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itchingsphynxon Was silent reading unusual during Augustine's time?

That example is prayer not reading, but yes there’s many Hebrew examples of meditating in the heart because most texts were memorised aurally rather than read directly.

A first century explicit example of private reading aloud is Acts 8:28–30 Philip runs up and "heard him reading" (ἤκουσεν αὐτοῦ ἀναγινώσκοντος).

Ten minutes of Claude searching the Hebrew and Greek scriptural texts came up with no examples that are explicitly private silent reading of text.

itchingsphynxon Was silent reading unusual during Augustine's time?

It’s worth recalling that mass literacy is only about 300 years old, so the modern culture of private reading is only slightly older than the United States, which is probably itself a consequence of mass literacy - sparked by Luther, Gutenberg, etc. Ironically, today the USA is also probably leading the decline in mass literacy woth a “post-literate president.” Maybe book-reading will eventually become an anachronistic hobby, although even Thomas Jefferson made this dire prophecy too about fiction [1].

“Acoustic representations activated in silent reading are best characterized as inner speech rather than as abstract phonological codes.” [2]

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-...

2. https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03205520

itchingsphynxon Apple Music to open concert venue in Battersea Power Station

I hope they show details of their audio recording and speaker set up.

itchingsphynxon Of Gods and Languages: On "When God Spoke Greek" (2013)

Note, this article is from 2013.

>We do well to remember that “scripture” and “canon” are different things, and of course we should never make the mistake of thinking that early Christians had Bibles like our own.

Reading any of this ancient text is like tourism.

itchingsphynxon Backflip: Apple now wants to train AI models with user data after all

What a crazy dickover. I think I was told I could “consent to or reject individual data processing operations” for every 193 partners. See ya!

itchingsphynxon Rebuilding a 1995 GPS Time Server so I don't get Telstra'd

Nothing special - just a homelab. It's not so much the precision that matters at home as for planning when the home becomes an island, in 'orphan mode' as chrony calls it [1], without a time reference at all. Time really is a 'sovereign function' per Telstra's report [2], especially if you have internal HTTPS, etc.

Last summer an 8+ hour mains power outage drained my home CWWK OPNsense router's UPS then internal battery (it must have been losing voltage). When mains power came up the router was unable to connect to the ISP because the internal time was completely wrong and I had to manually set it via console. However, the internal batteries and clocks on other home network infrastructure (HP NAS and Lenovo Tiny) were fine.

The chrony.conf orphan mode:

server 192.168.1.1

server 192.168.1.2

local stratum X orphan (higher X determines who is master in orphan mode, usually minimum 10)

Annoyingly, the OPNsense chronyd plug-in does not (yet) implement the "local orphan" mode [3], so I have not yet confirmed that it does accept the non-reference master orphan time to bootstrap itself... should test before the summer storms start again.

1. <https://chrony-project.org/doc/latest/chrony.conf.html>

2. <https://www.telstra.com.au/exchange/what-we-ve-learned-from-...>

3. <https://github.com/opnsense/plugins/issues/5115>

itchingsphynxon Rebuilding a 1995 GPS Time Server so I don't get Telstra'd

After the Telstra NTS issue and preparing for the upcoming summer storms and power outages, I set up a chrony mesh on three devices, each with a different upstream stratum 1 NTS. I seriously considered a GPS reference too, but I live on the bottom floor of apartment blocks so reception is probably quite poor. After blocking the firewall ports, the mesh stays linked and drift is well within sensible boundaries for the typical length of internet and power outages of a few hours. Although, a man with a watch knows the time but man with two watches cannot be certain.

itchingsphynxon BSDnas – fork that continues TrueNAS CORE on current FreeBSD

When TrueNAS CORE died I decided it was time to learn FreeBSD myself properly and have gone CLI only without ever looking back. I hope this project helps others to ease into FreeBSD and CLI like it for me. It’s really great for NAS.

itchingsphynxon Move FreeBSD System Between ZFS Disks

Nice. Not so much a FreeBSD as a ZFS feature?

itchingsphynxon P[drive failure]: how reliable is your NAS?

Instantly recognisable as Tufte

https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css

itchingsphynxon Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified

I agree on most points, except perhaps for the expectation of compute and RAM since NAS = ‘network attached storage.’

I’ve had a HP N40L for 15 years and every time I see the current offerings I hope I don’t have to look for hardware soon; it’s been such a great homelab server. After FreeNAS > TrueNAS Core, I now roll my own FreeBSD. It felt like a great leap into the deep end going from GUI to CLI, but I haven’t once looked back.

itchingsphynxon Claude Cookbook

I was hoping too, because I use a Claude project for recipes and it’s great for suggestions and adapting recipes for what’s in the pantry.

itchingsphynxon Book prizes don't work how you think

This sounds similar to submissions for national science grants.

itchingsphynxon AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study

The original study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09922-y

itchingsphynxon Nationwide outage for Australia's largest mobile operator Telstra

Sounds like a time server issue? I wonder sources they use.

itchingsphynxon How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)

Agreed. I have used a HP N40L ProLiant MicroServer since 2013 as home NAS and Time Machine backups via samba. Rock solid hardware, incredibly expandable, and today runs FreeBSD 15.1 with ZFS. Additional hardware modifications include; CD-ROM replaced by two 3.5" HDDs on mounts (now six HDDs of 10TB each in ZRAID1), a SAS card to add two mirrored bootable SSDs underneath CD-ROM drive space, a 2x 2.5G NIC (limited to 4GB/s slot) for dedicated NFS link, while additional internal SATA and external SATA ports unused. Next: replace PSU fan with quieter Noctua fan.

itchingsphynxon Babies should not use screens at all in the first two years, major review finds

Study website: https://www.1001criticaldays.com/article/screen-time-researc...

itchingsphynxon New Microsoft 365 pricing live, some products up by 42% due to AI

Probably worse productivity because now I have to read paragraphs of emails that could have been sentences.

itchingsphynxon How do wombats poop cubes? (2021)

And yet the very article that you refer to confirms that anecdotal reports by the biologists studying these very animals report that during breeding seasons that the male Southern Hairy-Nose Wombat can reach these speeds in bursts:

>South Australian wildlife biologist [A/Prof] David Taggart has studied the southern hairy-nosed wombat since 1993. In the 2008 and 2024 editions of Strahan's mammal book, he writes that the southern hairy-nosed species can run at 40 kph. "I can confirm that I have clocked this species running at just over 40 kph, although they can't maintain that for long."

More non-peer reviewed information here from the Australian national science agency: https://connectsci.au/news/news-parent/3758/Turns-out-wombat...

itchingsphynxon Migrating from Proxmox to NixOS and Incus

How does Sylve compare to Webmin [1]?

[1]: https://docs.vultr.com/how-to-install-webmin-on-freebsd-14-0

itchingsphynxon Apple's weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bjorl.2023.101382

One simple question detects motion sickness susceptibility in migraine patients: While riding in a car or bus, can you read without getting motion sick?

itchingsphynxon How iPhones Became Birth Control

>Our results point to one possible answer. The fertility drop is concentrated among young populations and largely operates through declines in unintended births (Buckles et al., 2025), suggesting the operative margin may be less about the cost of raising a child and more about whether the relationships and sexual activity that produce children are forming at all.

So the current rate is closer to true ‘planned’ rate.

itchingsphynxon Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

Great website!

itchingsphynxon Vanguard Investor Choice

I’ve always appreciated Vanguard’s relative transparency and education material and insight into their thinking. However, I think they should be taking a stronger stance on long-term effects e.g., climate change, as good stewardship for all businesses and economy ad a whole. Allowing the owners to contribute to voting is a small but useful step.

itchingsphynxon Magnifica Humanitas

Indeed, the Industrial Revolution was the topic of a previous encyclical, which inspired this one.

RERUM NOVARUM ENCYCLICAL OF POPE LEO XIII ON CAPITAL AND LABOR

http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/docume...

itchingsphynxon Opus 4.7 Part 3: Model Welfare

Perhaps relevant here is Melanie Mitchel's comment on LLMs a few years ago:

>"AI researchers are still grappling for the right metaphors to understand our enigmatic creations. But as we humans make choices on how we deploy and use these systems, how we study them, and how we craft and apply laws and regulations to keep them safe and ethical, we need to be acutely aware of the often unconscious metaphors that shape our evolving understanding of the nature of their intelligence."

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adt6140

itchingsphynxon Quad9 Enables DNS over HTTP/3 and DNS over QUIC

"Does Quad9 offer content filtering? No. Quad9 has no plans to provide content filtering. Quad9 is dedicated solely to internet security and the blocking of malicious domains, such as phishing, malware, and exploit kits." https://quad9.net/support/faq/#dns_crypt

itchingsphynxon Quad9 Enables DNS over HTTP/3 and DNS over QUIC

Quad9 has enabled DNS over HTTP/3 (DoH3) and DNS over QUIC (DoQ) across its global resolver network.

itchingsphynxon Physicists Trace Sun's Magnetic Engine, 200k Kilometers Below Surface

Magnetohydrodynamic fluids are so cool! The fundamental concept behind MHD is that magnetic fields can induce currents in a moving conductive fluid, which in turn polarizes the fluid and reciprocally changes the magnetic field itself. Thus, a self-generating dynamo.

itchingsphynxon iOS 26.3 and macOS 26.3 Fix Dozens of Vulnerabilities, Including Zero-Day

Looks like this is for older devices only. “Available for: iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR, iPad 7th generation” so doesn’t include iPhone 16… nor is available on my device.