olives
Arnie drove us down to Chatsworth in his tech filled van to visit Kayla for Thanksgiving. Every day we would take Poncho for a walk through the park behind their rented house in the Simi Valley. Walking with Rian, we came across a tree full of ripe black olives. The limbs were heavy, and the ground was littered with them. I picked a few and then filled my pockets with as many as I could carry and suggested we return with a bag, so I could collect more. I wanted to try pickling olives.
The next day Amanda, Rian, and I returned, and I kept them waiting while I foraged, combing the ripe berries from the dry leaves. I would have gathered more, but I felt guilty making them wait, and it was difficult enough to get the ones I collected back home on the train.
I opened a half dozen olive pickling recipes online and selected this one. The process has taken a few months. I started by discarding the damaged berries and slicing the rest with three or four vertical cuts to help the oleuropein, a nasty tasting chemical, leach out of the skin. Then I soaked them in 9 water baths, changing the water every day.
They just finished the last of four week-long soaks in brine and I bottled them in three large resealable jars with a mixture of brine and balsamic vinegar and apple cider. They should be ready to eat in a week. The ones I tried after brine baths already tasted fine.
For the effort put into them, it would have made more sense to do two or ten times more. If I lived closer to that olive tree I would have collected gallons and made a press to squeeze the oil out.
I now have three jars of olives crouched on the floor by the cat feeder in dark pools of spiced brine. They will garnish my meals and I will eat them whole as an afternoon snack. In future Novembers, I will pay more attention to olive trees.
The Walking Dead
Some Inuit saw white men for the first time when they came across members of the failed Franklin expedition. The men were encountered as small parties on the edge of death.
Inuit nomads had come across streams of men that “didn’t seem to be right.” Maddened by scurvy, botulism or desperation, they were raving in a language the Inuit couldn’t understand. In one case, hunters came across two Franklin Expedition survivors who had been sleeping for days in the hollowed-out corpses of seals.
“They were unrecognizable they were so dirty,” Lena Kingmiatook, a resident of Taloyoak, told Eber.
“I’ve never in all my life seen any kind of spirit — I’ve heard the sounds they make, but I’ve never seen them with my own eyes,” said the old man who had gone out to investigate the Franklin survivors who had straggled into his camp that day on King William Island.
The figures’ skin was cold but it was not “cold as a fish,” concluded the man. Therefore, he reasoned, they were probably alive.
“They were beings but not Inuit,” he said, according to the account by shaman Nicholas Qayutinuaq.
The figures were too weak to be dangerous, so Inuit women tried to comfort the strangers by inviting them into their igloo.
But close contact only increased their alienness: The men were timid, untalkative and — despite their obvious starvation — they refused to eat.
The men spit out pieces of cooked seal offered to them. They rejected offers of soup. They grabbed jealous hold of their belongings when the Inuit offered to trade.
When the Inuit men returned to the camp from their hunt, they constructed an igloo for the strangers, built them a fire and even outfitted the shelter with three whole seals.
Then, after the white men had gone to sleep, the Inuit quickly packed up their belongings and fled by moonlight.
The Inuit had left in such a hurry that they had abandoned several belongings. When a small party went back to the camp to retrieve them, they found an igloo filled with corpses.
The seals were untouched. Instead, the men had eaten each other.
The Franklin expedition was serialized as a television series in 2018. I didn't like it, it was pretty, but the plot was much too slow.
Pink animals
Mount Kaputar pink slug
Mwanza Flat Headed Rock Agama
Noctuid Moth
Pink Robin
Roseate Spoonbill
Western Coachwhip
jujutsu
Enough people recommended this git compatible VCS that I had to check it out. Now it's been a few weeks I can report it's pretty good, and I will continue to use it despite the fact I had no problems with the git mental model.
If you want to get started, read these:
jujutsu is compatible with git and unless you have a huge repo, it makes sense to colocate; use both version control systems in your project.
I use the git squash method mentioned in the tutorial and only needed to learn a few subcommands. I really like how it logs every command allowing you to undo and how it automatically rewrites descendant nodes. I also like how conflicts are not blocking and that you only have to create a branch when you're about to push to a remote git repo.
The project is still going through a lot of changes but is safe to use now. I have version 0.24.0.
Here's how I start and work on a project (after setting up a username and email):
In an existing git repo run:
jj git init --colocate
Create a change and optionally give it a description indicating your intended work then create another unnamed change on top of this.
jj new -m "create skynet"
jj new
View the current status and log with:
jj st
jj
Work on your code. These changes will be going into the undescribed change and are not saved. When you have something good, you can squash these changes into the described change to commit them.
jj squash
When I'm ready to add another change I just describe my empty, previously unnamed change, and create a new unnamed change on top of this to continue the squash process.
jj desc -m "Oh wait, we should put in some safeguards"
jj new
Change your working-copy revision with:
jj edit <revision>
Any time you are tracking a described change, and you make a change to the code, it will commit those changes and rewrite descendants (if necessary).
Before pushing to a remote repo you have to set up a bookmark:
jj git remote add origin na@github:/satellite_software
jj bookmark set skynet
jj git push
Rebase with:
jj rebase -r <source revision> -d <dest revision>
Or merge a bunch of changes into a single change with:
jj new <revision1> <revision2> <revision3> <...
This model is faster than using git and takes less mental effort. The git process wasn't difficult, but you have to follow a deliberate series of steps to save your work and rebasing and merging are something to consider carefully. With jujutsu it's so fast to just type 'jj squash' (I've aliased it to 'jsq') you don't really need to think about it at all. I spend more time thinking about code than fussing with the source control.
Update 241225:
Go read about the 'jj absorb' command in 0.24 it's crazy!
New browser?
I ran into a post on lobste.rs asking why, when you visit the site using the brave browser, it returns an error.
The brave browser is advertised as a 'privacy focused' browser, but this is misleading. As you browse it replaces the content you requested with their own ads and supposedly holds an attention based cryptocurrency in escrow for the site. From that post:
The content you see on a site may not be the content being sent - they’re deliberately replacing content being sent by the site to content that they profit from
They then claimed that they were doing this to “help” the site operators and were holding the earnings in escrow, but were not
Furthermore, they sell user data for AI training and they deliberately don't honor robots.txt because they don't want to be blocked.
When the discussion rolled around to what we should use instead there was some good advice:
If you want to use a chromium based browser like Brave but want to avoid Google and Microsoft, Vivaldi is a good option. It has several interesting privacy features, including an ad blocker built-in. And Vivaldi doesn’t do the shady things Brave does.
If you want to be in the Firefox ecosystem but avoid Mozilla, Librewolf is an independent fork focused on privacy, security and openness. It works very well on all the platforms Firefox does.
Chrome is owned by an ad company. They're in the process of shutting down the ability to block ads.. Firefox aspires to be an ad company.
I've been on the hunt for a better browser for a while. Firefox meets all my needs but the mozilla foundation refuses to fund the project except to add ads, AI, and other features that reduce privacy and try to monetize me.
I've tried pale moon, another gecko based engine, but it was forked from firefox years ago and doesn't support modern plugins like tridactyl.
I was unaware of librewolf. Here's what they say on the site:
How often do you update LibreWolf?
LibreWolf is always based on the latest version of Firefox. Updates usually come within three days from each upstream stable release, at times even the same day. Unless problems arise, we always try to release often and in a timely manner.
It should however be noted that LibreWolf does not have auto-update capabilities, and therefore it relies on package managers or users to apply them.
I installed the package from AUR and on first boot began the customary walk through the settings to turn off all the ad tracking, enable security settings, and disable the other unwanted features (like pocket, ai, and sync) only to discover they were already switched off or missing. The fact I barely had to change anything at all was encouraging.
Also, because it's based on the current version of firefox it accepted all my extensions, though with one irritating issue. I was unable to get any extension to add a button to the toolbar. This missing toolbar button completely breaks uMatrix and several other extensions, but is not quite enough to prevent me from moving away from firefox.
So I've switched my primary browser. I feel a little better using a tool use isn't trying to exploit me, but it's not comforting to be dependent on a project that's currently shitting itself.
The infrequently updated blog.