Whether you're on the left or on the right, at least in the US and other Western countries, the implication that immigrants are stealing our jobs is so pervasive you would be forgiven for thinking it's some sort of basic fact. But...it's just not true.
Everyone knows they should exercise. It's so ubiquitous in our culture that —– if you have the time and money —– you feel bad if you don't work out. My own journey with this was a bit winding and starts back in school.
Throughout elementary, middle, and high school, I would try to keep regularly active, and it was definitely helpful that we went to active summer camps relatively often. During the year we would have gym class (my least favorite class!), but until high school I didn't intentionally try to get a workout schedule (I'm not even sure I knew what a workout schedule was).
By high school, we had an elliptical at home, so I started using that a few times a week —– usually one of the pre-programmed courses. It was always a bit sporadic, but at least I was trying.
Five years ago (and change), I finally went vegan. I say “finally” because I had thought about going vegan since 2014; I was in college at the time and figured I should wait until I had more control over my diet to properly switch over. I was already vegetarian (was brought up that way), so the switch was easier for me than, say, for an omnivore looking to do so.
So what caused my change of heart? After all, the narrative I had been told from the beginning was that vegetarianism was the ethical choice (hey look, animals don't get killed because of us!), so for a long time I just...didn't think about it. I started rethinking this, though, as I learned more about the dairy and egg industries (and started thinking about how they can exist in the first place).
I want to expand on my previous post a little bit to explain the steps I took to setup PeerTube, Ente, and WriteFreely.
Prerequisites
I set everything up on two different VPSs. PeerTube was on a new domain, so I used an Ionos VPS. Ente and WriteFreely are on my main VPS (powering this website) since they were on subdomains of this domain.
All intensive storage (photos and videos) happens on Backblaze B2. I love Backblaze for its reliably cheap storage and excellent APIs (including, crucially for this use-case, S3-compatible APIs).
Not too long ago, I was not self-hosting anything (other than building my website from scratch). It's not because I couldn't (I have enough GNU/Linux knowledge and I've programmed in a fair bunch of languages), but because it felt too complicated and involved.
We all know the Gregorian calendar, right? It's the “standard” one, with 12 months, each one with a variable number of days from 28 to 31. And we may not love it, but we use it. But what if...there were a better way?
I started thinking about this at first when I watched Kurzgesagt's video, which argues that we should find a new year “0” that better reflects the sheer magnitude of all that we have accomplished as a species. They end up settling on 10000 BC/BCE as the appropriate year “0”, for reasons that they describe in the video. In practice, in order to use the Human Era system, we just tack on an extra “1” at the beginning of the year. So the year 2020 AD/CE becomes the year 12,020 HE (Human Era).
That got me thinking, though, that there must be a better way to distribute the days of the year. I mean, the sheer madness that is the Gregorian calendar would be hilarious if it weren't so ingrained into us. Instead of each month having a fixed number of days (possibly with some minor adjustment at the end to account for imperfections), we end up with a monstrosity where you have to memorize the number of days in each month. Of course, this happened because the calendar was iteratively refined due to increased knowledge about exactly how long one revolution around the sun takes, adding/subtracting months to please Roman emperors, and so on. But if we were to design a calendar from scratch, what might it look like?
Recently, I switched to ProtonMail as a way of increasing my privacy online and moving away from the “data as currency” model of Google and Facebook (as part of this same effort, I closed my Facebook in favor of creating this blog!). However, most of what I describe here has been my setup for a while due to my penchant for two things:
Wanting to keep my emails backed up (and a local copy always at hand).
Wanting a simple but powerful email reader so that it gets out of the way while enabling as much customization as needed.
At the same time, I wanted a system where I could easily add and remove accounts while adding/removing as little configuration as possible, and this informs the way I partition my configuration files (as will be apparent).
As the title suggests, there are two different parts to this setup: fetchmail and mutt.
Recently, Prime Minister Modi of India decided to abrogate Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution and fully annex Jammu and Kashmir. This article from inside Kashmir talks about police- and military-enforced curfews, internet and phones being blocked, and a general sense of oppression.
Defenders will point to Pakistan's decades-long policy of interfering in Indian-controlled parts of Jammu and Kashmir. This, in its own right, is a form of imperialism and must be opposed. However, this is no excuse for Indian imperialism.
This whole thing is complicated, right? Because there are two conflicting desires.
So a while back, I decided to get a Raspberry Pi to setup as a UPnP media server for my local network (not accessible from outside the network). Of course, the standard procedure is to install Raspbian, which is a customized Debian-based distribution that works well with the Raspberry Pi.
However, this presents an annoyance: the Raspbian repositories contain a very tiny subset of the Debian respositories. This means that your software choice is reduced by a lot and, given that I wanted this to be a “set it and forget it” type of media server, compiling and updating programs from source was mostly out of the question (especially when that software was available in Debian!). I decided to go on an adventure and convert Raspbian to Debian proper.
Note: I did this a while ago, so I may be missing some steps. Please let me know in the comments and I will update it with more details if need be!
The modern web is fantastic — it offers super advanced functionality and APIs to the point where Progressive Web Apps are actually plausible replacements for full-blown native programs (although I personally am against them, it's clear that they satisfy the use cases for the vast majority of users, given their popularity).
But the modern web is also a privacy nightmare. Trackers, analytics, you name it, it's there. Javascript APIs to sniff location, bluetooth state, battery state — it's ludicrous. Browser fingerprinting, where the interested party uses attributes of your browser (such as screen size, color depth, operating system, and so on) to track you (possibly without cookies), is more of a concern than ever. All of this on top of the fact that browser makers themselves have access to a wealth of information about the user, something that doesn't escape the notice of e.g. Google or Microsoft.
So what can we do? What can we, the humble users of these products, do to protect ourselves from all this tracking? Well…as someone who's been trying to fight this stuff since I learned about it, I've come up with a couple of tricks, which seem to work fairly well.