Homework

This is a part of the homework feature of my blog, which is an ongoing conversation with my mate S.F.

Hey mate. Lovely to see you again, as always.

You must watch this: Mark Osborne’s MORE (the homepage is here).

Death is the ultimate holiday. Never have to work again!

One of the most belligerent things you can say to someone is “you’re belligerent.”

The washing machine is a machine.

Aphyr is one of those one in ten thousand type geniuses, just next level. Also openly gay and into BDSM. He did this fantastic creative writing riffing on witch craft and programming interviews which I have made notes about over here. I don’t think you need to be a programmer to appreciate this, maybe give the first one a read.

I did a write up of Inside Bureaucracy by Anthony Downs. It’s long and High Modern. The five types of bureaucrats he identifies are: Climbers, Conservers, Zealots, Advocates, Statesmen.

The cargo cult phenomenon is truly bizarre and also quaint and understandable. During WWII a lot of native tribes saw cargo planes arriving full of supplies. After the war when the planes stopped coming the tribe members setup faux runways and did elaborate pantomimes with aircontrollers and radiomen etc in an attempt to mimic what they had seen the westerners do in order to bring the cargo back. Now “cargo cult” is used as a term to describe when people are doing the things they they will bring success because they think those activities will lead to success (but those activities won’t by themselves lead to success).

RE my hair: I can clip! I can clip! </Seinfeld>

This bloke Derek Muller has a video blog known as Veritasium. Recently he did a fun video about 37.

I would definitely recommend you get Authy and set it up on your phone so you can use it for 2FA (two-factor authentication).

TPM stands for Trusted Platform Module. It’s a hardware security feature which is probably in your computers. Apparently it is required by Windows 11 as explained by Microsoft over here: What is TPM?

Two fun quotes from the YouTube comments on my channel recently:

  • Lol, bald Jimmy Neutron, but its so cool
  • Look at this absolute chad flexing on all of us with his swag lab setup. Steady on king.

The 80/20 rule is known as the Pareto principle which states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the “vital few”).

Do Dogs Have Belly Buttons? (Spoiler: they do!)

Software is one form of hyperreality.

Thank you for loaning me your copy of Travels In Hyperreality by Umberto Eco, I will return it soon, along with a copy of GEB for you!

Crash Test Dummies – Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm.

Matchbox Twenty – 3AM.

There is a full length version of Elegia from New Order, it’s an instrumental tribute to Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis. It’s a seriously moving piece of music. It’s the soundtrack to Mark Osborne’s MORE (linked above). The words elegia and eulogy are different but they connote something similar.

Substance is a compilation album by English alternative dance band New Order. It was released in August 1987 by Factory Records and reissued in 2023. Here is Disc 1.

On a related note, the 2007 film Joy Division is a documentary on the British post-punk band Joy Division.

More from 2007, Control a British biographical film about the life of Ian Curtis, singer of the late-1970s English post-punk band Joy Division.

The Jesus nut is a slang term for the main rotor retaining nut or mast nut, which holds the main rotor to the mast of some helicopters.

Fucking boat people.

The 2004 film Metallica: Some Kind of Monster is a documentary film about American heavy metal band Metallica.

Metamodernism refers to a number of related discourses about cultural developments that move beyond postmodernism by means of postmodernism. There is a fun video on the topic over here: The Rise of the Meaning Economy – A major paradigm shift is coming, this will reshape life and work!.

It’s a simple silly little temporary thing.

Chicks man, fuck.

So there’s this American bloke out there Andrew Bustamante running EverydaySpy with his wife. They have heaps of videos on YouTube, you can get a taste over here: Leave The USA Before 2030? – CIA Spy On World War 3’s Timeline | Andrew Bustamante.

Eben Moglen is an American legal scholar and orator who is professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, and is the founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center. In 2019 he spoke on the 10 year anniversary of the FreedomBox: Eben Moglen: “FreedomBox Turns Ten” (Nov. 2019) .

There is a kickass documentary featuring Bunnie Huang over here: Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware (Full Documentary) | Future Cities. Bunnie has done some cool things, not least Hacking the Xbox. Here’s an interesting talk from him: An Alternative to the American way of Innovation | Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang | TEDxPickeringStreet.

Bridge sniffer

I’ve been having trouble getting my Pioneer FreedomBox to work and I found myself wanting a network protocol analyser so I could see what was going on.

I got myself two of these Simplecom USB 3.0 to Gigabit RJ45 Ethernet LAN Adapters and attached them to my MacBook Pro, like this:

network sniffing setup

Then I spun up a Kubuntu system in a VMWare Fusion virtual machine and created a bridge like this (thanks to my mate Raz for the instructions):

   ifconfig eth0 up
   ifconfig eth1 up
   brctl addbr br0
   brctl addif br0 eth0
   brctl addif br0 eth1
   ifconfig br0 up

Then I was able to run WireShark to monitor traffic across the br0 bridge which helped me to diagnose the issues I was facing.

…and in the end I got my FreedomBox operational, so got to be happy about that! :)

The problem I was having was that my FreedomBox would work okay for a few minutes and then lose network connectivity. I confirmed this with my WireShark logs. You could see the DHCP and MDNS working at first and then see things stop working after some time.

The problem turned out to be related to the fact that I was running an old version of the FreedomBox software. The reason my software was out of date was that I had downloaded a “nightly build” which was well out of date. I think maybe the nightly builds are no longer maintained. After I upgraded to a stable build my networking problems went away.