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Forty years ago last summer I learned how to program computers. I was thirty then, and bought a cheap computer, a TS-1000. It was monochrome, text only with a dozen blocks that do very primitive graphics, 1 mHz clock speed, with 2 kilobytes of memory. A very small, primitive computer.
        I bought it because I hated my job pumping gas at Disney World, despite its numerous perks, and had read that a teenager had become a millionaire writing computer programs. A teenager? I could do that! Hell, I was hacking electronics as a teenager, making a guitar fuzzbox, like was sold for $300 in music stores, out of a broken $10 transistor radio!
        The computer came with a tutorial on how to program it in Sinclair BASIC. It took a few weeks of spare time to learn well enough that I could write an analog clock display, albeit not a very accurate clock, and simple 2-D video games, building up in complexity.
        The most ambitious game I wrote at that time was a two player battle tanks game, similar to what Windows would have decades later. The only trouble was, the slow clock speed of the machine, with the added overhead of its BASIC interpreter made it unplayably slow.
        So I learned Z-80 assembly, re-wrote it based on the BASIC version I had written; BASIC is incredibly similar to assembly, and I had to assemble it by hand because that computer had no assembler I knew of. Then I had to add timing loops to slow it down.
        A couple of years later, I discovered that the teenager was Bill Gates, his parents were rich lawyers who worked for IBM, and he became a millionaire making an operating system he had bought to work on an IBM-PC, then licensed that OS to IBM. And I bought another computer with my meager Disney wages, a Radio Shack TRS-80 MC-10. This was color, but text-only as well.
        I bought its repair manual because I’ve always wanted to know as much as I could about stuff I owned, and discovered that although it was text-only, its video chip was capable of graphics. It was fun finding its address and what value to POKE there to make it do things; trial and error, short routines, etc. I had hacked its hardware with software.
        I wrote a graphics program for it called HRG, bought a classified ad in Byte Magazine, and sold enough copies for $20 each to pay for the ad, but not for the blank cassettes or postage.
        Learning was always easy as a young man, as long as I worked my ass off on it.
        But half a decade later during a bad recession I got a job with the state of Illinois on the basis of my knowing about computers; they were still new in offices, and most people had never seen one. Of course, the state had mainframes for decades, but “microcomputers” were still new.
        I started out entering data, and wound up writing the databases in dBase, later taking a college course in NOMAD. I still have the textbook in my basement, I think. The two languages are similar enough that I suspect that dBase was originally written as NOMAD on a PC.
        Four decades after haunting the library and devouring dozens of books learning assembly, and almost a decade after retiring, I find the books I’ve written are listed on Goodreads and sign up for an author account.
        It requires RSS for a linked blog. I’ve never used RSS on either end, and as of when I created the Goodreads account yesterday knew nothing of it whatever, except that a thing called “RSS” existed. I searched for information all afternoon yesterday and wound up where I should have started, W3C Schools.
        I’m seventy now, but I’ll bet I have that RSS feed up and running faster than I had that machine code tanks program running when I was young!
        Update: Two hours. Who says you can’t teach am old dog new tricks? Of course, XML ain’t hand assembled machine code...

Was there another S/N crash, or did I screw up? Probably the latter; I posted this a week ago and it disappeared. [Edit]: The former, all the comments I made yesterday are also gone, and few stories have any comments at all! Now to what was lost:
        I have the Linux computer pretty useful, thanks to your comments, although I’m still sharing files with Sneakernet.
        But I think my biggest Linux problem, as a few of you mentioned, is kubuntu. So now I’m looking for a better distro, I think I’ll try Mint. What I’d probably like best is one with the biggest repository.
        Kate works okay as a text editor, but it’s too busy, has too many functions I have no use for, and worse, it’s completely nonstandard, with the stupid Chrome nonsense. Doubly stupid in an interface as busy as Kate has. Any suggestions for a Linux text editor that’s as minimalist as Windows Notepad?
        I’m still going through your answers. Thanks again!

Last night I typed a long response to (I think) Phoenix666 about his inquiry into the "gotchas" of milling your own lumber using a chainsaw mill. Unfortunately, when the SN DB shit the bed my post was lost, so I figured putting what I typed into a journal entry would be a good idea. I think I can recall most of what I typed even though I was pretty tired last night.

I have three Stihl saws, an MS310, MS441C and an MS462. The 310 has a 20" bar and is my go-to saw for cutting everything it can handle. I've had it about 15 years and it's been rock solid. The 441 has a 32" bar and is strictly used for cutting down and bucking up big trees the 310 can't handle. The 462 is what I use in my mill.

One big "gotcha" is the price of saws. Before Covid the saw I wanted ran about $900. After Covid the price shot up to $1300 and I had to wait 5 month to get one. The price of Granberg mills went up too but not as much.

I bought Granberg's medium-sized mill. It's supposed to be used w/ a 30" bar max but I use it w/ a 32" bar in my 462 and it works fine. I've tried milling saw chains from several different manufacturers and the ones Granberg sells work the best for me. Since milling more planes the wood (instead of cutting it) you need to use specialized chains. I have both a 28" bar and a 32" bar and several chains for both that are used only for milling.

Another thing you'll want to invest in is a grinder for sharpening your chains. I think mine was made by Oregon and it was around $300 when I bought it years ago. Depending on what kind of tree I'm milling I can usually get 3-5 passes before a chain needs sharpened. If you rely on someplace local to sharpen your saw chains you'll be spending a lot of money plus there's the downtime waiting to get them back. I sharpen my regular chains at 31 degrees and the milling chains at 10 degrees. After sharpening, always check your cleanouts b/c if they're too high the chain will never cut correctly.

I use a 20' ladder to make the first pass then run the mill on the flat surface for the rest of the cuts. I made the brackets to hold the ladder out of a 2x8. Granberg's medium-sized mill has a clamp that holds the bar on the end and this helps avoid the problem where the bar wants to dip and make an uneven cut.

There's a bit of a learning curve to using a chainsaw mill so be sure to practice on a rotten log or something you don't care about. Screwing up a nice walnut log while learning how to use a mill is definitely not desirable.

I made two stout horses out of ash to hold the log I'm milling up off the ground so I can stand while running the mill. It can be done while kneeling but to me this is not desirable. If you use horses you'll need something to lift the logs. I use the front loader on my tractor, but there's ways to do this w/ a "log lifter" device too.

Of course, it's recommended you dry your lumber before using it. I have several stacks in my barn and a few in my basement. You'll need a lot of stickers to stack the lumber and I make mine on my band saw out of the cutoffs from using my circular saw to dimension the lumber. I use ratchet straps around the ends of a stack to keep the lumber from bowing up while drying.

Two good YT channels I recommend are Guilty of Treeson for learning the different notches to use on the hinge cut (I assume you'll be felling your own trees), and I like watching Surviving Ringworm b/c that guy is a master when it comes to making stuff using just a chainsaw. He also has a video about the log lifting device he came up w/ for moving heavy logs up onto the horses. Have fun!

I'm reading the comments, and here's my initial thoughts, I'll mull more as feedback comes i.:

Folks want AC posting to stay.

I'm personally not a fan, but frankly, I am willing to concede this point. It may become "Logged in users can post as AC" if you have high karma, or leave it as it is that ACs can post on journals, but not on the main page, but that's a more in-depth discussion. I may actually wait until after the site renovations are complete before addressing this; that means the backend has been updated to use less brittle infrastructure.

For now, the current status quo will continue, but I will continue to get feedback on what the final for of this will take. I may also just leave it for whomever replaces me, as I do wish to find someone to replace me.

Karma changes

I don't think I saw much objection to this. I wrote some comments explaining how karma works, but the short version is its a range from -25 to 50, with +3 points given when you submit a story, and then affected by moderation values. By and large, people don't downvote very often, especially on logged in accounts. This was a constant problem which is why we ended up going with 10 moderator points per day vs. the original lottery system. Shrinking the range might be enough to basically cause AC posts to automatically get tagged as -1 if there's just a stream of garbage coming out of the domain. That might be enough of a middle ground here.

Comment Deletion/Edit

My intent here was that for things like COVID misinformation and the like, it should be flat out deleted ala a subreddit. I wasn't clear about this in the original post however. I'll talk with the editors more about that on the side. As for an edit button, I'm not object to it, but it would be a time limited thing, and keep the original post and show a banner "This post was edited"

  - N

This week has been a dumpster fire, but I'll write more up about SN tomorrow, and more plans going forward. I'll try and draft things tonight on where we're going. Just wanted to post publicly that I am still working on things in the background.

Here is the deleted journal, which can also be found in my real web page.

The Man With No Belly Button
A True War Story

        You may think that the movie “Forest Gump” was unbelievable because you can’t believe anyone that dim could ever be accepted by the military, but I wasn’t in the Air Force long before I found that if you have a mental disability, you’re fine. Maybe intelligence is a detriment, although there are some stupid stunts that they won’t stand for.
        One was possessing marijuana, a felony in 1972, outlawed on the basis of lies.
        It was my day for clean-up duty in the barracks, as well as the duty sergeant’s. I can’t remember the fellow’s name, but Private Gump was a lot smarter than him. As we were cleaning the day room, where there were couches and a TV, the sergeant found a doobie. A big fat one, a real hog’s leg. He asked me if I knew what it was.
        I took it and looked at it. “It’s a hand-rolled cigarette.”
        “Could that be... marijuana?”
        “One way to find out,” I said, and broke it in half. “I never saw green tobacco before,” I said, handing it back to him.
        “What should I do with it?”
        I shrugged. “Throw it in the dumpster.”
        “You don’t think I should turn it in to the SPs?” The SPs were the Security Police, what other branches call the MPs.
        “Hell, no! If you do, you’re going to be there all damned day filling out paperwork.”
        He did. I saw him in the hall the day after next.
        “You were right, I should have thrown it in the dumpster. I spent all damned day yesterday at the SP’s filling out paperwork!”
        Two friends I was stationed with there were Stan Rogers and Chuck Woods. Chuck hated the tongue twister “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood?”
        Late one afternoon as I was reading, Stan dropped by my room to show off a gun he had gotten, from God only knows where. It was a snub nosed .38 pistol.
        My dad was a hunter, so I was brought up around dogs and guns. I was taught dog safety and gun safety at an early age. It was obvious that Stan had never seen a gun of any kind except on TV and movies, and the two days during basic training.
        I ran him off, despite his protestations that it wasn’t loaded. I was sure someone was going to get killed and I didn’t want to be around when it happened, especially if it happened to me.
        Later in the evening a fellow whose name I don’t remember, the company clerk, a practical joker and doobie toker who hung with and smoked with the guys I hung around with, knocked on my door. I put down my book again and answered it.
        “Stan shot Chuck!” He seemed really excited. Nice acting, I thought.
        I frowned. “Peddle your sick joke somewhere else.”
        “No! Really!”
        I slammed the door and picked my book back up, a truly evil book I had checked out from the base library. It was Aleister Crowley’s “autohagiography”, the book that Ozzy Osbourne obviously named his album “Diary of a Madman” for, and sang about in the song “Mister Crowley”. It’s a book of black magic with instructions on how to perform it, drug abuse, murder (he claimed the King of England was Jack the Ripper), rape, sodomy, bestiality, suicide, ocean voyages, and mountain climbing. Four thousand evil pages. I read the whole damned thing, Delaware was the most boring place I’ve ever been in my life.
        But real life was just as ghastly that night. The fellow wasn’t joking, Stan really did shoot Chuck! But it wasn’t on purpose.
        I don’t know why I didn’t hear the gunshot or hear the sirens. I never thought about that until now that I’m writing it down. Maybe I had dozed off? A C-5 took off at the same time? Those things are really loud, although an SR-71 is a hell of a lot louder. Or maybe I was so absorbed in the batshit crazy book that I was just oblivious.
        At any rate, Stan had visited Chuck after I had run him off. They took turns playing with the gun that Stan had insisted was unloaded.
        I learned gun safety at a young age, as I said, and rule one is to never treat a gun as if it’s unloaded, even if you just unloaded it yourself. My dad always said that more people are killed by unloaded guns than loaded ones; I don’t know how accurate that was. But Stan and Chuck sadly didn’t know the rules.
        Chuck later told me what happened.
        He was leaning against a wall. Stan, a tall thin fellow, was twirling it like the “cowboys” (the word “cowboy” was an insult in the 1800s, referring to a drover, who held America’s worst job) do on TV and in the movies.
        His unloaded gun went off. The slug hit Chuck square in the belly button and exited from his left buttock. He told me as he recounted the tale, “When I die, I want it to be from getting shot. The only way I knew I was shot was my leg started twitching.”
        He slumped down the wall.
        “Oh, shit!” Roger exclaimed. “Shit! Shit! Oh, fuck! Are you okay?”
        “No, God damn it! You fucking SHOT me!”
        I imagine a lot of blood was pooling, but he didn’t mention the blood, but said he wasn’t freaking out. I imagine it was like the car wreck I had in 1976; I was calm, but the ambulance guys were freaking out.
        Stan was frantic. “Oh shit! Oh Shit! What should I do? What should I...”
        “Get the God damned duty sergeant you fucking moron!” Chuck yelled. Stan ran down for help, and came back with the sergeant, of whom, as I said, Terry Pratchett might have said wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, and might even be a spoon.
        “Holy fuck! What do I do?”
        “Get an ambulance! Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with you?!”
        Yes, unlike TV and the movies, in real life military men freak out and panic sometimes, just like civilians. The ambulance came and took him to the hospital and the doctors started surgery.
        The hospital lost power halfway through the operation, and they had to get a generator from the flight line.
        Before they started sewing him up, the generator went out. In my 3½ years on the flight line towing AGE (Aerospace Ground Equipment), that was the only time I ever heard of those things failing; the military keeps a sharp eye on their equipment. Most of the vehicles I drove were older than I was.
        Someone on the internet said that my science fiction story “But Sir, I’m Just a Robot” was unbelievable because of the string of bad luck that befell the robot’s owner, but Chuck’s story is actually true; all of this happened to the best of my memory. Mark Twain said ”truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be believable” (Terry Pratchett disagreed).
        I never saw poor Stan again. He was immediately incarcerated, and stayed in jail until he was court-martialled on the charge of bringing a prohibited weapon on base; the only firearms are supposed to be owned by the government, and Chuck’s injury illustrates why.
        Stanley was found guilty, and spent the next six months in Leavenworth, before receiving a dishonorable discharge. Nixon was in office, and the nation would be in a recession until Clinton’s administration, so life must have been really rough for Stan after the Air Force.
        Chuck was in the hospital for a long time, but bore no ill will towards Stan. It was an accident, and it could have been just as easily Chuck shooting Stan. But he was pissed off at the hospital; they had incinerated his shirt and jeans because of the blood. He wanted them for souvenirs, I guess the big scar wasn’t enough.
        He did recover from his injuries, but lost his belly button.
        If you’re thinking about buying a firearm, please take a safety course. More gunshot wounds are accidental than murderous.

I’m a n00b all over again.
        I first started using Linux with Mandrake, after trying unsuccessfully to get Red Hat to behave on my hardware, later learning that that distro was better suited for a web server than a desktop. I used Suse for a while on one machine, and lately kubuntu. All were dual-boot, and the Linux side was honestly not used much except for a laptop that was stolen; Windows was annoying but worked okay.
        At least, until I got a virus. I assume it was a virus, but who knows, it could have been targeted. I don’t know why I would have been, but it would be possible. At any rate, all my efforts to vanquish it led to the computer becoming unusable, so I just replaced the computer. I would have replaced the hard drive when I was young and poor. Replacing the computer’s pretty easy to do when the data are all on a network drive.
        The replacement was the same make and model computer, and both were running Windows 10. I never got around to installing Linux on the new one, and the useless one sat under a table sulking.
        Several times in the past, Microsoft had instituted measures to cripple Audacity with its Windows “updates”. Rolling back the updates fixed it. But the last time, they also disabled THE COMPUTER’S OWNER who bought and paid for it from rolling back updates. Virus? Microsoft is its own malware.
        So I bought a new hard drive for the unused infected computer. They’ve really gotten cheap and huge lately! I tired of building computers years ago; hell, I’m old. But I opened the infected box up and replaced its infected drive with the new, giant clean drive that was physically smaller. It’s not properly installed, but fuck it, it works. Well, after the Linux Install CD formatted it and installed Linux, anyway.
        But I never had to do two things: find a new repository and install it, and install the network drive that Windows and Android have no trouble with. I want GIMP and XMMS and Audacity, since Audacity was the reason I bought the drive.
        I was able to download a working copy of Audacity from their web site, but it won’t install, it just runs. At least it’s usable, although I can’t run it by clicking one of its files. I also can’t record the internet with it, but I can record the Windows computer through a patch cord.
        The network drive is what drives me crazy, because I had it working on the old infected drive. And I’d like to be able to install shit.
        This brings up something else, something my daughter Patty and I were disagreeing about the last time she visited home from Cincinnati. She’s going back to college at age 35, and grew up with shareware, freeware, and open source along with some commercial software, but the college, probably bankrolled by Microsoft, has brainwashed its students into believing that normal people can’t use open source software, only freaks like you, me, and her.
        I tried to convince her it’s just what you’re used to. But then, I bought my first computer as a birthday present to myself on my 30th birthday, forty years ago and I’m having trouble with Linux.
        Yes, an OS isn’t an app, but try explaining that to a college professor who has been likewise brainwashed. But at any rate, I’m looking for good information on how to connect the network drive; what I’ve found on the internet is missing a lot of needed info.
        Then there’s new software, Kubuntu’s repository is tiny, missing much of what I need, like Audacity, XMMS, and GIMP. Where can I find these apps and how do I install them?

TIPS ON PRECISION SPINDLE REBUILD
You see, they are just tips - like, 90 minutes of them.

More precision machining porn:
https://www.youtube.com/c/ROBRENZ/videos

https://www.youtube.com/user/oxtoolco/videos

Will Xi’s Paranoia Defeat Him?

However, Xi takes the paranoia that has been endemic to Chinese politics since Mao Zedong’s rule to an extreme. China is stronger than ever. It has a hugely successful economy, a capable military, and growing global influence. The government enjoys a high level of public support. Yet Xi’s fixation on security betrays his persistent feelings of vulnerability. Xi’s “overall national security outlook” is more holistic than Hu’s, more party-centered, and more explicitly highlights external threats.
...
Xi’s moves to suppress domestic threats have often shocked the world in part because they have been so sudden. These include the revision of the constitution to allow Xi to remain leader for life, the incarceration of around 1 million Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, the imposition of the 2020 national security law that destroyed Hong Kong’s freedoms almost overnight, the 2021 regulatory storm against private internet firms, and the two-month COVID-19 lockdown of Shanghai. These actions came as bolts from the blue because Xi decided on them with little broader debate or deliberation. The combination of Xi’s unbridled power and the competition of other officials to prove their unquestioning loyalty to him propelled policy toward overreach.
...
It all came full circle when China’s former minister of justice, Fu Zhenghua, a man sometimes called “Xi’s muscle,” was himself arrested in April for corruption and disciplinary infractions. Another former deputy head of public security, Sun Lijun—who was considered so reliable that Xi sent him to Wuhan, China, after the COVID-19 outbreak—was arrested last year. Xi replaced Fu and Sun with two of his more trusted followers, Wang Xiaohong and Chen Yixin, who are likely to be elevated to the Politburo at the 20th Party Congress. Just weeks before the Party Congress, Fu and Sun were sent to prison for life.

Up to here, there are compelling arguments for "Xi's paranoia" (hint, there are more of the same kind in TFA, feel free to read them yourself).

What does it mean, tho'?

Xi’s centralized version of social control is far more granular and pervasive—closer to a totalitarian state—than Hu’s fragmented bureaucratic version. The regime has unprecedented capabilities to surveil people and collect and analyze their personal data. For instance, China leads the world in facial recognition artificial intelligence. The security apparatus has grafted these surveillance technologies onto a system inherited from the Mao era of mutual supervision by neighbors.
...
Like Hu, Xi wants to shift social management down to the grassroots to relieve the center’s burden. He has adopted the Hu-era slogan: “Small issues don’t leave the village, big things don’t leave the township, and no conflicts are passed on to higher authorities. Since becoming party secretary of Zhejiang province in 2002, Xi has been promoting a method developed in a Zhejiang township during the Mao era in 1963. It is called the “Fengqiao experience,” referring to the way this community involved the masses in its struggle against reactionaries, along with the party and the police.

• that would explain how COVID got away, with the regional leaders reluctant to break the news to the supreme one. Viruses aren't that pliable to ideology, tho'
• the risk of "situations going out of hand" is likely to continue. The economy has the same bad habit of being stubborn to ideology; not because some "free market fairy", just because of being complex enough to manifest deterministic chaos even under the best management.
• the "leader's head in the sand" strategy, what a good one to stay clueless and take whatever decisions you like, because you are fed with a reality that you will like. Until it's too late, that is

Xi’s sense of political vulnerability is reflected in his strivings to impose almost totalitarian social control on Chinese society and eliminate all potential rivals. Security has eclipsed economic development as the CCP’s defining goal. But this approach to governance could backfire on Xi during his third term. A party that puts ideological loyalty ahead of economic results is not going to retain its popular appeal for long.

Well, well... That's a mistake, Xi's rule is not based on popular appeal. If the things go wrong, Xi won't be overthown by a popular uprising. The two most likely outcomes (and they can happen in the same time):

1. the chinese citizens are repressed enough to endure the consequences of leadership mismanagement. If they don't comply enough... then:
2. Xi moves to wag the dog. Taiwan is the easiest, but the South China Sea is large enough to create wagging opportunities. If the things still need to go deeper on this path, its not like "the West" doesn't have potential to be painted as the "enemy of the people" or the "reason for which the world can't live in peace" (and speak mandarin)

Way back in 1977 when I was in college, my history class was assigned a book by F.L. Allen titled Only Yesterday. It surprised me; I was expecting a dry, scholastic work devoid of flavor or writing skill.
        But I was wrong. This “textbook”, in paperback for ninety five cents plus tax (how much did you pay for your textbooks? My most expensive one was ten bucks) was written as if it were a high quality magazine article. I was impressed.
        It sat on my bookshelf for almost half a century until the Covid pandemic struck, and reminders were everywhere of the last pandemic a century earlier.
        I had referenced this book since I got on the internet when some ignoramus spewed some nonsense about the “roaring twenties”, which my grandmother, an eighteen year old new mother in 1921 said only roared for the rich. The book agrees with Grandma, although weakly.
        But I began to see similarities to our twenties, the 2020s, and figured that this book would be of interest to everyone in this decade.
        There’s a mention somewhere in the book about time repeating itself, but never exactly. Some things were very similar to now, some were the exact opposite. In the last ’20s the Republican president took the Democrat’s job, in our ’20s the Democrat took the Republican’s job.
        Rather than a right wing mob storming the capitol, in the 20th century Bolsheviks bombed the stock market on Wall Street in New York. Alcohol prohibition began in the 1920s, cannabis prohibition ended in Illinois in 2020. In 1920, Women gained the right to vote. In 2022 they lost the right to have an abortion.
        Like our decade, theirs started at the end of wartime. Like their decade, ours followed a quarter century of technical innovation. Like our decade, the nation was very divided a hundred years ago.
        So I decided to put it on my book web site.
        I found an HTML copy on the University of Virginia’s website quite a while ago and decided to get the text from there. Its book is a file per chapter, so I copied the text into a text editor, and then went to format it.
        I had a real good start, to chapter four, I think, and something just didn’t look right and I couldn’t figure out what, so I looked for other copies. One was at the Australian Gutenberg, and apparently my memory was at once better and worse than I remembered it was; the two didn’t exactly match. I put the project away for a while; I like to get things as close to perfect as I possibly can.
        Then looking for something completely different, there sat Mr. Cleese himself in the person of a PDF file scanned from a Houghton-Mifflin 1957 copy by the Kansas City Library. That book was a hell of a lot fancier than my paperback copy, and than the Gutenberg and VU copies.
        I had a lot more work ahead of me, loading the PDF into GIMP as an image per page. Saving about four hundred images would take a while, so I thought I’d try something I was sure wouldn’t work, trying to OCR the PDF directly.
        My OCR program was included with a scanner a quarter of a century ago, and I wasn’t sure if they even had PDFs then but was certain that the ancient OCR wouldn’t read a new PDF file. Apparently they did have PDFs back then, because it actually worked, seemingly against all logic. And it worked better and with more accuracy than I’ve ever seen it do before.
        And I discovered the invisible hyphen. I’d never seen, or even heard of one before. It’s a hyphen that is invisible in an HTML page unless it falls at the right side of the page, when it becomes visible. But you can’t copy and paste it in Notepad, as when pasted it becomes a normal hyphen.
        This was a problem formatting the book, because in Notepad there was a hyphen, but “school-board” became “schoolboard” in HTML.
        But this thing could be very useful! Someone should write a program that had a word database and would put one between syllables. It would be great for HTML full justification! I left in many of the useful ones, at least after I started understanding what was happening; I’d deleted a lot and wasn’t going to start over from scratch again!
        I wish I had more information about it. What is its real name? Its ASCII value? Does anyone have any links to information about it?
        Anyway, I decided to make my HTML copy as fancy as the PDF from the hardcover book, including foreign characters and drop caps. In two ways it’s fancier. You can’t click a link on paper. Another way was making the “th” in dates superscript as is common today.
        For drop caps, I used the same kludge I used in the HTML version of Random Scribblings, an image of the character. I’ve been doing hacks and kludges since I was a teenager in the ‘60s, when I was unable to afford a multi-hundred dollar guitar fuzzbox from a music store, so I made one out of a broken transistor radio. This doesn’t count the meaningless gizmos I made in 6th grade, like the Dufus Detector that would light up when it was pointed at a dufus.
        I decided that when a movie or book title showed up in the text, I would link movies to movies in the Internet Archive, and books from Gutenberg, but there was a roadblock with the movies. I copied the URL from the browser’s bar, but on testing it led to some stupid page about their stupid policies. Stupid. And they want me to donate! I donate to Wikipedia because I use it almost daily and Jimmy Wales isn’t an idiot like the morons who run the Internet Archive.
        Gutenberg was far more intelligent, and I noticed that they’ve improved their search capabilities, although they’re still really weak. I should be able to enter a title and get that one book, if found, instead of every book with any book in the book you’re looking for’s title.
        I later found some mentioned movies on YouTube, who encourages you to share.
        The links are all black, because you just don’t see colored texts in any book except a magazine or a child’s book. The table of contents is the exception.
        I see no point to linking the magazines that still exist. None are much like they were a century ago. At any rate, I’m not done with editing. When I’m satisfied with it, it will be at mcgrewbooks.com/Allen/.
        If anyone has any information about the weird hyphen, or links to any unlinked books, or direct links to any mentioned movie (most are in the public domain, all made before 1927 are public domain), please let me know.