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sure you don t have two pieces of code trying to modify the same data at the same time, or using a value when it s no longer valid.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.

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:

• Power Right side
• Volume up/down long button top of the left side
• Bixby key for Samsung assistant that s below the volume on the left

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.

• Log output of ps auxf equivalent.
• Make notes on what they are doing with SE Linux.
• Test the stylus.
• Test USB networking to my workstation and my laptop.
• Make a copy of the dmesg output. Also look for D state processes and other signs of problems.

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.

• [1] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_note9-9163.php
• [2] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/06/06/pinephonepro-first-impression/
• [3] https://github.com/droidian/droidian/issues/36
• [4] https://github.com/droidian/droidian/issues/37
• [5] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/07/08/sandboxing-phone-apps/
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/236bjztz

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

I recently became a maintainer of/committer to IkiWiki, the software that powers my site. I also took over maintenance of the Debian package. Last week I cut a new upstream point release, 3.20200202.4, and a corresponding Debian package upload, consisting only of a handful of low-hanging-fruit patches from other people, largely to exercise both processes. I've been discussing IkiWiki's maintenance situation with some other users for a couple of years now. I've also weighed up the pros and cons of moving to a different static-site-generator (a term that describes what IkiWiki is, but was actually coined more recently). It turns out IkiWiki is exceptionally flexible and powerful: I estimate the cost of moving to something modern(er) and fashionable such as Jekyll, Hugo or Hakyll as unreasonably high, in part because they are surprisingly rigid and inflexible in some key places. Like most mature software, IkiWiki has a bug backlog. Over the past couple of weeks, as a sort-of "palate cleanser" around work pieces, I've tried to triage one IkiWiki bug per day: either upstream or in the Debian Bug Tracker. This is a really lightweight task: it can be as simple as "find a bug reported in Debian, copy it upstream, tag it upstream, mark it forwarded; perhaps taking 5-10 minutes. Often I'll stumble across something that has already been fixed but not recorded as such as I go. Despite this minimal level of work, I'm quite satisfied with the cumulative progress. It's notable to me how much my perspective has shifted by becoming a maintainer: I'm considering everything through a different lens to that of being just one user. Eventually I will put some time aside to scratch some of my own itches (html5 by default; support dark mode; duckduckgo plugin; use the details tag...) but for now this minimal exercise is of broader use.

A short status update what happened last month. Work in progress is marked as WiP: GNOME Calls

• Landed support to pick emergency calls numbers based on location (until now Calls picked the numbers from the SIM card only): Merge Request
• Bugfix: Fix dial back - the action mistakenly got disabled in some circumstances: Merge Request, Issue.

Phosh and Phoc As this often overlaps I've put them in a common section:

• Prepare and release Phosh 0.36.0 and upload to Debian
• phoc: Implement always on top and allow to move to corners via keybindings: Merge Request, Demo
• phoc: Wire up support for fractional-scale-v1 protocol: Merge Request. Issue
• phoc: Go with the flow and don't use APIs that will be removed in wlroots 0.18, thus switch to render pass: Merge Request
• phoc (as art of my ongoing cleanups to make the code base more approachable):
  • Make PhocServer private: Merge Request
  • Move drag-icon handling into it's own file: Merge Request
• phosh: load backgrounds asynd and handle dark theme URIs: Merge Request
• WiP: Allow to use wallpapers in lock screen and overview: Merge Request 1, Merge Request 2, Merge Request 3
• phosh: Add a caffeine quick-setting: Merge Request, Demo
• phosh and phoc bug fixes
  • Fix Maximized map of X11 surfaces: Merge Request
  • vpn fix: Merge Request
  • Fix crash around emergency calls: Merge Request
  • Honor disabled locking when there's no lock delay: Merge Request
• Testsuite improvements:
  • Speedup tests: Merge Request
  • Load plugins in tests: Merge Request
• release gmobile 0.0.6

Phosh Tour

• Allow for hardware specific pages: Merge Request
• Catch up with library and CI improvements: Merge Request

Phosh Mobile Settings

• Filter lockscreen plugins on lockscreen page: Merge Request

Phosh OSK Stub

• Add OSK side workaround for splash timeouts until GTK side is merged: Merge Request
• Update emoji data: Merge Request

Livi Video Player

• Remember stream position: Merge Request
• Label SDH subtitles: Merge Request
• Show controls when window becomes active: Merge Request

Phosh.mobi Website

• Directly link to tarballs from the release page, e.g. here

If you want to support my work see donations.

In light of the recent cancellation of the queer.af domain registration by the Taliban, the fragile and difficult nature of country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) has once again been comprehensively demonstrated. Since many people may not be aware of the risks, I thought I d give a solid explainer of the whole situation, and explain why you should, in general, not have anything to do with domains which are registered under ccTLDs.

Top-level What-Now? A top-level domain (TLD) is the last part of a domain name (the collection of words, separated by periods, after the https:// in your web browser s location bar). It s the com in example.com, or the af in queer.af. There are two kinds of TLDs: country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) and generic TLDs (gTLDs). Despite all being TLDs, they re very different beasts under the hood.

What s the Difference? Generic TLDs are what most organisations and individuals register their domains under: old-school technobabble like com , net , or org , historical oddities like gov , and the new-fangled world of words like tech , social , and bank . These gTLDs are all regulated under a set of rules created and administered by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ), which try to ensure that things aren t a complete wild-west, limiting things like price hikes (well, sometimes, anyway), and providing means for disputes over names¹. Country-code TLDs, in contrast, are all two letters long², and are given out to countries to do with as they please. While ICANN kinda-sorta has something to do with ccTLDs (in the sense that it makes them exist on the Internet), it has no authority to control how a ccTLD is managed. If a country decides to raise prices by 100x, or cancel all registrations that were made on the 12th of the month, there s nothing anyone can do about it. If that sounds bad, that s because it is. Also, it s not a theoretical problem the Taliban deciding to asssert its bigotry over the little corner of the Internet namespace it has taken control of is far from the first time that ccTLDs have caused grief.

Shifting Sands The queer.af cancellation is interesting because, at the time the domain was reportedly registered, 2018, Afghanistan had what one might describe as, at least, a different political climate. Since then, of course, things have changed, and the new bosses have decided to get a bit more active. Those running queer.af seem to have seen the writing on the wall, and were planning on moving to another, less fraught, domain, but hadn t completed that move when the Taliban came knocking.

The Curious Case of Brexit When the United Kingdom decided to leave the European Union, it fell foul of the EU s rules for the registration of domains under the eu ccTLD³. To register (and maintain) a domain name ending in .eu, you have to be a resident of the EU. When the UK ceased to be part of the EU, residents of the UK were no longer EU residents. Cue much unhappiness, wailing, and gnashing of teeth when this was pointed out to Britons. Some decided to give up their domains, and move to other parts of the Internet, while others managed to hold onto them by various legal sleight-of-hand (like having an EU company maintain the registration on their behalf). In any event, all very unpleasant for everyone involved.

Geopolitics on the Internet?!? After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Ukranian Vice Prime Minister asked ICANN to suspend ccTLDs associated with Russia. While ICANN said that it wasn t going to do that, because it wouldn t do anything useful, some domain registrars (the companies you pay to register domain names) ceased to deal in Russian ccTLDs, and some websites restricted links to domains with Russian ccTLDs. Whether or not you agree with the sort of activism implied by these actions, the fact remains that even the actions of a government that aren t directly related to the Internet can have grave consequences for your domain name if it s registered under a ccTLD. I don t think any gTLD operator will be invading a neighbouring country any time soon.

Money, Money, Money, Must Be Funny When you register a domain name, you pay a registration fee to a registrar, who does administrative gubbins and causes you to be able to control the domain name in the DNS. However, you don t own that domain name⁴ you re only renting it. When the registration period comes to an end, you have to renew the domain name, or you ll cease to be able to control it. Given that a domain name is typically your brand or identity online, the chances are you d prefer to keep it over time, because moving to a new domain name is a massive pain, having to tell all your customers or users that now you re somewhere else, plus having to accept the risk of someone registering the domain name you used to have and capturing your traffic it s all a gigantic hassle. For gTLDs, ICANN has various rules around price increases and bait-and-switch pricing that tries to keep a lid on the worst excesses of registries. While there are any number of reasonable criticisms of the rules, and the Internet community has to stay on their toes to keep ICANN from totally succumbing to regulatory capture, at least in the gTLD space there s some degree of control over price gouging. On the other hand, ccTLDs have no effective controls over their pricing. For example, in 2008 the Seychelles increased the price of .sc domain names from US$25 to US$75. No reason, no warning, just pay up .

Who Is Even Getting That Money? A closely related concern about ccTLDs is that some of the cool ones are assigned to countries that are not great. The poster child for this is almost certainly Libya, which has the ccTLD ly . While Libya was being run by a terrorist-supporting extremist, companies thought it was a great idea to have domain names that ended in .ly. These domain registrations weren t (and aren t) cheap, and it s hard to imagine that at least some of that money wasn t going to benefit the Gaddafi regime. Similarly, the British Indian Ocean Territory, which has the io ccTLD, was created in a colonialist piece of chicanery that expelled thousands of native Chagossians from Diego Garcia. Money from the registration of .io domains doesn t go to the (former) residents of the Chagos islands, instead it gets paid to the UK government. Again, I m not trying to suggest that all gTLD operators are wonderful people, but it s not particularly likely that the direct beneficiaries of the operation of a gTLD stole an island chain and evicted the residents.

Are ccTLDs Ever Useful? The answer to that question is an unqualified maybe . I certainly don t think it s a good idea to register a domain under a ccTLD for vanity purposes: because it makes a word, is the same as a file extension you like, or because it looks cool. Those ccTLDs that clearly represent and are associated with a particular country are more likely to be OK, because there is less impetus for the registry to try a naked cash grab. Unfortunately, ccTLD registries have a disconcerting habit of changing their minds on whether they serve their geographic locality, such as when auDA decided to declare an open season in the .au namespace some years ago. Essentially, while a ccTLD may have geographic connotations now, there s not a lot of guarantee that they won t fall victim to scope creep in the future. Finally, it might be somewhat safer to register under a ccTLD if you live in the location involved. At least then you might have a better idea of whether your domain is likely to get pulled out from underneath you. Unfortunately, as the .eu example shows, living somewhere today is no guarantee you ll still be living there tomorrow, even if you don t move house. In short, I d suggest sticking to gTLDs. They re at least lower risk than ccTLDs.

+1, Helpful If you ve found this post informative, why not buy me a refreshing beverage? My typing fingers (both of them) thank you in advance for your generosity.

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Footnotes

1. don t make the mistake of thinking that I approve of ICANN or how it operates; it s an omnishambles of poor governance and incomprehensible decision-making.
2. corresponding roughly, though not precisely (because everything has to be complicated, because humans are complicated), to the entries in the ISO standard for Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions , ISO 3166.
3. yes, the EU is not a country; it s part of the roughly, though not precisely caveat mentioned previously.
4. despite what domain registrars try very hard to imply, without falling foul of deceptive advertising regulations.

Posted on January 2, 2024
Tags: madeof:atoms

One of the knitting projects I m working on is a big bottom-up triangular shawl in less-than-fingering weight yarn (NM 1/15): it feels like a cloud should by all rights feel, and I have good expectations out of it, but it s taking forever and a day. And then one day last spring I started thinking in the general direction of top-down shawls, and decided I couldn t wait until I had finished the first one to see if I could design one. For my first attempt I used an odd ball of 50% wool 50% plastic I had in my stash and worked it on 12 mm tree trunks, and I quickly made something between a scarf and a shawl that got some use during the summer thunderstorms when temperatures got a bit lower, but not really cold. I was happy with the shape, not with the exact position of the increases, but I had ideas for improvements, so I just had to try another time. Digging through the stash I found four balls of Drops Alpaca in two shades of grey: I had bought it with the intent to test its durability in somewhat more demanding situations (such as gloves or even socks), but then the LYS¹ no longer carries it, so I might as well use it for something a bit more one-off (and when I received the yarn it felt so soft that doing something for the upper body looked like a better idea anyway). I decided to start working in garter stitch with the darker colour, then some garter stitch in the lighter shade and to finish with yo / k2t lace, to make the shawl sort of fade out. The first half was worked relatively slowly through the summer, and then when I reached the colour change I suddenly picked up working on it and it was finished in a couple of weeks.

looks denser in a nice way, but the the lace border is scrunched up.

Then I had doubts on whether I wanted to block it, since I liked the soft feel, but I decided to try it anyway: it didn t lose the feel, and the look is definitely better, even if it was my first attempt at blocking a shawl and I wasn t that good at it. I m glad that I did it, however, as it s still soft and warm, but now also looks nicer. The pattern is of course online as #FreeSoftWear on my fiber craft patterns website.

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1. at least local to somebody: I can t get to a proper yarn shop by foot, so I ve bought this yarn online from one that I could in theory reach on a day trip, but it has not happened yet.

In 2023, I finished and reviewed 53 books, continuing a trend of year-over-year increases and of reading the most books since 2012 (the last year I averaged five books a month). Reviewing continued to be uneven, with a significant slump in the summer and smaller slumps in February and November, and a big clump of reviews finished in October in addition to my normal year-end reading and reviewing vacation. The unevenness this year was mostly due to finishing books and not writing reviews immediately. Reviews are much harder to write when the finished books are piling up, so one goal for 2024 is to not let that happen again. I enter the new year with one book finished and not yet reviewed, after reading a book about every day and a half during my December vacation. I read two all-time favorite books this year. The first was Emily Tesh's debut novel Some Desperate Glory, which is one of the best space opera novels I have ever read. I cannot improve on Shelley Parker-Chan's blurb for this book: "Fierce and heartbreakingly humane, this book is for everyone who loved Ender's Game, but Ender's Game didn't love them back." This is not hard science fiction but it is fantastic character fiction. It was exactly what I needed in the middle of a year in which I was fighting a "burn everything down" mood. The second was Night Watch by Terry Pratchett, the 29th Discworld and 6th Watch novel. Throughout my Discworld read-through, Pratchett felt like he was on the cusp of a truly stand-out novel, one where all the pieces fit and the book becomes something more than the sum of its parts. This was that book. It's a book about ethics and revolutions and governance, but also about how your perception of yourself changes as you get older. It does all of the normal Pratchett things, just... better. While I would love to point new Discworld readers at it, I think you do have to read at least the Watch novels that came before it for it to carry its proper emotional heft. This was overall a solid year for fiction reading. I read another 15 novels I rated 8 out of 10, and 12 that I rated 7 out of 10. The largest contributor to that was my Discworld read-through, which was reliably entertaining throughout the year. The run of Discworld books between The Fifth Elephant (read late last year) and Wintersmith (my last of this year) was the best run of Discworld novels so far. One additional book I'll call out as particularly worth reading is Thud!, the Watch novel after Night Watch and another excellent entry. I read two stand-out non-fiction books this year. The first was Oliver Darkshire's delightful memoir about life as a rare book seller, Once Upon a Tome. One of the things I will miss about Twitter is the regularity with which I stumbled across fascinating people and then got to read their books. I'm off Twitter permanently now because the platform is designed to make me incoherently angry and I need less of that in my life, but it was very good at finding delightfully quirky books like this one. My other favorite non-fiction book of the year was Michael Lewis's Going Infinite, a profile of Sam Bankman-Fried. I'm still bemused at the negative reviews that this got from people who were upset that Lewis didn't turn the story into a black-and-white morality play. Bankman-Fried's actions were clearly criminal; that's not in dispute. Human motivations can be complex in ways that are irrelevant to the law, and I thought this attempt to understand that complexity by a top-notch storyteller was worthy of attention. Also worth a mention is Tony Judt's Postwar, the first book I reviewed in 2023. A sprawling history of post-World-War-II Europe will never have the sheer readability of shorter, punchier books, but this was the most informative book that I read in 2023. 2024 should see the conclusion of my Discworld read-through, after which I may return to re-reading Mercedes Lackey or David Eddings, both of which I paused to make time for Terry Pratchett. I also have another re-read similar to my Chronicles of Narnia reviews that I've been thinking about for a while. Perhaps I will start that next year; perhaps it will wait for 2025. Apart from that, my intention as always is to read steadily, write reviews as close to when I finished the book as possible, and make reading time for my huge existing backlog despite the constant allure of new releases. Here's to a new year full of more new-to-me books and occasional old favorites. The full analysis includes some additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.

Posted on December 30, 2023
Tags: madeof:atoms

By the influencers on the famous proprietary video platform¹. When I m crafting with no powertools I tend to watch videos, and this autumn I ve seen a few in a row that were making red wool dresses, at least one or two medieval kirtles. I don t remember which channels they were, and I ve decided not to go back and look for them, at least for a time. Anyway, my brain suddenly decided that I needed a red wool dress, fitted enough to give some bust support. I had already made a dress that satisfied the latter requirement and I still had more than half of the red wool faille I ve used for the Garibaldi blouse (still not blogged, but I will get to it), and this time I wanted it to be ready for this winter. While the pattern I was going to use is Victorian, it was designed for underwear, and this was designed to be outerwear, so from the very start I decided not to bother too much with any kind of historical details or techniques. I knew that I didn t have enough fabric to add a flounce to the hem, as in the cotton dress, but then I remembered that some time ago I fell for a piece of fringed trim in black, white and red. I did a quick check that the red wasn t clashing (it wasn t) and I knew I had a plan for the hem decoration. Then I spent a week finishing other projects, and the more I thought about this dress, the more I was tempted to have spiral lacing at the front rather than buttons, as a nod to the kirtle inspiration. It may end up be a bit of a hassle, but if it is too much I can always add a hidden zipper on a side seam, and only have to undo a bit of the lacing around the neckhole to wear the dress. Finally, I could start working on the dress: I cut all of the main pieces, and since the seam lines were quite curved I marked them with tailor s tacks, which I don t exactly enjoy doing or removing, but are the only method that was guaranteed to survive while manipulating this fabric (and not leave traces afterwards). While cutting the front pieces I accidentally cut the high neck line instead of the one I had used on the cotton dress: I decided to go for it also on the back pieces and decide later whether I wanted to lower it. Since this is a modern dress, with no historical accuracy at all, and I have access to a serger, I decided to use some dark blue cotton voile I ve had in my stash for quite some time, cut into bias strip, to bind the raw edges before sewing. This works significantly better than bought bias tape, which is a bit too stiff for this. For the front opening, I ve decided to reinforce the areas where the lacing holes will be with cotton: I ve used some other navy blue cotton, also from the stash, and added two lines of cording to stiffen the front edge. So I ve cut the front in two pieces rather than on the fold, sewn the reinforcements to the sewing allowances in such a way that the corded edge was aligned with the center front and then sewn the bottom of the front seam from just before the end of the reinforcements to the hem. The allowances are then folded back, and then they are kept in place by the worked lacing holes. The cotton was pinked, while for the wool I used the selvedge of the fabric and there was no need for any finishing. Behind the opening I ve added a modesty placket: I ve cut a strip of red wool, a strip of cotton, folded the edge of the strip of cotton to the center, added cording to the long sides, pressed the allowances of the wool towards the wrong side, and then handstitched the cotton to the wool, wrong sides facing. This was finally handstitched to one side of the sewing allowance of the center front. I ve also decided to add real pockets, rather than just slits, and for some reason I decided to add them by hand after I had sewn the dress, so I ve left opening in the side back seams, where the slits were in the cotton dress. I ve also already worn the dress, but haven t added the pockets yet, as I m still debating about their shape. This will be fixed in the near future. Another thing that will have to be fixed is the trim situation: I like the fringe at the bottom, and I had enough to also make a belt, but this makes the top of the dress a bit empty. I can t use the same fringe tape, as it is too wide, but it would be nice to have something smaller that matches the patterned part. And I think I can make something suitable with tablet weaving, but I m not sure on which materials to use, so it will have to be on hold for a while, until I decide on the supplies and have the time for making it. Another improvement I d like to add are detached sleeves, both matching (I should still have just enough fabric) and contrasting, but first I want to learn more about real kirtle construction, and maybe start making sleeves that would be suitable also for a real kirtle. Meanwhile, I ve worn it on Christmas (over my 1700s menswear shirt with big sleeves) and may wear it again tomorrow (if I bother to dress up to spend New Year s Eve at home :D )

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1. yep, that s YouTube, of course.

Read all parts of the series Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3 // Part 4 I ve been wanting to write this post for over a year, but lacked energy and time. Before 2023 is coming to an end, I want to close this series and share some more insights with you and hopefully provide you with a smile here and there. For this round of interviews, four more kids around the ages of 8 to 13 were interviewed, 3 of them have a US background these 3 interviews were done by a friend who recorded these interviews for me, thank you! As opposed to the previous interviews, these four kids have parents who have a more technical professional background. And this seems to make a difference: even though none of these kids actually knew much better how the internet really works than the other kids that I interviewed, specifically in terms of physical infrastructures, they were much more confident in using the internet, they were able to more correctly name things they see on the internet, and they had partly radical ideas about what they would like to learn or what they would want to change about the internet! Looking at these results, I think it s safe to say that social reproduction is at work and that we need to improve education for kids who do not profit from this type of social and cultural wealth at home. But let s dive into the details.

The boy and the aliens (I ll be mostly transribing the interview, which was short, and which I find difficult to sum up because some of the questions are written in a way to encourage the kids to tell a story, and this particular kid had a thing going on with aliens.) He s a 13 year old boy living in the US. He has his own computer, which technically belongs to his school but can be used by him freely and he can also take it home. He s the first kid saying he s reading the news on the internet; he does not actually use social media, besides sometimes watching TikTok. When asked: Imagine that aliens land and come to you and say: We ve heard about this internet thing you all talk about, what is it? What do you tell them? he replied:

Well, I mean they re aliens, so I don t know if I wanna tell them much.

(Parents laughing in the background.) Let s assume they re friendly aliens.

Well, I would say you can look anything up and play different games. And there are alien games. But mostly the enemies are aliens which you might be a little offended by. And you can get work done, if you needed to spy on humans. There s cameras, you can film yourself, yeah. And you can text people and call people who are far away

And what would be in a drawing that would explain the internet? And here s what he explains about his drawing:

First, I would draw what I see when you open a new tab, Google.

On the right side of the drawing we see something like Twitch.

I don t wanna offend the aliens, but you can film yourself playing a game, so here is the alien and he s playing a game.

And then you can ask questions like: How did aliens come to the Earth? And the answer will be here (below). And there ll be different websites that you can click on.

And you can also look up Who won the alien contest? And that would be Usmushgagu, and that guy won the alien contest.

Do you think the information about alien intergalactic football is already on the internet?

Yeah! That s how fast the internet is.

On the bottom of the drawing we see an iPhone and an instant messaging software.

There s also a device called an iPhone and with it you can text your friends. So here s the alien asking: How was ur day? and the friend might answer IDK [I don t know].

Imagine that a wise and friendly dragon could teach you one thing about the internet that you ve always wanted to know. What would you ask the dragon to teach you about?

Is there a way you don t have to pay for any channels or subscriptions and you can get through any firewall?

Imagine you could make the internet better for everyone. What would you do first?

Well you wouldn t have to pay for it [paywalls].

Can you describe what happens between your device and a website when you visit a website?

Well, it takes 0.025 seconds. [ ] It s connecting.

Wow, that s indeed fast! We were not able to obtain more details about what is that fast thing that s happening exactly

The software engineer s kid This kid identifies as neither boy nor girl, is 10 years old and lives in Germany. Their father works as a software engineer, or in the words of the child:

My dad knows everything.

The kid has a laptop and a mobile phone, both with parental control they don t think that the controlling is fair. This kid uses the internet foremostly for listening to music and watching prank channels on Youtube but also to work with Purple Mash (a teaching platform for the computing curriculum used at their school), finding 3d printing models (that they ask their father to print with them because they did not manage to use the printer by themselves yet). Interestingly, and very differently from the non-tech-parent kids, this kid insists on using Firefox and Signal - the latter is not only used by their dad to tell them to come downstairs for dinner, but also to call their grandmother. This kid also shops online, with the help of the father who does the actual shopping for them using money that the kid earned by reading books. If you would need to explain to an alien who has landed on Earth what the internet is, what would you tell them?

The internet is something where you search, for example, you can look for music. You can also watch videos from around the world, and you can program stuff.

Like most of the kids interviewed, this kid uses the internet mostly for media consumption, but with the difference that they also engage with technology by way of programming using Purple Mash. In their drawing we see a Youtube prank channel on a screen, an external trackpad on the right (likely it s not a touch screen), and headphones. Notice how there is no keyboard, or maybe it s folded away. If you could ask a nice and friendly dragon anything you d like to learn about the internet, what would it be?

How do I shutdown my dad s computer forever?

And what is it that he would do to improve the internet for everyone? Contrary to the kid living in the US, they think that

It takes too much time to load stuff!

I wonder if this kid experiences the internet as being slow because they use the mobile network or because their connection somehow gets throttled as a way to control media consumption, or if the German internet infrastructure is just so much worse in certain regions If you could improve the internet for everyone, what would you do first? I d make a new Firefox app that loads the internet much faster.

The software engineer s daughter This girl is only 8 years old, she hates unicorns, and her dad is also a software engineer. She uses a smartphone, controlled by her parents. My impression of the interview is that at this age, kids slightly mix up the internet with the devices that they use to access the internet. In her drawing, we see again Google - it s clearly everywhere - and also the interfaces for calling and texting someone. To explain what the internet is, besides the fact that one can use it for calling and listening to music, she says:

[The internet] is something that you can [use to] see someone who is far away, so that you don t need to take time to get to them.

Now, that s a great explanation, the internet providing the possibility for communication over a distance :) If she could ask a friendly dragon something she always wanted to know, she d ask how to make her phone come alive:

that it can talk to you, that it can see you, that it can smile and has eyes. It s like a new family member, you can talk to it.

Sounds a bit like Siri, Alexa, or Furby, doesn t it? If you could improve the internet for everyone, what would you do first? She d have the phone be able to decide over her free time, her phone time. That would make the world better, not for the kids, but certainly for the parents.

The antifascist kid This German boy s dad has a background in electrotechnical engineering. He s 10 years old and he told me he s using the internet a lot for searching things for example about his passion: the firefighters. For him, the internet is:

An invisible world. A virtual world. But there s also the darknet.

He told me he always watches that German show on public TV for kids that explains stuff: Checker Tobi. (In 2014, Checker Tobi actually produced an episode about the internet, which I d criticize for having only male characters, except for one female character: a secretary Google, a nice and friendly woman guiding the way through the huge library that s the internet ) This kid was the only one interviewed who managed to actually explain something about the internet, or rather about the hypertextual structure of the web. When I asked him to draw the internet, he made a drawing of a pin board. He explained:

Many items are attached to the pin board, and on the top left corner there s a computer, for example with Youtube and one can navigate like that between all the items, and start again from the beginning when done.

When I asked if he knew what actually happens between the device and a website he visits, he put forth the hypothesis of the existence of some kind of

Waves, internet waves - all this stuff somehow needs to be transmitted.

What he d like to learn:

How to get into the darknet? How do you become a Whitehat? I ve heard these words on the internet, the internet makes me clever.

And what would he change on the internet if he could?

I want that right wing extreme stuff is not accessible anymore, or at least, that it rains turds ( Kackw rste ) whenever people watch such stuff. Or that people are always told: This video is scum.

I suspect that his father has been talking with him about these things, and maybe these are also subjects he heard about when listening to punk music (he told me he does), or browsing Youtube.

Future projects To me this has been pretty insightful. I might share some more internet drawings by adults in the future, which I think are also really interesting, as they show very different things depending on the age of the person. I ve been using the information gathered to work on a children s book which I hope to be able to share with you next year.

Review: A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle

Series:	Sherlock Holmes #1
Publisher:	AmazonClassics
Copyright:	1887
Printing:	February 2018
ISBN:	1-5039-5525-7
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	159

A Study in Scarlet is the short mystery novel (probably a novella, although I didn't count words) that introduced the world to Sherlock Holmes. I'm going to invoke the 100-year-rule and discuss the plot of this book rather freely on the grounds that even someone who (like me prior to a few days ago) has not yet read it is probably not that invested in avoiding all spoilers. If you do want to remain entirely unspoiled, exercise caution before reading on. I had somehow managed to avoid ever reading anything by Arthur Conan Doyle, not even a short story. I therefore couldn't be sure that some of the assertions I was making in my review of A Study in Honor were correct. Since A Study in Scarlet would be quick to read, I decided on a whim to do a bit of research and grab a free copy of the first Holmes novel. Holmes is such a part of English-speaking culture that I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. This was largely true, but cultural osmosis had somehow not prepared me for the surprise Mormons. A Study in Scarlet establishes the basic parameters of a Holmes story: Dr. James Watson as narrator, the apartment he shares with Holmes at 221B Baker Street, the Baker Street Irregulars, Holmes's competition with police detectives, and his penchant for making leaps of logical deduction from subtle clues. The story opens with Watson meeting Holmes, agreeing to split the rent of a flat, and being baffled by the apparent randomness of Holmes's fields of study before Holmes reveals he's a consulting detective. The first case is a murder: a man is found dead in an abandoned house, without a mark on him although there are blood splatters on the walls and the word "RACHE" written in blood. Since my only prior exposure to Holmes was from cultural references and a few TV adaptations, there were a few things that surprised me. One is that Holmes is voluble and animated rather than aloof. Doyle is clearly going for passionate eccentric rather than calculating mastermind. Another is that he is intentionally and unabashedly ignorant on any topic not related to solving mysteries.

My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it. "You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it." "To forget it!" "You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you chose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

This is directly contrary to my expectation that the best way to make leaps of deduction is to know something about a huge range of topics so that one can draw unexpected connections, particularly given the puzzle-box construction and odd details so beloved in classic mysteries. I'm now curious if Doyle stuck with this conception, and if there were any later mysteries that involved astronomy. Speaking of classic mysteries, A Study in Scarlet isn't quite one, although one can see the shape of the genre to come. Doyle does not "play fair" by the rules that have not yet been invented. Holmes at most points knows considerably more than the reader, including bits of evidence that are not described until Holmes describes them and research that Holmes does off-camera and only reveals when he wants to be dramatic. This is not the sort of story where the reader is encouraged to try to figure out the mystery before the detective. Rather, what Doyle seems to be aiming for, and what Watson attempts (unsuccessfully) as the reader surrogate, is slightly different: once Holmes makes one of his grand assertions, the reader is encouraged to guess what Holmes might have done to arrive at that conclusion. Doyle seems to want the reader to guess technique rather than outcome, while providing only vague clues in general descriptions of Holmes's behavior at a crime scene. The structure of this story is quite odd. The first part is roughly what you would expect: first-person narration from Watson, supposedly taken from his journals but not at all in the style of a journal and explicitly written for an audience. Part one concludes with Holmes capturing and dramatically announcing the name of the killer, who the reader has never heard of before. Part two then opens with... a western?

In the central portion of the great North American Continent there lies an arid and repulsive desert, which for many a long year served as a barrier against the advance of civilization. From the Sierra Nevada to Nebraska, and from the Yellowstone River in the north to the Colorado upon the south, is a region of desolation and silence. Nor is Nature always in one mood throughout the grim district. It comprises snow-capped and lofty mountains, and dark and gloomy valleys. There are swift-flowing rivers which dash through jagged ca ons; and there are enormous plains, which in winter are white with snow, and in summer are grey with the saline alkali dust. They all preserve, however, the common characteristics of barrenness, inhospitality, and misery.

First, I have issues with the geography. That region contains some of the most beautiful areas on earth, and while a lot of that region is arid, describing it primarily as a repulsive desert is a bit much. Doyle's boundaries and distances are also confusing: the Yellowstone is a northeast-flowing river with its source in Wyoming, so the area between it and the Colorado does not extend to the Sierra Nevadas (or even to Utah), and it's not entirely clear to me that he realizes Nevada exists. This is probably what it's like for people who live anywhere else in the world when US authors write about their country. But second, there's no Holmes, no Watson, and not even the pretense of a transition from the detective novel that we were just reading. Doyle just launches into a random western with an omniscient narrator. It features a lean, grizzled man and an adorable child that he adopts and raises into a beautiful free spirit, who then falls in love with a wild gold-rush adventurer. This was written about 15 years before the first critically recognized western novel, so I can't blame Doyle for all the cliches here, but to a modern reader all of these characters are straight from central casting. Well, except for the villains, who are the Mormons. By that, I don't mean that the villains are Mormon. I mean Brigham Young is the on-page villain, plotting against the hero to force his adopted daughter into a Mormon harem (to use the word that Doyle uses repeatedly) and ruling Salt Lake City with an iron hand, border guards with passwords (?!), and secret police. This part of the book was wild. I was laughing out-loud at the sheer malevolent absurdity of the thirty-day countdown to marriage, which I doubt was the intended effect. We do eventually learn that this is the backstory of the murder, but we don't return to Watson and Holmes for multiple chapters. Which leads me to the other thing that surprised me: Doyle lays out this backstory, but then never has his characters comment directly on the morality of it, only the spectacle. Holmes cares only for the intellectual challenge (and for who gets credit), and Doyle sets things up so that the reader need not concern themselves with aftermath, punishment, or anything of that sort. I probably shouldn't have been surprised this does fit with the Holmes stereotype but I'm used to modern fiction where there is usually at least some effort to pass judgment on the events of the story. Doyle draws very clear villains, but is utterly silent on whether the murder is justified. Given its status in the history of literature, I'm not sorry to have read this book, but I didn't particularly enjoy it. It is very much of its time: everyone's moral character is linked directly to their physical appearance, and Doyle uses the occasional racial stereotype without a second thought. Prevailing writing styles have changed, so the prose feels long-winded and breathless. The rivalry between Holmes and the police detectives is tedious and annoying. I also find it hard to read novels from before the general absorption of techniques of emotional realism and interiority into all genres. The characters in A Study in Scarlet felt more like cartoon characters than fully-realized human beings. I have no strong opinion about the objective merits of this book in the context of its time other than to note that the sudden inserted western felt very weird. My understanding is that this is not considered one of the better Holmes stories, and Holmes gets some deeper characterization later on. Maybe I'll try another of Doyle's works someday, but for now my curiosity has been sated. Followed by The Sign of the Four. Rating: 4 out of 10

Review: Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #35
Publisher:	Clarion Books
Copyright:	2006
Printing:	2007
ISBN:	0-06-089033-9
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	450

Wintersmith is the 35th Discworld novel and the 3rd Tiffany Aching novel. You could probably start here, since understanding the backstory isn't vital for following the plot, but I'm not sure why you would. Tiffany is now training with Miss Treason, a 113-year-old witch who is quite different in her approach from Miss Level, Tiffany's mentor in A Hat Full of Sky. Miss Level was the unassuming and constantly helpful glue that held the neighborhood together. Miss Treason is the judge; her neighbors are scared of her and proud of being scared of her, since that means they have a proper witch who can see into their heads and sort out their problems. On the surface, they're quite different; part of the story of this book is Tiffany learning to see the similarities. First, though, Miss Treason rushes Tiffany to a strange midnight Morris Dance, without any explanation. The Morris Dance usually celebrates the coming of spring and is at the center of a village party, so Tiffany is quite confused by seeing it danced on a dark and windy night in late autumn. But there is a hole in the dance where the Fool normally is, and Tiffany can't keep herself from joining it. This proves to be a mistake. That space was left for someone very different from Tiffany, and now she's entangled herself in deep magic that she doesn't understand. This is another Pratchett novel where the main storyline didn't do much for me. All the trouble stems from Miss Treason being maddeningly opaque, and while she did warn Tiffany, she did so in that way that guarantees a protagonist of a middle-grade novel will ignore. The Wintersmith is a boring, one-note quasi-villain, and the plot mainly revolves around elemental powers being dumber than a sack of hammers. The one thing I will say about the main plot is that the magic Tiffany danced into is entangled with courtship and romance, Tiffany turns thirteen over the course of this book, and yet this is not weird and uncomfortable reading the way it would be in the hands of many other authors. Pratchett has a keen eye for the age range that he's targeting. The first awareness that there is such a thing as romance that might be relevant to oneself pairs nicely with the Wintersmith's utter confusion at how Tiffany's intrusion unbalanced his dance. This is a very specific age and experience that I think a lot of authors would shy away from, particularly with a female protagonist, and I thought Pratchett handled it adroitly. I personally found the Wintersmith's awkward courting tedious and annoying, but that's more about me than about the book. As with A Hat Full of Sky, though, everything other than the main plot was great. It is becoming obvious how much Tiffany and Granny Weatherwax have in common, and that Granny Weatherwax recognizes this and is training Tiffany herself. This is high-quality coming-of-age material, not in the traditional fantasy sense of chosen ones and map explorations, but in the sense of slowly-developing empathy and understanding of people who think differently than you do. Tiffany, like Granny Weatherwax, has very little patience with nonsense, and her irritation with stupidity is one of her best characteristics. But she's learning how to blunt it long enough to pay attention, and to understand how people she doesn't like can still be the right people for specific situations. I particularly loved how Granny carries on with a feud at the same time that Tiffany is learning to let go of one. It's not a contradiction or hypocrisy; it's a sign that Tiffany is entitled to her judgments and feelings, but has to learn how to keep them in their place and not let them take over. One of the great things about the Tiffany Aching books is that the villages are also characters. We don't see that much of the individual people, but one of the things Tiffany is learning is how to see the interpersonal dynamics and patterns of village life. Somehow the feelings of irritation and exasperation fade once you understand people's motives and see more sides to their character. There is a lot more Nanny Ogg in this book than there has been in the last few, and that reminded me of how much I love her character. She has a completely different approach than Granny Weatherwax, but it's just as effective in different ways. She's also the perfect witch to have around when you've stumbled into a stylized love story that you don't want to be a part of, and yet find oddly fascinating. It says something about the skill of Pratchett's characterization that I could enjoy a book this much while having no interest in the main plot. The Witches have always been great characters, but somehow they're even better when seen through Tiffany's perspective. Good stuff; if you liked any of the other Tiffany Aching books, you will like this as well. Followed by Making Money in publication order. The next Tiffany Aching novel is I Shall Wear Midnight. Rating: 8 out of 10

Today, 12 years after the meeting where AppStream was first discussed and 11 years after I released a prototype implementation I am excited to announce AppStream 1.0! Check it out on GitHub, or get the release tarball or read the documentation or release notes!

Some nostalgic memories I was not in the original AppStream meeting, since in 2011 I was extremely busy with finals preparations and ball organization in high school, but I still vividly remember sitting at school in the students lounge during a break and trying to catch the really choppy live stream from the meeting on my borrowed laptop (a futile exercise, I watched parts of the blurry recording later). I was extremely passionate about getting software deployment to work better on Linux and to improve the overall user experience, and spent many hours on the PackageKit IRC channel discussing things with many amazing people like Richard Hughes, Daniel Nicoletti, Sebastian Heinlein and others. At the time I was writing a software deployment tool called Listaller this was before Linux containers were a thing, and building it was very tough due to technical and personal limitations (I had just learned C!). Then in university, when I intended to recreate this tool, but for real and better this time as a new project called Limba, I needed a way to provide metadata for it, and AppStream fit right in! Meanwhile, Richard Hughes was tackling the UI side of things while creating GNOME Software and needed a solution as well. So I implemented a prototype and together we pretty much reshaped the early specification from the original meeting into what would become modern AppStream. Back then I saw AppStream as a necessary side-project for my actual project, and didn t even consider me as the maintainer of it for quite a while (I hadn t been at the meeting afterall). All those years ago I had no idea that ultimately I was developing AppStream not for Limba, but for a new thing that would show up later, with an even more modern design called Flatpak. I also had no idea how incredibly complex AppStream would become and how many features it would have and how much more maintenance work it would be and also not how ubiquitous it would become. The modern Linux desktop uses AppStream everywhere now, it is supported by all major distributions, used by Flatpak for metadata, used for firmware metadata via Richard s fwupd/LVFS, runs on every Steam Deck, can be found in cars and possibly many places I do not know yet.

What is new in 1.0?

API breaks The most important thing that s new with the 1.0 release is a bunch of incompatible changes. For the shared libraries, all deprecated API elements have been removed and a bunch of other changes have been made to improve the overall API and especially make it more binding-friendly. That doesn t mean that the API is completely new and nothing looks like before though, when possible the previous API design was kept and some changes that would have been too disruptive have not been made. Regardless of that, you will have to port your AppStream-using applications. For some larger ones I already submitted patches to build with both AppStream versions, the 0.16.x stable series as well as 1.0+. For the XML specification, some older compatibility for XML that had no or very few users has been removed as well. This affects for example release elements that reference downloadable data without an artifact block, which has not been supported for a while. For all of these, I checked to remove only things that had close to no users and that were a significant maintenance burden. So as a rule of thumb: If your XML validated with no warnings with the 0.16.x branch of AppStream, it will still be 100% valid with the 1.0 release. Another notable change is that the generated output of AppStream 1.0 will always be 1.0 compliant, you can not make it generate data for versions below that (this greatly reduced the maintenance cost of the project).

Developer element For a long time, you could set the developer name using the top-level developer_name tag. With AppStream 1.0, this is changed a bit. There is now a developer tag with a name child (that can be translated unless the translate="no" attribute is set on it). This allows future extensibility, and also allows to set a machine-readable id attribute in the developer element. This permits software centers to group software by developer easier, without having to use heuristics. If we decide to extend the developer information per-app in future, this is also now possible. Do not worry though the developer_name tag is also still read, so there is no high pressure to update. The old 0.16.x stable series also has this feature backported, so it can be available everywhere. Check out the developer tag specification for more details.

Scale factor for screenshots Screenshot images can now have a scale attribute, to indicate an (integer) scaling factor to apply. This feature was a breaking change and therefore we could not have it for the longest time, but it is now available. Please wait a bit for AppStream 1.0 to become deployed more widespread though, as using it with older AppStream versions may lead to issues in some cases. Check out the screenshots tag specification for more details.

Screenshot environments It is now possible to indicate the environment a screenshot was recorded in (GNOME, GNOME Dark, KDE Plasma, Windows, etc.) via an environment attribute on the respective screenshot tag. This was also a breaking change, so use it carefully for now! If projects want to, they can use this feature to supply dedicated screenshots depending on the environment the application page is displayed in. Check out the screenshots tag specification for more details.

References tag This is a feature more important for the scientific community and scientific applications. Using the references tag, you can associate the AppStream component with a DOI (Digital object identifier) or provide a link to a CFF file to provide citation information. It also allows to link to other scientific registries. Check out the references tag specification for more details.

Release tags Releases can have tags now, just like components. This is generally not a feature that I expect to be used much, but in certain instances it can become useful with a cooperating software center, for example to tag certain releases as long-term supported versions.

Multi-platform support Thanks to the interest and work of many volunteers, AppStream (mostly) runs on FreeBSD now, a NetBSD port exists, support for macOS was written and a Windows port is on its way! Thank you to everyone working on this

Better compatibility checks For a long time I thought that the AppStream library should just be a thin layer above the XML and that software centers should just implement a lot of the actual logic. This has not been the case for a while, but there was still a lot of complex AppStream features that were hard for software centers to implement and where it makes sense to have one implementation that projects can just use. The validation of component relations is one such thing. This was implemented in 0.16.x as well, but 1.0 vastly improves upon the compatibility checks, so you can now just run as_component_check_relations and retrieve a detailed list of whether the current component will run well on the system. Besides better API for software developers, the appstreamcli utility also has much improved support for relation checks, and I wrote about these changes in a previous post. Check it out! With these changes, I hope this feature will be used much more, and beyond just drivers and firmware.

So much more! The changelog for the 1.0 release is huge, and there are many papercuts resolved and changes made that I did not talk about here, like us using gi-docgen (instead of gtkdoc) now for nice API documentation, or the many improvements that went into better binding support, or better search, or just plain bugfixes.

Outlook I expect the transition to 1.0 to take a bit of time. AppStream has not broken its API for many, many years (since 2016), so a bunch of places need to be touched even if the changes themselves are minor in many cases. In hindsight, I should have also released 1.0 much sooner and it should not have become such a mega-release, but that was mainly due to time constraints. So, what s in it for the future? Contrary to what I thought, AppStream does not really seem to be done and fetature complete at a point, there is always something to improve, and people come up with new usecases all the time. So, expect more of the same in future: Bugfixes, validator improvements, documentation improvements, better tools and the occasional new feature. Onwards to 1.0.1!

I just had to setup a Brother MFC-J4440DW for a relative. They were replacing an old HP laser printer that mysteriously stopped printing as dark as it should, I don t know whether the HP printer had worn out or if the HP firmware decided to hobble it to make them buy a new printer. In either case HP is well known for shady behaviour with their printer firmware and should be avoided. The new Brother printer has problems when using wifi and auto DNS. I don t know how much of that was due to the printer itself and how much was due to the wifi AP provided by Foxtel. Anyway it works better with Ethernet and a fixed address (the wifi AP didn t allow me to set a fixed address). I think the main thing was configuring CUPS to connect via the IP address and not use Avahi etc. One problem I had with printing was that programs like Chrome and LibreOffice would hang for about a minute before printing, that turned out to be due to /etc/cups/lpoptions having the old printer (which had been removed) listed as the default. It would be nice if the web configuration for cups would change that when I set the default printer. CUPS doesn t seem to support USB printing. If it is possible to get this printer to print via USB then I welcome a comment describing how to do it. Scanning only seems to work on Ethernet not on USB, the command for scanning that I ended up with was scanimage -d escl:http://10.0.0.3:80 . Again I welcome comments from anyone who has had success in scanning via USB. There are probably some Linux users who would find it really inconvenient to setup a network interface specifically for printing. It s easy for me as I have a pile of spare ethernet cards and a box of cables but some people would have to buy this. Also it s disappointing that Brother didn t include an Ethernet cable or a USB cable in the box. But if that makes it cheaper I can deal with that. The resolution for scanning is only 832*1163 and it s black and white, I think that generally scanning in printers is a bad idea, taking a photo with a phone is a better way of scanning documents. Generally this printer works well and is cheap at only $299, a price for disposable hardware by today s standards. There are Debian packages from Brother for the printer. The scanner package looks like it just configures scanimage, and I m not sure whether the stock version of CUPS in Debian will do it without the Brother package. One thing I found interesting is that the package mfcj4440dwpdrv has the following shell code in the postinst to label for SE Linux:

if [ "$(which semanage 2> /dev/null)" != '' ];then
semanage fcontext -a -t cupsd_rw_etc_t '/opt/brother/Printers/mfcj4440dw/inf(/.*)?'
semanage fcontext -a -t bin_t          '/opt/brother/Printers/mfcj4440dw/lpd(/.*)?'
semanage fcontext -a -t bin_t          '/opt/brother/Printers/mfcj4440dw/cupswrapper(/.*)?'
if [ "$(which restorecon 2> /dev/null)" != '' ];then
restorecon -R /opt/brother/Printers/mfcj4440dw
fi
fi

This is the first time I ve seen a Debian package from a hardware vendor with SE Linux specific code. I can t just add those rules to the Debian policy as that would make the semanage commands fail to add an identical context spec will break the postinst. In the latest policy I m uploading to Debian/Unstable (version 2.20231010-1) there are the following 3 lines to deal with this, the first was already there for some time and the other 2 I just added:

/opt/brother/Printers/([^/]+/)?inf(/.*)?        gen_context(system_u:object_r:cupsd_rw_etc_t,s0)
/opt/brother/Printers/[^/]+/lpd(/.*)?   gen_context(system_u:object_r:bin_t,s0)
/opt/brother/Printers/[^/]+/cupswrapper(/.*)?   gen_context(system_u:object_r:bin_t,s0)

The Brother employee(s) who added the SE Linux code to their package are welcome to connect to me on LinkedIn.

Review: A Hat Full of Sky, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #32
Publisher:	HarperTrophy
Copyright:	2004
Printing:	2005
ISBN:	0-06-058662-1
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	407

A Hat Full of Sky is the 32nd Discworld novel and the second Tiffany Aching young adult novel. You should not start here, but you could start with The Wee Free Men. As with that book, some parts of the story carry more weight if you are already familiar with Granny Weatherwax. Tiffany is a witch, but she needs to be trained. This is normally done by apprenticeship, and in Tiffany's case it seemed wise to give her exposure to more types of witching. Thus, Tiffany, complete with new boots and a going-away present from the still-somewhat-annoying Roland, is off on an apprenticeship to the sensible Miss Level. (The new boots feel wrong and get swapped out for her concealed old boots at the first opportunity.) Unbeknownst to Tiffany, her precocious experiments with leaving her body as a convenient substitute for a mirror have attracted something very bad, something none of the witches are expecting. The Nac Mac Feegle know a hiver as soon as they feel it, but they have a new kelda now, and she's not sure she wants them racing off after their old kelda. Terry Pratchett is very good at a lot of things, but I don't think villains are one of his strengths. He manages an occasional memorable one (the Auditors, for example, at least before the whole chocolate thing), but I find most of them a bit boring. The hiver is one of the boring ones. It serves mostly as a concretized metaphor about the temptations of magical power, but those temptations felt so unlike the tendencies of Tiffany's personality that I didn't think the metaphor worked in the story. The interesting heart of this book to me is the conflict between Tiffany's impatience with nonsense and Miss Level's arguably excessive willingness to help everyone regardless of how demanding they get. There's something deeper in here about female socialization and how that interacts with Pratchett's conception of witches that got me thinking, although I don't think Pratchett landed the point with full force. Miss Level is clearly a good witch to her village and seems comfortable with how she lives her life, so perhaps they're not taking advantage of her, but she thoroughly slots herself into the helper role. If Tiffany attempted the same role, people would be taking advantage of her, because the role doesn't fit her. And yet, there's a lesson here she needs to learn about seeing other people as people, even if it wouldn't be healthy for her to move all the way to Miss Level's mindset. Tiffany is a precocious kid who is used to being underestimated, and who has reacted by becoming independent and somewhat judgmental. She's also had a taste of real magical power, which creates a risk of her getting too far into her own head. Miss Level is a fount of empathy and understanding for the normal people around her, which Tiffany resists and needed to learn. I think Granny Weatherwax is too much like Tiffany to teach her that. She also has no patience for fools, but she's older and wiser and knows Tiffany needs a push in that direction. Miss Level isn't a destination, but more of a counterbalance. That emotional journey, a conclusion that again focuses on the role of witches in questions of life and death, and Tiffany's fascinatingly spiky mutual respect with Granny Weatherwax were the best parts of this book for me. The middle section with the hiver was rather tedious and forgettable, and the Nac Mac Feegle were entertaining but not more than that. It felt like the story went in a few different directions and only some of them worked, in part because the villain intended to tie those pieces together was more of a force of nature than a piece of Tiffany's emotional puzzle. If the hiver had resonated with the darker parts of Tiffany's natural personality, the plot would have worked better. Pratchett was gesturing in that direction, but he never convinced me it was consistent with what we'd already seen of her. Like a lot of the Discworld novels, the good moments in A Hat Full of Sky are astonishing, but the plot is somewhat forgettable. It's still solidly entertaining, though, and if you enjoyed The Wee Free Men, I think this is slightly better. Followed by Going Postal in publication order. The next Tiffany Aching novel is Wintersmith. Rating: 8 out of 10

This is an interesting idea from Bruce Schneier, an AI Dividend paid to every person for their contributions to the input of ML systems [1]. We can t determine who s input was most used so sharing the money equally seems fair. It could end up as yet another justification for a Universal Basic Income. The Long Now foundation has an insightful article about preserving digital data [2]. It covers the history of lost data and the new challenges archivists face with proprietary file formats. Tesla gets fined for having special Elon mode [3], turns out that being a billionaire isn t an exemption from road safety legislation. Wired has an interesting article about the Olympics Destroyer malware that Russia used to attack the 2018 Olympics [4]. Wired has an interesting article about Marcus Hutchins, how he prevented a serious bot attack and how he had a history in crime when he was a teenager [5]. It s good to see that some people can reform. The IEEE has a long and informative article about what needs to be done to transition to electric cars [6]. It s a lot of work and we should try and do it as fast as possible. Linux Tech Tips has an interesting video about a new cooling system for laptops (and similar use cases for moving tens of watts from a thin space) [7]. This isn t going to be useful for servers or desktops as big heavy heatsinks work well for them. But for something to put on top of a laptop CPU or to have several of them connected to a laptop CPU by heat pipes it could be very useful. The technology of piezo electric cooling devices is interesting on it s own, I expect we will see more of that in future.

• [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/07/the-ai-dividend.html
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/28k5jdjm
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/2cdm5a8k
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/yylsokta
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/y7vzgqo6
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/2bzqn6mg
• [7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdD0yMS40a0

Now that it's more convenient for me to run containers at home, I thought I'd write a bit about web apps I am enjoying. First up, FreshRSS, a web feed aggregator. I used to make heavy use of Google Reader until Google killed it, and although a bunch of self-hosted cloned sprung up very quickly afterwards, I didn't transition to any of them. Then followed a number of years within which, in retrospect, I basically didn't do a great job of organising reading the web. This lasted until a couple of years ago when, on a whim, I tried out NetNewsWire for iOS. NetNewsWire is a well-established and much-loved feed reader for Mac which I've never used. I used the iOS version in isolation for a long time: only dipping into web feeds on my phone and never on another device. I'd like to see the old web back, and do my part to make that happen. I've continually published rss and atom feeds for my own blog. I'm also trying to blog more: this might be easier now that Twitter (which, IMHO, took a lot of the energy for quick writing out of blogging) is mortally wounded. So, I'm giving FreshRSS a go. Early signs are good: it's fast, lightweight, easy to use, vaguely resembles how I remember Google Reader, and has a native dark-mode. It's still early days building up a new list of feeds to follow. I'll be sure to share interesting ones as I discover them!

Phys.org has an interesting article about finding evidence for nanohertz gravity waves [1]. 1nano-Herz is a wavelength of 31.7 light years! Wired has an interesting story about OpenAI saying that no further advances will be made with larger training models [2]. Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders wrote an insightful article about the need for government run GPT type systems [3]. He focuses on the US, but having other countries/groups of countries do it would be good too. We could have a Chinese one, an EU one, etc. I don t think it would necessarily make sense for a small country like Australia to have one but it would make a lot more sense than having nuclear submarines (which are much more expensive). The Roadmap project is a guide for learning new technologies [4]. The content seems quite good. Bigthink has an informative and darkly amusing article Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of futurists hoping for immortality [5]. From this month in Australia psilocybin (active ingredient in Magic Mushrooms) can be prescribed for depression and MDMA (known as Ecstacy on the streets) can be prescribed for PTSD [6]. That s great news! Slate has an interesting article about the Operation Underground Railroad organisation that purports to help sex trafficed chilren [7]. This is noteworthy now with the controverst over the recent movie about that. Apparently they didn t provide much help for kids after they had been rescued and at least some of the kids were trafficed specifically to fulfill the demand that they created by offering to pay for it. Vigilantes aren t as effective as law enforcement. The ACCC is going to prevent Apple and Google from forcing app developers to give them a share of in-app purchases in Australia [8]. We need this in every country! This site has links to open source versions of proprietary games [9]. Vice has an interesting article about the Hungarian neuroscientist Viktor T th who taught rats to play Doom 2 [10]. The next logical step is to have mini tanks that they can use in real battlefields. Like the Mason s Rats episode of Love Death and Robots on Netflix. Brian Krebs wrote a mind boggling pair of blog posts about the Ashley Adison hack [11]. A Jewish disgruntled ex-employee sending anti-semitic harassment to the Jewish CEO and maybe cooperating with anti-semitic organisations to harass him is one of the people involved, but he killed himself (due to mental health problems) before the hack took place. Long Now has an insightful blog post about digital avatars being used after the death of the people they are based on [12]. Tavis Ormandy s description of the zenbleed bug is interesting [13]. The technique for finding the bug is interesting as well as the information on how the internals of the CPUs in question work. I don t think this means AMD is bad, trying to deliver increasing performance while limited by the laws of physics is difficult and mistakes are sometimes made. Let s hope the microcode updates are well distributed. The Hacktivist documentary about Andrew Bunnie Huang is really good [14]. Bunnie s lecture about supply chain attacks is worth watching [15]. Most descriptions of this issue don t give nearly as much information. However bad you thought this problem was, after you watch this lecture you will realise it s worse than that!

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2a7fbx2t
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/25nkg4zs
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/2dm3pl6g
• [4] https://roadmap.sh/roadmaps
• [5] https://bigthink.com/the-future/cryonics-horror-stories/
• [6] https://adf.org.au/insights/magic-mushrooms-medicine/
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/yhxe8aqy
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/2z2xecl7
• [9] https://osgameclones.com/
• [10] https://tinyurl.com/2jmy2hyc
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/2mlhnn3t
• [12] https://longnow.org/ideas/digital-avatars-and-our-refusal-to-die/
• [13] https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/zenbleed.html
• [14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyYsVeYzbik
• [15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqQhWitJ1As

Posted on July 26, 2023

Since some time I ve been thinking about making myself a top or a dress with a wide gathered neckline that can be work at different widths, including off-the-shoulders. A few years ago I ve been gifted a cut of nice, thin white fabric with a print of lines and lozenges that isn t uniform along the fabric, but looks like it was designed for some specific garment, and it was waiting in my stash for a suitable pattern. And a few days ago, during a Sunday lunch, there was an off-hand mention of a dress from the late 1970s which had an elastic in the neckline, so that it could be optionally worn off-the-shoulders. And something snapped in place. I had plans for that afternoon, but they were scrapped, and I started to draw, measure, cut rectangles of fabric, pin and measure again, cut more fabric.

two rectangular tubes for the sleeves laid so that they meet the body just at the corners, and a triangle (a square gusset folded on the diagonal) joins them to the body.

I decided on a pattern made of rectangles to be able to use as much fabric as possible, with the size of each rectangle based mostly on the various sections on the print of the fabric. I ve made the typical sleeves from a rectangle and a square gusset, and then attached them to the body just from the gusset to keep the neckline wide and low. The part of the fabric with large vertical stripes had two different widths: I could have made the back narrower, but I decided to just keep a strip with narrower lines to one side. The fabric also didn t have a full second strip of lozenges, so I had to hem it halfway through it. The casing for the elastic was pieced from various scraps, but at least I was able to match the lines on the center front and back, even if they are different. Not that it matters a lot, since it s all hidden in the gathering, but I would have known. And since I was working on something definitely modern, even if made out of squares and rectangles, of course I decided to hand-sew everything, mostly to be able to use quite small sewing allowances, since the fabric was pretty thin. In my stash I had a piece of swimsuit elastic that feels nice, looks nice and makes a knot that doesn t slip, so I used it. It s a perfect match, except for the neon yellow colour, which I do like, but maybe is a bit too high visibility? I will see if the haberdasher has the same elastic in dark blue, but right now this will do. It was a quick project anyway: by the end of the working week the top was finished; I think that on a sewing machine it would be easy to make it in a day. And it can be worn off the shoulders! Which is something I will probably never do in public (and definitely not outdoors), but now if I wanted I could! :D As usual, the pattern (for what pattern there is) and instructions are on my pattern website under a #FreeSoftWear license, and I ve also added to the site a tip on how I use electrician fish tape to thread things through long casings

A few days ago, I released a major update on blag, my blog-aware static-site generator, which introduces a few backwards-incompatible changes and many improvements over the old version. Good-looking default theme The old bare-bones default theme has been replaced with a good-looking one, based on the one used on this blog: It comes with a light- and dark theme that switches automatically based on the browser setting, as well as fitting light- and dark syntax highlighting themes for code blocks. Improved quickstart The blag quickstart command has been improved. Additionally to generating the configuration, it now also populates the working directory with the templates-, static- and content directories, containing the updated default theme and a few content pages to get you started. No internal fallback templates anymore Related to the changes in quickstart, the internal fallback template has been removed, and blag now completely relies on the templates in the local templates directory. This makes it more transparent for the user what is happening while simplifying blag s internal logic. However, this is a backwards incompatible change! In the case of a missing template, the user will be warned with a hint on how to obtain the missing template. Index and archive are now separate Previously, the front-page would always show the archive of all articles. This is not very useful when your blog contains more than a few dozen articles. With blag 2.0, the previous archive has been split into index and archive, where index is the front-page showing only the most recent 15 articles by default and linking to the archive which shows all articles. There s also two corresponding templates in the templates directory. Miscellaneous

• Various dependencies have been updated.
• blag s documentation has been migrated from Sphinx to MkDocs, which is a bit more lightweight and easier to maintain
• A packaging issue has been fixed, where the tests/conftest.py was missing in the source distribution

Blag 2.0 is available on pypi, debian/unstable and github