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I've been given an old XP pc and have put (X)ubuntu on it in order to get a web-server running with the goal being to let family members sign in and download TV shows/movies/etc.

Have set it up according to a couple of sites (a mix of Ubuntu/apache etc sites) and am using ngrok to open up a tunnel (with the end goal being once it's running and accessible, i will go for the $5/mnth for the permanent address).

Have apache/mysql/php working (this is NEW territory for me, but i THINK it is working correctly) and have ngrok running, but i cannot connect from an external device (my tablet).

I THINK the problem is with firewall (ufw on ubuntu and the router firewall): have tried to get port 80 accessible through both , have allowed access through the router firewall for the web-server: my next plan is to completely stop ufw on the pc and just allow the router to run things.

Does anyone have advice/tips/help?

Gotta be at least a couple people familiar with running a web site around here :)

I heard a fantastic story on the radio on my way to work today:

Alberta man changes gender on government IDs for cheaper car insurance

I salute you, good sir -- errr.. madam.

I've been working for the same company for 13 years - 10 of which have been in my current role. I do application support for a highly customized, business critical application. I'm good at my job. I've automated most of the job away. I can fix any issue that comes up. It's easy.

A manager position has just opened up to manage the team I am currently a member of. I'm not sure if I should apply or not.

One one hand, I know the company well. I know the functions of the group intimately. I am familiar with the business processes and know most of the key people on the business side of the house and have good relationships with them. I'm good at fixing problems. I'm good at working with others to get a problem solved. I like running meetings (I like the showmanship). I've been doing the same thing for a long time. I'm comfortable.

On the other hand, I'm not all that organized. I don't like screwing around with excel. I hate powerpoint. Basically, I hate all of office. Managers at my organization tend not to last more than a couple years. I have a solid pension that if I can hang in here until I'm 55, I could retire. I'm also tired all the time from my baby. We are going to get pregnant again soon so I'm not going to be any less tired for the forseeable future. I don't know if I have the energy.

Should I give up a good cushy job that allows me to dick around on the Internet for most of the day? The management position would probably come with a raise, but it probably wouldn't be that much extra (I'd guess +15%ish, maybe). I'm bored of my current job and feel stagnant in life, but I'm also exhausted.

What do you say? Stay and keep my chair warm for another 20 years to retire with pension at 55, or try for the manager position and get some experience that I will need a couple years later after the next round of 'restructuring'?

A guy i know makes socks geared towards bicyclers (geared! get it?). His business is Sneaky Socks.

He was telling us about making socks (more interesting than you'd think) and he says it's hard to produce socks like China at their price because they have ENTIRE CITIES based on making things for your body:
Sock city: an entire city based on the production (and support) of socks.
They also have entire cities doing sweaters, shirts, pants, etc.

Imagine trying to compete with that.

He also says that they use cheap wool and nylon and the fibers are run between ropes drenched with kerosene in order to keep the 'fuzzing' down: better socks are made with better fibers and this is not needed.

It was, really, more interesting than i thought.

Two quick searches led me to these:
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/24/business/worldbusiness/in-roaring-china-sweaters-are-west-of-socks-city.html/

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/sep/09/sock-city-decline-china-economy

With the USgov seemingly unwilling to aid Puerto Rico, wouldn't it be something for Putin to step in and say Russia will send aid.

I'd bet you'd see a US 180° turn.

And Putin might then win the Nobel peace prize? :) Yeah, right.

Sorry I haven’t written, but I’ve been spending all my time working on my cookbook. I’ve even gotten way behind on my reading; there are four copies of F&SF I haven’t even cracked open yet.
        It isn’t the TTL Cookbook, someone else wrote that one a few decades ago. I highly recommend it, if you can find a copy. It describes how all the circuits in a computer work, down to the individual components within the chips; transistors, capacitors, resisters, etc.
        This cookbook is a culinary cookbook. Five hundred old family recipes covering breakfast, lunch, brunch, deserts, drinks, and snacks, an herb and spice guide over twenty pages long, hundreds of illustrations, and detailed information about people, places, things, and histories connected to many of the recipes.
        The recipes themselves come from a cookbook my grandmother’s family compiled a few decades ago. Many come from popular southern restaurants that were owned and run by family members.
        It’s almost ready for publication. I need to take a few more photos at Humphrey’s Market tomorrow and add them to the book, but other than that it’s finished and ready to have bound copies printed.
        Now I can get back to science fiction.

Tonight i had a breakthrough with my son!

His norm is to ask for a drink by handing you his cup, or by pointing or by saying 'rink'.
Tonight, i was back at forcing words from him, but this time when getting him to say "I. Want. A. Drink", i moved my arm down and up with every word. Did this a couple times, then used his arm.
Each time i moved his arm down and up again, i said "I. want. a. rink." Then did it again without saying anything but the starting "I."
He then proceeded to finish with "I. want. a. drink."

BIG BREAKTHROUGH, as he usually has to have sentences dragged out of him slowly and prefers the one word answer (so do i: while i admit he gets through to you what he wants when he says "rink", getting him to repeat words and sentences is the next step in removing the tech we have to haul around).
So, it was nice to see this from him. Or...

It.
was.
nice.

(Problem is, as it was with him saying "Butterfly" once and only once no matter how much I praised him and tried to get him to say it again, this may be a one time thing and he may never do it again...

...but will attempt it again tomorrow after he has time to sleep on it, lol.

Most of the regulars here probably know that I'm into the Bitcoin. I've been completely obsessed with it for just over 5 years now. I've mined, I've traded (usually unsuccessfully), I've held.

Bitcoin has changed, and not in a good way.

When I first got into bitcoin, there really wasn't much you could buy with it. There was that farm in Argentina(?) that would sell Alpaca socks, Bees Brothers Honey, Satoshi Dice (gambling), and that was pretty much it. The network was much smaller with less users and less transactions. 'Real' people still hadn't heard of bitcoin yet.

Back then, the energy was good. Communities valued differing opinions and being nerds, there was ample debate on every topic no matter how menial. Every time a new merchant accepted BTC, everyone was excited and would try to support that business. The motto wasn't 'HODL', but rather 'Spend and Replace'. Big business started accepting Bitcoin. Microsoft and Steam where huge victories. Buying games off steam with bitcoin was an amazing experience.

So what happened? Bitcoin stopped growing and started shrinking. Business that used to accept bitcoin stopped. Steam? They left. There are many other examples of companies that previously accepted bitcoin that no longer do.

***

In 2014, a number of the Bitcoin Core Developers created BlockStream. Blockstream was one of the early 'companies' to actually receive funding in bitcoinland. The initial announcement was generally well received (after all, if someone wants to spend money on dev work, that's great). Some people expressed concern about this new company. Blockstream's stated goal was to enhance the bitcoin ecosystem using something called sidechains. This concept was completely new at the time and everyone was pretty unsure what a sidechain even was and how it worked.

The basic idea of a sidechain is that you can send bitcoin to a script address that would lock up the bitcoin until a set of conditions are met. While the bitcoin is locked up in that script address, you can then reference the locked-up bitcoin in another blockchain and transact on this other blockchain referencing the 'value' of the locked up bitcoin. This new sidechain could offer additional functionality (like faster blocks, bigger blocks, additional scripting features, etc). When the transaction is complete, the sidechain could signal back to the original chain to release the funds (and possibly redistribute them if value was transferred on the sidechain).

One of the first examples (I think it actually /was/ the first) of a working sidechain was from a company called 21inc. This company received a pretty good chunk of cash to develop a little chip that was going to be installed everywhere. This chip was capable of mining as well as performing transactions. The idea was that one of these chips would be installed in pretty much every powered appliance. Your fridge, your washing machine, your cell phone, etc. All these devices would be mining and earning a small amount of bitcoin. 21inc would collect 75% and the 'owner' of the device would get the remaining 25% of mining revenue. So, your fridge would be mining away earning you a small amount of bitcoin. This bitcoin could then be used to pay for services. Your fridge could buy food or electricity or whatever. Your washing machine could buy water. Your phone could pay for stuff. There was a lot of excitement, but unfortunately 21inc never really went anywhere beyond a dev kit that you could purchase.

Back to Blockstream. While the initial response to Blockstream's incorporation and funding was positive, eventually people started to question their motives. Blockstream's stated business model was to create sidechains and profit off them. 6 months after Blockstreams founding, Lightning was announced. Lightning was kind of like a sidechain but not quite... The initial response to the announcement was overwhelmingly positive. Lightning promised quick, cheap transactions using bitcoin as the value backing the transaction.

Not everyone was a fan of Blockstream. Some people looked into where the funding had come from and found that AXA Venture Partners (a subsidvision of AXA insurance) was a major contributor to the initial seed funding. Many of the investors of Blockstream had some pretty heavy traditional banking background and that worried some people. Blockstream starting hiring Bitcoin Core developers in 2015. It wasn't long before ~50% of the core developers (the ones that actually committed code) where on Blockstream's payroll. And around this time, the narrative started changing.

At the time, there were two main communities that people would discuss Bitcoin: reddit/r/bitcoin and bitcointalk.com. Both of these communities were run be the same person, Michael Marquardt, who went by the handle 'Theymos'. Discussion was generally open and unmoderated until some time in 2015. The block size debate had resurfaced again. This debate had been going on for years and until this point it was pretty much assumed that when transaction volume warranted it, that there would be an update to increase the block size. There were several proposals on the table, but the proposal that had the most traction was an 8MB block size.

Gavin Andreson (former lead developer for Bitcoin and the man that Satoshi left in charge when he mysteriously left), coded up a fully functional bitcoin client that would accept these larger blocks. The client was called BitcoinXT and would enable a block size increase if 750 of the last 1000 blocks signaled for the increase (75% threshold).

Meanwhile, on reddit (where all the bitcoiners would congregate), Theymos was no longer taking a light handed approach to moderation. Any post that promoted BitconXT was 'offtopic' or 'alt-coin discussion' and those posts would be removed. Comments would be removed, and Theymos went so far as to modify the custom CSS for the bitcoin subreddit so that deleted comments wouldn't show up at all hiding the extent of moderation. It was around this time that I noticed that some threads would be sorted weirdly. Instead of the normal sort order of 'new' or 'best', many threads were being sorted by 'controversial'. Sorting in this way would allow Theymon to bury comments and mislead the discussion. This sorting manipulation was not just on a few threads, I would see quite a few examples of this every day and it was an obvious attempt to quell and mislead actual discussion.

As BitcoinXT started gaining support, someone or some group started attacking nodes running the XT nodes. THey would be DDoSed into oblivion. Core developers under the payroll of Blockstream even condoned these attackes and suggested other possible attack vectors, such as faking support to cross the activation threshold only to pull support at the last moment. Anyone that would publicly support a block size increase would be publicy smeared and attacked. Many people and companies continue to be smeared and attacked to this day. (One recent example is coinbase being removed from the bitcoin.org website because they added Bitcoin Cash support).

One day, during some 'Who is Satoshi?' drama, Gaven Andresen posted a tweet saying that he believed that Craig Wright was satoshi. This was after Gavin had met with Craig in person and had allegedly watched Craig sign a message with an original Satoshi private key. When Gavin posted this tweet, the Core developers claimed that was evidence that he had been hacked and revoked his commit access to the github bitcoin repo. That access was never reinstated. The original developer that was chosen by satoshi had been kicked out.

The scaling argument continued to rage on. Users of reddit/bitcoin that supported a block size increase would find themselves banned from the sub. These big blockers would find a new home in reddit/btc and stop posting in reddit/bitcoin. The community was split -- big blockers lived on reddit/btc and small blockers lived on reddit/bitcoin.

More proposals would be offered. Bitcoin Unlimited was released sometime around early 2017, again with the goal of increasing block sizes using a new signaling technique. Another idea was 'SegWit'. In the spring of 2017 segwit had ~30% support while Bitcoin Unlimited was at times approaching 50%. However, bitcoin was at a stalemate.

Some bitcoin industry leaders met in NY to create what would become the New York Agreement. This agreement would accept SegWit, and a block size would be enabled 90 (?) days after that. The block size would be 2MB, the smallest increase possible, but an increase nonetheless. As per the agreement, miners started signaling, and Segwit was enabled on mainnet. However, after Segwit was enabled, a massive campaign was launched called NO2x. This campaign was ultimately successful, and is why Bitcoin only has 1MB blocks.

Since then, bitcoin hasn't been growing like it did prior to that time. Instead of features being added, features were being removed. Things were getting more complex instead of simpler and more accessable. Bitcoin used to be 'Build it and they Will Come', but now bitcoin actually discourages people from using it. That is not the bitcoin I signed up for.

Fortunately, just prior to Segwit activating on mainnet, Bitcoin ABC was created to split the bitcoin chain, and on August 1, 2017 Bitcon Cash was born. Unlike bitcoin, Bitcoin cash is growing. Bitcoin cash has many of the 'old-timer' working on it. These people helped make bitcoin what it was, but many now fight for Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash has nearly caught up with Bitcoin in terms of acceptance in less than one year.

This is really just the very, very tip of the iceburg. There is so much more that I have left out. In short, I feel that Bitcoin has been hijacked and no longer represents the bitcoin described in the whitepaper. It no longer follows the formula that made it successful initially. Bitcoin Cash is now the closest thing to the original vision, and that's why I am a Bitcoin Cash Supporter.

My son has cerebral palsy which leaves him with very low fine finger and joint control.

(Quite) A few years back, we bought a Wii because we thought he'd be able to play games just by waving his arm around.
Wrong.
Too much of ALL games took clicking or trigger pulling, etc, so we have to help him if he has any chance of advancing the game.
Mario kart with a steering wheel is okay, but he can't react fast enough to keep up with the other cars (it's hard enough for this 50-ish year old, lol)

I saw a Sesame Street game for the Xbox Kinect.
The question is, would the Kinect be better for him? Are there games he could play just by waving his arms or making punch motions or just moving?

Thanks for any good advice anyone can give.

I wrote in a prior journal that I had an upcoming date with a married woman I met while at a playground a few months ago. Last Friday I had that date.

We met at a fancy bar. It was the kind of place that had a wine menu a dozen pages long. Very classy place. I arrived first, and she showed up a few minutes later. She extended her hand for a handshake, but I refused it and went in for the hug. She was a little surprised.

The conversation was fantastic and flowed easily. Eventually there was a natural point in the conversation where I could bring up/ask whether or not we were actually on a date. She said she wasn't sure. I let her know about my open relationship status and she said that they have a more Don't Ask Don't Tell type setup.

I'm really bad at remembering exact words. I more remember the 'feel' of the conversation. I got the impression that they used to have a DADT setup, but since her daughter they kinda stopped, but in an unsaid way. It wasn't exactly clear. I did say that I didn't want to be 'that guy', and that I don't want to cause problems with their family.

Anyways, we continued the evening and later a live band came on and started playing. We got up to dance at one point. As we danced we caressed each others fingers in a soft and erotic way. It almost felt as if sparks were jumping between our fingers.

We sat back down and ordered another drink. She ordered another after that 'to find an excuse to prolong the night'. Eventually it was almost 1:00am. She had to run a 5k with her daughter the next morning (I felt terrible for her the next morning). We left, I kissed her, and she hopped into her Uber.

It was an amazing night. I think it was the best date I've been on since I started dating again.