lists the #Oneplus3 as a #Droidian community-supported device. I spent hours downloading and going through the steps for a Droidian install. I tried both the rootfs image installed via recovery, and the alternate image which I flashed manually with #fastboot. Neither one boots. And after all that, I can find no formal place to report that it does not work / don't waste your time. No e-mail list, no issue list on github, just (what I regard as) a hand-wave to go complain on Telegram. This Brave New World of ephemeral forums and chat groups does not work. I feel like I am wasting my time even trying to interact with a community that operates in this manner, and am probably near the end of my rope with respect to #Linux on Mobile, as this sad frustrating state seems to be the norm here.
Book Review: American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard
This is mainly the story of the deeply ethnic and amazingly persistent roots of the various waves of immigration and settlement across N.America. Most of these threads are still alive and well today, despite centuries of evolution and some very large events such as the Civil War along the way. In addition to all the bits of interesting knowledge gained from any good history book, there is also here much useful context for certain patterns in recent events in N.America.
The author's very strong Yankee bias comes out later in the book, and that is the only place where my progress bogged down. Outside of that short section, this is a history book that does not want to be set aside.
There is also some comfort to be found here, as apparently indigenous cultures are really not easily dislodged even by massive immigration.
#review #bookreview #history #Americana
This in today's announcement email at this years #Debian (#Linux) Conference (commonly referred to as #Debconf) in Brest, France:
"=== Anti-COVID-19 measures === Some hand sanitizers are available in common areas, especially on the food tables. Please, use them. Face masks and some tests are also available at the front desk. Please, remember to help everybody to check the air quality of the room where you are."
This continuing #woke #covid foolishness is a symptom of why our family no longer runs Debian OS on any of our devices.
#bookreview: The War of the Worlds (WoW) by #hgwells
I had read some of Wells' novels many years ago, before I learned about his reputation as a very famous #eugenicist (very common at the end of the 19th Century) and misanthrope.
I got a very similar vibe with all the Wells' novels I have read, this one included: very well and gracefully written, but also very dark and somewhat forgettable. The "main" characters are cardboard figures just marching through the story. Wells never even gave us a name for the main character / narrator of WoW, as a matter of fact I am remembering now most people met along the way in the story do not get names either.
Decades later, now I can put my finger on what is wrong with Wells writing: he is actually not a novelist at all. He is a pure #propagandist. He has decided in advance the talking points he wants to make (that humans are actually just animals, etc.) and he uses the text of the book to drive those points home, over and over again, reworded in a dozen different ways. The story is just a vehicle, and the every-man characters in the story, beyond their utility as educational tools, are literally unimportant and disposable in the eyes of the writer.
Great read if you want to study at the feet of a master propagandist. Otherwise, I would say don't bother.
#review #sf #sciencefiction
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
by David Graeber and David Wengrow
In a continuing trend on my bookshelf, this is yet another astonishing piece of non-fiction that shreds the modern #Scientism paradigm.
Again, we are going after #anthropology and #archaeology, and particularly the idea that human social organization has evolved smoothly from simple hunter-gatherer / anarchism, through agriculture / feudalism, to the current industrial / nation state mandatory repression situation. From freedom and simplicity to increasingly complex, restrictive, and hierarchical social structures.
The authors dismantle this belief system with a multitude of examples, from deep prehistory to the recent past, of human social organization not only experimenting with ideas that are "inappropriate" for the time and place, but sometimes even oscillating between radically different social arrangements in winter and summer, or neighboring societies that seem to consciously organize themselves to NOT be like their neighbors, going in opposite directions.
This picture is one of variety and a deep willingness (seemingly lost in modern times) to experiment. Particularly noteworthy for anarchists are the examples throughout history and all over the world of very large communities / cities that seem to do just fine with little or no hierarchical structure.
This was a very good and engaging scholarly read, the last third of the book consumed entirely by citations.
#review #bookreview
@alby Are you now #censoring #Alby nodes running on #Russian IP addresses? 'Cause that is what I am seeing: an Alby account unable to authenticate with an Alby node on a Russian IP.
#censorship #albynode
Podcast Guru has taken first place in my house among #v4v #podcast apps. I was trying really hard to make the open source #podverse work for me, for years really. I also had a good go at the #fountain app. I found both a bit buggy, and do not like the Fountain wallet requiring an e-mail address to activate. And both, at one time or another (multiple times for Podverse) lost track of my entire multi-gigabyte collection of downloads.
#podcastguru UI is very clean and simple, and of the three I would say it handles the streaming of sats the best. (Via an #alby integration, like Podverse.) I have been using it a couple of days and am having a very good first impression. Just wish it was open source, and FDroid.....
@Podverse@Fountain
If you were wondering what is REALLY(?) going on in Yemen, here is an interview with someone who was born and raised in Yemen and still lives in the Middle East. Fun facts: Yemen has a long and Biblical history, and is characterized by the interviewee as fundamentally "anarchic" due to the terrain (where Saudi Arabia and the UAE have dropped almost their entire arsenals worth hundreds of billions of $$$$, to little apparent effect). And Yemen is home to one of the lowest national Covid jab rates in the world. Be careful who you cheer for.....
Although I do not agree with the implication that one should trade bitcoin, I would agree that getting one's #sleep in order is THE master #lifehack. It is critical for every part of one's life, AND almost every part of one's life feeds back and affects one's sleep. As someone who has endured a whole lifetime of #insomnia and shrugged it off, I find as I get older that is no longer an option. For about the last three years one of my top daily priorities has been to sleep well, and I have modified many, many things in my environment and lifestyle. Finally, I am getting there. Recently I find myself getting most of two hours or more of #deepsleep each night. Maybe I will make it to 2140 now. Two years ago I would not have taken the bet that I would make it to 2040.
[Common Sense with Dan Carlin] Show 324 - What's Good for the Goose
Dan hasn't done a lot of political commentary in recent years. He considers himself to be independent: not Republican, not Democrat, not Libertarian, not Anarchist, not a fan of Trump, not a fan of Biden. Maybe his position could be called letter-of-the-law "Constitutionalist"?
Anyway, I think one does not need to agree with everything he says here to appreciate most of the points he makes. Don your open mind, and give a listen.
since it is a) cheap at about $1 per month, and b) I can pay for it very easily and anonymously with #lightning. The #IPv6 thing means a lot of use-cases still(!?!) either do not work or work poorly. So far I have been using it for a personal (#Tailscale powered) #VPN endpoint and that is definitely working poorly, but nonetheless works just enough for me for it to be occasionally useful. I wonder how a Nostr relay would run in IPv6-only mode? Has anyone tried it?
#cheapVPS #skhron
#Saifedean Ammous interviews an agricultural engineer in #Kenya, a very knowledgeable fellow with a lot of numbers at his fingertips to confirm that the WEF / #IMF / #WorldBank multi-generational campaign in #Africa is one of poverty and #depopulation. He further asserts that when you try to find out what the actual product of a loan from these sharks might be, there usually isn't anything there. On the other hand, a loan from #China usually costs half the interest rate, and results in a new road / railroad / airport / etc., some kind of obvious, visible, and useful return on the money. Similarly he views the behavior and influence of #Russia in Africa to also be net productive and helpful. Not so much for anything that comes from Europe / N.America. #Colonialism in Africa never ended, it just became more subtle.
So way back when, as an introverted teenager I read voraciously. Then I became a young adult and discovered I did not have any social skills, and that was not good. So I pretty much completely swore-off reading novels for pleasure for a couple decades, for what should be obvious reasons.
Somewhere around when my first kid came along, I had been poking around at (anti-)#socialmedia, and was experiencing a sustained "this is a complete waste of time" feeling. And then I realized that it was all about mass surveillance, and that was the end. That was quite some years ago, have not touched that drug since then. But somewhere along there, I started reading novels again (currently using a Kindle with wifi PERMANENTLY disabled) because among other things it turns out that reading novels is great for de-stressing, especially before bed time.
Along comes #Nostr. Apparently not a waste of time, not a corporate honey pot, not so easily the subject of mass surveillance. And possibly, finally, the bitcoin "killer app". So I am adding to my "spend bitcoin often" resolution: also post on Nostr often. I do like how posting like this motivates a certain kind of daily journalling, which is definitely a good thing that I do not do enough of. Let's see how it goes.
Leviathan Wakes (#Expanse Series)
by James S. A. Corey
#sf #sciencefiction #bookreview #readingtokids
Or, how to get your #kids to #startreading. As it turns out, this is a book kids will sit (lie?) still for.
This is a very easy #review to write: absolutely outstanding hard science fiction, if I were ever to write an SF novel this is the one I would have wanted to write. World building, characters and their relationships, story line, tech, alien contact, all executed at the very highest level.
This is the first installment of the "Expanse" series, but this book absolutely stands alone, you would never know there was a sequel if you did not go looking.
I read the entire series myself first. Then last year I watched the TV series on video with my kids (they were absolutely hooked) which was also really very good, and mostly true to the books.
I have a very modern problem: my kids are #videoaddicts, and generally will not sit still to even listen to a book being read, let alone read one themselves. So I was quite surprised at the positive response when I offered to read "Leviathan Wakes" to them at bed time. (Remember, they have already watched the whole video version.) This has been going on now every night for a couple of months, about two chapters / forty minutes per night. We have gotten through two entire books of the series already, and going strong. And now when I suggest maybe we take a rest and read a different book before going on to the 3rd Expanse book, they are open to it.
For the record, while the 10-year-old often goes to sleep before I finish, the 12-year-old is usually still awake right to the end.
Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art
by Rebecca Wragg Sykes
#nonfiction #book #review #neanderthal #archaeology #anthropology
This book is in a very rare category of non-fiction, that engages almost as deeply as a novel by making the entire Neanderthal sub-species a character in an almost one million year story. Yes, the Neanderthals go back that far. They seem to have been an awful like us. And yes, even though they seem to have gone extinct about 40,000 years ago, we all have inherited a low single digit percent of Neanderthal genes from our family tree. ALL of us. So the Neanderthals are actually our ancestors. The book that has resulted here is enthralling, and I can honestly say that I look at our world a little bit differently now, especially my attitude towards animals as food, in the light of the epic story of my ancestor's, the Neanderthal's, almost a million years / multiple Ice Age cycles on this Earth. A wonderful, effortless read.
Bitcoin is not a religion. Which can be restated as follows: all software has bugs; it is currently impossible to guarantee any given piece of software has zero very serious bugs; #bitcoin is software; therefore bitcoin can fail.
One can follow this chain of logic further and assert that IF bitcoin fails, some of the stronger #altcoins can reasonably, eventually be expected to gain in value and usage. Therefore, while most altcoins are #shitcoins, some of them are definitely not.
We can all argue until we are blue in the face what the probability of bitcoin failing might be. (Personally I think that probability is very low at the moment.) The one propisition that cannot be rationally argued, is that bitcoin cannot fail.
Therefore any rational bitcoin advocate could reasonably hold most of their net wealth in bitcoin, but it is not reasonable (CERTAINLY not if you have dependents) to hold 100% of your wealth in bitcoin.
Buy lots of bitcoin, do it now. Buy some gold and silver, at least some of it physical. Buy small quantities of a handful of the more worthy altcoins. Personally I like litecoin (bitcoin's testnet), monero for privacy, Ethereum which deserves a lot of credit for putting flesh on the idea of "smart contracts". Keep a nice wad of physical cash under your pillow. And then no matter what happens, you and your children are much less likely to be rendered destitute by unforeseen events.
@CITADEL DISPATCH Today this is what my self-hosted #albynode showed while streaming sats to you from #podverse. A different podcast worked just fine immediately afterward. @Alby
Egregious #lawfare directed against a private #TorExitNode operator.
#tor
