TrenchcoatFullOfBats

No, it was definitely him. I was just paying tribute to him as an aficionado of a democratizing system of long range communication.

The GNU thing is a reference to author Terry Pratchett, who wrote about a democratizing system of long range communication similar to the telegraph but with semaphore towers, called the “clacks” (because of the clacking sounds the semaphore flags made when they moved). Each clacks tower was in visual range of another clacks tower, and each one was manned by an operator who would read the incoming message and then send the same message on to the next tower in the line until the message reached the intended destination. This system is one of the main subplots in the book “Going Postal”, which is a critique of unchecked capitalism, corporate greed and privatization of profit over public service and worker safety.

In the book, the clacks system is the victim of a hostile takeover by a rich capitalist named Reacher Gilt, who either directly via one of his agents (similar to the Pinkertons), or indirectly via cost-cutting that leads to safety issues, murders/kills the creator and previous owner of the clacks system, John Dearheart.

After his death, clacks operators up and down the line of towers memorialize him with the message “GNU John Dearheart”, which was inserted into the “overhead” of the messages (also literally over their heads in the towers), which were sent in every single clacks message on all lines as additional information for operators about the message.

“G” meant “send the message on” “N” meant “do not log the message” “U” meant “at the end of the line, turn the message around”

In the book, the reason they did this is because “A man’s not dead while his name is still spoken”.

When Pratchett himself died, GNU Terry Pratchett became a thing as a way for fans to remember him. Some even created the “X-Clacks-Overhead” code, which can be inserted into the header of websites as a tribute to those who should not be forgotten.

So GNU Terry Pratchett and GNU Garry Shandling.

GNU Garry Shandling

If you run Home Assistant, Sleep as Android can publish events to an MQTT broker so you can create automations based on those events, like “smart_period”, “awake”, “not_awake”, “alarm_alert_smart”, etc.

The internet certainly forgets…but a Usenet service with good retention will remember for about a decade

My Gen 2 only had whispernet, which relied on the Sprint EVDO network, both of which no longer exist (the company and the network type).

FWIW, Amazon deprecated mobi files recently and epub is the new “sideload” standard. You still have to email the file to the kindle address to be able to read them, or convert to azw3.

If you’re already using Calibre, check out Calibre-Web, which essentially uses a Calibre database as the back end. The interface is so much nicer than Calibre.

Roe v. Wade worked, until it didn’t. Legalizing something via SCOTUS has lately proven to be as permanent as the political views of a majority of the justices on that bench.

The only correct way to fix this problem is via a Constitutional amendment, and that’s never going to happen because Republicans have rage boners for state-sponsored killing, or in this case, murder.

Proton purchased SimpleLogin in 2022 and the creator/dev has been working there ever since. Also, you can easily create random email aliases in Vaultwarden/Bitwarden via the SimpleLogin API.

Another vote for Runbox. Been using them for almost 5 years now with no issues. They are also an employee owned co-op if that is of interest.

It’s more that it challenged me so much that the gut-wrenching horror has been burned into my memory to the extent that I don’t need to watch it ever again.

The reality was much worse. The movie was based on a short story written by “Seita” (Akiyuki Nosaka) as a fantasy, apologetic version of what actually happened, in that in the fantasy, he actually gave his starving sister some of his food, but in reality, he ate it himself:

Nosaka said that in the story, Seita “got increasingly transformed into a better human being” since he was trying to “compensate for everything I couldn’t do myself” and that he was never “kind like the main character.”

Nosaka explained that “I always thought I wanted to perform those generous acts in my head, but I couldn’t do so.” He believed that he would always give food to his sister, but when he obtained food, he ate it. The food tasted very good when it was scarce, but he felt remorse afterwards. Nosaka concluded, “I’d think there is no one more hopeless in the world than me. I didn’t put anything about this in the novel.”

There Will Be Blood is another one-and-done for me, for similar reasons; the human cost of human selfishness and greed. Also, the atonal, discordant soundtrack of TWBB is amazing, and fits the story perfectly, but is also really, really uncomfortable.

Just imagine you’re weightless, in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by tiny little seahorses.

That movie was certainly ahead of its time on the whole brain cloud thing

…but why? (à la Ryan Reynolds in “Harold & Kumar Go to Whitecastle”) Some movies are one-and-done, and that is near the top of that list for me.

You should not trust Amazon. Multiple Ring privacy failures, including giving video footage to police without consent, Amazon employees watching Ring video footage without consent, then there’s stuff like Sidewalk that uses your home network as part of a mesh network, collection of biometric days via palm readers at Whole Foods for checkout, which they then use for their Amazon One service that they sell to businesses to verify age and identity, the whole “AI powered” Just Walk Out tech in physical Amazon stores that turned out to be not AI at all but a bunch of Indian subcontractors watching video cameras, etc, etc, etc…

I’ve moved to Garmin now, but I have an ocean’s worth of salt over Pebble as well.

LET US LISTEN TO YOU IT WILL BE FINE.

IGNORE ME!

My solution to this problem is Jellyfin, fed by usenet-backed sonarr/radar and Tubesync to pull in YouTube channel subscriptions. Those are added to a Jellyfin library which is accessible right next to movies and tv shows.

This is all through the Jellyfin app on a 2019 Nvidia Shield Pro. It’s a perfect couch-friendly setup. For just regular YouTube browsing, SmartTube can be installed on the Shield and on your phone. You can then cast to the SmartTube app on the Shield instead of to the YouTube app.

You may also want to look into Usenet instead of torrents when you’re researching. Sonarr/Radarr/Readarr etc all work (in my opinion) better with Usenet.

You’ll need to pay some, but the reliability is amazing, which is extremely helpful for the partner acceptance factor. I pay for two providers (newsdemon is primary and eweka is a backup) and two indexers (drunkenslug and nzbfinder), and everything has been rock solid reliable for years. Download speeds are also MUCH faster than torrents.

Combine this setup with overseerr (or jellyseerr) so your partner can find their own things to download and you might be able to get them back on board.

Plus, no flaresolverr required!

And Innovis