2023-05-05

Morning, programs!

MC here again on my day off, sitting at the kitchen table with a french press full of Bolivian coffee, writing on a trusty old Thinkpad x230 with a very new battery! Since I patched the EC in this one I dared to get a new battery. It was actually given to me by a dear friend when I mentioned I needed a new one! Thanks, R (and J for delivering it)! And yes, it charges. Ah, the great new future I was promised!

Nostalgic for the future?

P and I recently celebrated that we have been married 20 years... We got to talking at a nice restaurant about what our lives would be like in 20 years, in 2043. It was hard but manageable.

I've always been bad at seeing myself in the future. It's like at those job interviews where you get the question "Where do you see yourself in five years?" and you just lose it and almost start to cry. You know what I mean.

I had a revelation when were discussing this: I have a way of losing myself in what I would like to describe as creative nostalgia. I look back at a time and wonder a lot of "What if...?". You can see it in these log entries as well. It's not necessarily with regret, it's more like a creative fantasy about the past, tinged with a feeling of nostalgia.

What if I could do that with the future?

Maybe other people do this all the time? Maybe that's why studies say that people are happy when they are planning their vacation travels? I usually find it anxiety inducing and horrible.

I'll try to practise being nostalgic for the future.

Tillitis TKey now available

The Tillitis web shop opened in the beginning of April while I was travelling! The end-user version of the TKey is now available for sale.

Note that the only one available in the web shop right now is a locked down end-user version. You won't be able to update the FPGA bitstream nor read it, nor the Unique Device Secret. Unlocked TKeys and a programmer board will be available soon.

Paris in spring

P, #3 and I spent a week in Paris in the beginning of April. The primary reason we went to Paris was that P was running in the Paris marathon but we also wanted to see Paris. Neither of us have been there, or even in France, before.

We were a bit worried about the strikes and if we would even get all the way with all the cancelled trains. Even though I sympatize with the strikers we might have had to call the whole thing off. In the end we decided to just try to reach Paris anyway and make an adventure of it.

We went to Paris by train, first Öresundståg to Copenhagen, then DSB's fucking diesel train to Hamburg, then a DB IC night train Hamburg-Karlsruhe. Unfortunately for us we didn't have tickets for a sleeper car so we sat up during the night. Not optimal.

When we arrived in Karlsruhe P piloted zombie #3 and the zombie dad to some very large morning coffee at the station and then on to a TGV to Paris. There was surprisingly little space on the TGV and the seats very close to each other compared to Swedish, Danish or German trains.

We arrived at Gare de l'Est, not far from the flat we were renting. The flat wasn't ready so we stored our bags and walked around in Montmartre for a couple of hours, including having a look at the Sacre-Coeur basilica. I thought it was funny that the square below the church was named after famous anarchist and presumed atheist Louise Michel! Parisian humor?

The flat was a very small studio thing with a kitchen. The kitchen was missing some utensils that made it a bit challenging to cook, but I managed. I don't think many people actually used the kitchen much, but we did. I cooked most of our meals there. There were several grocery stores nearby and I think we found the best one for vegans.

On the wall on the neighbouring house there was a stylized plaque of Louise Michel! It wasn't official or anything, just this image of her face about four metres up on the wall! There was a lot of wall art everywhere in Montmartre, actually, and some of it just appeared over night.

P ran the Paris marathon. A very cold marathon. I think it was 4 C! She was grumpy about the finishing time but I'm so proud of her. I met her at the goal and it was indeed very cold. This was true most of the week, actually. I had imagined Paris in April to be much warmer and didn't bring much winter clothing.

One of the big things to do in Paris is, of course, the restaurants. We didn't find that many restaurants that knew anything about veganism, however, and it certainly didn't help that I'm allergic to soy protein and that there was quite the language barrier. Drinks were the worst, though. Not many knew about the beer or the wine and barnivore.com didn't either. The result was that we had lunch some of the days in a restaurant (sometimes just french fries and hummus) but no restaurant dinner at all.

We saw a lot of interesting things in Paris. Père Lachaise and the catacombs were among the best and the Dalí museum was great. I also quite liked just walking around and looking at the neighbourhoods.

At Père Lachaise I looked for and found the final resting place of anarchist Nestor Makhno! He's in niche 6685 at the columbarium. I thought it was a bit funny that I also found a Picard family grave.

I was a bit scared since watching Black Friday's vlog about how people would treat goths or people in black but we were never bothered by anyone. Granted, we didn't look extreme or anything.

We only saw the Eiffel tower at the distance and the Arc de Triomphe not even once, except P who saw it during the marathon. Panthéon was closed when we went by but we sat on the stairs outside for a while and talked about Marie Curie, then walked around in the Quartier Latin and the People's free Sorbonne (well... in the spring of 1968, perhaps).

We tried to find alternative clothing stores but only found a couple small shops with very little to offer. Didn't see much punks or goths, either, and the ones we saw were clearly the bored teenage kids in tourist families.

I tried to find the hackers and the techno-anarchists. I asked in Fedi in advance. No replies. I joined La Quadrature du Net's IRC channel and asked where everyone was hanging out but they weren't very forthcoming. I guess writing in English made me stand out in a bad way?

I wrote this in a chat at the time:

Maybe I just didn't find my people? Does anyone know where they are?

During one of our many walks in Montmartre (and other neighbourhoods) we came across Cafe des 2 moulins, the cafe from "Amélie" (2001)! I got tears in my eyes and had to stand there for a while just soaking it in.

Some observations about Paris:

Very few alternative people.

Very chlorinated water.

Very few vegan markings on food and hygiene products.

Very nice underground trains.

Fantastic buildings.

Many historical landmarks.

We left Paris by a TGV to Cologne from Gare du Nord. The large train stations are really magnificient in Paris and this was no exception. Btw, don't miss Musée d'Orsay which used to be a train station!

When we arrived at Cologne and went out of the station the Cologne cathedral was just there. #3 just went "Wooow! Gothiest church ever!" and liked the place instantly. And yes, within 15 minutes we had seen at least two teenage punk girls, complete with ACAB patches and pink hair, holding hands! It felt like coming home!

I had looked up restaurants in advance and we had dinner at Brauhaus Tünnes und Schäl which actually had a lot of vegan soy-free options! I was quite surprised to find something like that in an otherwise traditional Brauhaus.

We spent the night in a hotel in Cologne. It was Osternacht but instead of going to the cathedral we celebrated(?) sitting on the hotel room floor with some snacks (again, easy to find things with vegan markings) and a few kölsch beers. Not unlike how many nights used to end during C3, actually. All the bells in the city was chiming at something like 22:30 and it sounded magical.

The next day we left on an IC to Hamburg. Not ICE this time either, unfortunately, but the train was nice anyway. I had bought some new to me Efrischungsgetränk mit Mategeschmack (not Club-Mate or Flora Power) and enjoyed the trip. Across the aisle what I think was a gay couple brought out two champagne flutes and opened a bottle of Sekt. As I said, it felt like coming home.

In Hamburg we lived at the wonderful hotel Wedina. They call themselves a Litteraturhotel and yes, they had quite the library with signed first editions!

Again, it was easy to find vegan food. And I could order in German and made myself understood about veganism and soy protein. Very, very nice.

The next day we left Hamburg by bus becuase the train tracks were being worked on. We shopped a lot of food and snacks before leaving because it would take quite some time to get home.

Unfortunately the busses were in total chaos. In the end we ended up on an ordinary city bus shanghaied into long range service! We had to be on this thing for three hours. I spent the time talking to some nice Germans and reading first Eli Lee's "A Strange and Brilliant Light" and then starting on Garth Nix's "The Sinister booksellers of Bath".

We ended up in Padborg station in Denmark, too late to catch our train, and ended up sitting on the ground in the sun drinking beer and eating for two hours more. When a DSB train to Copenhagen came we jumped on board and no one said anything about being on the wrong train. The change in Copenhagen was unproblematic and we were soon home.

Codeberg & free time vs work

I pushed a few other Github repos to my Codeberg page:

https://codeberg.org/mchack

I'm going to archive them on Github.

I work with Github every day. It's too much to use it on my free time too, so I'm moving my stuff to Codeberg. There's a lot of other things to say about Github, but many people have said it much better than I can.

Did something similar with the work computer. I'm back to Sway there and keep running River on my personal machines. This makes them at least a little different, which I think is a good thing. Yes, yes, I know. I'm mostly in Emacs all the time on both of them, so not that different, I guess, but it's one more attempt at making work and free time a little different.

New server hardware

I bought the 1U machine I was talking about earlier. It's a Supermicro SC815 with two Xeon E5's and 24 gigs of ECC RAM. I bought four used 4 TiB Hitachi spinners for it. It's already in my spare room but I haven't had time to do anything with it. In time it will become the new hack.org main machine. I'm still not decided if I'll go with FreeBSD again or if I'll just give in and use a Linux dist.

mc,

Setting Orange, the 52 day of Discord in the YOLD 3189

mc

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