======= Books ======= This month was themed with the local censorship reaching YouTube, employing DPI to drop some of the packets directed to it (making YouTube videos challenging to watch without censorship circumvention tools, but still possible to extract information out of), while claiming that those are Google's technical issues. From personal observations, even casual users are unhappy about it, discussing "VPN" (by which they mean proxying, but apparently even non-VPN proxying software advertises itself as "VPN" now: just as X.509 certificates and TLS are advertised as "SSL", and numerous other common inaccuracies), though apparently understanding the situation even to a lesser extent than it is viable from the currently available information. There are other things going on, of course, of the violent kind, but those do not affect daily lives of most people as directly. I decided to revise my backups, including those of public (non-personal) data, and to look into bookbinding: maybe will try making paper backups of books. That is, print and bind physical books. Books are relatively information-dense, and such backups may be useful in case of an even worse censorship and isolation. So far considering an A4 laser printer (likely Brother, I hear good things about those), which is relatively small and inexpensive, and some ISO 9706-compliant paper, which is also inexpensive and easy to acquire. That would suffice for A5 books with single folding and stitching, which is a nice bookbinding method, and A4 books (perhaps the majority of books of interest are like that, and hard to reduce to A5: PDFs and scans of textbooks) with individual pages, bound using binding screws, which would not be as nice, but easy, and still long-lasting (unlike gluing, as with "perfect binding", although I hear that some people reinforce such gluing with side stitching, even though side stitching is said to be only suitable for thinner books). Or maybe I should aim an A3 printer at once: books themselves would take more space than the printer would anyway, and it may be a relatively good use of money. Or not as good, if things will finally improve here. While considering which books I would like to print, I decided to read a few as well. Started reading a few philosophy books, though only finished one of those so far: "Think: A compelling Introduction to Philosophy" by Simon Blackburn. It looks good, even though it is brief, and yet again I noticed that I read books in a wrong order: would have been better to read this one much earlier, delaying some of the others, but better late than never. Perhaps I should pick future ones more carefully, though I imagine it can be tricky: as with most things, reading goes well when there is an interest, which may spark unexpectedly, and which is tricky to plan for. But now reading a history book: The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume III (the XX century). This is the topic most censored and most actively rewritten here, and quite interesting to me now, since it is hard to not wonder how the current mess came to be, what led to it. Other than that, still slowly working through the physics textbook (still chapter 6, solving problems after it, 1-2 per day), and skimmed some RPG rule books (Ironsworn in particular looks nice, and freely available, though I still have not tried to actually play any such RPGs), which also seem potentially useful to have stored. Maybe I should look into some e-zine (or other periodical, blog) archives: I imagine that textual ones (including, say, LaTeX sources) can be also quite information-dense and fun to read. Especially if there is nothing else to read. This whole situation gives me flashbacks to boredom in the pre-Internet times (back when it was not available to me here, that is), without decent books or guidance for those. Meantime, I have finally set USB flash drives for an off-site backup: flash memory is not ideal for backups in general, but more robust than HDDs when it comes to physical transfer. 256 GB thumb drives are inexpensive these days, a little above $20 here; Kingston ones actually have less usable space than even 256e9 bytes (possibly starting with 256e9, which also includes spare and bad sectors): something close to 231 GiB, which is 227 GiB of total space with ext4, 215 GiB of available space (though perhaps it makes sense to disable space reserved for root on such USB flash drives). Write speed was about 1 MiB/s on average, though apparently higher once I switched to writing from a laptop (since the workstation had occasional USB disconnects) and started writing onto another USB stick via another port. I skipped dm-integrity for those, since wiping would have been too slow at such a speed, and without wiping there are errors on ext4 creation; besides, that authenticated disk encryption support is experimental, and would have reduced the available space even further. In other news, I have leveled up at pull-ups a little more: switched to single sets of 16, though the last one is challenging, and it took a while. Apparently reached a plateau, at least with the current exercise regime and diet, though my aim is just to stay in a fine shape, which does not necessarily involve ever-increasing numbers of repetitions. Speaking of a diet, I tried a peach cobbler for the first time, loosely following the recipe (but with a little more flour, to reach a suitable batter consistency, with less sugar, with cinnamon added into peaches as well). It is delicious, and the recipe is quite easy: similar to pancakes, allowing to eyeball the proportions and adjust for a sensible consistency, and having few ingredients. Work and chores go mostly as usual, new ones keep coming. Sometimes it reminds me of the Red Queen's race, or even the myth of Sisyphus when it is more annoying, though either of those works as a metaphor for any kind of upkeep. Also considering ear training lately: I imagine that it would be nice to be able to transcribe (and then play) melodies from memory or upon hearing them. Though I suspect it may take a while, and there is not quite enough of time and energy for all the things as it is. So likely I will postpone this, in order to have a chance to complete some of the other planned activities. ---- :Date: 2024-08-25