Goodbye, Tortuga.
On April 21st, 2024, at 20:39, Tortuga was gently put to rest after a three year-long struggle with what was probably cancer and a short-lived victory over a mycoplasma bacterial blood infection.
She first took advantage of our yard-cat support program in 2009 as a juvenile cat and passed at about 15 or 16 years of age. She lived a good life, had 5 kittens on March 27th, 2010 that were all weaned and adopted out successfully, and grew old never wanting for food, shelter, or comfort, and never suffering any meaningful illness or injury until her last year.
Over the years, she was the beneficiary of a very strong community support network that took her in whenever she needed it and gave her loving care. She had housemates, human and feline, and a few canine over the years and was always gracious and pleasant, if not always enthusiastic about the four-legged companions.
I am eternally, deeply grateful to everyone who helped her over the years and who made my work and travel possible and Tortuga’s life pleasant and comfortable in my absence, especially in her later years as she needed more care.
She was the best, sweetest cat I’ve ever known. She was always polite, always pleasant, and never scratched or bit, not even when startled or annoyed by dogs. She never broke things or pushed things over or made a mess.
She wasn’t a big fan of other cats, and only a select few were tolerated as guests in her garden. She wanted to start every morning by marking her territory and she ruled her garden with a fierceness that vastly exceeded her tiny size. She started there, spent her last day in the sun there, and will spend eternity there.
Almost every night I was home, she slept in my bed with me. Almost every day I was working at home, she would hop up and sleep quietly between my keyboard and monitor on her little bed there. She didn’t meow much or fuss but purred easily and happily.
In later years, she’d sometimes wake me just before light by prodding my back or nipping to ask for pets; after 5 or 10 minutes of purring and being petted, she would settle back to sleep. It was a ritual that I came to very much enjoy.
Whenever I came home from my travels, no matter how late, as I opened the door into the living space, I’d hear her stir, jumping down from the attic maybe or from my bed or the window perch upstairs and tap-tap-tap down the stairs and trot up to greet me, rubbing my leg and purring. She’d let me scoop her up and snuggle her, though she wasn’t normally a carry cat, and then walk circles around me for 10 or 15 minutes, welcoming me home in the sweetest way possible. She came to know my departures too and always gave me a look of disappointment, sometimes refusing to come to the door to see me off, but usually relenting for one last scritch on the head.
When Corona hit in 2020, I was in Iraq after leaving her in January of 2020 thinking I’d be back in the spring. I couldn’t make it home for almost two years. The longest I’d been away before then was less than 6 months and even that only once or twice. She’s a cat, and by then an old cat, so I didn’t expect much, but in January of 2022, I opened the door late at night to the sound of her tap-tap-tapping down the stairs to greet me.
She was laid to rest in the garden she ruled for 15 years.
I went through the thousands of pictures I’ve taken of her and others have shared with me and tried to find a few from every year from her first foray in 2009 until her last day. If you knew her at some point during this time, I hope this brings back fond memories of a very special kitty.
2009: Tortuga finds food, takes over a house, and becomes part of the family.
2010 Tortuga has kittens and settles into her role as queen of the garden.
2011 Tortuga takes ownership of my desk.
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020 Corona time.
2021 Corona time.
I didn’t get to see Tortuga at all from January of 2020 until January of 2022.
2022 Reunited.
2023
A typical welcome home when I’d been away too long.
2024 The queen of the garden forever.
A one page home/new tab page with random pictures, time, and weather
Are you annoyed by a trend in browsers to default to an annoying advertising page with new tabs? I sure am. And they don’t make it easy to change that. I thought, rather than a blank new tab page, why not load something cute and local. I enlisted claude.ai to help expedite the code and got something I like.
myHomePage.html is a very simple default page that loads a random image from a folder as a background, overlays the current local time in the one correct time format with seconds, live update, and throws up the local weather from wttr.in after a delay (to avoid hitting the server unnecessarily if you’re not going to keep the tab blank long enough to see the weather).
Images have to be in a local folder and in a predictable naming structure, as written “image_001.webp” to “image_999.webp.” If the random enumerator chooses an image name that doesn’t exist, you get a blank page.
Browsers don’t auto-rotate by exif (or webp) metadata, so orient all images in the folder as you’d like them to appear.
The weather information is only “current” which isn’t all that useful to me, I’d like tomorrows weather, but that’s not quite possible with the one-liner format yet.
Update, I added some code to display today and tomorrow’s events and current todos meeting specific filter tests from your Thunderbird calendar, if you have it. If not, just don’t cron the bash script and they won’t show. I also changed the mechanism of updating the weather to a 30 minute refresh of the page itself, this way you get more pix AND the calendar data updates every 30 minutes. Web browsers and javascript are pretty isolated from the host device, you can’t even read a local file in most (let alone write one). All good security, but a problem if you want data from your host computer in a web page without running a local server to deliver it.
My work around was to write the data into the file itself with a script. Since the data being written is multi-line, I opted to tag the span for insert with non-breaking spaces, a weird character and the script sanatizes the input from calendar events extracted from the sqlite database in case some event title includes them. The current config is by default:
~/.myHomePage/myHomePage.html ~/.myHomePage/getEvents.pl ~/.myHomePage/getToDos.pl ~/.myHomePage/putEvents.py ~/.myHomePage/putToDos.py ~/.myHomePage/myHomeImages/image_001.webp ~/.myHomePage/myHomeImages/image_002.webp etc.
How to set the homepage and new tab default page varies by browser. In Brave try hamburger→settings→appearance→show home button→select option→paste the location of the homepage.html file, e.g. file:///home/(username)/.myHomePage/myHomePage.html
Then just set a cron script like <code>*/30 * * * * /home/<username>/.myHomePage/getEvents.pl</code> for regular updates: script all the subroutines that are useful or write a little bash script to do them in sequence and call that with your favorite periodic method.
Parsing recurring events in perl is a challenge and I managed to get claude to ragequit, that’s got to be a some sort of a record:
So the parsing scripts are in python using icalendar, I put them on gitlab at https://gitlab.com/gessel/myhomepage to make it a little easier to mess with, if anyone wants to.
Putting ccache on a backed RAM disk to speed compiles
Why do this
Compiling and building ports can be meaningfully accelerated by caching (ccache) certain intermediate results and by moving work directories from slower media to faster (tmpfs /tmp). If you do regular builds, such as one might on a poudriere server, there can be a meaningful write workload to the working directory which uses up SSD life, possibly meaningfully (though probably not really that much if your SSD is modern and big).
If you have a fast, high endurance SSD, putting ccache on it won’t do much. If ccache is going on rotating media, this config will speed up builds appreciably. The save/restore code below will preserve the ccache across reboots and leaves file management inside the ccache directory to ccache itself, while managing the persistence of any other random files that get written outside the directory.
Note this code, different than other examples I’ve found, works with FreeBSD as a service and doesn’t flush files that are accessed (read) between reboots, only files that aren’t touched in any way and therefore can (probably) be evicted without penalty and prevents cruft and clutter on the RAM disk accumulating because it has been made non-volatile.
Putting the workdirectory into a RAM-based tmpfs should speed up builds even compared to a fast SSD, as SSD write times aren’t a strong feature of SSDs. There’s no persistence code as there’s no expectation that the work directories will persist.
Setup ccache
Setting up ccache is pretty easy. First, install it from ports. If you’re using binary packages, you obviously don’t need ccache.
cd /usr/ports/devel/ccache make install clean
make.conf
Append a few lines to your make.conf files like so:
nano /etc/make.conf nano /usr/local/etc/poudriere.d/FBSD_14-0-R-make.conf
Add the following:
CCACHE_DIR=/ram/ccache WITH_CCACHE_BUILD=yes # WRKDIRPREFIX="/tmp/ports"
note that WRKDIRPREFIX (to use tmpfs /tmp, see below) seems to conflict with the same directive in poudriere.conf so comment out for poudriere hosts or don’t use the option in poudriere.
poudriere.conf
nano /usr/local/etc/poudriere.conf
CCACHE_DIR=/ram/ccache
/etc/fstab
Next, make the /ram directory and set a limit of how much RAM it can use. 12884901888 is 12GB. Somewhere between 8 and 16GB is probably sufficient for most needs. After a few builds, I was using 1.3GB.
mkdir /ram nano /etc/fstab none /ram tmpfs rw,size=12884901888 0 0 mount /ram
ccache.conf
nano /root/.ccache/ccache.conf nano /usr/local/etc/ccache.conf
cache_dir = /ram/ccache max_size = 12G
status
Now all ports you build will be compiled entirely in RAM. You can check your ccache usage with:
ccache -s
CREATE A CACHE STORE/RESTORE SCRIPT
From: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-838198-start-0.html
This is in /etc/rc.d
and should be executed on startup and shutdown, but only actual shutdown not reboot or halt. The correct command to reboot (and preserve /ram) is (you do not need to do this now!):
shutdown -r now
Don’t reboot now, just know that using “reboot” or some other command other than calling shutdown will not call the stop script and won’t sync the cache to NV storage.
Create /etc/rc.d/syncram
something like:
#!/bin/sh - # PROVIDE: syncram # REQUIRE: FILESYSTEMS # KEYWORD: nojail shutdown . /etc/rc.subr name="syncram" rcvar="syncram_enable" desc="rsync ram disk from/to var on startup/shutdown" stop_cmd="${name}_stop" start_cmd="${name}_start" syncram_start() { # rsync data from persistent storage to ram disk on boot # preserving all file attributes logger syncram-start /usr/local/bin/rsync -a -A -X -U -H -x \ /var/tmp/syncram/ /ram \ > /dev/null 2>/var/log/syncram-store.log touch /var/tmp/syncram/.lastsync } syncram_stop() { # rsync data from ramdisk to persistent storage on shutdown # preserving all file atributes logger syncram-stop #!/bin/sh # if the dest dir doesn't exist, create it if [ ! -d /var/tmp/syncram ]; then mkdir /var/tmp/syncram fi # flush any accumulated cruft that weren't accessed since the last sync # note tmpfs records accurate atime if [ -f /ram/.lastsync ]; then find /ram -type f ! -neweram /var/tmp/syncram/.lastsync -delete fi # rsync new or accessed removing unused from target /usr/local/bin/rsync -a -A -X -U -H -x -del \ /ram/ /var/tmp/syncram \ > /dev/null 2>/var/log/syncram-restore.log } load_rc_config $name run_rc_command "$1"
chmod +x syncram
Then edit /etc/rc.conf
to include
syncram_enable="YES"
and execute
service syncram onestart
Bonus: tmpfs for working builds
tmpfs can also be used to create a similar ramdisk at the /tmp mount point where it is fairly automatically used by poudriere to speed up builds. There’s a quirk that seems to be a problem (not fully debugged, but the config described here works and survives reboots): putting the WRKDIRPREFIX in make.conf
AND in poudriere.conf
seems to yield “workdirectory” errors so pick one for the directive and probably pick poudriere.conf
if you’re running poudriere.
poudriere.conf
nano /usr/local/etc/poudriere.conf
# Use tmpfs(5) # This can be a space-separated list of options: # wrkdir - Use tmpfs(5) for port building WRKDIRPREFIX # data - Use tmpfs(5) for poudriere cache/temp build data # localbase - Use tmpfs(5) for LOCALBASE (installing ports for packaging/testing) # all - Run the entire build in memory, including builder jails. # yes - Enables tmpfs(5) for wrkdir and data # no - Disable use of tmpfs(5) # EXAMPLE: USE_TMPFS="wrkdir data" USE_TMPFS=yes # How much memory to limit tmpfs size to for *each builder* in GiB # (default: none) #TMPFS_LIMIT=4 # List of package globs that are not allowed to use tmpfs for their WRKDIR # Note that you *must* set TMPFS_BLACKLIST_TMPDIR # EXAMPLE: TMPFS_BLACKLIST="rust" TMPFS_BLACKLIST="rust" # The host path where tmpfs-blacklisted packages can be built in. # A temporary directory will be generated here and be null-mounted as the # WRKDIR for any packages listed in TMPFS_BLACKLIST. # EXAMPLE: TMPFS_BLACKLIST_TMPDIR=${BASEFS}/data/cache/tmp TMPFS_BLACKLIST_TMPDIR=${BASEFS}/data/cache/tmp
Rust may overflow even a chonky RAM config.
/etc/fstab
nano /etc/fstab
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs rw,mode=1777 0 0
This will “intelligently” allocate remaining RAM to the tmpfs mounted at /tmp and builds should mostly happen there.
mount -a
NB
There’s a risk that screwing around with /etc/fstab
will break boot – if the system reboots to single user mode, get shell, navigate to /etc/fstab
and check for errors or comment out the lines and reboot again.
Audio File Analysis With Sox
Sox is a cool program, a “Swiss Army knife of sound processing,” and a useful tool for checking audio files that belongs in anyone’s audio processing workflow. I thought it might be useful for detecting improperly encoded audio files or those files that have decayed due to bit rot or cosmic rays or other acoustic calamities and it is.
Sox has two statistical output command line options, “stat” and “stats,” which output different but useful data. What’s useful about sox for this, that some metadata checking programs (like the very useful MP3Diags-unstable) don’t do is actually decode the file and compute stats from the actual audio data. This takes some time, about 0.7 sec for a typical (5 min) audio file. This may seem fast, it is certainly way faster than real time, but if you want to process 22,000 files, it will take 4-5 hours.
Some of the specific values that are calculated seem to mean something obvious, like “Flat factor” is related to the maximum number of identical samples in a row – which would make the waveform “flat.” But the computation isn’t linear and there is a maximum value (>30 is a bad sign, usually).
So I wrote a little program to parse out the results and generate a csv file of all of the results in tabular form for analysis in LibreOffice Calc. I focused on a few variables I thought might be indicative of problems, rather than all of them:
- DC offset—which you’d hope was always close to zero.
- Min-Max level difference—min and max should be close to symmetric and usually are, but not always.
- RMS pk dB—which is normally set for -3 or -6 dB, but shouldn’t peak at nearly silent, -35 dB.
- Flat factor—which is most often 0, but frequently not.
- Pk count—the number of samples at peak, which is most often 2
- Length s—the length of the file in seconds, which might indicate a play problem
After processing 22,000 files, I gathered some statistics on what is “normal” (ish, for this set of files), which may be of some use in interpreting sox results. The source code for my little bash script is at the bottom of the post.
DC Bias
DC Bias really should be very close to zero, and the most files are fairly close to zero, but some in the sample had a bias of greater than 0.1, which even so has no perceptible audio impact.
Min Level – Max Level
Min level is most often normalized to -1 and max level most often normalized to +1, which would yield a difference of 2 or a difference of absolute values of 0 (as measured) and this is the most common result (31.13%). A few files, 0.05% or so have a difference greater than 0.34, which is likely to be a problem and is worth a listen.
RMS pk dB
Peak dB is a pretty important parameter to optimize as an audio engineer and common settings are -6dB and -3dB for various types of music, however if a set of files is set as a group, individual files can be quite a bit lower or, sometimes, a bit higher. Some types of music, psychobilly for example, might be set even a little over -3 dB. A file much above -3 dB might have sound quality problems or might be corrupted to be just noise; 0.05% of files have a peak dB over -2.2 dB. A file with peak amplitudes much below -30 dB may be silent and certainly will be malto pianissimo; 0.05% of files have a peak dB below -31.2 dB.
A very quiet sample, with a Pk dB of -31.58, would likely have a lot of aliasing due to the entire program using only about 10% of the total head room.
Flat factor
Flat factor is a complicated measure, but is roughly (but not exactly) the maximum number of consecutive identical samples. @AkselA offered a useful oneliner (sox -n -p synth 10 square 1 norm -3 | sox - -n stats
) to verify that it is not, exactly, just a run of identical values and just what it actually is, isn’t that well documented. Whatever it is exactly, 0 is the right answer and 68% of files get it right. Only 0.05% of files have a flat factor greater than 27.
Pk count
Peak count is a good way to measure clipping. 0.05% of files have a pk count < 1000, but the most common value, 65.5%, is 2, meaning most files are normalized to peak at 100%… exactly twice (log scale chart, the peak is at 2).
As an example, a file with levels set to -2.31 and a flat factor of only 14.31 but with a Pk count of 306,000 looks like this in Audacity with “Show Clipping” on, and yet sounds kinda like you’d think it is supposed to. Go figure.
Statistics
What’s life without statistics, sample pop: 22,096 files. 205 minutes run time or 0.56 seconds per file.
Stats | DC bias | min amp | max amp | min-max | avg pk dB | flat factor | pk count | length s |
Mode | 0.000015 | -1 | 1 | 0 | -10.05 | 0.00 | 2 | 160 |
Count at Mode | 473 | 7,604 | 7,630 | 6,879 | 39 | 14,940 | 14,472 | 14 |
% at mode | 2.14% | 34.41% | 34.53% | 31.13% | 0.18% | 67.61% | 65.50% | 0.06% |
Average | 0.00105 | -0.80 | 0.80 | 0.03 | -10.70 | 2.03 | 288.51 | 226.61 |
Min | 0 | -1 | 0.0480 | 0 | -34.61 | 0 | 1 | 4.44 |
Max | 0.12523 | -0.0478 | 1 | 0.497 | -1.25 | 129.15 | 306,000 | 7,176 |
Threshold | 0.1 | -0.085 | 0.085 | 0.25 | -2.2 | 27 | 1,000 | 1,200 |
Count @ Thld | 3 | 11 | 10 | 68 | 12 | 12 | 35 | 45 |
% @ Thld | 0.01% | 0.05% | 0.05% | 0.31% | 0.05% | 0.05% | 0.16% | 0.20% |
Bash Script
#!/bin/bash ############################################################### # This program uses sox to analyize an audio file for some # common indicators that the actual file data may have issues # such as corruption or have been badly prepared or modified # It takes a file path as an input and outputs to stdio the results # of tests if that file exceeds the theshold values set below # or, if the last conditional is commented out, all files. # a typical invocation might be something like: # find . -depth -type f -name "*.mp3" -exec soxverify.sh {} > stats.csv \; # The code does not handle single or multi-track files and will # throw an error. If sox can't read the file it will throw an error # to the csv file. Flagged files probably warrant a sound check. ############################################## ### Set reasonable threshold values ########## # DC offset should be close to zero, but is almost never exactly # The program uses the absolute value of DC offset (which can be # neg or positive) as a test and is normalized to 1.0 # If the value is high, total fidelity might be improved by # using audacity to remove the bias and recompressing. # files that exceed the dc_offset_bias will be output with # Error Code "O" dc_offset_threshold=0.1 # Most files have fairly symmetric min_level and max_level # values. If the min and max aren't symmetric, there may # be something wrong, so we compute and test. 99.95% of files have # a delta below 0.34, files with a min_max_delta above # min_max_delta_threshold will be flagged EC "D" min_max_delta_threshold=0.34 # Average peak dB is a standard target for normalization and # replay gain is common used to adjust files or albums that weren't # normalized to hit that value. 99.95% of files have a # RMS_pk_dB of < -2.2, higher than that is weird, check the sound. # Exceeding this threshold generates EC "H" RMS_pk_dB_threshold=-2.2 # Extremely quiet files might also be indicative of a problem # though some are simply malto pianissimo. 99.95% of files have # a minimum RMS_pk_dB > -31.2 . Files with a RMS pk dB < # RMS_min_dB_threshold will be flagged with EC "Q" RMS_min_dB_threshold=-31.2 # Flat_factor is a not-linear measure of sequential samples at the # same level. 68% of files have a flat factor of 0, but this could # be intentional for a track with moments of absolute silence # 99.95% of files have a flat factor < 27. Exceeding this threshold # generates EC "F" flat_factor_threshold=27 # peak_count is the number of samples at maximum volume and any value > 2 # is a strong indicator of clipping. 65% of files are mixed so that 2 samples # peak at max. However, a lot of "loud" music is engineered to clip # 8% of files have >100 "clipped" samples and 0.16% > 10,000 samples # In the data set, 0.16% > 1000 samples. Exceeding this threshold # generates EC "C" pk_count_threshold=1000 # Zero length (in seconds) or extremely long files may be, depending on # one's data set, indicative of some error. A file that plays back # in less time than length_s_threshold will generate EC "S" # file playing back longer than length_l_threshold: EC "L" length_s_threshold=4 length_l_threshold=1200 # Check if a file path is provided as an argument if [ "$#" -ne 1 ]; then echo "Usage: $0 <audio_file_path>" exit 1 fi audio_file="$1" # Check if the file exists if [ ! -f "$audio_file" ]; then echo "Error: File not found - $audio_file" exit 1 fi # Run sox with -stats option, remove newlines, and capture the output sox_stats=$(sox "$audio_file" --replay-gain off -n stats 2>&1 | tr '\n' ' ' ) # clean up the output sox_stats=$( sed 's/[ ]\+/ /g' <<< $sox_stats ) sox_stats=$( sed 's/^ //g' <<< $sox_stats ) # Check if the output contains "Overall" as a substring if [[ ! "$sox_stats" =~ Overall ]]; then echo "Error: Unexpected output from sox: $1" echo "$sox_stats" echo "" exit 1 fi # Extract and set variables dc_offset=$(echo "$sox_stats" | cut -d ' ' -f 6) min_level=$(echo "$sox_stats" | cut -d ' ' -f 11) max_level=$(echo "$sox_stats" | cut -d ' ' -f 16) RMS_pk_dB=$(echo "$sox_stats" | cut -d ' ' -f 34) flat_factor=$(echo "$sox_stats" | cut -d ' ' -f 50) pk_count=$(echo "$sox_stats" | cut -d ' ' -f 55) length_s=$(echo "$sox_stats" | cut -d ' ' -f 67) # convert DC offset to absolute value dc_offset=$(echo "$dc_offset" | tr -d '-') # convert min and max_level to absolute values: abs_min_lev=$(echo "$min_level" | tr -d '-') abs_max_lev=$(echo "$max_level" | tr -d '-') # compute delta and convert to abs value min_max_delta_int=$(echo "abs_max_lev - abs_min_lev" | bc -l) min_max_delta=$(echo "$min_max_delta_int" | tr -d '-') # parss pkcount pk_count=$( sed 's/k/000/' <<< $pk_count ) pk_count=$( sed 's/M/000000/' <<< $pk_count ) # Compare values against thresholds threshold_failed=false err_code="ERR: " # Offset bad check if (( $(echo "$dc_offset > $dc_offset_threshold" | bc -l) )); then threshold_failed=true err_code+="O" fi # Large delta check if (( $(echo "$min_max_delta >= $min_max_delta_threshold" | bc -l) )); then threshold_failed=true err_code+="D" fi # Mix set too high check if (( $(echo "$RMS_pk_dB > $RMS_pk_dB_threshold" | bc -l) )); then threshold_failed=true err_code+="H" fi # Very quiet file check if (( $(echo "$RMS_pk_dB < $RMS_min_dB_threshold" | bc -l) )); then threshold_failed=true err_code+="Q" fi # Flat factor check if (( $(echo "$flat_factor > $flat_factor_threshold" | bc -l) )); then threshold_failed=true err_code+="F" fi # Clipping check - peak is max and many samples are at peak if (( $(echo "$max_level >= 1" | bc -l) )); then if (( $(echo "$pk_count > $pk_count_threshold" | bc -l) )); then threshold_failed=true err_code+="C" fi fi # Short file check if (( $(echo "$length_s < $length_s_threshold" | bc -l) )); then threshold_failed=true err_code+="S" fi # Long file check if (( $(echo "$length_s > $length_l_threshold" | bc -l) )); then threshold_failed=true err_code+="L" fi # for data collection purposes, comment out the conditional and the values # for all found files will be output. if [ "$threshold_failed" = true ]; then echo -e "$1" "\t" "$err_code" "\t" "$dc_offset" "\t" "$min_level" "\t" "$max_level" "\t" "$min_max_delta" "\t" "$RMS_pk_dB" "\t" "$flat_factor" "\t" "$pk_count" "\t" "$length_s" fi
Manually Update Time Zone Data on Android 10
One of the updates that stops when your carrier decides you have to buy a new phone to keep their profits up is the time zone data, which means as regions decide they will or won’t continue using standard time and will switch permanently to lazy people time (or not), time zone calculations start to fail, which can be awfully annoying when it causes you to miss flights or meetings. It is probably something you’ll want to keep up to date. Unfortunately, this requires root access to your phone because… profits depend on the velocity by which first world money is converted to e-waste to poison third world children. Yay.
Root requires reflashing your device, which means wiping all your data and apps and reinstalling them, so easier to do on a new phone than backing up and restoring and re-configuring all your apps. Sooner or later your vendor will stop supporting your device in an attempt to get you to throw it away and buy a new one and you’ll have to root it to keep it up to date and secure so you might as well do it now, void their stupid warranty, and take control of your device.
You should also take a moment to write your elected representatives and demand that they take civil action against this crap. Lets take a short rant break, shall we?
Planned obsolescence, death by security flaws, and vendor locks should be prosecuted, not just as illegal profiteering but as environmental crimes for needlessly flooding the world with e-waste. If you own a device you have the right to use it as you like and any entity that by omission or obfuscation of reasonable information needed to keep that device operational is depriving legitimate owners of rightful value. Willfully obstructing security updates, knowing full well the risks implied, is coercive if not extortion. Actively blocking the provision of third party services intended to mitigate these harms through barratry and legal extortion should be prosecuted aggressively. Everyone who has purchased a phone that has been intentionally and unfairly life-limited by non-replaceable batteries, intimidation of repair services, manipulation of the spare parts market, or restrictions or obfuscation of security updates is due refund of the value thus denied plus penalties.
Ah, that feels better, no?
Assuming you have a rooted phone, adb installed on your computer, and your TZ data is out of date, lets get it fixed, shall we? The problem is that TZ data comes from IANA, from here actually, and is versioned in a form like 2023c, the current as of now. That’s lovely but the format they provide is not compatible with android and needs to be transformed. Google seems to have some tools for this in the FOSS branch of Android, but it seems a little useless without a virtual environment, a PITA. But the good folks at LineageOS (yay, FOSS!!!) maintain their version of the tool with the thus created output data in their git, which we can use for all android devices (it seems). The files we need are in this directory: note that these are 2023a, but 2023c is identical to 2023a, reverting some changes made in 2023b because, I don’t know, the whole mess about getting up an hour earlier or later being some traumatic experience when it happens twice a year is catastrophic for people’s sense of well being, but when they get up at different times on days off than on work days, that doesn’t count or something. OMG. so drama. people. sometimes it hurts to be associated with them as a species. Not that I care, but stop messing around and just pick one. So many rant triggers in this whole mess.
Anyway, proceeding with the assumption your device is rooted and you have adb installed on your computer, the files needed are:
tzdata a binary file that if you view with a text editor should start with: tzdata2023a tzlookup.xml an xml file that should (nearly) start with: <timezones ianaversion="2023a"> tz_version a simple text file that should have one line: 003.001|2023a|001
Download the compressed .tgz archive of the output_data
directory from here by clicking on the [tgz]
text at the top right
You should get a .tgz archive, from which you want to extract:
tzlookup.xml
from theandroid
foldertzdata
from theiana
foldertz_version
from theversion
folder
Here’s the tricky bit, you gotta get these files to the right places. So I mounted my android on my computer and created a folder TZData
in Downloads
and copied the files there, this resolved to /data/media/0/Download/TZdata/
on my device. While you’re there, make a folder like oldTZ
in the same place for backup. Everything else is done by command line via adb.
(comments are demarked with "#", the prompt is assumed) # get shell on your device adb shell # get root, if this fails, you don't have root, bummer, you don't really own your device. su root # verify your tz data is where mine was, if so copypasta should be safe. find / -name tzdata 2>/dev/null #output for me looks like some are symlinks /apex/com.android.tzdata/etc/tz/tzdata /apex/com.android.tzdata@290000000/etc/tz/tzdata /apex/com.android.runtime/etc/tz/tzdata /apex/com.android.runtime@1/etc/tz/tzdata /system/apex/com.android.runtime.release/etc/tz/tzdata /system/apex/com.android.tzdata/etc/tz/tzdata /system/usr/share/zoneinfo/tzdata # did ya get the same or close enough to figure out what to do next? good. # Backup your old stuff cp /system/apex/com.android.tzdata/etc/tz/* /data/media/0/Download/oldTZ # your directories are read only, so you need to fix that, scary but reversible mount -o rw,remount / mount -o rw,remount /apex/com.android.tzdata mount -o rw,remount /apex/com.android.runtime # copy the new files over the old files, the last location is legacy and doesn't # seem to have a copy of tzlookup.xml, so we don't put a new one there, but check ls /system/usr/share/zoneinfo # only tzdata and tz_version? Good. cp /data/media/0/Download/TZdata/* /apex/com.android.tzdata/etc/tz cp /data/media/0/Download/TZdata/* /apex/com.android.runtime/etc/tz cp /data/media/0/Download/TZdata/* /system/apex/com.android.tzdata/etc/tz cp /data/media/0/Download/TZdata/tz_version /system/usr/share/zoneinfo cp /data/media/0/Download/TZdata/tzdata /system/usr/share/zoneinfo # all done, now we just gotta read-only those directories again mount -o ro,remount / mount -o ro,remount /apex/com.android.tzdata mount -o ro,remount /apex/com.android.runtime # and why not reboot from the command line? reboot
That was fairly painless once you know what to do and have root, no? it worked for me, my phone rebooted and the time zone database appears to be updated. YMMV, hopefully not the reboot successfully part but bricking a phone is a risk because, you know, profits. After that tz file surgery I created a new event in a US time zone that recently changed their daylight savings to pacify the crazies and it seemed to work as expected.
Projecting Qubit Realizations to the Cryptopocalpyse Date
RSA 2048 is predicted to fail by 2042-01-15 at 02:01:28.
Plan your bank withdrawals accordingly.
Way back in the ancient era of 2001, long before the days of iPhones, back when TV was in black and white and dinosaurs still roamed the earth, I delivered a talk on quantum computing at DEF CON 9.0. In the conclusion I offered some projections about the growth of quantum computing based on reported growth of qubits to date. Between the first qubit in 1995 and the 8 qubit system announced before my talk in 2001, qubits were doubling about every 2 years.
I drew a comparison with Moore’s law that computers double in power every 18 months, or as 2(years/1.5). A feature of quantum computers is that the power of a quantum computer increases as the power of the number of qubits, which is itself doubling at some rate, then two years, or as 22(years/2), or, in ASCII: Moore’s law is 2^(Y/1.5) and Gessel’s law is 2^2^(Y/2).
As far as I know, nobody has taken up my formulation of quantum computing power as a time series double exponential function of the number of qubits in a parallel structure to Moore’s law. It seems compelling, despite obviously having a few (minor) flaws. A strong counter argument to my predictions is that useful quantum computers require stable, actionable qubits, not noisy ones that might or might not be in a useful state when measured. Data on stable qubit systems is still too limited to extrapolate meaningfully, though a variety of error correction techniques have been developed in the past two decades to enable working, reliable quantum computers. Those error correction techniques work by combining many “raw” qubits into a single “logical” qubit at around a 10:1 ratio, which certainly changes the regression substantially, though not the formulation of my “law.”
I generated a regression of qubit growth along the full useful quantum computer history, 1998–2023, and performed a least-squares fit to an exponential doubling period and got 3.376 years, quite a bit slower than the heady early years’ 2.0 doubling rate. On the other hand, fitting an exponential curve to all announcements in the modern 2016–2023 period yields a doubling period of only 1.074 years. The qubit doubling period is only 0.820 years if we fit to just the most powerful quantum computers released, ignoring various projects’ lower-than-maximum qubit count announcements; I can see arguments for either though selected the former as somewhat less aggressive.
From this data, I offer a formulation of what I really hope someone else somewhere will call, at least once, “Gessel’s Law,” P = 22(y/1.1) or, more generally given that we still don’t have enough data for a meaningful regression, P = 22(y/d); quantum computational power will grow as 2 to the power 2 to the power years over a doubling period which will become more stable as the physics advance.
Gidney & Ekra (of Google) published How to factor 2048-bit RSA integers in 8 hours using 20 million noisy qubits, 2021-04-13. So far for the most efficient known (as in not hidden behind classification, should such classified devices exist) explicit algorithm for cracking RSA. The qubit requirement, 2×10⁷, is certainly daunting, but with a doubling time of 1.074 years, we can expect to have a 20,000,000 qubit computer by 2042. Variations will also crack Diffie-Hellman and even elliptic curves, creating some very serious security problems for the world not just from the failure of encryption but the exposure of all so-far encrypted data to unauthorized decryption.
Based on the 2016–2023 all announcements regression and Gidney & Ekra, we predict RSA 2048 will fall on 2042-01-15 at 2am., a prediction not caveated by the error correction requirement for stable qubits as they count noisy, raw, cubits as I do. As a validity check, my regression predicts “Quantum Supremacy” right at Google’s 2022 announcement.
AI PSYOPS are changing strategic messaging
Social media fundamentally changed strategic messaging, cutting the cost per effect by at least two orders of magnitude, probably more. It has become the most cost effective munition in the global arsenal. Even when it took teams of actual humans to populate content and troll farms to flood social media with messaging intended to result in a desired outcome, for example to swing an election, start a war, damage alliances, break treaties, or generate support for one particular policy, foreign or domestic, or another, it was still a revolution in reduced cost warfare.
Take Operation INFEKTION, the active measure campaign run by the KGB starting in about 1983″to create a favorable opinion for us abroad that this disease (AIDS) is the result of secret experiments with a new type of biological weapon by the secret services of the USA and the Pentagon that spun out of control.”
This campaign leveraged assets put in place as far back as 1962 and eventually consumed the authority of Prof. Jakob Segal as a self-referential authoritative citation. After a little more than a decade of relentless media placements of strategic messaging, even in the United States more than 25% of the population had been convinced AIDS was a government project and 12% had been manipulated into believing it was created and spread by the CIA. This project was tremendously successful despite having to overcome the then standard and generally principled editorial gate keeping that protected “traditional” media from abuse and cooptation by manufacturing plausible chains of authority and fabricating deep and broad reference chains to thwart fact checking.
By the 2016 Election, the KGB’s successors, the IRA and GRU, efficiently and expertly leveraged social media to achieve even more impressive results, possibly winning the most significant military battle in history, to alter the outcome of the US election at a cost of only a few billion dollars and within a mere 2-3 years of effort.
Any-to-any publishing circumvents editorial protections (he writes without a trace of irony). What might otherwise be a limitation of psyop being clearly outside any authorative endorsement, something that required the consumption of an asset like Jakob Segal to achieve in an earlier era, has been overwhelmingly diminished by a parallel effort to destroy trust in institutions and authority creating a direct path to shape the beliefs of targets through mass individualization of messaging unchecked by any need for longitudinal reputation building.
That the 2016 effort still cost billions, requiring a massive capacity build of English speaking, internet savvy teams inducted into “troll farms,” (many ironically located in Bulgaria given that county’s role in Operation INFEKTION) may already be obsolete just 8 years later.
Many have written about ChatGPT representing some sort of existential risk to humanity’s future, some quick resolution to the Fermi Paradox, but the real risk is an acceleration of the destruction of objective truth and the substitution conceptual paradigms that align with strategic outcomes.
As an example, let me introduce to you Dr. Alexander Greene, a person ChatGPT tells us “is a highly esteemed and celebrated professor with a remarkable career dedicated to advancing the fields of green energy and engineering.”
Obviously, it’s hard to really believe Dr. Greene without seeing the man himself, but fortunately we have a tool for that too:
A few images from bing/Dall-E and we can create a very convincing article that would easily pass muster as an authoritative discussion on the benefits of continuing to burn fossil fuels with minimal editing and formatting, just to cut out the caveats that ChatGPT inserts in counterfactual text requests we can have such pearls of wisdom to impart upon the world as:
Access to affordable and reliable energy is a crucial driver of economic development, and historically, fossil fuels have played a significant role in providing low-cost energy solutions. While there are concerns about the environmental impact of fossil fuels, particularly their contribution to climate change, it is essential to understand the benefits they have brought to the developing world and the potential consequences of increasing energy costs.
Read the whole synthetic article in pdf form below and consider the difficulty of finding a shared factual foundation in a world where it is trivial to synthesize plausible authority.
The Benefits of Low-Cost Energy from Fossil Fuels and the Impact of Increasing Energy Costs on Developing Nations, “by” “Dr. Alexander Greene” (ghost written by ChatGPT).