2025-05-17 05:09:51
After a nearly twenty year break from using peer-to-peer
technology (torrents) to download movies and TV shows, I have decided
that it's more ethically pure in 2025 to once again fly the skull and
crossbones than it is to put money in the hands of the fascist
billionaires who monopolize the entertainment industry. To be clear, I'm
not advocating doing this to software from independent developers. It's
the collaborating big tech companies that don't deserve your money any
more.
Don't do this without a VPN. Just to show you how easy it is for your ISP or anyone who has your router's IP address to see what you download, you can use I Know What You Download
With minimal effort, using mostly free or freemium software. you can cobble together a secure, integrated system capable of importing my watchlist from Trakt into a an app that will search torrent web sites for the media that you want, download it and add it to a Plex media server.
The tools needed for creating this system are:
Jeff Bezos owns Amazon Prime Video, The Washington Post , and a hobby space exploration company among many other things. When the de facto head of Saudi Arabia's government ordered the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Bezos protested loudly and had a PR photo taken at the man's grave. Yesterday, Bezos proudly announced a new business partnership with the same government that committed the murder.
Apple has been in active collaboration with MAGA since the CEO, Tom Cook, donated $1 million to the president's inauguration. The company was just found to have committed perjury and ignoring a court order to end abusive business practices that unfairly rob developers of revenue and inflate the price of software and services.
2025-05-16 23:02:53
Having lived in the same house for 30 years now, I’ve watched generations of tree rats make their home in my backyard. Every year, a new crop of babies starts the process of getting to know us through the bribery process. I’ve probably distributed a ton of peanuts to them since 1995.
2025-05-16 07:08:38
A spring afternoon in a kayak on a waterway like this is not a bad place to be. In the South Carolina Low Country, you can find places like this all over.
2025-05-15 21:12:30
If you ever heard Andy and Barney talking about Mount Pilot on the Andy Griffith Show, that was a reference to the real place, Pilot Mountain, NC, which is about 20 minutes away from Mount Airy, Griffith’s real hometown and the basis for the fictional Mayberry from the show.
2025-05-15 14:28:00
I've just taken the longest break from writing in well over a year. It wasn't a planned break. We've been traveling quite a bit over the past month. Preparing for and recovering from the trips takes time, not to mention actually being away from home. I've also been consumed with a couple of interesting projects that can be real time sucks. It's been nice to give myself a break. No one creates pressure for me the pressure I put on myself. The minute a hobby starts to feel like work, it's time to reevaluate.
I operate well when I'm consistent. I'm capable of long, long streaks in all kinds of circumstances. I went nearly two years of getting 10K steps a day, which required me to go for long walks in the midst of a couple of hurricanes. So, yeah, I'm not always the brightest when it comes to these arbitrary goals. Consistency in writing caused me to literally lose sleep on the days when I put off posting until late in the day. Tapping out blog posts on road trips with Wonder Woman doesn't make me the best traveling companion either. I decided to evaluate my dopamine addiction, the one that's fed every time I hit the "publish" button on my blog. Writing is stil a priority, but I'm giving myself some space for other things.
One of the projects I'm working on is the consolidation of a lifetime of photographs. I started using a digital camera in 1995 when I worked for Westinghouse as a technical writer. It was a hefty model made by Kodak that used a small disk to record images. I think it cost about $5K at the time. The company paid for it, but I would occasionally use it to take personal photos. I've been using an iPhone since 2009, which is when the production of digital photography really accelerated. I'm sorting my pictures by the year and month they were taken. When possible, I add geotags to any images that don't have one. Using face recognition software, I'm tagging all the photos of my friends and family. In as many cases as I can, I'm also tagging the photos by subject.
I'm removing all the residue from work, which means random images of IP addresses, error messages, blinking lights from switches, routers, and wireless access points and the like. I'm also moving the thousands of memes I've collected to a separate library to that all my anti-Republican vitriol doesn't get mixed up with the images of my grandkids when i set my computers to play slide shows.
My second project is the self-hosted server I've been working on. I've repurposed old hard drives and other pieces of hardware to create versions of my music, photos, books and video collections from the Internet and on my home network on various devices. Every day I try new ways to avoid using the resources of the big tech companies, a big goal of mine this year.
The only other issue I'm facing is a wacky disturbance in my sleep schedule. It's been months since I got eight continuous hours of shut-eye. I've gotten into a pattern of getting up around 2:00 AM every day to work on my projects and then napping throughout the rest of the day. It's not a productive pattern, but I'm having a hard time breaking it.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇
2025-05-15 02:22:01
"Jesus Christ" by Woody Guthrie
What’s a lyric that resonates deeply with you and why? I'm far from religious, but I pay attention to the effect that religion plays on society. Although the utter hypocrisy of the Christian right-wingers seems like a fairly recent development, it really isn't. Woody Guthrie was singing about the dividing line between God and mammon 85 years ago. This song was written in New York City Of a rich man, preacher, and slave If Jesus was to preach what He preached in Galilee, They would lay poor Jesus in His grave.
