Towards the Alternative Tech Life (I)
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Commentary, Computing, Environment, General, Health, The Destruction of History, Uncategorized
As regular readers may know, I have been trying (not altogether successfully, alas) to escape the demesne of the evil Bill G. and his hangers-on ever since leaving benighted Blighty. The most interesting aspect of this, right now, adventures with Linux aside, is what is happening to both what have come to be referred to as the “legacy media” and, indeed, to YouTube itself. Recent events and the behaviour of YT themselves have started to make it crystal clear what is happening, at the same time fuelling the rise of alternative media. It would all be so amusing if it were not so serious.
One thing which has emerged on the Internet since way-back-when is the desire of individuals to upload all kinds of goofy shit to the Internet. Originally there were few suitable outlets, so when YT came along, people naturally thought that this was an ideal place for their video material, and gradually said material became longer in duration and more intense (although not necessarily more “serious”) in terms of content. In recent years, however, we have been seeing that these outlets are in fact a form of social control, and the more serious (and relevant) content producers have been sidelined, banned and forced to resort to alternative means to get their message out. All I can say is that this is a very good trend, as YT itself seeks to become ever more irrelevant and to imitate the failing model of legacy media, which fewer and fewer seem to want to subscribe to because it no longer has content (or viewpoints) which relate to theirs.
Now I have subscribed to a lot of these alternative platforms over the last few years for one reason or another, the main reason being that, for whatever reason they may have, the legacy media are conspicuously controlled by a group (or groups) who clearly do not have the well-being of the various nations at heart: someone’s agenda is being played out and the media are suspiciously compliant and supportive of that agenda.
There have been many recent cases where serious incidents have occurred and the mainstream (“lamestream”) media have not reported them at all; it’s like an ongoing malaise which affects everyone, but especially the brain-dead normie types for whom media always report the truth and cannot be questioned. As an example, large-scale food repositories across the US have been (and continue to be) subject to sudden acts of what appear to be arson – suddenly and inexplicably catching fire, therefore depriving whole local populations downstream of food supplies.
The latest incarnation of this has been an outbreak of train crashes. You may perhaps have heard of the recent vinyl chloride shipment crashing in Ohio and the decision of the local authorities to actually set light to the shipment, ostensibly to prevent the containers from exploding, but little is being said about the disastrous effects of this not only to the locals and their wildlife and water courses, but also the eastward progression of the polluted air towards the Atlantic. Joker has recently put a video out about this and you should watch it:
While it remains the case that there is a lot of fine material still available on YT, it is increasingly a place where anyone who has a message in conflict with their policies can be demonetised and even de-platformed, for reasons which are often arbitrary and unavailable for public scrutiny; science there is often a domain dominated by virtue signallers who are merely acting as propagandists for some official paradigm, and who essentially present as brain-dead repeaters.
Against this backdrop, a whole range of new platforms have arisen to which creators on YT have increasingly been taking resort as it has become less possible to air their material and views there. I thoroughly recommend you to get away from YT and find out where so many well-established creators have set themselves up. You will not be disappointed!
The Dubious End of Windows 7
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Computing, General, Gripes, Humour, Uncategorized
So… at a stupid hour of the morning (meaning: it’s now Sunday!) I am almost forced to give up trying to resurrect an existing Win7 partition. The reason seems to be not that there is any real problem with the system, but that there is either a memory decay issue or something to do with the NVIDIA video driver. Trouble is… it’s difficult to tell which one it is. It looks like CCleaner (alias Crap Cleaner, I used to use it regularly on XP) can cure the issue, but first I have to pay for the privilege. [1]
Contrast this with the situation on Mageia 8 Linux. Many programs can be substituted for those available in the Windows ecosystem because the focus is really on the filetype; also, of course, a lot of work performed nowadays on Win10/11 is actually on the Internet and really depends upon the capabilities of the browser. As it happens, over the years a number of programs have been ported across OSes so that there is no difficulty manipulating the same files on concurrent ports of the same program – think of Audacity (sound editor), VLC media player, and various Internet browsers, a category which now includes Microsoft’s own Edge! [2] This means that their online services, such as Office, would be performed in a browser rather than a dedicated program… but isn’t this killing their own markets? Why would anyone want to buy a system with their OS when everything can be done online through a browser?
Corollary: I am handling the same files with programs ported to Windows, Android and Linux.
I could see the way things were going already, way back under XP: programs that used to be free (albeit with limited functionality) are now “Pro” and you have to pay more money for the dubious benefit of maintaining the “security” of an OS that is obviously more open to attack than others. In this particular case, the trouble is not that I cannot find out where the problem is, oh no, the trouble is that its nature is such that I cannot complete scanning and register for the “Pro” version that allegedly would cure this. I keep getting the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death” (BSOD) before any “solution” can be applied, which, from my long and painful years of experience, is absolutely typical of Windows. It repeatedly BSODs during scanning… plus, even if I could prevent this problem, this particular machine was made in 2008, is running a now-defunct version of Windows, and its final fate will be to end its days running Linux.
This is the real issue with closed-source software: running the operating system which runs it already costs money, and then you have to pay more money each year because (a) it is not secure enough by design, (b) this means that there is a whole host of malware, spyware, Trojans and stuff designed specifically to infect it, and (c) different security/system apps seem to target different malware so that in the end, if you want something approaching real security (because the different apps overlap in detection capabilities to some extent, and therefore coverage is dodgy), you need to waste a whole lot of time and power regularly scanning with a number of them, which also slows the machine down. Many of the programs I used to run under XP and 98SE, such as BearShare (a file-sharing program) and others (mainly security scanners) that I used to think were so good, were apparently bearers of malware and needed to be avoided; this was one of the reasons that I gave up on M$ in the first place and also didn’t go for the Fruity One – there were a whole load of free OSes out there, I had already had experience with one (trashing at least one hard drive in the process) and the experience of forever having to reinstall Win3.x (sometimes several times a week, it literally reduced me to tears at times, I kid you not, I have witnesses!) turned out to be a strange blessing, giving me strength in the early days when my unfamiliarity with Mandrake proved to be rather similar to my experience with the different incarnations of “Win”… I developed the art of patience, the Zen of OS installation.
However… there’s the thing. Normally, even if something goes wrong with the boot process on Mageia (and on my main system, it has, right now), the thing still works; it doesn’t go “Bork” when booting and if it does, well, the kind of system hygiene that you could apply means that reinstallation is easy and can happen while you are sleeping. We might add that there are applications (programs) which are third-party (i.e., proprietary; you have to pay for them) even under a free OS and yes, I do actually pay for them – precisely because I can use them under a free OS and the money that I pay doesn’t go to an account in Redmond. Programs like this include SoftMaker Office (which I used, among other things, to help a certain South African gentleman get his second novel typeset) [3] and WPS Office, perpetrated by KingSoft, who have been at this for a long time and guess what? The Linux version of their (very good) M$-compatible office suite is actually free to install under Linux! [4]
Anyway, I just paid for “Pro” and Win7 is still dying, I may have to let it expire on this particular machine soon. I bought this reconditioned laptop exactly because (a) I have been so sick of the constant e-waste that this kind of thing generates and (b) Windoze is sh*t and needs to be replaced by something that is useful and not prone to the type of “planned obsolescence” so prevalent in the Windoze ecology.
That’s my two penn’orth of opinion. A penny for your thoughts, lazangen’lemen???
[1] Yes, I did pay. Alas!
[2] Imagine: a Chrome-based browser on Linux. Who would’a thunk?
[3] Did I mention that SoftMaker have a FreeOffice that you can download on Windoze? No? Well, I’ve mentioned it now… https://www.freeoffice.com/en/
[4] See: https://www.wps.com/office/linux/
Alternative Social Networks to Try… 1: MeWe
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, Computing, General, Gripes, How-To, Odds and Ends..., Uncategorized
With all the little issues and niggles I am having lately with our first official online session, it has been hard to do much of my own online stuff, so I decided to do a series of brief introductions to alternative social network platforms.
Hi again everyone,
My attention was grabbed today by a link on Gab (of which more in a later article) to a piece over on ZDNet about MeWe, so that’s as good a place to start as any… I have been on MeWe for a couple of years now and it really seems to be a place where anything goes, which is fine with me.
It has a typical three-column interface which (in its basic form) is rather bright, but the good news is that they will sell you a different skin for a couple of dollars. I don’t often spend money on social web sites, but after a few months on MeWe, it seemed like a good idea, and I have never looked back.
You have completely free speech here plus 8Gb free storage. They are constantly asking you to upgrade when you log in, but I am ignoring this (for now).
A point to be made here is that many of the people you know from FB are already on here, “just in case”. If not, perhaps you could persuade them?
You are invited to MeWe: http://www.mewe.com/i/andrewholmes2
You can also see MeWe on FB: https://www.facebook.com/mewenetwork/
The Love (and Lack) of Reading
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Cancer Diary, Commentary, Computing, General, Gripes, Living in Korea, Odds and Ends..., Uncategorized
With space dwindling on all my drives, I lost it this weekend and ordered a new 2TB hard drive for my main machine.
The fact that my new KT Internet keeps flipping out every morning is hardly pleasing me, either…
It seems to be one of those things these days… when I was younger and didn’t have the level of personal technology that I have now, you would routinely find me with my nose in a book or a magazine novels by Michael Moorcock, Fortean Times, that kind of thing. Alas, my needs these days, where moving between cities has been costing an arm, a leg and perhaps several other limbs over the years, things have contracted. I am not buying books routinely, not because I dislike books or even that I cannot afford them; no.
The trouble has been that I have encountered a number of impediments to relaxed and undisturbed reading. Many of the apartments have been unfurnished and without a bed to sleep on, never mind a comfortable reading chair; and when I got my last pair of glasses, the lenses (courtesy of Carl Zeiss, would you believe) came with a varifocal profile and two reading dimples placed in a position for an upright (rather than comfortably recumbent) head position. In addition, the kind of central room lighting here is terrible for extended sessions of reading, but I never seem to move between apartments without losing more appropriate reading lamps. My own personal preference is low-intensity ambient lighting, especially for reading, ideally from proper bulbs and not from LED shit, which is enriched in blue-wavelength emissions known to damage human eyesight [1]. So my actual domestic environment for reading has not been good for a long time. I really want to change that, and with a little reaasonable effort, that’s precisely what I aim to do over this coming winter.
In the meantime, however… ironically, the oldest working HD that I have is the original 80Gb drive I used to build my first machine in Korea back in 2004. The only reason I don’t use it any more is because all the new mobos I’ve seen don’t have IDE interfaces any more – only SATA.
If not for that, I’d still be using all my IDE drives because – so many years after I bought them – they are all still working. The biggest are 500Gb and they are now idle due to a preference on the part of the mobo manufacturers for SATA; go to Gmarket and, likewise, you will see that IDE drives are rarely new. This is the way the technology has gone since I arrived here.
Contrast that with the stupid 1Tb Western Digital drive I bought the other year. Never worked. Until I came to Korea, WD drives never failed. I still have a ten-year-old WD 160Gb portable that works, even though the USB situation has changed since then. And back at home in the UK, I always bought WD and never. had. any. issues. with them.
That last one, however, I refused to exchange at the time because hey, if it fails you have to send it to their office in Malaysia (!!!) at your own expense (by which they mean by international courier, of course). Which meant that to get a replacement would cost more than buying the original, and when confronted by that and having therefore wasted the money on a dead loss, I ordered a replacement from Seagate and WTF, no. trouble. ever.
So this time it will be another Seagate, at a fair price, twice the size of the previous one, which has filled up to about 85% in the space of three years. Well, I can’t imagine why, of course, it’s another great Mystery of Asia… but in particular, I really think it’s about time to drain my fifteen-plus years of e-mails from Yahoo, which seems to have gone so far downhill (and seems to have become some kind of disgusting NWO shill, if much of its so-called “news” is anything to go by). That, however, is currently just under 290Gb in size, and it will have to be dumped somewhere, and if I decide to dump my Facebook, too… well, you can see where this is leading.
As for the cancer front, unbelievably (for an English bod like me) the next blood test is scheduled for Guy Fawkes’ Night – November 5th! The day when a pre-Elizabethan crowd failed to blow up the old Houses of Parliament with King James actually in attendance. That’s on a Monday, too; time to book a day off in advance! But as always, I’ll let all two of my readers know what happens…
1: https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2016/10/23/near-infrared-led-lighting.aspx
Still Not Ready for the Desktop? Stop Whining!
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Computing
LOL Yet another argument over on http://www.osnews.com/ about Linux originating in a whiny “it’s just for people who like tinkering” should be rebutted by a simple argument . . .
http://www.osnews.com/comments/27758
Ohhh . . . how I am getting fed up with this constant “Linux is just for hobbyists and tinkerers, it will never be a mainstream OS” bullshit . . . seriously, folks, I run Mageia Linux (currently version 4) on all of my three machines and I have little by way of complaints.
After seeing yet another set of whining comments over on OSNEWS, I really had to respond. And I think this response is important because it relates to the usefulness of OSes generally: Go with whatever suits you and gets your job done. Everything else is just hot air. Really. Start off with whatever version of Micro$haft floats your boat, if that is all you want. But if you stay with them each release, eventually you will run into problems. Already, with version 7.x, long-time customers were beginning to run into difficulties with older software which they needed to run for business or other purposes, then M$ decided to shaft them a little further by trying to turn their desktops into tablets with a touch-oriented UI.
Ditto with file formats. As if it were not irritating enough that M$ forced the execrable “ribbon” on the Great Unwashed, they also brought another format – *.docx – to term when it would be debatable that such a thing should be needed at all. The effects of these things are just what you would expect from a monopolising commercial entity.
After using virtually all versions of Windoze except 1.0 and the latest, I had already given up the fight long ago and moved over to a new distribution of Linux with a Windoze-like UI in the form of KDE. It is snappy on all of my machines and doesn’t get in the way of whatever I want to do, and it has a range of tools for manipulating all kinds of filetypes, mainly for free but I have repeatedly installed SoftMaker Office and had almost no trouble at all.
People seem to become very defensive when their choice of OS is questioned, never mind disparaged; there seems to be a substantial emotional investment in these things, which I am tempted to think is quite unnecessary. I think that at its core, this is really a Micro$haft problem. I say this because those who venture into the heady realms of Apple, Linux, BSD and others do so precisely because their experience with Windoze pushes them there. The constant frustration of trying to maintain a system in the face of so many attacks from the various forms of malware alone is truly enough to make anyone throw up their hands in despair and scrub the hard drive. It makes them think that there must be something different “out there”.
Whether “different” equates with “better” is debatable, but one constant problem with the computing space is lack of training or experience. For most people, for better or worse, the first computing experience is usually Windoze. People therefore become accustomed to whatever file formats or unique quirks come with that experience and for them, these features become “normal”. And indeed, they are normal – for Windoze. But you should be able to manipulate the same filetypes across a range of platforms without hindrance or glitch. You should be able to open a document file using a word processor under (say) Linux and pass it over to Windoze and have no formatting or other issues. An OS should be in the background and all of these functions should be managed by whatever program you are using. So I should be able to originate (say) a *.doc file on a Mac, edit it on some flavour of Linux and display it without deformation using Windows. Otherwise, the level of leverage exercised by any one platform would essentially constitute an attempt at hegemony and we would expect something like this from a commercial entity. Who is most guilty of this?
So having used and being still in the use of several platforms, I would say there is only one important principle here: Use whatever suits you. Use whatever gets the job done. Other peoples’ thoughts are not important. Make decisions based upon your own needs, wants and judgements. Maybe some flavour of Windows suits you but if Mac, Linux or something more exotic do the job equally well, why worry about it? You demonstrated to your own satisfaction, already, that you have everything that you need. But being prepared to be flexible of mind and willing to learn when you are presented with a possibly rather steep learning curve, and not giving up, will make you more the master of your chosen platform than fees paid to some snotty repair person ever will.
The accusation is often levelled at Linux that it is somehow “not ready for the desktop”. This is hogwash; it has been a perfectly functional “desktop” for years – I currently run it on my main machine, an ageing laptop and a reconditioned Samsung netbook and I can tell you straight, problems are virtually ZERO. Zilch, nada, zed. Got that? I am sitting here now with XP Pro virtualised on an Intel Core Duo, updating and then scanning with SpyBot while (on the host OS, Mageia Linux 4) surfing the ‘Net and preparing the text of this latest blog using the Leafpad text editor. I have a huge selection of software and due to circumstances discussed in previous blogs, have learned to make use of many of them for the preparation of different types of documents.
By the time I came to Korea, I had already arrived at the point of building my own PCs. It was therefore only a matter of time before I started to experiment, first with Mandrake/Mandriva, then with Mageia. I have seriously never looked back. I now realise that I am not tied to any one platform, but have a choice; and that the usefulness of older hardware in particular can be extended by the choice of platform. I can prepare teaching materials without having to spend a shedload of money for programs and best of all, I can use Mageia in English whereas M$ would have me struggle in Korean or some other language without good reason. And it’s completely free. No overheads, either in terms of time or memory usage, lost to protecting the system from malware, which is almost entirely Windoze-based in any case.
Perhaps the single most useful thing about using Mageia is that it simply does not get in the way. Free software such as Libre Office, VLC Player, various web browsers and other programs, which have been ported to different platforms, means that it is possible to manipulate and display files across platforms for free and without any problems, so what part of this is “not ready for the desktop”? Windoze is “ready for the desktop” and it uses the same software, so . . ?
Frankly, this pointless trolling about whether a particular platform is or is not “ready” or otherwise appropriate is a red herring; it all comes down to the user and the extent of their ability and willingness to learn. The computer is a servant, a versatile tool to do the owner’s bidding, it is not there to somehow run the owner’s life; how useful it is is up to you. When I first installed XP Pro on the original machine that I built here in Changwon, there was simply no way that it could be described as “ready for the desktop”, because it came with absolutely zero useful software. Got that? Oh sure, there were things like video editing software, but in those days I didn’t even have a useful camera to use with it. My Linux installation came of age, however, when I bought a new webcam and the system detected it immediately. From that moment, Windoze was dead on my desktop. I could run Skype on Linux, finally, with video! Windoze was legacy software!
So the message of my experience seems to be that adherence to a single platform is limiting. A competent computer user should be able to prepare and alter documents on any platform through a combination of key bindings and machine empathy, so let’s can the stupid “not ready for the desktop” shit. It’s time for these whiners to graduate from the playground!
Hello Darkness, My Old Friend . . .
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Computing
Tags: Barbarella, contrast, customise, dark, desktop, eye, eyes, facebook, Internet, kde, laptop, Linux, Mageia Linux, mandriva, my opera, opera blog, stab, tweak, white space, XP, xpize, yahoo, youtube
Teacher’s Tools: (I)
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Computing
Tags: crop, elementary, GIMP, GNU, image processing, Korea, Linux, resize, rotate, scale, school
Bye Bye Bill, it’s Been Bad Knowing You
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Computing
An Example of a Captive Market . . .
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Computing
Hero for a Day
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Computing
