1 1 of 2 Goodbye twitter. In 2016 Facebook got too political so I dropped it. Now, Twitter. You can reach me as gmj AT pobox DOT com. Please drop an email if you to stay in touch. I blog semi-regularly at https://eludom.github.io/. 2 2 of 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software) is a free, open source, ad-free, distributed twitter-like thing. No corporation algorithmically manipulates your timeline and AUPs are set by the community. I’m on the https://fosstodon.
Source code distribution has changed over the years. Today we all love (hate?) git, github and friends, but, believe it or not there were ways to distribute source code even before the Internet. In fact, this was the world in which the GNU Public License was created. Below are a few of the ways I’ve gotten/transferred source code through the years, in something like chronological order
Figure 1: Code on the Europython 2009 bag" by Thomas Guest is licensed with CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Post 31 of #100DaysToOffload https://100daystooffload.com/
There is, I think, an urgent need to protect the essence of individuality from headlong technological progress. For unless we are careful, individual men and women may soon be reduced to little more than numbers in immense and terrifying data bank.
Georges Duby, Forward to A History of Private Life, 1987
I’m in the process of deleting Facebook, Twitter and Google from my life. I think Duby et al. were on to something a little ahead of their time.
Figure 1: A History of Private Life
Post 30 of #100DaysToOffload https://100daystooffload.com/
I recently went backpacking on the Appalachian Trail in Massachusetts. One of the reasons I go out is to “get away”, to go “off the grid”, to enjoy nature and get away from adds, trackers, social media, etc.
But a funny thing happened at my last campsite. There was a camera strapped to a tree taking my picture every time I put my food in or out of the “bear box”. The sign on the camera, in addition to asking us not disturb the camera (duct tape, anyone ?) assured us that they were only using the images to track bear activity at the campsite and the images would be destroyed after being used for their intended purpose. Right. They would not be fed to facial recognition software, and the results would not be passed to law enforcement. Right.
Figure 1: “Caméra de vidéo-surveillance” by zigazou76 is licensed under CC BY 2.0
In this world where Big Internet firms track you to sell you stuff (and to sell YOU), big Government tracks you because, well, they can, and where I found myself on a motion activated camera when backpacking alone in the “backcountry” in an attempt to “get away from it all”, I’ve spend some time thinking about privacy. Life is short. I could spend a lot of time registering domain names, managing certificates, running my own mail server, de-googling, convincing my friends and family to use nifty new security and privacy apps, and generally fighting the privacy fight as an individual against entire well-funded industries and governments.
1500 miles down, 700 to go to finish section hiking the Appalachian Trail with 215 miles completed this year in 3 trips.
Of course, I have some of the hardest miles left: the Smokies, Mt. Washington, the Whites, the Presidentials, the Bigelows, but with persistence, luck, health, constant gear tweaks (and some HARD hiking) I should finish in a few years.
Figure 1: Miles to go before I sleep
#100daystooffload #hiking
When talking about Internet assets we often confuse “What is it?”, “Is it bad?” and “What should I do about it?”. This write-up intends to show why it is important to keep those questions and answers to them separate.
Figure 1: The Shape of the Elephant
Post 27 of #100DaysToOffload https://100daystooffload.com/
Sometimes you want to see the head of a file. Sometimes you want to see the tail. Sometimes you just want to see some lines from a file.
The bash function below gives you some lines:
gmj@ed bash [master] $ cat <<END > lines.txt
> 1
> 2
> 3
> 4
> 5
> 6
> 7
> 8
> 9
> 10
> 11
> 12
> 13
> 14
> 15
> END
gmj@ed bash [master] $ source some.t
sh
gmj@ed bash [master] $
gmj@ed bash [master] $ some -2 lines.txt
14
15
gmj@ed bash [master] $ some -2 lines.txt
9
10
gmj@ed bash [master] $ some -2 lines.txt
6
7
gmj@ed bash [master] $ cat some.sh
Below I show an editing session that uses basic /bin/ed commands.
/bin/edis the standard Unix Editor
ed was written round 1969. It’s still here. grep comes from
/bin/ed: g/re/p works as an ed command to search globally for a
regular expression and print the matching lines. ed commands
will be familiar to users of sed, as sed is the “stream editor”
with a very similar set of commands. ed commands will be familiar to
vi users. If you type “:” in vi, you get, basically, an ed prompt.
You can type ed commands (see below) and they work. “vi” is the
“visual interface” to ed (or one of it’s successors). Though I am a
die hard emacs user, often when I just want to do a quick edit or take
some note I just fire up /bin/ed and go….
/bin/ed session…
When my father was writing letters to faceless, nameless people stuck jobs answering IRS letters, he started with tiles like:
PENALTY OR NO PLENALTY, THAT IS THE QUESTION
Big, bold a the top, and IN CAPS.