sherr

I sympathise with a bit of paranoia about this. Personally, I'd use a platform like "Tails" (do your own research) which wraps Tor up in a USB bootable Linux OS.

https://tails.net/

Funnily enough, they've just released an update! Yes, I was taken by surprise a bit.

EdgeRouter 3.0.0 [1] adds official wireguard support (I've been using the "wireguard-vyatta-ubnt" package from Github [2]), UI changes and some other improvements/fixes. I haven't tried it yet but will. I have an Edgerouter3-lite and an ER-X.

[1] https://community.ui.com/releases/EdgeRouter-3-0-0/33ee3852-...

[2] https://github.com/WireGuard/wireguard-vyatta-ubnt

This is the point that The Economist made this week about Xiaomi. It looks like Lei Jun, the CEO, has a bit of a cult following in China.

"With the successful release of the YU7—its second electric vehicle (EV) after the SU7, a sporty sedan launched in March last year—Xiaomi has pulled off a feat that eluded Apple, which ditched plans to make its own EV after burning billions of dollars on the effort over a decade."

There's also a brutal price war going on over there. Those cars will be exported worldwide. Western countries are in a bind: protect the local manufacturer or allow the (much) cheaper and environmentally sound EV in from China?

"China’s smartphone champion has triumphed where Apple failed" [1]

https://archive.is/4o8hM

Looking forward to the release.

I use Debian Stable on almost all the systems I use (one is stuck on 10/Buster due to MoinMoin). I installed Trixie in a container last week, using an LXC container downloaded from linuxcontainers.org [1].

Three things I noted on the basic install :

1) Ping didn't work due to changed security settings (iputils-ping) [2]

2) OpenSSH server was installed as systemd socket activated and so ignored /etc/ssh/sshd_config*. Maybe this is something specific to the container downloaded.

3) Systemd-resolved uses LLMNR as an name lookup alternative to DNS and pinging a firewalled host failed because the lookup seemed to be LLMNR accessing TCP port 5355. I disabled LLMNR.

Generally, Debian version updates have been succesful with me for a few years now, but I always have a backup, and always read the release notes.

[1] https://linuxcontainers.org

[2] https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues....

"Hardware support for Linux PCs is poor and lacks the manageable of Windows PCs with Active Directory and GPO, or JAMF for Macs. Enterprise software usually doesn't support Linux. Linux PCs are uncommon for personal use and corporations don't want to train users how to use Linux."

I would dispute the "hardware support" comment. Linux has pretty good hardware support nowadays. And "enterprise" software is a vague term here. For desktop Windows, of course Microsoft will have that covered every which way, but for things such as authentication, authorization and security, Linux has a place. A comment about adding "Redhat" to the mix is not talking about desktops (necessarily) but servers and security.

This article in The Economist recently would tend to agree : "Why all Indians are rule-breakers [1]

"IF YOU HAVE ever relaxed with a cold Kingfisher beer at the end of a long, sweaty day in Mumbai, the party capital of India, you have almost certainly broken the law. Specifically, you violated section 40 of the Bombay Prohibition Act of 1949, under which you must hold a permit to drink booze. A first offence is punishable by a fine of 10,000 rupees ($115) and up to six months in prison. Welcome to India, where everything is against the law."

[1] https://archive.is/ONfHw

I get a "badware" risk on that link from uBlock Origin (Firefox).

"uBlock filters – Badware risks"

This was interesting and I was waiting for H.G. Wells to show up, which he did. For anyone interested in the far reaches of science-fiction literature, and much else, see "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction". It is used to be a thick book but is now online, and includes a decent entry on Maurice Renard [1]. I often worry about the quality of the translation for works not in English though.

[1] https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/renard_maurice

There is a darker side to Samuel Pepys unfortunately. Either unknown, glossed over or ignored.

Pepys had many admirable qualities but these have to be placed against his extremely bad behaviour towards women. Today he would be called a "sexual predator" and he was almost certainly also a rapist. Unfortunately, women were (and still are in many places) seen as sexual objects and this view was common in the 18th Century.

I became aware of this from watching Guy de la Bédoyère's YouTube video "Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations" [1] where he discussed the good and the bad in Pepys, having just completed a new book about the diary and man. The video is good, as is the channel (he's a historian I was familar with from his Time Team appearances).

I don't like mentioning things like this usually, but for the sake of a true picture, it is worth it.

[1] https://youtu.be/uxaPbPm7sMk?si=W9vIJ_JD-BynAlOp

If you like this sort of thing, a novel I would heartily recommend is "Kolymsky Heights" by a much neglected (and long dead) author Lionel Davidson.

The Guardian has a short piece from 2014 that describes the plot. Great setup and a particular sort of cultural and linguistic skillset :

"Porter, however, is descended from Canadian Inuits, who remain – physically, ethnically and culturally – virtually identical to their Siberian counterparts, despite the decades-long political rift between the two."

From : https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/aug/03/book...

To give proper credit, it would be fair to say here that the actual machine was designed by Poles. From the same source :

"The British bombe was developed from a device known as the "bomba" (Polish: bomba kryptologiczna), which had been designed in Poland at the Biuro Szyfrów (Cipher Bureau) by cryptologist Marian Rejewski, who had been breaking German Enigma messages for the previous seven years, using it and earlier machines."

I don't worry about things like games or 3D. The big advantage to me about Intel is the open-source graphics drivers. As a long time user of Linux (on everything), I don't need to worry about graphics driver issues after kernel upgrades.

Yes, bad laws that are open to interpretation, perhaps as designed. But the police have a lot of discretion and it's much easier to go after someone for an obnoxious tweet or supposed offense than it is to go after real crimes. We always hear "lessons will be learned" after the fact, again and again, but they don't seem to be.

It was the rootkit on a CDROM that did it for me. Ever since then, I avoid Sony. As you say: reputation.

Today I read a couple of book reviews in the Economist with Sam Altman as the subject. The books are :

The Optimist. By Keach Hagey Empire of AI. By Karen Hao

The reviews are positive for both books. The column itself is titled "Sam Altman is a visionary with a trustworthiness problem" and shows a few reasons people have had some problems with his behaviour. One quote from the article is :

"Ms Livingston fired him, but as Ms Hagey recounts, he left chaos in his wake. Not only was he overseen by a non-functioning board, he had also used YC equity to help lure people to OpenAI. She says some YC partners saw a potential conflict of interest, “or at least an unseemly leveraging of the YC brand for Altman’s personal projects”."

Sam Altman is a visionary with a trustworthiness problem https://archive.is/oANfs

"Two books tell a similar tale about OpenAI. It is worrying"

I haven't visited the site in years but remember reading it every week back in the 90's, early 2000's. What I recall thinking was how it put th USA "freedoms" into sharp perspective compared to most of the rest of the world, including the UK (where I was). Some of the things he posted (the "eye-balling" secret sites, for instance) were things he'd be in jail for elsewhere. Or worse. Brave guy and it took some gumption.

Also, a decade or so ago, a woman noticed a change in smell of her husband when he got Parkinson's [1]. She can smell the disease on people. I believe some dog's can also smell disease such as cancer. This sort of thing is a "super-power" I hope science can nail down and harness somehow.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-62795737

Thanks. This looks like a good book and probably one I'll buy. I have many books on the "Celts" and their history, plus many more on the Iron Age in general. It's a fascinating period unfortunately let down by the lack of many good sources. The Greeks and then the Romans were very confused about these people and that's made it very hard to sort out the reality. As the review states, add a large helping of racism (not necessarily all of the negative sort), nationalism, romanticism and mythology and it can be a recipe for many competing histories. Hopefully we're starting to untangle what we can with help from books like Stewart's.

Great piece about a singular man and artist. It is Gorey's centenary this year (born 1925) and by a strange coincidence I just wrote a small blog post about a tribute exhibition I went to last week [1]. He seems to be a soul mate to Charles Addams. I'm not sure what Gorey would make of 2025 but then, was the "real" mundane world, as it really is, the one he inhabited anyway?

[1] https://www.sherringham.net/blog/2025/03/01#gorey

Yes, I believe it left quite a bad taste in the mouths of many a small software house. At least those trying to compete against them with a "software" paint brush,

Great story. Halcyon days. Was Garcia playing on the kit for a purpose or just fun? Did he create anything that was seen anywhere?

You think the C.S. Forester Hornblower's are juvenile? I assume you jest a little. I haven't read the O'Brian novels but have read the first two Hornblower books. I thought they were excellent, and exceeded my expectation. Better written and better stories than I thought I would get. I highly recommend them.

Radio Garden's great. But I just found out that it no longer allows a UK listener to listen to overseas stations, so that means it is now much less attractive ("licensing reasons"). What a shame.

An amazing site, a real treasure. The covers are something else: lurid, sometimes very amateurish, but still wonderful. Plenty of pulp but also some very good stories, well written, by great writers. I feel we've lost something over the past four decades.

There's also archives of New Worlds and Amazing Stories (and no doubt much more) on archive.org. If you like older SF, worth a look. Modern and contemporary SF often just re-treads, only worse, some great stories from the past.

https://archive.org/details/newworldssf

https://archive.org/details/amazingstoriesmagazine

Has some similarity to Tipler's "omega point" hypothesis iin his 1994 book "The Physics of Immortality" [1]. I read this years ago but have recently bought it again to have another look at. It seems to be a PDF on the Internet Archive as well. It was a very wild idea.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_J._Tipler

Trustworthy in what way?

That seems to be a great tip. Thanks.

In my experience, how you like reading a book is hugely influenced by your state of mind and situation when you read it. You might love a book this month but have found it boring six months ago. It's just something you need to bear in mind (I loved Seveneves).

I think this is an important realisation and it brought to mind John Von Neumann, who said to Felix Smith: "Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."

I think I have sabotaged by own education in maths (to a degree) by wanting to "understand" the "why" of something rather than just get used to it, practice and get fluent. The understanding can wait and might not even be important.