101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

brin-bellway:

Also, I have acquired a new appreciation for AO3’s download function, which is great at facilitating archiving.

And I have acquired a new opposite-of-appreciation for fanfiction.net, which goes so far the other direction that you are *not allowed to copy text from a fic*. I did a couple of small fics by *going into the page source*, finding the fic *there*, pasting it into a LibreOffice document, and *manually replacing the br tags with line breaks* (there was probably some way to automate that last bit). Then I hit upon the solution of simply saving the entire page as an HTML file, which seems to have worked. Good: I was not looking forward to manually inserting line breaks in Chanson de Geste.

 

serinemolecule:

https://alanhogan.com/code/text-selection-bookmarklet

is what I personally use to copy/paste things from sites that don’t want me to. It doesn’t work on all sites, but it works on a lot of them.

 

brin-bellway:

Ooh, this looks promising. Thank you!

 

mugasofer:

I use http://ficsave.xyz when I want to download a fic off fanfiction.net

 

eclairsandsins:

You could also use a text editor like sublime

Tags:

#(OP from January 2018; responses from May 2018) #conversational aglets #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #the more you know #(I don’t think I’ve come across any opportunities to use these since then)

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

brin-bellway:

Hello, fellow citizens of The Future! I am writing this from my smartphone, because I can. I just bought it this afternoon.

I’ve never owned a smartphone before. I have a lot of waste-not-want-not issues about technology, and I was never quite able to justify a smartphone to my satisfaction. Even after my then-7.5-year-old MP3 player’s clickwheel began to fail four months ago, taking two clicks forward and one click back (or, worse, the other way around), I still tried to keep using it.

A few days ago, though, after a talk with my parents, I came to terms with the fact that it was time to move on. (Besides, I can give my old Sansa to my brother anyway, and he might be able to get a bit more use out of it. It’s still a step up from his current utter lack of handheld non-GBA computer.)

At that point, the question wasn’t so much *why* to get a smartphone as why *not*. I could get an MP3 player *without* Wi-Fi and camera and variety of other goodies, or I could get one *with*, in either case for less than I paid for the Sansa.

So, I bought an Alcatel Idol Mini. I haven’t set up the phone plan yet, but there’s a lot it can do without the SIM card. Almost everything I want it to do, really.

Of course, I can’t play around with it much yet, because of the whole school thing. Soon, phone. Soon, once all this pesky schoolwork is out of the way, you and I will spend some quality time getting to know each other.

(After all these years of gazing longingly from afar, I’ve finally got a smartphone. It’s beautiful and wonderful and *mine*, *finally* mine.)

P.S. (from laptop): Today is my Hebrew-calendar birthday. I didn’t intend for the phone to be a birthday present from myself, but it’s nice how that worked out.

depizan said: Happy birthday! And enjoy your phone. :)

Tags:

#(November 2014) #conversational aglets #wavered on whether this was worth agletting #but fuck it who said it had to be ~substantial~ #this is my blog and I will build a beautiful archive out of it #if you are uninterested or wish not to be caught off guard by blasts-from-the-past there is a conveniently blacklistable tag #(fun fact: I still don’t have a phone plan) #(my parents are almost never both using their phones at the same time so I just borrow one of those if I specifically need cell access) #(I have a VoIP account for making calls from Wi-Fi zones (and usually know where the closest Wi-Fi is at any given time)) #(if I trip and break my leg or something while walking alone I can still call for help: you don’t need a SIM card for 911) #(so overall I really don’t think I’d get $7/month of value out of having my own phone plan) #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #adventures in human capitalism #tag rambles #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #replies

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

etirabys:

“wow, this is a difficult pose to draw, I think I should probably strip down to underwear and photograph myself in the same pose because I’m not going to find the exact reference I need by googling”

“yeah, but what about… [vague sense that any sense that the photos on my phone are private is illusory]”

“oh… that… yes. I do feel bad about that. okay, let’s just keep guessing”

“hey, I need to borrow your single-purpose camera, it’s a long story, no I’m not going to let you see what pictures I took before I remove them from the storage drive”

Tags:

#reply via reblog #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #(I feel like this obeys the letter of the tag if not necessarily the spirit) #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what

mkfshard asked: I've recently begun reading Pact, after finishing Worm, mostly because of yours and others' recommendations! Do you have any other reading recommendations past wildbow, be it serial novels or full-on publications? :D

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

minitiate:

itsbenedict:

brin-bellway:

brin-bellway:

itsbenedict:

Ooh, hm. If you liked Worm, you’d probably also like @walterlw​‘s The Fifth Defiance, which is in the same vein of realistic and/or clever superhero worldbuilding and has some great characters. Uh, what else, though, going off knowing you liked Worm, and also I know you were into Homestuck back in the day… hm. 

  • nostalgebraist’s The Northern Caves is a fun sort of psychological horror-y thing told through mocked-up message board posts, plus his other stuff (Almost Nowhere, freaky sci-fi psychodrama involving weird time shit, and Floornight, his previous freaky sci-fi psychodrama involving weird time shit) is great. 
  • Do you like Danganronpa? KinuNishimura has a really good fanganronpa called Operation V.K. that goes in its own direction and does some cool shit with robots. 
  • I was about to recommend Floating Point by Stefan Gagne, which is this thing about like, the internet as a self-contained world inhabited by digital people who have no idea a real world ever existed, but for some reason his site is impossible to find- I don’t know if he took it down to sell the physical books directly or what.
  • I wrote some stuff, but you’ve been following me for a while so I figure you probably already know about Cordyceps and my Overwatch fic.
  • The Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer is pretty cool- really elaborate sci-fi worldbuilding for a future Earth where high-speed transportation has rendered geographical nations obsolete, which really gets into the wild political ramifications of everything.
  • One thing I relate to very much like I relate to Homestuck- in that it was super formative for me and remains really funny and compelling and I continue to recommend it, despite a lackluster ending, being kind of off-putting and hard to get into at the beginning, and most people who were really into it back in the day claiming to have outgrown it- is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Say what you will about it being didactic or unrealistic or condescending or whatever, but that shit is still fun.

*

I’m partway through Floating Point and the website still seems to be working fine for me [link].

(I was worried for a moment there when you said that, but then I remembered I kept local copies of those pages, so even if it *had* gone down I could make do)

Oh, thanks! It was down when I went to check, and even now it seems like the CSS isn’t loading right, but I guess that was just some temporary hosting issue. Whew!

Oh thank goodness, I haven’t read floating point in ages but was briefly worried that I may have missed my chance

Tags:

#conversational aglets #recs #Floating Point #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

mkfshard asked: I've recently begun reading Pact, after finishing Worm, mostly because of yours and others' recommendations! Do you have any other reading recommendations past wildbow, be it serial novels or full-on publications? :D

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

brin-bellway:

itsbenedict:

Ooh, hm. If you liked Worm, you’d probably also like @walterlw​‘s The Fifth Defiance, which is in the same vein of realistic and/or clever superhero worldbuilding and has some great characters. Uh, what else, though, going off knowing you liked Worm, and also I know you were into Homestuck back in the day… hm. 

  • nostalgebraist’s The Northern Caves is a fun sort of psychological horror-y thing told through mocked-up message board posts, plus his other stuff (Almost Nowhere, freaky sci-fi psychodrama involving weird time shit, and Floornight, his previous freaky sci-fi psychodrama involving weird time shit) is great. 
  • Do you like Danganronpa? KinuNishimura has a really good fanganronpa called Operation V.K. that goes in its own direction and does some cool shit with robots. 
  • I was about to recommend Floating Point by Stefan Gagne, which is this thing about like, the internet as a self-contained world inhabited by digital people who have no idea a real world ever existed, but for some reason his site is impossible to find- I don’t know if he took it down to sell the physical books directly or what.
  • I wrote some stuff, but you’ve been following me for a while so I figure you probably already know about Cordyceps and my Overwatch fic.
  • The Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer is pretty cool- really elaborate sci-fi worldbuilding for a future Earth where high-speed transportation has rendered geographical nations obsolete, which really gets into the wild political ramifications of everything.
  • One thing I relate to very much like I relate to Homestuck- in that it was super formative for me and remains really funny and compelling and I continue to recommend it, despite a lackluster ending, being kind of off-putting and hard to get into at the beginning, and most people who were really into it back in the day claiming to have outgrown it- is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Say what you will about it being didactic or unrealistic or condescending or whatever, but that shit is still fun.

*

I’m partway through Floating Point and the website still seems to be working fine for me [link].

(I was worried for a moment there when you said that, but then I remembered I kept local copies of those pages, so even if it *had* gone down I could make do)

Tags:

#also: good taste #though a bit horror-y at points #recs #reply via reblog #Floating Point #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

{{next post in sequence}}

The Thingie, round 3!

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

floresapriles:

I have returned after recovering from (moderate-to-large homework assignment that would have been infinitely easier had I not left it until the last… three-ish hours before the deadline? after knowing it was due for over a month?) to say more nice things about people on the internet!

@prophecyformula:

One of your about pages implies that you only follow highly interesting people. This is an excellent strategy because it makes your follows feel important and insightful even if they’ve only sporadically participated in a couple of ask memes since September

You’re really good at finding interesting articles from the Outside World and having thoughts about them. This is why you’re one of my favorite options for archive-trawling. If I accidentally like a post from three weeks ago please do not be alarmed

I’m most familiar with your blog as part of the @xhxhxhx, @lambdaphagy, etc. triad of people whose economics/sociology opinions I may or may not agree with but always enjoy reading. This is an A+ sphere of Tumblr in which to be involved

@sharkyminimalist:

1. pink hair!!! yes this deserves its own point

2. excellent taste in sushi, artsy hobbies, pretty dresses, and Instagram people

3. blog typically has more horses than sharks, despite what one may expect from the title, but they are very excellent horses

4. makes the CUTEST THINGS like omg

5. very fun to hang out with! also apparently people I have actually met in real life get bullet points not sure why this is

@reasonableapproximation:

You have a really pretty Tumblr avatar. I don’t know what it’s of, but it’s always nice to run across it as I’m scrolling through my dash and see it off to the side being all vaguely rainbow-y. This usually isn’t the kind of thing people hope to be complimented on, but avatar choice is important and you have chosen wisely

I don’t know about the approximation part, but the ‘reasonable’ half of your url is definitely applicable to every post of yours I’ve seen.

…This kind of sounds like a ‘damned with faint praise’ scenario, but seriously, reasonableness is one of the few characteristics that all of the writers I admire invariably share; it’s also important and that kind of consistency is admirable

@brin-bellway:

I haven’t posted them because space-conservation reasons, but your compliment meme request was the funniest! So you win on that front! and yes it was a competition this whole time

Your blog seems like a decent source of non-USian news and general Canadian-ish-ness. As your country has just elected an exceptionally cute prime minister, this is an incredibly important feature and I hope to see further updates in the future

I have a hard time finding blogs that contain Tumblr-typical humor without being too Tumblr-humor-y, so your blog is a great resource! Your anything-that-makes-me-laugh-this-much-deserves-a-reblog tag has been instrumental in bringing the Mint Mistake to my attention, for which I owe you my thanks

(I want to use this as a context link, but @floresapriles got force-safe-moded (for some probably-bullshit reason) and is too dormant to try to do anything about that. So, I skimmed through her blog on the dashboard view until I found it (I knew roughly when it was posted, so it wasn’t all that hard to find), and I’m reblogging it here. A link to this post will be showing up shortly, in an aside on a comment roundup.)

Tags:

#(October 2015) #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #compliment meme

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

moral-autism:

Laptop is in the shop almost certainly overnight at least. I can’t find the power cable for my old 2010 one. I probably can’t set up my Raspberry Pi, I know I don’t have the right adapter for it because I broke it. I might be able to use someone’s old AlphaSmart?

 

moral-autism:

Laptop still in shop. I should get info tomorrow at least, emails say I’ll be called after 48 hours. I forgot to ask about the AlphaSmart.

Honestly I think the amount of stuff I’ve done and the fact that I have had chunks of happiness over the past several days and not injured myself at all is really suggestive of a lot of mental health improvement. Maybe it’s experiences, maybe it’s having more produce and sardines, but something’s working.

This is still really difficult for me, though.

 

moral-autism:

Update: Apple called this morning to say that I have a hard drive problem (that affects booting from USBs and persists when the drive is wiped, yet doesn’t present any issues when copying files off the drive? seems unlikely) or a motherboard problem. Apple wanted to charge $475 to fix it, which I declined.

I was able to install Xubuntu on it from USB, and it is “working”, in that it still can’t talk to the battery at all and that it seems to freeze sometimes. I’ll probably try to transfer files later today. I am still overall dissatisfied with this state of affairs, though.

I am happy that I have a computer right now, but this does create a bit of a dilemma. I’m not sure I can justify replacing this computer just because I want to play some video games without Linux support and be able to see how charged my battery is. I guess this might get worse in the future, which might also justify replacing it. I sure don’t know how to replace a motherboard myself, and it sounds like a huge pain.

 

moral-autism:

Laptop status update:

  • It gets completely nonresponsive and requires a forced shutdown sometimes more than once daily
  • Still doesn’t show the battery level (acpi won’t work)
  • Sleep/wake issues, does not travel well (overheats in bag)
  • Cannot shut down properly

I also still haven’t put my files on this thing. “Mount a 200GB disk image, on an HFS-formatted drive, of an Ext4 partition with logical volume management, and then figure out how to decrypt an encrypted user folder, with the password but without being able to log into it” is something which sounds like it should be technically feasible but also kind of sounds like a nightmare, and I have a feeling that my current computer setup is really not my long-term setup. I can get files from SpiderOak but that will take a while and they won’t be as recent.

What’s going on with the disk image was that booting up my computer in Target Disk Mode and getting the data off of it, using a connected Mac, was such that I couldn’t mount or even really properly interpret a partition with logical volume management, so I just frickin’ copied the whole thing. Yadda yadda I should make more frequent cloud backups or actually figure out how to do regular nice usable backups to a drive or both. At least I have the files. Probably.

I will apparently have some support in repairing or replacing this machine, which biases me towards doing so. Also, I’ll want to use it for taking lecture notes and other time-sensitive outside-the-home uses, so freezing and being a pain to store while asleep are problematic. If I repair it, I’m pretty sure it needs a logic board replacement which I would really rather not do myself. (I don’t have the right screwdrivers, a good workspace, etc.) If I replace it, I should probably replace it with a Windows machine, because the only times I’ve used OSX recently have been gaming and taking the easy route in dealing with printers/scanners.

I don’t know much about shopping for non-Macs or using whatever the latest version of Windows is. Every time I interact with recent proprietary operating systems I do get the vague feeling that they are tending in a direction my computer is not, such that my experience with Windows XP and 2016-and-previous versions of OSX won’t necessarily generalize.

If anyone has advice on any of the above, let me know.

 

brin-bellway:

For replacement laptops, eBay is great, especially for people located in the United States. The laptop I am typing this on, which I recently bought from one of the refurbished-laptop stores that sell through eBay, was USD$300 *after* international shipping and import taxes. For an American, it would have been around USD$250.

My usual strategy for laptop buying is “get the best PC USD$300 can buy”. I generally find laptops at that price point strike a good balance between “cheap” and “will keep pace with my needs for the approximately three years it takes for a used laptop to die of old age anyway” ; if you need more from a laptop than I do, you may need a higher budget.

You might not need me to tell you this, but make sure you know what kind of specs you need in a computer (RAM quantity, storage space, number of CPUs, dedicated vs basic graphics, etc), and add a little to leave room to grow. When searching, keep an eye out for laptops that have been discounted because they have problems in areas you don’t care about or are willing to live with: my previous laptop was unusually cheap because it was incapable of standby and took several minutes to come out of hibernation, which was pretty easy to adapt to for someone with my usage pattern.

Since I only just got a Windows 10 machine yesterday, I can’t say much about it. I *can* say that I’m pretty much just keeping that partition around for gaming, and intend to continue using Ubuntu for my primary OS.

—

Rather than a dedicated backup drive, I just keep a full copy of my files on my smartphone [link], where they are readily accessible and can in fact–in most cases–be accessed directly from the drive itself. I gather that a lot of people have too much data to pull that method off easily, but even if you can’t do it *yet*, maybe keep it in mind for if/when the progression of smartphones’ increasing storage space catches up to your needs.

 

theopjones:

Yah. Used laptops are a lot cheaper than new laptops for entry-level performance. 

The one huge downside is battery life. Batteries have improved quite a bit recently, and there are a lot more low-power CPUs on the market. So, even the low-end Chromebooks and such can trounce any used laptop in terms of battery life. 

 

rustingbridges:

Yeah my $150 2015 chromebook, after 4 years of fairly regular use, only gets 5ish hours of battery life, down from almost 10, so if battery life is of interest you can get pretty good. On the other hand, it is not a powerful machine. This is mostly okay for my personal laptop.

 

brin-bellway:

[my tags on my previous reblog, for context:

#(since I’ve pretty much only ever had used laptops I’m whatever-the-opposite-of-spoiled-is on battery life) #(1.5 – 2 hours is simply how long a laptop battery lasts and so I don’t find it a cause for concern)]

holy shit

(ftr, I tested this laptop’s battery shortly after receiving it, got a result of 2 hours, and was pleased to have a battery life near the high end of normal)

—

What do you *use* a 5-hour laptop battery for, anyway? I mean, more battery life is always better all else equal, but when I need to computer for significant lengths of time off-grid that is what smartphones are for.

(Admittedly, my smartphone’s battery also sucks, at least by smartphone standards–sometimes it dies because I didn’t check it for 4 days and it only has a 3-day standby time, and that’s in airplane mode–but it’s much easier and cheaper to get a backup power pack for a phone than a laptop.)

(yes I *did* end up getting that solar-powered phone charger I wanted [link], and so far it’s been working pretty well)

 

theopjones:

For me the initial use case that caused me to buy an ultrabook type laptop with long battery life (in my case one of the 12in MacBooks), was college classes. Namely, situations where there would be multiple hours of straight through classes or something like a long evening class that would be four hours long. 

It’s a bit less relevant now for me to have that type of battery life now that I’m out of college. 

But the other benefit of the increase in laptop battery life is that even the high performance desktop replacement laptops are starting to get to the 2hr+ level of performance. Making desktops as a whole a lot less relevant as a platform because desktop replacement/”gaming” laptops have started to become actually usable as laptops and not just in effect really shitty small form factor desktops.

(previously on; other branch 1; other branch 2)

Good point, and I’m a little embarrassed not to have thought of that. The few times I have had some form of meatspace class I used a paper notebook, but I can see how that would be suboptimal or outright unsuitable in many cases, especially for a routine event.

(It’s interesting that we’ve now *both* made remarks that make no sense to someone with the other’s experience of college [link]. I guess we’re even?)

—

Also, even though the battery-monitor section of my phone settings did not *display* anything on its list of battery-draining apps, force-stopping TunnelBear improved my phone’s standby time tremendously. I will have to remember to shut that app down completely when I am not using it (and I’m usually not), not just setting it to off.

Tags:

#Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #reply via reblog #adventures in University Land #long post #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

Tumblr tracker Dashboard

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

{{Title link: http://tracker.archiveteam.org/tumblr/ }}

brin-bellway:

nightpool:

Hey everybody, the ArchiveTeam tumblr project is up and running!

If you have resources, please install Archiveteam’s warrior program to contribute to the project! It’s very easy to set up on and install on any computer, there are step by step instructions at http://tracker.archiveteam.org/tumblr/

We’re already up to 11TB and 187 million blogs archived, but we’re going to need a lot more help to get all the NSFW content before the 17th!

main project discussion takes place irc at #tumbledown on efnet, and you can add blogs to be saved using this google form: https://goo.gl/RtXZEq

Where did you get the 187-million figure from? It makes sense that the ~65k figure on the tracker would just be the sex blogs, since all of the blogs I’ve seen go by on it have been sex blogs, but I didn’t see any information regarding non-sex blogs.

I have unlimited Internet, cheap electricity, and a cool climate, so I’m in a pretty good position for (small-scale) volunteer computing. I’ve been running a warrior for a couple days now. I’ve been leaving my laptop on overnight because if I’m interpreting the instructions right, you only get to pause a task for a few hours before it’s considered abandoned and re-assigned, and I didn’t want to lose work. (especially since my current task has been 22 hours and counting; some of these blogs are pretty big)

I think I’ll continue helping out with their other projects once this one is finished: archiving is (as anyone reading this blog has probably noticed) a pet cause of mine. Since it mostly just needs bandwidth and doesn’t take much CPU, I can even run it and World Community Grid at the same time without problems (anti-disease efforts are my other pet cause).

nightpool replied to this post with:

the 187 number came from scott’s recent tweet, i’m not aware of the source of it but considering that he literally owns the computer all of these are uploading to (before being sent to the archive) he’s reasonably authoritative on the subject

Tags:

#(December 2018) #this concludes the retroactive application of my new aglet policy #(I looked at Twitter user @textfiles and was not able to find the figure) #(since it was not really that important I didn’t bother to dig further) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #(still helping with their other projects by the way) #(they’re kind of saturated right now but I leave the client program running anyway) #(sometimes I get a task to run if I happen to be close enough to the front of the line when they’re handing out a batch) #(and next time there’s an all-hands-on-deck project I’ll be ready to leap into action)

brin-bellway asked: Do you know of any good ways to backup a DW blog? So far, I have investigated: built-in exporter (doesn’t include comments); wget (doesn’t include access-locked posts); LJMigrate (gives an HTTP 307 error, which I have no idea how to deal with); most other tools on the list of DW-compatible LJ archivers (aren’t available at all anymore); printing every post to PDF and re-printing the relevant post with every new comment (severe, ongoing tedium).

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

farfromdaylight:

brin-bellway:

farfromdaylight:

dreamwidth-help:

I’m an oldie who used to use Semagic but I haven’t done a backup in a while and I believe Semagic doesn’t work anymore. Let me pitch this to the crowd.

as far as i know there’s no great way to do it right now, though I would ask over on DW, they would have a better idea. iirc they do intend to build a native backup tool in the future but I probably read that in, like 2013, so it’s worth asking about again.

Wait they have a native exporter now??? Holy crap I had no idea that was a thing. The fact that it’s CSV/XML sucks but dang I’ll take it over nothing. Thanks @brin-bellway, this is gonna come in super handy for me.

Anyway as far as comments go I actually just use my email as an archive. Not ideal but it’s better than nothing. (You can also get your own comments emailed to you.) There might be a tool that does still work with DW but if there is I don’t know it, unfortunately.

I appreciate the effort, but I think we cross-posted. I just figured out how to fix the access-lock problem with wget [link].

I hope you find it handy too! :)

:’) i saw it about three seconds after i posted. the world is funny sometimes.

i’ll give that a shot too! i’ve never tried wget but what better time than now to learn.

Tags:

#(December 2018) #conversational aglets #Dreamwidth #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers