Birthday, Gigs, Feb 2025
Played a gig at a birthday party,watched a comedian do a gig,fixed some things, did more improvand got a keyboard for my birthday.
Me
Playing a music gig
Went to a friend’s birthday party, played some songs on the synth with the loop pedal.
Seemed to go down okay, they demanded an encore.
It requires more attention in front of an audience somehow. Can feel my concentration shrinking and the timing and voicecontrol slip quite a lot.
Good to see some old friends I don’t get to see very often, and some of the more usual crowd. Half the people there are, like me, not drinking due to health reasons.
Getting older sucks quite a lot. Does mean I can drive home at least I guess.
There’s a video of one of the songs that only makes me cringe at how terrible it is a couple of times.
Suspect there’s too much going on by the end of this loop. Self indulgent. Possibly ought to stop the loop of the finalguitar solo so it’ isn’t playing over itself like 3 times.
Seeing a comedy Gig
Went to see a comedian called Rob Auton do a work-in-progress show at the local little theater.
More “first time” than “in progress” really. He was more comfortable and funny when talking about the act than when reading it from the pages.
A strange story where he’s pretending to be a motivational speaker called “Can”, which has quite a bit of work still to be done.
Good to see a couple of friends and have some food before the show, nice enjoyable evening.
Fixing Things
Something broke in my internet router and I had to reset it and it screwed up so all the devices in the flat needed to be updated to connect to the new network.
There’s the main desktop, two phones, two tablets,two laptops, one palmtop, a VR headset, the Steamdeck,and the kitchen screen.
The Raspbery Pi that controls the lights in kiosk mode needed me to attach an ethernet cable so I could shell in to kill the kiosk, and a keyboard/mouse so I could select the network and password once it was gone.
The Magic-Home LED strips needed me to use the app on the burner phone. Putting them in reset mode bypowering off and on again quickly 3 times then pairing them from the app. Three of those.
The WLED led strips have no way to set them to re-pair the network so had to each be re-flashed. They are stuck to the walls so I had to use the palmtop, which needed to have it’s OS updated and then Chrome installed so it could do that. Four of those.
The two wifi-controlled power-sockets aren’t currently used coz the lava-lamps and the plasma-ball are all broken anyway.
Think that’s everything.
I don’t bother attaching the robot vacuum cleaner. It doesn’t really need it, I don’t control it with a script or my phone, just use the remote.
Smart homes eh? Don’t let the wifi reset!
Also a tablet’s battery swelled up so much it popped the screen off and so it’s been sat around waiting for me to fix it for… Oh, three years maybe?
Ages.
Fixed it this month!
Replacing that battery required dealing with fiddly ribbon cables that blocked it in, and the bastards had glued the battery in too so had to deal with slowly trying to break the glue by wedging a plastic card behind it.
That’s why I put it off for years.
Took ages. Then when I finished, it didn’t seem to work 😦 Had to re-do all those fiddly ribbon cables again to eventually gain success.
This is why I have two tablets now. The new one is much cheaper and more slow and rubbish with bigger pixels despite this fixed one being half a decade old now.
New Keyboard
I was looking for a good properly split keyboard, separate halves to maybe put on separate arm-rests on a captain’s chair.
Ain’t many readily available retail units. But I found some in kickstarter funds-raising right now
Looked amazing, but quite a lot of money for a keyboard I wouldn’t get till December, and presumably with Kickstarter possibly not even at all?
🤔
Asked if anyone has much experience orderingkickstarter hardware? Do they generally ship if they raise over their goal? Anyone know anything about this hong kong company?
Went with buying the Dygma that @petejohanson suggested in the end.
Spent most of my birthday programming it’s layers to customize it. Setting the lights to light up how I like, a layer to type emoji like 😉😀😆🥴 and one for app launching.
I can even type my email address with a two keypress combo.
Taking some getting used to typing on it though. The return buttons being on the thumb near the space means I keep posting messages earlier than I intended.
Most expensive keyboard I ever owned.
More expensive than most of the computers I’ve owned.
Enjoying it so far though. Wondering if I should have bought the clicky switches mind. Wonder ifI’ll ever get around to embedding it into thearms of an arm chair?
Mozilla Is Lost
Yes, Mozilla’s new terms of use are obnoxious and stupid but this is not unexpected, remember that they are an advertising company now, they have been since June last year when (like Google before them) they merged with advertising company, Anonym.
Advertising is poison, and there is no hope for Mozilla nowunless they can separate that poison from their organization.
Mozilla is lost.
Librewolf is cutting the worst of it out, but we need a newfork, not just of the browser but of the whole org.
No, I don’t know how we get it, or really expect it to be possible.
There are no good browsers now. Firefox and Chrome areboth run by advertising companies.
Labour Suck
Labour Suck Diffusing Reform Lies
A group of Labour MPs urge No 10 to be tougher on migration to fend off Reform?
Oh look, it’s the Labour party saying
Reform is correct,
you shouldn’t vote for them, but Reform is correct and have
accurately described all your problems
The more Labour accept the framing Reform offers, instead of arguing against it, the more they ensure a Reform victory.
When Nigel Farage is the prime minister, it will be because the Labour Party agreed with them when they lied that immigration causes everyone’s problems and is bad for the country.
It’ll be because when Nigel says “Refugees are the cause of house price inflation” they say “Yes, we must do something about refuges” instead of “Bollocks, rich landlords cause house price inflation, we should tax landlordism”
It’s hard to underestimate just how awful terrible a job the Labour party is doing of diffusing Reform’s lies.😔
Labour Suck At Regulating Water
Thames Water have written to me saying that their prices are going to change, and claiming to explain why.
They say it’s because
water regulator Ofwat has finished their industry-wide price review. This is the basis for our changes.
Which is hardly a reason at all, they say:
It’s vital that we invest in our network and infrastructure
Which is true, but isn’t the reason the bills must go up. They’ve had years to do this, they’ve borrowed the money to do it with.
But instead of using that borrowed money to upgrade or repair their pipe network, they gave it to shareholders in dividends.The reason for the price increase is because they loaded up the company with debt and drained all it’s value into the pockets of the owner class. Practically bankrupting the company so that it requires new cash injection in order to enrich its capital owners.
I see you Thames Water. 👀
I see you Ofwat, and the red and blue Tory parties 👀
Labour suck at Encryption Freedom
Well, well. If you want to encrypt your backup data in the UK you’ll have to do it yourself with open tools because Apple have removed encryption from uk backups rather than create a master-key to let the government decrypt everything.
Absolutely the right move from Apple, probably nobody should have been trusting Apple to encrypt their backups and so doing it themselves anyway.
Absolutely the wrong move from the UK government, as usual, who seem to think there is such a thingas an encryption breaking key which only good-guys can use.
Even though the cops and the government also contain bad-guys.
Tsk.
Seems like governments can’t make good internet law ever at all.
Labour suck at sucking up
Oh, he gave Trump a love letter, isn’t that nice.🤢 🤮
Trump and Starmer, sitting in a tree, Brown-nosing with royalty.
Labour suck at taxing the rich
Billions of pounds found, not by the hard choice of taxing the super-rich of course but by the easy choice (labelled “difficult”)of taking it from the poor!
What will it be spent on? Primarily contracts for American war corporations.
It’s a tithe. We are paying a tithe bigger than the “black hole” everyone was worried about last year to buy favor with the menace in the white house.
None of this in their manifesto.
Fuck this tory party as much as the other one.
Labour and conservatives, all tories.
Trump sucks too
“Tone and body language”, plus a “lack of respect” are the things which Trump objected to, which blew his deal up and left him failing to reach any agreement with Zelinskyy.
What a master deal-maker he must be, to let his entire negotiation blow up in anger just because of the tone and respect he thinks he deserves.
Hope he never has to broker a deal with me and anyone else coz Zelenksyy appeared to me to be far too differential, and didn’t even swear or try and throw a milkshake over the fascist. I’d be throwing a milkshake at the very least. Showing full on contempt, never mind lack of respect.
Strange how much these so-called “strong” men require respect and deference to support their fragile masculinity or else they throw all their toys out of the pram.
Don’t seem that strong to me. Seems pretty pathetic.
Releases
Wordcloud Tarot
Trump threw Zelinskyy out of the Whitehouse and refused hisrequest for security guarantees. What’s going on?
I did a five minute tarot reading to investigate and find that Ukraine was oppressed by a brutal fascist dictator, but it’s people are strong, brave and assured, with a pragmatic honest leader.
Now a jealous inconsiderate felon has withdrawn support.
But this will lead to a manifestation of European strength, a selfless sacrifice, perseverance and heroic discipline.
Watch on our website here:
https://wordcloudtarot.com/readings/2025-03-04-trumpukraine/
Reading
Read “Making Sense Of Chaos” by J Doyne Farmer, in which he describes some of the problems withstandard static economic models and his successeswith instead using “complexity economics”, where he’s building giant models of economies out of interactions between software simulated people called agents.
The thing, he reckons, about the mathematical equation driven models is that they are static, and so only really reflect changes when exogenous shocks hit the system.
So you can see a change in the model if there’s some supply shock caused by a pandemic or whatever, but the economic model won’t evolve over time to reflect changes which come from within the economy itself. It always reaches an equilibrium until the next shock.
Whereas his agent-based models are chaotic, and can modelthe chaotic behaviour of a real economy. Dynamic changes within the model can lead to boom and bust cycles, or to market crashes based on nothing but the endogenous behaviour of the model without requiring some shock from outside it like a war or a pandemic.
He describes some success stories over his career of models getting increasingly complex as computational power increases, and paints a convincing picture of how better models can help decision makers determine the best courses of action.
Maybe it’s because I’m a programmer from the games business,and not really much of a mathematician, but this is the method I’d have used if you asked me to model an economy. Hard to seehow it could possibly work with just an equation of demand and supply.
But of course economics as a discipline is older thancomputers so they couldn’t do it that way in the first place.
It would be good to have the field of economics catch up to trying to model the real world instead of just justify their pre-conceived ideas, to validate concepts that allow the rich getting to rule the world and the politicians to do what they were planning anyway.
Links
What’s going on where it’s going on, on the web?
Economics
Richard Wolff on Erhardt for four hours talking about the current economic situation. He has a great understanding and a clear wayof speaking.
Doctorow on Piketty:
eventually the share of wealth held by the rich will reach a tipping point, and we’ll see policies that benefit the wealthy crowding out policies that support human thriving, and the rich will get richer, and they will feud with each other, and society will destabilize, and we will face collapse.
AI
Who should control what the ai thinks is good and moral?
But fast-forward 2-3 years to when AIs are a big part of the economy and military, and this gets more interesting. What should the spec say? In particular, what is the chain of command?
Zvi on Xai’s newly released model, Grok:
Grok is not as smart as one might hope and has other issues, but it is better than I expected and for now has its place in the rotation, especially for when you want its Twitter integration.but also,
Grok turned out rather woke and extremely anti-Trump and anti-Musk, as well as trivial to jailbreak, and [xAi did] rather blunt things about that … lot of trust has been lost. It will be extremely difficult to win it back.
as usual from Zvi, extremely long.
Scott Alexander wonders if Tegmark’s “Mathematical Universe” defeatsmost of the arguments he sees for God’s existence.
Internet
An hour of Cory doing a lecture about internet enshitification, it’s causes and it’s solutions and how we can and must build a new better internet.
Online Safety
- UK Online Safety Act may not be safe for blog owners - The Register Terrible bill comes into force in March:
the Online Safety Act has a set of obligations that come into force on March 17, 2025, and large website operators are already concerned. Several, like London Fixed Gear and Single Speed, have stated that they will shut their online forums rather than attempt to comply. And outside the UK, online discussion site Lobsters has implemented a geoblock that will prevent UK visitors from accessing the site after March 16.
Gender
Potholer’s fifteen minute answer to the question of how many genders there are (It depends on which language you’reasking about, in English: none) and how many sexes there are(two, but the boundaries are fuzzy).
more
————-That’s just the highlights this month,there’s more in my full public bookmarks from my link-bot on the fediverse or an RSS feed
Around the Fediverse
The fediverse isn’t like the rest of the internet,no billionaire controls it, no company owns it,the people each own their own part. What’s been going on there this month?
Online Safety Act
So what happens when a country produceslegislation trying to control the hugecompanies they think run it all? Does itapply? How can tiny admin teams do all thelegal compliance work with no budget?
- @neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk A thread following the government talking about the Online Safety Bill
Ofcom: “we are not looking to answer questions specific to your services”.“We want you to make your own decisions”.
Well that sets the tone nicely.#OnlineSafetyAct
- @networkstring@ablative.stream Starts a block the UK campaign
I woke up angry and chose violence; https://geoblockthe.uk/
I’m going for a walk but please send me more guides (preferably the official documentation where possible) and I’ll add them.
Great Blender Plugin
@mike_edwards@mas.to was exploring a texturing plugin for blender
Wow, I spent the past couple days working with Ucupaint for the first time. It’s a free addon for Blender available from the extensions site, and it feels like the missing piece—especially for texture painting. Not a huge Substance Designer person, but Ucupaint goes a long way toward making Blender competitive for that kind of work. For someone like me whose primary strength isn’t as a painter, the layered and non-destructive (or less destructive) workflow was rad
Mozilla is lost
@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social Talks about Mozilla’s updated T&Cs:
General rule of thumb: Every time an organization updates their terms of service and/or privacy policy, it is never because they have your best interests at heart.
Specific thoughts on this latest Mozilla action…
Setting aside the “worldwide license” bullshit, the privacy policy appears to have broadened both the classes of data Mozilla aims to collect, and the situations in which they collect them.
These are not the actions of an org that cares about your privacy….
@neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk takes the mick:
I need to clarify that I can’t tell you that I am not selling your data because legally I am selling your data because I am doing things that are not not selling your data which some people consider to be selling your data despite promising that I will never sell your data and I am not sure why you find this unclear and I still need that license to your content and I am very transparent and trustworthy.
@davidrevoy@framapiaf.org Did a nice drawing as he checks out Librewolf instead of Firefox
How my Firefox became a LibreWolf New blog-post: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1065/how-my-firefox-became-a-librewolf
Arts and Craft
@revk@toot.me.uk Is making and selling electronic things
The two new things I now have are…
Coasters
7.5" E-Paper panels and controllers
Both have been a lot of work, and I’m personally building and shipping.
I hope they work out and people buy them.
@elysegrasso@historians.social has a book finished!
Shameless self-promotion day. Let’s boost away.
My first book: Heir of the Bindings: Elderkin Chronicles Volume I, has been out for just over a month and is available almost everywhere in ebook and POD paperback formats
A few readers have said nice things.
The next volume, Childe of Sorrows: Elderkin Chronicles Volume II, is progressing nicely and should come out in a few months.
Other books in the queue are mentioned at https://www.SuperiorMagpiePress.com.