maphew

a hewer of maps, sometimes

So dependent are we on fastening. Zippers, buttons, snaps, grips, knots, threads, and stitching. Blithely assuming, trusting. I sit regarding my winter jacket of some years. Stains and grub, here, there. Easily washed. Ragged cuffs, waistline. Evidence of good and bad past adventures successfully challenged. Damages born and worn with affection. Years of service left; it's still warm, wind resistant, sheds light moisture. And yet, as these two zippers croak, the coat is broke.

“Right to Repair!” he wails.

“Sure, go ahead” it says. There's no law, policy, or rule against.

Appropriate parts, he lacks. Fitting tools, are not present. Skills, be absent.

Each are obtainable.

But the DIY result will be crude, cobbled together, obviously home-made, not showing the Fit And Finish to which he is enamored and accustomed.

Somehow believing a single individual could and should achieve the same as a team of designers & engineers & builders & shippers & clerks, he quits.

Discuss at https://indieweb.social/@maphew/111993758670405282.

Why am I pissed?

Reality doesn’t match my expectation.

What did I expect differently?

Person X would look past the nano-thick veneer, contemplate the situation for at least a single breath, and respond meaningfully in a way that actually helps.

Because you know, well, you know, they’ve…never, ever done that before.

(…)

Damn.

Send the bastard/bitch the biggest expanding dripping infusing orb of warm fuzzy sunshine one could possibly think of. Stretch till it hurts and I feel faint because the vastness is too large. Because: clearly they need it, and the sooner they get their dumbass myopic delusional mental emotional twisted fucked thinking straightened out and embued with clarity and regard for others the sooner they’ll get out of my way and stop causing me problems.

Does it work? I don’t know, but usually I feel better.

And maybe I'm their dumbass twisted fuck and if they do the same for me together we can get out of this mess.

discuss at https://indieweb.social/@maphew/111922193096942687.

I have not insight or knowledge capable of offering anything worthwhile on horrors unfolding hour on hour in lands Ukraine, Palestine and Israel. Tears tracing my cheek bones have power of naught. No help or change or alleviation in unspeakable suffering. Yet all the same they propel these finger tips, typing words on glass into the ether perhaps finding lodging in you.

What then? Then. Breathe Feel Breathefeel again watch resonate Ensure all in my field recieve no wisp of hatred emanating from me.

I had two really good friends in my mid-teen years who couldn’t be more different from each other. One, a 7th day Adventist pastor’s son, intelligent, wholesome, polite, a freckled smile that opens any door. The other, offspring of a green beret vietnam war veteran california hippie. Smart, irreverent, rule breaker, freckled knowing smile as hands loosen hinges and make that decidedly locked door open anyway.

They both left lasting imagery in my mind. Polar opposites, but with respect to approaching and handling power, they are kin.

Picture them, 13 or 14 years old, determined to ride Dad’s oversized 600cc motocross dirt bike. Seat up to midriff. To mount, have one foot on the ground, on toes, the other leg strung over the seat, supporting thigh. Getting going requires twisting the throttle for enough forward momentum to avoid toppling to ground when that toe is removed, and then madly pulling-climbing onboard before the machine gets entirely away. Hopefully, feet make it forward to find foot pegs instead of flapping behind like so much laundry in the wind (and unhappy balls slapping on not-so-soft-after-all surfaces).

Trial and error required to pull it off. There is no calling for help. You've been told you can ride it in a couple years, when you're big enough get it off the ground yourself.

Who, me? Do I want to take a turn? Hell no. It'll kill me. I'll keep watching safely from the sidelines on my pedal bike.

They both succeeded. Bumps and scrapes and bruises explained away as tree climbing n such. And grew up to be the kind of guys you beside you in a difficult situation, not scared of people and things apparently beyond their size and strength. Accomplished.

...

By dint of nature’s whimsy you, dear reader, have been handed an over-powered emotive machine.

Unlike my adventurous friends there’s no choice involved. You are leashed to it, and the throttle has a mind of its own, you can't stop it. You can abdicate control, and get dragged along anyway. Or you can grab hold and steer, modulate the throttle, and find that trail between bump, rocks and trees.

Yeah, it's bigger than you. Loud, snorty, dirty. But you know what? You're going to get the bruises either way, and apprehensions to the contrary, it won't kill you. You can do it. Become accomplished.

In a very real sense, I owe my livelihood to (love of) video games, yet my job and career of the last two decades which has paid for my house, cars, family, vacations, etc. has zero, zip, nada to do with games.

In junior high our school had a single Apple IIc. If we finished our work ahead of time, and it was done right, we could go use it. Ostensibly to learn programming or somesuch but really it was to play Castle Wolfenstein (the real one, with puzzles and strategy and disguises, not the 1st person shooter that presaged Doom. The controls were so difficult it took two people at once, one to control movement and the other to aim and fire).

Just after high school I Iived with a man who said, yeah sure you can use that computer (a Tandy 1000 and DOS 2.x if memory serves). Yeah there’s some games on it. No I’m not going to tell you how to get them started (though I’ll start one for you, just this once). However if you transcribe this document I’ll show you one or two commands that will get you there, eventually.

Which led to: ‘cd’ to change directory, ‘dir’ to list contents, ‘foo.exe’ to see what that program does. A few days later I learned how to get into Zork and Planetfall by myself. (All Hail InfoCom!). Some weeks after that, as I continued to poke about to see what ‘bar.exe’ and ‘snafu.com’ did I learned, to my extreme consternation, that ‘fdisk.exe’ in illiterate hands is a dangerous weapon. A foot gun. I killed the computer. It couldn’t do anything. Oh shit.

When I finally got the nerve to cop to my misdemeanor, my mentor just smiled and said, “well this is a good time to upgrade DOS”, and proceeded to teach me how to partition and format a hard drive and install an operating system from scratch.

He talked, I did. (A process I’ve repeated countless times since, and for good money.) Somewhere along the line in this period new games showed up, the most memorable being Leisure Suite Larry (ooooh! graphics!, sounds!).

Some years later, I was often hanging around an office in the building where my father worked. Waiting for rides I suppose. The manager said well, if you’re here anyway you might as well digitize these maps (and there’s a game you can play afterwards…). After some months I was on the payroll, doing a more work, and more games. Here I learned about modems, BBSes, and FidoNET — where one could talk about and acquire: you guessed it, games! Modems in these days were fussy things. You had to know what jumpers to set, what COM ports to configure for, handle IRQ conflicts (don’t interfere with the sound card! that messes up the games!), and a myriad of other things.

In this time period network DOOM! came out. That was just too cool to let go by. But, before we could get it to work I needed to learn how to wire BNC cable, install network cards (DMA and IRQ conflicts rear their ugly heads again), and figure out what parts of novell ipx/spx to load and ignore, without running out of ram under the 1024k barrier.

It took a month, but we did it. At the end, after the frag-fest had died to a dull roar (taking many days), the office had a working and stable local area network that completely transformed how business was done for years to come.

I’m now 41 and haven’t played a video game in a serious way for more than a decade, other stuff is more interesting. Yet all my core computing skill sets were learned because of wanting to play games. Games were my motivation.

The kids I see today are at least as game motivated as I was, but by and large there is no appreciable distance between the desire and the result for them, and consequently lesser opportunity to learn. Fire up a browser and type “online games” or what have you and there you are, games galore. One of Apple’s most successful memes is that “a two year old can do it”, and so they can.

I’m not calling for a return to difficult computing environments, I think the usability and user experience professions are among the most interesting and beneficial developments to date. The point is: the motivation is there, we just need to think about how to wield it intelligently.

Matt Wilkie, May 2012. A rework from an earlier essay c.2000.


Postscript, January 2024.

I'm now 53 and ’the kids’ I saw then at 11 are now 22. The gap of lesser opportunity has widened to a canyon bridged with successes. They've spent years commandering old computers, ripping out and replacing their guts, resurrecting as servers running a variety of operating systems, applying Minecraft and who knows what else mods, and punching holes in my firewall. (And financially contributing to our now unlimited-because-of-them bandwidth ISP connection.)

I'd like to tell you their success was because I mentored in kind, actively showed them the way. That would be a lie. The best I can claim to is that I didn't get in the way, too much. I reread the essay above today and feel my insides shrink a little. I let the shadowy indistinct archetype of “what grownups are supposed to be like” rule a wider domain than it needed to. Too heavy on The Should brake pedal and not enough on the Foster Curiosity accelerator.

(And yet, and yet, I still think they spend too much time playing games and not enough time doing and building real things. Nevermind that when I was 22 I spent all the money I had, which was miniscule, on getting stoned and partying! So, umm, yeah. Carry on kiddos.)

Recipe to install WriteFreely on Nearly Free Speech Net. Adpated from WriteFreely start guide and this forum thread. Posted to nfsn wiki.

NFSN website

Login » Sites » Your WF Site

  • set Software Realm to “White”
  • set Server Type to “Kitchen Sink” (in order get Daemons and Proxies).

SSH

Begin by verifying WF is available, download the WF release archive to get templates and assets, put the WF config and database into your protected directory. We're going to use sqlite db.

which writefreely

...should emit “/usr/local/bin/writefreely”

Download the latest release for MacOS. It probably doesn't matter which system though as  we're just after the templates and other resources.

cd ~/../protected
wget https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely/releases/download/v0.14.0/writefreely_0.14.0_macos_amd64.tar.gz
tar -xzvf writefreely_0.14.0_macos_amd64.tar.gz
cd writefreely

# delete the MacOS executable
rm ./writefreely

Settings

writefreely config start

Use whatever values you want for ones not listed. Afterwards peruse config.ini for other things you might want to change that aren't part of the wizard.

Deployment Production, behind reverse proxy
Local port 8080 (or anything above 1024)
Database Sqlite
Filename writefreely.db (or mywf-blog.db or whatever)
Site type Single user blog
Public URL https://sitename.nfshost.com/ or https://yourdomain.org/ (trailing slash, no port)

We generate keys as  WF errors out without them even though they're unecessary with external TLS, and then allow web server to read the keys.

writefreely keys generate
chgrp web keys keys/*
chmod g+r keys keys/*

NFSN website

Site » select site : Daemons and Proxies

DAEMON

    tag = writefreely
    command line = /usr/local/bin/writefreely
    working directory = /home/protected/writefreely
    Run daemon as = web

PROXY

    protocol = HTTP
    base uri = /
    document root = /
    target port = 8080

File and directory permissions

cd /home/protected/writefreely
# Recursively add files and dirs to Web group
chgrp -R web ./
# strip existing permissions for group and other
chmod -R g-rwx ./
chmod -R o-rwx ./
# Allow web user to read all files recursively
chmod -R g+r ./
# Allow web user to enter direcories
find ./ -type d -exec chmod g+x {} +
# Allow web user to create and write sqlite journalling files
chmod g+w ./
# Allow Web user to modfify the db
chmod g+w ./*.db

At this point you should be able to point a browser at https://sitename.nfshost.com or your domain name and login to WriteFreely. Leave off the port selected above, that's for internal communication.

Visit the NFSN Sites page to start/stop/restart etc. the daemon. For troubleshooting see:

/home/logs/daemon_writefreely.log

Cross posted to https://members.nearlyfreespeech.net/wiki/Applications/WriteFreely.

#nfsn #webadmin #install

Ok, here we have my first foray into publicly writing again in several years. In the intervening moment much physical and digital ink has been committed on why is it so, and will it ever end and, and. I'm not going to resurrect those thoughts here, I don't think. Bounce around the net enough and you'll find others have already done so and mine aren't different enough to add flavour.

Arguably, persuasively, the same can be said and asked about this very post. What flavour does this add to our public soup? Why is worth committing? Nothing, and, I don't know. Except that it feels somehow wrong to not have some kind of segue from the silence to the newly formed.

And so, 1st post. Now planted.