Quite a few years ago - 4, to be precise, so in 2018 - I did a couple
of SUP trainings, organised by a colleague. That was enjoyable, but
not really matching with me (asymmetric paddling, ugh!), so I also did
learn some kayaking, which I really love, but that s way higher
overhead - no sea around in Switzerland, and lakes are generally too
small. So I basically postponed any more water sports , until
sometime in the future when I ll finally decide what I want to do (and
in what setup).
I did a couple of one-off SUP rides in various places (2019, 2021),
but I really was out of practice, so it wasn t really enjoyable. But
with family, SUP offers a much easier way to carry a passenger (than a
kayak), so slowly I started thinking more about doing it more
seriously.
So last week, after much deliberation, bought an inflatable board,
paddle and various other accessories, and on Saturday went to try it
out, on excellent weather (completely flat) and hot but not overly
so. The board choosing in itself was something I like to do (research
options), so for a bit I was concerned whether I m more interested in
the gear, or the actual paddling itself
To my surprise, it went way better than I feared - last time I tried
it, paddled 30 minutes on my knees (knee-paddling?!), since I didn t
dare stand up. But this time, I launched and then did stand up, and
while very shaky, I didn t fall in. Neither by myself, nor with an
extra passenger
And hour later, and my initial shakiness went away, with the trainings
slowly coming back to mind. Another half hour, and - for completely
flat water - I felt quite confident. The view was awesome, the weather
nice, the water cold enough to be refreshing and the only question on
my mind was - why didn t I do this 2, 3 years ago? Well, Corona aside.
I forgot how much I love just being on the water. It definitely pays
off the cost of going somewhere, unpacking the stuff, pumping up the
board (that s a bit of a sport in itself ), because the
blue-green-light-blue colour palette is just how things should be:
Small lake, but beautiful view
Well, approximately blue. This being a small lake, it s more
blue-green than proper blue. That s next level, since bigger lakes
mean waves, and more traffic.
Of course, this could also turn up like many other things I tried (a
device in a corner that s not used anymore), but at least for
yesterday, I was a happy paddler!
Steles of the Sky is the third book of the Eternal Sky trilogy and
a direct sequel to Shattered Pillars.
You should not start here, and ideally you should read all three books
close together. They form a single story, and Elizabeth Bear is somewhat
notorious for not adding extra explanation to her novels.
By the end of Shattered Pillars, Bear was (mostly) finished adding
new factions to this story. Temur is returning home to fight for his
people and his clan. His allies are mostly in place, as are his enemies.
The hissable villain has remained hissable and boring, but several of his
allies are more ambiguous and therefore more interesting (and get
considerably more page time). All that remains is to see how Bear will
end the story, and what last-minute twists will be thrown in.
Well, that and getting the characters into the right positions, which
occupies roughly the first half of the book and dragged a bit. There is
an important and long-awaited reunion, Brother Hsiung gets his moment of
focus, and the dowager empress gets some valuable character development,
all of which did add to the story. But there's also a lot of plodding
across the countryside. I also have no idea why the extended detour to
Kyiv, began in Shattered Pillars and completed here, is even in
this story. It tells us a few new scraps about Erem and its implications,
but nothing vital. I felt like everything that happened there could have
been done elsewhere or skipped entirely without much loss.
The rest of the book is build-up to the epic conclusion, which is,
somewhat unsurprisingly, a giant battle. It was okay, as giant battles
go, but it also felt a bit like a fireworks display. Bear makes sure all
the guns on the mantle go off by the end of the series, but a lot of them
go off at the same time. It robs the plot construction of some of its
power.
There's nothing objectionable about this book. It's well-written, does
what it sets out to do, brings the story to a relatively satisfying
conclusion, provides some memorable set pieces, and is full of women
making significant decisions that shape the plot. And yet, when I
finished it, my reaction was "huh, okay" and then "oh, good, I can start
another book now." Shattered Pillars won me over during the book.
Steles of the Sky largely did not.
I think my biggest complaint is one I've had about Bear's world-building
before. She hints at some fascinating ideas: curious dragons, skies that
vary with the political power currently in control, evil ancient magic,
humanoid tigers with their own beliefs and magical system independent from
humans, and a sky with a sun so hot that it would burn everything. Over
the course of the series, she intrigued me with these ideas and left me
eagerly awaiting an explanation. That explanation never comes. The
history is never filled in, the tiger society is still only hints, Erem
remains a vast mystery, the dragons appear only fleetingly to hint at
connections with Erem... and then the book ends.
I'm not sure whether Bear did explain some details and I wasn't paying
close enough attention, or if she never intended detailed explanations.
(Both are possible! Bear's books are often subtle.) But I wanted so much
more. For me, half the fun of SFF world-building is the explanation. I
love the hints and the mystery and the sense of lost knowledge and hidden
depths... but then I want the characters to find the knowledge and plumb
the depths, not just solve their immediate conflict.
This is as good of a book as the first two books of the series on its own
merits, but I enjoyed it less because I was hoping for more revelations
before the story ended. The characters are all fine, but only a few of
them stood out. Hrahima stole every scene she was in, and I would happily
read a whole trilogy about her tiger people. Edene came into her own and
had some great moments, but they didn't come with the revelations about
Erem that I was hungry for. The rest of the large cast is varied and
well-written and features a refreshing number of older women, and it
wouldn't surprise me to hear that other readers had favorite characters
who carried the series for them. But for me the characters weren't
compelling enough to overcome my disappointment in the lack of
world-building revelations.
The series sadly didn't deliver the payoff that I was looking for, and I
can't recommend it given the wealth of excellent fantasy being written
today. But if you like Bear's understated writing style and don't need as
much world-building payoff as I do, it may still be worth considering.
Rating: 6 out of 10
Review: Children of Earth and Sky, by Guy Gavriel Kay
Publisher:
New American Library
Copyright:
2016
ISBN:
0-698-18327-4
Format:
Kindle
Pages:
572
Nine hundred years have passed since the events of
Lord of Emperors. Twenty-five years
ago, Sarantium, queen of cities, fell to the Osmanlis, who have renamed it
Asharias in honor of their Asherite faith. The repercussions are still
echoing through the western world, as the Osmanlis attempt each spring to
push farther west and the forces of Rodolfo, Holy Emperor in Obravic and
defender of the Jaddite faith, hold them back.
Seressa and Dubrava are city-state republics built on the sea trade.
Seressa is the larger and most renown, money-lenders to Rodolfo and
notorious for their focus on business and profit, including willingness to
trade with the Osmanlis. Dubrava has a more tenuous position: smaller,
reliant on trade and other assistance from Seressa, but also holding a
more-favored trading position with Asharias. Both are harassed by piracy
from Senjan, a fiercely Jaddite raiding city north up the coast from
Dubrava and renown for its bravery against the Asherites. The Senjani
are bad for business. Seressa would love to wipe them out, but they have
the favor of the Holy Emperor. They settled for attempting to starve the
city with a blockade.
As Children of Earth and Sky opens, Seressa is sending out new
spies. One is a woman named Leonora Valeri, who will present herself as
the wife of a doctor that Seressa is sending to Dubrava. She is neither
his wife nor Seressani, but this assignment gets her out of the convent to
which her noble father exiled her after an unapproved love affair. The
other new spy is the young artist Pero Villani, a minor painter whose only
notable work was destroyed by the woman who commissioned it for being too
revealing. Pero's destination is farther east: Grand Khalif Gur u the
Destroyer, the man whose forces took Sarantium, wants to be painted in the
western style. Pero will do so, and observe all he can, and if the
opportunity arises to do more than that, well, so much the better.
Pero and Leonora are traveling on a ship owned by Marin Djivo, the younger
son of a wealthy Dubravan merchant family, when their ship is captured by
Senjani raiders. Among the raiders is Danica Gradek, the archer who broke
the Seressani blockade of Senjan. This sort of piracy, while tense,
should be an economic transaction: some theft, some bargaining, some
ransom, and everyone goes on their way. That is not what happens.
Moments later, two men lie dead, and Danica's life has become entangled
with Dubravan merchants and Seressani spies.
Children of Earth and Sky is in some sense a sequel to the
Sarantine Mosaic, and knowing the events
of that series adds some emotional depth and significant moments to this
story, but you can easily read it as a stand-alone novel. (That said, I
recommend the Sarantine Mosaic regardless.) As with nearly all of
Kay's work, it's historical fiction with the names changed (less this time
than in most of this books) and a bit of magic added. The setting is the
middle of the 15th century. Seressa is, of course, Venice. The Osmanlis
are the Ottoman Turks, and Asharias is Istanbul, the captured
Constantinople. Rodolfo is a Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, holding court
in an amalgam of northern cities that (per the afterward) is primarily
Prague. Dubrava, which is central to much of this book, is Dubrovnik in
Croatia. As usual with Kay's novels, you don't need to know this to enjoy
the story, but it may spark some fun secondary reading.
The touch of magic is present in several places, but comes primarily from
Danica, whose grandfather resides as a voice in her head. He is the last
of her family that she is in contact with. Her father and older brother
were killed by Osmanli raiders, and her younger brother taken as a slave
to be raised as a djanni warrior in the khalif's infantry. (Djannis are
akin to Mamluks in our world.) Damaz, as he is now known, is the
remaining major viewpoint character I've not mentioned. There are a
couple of key events in the book that have magic at the center, generally
involving Danica or Damaz, but most of the story is straight historical
fiction (albeit with significant divergences from our world).
I'd talked myself out of starting this novel several times before I
finally picked it up. Like most of Kay's, it's a long book, and I wasn't
sure if I was in the mood for epic narration and a huge cast. And indeed,
I found it slow at the start. Once the story got underway, though, I was
as enthralled as always. There is a bit of sag in the middle of the book,
in part because Kay didn't follow up on some relationships that I wish
were more central to the plot and in part because he overdoes the
narrative weight in one scene, but the ending is exceptional.
Guy Gavriel Kay is the master of a specific type of omniscient tight third
person narration, one in which the reader sees what a character is
thinking but also gets narrative commentary, foreshadowing, and emotional
emphasis apart from the character's thoughts. It can feel heavy-handed;
if something is important, Kay tells you, explicitly and sometimes
repetitively, and the foreshadowing frequently can be described as
portentous. But in return, Kay gets fine control of pacing and emphasis.
The narrative commentary functions like a soundtrack in a movie. It tells
you when to pay close attention and when you can relax, what moments are
important, where to slow down, when to brace yourself, and when you can
speed up. That in turn requires trust; if you're not in the mood for the
author to dictate your reading pace to the degree Kay is attempting, it
can be irritating. If you are in the mood, though, it makes his novels
easy to relax into. The narrator will ensure that you don't miss anything
important, and it's an effective way to build tension.
Kay also strikes just the right balance between showing multiple
perspectives on a single moment and spending too much time retelling the
same story. He will often switch viewpoint characters in the middle of a
scene, but he avoids the trap of replaying the scene and thus losing the
reader's interest. There is instead just a moment of doubled perspective
or retrospective commentary, just enough information for the reader to
extrapolate the other character's experience backwards, and then the story
moves on. Kay has an excellent feel for when I badly wanted to see
another character's perspective on something that just happened.
Some of Kay's novels revolve around a specific event or person.
Children of Earth and Sky is not one of those. It's a braided
novel following five main characters, each with their own story. Some of
those stories converge; some of them touch for a while and then diverge
again. About three-quarters of the way through, I wasn't sure how Kay
would manage a satisfying conclusion for the numerous separate threads
that didn't feel rushed, but I need not have worried. The ending had very
little of the shape that I had expected, focused more on the small than
the large (although there are some world-changing events here), but it was
an absolute delight, with some beautiful moments of happiness that took
the rest of the novel to set up.
This is not the sort of novel with a clear theme, but insofar as it has
one, it's a story about how much of the future shape and events of the
world are unknowable. All we can control is our own choices, and we may
never know their impact. Each individual must decide who they want to be
and attempt to live their life in accordance with that decision, hopefully
with some grace towards others in the world.
The novel does, alas, still have some of Kay's standard weaknesses. There
is (at last!) an important female friendship, and I had great hopes for a
second one, but sadly it lasted only a scant handful of pages. Men
interact with each other and with women; women interact almost exclusively
with men. Kay does slightly less awarding of women to male characters
than in some previous books (although it still happens), but this world is
still weirdly obsessed with handing women to men for sex as a hospitality
gesture. None of this is too belabored or central to the story, or I
would be complaining more, but as soon as one sees how regressive the
gender roles typically are in a Kay novel, it's hard to unsee.
And, as always for Kay, the sex in this book is weirdly off-putting to me.
I think this goes hand in hand with Kay's ability to write some of the
best conversations in fantasy. Kay's characters spar and thrust with
every line and read nuance into small details of wording. Frequently, the
turn of the story rests on the outcome of a careful conversation. This is
great reading; it's the part of Kay's writing I enjoy the most. But I'm
not sure he knows how to turn it off between characters who love and trust
each other. The characters never fully relax; sex feels like another move
in ongoing chess games, which in turn makes it feel weirdly transactional
or manipulative instead of open-hearted and intimate. It doesn't help
that Kay appears to believe that arousal is a far more irresistible force
for men than I do.
Those problems did get in the way of my enjoyment occasionally, but I
didn't think they ruined the book. The rest of the story is too good.
Danica in particular is a wonderful character: thoughtful, brave,
determined, and deeply honest with herself in that way that is typical of
the best of Kay's characters. I wanted to read the book where Danica's
and Leonora's stories stayed more entwined; alas, that's not the story Kay
was writing. But I am in awe at Kay's ability to write characters who
feel thoughtful and insightful even when working at cross purposes, in a
world that mostly avoids simple villains, with a plot that never hinges on
someone doing something stupid. I love reading about these people. Their
triumphs, when they finally come, are deeply satisfying.
Children of Earth and Sky is probably not in the top echelon of
Kay's works with the Sarantine Mosaic and Under Heaven, but it's close. If you like his other writing, you
will like this as well. Highly recommended.
Rating: 9 out of 10
I have a home server.
Initially conceived and sized so I could digitize my (rather sizeable)
DVD collection, I started using it for other things; I added a few play
VMs on it, started using it as a destination for the
deja-dup-based backups of my
laptop and the time machine-based ones of the various macs in the house,
and used it as the primary location of all the photos I've taken with my
cameras over the years (currently taking up somewhere around 500G) as
well as those that were taking at our wedding (another 100G). To add to
that, I've copied the data that my wife had on various older laptops and
external hard drives onto this home server as well, so that we don't
lose the data should something happen to one or more of these bits of
older hardware.
Needless to say, the server was running full, so a few months ago I
replaced the 4x2T hard drives that I originally put in the server with
4x6T
ones,
and there was much rejoicing.
But then I started considering what I was doing. Originally, the intent
was for the server to contain DVD rips of my collection; if I were to
lose the server, I could always re-rip the collection and recover that
way (unless something happened that caused me to lose both at the same
time, of course, but I consider that sufficiently unlikely that I don't
want to worry about it). Much of the new data on the server, however,
cannot be recovered like that; if the server dies, I lose my photos
forever, with no way of recovering them. Obviously that can't be okay.
So I started looking at options to create backups of my data, preferably
in ways that make it easily doable for me to automate the backups --
because backups that have to be initiated are backups that will be
forgotten, and backups that are forgotten are backups that don't exist.
So let's not try that.
When I was still self-employed in Belgium and running a consultancy
business, I sold a number of lower-end tape
libraries for which I then
configured bacula, and I preferred a solution
that would be similar to that without costing an arm and a leg. I did
have a look at a few second-hand tape libraries, but even second hand
these are still way outside what I can budget for this kind of thing, so
that was out too.
After looking at a few solutions that seemed very hackish and would
require quite a bit of handholding (which I don't think is a good idea),
I remembered that a few years ago, I had a look at the Amazon Storage
Gateway for a customer. This gateway provides a virtual tape library
with 10 drives and 3200 slots (half of which are import/export slots)
over iSCSI. The idea is that you install the VM on a local machine, you
connect it to your Amazon account, you connect your backup software to
it over iSCSI, and then it syncs the data that you write to Amazon S3,
with the ability to archive data to S3 Glacier or S3 Glacier Deep
Archive. I didn't end up using it at the time because it required a
VMWare virtualization infrastructure (which I'm not interested in), but
I found out that these days, they also provide VM images for Linux
KVM-based virtual machines (amongst others), so that changes things
significantly.
After making a few calculations, I figured out
that for the amount of data that I would need to back up, I would
require a monthly budget of somewhere between 10 and 20 USD if the bulk
of the data would be on S3 Glacier Deep Archive. This is well within my
means, so I gave it a try.
The VM's technical requirements state that you need to assign four vCPUs
and 16GiB of RAM, which just so happens to be the exact amount of RAM
and CPU that my physical home server has. Obviously we can't do that. I
tried getting away with 4GiB and 2 vCPUs, but that didn't work; the
backup failed out after about 500G out of 2T had been written, due to
the VM running out of resources. On the VM's console I found complaints
that it required more memory, and I saw it mention something in the
vicinity of 7GiB instead, so I decided to try again, this time with 8GiB
of RAM rather than 4. This worked, and the backup was successful.
As far as bacula is concerned, the tape library is just a (very big...)
normal tape library, and I got data throughput of about 30M/s while the
VM's upload buffer hadn't run full yet, with things slowing down to
pretty much my Internet line speed when it had. With those speeds,
Bacula finished the backup successfully in "1 day 6 hours 43 mins 45
secs", although the storage gateway was still uploading things to S3
Glacier for a few hours after that.
All in all, this seems like a viable backup solution for large(r)
amounts of data, although I haven't yet tried to perform a restore.
Redemptor is the second half of a duology that started with
Raybearer. You could read the first
book without the second, but reading the second without the first will not
make much sense. I'm going to be a bit elliptical in my plot description
since there's a lot of potential for spoilers for the first book.
Tarisai has reached a point of stability and power, but she's also
committed herself to a goal, one that will right a great historical and
ongoing injustice. She's also now in a position to both notice and
potentially correct numerous other injustices in the structure of her
society, and plans to start by defending those closest to her. But in the
midst of her opening gambit to save someone she believes is unjustly
imprisoned, the first murderous undead child appears, attacking both
Tarisai's fragile sense of security and her self-esteem and self-worth.
Before long, she's drowning in feelings of inadequacy and isolation, and
her grand plans for reordering the world have turned into an anxiety loop
of self-flagellating burnout.
I so much wanted to like this book. Argh.
I think I see what Ifueko was aiming for, and it's a worthy topic for a
novel. In Raybearer, Tarisai got the sort of life that she
previously could only imagine, but she's also the sort of person who
shoulders massive obligations. Imposter syndrome, anxiety, overwork, and
burnout are realistic risks, and are also important topics to write about.
There are some nicely subtle touches buried in this story, such as the
desire of her chosen family to have her present and happy without entirely
understanding why she isn't, and without seeing the urgency that she sees
in the world's injustice. The balancing act of being effective without
overwhelming oneself is nearly impossible, and Tarisai has very little
preparation or knowledgeable support.
But this story is told with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, and in a way
that felt forced rather than arising naturally from the characters. If
the point of emphasis had been a disagreement with her closest circle over
when and how much the world should be changed, I think this would be a
better book. In the places where this drives the plot, it is a
better book. But Ifueko instead externalizes anxiety and depression in
the form of obviously manipulative demonic undead children who (mostly)
only Tarisai can see, and it's just way too much. Her reactions are
manipulated and sometimes externally imposed in a way that turns what
should have been a character vs. self plot into a character vs. character
plot in which the protagonist is very obviously making bad decisions and
the antagonist is an uninteresting cliche.
The largest problem I had with this book is that I found it thuddingly
obvious, in part because the plot felt like it was on narrowly constrained
rails to ensure it hit all of the required stops. When the characters
didn't want the plot to go somewhere, they're sidelined, written out of
the story, or otherwise forcibly overridden. Tarisai has to feel
isolated, so all the people who, according to the events of the previous
book and the established world-building rules, would not let her be
isolated are pushed out of her life. When this breaks the rules of magic
in this world, those rules are off-handedly altered. Characters that
could have had their own growth arcs after Raybearer become static
and less interesting, since there's no room for them in the plot.
Instead, we get all new characters, which gives Redemptor a bit of
a cast size problem.
Underneath this, there is an occasional flash of great writing. Ifueko
chooses to introduce a dozen mostly-new characters to an already large
cast and I was still able to mostly keep them straight, which shows real
authorial skill. She is very good with short bursts of characterization
to make new characters feel fresh and interesting. Even the most
irritating of the new characters (Crocodile, whose surprise twist I
thought was obvious and predictable) is an interesting archetype to
explore in a book about activism and activist burnout. I can see some
pieces of a better book here. But I desperately wanted something to
surprise me, for Tarisai or one of the other characters to take the plot
in some totally unexpected direction the way that Raybearer did.
It never happened.
That leads directly to another complaint: I liked Raybearer in part
because of the freshness of a different mythological system and a
different storytelling tradition than what we typically get in fantasy
novels. I was hoping for more of the same in Redemptor, which
meant I was disappointed when I got a mix of Christianity and Greek
mythology.
As advertised by Raybearer, the central mythological crisis of
Redemptor concerns the Underworld. This doesn't happen until about
80% into the book (which is also a bit of a problem; the ending felt
rushed given how central it was to the plot), so I can't talk about it in
detail without spoiling it. But what I think I can say is that
unfortunately the religious connotations of the title are not an accident.
Rather than something novel that builds on the excellent idea of the
emi-ehran spirit animal, there is a lot of Christ
symbolism mixed with an underworld that could have come from an Orpheus
retelling. There's nothing inherently wrong with this (although the
Christian bits landed poorly for me), but it wasn't what I was hoping for
from the mythology of this world.
I rarely talk much about the authors in fiction reviews. I prefer to let
books stand on their own without trying too hard to divine the author's
original intentions. But here, I think it's worth acknowledging Ifueko's
afterword in which she says that writing Redemptor in the middle of
a pandemic, major depression, and the George Floyd protests was the most
difficult thing she'd ever done. I've seen authors write similar things
in afterwords when the effect on the book was minimal or invisible, but I
don't think that was the case here. Redemptor is furious, anxious,
depressed, and at points despairing, and while it's okay for novels to be
all of those things when it's under the author's control, here they felt
like emotions that were imposed on the story from outside.
Raybearer was an adventure story about found family and ethics that
happened to involve a lot of politics. Redemptor is a story about
political activism and governance, but written in a universe whose bones
are set up for an adventure story. The mismatch bothered me throughout;
not only did these not feel like the right characters to tell this story
with, but the politics were too simple, too morally clear-cut, and too
amenable to easy solutions for a good political fantasy. Raybearer
focused its political attention on colonialism. That's a deep enough
topic by itself to support a duology (or more), but Redemptor adds
in property rights, land reform, economic and social disparity, unfair
magical systems, and a grab bag of other issues, and it overwhelms the
plot. There isn't space and time to support solutions with sufficient
complexity to satisfyingly address the problems. Ifueko falls back on
benevolent dictator solutions, and I understand why, but that's not the
path to a satisfying resolution in an overtly political fantasy.
This is the sort of sequel that leaves me wondering if I can recommend
reading the first book and not the second, and that makes me sad.
Redemptor is not without its occasional flashes of brilliance, but
I did not have fun reading this book and I can't recommend the experience.
That said, I think this is a book problem, not an author problem; I will
happily read Ifueko's next novel, and I suspect it will be much better.
Rating: 5 out of 10
For a while now, I ve been looking for a good way to stream music from my home
music collection on my phone.
There are quite a few options for music servers that support streaming. However,
Android apps that can stream music from one of those servers tend to be
unmaintained, clunky or slow (or more than one of those).
It is possible to use something that runs in a web server, but that means
no offline caching - which can be quite convenient in spots without
connectivity, such as the Underground or other random bits of London with poor
cell coverage.
Server
Most music servers today support some form of the subsonic API.
I ve tried a couple, with mixed results:
supysonic; Python. Slow. Ran into some issues with subsonic clients. No real web UI.
gonic; Go. Works well & fast enough. Minimal web UI, i.e. no ability to play music from a browser.
airsonic; Java. Last in a chain of (abandoned) forks. More effort to get to work, and resource intensive.
Eventually, I ve settled on Navidrome. It s got a
couple of things going for it:
Good subsonic implementation that worked with all the Android apps I used it with.
Great Web UI for use in a browser
I run Navidrome in Kubernetes. It s surprisingly easy to get going. Here s the
deployment I m using:
At the moment, this deployment is still tied to the machine with my music
on it since it relies on hostPath volumes, but I m planning to move that to
ceph in the future.
I then expose this service on /navidrome on my private domain (here replaced
with example.com) using an Ingress:
Client
On the desktop, I usually just use navidrome s web interface. Clementine s support
for subsonic is also okay. sublime-music is meant to be a music player
specifically for Subsonic, but I ve not really found it stable enough for
day-to-day usage.
There are various Android clients for Subsonic, but I ve only really considered the
Open Source ones that are hosted on F-Droid. Most of those are
abandoned, but D-Sub works pretty well - as does my preferred option, Subtracks.
In my three most recent posts, I went over the memoirs and biographies, the non-fiction and fiction I enjoyed in 2021. But in the last of my 2021 book-related posts, however, I'll be going over my favourite classics.
Of course, the difference between regular fiction and a 'classic' is an ambiguous, arbitrary and often-meaningless distinction: after all, what does it matter if Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (from 1951) is a classic or not? The term also smuggles in some of the ethnocentric gatekeeping encapsulated in the term 'Western canon' too. Nevertheless, the label of 'classic' has some utility for me in that it splits up the vast amount of non-fiction I read in two...
Books that just missed the cut here include: Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (moody and hilarious, but I cannot bring myself to include it due to the egregious antisemitism); Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata (so angry! so funny!); and finally Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Of significant note, though, would be the ghostly The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.
Heart of Darkness (1899)
Joseph ConradHeart of Darkness tells the story of Charles Marlow, a sailor who accepts an assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in the African interior, and the novella is widely regarded as a critique of European colonial rule in Africa. Loosely remade by Francis Ford Coppola as Apocalypse Now (1979), I started this book with the distinct possibility that this superb film adaptation would, for a rare treat, be 'better than the book'. However, Conrad demolished this idea of mine within two chapters, yet also elevated the film to a new level as well.
This was chiefly due to how observant Conrad was of the universals that make up human nature. Some of his insight pertains to the barbarism of the colonialists, of course, but Conrad applies his shrewd acuity to the at the smaller level as well. Some of these quotes are justly famous: Ah! but it was something to have at least a choice of nightmares, for example, as well as the reference to a fastidiously turned-out colonial administrator who, with unimaginable horrors occurring mere yards from his tent, we learn he was devoted to his books, which were in applepie order . (It seems to me to be deliberately unclear whether his devotion arises from gross inhumanity, utter denial or some combination of the two.) Oh, and there's a favourite moment of mine when a character remarks that It was very fine for a time, but after a bit I did get tired of resting.
Tired of resting! Yes, it's difficult to now say something original about a many-layered classic such as this, especially one that has analysed from so many angles already; from a literary perspective at first, of course, but much later from a critical postcolonial perspective, such as in Chinua Achebe's noted 1975 lecture, An Image of Africa. Indeed, the history of criticism in the twentieth century of Heart of Darkness must surely parallel the social and political developments in the Western world. (On a highly related note, the much-cited non-fiction book King Leopold's Ghost is on my reading list for 2022.)
I will therefore limit myself to saying that the boat physically falling apart as it journeys deeper into the Congo may be intended to represent that our idea of 'Western civilisation' ceases to function, both morally as well as physically, in this remote environment. And, whilst I'm probably not the first to notice the potential ambiguity, when Marlow lies to Kurtz's 'Intended [wife]' in the closing section in order to save her from being exposed to the truth about Kurtz (surely a metaphor about the ignorance of the West whilst also possibly incorporating some comment on gender?), the Intended replies: I knew it. For me, though, it is not beyond doubt that what the Intended 'knows' is that she knew that Marlow would lie to her: in other words, that the alleged ignorance of everyday folk in the colonial homeland is studied and deliberate. Compact and fairly easy-to-read, it is clear that Heart of Darkness rewards even the most rudimentary analysis.
Rebecca (1938)
Daphne du Maurier
Daphne du Maurier creates in Rebecca a credible and suffocating atmosphere in the shape of Manderley, a grand English mansion owned by aristocratic widower Maxim de Winter. Our unnamed narrator (a young woman seemingly na ve in the ways of the world) meets Max in Monte Carlo, and she soon becomes the second Mrs. de Winter. The tale takes a turn to the 'gothic', though, when it becomes apparent that the unemotional Max, as well as potentially Manderley itself, appears to be haunted by the memory of his late first wife, the titular Rebecca.
Still, Rebecca is less of a story about supernatural ghosts than one about the things that can haunt our minds. For Max, this might be something around guilt; for our narrator, the class-centered fear that she will never fit in. Besides, Rebecca doesn't need an actual ghost when you have Manderley's overbearing housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, surely one of the creepiest characters in all of fiction. Either way, the conflict of a kind between the fears of the protagonists means that they never really connect with each other.
The most obvious criticism of Rebecca is that the main character is unreasonably weak and cannot quite think or function on her own. (Isn't it curious that the trait of the male 'everyman' is a kind of physical clumsiness yet the female equivalent is shorthanded by being slightly slow?) But the na vete of Rebecca's narrator makes her easier to relate to in a way, and it also makes the reader far more capable of empathising with her embarrassment. This is demonstrated best whilst she, in one of the best evocations of this particular anxiety I have yet come across, is gingerly creeping around Manderlay and trying to avoid running into the butler.
A surprise of sorts comes in the latter stages of the book, and this particular twist brings us into contact with a female character who is anything but 'credulous'. This revelation might even change your idea of who the main character of this book really is too. (Speaking of amateur literary criticism, I have many fan theories about Rebecca, including that Maxim de Winter's estate manager, Frank Crawley, is actually having an affair with Max, and also that Maxim may have a lot more involvement in Mrs Danvers final act that he lets on.)
An easily accessible novel (with a great-but-not-perfect 1940 adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock, Rebecca is a real indulgence.
A Clockwork Orange (1962)
Anthony Burgess
One of Stanley Kubrick's most prominent tricks was to use different visual languages in order to prevent the audience from immediately grasping the underlying story. In his 1975 Barry Lyndon, for instance, the intentionally sluggish pacing and elusive characters require significant digestion to fathom and appreciate, and the luminous and quasi-Renaissance splendour of the cinematography does its part to constantly distract the viewer from the film's greater meaning.
This is very much the case in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange as well whilst it ostensibly appears to be about a Saturnalia of violence, the 'greater meaning' of A Clockwork Orange pertains to the Christian conception of free will; admittedly, a much drier idea to bother making a film around. This is all made much clearer when reading Anthony Burgess' 1962 original novel. Alex became a 'true Christian' through the experimental rehabilitation process, and even offers to literally turn the other cheek at one point. But as Alex had no choice to do so (and can no longer choose to commit violence), he is incapable of making a free moral choice. Thus, is he really a Man?
Yet whilst the book's central concern is our conception of free will in modern societies, it also appears to be a repudiation of two conservative principles. Firstly, A Clockwork Orange demolishes the idea that 'high art' leads to morally virtuous citizens. After all, if you can do a bit of the old ultra-violence whilst listening to the glorious 9th by old Ludvig van, then so much for the oft-repeated claims that culture makes you better as a person. (This, at least, I already knew from personal experience.)
The other repudiation in A Clockwork Orange is in regard to the pervasive idea that the countryside is a refuge from crime and sin. By contrast, we see the gang commit their most horrific violence in rural areas, and, later, Alex is taken to the countryside by his former droogs for a savage beating. Although this doesn't seem to quite fit the novel, this was actually an important point for Burgess to include: otherwise his book could easily be read as a commentary on the corrupting influence of urban spaces, rather than of modernity itself.
The language of this book cannot escape comment here. Alex narrates most of the book in a language called Nadsat, a fractured slang constructed by Burgess based on Russian and Cockney rhyming slang. (The language is strange for only a few pages, I promise. And note that 'Alex' is a very common Russian name.) Using Nadsat has the effect of making the book feel distinctly alien, but it also prevents it from prematurely aging too. Indeed, it comes as bit of a shock to realise that A Clockwork Orange was published 1962, the same year as The Beatles' released their first single, Love Me Do.
I could probably say a whole lot more about this thoroughly engrossing book and its movie adaptation (eg. the meta-textual line in Kubrick's version: It's funny how the colours of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen... appears verbatim in the textual original), but I'll leave it there. The book of A Clockwork Orange is not only worth the investment in the language, but is, again, somehow better than the film.
The Great Gatsby (1925)
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I'm actually being a little deceitful by including this book here: I cannot really say that The Great Gatsby was a 'favourite' read of the year, but its literary merit is so undeniable (and my respect for Fitzgerald's achievement is deep enough) that the experience was one of those pleasures you feel at seeing anything done well.
Here you have a book so rich in symbolic meaning that you could easily confuse the experience with drinking Coke syrup undiluted. And a text that has made the difficulty and complexity of reading character a prominent theme of the novel, as well as a technical concern of the book itself. Yet at all times you have in your mind that The Great Gatsby is first and foremost a book about a man writing a book, and, therefore, about the construction of stories and myths.
What is the myth being constructed in Gatsby? The usual answer today is that the book is really about the moral virtues of America. Or, rather, the lack thereof. Indeed, as James Boice wrote in 2016:
Could Wilson have killed Gatsby any other way? Could he have ran him over, or poisoned him, or attacked him with a knife? Not at all this an American story, the quintessential one, so Gatsby could have only died the quintessential American death.
The quintessential American death is, of course, being killed with a gun.
Whatever your own analysis, The Great Gatsby is not only magnificently written, but it is captivating to the point where references intrude many months later. For instance, when reading something about Disney's 'princess culture', I was reminded of when Daisy says of her daughter: I hope she'll be a fool that's the best thing of a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool . Or the billboard with the eyes of 'Doctor T. J. Eckleburg'. Or the fact that the books in Gatsby's library have never been read (so what is 'Owl Eyes' doing there during the party?!). And the only plain room in Gatsby's great house is his bedroom... Okay, fine, I must have been deluding myself: I love this novel.
How to disable internal keyboard/touchpad when a cat arrives I m using an external keyboard (1) and mouse (2), but the laptop lid is usually still open for better cooling. That means the internal keyboard (3) and touchpad (4) made of comfortable materials are open to be used by a cat searching for warmth (7), in the obvious every time case that a normal non-heated nest (6) is not enough.
The problem is, everything goes chaotic at that point in the default configuration. The solution is to have quick shortcuts in my Dash to Dock (8) to both disable (10) and enable (9) keyboard and touchpad at a very rapid pace.It is to be noted that I m not disabling the touch screen (5) by default, because most of the time the cat is not leaning on it there is also the added benefit that if one forgets about the internal keyboard and touchpad disabling and detaches the laptop from the USB-C monitor (11), there s the possibility of using the touch screen and on-screen keyboard to type in the password and tap on the keyboard/touchpad enabling shortcut button again. If also touch screen was disabled, the only way would be to go back to an external keyboard or reboot.So here are the scripts. First, the disabling script (pardon my copy-paste use of certain string manipulation tools):
dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/peripherals/touchpad/send-events "'disabled'" sudo killall evtest sudo evtest --grab $(sudo libinput list-devices grep -A 1"AT Translated Set 2 keyboard" tail -n 1 sed 's/.*\/dev/\/dev/')& sudo evtest --grab $(sudo libinput list-devices grep -A 1"Dell WMI" tail -n 1 sed 's/.*\/dev/\/dev/')& sudo evtest --grab $(sudo libinput list-devices grep -A 1"Power" grep Kernel tail -n 1 sed 's/.*\/dev/\/dev/')& sudo evtest --grab $(sudo libinput list-devices grep -A 1"Power" grep Kernel head -n 1 sed 's/.*\/dev/\/dev/')& sudo evtest --grab $(sudo libinput list-devices grep -A 1"Sleep" grep Kernel tail -n 1 sed 's/.*\/dev/\/dev/')& sudo evtest --grab $(sudo libinput list-devices grep -A 1"HID" grep Kernel head -n 1 sed 's/.*\/dev/\/dev/')& sudo evtest --grab $(sudo libinput list-devices grep -A 1"HID" tail -n 1 sed 's/.*\/dev/\/dev/')& #sudo evtest --grab $(sudo libinput list-devices grep -A 1 "ELAN" tail -n 1 sed 's/.*\/dev/\/dev/') # Touch screen
And the associated ~/.local/share/applications/disable-internal-input.desktop:
With these, if I sense a cat or am just proactive enough, I press Super+9. If I m about to detach my laptop from the monitor, I press Super+8. If I forget the latter (usually this is the case) and haven t yet locked the screen, I just tap the enabling icon on the touch screen.
So I couldn't sleep the other night, and my brain wanted to think about odd problems
Ever had a script that's compatible with both, Python 2 and 3, but you didn't want to bother the user to know which interpreter to call? Maybe because the script is often used in environments where only one Python is available (as either /usr/bin/pythonOR/usr/bin/python3) and users just expect things to work? And it's only that one script file, no package, no additional wrapper script, nothing.
Yes, this is a rather odd scenario. And yes, using Python doesn't make it easier, but trust me, you wouldn't want to implement the same in bash.
Nothing that you will read from here on should ever be actually implemented, it will summon dragons and kill kittens. But it was a fun midnight thought, and I like to share nightmares!
The nice thing about Python is it supports docstrings, essentially strings you can put inside your code which are kind of comments, but without being hidden inside commnent blocks. These are often used for documentation that you can reach using Python's help() function. (Did I mention I lovehelp()?)
Bash on the other hand, does not support docstrings. Even better, it doesn't give a damn whether you quote commands or not. You can call "ls" and you'll get your directory listing the same way as with ls.
Now, nobody would under normal circumstances quote ls. Parameters to it, sure, those can contain special characters, but ls?!
Another nice thing about Python: it doesn't do any weird string interpolation by default (ssssh, f-strings are cool, but not default). So "$(ls)" is exactly that, a string containing a Dollar sign, an open parenthesis, the characters "l" and "s" and a closing parenthesis.
Bash, well, Bash will run ls, right?
If you don't yet know where this is going, you have a clean mind, enjoy it while it lasts!
So another thing that Bash has is exec: "replace[s] the shell without creating a new process". That means that if you write exec python in your script, the process will be replaced with Python, and when the Python process ends, your script ends, as Bash isn't running anymore. Well, technically, your script ended the moment exec was called, as at that point there was no more Bash process to execute the script further.
Using exec is a pretty common technique if you want to setup the environment for a program and then call it, without Bash hanging around any longer as it's not needed.
So we could have a script like this:
#!/bin/bashexec python myscript.py "$@"
Here "$@" essentially means "pass all parameters that were passed to this Bash script to the Python call" (see parameter expansion).
We could also write it like this:
#!/bin/bash"exec""python""myscript.py""$@"
As far as Bash is concerned, this is the same script. But it just became valid Python, as for Python those are just docstrings.
So, given this is a valid Bash script and a valid Python script now, can we make it do something useful in the Python part? Sure!
If we call this using Bash, it never gets further than the exec line, and when called using Python it will print lol as that's the only effective Python statement in that file.
Okay, but what if this script would be called myscript.py? Exactly, calling it with Python would print lol and calling it with Bash would end up printing lol too (because it gets re-executed with Python).
We can even make it name-agnostic, as Bash knows the name of the script we called:
#!/bin/bash"exec""python""$0""$@"
print("lol")
But this is still calling python, and it could be python3 on the target (or even something worse, but we're not writing a Halloween story here!).
Enter another Bash command: command (SCNR!), especially "The -v option causes a single word indicating the command or file name used to invoke command to be displayed". It will also exit non-zero if the command is not found, so we can do things like $(command -v python3 command -v python) to find a Python on the system.
For Python the variable assignment is just a var with a weird string, for Bash it gets executed and we store the result. Nice!
Now we have a Bash header that will find a working Python and then re-execute itself using said Python, allowing us to use some proper scripting language.
If you're worried that $0 won't point at the right file, just wrap it with some readlink -f .
Colson Whitehead's latest novel, Harlem Shuffle, was always going to be widely reviewed, if only because his last two books won Pulitzer prizes. Still, after enjoying both The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, I was certainly going to read his next book, regardless of what the critics were saying indeed, it was actually quite agreeable to float above the manufactured energy of the book's launch.
Saying that, I was encouraged to listen to an interview with the author by Ezra Klein. Now I had heard Whitehead speak once before when he accepted the Orwell Prize in 2020, and once again he came across as a pretty down-to-earth guy. Or if I were to emulate the detached and cynical tone Whitehead embodied in The Nickel Boys, after winning so many literary prizes in the past few years, he has clearly rehearsed how to respond to the cliched questions authors must be asked in every interview. With the obligatory throat-clearing of 'so, how did you get into writing?', for instance, Whitehead replies with his part of the catechism that 'It seemed like being a writer could be a cool job. You could work from home and not talk to people.' The response is the right combination of cute and self-effacing... and with its slight tone-deafness towards enforced isolation, it was no doubt honed before Covid-19.
Harlem Shuffle tells three separate stories about Ray Carney, a furniture salesman and 'fence' for stolen goods in New York in the 1960s. Carney doesn't consider himself a genuine criminal though, and there's a certain logic to his relativistic morality. After all, everyone in New York City is on the take in some way, and if some 'lightly used items' in Carney's shop happened to have had 'previous owners', well, that's not quite his problem. 'Nothing solid in the city but the bedrock,' as one character dryly observes. Yet as Ezra pounces on in his NYT interview mentioned abov, the focus on the Harlem underworld means there are very few women in the book, and Whitehead's circular response ah well, it's a book about the criminals at that time! was a little unsatisfying. Not only did it feel uncharacteristically slippery of someone justly lauded for his unflinching power of observation (after all, it was the author who decided what to write about in the first place), it foreclosed on the opportunity to delve into why the heist and caper genres (from The Killing, The Feather Thief, Ocean's 11, etc.) have historically been a 'male' mode of storytelling.
Perhaps knowing this to be the case, the conversation quickly steered towards Ray Carney's wife, Elizabeth, the only woman in the book who could be said possesses some plausible interiority. The following off-hand remark from Whitehead caught my attention:
My wife is convinced that [Elizabeth] knows everything about Carney's criminal life, and is sort of giving him a pass. And I'm not sure if that's true. I have to have to figure out exactly what she knows and when she knows it and how she feels about it.
I was quite taken by this, although not simply due to its effect on the story it self. As in, it immediately conjured up a charming picture of Whitehead's domestic arrangements: not only does Whitehead's wife feel free to disagree with what one of Whitehead's 'own' characters knows or believes, but that Colson has no problem whatsoever sharing that disagreement with the public at large. (It feels somehow natural that Whitehead's wife believes her counterpart knows more than she lets on, whilst Whitehead himself imbues the protagonist's wife with a kind of neo-Victorian innocence.) I'm minded to agree with Whitehead's partner myself, if only due to the passages where Elizabeth is studiously ignoring Carney's otherwise unexplained freak-outs.
But all of these meta-thoughts simply underline just how emancipatory the Death of the Author can be. This product of academic literary criticism (the term was coined by Roland Barthes' 1967 essay of the same name) holds that the original author's intentions, ideas or biographical background carry no especial weight in determining how others should interpret their work. It is usually understood as meaning that a writer's own views are no more valid or 'correct' than the views held by someone else. (As an aside, I've found that most readers who encounter this concept for the first time have been reading books in this way since they were young. But the opposite is invariably true with cinephiles, who often have a bizarre obsession with researching or deciphering the 'true' interpretation of a film.) And with all that in mind, can you think of a more wry example of how freeing (and fun) nature of the Death of the Author than an author's own partner dissenting with their (Pulitzer Prize-winning) husband on the position of a lynchpin character?
The 1964 Harlem riot began after James Powell, a 15-year-old African American, was shot and killed by Thomas Gilligan, an NYPD police officer in front of 10s of witnesses. Gilligan was subsequently cleared by a grand jury.
As it turns out, the reviews for Harlem Shuffle have been almost universally positive, and after reading it in the two days after its release, I would certainly agree it is an above-average book. But it didn't quite take hold of me in the way that The Underground Railroad or The Nickel Boys did, especially the later chapters of The Nickel Boys that were set in contemporary New York and could thus make some (admittedly fairly explicit) connections from the 1960s to the present day that kind of connection is not there in Harlem Shuffle, or at least I did not pick up on it during my reading.
I can see why one might take exception to that, though. For instance, it is certainly true that the week-long Harlem Riot forms a significant part of the plot, and some events in particular are entirely contingent on the ramifications of this momentous event. But it's difficult to argue the riot's impact are truly integral to the story, so not only is this uprising against police brutality almost regarded as a background event, any contemporary allusion to the murder of George Floyd is subsequently watered down. It's nowhere near the historical rubbernecking of Forrest Gump (1994), of course, but that's not a battle you should ever be fighting.
Indeed, whilst a certain smoothness of affect is to be priced into the Whitehead reading experience, my initial overall reaction to Harlem Shuffle was fairly flat, despite all the action and intrigue on the page. The book perhaps belies its origins as a work conceived during quarantine after all, the book is essentially comprised of three loosely connected novellas, almost as if the unreality and mental turbulence of lockdown prevented the author from performing the psychological 'deep work' of producing a novel-length text with his usual depth of craft. A few other elements chimed with this being a 'lockdown novel' as well, particularly the book's preoccupation with the sheer physicality of the city compared to the usual complex interplay between its architecture and its inhabitants. This felt like it had been directly absorbed into the book from the author walking around his deserted city, and thus being able to take in details for the first time:
The doorways were entrances into different cities no, different entrances into one vast, secret city. Ever close, adjacent to all you know, just underneath. If you know where to look.
And I can't fail to mention that you can almost touch Whitehead's sublimated hunger to eat out again as well:
Stickups were chops they cook fast and hot, you re in and out. A stakeout was ribs fire down low, slow, taking your time.
[ ]
Sometimes when Carney jumped into the Hudson when he was a kid, some of that stuff got into his mouth. The Big Apple Diner served it up and called it coffee.
More seriously, however, the relatively thin personalities of minor characters then reminded me of the simulacrum of Zoom-based relationships, and the essentially unsatisfactory endings to the novellas felt reminiscent of lockdown pseudo-events that simply fizzle out without a bang. One of the stories ties up loose ends with: 'These things were usually enough to terminate a mob war, and they appeared to end the hostilities in this case as well.' They did? Well, okay, I guess.
The corner of 125th Street and Morningside Avenue in 2019, the purported location of Carney's fictional furniture store. Signage plays a prominent role in Harlem Shuffle, possibly due to the author's quarantine walks.
Still, it would be unfair to characterise myself as 'disappointed' with the novel, and none of this piece should be taken as really deep criticism. The book certainly was entertaining enough, and pretty funny in places as well:
Carney didn t have an etiquette book in front of him, but he was sure it was bad manners to sit on a man s safe.
[ ]
The manager of the laundromat was a scrawny man in a saggy undershirt painted with sweat stains. Launderer, heal thyself.
Yet I can't shake the feeling that every book you write is a book that you don't, and so we might need to hold out a little longer for Whitehead's 'George Floyd novel'. (Although it is for others to say how much of this sentiment is the expectations of a White Reader for The Black Author to ventriloquise the pain of 'their' community.)
Some room for personal critique is surely permitted. I dearly missed the junk food energy of the dry and acerbic observations that run through Whitehead's previous work. At one point he had a good line on the model tokenisation that lurks behind 'The First Negro to...' labels, but the callbacks to this idea ceased without any payoff. Similar things happened with the not-so-subtle critiques of the American Dream:
Entrepreneur? Pepper said the last part like manure. That s just a
hustler who pays taxes.
[ ]
One thing I ve learned in my job is that life is cheap, and when things start getting expensive, it gets cheaper still.
Ultimately, though, I think I just wanted more. I wanted a deeper exploration of how the real power in New York is not wielded by individual street hoodlums or even the cops but in the form of real estate, essentially serving as a synecdoche for Capital as a whole. (A recent take of this can be felt in Jed Rothstein's 2021 documentary, WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn and it is perhaps pertinent to remember that the US President at the time this novel was written was affecting to be a real estate tycoon.). Indeed, just like the concluding scenes of J. J. Connolly's Layer Cake, although you can certainly pull off a cool heist against the Man, power ultimately resides in those who control the means of production... and a homespun furniture salesman on the corner of 125 & Morningside just ain't that. There are some nods to kind of analysis in the conclusion of the final story ('Their heist unwound as if it had never happened, and Van Wyck kept throwing up buildings.'), but, again, I would have simply liked more.
And when I attempted then file this book away into the broader media landscape, given the current cultural visibility of 1960s pop culture (e.g. One Night in Miami (2020), Judas and the Black Messiah (2021), Summer of Soul (2021), etc.), Harlem Shuffle also seemed like a missed opportunity to critically analyse our (highly-qualified) longing for the civil rights era. I can certainly understand why we might look fondly on the cultural products from a period when politics was less alienated, when society was less atomised, and when it was still possible to imagine meaningful change, but in this dimension at least, Harlem Shuffle seems to merely contribute to this nostalgic escapism.
I first started using Debian sometime in the mid 90s and started contributing as a developer and package maintainer more than two decades years ago. My first very first scholarly publication, collaborative work led by Martin Michlmayr that I did when I was still an undergrad at Hampshire College, was about quality and the reliance on individuals in Debian. To this day, many of my closest friends are people I first met through Debian. I met many of them at Debian s annual conference DebConf.
Given my strong connections to Debian, I find it somewhat surprising that although all of my academic research has focused on peer production, free culture, and free software, I haven t actually published any Debian related research since that first paper with Martin in 2003!
So it felt like coming full circle when, several days ago, I was able to sit in the virtual DebConf audience and watch two of my graduate student advisees Kaylea Champion and Wm Salt Hale present their research about Debian at DebConf21.
Salt presented his masters thesis work which tried to understand the social dynamics behind organizational resilience among free software projects. Kaylea presented her work on a new technique she developed to identifying at risk software packages that are lower quality than we might hope given their popularity (you can read more about Kaylea s project in our blog post from earlier this year).
If you missed either presentation, check out the blog post my research collective put up or watch the videos below. If you want to hear about new work we re doing including work on Debian you should follow our research group blog, and/or follow or engage with us in the Fediverse (@communitydata@social.coop), or on Twitter (@comdatasci).
And if you re interested in joining us perhaps to do more research on FLOSS and/or Debian and/or a graduate degree of your own? please be in touch with me directly!
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants Issac Newton, 1675. Although it should be credited to 12th century Bernard of Chartres. You will know why I have shared this, probably at the beginning of Civil Aviation history itself.
Comments on the BBI court case which happened in Kenya, then and the subsequent appeal.
I am not going to share much about the coverage of the BBI appeal as Gautam Bhatia has shared quite eloquently his observations, both on the initial case and the subsequent appeal which lasted 5 days in Kenya and was shown all around the world thanks to YouTube. One of the interesting points which stuck with me was that in Kenya, sign language is one of the official languages. And in fact, I was able to read quite a bit about the various sign languages which are there in Kenya. It just boggles the mind that there are countries that also give importance to such even though they are not as rich or as developed as we call developed economies. I probably might give more space and give more depth as it does carry some important judicial jurisprudence which is and which will be felt around the world. How does India react or doesn t is probably another matter altogether But yes, it needs it own space, maybe after some more time.
Report on Standing Committee on IP Regulation in India and the false promises.
Again, I do not want to take much time in sharing details about what the report contains, as the report can be found here. I have uploaded it on WordPress, in case of an issue. An observation on the same subject can be found here. At least, to me and probably those who have been following the IP space as either using/working on free software or even IP would be aware that the issues shared have been known since 1994. And it does benefit the industry rather than the country. This way, the rent-seekers, and monopolists win. There is ample literature that shared how rich countries had weak regulation for decades and even centuries till it was advantageous for them to have strong IP. One can look at the history of Europe and the United States for it. We can also look at the history of our neighbor China, which for the last 5 decades has used some provision of IP and disregarded many others. But these words are of no use, as the policies done and shared are by the rich for the rich.
Fighting between two State Borders
Ironically or because of it, two BJP ruled states Assam and Mizoram fought between themselves. In which 6 policemen died. While the history of the two states is complicated it becomes a bit more complicated when one goes back into Assam and ULFA history and comes to know that ULFA could not have become that powerful until and unless, the Marwaris, people of my clan had not given generous donations to them. They thought it was a good investment, which later would turn out to be untrue. Those who think ULFA has declined, or whatever, still don t have answers to this or this.
Interestingly, both the Chief Ministers approached the Home Minister (Mr. Amit Shah) of BJP. Mr. Shah was supposed to be the Chanakya but in many instances, including this one, he decided to stay away. His statement was on the lines of you guys figure it out yourself.
There is a poem that was shared by the late poet Rahat Indori. I am sharing the same below as an image and will attempt to put a rough translation.
kisi ke baap ka hindustan todi hain Rahat Indori
Poets, whether in India or elsewhere, are known to speak truth to power and are a bit of a rebel. This poem by Rahat Indori is provocatively titled Kisi ke baap ka Hindustan todi hai , It challenges the majoritarian idea that Hindustan/India only belongs to the majoritarian religion. He also challenges as well as asserts at the same time that every Indian citizen, regardless of whatever his or her religion might be, is an Indian and can assert India as his home. While the whole poem is compelling in itself, for me what hits home is in the second stanza
:Lagegi Aag to aayege ghat kayi zad me, Yaha pe sirf hamara makan todi hai
The meaning is simple yet subtle, he uses Aag or Fire as a symbol of hate sharing that if hate spreads, it won t be his home alone that will be torched. If one wants to literally understand what he meant, I present to you the cult Russian movie No Escapes or Ogon as it is known in Russian.
If one were to decipher why the Russian film doesn t talk about climate change, one has to view it from the prism of what their leader Vladimir Putin has said and done over the years. As can be seen even in there, the situation is far more complex than one imagines. Although, it is interesting to note that he decried Climate change as man-made till as late as last year and was on the side of Trump throughout his presidency. This was in 2017 as well as perhaps this. Interestingly, there was a change in tenor and note just a couple of weeks back, but that could be only politicking or much more. Statements that are not backed by legislation and application are usually just a whitewash. We would have to wait to see what concrete steps are taken by Putin, Kremlin, and their Duma before saying either way.
Civil Aviation and the broad structure
Civil Aviation is a large topic and I would not be able to do justice to it all in one article/blog post. So, for e.g. I will not be getting into Aircraft (Boeing, Airbus, Comac etc., etc.) or the new electric aircraft as that will just make the blog post long. I will not be also talking about cargo or Visa or many such topics, as all of them actually would and do need their own space. So this would be much more limited to Airports and to some extent airlines, as one cannot survive without the other. The primary reason for doing this is there is and has been a lot of myth-making in India about Civil Aviation in general, whether it has to do with Civil Aviation history or whatever passes as of policy in India.
A little early history
Man has always looked at the stars and envisaged himself or herself as a bird, flying with gay abandon. In fact, there have been many paintings, sculptors who imagined how we would fly. The Steam Engine itself was invented in 82 BCE. But the attempt to fly was done by a certain Monk called Brother Elmer of Malmesbury who attempted the same in 1010., shortly after the birth of the rudimentary steam engine The most famous of all would be Leonardo da Vinci for his amazing sketches of flying machines in 1493. There were a couple of books by Cyrano de Bergerac, apparently wrote two books, both sadly published after his death. Interestingly, you can find both the book and the gentleman in the Project Gutenberg archives. How much of M/s Cyrano s exploits were his own and how much embellished by M/S Curtis, maybe a friend, a lover who knows, but it does give the air of the swashbuckling adventurer of the time which many men aspired to in that time. So, why not an author???
L Autre Monde: ou les tats et Empires de la Lune (Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon) and Les tats et Empires du Soleil (The States and Empires of the Sun). These two French books apparently had a lot of references to flying machines. Both of them were authored by Cyrano de Bergerac. Both of these were sadly published after his death, one apparently in 1656 and the other one a couple of years later.
By the 17th century, while it had become easy to know and measure the latitude, measuring longitude was a problem. In fact, it can be argued and probably successfully that India wouldn t have been under British rule or UK wouldn t have been a naval superpower if it hadn t solved the longitudinal problem. Over the years, the British Royal Navy suffered many blows, one of the most famous or infamous among them might be the Scilly naval disaster of 1707 which led to the death of 2000 odd British Royal naval personnel and led to Queen Anne, who was ruling over England at that time via Parliament and called it the Longitude Act which basically was an open competition for anybody to fix the problem and carried the prize money of 20,000. While nobody could claim the whole prize, many did get smaller amounts depending upon the achievements.
The best and the nearest who came was John Harrison who made the first sea-watch and with modifications, over the years it became miniaturized to a pocket-sized Marine chronometer although, I doubt the ones used today look anything in those days. But if that had not been invented, we surely would have been freed long ago. The assumption being that the East India Company would have dashed onto rocks so many times, that the whole exercise would have been futile. The downside of it is that maritime trade routes that are being used today and the commerce would not have been. Neither would have aircraft or space for that matter, or at the very least delayed by how many years or decades, nobody knows. If one wants to read about the Longitudinal problem, one can get the famous book Longitude .
In many mythologies, including Indian and Arabian tales, in which we had the flying carpet which would let its passengers go from one place to the next. Then there is also mention of Pushpak Vimana in ancient texts, but those secrets remain secrets. Think how much foreign exchange India could make by both using it and exporting the same worldwide. And I m being serious. There are many who believe in it, but sadly, the ones who know the secret don t seem to want India s progress. Just think of the carbon credits that India could have, which itself would make India a superpower. And I m being serious.
Western Ideas and Implementation.
Even in the late and early 18th century, there were many machines that were designed to have controlled flight, but it was only the Wright Flyer that was able to demonstrate a controlled flight in 1903. The ones who came pretty close to what the Wrights achieved were the people by the name of Cayley and Langley. They actually studied what the pioneers had done. They looked at what Otto Lilienthal had done, as he had done a lot of hang-gliding and put a lot of literature in the public domain then.
Furthermore, they also consulted Octave Chanute. The whole system and history of the same are a bit complicated, but it does give a window to what happened then. So, it won t be wrong to say that whatever the Wright Brothers accomplished would probably not have been possible or would have taken years or maybe even decades if that literature and experiments, drawings, etc. in the commons were not available. So, while they did experimentation, they also looked at what other people were doing and had done which was in public domain/commons.
They also did a lot of testing, which gave them new insights. Even the propulsion system they used in the 1903 flight was a design by Nicolaus Otto. In fact, the Aircraft would not have been born if the Chinese had not invented kites in the early sixth century A.D. One also has to credit Issac Newton because of the three laws of motion, again without which none of the above could have happened. What is credited to the Wilbur brothers is not just they made the Kitty Hawk, they also made it commercial as they sold it and variations of the design to the American Air Force and also made a pilot school where pilots were trained for warfighting. 119 odd pilots came out of that school. The Wrights thought that air supremacy would end the war early, but this turned out to be a false hope.
Competition and Those Magnificent Men and their flying machines
One of the first competitions to unlock creativity was the English Channel crossing offer made by Daily Mail. This was successfully done by the Frenchman Louis Bl riot. You can read his account here. There were quite a few competitions before World War 1 broke out. There is a beautiful, humorous movie that does dedicate itself to imagining how things would have gone in that time. In fact, there have been two movies, this one and an earlier movie called Sky Riders made many a youth dream. The other movie sadly is not yet in the public domain, and when it will be nobody knows, but if you see it or even read it, it gives you goosebumps.
World War 1 and Improvements to Aircraft
World War 1 is remembered as the Great War or the War to end all wars in an attempt at irony. It did a lot of destruction of both people and property, and in fact, laid the foundation of World War 2. At the same time, if World War 1 hadn t happened then Airpower, Plane technology would have taken decades. Even medicine and medical techniques became revolutionary due to World War 1. In order to be brief, I am not sharing much about World War 1 otherwise that itself would become its own blog post. And while it had its heroes and villains who, when, why could be tackled perhaps another time.
The Guggenheim Family and the birth of Civil Aviation
If one has to credit one family for the birth of the Civil Aviation, it has to be the Guggenheim family. Again, I would not like to dwell much as much of their contribution has already been noted here.
There are quite a few things still that need to be said and pointed out. First and foremost is the fact that they made lessons about flying from grade school to college and afterward till college and beyond which were in the syllabus, whereas in the Indian schooling system, there is nothing like that to date. Here, in India, even in Engineering courses, you don t have much info. Unless until you go for professional Aviation or Aeronautical courses and most of these courses cost a bomb so either the very rich or the very determined (with loans) only go for that, at least that s what my friends have shared. And there is no guarantee you will get a job after that, especially in today s climate.
Even their fund, grants, and prizes which were given to people for various people so that improvements could be made to the United States Civil Aviation. This, as shared in the report/blog post shared, was in response to what the younger child/brother saw as Europe having a large advantage both in Military and Civil Aviation. They also made several grants in several Universities which would not only do notable work during their lifetime but carry on the legacy researching on different aspects of Aircraft.
One point that should be noted is that Europe was far ahead even then of the U.S. which prompted the younger son. There had already been talks of civil/civilian flights on European routes, although much different from what either of us can imagine today. Even with everything that the U.S. had going for her and still has, Europe is the one which has better airports, better facilities, better everything than the U.S. has even today. If you look at the lists of the Airports for better value of money or facilities, you would find many Airports from Europe, some from Asia, and only a few from the U.S. even though they are some of the most frequent users of the service. But that debate and arguments I would have to leave for perhaps the next blog post as there is still a lot to be covered between the 1930s, 1950s, and today. The Guggenheims archives does a fantastic job of sharing part of the story till the 1950s, but there is also quite a bit which it doesn t. I will probably start from that in the next blog post and then carry on ahead.
Lastly, before I wind up, I have to share why I felt the need to write, capture and share this part of Aviation history. The plain and simple reason being, many of the people I meet either on the web, on Twitter or even in real life, many of them are just unaware of how this whole thing came about. The unawareness in my fellow brothers and sisters is just shocking, overwhelming. At least, by sharing these articles, I at least would be able to guide them or at least let them know how it all came to be and where things are going and not just be so clueless. Till later.
I feel like I haven t had a lot to say about open source or, in general, tech for a while. From another perspective, I have a whole lot of heady things to say about open source and technology and writing about it seems like a questionable use of time when I have so much other writing and reading and job hunting to do. I will briefly share the two ideas I am obsessed with at the moment, and then try to write more about them later.
The Defensible-Charitable-Beneficent Trichotamy
I will just jokingly ha ha no but seriously maybe jk suggest calling this the de Blanc-West Theory, considering it s heavily based on ideas from Ben West.
Actions fall into one of the following categories:
Defensible: When an action is defensible, it is permissible, acceptable, or okay. We might not like it, but you can explain why you had to do it and we can t really object. This could also be considered the bare minimum.
Charitable: A charitable action is better than a defensible action in that it produces more good, and it goes above and beyond the minimum.
Beneficent: This is a genuinely good action that produces good. It is admirable.
I love J.J. Thomson example of Henry Fonda for this. For a full explanation see section three at this web site. For a summary: imagine that you re sick and the only thing that can cure you is Henry Fonda s cool touch on your fevered brow. It is Defensible for Henry Fonda to do nothing he doesn t owe you anything in particular. It is Charitable for, say if Henry Fonda happened to be in the room, to walk across it and touch your forehead. It is Beneficent for Henry Fonda to re-corporealize back into this life and travel to your bedside to sooth your strange illness. P.S. Henry Fonda died in 1982.
I don t think these ideas are particularly new, but it s important to think about what we re doing with technology and its design: are our decisions defensible, charitable, or beneficent? Which should they be? Why?
The Offsetting Harm-Ameliorating Harm-Doing Good Trichotamy
I ve been doing some research and writing around carbon credits. I owe a lot of thanks to Philip Withnall and Adam Lerner for talking with me through these ideas. Extrapolating from action and policy recommendations, I suggest the following trichotamy:
Offsetting harm is attempting to look at the damage you ve done and try to make up for it in some capacity. In the context of, e.g., air travel, this would be purchasing carbon credits.
Ameliorating harm is about addressing the particular harm you ve done. Instead of carbon credits, you would be supporting carbon capture technologies or perhaps giving to or otherwise supporting groups and ecosystems that are being harmed by your air travel.
Doing Good is Doing Good. This would be like not traveling by air and choosing to still help the harm being caused by carbon emissions.
These ideas are also likely not particularly new, but thinking about technology in this context is also useful, especially as we consider technology in the context of climate change.
BBI Kenya and live Supreme Court streaming on YT
The last few weeks have been unrelenting as all sorts of news have been coming in, mostly about the downturn in the Economy, Islamophobia in India on the rise, Covid, and electioneering. However, in the last few days, Kenya surpassed India in live-streaming proceeds in a Court of Appeals about BBI or Building Bridges Initiative. A background filler article on the topic can be found in BBC. The live-streaming was done via YT and if wants to they can start from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIQzpmVKvro
One can also subscribe to K24TV which took the initiative of sharing the proceedings with people worldwide. If K24TV continues to share SC proceedings of Kenya, that would add to the soft power of Kenya. I will not go into the details of the case as Gautam Bhatia who has been following the goings-on in Kenya is a far better authority on the subject. In fact, just recently he shared about another Kenyan judgment from a trial which can be seen here. He has shared the proceedings and some hot takes on the Twitter thread started by him. Probably after a couple of weeks or more when he has processed what all has happened there, he may also share some nuances although many of his thoughts would probably go to his book on Comparative Constitutional Law which he hopes to publish maybe in 2021/2022 or whenever he can. Such televised proceedings are sure to alleviate the standing of Kenya internationally. There has been a proposal to do similar broadcasts by India but with surveillance built-in, so they know who is watching. The problems with the architecture and the surveillance built-in have been shared by Srinivas Kodali or DigitalDutta quite a few times, but that probably is a story for another day.
Uttar Pradesh Population Control BillHindus comprise 83% of Indian couples with more than two child children
The U.P. Population Bill came and it came with lot of prejudices. One of the prejudices is the idea that Muslims create or procreate to have the most children. Even with data is presented as shared above from NFHS National Family Health Survey which is supposed to carry our surveys every few years did the last one around 4 years back. The analysis from it has been instrumental not only in preparing graphs as above but also sharing about what sort of death toll must have been in rural India. And as somebody who have had the opportunity in the past, can vouch that you need to be extremely lucky if something happens to you when you are in a rural area.
Even in places like Bodh Gaya (have been there) where millions of tourists come as it is one of the places not to be missed on the Buddhism tourist circuit, the medical facilities are pretty underwhelming. I am not citing it simply because there are too many such newspaper reports from even before the pandemic, and both the State and the Central Govt. response has been dismal. Just a few months back, they were recalled. There were reports of votes being bought at INR 1000/- (around $14) and a bottle or two of liquor. There used to be a time when election monitoring whether national or state used to be a thing, and you had LTO s (Long-time Observers) and STO s (Short-Term Observers) to make sure that the election has been neutral. This has been on the decline in this regime, but that probably is for another time altogether. Although, have to point out the article which I had shared a few months ago on the private healthcare model is flawed especially for rural areas. Instead of going for cheap, telemedicine centers that run some version of a Linux distro. And can provide a variety of services, I know Kerala and Tamil Nadu from South India have experimented in past but such engagements need to be scaled up. This probably will come to know when the next time I visit those places (sadly due to the virus, not anytime soonish.:( ) .
Going back to the original topic, though, I had shared Hans Rosling s famous Ted talk on population growth which shows that even countries which we would not normally associate with family planning for e.g. the middle-east and Africa have also been falling quite rapidly. Of course, when people have deeply held prejudices, then it is difficult. Even when sharing China as to how they had to let go of their old policy in 2016 as they had the thing for leftover men . I also shared the powerful movie So Long my Son. I even shared how in Haryana women were and are trafficked and have been an issue for centuries but as neither suits the RW propaganda, they simply refuse to engage. They are more repulsed by people who publish this news rather than those who are actually practicing it, as that is culture . There is also teenage pregnancy, female infanticide, sex-selective abortion, etc., etc. It is just all too horrible to contemplate.
Personal anecdote I know a couple, or they used to be a couple, where the gentleman wanted to have a male child. It was only after they got an autistic child, they got their DNA tested and came to know that the gentleman had a genetic problem. He again forced and had another child, and that too turned out to be autistic. Finally, he left the wife and the children, divorced them and lived with another woman. Almost a decade of the wife s life was ruined. The wife before marriage was a gifted programmer employed at IBM. This was an arranged marriage. After this, if you are thinking of marrying, apart from doing astrology charts, also look up DNA compatibility charts. Far better than ruining yours or the women s life. Both the children whom I loved are now in heaven, god bless them
If one wants to, one can read a bit more about the Uttar Pradesh Population bill here. The sad part is that the systems which need fixing, nobody wants to fix. The reason being simple. If you get good health service by public sector, who will go to the private sector. In Europe, AFAIK they have the best medical bang for the money. Even the U.S. looks at Europe and hopes it had the systems that Europe has but that again is probably for another day.
South Africa and India long-lost brothers.
As had shared before, after the 2016 South African Debconf convention, I had been following South Africa. I was happy when FeesMustFall worked and in 2017 the then ANC president Zuma declared it in late 2017. I am sure that people who have been regular visitors to this blog know how my position is on student loans. They also must be knowing that even in U.S. till the 1970s it had free education all the way to be a lawyer and getting a lawyer license. It is only when people like Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., and others from the civil rights movement came out as a major force that the capitalists started imposing fees. They wanted people who could be sold to corporate slavery, and they won. Just last week, Biden took some steps and canceled student loans and is working on steps towards broad debt forgiveness.
Interestingly, NASA has an affirmative diversity program for people from diverse backgrounds, where a couple of UC (Upper Caste) women got the job. While they got the job, the RW (Right-Wing) was overjoyed as they got jobs on merit . Later, it was found that both the women were the third or fourth generation of immigrants in U.S.
NASA Federal Equal Opportunity Policy Directive NPD 3713 2H
Going back to the original question and topic, while there has been a concerning spate of violence, some calling it the worst sort of violence not witnessed since 1994. The problem, as ascertained in that article, is the same as here in India or elsewhere.
Those, again, who have been on my blog know that merit 90% of the time is a function of privilege and there is a vast amount of academic literature which supports that.
If, for a moment, you look at the data that is shared in the graph above which shows that 83% of Hindus and 13% of Muslims have more than 2 children, what does it show, it shows that 83+13 = 96% of the population is living in insecurity. The 5% are the ones who have actually consolidated more power during this regime rule in India. Similarly, from what I understood living in Cape Town for about a month, it is the Dutch Afrikaans as they like to call themselves and the immigrants who come from abroad who have enjoyed the fruits of tourism and money and power while the rest of the country is dying due to poverty. It is the same there, it is the same here. Corruption is also rampant in both countries, and the judiciary is virtually absent from both communities in India and SA. Interestingly, South Africa and India have been at loggerheads, but I suspect that is more due to the money and lobbying power by the Dutch. Usually, those who have money power, do get laws and even press on their side, and it is usually the ruling party in power. I cannot help but share about the Gupta brothers and their corruption as I came to know about it in 2016. And as have shared that I m related to Gupta s on my mother s side, not those specific ones but Gupta as a clan. The history of the Gupta dynasty does go back to the 3rd-4th century.
Equally interesting have been Sonali Ranade s series of articles which she wrote in National Herald, the latest on exports which is actually the key to taking India out of poverty rather than anything else. While in other countries Exporters are given all sort of subsidies, here it is being worked as how to give them less. This was in Economic times hardly a week back Export incentive schemes being reduced
I can t imagine the incredible stupidity done by the Finance Minister. And then in an attempt to prove that, they will attempt to present a rosy picture with numbers that have nothing to do with reality.
Interestingly enough, India at one time was a major exporter of apples, especially from Kashmir. Now instead of exporting, we are importing them from Afghanistan as well as Belgium and now even from the UK. Those who might not want to use the Twitter link could use this article. Of course, what India got out of this trade deal is not known. One can see that the UK got the better deal from this. Instead of investing in our own capacity expansion, we are investing in increasing the capacity of others. This is at the time when due to fuel price hike (Central taxes 66%) demand is completely flat. And this is when our own CEA (Chief Economic Adviser) tells us that growth will be at the most 6-7% and that too in 2023-2024 while currently, the inflation rate is around 12%. Is it then any wonder that almost 70% are living on Govt. ration and people in the streets of Kolkata, Assam, and other places have to sell kidneys to make sure they have some money for their kids for tomorrow. Now I have nothing against the UK but trade negotiation is an art. Sadly, this has been going on for the last few years. The politicians in India fool the public by always telling of future trade deals. Sadly, as any businessman knows, once you have compromised, you always have to compromise. And the more you compromise, the more you weaken the hand for any future trade deals. IIT pupil tries to sell kidney to repay loan, but no takers for Dalit organ.
The above was from yesterday s Times of India. Just goes to show how much people are suffering. There have been reports in vernacular papers of quite a few people from across regions and communities are doing this so they can live without pain a bit.
Almost all the time, the politicians are saved as only few understand international trade, the diplomacy and the surrounding geopolitics around it. And this sadly, is as much to do with basic education as much as it is to any other factor
Suli Deals
About a month back on the holy day of Ramzan or Ramadan as it is known in the west, which is beloved by Muslims, a couple of Muslim women were targeted and virtually auctioned. Soon, there was a flood and a GitHub repository was created where hundreds of Muslim women, especially those who have a voice and fearlessly talk about their understanding about issues and things, were being virtually auctioned. One week after the FIR was put up, to date none of the people mentioned in the FIR have been arrested. In fact, just yesterday, there was an open letter which was published by livelaw. I have saved a copy on WordPress just in case something does go wrong. Other than the disgust we feel, can t say much as no action being taken by GOI and police.
IT Rules 2021 and Big Media
After almost a year of sleeping when most activists were screaming hoarsely about how the new IT rules are dangerous for one and all, big media finally woke up a few weeks back and listed a writ petition in Madras High Court of the same. Although to be frank, the real writ petition was filed In February 2021, classical singer, performer T.M. Krishna in Madras High Court. Again, a copy of the writ petition, I have hosted on WordPress. On 23rd June 2021, a group of 13 media outlets and a journalist have challenged the IT Rules, 2021.
The Contention came from Digital News Publishers Association which is made up of the following news companies: ABP Network Private Limited, Amar Ujala Limited, DB Corp Limited, Express Network Pvt Ltd, HT Digital Streams Limited, IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd, Jagran Prakashan Limited, Lokmat Media Private Limited, NDTV Convergence Limited, TV Today Network Limited, The Malayala Manorama Co (P) Ltd, Times Internet Limited, and Ushodaya Enterprises Private Limited. All the above are heavyweights in the markets where they operate. The reason being simple, when these media organizations came into being, the idea was to have self-regulation, which by and large has worked. Now, the present Govt. wants each news item to be okayed by them before publication. This is nothing but blatant misuse of power and an attempt at censorship. In fact, the Tamil Nadu BJP president himself made a promise of the same. And of course, what is true and what is a lie, only GOI knows and will decide for the rest of the country. If somebody remembers Joseph Goebbels at this stage, it is merely a coincidence. Anyways, 3 days ago Supreme Court on 14th July the Honorable Supreme Court asked the Madras High Court to transfer all the petitions to SC. This, the Madras High Court denied as cited/shared by Meera Emmanuel, a reporter who works with barandbench. The Court says nothing doing, let this happen and then the SC can entertain the motion of doing it that level. At the same time, they would have the benefit of Madras High Court opinion as well. It gave the center two weeks to file a reply. So, either of end-week of July or latest by August first week, we might be able to read the Center s reply on the same. The SC could do a forceful intervention, but it would lead to similar outrage as has been witnessed in the past when a judge commented that if the SC has to do it all, then why do we need the High Courts, district courts etc. let all the solutions come from SC itself. This was, admittedly, frustration on the part of the judge, but due in part to the needless intervention of SC time and time again. But the concerns had been felt around all the different courts in the country.
Sedition Law
A couple of days ago, the Supreme Court under the guidance of Honorable CJI NV Ramanna, entertained the PIL filed by Maj Gen S G Vombatkere (Retd.) which asked simply that the sedition law which was used in the colonial times by the British to quell dissent by Mahatma Gandhi and Bal Gangadhar Tilak during the Indian freedom struggle. A good background filler article can be found on MSN which tells about some recent cases but more importantly how historically the sedition law was used to quell dissent during India s Independence. Another article on MSN actually elaborates on the PIL filed by Maj Gen S. G. Vombatkere. Another article on MSN tells how sedition law has been challenged and changed in 10 odd countries. I find it equally sad and equally hilarious that the Indian media whose job is to share news and opinion on this topic is being instead of being shared more by MSN. Although, I would be bereft of my duty if I did not share the editorial on the same topic by the Hindu and Deccan Chronicle. Also, an interesting question to ask is, are there only 10 countries in the world that have sedition laws? AFAIK, there are roughly 200 odd countries as recognized by WTO. If 190 odd countries do not have sedition laws, it also tells a lot about them and a lot about the remaining 10. Also, it came to light that police are still filing laws under sec66A which was declared null and void a few years ago. It was replaced with section 124A if memory serves right and it has more checks and balances.
Danish Siddiqui, Pulitzer award-winning and death in Afghanistan
Before I start with Danish Siddiqui, let me share an anecdote that I think I have shared on the blog years ago about how photojournalists are. Again, those who know me and those who follow me know how much I am mad both about trains and planes (civil aviation). A few months back, I had shared a blog post about some of the biggest railway systems in the world which shows that privatization of Railways doesn t necessarily lead to up-gradation of services but definitely leads to an increase in tariff/fares. Just had a conversation couple of days ago on Twitter and realized that need to also put a blog post about civil aviation in India and the problems it faces, but I digress.
This was about a gentleman who wanted to take a photo of a particular train coming out of a valley at a certain tunnel at two different heights, one from below and one from above the train. This was several years ago, and while I did share that award-winning photograph then, it probably would take me quite a bit of time and effort to again look it up on my blog and share.
The logistics though were far more interesting and intricate than I had first even thought of. We came around a couple of days before the train was supposed to pass that tunnel and the valley. More than half a dozen or maybe more shots were taken throughout the day by the cameras. The idea was to see how much light was being captured by the cameras and how much exposure was to be given so that the picture isn t whitened out or is too black.
Weather is the strangest of foes for a photojournalist or even photographers, and the more you are in nature, the more unpredictable it is and can be. We were also at a certain height, so care had to be taken in case light rainfall happens or dew falls, both not good for digital cameras.
And dew is something which will happen regardless of what you want. So while the two days our gentleman cameraman fiddled with the settings to figure out correct exposure settings, we had one other gentleman who was supposed to take the train from an earlier station and apprise us if the train was late or not.
The most ideal time would be at 0600 hrs. When the train would enter the tunnel and come out and the mixture of early morning sun rays, dew, the flowers in the valley, and the train would give a beautiful effect. We could stretch it to maybe 0700 hrs.
Anything after that would just be useless, as it wouldn t have the same effect. And of all this depended on nature. If the skies were to remain too dark, nothing we could do about it, if the dewdrops didn t fall it would all be over.
On the day of the shoot, we were told by our compatriot that the train was late by half an hour. We sank a little on hearing that news. Although Photoshop and others can do touch-ups, most professionals like to take as authentic a snap as possible. Everything had been set up to perfection. The wide-angle lenses on both the cameras with protections were set up. The tension you could cut with a knife. While we had a light breakfast, I took a bit more and went in the woods to shit and basically not be there. This was too tensed up for me. Returned an hour to find everybody in a good mood. Apparently, the shoot went well. One of the two captured it for good enough. Now, this is and was in a benign environment where the only foe was the environment. A bad shot would have meant another week in the valley, something which I was not looking forward to. Those who have lived with photographers and photojournalists know how self-involved they can be in their craft, while how grumpy they can be if they had a bad shoot. For those, who don t know, it is challenging to be friends with such people for a long time. I wish they would scream more at nature and let out the frustrations they have after a bad shoot. But again, this is in a very safe environment.
Now let s cut to Danish Siddiqui and the kind of photojournalism he followed. He followed a much more riskier sort of photojournalism than the one described above. Krittivas Mukherjee in his Twitter thread shared how reporters in most advanced countries are trained in multiple areas, from risk assessment to how to behave in case you are kidnapped, are in riots, hostage situations, etc. They are also trained in all sorts of medical training from treating gunshot wounds, CPR, and other survival methods. They are supposed to carry medical equipment along with their photography equipment. Sadly, these concepts are unknown in India. And even then they get killed. Sadly, he attributes his death to the thrill of taking an exclusive photograph. And the gentleman s bio reads that he is a diplomat. Talk about tone-deafness
On another completely different level was Karen Hao who was full of empathy as she shared the humility, grace, warmth and kinship she describes in her interaction with the photojournalist. His body of work can be seen via his ted talk in 2020 where he shared a brief collage of his works. Latest, though in a turnaround, the Taliban have claimed no involvement in the death of photojournalist Danish Siddiqui. This could be in part to show the Taliban in a more favorable light as they do and would want to be showcased as progressive, even though they are forcing that all women within a certain age become concubines or marry the fighters and killing the minority Hazaras or doing vile deeds with them. Meanwhile, statements made by Hillary Clinton almost a decade, 12 years ago have come back into circulation which stated how the U.S. itself created the Taliban to thwart the Soviet Union and once that job was finished, forgot all about it. And then in 2001, it landed back in Afghanistan while the real terrorists were Saudi. To date, not all documents of 9/11 are in the public domain. One can find more information of the same here. This is gonna take probably another few years before Saudi Arabia s whole role in the September 11 attacks will be known.
Last but not the least, came to know about the Pegasus spyware and how many prominent people in some nations were targeted, including in mine India. Will not talk more as it s already a big blog post and Pegasus revelations need an article on its own.
Our house has solar powered, remote controllable roller shutters on the roof windows, built by the German company named HEIM & HAUS. However, when you look closely at the remote control or the shutter motor, you'll see another brand name: SIMU. As the shutters don't have any wiring inside the house, the only way to control them is via the remote interface. So let's go on the Internet and see how one can do that, shall we? ;)
First thing we learn is that SIMU remote stuff is just re-branded Somfy. Great, another name! Looking further we find that Somfy uses some obscure protocol to prevent (replay) attacks (spoiler: it doesn't!) and there are tools for RTL-SDR and Arduino available. That's perfect!
Always sniff with RTL-SDR first!
Given the two re-brandings in the supply chain, I wasn't 100% sure our shutters really use the same protocol. So the first "hack" was to listen and decrypt the communication using RTL-SDR:
$ git clone https://github.com/dimhoff/radio_stuff
$ cd radio_stuff
$ make -C converters am_to_ook
$ make -C decoders decode_somfy
$ rtl_fm -M am -f 433.42M -s 270K ./am_to_ook -d 10 -t 2000 - ./decode_somfy
<press some buttons on the remote>
The output contains the buttons I pressed, but also the id of the remote and the command counter (which is supposed to prevent replay attacks). At this point I could just use the id and the counter to send own commands, but if I'd do that too often, the real remote would stop working, as its counter won't increase and the receiver will drop the commands when the counters differ too much.
But that's good enough for now. I know I'm looking for the right protocol at the right frequency. As the end result should be an ESP32, let's move on!
Acquiring the right hardware
Contrary to an RTL-SDR, one usually does not have a spare ESP32 with 433MHz radio at home, so I went shopping: a NodeMCU-32S clone and a CC1101. The CC1101 is important as most 433MHz chips for Arduino/ESP only work at 433.92MHz, but Somfy uses 433.42MHz and using the wrong frequency would result in really bad reception. The CC1101 is essentially an SDR, as you can tune it to a huge spectrum of frequencies.
Oh and we need some cables, a bread board, the usual stuff ;)
The wiring is rather simple:
And the end result isn't too beautiful either, but it works:
Acquiring the right software
In my initial research I found an Arduino sketch and was totally prepared to port it to ESP32, but luckily somebody already did that for me! Even better, it's explicitly using the CC1101. Okay, okay, I cheated, I actually ordered the hardware after I found this port and the reference to CC1101. ;)
As I am using ESPHome for my ESPs, the idea was to add a "Cover" that's controlling the shutters to it. Writing some C++, how hard can it be?
Turns out, not that hard. You can see the code in my GitHub repo. It consists of two (relevant) files: somfy_cover.h and somfy.yaml.
somfy_cover.h essentially wraps the communication with the Somfy_Remote_Lib library into an almost boilerplate Custom Cover for ESPHome. There is nothing too fancy in there. The only real difference to the "Custom Cover" example from the documentation is the split into SomfyESPRemote (which inherits from Component) and SomfyESPCover (which inherits from Cover) -- this is taken from the Custom Sensor documentation and allows me to define one "remote" that controls multiple "covers" using the add_cover function. The first two params of the function are the NVS name and key (think database table and row), and the third is the rolling code of the remote (stored in somfy_secrets.h, which is not in Git).
In ESPHome a Cover shall define its properties as CoverTraits. Here we call set_is_assumed_state(true), as we don't know the state of the shutters - they could have been controlled using the other (real) remote - and setting this to true allows issuing open/close commands at all times. We also call set_supports_position(false) as we can't tell the shutters to move to a specific position.
The one additional feature compared to a normal Cover interface is the program function, which allows to call the "program" command so that the shutters can learn a new remote.
somfy.yaml is the ESPHome "configuration", which contains information about the used hardware, WiFi credentials etc. Again, mostly boilerplate. The interesting parts are the loading of the additional libraries and attaching the custom component with multiple covers and the additional PROG switches:
The switch to trigger the program mode took me a bit. As the Cover interface of ESPHome does not offer any additional functions besides movement control, I first wrote code to trigger "program" when "stop" was pressed three times in a row, but that felt really cumbersome and also had the side effect that the remote would send more than needed, sometimes confusing the shutters. I then decided to have a separate button (well, switch) for that, but the compiler yelled at me I can't call program on a Cover as it does not have such a function. Turns out, you need to explicitly cast to SomfyESPCover and then it works, even if the code becomes really readable, NOT. Oh and as the switch does not have any code to actually change/report state, it effectively acts as a button that can be pressed.
At this point we can just take an existing remote, press PROG for 5 seconds, see the blinds move shortly up and down a bit and press PROG on our new ESP32 remote and the shutters will learn the new remote.
And thanks to the awesome integration of ESPHome into HomeAssistant, this instantly shows up as a new controllable cover there too.
Future Additional Work
I started writing this post about a year ago And the initial implementation had some room for improvement
More than one remote
The initial code only created one remote and one cover element. Sure, we could attach that to all shutters (there are 4 of them), but we really want to be able to control them separately.
Thankfully I managed to read enough ESPHome docs, and learned how to operate std::vector to make the code dynamically accept new shutters.
Using ESP32's NVS
The ESP32 has a non-volatile key-value storage which is much nicer than throwing bits at an emulated EEPROM. The first library I used for that explicitly used EEPROM storage and it would have required quite some hacking to make it work with NVS. Thankfully the library I am using now has a plugable storage interface, and I could just write the NVS backend myself and upstream now supports that. Yay open-source!
Remaining issues
Real state is unknown
As noted above, the ESP does not know the real state of the shutters: a command could have been lost in transmission (the Somfy protocol is send-only, there is no feedback) or the shutters might have been controlled by another remote. At least the second part could be solved by listening all the time and trying to decode commands heard over the air, but I don't think this is worth the time -- worst that can happen is that a closed (opened) shutter receives another close (open) command and that is harmless as they have integrated endstops and know that they should not move further.
Can't program new remotes with ESP only
To program new remotes, one has to press the "PROG" button for 5 seconds. This was not exposed in the old library, but the new one does support "long press", I just would need to add another ugly switch to the config and I currently don't plan to do so, as I do have working remotes for the case I need to learn a new one.
As a person who prefers full access to data in the simplest format, while at the same time having it useful with latest technologies, my quest for trying things out is an ongoing activity.
Earlier, I blogged about my needs of collating news feeds in a simple format, readily accessible offline, while still being useful and aligned with the modern paradigm.
In today s age, the other common aspect of our life, is digitization of moments. With the advent of great technology and affordable economics, the world now has access to great devices to capture moments in digital form. Most people, these days, are equipped with smart devices, like mobile phones, that come with pretty good image capturing devices. Our lives, our societies, how we interact; a lot of it is now built around the assumption of smart devices and digital services.
A lot of good things have happened of it. We are now able to send messages to people, securely, in a matter of seconds. We are now able to capture moments, which otherwise we d often miss; all thanks to devices like smart mobile phones that most of all carry almost all along with us.
In this regard, we are quite indebted to the technology revolution that has improved life styles all over. Of course, like every coin has a flip side, thus too, too much of obsession with digital life, also has its drawbacks. A simple reminder to self should always be about what a human life is designed for and try to live by its rules.
Moments
Given the tools general availability, we are all more used to capturing moments. Once upon a time, taking a photo meant going to a photo studio.
Then came a generation where we d have personal devices with roll films, to which we captured the moments. And then get it processed from a photo developing service provider. And that is when we d know which all moments came out correct and which ones were spoilt. In such cases, there s always the wish I could have that moment again.
Thankfully, now, in our current generation, we have the liberty to take pictures and validate them almost immediately. We also have the flexibility to take multiple shots of the moment and do the filtering later. There s also many intelligent and invasive services, all mostly provided free, to help you organize these moments; at a small cost of keeping an eye on your life activity.
In a summary, mankind, now, generates lots and lots of data. So much lot that now even mammoths like Google are forced to make a call whether it is more profitable to sniff user activity while providing them a service for free, or ask people to pay otherwise too.
Privacy
Many of us are wary of the amount of personal data we generate, which is our asset; and how the big tech giants want a piece of it in the name of free services. And in such quest, free aside, there s always a lookout for privacy savvy tools that can help us draw a bold line in between Public and Private
Google Photos
Google Photos has been a great tool. The way it organizes, siphons and present your data is simply amazing. No good would have been the photos taken, if they weren t easily searchable, organized, annotated, and presented.
But Google Photos is proprietary and invasive. The amount of information they have access to should be a concern to all people. For services that invade so much, the world needs Free Services.
PhotoPrism
I only came across this project around a month ago, while the project has been around since 2019. So far, in my exploration, this is one of the best Free Software tools to manage and organize my digital photos. The other favorite tool that I regularly depend on is Digikam and it still is a gem.
In a gist, PhotoPrism aims to be the equivalent of Google Photos, for the privacy savvy people.
As of date, it has a decent list of features available. And for some of the missing ones, I ve come up with a fairly okay workflow with other tools, which is one of the reasons of this blog post.
PhotoPrism is a web app, written in the Go Programming Language. Its layout and workflow as a Photo Management application is similar to Google Photos. It is very performant compared to other applications. Since it is a Progressive Web App, access through a Laptop, Tablet or Mobile is almost the same. It uses Google TensorFlow for some of its features and thus you feel like using Google Photos in some regard.
Some shortcomings and workarounds
Facial Recognition: To date, facial recognition is a planned feature. But this was easy to tackle given that Digikam has pretty solid facial recognition. So I use Digikam to detect, recognize and annotate faces. And then PhotoPrism is happy enough to use those annotations and present relevant data.
HTTP Web App: The upstream project has done a good job of making use of Docker container technology in presenting this web app solution. A software solution, the equivalent of a Google Photos, does need a heavyweight config. In free software, it is all about reusing available tools. PhotoPrism makes use of tools like MySQL, Vue.js, TensorFlow, GoLang, GoLibs and strives to provide a single package solution, all thanks to Docker containers.
In its current offering, PhotoPrism is run as a HTTP Web App. I wanted to have an added layer of security on top of it. And thus run an nginx reverse proxy on top of it. Along with it, I run the proxy service on HTTPS, thus making all traffic from clients to the proxy encrypted. I also wanted an added layer of HTTP AUTH on top, so I explored some options and finally settled down with http-auth-digest
Also, in the current implementation, PhotoPrism doesn t have a strong notion of normal and private photos in its data organization. I wanted normal photos available under a standard auth realm and private photos under a different realm. And along with a different realm, I also wanted some added security directives for it. So far, it looks like I ve put together a decent solution with the help of nginx.
First of all, since the port from the host is forwarded to the docker instance, that needed to be controlled. Instead of the default of listening on all interfaces, I changed it to loopback only. Because my primary and only interface is going to be the nginx reverse proxy
Setup nginx with a self-signed certificate to have all communication encrypted.
Setup nginx as a reverse proxy to talk to PhotoPrism.
nginx packaging: I was so happy to see the simplicity of the nginx packaging in Debian. Becuase http-auth-digest is not upstream, it needs to be pulled in separately and compiled. I was happy to see how simple the packaging structure of nginx in Debian is. It was just a matter of putting in the module in the right modules location, which as structured such in the packaging falls under the debian/ packaging sub-folder, that any future upgrades will be quite easy to manage.
http-auth-digest: I d love to see http-auth-digest module be part of the upstream package. While I m a web n00b, I felt this module perfect for my use case. From what I ve understood, set up and tested so far, this module fills in all my requirements; which is more of like a session management.
With the combined setup in place, https://host is authenticated with a different set of credentials. On the other hand, https://host/discover and /private get covered with a different set of credentials and policies. While, this will continue to be an ongoing effort and audit of the services that I build, so far now, I feel this is in decent shape that I can use it as my daily driver.
The end result is:
It is is now fair to say that Google is big enough to rewrite all the standards. Or at least break them. Or best, their arrogance of it. This bug report is a fine example of what other ways it could have been dealt.
My newsletter Le Courrier du hacker (3,800 subscribers, 176 issues) is 3 years old and Mailchimp costs were becoming unbearable for a small project ($50 a month, $600 a year), with still limited revenues nowadays. Switching to the Open Source Mailtrain plugged to the AWS Simple Email Service (SES) will dramatically reduce the associated costs.
First things first, thanks a lot to Pierre-Gilles Leymarie for his own article about switching to Mailtrain/SES. I owe him (and soon you too) so much. This article will be a step-by-step about how to set up Mailtrain/SES on a dedicated server running Linux.
What s the purpose of this article?
Mailchimp is more and more expensive following the growth of your newsletter subscribers and you need to leave it. You can use Mailtrain, a web app running on your own server and use the AWS SES service to send emails in an efficient way, avoiding to be flagged as a spammer by the other SMTP servers (very very common, you can try but you have been warned against
Prerequisites
You will need the following prerequisites :
An AWS account with admin rights
Full control over the domain name you use to send your newsletter
A baremetal or virtual Linux Debian server you have the root access to
NodeJS installed (8x and 10x are ok with Mailtrain)
A MySQL/MariaDB instance with the root access to
Redis 3x (not 5) if you want to use Redis (not mandatory)
Steps
This is a fairly straightforward setup if you know what you re doing. In the other case, you may need the help of a professional sysadmin.
You will need to complete the following steps in order to complete your setup:
Configure AWS SES
Configure your server by:
configuring your database
install Mailtrain
configuring your web server
Configure your Mailtrain setup
Configure AWS SES
Verify your domain
You need to configure the DKIM to certify that the emails sent are indeed from your own domain. DKIM is mandatory, it s the de-facto standard in the mail industry.
Ask to verify your domain
Ask AWS SES to verify a domain
Generate the DKIM settings
Generate the DKIM settings
Use the DKIM settings
Now you have your DKIM settings and Amazon AWS is waiting for finding the TXT field in your DNS zone.
Configure your DNS zone to include DKIM settings
I can t be too specific for this section because it varies A LOT depending on your DNS provider. The keys is: as indicated by the previous image you have to create one TXT record and two CNAME records in your DNS zone. The names, the types and the values are indicated by AWS SES.
If you don t understand what s going here, there is a high probabiliy you ll need a system administrator to apply these modifications and the next ones in this article.
Am I okay for AWS SES ?
As long as the word verified does not appear for your domain, as shown in the image below, something is wrong. Don t wait too long, you have a misconfiguration somewhere.
AWS SES pending verification
When your domain is verified, you ll also receive an email to inform you about the successful verification.
SMTP settings
The last step is generating your credentials to use the AWS SES SMTP server. IT is really straightforward, providing the STMP address to use, the port, and a pair of username/password credentials.
AWS SES SMTP settings and credentials
Just click on Create My SMTP Credentials and follow the instructions. Write the SMTP server address somewhere and store the file with credentials on your computer, we ll need them below.
Configure your server
As we said before, we need a baremetal server or a virtual machine running a recent Linux.
Configure your MySQL/MariaDB database
We create a user mailtrain having all rights on a new database mailtrain.
MariaDB [(none)]> create database mailtrain;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE USER 'mailtrain' IDENTIFIED BY 'V3rYD1fF1cUlTP4sSW0rd!';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON mailtrain.* TO 'mailtrain'@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'V3rYD1fF1cUlTP4sSW0rd!';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
MariaDB [(none)]> show databases;
+--------------------+
Database
+--------------------+
information_schema
mailtrain
mysql
performance_schema
+--------------------+
6 rows in set (0.00 sec)
MariaDB [(none)]> Bye
Configure your web server
I use Nginx and I ll give you the complete setup for it, including generating Let s Encrypt.
Configure Let s Encrypt
You need to stop Nginx as root:
systemctl stop nginx
Then get the certificate only, I ll give the Nginx Vhost configuration:
certbot certonly -d mailtrain.toto.com
Install Mailtrain
On your server create the following directory:
mkdir -p /var/www/ cd /var/www wget https://github.com/Mailtrain-org/mailtrain/archive/refs/tags/v1.24.1.tar.gz tar zxvf v1.24.1.tar.gz
Modify the file /var/www/mailtrain/config/production.toml to use the MySQL settings:
Now Mailtrain is launched and should be running. Yeah I know it s ugly to launch like this (root process in a screen, etc) you can improve security with the following commands:
To register the following systemd unit and to launch the new Mailtrain daemon, use the following commands (do not forget to kill your screen session if you used it before):
Now Mailtrain is running under the classic user mailtrain of the mailtrain system group.
Configure the Nginx Vhost configuration for your domain
Here is my configuration for the Mailtrain Nginx Vhost:
This Nginx vhost will redirect all http requests coming to the Mailtrain process running on the 3000 port. Now it s time to setup Mailtrain!
Setup Mailtrain
You should be able to access your Mailtrain at https://mailtrain.toto.com
Mailtrain is quite simple to configure, Here is my mailer setup. Mailtrain just forwards emails to AWS SES. We only have to plug Mailtrain to AWS SES.
Mailtrain mailer setup
The hostname is provided by AWS SES in the STMP Settings section. Use the 465 port and USE TLS option. Next is providing your AWS SES username and password you generated above and stored somewhere on your computer.
One of the issues I encountered is the AWS SES rate limit. Send too many emails too fast will get you flagged as a spammer.
So I had to throttle Mailtrain. Because I m a lazy man, I asked Pierre-Gilles Leymarie his setup. Quite easier than determining myself the good one. Here is my setup. Works fine for my soon-to-be 4k subscribers. The idea is: if your AWS SES lets you know you send too fast then just slow down.
Mailtrain to throttle sending emails to AWS SES
Conclusion
That s it! You re ready! Almost. You need an HTML template for your newsletter and a list of subscribers. Buf if you re not new in the newsletter field, fleeing Mailchimp because of their expensive prices, you should have them both already.
After sending almost ten issues with this setup, I m really happy with it. Open/click rates are the same.
When leaving Mailchimp, do not leave any list of subscribers because they ll charge you $8 for a 0 to 500 contacts, that s crazy expensive!
About the author
I ve mostly had the preference of controlling my data rather than depend on someone else. That s one reason why I still believe email to be my most reliable medium for data storage, one that is not plagued/locked by a single entity. If I had the resources, I d prefer all digital data to be broken down to its simplest form for storage, like email format, and empower the user with it i.e. their data.
Yes, there are free services that are indirectly forced upon common users, and many of us get attracted to it. Many of us do not think that the information, which is shared for the free service in return, is of much importance. Which may be fair, depending on the individual, given that they get certain services without paying any direct dime.
New age communication
So first, we had email and usenet. As I mentioned above, email was designed with fine intentions. Intentions that make it stand even today, independently.
But not everything, back then, was that great either. For example, instant messaging was very closed and centralised then too. Things like: ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger; all were centralized. I wonder if people still have access to their ICQ logs.
Not much has chagned in the current day either. We now have domination by: Facebook Messenger, Google Whatever the new marketing term they introdcue, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal etc. To my knowledge, they are all centralized.
Over all this time, I m yet to see a product come up with good (business) intentions, to really empower the end user. In this information age, the most invaluable data is user activity. That s one data everyone is after. If you decline to share that bit of free data in exchange for the free services, mind you, that that free service like Facebook, Google, Instagram, WhatsApp, Truecaller, Twitter; none of it would come to you at all. Try it out.
So the reality is that while you may not be valuating the data you offer in exchange correctly, there s a lot that is reaped from it. But still, I think each user has (and should have) the freedom to opt in for these tech giants and give them their personal bit, for free services in return. That is a decent barter deal. And it is a choice that one if free to choose
Retaining my data
I m fond of keeping an archive folder in my mailbox. A folder that holds significant events in the form of an email usually, if documented. Over the years, I chose to resort to the email format because I felt it was more reliable in the longer term than any other formats.
The next best would be plain text.
In my lifetime, I have learnt a lot from the internet; so it is natural that my preference has been with it. Mailing Lists, IRCs, HOWTOs, Guides, Blog posts; all have helped. And over the years, I ve come across hundreds of such content that I d always like to preserve.
Now there are multiple ways to preserving data. Like, for example, big tech giants. In most usual cases, your data for your lifetime, should be fine with a tech giant. In some odd scenarios, you may be unlucky if you relied on a service provider that went bankrupt. But seriously, I think users should be fine if they host their data with Microsoft, Google etc; as long as they abide by their policies.
There s also the catch of alignment. As the user, you should ensure to align (and transition) with the product offerings of your service provider. Otherwise, what may look constant and always reliable, will vanish in the blink of an eye. I guess Google Plus would be a good example. There was some Google Feed service too. Maybe Google Photos in the near decade future, just like Google Picasa in the previous (or current) decade.
History what is
On the topic of retaining information, lets take a small drift. I still admire our ancestors. I don t know what went in their mind when they were documenting events in the form of scriptures, carvings, temples, churches, mosques etc; but one things for sure, they were able to leave a fine means of communication. They are all gone but a large number of those events are evident through the creations that they left. Some of those events have been strong enough that further rulers/invaders have had tough times trying to wipe it out from history. Remember, history is usually not the truth, but the statement to be believed by the teller. And the teller is usually the survivor, or the winner you may call.
But still, the information retention techniques were better.
I haven t visited, but admire whosoever built the Kailasa Temple, Ellora, without which, we d be made to believe what not by all invaders and rulers of the region. But the majestic standing of the temple, is a fine example of the history and the events that have occured in the past.
Ellora Temple - The majectic carving believed to be carved out of a single stone
Dominance has the power to rewrite history and unfortunately that s true and it has done its part. It is just that in a mere human s defined lifetime, it is not possible to witness the transtion from current to history, and say that I was there then and I m here now, and this is not the reality.
And if not dominance, there s always the other bit, hearsay. With it, you can always put anything up for dispute. Because there s no way one can go back in time and produce a fine evidence.
There s also a part about religion. Religion can be highly sentimental. And religion can be a solid way to get an agenda going. For example, in India - a country which today consitutionally is a secular country, there have been multiple attempts to discard the belief, that never ever did the thing called Ramayana exist. That the Rama Setu, nicely reworded as Adam s Bridge by who so ever, is a mere result of science. Now Rama, or Hanumana, or Ravana, or Valmiki, aren t going to come over and prove that that is true or false. So such subjects serve as a solid base to get an agenda going. And probably we ve even succeeded in proving and believing that there was never an event like Ramayana or the Mahabharata. Nor was there ever any empire other than the Moghul or the British Empire.
But yes, whosoever made the Ellora Temple or the manymanymore of such creations, did a fine job of making a dent for the future, to know of what the history possibly could also be.
Enough of the drift
So, in my opinion, having events documented is important. It d be nice to have skills documented too so that it can be passed over generations but that s a debatable topic. But events, I believe should be documented. And documented in the best possible ways so that its existence is not diminished.
A documentation in the form of certain carvings on a rock is far more better than links and posts shared on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc. For one, these are all corporate entities with vested interests and can pretext excuse in the name of compliance and conformance.
So, for the helpless state and generation I am in, I felt email was the best possible independent form of data retention in today s age. If I really had the resources, I d not rely on digital age. This age has no guarantee of retaining and recording information in any reliable manner. Instead, it is just mostly junk, which is manipulative and changeable, conditionally.
Email and RSS
So for my communication, I like to prefer emails over any other means. That doesn t mean I don t use the current trends. I do. But this blog is mostly about penning my desires. And desire be to have communication over email format.
Such is the case that for information useful over the internet, I crave to have it formatted in email for archival.
RSS feeds is my most common mode of keeping track of information I care about. Not all that I care for is available in RSS feeds but hey such is life. And adaptability is okay.
But my preference is still RSS.
So I use RSS feeds through a fine software called feed2imap. A software that fits my bill fairly well.
feed2imap is:
An rss feed news aggregator
Pulls and extracts news feeds in the form of an email
Can push the converted email over pop/imap
Can convert all image content to email mime attachment
In a gist, it makes the online content available to me offline in the most admired email format
In my mail box, in today s day, my preferred email client is Evolution. It does a good job of dealing with such emails (rss feed items). An image example of accessing the rrs feed item through it is below
RSS News Item through Evolution
The good part is that my actual data is always independent of such MUAs. Tomorrow, as technology - trends - economics evolve, something new would come as a replacement but my data would still be mine.
Mobile trends
Trends have shown. Data mobility is a commodity expectation now. As such, I wanted to have something fill in that gap for me. So that I could access my information - which I ve preferred in a format - easily in today s trendy options.
I tried multiple options on my current preferred platform of choice for mobiles, i.e. Android. Finally I came across Aqua Mail, which fits in most of my requirements.
Aqua Mail does
Connect to my laptop over imap
Can sync the requested folders
Can sync requested data for offlince accessibility
Can present the synchronized data in a quite flexible and customizable manner, to match my taste
Has a very extensible User Interface, allowing me to customize it to my taste
Pictures can do a better job of describing my english words.
Aqua Mail Message List Interface
Aqua Mail Message View Normal
Aqua Mail Message View Zoomed - Fit to Screen
All of this done with no dependence on network connectivity, post the sync. And all information is stored is best possible simple format.
Prince Caspian is the second book of the Chronicles of Narnia in
the original publication order (the fourth in the new publication order)
and a direct sequel to The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe. As much as I would like to say you could start here
if you wanted less of Lewis's exploration of secondary-world Christianity
and more children's adventure, I'm not sure it would be a good reading
experience. Prince Caspian rests heavily on the events of
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
If you haven't already, you may also want to read
my review of that book for some introductory
material about my past relationship with the series and why I follow the
original publication order.
Prince Caspian always feels like the real beginning of a re-read.
Re-reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is okay but a bit
of a chore: it's very random, the business with Edmund drags on, and it's
very concerned with hitting the mandatory theological notes. Prince
Caspian is more similar to the following books and feels like Narnia
proper. That said, I have always found the ending of Prince
Caspian oddly forgettable. This re-read helped me see why: one of the
worst bits of the series is in the middle of this book, and then the
dramatic shape of the ending is very strange.
MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW for both this book and The Lion, the
Witch and the Wardrobe.
Prince Caspian opens with the Pevensie kids heading to school by
rail at the end of the summer holidays. They're saying their goodbyes to
each other at a train station when they are first pulled and then dumped
into the middle of a wood. After a bit of exploration and the discovery
of a seashore, they find an overgrown and partly ruined castle.
They have, of course, been pulled back into Narnia, and the castle is Cair
Paravel, their great capital when they ruled as kings and queens. The
twist is that it's over a thousand years later, long enough that Cair
Paravel is now on an island and has been abandoned to the forest. They
discover parts of how that happened when they rescue a dwarf named
Trumpkin from two soldiers who are trying to drown him near the supposedly
haunted woods.
Most of the books in this series have good hooks, but Prince
Caspian has one of the best. I adored everything about the start of this
book as a kid: the initial delight at being by the sea when they were on
their way to boarding school, the realization that getting food was not
going to be easy, the abandoned castle, the dawning understanding of where
they are, the treasure room, and the extended story about Prince Caspian,
his discovery of the Old Narnia, and his flight from his usurper uncle.
It becomes clear from Trumpkin's story that the children were pulled back
into Narnia by Susan's horn (the best artifact in these books), but
Caspian's forces were expecting the great kings and queens of legend from
Narnia's Golden Age. Trumpkin is delightfully nonplussed at four
school-age kids who are determined to join up with Prince Caspian and
help.
That's the first half of Prince Caspian, and it's a solid magical
adventure story with lots of potential. The ending, alas, doesn't
entirely work. And between that, we get the business with Aslan and Lucy
in the woods, or as I thought of it even as a kid, the bit where Aslan is
awful to everyone for no reason.
For those who have forgotten, or who don't care about spoilers, the kids
plus Trumpkin are trying to make their way to Aslan's How (formerly the
Stone Table) where Prince Caspian and his forces were gathered, when they
hit an unexpected deep gorge. Lucy sees Aslan and thinks he's calling for
them to go up the gorge, but none of the other kids or Trumpkin can see
him and only Edmund believes her. They go down instead, which almost gets
them killed by archers. Then, that night, Lucy wakes up and finds Aslan
again, who tells her to wake the others and follow him, but warns she may
have to follow him alone if she can't convince the others to go along.
She wakes them up (which does not go over well), Aslan continues to be
invisible to everyone else despite being right there, Susan is
particularly upset at Lucy, and everything is awful. But this time they
do follow her (with lots of grumbling and over Susan's objections). This,
of course, is the right decision: Aslan leads them to a hidden path that
takes them over the river they're trying to cross, and becomes visible to
everyone when they reach the other side.
This is a mess. It made me angry as a kid, and it still makes me angry
now. No one has ever had trouble seeing Aslan before, so the kids are
rightfully skeptical. By intentionally deceiving them, Aslan puts the
other kids in an awful position: they either have to believe Lucy is
telling the truth and Aslan is being weirdly malicious, or Lucy is
mistaken even though she's certain. It not only leads directly to
conflict among the kids, it makes Lucy (the one who does all the right
things all along) utterly miserable. It's just cruel and mean, for no
purpose.
It seems clear to me that this is C.S. Lewis trying to make a theological
point about faith, and in a way that makes it even worse because I think
he's making a different point than he intended to make. Why is religious
faith necessary; why doesn't God simply make himself apparent to everyone
and remove the doubt? This is one of the major problems in Christian
apologetics, Lewis chooses to raise it here, and the answer he gives is
that God only shows himself to his special favorites and hides from
everyone else as a test. It's clearly not even a question of intention to
have faith; Edmund has way more faith here than Lucy does (since Lucy
doesn't need it) and still doesn't get to see Aslan properly until
everyone else does. Pah.
The worst part of this is that it's effectively the last we see of Susan.
Prince Caspian is otherwise the book in which Susan comes into her
own. The sibling relationship between the kids is great here in general,
but Susan is particularly good. She is the one who takes bold action to
rescue Trumpkin, risking herself by firing an arrow into the helmet of one
of the soldiers despite being the most cautious of the kids. (And then
gets a little defensive about her shot because she doesn't want anyone to
think she would miss that badly at short range, a detail I just love.) I
identified so much with her not wanting to beat Trumpkin at an archery
contest because she felt bad for him (but then doing it anyway). She is,
in short, awesome.
I was fine with her being the most grumpy and frustrated with the argument
over picking a direction. They're all kids, and sometimes one gets grumpy
and frustrated and awful to the people around you. Once everyone sees
Aslan again, Susan offers a truly excellent apology to Lucy, so it seemed
like Lewis was setting up a redemption arc for her the way that he did for
Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (although I maintain
that nearly all of this mess was Aslan's fault). But then we never see
Susan's conversation with Aslan, Peter later says he and Susan are now too
old to return to Narnia, and that's it for Susan. Argh.
I'll have more to say about this later (and it's not an original opinion),
but the way Lewis treats Susan is the worst part of this series, and it
adds insult to injury that it happens immediately after she has a chance
to shine.
The rest of the book suffers from the same problem that The Lion,
the Witch and the Wardrobe did, namely that Aslan fixes everything in a
somewhat surreal wild party and it's unclear why the kids needed to be
there. (This is the book where Bacchus and Silenus show up, there is a
staggering quantity of wine for a children's book, and Aslan turns a bunch
of obnoxious school kids into pigs.) The kids do have more of a role to
play this time: Peter and Edmund help save Caspian, and there's a
(somewhat poorly motivated) duel that sends up the ending. But other than
the brief battle in the How, the battle is won by Aslan waking the trees,
and it's not clear why he didn't do that earlier. The ending is, at best,
rushed and not worthy of its excellent setup. I was also disappointed
that the "wait, why are you all kids?" moment was hand-waved away by
Narnia giving the kids magical gravitas.
Lewis never felt in control of either The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe or Prince Caspian. In both cases, he had a great hook
and some ideas of what he wanted to hit along the way, but the endings are
more sense of wonder and random Aslan set pieces than anything that
follows naturally from the setup. This is part of why I'm not commenting
too much on the sour notes, such as the red dwarves being the good and
loyal ones but the black dwarves being suspicious and only out for
themselves. If I thought bits like that were deliberate, I'd complain
more, but instead it feels like Lewis threw random things he liked about
children's books and animal stories into the book and gave it a good stir,
and some of his subconscious prejudices fell into the story along the way.
That said, resolving your civil war children's book by gathering all the
people who hate talking animals (but who have lived in Narnia for
generations) and exiling them through a magical gateway to a conveniently
uninhabited country is certainly a choice, particularly when you wrote the
book only two years after the
Partition of
India. Good lord.
Prince Caspian is a much better book than The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe for the first half, and then it mostly falls apart. The
first half is so good, though. I want to read the book that this could
have become, but I'm not sure anyone else writes quite like Lewis at his
best.
Followed by The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is my absolute
favorite of the series.
Rating: 7 out of 10
I wrote this blog post with Kaylea Champion and a version of this post was originally posted on the Community Data Science Collective blog.
Critical software we all rely on can silently crumble away beneath us. Unfortunately, we often don t find out software infrastructure is in poor condition until it is too late. Over the last year or so, I have been supporting Kaylea Champion on a project my group announced earlier to measure software underproduction a term we use to describe software that is low in quality but high in importance.
Underproduction reflects an important type of risk in widely used free/libre open source software (FLOSS) because participants often choose their own projects and tasks. Because FLOSS contributors work as volunteers and choose what they work on, important projects aren t always the ones to which FLOSS developers devote the most attention. Even when developers want to work on important projects, relative neglect among important projects is often difficult for FLOSS contributors to see.
Given all this, what can we do to detect problems in FLOSS infrastructure before major failures occur? Kaylea Champion and I recently published a paper laying out our new method for measuring underproduction at the IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER) 2021 that we believe provides one important answer to this question.
Conceptual diagram showing how our conception of underproduction relates to quality and importance of software.
In the paper, we describe a general approach for detecting underproduced software infrastructure that consists of five steps: (1) identifying a body of digital infrastructure (like a code repository); (2) identifying a measure of quality (like the time to takes to fix bugs); (3) identifying a measure of importance (like install base); (4) specifying a hypothesized relationship linking quality and importance if quality and importance are in perfect alignment; and (5) quantifying deviation from this theoretical baseline to find relative underproduction.
To show how our method works in practice, we applied the technique to an important collection of FLOSS infrastructure: 21,902 packages in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Although there are many ways to measure quality, we used a measure of how quickly Debian maintainers have historically dealt with 461,656 bugs that have been filed over the last three decades. To measure importance, we used data from Debian s Popularity Contest opt-in survey. After some statistical machinations that are documented in our paper, the result was an estimate of relative underproduction for the 21,902 packages in Debian we looked at.
One of our key findings is that underproduction is very common in Debian. By our estimates, at least 4,327 packages in Debian are underproduced. As you can see in the list of the most underproduced packages again, as estimated using just one more measure many of the most at risk packages are associated with the desktop and windowing environments where there are many users but also many extremely tricky integration-related bugs.
These 30 packages have the highest level of underproduction in Debian according to our analysis.
We hope these results are useful to folks at Debian and the Debian QA team. We also hope that the basic method we ve laid out is something that others will build off in other contexts and apply to other software repositories.
Paper Citation: Kaylea Champion and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2021. Underproduction: An Approach for Measuring Risk in Open Source Software. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER 2021). IEEE.
Contact Kaylea Champion (kaylea@uw.edu) with any questions or if you are interested in following up.
Small lake, but beautiful view
I have a home server.
Initially conceived and sized so I could digitize my (rather sizeable)
DVD collection, I started using it for other things; I added a few play
VMs on it, started using it as a destination for the
In my three most recent posts, I went over the 
I first started using 
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants Issac Newton, 1675. Although it should be credited to 12th century Bernard of Chartres. You will know why I have shared this, probably at the beginning of Civil Aviation history itself.
But yes, it needs it own space, maybe after some more time.
Hindus comprise 83% of Indian couples with more than two child children
As a person who prefers full access to data in the simplest format, while at the same time having it useful with latest technologies, my quest for trying things out is an ongoing activity.
Earlier, I 
Prerequisites
You will need the following prerequisites :
Ask AWS SES to verify a domain
Generate the DKIM settings
AWS SES pending verification
AWS SES SMTP settings and credentials
Mailtrain mailer setup
Mailtrain to throttle sending emails to AWS SES
