Epicyon
I made a new fedi personal instance using epicyon. It took hours, and wasn’t even my first choice. I rented the new server under the assumption I’d be using Streams. See the post I wrote on epicyon itself here. It’s actually a temptation to continue using epicyon’s blogging feature. But org-static-blog gives me better possibilities for presentation.
I love this system, though I do not know yet how well it works. I’ve used a couple of former instances I made in the fediverse, to follow the new instance, and see how well it managing to send and receive posts, and it seems to be performing all right, though with mixed results. From one connection, I was unable to send a connection request; another said that a connection had yet to be confirmed. But these particular instances exist on the periphery of the fediverse.
There are differences between the presentation of the the different fediverse flavors. Mastodon most closely resembles Twitter and is similarly suitable for fast-paced ongoing conversations. Those become annoying on software with a more spacious presentation, like Epicyon, and tend to result in slightly disjointed conversations: it’s easier to follow those by following their link back to Mastodon. I’ve unfollowed some of the chattiest people, even though they have something interesting to say. I’ll catch up with them elsewhere. And, as with Twitter, I often find an easier way to follow people is to browser-bookmark them and go directly to their personal profiles, checking in just occasionally.
In my timeline I like to see more substantive posts – either directly or through links – and that is what I try to post too. After unfollowing, my timeline is closer to what I want to see.
Shantaram
I rewatched the first episode with D, and since then we managed another couple of episodes. It captures well the spirit of the book – I think Roberts will be very happy with it. One thing that comes across very much is the writer’s emotional warmth and humanism. The characters are all 3-dimensional; even the minor parts.
Delivery heroes
I ordered 2 new computers last week for Einat at the spiritual center and all this week the delivery company has been calling to say they will be arriving. On Thursday they called to say that they would deliver by 8 PM. But nada. Today, I was skeptical that anything would come because Fridays here are a bit like Saturdays elsewhere; it’s a day when fewer people are at work and you don’t expect much to happen: out here in the boondocks, even the post doesn’t come.
But at around 6 PM I got a call to say the delivery man was on his way. I met him outside and all my annoyance with the company dissipated. As often happens in Israel, the delivery van was his ordinary car – with packages crammed into the back seats, the front passenger seat and the trunk. It took him several minutes to locate the package in the dark, with the flashlight of his phone.
He told me the story of why he happened to be arriving at dinner time on a Friday: the previous guy in charge of deliveries to our area had quit earlier in the week, and he was the new guy – just 2 days on the job and struggling to deal with a backlog that was especially big due to Black Friday sales. Looking at the number of remaining packages in his car, he obviously had another couple of hours work, and had been at it since the morning.
How can you give a delivery company a poor rating when the guys themselves are working so hard? – being sent out in their own cars, missing dinner with their families in order to bring well-to-do scumbags their new toys. It’s the same as with other forms of exploitation.
I unloaded the computers at the spiritual center and met Einat there. She was super-happy with the new laptop, a feather-weight Asus Zen Book with a reversible oled touch-screen. She too was pretty busy: a group coming to rent the halls at 8 PM, and tomorrow a special program for the UN’s day for the elimination of violence against women.
TROM
I really like the TROM people.
TROM is a project that aims to showcase in detail the root cause of most of today’s problems and proposes realistic solutions to solve those problems. But it is also about challenging people’s values, explaining in simple language how the world works, and providing free and good quality educational materials/tools for everyone.
I haven’t got into TROM as such yet, but I think there’s lots of potential there. They have a really cool peertube channel. And the people involved are really interesting – Tio, Sasha and Aaron are the ones I’ve encountered. Sasha has a great website of her own, “Big World Small Sasha”.
Potato nose
My cold has lasted over a week, and it’s run through 3 packs of tissues + hankies. The span of time is in excess of my usual winter colds and I think this is partly due to a potato. I was spooning a vegetable soup a few days ago when the onset of a sneeze caused me somehow to inhale. I immediately had a burning sensation at the top of the nose and a slightly painful feeling there for the rest of the evening, but then it passed. Two or three days later I started to develop a bad smell in my nose – a smell similar to that of a potato that is rotting at the bottom of a basket of vegies.
An altered sense of smell sometimes result from nasal infections. But I discovered today that this one was for real, when a sneeze suddenly ejected a large piece of potato skin. It had probably been irritating my nose all the while, and keeping my cold alive in the process.
Reactions to political realities
When G was here a week ago, back from Mumbai, I was asking him how he found the worsening political reality there – which seems almost as bad in India as here, and in quite a similar way. He said that one thing he found is that it changes the way people behave. I asked him if he could give an example. He said that there is a Muslim tailor who has a shop in the apartment building of his wife’s family’s Mumbai home. A Muslim tailor in a building with no other Muslims, in a political climate that is worsening for Muslims. Nowadays, whenever he is there he makes a point of consciously going to sit and spend time with him, because he knows that nobody else will. So what might be a normal human response becomes a political act. That’s how bad it’s getting there.
Here in our village the connections between the different identities are much more normal. The conscious act is to keep alive connections with Palestinians in the West Bank.
Links
It ain’t lookin’ good around here. A “soft” annexation. Also Yuval Noah Harari is saying that Israelis are replacing the vision of the “two state solution” with the vision of a land with three classes of people: Jews with all the rights; Palestinian citizens of Israel with some rights; and other Palestinians with very few rights. Full-on apartheid, in other words. My wife thinks maybe that’s not a bad thing, as eventually it will force change. Unlike the current stasis, which leads nowhere, a civil rights struggle. But 21st century realities are unlike those that preceded them. States are much savvier about quelling or subverting phenomena like nonviolent activism, and Israel is extremely sophisticated about managing reactions in the international press.
Germany Forces a Microsoft 365 Ban Due to Privacy Concerns – Best of Privacy
Europe may yet keep the world sane, at least they have a healthier understanding of the dangers of tech imperialism. They are pushing back in a similar way to which Americans push back against China.