Search Results: "dark"

2 December 2024

Jonathan Dowland: jungle/acid/etc

I thought it had been a full year since I last shared a playlist, but it's been two! I had a plan to produce more, but it seems I haven't. Instead here's a few tracks I've discovered recently which share a common theme. In August I stumbled across a Sound on Sound video interviewing Pete Cannon, who creates authentically old-school Jungle music using tools and techniques from the time, including AKAI samplers and the Commodore Amiga computer.
Here's three tracks that I found since then. Some 8-bit Amiga-jungle, by some slower-paced acid house from someone ostensibly based on Whitley Bay, by and a darker piece I heard on the radio. by

Russ Allbery: Review: Long Live Evil

Review: Long Live Evil, by Sarah Rees Brennan
Series: Time of Iron #1
Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: July 2024
ISBN: 0-316-56872-4
Format: Kindle
Pages: 433
Long Live Evil is a portal fantasy (or, arguably more precisely, a western take on an isekai villainess fantasy) and the first book of a series. If the author's name sounds familiar, it's possibly because of In Other Lands, which got a bunch of award nominations in 2018, She has also written a lot of other YA fantasy, but this is her first adult epic fantasy novel. Rae is in the hospital, dying of cancer. Everything about that experience, from the obvious to the collapse of her friendships, absolutely fucking sucks. One of the few bright points is her sister's favorite fantasy series, Time of Iron, which her sister started reading to her during chemo sessions. Rae mostly failed to pay attention until the end of the first book and the rise of the Emperor. She fell in love with the brooding, dangerous anti-hero and devoured the next two books. The first book was still a bit hazy, though, even with the help of a second dramatic reading after she was too sick to read on her own. This will be important later. After one of those reading sessions, Rae wakes up to a strange woman in her hospital room who offers her an option. Rather than die a miserable death that bankrupts her family, she can go through a door to Eyam, the world of Time of Iron, and become the character who suits her best. If she can steal the Flower of Life and Death from the imperial greenhouse on the one day a year that it blooms, she will wake up, cured. If not, she will die. Rae of course goes through, and wakes in the body of Lady Rahela, the Beauty Dipped in Blood, the evil stepsister. One of the villains, on the night before she is scheduled to be executed. Rae's initial panic slowly turns to a desperate glee. She knows all of these characters. She knows how the story will turn out. And she has a healthy body that's not racked with pain. Maybe she's not the heroine, but who cares, the villains are always more interesting anyway. If she's going to be cast as the villain, she's going to play it to the hilt. It's not like any of these characters are real. Stories in which the protagonists are the villains are not new (Nimona and Hench come to mind just among books I've reviewed), but they are having a moment. Assistant to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer came out last year, and this book and Django Wexler's How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying both came out this year. This batch of villain books all take different angles on the idea, but they lean heavily on humor. In Long Live Evil, that takes the form of Rae's giddy embrace of villainous scheming, flouncing, and blatant plot manipulation, along with her running commentary on the various characters and their in-story fates. The setup here is great. Rae is not only aware that she's in a story, she knows it's full of cliches and tropes. Some of them she loves, some of them she thinks are ridiculous, and she isn't shy about expressing both of those opinions. Rae is a naturally dramatic person, and it doesn't take her long to lean into the opportunities for making dramatic monologues and villainous quips, most of which involve modern language and pop culture references that the story characters find baffling and disconcerting. Unfortunately, the base Time of Iron story is, well, bad. It's absurd grimdark epic fantasy with paper-thin characters and angst as a central character trait. This is clearly intentional for both in-story and structural reasons. Rae enjoys it precisely because it's full of blood and battles and over-the-top brooding, malevolent anti-heroes, and Rae's sister likes the impossibly pure heroes who suffer horrible fates while refusing to compromise their ideals. Rae is also about to turn the story on its head and start smashing its structure to try to get herself into position to steal the Flower of Life and Death, and the story has to have a simple enough structure that it doesn't get horribly confusing once smashed. But the original story is such a grimdark parody, and so not my style of fantasy, that I struggled with it at the start of the book. This does get better eventually, as Rae introduces more and more complications and discovers some surprising things about the other characters. There are several delightful twists concerning the impossibly pure heroine of the original story that I will not spoil but that I thought retroactively made the story far more interesting. But that leads to the other problem: Rae is both not very good at scheming, and is flippant and dismissive of the characters around her. These are both realistic; Rae is a young woman with cancer, not some sort of genius mastermind, and her whole frame for interacting with the story is fandom discussions and arguments with her sister. Early in the book, it's rather funny. But as the characters around her start becoming more fleshed out and complex, Rae's inability to take them seriously starts to grate. The grand revelation to Rae that these people have their own independent existence comes so late in the book that it's arguably a spoiler, but it was painfully obvious to everyone except Rae for hundreds of pages before it got through Rae's skull. Those are my main complaints, but there was a lot about this book that I liked. The Cobra, who starts off as a minor villain in the story, is by far the best character of the book. He's not only more interesting than Rae, he makes everyone else in the book, including Rae, more interesting characters through their interactions. The twists around the putative heroine, Lady Rahela's stepsister, are a bit too long in coming but are an absolute delight. And Key, the palace guard that Rae befriends at the start of the story, is the one place where Rae's character dynamic unquestionably works. Key anchors a lot of Rae's scenes, giving them a sense of emotional heft that Rae herself would otherwise undermine. The narrator in this book does not stick with Rae. We also get viewpoint chapters from the Cobra, the Last Hope, and Emer, Lady Rahela's maid. The viewpoints from the Time of Iron characters can be a bit eye-roll-inducing at the start because of how deeply they follow the grimdark aesthetic of the original story, but by the middle of the book I was really enjoying the viewpoint shifts. This story benefited immensely from being seen from more angles than Rae's chaotic manipulation. By the end of the book, I was fully invested in the plot line following Cobra and the Last Hope, to the extent that I was a bit disappointed when the story would switch back to Rae. I'm not sure this was a great book, but it was fun. It's funny in places, but I ended up preferring the heartfelt parts to the funny parts. It is a fascinating merger of gleeful fandom chaos and rather heavy emotional portrayals of both inequality and the experience of terminal illness. Rees Brennan is a stage four cancer survivor and that really shows; there's a depth, nuance, and internal complexity to Rae's reactions to illness, health, and hope that feels very real. It is the kind of book that can give you emotional whiplash; sometimes it doesn't work, but sometimes it does. One major warning: this book ends on a ridiculous cliffhanger and does not in any sense resolve its main plot arc. I found this annoying, not so much because of the wait for the second volume, but because I thought this book was about the right length for the amount of time I wanted to spend in this world and wish Rees Brennan had found a way to wrap up the story in one book. Instead, it looks like there will be three books. I'm in for at least one more, since the story was steadily getting better towards the end of Long Live Evil, but I hope the narrative arc survives being stretched out across that many words. This one's hard to classify, since it's humorous fantasy on the cover and in the marketing, and that element is definitely present, but I thought the best parts of the book were when it finally started taking itself seriously. It's metafictional, trope-subverting portal fantasy full of intentional anachronisms that sometimes fall flat and sometimes work brilliantly. I thought the main appeal of it would be watching Rae embrace being a proper villain, but then the apparent side characters stole the show. Recommended, but you may have to be in just the right mood. Content notes: Cancer, terminal illness, resurrected corpses, wasting disease, lots of fantasy violence and gore, and a general grimdark aesthetic. Rating: 7 out of 10

30 November 2024

Enrico Zini: New laptop setup

My new laptop Framework (Framework Laptop 13 DIY Edition (AMD Ryzen 7040 Series)) arrived, all the hardware works out of the box on Debian Stable, and I'm very happy indeed. This post has the notes of all the provisioning steps, so that I can replicate them again if needed. Installing Debian 12 Debian 12's installer just worked, with Secure Boot enabled no less, which was nice. The only glitch is an argument with the guided partitioner, which was uncooperative: I have been hit before by a /boot partition too small, and I wanted 1G of EFI and 1G of boot, while the partitioner decided that 512Mb were good enough. Frustratingly, there was no way of changing that, nor I found how to get more than 1G of swap, as I wanted enough swap to fit RAM for hybernation. I let it install the way it pleased, then I booted into grml for a round of gparted. The tricky part of that was resizing the root btrfs filesystem, which is in an LV, which is in a VG, which is in a PV, which is in LUKS. Here's a cheatsheet. Shrink partitions: note that I used an increasing size because I don't trust that each tool has a way of representing sizes that aligns to the byte. I'd be happy to find out that they do, but didn't want to find out the hard way that they didn't. Resize with gparted: Move and resize partitions at will. Shrinking first means it all takes a reasonable time, and you won't have to wait almost an hour for a terabyte-sized empty partition to be carefully moved around. Don't ask me why I know. Regrow partitions: Setup gnome When I get a new laptop I have a tradition of trying to make it work with Gnome and Wayland, which normally ended up in frustration and a swift move to X11 and Xfce: I have a lot of long-time muscle memory involved in how I use a computer, and it needs to fit like prosthetics. I can learn to do a thing or two in a different way, but any papercut that makes me break flow and I cannot fix will soon become a dealbreaker. This applies to Gnome as present in Debian Stable. General Gnome settings tips I can list all available settings with: 
gsettings list-recursively
which is handy for grepping things like hotkeys. I can manually set a value with: 
gsettings set <schema> <key> <value>
and I can reset it to its default with: 
gsettings reset <schema> <key>
Some applications like Gnome Terminal use "relocatable schemas", and in those cases you also need to specify a path, which can be discovered using dconf-editor: 
gsettings set <schema>:<path> <key> <value>
Install appindicators First thing first: app install gnome-shell-extension-appindicator, log out and in again: the Gnome Extension manager won't see the extension as available until you restart the whole session. I have no idea why that is so, and I have no idea why a notification area is not present in Gnome by default, but at least now I can get one. Fix font sizes across monitors My laptop screen and monitor have significantly different DPIs, so: 
gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"
And in Settings/Displays, set a reasonable scaling factor for each display. Disable Alt/Super as hotkey for the Overlay Seeing all my screen reorganize and reshuffle every time I accidentally press Alt leaves me disoriented and seasick: 
gsettings set org.gnome.mutter overlay-key ''
Focus-follows-mouse and Raise-or-lower My desktop is like my desktop: messy and cluttered. I have lots of overlapping window and I switch between them by moving the focus with the mouse, and when the visible part is not enough I have a handy hotkey mapped to raise-or-lower to bring forward what I need and send back what I don't need anymore. Thankfully Gnome can be configured that way, with some work: This almost worked, but sometimes it didn't do what I wanted, like I expected to find a window to the front but another window disappeared instead. I eventually figured that by default Gnome delays focus changes by a perceivable amount, which is evidently too slow for the way I move around windows. The amount cannot be shortened, but it can be removed with: 
gsettings set org.gnome.shell.overrides focus-change-on-pointer-rest false
Mouse and keyboard shortcuts Gnome has lots of preconfigured sounds, shortcuts, animations and other distractions that I do not need. They also either interfere with key combinations I want to use in terminals, or cause accidental window moves or resizes that make me break flow, or otherwise provide sensory overstimulation that really does not work for me. It was a lot of work, and these are the steps I used to get rid of most of them. Disable Super+N combinations that accidentally launch a questionable choice of programs: 
for i in  seq 1 9 ; do gsettings set org.gnome.shell.keybindings switch-to-application-$i '[]'; done
Gnome-Shell settings: gnome-tweak-tool settings: Gnome Terminal settings: Thankfully 10 years ago I took notes on how to customize Gnome Terminal, and they're still mostly valid: Other hotkeys that got in my way and had to disable the hard way: 
for n in  seq 1 12 ; do gsettings set org.gnome.mutter.wayland.keybindings switch-to-session-$n '[]'; done
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings move-to-workspace-down '[]'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings move-to-workspace-up '[]'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings panel-main-menu '[]'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface menubar-accel '[]'
Note that even after removing F10 from being bound to menubar-accel, and after having to gsetting binding to F10 as is: 
$ gsettings list-recursively grep F10
org.gnome.Terminal.Legacy.Keybindings switch-to-tab-10 '<Alt>F10'
I still cannot quit Midnight Commander using F10 in a terminal, as that moves the focus in the window title bar. This looks like a Gnome bug, and a very frustrating one for me. Appearance Gnome-Shell settings: gnome-tweak-tool settings: Gnome Terminal settings: Other decluttering and tweaks Gnome Shell Settings: Set a delay between screen blank and lock: when the screen goes blank, it is important for me to be able to say "nope, don't blank yet!", and maybe switch on caffeine mode during a presentation without needing to type my password in front of cameras. No UI for this, but at least gsettings has it: 
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.screensaver lock-delay 30
Extensions I enabled the Applications Menu extension, since it's impossible to find less famous applications in the Overview without knowing in advance how they're named in the desktop. This stole a precious hotkey, which I had to disable in gsettings: 
gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.apps-menu apps-menu-toggle-menu '[]'
I also enabled: I didn't go and look for Gnome Shell extentions outside what is packaged in Debian, as I'm very wary about running JavaScript code randomly downloaded from the internet with full access over my data and desktop interaction. I also took care of checking that the Gnome Shell Extensions web page complains about the lacking "GNOME Shell integration" browser extension, because the web browser shouldn't be allowed to download random JavaScript from the internet and run it with full local access. Yuck. Run program dialog The default run program dialog is almost, but not quite, totally useless to me, as it does not provide completion, not even just for executable names in path, and so it ends up being faster to open a new terminal window and type in there. It's possible, in Gnome Shell settings, to bind a custom command to a key. The resulting keybinding will now show up in gsettings, though it can be located in a more circuitous way by grepping first, and then looking up the resulting path in dconf-editor: 
gsettings list-recursively grep custom-key
org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys custom-keybindings ['/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom0/']
I tried out several run dialogs present in Debian, with sad results, possibly due to most of them not being tested on wayland: Both gmrun and xfrun4 seem like workable options, with xfrun4 being customizable with convenient shortcut prefixes, so xfrun4 it is. TODO I'll try to update these notes as I investigate. Conclusion so far I now have something that seems to work for me. A few papercuts to figure out still, but they seem manageable. It all feels a lot harder than it should be: for something intended to be minimal, Gnome defaults feel horribly cluttered and noisy to me, continuosly getting in the way of getting things done until tamed into being out of the way unless called for. It felt like a device that boots into flashy demo mode, which needs to be switched off before actual use. Thankfully it can be switched off, and now I have notes to do it again if needed. gsettings oddly feels to me like a better UI than the interactive settings managers: it's more comprehensive, more discoverable, more scriptable, and more stable across releases. Most of the Q&A I found on the internet with guidance given on the UI was obsolete, while when given with gsettings command lines it kept being relevant. I also have the feeling that these notes would be easier to understand and follow if given as gsettings invocations instead of descriptions of UI navigation paths. At some point I'll upgrade to Trixie and reevaluate things, and these notes will be a useful checklist for that. Fingers crossed that this time I'll manage to stay on Wayland. If not, I know that Xfce is still there for me, and I can trust it to be both helpful and good at not getting in the way of my work.

24 November 2024

Edward Betts: A mini adventure at MiniDebConf Toulouse

A mini adventure at MiniDebConf Toulouse Last week, I ventured to Toulouse, for a delightful mix of coding, conversation, and crepes at MiniDebConf Toulouse, part of the broader Capitole du Libre conference, akin to the more well-known FOSDEM but with a distinctly French flair. This was my fourth and final MiniDebConf of the year. no jet bridge My trek to Toulouse was seamless. I hopped on a bus from my home in Bristol to the airport, then took a short flight. I luxuriated in seat 1A, making me the first to disembark a mere ten minutes later, I was already on the bus heading to my hotel.

Exploring the Pink City pink img 29 duck shop Once settled, I wasted no time exploring the charms of Toulouse. Just a short stroll from my hotel, I found myself beside a tranquil canal, its waters mirroring the golden hues of the trees lining its banks. Autumn in Toulouse painted the city in warm oranges and reds, creating a picturesque backdrop that was a joy to wander through. Every corner of the street revealed more of the city's rich cultural tapestry and striking architecture. Known affectionately as 'La Ville Rose' (The Pink City) for its unique terracotta brickwork, Toulouse captivated me with its blend of historical allure and vibrant modern life.

MiniDebCamp FabLab sign laptop setup Prior to the main event, the MiniDebCamp provided two days of hacking at Artilect FabLab a space as creative as it was welcoming. It was a pleasure to reconnect with familiar faces and forge new friendships.

Culinary delights lunch 1 img 14 img 15 img 16 img 17 cakes The hospitality was exceptional. Our lunches boasted a delicious array of quiches, an enticing charcuterie board, and a superb selection of cheeses, all perfectly complemented by exquisite petite fours. Each item was not only a feast for the eyes but also a delight for the palate.

Wine and cheese wine and cheese 1 wine and cheese 2 Leftovers from these gourmet feasts fuelled our impromptu cheese and wine party on Thursday evening a highlight where informal chats blended seamlessly with serious software discussions.

The river at night night river 1 night river 2 night river 3 night river 4 The enchantment of Toulouse doesn't dim with the setting sun; instead, it transforms. My evening strolls took me along the banks of the Garonne, under a sky just turning from twilight to velvet blue. The river, a dark mirror, perfectly reflected the illuminated grandeur of the city's architecture. Notably, the dome of the H pital de La Grave stood out, bathed in a warm glow against the night sky. This architectural gem, coupled with the soft lights of the bridge and the serene river, created a breathtaking scene that was both tranquil and awe-inspiring.

Capitole du Libre making crepes The MiniDebConf itself, part of the larger Capitole du Libre event, was a fantastic immersion into the world of free software. Unlike the ticket-free FOSDEM, this conference required QR codes for entry and even had bag searches, adding an unusual layer of security for a software conference. Highlights included the crepe-making by the organisers, reminiscent of street food scenes from larger festivals. The availability of crepes for MiniDebConf attendees and the presence of food trucks added a festive air, albeit with the inevitable long queues familiar to any festival-goer.

v l Toulouse bike cyclocity The city's bike rental system was a boon easy to use with handy bike baskets perfect for casual city touring. I chose pedal power over electric, finding it a pleasant way to navigate the streets and absorb the city's vibrant atmosphere.

Markets market flatbreads Toulouse's markets were a delightful discovery. From a spontaneous visit to a market near my hotel upon arrival, to cycling past bustling marketplaces, each day presented new local flavours and crafts to explore. The Za'atar flatbread from a Syrian stall was a particularly memorable lunch pick.

La brasserie Les Arcades img 25 img 26 img 27 Our conference wrapped up with a spontaneous gathering at La Brasserie Les Arcades in Place du Capitole. Finding a caf that could accommodate 30 of us on a Sunday evening without a booking felt like striking gold. What began with coffee and ice cream smoothly transitioned into dinner, where I enjoyed a delicious braised duck leg with green peppercorn sauce. This meal rounded off the trip with lively conversations and shared experiences.

The journey back home img 30 img 31 img 32 img 33 Returning from Toulouse, I found myself once again in seat 1A, offering the advantage of being the first off the plane, both on departure and arrival. My flight touched down in Bristol ahead of schedule, and within ten minutes, I was on the A1 bus, making my way back into the heart of Bristol.

Anticipating DebConf 25 in Brittany My trip to Toulouse for MiniDebConf was yet another fulfilling experience; the city was delightful, and the talks were insightful. While I frequently travel, these journeys are more about continuous learning and networking than escape. The food in Toulouse was particularly impressive, a highlight I've come to expect and relish on my trips to France. Looking ahead, I'm eagerly anticipating DebConf in Brest next year, especially the opportunity to indulge once more in the excellent French cuisine and beverages.

17 November 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: Dark Deeds

Review: Dark Deeds, by Michelle Diener
Series: Class 5 #2
Publisher: Eclipse
Copyright: January 2016
ISBN: 0-6454658-4-4
Format: Kindle
Pages: 340
Dark Deeds is the second book of the self-published Class 5 science fiction romance series. It is a sequel to Dark Horse and will spoil the plot of that book, but it follows the romance series convention of switching to a new protagonist in the same universe and telling a loosely-connected story. Fiona, like Rose in the previous book, was kidnapped by the Tecran in one of their Class 5 ships, although that's not entirely obvious at the start of the story. The book opens with her working as a slave on a Garmman trading ship while its captain works up the nerve to have her killed. She's spared this fate when the ship is raided by Krik pirates. Some brave fast-talking, and a touch of honor among thieves, lets her survive the raid and be rescued by a pursuing Grih battleship, with a useful electronic gadget as a bonus. The author uses the nickname "Fee" for Fiona throughout this book and it was like nails on a chalkboard every time. I had to complain about that before getting into the review. If you've read Dark Horse, you know the formula: lone kidnapped human woman, major violations of the laws against mistreatment of sentient beings that have the Grih furious on her behalf, hunky Grih starship captain who looks like a space elf, all the Grih are fascinated by her musical voice, she makes friends with a secret AI... Diener found a formula that worked well enough that she tried it again, and it would not surprise me if the formula repeated through the series. You should not go into this book expecting to be surprised. That said, the formula did work the first time, and it largely does work again. I thoroughly enjoyed Dark Horse and wanted more, and this is more, delivered on cue. There are worse things, particularly if you're a Kindle Unlimited reader (I am not) and are therefore getting new installments for free. The Tecran fascination with kidnapping human women is explained sufficiently in Fiona's case, but I am mildly curious how Diener will keep justifying it through the rest of the series. (Maybe the formula will change, but I doubt it.) To give Diener credit, this is not a straight repeat of the first book. Fiona is similar to Rose but not identical; Rose had an unshakable ethical calm, and Fiona is more of a scrapper. The Grih are not stupid and, given the amount of chaos Rose unleashed in the previous book, treat the sudden appearance of another human woman with a great deal more caution and suspicion. Unfortunately, this also means far less of my favorite plot element of the first book: the Grih being constantly scandalized and furious at behavior the protagonist finds sadly unsurprising. Instead, this book has quite a bit more action. Dark Horse was mostly character interactions and tense negotiations, with most of the action saved for the end. Dark Deeds replaces a lot of the character work with political plots and infiltrating secret military bases and enemy ships. The AI (named Eazi this time) doesn't show up until well into the book and isn't as much of a presence as Sazo. Instead, there's a lot more of Fiona being drafted into other people's fights, which is entertaining enough while it's happening but which wasn't as delightful or memorable as Rose's story. The writing continues to be serviceable but not great. It's a bit cliched and a bit awkward. Also, Diener uses paragraph breaks for emphasis. It's hard to stop noticing it once you see it. Thankfully, once the story gets going and there's more dialogue, she tones that down, or perhaps I stopped noticing. It's that kind of book (and that kind of series): it's a bit rough to get started, but then there's always something happening, the characters involve a whole lot of wish-fulfillment but are still people I like reading about, and it's the sort of unapologetic "good guys win" type of light science fiction that is just the thing when one simply wants to be entertained. Once I get into the book, it's easy to overlook its shortcomings. I spent Dark Horse knowing roughly what would happen but wondering about the details. I spent Dark Deeds fairly sure of the details and wondering when they would happen. This wasn't as fun of an experience, but the details were still enjoyable and I don't regret reading it. I am hoping that the next book will be more of a twist, or will have a character more like Rose (or at least a character with a better nickname). Sort of recommended if you liked Dark Horse and really want more of the same. Followed by Dark Minds, which I have already purchased. Rating: 6 out of 10

17 September 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: The Book That Broke the World

Review: The Book That Broke the World, by Mark Lawrence
Series: Library Trilogy #2
Publisher: Ace
Copyright: 2024
ISBN: 0-593-43796-9
Format: Kindle
Pages: 366
The Book That Broke the World is high fantasy and a direct sequel to The Book That Wouldn't Burn. You should not start here. In a delightful break from normal practice, the author provides a useful summary of the previous volume at the start of this book to jog your memory. At the end of The Book That Wouldn't Burn, the characters were scattered and in various states of corporeality after some major revelations about the nature of the Library and the first appearance of the insectile Skeer. The Book That Wouldn't Burn picks up where it left off, and there is a lot more contact with the Skeer, but my guess that they would be the next viewpoint characters does not pan out. Instead, we get a new group and a new protagonist: Celcha, whose sees angels who come to visit her brother. I have complaints, but before I launch into those, I should say that I liked this book apart from the totally unnecessary cannibalism. (I'll get to that.) Livira is a bit sidelined, which is regrettable, but Celcha and her brother are interesting new characters, and both Arpix and Clovis, supporting characters in the first book, get some excellent character development. Similar to the first book, this is a puzzle box story full of world-building tidbits with intellectually-satisfying interactions. Lawrence elaborates and complicates his setting in ways that don't contradict earlier parts of the story but create more room and depth for the characters to be creative. I came away still invested in this world and eager to find out how Lawrence pulls the world-building and narrative threads together. The biggest drawback of this book is that it's not new. My thought after finishing the first book of the series was that if Lawrence had enough world-building ideas to fill three books to that same level of density, this had the potential of being one of my favorite fantasy series of all time. By the end of the second book, I concluded that this is not the case. Instead of showing us new twists and complications the way the first book did throughout, The Book That Broke the World mostly covers the same thematic ground from some new angles. It felt like Lawrence was worried the reader of the first book may not have understood the theme or the world-building, so he spent most of the second book nailing down anything that moved. I found that frustrating. One of the best parts of The Book That Wouldn't Burn was that Lawrence trusted the reader to keep up, which for me hit the glorious but rare sweet spot of pacing where I was figuring out the world at roughly the same pace as the characters. It surprised me in some very enjoyable ways. The Book That Broke the World did not surprise me. There are a few new things, which I enjoyed, and a few elaborations and developments of ideas, which I mostly enjoyed, but I saw the big plot twist coming at least fifty pages before it happened and found the aftermath more annoying than revelatory. It doesn't help that the plot rests on character misunderstandings, one of my least favorite tropes. One of the other disappointments of this book is that the characters stop using the Library as a library. The Library at the center of this series is a truly marvelous piece of world-building with numerous fascinating features that are unrelated to its contents, but Livira used it first and foremost as a repository of books. The first book was full of characters solving problems by finding a relevant book and reading it. In The Book That Broke the World, sadly, this is mostly gone. The Library is mostly reduced to a complicated Big Dumb Object setting. It's still a delightful bit of world-building, and we learn about a few new features, but I only remember two places where the actual books are important to the story. Even the book referenced in the title is mostly important as an artifact with properties unrelated to the words that it contains or to the act of reading it. I think this is a huge lost opportunity and something I hope Lawrence fixes in the last book of the trilogy. This book instead focuses on the politics around the existence of the Library itself. Here I'm cautiously optimistic, although a lot is going to depend on the third book. Lawrence has set up a three-sided argument between groups that I will uncharitably describe as the libertarian techbros, the "burn it all down" reactionaries, and the neoliberal centrist technocrats. All three of those positions suck, and Lawrence had better be setting the stage for Livira to find a different path. Her unwillingness to commit to any of those sides gives me hope, but bringing this plot to a satisfying conclusion is going to be tricky. I hope I like what Lawrence comes up with, but it feels far from certain. It doesn't help that he's started delivering some points with a sledgehammer, and that's where we get to the unnecessary cannibalism. Thankfully this is a fairly small part of the tail end of the book, but it was an unpleasant surprise that I did not want in this novel and that I don't think made the story any better. It's tempting to call the cannibalism gratuitous, but it does fit one of the main themes of this story, namely that humans are depressingly good at using any rule-based object in unexpected and nasty ways that are contrary to the best intentions of the designer. This is the fundamental challenge of the Library as a whole and the question that I suspect the third book will be devoted to addressing, so I understand why Lawrence wanted to emphasize his point. The reason why there is cannibalism here is directly related to a profound misunderstanding of the properties of the library, and I detected an echo of one of C.S. Lewis's arguments in The Last Battle about the nature of Hell. The problem, though, is that this is Satanic baby-killerism, to borrow a term from Fred Clark. There are numerous ways to show this type of perversion of well-intended systems, which I know because Lawrence used other ones in the first book that were more subtle but equally effective. One of the best parts of The Book That Wouldn't Burn is that there were few real villains. The conflict was structural, all sides had valid perspectives, and the ethical points of that story were made with some care and nuance. The problem with cannibalism as it's used here is not merely that it's gross and disgusting and off-putting to the reader, although it is all of those things. If I wanted to read horror, I would read horror novels. I don't appreciate surprise horror used for shock value in regular fantasy. But worse, it's an abandonment of moral nuance. The function of cannibalism in this story is like the function of Satanic baby-killers: it's to signal that these people are wholly and irredeemably evil. They are the Villains, they are Wrong, and they cease to be characters and become symbols of what the protagonists are fighting. This is destructive to the story because it's designed to provoke a visceral short-circuit in the reader and let the author get away with sloppy story-telling. If the author needs to use tactics like this to point out who is the villain, they have failed to set up their moral quandary properly. The worst part is that this was entirely unnecessary because Lawrence's story-telling wasn't sloppy and he set up his moral quandary just fine. No one was confused about the ethical point here. I as the reader was following without difficulty, and had appreciated the subtlety with which Lawrence posed the question. But apparently he thought he was too subtle and decided to come back to the point with a pile-driver. I think that seriously injured the story. The ethical argument here is much more engaging and thought-provoking when it's more finely balanced. That's a lot of complaints, mostly because this is a good book that I badly wanted to be a great book but which kept tripping over its own feet. A lot of trilogies have weak second books. Hopefully this is another example of the mid-story sag, and the finale will be worthy of the start of the story. But I have to admit the moral short-circuiting and the de-emphasis of the actual books in the library has me a bit nervous. I want a lot out of the third book, and I hope I'm not asking this author for too much. If you liked the first book, I think you'll like this one too, with the caveat that it's quite a bit darker and more violent in places, even apart from the surprise cannibalism. But if you've not started this series, you may want to wait for the third book to see if Lawrence can pull off the ending. Followed by The Book That Held Her Heart, currently scheduled for publication in April of 2025. Rating: 7 out of 10

16 September 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: The Wings Upon Her Back

Review: The Wings Upon Her Back, by Samantha Mills
Publisher: Tachyon
Copyright: 2024
ISBN: 1-61696-415-4
Format: Kindle
Pages: 394
The Wings Upon Her Back is a political steampunk science fantasy novel. If the author's name sounds familiar, it may be because Samantha Mills's short story "Rabbit Test" won Nebula, Locus, Hugo, and Sturgeon awards. This is her first novel. Winged Zemolai is a soldier of the mecha god and the protege of Mecha Vodaya, the Voice. She has served the city-state of Radezhda by defending it against all enemies, foreign and domestic, for twenty-six years. Despite that, it takes only a moment of errant mercy for her entire life to come crashing down. On a whim, she spares a kitchen worker who was concealing a statue of the scholar god, meaning that he was only pretending to worship the worker god like all workers should. Vodaya is unforgiving and uncompromising, as is the sleeping mecha god. Zemolai's wings are ripped from her back and crushed in the hand of the god, and she's left on the ground to die of mechalin withdrawal. The Wings Upon Her Back is told in two alternating timelines. The main one follows Zemolai after her exile as she is rescued by a young group of revolutionaries who think she may be useful in their plans. The other thread starts with Zemolai's childhood and shows the reader how she became Winged Zemolai: her scholar family, her obsession with flying, her true devotion to the mecha god, and the critical early years when she became Vodaya's protege. Mills maintains the separate timelines through the book and wraps them up in a rather neat piece of symbolic parallelism in the epilogue. I picked up this book on a recommendation from C.L. Clark, and yes, indeed, I can see why she liked this book. It's a story about a political awakening, in which Zemolai slowly realizes that she has been manipulated and lied to and that she may, in fact, be one of the baddies. The Wings Upon Her Back is more personal than some other books with that theme, since Zemolai was specifically (and abusively) groomed for her role by Vodaya. Much of the book is Zemolai trying to pull out the hooks that Vodaya put in her or, in the flashback timeline, the reader watching Vodaya install those hooks. The flashback timeline is difficult reading. I don't think Mills could have left it out, but she says in the afterword that it was the hardest part of the book to write and it was also the hardest part of the book to read. It fills in some interesting bits of world-building and backstory, and Mills does a great job pacing the story revelations so that both threads contribute equally, but mostly it's a story of manipulative abuse. We know from the main storyline that Vodaya's tactics work, which gives those scenes the feel of a slow-motion train wreck. You know what's going to happen, you know it will be bad, and yet you can't look away. It occurred to me while reading this that Emily Tesh's Some Desperate Glory told a similar type of story without the flashback structure, which eliminates the stifling feeling of inevitability. I don't think that would not have worked for this story. If you simply rearranged the chapters of The Wings Upon Her Back into a linear narrative, I would have bailed on the book. Watching Zemolai being manipulated would have been too depressing and awful for me to make it to the payoff without the forward-looking hope of the main timeline. It gave me new appreciation for the difficulty of what Tesh pulled off. Mills uses this interwoven structure well, though. At about 90% through this book I had no idea how it could end in the space remaining, but it reaches a surprising and satisfying conclusion. Mills uses a type of ending that normally bothers me, but she does it by handling the psychological impact so well that I couldn't help but admire it. I'm avoiding specifics because I think it worked better when I wasn't expecting it, but it ties beautifully into the thematic point of the book. I do have one structural objection, though. It's one of those problems I didn't notice while reading, but that started bothering me when I thought back through the story from a political lens. The Wings Upon Her Back is Zemolai's story, her redemption arc, and that means she drives the plot. The band of revolutionaries are great characters (particularly Galiana), but they're supporting characters. Zemolai is older, more experienced, and knows critical information they don't have, and she uses it to effectively take over. As setup for her character arc, I see why Mills did this. As political praxis, I have issues. There is a tendency in politics to believe that political skill is portable and repurposable. Converting opposing operatives to the cause is welcomed not only because they indicate added support, but also because they can use their political skill to help you win instead. To an extent this is not wrong, and is probably the most true of combat skills (which Zemolai has in abundance). But there's an underlying assumption that politics is symmetric, and a critical reason why I hold many of the political positions that I do hold is that I don't think politics is symmetric. If someone has been successfully stoking resentment and xenophobia in support of authoritarians, converts to an anti-authoritarian cause, and then produces propaganda stoking resentment and xenophobia against authoritarians, this is in some sense an improvement. But if one believes that resentment and xenophobia are inherently wrong, if one's politics are aimed at reducing the resentment and xenophobia in the world, then in a way this person has not truly converted. Worse, because this is an effective manipulation tactic, there is a strong tendency to put this type of political convert into a leadership position, where they will, intentionally or not, start turning the anti-authoritarian movement into a copy of the authoritarian movement they left. They haven't actually changed their politics because they haven't understood (or simply don't believe in) the fundamental asymmetry in the positions. It's the same criticism that I have of realpolitik: the ends do not justify the means because the means corrupt the ends. Nothing that happens in this book is as egregious as my example, but the more I thought about the plot structure, the more it bothered me that Zemolai never listens to the revolutionaries she joins long enough to wrestle with why she became an agent of an authoritarian state and they didn't. They got something fundamentally right that she got wrong, and perhaps that should have been reflected in who got to make future decisions. Zemolai made very poor choices and yet continues to be the sole main character of the story, the one whose decisions and actions truly matter. Maybe being wrong about everything should be disqualifying for being the main character, at least for a while, even if you think you've understood why you were wrong. That problem aside, I enjoyed this. Both timelines were compelling and quite difficult to put down, even when they got rather dark. I could have done with less body horror and a few fewer fight scenes, but I'm glad I read it. Science fiction readers should be warned that the world-building, despite having an intricate and fascinating surface, is mostly vibes. I started the book wondering how people with giant metal wings on their back can literally fly, and thought the mentions of neural ports, high-tech materials, and immune-suppressing drugs might mean that we'd get some sort of explanation. We do not: heavier-than-air flight works because it looks really cool and serves some thematic purposes. There are enough hints of technology indistinguishable from magic that you could make up your own explanations if you wanted to, but that's not something this book is interested in. There's not a thing wrong with that, but don't get caught by surprise if you were in the mood for a neat scientific explanation of apparent magic. Recommended if you like somewhat-harrowing character development with a heavy political lens and steampunk vibes, although it's not the sort of book that I'd press into the hands of everyone I know. The Wings Upon Her Back is a complete story in a single novel. Content warning: the main character is a victim of physical and emotional abuse, so some of that is a lot. Also surgical gore, some torture, and genocide. Rating: 7 out of 10

27 August 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: Dark Horse

Review: Dark Horse, by Michelle Diener
Series: Class 5 #1
Publisher: Eclipse
Copyright: June 2015
ISBN: 0-9924559-3-6
Format: Kindle
Pages: 366
Dark Horse is a science fiction romance novel, the first of a five book series as of this writing. It is self-published, although it is sufficiently well-edited and packaged that I had to do some searching to confirm that. Rose was abducted by aliens. The Tecrans picked her up along with a selection of Earth animals, kept her in a cell in their starship, and experimented on her. As the book opens, she has managed to make her escape with the aid of an AI named Sazo who was also imprisoned on the Tecran ship. Sazo dealt with the Tecrans, dropped the ship in the middle of Grih territory, and then got Rose and most of the animals on shuttles to a nearby planet. Dav Jallan is the commander of the ship the Grih sent to investigate the unexplained appearance of a Class 5 Tecran warship in the middle of their territory. The Grih and the Tecran, along with three other species, are members of the United Council, which means in theory they're all at peace. With the Tecran, that theory is often strained. Dav is not going to turn down one of their highly-advanced Class 5 warships delivered to him on a silver platter. There is only the matter of the unexpected cargo, the first orange dots (indicating unknown life forms) that most of the Grih have ever seen. There is a romance. That romance did not work for me. I thought it was highly unprofessional on Dav's part and a bit too obviously constructed on the author's part. It also leans on the subgenre convention that aliens can be remarkably physically similar and sexually compatible, which always causes problems for my suspension of disbelief even though I know it's no less plausible than faster-than-light travel. Despite that, I had so much fun with this book! It was absolutely delightful and weirdly grabby in a way that caught me by surprise. I was skimming some parts of it to write this review and found myself re-reading multiple pages before I dragged myself back on task. I think the most charming part of this book is that the United Council has a law called the Sentient Beings Agreement that makes what the Tecran were doing extremely illegal, and the Grih and the other non-Tecran aliens take this very seriously and with a refreshing lack of cynicism. Rose has a typical human reaction to ending up in a place where she doesn't know the rules and isn't entirely an expected guest. She almost reflexively smoothes over miscommunications and tensions, trying to adapt to their expectations. And then, repeatedly, the Grih realize how much work she's doing to adapt to them, feel enraged at the Tecran and upset that they didn't understand or properly explain something, and find some way to make Rose feel more comfortable. It's surprisingly soothing and comforting to read. It occurred to me in several places that Dark Horse could be read as a wish-fulfillment fantasy of what life as a woman could be like if men took their fair share of the mental load. (This concept is usually applied to housework, but I think it generalizes to other social and communication contexts.) I suspect this was not an accident. There is a lot of wish fulfillment in this book. The Grih are very human-like but hunky, which is convenient for the romance subplot. They struggle to sing, value music exceptionally highly, and consider Rose's speaking voice beautifully musical. Her typical human habit of singing to herself is a source of immediate and almost overwhelming fascination. The supplies Rose takes from the Tecran ship when she flees just happen to be absurdly expensive scented shampoo and equally expensive luxury adaptable clothing. The world she lands on, and the Grih ship, are low-gravity compared to Earth, so Rose is unusually strong for her size. Grih military camouflage has no effect on her human vision. The book is set up to make Rose special. If that type of wish fulfillment is going to grate, wait on this book until you're more in the mood for it. But I like wish fulfillment books when they're done well. Part of why I like to read is to imagine a better world. And Rose isn't doted on; despite their hospitality, she's constantly underestimated by the Grih. Even with their deep belief in the Sentient Beings Agreement, they find it hard to believe that an unknown sentient, even an advanced sentient, is really their equal. Their concern at the start is somewhat patronizing, so watching Rose constantly surprise them delighted the part of my brain that likes both competence porn and deserved reversals, even though the competence here is often due to accidents of biology. It helps that Diener tells the story in alternating perspectives, so the reader first watches Rose do something practical and straightforward from her perspective and then gets to enjoy the profound surprise and chagrin of the aliens. There is a plot beneath this first contact story, and beyond the political problem of figuring out what to do with Rose and the Tecran. Sazo, Rose's AI friend, does not want the Grih to know he exists. He has a history that Rose does not know about and may not be entirely safe. As the political situation with the Tecran escalates, Sazo is pursuing goals of his own, and Rose has a firm opinion about where her loyalties should lie. The resolution is nothing ground-breaking as far as SF goes, but I thought it was satisfyingly tense and complex. Dark Horse leaves obvious room for a sequel, but it comes to a satisfying conclusion. The writing is serviceable, particularly once you get into the story. I would not call it great, and it's not going to win any literary awards, but it didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the story. This is not the sort of book that will make anyone's award list, but it is easily in the top five of books I had the most fun reading this year. Maybe save it for when you're looking for something light and wholesome and don't mind some rather obvious tropes, but if you're in the mood for imagining people who take laws seriously and sincerely try to help other people, I found this an utterly delightful way to pass the time. I immediately bought the sequel. Recommended. Followed by Dark Deeds. Rating: 8 out of 10

31 July 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: The Book That Wouldn't Burn

Review: The Book That Wouldn't Burn, by Mark Lawrence
Series: Library Trilogy #1
Publisher: Ace
Copyright: 2023
ISBN: 0-593-43793-4
Format: Kindle
Pages: 561
The Book That Wouldn't Burn is apparently high fantasy, but of the crunchy sort that could easily instead be science fiction. It is the first of a trilogy. Livira is a young girl, named after a weed, who lives in a tiny settlement in the Dust. She is the sort of endlessly curious and irrepressible girl who can be more annoying than delightful to adults who are barely keeping everyone alive. Her settlement is not the sort of place that's large enough to have a name; only their well keeps them alive in the desert and the ever-present dust. There is a city somewhere relatively near, which Livira dreams of seeing, but people from the settlement don't go there. When someone is spotted on the horizon approaching the settlement, it's the first time Livira has ever seen a stranger. It's also not a good sign. There's only one reason for someone to seek them out in the Dust: to take. Livira and the other children are, in short order, prisoners of the humanoid dog-like sabbers, being dragged off to an unknown fate. Evar lives in the library and has for his entire life. Specifically, he lives in a square room two miles to a side, with a ceiling so high that it may as well be a stone sky. He lived there with his family before he was lost in the Mechanism. Years later, the Mechanism spit him out alongside four other similarly-lost kids, all from the same library in different times. None of them had apparently aged, but everyone else was dead. Now, years later, they live a strange and claustrophobic life with way too much social contact between way too few people. Evar's siblings, as he considers them, were each in the Mechanism with a book. During their years in the Mechanism they absorbed that book until it became their focus and to some extent their personality. His brothers are an assassin, a psychologist, and a historian. His sister, the last to enter the Mechanism and a refugee from the sabber attack that killed everyone else, is a warrior. Evar... well, presumably he had a book, since that's how the Mechanism works. But he can't remember anything about it except the feeling that there was a woman. Evar lives in a library in the sense that it's a room full of books, but those books are not on shelves. They're stacked in piles and massive columns, with no organizational system that any of them could discern. There are four doors, all of which are closed and apparently impenetrable. In front of one of them is a hundred yards of char and burned book remnants, but that door is just as impenetrable as the others. There is a pool in the center of the room, crops surrounding it, and two creatures they call the Soldier and the Assistant. That is the entirety of Evar's world. As you might guess from the title, this book is about a library. Evar's perspective of the library is quite odd and unexplained until well into the book, and Livira's discovery of the library and subsequent explorations are central to her story, so I'm going to avoid going into too many details about its exact nature. What I will say is that I have read a lot of fantasy novels that are based around a library, but I don't think I've ever read one that was this satisfying. I think the world of The Book That Wouldn't Burn is fantasy, in that there are fundamental aspects of this world that don't seem amenable to an explanation consistent with our laws of physics. It is, however, the type of fantasy with discoverable rules. Even better, it's the type of fantasy where discovering the rules is central to the story, for both the characters and the readers, and the rules are worth the effort. This is a world-building tour de force: one of the most engrossing and deeply satisfying slow revelations that I have read in a long time. This book is well over 500 pages, the plot never flags, new bits of understanding were still slotting into place in the last chapter, and there are lots of things I am desperately curious about that Lawrence left for the rest of the series. If you like puzzling out the history and rules of an invented world and you have anything close to my taste in characters and setting, you are going to love this book. (Also, there is at least one C.S. Lewis homage that I will not spoil but that I thought was beautifully done and delightfully elaborated, and I am fairly sure there is a conversation happening between this book and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series that I didn't quite untangle but that I am intrigued by.) I do need to offer a disclaimer: Livira is precisely the type of character I love reading about. She's stubborn, curious, courageous, persistent, egalitarian, insatiable, and extremely sharp. I have a particular soft spot for exactly this protagonist, so adjust the weight of my opinion accordingly. But Lawrence also makes excellent use of her as a spotlight to illuminate the world-building. More than anything else in the world, Livira wants to understand, and there is so much here to understand. There is an explanation for nearly everything in this book, and those explanations usually both make sense and prompt more questions. This is such a tricky balance for the writer to pull off! A lot of world-building of this sort fails either by having the explanations not live up to the mysteries or by tying everything together so neatly that the stakes of the world collapse into a puzzle box. Lawrence avoids both failures. This world made sense to me but remained sufficiently messy to feel like humans were living in it. I also thought the pacing and timing were impeccable: I figured things out at roughly the same pace as the characters, and several twists and turns caught me entirely by surprise. I do have one minor complaint and one caveat. The minor complaint is that I thought one critical aspect of the ending was a little bit too neat and closed. It was the one time in the book where I thought Lawrence simplified his plot structure rather than complicated it, and I didn't like the effect it had on the character dynamics. There is, thankfully, the promise of significant new complications in the next book. The caveat is a bit harder to put my finger on, but a comparison to Alaya Dawn Johnson's The Library of Broken Worlds might help. That book was also about a library, featured a protagonist thrown into the deep end of complex world-building, and put discovery of the history and rules at the center of the story. I found the rules structure of The Book That Wouldn't Burn more satisfyingly complicated and layered, in a way that made puzzle pieces fit together in my head in a thoroughly enjoyable way. But Johnson's book is about very large questions of identity, history, sacrifice, and pain, and it's full of murky ambiguity and emotions that are only approached via metaphor and symbolism. Lawrence's book is far more accessible, but the emotional themes are shallower and more straightforward. There is a satisfying emotional through-line, and there are some larger issues at stake, but it won't challenge your sense of morality and justice the way that The Library of Broken Worlds might. I think which of those books one finds better will depend on what mood you're in and what reading experience you're looking for. Personally, I was looking for a scrappy, indomitable character who would channel her anger into overcoming every obstacle in the way of thoroughly understanding her world, and that's exactly what I got. This was my most enjoyable reading experience of the year to date and the best book I've read since Some Desperate Glory. Fantastic stuff, highly recommended. Followed by The Book That Broke the World, and the ending is a bit of a cliffhanger so you may want to have that on hand. Be warned that the third book in the series won't be published until 2025. Rating: 9 out of 10

17 July 2024

Russell Coker: Samsung Galaxy Note 9 Review

After the VoLTE saga [1] and the problems with battery life on the PinePhonePro [2] (which lasted 4 hours while idle with the screen off in my last test a few weeks ago) I m running a Galaxy Note 9 [3] with the default Samsung OS as my daily driver. I don t think that many people will be rushing out to buy a 2018 phone regardless of my review. For someone who wants a phone of such age (which has decent hardware and a low price) then good options are the Pixel phones which are all supported by LineageOS. I recommend not buying this phone due to the fact that it doesn t have support for VoLTE with LineageOS (and presumably any other non-Samsung Android build) and doesn t have support from any other OS. The One Plus 6/6T has Mobian support [4] as well as LineageOS support and is worth considering. The Note 9 still has capable hardware by today s standards. A 6.4 display is about as big as most people want in their pocket and 2960 1440 resolution in that size (516dpi) is probably as high as most people can see without a magnifying glass. The model I m using has 8G of RAM which is as much as the laptop I was using at the start of this year. I don t think that many people will have things that they actually want to do on a phone which needs more hardware than this. The only hardware feature in new phones which beats this is the large folding screen in some recent phones, but $2500+ (the price of such phones in Australia) is too much IMHO and the second hand market for folding phones is poor due to the apparently high incidence of screens breaking. The Note 9 has the Dex environment for running as a laptop if you connect it to a USB-C dock. It can run nicely with a 4K monitor with USB keyboard and mouse. The UI is very similar to that of older versions of Windows. The Samsung version of Android seems mostly less useful than the stock Google version or the LineageOS version. The Samsung keyboard flags words such as gay as spelling errors and it can t be uninstalled even when you install a better keyboard app. There is a Bixby button on the side of the phone to launch the Bixby voice recognition app which can t be mapped to any useful purpose, The Google keyboard has a voice dictation option which I will try out some time but that s all I desire in terms of voice recognition. There are alerts about Samsung special deals and configuration options including something about signing in to some service and having it donate money to charity, I doubt that any users want such features. Apart from Dex the Samsung Android build is a good advert for LineageOS. The screen has curved sides for no good reason. This makes it more difficult to make a protective phone case as a case can t extend beyond the screen at the sides and therefore if it s dropped and hits an edge (step, table, etc) then the glass can make direct contact with something. Also the curved sides reflect sunlight in all directions, this means that the user has to go to more effort to avoid reflecting the sun into their eyes and that a passenger can more easily reflect sunlight into the eyes of a car driver. It s an impressive engineering feat to make a curved touch-screen but it doesn t do any good for users. The stylus is good as always and the screen is AMOLED so it doesn t waste much power when in dark mode. There is a configuration option to display a clock all the time when the screen is locked because that apparently doesn t use much power. I haven t felt inclined to enable the always on screen but it s a nice feature for those who like such things. The VoLTE implementation is apparently a bit unusual so it s not supported by LineageOS and didn t work on Droidian for the small amount of time that Droidian supported it. Generally this phone is quite nice hardware it s just a pity that it demonstrates all of the downsides to buying a non-Pixel phone.
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12 July 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: The Splinter in the Sky

Review: The Splinter in the Sky, by Kemi Ashing-Giwa
Publisher: Saga Press
Copyright: July 2023
ISBN: 1-6680-0849-1
Format: Kindle
Pages: 372
The Splinter in the Sky is a stand-alone science fiction political thriller. It is Kemi Ashing-Giwa's first novel. Enitan is from Koriko, a vegetation-heavy moon colonized by the Vaalbaran empire. She lives in the Ijebu community with her sibling Xiang and has an on-again, off-again relationship with Ajana, the Vaalbaran-appointed governor. Xiang is studying to be an architect, which requires passing stringent entrance exams to be allowed to attend an ancillary imperial school intended for "primitives." Enitan works as a scribe and translator, one of the few Korikese allowed to use the sacred Orin language of Vaalbara. In her free time, she grows and processes tea. When Xiang mysteriously disappears while she's at work, Enitan goes to Ajana for help. Then Ajana dies, supposedly from suicide. The Vaalbaran government demands a local hostage while the death is investigated, someone who will be held as a diplomatic "guest" on the home world and executed if there is any local unrest. This hostage is supposed to be the child of the local headwoman, a concept that the Korikese do not have. Seeing a chance to search for Xiang, Enitan volunteers, heading into the heart of imperial power with nothing but desperate determination and a tea set. The empire doesn't stand a chance. Admittedly, a lot of the reason why the empire doesn't stand a chance is because the author is thoroughly on Enitan's side. Before she even arrives on Gondwana, Vaalbara's home world, Enitan is recruited as a spy by the other Gondwana power and Vaalbara's long-standing enemy. Her arrival in the Splinter, the floating arcology that serves as the center of Vaalbaran government, is followed by a startlingly meteoric rise in access. Some of this is explained by being a cultural curiosity for bored nobles, and some is explained by political factors Enitan is not yet aware of, but one can see the author's thumb resting on the scales. This was the sort of book that was great fun to read, but whose political implausibility provoked "wait, that didn't make sense" thoughts afterwards. I think one has to assume that the total population of Vaalbara is much less than first comes to mind when considering an interplanetary empire, which would help explain the odd lack of bureaucracy. Enitan is also living in, effectively, the palace complex, for reasonably well-explained political reasons, and that could grant her a surprising amount of access. But there are other things that are harder to explain away: the lack of surveillance, the relative lack of guards, and the odd political structure that's required for the plot to work. It's tricky to talk about this without spoilers, but the plot rests heavily on a conspiratorial view of how government power is wielded that I think strains plausibility. I'm not naive enough to think that the true power structure of a society matches the formal power structure, but I don't think they diverge as much as people think they do. It's one thing to say that the true power brokers of society can be largely unknown to the general population. In a repressive society with a weak media, that's believable. It's quite another matter for the people inside the palace to be in the dark about who is running what. I thought that was the biggest problem with this book. Its greatest feature is the characters, and particularly the character relationships. Enitan is an excellent protagonist: fascinating, sympathetic, determined, and daring in ways that make her success more believable. Early in the book, she forms an uneasy partnership that becomes the heart of the book, and I loved everything about that relationship. The politics of her situation might be a bit too simple, but the emotions were extremely well-done. This is a book about colonialism. Specifically, it's a book about cultural looting, appropriation, and racist superiority. The Vaalbarans consider Enitan barely better than an animal, and in her home they're merciless and repressive. Taken out of that context into their imperial capital, they see her as a harmless curiosity and novelty. Enitan exploits this in ways that are entirely believable. She is also driven to incandescent fury in ways that are entirely believable, and which she only rarely can allow herself to act on. Ashing-Giwa drives home the sheer uselessness of even the more sympathetic Vaalbarans more forthrightly than science fiction is usually willing to be. It's not a subtle point, but it is an accurate one. The first two thirds of this book had me thoroughly engrossed and unable to put it down. The last third unfortunately turns into a Pok mon hunt of antagonists, which I found less satisfying and somewhat less believable. I wish there had been more need for Enitan to build political alliances and go deeper into the social maneuverings of the first part of the book, rather than gaining some deus ex machina allies who trivially solve some otherwise-tricky plot problems. The setup is amazing; the resolution felt a bit like escaping a maze by blasting through the walls, which I don't think played to the strengths of the characters and relationships that Ashing-Giwa had constructed. The advantage of that approach is that we do get a satisfying resolution and a standalone novel. The central relationship of the book is unfortunately too much of a spoiler to talk about in a review, but I thought it was the best part of the story. This is a political thriller on the surface, but I think it's heart is an unexpected political alliance with a fascinatingly tricky balance of power. I was delighted that Ashing-Giwa never allows the tension in that relationship to collapse into one of the stock patterns it so easily could have become. The Splinter in the Sky reminded me a little of Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. It's not as assured or as adroitly balanced as that book, and the characters are not quite as memorable, but that's a very high bar. The political point is even sharper, and it has some of the same appeal. I had so much fun reading this book. You may need to suspend your disbelief about some of the politics, and I wish the conclusion had been a bit less brute-force, but this is great stuff. Recommended when you're in the mood for a character story in the trappings of a political thriller. Rating: 8 out of 10

1 July 2024

Guido G nther: Free Software Activities June 2024

A short status update of what happened on my side last month. Was able to test our Cellbroadcast bits, feedbackd became more flexible regarding LEDs, Phosh 0.40 is out, and some more. Phosh Phoc gmobile phosh-mobile-settings phosh-wallpapers emacs Debian ModemManager Feedbackd Livi Calls Chatty meta-phosh Libhandy If you want to support my work see donations.

29 June 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: Bitter Angels

Review: Bitter Angels, by C.L. Anderson
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Copyright: 2009
ISBN: 0-553-59217-3
Format: Mass market
Pages: 438
Bitter Angels is a stand-alone science fiction novel. It won the Philip K. Dick award for best SF original paperback in 2010. C.L. Anderson is a pen name for Sarah Zettel. Terese was a Guardian, one of the agents of the Pax Solaris who find ways to keep the peace in troubled systems and high-stress situations with the help of an implanted Companion, an assistant AI. Forty years ago, on one of those missions, she was captured and her Companion was forcibly removed. She was rescued by her friend and mentor and retired afterwards, starting a new life and a new family, trying to leave the memories behind. Now, the woman who rescued her is dead. She was murdered on duty in the Erasmus system, a corporate hellhole that appears to be on the verge of exploding into a political hot spot. Bianca's last instructions asked for Terese to replace her. Terese's family is furious at her for even considering returning to the Guardians, but she can't say no. Duty, and Bianca's dying request, call too strongly. Amerand is Security on Dazzle, one of the Erasmus stations. He is one of the refugees from Oblivion, the station that the First Bloods who rule the system let die. He keeps his head above water and tries to protect his father and find his mother without doing anything that the ever-present Clerks might find concerning. Keeping an eye on newly-arriving Solaris saints is a typical assignment, since the First Bloods don't trust the meddling do-gooders. But something is not quite right, and a cryptic warning from his Clerk makes him even more suspicious. This is the second book by Sarah Zettel that I've read, and both of them have been tense, claustrophobic thrillers set in a world with harsh social inequality and little space for the characters to maneuver. In this case, the structure of her future universe reminded me a bit of Iain M. Banks's Culture, but with less advanced technology and only humans. The Pax Solaris has eliminated war within its borders and greatly extended lifespans. That peace is maintained by Guardians, who play a role similar to Special Circumstances but a bit more idealist and less lethal. They show up where there are problems and meddle, manipulating and pushing to try to defuse the problems before they reach the Pax Solaris. Like a Culture novel, nearly all of the action takes place outside the Pax Solaris in the Erasmus system. Erasmus is a corporate colony that has turned into a cross between a hereditary dictatorship and the Corporate Rim from Martha Wells's Murderbot series. Debt slavery is ubiquitous, economic inequality is inconceivably vast, and the Clerks are everywhere. Erasmus natives like Amerand have very little leeway and even fewer options. Survival is a matter of not drawing the attention of the wrong people. Terese and her fellow Guardians are appalled, but also keenly aware that destabilizing the local politics may make the situation even worse and get a lot of people killed. Bitter Angels is structured like a mystery: who killed Bianca, and what was her plan when she was killed? Unlike a lot of books of this type, the villains are not idiots and their plan is both satisfyingly complex and still depressingly relevant. I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying that I have read recent news articles about people with very similar plans, albeit involving less science-fiction technology. Anderson starts with a tense situation and increases the pressure relentlessly, leaving the heroes one step behind the villains for almost the entire novel. It is not happy or optimistic reading at times, the book is quite dark but it certainly was engrossing. The one world-building quibble that I had is that the Erasmus system is portrayed partly as a hydraulic empire, and while this is arguably feasible given that spaceship travel is strictly controlled, it seemed like a weird choice given the prevalence of water on the nearby moons. Water smuggling plays a significant role in the plot, and I wasn't entirely convinced of the politics and logistics behind it. If this sort of thing bugs you, there are some pieces that may require suspension of disbelief. Bitter Angels is the sort of tense thriller where catastrophe is barely avoided and the cost of victory is too high, so you will want to be in the mood for that before you dive in. But if that's what you're looking for, I thought Anderson delivered a complex and satisfying story. Content warning: major character suicide. Rating: 7 out of 10

29 May 2024

Antoine Beaupr : Playing with fonts again

I am getting increasingly frustrated by Fira Mono's lack of italic support so I am looking at alternative fonts again.

Commit Mono This time I seem to be settling on either Commit Mono or Space Mono. For now I'm using Commit Mono because it's a little more compressed than Fira and does have a italic version. I don't like how Space Mono's parenthesis (()) is "squarish", it feels visually ambiguous with the square brackets ([]), a big no-no for my primary use case (code). So here I am using a new font, again. It required changing a bunch of configuration files in my home directory (which is in a private repository, sorry) and Emacs configuration (thankfully that's public!). One gotcha is I realized I didn't actually have a global font configuration in Emacs, as some Faces define their own font family, which overrides the frame defaults. This is what it looks like, before:
A dark terminal showing the test sheet in Fira Mono Fira Mono
After:
A dark terminal showing the test sheet in Fira Mono Commit Mono
(Notice how those screenshots are not sharp? I'm surprised too. The originals look sharp on my display, I suspect this is something to do with the Wayland transition. I've tried with both grim and flameshot, for what its worth.) They are pretty similar! Commit Mono feels a bit more vertically compressed maybe too much so, actually -- the line height feels too low. But it's heavily customizable so that's something that's relatively easy to fix, if it's really a problem. Its weight is also a little heavier and wider than Fira which I find a little distracting right now, but maybe I'll get used to it. All characters seem properly distinguishable, although, if I'd really want to nitpick I'd say the and are too different, with the latter (REGISTERED SIGN) being way too small, basically unreadable here. Since I see this sign approximately never, it probably doesn't matter at all. I like how the ampersand (&) is more traditional, although I'll miss the exotic one Fira produced... I like how the back quotes ( , GRAVE ACCENT) drop down low, nicely aligned with the apostrophe. As I mentioned before, I like how the bar on the "f" aligns with the other top of letters, something in Fira mono that really annoys me now that I've noticed it (it's not aligned!).

A UTF-8 test file Here's the test sheet I've made up to test various characters. I could have sworn I had a good one like this lying around somewhere but couldn't find it so here it is, I guess. 
US keyboard coverage:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 1234567890-=[]\;',./
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ~!@#$%^&*()_+ :"<>?
latin1 coverage:  
EURO SIGN, TRADE MARK SIGN:  
ambiguity test:
e coC0ODQ iI71lL! 
b6G&0B83  []() /\. 
zs$S52Z%   '" 
all characters in a sentence, uppercase:
the quick fox jumps over the lazy dog
THE QUICK FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG
same, in french:
Portez ce vieux whisky au juge blond qui fume.
d s no l, o  un z phyr ha  me v t de gla ons w rmiens, je d ne
d exquis r tis de b uf au kir,   l a  d ge m r, &c tera.
D S NO L, O  UN Z PHYR HA  ME V T DE GLA ONS W RMIENS, JE D NE
D EXQUIS R TIS DE B UF AU KIR,   L A  D GE M R, &C TERA.
Ligatures test:
-<< -< -<- <-- <--- <<- <- -> ->> --> ---> ->- >- >>-
=<< =< =<= <== <=== <<= <= => =>> ==> ===> =>= >= >>=
<-> <--> <---> <----> <=> <==> <===> <====> :: ::: __
<~~ </ </> /> ~~> == != /= ~= <> === !== !=== =/= =!=
<: := *= *+ <* <*> *> <  < >  > <. <.> .> +* =* =: :>
(* *) /* */ [   ]     ++ +++ \/ /\  - -  <!-- <!---
Box drawing alignment tests:
                                                                    
                                 
                           
                                                   
                                       
                                                 
                               
                                
Dashes alignment test:
HYPHEN-MINUS, MINUS SIGN, EN, EM DASH, HORIZONTAL BAR, LOW LINE
--------------------------------------------------
 
 
 
 
__________________________________________________
Update: here is another such sample sheet, it's pretty good and has support for more languages while being still relatively small. So there you have it, got completely nerd swiped by typography again. Now I can go back to writing a too-long proposal again. Sources and inspiration for the above:
  • the unicode(1) command, to lookup individual characters to disambiguate, for example, - (U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, the minus sign next to zero on US keyboards) and (U+2212 MINUS SIGN, a math symbol)
  • searchable list of characters and their names - roughly equivalent to the unicode(1) command, but in one page, amazingly the /usr/share/unicode database doesn't have any one file like this
  • bits/UTF-8-Unicode-Test-Documents - full list of UTF-8 characters
  • UTF-8 encoded plain text file - nice examples of edge cases, curly quotes example and box drawing alignment test which, incidentally, showed me I needed specific faces customisation in Emacs to get the Markdown code areas to display properly, also the idea of comparing various dashes
  • sample sentences in many languages - unused, "Sentences that contain all letters commonly used in a language"
  • UTF-8 sampler - unused, similar

Other fonts In my previous blog post about fonts, I had a list of alternative fonts, but it seems people are not digging through this, so I figured I would redo the list here to preempt "but have you tried Jetbrains mono" kind of comments. My requirements are:
  • no ligatures: yes, in the previous post, I wanted ligatures but I have changed my mind. after testing this, I find them distracting, confusing, and they often break the monospace nature of the display
  • monospace: this is to display code
  • italics: often used when writing Markdown, where I do make use of italics... Emacs falls back to underlining text when lacking italics which is hard to read
  • free-ish, ultimately should be packaged in Debian
Here is the list of alternatives I have considered in the past and why I'm not using them:
  • agave: recommended by tarzeau, not sure I like the lowercase a, a bit too exotic, packaged as fonts-agave
  • Cascadia code: optional ligatures, multilingual, not liking the alignment, ambiguous parenthesis (look too much like square brackets), new default for Windows Terminal and Visual Studio, packaged as fonts-cascadia-code
  • Fira Code: ligatures, was using Fira Mono from which it is derived, lacking italics except for forks, interestingly, Fira Code succeeds the alignment test but Fira Mono fails to show the X signs properly! packaged as fonts-firacode
  • Hack: no ligatures, very similar to Fira, italics, good alternative, fails the X test in box alignment, packaged as fonts-hack
  • Hermit: no ligatures, smaller, alignment issues in box drawing and dashes, packaged as fonts-hermit somehow part of cool-retro-term
  • IBM Plex: irritating website, replaces Helvetica as the IBM corporate font, no ligatures by default, italics, proportional alternatives, serifs and sans, multiple languages, partial failure in box alignment test (X signs), fancy curly braces contrast perhaps too much with the rest of the font, packaged in Debian as fonts-ibm-plex
  • Inconsolata: no ligatures, maybe italics? more compressed than others, feels a little out of balance because of that, packaged in Debian as fonts-inconsolata
  • Intel One Mono: nice legibility, no ligatures, alignment issues in box drawing, not packaged in Debian
  • Iosevka: optional ligatures, italics, multilingual, good legibility, has a proportional option, serifs and sans, line height issue in box drawing, fails dash test, not in Debian
  • Jetbrains Mono: (mandatory?) ligatures, good coverage, originally rumored to be not DFSG-free (Debian Free Software Guidelines) but ultimately packaged in Debian as fonts-jetbrains-mono
  • Monoid: optional ligatures, feels much "thinner" than Jetbrains, not liking alignment or spacing on that one, ambiguous 2Z, problems rendering box drawing, packaged as fonts-monoid
  • Mononoki: no ligatures, looks good, good alternative, suggested by the Debian fonts team as part of fonts-recommended, problems rendering box drawing, em dash bigger than en dash, packaged as fonts-mononoki
  • Source Code Pro: italics, looks good, but dash metrics look whacky, not in Debian
  • spleen: bitmap font, old school, spacing issue in box drawing test, packaged as fonts-spleen
  • sudo: personal project, no ligatures, zero originally not dotted, relied on metrics for legibility, spacing issue in box drawing, not in Debian
So, if I get tired of Commit Mono, I might probably try, in order:
  1. Hack
  2. Jetbrains Mono
  3. IBM Plex Mono
Iosevka, Monoki and Intel One Mono are also good options, but have alignment problems. Iosevka is particularly disappointing as the EM DASH metrics are just completely wrong (much too wide). This was tested using the Programming fonts site which has all the above fonts, which cannot be said of Font Squirrel or Google Fonts, amazingly. Other such tools:

18 May 2024

Russell Coker: Kogan 5120*2160 40 Monitor

I ve just got a new Kogan 5120*2160 40 curved monitor. It cost $599 including shipping etc which is much cheaper than the Dell monitor with similar specs selling for about $2500. For monitors with better than 4K resolution (by which I don t mean 5K*1440) this is the cheapest option. The nearest competitors are the 27 monitors that do 5120*2880 from Apple and some companies copying Apple s specs. While 5120*2880 is a significantly better resolution than what I got it s probably not going to help me at 27 size. I ve had a Dell 32 4K monitor since the 1st of July 2022 [1]. It is a really good monitor and I had no complaints at all about it. It was clearer than the Samsung 27 4K monitor I used before it and I m not sure how much of that is due to better display technology (the Samsung was from 2017) and how much was due to larger size. But larger size was definitely a significant factor. I briefly owned a Phillips 43 4K monitor [2] and determined that a 43 flat screen was definitely too big. At the time I thought that about 35 would have been ideal but after a couple of years using a flat 32 screen I think that 32 is about the upper limit for a flat screen. This is the first curved monitor I ve used but I m already thinking that maybe 40 is too big for a 21:9 aspect ratio even with a curved screen. Maybe if it was 4:4 or even 16:9 that would be ok. Otherwise the ideal for a curved screen for me would be something between about 36 and 38 . Also 43 is awkward to move around my desk. But this is still quite close to ideal. The first system I tested this on was a work laptop, a Dell Latitude 7400 2in1. On the Dell dock that did 4K resolution and on a HDMI cable it did 1440p which was a disappointment as that laptop has talked to many 4K monitors at native resolution on the HDMI port with the same cable. This isn t an impossible problem, as I work in the IT department I can just go through all the laptops in the store room until I find one that supports it. But the 2in1 is a very nice laptop, so I might even just keep using it in 4K resolution when WFH. The laptop in question is deemed an executive laptop so I have to wait another 2 years for the executives to get new laptops before I can get a newer 2in1. On my regular desktop I had the problem of the display going off for a few seconds every minute or so and also occasionally giving a white flicker. That was using 5120*2160 with a DisplayPort switch as described in the blog post about the Dell 32 monitor. When I ran it in 4K resolution with the DisplayPort switch from my desktop it was fine. I then used the DisplayPort cable that came with the monitor directly connecting the video card to the display and it was fine at 5120*2160 with 75Hz. The monitor has the joystick thing that seems to have become some sort of standard for controlling modern monitors. It s annoying that pressing it in powers it off. I think there should be a separate button for that. Also the UI in general made me wonder if one of the vendors of expensive monitors had paid whoever designed it to make the UI suck. The monitor had a single dead pixel in the center of the screen about 1/4 the way down from the top when I started writing this post. Now it s gone away which is a concern as I don t know which pixels might have problems next or if the number of stuck pixels will increase. Also it would be good if there was a dark mode for the WordPress editor. I use dark mode wherever possible so I didn t notice the dead pixel for several hours until I started writing this blog post. I watched a movie on Netflix and it took the entire screen area, I don t know if they are storing movies in 64:27 ratio or if the clipped the top and bottom, it was probably clipped but still looked OK. The monitor has different screen modes which make it look different, I can t see much benefit to the different modes. The standard mode is what I usually use and it s brighter and the movie mode seems OK for the one movie I ve watched so far. In other news BenQ has just announced a 3840*2560 28 monitor specifically designed for programming [3]. This is the first time I ve heard of a monitor with 3:2 ratio with modern resolution, we still aren t at the 4:3 type ratio that we were used to when 640*480 was high resolution but it s a definite step in the right direction. It s also the only time I recall ever seeing a monitor advertised as being designed for programming. In the 80s there were home computers advertised as being computers for kids to program, but at that time it was either TV sets for monitors or monitors sold with computers. It was only after the IBM PC compatible market took off that having a choice of different monitors for one computer was a thing. In recent years monitors advertised as being for office use (meaning bright and expensive) have become common as are monitors designed for gamer use (meaning high refresh rate). But BenQ seems to be the first to advertise a monitor for the purpose of programming. They have a desktop partition feature (which could be software or hardware the article doesn t make it clear) to give some of the benefits of a tiled window manager to people who use OSs that don t support such things. The BenQ monitor is a bit small for my taste, I don t know if my vision is good enough to take advantage of 3840*2560 in a 28 monitor nowadays. I think at least 32 would be better. Google seems to be really into buying good monitors for their programmers, if every Google programmer got one of those BenQ monitors then that would be enough sales to make it worth-while for them. I had hoped that we would have 6K monitors become affordable this year and 8K become less expensive than most cars. Maybe that won t happen and we will instead have a wider range of products like the ultra wide monitor I just bought and the BenQ programmer s monitor. If so I don t think that will be a bad result. Now the question is whether I can use this monitor for 2 years before finding something else that makes me want to upgrade. I can afford to spend the equivalent of a bit under $1/day on monitor upgrades.
Related posts:
  1. Dell 32 4K Monitor and DisplayPort Switch After determining that the Philips 43 monitor was too large...
  2. Philips 438P1 43 4K Monitor I have just returned a Philips 438P1 43 4K Monitor...
  3. cheap big TFT monitor I just received the latest Dell advert, they are offering...

12 May 2024

Elana Hashman: I am very sick

I have not been able to walk since February 18, 2023. When people ask me how I'm doing, this is the first thing that comes to mind. "Well, you know, the usual, but also I still can't walk," I think to myself. If I dream at night, I often see myself walking or running. In conversation, if I talk about going somewhere, I'll imagine walking there. Even though it's been over a year, I remember walking to the bus, riding to see my friends, going out for brunch, cooking community dinners. But these days, I can't manage going anywhere except by car, and I can't do the driving, and I can't dis/assemble and load my chair. When I'm resting in bed and follow a guided meditation, I might be asked to imagine walking up a staircase, step by step. Sometimes, I do. Other times, I imagine taking a little elevator in my chair, or wheeling up ramps. I feel like there is little I can say that can express the extent of what this illness has taken from me, but it's worth trying. To an able-bodied person, seeing me in a power wheelchair is usually "enough." One of my acquaintances cried when they last saw me in person. But frankly, I love my wheelchair. I am not "wheelchair-bound" I am bed-bound, and the wheelchair gets me out of bed. My chair hasn't taken anything from me. *** In October of 2022, I was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis. Scientists and doctors don't really know what myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) is. Diseases like it have been described for over 200 years.1 It primarily affects women between the ages of 10-39, and the primary symptom is "post-exertional malaise" or PEM: debilitating, disproportionate fatigue following activity, often delayed by 24-72 hours and not relieved by sleep. That fatigue has earned the illness the misleading name of "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" or CFS, as though we're all just very tired all the time. But tired people respond to exercise positively. People with ME/CFS do not.2 Given the dearth of research and complete lack of on-label treatments, you may think this illness is at least rare, but it is actually quite common: in the United States, an estimated 836k-2.5m people3 have ME/CFS. It is frequently misdiagnosed, and it is estimated that as many as 90% of cases are missed,4 due to mild or moderate symptoms that mimic other diseases. Furthermore, over half of Long COVID cases likely meet the diagnostic criteria for ME,5 so these numbers have increased greatly in recent years. That is, ME is at least as common as rheumatoid arthritis,6 another delightful illness I have. But while any doctor knows what rheumatoid arthritis is, not enough7 have heard of "myalgic encephalomylitis." Despite a high frequency and disease burden, post-viral associated conditions (PASCs) such as ME have been neglected for medical funding for decades.8 Indeed, many people, including medical care workers, find it hard to believe that after the acute phase of illness, severe symptoms can persist. PASCs such as ME and Long COVID defy the typical narrative around common illnesses. I was always told that if I got sick, I should expect to rest for a bit, maybe take some medications, and a week or two later, I'd get better, right? But I never got better. These are complex, multi-system diseases that do not neatly fit into the Western medical system's specializations. I have seen nearly every specialty because ME/CFS affects nearly every system of the body: cardiology, nephrology, pulmonology, neurology, opthalmology, and, many, many more. You'd think they'd hand out frequent flyer cards, or a medical passport with fun stamps, but nope. Just hundreds of pages of medical records. And when I don't fit neatly into one particular specialist's box, then I'm sent back to my primary care doctor to regroup while we try to troubleshoot my latest concerning symptoms. "Sorry, can't help you. Not my department." With little available medical expertise, a lot of my disease management has been self-directed in partnership with primary care. I've read hundreds of articles, papers, publications, CME material normally reserved for doctors. It's truly out of necessity, and I'm certain I would be much worse off if I lacked the skills and connections to do this; there are so few ME/CFS experts in the US that there isn't one in my state or any adjacent state.9 So I've done a lot of my own work, much of it while barely being able to read. (A text-to-speech service is a real lifesaver.) To facilitate managing my illness, I've built a mental model of how my particular flavour of ME/CFS works based on the available research I've been able to read and how I respond to treatments. Here is my best attempt to explain it: The best way I have learned to manage this is to prevent myself from doing activities where I will exceed that aerobic threshold by wearing a heartrate monitor,12 but the amount of activity that permits in my current state of health is laughably restrictive. Most days I'm unable to spend more than one to two hours out of bed. Over time, this has meant worsening from a persistent feeling of tiredness all the time and difficulty commuting into an office or sitting at a desk, to being unable to sit at a desk for an entire workday even while working from home and avoiding physically intense chores or exercise without really understanding why, to being unable to leave my apartment for days at a time, and finally, being unable to stand for more than a minute or two or walk. But it's not merely that I can't walk. Many folks in wheelchairs are able to live excellent lives with adaptive technology. The problem is that I am so fatigued, any activity can destroy my remaining quality of life. In my worst moments, I've been unable to read, move my arms or legs, or speak aloud. Every single one of my limbs burned, as though I had caught fire. Food sat in my stomach for hours, undigested, while my stomach seemingly lacked the energy to do its job. I currently rely on family and friends for full-time caretaking, plus a paid home health aide, as I am unable to prep meals, shower, or leave the house independently. This assistance has helped me slowly improve from my poorest levels of function. While I am doing better than I was at my worst, I've had to give up essentially all of my hobbies with physical components. These include singing, cooking, baking, taking care of my houseplants, cross-stitching, painting, and so on. Doing any of these result in post-exertional malaise so I've had to stop; this reduction of activity to prevent worsening the illness is referred to as "pacing." I've also had to cut back essentially all of my volunteering and work in open source; I am only cleared by my doctor to work 15h/wk (from bed) as of writing. *** CW: severe illness, death, and suicide (skip this section) The difficulty of living with a chronic illness is that there's no light at the end of the tunnel. Some diseases have a clear treatment path: you take the medications, you complete the procedures, you hit all the milestones, and then you're done, perhaps with some long-term maintenance work. But with ME, there isn't really an end in sight. The median duration of illness reported in one 1997 study was over 6 years, with some patients reporting 20 years of symptoms.13 While a small number of patients spontaneously recover, and many improve, the vast majority of patients are unable to regain their baseline function.14 My greatest fear since losing the ability to walk is getting worse still. Because, while I already require assistance with nearly every activity of daily living, there is still room for decline. The prognosis for extremely ill patients is dismal, and many require feeding tubes and daily nursing care. This may lead to life-threatening malnutrition;15 a number of these extremely severe patients have died, either due to medical neglect or suicide.16 Extremely severe patients cannot tolerate light, sound, touch, or cognitive exertion,17 and often spend most of their time lying flat in a darkened room with ear muffs or an eye mask.18 This is all to say, my prognosis is not great. But while I recognize that the odds aren't exactly in my favour, I am also damn stubborn. (A friend once cheerfully described me as "stubbornly optimistic!") I only get one shot at life, and I do not want to spend the entirety of it barely able to perceive what's going on around me. So while my prognosis is uncertain, there's lots of evidence that I can improve somewhat,19 and there's also lots of evidence that I can live 20+ years with this disease. It's a bitter pill to swallow, but it also means I might have the gift of time something that not all my friends with severe complex illnesses have had. I feel like I owe it to myself to do the best I can to improve; to try to help others in a similar situation; and to enjoy the time that I have. I already feel like my life has been moving in slow motion for the past 4 years there's no need to add more suffering. Finding joy, as much as I can, every day, is essential to keep up my strength for this marathon. Even if it takes 20 years to find a cure, I am convinced that the standard of care is going to improve. All the research and advocacy that's been happening over the past decade is plenty to feel hopeful about.20 Hope is a discipline,21 and I try to remind myself of this on the hardest days. *** I'm not entirely sure why I decided to write this. Certainly, today is International ME/CFS Awareness Day, and I'm hoping this post will raise awareness in spaces that aren't often thinking about chronic illnesses. But I think there is also a part of me that wants to share, reach out in some way to the people I've lost contact with while I've been treading water, managing the day to day of my illness. I experience this profound sense of loss, especially when I think back to the life I had before. Everyone hits limitations in what they can do and accomplish, but there is so little I can do with the time and energy that I have. And yet, I understand even this precious little could still be less. So I pace myself. Perhaps I can inspire you to take action on behalf of those of us too fatigued to do the advocacy we need and deserve. Should you donate to a charity or advocacy organization supporting ME/CFS research? In the US, there are many excellent organizations, such as ME Action, the Open Medicine Foundation, SolveME, the Bateman Horne Center, and the Workwell Foundation. I am also happy to match any donations through the end of May 2024 if you send me your receipts. But charitable giving only goes so far, and I think this problem deserves the backing of more powerful organizations. Proportionate government funding and support is desperately needed. It's critical for us to push governments22 to provide the funding required for research that will make an impact on patients' lives now. Many organizers are running campaigns around the world, advocating for this investment. There is a natural partnership between ME advocacy and Long COVID advocacy, for example, and we have an opportunity to make a great difference to many people by pushing for research and resources inclusive of all PASCs. Some examples I'm aware of include: But outside of collective organizing, there are a lot of sick individuals out there that need help, too. Please, don't forget about us. We need you to visit us, care for us, be our confidantes, show up as friends. There are a lot of people who are very sick out here and need your care. I'm one of them.

7 May 2024

John Goerzen: Photographic comparison: Is the Kobo Libra Colour display worse than the Kobo Libra 2?

I ve been using E Ink-based ereaders for quite a number of years now. I ve had my Kobo Libra 2 for a few years, and was looking forward to the Kobo Libra Colour the first color E Ink display in a mainstream ereader line. I found the display to be a mixed bag; contrast seemed a lot worse on B&W images, and the device backlight (it s not technically a back light) seemed to cause a particular contrast reduction in dark mode. I went searching for information on this. I found a lot of videos on Kobo Libra 2 vs Libra Colour and so forth, but they were all pretty much useless. These were the mistakes they made: So I dug out my Canon DSLR, tripod, and set up shots. Every shot here is set at ISO 100. Every shot in the same setting has the same exposure settings, which I document. The one thing I forgot to shut off was automatic white balance; you can notice it is active if you look closely at the backgrounds, but WB isn t really relevant to this comparison anyhow. Because there has also been a lot of concern about how well fine B&W details will show up on the Kobo Libra Colour screen, I shot all photos using a PDF test image from the open source hplip package (testpage.ps.gz converted to PDF). This also rules out font differences between the devices. I ensured a full screen refresh before each shot. This is all because color E Ink is effectively a filter called Kaleido over the B&W layer. This causes dimming and some other visual effects. You can click on any image here to see a full-resolution view. The full-size images are the exact JPEG coming from the camera, with only two modifications: 1) metadata has been redacted for privacy reasons, and 2) some images were losslessly rotated after the shoot. OK, onwards! Outdoors, bright sun, shot from directly overhead Bright sun is ideal lighting for an E Ink display. They need no lighting at all in this scenario, and in fact, if you turn on their internal display light, it will probably not be very noticeable. Of course, this is in contrast to phone LCD screens, for which bright sunlight is the worst. Scene: Morning sunlight reaching the ereaders at an angle. The angle was sufficient so that no shadows were cast by the camera or tripod. Device light: Off on both Exposure: 1/160, f16, ISO 100 You can see how much darker the Libra Colour is here. Though in these bright conditions, it is still plenty bright. There may actually be situations in which the Libra 2 is too bright in direct sunlight, requiring a person to squint or whatnot. Looking at the radial lines, it is a bit difficult to tell because the difference in brightness, but I don t see a hugely obvious reduction in quality in the Libra 2. Later I have a shot where I try to match brightness, and we ll check it out again there. Outdoors, shade, shot from directly overhead For the next shot, I set the ereaders in shade, but still well-lit with the diffuse sunlight from all around. The first two have both device lights off. For the third, I set the device light on the Kobo Colour to 100%, full cool shade, to try to see how close I could get it to the Libra 2 brightness. (Sorry it looks like I forgot to close the toolbar on the Colour for this set, but it doesn t modify the important bits of the underlying image.) Device light: Initially off on both Exposure: 1/60, f6.4, ISO 100 Here you can see the light on the Libra Colour was nearly able to match the brightness on the Libra 2. Indoors, room lit with overhead and window light, device light off We continue to move into dimmer light with this next shot. Device light: Off on both Exposure: 1/4, f5, ISO 100 Indoors, room lit with overhead and window light, device light on Now we have the first head-to-head with the device light on. I set the Libra 2 to my favorite warmth setting, found a brightness that looked good, and then tried my best to match those settings on the Libra Colour. My camera s light meter aided in matching brightness. Device light: On (Libra 2 at 40%, Libra Colour at 59%) Exposure: 1/8, f5, ISO 100 (Apparently I am terrible at remembering to dismiss menus, sigh.) Indoors, dark room, dark mode, at an angle The Kobo Libra Colour surprised me with its dark mode. When viewed at an oblique angle, the screen gets pretty washed out. I maintained the same brightness settings here as I did above. It is much more noticeable when the brightness is set down to my preferred nighttime level (4%), or with a more significant angle. Since you can t see my tags, the order of the photos here will be: Libra 2 (standard orientation), Colour (standard orientation), Colour (turned around. Device light: On (as above) Exposure: 1/4, f5.6, ISO 100 Notice how I said I maintained the same brightness settings as before, and yet the Libra Colour looks brighter than the Libra 2 here, whereas it looked the same in the prior non-dark mode photos. Here s why. I set the exposure of each set of shots based on camera metering. As we have seen from the light-off photos, the brightness of a white pixel is a lot less on a Libra Colour than on the Libra 2. However, it is likely that the brightness of a black pixel is about that same. Therefore, contrast on the Libra Colour is lower than on the Libra 2. The traditional shot is majority white pixels, so to make the Libra Colour brightness match that of the Libra 2, I had to crank up the brightness on the Libra Colour to compensate for the darker white background. With me so far? Now with the inverted image, you can see what that does. It doesn t just raise the brightness of the white pixels, but it also raises the brightness of the black pixels. This is expected because we didn t raise contrast, only brightness. Also, in the last image, you can see it is brighter to the right. Again, other conditions that are more difficult to photograph make that much more pronounced. Viewing the Libra Colour from one side (but not the other), in dark mode, with the light on, produces noticeably worse contrast on one side. Conclusions This isn t a slam dunk. Let s walk through this: I don t think there is any noticeable loss of detail on the Libra Colour. The radial lines appeared as well defined on it as on the Libra 2. Oddly, with the backlight, some striations were apparent in the gray gradient test, but I wouldn t be using an E Ink device for clear photographic reproduction anyhow. If you read mostly black and white: If you had been using a Kobo Libra Colour and were handed a Libra 2, you would go, Wow! What an upgrade! The screen is so much brighter! There s little reason to get a Libra Colour. The Libra 2 might be hard to find these days, but the new Clara BW (with a 6 instead of the 7 screen on the Libra series) might be just the thing for you. The Libra 2 is at home in any lighting, from direct sun to pitch black, and has all the usual E Ink benefits (eg, battery life measured in weeks) and drawbacks (slower refresh rate) that we re all used to. If you are interested in photographic color reproduction mostly indoors: Consider a small tablet. The Libra Colour s 4096 colors are going to appear washed out compared to what you re used to on a LCD screen. If you are interested in color content indoors and out: The Libra Colour might be a good fit. It could work well for things where superb color rendition isn t essential for instance, news stories (the Pocket integration or Calibre s news feature could be nice there), comics, etc. In a moderately-lit indoor room, it looks like the Libra Colour s light can lead it to results that approach Libra 2 quality. So if most of your reading is in those conditions, perhaps the Libra Colour is right for you. As a final aside, I wrote in this article about the Kobo devices. I switched from Kindles to Kobos a couple of years ago due to the greater openness of the Kobo devices (you can add things like Nickel Menu and KOReader to them, and they have built-in support for more useful formats), their featureset, and their cost. The top-of-the-line Kindle devices will have a screen very similar if not identical to the Libra 2, so you can very easily consider this to be a comparison between the Oasis and the Libra Colour as well.

1 May 2024

Matthew Palmer: The Mediocre Programmer's Guide to Rust

Me: Hi everyone, my name s Matt, and I m a mediocre programmer. Everyone: Hi, Matt. Facilitator: Are you an alcoholic, Matt? Me: No, not since I stopped reading Twitter. Facilitator: Then I think you re in the wrong room.
Yep, that s my little secret I m a mediocre programmer. The definition of the word hacker I most closely align with is someone who makes furniture with an axe . I write simple, straightforward code because trying to understand complexity makes my head hurt. Which is why I ve always avoided the more academic languages, like OCaml, Haskell, Clojure, and so on. I know they re good languages people far smarter than me are building amazing things with them but the time I hear the word endofunctor , I ve lost all focus (and most of my will to live). My preferred languages are the ones that come with less intellectual overhead, like C, PHP, Python, and Ruby. So it s interesting that I ve embraced Rust with significant vigour. It s by far the most complicated language that I feel at least vaguely comfortable with using in anger . Part of that is that I ve managed to assemble a set of principles that allow me to almost completely avoid arguing with Rust s dreaded borrow checker, lifetimes, and all the rest of the dark, scary corners of the language. It s also, I think, that Rust helps me to write better software, and I can feel it helping me (almost) all of the time. In the spirit of helping my fellow mediocre programmers to embrace Rust, I present the principles I ve assembled so far.

Neither a Borrower Nor a Lender Be If you know anything about Rust, you probably know about the dreaded borrow checker . It s the thing that makes sure you don t have two pieces of code trying to modify the same data at the same time, or using a value when it s no longer valid. While Rust s borrowing semantics allow excellent performance without compromising safety, for us mediocre programmers it gets very complicated, very quickly. So, the moment the compiler wants to start talking about explicit lifetimes , I shut it up by just using owned values instead. It s not that I never borrow anything; I have some situations that I know are borrow-safe for the mediocre programmer (I ll cover those later). But any time I m not sure how things will pan out, I ll go straight for an owned value. For example, if I need to store some text in a struct or enum, it s going straight into a String. I m not going to start thinking about lifetimes and &'a str; I ll leave that for smarter people. Similarly, if I need a list of things, it s a Vec<T> every time no &'b [T] in my structs, thank you very much.

Attack of the Clones Following on from the above, I ve come to not be afraid of .clone(). I scatter them around my code like seeds in a field. Life s too short to spend time trying to figure out who s borrowing what from whom, if I can just give everyone their own thing. There are warnings in the Rust book (and everywhere else) about how a clone can be expensive . While it s true that, yes, making clones of data structures consumes CPU cycles and memory, it very rarely matters. CPU cycles are (usually) plentiful and RAM (usually) relatively cheap. Mediocre programmer mental effort is expensive, and not to be spent on premature optimisation. Also, if you re coming from most any other modern language, Rust is already giving you so much more performance that you re probably ending up ahead of the game, even if you .clone() everything in sight. If, by some miracle, something I write gets so popular that the expense of all those spurious clones becomes a problem, it might make sense to pay someone much smarter than I to figure out how to make the program a zero-copy masterpiece of efficient code. Until then clone early and clone often, I say!

Derive Macros are Powerful Magicks If you start .clone()ing everywhere, pretty quickly you ll be hit with this error: 

error[E0599]: no method named  clone  found for struct  Foo  in the current scope
This is because not everything can be cloned, and so if you want your thing to be cloned, you need to implement the method yourself. Well sort of. One of the things that I find absolutely outstanding about Rust is the derive macro . These allow you to put a little marker on a struct or enum, and the compiler will write a bunch of code for you! Clone is one of the available so-called derivable traits , so you add #[derive(Clone)] to your structs, and poof! you can .clone() to your heart s content. But there are other things that are commonly useful, and so I ve got a set of traits that basically all of my data structures derive: 

#[derive(Clone, Debug, Default)]
struct Foo  
    // ...
Every time I write a struct or enum definition, that line #[derive(Clone, Debug, Default)] goes at the top. The Debug trait allows you to print a debug representation of the data structure, either with the dbg!() macro, or via the :? format in the format!() macro (and anywhere else that takes a format string). Being able to say what exactly is that? comes in handy so often, not having a Debug implementation is like programming with one arm tied behind your Aeron. Meanwhile, the Default trait lets you create an empty instance of your data structure, with all of the fields set to their own default values. This only works if all the fields themselves implement Default, but a lot of standard types do, so it s rare that you ll define a structure that can t have an auto-derived Default. Enums are easily handled too, you just mark one variant as the default: 

#[derive(Clone, Debug, Default)]
enum Bar  
    Something(String),
    SomethingElse(i32),
    #[default]   // <== mischief managed
    Nothing,

Borrowing is OK, Sometimes While I previously said that I like and usually use owned values, there are a few situations where I know I can borrow without angering the borrow checker gods, and so I m comfortable doing it. The first is when I need to pass a value into a function that only needs to take a little look at the value to decide what to do. For example, if I want to know whether any values in a Vec<u32> are even, I could pass in a Vec, like this: 

fn main()  
    let numbers = vec![0u32, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
    if has_evens(numbers)  
        println!("EVENS!");
     
 
fn has_evens(numbers: Vec<u32>) -> bool  
    numbers.iter().any( n  n % 2 == 0)
Howver, this gets ugly if I m going to use numbers later, like this: 

fn main()  
    let numbers = vec![0u32, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
    if has_evens(numbers)  
        println!("EVENS!");
     
    // Compiler complains about "value borrowed here after move"
    println!("Sum:  ", numbers.iter().sum::<u32>());
 
fn has_evens(numbers: Vec<u32>) -> bool  
    numbers.iter().any( n  n % 2 == 0)
Helpfully, the compiler will suggest I use my old standby, .clone(), to fix this problem. But I know that the borrow checker won t have a problem with lending that Vec<u32> into has_evens() as a borrowed slice, &[u32], like this: 

fn main()  
    let numbers = vec![0u32, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
    if has_evens(&numbers)  
        println!("EVENS!");
     
 
fn has_evens(numbers: &[u32]) -> bool  
    numbers.iter().any( n  n % 2 == 0)
The general rule I ve got is that if I can take advantage of lifetime elision (a fancy term meaning the compiler can figure it out ), I m probably OK. In less fancy terms, as long as the compiler doesn t tell me to put 'a anywhere, I m in the green. On the other hand, the moment the compiler starts using the words explicit lifetime , I nope the heck out of there and start cloning everything in sight. Another example of using lifetime elision is when I m returning the value of a field from a struct or enum. In that case, I can usually get away with returning a borrowed value, knowing that the caller will probably just be taking a peek at that value, and throwing it away before the struct itself goes out of scope. For example: 

struct Foo  
    id: u32,
    desc: String,
 
impl Foo  
    fn description(&self) -> &str  
        &self.desc
Returning a reference from a function is practically always a mortal sin for mediocre programmers, but returning one from a struct method is often OK. In the rare case that the caller does want the reference I return to live for longer, they can always turn it into an owned value themselves, by calling .to_owned().

Avoid the String Tangle Rust has a couple of different types for representing strings String and &str being the ones you see most often. There are good reasons for this, however it complicates method signatures when you just want to take some sort of bunch of text , and don t care so much about the messy details. For example, let s say we have a function that wants to see if the length of the string is even. Using the logic that since we re just taking a peek at the value passed in, our function might take a string reference, &str, like this: 

fn is_even_length(s: &str) -> bool  
    s.len() % 2 == 0
That seems to work fine, until someone wants to check a formatted string: 

fn main()  
    // The compiler complains about "expected  &str , found  String "
    if is_even_length(format!("my string is  ", std::env::args().next().unwrap()))  
        println!("Even length string");
Since format! returns an owned string, String, rather than a string reference, &str, we ve got a problem. Of course, it s straightforward to turn the String from format!() into a &str (just prefix it with an &). But as mediocre programmers, we can t be expected to remember which sort of string all our functions take and add & wherever it s needed, and having to fix everything when the compiler complains is tedious. The converse can also happen: a method that wants an owned String, and we ve got a &str (say, because we re passing in a string literal, like "Hello, world!"). In this case, we need to use one of the plethora of available turn this into a String mechanisms (.to_string(), .to_owned(), String::from(), and probably a few others I ve forgotten), on the value before we pass it in, which gets ugly real fast. For these reasons, I never take a String or an &str as an argument. Instead, I use the Power of Traits to let callers pass in anything that is, or can be turned into, a string. Let us have some examples. First off, if I would normally use &str as the type, I instead use impl AsRef<str>: 

fn is_even_length(s: impl AsRef<str>) -> bool  
    s.as_ref().len() % 2 == 0
Note that I had to throw in an extra as_ref() call in there, but now I can call this with either a String or a &str and get an answer. Now, if I want to be given a String (presumably because I plan on taking ownership of the value, say because I m creating a new instance of a struct with it), I use impl Into<String> as my type: 

struct Foo  
    id: u32,
    desc: String,
 
impl Foo  
    fn new(id: u32, desc: impl Into<String>) -> Self  
        Self   id, desc: desc.into()
We have to call .into() on our desc argument, which makes the struct building a bit uglier, but I d argue that s a small price to pay for being able to call both Foo::new(1, "this is a thing") and Foo::new(2, format!("This is a thing named name ")) without caring what sort of string is involved.

Always Have an Error Enum Rust s error handing mechanism (Results everywhere), along with the quality-of-life sugar surrounding it (like the short-circuit operator, ?), is a delightfully ergonomic approach to error handling. To make life easy for mediocre programmers, I recommend starting every project with an Error enum, that derives thiserror::Error, and using that in every method and function that returns a Result. How you structure your Error type from there is less cut-and-dried, but typically I ll create a separate enum variant for each type of error I want to have a different description. With thiserror, it s easy to then attach those descriptions: 

#[derive(Clone, Debug, thiserror::Error)]
enum Error  
    #[error(" 0  caught fire")]
    Combustion(String),
    #[error(" 0  exploded")]
    Explosion(String),
I also implement functions to create each error variant, because that allows me to do the Into<String> trick, and can sometimes come in handy when creating errors from other places with .map_err() (more on that later). For example, the impl for the above Error would probably be: 

impl Error  
    fn combustion(desc: impl Into<String>) -> Self  
        Self::Combustion(desc.into())
     
    fn explosion(desc: impl Into<String>) -> Self  
        Self::Explosion(desc.into())
It s a tedious bit of boilerplate, and you can use the thiserror-ext crate s thiserror_ext::Construct derive macro to do the hard work for you, if you like. It, too, knows all about the Into<String> trick.

Banish map_err (well, mostly) The newer mediocre programmer, who is just dipping their toe in the water of Rust, might write file handling code that looks like this: 

fn read_u32_from_file(name: impl AsRef<str>) -> Result<u32, Error>  
    let mut f = File::open(name.as_ref())
        .map_err( e  Error::FileOpenError(name.as_ref().to_string(), e))?;
    let mut buf = vec![0u8; 30];
    f.read(&mut buf)
        .map_err( e  Error::ReadError(e))?;
    String::from_utf8(buf)
        .map_err( e  Error::EncodingError(e))?
        .parse::<u32>()
        .map_err( e  Error::ParseError(e))
This works great (or it probably does, I haven t actually tested it), but there are a lot of .map_err() calls in there. They take up over half the function, in fact. With the power of the From trait and the magic of the ? operator, we can make this a lot tidier. First off, assume we ve written boilerplate error creation functions (or used thiserror_ext::Construct to do it for us)). That allows us to simplify the file handling portion of the function a bit: 

fn read_u32_from_file(name: impl AsRef<str>) -> Result<u32, Error>  
    let mut f = File::open(name.as_ref())
        // We've dropped the  .to_string()  out of here...
        .map_err( e  Error::file_open_error(name.as_ref(), e))?;
    let mut buf = vec![0u8; 30];
    f.read(&mut buf)
        // ... and the explicit parameter passing out of here
        .map_err(Error::read_error)?;
    // ...
If that latter .map_err() call looks weird, without the e and such, it s passing a function-as-closure, which just saves on a few characters typing. Just because we re mediocre, doesn t mean we re not also lazy. Next, if we implement the From trait for the other two errors, we can make the string-handling lines significantly cleaner. First, the trait impl: 

impl From<std::string::FromUtf8Error> for Error  
    fn from(e: std::string::FromUtf8Error) -> Self  
        Self::EncodingError(e)
     
 
impl From<std::num::ParseIntError> for Error  
    fn from(e: std::num::ParseIntError) -> Self  
        Self::ParseError(e)
(Again, this is boilerplate that can be autogenerated, this time by adding a #[from] tag to the variants you want a From impl on, and thiserror will take care of it for you) In any event, no matter how you get the From impls, once you have them, the string-handling code becomes practically error-handling-free: 

    Ok(
        String::from_utf8(buf)?
            .parse::<u32>()?
    )
The ? operator will automatically convert the error from the types returned from each method into the return error type, using From. The only tiny downside to this is that the ? at the end strips the Result, and so we ve got to wrap the returned value in Ok() to turn it back into a Result for returning. But I think that s a small price to pay for the removal of those .map_err() calls. In many cases, my coding process involves just putting a ? after every call that returns a Result, and adding a new Error variant whenever the compiler complains about not being able to convert some new error type. It s practically zero effort outstanding outcome for the mediocre programmer.

Just Because You re Mediocre, Doesn t Mean You Can t Get Better To finish off, I d like to point out that mediocrity doesn t imply shoddy work, nor does it mean that you shouldn t keep learning and improving your craft. One book that I ve recently found extremely helpful is Effective Rust, by David Drysdale. The author has very kindly put it up to read online, but buying a (paper or ebook) copy would no doubt be appreciated. The thing about this book, for me, is that it is very readable, even by us mediocre programmers. The sections are written in a way that really clicked with me. Some aspects of Rust that I d had trouble understanding for a long time such as lifetimes and the borrow checker, and particularly lifetime elision actually made sense after I d read the appropriate sections.

Finally, a Quick Beg I m currently subsisting on the kindness of strangers, so if you found something useful (or entertaining) in this post, why not buy me a refreshing beverage? It helps to know that people like what I m doing, and helps keep me from having to sell my soul to a private equity firm.

28 April 2024

Russell Coker: Galaxy Note 9 Droidian

Droidian Support for Note 9 Droidian only supported the version of this phone with the Exynos chipset. The GSM Arena specs page for the Note 9 shows that it s the SM-N960F part number [1]. In Australia all Note 9 phones should have the Exynos but it doesn t hurt to ask for the part number before buying. The status of the Note9 in Droidian went from fully supported to totally unsupported in the time I was working on this blog post. Such a rapid change is disappointing, it would be good if they at least kept the old data online. It would also be good if they didn t require a hash character in the URL for each phone which breaks the archive.org mirroring. Installing Droidian Firstly Power+VolumeDown will reboot in some situations where Power button on its own won t. The Note 9 hardware keys are: The Droidian install document for the Galaxy Note 9 9 now deleted is a bit confusing and unclear. Here is the install process that worked for me.
  1. The doc says to start by installing Android 10 (Q) stock firmware , but apparently a version of Android 10 that s already on the phone will do for that.
  2. Download the rescue.img file and the Droidian s image files from the Droidian page and extract the Droidian s image zip.
  3. Connect your phone to your workstation by USB, preferably USB 3 because it will take a few minutes to transfer the image at USB 2 speed. Install the Debian package adb on the workstation.
  4. To Unlock the bootloader you can apparently use a PC and the Samsung software but the unlock option in the Android settings gives the same result without proprietary software, here s how to do it:
    1. Connect the phone to Wifi. Then in settings go to Software update , then click on Download and install . Refuse to install if it offers you a new version (the unlock menu item will never appear unless you do this, so you can t unlock without Internet access).
    2. In settings go to About phone , then Software information , then tap on Build number repeatedly until Developer mode is enabled.
    3. In settings go to the new menu Developer options then turn on the OEM unlocking option, this does a factory reset of the phone.
  5. To flash the recovery.img you apparently use Odin on Windows. I used the heimdall-flash package on Debian. On your Linux workstation run the commands: 
    adb reboot download
heimdall flash --RECOVERY recovery.img
    Then press VOLUME-UP+BIXBY+POWER as soon as it reboots to get into the recovery image. If you don t do it soon enough it will do a default Android boot which will wipe the recovery.img you installed and also do a factory reset which will disable Developer mode and you will need to go back to step 4.
  6. If the above step works correctly you will have a RECOVERY menu where the main menu has options Reboot system now , Apply update , Factory reset , and Advanced in a large font. If you failed to install recovery.img then you would get a similar menu but with a tiny font which is the Samsung recovery image which won t work so reboot and try again.
  7. When at the main recovery menu select Advanced and then Enter fastboot . Note that this doesn t run a different program or do anything obviously different, just gives a menu that s OK we want it at this menu.
  8. Run ./flash_all.sh on your workstation.
  9. Then it should boot Droidian! This may take a bit of time.
First Tests Battery The battery and its charge and discharge rates are very important to me, it s what made the PinePhonePro and Librem5 unusable as daily driver phones. After running for about 100 minutes of which about 40 minutes were playing with various settings the phone was at 89% battery. The output of upower -d isn t very accurate as it reported power use ranging from 0W to 25W! But this does suggest that the phone might last for 400 minutes of real use that s not CPU intensive, such as reading email, document editing, and web browsing. I don t think that 6.5 hours of doing such things non-stop without access to a power supply or portable battery is something I m ever going to do. Samsung when advertising the phone claimed 17 hours of video playback which I don t think I m ever going to get or want. After running for 11 hours it was at 58% battery. Then after just over 21 hours of running it had 13% battery. Generally I don t trust the upower output much but the fact that it ran for over 21 hours shows that its battery life is much better than the PinePhonePro and the Librem5. During that 21 hours I ve had a ssh session open with the client set to send ssh keep-alive messages every minute. So it had to remain active. There is an option to suspend on Droidian but they recommend you don t use it. There is no need for the caffeine mode that you have on Mobian. For comparison my previous tests suggested that when doing nothing a PinePhonePro might last for 30 hours on battery while the Liberem5 might only list 10 hours [2]. This test with Droidian was done with the phone within my reach for much of that time and subject to my desire to fiddle with new technology so it wasn t just sleeping all the time. When charging from the USB port on my PC it went from 13% to 27% charge in half an hour and then after just over an hour it claimed to be at 33%. It ended up taking just over 7 hours to fully charge from empty that s not great but not too bad for a PC USB port. This is the same USB port that my Librem5 couldn t charge from. Also the discharge:charge ratio of 21:7 is better than I could get from the PinePhonePro with Caffeine mode enabled. rndis0 The rndis0 interface used for IP over USB doesn t work. Droidian bug #36 [3]. Other Hardware The phone I bought for testing is the model with 6G of RAM and 128G of storage, has a minor screen crack and significant screen burn-in. It s a good test system for $109. The screen burn-in is very obvious when running the default Android setup but when running the default Droidian GNOME setup set to the Dark theme (which is a significant power saving with an AMOLED screen) I can t see it at all. Buying a cheap phone with screen burn-in is something I recommend. The stylus doesn t work, this isn t listed on the Droidian web page. I m not sure if I tested the stylus when the phone was running Android, I think I did. D State Processes I get a kernel panic early in the startup for unknown reasons and some D state kernel threads which may or may not be related to that. Droidian bug #37 [4]. Second Phone The Phone I ordered a second Note9 on ebay, it had been advertised at $240 for a month and the seller accepted my offer of $200. With postage that s $215 for a Note9 in decent condition with 8G of RAM and 512G of storage. But Droidian dropped support for the Note9 before I got to install it. At the moment I m not sure what I ll do with this, maybe I ll keep it on Android. I also bought four phone cases for $16. I got spares because of the high price of postage relative to the case cost and the fact that they may be difficult to get in a few years. The Tests For the next phone my plan was to do more tests on Android before upgrading it to Debian. Here are the ones I can think of now, please suggest any others I should do. Droidian and Security When I tell technical people about Droidian a common reaction is great you can get a cheap powerful phone and have better security than Android . This is wrong in several ways. Firstly Android has quite decent security. Android runs most things in containers and uses SE Linux. Droidian has the Debian approach for most software (IE it all runs under the same UID without any special protections) and the developers have no plans to use SE Linux. I ve previously blogged about options for Sandboxing for Debian phone use, my blog post is NOT a solution to the problem but an analysis of the different potential ways of going about solving it [5]. The next issue is that Droidian has no way to update the kernel and the installation instructions often advise downgrading Android (running a less secure kernel) before the installation. The Android Generic Kernel Image project [6] addresses this by allowing a separation between drivers supplied by the hardware vendor and the kernel image supplied by Google. This also permits running the hardware vendor s drivers with a GKI kernel released by Google after the hardware vendor dropped security support. But this only applies to Android 11 and later, so Android 10 devices (like the Note 9 image for Droidian) miss out on this.
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25 April 2024

Russ Allbery: Review: Nation

Review: Nation, by Terry Pratchett
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: 2008
Printing: 2009
ISBN: 0-06-143303-9
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 369
Nation is a stand-alone young adult fantasy novel. It was published in the gap between Discworld novels Making Money and Unseen Academicals. Nation starts with a plague. The Russian influenza has ravaged Britain, including the royal family. The next in line to the throne is off on a remote island and must be retrieved and crowned as soon as possible, or an obscure provision in Magna Carta will cause no end of trouble. The Cutty Wren is sent on this mission, carrying the Gentlemen of Last Resort. Then comes the tsunami. In the midst of fire raining from the sky and a wave like no one has ever seen, Captain Roberts tied himself to the wheel of the Sweet Judy and steered it as best he could, straight into an island. The sole survivor of the shipwreck: one Ermintrude Fanshaw, daughter of the governor of some British island possessions. Oh, and a parrot. Mau was on the Boys' Island when the tsunami came, going through his rite of passage into manhood. He was to return to the Nation the next morning and receive his tattoos and his adult soul. He survived in a canoe. No one else in the Nation did. Terry Pratchett considered Nation to be his best book. It is not his best book, at least in my opinion; it's firmly below the top tier of Discworld novels, let alone Night Watch. It is, however, an interesting and enjoyable book that tackles gods and religion with a sledgehammer rather than a knife. It's also very, very dark and utterly depressing at the start, despite a few glimmers of Pratchett's humor. Mau is the main protagonist at first, and the book opens with everyone he cares about dying. This is the place where I thought Pratchett diverged the most from his Discworld style: in Discworld, I think most of that would have been off-screen, but here we follow Mau through the realization, the devastation, the disassociation, the burials at sea, the thoughts of suicide, and the complete upheaval of everything he thought he was or was about to become. I found the start of this book difficult to get through. The immediate transition into potentially tragic misunderstandings between Mau and Daphne (as Ermintrude names herself once there is no one to tell her not to) didn't help. As I got farther into the book, though, I warmed to it. The best parts early on are Daphne's baffled but scientific attempts to understand Mau's culture and her place in it. More survivors arrive, and they start to assemble a community, anchored in large part by Mau's stubborn determination to do what's right even though he's lost all of his moorings. That community eventually re-establishes contact with the rest of the world and the opening plot about the British monarchy, but not before Daphne has been changed profoundly by being part of it. I think Pratchett worked hard at keeping Mau's culture at the center of the story. It's notable that the community that reforms over the course of the book essentially follows the patterns of Mau's lost Nation and incorporates Daphne into it, rather than (as is so often the case) the other way around. The plot itself is fiercely anti-colonial in a way that mostly worked. Still, though, it's a quasi-Pacific-island culture written by a white British man, and I had some qualms. Pratchett quite rightfully makes it clear in the afterward that this is an alternate world and Mau's culture is not a real Pacific island culture. However, that also means that its starkly gender-essentialist nature was a free choice, rather than one based on some specific culture, and I found that choice somewhat off-putting. The religious rituals are all gendered, the dwelling places are gendered, and one's entire life course in Mau's world seems based on binary classification as a man or a woman. Based on Pratchett's other books, I assume this was more an unfortunate default than a deliberate choice, but it's still a choice he could have avoided. The end of this book wrestles directly with the relative worth of Mau's culture versus that of the British. I liked most of this, but the twists that Pratchett adds to avoid the colonialist results we saw in our world stumble partly into the trap of making Mau's culture valuable by British standards. (I'm being a bit vague here to avoid spoilers.) I think it is very hard to base this book on a different set of priorities and still bring the largely UK, US, and western European audience along, so I don't blame Pratchett for failing to do it, but I'm a bit sad that the world still revolved around a British axis. This felt quite similar to Discworld to me in its overall sensibilities, but with the roles of moral philosophy and humor reversed. Discworld novels usually start with some larger-than-life characters and an absurd plot, and then the moral philosophy sneaks up behind you when you're not looking and hits you over the head. Nation starts with the moral philosophy: Mau wrestles with his gods and the problem of evil in a way that reminded me of Job, except with a far different pantheon and rather less tolerance for divine excuses on the part of the protagonist. It's the humor, instead, that sneaks up on you and makes you laugh when the plot is a bit too much. But the mix arrives at much the same place: the absurd hand-in-hand with the profound, and all seen from an angle that makes it a bit easier to understand. I'm not sure I would recommend Nation as a good place to start with Pratchett. I felt like I benefited from having read a lot of Discworld to build up my willingness to trust where Pratchett was going. But it has the quality of writing of late Discworld without the (arguable) need to read 25 books to understand all of the backstory. Regardless, recommended, and you'll never hear Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in quite the same way again. Rating: 8 out of 10

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