Why "vin-dit"?
Some fun videos here:
Videos
Nov. 29. Got some old musical creations digitized (from an LP and a cassette). I had no way to play them and hadn't heard them in decades. None good enough to put here. Some of my efforts at MIDI-based music production.
Came across (on Reddit) an interesting article from 2016. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/03/how-11-lines-of-code-broke-tons-sites.html
It seems an open source zealot accidentally used a corporation's name for a package, and they threatened to lawyer up etc. His work was on npm. He had another package that was widely used, though trivial. In the drama, he removed all his packages, and chaos ensued. Lots of people were depending on that one package.
Another concerning possibility for open source: "A subsequent investigation found that the campaign to insert the backdoor into the XZ Utils project was a culmination of approximately three years of effort, between November 2021 and February 2024,[14] by a user going by the name Jia Tan and the nickname JiaT75 to gain access to a position of trust within the project."
See:
Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. "XZ Utils backdoor," (accessed Nov. 29, 2024), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor
This is what scares me about Rust. It's got some great stuff, but it seems in practice people depend a lot on open-source "crates". I'm as into Free Software etc as anyone, but these things worry me.
Nov. 28 (Thanksgiving in the US) Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" has been declared the word of the year by an Australian dictionary. Here's the definition:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
An interview with the Register from January discusses possible solutions.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/30/tech_monopoly_doctorow/
Nov. 24 again, again - Cory Doctorow's blog is pretty interesting. here's a sample as a screenshot: https://pluralistic.net/ Wow, VS Code created that link. Kind of scary.
Nov. 24 again - notice to Safari users.
Nov. 24 - This is a computer keyboard turned into a Zen rock garden by Nick. It was a birthday or Christmas present some years ago. I used to have it at my desk, in my cube, when I had a desk and cube (i.e. before Covid). Notice the arrow keys and the Insert/PgUp/PgDn replacements. And the mini wood rake. 
Nov. 23 - saw the band Origem, featuring the Lucini brothers including my old bandmate Leonardo. They were playing at a level I never could have done. Really a pleasure to listen to them, and live in a small setting. Hope to see them again!
Nov. 20 - anonymous report from a friend in Ukraine. ukraine-11-20-2024.html
Nov. 20. Switched hosts. Too much news about the evils of google. Seems to be working OK.
Nov. 18 again. Found myself thinking "Is there a Ringo song in Yellow Submarine?"-- well, duh! Here it is, it was the opening credits. In the movie it's immediately followed by Eleanor Rigby, pretty much as I have it extracted.
YellowSubmarine.mp4
Nov. 18. Was thinking I had some Yellow Submarine videos that included George and John bits, but no Paul, so here is Eleanor Rigby. I think it's beautiful but sad. Didn't get exactly how sad when I saw this at like 7 years old.
EleanorRigby.mp4
Have to admit, VSCode suggestions sometimes are helpful. :)
These excerpts are from a pirate bay sourced video, done with Free software (in many senses of the word free). I could get the Adobe stuff, which is probably better, but I like the idea of free software and content. Even though creators should be able to monetize. But George Martin and Paul McCartney etc are in pretty good shape. :)
Nov. 17. Had to put up the text of this New Yorker profile of Eddie Palmieri!!!!! palmieri-newyorker11-2024.html
Nov. 16. Went to a NovaLug (Northern Virginia Linux Users' Group) meeting today. Hadn't done that in a LONG time.
Saw a great presentation on AI for programmers. Mostly it focused on writing some code that used some AI tools via APIs etc. Although large language models are the most visible thing, there are other types of AI that are do not "hallucinate" and are more reliable. Went home and fought with the project, which is available on GitHub. Python library management and version selection on Macs kind of stinks and I don't know the tricks. Eventually got it running.
I wish VS Code would stop offering to insert fictional content as I type......
Nov. 14 again**5 To all my writer friends that use MS Word - Microsoft has turned their Al bits and bots on to automatically go through anything done via Word. Here's how to turn it off. File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Connected Experiences"
On the Mac I found it under Word/Excel/Etc > Preferences > Privacy, and near the bottom was the checkbox for "Turn on optional connected experiences" which of course was on by default. (from mastodon)
Nov.14 again/again/again/again made the http addresses into links, so as not to be stupid.
Nov. 14, again,again,again - a very smart guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard author of ffmpeg which I just used, and generally a genius who doesn't need to self-promote.
Nov. 14 again, again - that Jodorowsky video is taking forever! Should have used BitTorrent. Grabbed a couple more videos and put them here.
Massive thanks to https://github.com/yt-dlp !!!! I don't trust youtube for the long run.
Nov. 14 again - was reminded of the need for web sites to be accessible to people with "disabilities". I used to have to produce such work making intranet sites for the US government. There are tools online to help check compliance. I just made a couple changes (added alt text). This site is I think pretty good in that regard, not perfect but pretty good. I should put more time into that and be disciplined about it.
I just tested it with this tool: https://github.com/SSAgov/ANDI(accessibility tester for web sites) and made a couple changes.
Back in my working days (VS Code offered to write this for me but I declined) we developers (none of whom were disabled) used to hate what we called "508 bugs" (named after Section 508, the law mandating govt. sites be accessible). I knew it was really a good thing, but we were working against deadlines, and
kind of caught in the middle between desired visual and UX innovations, requested by the clients, and the fact that those were often not accessible. It also required color contrast and other things that sometimes went against aesthetic ideas.
The original idea of HTML etc was actually pretty accessible - styling could be done by the user, and content could be pretty easy for a screenreader to make sense of. Lots of HTML tags are meant to represent meaning rather than appearance (H1-H6 levels of heading, "em" for emphasis, etc). This is one of the eternal conflicts in the computing world,
between semantically meaningful content and things "non-disabled" people like, that are not accessible (date pickers, text rendered in images, etc).
Sorry for the rant. Being a government intranet app developer, this was a pain point. I will try to make this site accessible, of course videos and images are less so by nature.
Nov. 14 was reminded of the existence of this film, Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain from 1973. https://archive.org/details/HOLYMOUNTAIN_201806 Might be good to download as archive.org is under attack.
Nov 12, again,again, again (caching not fixed) Anyone who can tell me how to prevent caching on Google Cloud, feel free to contact me (jholland (AT) vin-dit.org)
BTW: 無 works sometimes, 無 works sometimes.
Nov 12 again, again (may have fixed the caching thanks to Stack Overflow. God Bless Stack Overflow.) This is an important video IMHO:
TwoAndTwo.mp4 .It's Iranian. Pretty subversive???? Does Iran like this? I got it from youtube and the quality isn't very good. Sorry.
Nov. 12 again - I would like to extract this video from its Instagram location, but I am not motivated enough to attack it. The modern web gives us a lot, but I feel like direct free exchange of media is very often lost. I have some videos here and they are "free" in the freedom sense, not attached to any context - you can download them and share them and modify them as you see fit.
Anyway, I like this video on instragram, shared by a friend: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DCO8wVahAT6/
addendum - tried a little, but what Instagram sends back is beyond me to take apart, at least looking at it for 15 minutes in Safari developer tools. It is also annoying that Google cloud doesn't reflect my uploaded changes for sometimes quite a while. I have caching turned off where I can find it but it continues to serve previous versions of this file.
Nov. 12. There is this concept Douglas Hofstadter has of a "strange loop". If I understand correctly, rock-paper-scissors is a strange loop. scissors defeats paper which defeats rock which defeats scissors which...... An interesting thing about this little system, is that "defeats" in this world is not transitive. You may recall that in algebra and common sense, if a > b, and b > c, then a > c. A little reflection which show you that in rock-paper-scissors world, that is not true. if we write them as r, p and s and write "defeats" as >, then s > p > r, but s > r is wrong - scissors do not defeat rock!
Hofstadter thinks strange loops are part of where our consciousness comes from (that is a grotequely simple and probably incorrect summary of part of his thinking). M.C. Escher pictures often have strange loops.
I sometimes enjoy pondering mysteries like this.
Nov.11 -- I spent way too much time trying to make music with a Mac (Plus, then SE/30) and MIDI keyboards and stuff, from about 1988-1992. I don't have much of anything to show for it now, but I do have this song.
This song (Fosofi.mp3) was written by and performed (guitars, vocals) by Itadi K. Bonney (RIP). I played/sequenced the other parts pretty much as directed by him. It was recorded using Performer for Mac, and a TEAC 2340 4-track 1/4" 7.5IPS reel-to-reel, synced to the Mac via SMPTE (from a Jambox)
I recorded some other things during this time, but I don't have any of them handy.
Performer looked like this: 
(I saw this Performer screenshot on Facebook yesterday and it reminded me of all this.)
Nov 10 again, again - it seems that google cloud and other things are "helping" me by adding to and modifying my html. Hopefully it's all straight now.
Nov. 10 again jwz (check out https://jwz.org/blog/) posted this Bowie video. It's somewhat old, there's a wikipedia article about it. Anyway, I added it to my videos collection here. It's a 344 MB file, so it may take a bit to download etc.
Nov. 10 A picture! When the web was first invented it was really hyperTEXT, images actually came a little bit later. (IIRC)
I like this picture. In a post-2024 US election depresso kind of way. You can download it or view it in a window and zoom it.
Nov. 9, 2024 again. Thought I would post a self-made mp3 file. This is
me playing a piece by Wally Badarou, on a digital piano plugged into the
audio in of a computer. I recorded it 1/22/2023 on the occasion of
retiring from fannie mae contracting. The coworkers wanted me to play
something live and I preferred to record it, then present it. I have it
on soundcloud as a .wav file.
Rain2-1-22-2023.mp3
I remember posting mp3s (mp2's actually!) of the band I was in in 1995.
Soundcloud is a little annoying, actually. The early days of the web were so simple.
Nov. 9, 2024. Adding some <hr/>'s to improve comprehensibility.
Discovered that archive.org has some captures of this domain (I used to
self host it, and it didn't need the www. prefix)
They (archive.org)really do an important service to us all. Sad that
they are struggling, guess it's driven by being attacked due to trying
to share information without the corporations getting their piece.
A friend from the zendo (https://www.washingtonzen.org) is in Ukraine
now. He is working for some sort of relief thing I think, also think
it's funded by the US government? And for how long, until jan. 20?
Anyway, things in Ukraine sound pretty scary. Life during Wartime.
Nov. 8, 2024. Kamala Harris lost. I found out that Google fired some
employees for protesting their involvement in the war on Gaza. How does
that compare to Bezos' non-endorsement? Who can I ethically patronize to
publish my thoughts?
I'm publishing this by editing a file called index.html in what passes
for a text editor these days. Definitely not "default.htm". A thought
based on long-ago allegiances and conflicts......
Addendum- I don't know why there is a delay in uploading an
edited version of this file and my browser loading those edits from the
load balancer that is in front of my google cloud storage. Longing for
the days of a website based on tilde followed by my username and editing
in a terminal window, in "vi"......
Nov.3, 2024. This is my little website. I started it because I was going
to de-amazon myself after
Bezos' non-endorsement move in the 2024 election. So it's on Google
Cloud, which I don't know how to use. (I know or knew AWS, some).
Of course I think Google is bad in some way, but right now it's not the
current news.
I used to serve my vin-dit domain from a VM, various incarnations of
that involved RHEL clones, Debian, FreeBSD....Eventually I decided that
using my own email server and address for legally binding things
(pretty much for everything) was kind
of risky, and that I'd had a good run, and I migrated my email
activity to an icloud address.
I wanted to make sure people using the vin-dit address would still
reach me, so I used Google's facility for a custom email address,
though I had originally wanted to get Google out of my life when I
first set up vin-dit. Times change.
So I put a date on this multi-paragraph ramble, I guess this could
become a blog. I'm glad I'm not a Wordpress user now....
TBH the auto-complete and suggested text from VS Code as I write
this is a little creepy, and not very useful.