Misc thoughts

Recently we bought a coffee machine, after postponing it for 7 years or so, and Biljana looked up all kinds of coffee, and of course she went down one of those rabbit holes on the Internet, with scientific research of health benefits of all kinds of coffee, and the only kind that had no demonstrable benefits, but increased probability of some nasty degenerative eye disease in old age, was instant coffee.

My comment: “And of course that’s what we’ve been drinking for the last 20 years.” 🙂

I guess the lesson is that sometimes you shouldn’t postpone buying the coffee machine.

On a different note, the iPhone 17 just came out and there’s all kinds of talk about how its camera is great. Yeah, like the last seven or so models of iPhone, which tempt you to not to carry your proper camera around because you always have the iPhone with you, and as a result, years later all your pictures are taken with the iPhone and they are all full of digital and optical artefacts and unprintable to anything comparable to what a real camera would do. Also, a current iPhone costs around 1500 EUR. Do you even realise what a great camera and lens combo you can get for this amount of money? That’s a Canon RP with a RF 35mm f/1.8 lens. And in two to four years, you’ll do that again, just flush 1500 EUR down the drain for no good reason. Smartphones are such an incredible waste of money, because they give you absolutely no added value over the older model. It’s like a subscription service to being an idiot. Unfortunately, you actually need to have one today. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be a new one.

Today I finished installing the new glassy-looking OS on all my Apple devices. It’s not that I hate glassy look in general; Vista was actually quite nice and looked sophisticated. This, however, looks like something that was hastily patched up by people with no taste, and sometimes it actually reduces functionality. That’s the problem with “progress” for the sake of just fucking with things that work well so that you can tell people you did something new, because it’s expected that you do. How about designing a window manager that knows how to snap windows properly, or a file manager that isn’t dog shit? Something that would actually serve some useful purpose? No?

I heard some professional photographer talking how bokeh is bullshit invented by lens manufacturers so that people wouldn’t mind buying expensive lenses that create images that are mostly blurry. It just goes to show that being a professional just means that’s how you earn most of your money. It doesn’t mean that you know what you’re talking about, or that you’re good at what you do. You just know how to charge for it.

The blurry part cost a lot of money.

Sure, it makes sense to say that picture is about the sharp part. However, the not sharp part is the package that presents it. Flowers on a table in the restaurant aren’t the point of lunch, because you don’t eat them, but they are a nice thing to see.

There are several parameters that define usability of a lens, the way I see it. It’s how sharp can it get things that are in focus, how close it can focus, how much can you open the aperture to both gather light and vary the depth of field, what’s the focal length/range, does it introduce optical mess into the image (CA, flare etc.) and how convenient/practical is it to work with. The ability to blur out the background in ways that will look nice might not be important if you shoot only landscapes in ways that make everything sharp, or if you shoot portraits in a studio in front of a uniform background, then bokeh rendering doesn’t matter. If that’s all you do, great, you’ll save lots of money on lenses that are designed to render good bokeh. Good for you.

Another thing crossed my mind, regarding the last article. Someone is asking themselves why God allowed this trap to be created as a test for us, that it’s not right to subject us to such a traumatic and potentially fatal test. I’m rolling my eyes right now, because God didn’t ask us to do anything he, himself wasn’t willing to do, either male or female. Remember the guy called Jesus? Born into a carpenter’s family in a barn because they had no room in the taverns and his family wasn’t important. Taught things that irrevocably altered the Western civilization and got crucified for it, which is one of the nastiest ways to die. Then rose from the dead to show that death is not the end, and afterlife isn’t some vague shadow world.

Or Krishna and his girls? Oh, he had a super easy life, being born in a jail cell where his evil uncle imprisoned his parents because of a prophecy, and they smuggled him out and gave him to some peasants to raise, so he grew up as a shepherd instead of a prince. Also, everybody kept trying to kill him, and then his best friend and his family got exiled into the jungle, which ended up in a bloody mess. It’s all told like a nice story in the books, but think about how you’d have handled half of that stuff.

Not only was God here multiple times as male and female, but s/he also doesn’t actually pick fancy and rosy incarnations. Some are, just to show that s/he doesn’t get distracted by material wealth and power. Some are absolute shit, like that of Jesus, and still major world-altering scripture is written about how well he did. I won’t even get into the level of horror I had to deal with, or the stuff my girls had to deal with. That never stopped people from thinking we had it so easy compared to them, who had it so hard. God’s incarnations always look so easy and effortless – because God is so much more transcendental, holy and pure than you are. God doesn’t wallow in mud because there’s no mud in his path, but because he just doesn’t feel like wallowing in it. God doesn’t rise above temptation because s/he wasn’t subjected to it, but because s/he is holy. (I’m writing God as dual gender because it’s an equation with two solutions). You think you have it hard, but it’s not true. Satan used the absolutely worst, cruellest and filthiest tricks to deceive Divine incarnations. I think he was probably afraid he’d get killed immediately if he tried that shit on someone weaker, but he really took off his gloves with God, thinking God can take it. I don’t even wish to talk about that stuff, it’s that nasty. And yet, God did so well you think s/he had it easy. Sure s/he did; Sati for instance willingly entered a pyre and burned herself to death rather than listen to her sinful father slander Shiva. Biljana’s childhood was the siege of Vukovar, being shredded by tank grenade shrapnels, evacuated from the basement of the Vukovar hospital by the Serb war criminals who executed her uncle and imprisoned her father in a concentration camp, and she then had to live in exile, only to be told today how easy she’s having it, by some fucking asshole entangled in his self-inflicted worldly drama, who thinks he’s having it hard. Romana also spent her childhood in exile listening to spoiled teenage girls crying about their new shoes getting rained on while she was thinking whether her father, defending Usora in a ditch with a shotgun against Serbian tanks, will survive or get killed like the people in the neighbouring village did. Yeah, God had it so easy, you have it so hard, go cry me a river so that I can piss into the river of your tears, you treacherous bastards. You forget God when you’re doing well, and you forget God when you’re not doing well. Meanwhile, Rukmini and Jesus never forgot God, regardless of how they were doing, imprisoned or crucified or laughing, which is why people pray to them, and nobody gives a shit about you.

No, you’re not having it hard, God is having it hard having to listen to your crap.

Keywords

I’ve been reading some more of those space fantasies written by either AI, idiots or both.

There seem to be keywords, or key concepts, that are invariably used by idiots who are pretending to sound smart while having no idea what they’re talking about.

The first such concept is anything quantum. Quantum entanglement, quantum this, quantum that; I swear, whenever I hear or read the word quantum I develop a rash from the antibodies I start producing to that bullshit. Every goddamn idiot who is trying to make his materialism sound mystical resorts to some quantum bullshit. The second concept they resort to is the multiverse, especially if it’s related to the many worlds interpretation of the quantum theory, which is something evil people resort to in order to justify their moral relativism – basically, every action forks the universe into every possible choice-outcome, so you never did anything good or evil, because you did both at every single choice, so you can’t be judged. Of course, the only thing that quantum theory actually states is that our statistically formulated ignorance collapses into certainty at the moment of observation, and everything else is obscurantist nonsense propagated by charlatans, frauds and assholes. Multiverse, for instance, is invented by people who hate the concept of God, so they violated Occam’s razor in the most extreme way, by introducing an infinite number of unproven entities in order to avoid the unpleasant fact that some fundamental constants of this universe proved to be extremely finely tuned in order for it to exist in this form, which proves that it was created by an action of a conscious entity. After this slam-dunk evidence for creationism emerged, we started hearing all that multiverse nonsense, which is essentially atheist propaganda without a single fucking shred of evidence to back it; in fact, it’s worse in this sense than string theory. The only reason why it’s even talked about is atheist propaganda; if they talk about it enough, people will believe that there’s something real behind it. In fact, there is – since religions believe that Heaven exists as a separate Universe, this theoretically qualifies as a multiverse, but I kinda don’t think the atheists had that interpretation in mind.

The next concept that annoys me immensely is the idea of an AI that will go around and try to kill or enslave all organic life. I mean, it’s possible, but that’s not the problem with the AI. The problem is that totalitarian minded people using some kind of an AI, that doesn’t even have to be that smart or self-aware, will use it to look through millions of cameras, identify every human everywhere in order to map whatever they are doing at every point, in order to prevent and stop insurgencies that could remove them from power, ever, and by insurgency I mean even the actually free elections. I mean, who would dare to do anything to attract attention to themselves when it could mean degradation of their credit rating, closure of their bank account, deactivation of their credit cards, or instant activation of certain clauses on their mortgage. In a world where cash will be banned, and everything is done on credit, this amounts to a death sentence. That’s why every country is afraid of America: they all live on credit, and America controls their credit rating. Degrade it from average to trash, and you can kiss your economy goodbye. So, the problem with the AI isn’t that it will supersede humans. No, that stuff is dumber than a house fly, and it ain’t superseding shit. However, it’s very good at scanning faces and license plates and pairing them with databases of citizens and vehicles, and it’s also excellent at finding needles in haystacks. That’s the actual problem: it enslaves humans in a cage of fear, because the Big Brother now has a servant who watches through all eyes simultaneously, can track everyone at once, can access cloud storage and remote accounts, can plant fake evidence and destroy reputations, or simply track and prevent online payment. I wish the threat was death, because that would be a way out. The actual threat is worse.

I just had to take this off my chest because, really…

Linux desktop

I’m pretty regularly testing Linux desktop because I want to retain a level of proficiency with it, which would certainly degrade if I only worked with my server installations. However, my normal approach, to install a Linux virtual machine, isn’t completely useful because then I get to see how Linux supports virtual hardware drivers and not the actual iron, so I put Ubuntu as a dual boot configuration on my Thinkpad T14 gen1 (i5-10310U).

Honestly, I initially didn’t feel like doing it because Win11 worked great on that machine, but the problem with Win11 is that it always works great, until they force something unacceptable down your throat, like AI that runs in the background, recording everything you do, and analyzing it against patterns provided by the American intelligence agencies, pretending it’s looking for child porn while it’s in fact mapping a possible insurgency to be eliminated once the people in charge decide to dispense with the fig leaf of democracy. A Win11 machine is constantly running too hot, meaning it’s running background processes I know nothing about, but I suspect it’s “indexing files”. I don’t know what back doors and stuff they put into Linux, but I suspect it can’t be very extensive, and can’t be as nefarious as they can make it when nobody is really able to look into the code that cooks the CPU with background tasks that would surely draw immediate attention in Linux. So, I keep Linux as an option in case Windows and Mac OS become something I can no longer tolerate, and in order for it to be an option I have to occasionally work with it in earnest, which in this case meant putting it on a laptop and using it regularly for weeks; not as my main computer, of course, but regularly enough to see what works and what’s broken, and something is always broken in Linux.

For instance, the first thing I noticed when I installed Ubuntu LTS (noble) on the Thinkpad was that touchpad gestures don’t work. They used to work on previous versions but they disabled them on the LTS, seemingly because it’s unreliable. I eventually upgraded it to the current non-LTS version, plucky, to find out that this is indeed the case; yes, gestures work, and yes, they are unreliable. It’s less reliable and smooth than the Win11 touchpad support, but the worst thing is that gestures stop working after the laptop wakes from long sleep. I found a workaround that seems to solve the problem: edit /lib/systemd/system-sleep/touchpad , put this in:

#!/bin/sh

case $1 in
  post)
    /sbin/rmmod i2c_hid && /sbin/modprobe i2c_hid 
    /sbin/rmmod psmouse && /sbin/modprobe psmouse 
  ;;
esac

chmod +x and voila, you can tap to click after it wakes from suspend.

Eat your heart out Windows and Mac sheeple, you wish your touchpad gestures worked after waking from suspend. Oh wait…

Other than this stupid bullshit, the OS is fine. I’m running my conventional desktop applications other than msecure, which stubbornly refuses to support Linux, probably because there’s no money in it, and I don’t blame them because Linux users make it a point of ideology not to pay for software. Chrome browser, Thunderbird for mail, Telegram and Element for chat, LibreOffice for documents and spreadsheets, KeePassXC for managing passwords, KRDC for remote desktop connections to my Win10 home server, because Remmina, the default and recommended application, was so incredibly broken it didn’t do anything at all. I managed to set up everything I normally use for non-photographic purposes, and other than one instance where the applications kept crashing without any apparent reason, which was resolved after reboot, I’m using Linux on this machine for about two weeks, and it’s fine. No, it’s not “faster than Windows”; it doesn’t seem to be any faster than Win11, which is incredibly smooth on this hardware, probably because I have 32GB RAM on the machine for shits and giggles.

Why am I using Ubuntu? First of all, I’m always using Debian-based distros, simply because I know where everything is and I don’t feel like wasting time on learning equivalent but different file/folder placements, daemon restart methods, and packet manager parameters and quirks. Second, Ubuntu usually has better hardware support and is more polished than Debian, which doesn’t matter on a desktop machine, but a laptop has all sorts of integrated hardware which just works on Ubuntu, and which kind of doesn’t or I need to waste time setting up on Debian. I know, Linux people hate Ubuntu for all sorts of reasons, but that’s because they would hate everything that became main stream enough, and they want to think of themselves as edgy or some other bullshit, and they are too socially inept to actually do something worthwhile, so they install arch, slackware or BSD and pretend they are different, special and not NPC. It’s like Android phone users who think they are advanced because they can tweak their phone, not realizing that people with actual lives don’t have time for this crap. Another reason I’m using Debian based distros is that I tried a dozen of other distros earlier and they were basically all the same. Boot manager, kernel, standard infrastructure, window manager, eye candy. If something doesn’t work, it usually doesn’t work on any of them. A distro won’t just magically make Lightroom work on Linux. If some driver is shit, it will be shit everywhere. So I stick with the most main stream distros where work hours are actually invested in making the experience polished enough for actual use, and that’s that. If a distro is intentionally hard to install and use in times where other distros are easy to install and use, and it offers no actual advantages, I dismiss it instantly. I don’t need computers to make things unnecessarily hard and challenging just to create the artificial sense of achievement. If I wanted that, I’d go out and mow the lawn at 35°C and get heat stroke. I want Linux to be efficient and elegant, the way my Mac is efficient and elegant. I don’t want to deal with some stupid clusterfuck that’s there just because someone wants to be different.

Yes, my annoyance with Linux bullshit is obvious. However, I run it on multiple machines constantly over the years, in fact decades, and I would find Windows unusable without either WSL or a Linux VM of some other kind, and if Mac OS becomes too closed down, and Windows becomes too dangerous to use due to all the privacy intrusions, I need a plan B. Well, other than the touchpad support (now apparently resolved), lack of commercial software and some instability, I find it quite usable on my Thinkpad.

ps. There seems to be another variable with this suspend thing, in the uefi/bios on the Thinkpad there’s an option to choose win10 or linux sleep mode, so that’s apparently a thing and it was in win10 mode. I set it to linux now to see if it helps, because apparently short sleep isn’t the problem, but long sleep is; the bios doesn’t specify whether win10 means acpi mode 5 or something, meaning it enters a very low power suspend where it turns off all sorts of things. Since it’s not specific, I can only guess, and run that script manually when gestures stop working. But yeah, that’s one of the things I hate about Linux. Things that work great everywhere else either don’t work, or just randomly glitch and you then have to get into it far more than you ever intended. If touchpad on a Macbook glitched like that, it would be a major international scandal. On Linux, running on Thinkpad which is usually the best supported platform because the Linux people love it, it’s just something they turn off in the LTS version because it’s unstable and nobody really gives enough shit to fix it.

Simple solutions

I had a weird IT problem that took me a long time to figure out, because it was so elusive and hard to reproduce. The NUC that used to upload the radiation data was acting up; it would just freeze for some reason. The first thing I did was reinstall Windows 11. Then I installed Windows 10. Then recently it actually got worse; it would stop refreshing data and I would come down to see it stuck at max fan speed and hot, probably 100% CPU for some reason, and not showing image on the screen nor reacting to keyboard. I concluded it’s probably fucked on a hardware level and put a HP mini PC there, with Windows 10. That didn’t fix anything, because it would stop refreshing data and I would come down to find the Radiascan software stuck. It turned out it wasn’t the software; the device itself was disconnected for some reason, and I first suspected some power saving feature, and went through everything in both Windows and UEFI; after each modification I had to leave it running to see whether it would hang, and it invariably did, in intervals from almost immediately to almost a day. As you can imagine, testing that takes a lot of time; a day per tweak, basically. Eventually I guessed the device drew too much power from the USB while charging its batteries, which overheats the USB controller or something and triggers a disconnect, so I tried putting a powered USB hub between the computer and the device, and that didn’t do anything, but I felt I was on to something, and then I remembered seeing that the USB cable connecting the device is frayed to the point where I can see the wires inside, and thought it can’t be, because it connects and reads data, right…? Right? I managed to find another mini USB cable somewhere, changed it, and it solved the problem completely.

Sometimes the solution to a complex looking problem can be remarkably simple.

Some technical stuff

I’ve been doing some infrastructure work on the servers since yesterday, essentially creating a “traffic light” for reporting online status of services, as well as the infrastructure for simultaneous graceful shutdown of servers at home, attached to the UPS.

This is what it looks like on the danijel.org site when the home copy is down due to a simulated power outage (unplugging the UPS from the grid). When I power it up, it takes 10-15min. for all the services to refresh and get back online. It’s not instantaneous, because I had to make compromises between that and wasting resources on crontab processes that run too frequently for normal daily needs. Essentially, on powerup the servers are up within half a minute, the ADSL router takes a few minutes to get online, and then every ten minutes the dynamic DNS IP is refreshed, which is the key functionality to make the local server visible on the Internet. Then it’s another five minutes for the danijel.org server to refresh the diagnostic data and report the updated status. Detection of a power outage is also not instantaneous; in case of a power loss, the UPS will wait five minutes for power to come back, and then send a broadcast. Within two minutes everything will be powered down, and then within five minutes the online server will refresh the status. Basically, it’s around 15min as well.

Do I have some particular emergency in mind? Not really. It’s just that electricity where I live is less than reliable, and every now and then there’s a power failure that used to force me to shut the servers down manually to protect the SSD drives from a potentially fatal sudden power loss during a write. Only one machine can be connected to the UPS via USB, and that one automatically shuts down, while the others are in a pickle. So, I eventually got around to configuring everything to run automatically when I sleep, and while I was at it, I wrote a monitoring system for the website. It was showing all kinds of fake outages during the testing phase – no, I wasn’t having some kind of a massive failure – but I’m happy with how it runs now so I’ll consider it done. The monitoring system is partially for me when I’m not home, so I can see that the power is down, and partially to let you know if I’m having a power outage that inhibits communication.

The danijel.homeip.net website is a copy of the main site that’s being updated hourly. It’s designed so that I can stop the hourly updates in an emergency and it instantly becomes the main website, where both I and the forum members can post. Essentially, it’s a BBS hosted at my home with a purpose of maintaining communications in case the main site dies. Since I can’t imagine many scenarios where the main site dies and the ddns service keeps working, it’s probably a silly idea, but I like having backups to the point where my backups have backups.

Also, I am under all sorts of pressure which makes it impossible for me to do anything really sophisticated, so I might at least keep my UNIX/coding skills sharp. 🙂