gopher://aussies.space/1/~freet/phlog The free-floating phantasms resident in the mind of The Free Thinker, brought home to you in 68 columns of plain-text purity by the kind generosity of your local neighbourhood Gopher. en-au https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html Mon, 16 Sep 2024 09:03:11 +1000 gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2024-09-16Aleksandr_Getting_Smarter.txt ALEKSANDR GETS SMARTER Oh damn, after over a year, 'Aleksander' the spammer from 2023-04-13My_Turn_With_Aleksandr.txt has finally read spamming 101 and removed the header I was using to filter his emails, as well as changed the Subject and the name used in From. "Subject: Offer" and "From: Alex <info@*" might be a filterable combination, but that depends if they start changing like the email domains and IP addresses do. Or maybe I've harvested enough of his IP addresses by logging past blocked emails that I can use that as an effective IP blacklist now? Unfortunately I haven't got time - too busy failing to make money as usual - so I'll just have to put up with them for now. I guess I do sort-of see why all the big email providers set up rules that stop email from random servers like mine getting through to people, though I'm still the guy in the corner of the room shouting "but it shouldn't be this way!" at the moment, and looking for more intelligent solutions. No time for writing more interesting phlog posts than this either unfortunately, and I need to get onto preparing for the 3G turn-off now pushed back to the end of October too. Not looking too hopeful for optical ROOPHLOCHing... Oh, one other bit of news. I replaced the noisy fan in my 22yo laptop with a replacement bought from Aliexpress. It was a perfect match to the original and works well - amazing that you can get a replacement relatively cheaply as NOS (by description and appearance, though it's possibly a very well cleaned pull) after all these years, though I think it's almost the only part where that's still the case. As much as I hate the Web, and indeed the Aliexpress website, it is kinda wonderful what it allows you to buy sometimes if you look hard enough. - The Free Thinker gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2024-09-07ROOPHLOCH_Alert.txt ROOPHLOCH ALERT Doing some weekend phlog checking I noticed Solderpunk has announced ROOPHLOCH 2024 and the news hasn't made it to Bongusta! yet so far as I can see, so hopefully this post will rectify that: gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/announcing-roophloch-2024.txt This isn't a ROOPHLOCH post, I'm sat at home waiting for the washing to finish, but my optical data receiver has been clogging up my workbench ever since I never got a transmitter built to go with it for last year's ROOPHLOCH, and Solderpunk's put out a challenge now that might finally spurr me to do just that. Then again, the weather lately hasn't been very welcoming to outdoor phlogging - wind gusts of over 130Km/hr last weekend. It calmed down now though, and besides the lid from my recycleables bin blowing off into lands unknown, no damage done (my carport reinforcements made since it fell down last time held up). So watch this space... or, well mainly that space at the link above, since that's what this post is about. You know what I mean. - The Free Thinker gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2024-08-25Review_-_Dostoevskys_Travels_1991.txt REVIEW: DOSTEVSKY'S TRAVELS It was a nice warm Saturday yesterday, in between bursts of rain. Warm enough for me to dispense with clothes for most of the day, for the first time in a while. So between laying around in the sun naked and cutting open old engine oil filters to compare their internal construction, I decided to combine my own quirky habits with a lunchtime viewing of one of the quirkier documentaries I know, caught recently with its film reel poking out of the BBC's vaults into the unknown depths of YouTube. Dostoevsky's Travels (1991): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PxkeFhzItE On Vimeo (untested): https://vimeo.com/307839240 If you're into quirky documentaries, then this screen-grab alone is probably enough to convince you it's worth a watch, but I'll talk about it more regardless: https://jff.org.il/sites/default/files/styles/slide_show/public/dostoevskys_travels_-_cat.jpg Dostoevsky's Travels follows Dimitri Dostoevsky, St Petersburg tram driver and great-granson of the famous 19th centry Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, on his first journey to Western Europe at the beginning of the 1990s, just as the Communist government in Russia was collapsing. A 52min documentary made early in the career of Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski and published by the BBC in 1991, this observational film tags along with Dimitri when he's invited into Germany to speak with a newly founded German Dostoevsky society. In spite of the literary association, this film isn't really about the works of the famous auther, who I haven't read myself. Instead it captures a unique time in history where the western european ellite was facinated with the new cultural, and most particularly, business, potential of an open capitalist Russia then ermerging from behind the iron curtain. Dostoevsky's 19th century novels seem to have been a good match for the right-wing visions of Russia's future being juggled around by the european aristocracy which had been cut off from the country since the Russian Revolution. From a German casino looking to expand into St Petersburg, to people trying to restore the Russian Monarchy, and the mayor who secures him a visa in exchange for some promotional work, Dimitri mages to stumble between various people interested in using his name, though not his own artistic talents, to their own ends. Yet Dimitri doesn't really care about any of that, all he wants is to make enough money to buy a Mercedes and drive it back home to St Petersburg. Altogether this makes for a funny, tragic, and insightful film. At one point he's translating for a blind German car dealer selling cars at a shady maket for Russian soldiers said to be offereing anything from weapons to wives in exchange for a western motor. He stays with a monk claiming to have been exiled from Russia by word of God rather than by the Communist government. Then later he drives a borrowed Ferrari into Lichtenstein to meet his only relative in the West, Baron von Falz-Fein, at his villa where he meets a young man who the baron hopes to place as the next Tsar of Russia. Presenting itself in a purely observational style, there are certain aspects to this documentary which my cynical side has to proclaim as a little 'too good'. Besides the almost perfect beginning, middle, and end to the storyline, some shots are too well framed and timed to have been taken without a degree of staging. Indeed you can easily see how the director has since transitioned to making fictional feature films. Indeed a skeptic like me begins to wonder how much of the story itself is actually true, although it's hard to imagine how many of the important scenes could be completely faked on the budget of a one-hour foreign BBC documentary. Research online isn't terribly rewarding. There's no corresponding Dimitri Dostoevsky known to the internet today except through references to this documentary, plus a very odd biography of a Russian actor by the same name, starring in Soviet-era film versions of Fyodor Dostoevsky's works, but who is said to have died in 1985: https://guidedoc.tv/people/dimitri-dostoevsky-39199/ But IMDB doesn't list a Dimitri Dostoevsky in the credits for those films! https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062757/fullcredits/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051762/fullcredits/ It seems like this is another case of the internet consciousness being corrupted by a wayward AI website content generator that's worked out there's an association with Dimitri Dostoevsky and Fyodor Dostoevsky in film work due to the documentary, then spiraled off from that into completely senseless fiction. Then again, the documentary does mention Dimitri helping in an unspecified way with 'The Posessed', a later film adaptation of a Dostoyevsky novel. IMDB lists that as released in 1988 and there's no Dimitri Dostoevsky in the credits for it either: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093765/fullcredits/ One person who I could follow up on was Baron Eduard von Falz-Fein, a rather facinating figure himself who died in a fire at his villa in 2018 at the age of 106. His biographies online seem to back up everything shown in the documentary, including photos of the richly furnished villa where he meets Dimitri in the film, and his ambition to restore the Russian monarchy. He also seems to have been extremely active in promoting his home country of Lichtenstein to the world, whose prince at the time of the Russian Revolution granted him and his family citizenship when they fled from Russia. His promotion of the country was helped by, or perhaps more cynically because of, his tourist shop business, positioned to accomodate American tourists diverted to Lichtenstein for lunch after he pointed out to US tour operators that this would easily allow them to advertise touring eleven countries instead of ten. The success of this business apparantly restored him his family's traditional position of wealth and influence that would have been impossible for the Dostoyevsky family back in Communist Russia. A fun 1970s New York Times article on the baron: https://www.nytimes.com/1973/04/08/archives/if-you-can-find-liechtenstein-the-baron-will-be-waiting.html A 2023 Paper about the Baron's life "A Russian Aristocrat in the Principality of Liechtenstein: Life Trajectories, Material Culture, and Language": https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/culture-2022-0172/html Gopherpedia page: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Eduard%20von%20Falz-Fein Oh and it seems _he_ is on IMDB, as a production manager for a 1950s movie set in Lichtenstein, as well as appearances in a couple of other TV documentaries: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4502417/ As for the documentary's director, Pawel Pawlikowski, there are a few other documentary works from him available on the web. So far I've only watched Tripping With Zhirinovsky from 1995 - a less narrative-driven observational documentary following a right-wing politician compaigning from a old Soviet-era cruise ship that ironically still has a red star painted on its bow. The documentary itself lacks many of the better qualities in Dostoevsky's Travels, but the politician it documents, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, can be seen sharing traits of right-wing western politicians such as Donald Trump today. He makes innumerable promises on the shakiest of policy ideas (forcing Germany to pay reparations to Russia for deaths in WWII), and seems willing to try anything to further his political career (launching his own vodka brand even though his own campaign song mentions that he doesn't drink). Then again, I just don't like politicians. Tripping With Zhirinovsky (1995) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIbkR5NXVP4 "From Moscow to Pietushki" apparantly has a similar concept to Dostoevsky's Travels, following a living Russian author, and was released a year earlier. From Moscow to Pietushki (1990): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orAZ6q35q0M Serbian Epics documents the more serious topic of the Bosnian War, and seems to have been Pawlikowski's most successful film before he switched to fictional works. Serbian Epics (1992) https://archive.org/details/SerbianEpics1992 https://vimeo.com/308405461 - The Free Thinker gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2024-08-22Warlink.txt WARLINK OSINT, or Open Source Intelligence, is a product of the internet era that I find quite interesting. The idea is assembling the wealth of public information available on the internet to document military and related information. There's a lot of information out there which was previously only all accessible to those with the resources of national intelligence agencies, and now it just takes one guy with a computer. To be honest my examples of good OSINT sources are pretty limited, just two websites. I'd like to find more but many in this space seem to sell articles to media organisations rather than document all their findings clearly and concisely on one free website, which to be fair probably offers little direct financial reward for their efforts. There are probably some busy making YouTube videos to appeal to the masses too, but I don't like that medium for this sort of topic. "Russian strategic nuclear forces" is relatively infrequently updated with short posts, but there are some interesting longer articles in their blog's archive about aspects of Russian, and also US, nuclear weaponry, strategy, and politics: https://russianforces.org/ But the best one, with ample time-wasting potential via the related links at the bottom of each article page, is Covert Shores: http://www.hisutton.com/ Primarily about sea-going military and smuggling vessles, particular underwarer, the author (who also draws excellent cut-away diagrams) has become quite focused on unmanned craft, for both sea and sky. This space has advanced massively during the war in Ukraine as their army seems capable of producing an infinite variety of very different 'drone' war machines. In turn Russia, and actually all the world's military powers (even us Aussies), are responding with their own derivative projects for what often amount to robot bombs. Remote guided missiles are nothing new, rather incredibly they were in development by the Americans all the way back at the end of WWII, complete with video transmitted by a missile back to its controller in the aircraft it launched from. The limitation really has been that transmission aspect - how to control these weapons from a properly safe distance away. The US military's drone programme of course cracked it a long time ago with satellites relaying transmissions from their drones over Afghanistan (or any country where you don't want to be), back in fact to places like their base in the middle of the Australian outback at Pine Gap. Starlink and its mostly-vaporware competitors have been promising this sort of global satellite data capability to any guy with the cash, and it's not surprising that the US military has been said to be one of Starlink's big financial backers. Now though, it's interesting to see Starlink dishes appearing on both Ukranian and Russian naval drones in these articles: http://www.hisutton.com/Ukraine-USV-Jetski.html http://www.hisutton.com/Russia-USVs-ARMY-2024.html Whether the Russians are actually using Starlink, or if they're hoping to use an equivalent LEO satellite internet service run from a more friendly country like China, one can only guess. Since the Chinese are ramping up their StarLink copy project, Qianfan, the Starlink dish(y) on the Russian naval drone is probably some degree of stand-in for a future Chinese equivalent. https://www.space.com/china-first-launch-internet-satellite-megaconstellation So what this shows is that warfare is entering a new era where advanced satellite communication is no longer dominated by the superpowers. Interestingly, wheras GPS and its Russian equivalent Glonass are military projects that revolutionised civilian life, LEO internet constellation satellites are outwardly civilian projects that seem set to revolutionise global military strategy. - The Free Thinker gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2024-08-18Week_Thoughts.txt WEEK THOUGHTS I haven't been finding much time for phlog posts this month. Partly it's just that the cold winder weather, relenting a bit now, has put me off spending long at the desk where this old computer lives (somehow I can't get into writing these posts on a laptop). Plus there's my usual issue of too many computer-based projects which means I want to use my remaining time in less computational company. I'm really not doing very well at finishing those things either. So, while the washing's going, here's another one of my condensed weekly thoughts run downs. DOCUMENTATION The Raspberry Pi Pico 2 was released recently and its datasheet is reportedly 1347 pages, up from 644 pages with the first Pico. This length isn't that unusual, and hard to compare fairly since many datasheets for microcontrollers/SoCs point at lots of other documents for details on specifics. But the trouble with this is that it's barely practical to even skim over the contents. Contents pages and indexes are often misleading, probably because the length makes them too hard to compile as well, what I think everyone does is just read a few likely bits and word-search for things they don't see. That's fine if it works, but when it doesn't you're left with wondering which of the 993 pages that you didn't look at has the info you missed, and how do you find it without spending days actually reading the thing properly? It's the same with standards. The Pico datasheet is now between the USB 2.0 standard and the current Bluetooth standard in length. All the standards for the Web now are endless. If you see someone mention that in a forum when they're trying to develop something then the typical response is "well of course you don't have to read all of it, just look at the bits on x, y, and z, starting on page 1825". But then in that it refers to something on page 1053, and you misinterpret that because you didn't read page 671, and you don't know about the simpler alternative system on page 284 which does all you need anyway. Oh, except in the example on page 2934 it's noted how that system is never used in practice anymore. Also since the writers then attempt to avoid all that confusion by summarising things, you end up with the document growing exponentially as each section begins with a summary of info in previous sections in case you didn't bother to read them. The only limit on this used to be the physical cost of printing these documents out, but since computers have eliminated that restriction it's able to spiral completely out of control. I predict a future where engineers all just ask AI what the standards say because nobody would live long enough to read them all, and entire hardware/software infrastructures are built wrongly based on the AI's misinterpretations, then nobody can make it work anymore when the AI is changed and starts interpreting correctly/differently. In fact that's probably already beginning. COMPUTER POWER The power consumption of the cloud has become a concern even outside of technology circles. I'm not sure how this can be so singled out though. It may be a source of growth in energy consumption, but theoretically physical resource efficiency should be one of the few real features cloud computing has going for it. People share hardware instead of each having their own. That's why it's cheap, no? If the VPS I use for my website is using tons of electricity, then the $1/month I'm paying for it must be making them a big loss after counting their electricity costs. Same with the disks storing its automated backups for free on Oracle Cloud. OK so it all adds up, and it's true that speculation about AI has funded a new surge of expansion, but surely the things that actually cost all of us money are going to be bigger net energy consumers than these cheap/free computer services? They can't really be the place to start saving the planet. More likely they're just something conveniently out of sight for individuals to point a finger at while still buying a new smartphones, cars, and overseas holidays every few years. TONER SCAVENGING I've been 'collecting' used toner carts, which I generate a fair few of through my business activities, for years. They have potentially useful things in them which I hate to throw away, not least the remaining toner inside since you can never use them up completely. A couple of weeks ago my power was off for the day so I finally pulled them all apart on my verandah. I tried not to make a mess, but it didn't work, and the rain hasn't really washed it away since, oh well. Pics of the result are here: gopher://aussies.space/1/~freet/photos/teardowns/toner_carts/ It took me one or two of each type of cart before I got the method figured out - the easy way often isn't obvious. My 3D printed COVID mask came back into service to stop me breathing in the toner that wafts out. Last time I tried to do it indoors, which whas a mistake - better to have a light breeze to blow it away. I think I got about enough toner to refill three of the smaller toner carts that I use, and which are easier to refil than the awkward big HP ones like the one shown in the first pic (I tried refilling one of those once and failed miserably/messily). The gears are cool, the metal rods/tubes should be useful, the scrws maybe handy, the other metal bits probably not so much but easy to store, the plastic shells... well they're a problem. While the toner cartridges were intact I could drop them off at a cartridge recycling bin. What do they actually reuse? I don't know, but _maybe_ they reuse the plastic. Now they're apart though, can I recycle them? The council website says they accept "rigid plastics" at one tip location (about 40min drive away, and shut at most times convenient to me), but I think they just mean HDPE, PET, etc. plastic bottles. These don't have any recycling code on them, so I don't know the plastic. They're obviously a thermoplastic so they _could_ be recycled, but it looks like I'd have to put them in the rubbish. Or I could resurrect my unfinished 3D printing filament plastic extruder project, but I never really ended up doing enough 3D printing to justify that, and there's too much big competition now to make a business from it (yes, this was another one of my aborted business plans, back when home 3D printing was new). So, environmentally, was this good recycling or bad recycling? Maybe if I'd dumped them all in a cartridge recycling bin the plastic would be reused, but I wouldn't have been able to use the toner and other parts. Maybe they would have just got out the toner and sent the rest to the tip anyway? Fact is that the toner saves me $60 in new carts (somehow I've never been able to find a supplier selling toner for refills cheaper than new toner carts themselves), plus the extra bits, so I figure the recycling method that saves me money comes first. It still doesn't quite feel right though. - The Free Thinker gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2024-08-15Necrotechnology.txt NECROTECHNOLOGY Although I resist categorisation and hurd mentality anyway, it does strike me how I tick many boxes of groups here in Gopherspace without quite feeling I'm one of them. I stick with my old computers, mostly a mid-90s desktop and an early 2000s laptop, more recently backed up by my headless 'internet client' Atomic Pi SBC, which with its 1.44GHz Intel Atom CPU and 2GB DDR3 RAM is still the sort of thing people use in that Old School Computer Challenge. The permacomputing mob seems more political and idealistic than practical, while retrocomputing is often about trying out new things with old hardware, and not just doing the same old things everyday with the same old hardware like me (though I dabble in the former for fun sometimes too). There's also the software. I'm just as happy with sticking to old software as old hardware. So far as I can see both reached a point in time when, maybe by deliberate effort, maybe as the result of compromises that the developers themselves weren't happy with, something was created that worked just right for my purposes. A software developer might have since gone on to write new programs on top of a string of bloated libraries, or with stupid smart-phone-inspired graphical interfaces, or in some inefficient scripting language that only runs similarly fast on a top-spec PC bought in the last couple of years. A hardware developer might have scrapped customisability and repairability in preference for sleek design and reduced maufacturing costs, or compromised on the quality of construction and electronic components, or failed to achieve a thermal design that allows the components to last for more than a few years. Those developers, or their employers, might hate the work they did years ago. Even hide it away, deleted from their websites in shame. Given the chance they'd probably erase it from the global consciousness, if indeed they remember it still themselves. But in fact those abandoned works serve my purpose far better than their services today. I've realised that what I want is dead hardware and software. Technology harvested at the point where it does what I need, before the rot of alternative ideas and techniques withers it away. Therefore I've decided that I'm a necrotechnologist, out to reap usefulness from the abandoned wastelands of technology's past. Do what you like with your new software, standards, encryption schemes, and transistor count dreams, I'll be here peeking out from the scrapheap of tech left behind you. - The Free Thinker