It is a cold and damp day here in southeast Michigan, which has me wishing to be back in Phoenix watching the Cubs during spring training.#While the header graphic is not what I normally think of as spring, I did take it in spring while in Phoenix, and I might keep that one there all summer!#
Happy April 2! I need to get the top graphic on this page changed over to something not winter. #
America started developing tunnel vision during the 90s and I think our current state in which the ends is only the destruction of the now is the logical conclusion. Really what we are living through is the beginning of the fall of the American Empire that rose in place starting on August 6, 1945. Washington D.C. is being sacked while most of the nation cheers because the empire has been only serving a minority of citizens. Unfortunately, our tunnel vision prevents us from even considering what might come next.#
Clearly, we did not learn the right lessons from Trump 1.0. The establishment convinced itself it only lost due to Hilary's failure rather than face the message that nearly half the country find the U.S. government beyond redemption, that it needs to be complete destroyed. #
Really enjoyed this post by Dave Rogers: Our Tools Shape Us. I've been using Roam but I am in the process of transitioning fully to Obsidian, although if I am honest what I use most is Drummer, which makes me think that if I ever had used Think Tank I would have loved it. #
I have updated and completed the outline of the books that I read in 2024 and updated its inclusion in the larger total books read since 2020.#
I am not sure that it's really useful, but gone ahead and enabled the Linux Terminal in Android. I created and edited a text file using nano and pinged my home gateway. It's going to be interesting to see uses people come up with for this. #
Lawfar Media has an article about whether the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution applies to Musk. I wish a broader question would be asked. If the founders thought a quid pro quo relationship with U.S officials were bad, why is that relationship worse with foreign states than domestically? In my opinion, these domestic relationships, which include lobbying, are equally bad. Given how much money it takes to win an office, the dependency and consequences are worse! Of course, one cannot have this discussion with fundamentalists.#
Today is the first day of the NCAA men's basketball tournament and the first time I have been able to use the new Xfinity set top box for watching this type of sporting event in which multiple games are occurring at the same time. I am using Xfinity's Sports Zone app and it helps, but I really wish it would provide a way to show multiple games simultaneously like I can with the ESPN app. Looks like this might be possible in some areas but this multiview function doesn't work for me.#
I am pretty sure my Xfinity "cable TV" is actually Internet streaming via this set top rather "traditional" cable TV signal. I see too many occurrences of what I think is buffering that I never saw with traditional cable TV. I got this set top box because the prior one died and while it adds new features it is really slow. #
Google has announced the Pixel 9a, shipping in April. Looks like I can get $165 for trade-in on my Pixel 7a that is two years old. What I am wondering about is whether the there are any new features that I want that I can't have on the 7a. #
What makes liberty, which I define as personal autonomy, real in America are two fundamental things:
When one is accused of a crime they are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
Whether one is guilty of a crime needs to be proven by the state beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of one's peers, or a judge if the accused prefers.
We usually refer to these two items as due process and without it there is no liberty. Further, in our Declaration of Independence we stated that all people, not just U.S. Citizens, are endowed by their creator the right to liberty. Liberty is not provided by the state, it is inherent to who we are as humans. Further, we declared that we create governments for the purposes of preserving these rights.
What are crimes is defined by laws. With the aim of protecting our liberty from individuals and groups who would take it away, which we declared is the purpose of government, our founders created a government that rules by laws, laws written and passed by legislatures made up of people who are voted in to office by citizens to be their representative. This is our form of self government that made America unique in the world at it's founding, and I do not understand how anyone can honestly say the words "Make America Great Again" without accepting and respecting this fundamental tenant.
When one talks about the rule of law they are talking about how people in the United States are ruled. Neither the President nor Congress rule in the United States, the laws are what rule us, and if this rule of law is not respected and upheld by our government the United States of America no longer exists as defined by the U.S. Constitution.
All members of Congress, the President, the Vice President, and Supreme Court Justices take an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. Not respecting, acknowledging or binding oneself to due process and the rule of law is a violation of that oath, which should be an impeachable offense.
I think it is funny that when I first heard about Apple Intelligence, and in particular the plans for a "smarter Siri," my reaction is that if true that is something that could cause me to switch to an iPhone. A year later it appears that presentation was all vaporware and that is creating a kerfuffle.#
Looks like the battery optimization of my Pixel 7a is now re-calibrated so that charging stops at 80%. It looks like after ever monthly update the charge optimization will re-calibrate, which requires the phone to be charged to 100%. #
I don't think the majority of the human species has learned well the lessons of World War II. The fundamental lessons of World War II is that humanity has the willingness and the capability to destroy itself. In other words, humanity can, and without the required maturity will, cause it's own extinction. The United States emphatically demonstrated this in dropping nuclear bombs on Japan. For most of my life we have lived in the fear of this knowledge, aka the fear of nuclear war, but we have not really learned the lessons about how we need to change. Wars and weapons of war are rooted in fear. Greed is really driven by fear. I think that fear is driven by seeing ourselves as apart from the other, which I think is the point of the story in Genesis 3.#
Android Authority has the information about what is happening with the Android charging optimization. Occasionally the phone will charge to 100% to calibrate and need to keep it on charger for a while until you see a shield indicating calibration is complete.#
I've written a few posts using Wordland, just to check it out. I have three Wordpress sites that I have not been maintaining due to lack of time and energy, but one of those sites was my primary blog for many years and I cross p ost what I publish on micro.blog to it as a form of backup. Back when I could and wanted to, I consolidated all my posting, including Twitter and Facebook on to that site as a "one stop shop." Found out that there is a separate Wordland RSS feed that keeps what I write using it separate from everything else on that Wordpress site. You will find it here. #
Happy St. Patrick's day! Weather in March is such a Michigan thing. One day you can have temps in the 70s and the next day the temps are in the 30s and it is snowing. Winter does not go away without a fight, but it will lose! #
This Carnegie Mellon paper on polarization in America is long, so I uploaded a PDF copy to Google Notebook for summarization and further interaction in the future.#
I restarted my Pixel 7a due to the latest monthly update being pushed to my phone and once again it seems that the Charging Optimization setting to stop charging at 80% is either reset or overlooked. I have gone in to settings, turned off charging optimization, and then turned it back on, which seemed to "fix" the problem last month.#
I agree with so much of what is said by Chris Hedges says in this interview. If despair is the main tool of fascism then optimism is the main tool of resistance. Jesus says, do not be afraid!#
Everything I see so far from the "press" and other media outlets seem to assume that upcoming elections are a threat to the Republican majority. All of these references appear to assume that future elections will be legitimate, but I think that assumption is dangerous. Do you think that neither Trump nor his supporters learned from 2020? For that matter, is Congress really relevant? If Democrats had a majority right now, would it matter? #
I am afraid that we need to start talking more about liberty and what it actually means as it has been taken for granted and distorted to mean much. For me, agency such as described by Annie here in the section titled Radical responsibility, is fundamental to what I think is liberty.#
The fundamental issue is trust and that none of the existing institutions and its office holders have done anything to earn that trust. Party affiliation provides an element of trust, but that has been eroding as both parties no longer act in a manner consistent to their past values. Trust is most often earned through consistent actions.#
I fear that all of the talk about Trump's alignment with Putin falls on deaf hears, mainly because less people are alive today who lived during the time when the Soviet Union was the enemy. When one doesn't trust institutions then any claims made by them is ignored if not ridiculed.#
Hello March! Looking forward to warmer weather.#
Looks like Dave has a simple utility for viewing/displaying a RSS subscription list. I think this will link to mine. Wish Dave would turn this into a simple editor, all I would want is to add and delete items easily. A bonus would be some type of check to see which feeds have been updated recently.#
Just upgraded Rusk Desk on this remote desktop and set the default codec to AV1#
I am using Rust Desk as my primary remote access tool for the last couple of weeks and I am really happy, however, I do see occasional instances of display distortion that I clear up by changing the codec. My guess is that the distortion is caused by the wireless connectivity of my work PC. RDP drops the connection all together while VNC drops and automatically reconnects and both are more disruptive than what I experience with Rust Desk.#
At one point in time of my life I thought I was going to be a high school teacher. I can't imagine being a high school teacher today. How do you separate your own opinions and emotions about what is going on in the world today? #
Tried out Wordland and it looks to be an ok way for writing a post in Wordpress as it has all the basics. Most of what gets posted to my old Wordpress blog are what is cross-posted from my main blog using IFTTT. Today my Wordpress site is mainly a backup though it provides some continuity back to 2008.#
Because I don't know when Dave is going to shut off Feedland, I copied the feedlist I created there to Drummer where I can edit it for use with River5. I have not spent much time regarding my own instance of FeedLand behind installing mySQL. There is a high probability that I just use this file in Drummer rather than build my own instance.#
Here is a really good article describing a use case for Google NotebookLM: searching car manual information. I followed the instructions for installing NotebookLM on the "home screen" of my Pixel 7a. #
I have optimized charging configured for my Pixel 7a, which should stop charging when the battery is at 80%. I have noticed the last several days it going above that amount. I looked at the settings and it says occasionally it will be charged to 100% for calibration, which appears to be what happened today. Need to monitor this.#
Second consecutive day of cold temps. Brrr..#
I am currently in day 3 of a 4 day weekend. I spent most of day 1, which was Valentine's Day, with my wife. Yesterday and today I've spent at home, puttering with my homelab. The main fruit of my labor has been provisioning and configuring Homepage as my new homelab dashboard. When I built my first homelab server on a Raspberry Pi 4 a few years back I used Homer, but I did not maintain it very well. An article I recently read recommended Homepage and so I decided to give it a go.#
I wonder, if Dave is souring on hosting his apps, what that means for Drummer? Last I looked through Dave's repos I didn't see one for Drummer by which I mean the app behind https://drummer.land. Also wondering about http://oldschool.scripting.com, which is Dave's subdomain to which this blog is being published. I do think there is a way for my own instance of OldSchool but I am have to think hard about whether I want to go that far. #
A consequence of Dave shutting down the public instance of FeedLand is that the blogroll to the right of this page will stop working. I'll probably remove the blogroll at that time. My plan is to only host FeedLand on my home network as I don't really need a public instance just for myself. #
Feedland uses mySQL, which I don't really know so step one is getting myself familiar with it. I used the Proxmox mysql helper script to provision a new container running mySQL. This is a good opportunity to learn something new! #
Dave has announced that he is shutting down his hosting of Feedland. There is a way to self host that I will explore. I am using FeedLand to manage my RSS subscription list, though I do use it to check my feeds for thing each day because I think it is slightly better retaining older updates than River5. I am thinking I can run my own instance of FeedLand on the same server in my home lab that is running River5. I need to do this by the end of March.#
I wonder what it is that the Trump administration has to do for the majority of folks to realize the U.S. Constitution is no more? Is it that he has to refuse the courts? Fail to enforce laws passed by Congress? The whole point of the Constitution is to instill self (citizens) government and prevent tyranny. #
BTW, while troubleshooting I connected to this new desktop using RDP and it had a disconnect nearly right out of the hop. It dawned on me, however, that I might want to fiddle with the network connection options. I wonder whether I switched to WAN if that will make the RDP client more tolerant of issues? #
- Today will be my first full work day using the new Ubuntu and KDE Plasma remote desktop container connecting using Rust Desk. Let's see how this goes.#
- I've made it through most of the work day and did not experience one disconnect while using Rust Desk. I did see some video display sheer, but that seem to go away when I switched from teh VP9 codec it defaults to to the VP8 codec. More troubling is the strange keyboard behavior. #
- I use the Logitech MX Keys keyboard that is a near standard keyboard with a numeric keypad. By near standard I mean that in between the QWERTY keyboard and numeric keypad is a section of keys for page up, page down, home, end, insert, delete, and arrow keys that is not recognized in Chrome. I have to un-lock the numeric keypad and use the equivalent functions on it. However, this behavior does not exist when I am in the Readwise Reader app, in that app (browser tab) the "middle" Page Up and Page Down keys work and the numeric keypad is always numbers no matter when or not it is locked. I've also found that the Page Up/Down sequence of Command+Up Arrow and Command+Down Arrow doesn't work from the Mac OS client on the Macbook Pro, which I find really surprising.#
- Rust Desk is not very well documented. There are many options once connected that I don't understand and so far I haven't seen documentation about how to find out what they are. #
Playing around with Arch and Raycast. I have created a Raycast Quicklink to open Drummer, and it opens the app. #
I've been using Rust Desk Windows client to connect to a Lubuntu desktop running in a VM hosted in Proxmox all day and so far I have not had one disconnect or disruption like i"ve experienced with RDP and VNC. Performance of this VM is a bit less than a container, so I would like to build a desktop in a container, but for now this VM will do.#
I may have found a remote desktop solution that will work more reliably on my home network, it's called Rust Desk. I tried installing and using it on my existing remote desktops, but that would not work until I tried it with an old VM running Lubuntu. As that VM is running on a Proxmox node that seems to be having some disk problems, I built a new VM on my newest/fasted Proxmox host. So far I am happy with the result except that I can't seem to increase the resolution beyond 1920x1080. #
Found that if I set the display in Proxmox to VirtIO-GPU then I can increase the resolution and I have it set to 2048x1152, which is not the resolution I've been using for RDP and VNC but better than the above. I may fiddle with this more over time. I think 3840x2160 with a global scaling factor of 1.5 is just right. #