For Christmas, one of my sons gave me a new set of in-ear noise cancelling bluetooth earphones, which are very nice; great in fact – they remain comfortable after hours of use and I’m not bothered by things like the TV.
I also bought myself another set of headphones, though fortunately with a different purpose – they come as part of a sleep mask and are comfortable for nights when I want to fall asleep to music or hear it through the night. Lately I’ve been doing ok without them – I always sleep better in winter: the womby effect of thick blankets, probably.
Most of my music continues to be long mixes that SoundCloud chooses for me: right now it’s “May Peace be Everywhere in the World” – an almost 3 hour track by Andi Rietchel. No need for mainstream first-tier musicians with me. My mainstray is Cafe de Anatolia, especially the stuff mixed by Billy Esteban.
It may be a sign of the times that we spend a lot of time piping music to our ears. I have at least 7 functioning sets of headphones by now. Perhaps it’s to drown out all the negativity around us. The toxic politicians and cruel, divisive politics. There are no doubt stronger drugs that people are resorting to.
I have three social media streams now; having set up Hubzilla and Epicyon on my VPS while continuing to use Akkoma on Disroot’s server. I’m making sure to follow different people on each. However, I’m not so much enjoying the experience; maybe I’ve just fallen in with the wrong crowd. As for my own contribution, I haven’t felt much like sharing anything of late, so I don’t. I think I’m more interested in social media from a technical point of view; when it comes to actually using it, I find that I don’t have a great deal to do there.
I have a greater interest in creating my own corner on the web, “a digital garden”, so I keep thinking about that.
VPN service and internet connections
I made a trial subscription to njalla’s VPN service. This came after I followed a link to a world library site recommended, which asked if I’m in “Neve Shalom”. Usually, the sites that I encounter have suggested that I’m somewhere in the general region – where my ISP server is located, for example. I didn’t understand how it came to know I’m in this tiny village. I don’t have location services enabled in my browser and Google Maps always has to ask whether I wish to enable them. Anyway, I thought that’s just a step too far. It’s not that it’s hard to know where I live, for anyone who makes a bit of effort: I mention it in my blog and my fediverse accounts, but how does some random site knows where my computer is? That I didn’t get. Anyway now the library site believes I’m in Finland, which is fine with me. Njalla’s service seems OK, but was a bit hard to set up, and I still didn’t manage to incorporate the VPN into my computer startup sequence.
The whole business of connecting to the internet never seems to settle down. New protocols and standards to learn, and deliberate obfuscation on the part of telecoms and companies that don’t want us to know. I just bought a new mesh router but apparently it’s the wrong one for the proprietary fiber modem-router of my carrier. There’s some other mesh router that’s supposed to go with that. Bummer.
And I hate all this proprietary stuff. This new mesh component does not come with the traditional website interface but a stupid simplified phone app that claims to be super-easy but is much less configurable. The approach of telecoms and companies is “Don’t bother trying to understand: we’ll take care of everything for you.” And instead of explaining how everything’s supposed to work, they try to keep us in the dark, which limits our freedom.
We need to counter such attempts through hacker-groups and websites that tirelessly explain whatever information is being kept from us. Locally I’m at a disadvantage, because I am less aware of Hebrew-speaking groups that specifically address the obfuscation and fud of the local telecom and its competitors. For sure there are people out there that understand the field much better than I do.
Israel’s new government
It’s all dark stuff. There’s still a disconnect in my brain; I didn’t completely internalize what it means, though rationally I know how bad it is, and how much worse it can become. I don’t know what to do with this information. Of course, we should leave this country and go to some other, slightly better, place. But, as an individual: should one do that, when the rest of one’s family remains behind? This must have been the same question that Jews and left-wing intellectuals would ask themselves during the 1930s in Germany and central Europe. With the difference that they were directly endangered themselves. So maybe it’s more like the circumstances in which ordinary white Christian Germans without overt political affiliation found themselves during the same era. They would not be hunted down by the SS or the Gestapo, but they might suffer the effects of the war. And they might feel sympathy for the direct victims of the Nazi regime.
The situation may yet arise that we will all simply need to flee; I would not be too surprised, but I can’t be sure, and I’m old after all, with family responsibilities of my own.