About
Dalliance.net is Pre’s homepage, index of his projects, updates on his blog. That sort of thing. You can subscribe in various ways.
Projects
Blog
My blog, mostly monthly summaries of the Fediverse Account.
Visit at dalliance.net/blog
Or check out the categories index
Starship Schrödinger’s Destiny
Ongoing: An Interactive Sci-Fi story for Virtual Reality about the adventures of the crew of a flying saucer.
Visit at starshipsd.com
Wordcloud Tarot
Ongoing: My tarot decks have the meanings of the cards written on the card in a world-cloud. There’s also a video show with a reading about politics most weeks.
Visit at wordcloudtarot.com
Exocortex Log
Ongoing: A life-logging app, built as a progressive web app with all data stored on your local machine. Party for privacy, partly so I don’t have to run any servers. If you are interested in logging graphing and analysing your time as you spend it, this might be for you! But mostly it’s for me, I don’t care if you use it or not.
See the app at exocortexlog.com, or read the latest news blog.
Tentacles, After The End
A 30 minute animated movie about the last woman alive on a planet ravaged by tentacle monsters from outer space.
Tentacles is complete, visit the archive at tentacles.org.uk
Book: Do Dream Sheep Bleat?
A short story book about magic and memes and reality.
Dreamsheep is complete, you can buy a copy or read it online at dalliance.net/dreamsheep
Book: Yes, The Conspiracy Really Exists, And Furthermore It’s All Your Fault.
A long rant about how stupid humans screw up humanity.
The book is complete, you can buy a copy or read it online at dalliance.net/yes
Loopy
After the band broke up, I took to playing with myself via a loop pedal. Sometimes, very rarely, even in public.
Bookshelf
An album of songs inspired by some of the best books on my bookshelf.
The album is complete, you can listen to the songs at dalliance.net/bookshelf
Handsome Jack’s Showband
My punk cover’s band.
Despite some online-only gigs, the band didn’t make it though the pandemic, you can watch some old gig videos online at handsomejacks.co.uk
Joust Adventure
A little web-game I made back in 2011 with the hope people might pay me to make level 2.
I don’t think anyone ever finished level 1. Too hard.
Can you do it?
The project is abandoned, you can still play level one at dalliance.net/joustadventure. So far as I know, I’m the only person to ever complete the level. Let me know if you do!
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Diary
My diary from the Fediverse.Status at - Sat, 04 Apr 2026 19:38:55 +0000
My cuticles do not stand for even one days manual labour 😭 Where have they gone? 😢
Status at - Sat, 04 Apr 2026 17:22:01 +0000
The van's metalwork is exposed in the back and it is far from actually cosy in there so the job today has been to cover the entire insides in a foam insulation.
Seems to have gone okay. I certainly have lots of spare left over, only used about half.
Even had time to start on the covering of the wood and insulation with the vinyl blue wood-effect wallpaper.
Hopefully more of that wallpapering can be done tomorrow though I fear I will run out because I seem to have ordered three mini-rolls of extra rather than three large rolls like I wanted. 🤞 Probably end up having to leave some till next weekend when I run out.
The Carpet has arrived the wrong color too. Boo. Wonder if I'll just accept the black or try and handle the returns process to get the red I wanted.
Status at - Sat, 04 Apr 2026 17:13:01 +0000
The bedroom is long finished and summer is fast approaching so spring is the time to DIY the campervan.
Early last summer the guy booked to do the professional job of that gave himself a nervous system crisis by only drinking distilled water in a misguided heath-kick. On the week he was booked to do it for me.
So that failed. He left me with a boot-kit, which barely served the purpose and then before I could fix it much I fractured my wrist. Great.
Nothing in the way now so it's the DIY Microcamper Easter Special!
Over the last few days I have cut the boot-kit to enable it to open one leg at a time. Single bed or double bed. Painted it, coated the exposed surface with a vinyl blue wood-effect wallpaper.
Added a door into the back/inside to allow access from inside the van.
Seems pretty nice inside my flat here, but will of course be much more cramped and much lower roof when it's inside the van.
Status at - Thu, 02 Apr 2026 21:50:36 +0000
Went to see Stuart Goldsmith doing his work in progress stand up show about the climate at the local theater.
He's a funny man and has a good friendly personality (or stage-persona at least I guess) and is terrified and anxious and angry about the way the people are treating the world without out even being their fault.
It's a good show, he's a good guy, you should go see him do it at Edinburgh or whenever he's in your town.
No action you can take as an individual really makes much difference to the end of the world stuff. You should be vegan perhaps, ethical banking perhaps. But really the only thing that works is mass social pressure, so talking about it is the best thing you can do. If you can't be vegan, at least say you are.
Perhaps telling everyone on linked-in to book him for their climate sessions is best he reckons 😆 but I don't do corporate social media at all really, so Mastodon and cross post to Bluesky is the best thing I can do perhaps.
Stu's a friend of a friend, we've met before. Don't think he recognized me sitting in the front row without context against the stage lights though. Maybe a little at the end with some context when he's rushing to get home.
Still love that Captain Pike hairdo.
Status at - Sun, 29 Mar 2026 13:11:58 +0000
Been doing some augmented-reality fighting. Boxing matches against virtual robots in my studio. Getting breathless and working up a sweat.
Seems early in development. If it's not improved somewhat it'll get boring too quickly to actually get fit with.
Status at - Sat, 28 Mar 2026 23:58:18 +0000
Look maybe we should just compromise and stay half way between summer time and winter time all the time?
The world has 30 minute timezones. It's not all whole-hours.
This is ridiculous.
Tonight we skip an hour, and there will only be 23 hours tomorrow.
The answer to the question "How many hours between 8pm and 4am" will always need the response "That depends, what country on what day in what year" but we could at least make it standard from now on at least.
Status at - Sat, 28 Mar 2026 21:37:25 +0000
RE: https://boing.world/@pre/116308531551670843
I do wonder how screwed up a system would get if you just booted to tty running opencode connected to a local model and asked it to explore the machine and install a desktop.
Don't think we are that far away from trying that and it working.
Not well, but better than when they viciously exploit and trick and bamboozle the users like they do now.
Status at - Sat, 28 Mar 2026 21:24:32 +0000
RE: https://social.coop/@cwebber/116308252323044128
🤨
The year of the Linux laptop agent?
Status at - Sat, 28 Mar 2026 21:00:44 +0000
Battery drain on GrapheneOS here the last couple of days has definitely been worse than stock Google Android.
Battery-monitor says Molly is the main culprit.
Apparently Molly, the Signal client, keeps an open connection to the Signal server.
You can't just have the app check every 10 minutes if it has to ring like a phone upon call request. You need actually persistent connection.
On Google's android, google's play-servers do some kind of kung-fu to keep that modem mostly asleep despite this persistence.
Without Play Services, that don't happen.
But, there is a thing in F-Droid called "Sun up".
That does a similar thing I guess? Called "unified push". It uses Mozilla's servers instead of Google's. And does so anonymously apparently, but who knows for sure really? Not me.
End to end encryption means worst you'd be leaking is timing data really.
So install Sun Up from F-Droid and change Molly's settings / notifications / delivery-method to "Unified Push"
We will need a MollyServer too apparently as a bridge from Signal to Unified-Push at Mozilla.
All the cool kids are using molly.adminforge.de - there's the QR code you need at the site there. Maybe molly.notify.dykes.ca or some other one is better? I dunno. Can always use a different one if yours goes away.
We will find out over the next few days if that actually makes any difference to battery consumption.
Might save more if you have lots of other things also using open connections that can use unifed-push too. Emails and Matrix or whatever. Mux all those connections into one.
I don't do those things on my phone though, so it's just Molly, so we'll see.
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Bookmarks
Things I have bookmarked lately.Shameless Guesses, Not Hallucinations - Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:01:58 +0000
I hate the term “hallucinations” for when AIs say false things. It’s perfectly calculated to mislead the reader - to make them think AIs are crazy, or maybe just have incomprehensible failure modes.
AIs say false things for the same reason you do.
At least, I did. In school, I would take multiple choice tests. When I didn’t know the answer to a question, I would guess.
Age Verification Lobbying: Dark Money, Model Legislation & Institutional Capture - Mon, 16 Mar 2026 21:59:20 +0000
This investigation documents a national lobbying operation spanning corporate spending, think tank infrastructure, dark money networks, and competing model legislation templates. Meta spent a record $26.3 million on federal lobbying in 2025, deployed 86+ lobbyists across 45 states, and covertly funded a group called the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA) to advocate for the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA). But the operation extends beyond Meta.
Pluralistic: AI “journalists” prove that media bosses don’t give a shit (11 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow - Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:11:59 +0000
"If the purpose of a customer service department is to tell people to go
fuck themselves, then a chatbot is obviously the most efficient way of
delivering the service. It's not just that a chatbot charges less to
tell people to go fuck themselves than a human being – the chatbot
itself means "go fuck yourself." A chatbot is basically a "go fuck yourself" emoji. Perhaps this is why every AI icon looks like a butthole"
‘How On Earth Do You Justify That?’ Laura Kuenssberg’s Selective Empathy – Media Lens - Wed, 11 Mar 2026 17:50:50 +0000
"Worthy victims are people who are killed or oppressed by Official
Enemies of the West, such as the Soviet Union (and now Russia), North
Korea or China. These victims garner considerable media attention in the
propaganda system, marked by sympathy, indignation and fury. Their
suffering is humanised, described in detail, and used to generate moral
outrage directed at the offending regimes or governments, often as part
of a concerted attempt to topple them for the benefit of Western
geostrategic interests.---
‘Unworthy’ victims, by contrast, are people who are killed or whose
democratic aspirations are crushed by the West or ‘our allies’; such as
Suharto’s Indonesia in the 1960s, Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s, the
US-backed Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, and Israel in the
present day. These victims are less prominent, even absent, in western
media coverage or are often discounted as ‘collateral damage’: a lesser
kind of human, robbed of their individuality, their …
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber Is Stepping Down - Mon, 09 Mar 2026 23:57:19 +0000
"Schneider said he plans to emphasize scaling, describing his job as “to help set up Bluesky's next phase of growth.”"
phase two is where they tighten the thumb screws a little to see if anyone leaves. probably involves adverts.
Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse - Sat, 07 Mar 2026 15:37:16 +0000
"there's something quietly beautiful about a place where people just...
share what they know. No brand deals, no engagement metrics, no
algorithm nudging you toward rage. Just someone who spent twenty years
studying Arctic policy posting a thread at 2 AM because they think you
should understand what's happening. It's the internet I was promised in
1996. It only took thirty years and the complete collapse of American
journalism to get here."
‘Operation Epic Fury’ – Anatomy Of A War Of Aggression – Media Lens - Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:56:42 +0000
Pure, mendacious propaganda on prime-time BBC TV.
Hackers Expose The Massive Surveillance Stack Hiding Inside Your “Age Verification” Check - techdirt - Thu, 26 Feb 2026 09:06:25 +0000
See the pattern? Discord keeps swapping vendors like someone frantically rotating buckets under a leaking roof, apparently hoping the next bucket won’t have a hole in it. But the problem was never the bucket. The problem is the hole in the roof — the never-ending stream of age-verification government mandates.
Venezuela – ‘War Is Peace’ – Media Lens - Wed, 04 Feb 2026 13:45:45 +0000
"The 100-death toll may come as a surprise to consumers of
‘mainstream’ media, which have shown zero interest in the people killed
and maimed. If US soldiers had died, we would know their names, faces,
army units, back stories, with spouses and parents expressing their
grief in heart-rending interviews. --
For ‘mainstream’ politics and media, the latest killing spree is just
another Groundhog Day. Maduro is not perceived as a particular
individual; he is perceived as the latest incarnation of the generic
‘Bad Guy’: Milosevic, bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Assad,
Nasrallah and Sinwar. The Venezuelans are another anonymous crowd of
(mostly) brown-skinned people indistinguishable from Iraqis, Iranians,
Libyans, Syrians and Palestinians."
Sci-Fi Short Film "There Is No Antimemetics Division" | DUST - YouTube - Mon, 02 Feb 2026 23:25:09 +0000
Nice 15 minute sci-fi film about the anti-memetics division, a very strange place to work indeed.