Vin-dit

Some fun videos here:

Now at hostwinds.com, hope that solves some issues....
now available at both https://vin-dit.org and https://home.vin-dit.org, which is at my house, should be the same stuff.

Posts from November 2024

Posts from December 2024

Posts from January 2025

Posts from February 2025

Posts from March 2025

Posts from April 2025

Posts from May 2025

Posts from June 2025

July 6 again - I love Vonnegut so much. This revbobby.html is an excerpt from a speech a character in the novel The Sirens of Titan gives - imagine a fundamentalist preacher delivering this.

July 6 - https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250703-how-the-biosphere-2-experiment-changed-our-understanding-of-the-earth This experiment is really important! These people like Musk that think we're going to move to Mars are delusional.
Tilman estimates that, if future space colonies are anything like Biosphere 2, they'd cost $82,500 (£61,000) per person a month to live in, and even that would be no guarantee of sustaining human life. "It's incredibly expensive to try to replace the services that the Earth's ecosystems provide for free to humanity," Tilman says.
We need to realize there are things we don't know that the Earth does for us.
"I think that was a really important lesson to learn: that that [soil] microbiome, even though we can't see it, is extremely influential," Adams says.

July 4 - Not writing about current events, which are mostly horrible. Thinking about RMS (Richard Stallman). His website https://stallman.org has a "Political Notes" section, visible right away and can be loaded as a page by itself. I mostly agree with his notes and sometimes find things there I didn't find myself. He's a little extreme about "Software Freedom". For instance, he recommends an actionnetwork.org campaign but includes lengthy instructions on "how to use it without running non-free(sic) Javascript". Looking at one of their campaigns, viewing source, the Javascript seems to be Bootstrap and a small file with some pretty transparent code. The whole idea of "software freedom" as he defines it means access to the source code, in the preferred form for development, and possibly restricting reuse of that source under less "free" terms. This would make sense, if there could be a world of applications that followed these rules. There's a mindset or assumption, though, that what you run will be based on some definable piece of source code. Javascript served to a browser can be dynamically generated, or just revised, pretty much instantaneously. A lot of computing now is done by browsers interpreting Javascript, sometimes large quantities of it. Caching aside, all that code is possibly revised every time it is run. I think this paradigm of computing may render his beloved GPL sort of obsolete.

Stallman is a public figure and tries to set an example of how to live, for instance, refusing to pay except with cash when at all possible, trying not to patronize questionable companies, etc. He has many detractors and they may have some valid points. Looking at his "Political Notes" page today, though, I do think he has a lot of good ideas. I actually went to a dinner with him, like 15 years ago, with other FOSS (look it up) enthusiasts. At the time I tried to tell him I thought cloud computing was a good thing for allowing people a platform for less money. He was opposed, because it didn't involve complete control over the "software freedom".

July 2 - another month. Forgot to say "Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit" yesterday morning; didn't think of it til I'd already spoken about something else. :( Our 30th wedding anniversary is the 8th. Lots of terrible news about the US and other places. It hasn't hit me directly - sort of guilty about that. Don't want people to miss these two videos:
MilesQuintetItaly.mp4 colorized and enhanced version of video of Miles Davis Quintet Teatro dell'Arte, Milan, Italy, October 11th, 1964.
MilesQuintetItalyBW.mp4 Non-colorized, possibly more authentic, version of Miles Davis Quintet Teatro dell'Arte, Milan, Italy, October 11th, 1964
also: AllOfYou.html a page with a piano transcription and mp3 of the quintet on July 27 1963 (with George Coleman instead of Wayne Shorter).