Ravings

GrannyNAS

Matera the Mad

Now that I have al my main machines running Linux Mint 20.1, I figured it was time to get really organized. The new(er) laptop, LadyLuck, El for short, has a small drive. Also, sneaker-netting files is tedious. It would be better, I thought, to get my movies-in-bed via a cozy LAN. Old Horse could become a beast of burden for files, Zonker could dump a little extra weight, backups would be easier.

I haven’t done any serious networking in years, and then it was a set of Win98 doorstops (not mine!). I know, I should have been practicing with VMs, at least – but need drives me harder. So I hunted down info on networking. Then I got to work on all three critters and the router.

Right away there were problems. Changing the IPv4 method in the network manager from automatic to manual, as advised, kicked both Horse and Zonker off the Internet. WTF. I’d been running Horse headless, using DWService when I wanted to get a file or do an update, so I was skrewt at both ends. Luckily, I did have a monitor on him yet, so after I got Zonks straightened out again I went around and turned the monitor on and fixed Hoss.

The assigned IP addresses were still OK, so I got down on El. Welp, nobody told me about that . . . lol. No, I’m not going to embarrass myself here and now. I’ll just say that a good night’s sleep put my brain in a fit condition for figuring out what her problem was. In a few more minutes I had a happy little family, freely sharing files.

There are a few details I’d like to take care of yet, but at least I know what I’m doing now. Maybe I will fart around with some VMs too. They’re easier to fix and less frustrating than messing up the workstation. That IPv4 setting was a bucket of ice in the face that I didn’t see coming. I’d like to know some whys.

The White Goddess

Matera the Mad

Beneath the Moon I slept as it rose full.
It was Midsummer’s Eve, and I was young;
Unformed, untutored, but I felt its pull.
In a dream, that night, an ancient tale was sung:
A Goddess who upon occasion sought
Her long-dead lover; her unfettered might
Disguised in mortal form, her spell so wrought
That men must long for her to spend the night.
Each time she came among men, only one
Could she select, one man to try and test.
If he should prove unworthy ere the sun,
His lot was death, his heart cold in his chest.
The story told, I saw her, tall and fair
Beneath the full moon on a nearby hill.
Her robes were white, her gaze was hard to bear.
Upon her hand a white bird sat, so still.
She sent it flying out on thunder wings,
Its eyes dark pools of bottomless desire.
I woke, and saw the moon, a shining spring
Of icy light to set my heart afire.

[This is a true account of a dream I had, sleeping outside on a Midsummer Night many years ago. At the time, I was not aware of this potent Archetype.]

F1L3Z

Matera the Mad

I am a file hoarder.I have files that were created or downloaded nearly twenty years ago, when I had little drive space and my only option for backup storage was floppies.

Over the years a few have been lost, and some have been permanently deleted because they outlived their usefulness and had no sentimental value. But the collection has steadily grown. Not just photos, music, movies and e-books; I have stashed whole websites, some of which no longer exist on the Web. Reference material, vintage software, clipart, backups of websites that I created, backups of files recovered from other people’s computers (I keep those for at least a year). My writings, fan-fic written by others that I enjoyed reading, half-finished stories, rants, souvenirs of odd occurrences, screenshots of every desktop I ever had, memories of LARTs well done.

It’s interesting to poke around in, and now and then rewarding in unexpected ways. Recently an old Internet friend looked me up. In our email exchange, I mentioned some floppies that she had sent me. She said that the files on them no longer existed on her present computer. I dove straight into my archives, found the files, zipped them up and sent them to her.

Files don’t collect dust. 😉
screenshot - copying files

Kingdom of the Blind Giant

Matera the Mad

A Parable of Privacy and Security

Once upon a time there was a a country ruled by a blind giant. In the beginning, he seemed to be a kind ruler. His subjects were contented and happy. Neighboring kingdoms readily allied with his.

Since most of the people thought that he had their best interests at heart, few objected when he asked them all to wear bells. It was for their own good, after all. A blind king must have some way to know where people were.

The bells gave the blind giant more freedom to move. He persuaded other kingdoms to merge with his, and their people wore bells too.

There were still some people who didn’t like wearing bells. And, of course, there were many more who would forget to put their bells on when they went out. People without bells were apt to get hurt if they got in the giant’s way. At first, no one paid much attention to their cries of pain. The king said that it was sad that anyone was harmed, but had he not given them bells? Surely it was no his fault if anyone was not using them.

After a while, the people who tended to forget their bells started to wear them all the time. It became a common custom for everyone to have their bells on at all times. Despite the inconvenience, they felt safer with the bells.

Those who disagreed strongly with bell-wearing were alarmed by the nearly universal acceptance. They would ask their friends, “Why do you wear your bells all day, even at home? What are you afraid of?”

The answer was always, “No, no, I’m not afraid! The bells are for my protection. The king is good, bells are good.”

But the anti-bell faction continued speak out against bells, insisting that they were unnecessary. If people accepted personal responsibility and kept out of the blind giant’s way, they would never get stepped on, they said. “Watch out for yourselves,” they repeated. “The king gives you bells so that he can avoid blame. The bells are for his convenience, not yours.” In fact, the constant jangling of bells had begun to negate their supposed purpose. In the cacophonous confusion, people who wore bells suffered injury more than those who kept their eyes open and kept out of harm’s way.

The king denied this, of course. Being blind, he knew only what his advisers told him, and he chose his advisers carefully. All of them had well-tuned bells. They never got stepped on or knocked over, which proved to them — and the giant — that bells were completely effective. If people got hurt, it was their own fault.

Life was getting harder for the anti-bell people. They were often denied access to basic public services because they had no bells. It often took them several times as long to get anything done because of bell discrimination. But there was no where they could go to escape the tyranny of the bell cult, since the giant had taken over nearly all the adjacent kingdoms, and most of the territories that still claimed to be independent had adopted their own system of bells.

The giant’s name was Google.

The Poetry of Origami

Matera the Mad

At first, when I think of Origami, I think of the beautiful logic of its geometry. But in the process of folding, a kinship to poetry emerges.

Poetry is made up of words. Traditional poetic forms have a regularity of pattern that can be compared to Origami. Folds are the language, the words, of Origami. The same folds are used in different models, just as the same words may be found in thousands of poems. It is how the words or folds are ordered, how they follow one another, are repeated or combined, that makes a particular poem or Origami model.

Both poems and Origami models come in varying degrees of complexity. Long, short, serious, comic; regular or free verse; few folds or many; Origami poetry spans the gamut from simple to epic. The easiest to fold are those with few lines and a pleasant rhyme (repetition of folds).

Take the Chrysanthemum Bowl: A short piece with pleasantly regular form, it begins with a square, or Preliminary, base. That is the first line of its poem. The second line is four squash folds–a sort of internal rhyme.

The folding down and folding inside of four corners ends the first stanza.

The next stanza begins with folding eight corners to the center crease. Its second line is folding them inward.

The third line of the second stanza echoes the third line of the first, folding down the points.

Making the crease for the bottom and opening the bowl complete the poem, revealing all of its meaning.

I hope this makes you want to recite some poetry with your fingers. 🙂

 

Testing, one, two, three

Matera the Mad

Everything updates. Several days ago Horse, my summer computer, horked on an update. I rebooted late at night for reasons I can’t recall, and ended up staring at error messages I’d never seen before. A new version of the kernel had been inserted somewhen. It took effect on bootup, but freaked out when it met Horse’s old BIOS. After a night’s sleep and some research, I simply re-installed from a disk I’d burned a couple of days before.

This delightful event has increased my wariness of updates. Today, I find that WordPress wants me to use a new editor. I cringe, but progress is inevitable. So…here I am using the new editor. Since I am NOT fond of WYSIWYG shite, I don’t ecpect any love at first sight. WP has always had a tendency to second-guess me far too often.

So far I haven’t tried to do anything but type. I need to be able to get my hands on the code, and no way to do that is readily visible. But LO! There is a teensy menu symbol in the upper right corner of the paragraph block when I mouse over its boundaries! YES! It offers the blissful option to “Edit as HTML. I might live through this too. 😉

Now, where the hell are tags and all that happy horseshit? >:-(

More-igami, MOAR!

Matera the Mad

Couple of days ago I started to play with a Closed Sink fold in a Waterbomb Base. Things got interesting. As usual, I explored, tweaked, twisted, and inside-outed every possible angle. Sure enough, I found my own way around the thing. Ended up with cube holders all over the place.

Then I took a look around Youtube to see how everybody else made cube stands. I saw ONE guy, out of I didn’t count how many, using a waterbomb base. All the rest are doing some kludgy thing with too many creases, and brute-forcing the poor sink. So I had to make a video.

Here are some still shots showing better detail:

lock fold
Creasing the lock fold before finishing the sink is especially useful with a very small model. It’s a butt-pain to make an accurate fold inside a corner anyway, so why not make it easy.

The side that I mark the center crease on to help get the point positioned is the one that dives inside, so that’s where the lock fold goes.

Starting to close the sink

turn over

creases

folding

coming together

The pre-existing creases allow the closed part of the sink to collapse into place. Then you flip it over to get at the pre-creased locking fold, and voilá! Open it out and park your pet cube.

I will be making more folding vids — stay tuned. Really need to find a way to set up my good camera where it can see my flying folding fingers. The cheap webcam I used for this one…meh.

Farting Out The Lights

Matera the Mad

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Apophenia
“Apophenia is the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined by neurologist Klaus Conrad and defined as the ‘unmotivated seeing of connections.'”

One evening, a good many years ago, I was exercising — just a sort of free-form dance — in the living room, with no light except what came through the open door from the kitchen. A street light gave some extra illumination. After a while, I farted. The street light went out.

The light came back on as I continued to enjoy my exercise. But once again, because I was moving around, I farted. The light went out.

At least three times that evening, the street light blinked out at the exact moment of my expulsion of gas.

Of course it was not my pooting that put out the light. It was defective, and was replaced a couple of days later. What is significant is that, on that particular evening, the malfunction of the street light coincided exactly with my farts. What is even more significant is that these coincidental events had no significance. There was no connection, no cause-and-effect.

Yet every day things like this can and do happen. And, if the observer allows an emotional attachment to attribute meaning to the events, it can result in distorted thinking that feeds on itself, building and strengthening a perceptual filter that allows everything to be interpreted as having personal meaning.

We are all the center of our own universe. Giving meaning to things that are not really connected is a natural effect of our search for personal meaning. Being conscious of this tendency may prevent a desperate need for self-importance from running wild. In other words, don’t fart out the lights.

Google Voice UIFAIL

Matera the Mad

I’ve been using Google Voice for years. I use it for business calls because I can’t afford extra features on my land line (or get a cell phone). It has worked well for me. Voicemail and messages have allowed me to return missed calls when people call me about computer problems. It’s been great. And then this “New look” blight struck.

Instead of a straightforward, easily readable and manageable interface in which textual information dominates, I am stuck with ugly little cartoon-ballons, barely readable tiny font with too little contrast, scattered all over the glaring-white page. No way to delete more than one message at a time, and too many clicks to do just that one.

I am visually impaired, with advanced glaucoma. A clean, readable interface is extremely important to me. Nearly every time I open my dedicated gmail/voice browser, I have to scroll down to “Legacy Google Voice” near the bottom of a well-hidden menu in order to do anything.

It may be that some people like orange blobs; after all, many Americans voted for one. For me, the new interface is nothing but an annoyance. I live in fear that the sensible interface I NEED may be completely taken away at any time. WHY, for Heaven’s sake, can’t it be made a PERMANENT option for those who NEED it? What does Google have against usability? Do you hate the disabled? Please don’t suggest using a screen reader! I don’t need that! All I need is the ability to define a readable font size, and a sensibly organized, accessible interface.

Oh, by the way, in case anyone is tempted to slap me in the face with web browser discrimination, forget it — it’s not my choice of browser that creates the problem. My dedicated g-browser is Google Chrome. I only use it for mail/voice because it, too, has usability issues. Not being able to zoom text apart from images is an enormous handicap.

On top of it all, the “Send feedback” dialog of gvoice is SO WELL HIDDEN at the bottom of both the old gvoice sidebar and the new menu when the font size is readable that I needed help to find it. Plus, it says “include a screenshot” but will not accept screnshots that actually illustrate the problem. It insists on MAKING the screenshot itself, which means that, since I have adjusted my settings in order to be able to use the feedback form, the screenshot will be useless.

So, here are the screenshots that actually illustrate the problem, and a shot of the dickheadedly rigid feedback form. Names and numbers have been blurred out. Click to see full-size.

readable

hard to read

feedback form

Note the size of the feedback form. It is unchangeable. Making the font size readable only shoves the buttons over the edge. With a font size that I can read, I can see only three short lines of text in the input box. If I want to do more than tweet, I need to compose my rant in a text editor and paste it in.