Posts By ocrow
Action
Underachiever
Overachiever
Correct-amount achiever?
Struggle and worry
Calm and ease
Maintaining interest
Grasp. Breathe.
Release. Breathe.
Is there a right path?
Abandon straight and forget narrow
The middle way isn’t like that
“Cities” vs “Towns”
The words we use affect the way we think. In California like much of the US we call the legal entity that is responsible for local government a ‘city’. We ascribe to it a level of agency, talking, for example, about what a city requires or wants – meaning what the local regulations specify.
But we don’t talk about ‘towns’ or ‘villages’ in this way. What is the effect of this distinction on how we think about smaller settlements? If we ever mention towns at all, they are usually referred to with the political phrase ‘small towns’ implying an existence in opposition to cities.
There is, or should be, a reciprocal relationship between towns and cities that we’ve ignored and largely lost. Christopher Alexander explores what makes that connection in his book A Pattern Language. Developments of small and large scale exist in symbiosis. Towns provide places that are outside the city, local services, and access to the countryside. The city provides businesses and other resources not available in smaller places. Rural places and developed places should be intertwined and interconnected. People need both.
Instead of a city surrounded by a network of market towns we have cities surrounded by swathes of undistinguished residential suburbs – places that can only be reached by car and which require massive networks of asphalt, but which provide few local services and no places to go by foot or by bike.
We have failed to build ‘places’ outside of city centers, in part because we don’t think about them as places. We’ve forgotten what towns are and what they are for.
Language in The Rings of Power (ep. 3)
With possible spoilers ahead, up to episode three.
Tolkien loved English in such a way that he infused his world with the poetry of it to evoke a magical and beautiful imagined past. If you adapt his works for film, that magic acquires a grand visual canvas, but the soul of it must still lie in the words the characters speak. This is the nature of the task.
After the first episode of The Rings of Power, I held high hopes that where Peter Jackson preferred an enthusiastic and implausible fight to a well-turned phrase, perhaps show-runners J.D. Payne & Patrick McKay might, if not elevate the latter, at least find room for both. With almost Tolkienesque declarations like Elrond’s “She has passed beyond my sight” and Thondir’s desperate “Night is closing in. How long can living flesh endure where even sunlight fears to tread?”, there seemed ample hope for a linguistically sensitive adaptation. With the elves’ trilling of Rs my enthusiasm reach a peak – this is just how Tolkien spoke the words he wrote and it brings them to life!
There is much else in the series to celebrate. I’m delighted by the magnificence of Morfydd Clark’s both gritty and elegant Galadriel. Robert Aramayo’s rendition of Elrond is not so stiff as Hugo Weaving’s and much more compelling for it. The whimsically rustic nomad proto-Hobbit Harfoots are a fine setting for plucky heroine Nori Brandyfoot (Markella Kavenagh), who delightfully upstages their unlikely leader Lenny Henry (Sadoc).
By episode three, however, whatever enthusiasm I held for the use of English in the show has diminished and is at serious risk of departing into the Far West. After the dinner table discussion when fêted Numenorian warrior Elendil inquires of his son “Looking for a promotion, cadet?” and the teenaged Isildur replies, “I was thinking I might defer”, continuing later “Is this really so tragic?”, I fear that whatever care was taken with earlier scripts has now been set aside to be replaced with a smorgasbord of Americanized anachronisms. Later his daughter Eärien interjects “Father, I made apprentice … Isildur convinced me to reapply”. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in a taxicab! Did you send the guild your official transcript and GRE scores too?!
My hope now is that a renewed delight in the careful use of words soon settles upon the writing team and inspires them to craft some dialogue the better to evoke and delight in the Middle-Earthen setting.
Custom macOS keyboard
On my quest to do everything on the Mac conveniently with minimal mouse use, I made stickers for the extra function keys on the Apple keyboard using printable clear address labels. I found a template for Avery 5630 labels and some appropriate icon images. I didn’t varnish over the printed label, but I’ll try that if these ones end up wearing out.
The keys are:
F16 quaver – opens the Alfred app mini music player, a convenient keyboard driven UI for selecting albums and songs in the Music app.
F17 calendar – opens ItsyCal, a small and fast calendar program that lives in the menubar, can be navigated from the keyboard, and which syncs with the system calendar and Google calendar. ItsyCal it great and giving it a dedicated launch key is definitely the way to go.
F18 bell – opens the system notification panel with weather and Todoist reminders, among other notifications
F19 screen – show the desktop. I don’t use this very often, but it’s nice to have a key for it when I need to grab a file quickly.
Perhaps some explanation is in order of the other ways I’ve customized the Mac for keyboard-first navigation. The main-mast is Alfred app, a wonderful tool for quick launching apps, navigating to folders, opening server sessions, running calculations, launching web searches, and on and on. It’s a bit like Apple’s Spotlight search, but both more powerful and more customizable. Almost everything I need to do regularly that isn’t on a shortcut or function key can be reached with a short command abbreviation in Alfred.
Karabiner Elements is another program needed to make keyboard bindings that aren’t possible using the macOS keyboard preferences panel. ‘Key bindings’ is just a programmerish way of saying that you want to customize which keys do what. For example I have the Caps Lock key bound as the hot key to open Alfred. This is huge, probably my favorite customization, because it takes an almost useless key and makes it very useful!
macOS has a slightly schizophrenic view of the purpose of function keys, many of which have a default system-wide function printed on the key (e.g. screen brightness, volume, etc.). These are useful, but if you want to also use the function keys for a particular application specific purpose, you have to use a different mode which replaces those default key bindings with the application specific function keys. There’s a key marked fn that lets you access the other set, but it’s awkwardly placed for use as a key modifier and so doesn’t much help. Karabiner Elements finesses this dilemma by letting you choose on a key by key basis whether you want the default system behavior or to pass the key through to the current application.
Finally I use a program called AltTab to customize the task switcher. In macOS the command-tab key combination is good for switching between programs, but it won’t switch between windows within a program. For that purpose the default binding of command-backtick does not work well. Each time you hit the key it cycles to the next window, but it doesn’t re-order the window stack to put the new top window first. So you can’t just hit command-backtick repeatedly to flip between the top two windows. You have to cycle through all of the app’s windows in sequence, which is tedious, or alternate command-backtick and command-shift-backtick, which is hard to reach and to remember which one to press next. AltTab fixes this by letting you cycle through windows in the style of the Microsoft Windows alt-tab switcher, which does keep the most recent window first. I have it configured to flip between windows in the current app (command-backtick) and between all windows in the system (option-tab). With the default command-tab binding to switch between apps, that makes three different ways to switch windows from the keyboard. That may be overly complicated, but I don’t see a simpler way that still works for all common situations. I suspect one could write a customized switcher that improves on AltTab by providing access to all three types of navigation from a single interface, but that’s a job for another day.
Phone Resurrection
I have a three year old Motorola phone that has gone rather suddenly from working fine to stuttering badly on many simple actions. I thought the problem was caused by running out of memory, but looking at the “memory use” report (accessible when “developer options” is turned on) shows that memory (RAM) is only half used, so that’s not it.
What else would cause a phone to slow down drastically? It’s a bit of a puzzle. I tried running the CPDT storage performance report app. An interesting result! Writing to the internal flash storage is very slow, less than 10 megabytes per second, slower than the benchmark result for any other similarly aged device. There’s plenty of flash space available, but it’s very slow. There are periods of several seconds where almost no data is being written.
Why would old flash memory be slow? I’m not exactly sure, but I think it’s to do with allocation. Flash memory uses blocks and can only write a whole block of data at a time. Parts of a block that are no longer in use can be reused by consolidating unused space, but that requires effective communication between the operating system and the flash controller hardware about data that’s no longer in use. If the flash controller doesn’t have a clear picture of what data the operating system has discarded it gets busy finding space to move data from partially used blocks whenever it has to write new data.
What to do? I backed up my data and factory reset the phone. Ta-da! CPDT now reports a five times improvement in sequential flash write speed (50 megabytes per second) and the long pauses are gone. The phone is now quite usable and I don’t have to replace it. Great!
But, my goodness, getting all my apps working again … sigh. The Android backup/restore managed to install most of the apps and some of the configuration automatically, but it’s very incomplete.
I had a dozen or so web pages open in Firefox, but that data wasn’t sync’d, so those are gone. I remembered to save the Nova launcher config so I didn’t have to rebuild the launcher pages. I copied my eBooks off to Google Drive. I have to login again with every other app attached to a service (social media, messaging, readers, recommender apps, music, tv, etc., etc.), dozens of apps in total.
I have three multi-factor authentication apps needed for various high security accounts (Google Authenticator, Duo Mobile and Symantec VIP Access). Each one had a different account recovery process. I don’t think I’m locked out of anything I care about, but … sheesh.
The biggest pain was backing up and restoring Signal. You need to manually save and restore the data file and then hand copy and type a thirty digit security code. For real. It may have great security, but this app’s usability is terrible for people who want to keep their contacts and messages across phones (i.e. everyone). I’ll have to write another post about messaging apps.
Climate Change, The Facts
In April this year, while I was in London, a new documentary by the distinguished and loved naturalist David Attenborough was launched by the national broadcaster (BBC) on prime time television.
The title was “Climate Change, The Facts”.
And that was also the content: an honest and direct review of the climate situation as we find and understand it, the imperative it puts on us to act, and the consequences if we do not. All of which was supported by moving scenes of beautiful though unsettling video photography and David Attenborough’s gorgeous and instantly recognizable voice narration, turned now to a most serious observation of tragic reality.
The timing was fortuitous. It came during a brief lull in the ongoing Brexit disaster and additionally during the week that Greta Thunberg happened to be speaking in front of the European Parliament, where she publicly chided the assembled dignitaries for not having given climate change more focus and attention. There’s nothing quite like seeing global leaders lectured by an actually righteous teenager.
Blocking Hackers
How to prevent password guessing attacks against SSH
Remote SSH login access is pretty much a necessity for administering and managing Unix/Linux servers. But how to allow access for the admins without also letting in the hacker hordes? VPNs are one solution, but they can be a pain to use and to setup, especially if you’re working with machines on several different networks.
Servers that allow direct SSH access, are going to attract plenty of remote login attempts. You need to ensure that the hackers can’t just keep beating on your door presenting different passwords until they get lucky. On one fairly typical server I administer there are around 2,800 failed login attempts per day or roughly one attempt a second. Installing a blocker for brute-force password hacking has been on my todo list for a while. This week I finally got a round tuit.
Manifesto
Hello. My intention for this blog is to cover an overly broad range of subjects. There will be posts that are philosophical, political, technical, magical, and whimsical, individually and possibly all at once. Themes will undoubtedly emerge. I will do my best to categorize as I go.
My motivation for starting is to have a place to put writing that I would like to not disappear quickly into the time-steam, in the way that tweets and Facebook posts do. I’m hoping that the posts will be of interest for some significant period. Posts may be infrequent though. Such is the way of things, I’m afraid.
If you would like to keep up with my posts please find the RSS feed here.
I hope to write articles which are engaging enough to pique your interest, and thoughtful enough to add something to the broader conversations. Thank you for your attention. Let me know what you think.