issue. let me try to see if it has an easy fix.
this current setup is not acceptable, so let me try to connect over xp, instead.
0:22
ok, great. the tftp server itself runs smoothly over xp, as it can bind cleanly to an existing ip address. i'm not forcing it to act as a server; well, i am, but i'm doing it by hacking an existing connection, as a client. that's more in the range of things an older, naive os like xp can do out of the box.
great.
so, the topology is acceptable. the phone has an ip address, and is being provisioned by the tftp server running on the 90s laptop. that keeps all of the pcs off the network. one of these days, i'll set up a completely separate network for my pcs that is never connected to the internet. for now, i'm happy to transfer files over usb.
now, can i get the phone to connect to the voip server from behind the nat?
0:46
on the advice of voip.ms, i set up a subaccount for the cisco, and modified a few settings server side. then, i started googling things and realized that this probably isn't going to work, in the long run. so, i went to turn it off and...
it connected.
but, i wasn't able to push any buttons, so i rebooted. unfortunately, it went back into the same loop.
it seems like the device wants to exist in a subnet, which sort of makes sense; it's an office phone. i'm asking it to connect to the internet from behind a nat, which would get me fired if i was working it, somewhere. that is, i'm asking the device to do something it's specifically designed to avoid doing, then getting frustrated by it.
i should have done more research into the device rather than bought it on impulse due to the price, but, as it is, it's really not what i want, and i feel i've just wasted time with it. the phone was supposed to be $25 and be a quick, easy solution to getting a physical phone to work as a controller for a softphone. it ended up costing closer to $60, and i'm not likely to get it to work at all. it seems like i'm going to have to see if i can sell it locally. i don't want to ship it.
what i want is a usb phone to connect to the 90s laptop. hopefully, i can find something for less than $20, and at least break even on this.
but, i learned a little about cisco ip phones, and why this isn't how i want to do this, in the long run.
3:46
what i should do is sell the cisco first and then take what i can get for it as the maximum price i'm willing to pay for a usb phone, which is what i thought i was buying.
3:48
from an intuitive perspective, it seems obvious that you should just be able to plug one of these things into your computer. it doesn't really make sense to think you have to dial into a remote server to use the phone, and, everything else aside about connecting to tftp servers, etc, it's really not a good answer for sporadic, personal phone use.
i mean, no rational person would have guessed these things are so absurd, a priori.
i feel i've really done a fairly good job in teaching myself about something i neither have any education level in nor any intuition in, let alone any real interest in. if i had known what was required to set this thing up, i would not have wasted my time with it. as it is, i think i gave it a good go.
it might connect directly to the voip server if i remove the router, but then i'd have to figure out how to connect the phone to a tftp server on the other side of the nat. i guess i'd have to get a new router that lets me turn off the nat, and attach something like a raspberry pi running a tftp server, then connect my regular router behind the new one. that's entirely retarded.
if you want a project, good for you - i wanted something i could plug in with minimal effort. i think the fact that i got as far as i did is fairly impressive. but, i'm post-godel, too. i can understand that some problems don't have answers, and that proving something can't be solved is sometimes just the right fucking answer.
the lesson is to not buy things for cheap on impulse thinking you've got a deal without doing the research on it first. and, i always do the research first. alas.
4:08
i've also really underestimated the cost of a pi.
i should have got one when they were very cheap.
you could probably still find the older models for cheap if you look hard enough.
4:24
i just want to make sure that there isn't some way to connect this to a soft phone before i give up on it. all i actually wanted was a physical phone to act as a front-end for the softphone; i had no intention or interest in setting up some complicated bullshit on a fucking corporatist ip phone that connects directly to an external server through a nat. fuck.
the device is supposed to run locally. fine. so, can i set it up to connect to a local softphone behind the nat, and then let the software deal with the nat, instead?
this really should not be a difficult task, but it seems like i'm trying to use a device in a way it wasn't intended to be used and am making something that ought to be simple into something that is annoyingly complicated, in the process. but, i don't give up easily, and i bought the damned thing, and i want to force it to work.
4:53
ok. so, this is what i want: i want a softphone dialer like program that runs on windows (like the tftp server, which seems unavoidable) that i can use to log into from the phone and that can handle connecting to voip.ms through the nat strictly in software.
that can't be that hard.
can it?
5:09
i suppose i could install a linux distro on the 90s pc. it might even save it.
in fact, i suppose i could even dual boot it.
but, what i really want is the phone software to run as a service in windows.
ok.
so, i can't do this the way that it nerds would do it if they were to set it up, standalone. but, that just means that i've learned the limitations of the device and what i need to do to get around it - and also what components are required to set this up.
it shouldn't be difficult, in principle, to run a dhcp server that the phone can connect to as service in windows, and let it deal with the nat.
should i put linux on this thing?
5:15
the internet is telling me to use ics. i suspect that's naive.
but, now that the phone has firmware, what actually happens if i just plug it into the laptop?
5:27
friday, may 13, 2022
as has frequently been the case in scenarios where whiny bourgeois fake left politicians moan and complain about legitimate expressions of free speech, what seems to have marked this event is the complete lack of any sort of violence.
mr. singh went to a place that does not like him very much, and was chased off by the inhabitants. that is a legitimate expression of democracy, it is not something to call the police over, and this sustained fascist rhetoric from the ndp on issues of basic freedoms and fundamental human rights continues to be absolutely staggering. once again: the right-wing extremists here are jagmeet singh and alistair mcgregor, and their absolute disinterest in the expression of any sort of freedom of any kind is evidence of the fact that they are the right-wing extremists. peaceful protests of this sort are the hallmark of the traditional left.
so, instead of giving space to whiners and complainers that want to turn back the clocks on free speech, why not examine the legitimacy and correctness of some of the accusations made by these peaceful protesters?
one descriptive term - it's an adjective, really - used by the protesters was "traitor". this obviously refers to the recent agreement signed by the ndp and the liberals, in which the ndp agreed to entirely abandon their voting base in exchange for a promise to prop up the neo-liberals, who claim they will implement a series of programs that already exist (or get into a constitutional fight with the provinces over jurisdiction in the midst of a federal power grab, or something - it's not clear what, if anything, the liberals actually intend to do to gain the votes of our weak and cowardly ndp, who are in truth seeking merely to avoid losing seats in an election), in return for ndp support. i think calling mr. singh a traitor is truly being far too kind to him and the decisions he's made to turn his back on his voting base in signing a contemptible agreement of this sort with the dastardly and unsupportable liberals. likewise, whether somebody is a liar or not is an empirical question, and i think it rather clearly evaluates to true in the case of mr. singh, who has been hopelessly dishonest in his justification for this completely bullshit agreement with the liberals and more generally in his role as the leader of the ndp. somebody else can come up with concrete examples.
i might propose to mr. singh that if he does not want to be called a traitor and a liar then he should not sign dishonest deals to prop up the entities he was elected to oppose. and, as such, the only problem i see here is a broken political system full of dishonest and traitorous politicians, seeking to advance their self-interests over those of their constituents and over those that voted for them.
the laws that were passed during the pandemic were broadly unacceptable in a free society. one of the criticisms was that it may usher in a period of fascism. well, listen to the ndp talk about speech rights today, and tell me there wasn't value in those critiques - the opponents of the pandemic restrictions were empirically correct, and the bourgeois political class needs to find ways to apologize and make amends for their vicious attack on the constitutional rights of canadians, not whine and complain that they're being harassed in a democratic display of dissent that rejects and condemns their deplorable behaviour.
5:05
if i call you a fascist, and you call the police and try to get me arrested for it, what does that demonstrate?
5:09
who are the people yelling and screaming at these asshole upper class douchebags when they come through town?
the answer is that they're traditional ndp voters, and that this is what the party's base thinks of jagmeet singh - that he's a traitor and a liar. those are defendable accusations; they're both broadly true.
the ndp should be more concerned about what is happening to it's base and less concerned about protecting it's leader from being offended.
5:13
i understand that it's not always an answer.
but, mothers know that there's an easy answer to the infant formula shortage, right?
breast milk has a lot of positives to it. it's something to think about - especially if you can make it. there are mothers that can't.
5:36
what is being upheld here is the centrality of intent in the law, and that's not controversial, despite the existence of dissent around the point on the fake left. proving intent is required to convict somebody of a crime in this country.
further, in the abstract situation where somebody takes a magic potion and then loses control of themselves, i would agree that they cannot be held responsible for behaviour they did not actually intent to do.
however, i question the science in this particular scenario, and hope that it doesn't become a bad excuse for worse behaviour. mushrooms are still a niche drug, so the justices may very well not have any experience with them. they may have been misled by "experts" in court that are actually lowly grad students in bio-chem or applied psychology and have never done mushrooms, either. they might imagine it's something like getting really, really drunk, and that maybe you might wake up and not remember what happened. but, that's simply not what mushrooms are like at all.
taking mushrooms is like entering a topsy-turvy world where alternate truths become indisputable. i might imagine that it's something like a controlled, temporary schizophrenic episode. you could, for example, give a rational person mushrooms, then convince them that qanon is the literal truth of god, and have them believing you - until it wears off. i have not done mushrooms in many, many years, but mushroom trips have tended to be life-altering experiences for me because they help me understand perspective in a way that is not available in normal, conscious life. the last time i did mushrooms was in early 2013, and it helped me understand that the arguments i was having with professors at the time were not important, and i was better off moving on; it's not clear to me that i would have realized this with the same level of clarity without the aid of the drugs.
to have this kind of enlightening effect, mushrooms should be done in moderate dosages, and very infrequently - no more than every 4 or 5 years, and probably less frequently than that. i am probably due, but i have no concrete plans for a mushroom trip, at this time.
what mushrooms don't do is take control of you, automate your actions or produce blackouts, the way alcohol does. in fact, mushrooms are a strong stimulant - you will neither blackout on them, nor will you fall asleep. you will be wired for hours, and more aware of your surroundings than you would be normally. this hyper-awareness is a part of what helps you "build connections", which is what can trigger you into psychotic episodes.
to be clear: i've seen people have bad trips, even if i haven't had one myself, and i can assure you that they are in full physical control of themselves, even if they might be convinced of things that are not true. it's less a type of physical control and more a type of mind control, but it can be effectively overcome if you can figure out the right words, and present them in a way that generates enough trust. so, somebody having a bad trip might respond rationally to a mother or a girlfriend in a way that they wouldn't respond to other people because they would trust that person. conversely, if somebody really doesn't trust their girlfriend or parents, they may make things worse, or be the target of the episode.
so, the idea that somebody may do mushrooms and then become under the control of the drugs in a way that prevents them from making independent decisions is not credible. that person may become convinced that somebody else is out to get them, and may even hear voices telling them as much, and it may be very hard to convince them otherwise, but they are still fundamentally in control of themselves and fundamentally making independent decisions. the idea of temporary insanity may be applicable. but, the idea that drugs take control of our bodies and eliminate free will, consciousness or intent is in the realm of science fiction, not in the realm of science.
the individual should have perhaps been convicted in a lesser degree, and sentencing might have taken the situation into account. but, the only drug where this kind of defence should be considered reasonable is alcohol, as no other drug produces that kind of blackout type behaviour. marijuana, mushrooms, opiates, cocaine, amphetamines, mdma - none of them produce blackouts like alcohol, unless they're cut with something intended to. this defence should certainly not be used for somebody that is under the influence of marijuana, for example.
19:13
in the specific case, the person seems to have chugged a mickey of vodka with his 2.5 grams of mushrooms.
2.5 grams of mushrooms is enough for a very mild trip. standard recreational amounts are in the 4-8 range. i've watched people take 20 g of mushrooms in one sitting.
so, not only would 2.5 grams not produce anything resembling automaton-like behaviour, but it would barely even get somebody high - especially while drinking that much vodka. the vodka would be the more likely cause of violent urges, or violent outbursts.
generally speaking, though, what happens when you take a small amount of mushrooms - and 2.5 is small. it's the amount you would tell a teenager to take, as a first experiment. - with a large amount of vodka is that you spend the next 8 hours vomiting in a park. the alcohol will neutralize the mushrooms, it won't increase the potency of the trip.
for that reason, nobody mixes mushrooms and alcohol like that - it's a waste of mushrooms.
it's a bad ruling, rooted in a poor understanding of the science, by justices that have no experience with drugs.
19:34
the fundamental difference between somebody on drugs and somebody having an actual psychotic episode is that the person on drugs knows they're on drugs. so, yeah - i've heard voices on mushrooms, but i knew i was on mushrooms, so i knew they weren't real. i don't know what you'd label a situation where somebody takes drugs, has the experience of the drugs and then gets confused as to the nature of the experience; i suppose that, if somebody has an underlying psychiatric condition then they may be unable to tell what is real and what isn't, but a reasonable person (in the legalistic construction) should be able to discern that the effects they are experiencing are rationally connected to the intoxicants they consumed. trying to prove a lack of responsibility for behaviour produced under the influence of drugs consequently should reduce to demonstrating an underlying condition, as it is the existence of the underlying condition that is the correct question at law.
a healthy, normal person should be able to do 20 hits of lsd, hear the voice of god and say "yup. i'm on drugs, alright." and shrug it off.
19:49
somebody that is actually psychotic, on the other hand, can't do that - or can't process it. i've read about schizophrenics that know they're schizophrenic, and know the voices aren't real, and consequently just kind of adjust to it. but, the truly episodic can't do that - they hear the voices, and they believe they come from some outside place and they think they have an obligation to listen. there's probably a physical explanation to this that we haven't figured out yet; some part of their brain is likely literally wired wrong, so that thoughts get confused with experiences. but, the fundamental point is that they can't tell it's not real.
drug users that are normal, healthy people don't have that conundrum, or experience that confusion. the voices don't occur randomly; there's a cause and effect between taking the drugs and experiencing the effects. so, when you're on drugs, you know you're on drugs and you know that what you're hearing and feeling isn't real, even if the illusion can from time to time be rather convincing. that is, of course, the draw to doing drugs - that it is fun to experience things you know aren't true, yet seem to be true.
it is true that it is helpful to have a friend beside you to remind you, but that should not be a requirement for a mentally sound, physically healthy person. most people don't somehow forget that they're on drugs and need to be reminded; you'd have to already have something wrong with you to get to that point.
20:02
do you want me to guess what happened that night, based on my experiences with the drugs involved and the description of events?
the hockey player appears to have gotten so drunk that he ended up naked, and was discovered by his friends. perhaps, he had masturbated at the party - that's the kind of thing that happens when you get really drunk. but, he seems to have run off in a fit of embarrassment. he then seems to have gone to the wrong house, and broken through the window when it was clear that his keys didn't work. then, he came face to face with an intruder in his house, and had to protect himself from them, in this case by beating them with a broom handle. then, once he realized it wasn't his house after all, he left.
this is just what happens when you get shit-faced drunk - you make bad decisions, and get confused by events occurring around you. the very small amount of mushrooms involved was likely an entirely irrelevant factor. the likely truth that the person thought they were entering their own home, and thought they were defending themselves from an attacker, doesn't have much to with the question as to whether they formed an intent to attack the woman or not. blurriness in memory aside, it sounds to me like the person clearly formed an intent to attack the person, even if the facts leading to that intent were not correct.
i understand that the ruling was about the constitutionality of the existing law, rather than the precise issue at hand. but, that doesn't mean the individual should have been acquitted in a case that strikes me as rather obviously being an example of drunken confusion.
20:19
there's an election occurring.
will somebody finally stand up and promise to put an end to public funding for these horrible religious schools?
21:42
i've been arguing for a long time that the primary issue with odsp is the lack of affordable housing. if i could get into a subsidized rental unit, my rent would decrease to the amount allotted by the legislation and there really wouldn't be a problem any more.
see, the basic problem is that the legislation assumes that if you're on odsp then you're in subsidized housing, which is reasonable - we should have enough subsidized housing and most people on disability would prefer to be in subsidized housing, if it were available. as it is, we have waiting lists with thousands of names on them, so we have thousands and thousands (and thousands) of people living on disability and paying market rent when the rent amount allotted was calculated with the assumption of access to subsidized housing. if you could simply resolve that contradiction - either by building huge amounts of subsidized housing or by adjusting the legislation to remove the assumption of subsidized housing - then you'd solve 90% of the problem. my rent is currently $750, and it's at the bottom of the market in one of the cheapest places in the country; the government is telling me i shouldn't be paying more than $500 for rent, which is entirely impossible. if they tripled the amount allotted for rent, that would instantly fix essentially everything.
but, in fact, there was a decision made some time ago that the market should deal with this, under the absurd delusion that it would be more efficient. we see how that's worked out.
a couple of years ago, people might have told me i was exaggerating, or i wasn't looking hard enough. i do hope that that kind of thinking is now debunked by the evidence.
again: i'd rather live in subsidized housing, but nobody wants to build it. so, if you're going to let the market deal with it, then adjust the legislation from the assumption of subsidized rent to the reality of market rent. that will stop people on odsp from having to use money that's supposed to be for other things for rent and ensure that they're able to hang on to their living arrangements in the face of rising rent costs.
22:08
this is a terrible idea - we should be raising taxes on seniors and shipping them out into homes, not lowering them in an attempt to keep them in properties they don't need.
to each according to their need - and seniors don't need big houses, or really need houses at all.
22:38
but, i mean, it's pretty clear that you shouldn't expect much of anything remotely socialist or remotely left-wing from the ndp, at this point. that policy is just another government hand out for the rich, which is what you would expect from the ndp, given that the only people that vote for them are rich people.
22:46
the ndp is the party of the elite.
22:47
look around the province. the ndp signs are on the biggest houses in the richest neighbourhoods - they're professors, doctors, lawyers. it's the party of the educated upper class, of champagne socialists and do-gooding upper class liberals.
of course they want to cut taxes for the rich.
what else would you expect?
22:50
the rest of us need to stop voting for them.
22:53
the ndp are largely to the right of the liberals on the spectrum, and they really always have been. there's no value or function in having two liberal parties, it just elects conservatives.
i would like there to be a socialist party in this province, but there is not one, and the two liberal parties really need to question whether it serves anybody's interest in having them run against each other.
23:06
i am not going to vote in this election because i'm afraid that the liberals and/or the ndp might shut down the economy again to extend the lives of half-dead old people by six weeks, at tremendous cost to everybody.
but, we need to stop pretending the ndp are somehow different than the liberals and stop splitting the vote.
if you're a liberal, vote for the fucking liberals. and, if you're a leftist, vote for the greens.
23:08
our so-called workers party is running on a promise to defer taxes for the upper class, so that they can build equity to pass on to their children.
it's a farce.
put this party out of it's existence.
23:11
saturday, may 14, 2022
listen, i have no patience for feudalism. estate taxes should be set to 100%, property should be seized and sold and all wealth should be redistributed upon an individual's death.
inheritance should be entirely abolished; that is a longstanding position on the left, and you don't get to call yourself a leftist if you're in favour of inheritance. it's an idea that should not exist in a liberal society and could not exist in a communist society.
to have what is supposed to be a left-wing party run on a policy designed to maximize inheritance values is a slap in the face to the left and should really be the last straw - you can't be supporting the ndp and even pretending you're a leftist, at this point.
0:22
the idea that you get to be rich because your parents were is unacceptable in a democratic society.
we're all born equal - and we should all have the same starting points.
0:26
So I can make a moral case for a 100% estate tax. Which is, in some sense, what Kevin Drum is doing when he advocates "letting the dead pay for Medicare". He would make Medicare a senior creditor on estates; the government would get first crack at all the assets until the bill for all the Medicare services consumed has been repaid, or the estate runs out of money.
that's a good idea!
first, they can pay their own health care - including senior care for geriatric homes. then, we can redistribute the rest.
this is pretty much the most basic point that there's ever been on the left - it's what connects bernie sanders to karl marx to thomas paine to the great peasants' revolt to the populists in the roman empire: wealth redistribution and the assumption of equality at birth. it's the most fundamental idea on the left.
1:00
let me state this clearly, without the obscure historical references: we need land reform in canada. tweaks and tax policies aren't good enough. we need to reform how we understand property in this country, from the bottom up - or from the top down as it may be.
the focus on inheritance as a means of wealth generation is the problem, not the solution.
1:37
speaking of phil collins and entanglement...
as i count backwards, your eyes become heavier still...
after my dad's second marriage fell apart, he needed somewhere else to stay, and fast. he ended up renting a room way out in kanata. sleeping there was difficult on everybody, but required by court order, and my mom was a nasty bitch about it. so, my sister and i ended up being driven out of town every weekend to sleep on a living room floor, when we both had beds at home. it was very stupid, but court orders are court orders.
as the situation wasn't really conducive to finding ways to convince young children to sleep, this particular song was repeatedly utilized rather tactically.
i stopped on thursday morning and mostly lost friday, which we'll talk about. it's kind of a stuck, in between day. i have one more thing to try with the phone before i completely give up.
2:00
so, yes - phil collins was a part of many generations of childhoods, not just the childhoods of those that were children in the 90s.
in fact, this would have been a part of my father's childhood:
that's a young phil on drums.
the singer's name is peter gabriel.
2:22
the best genesis was with gabriel singing, partly because phil was just focusing on the drums.
but, they did plenty of great stuff after gabriel left, too. i'm young enough that i have no preconceptions - i can approach it as a body of work. the flavour changes when gabriel leaves, but the band doesn't really change until after hackett leaves. if anything, gabriel's departure opened the sound up a little. remember: gabriel left because he wanted to do music that was, and i believe i quote, "more like the who". he seems to have agreed with the punk rock critique, in fact - even if it never really applied well to genesis. ask magazine. don't ask greg graffin.
this, for example, is clearly phil collins predicting the harambe memes:
2:44
i think this is technically as interesting as anything done in the early period, even if it has a different flavour.
2:46
i didn't just growing up listening to genesis, i also grew up listening to people talk and argue about genesis. and, a lot of the really hardcore genesis nerds - people that listened to them from 1970 and forwards, for the next 20+ years - actually think that the duke suite, which is a self-referential rock opera about phil collins coming out from behind the kit and becoming a lead singer, is the best thing they did.
(i mentioned that peter gabriel was the singer in the live video from 1972. there's actually some debate about that point. i guess you'd have to ask phil. you wouldn't understand, though.)
i don't know about that.
i think it's perhaps the most concise thing they did. i think it holds up, at the least.
2:55
the story i heard was that gabriel wasn't actually a singer, and phil has perfect pitch, so phil would lay down the melodies because he could do it effortlessly, and then gabriel would sort of sing over it, but that if you listen to the records - and this is true - you can often hear phil multitracking. the ambiguity is who was really multitracking who. a lot of people think phil did the actual vocals, and gabriel was the backup singer.
it is true that they sound remarkably similar.
i'm reminded of billy corgan explaining why he played bass on the first handful of pumpkins records. sure, he could wait for d'arcy to figure it out, and get it right on the 5th take - or he could do it himself perfectly in one take. studio time costs money. you do the fastest, easiest thing to get it done.
the facts are that phil collins is a perfect singer and peter gabriel isn't. the theory has some basis to it.
2:59
even the very late period stuff, which is mostly fluff, all features a couple of tracks like this one that are just bafflingly creative, especially given the records they're on.
this was released in 1986. it's not clear when it was made. but, it sounds like a skinny puppy track. it makes you wonder what direction genesis would have gone in in the 80s, if they had seriously stayed together.
3:10
see, this is one of the last attempts at something more substantive, and in some ways it's big and abstract and complicated, but in others it's empty and specious and goofy.
like, that big orchestra hit sound, for example, becomes popular in 90s pop. this was 1986.
if you listen to the track, it has a weird time signature (for pop), unusual syncopation, etc. it's well produced. but, it's structurally...
it sounds like metallica remixing madonna. so, when it tries to be serious, it just gets cheesy. i have a guilty pleasure for this, though.
there's only one more record after this - the one with jesus he knows me and which is really a straight pop record - so this is really the last legit genesis track.
if you haven't heard it, you should hear it at least once. careful - it gets scary.
3:42
3:52
i always assumed that domino was about nuclear war, in general.
it turns out that it is specifically about the 1982 war in lebanon, and the potential of it creating a domino effect in the region.
"but, domino theory is debunked".
touche. but, in the specific case of lebanon, i actually think the idea demonstrated some foresight.
4:00
i'm trolling the universe.
4:13
well, it was the lebanese civil war that created a lot of the proxy conflicts that exist in the middle east to this day, including the iran-iraq war, the american invasion of iraq, etc. that's where the battle lines were actually drawn, for real. even in the early 80s, this was all incredibly complicated and included the americans, the israelis, the french, the british, the turks, the saudis, the iranians, the russians, the iraqis, the egyptians, the libyans and of course the lebanese and the palestinians. before the early 80s, it was a little less complicated, as you basically had the russians behind "arab socialism" and the americans propping up islamist regimes in saudi arabia, as well as a secularist regime in iran (before the revolution). but, the intervention into lebanon blew the whole thing up, so that you had a dozen different groups, all fighting for their own interests. maybe the region was a tinderbox and something else would have set it off, but we're basically still dealing with this decision, made by reagan, 40 years ago.
4:25
that was sure a wasted night.
this is an in between day that was sort of unintentionally lost, and i'm kind of just wasting time, which i hate doing, but so be it.
5:36
i would generally support higher taxes on corporations, but bezos has a point - i am aware of no theory that would argue that inflation is caused by low taxes, and many that would suggest it is cause by high taxes.
there's two takeaways from this:
1) biden doesn't know how to solve this problem, and his advisers do not have good answers
2) biden doesn't care what's true, he cares if he can convince you that bullshit is true. and, that's been clear for quite a while.
biden's statements here should make educated people guffaw. they are truly baffling. inflation is a serious problem, and his analysis is devastatingly unserious, and just intended to try to convince what he sees as stupid voters that jeff bezos is responsible for the problem. any halfways functioning disinformation board would need to address these statements by the president.
what can the government actually do about inflation?
there's two sides to this. the first is input costs, which include things like energy and labour. the second is a game of chicken between buyers and sellers. the government can do a little bit to affect the input variables, but it can't do much about the game of chicken. from what i can tell, much of the inflation right now is really price gouging, and it will continue for as long as consumers continue to pay for it. the reality that republicans are psychologically driving the perception of inflation is not helping - if people expect to pay more because they've been conditioned into believing that they have to, then they will.
i would advise consumers to avoid paying higher prices, as much as they can. prices will come down if people stop buying. i've already seen some goods - like strawberries - come down dramatically, as a result of sellers needing to move products that cannot be moved at the price they were previously charging. at least where i am, consumers have won this game of chicken, for now.
the government, in theory, has more control over things that may affect input prices, like the cost of oil, but it's currently limited in what it can do because the country is so import-dependent. it could regulate the price of oil, but it would just be absorbing the cost, and printing money to send overseas. a better idea is to look at changing how energy is produced, but that needs to be done the slow and inefficient way - by using the market - because the government is not functional. so, even the things that the government should have control over are mostly market-driven in today's economy.
perhaps the greater lesson and analysis is that this is the result of 40 years of neo-liberalism: the government has absolutely no control over the economy. this is what they wanted, and this is what they've got. keynesian spending doesn't work anymore, either, because the stimulus gets exported to china.
america is simply suffering the effects of being an import-dependent economy due to the free trade regime set in motion in the 80s, and it's likely going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. there's no quick answer. this is structural, and the result of decades of bad trade policies.
in the long run, if america wants to regain control over it's economy, it's going to need to look at withdrawing from free trade agreements and spending massively on an industrial policy to bring production back into the country.
5:54
conversely, will raising taxes increase inflation?
in theory, it should - sellers will increase their prices to offset the changes in taxation. if you put a 10% tax on item a, the store that sells item a will increase the cost of it to recoup the loss. that's not ideological, that's basic economics and "common sense".
in practice, it depends. some company could be trying to drive some other company out of business and decide to take a loss in order to do so, and might consequently defer the inflation to later. or, it might be decided that consumers might not pay more for a specific item and the loss can be absorbed due to economies of scale.
so, being certain that increasing taxation will lead to higher inflation is a step too far.
but, for the president to suggest that increasing taxes will lower inflation is breathtaking. it's disrespectful to voters to make a claim so outlandish and expect his audience to swallow it.
6:00
it's nice to see the court conclude that the governor is behaving despotically. this really isn't like abortion; the abortion debate is rooted in the contradiction created by pitting two incompatible concepts of morality against each other, and reasonable people on both sides can at least realize that the other side is usually not frivolous. i may think they're idiots, but the opposition to abortion is legitimately rooted in the religious delusion that god creates people uniquely (as stupid as that might be...) and that you're literally murdering a child. that may be wrong in every way you could possible look at it, but lots of people believe all kinds of stupid things that are wrong in any way you could possibly look at it - they're called people of faith. i am an advocate of self-ownership, and consequently support abortion rights up to 9 months minus a day, but that doesn't mean i don't acknowledge that abortions aren't ideal outcomes. nobody wants an abortion.
there is no other side to the issue of transsexuality, so it is not any sort of debate: you accept a person has bodily autonomy or you don't. there's no cause for pause, no reason for sober reflection. as such, restrictions on health care for transsexuality are just attacking a minority for political gain; there's no cogent argument that you're protecting anybody, or standing up for anybody without a voice - it is strictly repressive, strictly authoritarian, strictly despotic. conservatives actually don't tend to like it when politicians do that, and should mostly be expected to step in and stop it.
as such, i actually don't expect that courts much of anywhere are going to uphold these kinds of laws, or that this is going to be an issue that replaces abortion. abortion is a subtle, complicated thing that pits contradictory concepts against each other in often difficult ways. transsexuality is an individual choice that has no effect on anybody but the individual making it.
republicans may try to make an issue out of this to try to win votes, but they will lose legal battles at every level. principled conservatives will not like the rights restrictions, as it sets precedents for liberals to restrict "religious freedoms". i would expect these kinds of rulings, where conservative judges tell republican politicians that they're acting like fascists, to actually be the norm, and for this issue to dissipate rather quickly.
that doesn't mean that transgendered people won't have barriers to health care. i literally had to sue a hospital to get funds to go to toronto to get my testicles out because all of the doctors here are muslims and just wouldn't do it. i had funding, i had approval - they wouldn't do it. but, that's a private sector restriction, not a public sector one. this may come as a surprise, but principled conservatives are actually likely to side with transgendered children on this issue - it's the demagogues and political hacks that we have to worry about, and they always lose, when forced to make real legal arguments.
so, don't be surprised by the tone of this ruling - expect more of this. there's no babies to save, here; there's just state intrusion into personal decision making, and conservatives actually don't like that.
6:34
biden's theorem about inflation being caused by low taxation is truly baffling enough to coin a new term: bidenomics.
it's been a while since we heard a doozy like that one.
8:12
so, the thing i wanted to try with the phone was to install 3cx as a service, thinking it was free, only to find out that (1) it's a trial and (2) the download is 64-bit. i'm running this on a 32-bit laptop; i don't have the option to install a 64-bit os on this device.
this service is confirmed to work with the phone, but i'm not entirely sure how to connect it to the phone, itself. the phone is able to connect to the laptop when i plug both devices in to the switch, but the phone is going to need to connect to both the dhcp server and the tftp server on the same binding, and there's not an obvious way to bind the two different servers using the same ip address on windows xp (the tftp server won't connect to the phone over the virtual ip address in xp the way it does in 7, which is why i couldn't flash from xp; it needs to be assigned an address on the subnet the laptop is on (and needs to have the phone get an ip on that subnet as well, which has to be done by the router). so, i can run one or the other, but not both.). what i'm trying to do is to get a softphone running on windows xp that interfaces with the physical phone and deals with the nat in software, so i need to be connecting through the xp machine and need to get the virtual ip address for the phone from the xp machine; if i can get some kind of virtual router that can hand out two virtual ips (one to the phone and one to the tftp server), it should be relatively easy to get it to work, but the phone has to actually behave. otherwise, i'm not going to be able to use the xp machine for a tftp server, when i am using it to connect to the voip servers through software.
i've sort of lost patience with it, though.
i guess i wasted the night. i've at least crossed out 3cx, and i'm not sure what to do next. i have 3 choices, really:
1) i think it will work if i install freepbx on to the 90s laptop. i may have to find a creative solution for a tftp server, though. well, i guess i can run it on the other linux chromebook that's coming. this is not ideal.
2) i can keep trying to find a service that will run in the background in xp and will form the proper bridge between the phone and the router, through the laptop.
3) or, i could get a usb phone and hope it works with microsip.
i'm going to sleep on this, a little.
8:27
the turks are apparently threatening to veto finnish entry into nato, and it's an interesting question as to how other members of nato will respond to such a thing. i would expect that nato will decide to side with finland over turkey for white supremacist racial and cultural reasons, but that would not be a good exchange for nato.
i really think the long running russo-turkic conflict is what the current ukrainian mess really fits into, primarily, in the long run. so, i'd encourage you to keep an eye on the turks and how they respond to this.
finnish accession to nato makes the likelihood of a direct conflict with russia far more likely, and the turks are going to be on the front line of that, not the germans or french. they're being kept at an arms-length distance, despite being the primary stakeholder. should they get up and leave, nato will have lost a vital strategic partner in the region, at the gain of a barren wasteland of snow and swamp.
18:51
the russians really should have finished the job in the last round of direct conflicts, but the british intervention saved the turks - and stopped russia from pushing south, potentially as far as alexandria. the west seems to have forgotten that the russians have been a dominant player in the middle east for a very long time.
conquering the turks would be a difficult task at this point of time, but the russians don't have armed conflicts in latvia or lithuania; they have troops in georgia and in armenia, they have interests in cyprus and they've been fighting a lengthy war in syria. they have a dominant strategic interest in controlling the black sea.
the russians will attack the turks before they attack the poles.
but, we're not concerned about the turks - we're concerned about white atheist europeans that we incorrectly interpret as blonde christians.
19:01
sure - a dominant, confident russia will wake up one day and annex lithuania, but it's hardly going to start a war over access to a region with little strategic interest to it.
turkey, like ukraine, is of actual value to russia, and worth fighting for control over, if a war is inevitable.
19:13
yeah.
listen, finland. you're about to make a very stupid mistake, driven by a false understanding of what nato is, and a feeling of racial belongingness. you're allowing identity politics to cloud your thinking.
nato is not about mutual protection, it's about selling weapons. so, i'm going to tell you what's going to happen if you make the foolish mistake of signing a one-year accession. and, we can all come back here and laugh at how stupid you were, once your country is engulfed in flames. nobody should feel bad for the foolish when they are destroyed by their own stupidity.
so, this is what's going to happen.
you're going to sign a one-year accession, which is going to give the russians time to prepare for an invasion, before the waiting period is up. they will pressure you to pull out, and you won't - because you're stupid. meanwhile, you'll send billions of dollars in weapons payments to american defence contractors, thinking that you'll be protected - because that's the point, right?
noooo. america doesn't use it's influence to stop wars, america uses it's influence to start wars. so, you're going to buy all of these weapons, the fools that you are, thinking they're intended as deterrence, and will protect you from aggression. what you don't realize is that the reason you're being sold these weapons is that the pentagon intends you to use them.
you're being set up as a sitting duck, as diversion to water down russia's military and as cannon fodder for american expansionism. once all those weapons are in your country, america will then try and bait the russians to move in, by eliminating much of any other option. you will be overrun with american secret service operations to provoke russia into invading you.
...because that's the point, from washington's perspective: they want to weaken russia by drawing them into as many conflicts as possible. they don't care if finland burns to the ground as collateral, if it succeeds in weakening the russians.
nato might win this war in the end, but finland will be left to rebuild it's ruins, after unintentionally signing up to be a battleground for the conflict.
how does finland avoid such a thing? the answer is by avoiding making the mistake that ukraine made, which was actively seeking alliance with the west. your ancestors were smart - you should listen to them.
20:15
sunday, may 15, 2022
so, i did one more attempt to find windows software, and i found a softphone that is supposed to work with this model, but it won't install on xp, i need windows 7 for it. i cannot install windows 7 on the 90s laptop, and have no desire to connect one of my other computers to the network in order to use the phone. my new lenovo is the only computer in the house running windows 7 or higher and it will be kept strictly offline like the other pcs. so, it does not appear as though a softphone client for this phone exists for windows and is compatible with windows xp. that means that the idea of running it with windows is not feasible, and i'm therefore now largely disinterested in it.
i've put up a question at a voip forum about xp software for this phone. we'll see if i get an answer.
i want to be clear about the phone: it's not that i can't figure out how to connect it to the remote voip server, it's that it's a business phone that is purposefully designed to not be able to communicate outside of an internal network. nat is a technology that connects outside networks to inside ones, and it does make sense that a phone like this one would be designed so that it can't get through the translation - not as a bug, but as a feature, because you don't want your business phones connecting to outside servers, like ever. no network admin would want their ip phones connecting to the outside world - they're supposed to work behind a firewall, strictly on a local server. but, they're also designed to be configurable at the server level. so, in order to have the thing work, it really ought to connect to an internal server and it's really not a good idea to try to force it to connect through the nat, even if i can somehow force it to. as it is, it's a known issue that you can't connect the firmware version through a nat, and i have every reason to think it's by design. if i had realized this, i would not have bought it - i don't need or want a server running so i can call the doctor once a month. i don't use a phone every day; i don't even use a phone every week. this is far more trouble than it's worth. but, as it is, it's not that i can't figure this out, it's that it's designed to function in a way that isn't rational to set up in a normal home network.
i'm going to keep looking, but i'm not expecting to find the softphone i'm imagining, which means that the only way to save the phone is to connect it to a linux server and i'd rather, at this point, see if i can just get a cheap usb phone, instead.
should i keep this thing? well, i could see myself wanting two phones one day, but i can't see myself solving the issue with the tftp server in a reasonable manner. these chromebooks will all slowly die, and will all end up with linux on them. it's not so absurd to think i might eventually put pbx on one of them, and connect it to the phone in a room where i want a second phone. i guess i could launch a second tftp server on demand from the xp laptop, presuming it holds up, when i want to call out, but this seems like an absurdly obtuse solution.
i think i just need to accept that i bought a device thinking it performed a function it doesn't perform and i need to deal with it and get on with it.
1:11
yeah. i'm officially done with this.
i'm going to see if i can sell it back to the person that sold it to me. the phone does exactly what it's supposed to do, it just doesn't do what i want it to do. if we can work out an agreement where i get a refund and pay return shipping costs, that will give me enough to buy a usb phone, i think.
yes, i should have done the research. but, i bought a "voip business phone" - and i wanted a voip business phone. it's my fault for not looking into it enough, but cisco has to take some of the blame here for being obtuse about it's products.
2:17
so, where was i, then?
i guess i officially lost a full week on that. unfortunately.
i had two entries in my shortlist on my production machine - set up i5 and set up phone. i'm still waiting on the sata power splitter for the i5.
so, that means i'm back into loose-ending, which means rewinding back to february. i want to finish inri077, first, and then close some open thoughts, before rebooting to last summer.
2:21
so, it seems like i found the 8.5 version firmware:
this firmware apparently can connect outside of a nat. so, i have to try it.
the 3cx software itself is not free and only works on windows 7 or higher, although i was able to find a version of the 3cx software that is free and does work on windows xp. we'll have to see if it allows for the above functionality or not.
so, maybe i can get this to work, after all.
i need to eat, right now. we'll get back to this a little later.
5:44
yeah, the software is just a basic softphone like microsip - there's no management console, no server running, nowhere to add a phone.
but, now that i have the 8.5 version firmware, i can try to flash it on to the phone and see if it connects through the nat or not. it's supposed to.
6:14
i'm going to need to buy some more oil for my bicycle chain, soon.
hope it's not too expensive.
i'm looking forward to the extra $100 attached to the quarterly gst checks, though.
7:50
if gas is expensive, i guess you'll have to do without, huh?
7:52
indeed, it's a very sad day for finland, who has just unwittingly signed up to be a sacrificial lamb for the nazis in washington, and which will be utterly ruined by this time next year - on washington's insistence. somebody needs to break russia's fall, and finland just volunteered to take the direct hit.
if you're in finland, i'd advise you leave. unlike ukraine, finland's population is located in a very small area. saturation bombing will be less difficult, and an occupation will be far easier.
8:00
i will say this again: nobody should feel bad for what is about to happen to finland, and nobody should stand with them, in their upcoming time of need. by aligning with the west, they are turning their backs on their heritage and their history. they have become traitors to their own traditions, and they deserve to be annihilated for it.
8:35
monday, may 16, 2022
tuesday, may 17, 2022
i mentioned that the phone cannot pick up the tftp server on the virtual subnet created by the virtual dhcp server in xp, that it needs to have the tftp server running on the same subnet as the laptop. i spent some time this morning experimenting with whether i could get around it by using ip aliasing, but that seems to be incorrect.
however, now that i'm realizing that i can assign multiple ip addresses to the same device - something i've never done before or realized was even possible - the premise of installing a pbx server is no longer so absurd, if i can get a freepbx binary that will run on windows as a service. i should be able to run both the tftp server and the freepbx service on the 90s laptop. i think.
but, i cannot run anything on windows xp, so i'm going to upgrade to vista, at least to see if it works. if it does, i might consider moving to linux on the 90s laptop.
i'll have a more interesting post shortly.
9:00
i was thinking about this.
i don't agree with doug ford on really anything at all. in a random list of 100 statements, we might have the same views on 4 or 5. and, i'm not exaggerating - i've done these tests before with conservatives, and i'm really across the board diametrically opposed to them.
but, i don't think that doug ford is evil. i just think he's wrong.
conversely, i may agree with upwards of 60-70% of justin trudeau's political positions, but i have little doubt that he's rotten to the core, as a human being, and irreformable, on top of it.
9:42
so, who's the lesser evil?
it's not remotely clear.
9:44
wednesday, may 18, 2022
i was hoping to get a narrative update in by now that explained how i got the phone set up, but i keep...
i keep having ideas. maybe this doesn't work out in the end, but i feel i need to keep trying, so long as i keep having ideas.
vista is barely usable on the 90s laptop and i haven't been able to get it to behave the way i wanted it to, but i'm convinced at this point that i just don't have the right network topology in place, and it really ought to work if i could get the connections right. i keep pointing out that i don't know why this isn't easy because it seems as though it ought to be. i can get it to pick up a separate tftp server and i can get it to pick up an ip address on a virtual dhcp server, but i don't know how to connect that virtual ip to the internet without sending it back through the address it came from, which windows doesn't want to do. what i wanted to do last night was install freeswitch, but that doesn't even work on vista, and the laptop would not be capable of doing much with any sort of virtualization.
but, everything i'm reading about this tells me two things:
1) this would probably be as easy as i want it to be, if i'd just use the wireless adapter. yes, the 90s laptop has a wireless adapter - it's the size of a piece of bread, and probably radiates pure cancer. it has been removed, along with the wireless adapters in the two hp laptops. my pcs do not have wireless cards. i don't want a wireless network, though - i've gone to great lengths to avoid one.
2) i could use ics natively if i had a second nic.
now, i was hoping to use the loopback adapter as a dhcp server, but i'd have to find a way to encapsulate the phone inside windows first, it seems. it won't pick it up through the switch. in the process of uninstalling it, though, i noticed this device in device manager:
texas instruments pci-1400 cardbus controller
yes. i have a laptop with a cardbus controller. and, the battery even still works.
i knew there was a weird slot in the machine, and thought it was for an ancient type of card reader (for use with ancient phones and cameras, no doubt), and that is what cardbus was for, but on googling exactly what this thing is, i realized i can put a nic in it.
if i understand correctly, the second nic in the laptop would let me plug the device directly into the laptop, which would allow me to bridge the connection to the router. if this works the way i think it does, it should let me use windows to do proper port forwarding using the firewall - something i can't do well on my cheap, ancient dlink router. it will also help me understand the traffic between the phone and the server better.
cardbus nic adapters are inexpensive, and i think it's a good addition to the laptop, which is unfortunately then reduced to behaving as an appliance. but, i mean, that's fine - the second nic will also be helpful if i do decide to go with linux, i believe, and even if the phone works properly on the switch with linux.
so, i'm not done with this yet. i want to see if i can get it to read a virtual dns, and even i can get a virtual gateway. but, i think the problem is that i'm trying to use a single nic as a two-way device and windows does not actually allow for such things.
so, i'm about to buy an ethernet cardbus controller for an evo 8300c, but i should be able to see if it works first by trying to bridge the connection with the usb to rj-45 i bought for the dell, and which just crossed my mind as a troubleshooting option at the moment.
if this doesn't work, the seller has agreed to accept the item before june 1st. so, i've got a few days to work it out.
1:14
so, i'm on the thinkpad for the moment as the usb to ethernet cable is being used for the 90s laptop. unfortunately, whether you signed up for it or not, the more time you spend doing things like this means the more that you have to get it right, lest it all be in vain. i have to justify wasting the time.
i've stated before that i have no relevant education, experience or useful training working with any sort of networking. you might have to answer a couple of stupid multiple choice questions about network layers on a first year comp sci exam, but it's of no actual use or application in the real world. as a musician/blogger, networking is not something i've had to figure out on my own, or spent any time playing with, in my spare time. i've really never done anything like this before. so, i have absolutely no idea what i'm doing, and am rather relying on general technical intuition. if there's some useful outcome here, it may be that i have the opportunity to teach myself how these devices work, but how useful that actually is is up for debate.
the network sharing worked with the second adapter connected. sort of. it connects, but it's behind a very oppressive firewall that i don't appear to be able to turn off. the default is that all access to the virtual subnet is strictly restricted; you have to tell ics what ports and protocols to open, as everything is closed, by default. the device uses a random high number port to dial out and then listens on it, so i'd have to write in 30,000 exceptions, one by one, using the windows gui. if that's even right. this is what it means to say a device doesn't work well behind a nat.
what i was hoping was that connecting through windows would give me more control over the packet routing, not less - and, maybe it might, if i can teach myself what the options are. but, right now, it seems like i've just put myself behind two nats instead of one.
what are some more approaches?
1) well, i'm using the windows ics and getting annoyed by the restrictive defaults. maybe i have a less restrictive option. i mean, i can connect using microsip on the same computer; why can't i connect using a voip phone behind the same nat? is it the second nat?
2) what i see in wireshark is that the packets go from the phone out of the router and don't come back. i don't get responses from ntp (although i did this morning) and i don't get responses from voip.ms. voip.ms responds to register requests by microsip on high ntp ports. worse, despite many tutorials on the topic, i do not seem to be able to change the range of ntp ports used by the device, which are not in the range used by voip.ms.
3) so, i need to forward the ports in a complicated way that neither my router, nor windows firewall can do. worse, i don't have the resources in vista on this 90s laptop to do it, nor am i sure exactly what needs to be done.
so, what are some tasks for the night, then?
1) i'm going to need to go back down to xp. if installing vista was intended as a proof of concept, it's very clear that the 90s laptop simply cannot handle the operating system.
2) can i get wireshark to work on the router, or am i stuck with the limitations of it? it seems like the packets from voip.ms to the phone are being blocked by the router but that the packets from voip.ms to microsip are not. why would that be? is it because the phone is sending out bad headers?
3) would it be more helpful to use a different virtual router and try to bind it to the lan (which goes to the router via a switch) and therefore bypass the filtering in windows? or can i do this using the command line?
see, it should be clear that i have the background to figure this out, but i don't have the direct knowledge. if i can prove that the basic problem is that the phone is sending bad packets, i'll have to either find a way to modify them by putting some (virtual) device in between or give up.
i don't want to waste my time on this, but i already have, and i don't want it to have been all for nought. i need to either prove it's really impossible or figure it out and move on.
21:52
something else i had to do last night was fix the hinge on the thinkpad. i've been thinking about getting a monitor for it, recently. you don't want to open and close these cheap chromebooks too often.
what seems to have happened is that the plastic that the screws that connected the hinges in place were connected to shattered (i don't know how that happened, but i wonder if this machine was tampered with when i was out), which meant that the metal hinge was physically moving back and forth with the screen, on the side with the power. the problem with this is that (1) the chassis will break, eventually, as there is a hinge pushing on it and (2) the power button is in danger of being damaged. on this particular laptop, the power is not connected via wires or anything so the button is unlikely to get seriously damaged. however, the more the chassis gets demented out of place, the more likely the thing won't be able to turn on.
i don't remember dropping it, but that kind of damage would have to be from it being dropped or something dropping on it. it looked like somebody took a hammer to the corner with the hinge on it. like, the plastic was shattered into little pieces that fell out when i opened it up.
what i had to do was take the whole thing apart and just rip out the bulk of the hinge with a pair of wire cutters and kind of tuck the rest of it away; ripping out the entire hinge would dislodge the video out. what that means is that it's not as sturdily held together but also that there isn't a piece of metal recklessly pushing against the chassis every time the device opens and closes. the solution is to just not close the lid.
i'm also going to get a new keyboard for it, because it's inexpensive and it seems to otherwise be fine, besides the dead battery, which is unfortunately normal and which i think is actually bullshit. i think the battery would come back if i reprogrammed the board. that is, i think the chip in the board is telling me the perfectly good battery is dead, in an attempt to get me to buy a new chromebook.
23:15
my inverter also came in today, so i should be able to check to see if i can save the actual vista machine or not, as i take it off the 90s laptop. again, i just picked it up and it seems like somebody has taken it apart and then did a shitty job of putting it back together again. i have strenuously avoided disassembling this laptop. we'll see what happens....
i wish i understood what stupid reason it is that the police have for breaking all of my computers. this is going to come out in the end and they're going to give me millions of dollars for it. but, in the short term, i just wish i understood what they're looking for. i don't know what the point of bugging all of my laptops is, unless they think that i'm secretly communicating with vladimit putin.
23:30
now, to answer the first question - can i inspect traffic to and from the router? sure - if i put a sniffer between the modem and the router. well, i have enough laptops to try, right? apparently, i'd need to use a hub rather than a switch.
i need to shower and i'll come back to this in a few hours.
23:34
so, it seems like a local firewall setting was blocking the ntp server and turning off windows firewall altogether entirely resolved the problem.
if i could tell ics to unblock everything by default....
23:56
thursday, may 19, 2022
btw, in researching this, i'm starting to see message board posts that say things like "17 years ago".
that's a little surreal. internet time isn't supposed to go that far back.
you're going to eventually see message boards posts from 20, 30, 50, 100 years ago.
0:01
so, i stopped to eat, watched the debates, passed out and it's the morning already.
none of the candidates are remotely acceptable for public office. if i could vote against all of them, i would. del duca sounded like a fascist, ford is obviously running as obama (and is just as much of an empty suit), horwath is an absolute phony and mike schreiner makes glenn greenwald look straight, in comparison. on the one issue that is of importance to me this cycle - promising not to go back into lockdown - they all presented unacceptable positions that are really just reflections of differing levels of fascism. ford actually had to defend himself against not having enough lockdowns, despite the fact that ontario has had a freedom index comparable to saudi arabia's over the last two years. we've had longer and stricter lockdowns than almost anywhere else in the western world, and the opposition wants more lockdowns.
the lockdowns did not work and the science states very clearly that there's no reason to think they would have worked. so, it's the definition of insanity - doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
but, this is just the latest example of a developing problem, in that i am violently opposed to the bourgeois left on social issues, and violently opposed to the bourgeois right on economic issues, to the point that voting for either would be both voting against my self-interests. a vote for the tories is obviously against my economic self-interest. but, a vote for the other parties is just as much against my social self-interest. i am not about to balance this - i will not be voting. as stated previously, i will need the ruling political class to admit that the lockdowns were a mistake, that they were an infringement on the basic human rights of ontarians, that they apologize for making this mistake and that they promise that this will never happen again in this province before i even consider re-engaging in the process. this is a pre-requisite for a return to democracy in ontario.
even that isn't going to cut it, though. this basic contradiction in the contemporary political spectrum between social and economic issues is irresolvable and probably stable for the next generation or so. it is not clear to me if it is resolved by the tories moving left on economic issues or the fake left re-embracing the basic principles of liberalism on social concerns. but i'm currently at an impasse.
so, what i want to push for at this point is electoral reform to embrace the principles of direct democracy. it's gotten to that point, in the spectrum - none of these parties represent me, and they're all a threat to my self-interest, in different ways. it is not possible for me to vote for any of them and feel they will represent my interests or views in parliament. i need to be able to vote on an issue by issue basis; the lesser evil calculation is now unsolvable, and there's simply no better answer, no softer blow, to deal with.
8:39
so, i tried to plug the inverter in and i don't have the right power connector. i thought it would just connect to the laptop power supply, but it's the big style 6 pins for use with pcs, not the small style for laptops. that's not something i have siting around to swap.
i wanted to buy this as a backup tool as i suspect i will need to test more laptop screens in the future. but, if i have to spend $20 for an adapter, i'm not going to do that, i'll just take a chance on the part.
i have an external sata drive kit, so if i can find a 4-pin to mini 6-pin adapter, that should work. but, fuck.
9:40
they actually sent me a different item than i purchased, and the one i bought had the right connector. the items are otherwise technically interchangeable.
:|.
9:41
the price of this item was thirteen dollars. canadian. including shipping. i'm not returning the item.
the cord it comes with looks like one of the old 4-pin power cables you'd use with a floppy drive, but it has 6 pins instead of 4. i have sata cables, i have ide cables, i have fdd cables and i have all kinds of splitters and adapters but i've actually never seen a six pin like this before.
i can get 4 pin fdd to 4 pin molex adapters. and, there's only actually 4 wires. so, can i find a 6 pin to molex adapter?
9:49
is it some kind of european or asian cable or something?
9:52
my detour this morning was that i went to check the windows 98 computer for a cable and noticed that, again, my soundcard was unseated. why do my sound cards keep getting randomly unseated?
the cable wasn't there.
i can think of two reasons that the cops may fixate on my sound cards. the first is that they may think they can bug the card somehow and the second is that they may think i'm bugging the card. i happened to leave a sound card out on my desk, which may have led them to some false conclusions.
i've basically concluded that the cops have the mentality of young children - they think they're "investigating", but they're ultimately just driven by childish curiosity. the simple, obvious truth that i'm a musician with a lot of sound gear is not good enough, apparently. they need to investigate a sound card and try to figure out what i'm doing with it.
like, really - a cop walks into a recording studio and has to sleuth out what the sound card sitting out in it might potentially be for. because they have no fucking clue, and i'm obviously up to no good. i even have several of these strange devices, and put them in every single computer. am i using them to network the computers, and send secret messages to vladimir putin?
what was happening was that the computer was freezing on bootup, and it took me a few tries to understand it was the soundcard that wasn't seated properly. upon reseating the sound card, everything began to work properly, again. however, i kept getting a ram error message on startup, so i decided to try to swap a stick out. after all, i bought 4 backup sticks.
it turns out that the four backup sticks are all mislabeled - they all say 256 mb, but they're all 128 mb. i don't have any computers that i could use the 128 mb sticks for, so they're going to have to send me what i bought.
the pc boots and reads all of the ram, but one or more of the sticks may be a little shorty. that's ok, for now. but, i bought backups and i want them sent.
so, let me get back to the inverter, now. ugh.
15:22
mike schreiner, i don't think you're in kansas, anymore.
15:52
it's very disturbing to me that western university buckled to pressure from religious bigots in deleting the following photo from it's social media accounts:
surely, there is more support for reposting the picture than there is for taking it down, and if a campaign to have the picture removed is to be anything less than condemned by the university as bigotry and hate speech, a campaign to reinstate the picture should surely be successful.
so, i'd call on students at western to protest to have the picture reposted - and for those who called for it to be taken down to be disciplined for their bigotry and hate.
16:07
we need to stop treating muslims differently than we treat christians.
if those complaints were coming from christians, they would have been rightfully ignored. the double standard needs to end - or we're going to wake up in iran.
islam is not an ally of the queer movement, of secularism, of liberalism, of progressivism or of the left; it aligns directly with the extreme christian right. any delusions otherwise need to be jettisoned.
islam frequently promotes hate speech against queer people, and it's long past time that the left stopped looking the other way and started fighting back against it.
16:19
when white people are religious, we rightfully condemn them as idiots.
but, when brown people are religious, we shrug it off and say "that's just backwards people being primitive. we can't hold them to the same standards. let them be ignorant.".
we can and we should and we must hold them to the same standards - the double standard must come to an end.
16:36
just wait until somebody like derek sloan figures out that christianity is dead and islam is the way to go.
when that happens, we're fucked.
16:42
the turks are correctly acting in their self-interest in blocking finland from nato, but i suspect this ends with turkey out of nato, rather than with finland blocked from it.
this is a massive strategic blunder for nato, which appears to be insistent on opening a second front in the war.
16:56
the russians have historically been concerned about two things, in terms of directions:
1) they want to defend their west
2) they want to expand to the south
if turkey is aligned with germany, the russians will attack turkey, not germany, and not poland. if a broader war develops within the region, the russians will try to push it south, as that is what is in their self-interest. the whole point of turkey being in nato was to not fight a war with the russians, who at the time were backing the greeks. the entire concept of turkey is truly tenuous, at best - turkey has long been one bad war away from ceasing to exist. a contracted struggle with the russians could end with constantinople as the capital of a united greece, and much of eastern turkey absorbed by russian-aligned armenians and syrians. and, i'm sure the kurds will advance their interests, as well.
what nato is broadcasting to the turks is that they don't really give a fuck.
if the reason that the turks joined nato was to avoid fighting the russians, who nearly swallowed the turks in the last serious round of fighting, then their security position has also dramatically changed - and it's time for them to get out of nato.
the turks are right in their recalculation, while the finns are making an idiotic mistake.
the swedes are taking a more subtle position, if you listen to them. i don't think the swedes are really excited about this, but they were reliant on a finnish buffer state. now, with finland in nato, the swedes have little choice but to follow, or risk exposing themselves - potentially to an attack by nato. i mean, that's what happened to norway, in wwII. but, the swedes are also putting up some interesting conditions - they want to join nato, but they don't want bases on their soil. seems a little odd. i think the swedes would have decided differently if the finns had not made the choice for them, but here we are.
the finns are in for a rude surprise.
and, the exit of turkey from nato over fears about a hot war on their door step will be a major blow to the alliance.
17:18
friday, may 20, 2022
rebooting into windows xp instantly helped clarify what's happening, and i actually think it's because it disabled ipv6, although i also turned off alg.
so, now i'm getting a loop:
- phone tries to register
- server responds with a 401 at a high port
- phone sends back destination unreachable
- laptop tries to register
- server responds
- phone sends back destination unreachable
there's some nat-related settings at the server i can experiment with, but it seems like the phone is unable to connect to the server through the nat because the right port isn't opening, which is preventing authentication from occurring. so, i need to find a way to get all of these ports open in the ics, somehow, to allow free communication between the phone and the server.
how does that compare to microsip?
the answer is that microsip only uses port 1121.
so, what happens if i try to fix that on the phone? the answer is that it doesn't take.
well, what if i just turn off nat then? it just doesn't authenticate...
so, here is where the need for a middle piece of software becomes apparent: that middle piece of software needs to handle complex port mapping and needs to potentially act as an authentication layer. i'm going to guess that the phone - from about 2005 - will not be allowed to log directly into the server, today. and, there's your irresolvable contradiction. i'd need something like freepbx.
can i use a different virtual router instead of ics, specifically one that has less port restrictions?
1:29
ok, i'm now actually surprisingly getting it to authenticate, but it's authenticating the packets from the address on the first subnet. so, it would work if the phone was a program running on windows xp, but it can't get to the phone behind the ics firewall.
so, i really need a different virtual router.
1:44
i've been dealing with a dry cough the last few days, no other symptoms.
seems deliciously covid-y.
i did a test last year and i didn't have it, so i still don't actually know if i've caught it or not yet. free antibody testing would be a useful election promise. i'd get tested for antibodies, so i know...
but, i want to catch it repeatedly in the wild so my body knows what it is and it isn't "novel" anymore. in my age range (early 40s), that's how to maximize my self-interest. as i don't want to run into this for the first time when i'm 70. i want catching and beating covid to be routine, by that age. that's a part of the reason i'm irritated by the government's decision to try to stop all spread, rather than just protect the decrepit - it runs the risk of turning the healthy into the decrepit.
my mother, for example, is in her mid 60s. she's a drug addict, so her liver is in bad shape. if she can beat it at 64, she might not beat it at 67. it's a really crucial time window. she got vaccinated, but she still wants to maximize exposure while she can. if she's not able to build immunity (through exposure) and gets killed by the thing in the next 2-3 years, there's a good argument that the government is responsible for denying her access to antibody-building activity while she is healthy enough to succeed at it.
so, i hope the cough is covid, and i hope i catch it over and over again, so it's a routine process of flushing it out, like any other coronavirus. and, i deeply resent the government for trying to take my right of natural immunity away from me, to prolong the technical existence of the already dead. it's entirely backwards, logically.
2:20
ok, no - i think i confused myself. i think that was the softphone that i forgot to turn off. oops.
2:42
so, can the senate match the $40 billion in handouts to ukrainian thugs with another $40 billion to fight the war on poverty, or the war on homelessness?
*crickets*
5:37
i mean, i guess it's a good thing that biden personally balanced the budget by stopping all that tax money from being wasted on things that might benefit america.
now, he can take the money he saved by short-thrifting americans and hand it to ukraine, instead.
where else would he have gotten $40 billion dollars from on short notice, besides money saved by not spending money on infrastructure, carbon transition, health care, etc
this is the benefit of good fiscal prudence, to ensure you have money put aside for a rainy day, in case you need it....a few weeks after the budget. now, instead of the military only getting 70% of the budget, they can get 90% of the budget. brilliant!
5:54
ok, i think i've figured it out by looking at the wireshark output for microsip. it's a handshake. i guess that was obvious.
the first 401 is expected, then the phone needs to send something back, then the 200 comes in, along with a notify request.
the laptop is responding to the 401 with a host unreachable, so i really do need to open those ports up.
6:07
ok.
it seems like i can open the ports just using a loop in a script. that's relatively easy.
i want to essentially send all traffic on the virtual subnet to port 5060.
6:20
so, i have indeed written a very simple dos script that will forward ports on the router's ip from 40000 to 65535 to the phone's ip on the secondary nat at port 5060. that should send all traffic from the server to the phone.
but, it's going to take a while to finish.
10:24
saturday, may 21, 2022
if you thought that those that were arguing that ms. lich was a prisoner of conscience or that the charges are politically motivated were exaggerating, this is your smoking gun - clearly, the intent of the crown is to suppress ms. lich's political activities, and her freedom of expression.
it is a scary time in this country, when politically appointed justices are forced to reject politically motivated actions by the crown, in order to uphold the sanctity of the rule of law. that is an algorithm for fascism.
this woman behaved courageously in the face of overwhelming state oppression and is being acknowledged for it. that is a legitimate expression of her rights in any free society. the crown must adjust it's attitude on this matter, at once.
0:50
no, i wouldn't support any sort of plan to lower gas taxes, at all. i think that gas prices should remain high, that if you want to pollute then you should have to pay for it.
a cap on gas prices is not a coherent policy. gas prices will continue to rise, as the carbon tax increases and as supplies dwindle. gas taxes should be increased, not lowered or suspended.
the focus by our political class on lowering prices rather than on carbon transition demonstrates their foolishness and short-sightedness. a pox on all of their houses for their rank opportunism and base stupidity.
3:08
by not using gas, i will receive $400 extra this year from the carbon tax program. i will not spend that on gas. that income is set to increase in future years.
that is the answer to affordability issues regarding the price of gas - use less, and be rewarded.
3:14
we are twenty years past due for this.
you have to stop whining about oil prices and change your fucking habits.
you have to fucking change. and, you will be dragged into it kicking and screaming, if you must be.
3:16
this was a long time ago, now.
nothing has changed.
you expect short-sightedness from the tories, but the liberals and ndp should be embarrassed of themselves.
3:28
this article gets the idea backwards, but it pulls out something that's been understood for quite a while - doug ford, like his brother before him, is exceedingly popular amongst recent immigrants and the reason is that they overwhelmingly prefer the bbq-eating, lineman-attitude machismo, and especially when contrasted against women, intellectuals or gays.
these voters will not vote for a pierre polievre, because he's a nerd. that was the problem o'toole and scheer both had. they'd vote for a jason kenney, because he's a man. they don't participate in political conventions.
but, they are not liberals that are toying with the conservatives; they are longstanding conservatives, the heart and core of ford nation, that somewhat oddly vote liberal federally. the question isn't how much longer they will vote for ford (they are ford's base.) but how much longer they will vote liberal, federally.
the policies being discussed are extreme right, conservative policies; i do not think they hurt o'toole, so much as i think he came off as too much of an egghead with recent immigrant voters that want less intellectual candidates. that same issue will hurt del luca.
so long as the liberals continue to run and govern on the right, they will remain competitive with these recent immigrant voters. but, they need to be conscious of image and the new dominant culture in right-wing, immigrant-majority toronto. somebody like chrystia freeland, who is certainly more than right-wing enough, will not be competitive with ford's base, and will cause the federal liberals to lose toronto - and potentially never get it back.
the liberals tend to default towards fake intellectuals and want to present themselves as the smart party. that worked in the old toronto. in the new toronto, they will need to run a populist, and should avoid running women.
del luca's policy of running more women was not strategically well informed and will hurt their chances amongst recent immigrant voters who do not believe that women should work or hold positions of power.
this is the new ontario.
5:30
doug ford will win big because he's the clear preference of recent immigrants in toronto, who are a powerful voting bloc in that city.
5:41
you will recall that the conservatives led the polling, sometimes substantively, for much of the last federal election. it didn't convert, for whatever reason, but that is evidence that it is a matter of time before toronto becomes a conservative stronghold, due to widespread immigration to the city from people that come from conservative cultures.
5:45
when was the last time toronto elected a left-wing mayor?
john tory is certainly a conservative, and so was rob ford. you have to go back to 2006, which was the same year that stephen harper was elected and the country's immigration policy dramatically changed.
it is not likely that a left of centre candidate will become mayor of toronto again any time in the near future.
6:07
i got it.
it works.
now, i have to type it up.
it turns out i was just missing a file in the firmware package and that the phone doesn't authenticate correctly (through my router) unless you connect it over tcp, rather than the default udp. there's no fancy software required to get this thing to operate, and i don't have to connect it through the windows ics to evade the nat - i can just plug it directly into the switch, so long as it is communicating using tcp.
9:57
i had to sleep.
it has nothing to do with enabling or disabling nat, opening ports or setting external addresses in the header - which is what the internet's analysis of the device is incorrectly strictly focused on.
these devices have been unfairly smeared as "not nat friendly", but they're really just misunderstood. yes, they're designed to run behind a nat and not connect to the internet - which is why they use udp by default. but, you can very easily tell them to use tcp, if you want to connect to a remote voip server with them, instead.
so, i was sitting there trying to figure out why a handshake between a local phone and a remote server wasn't working, when the phone was trying to connect over udp. that will never work.
this succinctly explains the problem:
17:50
this really isn't what i wanted; it doesn't connect to a softphone, so i'm losing functionality. however, it's a definite upgrade over the noisy microphone that i had to use for divisional court. the receiver should dramatically cut down on environmental noise, which should be ideal for 90% of applications.
what if i want to record the conversation, though?
now that i understand how this works a little better, i think i want to also get a cheap headset for use with microsip. i intend to actually set this phone up in the other room, if i don't need to drive it with a laptop.
i will still need to use the xp laptop to run a tftp server, but it doesn't need to run anything like pbx. to be clear: voip.ms is itself running freepbx. so, i don't need two freepbxes running, and it might not actually work well.
18:04
sunday, may 22, 2022
while i don't give a fuck about ukrainian or finnish independence, as neither country has a convincing argument as to why they are different from russia, there is a clear historical obligation held by western culture to protect the distinctly different greece from the clearly imperialist turkey, a country with a habit of carrying out repeated, vicious genocides against it's indigenous peoples to try to maintain it's colonial footprint on a continent it is, itself, not indigenous to.
3:17
i'm sure that mr. erdogan is aware that the west has a special connection to greece, as it considers it it's cultural origin point.
3:29
it's easy to look at a map today and not understand that something like 30% of russia is historically finnish-speaking, and that the number is close to 50% if you look just at european russia. finland, as it exists today, is essentially a swedish colony on top of a russian province. while russia may claim it's cultural heritage in the slavic south, it is a selective history.
it is true that berlin was initially a polish town, before the heathen poles were driven east by saxon crusaders. it is also true that moscow is located in a region that is historically finnish.
while i acknowledge the existence of the swedish colony in the west of finland, i cannot separate between finnish and russian identity - that makes no sense to me.
4:07
it's not just that finland was historically a part of russia, it's that the ethnic, linguistic and cultural grouping that finland belongs to exists almost entirely in the north of russia. finland, unlike almost every other language in europe, is not indo-european. along with estonian, it belongs to a culture that occupies the core of the the north of russia, up to the urals. if you separated that from russia, russia would no longer exist.
in that sense, finland is russia; finand is west russia or, as the linguists say, much of russia is inhabited by eastern finns.
russia may not have a claim to the entirety of finland, but it would be correct to view finnish attempts to align with nato as an insolent separatist movement, and it would have grounds to be concerned about it destabilizing the kola peninsula, or parts of siberia.
4:17
what is finnish popular opinion?
well, don't listen to the media, to start.
i would expect that the urban areas to the west, which are swedish colonies, will align with the west. these areas have the money, the wealth, the education, etc. such is colonialism.
but, i would expect that if you go out into the countryside and talk to average finns what they'll tell you is that they have a strong cultural connection to karelia, and to russian identity.
finland has been through this before - look up the winter war, where the finns found themselves aligned with the nazis, in order to expel the soviets. finland is generally not considered to have bean an axis power, because historians have been empathetic to their nationalist struggles, and have argued they had no interest in the broader war in europe. the truth is that it was under a willing nazi alliance and occupation and that the nazis relied on finnish support on their march towards leningrad.
4:36
that was an unorganized few weeks that has left a lot of my things unorganized and a number of ideas open in my mind, but the phone now works. so, i need to collect my thoughts and move on.
what i'm going to do is post a single how-to post that is based on existing walkthroughs and corrects the mistakes in them. then, i'm going to need to write a big narrative post that pulls together the ideas of the last few weeks and helps me refocus, as i reorganize both my space and my thoughts.
i didn't ask for that project, but that's what it was. the solution is relatively trivial to implement, but it was relatively difficult to get there. i tend to go into high coffee and low organization mode when i get these things thrust on me, and may not want to sleep much until i get it. so, now i have to undo the damage.
11:25
some of them are better than others, but i keep going back to them because they remain relevant.
copernicus was right.
22:38
monday, may 23, 2022
how to connect a 7941 cisco voip phone directly to voip.ms from behind a consumer-grade nat.
this is the write-up explaining how to connect a 7941 cisco voip phone directly to voip.ms from behind a consumer-grade nat.
rtfm
basic research on tftp
now that you're a little familiar with the phone, i'm going to direct you to the following video to get an understanding of what a tftp server is and how to upload or reset the firmware:
the video is helpful, but the steps i needed to follow were a little bit different. so, i'm posting it as a reference but i'm not suggesting you follow exactly the same steps - unless you're actually trying to connect to a local pbx, which we are not doing. rather, we are connecting to a remote pbx, and from behind a nat.
factory reset
first, i would advise purposefully bricking your phone by following the factory reset instructions at the following site:
Generic factory reset procedure:
- Press and hold #, power cycle the phone
- When an LED starts to flash, release #, and enter:
• Hard Reset (format flash): 3491672850*#
The phone will display
Upgradingand erase its configuration.
downloading firmware
i need to start with a word of warning, and i do think this is a reasonable suggestion, given that you're trying to use a phone from c. 2005 - the procedure i'm going to describe requires two network interfaces connected via internet connection sharing, if attempted in xp. xp will not pick up your phone if you try to connect it to the computer using a vlan, a loopback adapter or a switch. xp will always assume that it is intended to be a client to anything you plug it into, unless you go out of your way to tell it otherwise; newer versions of windows allow for more intuitive, plug and play type two-way networking. i was able to get a second connection on my xp laptop using a usb-to-rj45 connector, and i had to plug the phone into that connector (and the nic into the router, in my case via a switch) in order to get it to pick up the connection. conversely, i was able to get windows 7 to pick up the phone as a client by simply plugging it into the back of the computer, and letting it connect to a dismantled vlan that hadn't been destroyed yet. i'm going to provide both sets of directions that i used to connect the phone to the respective operating systems, but just keep in mind that the point is that the tftp server has to bind to an open connection. the tftp server essentially piggybacks on to an existing connection, so you just have to have an existing connection, but this isn't obvious if you only have one nic, nor is it clear what to do next when faced with the reality of having one nic and needing to set up a dhcp server on your xp computer or your air gapped windows 7 computer.
but, before you can upload the firmware, you need to have firmware first.
the video suggests using the files at firewall.cx, but there is a strong suggestion online that they do not work behind a nat. it is not clear to me if my solution will work with the 9.3 firmware files or not, because i downgraded to 8.5 as a troubleshooting step and do not want to upgrade to see, but it would seem as though the problem was misdiagnosed by the internet community and, as such, the solution may not require downgrading, after all. if somebody wants to play with that, feel free to let me know the outcome.
regardless, the firmware i am using is not the one in the video but is rather this one:
3cx is a commercial provisioning provider, and if you want to avoid headaches then you may even consider buying their product. as it is, they are providing a safe download link to a firmware version that is no longer hosted by cisco. i have that file archived, but let us hope 3cx continues to provide it for free.
take that file and unzip it somewhere. next, go to where you unzipped it and immediately delete cisco_dialplan.html.
there are numerous walkthroughs online, but they all get the basic setting required to get the phone to work wrong and are all full of comments by people complaining that the answers don't actually work. if you want this to work, do not follow any of the other walkthroughs on the internet. however, i started by following these walkthroughs, and used their files as starting points, so i am going to properly reference them, as i correct the errors within them.
it is easiest to start with this walkthrough because it provides three accessible files:
you can read through the discussion on nat if you'd like, but i would advise you not to take it at all seriously in any way, except to realize that this is an office phone. it is certainly true that you don't want office phones connecting out to the internet, and it is likewise true that the examples on the forums of people not being able to connect to remote servers have to do with the phone's networking settings preventing them from doing it, but this external ip/nat thing did not fix my problem, did not fix the poster's problem and doesn't really seem to have anything to do with it. i was even able to open 30000 ports for the phone, which was sitting behind ics, using a batch script; it made no difference in resolving what is not a port forwarding error but a handshake error. in hindsight, it shouldn't have been expected to, because the error was that i was trying to complete a handshake over udp, not that i was unable to reach ports over tcp.
to continue with an actual working solution, download and extract each of those three files to the same directory that you extracted the 3cx download to. keeping in mind that you will eventually have to dial 1 to dial out, there is no reason to alter the dial plan or xmldefault files. the sepmac file will be where the user-configurable entries will be edited. and you should immediately change the name of the file so that it contains the mac address, as explained in the video and the forum post.
there is one more file required for the firmware. go to the following webpage and search for sip.conf:
create a new txt file in your directory that you unzipped everything to, paste the following contents into it and save it as sip.conf:
udpbindaddr=0.0.0.0
tcpenable=yes
tcpbindaddr=0.0.0.0
callcounter=yes
transport=udp, tcp
this enables your phone to use tcp as a transport protocol, which allows it to log into an external web server. otherwise, your phone will try to log into voip.ms using udp and the handshake will never complete - some intermediate device, like a virtual nat (ics), will send back a "destination unreachable" response, instead.
uploading firmware to your phone
a) using windows 7 or 10
when i bought the phone, i intended to use it as a front-end for microsip running in windows xp on an evo n800c, so i spent quite a while trying to get it to accept an ip from windows xp, with no success. after a while, i decided i had to try it in 7 to make sure it works, and i happen to only have one wired ethernet port in my only working 7 box, so i had to be creative about getting it to bind.
if you have two ethernet ports or an ethernet port and a wireless port, then it should be straight-forward like in the video. if you don't, you'll need to trick your computer into making it look like it has an open connection.
the way i got it to work was to right click on my lan connection, go to properties and select configure on the network card (in my case, an integrated intel card). i then went to the vlan tab and added a vlan. i then restarted the computer. after rebooting, i then went back and deleted the vlan i just created. this vlan will disappear on another reboot, but is still available as a ghost binding for the tftp server while the machine is on, and until the machine turns off. now, plug your phone in and the icon should spin rather than say "unplugged". i then went to my normal lan connection and changed it to a static ip and continued to bind it to tftp, like in the video. i would suggest you disable the tftp client. now, your phone should pick up an ip address from the dhcp server running in tftp and then connect to the tftp server. to flash the phone, you want to push # (on the phone) on startup until the lights flash, then type 123456789*0#.
b) using windows xp sp3
you need two physical connections for this to work. i used the ethernet port in my laptop (connected to the switch) as the local area network connection and then connected the phone to a usb-to-rj45 connector, which installed as a secondary adapter. the trick is to connect the two adapters using internet connection sharing, which turns the usb-to-rj45 connector into a virtual nat. your phone will then pick up an ip address from the laptop, which is now a server. you can then bind your virtual tftp server to the virtual subnet.
first, i'd suggest you just turn all software firewalls running in xp off for a second, altogether.
next, you create the internet sharing connection by going to the advanced tab of the adapter properties and clicking the appropriate box. you will then need to restart your computer; when it comes back up, you'll notice that the second connector has ip address 192.168.0.1, and is acting like a virtual router. your phone should pick up an address on that subnet (192.168.0.x), meaning you won't need to set up a dhcp server in tftp.
i would advise installing an alias on the virtual ics router to bind the tftp server to, as it keeps the concept conceptually cleaner; you can have your virtual router at 192.168.0.1, and your tftp server at something like 192.168.0.2. you can do this by entering the advanced tab of the tcp/ip properties in the adapter (lan) properties and adding a new address for the tftp server to bind to. you should then be able to reset the phone by holding down # on power up and keying in 123456789*0# when the lights flash - your phone will get the ip from the virtual nat and connect to the tftp server on the virtual subnet.
----
note that your phone now has the firmware on it, but it probably doesn't have the right configuration file and you probably don't have a long term tftp solution. so, we're now going to disconnect everything and put it back together in a more stable way.
giving your phone access to the wan
now, plug your phone directly into your router and make sure it can get an ip address from it. personally, i plug my phone into a switch that connects to a router on one side and a laptop (the evo n800c) for the tftp server on the other side. in the router's firmware, i use mac filtering (meaning i restrict which physical devices are allowed to connect to the network, behind the nat) and i have a very restricted pool of static ip addresses on a dhcp server that only hands out addresses to identified devices. so, if you come to my house and try to plug your cell phone or laptop into my network, it won't work until the router knows your mac address and i open up an exception in the dhcp list. so, on my network, the phone has a static ip address set in the router's firmware, and assigned to the phone's mac address. you will set up your network as you will, but the phone needs to be able to access the wan and needs an ip address from the router.
setting up the stable tftp server
you need to have some computer running a tftp server on the same subnet as the phone every time you turn this phone on. this is entirely absurd, but it's just how it works.
whether you are using a windows 7 or xp machine, the steps are now the same - disable whatever sharing scheme you had (either by rebooting the windows 7 machine with the vlan off or by disabling internet connection sharing on your xp machine and unplugging the secondary adapter, if it's not hard-wired) and just plug it directly into your router, in order to get an ip address on the same subnet as the phone. in my case, i keep all of my pcs off the internet, entirely; i will be using the evo n800c laptop as the tftp server, connected into the switch, as described before. this laptop has a static ip address on the subnet, as assigned by the router, to the laptop's mac address.
while you may just use this static ip address for your tftp server, i would again advise that you use an alias for it using the same procedure as before. that way, your computer and tftp servers will not have the same ip address on the subnet, and you can readily identify between them, if you need to analyze any traffic. broadly speaking, i would suggest that each virtual device ought to be given a unique alias on any subnet, real or virtual, as a best practice.
if you are using an alias, or if you are not, you can now bind the tftp server to the computer's active ip address on the subnet by using the steps in the video or in the forum post.
hardcoding addresses into your phone
this step will not apply to you if you are using dhcp servers to assign random ip addresses on the fly, but you may find yourself repeatedly reconfiguring your device if you choose that path, which is the opposite of the intent of the technology. based on my (limited) experience with this device, i would strongly suggest that you assign it a static ip and assign your tftp server to a static ip as well.
to enter the settings, push the settings button. if you don't know where that is, read the fucking manual.
now, push **# to unlock the settings on your phone. if you have just uploaded the stock config file, your phone will not have a password on it. yet.
- go to network configuration, then go to ipv4 configuration and change dhcp to disabled.
- now, go down to the ip address and type in the address you decided should be assigned to it by the router.
- below that is the subnet mask. perhaps your phone entered a subnet mask automatically, and perhaps it did not; you will need to look up how to do that if you don't know how, but you'd better enter in the right value.
- default router should be the ip address of your router, on the subnet
- dns server is probably the same as default router
- now, go down to tftp server and enter the alias to the computer's ip address, or the computer's ip address itself, if you insist on being unorganized.
- press save
- press **# again to lock the phone
- press **#** to reboot the phone
at this stage, your phone should correctly get an ip address from your router, and you should get an error when it loads data from the tftp server, but you need to be sure that it can connect to both of these external devices before you move forwards. if you're not sure, check the log messages in the tftp server; don't worry if there's error messages, just make sure it's actually connected.
updating the configuration file
i started with the configuration file (the sepmac file) at the above forum site and made a number of changes, which are highlighted here in red.
<device>
<deviceProtocol>SIP</deviceProtocol>
<sshUserId>whatever</sshUserId>
<sshPassword>whatever</sshPassword>
<devicePool>
<dateTimeSetting>
<dateTemplate>M/D/Y</dateTemplate>
<timeZone>Eastern Standard/Daylight Time</timeZone>
<ntps>
<ntp>
<name>128.138.140.44</name>
<ntpMode>Unicast</ntpMode>
</ntp>
</ntps>
</dateTimeSetting>
<callManagerGroup>
<members>
<member priority="0">
<callManager>
<ports>
<ethernetPhonePort>2000</ethernetPhonePort>
<sipPort>5060</sipPort>
<securedSipPort>5061</securedSipPort>
</ports>
<processNodeName>ip address of voip.ms proxy server</processNodeName>
</callManager>
</member>
</members>
</callManagerGroup>
</devicePool>
<sipProfile>
<sipProxies>
<backupProxy></backupProxy>
<backupProxyPort></backupProxyPort>
<emergencyProxy></emergencyProxy>
<emergencyProxyPort></emergencyProxyPort>
<outboundProxy></outboundProxy>
<outboundProxyPort></outboundProxyPort>
<registerWithProxy>true</registerWithProxy>
</sipProxies>
<sipCallFeatures>
<cnfJoinEnabled>true</cnfJoinEnabled>
<callForwardURI>x--serviceuri-cfwdall</callForwardURI>
<callPickupURI>x-cisco-serviceuri-pickup</callPickupURI>
<callPickupListURI>x-cisco-serviceuri-opickup</callPickupListURI>
<callPickupGroupURI>x-cisco-serviceuri-gpickup</callPickupGroupURI>
<meetMeServiceURI>x-cisco-serviceuri-meetme</meetMeServiceURI>
<abbreviatedDialURI>x-cisco-serviceuri-abbrdial</abbreviatedDialURI>
<rfc2543Hold>false</rfc2543Hold>
<callHoldRingback>2</callHoldRingback>
<localCfwdEnable>true</localCfwdEnable>
<semiAttendedTransfer>true</semiAttendedTransfer>
<anonymousCallBlock>1</anonymousCallBlock>
<callerIdBlocking>0</callerIdBlocking>
<dndControl>1</dndControl>
<remoteCcEnable>true</remoteCcEnable>
</sipCallFeatures>
<sipStack>
<sipInviteRetx>6</sipInviteRetx>
<sipRetx>10</sipRetx>
<timerInviteExpires>180</timerInviteExpires>
<timerRegisterExpires>180</timerRegisterExpires>
<timerRegisterDelta>5</timerRegisterDelta>
<timerKeepAliveExpires>120</timerKeepAliveExpires>
<timerSubscribeExpires>120</timerSubscribeExpires>
<timerSubscribeDelta>5</timerSubscribeDelta>
<timerT1>500</timerT1>
<timerT2>4000</timerT2>
<maxRedirects>70</maxRedirects>
<remotePartyID>false</remotePartyID>
<userInfo>None</userInfo>
</sipStack>
<autoAnswerTimer>1</autoAnswerTimer>
<autoAnswerAltBehavior>false</autoAnswerAltBehavior>
<autoAnswerOverride>true</autoAnswerOverride>
<transferOnhookEnabled>false</transferOnhookEnabled>
<enableVad>false</enableVad>
<preferredCodec>g711ulaw</preferredCodec>
<dtmfAvtPayload>101</dtmfAvtPayload>
<dtmfDbLevel>3</dtmfDbLevel>
<dtmfOutofBand>avt</dtmfOutofBand>
<alwaysUsePrimeLine>false</alwaysUsePrimeLine>
<alwaysUsePrimeLineVoiceMail>false</alwaysUsePrimeLineVoiceMail>
<kpml>3</kpml>
<natReceivedProcessing></natReceivedProcessing>
<natEnabled>true</natEnabled>
<natAddress></natAddress>
<phoneLabel>name displayed on phone</phoneLabel>
<stutterMsgWaiting>1</stutterMsgWaiting>
<callStats>false</callStats>
<silentPeriodBetweenCallWaitingBursts>10</silentPeriodBetweenCallWaitingBursts>
<disableLocalSpeedDialConfig>false</disableLocalSpeedDialConfig>
<startMediaPort>10001</startMediaPort>
<stopMediaPort>20000</stopMediaPort>
<sipLines>
<line button="1">
<featureID>9</featureID>
<featureLabel>name of line 1</featureLabel>
<proxy>USECALLMANAGER</proxy>
<port>5060</port>
<name>##VOIPMSUSER##</name>
<displayName>call display name</displayName>
<autoAnswer>
<autoAnswerEnabled>2</autoAnswerEnabled>
</autoAnswer>
<callWaiting>3</callWaiting>
<authName>##VOIPMSUSER##</authName>
<authPassword>##VOIPMSPASS##</authPassword>
<sharedLine>false</sharedLine>
<messageWaitingLampPolicy>1</messageWaitingLampPolicy>
<messagesNumber>*97</messagesNumber>
<ringSettingIdle>4</ringSettingIdle>
<ringSettingActive>5</ringSettingActive>
<contact>##VOIPMSUSER##</contact>
<forwardCallInfoDisplay>
<callerName>true</callerName>
<callerNumber>true</callerNumber>
<redirectedNumber>false</redirectedNumber>
<dialedNumber>true</dialedNumber>
</forwardCallInfoDisplay>
</line>
</sipLines>
<voipControlPort>5061</voipControlPort>
<dscpForAudio>184</dscpForAudio>
<ringSettingBusyStationPolicy>0</ringSettingBusyStationPolicy>
<dialTemplate>dialplan.xml</dialTemplate>
</sipProfile>
<commonProfile>
<phonePassword>password for phone</phonePassword>
<backgroundImageAccess>true</backgroundImageAccess>
<callLogBlfEnabled>2</callLogBlfEnabled>
</commonProfile>
<loadInformation>SIP41.8-5-4S</loadInformation>
<vendorConfig>
<disableSpeaker>false</disableSpeaker>
<disableSpeakerAndHeadset>false</disableSpeakerAndHeadset>
<pcPort>0</pcPort>
<settingsAccess>1</settingsAccess>
<garp>0</garp>
<voiceVlanAccess>0</voiceVlanAccess>
<videoCapability>0</videoCapability>
<autoSelectLineEnable>0</autoSelectLineEnable>
<webAccess>0</webAccess>
<spanToPCPort>0</spanToPCPort>
<loggingDisplay>1</loggingDisplay>
<loadServer></loadServer>
</vendorConfig>
<versionStamp></versionStamp>
<userLocale>
<name>United_States</name>
<uid>1</uid>
<langCode>en_US</langCode>
<version>1.0.0.0-1</version>
<winCharSet>iso-8859-1</winCharSet>
</userLocale>
<deviceSecurityMode>1</deviceSecurityMode>
<authenticationURL></authenticationURL>
<directoryURL></directoryURL>
<idleURL></idleURL>
<informationURL></informationURL>
<messagesURL></messagesURL>
<proxyServerURL></proxyServerURL>
<servicesURL></servicesURL>
<dscpForSCCPPhoneConfig>96</dscpForSCCPPhoneConfig>
<dscpForSCCPPhoneServices>0</dscpForSCCPPhoneServices>
<dscpForCm2Dvce>96</dscpForCm2Dvce>
<transportLayerProtocol>1</transportLayerProtocol>
<capfAuthMode>0</capfAuthMode>
<capfList>
<capf>
<phonePort>3804</phonePort>
</capf>
</capfList>
<certHash></certHash>
<encrConfig>false</encrConfig>
</device>
====
notes:
1) <anonymousCallBlock>1</anonymousCallBlock> ensures that anonymous callers cannot reach you. if you want to be reached by anonymous callers, pick 0. 2 does not seem to be in use.
2) <callerIdBlocking>0</callerIdBlocking> allows your call display name to appear on the phones of the people you're calling. if you want to make anonymous calls, pick 1. 2 does not appear to be in use.
3) <dndControl>1</dndControl> this is supposed to block incoming calls, but i don't think it works.
4) <timerRegisterExpires>180</timerRegisterExpires> is recommended by voip.ms
5) <natReceivedProcessing></natReceivedProcessing>. note that i removed the value from this entry. i do not believe my headers are being processed by voip.ms.
6) <natEnabled>true</natEnabled>. i am, in fact, behind a nat.
7) <natAddress></natAddress>. but, this isn't necessary to fill in.
8) <phoneLabel>name displayed on phone</phoneLabel>
9) <line button="1"> i removed the carriage line, here.
10) <proxy>USECALLMANAGER</proxy>. the call manager tag is defined above. a hard-coded ip might also work.
11) <displayName>call display name</displayName>. this is the name displayed on the phones of the people you're calling.
12) <phonePassword>password for phone</phonePassword>. if you enter a (short) password here, you will need to provide it after pressing **# to edit values on the phone.
13) <loadInformation>SIP41.8-5-4S</loadInformation>. you need to get the firmware revision correct, here.
14) <transportLayerProtocol>1</transportLayerProtocol> - this is the magic setting that fixed everything, and it seems to have been badly misunderstood. the numbers i've seen entered are 2 and 4 and the assumption seems to have been that you're telling the phone what layer to use in the osi framework. that is not what this setting is at all. this setting has values of 1 and 2, where 1 tells the phone to communicate over tcp and 2 tells it to use udp. functionally, 1 means you're behind a nat and trying to get through it and 2 means you're communicating strictly on the local subnet.
make sure that voip.ms is set to nat=yes
a common troubleshooting step is to try it with nat=no at voip.ms, but that does not make sense. you are, in fact, behind a nat. make sure that voip.ms knows that.
if you press settings, then **#** your phone will reboot and it should do the following:
1) find an ip address
2) load the tftp server
3) register
you should get a dial tone when you pick the phone up.
make sure to press one before dialing out.
15:36
tuesday, may 24, 2022
i don't understand why bob rae is talking about ukrainian self-interest, or thinks canadians are more concerned about ukrainian interests than they are about russian interests. canada is neither in any sort of alliance with ukraine, nor in any sort of war against russia.
bob rae should be talking about canada's self-interest, not ukraine's self-interest. and, canada's self-interest is clearly to avoid involving itself in an inter-slavic civil war that it has nothing to do with and that most of it's citizens don't remotely care about.
5:14
who, exactly, is bob rae working for, nowadays?
5:16
our ambassador to the united nations, appointed by the existing government, thinks that our position at that body should be to advance the self-interest of a foreign country that we do not have any sort of formal relationship with.
it's baffling.
5:19
perhaps the truth is that this bizarre language reflects the overwhelming influence that our ridiculously corrupt deputy prime minister has, and the conflict of interest that should have forced her to resign months ago.
i no longer have any confidence that mr. rae is interested in the country he is supposed to be representing, and i have not had any confidence in this government in years.
5:21
these cold overnights, below 15 degrees, this time of year are horrible - there's not enough latent heat in the building yet to keep the place warm when it dips below 20, and it doesn't get cold enough to turn the heat on, so you just have to suffer through it in two or three sweaters.
i've got the stove running at full blast, but the retard has the fucking disgusting a/c on. it's 10 degrees out.
9:09
so, that was a floaty couple of days. i got focused on something, accomplished a task and then couldn't stay awake for the next several days. it's a little self-realization that maybe i am lacking a little drive.
i've set out a plan for myself, and i complain i can't do it because i'm too tired, but if i was as into it as i ought to be, i wouldn't have as much difficulty staying awake to do it.
that doesn't mean i'm reconsidering. i think it's the lack of interest in the music, and i've been through this before with this - i may argue that my music is objectively superior to that which has market potential and that music that exists on the contemporary market is, without exception, void of value, and i may interject that my audience does not exist yet and that i'm strictly composing for the future, but that doesn't eliminate the alienation inherent in existing outside of society and creating for an audience that doesn't exist.
i have no interest in society, and nothing i've said changes that. but, i wish there were more outcasts and losers around that want out of the system, and it seems like it's getting harder and harder to exist without conforming and selling out.
a little real interest would help, as motivation.
but, i'm not wavering - my art is my purpose, my meaning, my existence. i just need to get myself going. i'm not the first artist that's struggled with the futility of existence.
for now, i need coffee and i need to put my space back together again. there will be a big narrative post coming.
13:01
as far as i can see, there's three conservative political personalities that could seriously beat justin trudeau.
1. jean charest, by winning votes in quebec
2. doug ford, by beating the liberals in the gta. let's think that through.
3. jason kenney, by also beating the liberals in the gta.
i have to wonder if kenney is thinking about it.
18:01
doug ford is incredibly popular in immigrant communities in this province. they love him.
he could very well run for prime minister, and he could very well win.
18:07
wednesday, may 25, 2022
i haven't been able to stay awake the last few days, and i'm sure it's caffeine withdrawal. i'm taking such high potency coffee with this one person machine that if i skip a day i just fall over.
i've got a coffee, now, and i hope i can stay awake for a bit.
lots of stuff has happened, and i really have to go through a narrative update to document it, but it's going to take a while. i might have four sticks of 128 mb sd ram that nobody wants, so that might guide me in the decision to get an old powerpc mac, which i believe had lower ram requirements than the pcs of the same era and which were still using sd ram until the mid 00s.
narrative update coming, really. here we go...
14:59
naw. even the g3s released in the mid 90s can take up to 768 mb of ram. i'd have to get a museum piece board to have a max of 512 mb, and chances are it won't work.
i take good care of my computers, so i have 20 year old boards in pristine condition. that is very rare.
i'm not going to find a 30 year old board for this ancient ram, and i have no idea what i could run on it. getting older than this windows 98 machine (which takes 1 gb max) and having a utility for the device really means looking at amigas and they had weird ram.
know what i can do with 4 sticks of pc 100 128 mb ram? send me an email.
15:10
amigas run for over $3000 on ebay, apparently.
most of the best electronic music ever created was done on an amiga, which is a very old type of personal computer with a powerpc processor that has been unavailable for decades. it's where cubase comes from.
15:16
having an amiga in 2022 might seem unusually niche, but it would get used, trust me.
15:17
fwiw, i think bill 21 is constitutional and actually support it but i think quebec is making the wrong argument in regards to it. i think that restrictions on religious symbols are equivalent to restrictions on political activities because i interpret religious organizations as political groups. that's a novel argument, but it's worth making.
however, bill 96 is clearly unconstitutional and should be vigorously opposed. while the government has grounds to protect itself from the influence of religion, it cannot justify restrictions on language use, especially in canada, where the constitution puts such an emphasis on language rights. they have no argument - which is why they're using the notwithstanding clause in a bluntly despotic manner.
quebeckers will need to overthrow the government to reverse this law, and i'd really ask quebeckers to think this through. do you not think this law goes too far?
the opposition will need to appeal to quebeckers and have them reconsider. our constitution has a loophole and this government has signalled it will use it; only a popular movement can overturn that.
15:35
in fact, the notwithstanding clause should not even apply to language rights, so they shouldn't even be allowed to use the loophole.
15:43
so, i also did this over the weekend:
16:39
for many years, there's been a subset of the transgender and broader queer community that has struggled against the idea that this isn't a choice, under fears that queerness may end up medicalized as an illness. it does follow that if we do not have a choice in the matter then we can be cured because it's not our fault in the first place. i don't think people really thought that through.
the science is pretty unambiguous about this, and it's pretty much the opposite of what stupid fake liberals think (a constant with stupid fake liberals is that they think they understand science and do not). humans are not born with a sexual orientation, nor is that sexual orientation fixed; sexuality and gender are spectrums, and they're fluid. they change based on a large number of variables, and choice is certainly one of them. we have overwhelming free will when it come to gender expression, particularly, and we have every right to reject religion, to reject norms and to reject society in regards to the issue if we happen to feel like doing so. any kind of queer advocacy should be insisting on the right to free expression, not pretending that free expression doesn't exist.
i point this out because i know i'm being drugged with testosterone, and i'm finally getting hints that the system that is drugging me is getting frustrated and confused by my refusal to go along with it. my doctor boosted my prescription for testosterone blockers, but the drugstore seems to have been ordered not to fill it. i don't know what level this is occurring at, but i suspect it's federal - and i'm not supposed to know about it. i'm just supposed to get drugged by the testosterone and be "cured", because i was simply testosterone deficient, and i never had any free will in the matter, anyways.
this is what happens when you allow for the absence of individual autonomy; you lose your right to make decisions. my right to decide what gender i want to present myself as is being forcibly suppressed, and i haven't even been informed, because i have no choice in the matter, anyways. it's not science, it's an extreme right-wing political ideology rooted in radical calvinism and that has taken over the bourgeois fake left.
i will continue to resist, but my organs will only allow me to do so for so long. and, in the end, my death will be a testament to my ability to make free choices about my gender expression, and a demonstration that suggestions otherwise are simply wrong.
19:23
if you thought what they did to turing was in the past, think again.
at least they told turing what they were doing.
19:31
thursday, may 26, 2022
while i have no intention to vaccinate against covid, i would get a smallpox vaccine if offered, because i'm not old enough to have gotten it when i was young.
13:18
friday, may 27, 2022
saturday, may 28, 2022
in fact, this is a rather outdated concept of what people might take across the border.
if i were to cross the border with a computer, what i would bring would be a chromebook and that chromebook would not have any data on it or be searchable in it's existing state. all information would be stored in some cloud, somewhere. so, they could search me for local data all they want - there wouldn't be anything to search or to find.
this is a constant with this government, which is trying to modernize the laws and continually demonstrating that it has little understanding of the technology it's trying to regulate. we see the same issues with their censorship bills and their weird wealth redistribution scheme for failing old media outlets, where they talk about sharing links as though it's hosting content - they know not of what they are legislating.
it's a reminder of why government shouldn't be regulating communication, in the first place.
this is a procedure that will annoy average people, mostly middle-aged and that are behind on the technology, and do nothing to provide law enforcement with any sort of useful information, whatever you think of the premise, as people harbouring useful data will know to cross the border with dead devices, and to leave the data in the cloud - which they mostly already do right now, anyways.
1:29
sunday, may 29, 2022
i spent most of the day yesterday doing grocery shopping, and i want to take note of the fact that there was an unusually large number of liberal signs in areas i'd expect to see conservative signs, and have seen conservatives signs in recent provincial and federal elections. the conservatives think they can swing windsor, but what was interesting to me in what i saw was the unusual deficit of conservative signs in high to middle income neighbourhoods.
that doesn't mean that the conservatives are unlikely to do well here, so much as it's reflective of the class realignment that's occurring in the anglosphere. it's really not surprising that middle or upper class voters may be put off or even embarrassed by doug ford, who does better with working class voters and recent immigrants. that abandonment of the conservative party in ontario (apparently in favour of the liberals) by high wage earners mirrors the move to the democratic party in the united states by the professional and managerial classes. what it took to happen in ontario appears to have been a premier that is broadly looked down upon by educated people, who feel he doesn't represent them, culturally.
as canada is a three-party system (it's actually a four-party system, but the always-existing party to the right of the bourgeois conservatives is never stable, and the ndp has been a fixture in canadian politics for decades), the movement is occurring in a cycle, rather than an exchange. working class voters seem to have abandoned the ndp, in favour of the conservatives; high income voters now seem to be abandoning doug ford out of cultural embarrassment, and moving to the liberals, instead. the third shift is that soft left, bourgeois liberals are now embracing the ndp, which has become the new liberal party.
as a low income, working class voter, this leaves me horribly disenfranchised. doug ford's successful marketing campaign directed at working class voters doesn't change the fact that he still represents the upper class, even if the upper class seems increasingly disinterested in voting for him. the liberals have always been the banker's party, but they've long embraced policies intended to balance out social inequities both because they realize it's in their self-interest and because they need the votes; if they are becoming the party of high tories, they may follow the federal liberals in taking a hard shift to the right. and, that leaves the ndp to represent and behave as the bourgeois left, and become everything that's wrong with the bourgeois left (something that's already long happened).
in a province where working people are dead set on voting against their self-interest, the direction of policy should be expected to take a turn for the worse, and quite dramatically so. these were problems we had avoided here, up until this point. but, the spectrum is aligning in the same way as the broken american spectrum, and it's hard to see how the outcomes will be any different.
it's up to working class ontarians to decide what they want to support, and if the answer is doug ford, if we're really that collectively retarded, we're in for a rough ride.
but, data nerds should keep an eye out for this: it might not help them in their seat count, but the liberals will probably do unusually well in traditionally conservative demographics this cycle, while not doing well at all in traditionally liberal demographics, and that may have the effect of putting them on a trendline towards the hard right that eventually ousts doug ford in favour of a right-wing liberal government.
11:50
the types of storms that we saw in ontario last week - and that demoed the infrastructure in ottawa - are the kinds of storms that are likely to increase in frequency in a climate with warmer oceans. what happened was that unusually dense early season humidity moving north smashed into lingering arctic air, and the result was a string of tornadoes. as the oceans get hotter, that will happen more and more often.
down here in windsor, it's starting to feel like a rainforest climate. everything is lush and green. the backwoods are overflowing. i checked my compost patch last night, and it filled in a beaten down path with ten foot high overgrowth. are those avocado seeds growing in the nitrates provided by the coffee grounds?
in ottawa, there needs to be a broad understanding that they need to rebuild for a different climate - one where tornadoes are set to increase in frequency and in severity. this isn't a freak occurrence, it's the new normal in an area where well understood thunderstorm tracks are now a vicious rendezvous of cold and hot energy masses.
12:17
while i generally oppose gun control because i think state interference should broadly be minimal in scope and i simply don't think it's an effective policy, i do not have strong opinions on the issue, and would not consider it a vote driver.
i've written a little on the topic. it can be searched for. i'm not interested in repeating myself.
we live in a culture of imperialist war that routinely presents violence as an acceptable solution to mundane problems. the american congress just approved a $40 billion package of handouts to the defence industry, to insert itself into a conflict it has no self-interest in. every personality on every tv station is glorifying war and violence, and nobody thinks anything of it. keep that fact in mind the next time somebody tries to convince you that gun control will solve anything.
12:21
what do i think is going on in ukraine?
i think ukraine has already been partitioned, and it's a question of whether the russians can assert the reality of the partition on the ground. it is not entirely clear where the partition actually ends up, but at the minimum, it would include the currently occupied regions in the south and east.
certain western analysts appear to be confusing russian tactical carefulness with a display of weakness. it should be obvious that russia does not want to blow up mostly russian speaking cities that it intends to occupy and re-russify. whether russia might be able to invade a city like kharkov with overwhelming force (like they have done in syria) is not the point - they clearly do not want to do any such thing, they want to try to take it mostly in tact. if western governments are basing decisions on a misinterpretation of these tactical approaches, they are going to make grave errors.
the western position appears to be an intent to prolong the war as long as possible, to extract maximum damage on the russians. the russians appear to be taking their time, in a slow and methodological movement in regions that they intend to actually hold. if the russians can effectively build actual defences in their slow movement forwards, this amounts to a tactical win for the west - even if the russians succeed in redrawing the map.
the statements from the russians seem to suggest they intend to set up an "east ukrainian" buffer state, but the boundaries of such a buffer state are not entirely clear. a "west ukrainian" rump would be left to essentially join poland. this partition into east and west ukraine with respective russian and american dependencies could be semi-permanent, as the partition of korea has been - or it could be short-lived, like the partitions of vietnam or germany.
a "neutral" ukraine is an incoherent idea and should not be discussed by serious people.
i do not believe that much of anybody is talking about a partition of ukraine, but i think that the decision has already been made, and that the process is merely to be left to unfold, along with the exactness of the boundaries which are likely currently in flux.
13:32
monday, may 30, 2022
more about ukrainian self-interest. fuck.
why doesn't mr. rae just suggest that everybody in ukraine take turns taking the day off, without pay?
4:41
maybe he can promise ukrainians free insurance on their ladas and then just...never speak of it ever again.
4:43
as alluded to several times, i am very much in need of a narrative update. the last actual update was very late on the night of the 10th, but i have made a number of attempts to build narrative updates since then that did not get posted, and are sitting in my draft box, half-written. the basic problem is that i wanted to complete the task of fixing the phone before i finished the write-up, and kept getting almost finished but not quite, so the write-up never got done.
what i'm going to do is complete each of the aborted attempts at a narrative update in a sequence of sequential posts, and try to get as much information out of each of them as i can, with the full realization that i might very well drop a lot of information, as the furthest posts are now several weeks in the past. this will split the larger task into a series of smaller tasks.
this first update was intended to be posted on the morning of the 17th and encompass the 11th-16th, but i stopped midway through and did not get back to it until now.
====
i want to finish the thought on that phone first, but this is for real the last night spent on it before i move on. the older firmware is supposed to be able to connect through the nat, so i want to try it to see if i can get it to work. but, that actually doesn't mean that i'm going to stick with it. if not, i'll have to see what the best way to exchange it for a usb phone, which is what i wanted and thought i was buying, is.
the splitter for the machine came in, but i'm going to hold off on everything coming in before i install the ssd and install windows 10 to it. it probably actually makes more sense to try to install it to the space for the card reader instead of taping it under the mechanical hard drive, as that is where they suggest installing an msata to.
=====
well, let's take a step back from that and finish it up - let's actually finish the thought on the phone, first, at least up until that point, from the previous narrative update (late on the 10th) to this point (early on the 17th).
after some combination of troubleshooting, sleeping and eating over the first half of the 11th that i've since forgotten, i posted the following on the afternoon of the 11th:
======
so, i suggest to google that they should sell usb phones and they tell me to turn on 2-factor authorization, instead, which is perhaps the actual answer to the question of why usb phones do not exist - the government doesn't want citizens connecting over voip because it's harder to trace. it's not actually harder to trace in theory, but they don't have the infrastructure to do it. the surveillance state assumes we all have sim cards connected to mobile devices that can be easily tracked from place to place using already existing systems. i've been over this before - the cops don't know what to do when they can't trace my cell phone and, my politics aside, i strongly suspect that the real reason they think i'm a spy is that they can't track me over wireless. to them, that's such an anomaly that it's a red flag. if they can't trace me by cell, i must be hiding my signal, and i must be up to no good, right?
in fact, i'm just poor and cheap and have identified a smart way to save a substantial amount of money. it's an intelligent, practical decision to not spend money on an unnecessary service that i really neither need nor even want and is overpriced and not worth it. the average monthly cell phone cost in canada would be a substantial proportion of my fixed income that i'd rather spend on anything else, including beer. i can't afford it, and i'd be stupid to pay for it if i could.
but, is 2-step authentication effective as a security feature? the answer is that it's the opposite, because all somebody needs to do to get access to your entire identity is steal your phone. it's perhaps the single biggest security mistake you could imagine creating, if you were to sit down and brainstorm ways to make stupid security mistakes. rather than put your entire identity in a single, easily hackable or stealable place on a cheap mobile device (that is easy to steal for five minutes and then put back, such as for example when you're sleeping), it is a far better idea to routinely clear your cookies and cache, which is what they're trying to force you to stop doing because it makes it harder to trace you. the reason i'm having problems with accessing online banking and other things is that i'm taking the smart step of routinely resetting my devices, and it's pissing them off because it's wiping out the tracking cookies. they're telling me that my security-informed behaviour is insecure, and trying to coerce me into doing something that is distinctly insecure instead, then calling it secure.
so, 2-step authentication as a security feature is just another orwellian term in our era of orwell; the technology is inherently insecure, and is designed to track you, not to keep your data safe. it's the worst thing you could do, security wise. if you're concerned about security, you should do the exact opposite - you should consistently make it harder to track you by wiping everything when you're done using it, not make it so the government can uniquely identify any device as yours every time you pick it up.
i'm not aware of any examples yet, but what this focus on confirming identities is going to lead to is identity theft, and a reality where it's going to be difficult to argue against people fraudulently using your identity, with or without your consent. if somebody steals your phone and authenticates as you, then they are legally you, and you will be legally responsible for their behaviour. you will have no argument. you'll be fucked.
so, as an anti-capitalist political dissident, what are my concerns here? what i'm imagining is that the government might be able to easily set up a fraudulent security handshake by claiming some transaction or behaviour is traced to your unique identity, and throwing you in jail for something you didn't do, as a result of it. and, i'll remind you that i was recently arrested and charged with a crime i didn't commit, as a consequence of a false accusation made by a state prosecutor. i'm still trying to figure out what really happened, and why. so, it's a pretty real concern, to me.
i would advise you to not use any sort of "security feature" that relies on any sort of unique identifiers. that is entirely backwards. if you're security-minded, you want to focus on ways to maximize anonymity, and ways to make it difficult to trace your behaviour. you certainly don't want your phone to be a magic passcode to unlock everything about you.
15:55
"For maximum security, always use multifactor authentication solutions with government furnished equipment" - nsa security advice.
16:08
i was able to get the config files to upload to the phone last night, and able to get it to boot from the tftp server running on the new lenovo, but the settings get deleted every time i reboot, which seems to be necessary to change the ip in the phone from the one used by the dhcp server in the tftp program to the static ip assigned by the router.
so, i don't know if the answer is to try to hardcode the setting into the config file or to change something on the router. further, i need clarification as to whether i need to load this tftp config file on every boot or not. that would be a limitation that i might not be able to resolve easily, as i don't want listening devices sitting idly on my network like that.
so, that's today's task.
if i learn that i need to load the config file from a static tftp server on every boot, and i can't get the 90s laptop to run the tftp server on demand, then i'm going to need to at least put this aside until i get the new linux chromebook running.
the phone will not be on at all times, anyways. i will only boot the phone up when i use it for outgoing calls. i do not want the capability to accept incoming phone calls. i am nobody's slave, and will not respond to attempts to gain my attention by ringing bells. you can leave me a voice mail, and i can decide to return your call at my convenience, if i choose to - or ignore you altogether, if i decide, as well.
there will be no pcs on the network, and i'm not installing linux over top of the chrome os. the chromebooks are intended to act as dumb terminals, so they can be easily reset. if i must connect to a tftp server on bootup, it will either need to run on the ancient xp laptop on demand or as something i can turn on and off on the linux machine that is coming. and, it will need to run on a switch behind a nat.
the usb phone i was looking at is likely the better option, and i'll need to decide whether i'm aborting use of this cisco phone or not within the next 24 hours.
16:33
yes, you're all slaves to your phones. deal with it.
16:37
how much more time am i going to waste on this phone?
not much.
i'll have an understanding by the end of the day, i think.
17:32
ok.
it turns out that there's a known issue with voip.ms and the newer firmware. so, i need to find an older firmware version - 8.5 or older.
17:35
no, i'm never going to find the old firmware files for this device, as cisco seems to have disowned it.
the workaround is to disable nat at voip.ms.
but, does that mean i have to plug the thing in directly?
17:41
ok.
so, the first thing i want to do is see if i can turn off dhcp and manually assign the device an ip. i think that should stop it from looking for a config file when i take it out of the network and plug it back in.
i'm getting these two ideas - provisioning and registering - a little blurry, though. provisioning is getting the settings installed. registering is connecting to the voip.ms server. i don't know if the device is overwriting these settings during registering or provisioning, as it's occurring between when i disconnect from the first ip (for provisioning) and when i try to switch to the second ip (for registering). hardcoding the local subnet ip address will help answer that question.
19:53
i'm deciding i cannot avoid having a tftp server running if i want to use these phones on any network at all.
i'm going to try to set it up to work with the tftp server on the local 7 machine through the switch as a proof of concept while blocking it access to the wan via the router. i don't see any good reason why the tftp needs wan access.
22:39
i should be able to do this easily if i can figure out the right tag for the alternate tftp server.
i'm learning how these devices work, and it's not complicated, but it's incredibly obtuse. like, i get it - it's a series of security features via obstruction. if it's frustrating to unpack the network then it's hard to use it, unless you're authorized. but, i mean, this is all stock. you learn it once, and you can break any cisco network very easily. that's not helpful, in the long run.
it's really more along the lines of forcing clients to buy extra hardware.
let me find the tag, hardcode it into the configuration file and get it to boot by connecting it to the tftp server via the switch. i'm going to do this one thing at a time to prove it works step by step.
22:48
i think i found the tag. i haven't tested it yet.
but, i was able to get it to boot from the new lenovo via the switch, indicating it can pick up the tftp from there.
the next thing i'll try to do is turn off the dhcp and see if it can find the tftp without the dhcp running. if it can, i'll then plug the router into the switch and see if it picks those two things up simultaneously: the tftp server on the lenovo + the static ip address handed out by the router.
i'm concerned about separating these two things. but, i'm not going to install the tftp server on the router, and i'm not going to use internet connection sharing in windows (unless i can do it in xp?). so, if this does not work, as a proof of concept, i'll probably have to give up on this, as the required topology is too undesirable.
if i can get the phone to recognize the ip & the tftp together, i can work on fixing any nat issues.
23:02
may 12, 2022
so, i did have to connect the lenovo to the network, temporarily, but it does allow me to connect to the tftp server running on the local machine and the ip address at the router simultaneously, so long as the windows 7 ip address (in which the tftp server is bound) is on the same subnet as the phone, ie. is an ip address assigned by the router. i can actually even edit that information on the phone itself. i guess that makes sense, as the tftp server would need to on the local subnet.
it is currently not able to connect to the voip server. i believe that is a known issue. let me try to see if it has an easy fix.
this current setup is not acceptable, so let me try to connect over xp, instead.
0:22
ok, great. the tftp server itself runs smoothly over xp, as it can bind cleanly to an existing ip address. i'm not forcing it to act as a server; well, i am, but i'm doing it by hacking an existing connection, as a client. that's more in the range of things an older, naive os like xp can do out of the box.
great.
so, the topology is acceptable. the phone has an ip address, and is being provisioned by the tftp server running on the 90s laptop. that keeps all of the pcs off the network. one of these days, i'll set up a completely separate network for my pcs that is never connected to the internet. for now, i'm happy to transfer files over usb.
now, can i get the phone to connect to the voip server from behind the nat?
0:46
on the advice of voip.ms, i set up a subaccount for the cisco, and modified a few settings server side. then, i started googling things and realized that this probably isn't going to work, in the long run. so, i went to turn it off and...
it connected.
but, i wasn't able to push any buttons, so i rebooted. unfortunately, it went back into the same loop.
it seems like the device wants to exist in a subnet, which sort of makes sense; it's an office phone. i'm asking it to connect to the internet from behind a nat, which would get me fired if i was working it, somewhere. that is, i'm asking the device to do something it's specifically designed to avoid doing, then getting frustrated by it.
i should have done more research into the device rather than bought it on impulse due to the price, but, as it is, it's really not what i want, and i feel i've just wasted time with it. the phone was supposed to be $25 and be a quick, easy solution to getting a physical phone to work as a controller for a softphone. it ended up costing closer to $60, and i'm not likely to get it to work at all. it seems like i'm going to have to see if i can sell it locally. i don't want to ship it.
what i want is a usb phone to connect to the 90s laptop. hopefully, i can find something for less than $20, and at least break even on this.
but, i learned a little about cisco ip phones, and why this isn't how i want to do this, in the long run.
3:46
what i should do is sell the cisco first and then take what i can get for it as the maximum price i'm willing to pay for a usb phone, which is what i thought i was buying.
3:48
from an intuitive perspective, it seems obvious that you should just be able to plug one of these things into your computer. it doesn't really make sense to think you have to dial into a remote server to use the phone, and, everything else aside about connecting to tftp servers, etc, it's really not a good answer for sporadic, personal phone use.
i mean, no rational person would have guessed these things are so absurd, a priori.
i feel i've really done a fairly good job in teaching myself about something i neither have any education level in nor any intuition in, let alone any real interest in. if i had known what was required to set this thing up, i would not have wasted my time with it. as it is, i think i gave it a good go.
it might connect directly to the voip server if i remove the router, but then i'd have to figure out how to connect the phone to a tftp server on the other side of the nat. i guess i'd have to get a new router that lets me turn off the nat, and attach something like a raspberry pi running a tftp server, then connect my regular router behind the new one. that's entirely retarded.
if you want a project, good for you - i wanted something i could plug in with minimal effort. i think the fact that i got as far as i did is fairly impressive. but, i'm post-godel, too. i can understand that some problems don't have answers, and that proving something can't be solved is sometimes just the right fucking answer.
the lesson is to not buy things for cheap on impulse thinking you've got a deal without doing the research on it first. and, i always do the research first. alas.
4:08
i've also really underestimated the cost of a pi.
i should have got one when they were very cheap.
you could probably still find the older models for cheap if you look hard enough.
4:24
i just want to make sure that there isn't some way to connect this to a soft phone before i give up on it. all i actually wanted was a physical phone to act as a front-end for the softphone; i had no intention or interest in setting up some complicated bullshit on a fucking corporatist ip phone that connects directly to an external server through a nat. fuck.
the device is supposed to run locally. fine. so, can i set it up to connect to a local softphone behind the nat, and then let the software deal with the nat, instead?
this really should not be a difficult task, but it seems like i'm trying to use a device in a way it wasn't intended to be used and am making something that ought to be simple into something that is annoyingly complicated, in the process. but, i don't give up easily, and i bought the damned thing, and i want to force it to work.
4:53
ok. so, this is what i want: i want a softphone dialer like program that runs on windows (like the tftp server, which seems unavoidable) that i can use to log into from the phone and that can handle connecting to voip.ms through the nat strictly in software.
that can't be that hard.
can it?
5:09
i suppose i could install a linux distro on the 90s pc. it might even save it.
in fact, i suppose i could even dual boot it.
but, what i really want is the phone software to run as a service in windows.
ok.
so, i can't do this the way that it nerds would do it if they were to set it up, standalone. but, that just means that i've learned the limitations of the device and what i need to do to get around it - and also what components are required to set this up.
it shouldn't be difficult, in principle, to run a dhcp server that the phone can connect to as service in windows, and let it deal with the nat.
should i put linux on this thing?
5:15
the internet is telling me to use ics. i suspect that's naive.
but, now that the phone has firmware, what actually happens if i just plug it into the laptop?
5:27
=====
i then did some research on what i was looking for and downloaded install media for a program called 3cx a little before 6:00 (along with some other things) and went to sleep before running it; i woke up to a hot 30 degree day on the 12th, and took advantage of it by going out for a bike ride and grocery run, although i had to wait for the day to really warm up in the afternoon, first. this is too early in the year for this kind of beautiful, enjoyable heat, so it was short lived and dissipated relatively quickly. it was only a few hours after it peaked that the remaining warmth was emanating from the concrete, but that is itself a weird effect - you don't often find yourself moving closer to the mall to enjoy the heat radiating from the building, in an attempt avoid the annoying cool breeze coming in with the dusk. i did not get much besides kale on this day and rather decided to wait until the next day, instead.
it was hot on both friday and saturday, but i found myself struggling with my sleeping schedule (which had me sleep during the day) and sleeping when i wanted to go out. iirc, the weather was also unsettled on both friday and saturday. so, i tried to stay up all night thursday but instead slept most of the day friday and woke up on friday night with the intent to get ready to finish the shopping on saturday morning, which sort of left friday night (and saturday morning) as an in-between day that never got started. i was really just wasting time and knew it; i ended up with a series of phil collins posts.
i did get the following post up on saturday morning, indicating i was at least working on it early in the morning, but i don't think it was for very long:
===
so, the thing i wanted to try with the phone was to install 3cx as a service, thinking it was free, only to find out that (1) it's a trial and (2) the download is 64-bit. i'm running this on a 32-bit laptop; i don't have the option to install a 64-bit os on this device.
this service is confirmed to work with the phone, but i'm not entirely sure how to connect it to the phone, itself. the phone is able to connect to the laptop when i plug both devices in to the switch, but the phone is going to need to connect to both the dhcp server and the tftp server on the same binding, and there's not an obvious way to bind the two different servers using the same ip address on windows xp (the tftp server won't connect to the phone over the virtual ip address in xp the way it does in 7, which is why i couldn't flash from xp; it needs to be assigned an address on the subnet the laptop is on (and needs to have the phone get an ip on that subnet as well, which has to be done by the router). so, i can run one or the other, but not both.). what i'm trying to do is to get a softphone running on windows xp that interfaces with the physical phone and deals with the nat in software, so i need to be connecting through the xp machine and need to get the virtual ip address for the phone from the xp machine; if i can get some kind of virtual router that can hand out two virtual ips (one to the phone and one to the tftp server), it should be relatively easy to get it to work, but the phone has to actually behave. otherwise, i'm not going to be able to use the xp machine for a tftp server, when i am using it to connect to the voip servers through software.
i've sort of lost patience with it, though.
i guess i wasted the night. i've at least crossed out 3cx, and i'm not sure what to do next. i have 3 choices, really:
1) i think it will work if i install freepbx on to the 90s laptop. i may have to find a creative solution for a tftp server, though. well, i guess i can run it on the other linux chromebook that's coming. this is not ideal.
2) i can keep trying to find a service that will run in the background in xp and will form the proper bridge between the phone and the router, through the laptop.
3) or, i could get a usb phone and hope it works with microsip.
i'm going to sleep on this, a little.
8:27
====
i don't think i intended to sleep all day, but i did; i was up on saturday night, got something to eat and decided to reach a conclusion before i went out, so i could decide what i wanted to spend money on for the rest of the month.
could i find a windows xp service to bridge the connection or not?
the following was posted on sunday morning:
====
so, i did one more attempt to find windows software, and i found a softphone that is supposed to work with this model, but it won't install on xp, i need windows 7 for it. i cannot install windows 7 on the 90s laptop, and no desire to connect one of my other computers to the network in order to use the phone. my new lenovo is the only computer in the house running windows 7 or higher and it will be kept strictly offline like the other pcs. so, it does not appear as though a softphone client for this phone exists for windows and is compatible with windows xp. that means that the idea of running it with windows is not feasible, and i'm therefore now largely disinterested in it.
i've put up a question at a voip forum about xp software for this phone. we'll see if i get an answer.
i want to be clear about the phone: it's not that i can't figure out how to connect it to the remote voip server, it's that it's a business phone that is purposefully designed to not be able to communicate outside of an internal network. nat is a technology that connects outside networks to inside ones, and it does make sense that a phone like this one would be designed so that it can't get through the translation - not as a bug, but as a feature, because you don't want your business phones connecting to outside servers, like ever. no network admin would want their ip phones connecting to the outside world - they're supposed to work behind a firewall, strictly on a local server. but, they're also designed to be configurable at the server level. so, in order to have the thing work, it really ought to connect to an internal server and it's really not a good idea to try to force it to connect through the nat, even if i can somehow force it to. as it is, it's a known issue that you can't connect the firmware version through a nat, and i have every reason to think it's by design. if i had realized this, i would not have bought it - i don't need or want a server running so i can call the doctor once a month. i don't use a phone every day; i don't even use a phone every week. this is far more trouble than it's worth. but, as it is, it's not that i can't figure this out, it's that it's designed to function in a way that isn't rational to set up in a normal home network.
i'm going to keep looking, but i'm not expecting to find the softphone i'm imagining, which means that the only way to save the phone is to connect it to a linux server and i'd rather, at this point, see if i can just get a cheap usb phone, instead.
should i keep this thing? well, i could see myself wanting two phones one day, but i can't see myself solving the issue with the tftp server in a reasonable manner. these chromebooks will all slowly die, and will all end up with linux on them. it's not so absurd to think i might eventually put pbx on one of them, and connect it to the phone in a room where i want a second phone. i guess i could launch a second tftp server on demand from the xp laptop, presuming it holds up, when i want to call out, but this seems like an absurdly obtuse solution.
i think i just need to accept that i bought a device thinking it performed a function it doesn't perform and i need to deal with it and get on with it.
1:11
yeah. i'm officially done with this.
i'm going to see if i can sell it back to the person that sold it to me. the phone does exactly what it's supposed to do, it just doesn't do what i want it to do. if we can work out an agreement where i get a refund and pay return shipping costs, that will give me enough to buy a usb phone, i think.
yes, i should have done the research. but, i bought a "voip business phone" - and i wanted a voip business phone. it's my fault for not looking into it enough, but cisco has to take some of the blame here for being obtuse about it's products.
2:17
so, where was i, then?
i guess i officially lost a full week on that. unfortunately.
i had two entries in my shortlist on my production machine - set up i5 and set up phone. i'm still waiting on the sata power splitter for the i5.
so, that means i'm back into loose-ending, which means rewinding back to february. i want to finish inri077, first, and then close some open thoughts, before rebooting to last summer.
2:21
===
at this point, i had sent a refund request to the original seller for the phone and the cord, so i started closing tabs, and i decided wanted to see if i could find an old version of the 3cx software that was both 32-bit and free. and, i found something:
===
so, it seems like i found the 8.5 version firmware:
this firmware apparently can connect outside of a nat. so, i have to try it.
the 3cx software itself is not free and only works on windows 7 or higher, although i was able to find a version of the 3cx software that is free and does work on windows xp. we'll have to see if it allows for the above functionality or not.
so, maybe i can get this to work, after all.
i need to eat, right now. we'll get back to this a little later.
5:44
yeah, the software is just a basic softphone like microsip - there's no management console, no server running, nowhere to add a phone.
but, now that i have the 8.5 version firmware, i can try to flash it on to the phone and see if it connects through the nat or not. it's supposed to.
6:14
this is where i stopped to finish eating and clean myself up before going out for a lengthy bike ride and finishing grocery shopping for the next several weeks.
sunday was the peak of this early heat wave here, and was a very hot day that ended in a rain storm that brought in a few days of more seasonable weather. the heat came in early enough in the day that i was able to spend almost the whole day enjoying the weather outside (i was out around 10:00 am). and, how hot did it get? the official reading by the government was a tad under 30 degrees, but i think that is a manipulated reading as the sitting liberal government seems to be slowly embracing climate denial (trudeau is el douche and harper-lite and what he's slowly constructing via media manipulation is a corporatist government that is controlled by the oil industry. he has to convince us that climate change is not happening before he embraces industry-written rollbacks on emissions targets. and, they don't give a fuck - they'll just burn more coal to turn the air conditioning up and then fund research to send their kids to colonies on uranus.) and needs to keep the data under an official bar in order to do it. so, the official data says something like 29.9, and readings will vary across a metropolitan area, but the reading on the billboard on tecumseh road said 34 when i drove by and i both think that was a more reflective temperature of what i experienced and don't think that was a maximum temperature for the day. i think we probably got over 35 in windsor on this day - may 15, 2022.
i got all of my groceries done and then some; i got fresh raspberries and blueberries, fresh strawberries, fresh blackberries and even fresh cherries, which are in season here and which i'd been looking for for a while. i then took a special ride out to the sobey's to get some items that are not available in the freshcos and was intent on doing yet another run to the end of town but had to stop because it was starting to rain - and just made it in before the drops started falling, too.
i had good reason to sleep all day monday and seem to have done exactly that.
this post was dated to 8:56 on the morning of tuesday the 17th, but was never posted:
======
so, i'm home and in for hopefully the next 10-15 days.
i want to finish the thought on that phone first, but this is for real the last night spent on it before i move on. the older firmware is supposed to be able to connect through the nat, so i want to try it to see if i can get it to work. but, that actually doesn't mean that i'm going to stick with it. if not, i'll have to see what the best way to exchange it for a usb phone, which is what i wanted and thought i was buying, is.
the splitter for the machine came in, but i'm going to hold off on everything coming in before i install the ssd and install windows 10 to it. it probably actually makes more sense to try to install it to the space for the card reader instead of taping it under the mechanical hard drive, as that is where they suggest installing an msata to.
8:56
what i was thinking was that i could sit down and write a narrative post once i finished the thought on the phone, so that post kept getting put off. however, it took another week before i was able to actually do that, and another two weeks before i could finish the post.
so, let's get to the next thing, then.
12:13
tuesday, may 31, 2022
one of the few serious issues being brought up in the election has to do with gridlock in toronto. the conservatives want more highways, the greens want less sprawl and the ndp & liberals have no answer to the problem, they just oppose more highways.
the greens are the least wrong, but their proposals are not serious, either - walkable cities are a good idea, but we can't solve the problem with density. how do we actually deal with this?
i think toronto has to come face to face with the simple truth that it's unsustainable and realize that the gridlock and the lack of affordable housing are actually symptoms of the same cause: the city is absurdly overpopulated, relative to the existing housing infrastructure. there are simply too many people trying to get in and out of a city that doesn't have enough space in it to accommodate the size of the population inhabiting it.
growing up is a good idea. any future development should seek to move upwards, and that should be a strategic, long term goal throughout the world, not just in toronto. but, if you replace a neighbourhood of mansions with a neighbourhood of 50 floor apartment buildings, what is the expected effect on traffic to and from that neighbourhood? does toronto have the infrastructure to withstand that kind of change?
one of the differences between new york and toronto is the prevalence of car ownership. car ownership in new york is unusual. if toronto wants to be a big city, it's going to need to drop the reliance on cars; the way to eliminate gridlock is to shift large amounts of day-to-day traffic from cars to buses and trains and subways and streetcars. but, that only solves half of the problem.
the other half of the problem is actually to minimize the need for people to travel from the suburbs to the city, which means increasing sprawl, in a certain way. the pandemic taught us that you don't actually have to come in to town for a meeting. how much of the gridlock could be reduced by eliminating the need for daily commutes?
these are the kinds of discussions you hope to hear from the ndp at the least, but they made the mistake of defining themselves in opposition to a highway instead of in favour of an alternative solution. i'm about as rabid an environmentalist as you can get - i not only don't have a car at 41, i never even got a driver's license, because i knew i'd never want a car. - and i don't see the value of opposing a highway. the existence of the highway doesn't create more emissions. and, electric cars need highways, too, right?
ford may win by a landslide, but don't interpret that as a mandate. i think ontarians would like an alternative to the status quo. unfortunately, both of the major opposition parties have failed to define what an alternative to doug ford would actually be, and have instead focused their efforts on either mimicking him or bickering at him, and at each other.
5:40