$ mkdir yakuake
$ wget https://steamdeck-packages.steamos.cloud/archlinux-mirror/extra/os/x86_64/yakuake-21.12.1-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
$ tar -C yakuake -xaf yakuake-*.tar.zst usr

$ mkdir -p yakuake/usr/lib/extension-release.d/
$ echo ID=steamos > yakuake/usr/lib/extension-release.d/extension-release.yakuake
$ echo VERSION_ID=3.3.1 >> yakuake/usr/lib/extension-release.d/extension-release.yakuake

$ mksquashfs yakuake yakuake.raw

(deck@steamdeck ~)$ mkdir extensions
(deck@steamdeck ~)$ scp user@host:/path/to/yakuake.raw extensions/
(deck@steamdeck ~)$ sudo ln -s $PWD/extensions /var/lib/extensions

(deck@steamdeck ~)$ sudo systemctl enable systemd-sysext
(deck@steamdeck ~)$ sudo systemctl start systemd-sysext

$ systemd-sysext status
HIERARCHY EXTENSIONS SINCE
/opt      none       -
/usr      yakuake    Tue 2022-09-13 18:21:53 CEST

1. Using extensions is easy (you put them in the directory and voil !). However, creating extensions is not necessarily always easy. To begin with, any libraries, files, etc., that your extensions may need should be either present in the root filesystem or provided by the extension itself. You may need to combine files from different sources or packages into a single extension, or compile them yourself.
2. In particular, if the extension contains binaries they should probably come from the Steam Deck repository or they should be built to work with those packages. If you need to build your own binaries then having a SteamOS virtual machine can be handy. There you can install all development files and also test that everything works as expected. One could also create a Steam Deck SDK extension with all the necessary files to develop directly on the Deck
3. Extensions are not distribution packages, they don t have dependency information and therefore they should be self-contained. They also lack triggers and other features available in packages. For desktop applications I still recommend using a system like Flatpak when possible.
4. Extensions are tied to a particular version of the OS and, as explained above, the ID and VERSION_ID of each extension must match the values from /etc/os-release. If the fields don t match then the extension will be ignored. This is to be expected because there s no guarantee that a particular extension is going to work with a different version of the OS. This can happen after a system update. In the best case one simply needs to update the extension s VERSION_ID, but in some cases it might be necessary to create the extension again with different/updated files.
5. Extensions only install files in /usr and /opt. Any other file in the image will be ignored. This can be a problem if a particular piece of software needs files in other directories.
6. When extensions are enabled the /usr and /opt directories become read-only because they are now part of an overlayfs. They will remain read-only even if you run steamos-readonly disable !!. If you really want to make the rootfs read-write you need to disable the extensions (systemd-sysext unmerge) first.
7. Unlike Flatpak or Podman (including toolbox / distrobox), this is (by design) not meant to isolate the contents of the extension from the rest of the system, so you should be careful with what you re installing. On the other hand, this lack of isolation makes systemd-sysext better suited to some use cases than those container-based systems.

(The picture is of the previous edition.) Almost two years after the previous Norwegian Bokm l translation of the "The Debian Administrator's Handbook" was published, a new edition is finally being prepared. The english text is updated, and it is time to start working on the translations. Around 37 percent of the strings have been updated, one way or another, and the translations starting from a complete Debian Buster edition now need to bring their translation up from 63% to 100%. The complete book is licensed using a Creative Commons license, and has been published in several languages over the years. The translations are done by volunteers to bring Linux in their native tongue. The last time I checked, it complete text was available in English, Norwegian Bokm l, German, Indonesian, Brazil Portuguese and Spanish. In addition, work has been started for Arabic (Morocco), Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Swedish, Turkish and Vietnamese. The translation is conducted on the hosted weblate project page. Prospective translators are recommeded to subscribe to the translators mailing list and should also check out the instructions for contributors. I am one of the Norwegian Bokm l translators of this book, and we have just started. Your contribution is most welcome. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Politics I have been reading books, both fiction and non-fiction for a long long time. My first book was a comic most probably when I was down with Malaria when I was a kid. I must be around 4-5 years old. Over the years, books have given me great joy and I continue to find nuggets of useful information, both in fiction as well as non-fiction books. So here s to sharing something and how that can lead you to a rabbit hole. This entry would be a bit NSFW as far as language is concerned. NYPD Red 5 by James Patterson First of all, have no clue as to why James Patterson s popularity has been falling. He used to be right there with Lee Child and others, but not so much now. While I try to be mysterious about books, I would give a bit of heads-up so people know what to expect. This is probably more towards the Adult crowd as there is a bit of sex as well as quite a few grey characters. The NYPD Red is a sort of elite police task force that basically is for celebrities. In the book series, they do a lot of ass-kissing (figuratively more than literally). Now the reason I have always liked fiction is that however wild the assumption or presumption is, it does have somewhere a grain of truth. And each and every time I read a book or two, that gets cemented. One of the statements in the book told something about how 9/11 took a lot of police personnel out of the game. First, there were a number of policemen who were patrolling the Two Towers, so they perished literally during the explosion. Then there were policemen who were given the cases to close the cases (bring the cases to conclusion). When you are investigating your own brethren or even civilians who perished 9/11 they must have experienced emotional trauma and no outlet. Mental health even in cops is the same and given similar help as you and me (i.e. next to none.) But both of these were my assumptions. The only statement that was in the book was they lost a lot of bench strength. Even NYFD (New York Fire Department). This led me to me to With Crime At Record Lows, Should NYC Have Fewer Cops? This is more right-wing sentiment and in fact, there have been calls to defund the police. This led me to https://cbcny.org/ and one specific graph. Unfortunately, this tells the story from 2010-2022 but not before. I was looking for data from around 1999 to 2005 because that will tell whether or not it happened. Then I remembered reading in newspapers the year or two later how 9/11 had led NYC to recession. I looked up online and for sure NY was booming before 9/11. One can argue that NYC could come down and that is pretty much possible, everything that goes up comes down, it s a law of nature but it would have been steady rather than abrupt. And once you are in recession, the first thing to go is personnel. So people both from NYPD and NYFD were let go, even though they were needed the most then. As you can see, a single statement in a book can take you to places & time literally. Edit: Addition 11th September There were quite a few people who also died from New York Port Authority and they also lost quite a number of people directly and indirectly and did a lot of patrolling of the water bodies near NYC. Later on, even in their department, there were a lot of early retirements.

Kosovo A couple of days back I had a look at the Debconf 2023 BOF that was done in Kosovo. One of the interesting things that happened during the BOF is when a woman participant chimed in and asks India to recognize Kosovo. Immediately it triggered me and I opened the Kosovo Wikipedia page to get some understanding of the topic. Reading up on it, came to know Russia didn t agree and doesn t recognize Kosovo. Mr. Modi likes Putin and India imports a lot of its oil from Russia. Unrelatedly, but still useful, we rejected to join IPEF. Earlier, we had rejected China s BRI. India has never been as vulnerable as she is now. Our foreign balance has reached record lows. Now India has been importing quite a bit of Russian crude and has been buying arms and ammunition from them. We are also scheduled to buy a couple of warships and submarines etc. We even took arms and ammunition from them on lease. So we can t afford that they are displeased with India. Even though Russia has more than friendly relations with both China and Pakistan. At the same time, the U.S. is back to aiding Pakistan which the mainstream media in India refuses to even cover. And to top all of this, we have the Chip 4 Alliance but that needs its own article, truth be told but we will do with a paragraph Edit Addition 11th September Seems Kosovo isn t unique in that situation, there are 3-4 states like that. A brief look at worldpopulationreview tells you there are many more.

Chip 4 Alliance For almost a decade I have been screaming about this on my blog as well as everywhere that chip fabrication is a national security thing. And for years, most people deny it. And now we have chip 4 alliance. Now to understand this, you have to understand that China for almost a decade, somewhere around 2014 or so came up with something called the big fund . Now one can argue one way or the other how successful the fund has been, but it has, without doubt, created ripples so strong that the U.S., Taiwan, Japan, and probably South Korea will join and try to stem the tide. Interestingly, in this grouping, South Korea is the weakest in the statements and what they have been saying. Within the group itself, there is a lot of tension and China would use that and there are a number of unresolved issues between the three countries that both China & Russia would exploit. For e.g. the Comfort women between South Korea and Japan. Or the 1985 Accord Agreement between Japan and the U.S. Now people need to understand this, this is not just about China but also about us. If China has 5-6x times India s GDP and their research budget is at the very least 100x times what India spends, how do you think we will be self-reliant? Whom are we fooling? Are we not tired of fooling ourselves In diplomacy, countries use leverage. Sadly, we let go of some of our most experienced negotiators in 2014 and since then have been singing in the wind

Accessibility, Jitsi, IRC, Element-Desktop The Wikipedia page on Accessibility says the following Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, vehicles, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design and practice of accessible development ensures both direct access (i.e. unassisted) and indirect access meaning compatibility with a person s assistive technology. Now IRC or Internet Relay Chat has been accessible for a long time. I know of even blind people who have been able to navigate IRC quite effortlessly as there has been a lot of work done to make sure all the joints speak to each other so people with one or more disabilities still can use, and contribute without an issue. It does help that IRC and many clients have been there since the 1970s so most of them have had more than enough time to get all the bugs fixed and both text-to-speech and speech-to-text work brilliantly on IRC. Newer software like Jitsi or for that matter Telegram is lacking those features. A few days ago, discovered on Telegram I was shared that Samsung Voice input is also able to do the same. The Samsung Voice Input works wonder as it translates voice to text, I have not yet tried the text-to-speech but perhaps somebody can and they can share whatever the results can be one way or the other. I have tried element-desktop both on the desktop as well as mobile phone and it has been disappointing, to say the least. On the desktop, it is unruly and freezes once in a while, and is buggy. The mobile version is a little better but that s not saying a lot. I prefer the desktop version as I can use the full-size keyboard. The bug I reported has been there since its Riot days. I had put up a bug report even then. All in all, yesterday was disappointing

"Look at it this way, then," she said, and took a deep mental breath. "Wherever people are obtuse and absurd... and wherever they have, by even the most generous standards, the attention span of a small chicken in a hurricane and the investigative ability of a one-legged cockroach... and wherever people are inanely credulous, pathetically attached to the certainties of the nursery and, in general, have as much grasp of the physical universe as an oyster has of mountaineering... yes, Twyla: there is a Hogfather.

"All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable." REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE. "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little " YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES. "So we can believe the big ones?" YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING. "They're not the same at all!" YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED. "Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point " MY POINT EXACTLY.

Community news As announced last month, registration is currently open for our in-person summit this year which is due to be held between November 1st November 3rd. The event will take place in Venice (Italy). Very soon we intend to pick a venue reachable via the train station and an international airport. However, the precise venue will depend on the number of attendees. Please see the announcement email for information about how to register.

---

The US National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) have released a document called Securing the Software Supply Chain: Recommended Practices Guide for Developers (PDF) as part of their Enduring Security Framework (ESF) work. The document expressly recommends having reproducible builds as part of advanced recommended mitigations, along with hermetic builds. Page 31 (page 35 in the PDF) says:

Reproducible builds provide additional protection and validation against attempts to compromise build systems. They ensure the binary products of each build system match: i.e., they are built from the same source, regardless of variable metadata such as the order of input files, timestamps, locales, and paths. Reproducible builds are those where re-running the build steps with identical input artifacts results in bit-for-bit identical output. Builds that cannot meet this must provide a justification why the build cannot be made reproducible.

The full press release is available online.

---

On our mailing list this month, Marc Prud hommeaux posted a feature request for diffoscope which additionally outlines a project called The App Fair, an autonomous distribution network of free and open-source macOS and iOS applications, where validated apps are then signed and submitted for publication .

---

Author/blogger Cory Doctorow posted published a provocative blog post this month titled Your computer is tormented by a wicked god . Touching on Ken Thompson s famous talk, Reflections on Trusting Trust , the early goals of Secure Computing and UEFI firmware interfaces:

This is the core of a two-decade-old debate among security people, and it s one that the benevolent God faction has consistently had the upper hand in. They re the curated computing advocates who insist that preventing you from choosing an alternative app store or side-loading a program is for your own good because if it s possible for you to override the manufacturer s wishes, then malicious software may impersonate you to do so, or you might be tricked into doing so. [..] This benevolent dictatorship model only works so long as the dictator is both perfectly benevolent and perfectly competent. We know the dictators aren t always benevolent. [ ] But even if you trust a dictator s benevolence, you can t trust in their perfection. Everyone makes mistakes. Benevolent dictator computing works well, but fails badly. Designing a computer that intentionally can t be fully controlled by its owner is a nightmare, because that is a computer that, once compromised, can attack its owner with impunity.

---

Lastly, Chengyu HAN updated the Reproducible Builds website to correct an incorrect Git command. [ ]

Debian In Debian this month, the essential and required package sets became 100% reproducible in Debian bookworm on the amd64 and arm64 architectures. These two subsets of the full Debian archive refer to Debian package priority levels as described in the 2.5 Priorities section of the Debian Policy there is no canonical minimal installation package set in Debian due to its diverse methods of installation. As it happens, these package sets are not reproducible on the i386 architecture because the ncurses package on that architecture is not yet reproducible, and the sed package currently fails to build from source on armhf too. The full list of reproducible packages within these package sets can be viewed within our QA system, such as on the page of required packages in amd64 and the list of essential packages on arm64, both for Debian bullseye.

---

It recently has become very easy to install reproducible Debian Docker containers using podman on Debian bullseye:

$ sudo apt install podman
$ podman run --rm -it debian:bullseye bash

The (pre-built) image used is itself built using debuerrotype, as explained on docker.debian.net. This page also details how to build the image yourself and what checksums are expected if you do so.

---

Related to this, it has also become straightforward to reproducibly bootstrap Debian using mmdebstrap, a replacement for the usual debootstrap tool to create Debian root filesystems:

$ SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH=$(date --utc --date=2022-08-29 +%s) mmdebstrap unstable > unstable.tar

This works for (at least) Debian unstable, bullseye and bookworm, and is tested automatically by a number of QA jobs set up by Holger Levsen (unstable, bookworm and bullseye)

---

Work has also taken place to ensure that the canonical debootstrap and cdebootstrap tools are also capable of bootstrapping Debian reproducibly, although it currently requires a few extra steps:

1. Clamping the modification time of files that are newer than $SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH to be not greater than SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.
2. Deleting a few files. For debootstrap, this requires the deletion of /etc/machine-id, /var/cache/ldconfig/aux-cache, /var/log/dpkg.log, /var/log/alternatives.log and /var/log/bootstrap.log, and for cdebootstrap we also need to delete the /var/log/apt/history.log and /var/log/apt/term.log files as well.

This process works at least for unstable, bullseye and bookworm and is now being tested automatically by a number of QA jobs setup by Holger Levsen [ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]. As part of this work, Holger filed two bugs to request a better initialisation of the /etc/machine-id file in both debootstrap [ ] and cdebootstrap [ ].

---

Elsewhere in Debian, 131 reviews of Debian packages were added, 20 were updated and 27 were removed this month, adding to our extensive knowledge about identified issues. Chris Lamb added a number of issue types, including: randomness_in_browserify_output [ ], haskell_abi_hash_differences [ ], nondeterministic_ids_in_html_output_generated_by_python_sphinx_panels [ ]. Lastly, Mattia Rizzolo removed the deterministic flag from the captures_kernel_variant flag [ ].

Other distributions Vagrant Cascadian posted an update of the status of Reproducible Builds in GNU Guix, writing that:

Ignoring the pesky unknown packages, it is more like ~93% reproducible and ~7% unreproducible... that feels a bit better to me! These numbers wander around over time, mostly due to packages moving back into an "unknown" state while the build farms catch up with each other... although the above numbers seem to have been pretty consistent over the last few days.

The post itself contains a lot more details, including a brief discussion of tooling. Elsewhere in GNU Guix, however, Vagrant updated a number of packages such as itpp [ ], perl-class-methodmaker [ ], libnet [ ], directfb [ ] and mm-common [ ], as well as updated the version of reprotest to 0.7.21 [ ]. In openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann published his usual openSUSE monthly report.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions 220 and 221 to Debian, as well as made the following changes:

• Update external_tools.py to reflect changes to xxd and the vim-common package. [ ]
• Depend on the dedicated xxd package now, not the vim-common package. [ ]
• Don t crash if we can open a PDF file using the PyPDF library, but cannot subsequently parse the annotations within. [ ]

In addition, Vagrant Cascadian updated diffoscope in GNU Guix, first to to version 220 [ ] and later to 221 [ ].

Community news The Reproducible Builds project aims to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible as well as to send all of our patches upstream wherever appropriate. This month we created a number of patches, including:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • at-spi-sharp (build failure when build on a multiprocessor machine).
  • borgbackup (fails to build in 2038, fix)
  • buzztrax (parallelism-related issue)
  • chart-testing (date-related issue)
  • memcached (fails to build in 2038)
  • nim (fails to build in 2038)
  • perl-Time-Moment (fails to build in 2038)
  • python-bson (fails to build in 2038)
  • python-heatclient (fails to build in 2038)
  • python3.8 (fails to build in 2038)
  • reproducible-faketools
  • s3fs (date-related issue)
  • systemd (date-related issue)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1016486 filed against wayfire.
  • #1016583 filed against multipath-tools.
  • #1016584 filed against node-canvas-confetti.
  • #1017473 filed against psi (forwarded upstream).
  • #1017475 filed against sphinx-panels (forwarded upstream).
  • #1017920 filed against sysfsutils.
  • #1017945 filed against geeqie.
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • #1017073 filed against python-suntime.
  • #1017372 filed against plymouth.
  • #1017373 filed against tiemu.
  • #1017421 filed against fltk1.3.
  • #1018802 filed against localechooser.
  • uboot (Rasmus Villemoes proposed fixing gcc instead [ ][ ])

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project runs a significant testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org, to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. This month, Holger Levsen made the following changes:

• Debian-related changes:
  • Temporarily add Debian unstable deb-src lines to enable test builds a Non-maintainer Upload (NMU) campaign targeting 708 sources without .buildinfo files found in Debian unstable, including 475 in bookworm. [ ][ ]
  • Correctly deal with the Debian Edu packages not being installable. [ ]
  • Finally, stop scheduling stretch. [ ]
  • Make sure all Ubuntu nodes have the linux-image-generic kernel package installed. [ ]
• Health checks & view:
  • Detect SSH login problems. [ ]
  • Only report the first uninstallable package set. [ ]
  • Show new bootstrap jobs. [ ] and debian-live jobs. [ ] in the job health view.
  • Fix regular expression to detect various zombie jobs. [ ]
• New jobs:
  • Add a new job to test reproducibility of mmdebstrap bootstrapping tool. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
  • Run our new mmdebstrap job remotely [ ][ ]
  • Improve the output of the mmdebstrap job. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Adjust the mmdebstrap script to additionally support debootstrap as well. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Work around mmdebstrap and debootstrap keeping logfiles within their artifacts. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Add support for testing cdebootstrap too and add such a job for unstable. [ ][ ][ ]
  • Use a reproducible value for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH for all our new bootstrap jobs. [ ]
• Misc changes:
  • Send the create_meta_pkg_sets notification to #debian-reproducible-changes instead of #debian-reproducible. [ ]

In addition, Roland Clobus re-enabled the tests for live-build images [ ] and added a feature where the build would retry instead of give up when the archive was synced whilst building an ISO [ ], and Vagrant Cascadian added logging to report the current target of the /bin/sh symlink [ ].

Contact As ever, if you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org

I have just filed a complaint with the CRTC about my phone provider's outrageous fees. This is a copy of the complaint.

• 2$/min
• 0.75$/text
• 10$/20MB

• unlimited data
• 1000 minutes
• 500 text messages
• 12GB data elsewhere in Europe

I have no illusions about this having any effect. I thought of filing such a complain after the Rogers outage as well, but felt I had less of a standing there because I wasn't affected that much (e.g. I didn't have a life-threatening situation myself). This, however, was ridiculous and frustrating enough to trigger this outrage. We'll see how it goes...

"We will respond to you within 10 working days."

Response from CRTC They did respond within 10 days. Here is the full response:

Dear Antoine Beaupr : Thank you for contacting us about your mobile telephone international roaming service plan rates concern with Fido Solutions Inc. (Fido). In Canada, mobile telephone service is offered on a competitive basis. Therefore, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is not involved in Fido's terms of service (including international roaming service plan rates), billing and marketing practices, quality of service issues and customer relations. If you haven't already done so, we encourage you to escalate your concern to a manager if you believe the answer you have received from Fido's customer service is not satisfactory. Based on the information that you have provided, this may also appear to be a Competition Bureau matter. The Competition Bureau is responsible for administering and enforcing the Competition Act, and deals with issues such as false or misleading representations, deceptive marketing practices and collusion. You can reach the Competition Bureau by calling 1-800-348-5358 (toll-free), by TTY (for deaf and hard of hearing people) by calling 1-866-694-8389 (toll-free). For more contact information, please visit http://www.competitionbureau.gc.ca/eic/site/cb-bc.nsf/eng/00157.html When consumers are not satisfied with the service they are offered, we encourage them to compare the products and services of other providers in their area and look for a company that can better match their needs. The following tool helps to show choices of providers in your area: https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/comm/fourprov.htm Thank you for sharing your concern with us.

In other words, complain with Fido, or change providers. Don't complain to us, we don't manage the telcos, they self-regulate. Great job, CRTC. This is going great. This is exactly why we're one of the most expensive countries on the planet for cell phone service.

Live chat with Fido Interestingly, the day after I received that response from the CRTC, I received this email from Fido, while traveling:

Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2022 10:10:00 -0400 From: Fido DONOTREPLY@fido.ca To: REDACTED Subject: Courriel d avis d itin rance Fido Roaming Welcome Confirmation Fido Date : 13 septembre 2022
Num ro de compte : [redacted] Bonjour
Antoine Beaupr ! Nous vous crivons pour vous indiquer qu au moins un utilisateur inscrit votre compte s est r cemment connect un r seau en itin rance.
Vous trouverez ci-dessous le message texte de bienvenue en itin rance envoy l utilisateur (ou aux utilisateurs), qui contenait les tarifs d itin rance
applicables. Message texte de bienvenue en itin rance Destinataire : REDACTED Date et heure : 2022-09-13 / 10:10:00
Allo, ici Fido : Bienvenue destination! Vous tes inscrit Fido Nomade alors utilisez vos donn es, parlez et textez comme vous le faites la
maison. Depuis le 1 mars 2022 le tarif cette destination pour 15 $/jour (+ taxes) et valide tous les jours jusqu' 23 h 59 HE, peu importe le fuseau
horaire dans lequel vous vous trouvez. Bon voyage! Des questions? Consultez fido.ca/m/itinerance ou composez +15149333436 (sans frais). Besoin d aide?

• PLANIFIEZ UN VOYAGE AVEC Fido NomadeMC
  D couvrez nos options d itin rance et restez en contact l tranger sans vous soucier de votre
  facture.

D tails

• G rez votre compte
  G rez vos produits et services Fido la maison ou sur la route gr ce Mon
  Compte.

D tails Ce courriel est produit automatiquement; veuillez ne pas y r pondre. Ce courriel (et toute pi ce jointe) est confidentiel. Si vous n tes pas le destinataire,
veuillez supprimer le pr sent message et en d truire toute copie. FIDO SOLUTIONS 800, RUE DE LA GAUCHETI RE OUEST
BUREAU 4000 MONTR AL (QU BEC) H5A 1K3
Fido

I found that message utterly confusing (and yes, I can read french). Basically, it says that some user (presumably me!) connected to the network with roaming. I did just disabled airplane mode on my phone to debug a Syncthing bug but had not enabled roaming. So this message seemed to say that I would be charged 15$ (per DAY!) for roaming from now on. Confused, I tried their live chat to try to clarify things, worried I would get charged even more for calling tech support on *611. This is a transcript of the chat:

F: Hi! What are we doing today? Type in your question or choose from the options below: * Track my Equipment Order * View Bill Online * Payment Options * iPhone 14 Pre-Order A: i received a message about roaming while abroad but i did not enable roaming on my phone, will i be charged anyways? F: I think I know what you re asking for. Select the topic that best matches your request or try rephrasing your question. A: no F: Thank you, this will help us to improve! Would you like to chat with a specialist? Chat with a specialist I'll get a specialist to help you with this. It appears that you're not signed in. Your session may have timed out. To save time and identify your account details, please sign in to My Account.

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Have any questions specific to your Fido account? To service you faster, please identify yourself by completing the form below. A: Personal info Form submitted F: Thank you! I'll connect you with the next available specialist. Your chat is being transferred to a Live Chat agent. Thanks for your patience. We are here to assist you and we kindly ask that our team members be treated with respect and dignity. Please note that abuse directed towards any Consumer Care Specialist will not be tolerated and will result in the termination of your conversation with us. All of our agents are with other customers at the moment. Your chat is in a priority sequence and someone will be with you as soon as possible. Thanks! Thanks for continuing to hold. An agent will be with you as soon as possible. Thank you for your continued patience. We re getting more Live Chat requests than usual so it s taking longer to answer. Your chat is still in a priority sequence and will be answered as soon as an agent becomes available. Thank you so much for your patience we're sorry for the wait. Your chat is still in a priority sequence and will be answered as soon as possible. Hi, I'm [REDACTED] from Fido in [REDACTED]. May I have your name please? A: hi i am antoine, nice to meet you sorry to use the live chat, but it's not clear to me i can safely use my phone to call support, because i am in ireland and i'm worried i'll get charged for the call F: Thank You Antoine , I see you waited to speak with me today, thank you for your patience.Apart from having to wait, how are you today? A: i am good thank you

[... delay ...]

A: should i restate my question? F: Yes please what is the concern you have? A: i have received an email from fido saying i someone used my phone for roaming it's in french (which is fine), but that's the gist of it i am traveling to ireland for a week i do not want to use fido's services here... i have set the phon eto airplane mode for most of my time here F: The SMS just says what will be the charges if you used any services. A: but today i have mistakenly turned that off and did not turn on roaming well it's not a SMS, it's an email F: Yes take out the sim and keep it safe.Turun off or On for roaming you cant do it as it is part of plan. A: wat F: if you used any service you will be charged if you not used any service you will not be charged. A: you are saying i need to physically take the SIM out of the phone? i guess i will have a fun conversation with your management once i return from this trip not that i can do that now, given that, you know, i nee dto take the sim out of this phone fun times F: Yes that is better as most of the customer end up using some kind of service and get charged for roaming. A: well that is completely outrageous roaming is off on the phone i shouldn't get charged for roaming, since roaming is off on the phone i also don't get why i cannot be clearly told whether i will be charged or not the message i have received says i will be charged if i use the service and you seem to say i could accidentally do that easily can you tell me if i have indeed used service sthat will incur an extra charge? are incoming text messages free? F: I understand but it is on you if you used some data SMS or voice mail you can get charged as you used some services.And we cant check anything for now you have to wait for next bill. and incoming SMS are free rest all service comes under roaming. That is the reason I suggested take out the sim from phone and keep it safe or always keep the phone or airplane mode. A: okay can you confirm whether or not i can call fido by voice for support? i mean for free F: So use your Fido sim and call on +1-514-925-4590 on this number it will be free from out side Canada from Fido sim. A: that is quite counter-intuitive, but i guess i will trust you on that thank you, i think that will be all F: Perfect, Again, my name is [REDACTED] and it s been my pleasure to help you today. Thank you for being a part of the Fido family and have a great day! A: you too

So, in other words:

1. they can't tell me if I've actually been roaming
2. they can't tell me how much it's going to cost me
3. I should remove the SIM card from my phone (!?) or turn on airplane mode, but the former is safer
4. I can call Fido support, but not on the usual *611, and instead on that long-distance-looking phone number, and yes, that means turning off airplane mode and putting the SIM card in, which contradicts step 3

Also notice how the phone number from the live chat (+1-514-925-4590) is different than the one provided in the email (15149333436). So who knows what would have happened if I would have called the latter. The former is mentioned in their contact page. I guess the next step is to call Fido over the phone and talk to a manager, which is what the CRTC told me to do in the first place... I ended up talking with a manager (another 1h phone call) and they confirmed there is no other package available at Fido for this. At best they can provide me with a credit if I mistakenly use the roaming by accident to refund me, but that's it. The manager also confirmed that I cannot know if I have actually used any data before reading the bill, which is issued on the 15th of every month, but only available... three days later, at which point I'll be back home anyways. Fantastic.

• [#1010380] buster-pu: flac/1.3.2-3+deb10u2, upload
• [#1009076] buster-pu: minidlna/1.2.1+dfsg-2+deb10u3, upload
• [#1009251] buster-pu: fribidi/1.0.5-3.1+deb10u2, upload
• [#1008578] buster-pu: golang-github-russellhaering-goxmldsig/0.0~git20170911.b7efc62-1+deb10u1, upload
• [#1016391] bullseye-pu: libhttp-daemon-perl/6.12-1+deb11u1, upload
• [DLA 3088-1] net-snmp security update for six CVEs
• [unstable] mod-wsgi for one CVE

• [ELA-655-1] libhttp-daemon-perl security update of Jessie and Stretch for one CVE
• [ELA-659-1] mod-wsgi security update of Stretch for one CVE
• [ELA-667-1] gst-plugins-good1.0 security update of Jessie and Stretch for seven CVEs
• [ELA-668-1] net-snmp security update of Jessie and Stretch for six CVEs

• cups-bjnp
• dymo-cups-driver
• hplip
• gutenprint

• planetary-system-stacker
• openvlbi
• libsbig
• indi-sbig

History Before I start, the game I was talking about is called Cell To Singularity. Now I haven t gone much in the game as I have shared but think that the Singularity it refers to is the Technological Singularity that people think will happen. Whether that will happen or not is open to debate to one and all. This is going to be a bit long one. Confession Time :- When I was sharing in the blog post, I had no clue that we actually had sessions on it in this year s Debconf. I just saw the schedule yesterday and then came to know. Then I saw Guido s two talks, one at Debconf as well as one as Froscon. In fact, saw the Froscon talk first, and then the one at Debconf. Both the talks are nearly the same except for a thing here or a thing there. Now because I was not there so my understanding and knowledge would be disadvantageously asymmetrical to Guido and others who were there and could talk and share more. Having a Debian mobile or Debian on the mobile could also make Debian more popular and connectable to the masses, one of the things that were not pointed out in the Debian India BOF sadly. At the same time, there are some facts that are not on the table and hence not thought about. Being a B.Com person, I have been following not just the technical but also how the economics work and smartphone penetration in India is pretty low or historically been very low, say around 3-4% while the majority that people use, almost 90-95% of the market uses what are called non-smartphones or dumbphones. Especially during the pandemic and even after that the dumbphones market actually went up while smartphones stagnated and even came down. There is a lot of inventory at most of the dealers that they can t get rid of. From a dealer perspective, it probably makes more sense to buy and sell dumbphones more in number as the turnaround of capital is much faster and easier than for smartphones. I have seen people spend a number of hours and rightly so in order to make their minds up on a smartphone while for a dumbphone, it is a 10-minute thing. Ask around, figure out who is selling at the cheapest, and just buy. Most of these low-end phones are coming from China. In fact, even in the middle and getting even into smartphones, the Chinese are the masters from whom we buy, even as they have occupied Indian territory. In the top five, Samsung comes at number three of four (sharing about Samsung as a fan and having used them.) even though battery times are atrocious, especially with Android 12L. The only hope that most of the smartphone manufacturers have is lowering the sticker prices and hoping that 5G Adoption picks up and that is what they are betting on but that comes with its own share of drawbacks as can be seen.

GNOME, MATE, memory leaks, Payments FWIW, while I do have GNOME and do use a couple of tools from the GNOME stack, I hate GNOME with a passion. I have been a mate user for almost a decade now and really love the simplicity that mate has vis-a-vis GNOME. And with each release, MATE has only become better. So, it would be nice if we can have MATE on the mobile phone. How adaptive the apps might be on the smaller area, I dunno. It would be interesting to find out if and how people are looking at debugging memory leaks on mobile phones. Although finding memory leaks on any platform is good, finding them and fixing them on a mobile phone is pretty much critical as most phones have fixed & relatively small amounts of memory and it is and can get quickly exhausted. One of the things that were asked in the Q&A was about payments. The interesting thing is both UK and India are the same or markedly similar in regard as far as contactless payments being concerned. What most Indians have or use is basically UPI which is basically backed by your bank. Unlike in some other countries where you have a selection of wallets and even temporary/permanent virtual accounts whereby you can minimize your risks in case your mobile gets stolen or something, here we don t have that. There are three digital wallets that I know Paytm Not used (have heard it s creepy, but don t really know), Google pay (Unfortunately, this is the one I use, they bought multiple features, and in the last couple of years have really taken the game away from Paytm but also creepy.). The last one is Samsung Pay (haven t really used it as their find my phone app. always crashes, dunno how it is supposed to work.) But I do find that the apps. are vulnerable. Every day there is some or other news of fraud happening. Previously, only States like Bihar and Jharkhand used to be infamous for cybercrime as a hub, but now even States like Andhra Pradesh have joined and surpassed them :(. People have lost lakhs and crores, this is just a few days back. Some more info. on UPI can be found here and GitHub has a few implementation examples that anybody could look at and run away with it.

Balancing on three things For any new mobile phone to crack the market, it has to balance three things. One, achieve economies of scale. Unless, that is not taken care of or done, however good or bad the product might be, it remains a niche and dies after some time. While Guido shared about Openmoko and N900, one of the more interesting bits from a user perspective at least was the OLPC project. There are many nuances that the short article didn t go through. While I can t say for other countries, at least in India, no education initiative happens without corruption. And perhaps Nicholas s hands were tied while other manufacturers would and could do to achieve their sales targets. In India, it flopped because there was no way for volunteers to buy or get OLPC unless they were part of a school or college. There was some traction in FOSS communities, but that died down once OLPC did the partnership with MS-Windows, and proverbially broke the camel s back. FWIW, I think the idea, the concept, and even the machine were far ahead of their time. The other two legs are support and Warranty Without going into any details, I can share and tell there were quite a few OLPC type attempts using conventional laptops or using Android and FOSS or others or even using one of the mainstream distributions but the problems have always been polishing, training and support. Guido talked about privacy as a winning feature but fails to take into account that people want to know that their privacy isn t being violated. If a mobile phone answers to Hey Google does it mean it was passively gathering, storing, and sending info to third parties, we just don t know. The mobile phone could be part of the right to repair profile while at the same time it can force us to ask many questions about the way things currently are and going to be. Six months down the line all the flagships of all companies are working on being able to take and share through satellites (Satellite Internet) and perhaps maybe a few non-flagships. Of course, if you are going to use a satellite, then you are going to drain that much more quickly. In all and every event there are always gonna be tradeoffs. The Debian-mobile mailing list doesn t seem to have many takers. The latest I could find there is written by Paul Wise. I am in a similar boat (Samsung; SM-M526B; Lahaina; arm64-v8a) v12. It is difficult to know which release would work on your machine, make sure that the building from the source is not tainted and pristine and needs a way to backup and restore if you need to. I even tried installing GNURoot Debian and the Xserver alternative they had shared but was unable to use the touch interface on the fakeroot instance . The system talks about a back key but what back key I have no clue.

Precursor Events Debconf 2023 As far as precursor events are concerned before Debconf 23 in India, all the festivals that we have could be used to showcase Debian. In fact, the ongoing Ganesh Chaturthi would have been the perfect way to showcase Debian and apps. according to the audience. Even the festival of Durga Puja, Diwali etc. can be used. When commercial organizations use the same festivals, why can t we? What perhaps we would need to figure out is the funding part as well as getting permissions from Municipal authorities. One of the things for e.g. that we could do is buy either a permanent 24 monitor or a 34 TV and use that to display Debian and apps. The bigger, the better. Something that we could use day to day and also is used for events. This would require significant amounts of energy so we could approach companies, small businesses and individuals both for volunteering as well as helping out with funding. Somebody asked how we could do online stuff and why it is somewhat boring. What could be done for e.g. instead of 4-5 hrs. of things, break it into manageable 45 minute pieces. 4-5 hrs. is long and is gonna fatigue the best of people. Make it into 45-minute negotiable chunks, and intersphere it with jokes, hacks, anecdotes, and war stories. People do not like or want to be talked down to but rather converse. One of the things that I saw many of the artists do is have shows and limit the audience to 20-24 people on zoom call or whatever videoconferencing system you have and play with them. The passive audience enjoys the play between the standup guy and the crowd he works on, some of them may be known to him personally so he can push that envelope a bit more. The same thing can be applied here. Share the passion, and share why we are doing something. For e.g. you could do smem -t -k less and give a whole talk about how memory is used and freed during a session, how are things different on desktop and ARM as far as memory architecture is concerned (if there is). What is being done on the hardware side, what is on the software side and go on and on. Then share about troubleshooting applications. Valgrind is super slow and makes life hell, is there some better app ? Doesn t matter if you are a front-end or a back-end developer you need to know this and figure out the best way to deal with in your app/program. That would have lot of value. And this is just an e.g. to help trigger more ideas from the community. I am sure others probably have more fun ideas as to what can be done. I am stopping here now otherwise would just go on, till later. Feel free to comment, feedback. Hope it generates some more thinking and excitement on the grey cells.

Creating archive at "/backup/borg:: hostname -home-jon- now:%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%f "
segment 61916 not found, but listed in compaction data
[ further, similar lines ]
Local Exception
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/borg/archiver.py", line 4690, in main
    exit_code = archiver.run(args)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/borg/archiver.py", line 4622, in run
    return set_ec(func(args))
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/borg/archiver.py", line 177, in wrapper
    return method(self, args, repository=repository, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/borg/archiver.py", line 595, in do_create
    create_inner(archive, cache)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/borg/archiver.py", line 560, in create_inner
    archive.save(comment=args.comment, timestamp=args.timestamp)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/borg/archive.py", line 530, in save
    self.repository.commit()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/borg/repository.py", line 475, in commit
    self.compact_segments()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/borg/repository.py", line 835, in compact_segments
    assert segments[segment] == 0, 'Corrupted segment reference count - corrupted index or hints'
AssertionError: Corrupted segment reference count - corrupted index or hints

fibs = 0 : 1 : zipWith (+) fibs (tail fibs)

Elegant graph traversals A maybe more practical example is the following calculation of the transitive closure of a graph:

import qualified Data.Set as S
import qualified Data.Map as M

type Graph = M.Map Int [Int]

transitive1 :: Graph -> Graph
transitive1 g = M.map S.toList sets
  where
    sets :: M.Map Int (S.Set Int)
    sets = M.mapWithKey (\v vs -> S.insert v (S.unions [ sets M.! v'   v' <- vs ])) g

We represent graphs as maps from vertex to their successors vertex, and define the resulting map sets recursively: The set of reachable vertices from a vertex v is v itself, plus those reachable by its successors vs, for which we query sets. And, despite this apparent self-referential recursion, it works!

ghci> transitive1 $ M.fromList [(1,[3]),(2,[1,3]),(3,[])]
fromList [(1,[1,3]),(2,[1,2,3]),(3,[3])]

Cyclic graphs ruin it all These tricks can be very impressive until someone tries to use it on a cyclic graph and the program just hangs until we abort it:

ghci> transitive1 $ M.fromList [(1,[2,3]),(2,[1,3]),(3,[])]
fromList [(1,fromList ^CInterrupted.

At this point we are thrown back to implement a more pedestrian graph traversal, typically keeping explicit track of vertices that we have seen already:

transitive2 :: Graph -> Graph
transitive2 g = M.fromList [ (v, S.toList (go S.empty [v]))   v <- M.keys g ]
  where
    go :: S.Set Int -> [Int] -> S.Set Int
    go seen [] = seen
    go seen (v:vs)   v  S.member  seen = go seen vs
    go seen (v:vs) = go (S.insert v seen) (g M.! v ++ vs)

I have written that seen/todo recursion idiom so often in the past, I can almost write it blindly And indeed, this code handles cyclic graphs just fine:

ghci> transitive2 $ M.fromList [(1,[2,3]),(2,[1,3]),(3,[])]
fromList [(1,[1,2,3]),(2,[1,2,3]),(3,[3])]

But this is a bit anticlimactic Haskell is supposed to be a declarative language, and transitive1 declares my intent just fine!

We can have it all It seems there actually is a way to write essentially the code in transitive1, and still get the right result in all cases, and I have just published a possible implementation as rec-def. In the module Data.Recursive.Set we find an API that resembles that of Set, with a type RSet a, and in addition to conversion functions from and to sets, we find the two operations that we needed in transitive1:

insert :: Ord a => a -> RSet a -> RSet a
unions :: Ord a => [RSet a] -> RSet a
get :: RSet a -> Set a

Let s try that:

import qualified Data.Recursive.Set as RS

transitive2 :: Graph -> Graph
transitive2 g = M.map (S.toList . RS.get) sets
  where
    sets :: M.Map Int (RS.RSet Int)
    sets = M.mapWithKey (\v vs -> RS.insert v (RS.unions [ sets M.! v'   v' <- vs ])) g

And indeed it works! Magic!

ghci> transitive2 $ M.fromList [(1,[3]),(2,[1,3]),(3,[])]
fromList [(1,[1,3]),(2,[1,2,3]),(3,[3])]
ghci> transitive2 $ M.fromList [(1,[2,3]),(2,[1,3]),(3,[])]
fromList [(1,[1,2,3]),(2,[1,2,3]),(3,[3])]

To show off some more, here are small examples:

ghci> let s = RS.insert 42 s in RS.get s
fromList [42]
ghci> : 
  let s1 = RS.insert 23 s2
      s2 = RS.insert 42 s1
  in RS.get s1
 : 
fromList [23,42]

How is that possible? Is it still Haskell? The internal workings of the RSet a type will be the topic of a future blog post; let me just briefly mention that it uses unsafe features under the hood, and just keeps applying the equations you gave until a fixed-point is reached. Because it starts with the empty set and all operations provided by Data.Recursive.Set are monotonous (e.g. no difference) it will eventually find the least fixed point. Despite the unsafe machinery under the hood, I claim that Data.Recursive.Set is itself nicely safe, and does not destroy Haskell s nice properties like purity, referential transparency and equational reasoning. If you disagree, I d like to hear about it (here, on Twitter, Reddit or Discourse)! There is a brief discussion at the end of the tutorial in Data.Recursive.Example.

More than sets The library also provides Data.Recursive.Bool for recursive equations with booleans (preferring False) and Data.Recursive.DualBool (preferring True), and some operations like member :: Ord a => a -> RSet a -> RBool can actually connect different types. I plan to add other data types (natural numbers, maps, Maybe, with suitable orders) as demand arises and as I come across nice small example use-cases for the documentation (e.g. finding shortest paths in a graph). I believe this idiom is practically useful in a wide range of applications (which of course all have some underlying graph structure but then almost everything in Computer Science is a graph). My original motivation was a program analysis. Imagine you want to find out from where in your program you can run into a division by zero. As long as your program does not have recursion, you can simply keep track of a boolean flag while you traverse the program, keeping track a mapping from function names to whether they can divide by zero all nice and elegant. But once you allow mutually recursive functions, things become tricky. Unless you use RBool! Simply use laziness, pass the analysis result down when analyzing the function s right-hand sides, and it just works!

J.R.R. Tolkein Now unless you have been living under a rock cave, I am sure you know who Mr. Tolkein is. Apparently, the gentleman passed away on 2nd September 1973 at the sprightly age of 80. And this gives fans like me to talk about fantasy, fantasy authors, and the love-hate relationship we have with them. For a matter of record, I am currently reading Babylon Steel by Gaie Sebold. Now while I won t go into many details (I never like to, if I enjoy a book, I would want the book to be mysterious rather than give praise, simply so that the next person enjoys it as much as I did without having any expectations.) Now this book has plenty of sex so wouldn t recommend it for teenagers but more perhaps to mature audiences, although for the life of me couldn t find any rating on the book. I did come across common sense media but unfortunately, it isn t well known beyond perhaps some people who use it. They sadly don t have a google/Android app And before anybody comments, I know that Android is no longer interested in supporting FOSS, their loss, not ours but that is entirely a blog post/article in itself. so let s leave that aside for now.

Fantasy So before talking about Mr. Tolkien and his creations let s talk and share a bit about fantasy. We know for a fact that the conscious mind functions at less than 5%, while the other bits are made by the subconscious and the unconscious mind (the three mind model.) So any thought or idea first germinates n either the unconscious or the subconscious part of the mind and then comes into the conscious mind. It is the reason we also dream. That s the subconscious and unconscious mind at work. While we say fantasy mostly to books, it is all around us and not just in prose but in song, dance, and all sorts of creativity are fantasy. Even Sci-fi actually comes from fantasy. Unfortunately, for reasons best known to people, they took out sci-fi and even divided fantasy into high fantasy and low fantasy. I am not going to go much into that but here s a helpful link for those who might want to look more into it. Now the question arises, why do people write? I have asked this question many a time to the authors I have met and the answers are as varied as they come. Two of the most common answers are the need to write (an itch they can t control or won t control) and the other is it s extremely healing. In my own case, even writing mere blog posts I found it unburdening & cathartetic. I believe this last part is what drove Mr. Tolkein and the story and arc that LOTR became. Tolkien, LOTR, World War I The casual reader might not know but if you followed or were curious about Mr. Tolkien, you would have found out that Mr. Tolkien served in World War 1 or what is known as the Great War. It was supposed to be the war that ended all wars but sadly didn t. One of the things that set apart Mr. Tolkein from many of his peers was that Mr. Tolkien was very straight about himself and corresponded with people far and wide. There is actually a book called The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien that I hope to get at one of the used book depots. That book spans about 480 pages and gives all the answers as to why Mr. Tolkien made Middle-earth as it was made. I sadly haven t had the opportunity to get it and it is somewhat expensive. But I m sure that if World War 1 wouldn t have happened and Mr. Tolkein hadn t taken part and experienced what he experienced, we wouldn t have LOTR. I can bet losing his friends and comrades, and the pain he felt for those around him propelled him to write about land and a race called Hobbits. I haven t done enough fantasy reading but I do feel that his description of hobbits and the way they were and are is unique. The names and surnames he used were for humor as well as to make a statement about them. Having names such as Harfoots, Padfoot, Took and others just wouldn t be for fun, would it? Also, the responses and the behavior in the four books by Hobbits are almost human-like. It is almost like they are or were our cousins at one point in time but we allowed ourselves to forget. Even the corruption of humans has been shown as well as self-doubt. There is another part that I found and find fascinating, unlike most books where there is a single hero, in LOTR we have many heroes and heroines. This again, I would attribute to Mr. Tolkien and the heroism he saw on the battlefield and beyond it. All the tender emotions he shares with readers like us are because either he himself or others around him were subjected to grace and wonderment. This is all I derive from the books, those who have The letters of J.R.R. Tolkein , feel free to correct me. I was supposed to write this yesterday but real life has its own way. I could go on and on, perhaps at a later date or time I may expand on it, but it isn t a coincidence that Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power is starting broadcast on the same day when Mr. Tolkein died. In the very end, fantasy is something humans got and does not matter how rich or poor you are. If one were to look, both artists like Michaelangelo and many other artists, who often didn t have enough to have two square meals in the day, but still somehow were inspired to sketch models of airplanes, flying machines which are shockingly similar to the real thing. Many may not know that almost all primates, including apes, monkeys, squirrels, and even dolphins dream. And all of them have elaborate, complex dreams just as we do. Sadly, this info. is not known by most people otherwise, we would be so much empathetic towards our cousins in the animal kingdom.

Culture Just before I start, I would like to point out that this post may or would probably be NSFW. Again, what is SFW (Safe at Work) and NSFW that so much depends on culture and perception of culture from wherever we are or wherever we take birth? But still, to be on the safe side I have put it as NSFW. Now there have been a few statements and ideas that gave me a pause. This will be a sort of chaotic blog post as I am in such a phase today. For e.g. while I do not know which culture or which country this comes from, somebody shared that in some cultures one can talk/comment May your poop be easy and with a straight face. I dunno which culture is this but if somebody asked me that I would just die from laughing or maybe poop there itself. While I can understand if it is a constipated person, but a whole culture? Until and unless their DNA is really screwed, I don t think so but then what do I know? I do know that we shit when we have extreme reactions of either joy or fear. And IIRC, this comes from mammal response when they were in dangerous situations and we got the same as humans evolved. I would really be interested to know which culture is that. I did come to know that the Japanese do wish that you may not experience hard work or something to that effect while ironically they themselves are becoming extinct due to hard work and not enough relaxation, toxic workplace is common in Japan according to social scientists and population experts. Another term that I couldn t figure out is The Florida Man Strikes again and this term is usually used when somebody does something stupid or something weird. While it is exclusively used in the American context, I am curious to know how that came about. Why does Florida have such people or is it an exaggeration? I have heard the term e.g. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas . Think it is also called Sin city although why just Vegas is beyond me?

Omicron-8712 Blood pressure machine I felt so stupid. I found another site or e-commerce site called Wellness Forever. They had the blood pressure machine I wanted, an Omron-8172. I bought it online and they delivered the same within half an hour. Amazon took six days and in the end, didn t deliver it at all. I tried taking measurements from it yesterday. I have yet to figure out what it all means but I did get measurements of 109 SYS, 88 DIA and Pulse is 72. As far as the pulse is concerned, guess that is normal, the others just don t know. If only I had known this couple of months ago. I was able to register the product as well as download and use the Omron Connect app. For roughly INR 2.5k you have a sort of health monitoring system. It isn t Star Trek Tricorder in any shape or form but it will have to do while the tricorder gets invented. And while we are on the subject let s not forget Elizabeth Holmes and the scam called Theranos. It really is something to see How Elizabeth Holmes modeled so much of herself on Steve Jobs mimicking how he left college/education halfway. A part of me is sad that Theranos is not real. Joe Scott just a few days ago shared some perspectives on the same just a few days ago. The idea in itself is pretty seductive, to say the least, and that is the reason the scam went on for more than a decade and perhaps would have been longer if some people hadn t gotten the truth out. I do see potentially, something like that coming on as A.I. takes a bigger role in automating testing. Half a decade to a decade from now, who knows if there is an algorithm that is able to do what is needed? If such a product were to come to the marketplace at a decent price, it would revolutionize medicine, especially in countries like India, South Africa, and all sorts of remote places. Especially, with all sorts of off-grid technologies coming and maturing in the marketplace. Before I forget, there is a game called Cell on Android that tells or shares about the evolution of life on earth. It also shares credence to the idea that life has come 6 times on Earth and has been destroyed multiple times by asteroids. It is in the idle sort of game format, so you can see the humble beginnings from the primordial soup to various kinds of cells and bacteria to finally a mammal. This is where I am and a long way to go.

Indian Bureaucracy One of the few things that Britishers gave to India, is the bureaucracy and the bureaucracy tests us in myriad ways. It would be full 2 months on 5th September and I haven t yet got a death certificate. And I need that for a sundry number of things. The same goes for a disability certificate. What is and was interesting is my trip to the local big hospital called Sassoon Hospital. My mum had shared incidents that occurred in the 1950s when she and the family had come to Pune. According to her, when she was alive, while Sassoon was the place to be, it was big and chaotic and you never knew where you are going. That was in 1950, I had the same experience in 2022. The term/adage the more things change, the more they remain the same seems to be held true for Sassoon Hospital. Btw, those of you who think the Devil exists, he is totally a fallacy. There is a popular myth that the devil comes to deal that he/she/they come to deal with you when somebody close to you passes, I was waiting desperately for him when mum passed. Any deal that he/she/they would have offered me I would have gladly taken, but all my wait was all for nothing. While I believe evil exists, that is manifested by humans and nobody else. The whole idea and story of the devil is just to control young children and nothing beyond that

Debconf 2023, friends, JPEGOptim, and EV s Quite a number of friends had gone to Albania this year as India won the right to host Debconf for the year 2023. While I did lurk on the Debconf orga IRC channel, I m not sure how helpful I would be currently. One news that warmed my heart is some people would be coming to India to check the site way before and make sure things go smoothly. Nothing like having more eyes (in this case bodies) to throw at a problem and hopefully it will be sorted. While I have not been working for the last couple of years, one of the things that I had to do and have been doing is moving a lot of stuff online. This is in part due to the Government s own intention of having everything on the cloud. One of the things I probably may have shared it more than enough times is that the storage most of these sites give is like the 1990s. I tried jpegoptim and while it works, it degrades the quality of the image quite a bit. The whole thing seems backward, especially as newer and newer smartphones are capturing more data per picture (megapixel resolution), case in point Samsung Galaxy A04 that is being introduced. But this is not only about newer phones, even my earlier phone, Samsung J-5/500 which I bought in 2016 took images at 5 MB. So it is not a new issue but a continuous issue. And almost all Govt. sites have the upper band fixed at 1 MB. But this is not limited to Govt. sites alone, most sites in India are somewhat frozen in the 1990s. And it isn t as if resources for designing web pages using HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, Python, or Java aren t available. If worse comes to worst, one can even use amp to make his, her or their point. But this is if they want to do stuff. I would be sharing a few photos with commentary, there are still places where I can put photos apart from social media

Friends Last week, Saturday suddenly all the friends decided to show up. I have no clue one way or the other why but am glad they showed up.

Mahendra, Akshat, Shirish and Sagar Sukhose (Mangesh s friend) at Bal Gandharva..

Electric scooter as shared by Akshat seen in Albania

Somebody making a real-life replica of Wall Street on F.C. Road (Commercial, all glass)

Ganesh Idol near my house

Wearing new clothes

I will have to be a bit rapid about what I am sharing above so here goes nothing

1. The first picture shows Mahendra, Akshat, me, and Sagar Sukhose (Mangesh s friend). The picture was taken by Mangesh Diwate. We talked quite a bit of various things that could be done in Debian. A few of the things that I shared were (bringing more stuff from BSD to Debian, I am sure there s still quite a lot of security software that could be advantageous to have in Debian.) The best person to talk to or guide about this would undoubtedly be Paul Wise or as he is affectionally called Pabs. He is one of the shy ones and yet knows so much about how things work. The one and only time I met him is 2016. The other thing that we talked about is porting Debian to one of the phones. This has been done in the past and done by a Puneitie some 4-5 years back. While I don t recollect the gentleman s name, I remember that the porting was done on a Motorola phone as that was the easiest to do. He had tried some other mobile but that didn t work. Making Debian available on phone is hard work. Just to have an idea, I went to the xda developers forum and found out that while M51 has been added, my specific phone model is not there. A Samsung Galaxy M52G Android (samsung; SM-M526B; lahaina; arm64-v8a) v12 . You look at the chat and you understand how difficult the process might be. One of the other ideas that Akshat pitched was Debian Astro, this is something that is close to the heart of many, including me. I also proposed to have some kind of web app or something where we can find and share about the various astronomy and related projects done by various agencies. While there is a NASA app, nothing comes close to JSR and that site just shares stuff, no speculation. There are so many projects taken or being done by the EU, JAXA, ISRO, and even middle-east countries are trying but other than people who are following some of the developments, we hear almost nothing. Even the Chinese have made some long strides but most people know nothing about the same. And it s sad to know that those developments are not being known, shared, or even speculated about as much as say NASA or SpaceX is. How do we go about it and how do we get people to contribute or ask questions around it would be interesting. 2. The second picture was something that was shared by Akshat. Akshat was sharing how in Albania people are moving on these electric scooters . I dunno if that is the right word for it or what. I had heard from a couple of friends who had gone to Vietnam a few years ago how most people in Vietnam had modified their scooters and they were snaking lines of electric wires charging scooters. I have no clue whether they were closer to Vespa or something like above. In India, the Govt. is in partnership with the oil, gas, and coal mafia just as it was in Australia (the new Govt. in Australia is making changes) the same thing is here. With the humongous profits that the oil sector provides the petro states and others, Corruption is bound to happen. We talk and that s the extent of things. 3. The third picture is from a nearby area called F.C. Road or Fergusson College Road. The area has come up quite sharply (commercially) in the last few years. Apparently, Mr. Kushal is making a real-life replica of Wall Street which would be given to commercial tenants. Right now the real estate market is tight in India, we will know how things pan out in the next few years. 4. Number four is an image of a Ganesh idol near my house. There is a 10-day festival of the elephant god that people used to celebrate every year. For the last couple of years because of the pandemic, people were unable to celebrate the festival as it is meant to celebrate. This time some people are going overboard while others are cautious and rightfully so. 5. Last and not least, one of the things that people do at this celebration is to have new clothes, so I shared a photo of a gentleman who had bought and was wearing new clothes. While most countries around the world are similar, Latin America is very similar to India in many ways, perhaps Gunnar can share. especially about religious activities. The elephant god is known for his penchant for sweets and that can be seen from his rounded stomach, that is also how he is celebrated. He is known to make problems disappear or that is supposed to be his thing. We do have something like 4 billion gods, so each one has to be given some work or quality to justify the same

Nothing was easy This story begins in the 1980s. Somewhere around my Kindergarten year of school, around 1985, my parents bought a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 (aka CoCo II). It had 64K of RAM and used a TV for display and sound. This got you the computer. It didn t get you any disk drive or anything, no joysticks (required by a number of games). So whenever the system powered down, or it hung and you had to power cycle it a frequent event you d lose whatever you were doing and would have to re-enter the program, literally by typing it in. The floppy drive for the CoCo II cost more than the computer, and it was quite common for people to buy the computer first and then the floppy drive later when they d saved up the money for that. I particularly want to mention that computers then didn t come with a modem. What would be like buying a laptop or a tablet without wifi today. A modem, which I ll talk about in a bit, was another expensive accessory. To cobble together a system in the 80s that was capable of talking to others with persistent storage (floppy, or hard drive), screen, keyboard, and modem would be quite expensive. Adjusted for inflation, if you re talking a PC-style device (a clone of the IBM PC that ran DOS), this would easily be more expensive than the Macbook Pros of today. Few people back in the 80s had a computer at home. And the portion of those that had even the capability to get online in a meaningful way was even smaller. Eventually my parents bought a PC clone with 640K RAM and dual floppy drives. This was primarily used for my mom s work, but I did my best to take it over whenever possible. It ran DOS and, despite its monochrome screen, was generally a more capable machine than the CoCo II. For instance, it supported lowercase. (I m not even kidding; the CoCo II pretty much didn t.) A while later, they purchased a 32MB hard drive for it what luxury! Just getting a machine to work wasn t easy. Say you d bought a PC, and then bought a hard drive, and a modem. You didn t just plug in the hard drive and it would work. You would have to fight it every step of the way. The BIOS and DOS partition tables of the day used a cylinder/head/sector method of addressing the drive, and various parts of that those addresses had too few bits to work with the big drives of the day above 20MB. So you would have to lie to the BIOS and fdisk in various ways, and sort of work out how to do it for each drive. For each peripheral serial port, sound card (in later years), etc., you d have to set jumpers for DMA and IRQs, hoping not to conflict with anything already in the system. Perhaps you can now start to see why USB and PCI were so welcomed.

Sharing and finding resources Despite the two computers in our home, it wasn t as if software written on one machine just ran on another. A lot of software for PC clones assumed a CGA color display. The monochrome HGC in our PC wasn t particularly compatible. You could find a TSR program to emulate the CGA on the HGC, but it wasn t particularly stable, and there s only so much you can do when a program that assumes color displays on a monitor that can only show black, dark amber, or light amber. So I d periodically get to use other computers most commonly at an office in the evening when it wasn t being used. There were some local computer clubs that my dad took me to periodically. Software was swapped back then; disks copied, shareware exchanged, and so forth. For me, at least, there was no online to download software from, and selling software over the Internet wasn t a thing at all.

Three Different Worlds There were sort of three different worlds of computing experience in the 80s:

1. Home users. Initially using a wide variety of software from Apple, Commodore, Tandy/RadioShack, etc., but eventually coming to be mostly dominated by IBM PC clones
2. Small and mid-sized business users. Some of them had larger minicomputers or small mainframes, but most that I had contact with by the early 90s were standardized on DOS-based PCs. More advanced ones had a network running Netware, most commonly. Networking hardware and software was generally too expensive for home users to use in the early days.
3. Universities and large institutions. These are the places that had the mainframes, the earliest implementations of TCP/IP, the earliest users of UUCP, and so forth.

The difference between the home computing experience and the large institution experience were vast. Not only in terms of dollars the large institution hardware could easily cost anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of dollars but also in terms of sheer resources required (large rooms, enormous power circuits, support staff, etc). Nothing was in common between them; not operating systems, not software, not experience. I was never much aware of the third category until the differences started to collapse in the mid-90s, and even then I only was exposed to it once the collapse was well underway. You might say to me, Well, Google certainly isn t running what I m running at home! And, yes of course, it s different. But fundamentally, most large datacenters are running on x86_64 hardware, with Linux as the operating system, and a TCP/IP network. It s a different scale, obviously, but at a fundamental level, the hardware and operating system stack are pretty similar to what you can readily run at home. Back in the 80s and 90s, this wasn t the case. TCP/IP wasn t even available for DOS or Windows until much later, and when it was, it was a clunky beast that was difficult. One of the things Kevin Driscoll highlights in his book called Modem World see my short post about it is that the history of the Internet we usually receive is focused on case 3: the large institutions. In reality, the Internet was and is literally a network of networks. Gateways to and from Internet existed from all three kinds of users for years, and while TCP/IP ultimately won the battle of the internetworking protocol, the other two streams of users also shaped the Internet as we now know it. Like many, I had no access to the large institution networks, but as I ve been reflecting on my experiences, I ve found a new appreciation for the way that those of us that grew up with primarily home PCs shaped the evolution of today s online world also.

An Era of Scarcity I should take a moment to comment about the cost of software back then. A newspaper article from 1985 comments that WordPerfect, then the most powerful word processing program, sold for $495 (or $219 if you could score a mail order discount). That s $1360/$600 in 2022 money. Other popular software, such as Lotus 1-2-3, was up there as well. If you were to buy a new PC clone in the mid to late 80s, it would often cost $2000 in 1980s dollars. Now add a printer a low-end dot matrix for $300 or a laser for $1500 or even more. A modem: another $300. So the basic system would be $3600, or $9900 in 2022 dollars. If you wanted a nice printer, you re now pushing well over $10,000 in 2022 dollars. You start to see one barrier here, and also why things like shareware and piracy if it was indeed even recognized as such were common in those days. So you can see, from a home computer setup (TRS-80, Commodore C64, Apple ][, etc) to a business-class PC setup was an order of magnitude increase in cost. From there to the high-end minis/mainframes was another order of magnitude (at least!) increase. Eventually there was price pressure on the higher end and things all got better, which is probably why the non-DOS PCs lasted until the early 90s.

Increasing Capabilities My first exposure to computers in school was in the 4th grade, when I would have been about 9. There was a single Apple ][ machine in that room. I primarily remember playing Oregon Trail on it. The next year, the school added a computer lab. Remember, this is a small rural area, so each graduating class might have about 25 people in it; this lab was shared by everyone in the K-8 building. It was full of some flavor of IBM PS/2 machines running DOS and Netware. There was a dedicated computer teacher too, though I think she was a regular teacher that was given somewhat minimal training on computers. We were going to learn typing that year, but I did so well on the very first typing program that we soon worked out that I could do programming instead. I started going to school early these machines were far more powerful than the XT at home and worked on programming projects there. Eventually my parents bought me a Gateway 486SX/25 with a VGA monitor and hard drive. Wow! This was a whole different world. It may have come with Windows 3.0 or 3.1 on it, but I mainly remember running OS/2 on that machine. More on that below.

Programming That CoCo II came with a BASIC interpreter in ROM. It came with a large manual, which served as a BASIC tutorial as well. The BASIC interpreter was also the shell, so literally you could not use the computer without at least a bit of BASIC. Once I had access to a DOS machine, it also had a basic interpreter: GW-BASIC. There was a fair bit of software written in BASIC at the time, but most of the more advanced software wasn t. I wondered how these .EXE and .COM programs were written. I could find vague references to DEBUG.EXE, assemblers, and such. But it wasn t until I got a copy of Turbo Pascal that I was able to do that sort of thing myself. Eventually I got Borland C++ and taught myself C as well. A few years later, I wanted to try writing GUI programs for Windows, and bought Watcom C++ much cheaper than the competition, and it could target Windows, DOS (and I think even OS/2). Notice that, aside from BASIC, none of this was free, and none of it was bundled. You couldn t just download a C compiler, or Python interpreter, or whatnot back then. You had to pay for the ability to write any kind of serious code on the computer you already owned.

The Microsoft Domination Microsoft came to dominate the PC landscape, and then even the computing landscape as a whole. IBM very quickly lost control over the hardware side of PCs as Compaq and others made clones, but Microsoft has managed in varying degrees even to this day to keep a stranglehold on the software, and especially the operating system, side. Yes, there was occasional talk of things like DR-DOS, but by and large the dominant platform came to be the PC, and if you had a PC, you ran DOS (and later Windows) from Microsoft. For awhile, it looked like IBM was going to challenge Microsoft on the operating system front; they had OS/2, and when I switched to it sometime around the version 2.1 era in 1993, it was unquestionably more advanced technically than the consumer-grade Windows from Microsoft at the time. It had Internet support baked in, could run most DOS and Windows programs, and had introduced a replacement for the by-then terrible FAT filesystem: HPFS, in 1988. Microsoft wouldn t introduce a better filesystem for its consumer operating systems until Windows XP in 2001, 13 years later. But more on that story later.

Free Software, Shareware, and Commercial Software I ve covered the high cost of software already. Obviously $500 software wasn t going to sell in the home market. So what did we have? Mainly, these things:

1. Public domain software. It was free to use, and if implemented in BASIC, probably had source code with it too.
2. Shareware
3. Commercial software (some of it from small publishers was a lot cheaper than $500)

Let s talk about shareware. The idea with shareware was that a company would release a useful program, sometimes limited. You were encouraged to register , or pay for, it if you liked it and used it. And, regardless of whether you registered it or not, were told please copy! Sometimes shareware was fully functional, and registering it got you nothing more than printed manuals and an easy conscience (guilt trips for not registering weren t necessarily very subtle). Sometimes unregistered shareware would have a nag screen a delay of a few seconds while they told you to register. Sometimes they d be limited in some way; you d get more features if you registered. With games, it was popular to have a trilogy, and release the first episode inevitably ending with a cliffhanger as shareware, and the subsequent episodes would require registration. In any event, a lot of software people used in the 80s and 90s was shareware. Also pirated commercial software, though in the earlier days of computing, I think some people didn t even know the difference. Notice what s missing: Free Software / FLOSS in the Richard Stallman sense of the word. Stallman lived in the big institution world after all, he worked at MIT and what he was doing with the Free Software Foundation and GNU project beginning in 1983 never really filtered into the DOS/Windows world at the time. I had no awareness of it even existing until into the 90s, when I first started getting some hints of it as a port of gcc became available for OS/2. The Internet was what really brought this home, but I m getting ahead of myself. I want to say again: FLOSS never really entered the DOS and Windows 3.x ecosystems. You d see it make a few inroads here and there in later versions of Windows, and moreso now that Microsoft has been sort of forced to accept it, but still, reflect on its legacy. What is the software market like in Windows compared to Linux, even today? Now it is, finally, time to talk about connectivity!

Getting On-Line What does it even mean to get on line? Certainly not connecting to a wifi access point. The answer is, unsurprisingly, complex. But for everyone except the large institutional users, it begins with a telephone.

The telephone system By the 80s, there was one communication network that already reached into nearly every home in America: the phone system. Virtually every household (note I don t say every person) was uniquely identified by a 10-digit phone number. You could, at least in theory, call up virtually any other phone in the country and be connected in less than a minute. But I ve got to talk about cost. The way things worked in the USA, you paid a monthly fee for a phone line. Included in that monthly fee was unlimited local calling. What is a local call? That was an extremely complex question. Generally it meant, roughly, calling within your city. But of course, as you deal with things like suburbs and cities growing into each other (eg, the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex), things got complicated fast. But let s just say for simplicity you could call others in your city. What about calling people not in your city? That was long distance , and you paid often hugely by the minute for it. Long distance rates were difficult to figure out, but were generally most expensive during business hours and cheapest at night or on weekends. Prices eventually started to come down when competition was introduced for long distance carriers, but even then you often were stuck with a single carrier for long distance calls outside your city but within your state. Anyhow, let s just leave it at this: local calls were virtually free, and long distance calls were extremely expensive.

Getting a modem I remember getting a modem that ran at either 1200bps or 2400bps. Either way, quite slow; you could often read even plain text faster than the modem could display it. But what was a modem? A modem hooked up to a computer with a serial cable, and to the phone system. By the time I got one, modems could automatically dial and answer. You would send a command like ATDT5551212 and it would dial 555-1212. Modems had speakers, because often things wouldn t work right, and the telephone system was oriented around speech, so you could hear what was happening. You d hear it wait for dial tone, then dial, then hopefully the remote end would ring, a modem there would answer, you d hear the screeching of a handshake, and eventually your terminal would say CONNECT 2400. Now your computer was bridged to the other; anything going out your serial port was encoded as sound by your modem and decoded at the other end, and vice-versa. But what, exactly, was the other end? It might have been another person at their computer. Turn on local echo, and you can see what they did. Maybe you d send files to each other. But in my case, the answer was different: PC Magazine.

PC Magazine and CompuServe Starting around 1986 (so I would have been about 6 years old), I got to read PC Magazine. My dad would bring copies that were being discarded at his office home for me to read, and I think eventually bought me a subscription directly. This was not just a standard magazine; it ran something like 350-400 pages an issue, and came out every other week. This thing was a monster. It had reviews of hardware and software, descriptions of upcoming technologies, pages and pages of ads (that often had some degree of being informative to them). And they had sections on programming. Many issues would talk about BASIC or Pascal programming, and there d be a utility in most issues. What do I mean by a utility in most issues ? Did they include a floppy disk with software? No, of course not. There was a literal program listing printed in the magazine. If you wanted the utility, you had to type it in. And a lot of them were written in assembler, so you had to have an assembler. An assembler, of course, was not free and I didn t have one. Or maybe they wrote it in Microsoft C, and I had Borland C, and (of course) they weren t compatible. Sometimes they would list the program sort of in binary: line after line of a BASIC program, with lines like 64, 193, 253, 0, 53, 0, 87 that you would type in for hours, hopefully correctly. Running the BASIC program would, if you got it correct, emit a .COM file that you could then run. They did have a rudimentary checksum system built in, but it wasn t even a CRC, so something like swapping two numbers you d never notice except when the program would mysteriously hang. Eventually they teamed up with CompuServe to offer a limited slice of CompuServe for the purpose of downloading PC Magazine utilities. This was called PC MagNet. I am foggy on the details, but I believe that for a time you could connect to the limited PC MagNet part of CompuServe for free (after the cost of the long-distance call, that is) rather than paying for CompuServe itself (because, OF COURSE, that also charged you per the minute.) So in the early days, I would get special permission from my parents to place a long distance call, and after some nerve-wracking minutes in which we were aware every minute was racking up charges, I could navigate the menus, download what I wanted, and log off immediately. I still, incidentally, mourn what PC Magazine became. As with computing generally, it followed the mass market. It lost its deep technical chops, cut its programming columns, stopped talking about things like how SCSI worked, and so forth. By the time it stopped printing in 2009, it was no longer a square-bound 400-page beheamoth, but rather looked more like a copy of Newsweek, but with less depth.

Continuing with CompuServe CompuServe was a much larger service than just PC MagNet. Eventually, our family got a subscription. It was still an expensive and scarce resource; I d call it only after hours when the long-distance rates were cheapest. Everyone had a numerical username separated by commas; mine was 71510,1421. CompuServe had forums, and files. Eventually I would use TapCIS to queue up things I wanted to do offline, to minimize phone usage online. CompuServe eventually added a gateway to the Internet. For the sum of somewhere around $1 a message, you could send or receive an email from someone with an Internet email address! I remember the thrill of one time, as a kid of probably 11 years, sending a message to one of the editors of PC Magazine and getting a kind, if brief, reply back! But inevitably I had

The Godzilla Phone Bill Yes, one month I became lax in tracking my time online. I ran up my parents phone bill. I don t remember how high, but I remember it was hundreds of dollars, a hefty sum at the time. As I watched Jason Scott s BBS Documentary, I realized how common an experience this was. I think this was the end of CompuServe for me for awhile.

Toll-Free Numbers I lived near a town with a population of 500. Not even IN town, but near town. The calling area included another town with a population of maybe 1500, so all told, there were maybe 2000 people total I could talk to with a local call though far fewer numbers, because remember, telephones were allocated by the household. There was, as far as I know, zero modems that were a local call (aside from one that belonged to a friend I met in around 1992). So basically everything was long-distance. But there was a special feature of the telephone network: toll-free numbers. Normally when calling long-distance, you, the caller, paid the bill. But with a toll-free number, beginning with 1-800, the recipient paid the bill. These numbers almost inevitably belonged to corporations that wanted to make it easy for people to call. Sales and ordering lines, for instance. Some of these companies started to set up modems on toll-free numbers. There were few of these, but they existed, so of course I had to try them! One of them was a company called PennyWise that sold office supplies. They had a toll-free line you could call with a modem to order stuff. Yes, online ordering before the web! I loved office supplies. And, because I lived far from a big city, if the local K-Mart didn t have it, I probably couldn t get it. Of course, the interface was entirely text, but you could search for products and place orders with the modem. I had loads of fun exploring the system, and actually ordered things from them and probably actually saved money doing so. With the first order they shipped a monster full-color catalog. That thing must have been 500 pages, like the Sears catalogs of the day. Every item had a part number, which streamlined ordering through the modem.

Inbound FAXes By the 90s, a number of modems became able to send and receive FAXes as well. For those that don t know, a FAX machine was essentially a special modem. It would scan a page and digitally transmit it over the phone system, where it would at least in the early days be printed out in real time (because the machines didn t have the memory to store an entire page as an image). Eventually, PC modems integrated FAX capabilities. There still wasn t anything useful I could do locally, but there were ways I could get other companies to FAX something to me. I remember two of them. One was for US Robotics. They had an on demand FAX system. You d call up a toll-free number, which was an automated IVR system. You could navigate through it and select various documents of interest to you: spec sheets and the like. You d key in your FAX number, hang up, and US Robotics would call YOU and FAX you the documents you wanted. Yes! I was talking to a computer (of a sorts) at no cost to me! The New York Times also ran a service for awhile called TimesFax. Every day, they would FAX out a page or two of summaries of the day s top stories. This was pretty cool in an era in which I had no other way to access anything from the New York Times. I managed to sign up for TimesFax I have no idea how, anymore and for awhile I would get a daily FAX of their top stories. When my family got its first laser printer, I could them even print these FAXes complete with the gothic New York Times masthead. Wow! (OK, so technically I could print it on a dot-matrix printer also, but graphics on a 9-pin dot matrix is a kind of pain that is a whole other article.)

My own phone line Remember how I discussed that phone lines were allocated per household? This was a problem for a lot of reasons:

1. Anybody that tried to call my family while I was using my modem would get a busy signal (unable to complete the call)
2. If anybody in the house picked up the phone while I was using it, that would degrade the quality of the ongoing call and either mess up or disconnect the call in progress. In many cases, that could cancel a file transfer (which wasn t necessarily easy or possible to resume), prompting howls of annoyance from me.
3. Generally we all had to work around each other

So eventually I found various small jobs and used the money I made to pay for my own phone line and my own long distance costs. Eventually I upgraded to a 28.8Kbps US Robotics Courier modem even! Yes, you heard it right: I got a job and a bank account so I could have a phone line and a faster modem. Uh, isn t that why every teenager gets a job? Now my local friend and I could call each other freely at least on my end (I can t remember if he had his own phone line too). We could exchange files using HS/Link, which had the added benefit of allowing split-screen chat even while a file transfer is in progress. I m sure we spent hours chatting to each other keyboard-to-keyboard while sharing files with each other.

Technology in Schools By this point in the story, we re in the late 80s and early 90s. I m still using PC-style OSs at home; OS/2 in the later years of this period, DOS or maybe a bit of Windows in the earlier years. I mentioned that they let me work on programming at school starting in 5th grade. It was soon apparent that I knew more about computers than anybody on staff, and I started getting pulled out of class to help teachers or administrators with vexing school problems. This continued until I graduated from high school, incidentally often to my enjoyment, and the annoyance of one particular teacher who, I must say, I was fine with annoying in this way. That s not to say that there was institutional support for what I was doing. It was, after all, a small school. Larger schools might have introduced BASIC or maybe Logo in high school. But I had already taught myself BASIC, Pascal, and C by the time I was somewhere around 12 years old. So I wouldn t have had any use for that anyhow. There were programming contests occasionally held in the area. Schools would send teams. My school didn t really send anybody, but I went as an individual. One of them was run by a local college (but for jr. high or high school students. Years later, I met one of the professors that ran it. He remembered me, and that day, better than I did. The programming contest had problems one could solve in BASIC or Logo. I knew nothing about what to expect going into it, but I had lugged my computer and screen along, and asked him, Can I write my solutions in C? He was, apparently, stunned, but said sure, go for it. I took first place that day, leading to some rather confused teams from much larger schools. The Netware network that the school had was, as these generally were, itself isolated. There was no link to the Internet or anything like it. Several schools across three local counties eventually invested in a fiber-optic network linking them together. This built a larger, but still closed, network. Its primary purpose was to allow students to be exposed to a wider variety of classes at high schools. Participating schools had an ITV room , outfitted with cameras and mics. So students at any school could take classes offered over ITV at other schools. For instance, only my school taught German classes, so people at any of those participating schools could take German. It was an early Zoom room. But alongside the TV signal, there was enough bandwidth to run some Netware frames. By about 1995 or so, this let one of the schools purchase some CD-ROM software that was made available on a file server and could be accessed by any participating school. Nice! But Netware was mainly about file and printer sharing; there wasn t even a facility like email, at least not on our deployment.

BBSs My last hop before the Internet was the BBS. A BBS was a computer program, usually ran by a hobbyist like me, on a computer with a modem connected. Callers would call it up, and they d interact with the BBS. Most BBSs had discussion groups like forums and file areas. Some also had games. I, of course, continued to have that most vexing of problems: they were all long-distance. There were some ways to help with that, chiefly QWK and BlueWave. These, somewhat like TapCIS in the CompuServe days, let me download new message posts for reading offline, and queue up my own messages to send later. QWK and BlueWave didn t help with file downloading, though.

BBSs get networked BBSs were an interesting thing. You d call up one, and inevitably somewhere in the file area would be a BBS list. Download the BBS list and you ve suddenly got a list of phone numbers to try calling. All of them were long distance, of course. You d try calling them at random and have a success rate of maybe 20%. The other 80% would be defunct; you might get the dreaded this number is no longer in service or the even more dreaded angry human answering the phone (and of course a modem can t talk to a human, so they d just get silence for probably the nth time that week). The phone company cared nothing about BBSs and recycled their numbers just as fast as any others. To talk to various people, or participate in certain discussion groups, you d have to call specific BBSs. That s annoying enough in the general case, but even more so for someone paying long distance for it all, because it takes a few minutes to establish a connection to a BBS: handshaking, logging in, menu navigation, etc. But BBSs started talking to each other. The earliest successful such effort was FidoNet, and for the duration of the BBS era, it remained by far the largest. FidoNet was analogous to the UUCP that the institutional users had, but ran on the much cheaper PC hardware. Basically, BBSs that participated in FidoNet would relay email, forum posts, and files between themselves overnight. Eventually, as with UUCP, by hopping through this network, messages could reach around the globe, and forums could have worldwide participation asynchronously, long before they could link to each other directly via the Internet. It was almost entirely volunteer-run.

Running my own BBS At age 13, I eventually chose to set up my own BBS. It ran on my single phone line, so of course when I was dialing up something else, nobody could dial up me. Not that this was a huge problem; in my town of 500, I probably had a good 1 or 2 regular callers in the beginning. In the PC era, there was a big difference between a server and a client. Server-class software was expensive and rare. Maybe in later years you had an email client, but an email server would be completely unavailable to you as a home user. But with a BBS, I could effectively run a server. I even ran serial lines in our house so that the BBS could be connected from other rooms! Since I was running OS/2, the BBS didn t tie up the computer; I could continue using it for other things. FidoNet had an Internet email gateway. This one, unlike CompuServe s, was free. Once I had a BBS on FidoNet, you could reach me from the Internet using the FidoNet address. This didn t support attachments, but then email of the day didn t really, either. Various others outside Kansas ran FidoNet distribution points. I believe one of them was mgmtsys; my memory is quite vague, but I think they offered a direct gateway and I would call them to pick up Internet mail via FidoNet protocols, but I m not at all certain of this.

Pros and Cons of the Non-Microsoft World As mentioned, Microsoft was and is the dominant operating system vendor for PCs. But I left that world in 1993, and here, nearly 30 years later, have never really returned. I got an operating system with more technical capabilities than the DOS and Windows of the day, but the tradeoff was a much smaller software ecosystem. OS/2 could run DOS programs, but it ran OS/2 programs a lot better. So if I were to run a BBS, I wanted one that had a native OS/2 version limiting me to a small fraction of available BBS server software. On the other hand, as a fully 32-bit operating system, there started to be OS/2 ports of certain software with a Unix heritage; most notably for me at the time, gcc. At some point, I eventually came across the RMS essays and started to be hooked.

Internet: The Hunt Begins I certainly was aware that the Internet was out there and interesting. But the first problem was: how the heck do I get connected to the Internet?

Learning Link and Gopher ISPs weren t really a thing; the first one in my area (though still a long-distance call) started in, I think, 1994. One service that one of my teachers got me hooked up with was Learning Link. Learning Link was a nationwide collaboration of PBS stations and schools, designed to build on the educational mission of PBS. The nearest Learning Link station was more than a 3-hour drive away but critically, they had a toll-free access number, and my teacher convinced them to let me use it. I connected via a terminal program and a modem, like with most other things. I don t remember much about it, but I do remember a very important thing it had: Gopher. That was my first experience with Gopher. Learning Link was hosted by a Unix derivative (Xenix), but it didn t exactly give everyone a shell. I seem to recall it didn t have open FTP access either. The Gopher client had FTP access at some point; I don t recall for sure if it did then. If it did, then when a Gopher server referred to an FTP server, I could get to it. (I am unclear at this point if I could key in an arbitrary FTP location, or knew how, at that time.) I also had email access there, but I don t recall exactly how; probably Pine. If that s correct, that would have dated my Learning Link access as no earlier than 1992. I think my access time to Learning Link was limited. And, since the only way to get out on the Internet from there was Gopher and Pine, I was somewhat limited in terms of technology as well. I believe that telnet services, for instance, weren t available to me.

Computer labs There was one place that tended to have Internet access: colleges and universities. In 7th grade, I participated in a program that resulted in me being invited to visit Duke University, and in 8th grade, I participated in National History Day, resulting in a trip to visit the University of Maryland. I probably sought out computer labs at both of those. My most distinct memory was finding my way into a computer lab at one of those universities, and it was full of NeXT workstations. I had never seen or used NeXT before, and had no idea how to operate it. I had brought a box of floppy disks, unaware that the DOS disks probably weren t compatible with NeXT. Closer to home, a small college had a computer lab that I could also visit. I would go there in summer or when it wasn t used with my stack of floppies. I remember downloading disk images of FLOSS operating systems: FreeBSD, Slackware, or Debian, at the time. The hash marks from the DOS-based FTP client would creep across the screen as the 1.44MB disk images would slowly download. telnet was also available on those machines, so I could telnet to things like public-access Archie servers and libraries though not Gopher. Still, FTP and telnet access opened up a lot, and I learned quite a bit in those years.

Continuing the Journey At some point, I got a copy of the Whole Internet User s Guide and Catalog, published in 1994. I still have it. If it hadn t already figured it out by then, I certainly became aware from it that Unix was the dominant operating system on the Internet. The examples in Whole Internet covered FTP, telnet, gopher all assuming the user somehow got to a Unix prompt. The web was introduced about 300 pages in; clearly viewed as something that wasn t page 1 material. And it covered the command-line www client before introducing the graphical Mosaic. Even then, though, the book highlighted Mosaic s utility as a front-end for Gopher and FTP, and even the ability to launch telnet sessions by clicking on links. But having a copy of the book didn t equate to having any way to run Mosaic. The machines in the computer lab I mentioned above all ran DOS and were incapable of running a graphical browser. I had no SLIP or PPP (both ways to run Internet traffic over a modem) connectivity at home. In short, the Web was something for the large institutional users at the time.

CD-ROMs As CD-ROMs came out, with their huge (for the day) 650MB capacity, various companies started collecting software that could be downloaded on the Internet and selling it on CD-ROM. The two most popular ones were Walnut Creek CD-ROM and Infomagic. One could buy extensive Shareware and gaming collections, and then even entire Linux and BSD distributions. Although not exactly an Internet service per se, it was a way of bringing what may ordinarily only be accessible to institutional users into the home computer realm.

Free Software Jumps In As I mentioned, by the mid 90s, I had come across RMS s writings about free software most probably his 1992 essay Why Software Should Be Free. (Please note, this is not a commentary on the more recently-revealed issues surrounding RMS, but rather his writings and work as I encountered them in the 90s.) The notion of a Free operating system not just in cost but in openness was incredibly appealing. Not only could I tinker with it to a much greater extent due to having source for everything, but it included so much software that I d otherwise have to pay for. Compilers! Interpreters! Editors! Terminal emulators! And, especially, server software of all sorts. There d be no way I could afford or run Netware, but with a Free Unixy operating system, I could do all that. My interest was obviously piqued. Add to that the fact that I could actually participate and contribute I was about to become hooked on something that I ve stayed hooked on for decades. But then the question was: which Free operating system? Eventually I chose FreeBSD to begin with; that would have been sometime in 1995. I don t recall the exact reasons for that. I remember downloading Slackware install floppies, and probably the fact that Debian wasn t yet at 1.0 scared me off for a time. FreeBSD s fantastic Handbook far better than anything I could find for Linux at the time was no doubt also a factor.

The de Raadt Factor Why not NetBSD or OpenBSD? The short answer is Theo de Raadt. Somewhere in this time, when I was somewhere between 14 and 16 years old, I asked some questions comparing NetBSD to the other two free BSDs. This was on a NetBSD mailing list, but for some reason Theo saw it and got a flame war going, which CC d me. Now keep in mind that even if NetBSD had a web presence at the time, it would have been minimal, and I would have not all that unusually for the time had no way to access it. I was certainly not aware of the, shall we say, acrimony between Theo and NetBSD. While I had certainly seen an online flamewar before, this took on a different and more disturbing tone; months later, Theo randomly emailed me under the subject SLIME saying that I was, well, SLIME . I seem to recall periodic emails from him thereafter reminding me that he hates me and that he had blocked me. (Disclaimer: I have poor email archives from this period, so the full details are lost to me, but I believe I am accurately conveying these events from over 25 years ago) This was a surprise, and an unpleasant one. I was trying to learn, and while it is possible I didn t understand some aspect or other of netiquette (or Theo s personal hatred of NetBSD) at the time, still that is not a reason to flame a 16-year-old (though he would have had no way to know my age). This didn t leave any kind of scar, but did leave a lasting impression; to this day, I am particularly concerned with how FLOSS projects handle poisonous people. Debian, for instance, has come a long way in this over the years, and even Linus Torvalds has turned over a new leaf. I don t know if Theo has. In any case, I didn t use NetBSD then. I did try it periodically in the years since, but never found it compelling enough to justify a large switch from Debian. I never tried OpenBSD for various reasons, but one of them was that I didn t want to join a community that tolerates behavior such as Theo s from its leader.

Moving to FreeBSD Moving from OS/2 to FreeBSD was final. That is, I didn t have enough hard drive space to keep both. I also didn t have the backup capacity to back up OS/2 completely. My BBS, which ran Virtual BBS (and at some point also AdeptXBBS) was deleted and reincarnated in a different form. My BBS was a member of both FidoNet and VirtualNet; the latter was specific to VBBS, and had to be dropped. I believe I may have also had to drop the FidoNet link for a time. This was the biggest change of computing in my life to that point. The earlier experiences hadn t literally destroyed what came before. OS/2 could still run my DOS programs. Its command shell was quite DOS-like. It ran Windows programs. I was going to throw all that away and leap into the unknown. I wish I had saved a copy of my BBS; I would love to see the messages I exchanged back then, or see its menu screens again. I have little memory of what it looked like. But other than that, I have no regrets. Pursuing Free, Unixy operating systems brought me a lot of enjoyment and a good career. That s not to say it was easy. All the problems of not being in the Microsoft ecosystem were magnified under FreeBSD and Linux. In a day before EDID, monitor timings had to be calculated manually and you risked destroying your monitor if you got them wrong. Word processing and spreadsheet software was pretty much not there for FreeBSD or Linux at the time; I was therefore forced to learn LaTeX and actually appreciated that. Software like PageMaker or CorelDraw was certainly nowhere to be found for those free operating systems either. But I got a ton of new capabilities. I mentioned the BBS didn t shut down, and indeed it didn t. I ran what was surely a supremely unique oddity: a free, dialin Unix shell server in the middle of a small town in Kansas. I m sure I provided things such as pine for email and some help text and maybe even printouts for how to use it. The set of callers slowly grew over the time period, in fact. And then I got UUCP.

Enter UUCP Even throughout all this, there was no local Internet provider and things were still long distance. I had Internet Email access via assorted strange routes, but they were all strange. And, I wanted access to Usenet. In 1995, it happened. The local ISP I mentioned offered UUCP access. Though I couldn t afford the dialup shell (or later, SLIP/PPP) that they offered due to long-distance costs, UUCP s very efficient batched processes looked doable. I believe I established that link when I was 15, so in 1995. I worked to register my domain, complete.org, as well. At the time, the process was a bit lengthy and involved downloading a text file form, filling it out in a precise way, sending it to InterNIC, and probably mailing them a check. Well I did that, and in September of 1995, complete.org became mine. I set up sendmail on my local system, as well as INN to handle the limited Usenet newsfeed I requested from the ISP. I even ran Majordomo to host some mailing lists, including some that were surprisingly high-traffic for a few-times-a-day long-distance modem UUCP link! The modem client programs for FreeBSD were somewhat less advanced than for OS/2, but I believe I wound up using Minicom or Seyon to continue to dial out to BBSs and, I believe, continue to use Learning Link. So all the while I was setting up my local BBS, I continued to have access to the text Internet, consisting of chiefly Gopher for me.

Switching to Debian I switched to Debian sometime in 1995 or 1996, and have been using Debian as my primary OS ever since. I continued to offer shell access, but added the WorldVU Atlantis menuing BBS system. This provided a return of a more BBS-like interface (by default; shell was still an uption) as well as some BBS door games such as LoRD and TradeWars 2002, running under DOS emulation. I also continued to run INN, and ran ifgate to allow FidoNet echomail to be presented into INN Usenet-like newsgroups, and netmail to be gated to Unix email. This worked pretty well. The BBS continued to grow in these days, peaking at about two dozen total user accounts, and maybe a dozen regular users.

Dial-up access availability I believe it was in 1996 that dial up PPP access finally became available in my small town. What a thrill! FINALLY! I could now FTP, use Gopher, telnet, and the web all from home. Of course, it was at modem speeds, but still. (Strangely, I have a memory of accessing the Web using WebExplorer from OS/2. I don t know exactly why; it s possible that by this time, I had upgraded to a 486 DX2/66 and was able to reinstall OS/2 on the old 25MHz 486, or maybe something was wrong with the timeline from my memories from 25 years ago above. Or perhaps I made the occasional long-distance call somewhere before I ditched OS/2.) Gopher sites still existed at this point, and I could access them using Netscape Navigator which likely became my standard Gopher client at that point. I don t recall using UMN text-mode gopher client locally at that time, though it s certainly possible I did.

The city Starting when I was 15, I took computer science classes at Wichita State University. The first one was a class in the summer of 1995 on C++. I remember being worried about being good enough for it I was, after all, just after my HS freshman year and had never taken the prerequisite C class. I loved it and got an A! By 1996, I was taking more classes. In 1996 or 1997 I stayed in Wichita during the day due to having more than one class. So, what would I do then but enjoy the computer lab? The CS dept. had two of them: one that had NCD X terminals connected to a pair of SunOS servers, and another one running Windows. I spent most of the time in the Unix lab with the NCDs; I d use Netscape or pine, write code, enjoy the University s fast Internet connection, and so forth. In 1997 I had graduated high school and that summer I moved to Wichita to attend college. As was so often the case, I shut down the BBS at that time. It would be 5 years until I again dealt with Internet at home in a rural community. By the time I moved to my apartment in Wichita, I had stopped using OS/2 entirely. I have no memory of ever having OS/2 there. Along the way, I had bought a Pentium 166, and then the most expensive piece of computing equipment I have ever owned: a DEC Alpha, which, of course, ran Linux.

ISDN I must have used dialup PPP for a time, but I eventually got a job working for the ISP I had used for UUCP, and then PPP. While there, I got a 128Kbps ISDN line installed in my apartment, and they gave me a discount on the service for it. That was around 3x the speed of a modem, and crucially was always on and gave me a public IP. No longer did I have to use UUCP; now I got to host my own things! By at least 1998, I was running a web server on www.complete.org, and I had an FTP server going as well.

Even Bigger Cities In 1999 I moved to Dallas, and there got my first broadband connection: an ADSL link at, I think, 1.5Mbps! Now that was something! But it had some reliability problems. I eventually put together a server and had it hosted at an acquantaince s place who had SDSL in his apartment. Within a couple of years, I had switched to various kinds of proper hosting for it, but that is a whole other article. In Indianapolis, I got a cable modem for the first time, with even tighter speeds but prohibitions on running servers on it. Yuck.

Challenges Being non-Microsoft continued to have challenges. Until the advent of Firefox, a web browser was one of the biggest. While Netscape supported Linux on i386, it didn t support Linux on Alpha. I hobbled along with various attempts at emulators, old versions of Mosaic, and so forth. And, until StarOffice was open-sourced as Open Office, reading Microsoft file formats was also a challenge, though WordPerfect was briefly available for Linux. Over the years, I have become used to the Linux ecosystem. Perhaps I use Gimp instead of Photoshop and digikam instead of well, whatever somebody would use on Windows. But I get ZFS, and containers, and so much that isn t available there. Yes, I know Apple never went away and is a thing, but for most of the time period I discuss in this article, at least after the rise of DOS, it was niche compared to the PC market.

Back to Kansas In 2002, I moved back to Kansas, to a rural home near a different small town in the county next to where I grew up. Over there, it was back to dialup at home, but I had faster access at work. I didn t much care for this, and thus began a 20+-year effort to get broadband in the country. At first, I got a wireless link, which worked well enough in the winter, but had serious problems in the summer when the trees leafed out. Eventually DSL became available locally highly unreliable, but still, it was something. Then I moved back to the community I grew up in, a few miles from where I grew up. Again I got DSL a bit better. But after some years, being at the end of the run of DSL meant I had poor speeds and reliability problems. I eventually switched to various wireless ISPs, which continues to the present day; while people in cities can get Gbps service, I can get, at best, about 50Mbps. Long-distance fees are gone, but the speed disparity remains.

Concluding Reflections I am glad I grew up where I did; the strong community has a lot of advantages I don t have room to discuss here. In a number of very real senses, having no local services made things a lot more difficult than they otherwise would have been. However, perhaps I could say that I also learned a lot through the need to come up with inventive solutions to those challenges. To this day, I think a lot about computing in remote environments: partially because I live in one, and partially because I enjoy visiting places that are remote enough that they have no Internet, phone, or cell service whatsoever. I have written articles like Tools for Communicating Offline and in Difficult Circumstances based on my own personal experience. I instinctively think about making protocols robust in the face of various kinds of connectivity failures because I experience various kinds of connectivity failures myself.

(Almost) Everything Lives On In 2002, Gopher turned 10 years old. It had probably been about 9 or 10 years since I had first used Gopher, which was the first way I got on live Internet from my house. It was hard to believe. By that point, I had an always-on Internet link at home and at work. I had my Alpha, and probably also at least PCMCIA Ethernet for a laptop (many laptops had modems by the 90s also). Despite its popularity in the early 90s, less than 10 years after it came on the scene and started to unify the Internet, it was mostly forgotten. And it was at that moment that I decided to try to resurrect it. The University of Minnesota finally released it under an Open Source license. I wrote the first new gopher server in years, pygopherd, and introduced gopher to Debian. Gopher lives on; there are now quite a few Gopher clients and servers out there, newly started post-2002. The Gemini protocol can be thought of as something akin to Gopher 2.0, and it too has a small but blossoming ecosystem. Archie, the old FTP search tool, is dead though. Same for WAIS and a number of the other pre-web search tools. But still, even FTP lives on today. And BBSs? Well, they didn t go away either. Jason Scott s fabulous BBS documentary looks back at the history of the BBS, while Back to the BBS from last year talks about the modern BBS scene. FidoNet somehow is still alive and kicking. UUCP still has its place and has inspired a whole string of successors. Some, like NNCP, are clearly direct descendents of UUCP. Filespooler lives in that ecosystem, and you can even see UUCP concepts in projects as far afield as Syncthing and Meshtastic. Usenet still exists, and you can now run Usenet over NNCP just as I ran Usenet over UUCP back in the day (which you can still do as well). Telnet, of course, has been largely supplanted by ssh, but the concept is more popular now than ever, as Linux has made ssh be available on everything from Raspberry Pi to Android. And I still run a Gopher server, looking pretty much like it did in 2002. This post also has a permanent home on my website, where it may be periodically updated.

Changes in littler version 0.3.16 (2022-08-28)

• Changes in package
  • The configure code checks for two more headers
  • The RNG seeding matches the current version in R (Dirk)
• Changes in examples
  • A cowu.r 'check Window UCRT' helper was added (Dirk)
  • A getPandoc.r downloader has been added (Dirk)
  • The -r option tp install2.r has been generalzed (Tatsuya Shima in #95)
  • The rcc.r code / package checker now has valgrind option (Dirk)
  • install2.r now installs to first element in .libPaths() by default (Dirk)
  • A very simple r2u.r help has been added (Dirk)
  • The installBioc.r has been generalized and extended similar to install2.r (Pieter Moris in #103)

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.