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Business Depot in Portland has laser printers that cost less than the complete set of inks for my ancient Canon. I completely replaced its inks only to find that it doesn't work anymore.

I mostly need black and white prints. If I need color all get them done at FedEx office.

I want a laser printer that will last until the heat death of the Universe.

TNX!

Student warns about 'Juuling' trend in eye-opening video

Juul, the vape device teens are getting hooked on, explained

arrr yooo {2Z} juuling Delysid in class, breh¿

In India, entry-level job applicants are called "Freshers". Knowing that will help me find more Indian companies to list at Soggy Jobs.

From its very start *no one* had a clue as to why I refered to "Computer Jobs".

There are two reasons: one is that most computer programmers do _not_ work in the computer business; they write "in-house apps" for other kinds of companies such as financial firms, medical companies as well as government agencies.

Admittedly my original title "The Global Computer Employer Index" did a poor job of conveying that message. Just today I renamed it to The Global Computer Industry Index. On the geographic pages I use titles like Find a Computer Industry Job in Goregaon, India.

(Doubtlessly to the dismay of tens of millions of women, Indian employers are permitted to specify "Male Candidates Only" in their job descriptions; it's that way in the Philippines too.)

The other reason is that I don't just list corporate software job portals but also hardware - for electrical engineers, electronics technicians, electronic test engineers and the like.

Despite that intent I list very, very few hardware companies for the simple reason that I didn't know how to look for them. It's easy to find publicly-traded companies like Intel, AMD and Apple but how I do find the small ones?

Really I _still_ don't know.

So I'm listing the big hardware companies, at least for now. Over the last few days I've been working on ARM Holdings, which designs the microprocessors that are found in most mobile devices as well as embedded systems such as my Antminer L3+ LiteCoin mining rig.

Also until recently I really didn't list any multinationals because I found the prospect of listing all their locations quite intimidating. This because I would have to create new pages for each new country, state or province, maybe the counties and the cities just so I could list _one_ company's office.

To my delight I've found the work of building out my site to have gotten far easier as I've progressed: if I find just _one_ tech company in Oula, I'm likely to find lots more; I've been devoting steadily-fewer hours to creating totally new HTML files as well as finding the companies to list.

It is quite helpful that some multinationals make it really easy to find a list of _all_ their locations. Oracle is the easiest but ARM Holdings isn't so bad. Rather than adding one new city then returning to ARM's careers portal, I open a text file to record just the names of the cities then scan through all the listings for tech jobs.

Progressively,

Soggy Mike

In Your Infinite Free Time... Do Yer Worst:

• What is the Key to Happiness?

(I only just now created my site's Recovery section. I at first was going to post this in my Mental Illness section but realized the topic was of interest to those who are in recovery for many different reasons: recovering addicts, survivors of sexual abuse, survivors of violence and war.)

I wrote Key to Happiness in 2004 then posted it to my previous website
so I could solicit criticism from the other members of the now-defunct
community website Kuro5hin. Everyone at "K5" was a dedicated writer
with most of us also being computer programmers.

My ex Bonita Hatcher felt this essay had potential and so encouraged
me to devote a lot more time and effort to it.

At the time I cited two books: Timothy Miller's "How to Want what You
Have" as well as "Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience" by
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

("ME-High Chicks Sent Me HIGH-Yee" according to the man himself.)

I expected to read then cite some other books but I never got that
far. 2004 was a very difficult year for Bonita and I.

Critically,

Michael David Crawford

Bully Hunters organizers shut down campaign after disastrous first stream

With your host, Zombi Unicorn.

White House Correspondents' Dinner: Michelle Wolf obliterates Sarah Huckabee Sanders

Comedian's Sarah Sanders 'roast' stuns White House Correspondents' Dinner

Michelle Wolf pushes back on criticism of Sarah Sanders jokes

Find a Computer Job in the United Kingdom

London is the only one with lots of listings.

Most of those cities have only one listing: Oracle.

I find that deeply disturbing. I'll go hide from Larry Ellison now.

So my last post was a bit of an intro to my newly ignited flame of curiosity fueled by the discovery of a plan 9 based cloud called 9gridchan. In this post I'm going to help you get up and running with the ants iso and get drawterm connected to a live plan9 session to get started. It's a bit lengthily and jumps around a bit but it's a crash course and my first guide so hold on tight...

First off grab the latest iso from http://ants.9gridchan.org/
Second, grab and build drawterm: http://drawterm.9front.org/ (we NEED the 9front version which supports p9sk1 security.)

Boot it in your favorite VM of choice using a bridged adapter so the system gets it's own ip accessible from any machine on your lan. I'm using Virtualbox under Linux Mint 18.3. If bridging doesn't work you need to install libvdeplug-dev. That was an issue I ran into.

Next up is booting the ants ISO. You have to enter a few settings manually during boot time but the defaults are fine. Aside from perhaps a different video mode you can just keep hitting enter at every single prompt until the GUI terminal is started. If you want a larger terminal, use 1280x1024x24 (or whatever) for video mode and leave it set to VESA mode. But take note, we are going to be doing the rest of our exploring in drawterm (more on that).

Right after entering the video mode, the GUI starts with a big white terminal asking you one final question: what kind of mouse are you using? If you want the scroll wheel enabled, type ps2intellimouse at the prompt and hit enter. Otherwise the default is ps2 which is fine for now.

You should now see your mouse cursor come to life and rio, the window manager, is started and two windows are opened for you. The small one in the upper left is your system monitor and the other is a terminal window with a little intro. If you want to jump right into the grid, type gridstart at the prompt. But not just yet, keep reading. If you're really hardcore: '% man intro'

If you've never used the plan 9 GUI before here is a crash course:
Right click an empty space (not a window), select new, then right click and drag to draw a new shell window. (mouse cording and button menus are core, read up on it) To delete a window you right click an empty space, select delete, and right click the window you want to delete. To cancel a delete, left click anywhere, or right click an empty space (meaning not over a window). Since everything is a file, including our terminal, deleting is how we close them. Resizing them works like any other OS, grab an edge or corner, left click and drag. To move a window is a little more tricky, go to an edge until the cursor turns to the resize glyph, right click, and the cursor should turn into a little square and the window border turns red so drag away! Window taking up too much screen and you want to "minimize" it? Right click, select hide, right click window to hide. To unhide, that window is now listed in the right click menu, just right click and select it to "maximize". In addition, any windows hidden by other windows are also listed in that menu so you dont lose them.

Since plan 9 was inspired directly by Unix it too has a shell, rc to be exact¹, which looks and somewhat behaves like a Unix shell. Many of the commands are the same such as cp, ls, grep, awk, and are mostly present but be warned, they are very different but offer the same basic functionality. man pages are your friend.

And I want to be clear, the shell and terminal are two different things. The shell is what we use to run commands, the terminal is what we sit in front of.
The shell experience is not unlike the primitive terminals of old *nix systems where accidental input can cause errors or leave you smashing the keyboard trying to figure out why it doesn't work anymore. You probably moved the cursor to another line and pressed enter sending garbage to the command interpreter or backspaced over the prompt. Press delete and you're back to the prompt.

The plan 9 kernel is a kind of file system router that is transparent over the network. All devices, processes, and resources are implemented as files. Plan 9 also separates the function of a computer into pieces you can arrange on one or more systems on a network, transparently, as needed: CPU, auth, disk. CPU is what runs user processes, without it you cant run stuff. Disk is a service that handles everything storage and disk related. It can run alone on a machine dedicated to serving up storage any way you want. Auth is how security is implemented. Want an active directory like domain controller? Just point your terminals to a single auth server and you're done. And finally, one last component: the terminal, or where your butt is parked and doing work. That can be anything from a drawterm session to a full blown workstation which is running it's own local CPU, disk, auth and terminal (In fact, that is what our VM is doing!). At this point your probably wondering, can I spin up a bunch of CPU servers to make a cluster? YUP! In fact, this is part of nix, another fork which is focused on distributed grid computing. And yes, workstations can also be part of distributed networks because it doenst make the distinction between configurations, it's just how that machine is setup. You can also have multiple auth servers linked as well to form more complex networks with multiple domains.

Namespaces, still fuzzy on this subject, but it implements per-process isolation. Quick demo of name space process isolation: draw two shell windows and run '% cat /dev/mouse' in each. If you notice, only when the mouse cursor is inside the window do you see the coordinates appear (also your mouse is a file that simply contains the current XY coordinates in human readable text). This demonstrates per-process namespace isolation. The /dev/mouse in each window is different and bound only to that window. Outside of that window, that process has no clue where the mouse is. Each process has it's own namespace and file system you can change at any time. What happens in that namespace, stays in that namespace. To see what binds and mounts are in that windows namespace, run '% ns'. Want to kill those cat /dev/mouse processes? Hit ctrl-c and watch as nothing happens. That's because you press the delete key. What? Why! Remember, in plan 9 processes are files too. You delete the process to kill it. It's simple when everything is a file. Lastly, cut/copy/paste works easily by left click and drag highlighting using the middle mouse button, though copy is called snarf, why? ThunderCats fan? Who knows.

In plan 9, a terminal is the device you sit in front of to do actual work. It means a GUI running rio. There is no text only interface to plan 9. I know that doesn't sound Unix but this is unix 2.0, the gui is for moar terminals! And this is where it gets weird, all windows are terminals. A GUI application starts and runs in it's parent terminal, the windows is resized as necessary. This is how Unix should work. Everything is unified. No duality of terminal vs GUI. In plan 9, they are one in the same.

Now if the VM networking is correctly working we should have an IP address accessible from our lan. Find your ip address by running '% cat /net/ndb' in a terminal. ndb is the network database, still learning that one but it is a collection of network configuration data as well as other machines which you wish to "dial". an alternative command is '% cat /net/ipselftab' which is a bit terse.

Can you ping? '% ping' but why is the command not found? because plan 9 breaks things up and /bin has a few directories in it, like ip, to group tools by category. So to run ping type '% ip/ping -n 4 HOST'. But wait one more demo: make sure we can talk to the VM from localhost or another host on the lan. Run this in a plan 9 terminal: '% aux/listen1 -tv tcp!*!9999 /bin/echo HELLO!' Then on another box: '$ telnet HOST 9999' which should print HELLO! and exit. Congrats, your plan 9 system is talking to the world!

Okay. Networking is running. Now we need to get drawterm up and running. Why this emphasis on using drawterm? The fork of plan 9 that ants is based on does not yet support virtio (Harvey, another fork, does but is out of scope for now). So graphics are sluggish and no mouse cursor integration. Drawterm is similar to an x client but uses 9p to directly mount/bind remote resources directly without any intermediate protocols. So you have the benefit of a more native user experience via smooth graphics and the mouse cursor is not captured. But there are two more major bonuses: drawterm serves up your local file system to your login namespace meaning you can seamlessly access your local files from your plan 9 session :-). And copy/paste between the host OS and your plan 9 session. That is how we share things easily between systems. The VM is used as a CPU and disk server and we leave the GUI alone.

Okay, enough nonsense lets get drawterm running. The live cd doesn't configure factotum for authentication so a one liner is needed to get that configured:
% echo 'key proto=dp9ik user=glenda dom=whatever !password=something' >/mnt/factotum/ctl
You can change the password to whatever you want. You'll also notice there was no output, could be all is well or nothing works. To check if configured properly run: '% cat /mnt/factotum/ctl' which should print the configuration string minus the password (should look like this: key proto=dp9ik user=glenda dom=whatever !password?). The authentication server, factotum, is a file server which is mounted at /mnt/factotum and we just configured it by writing to its control file. Cool eh? Repeat to yourself: "Everything is a file"

Now by this time you may or may not have drawterm built, if not get to it! You might need to gab a few libs to get it building. But on *nix but its pretty simple, run '$ CONF=unix make'

Okay. Now we need to dial our CPU server in the VM from drawterm:
'$ ./drawterm -h xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -u glenda -a xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx'
h - specifies the host (or CPU server in plan 9 jargon)
u - is the user, always glenda for this tutorial
a - is the auth server (factotum) which is running on the same machine so it too has the same ip as the CPU(host).

If everything is still working as configured, drawterm should open up to a similar screen you saw when the VM first started the GUI with a big white windows and bluish border. It might not display anything immediatly, give it a second. If nothing appears, type in the password and hit enter, I noticed it sometimes doesn't render the login text for some reason (could be my system or a bug). After typing the password and hitting enter, you should then see a command prompt: gnot%
type rio and hit enter. You should now be starting at a blank grey screen! Congrats! http://9front.org/img/1334088281.jpg

Open a new terminal (right click menu) and run gridstart. If everything is working you should see post printed a few times and a rio session is started from the 9grid. The 9 grid session presents you with four windows opened by default:
upper left is the hubchat window, enter a nick and say hello!
To the right is the Acme text editor. Acme is *THE* text editor of plan 9 so learn it if you plan to do anything code related. (draw a window in your cpu and run acme)
Under acme is a window displaying a bitmap for what I assume is decoration.
To the lower left, under the chat window, is the wiki web page rendered in mothra, a very primitive web browser (try running % mothra http://www.soylentnews.com in a window on your CPU).
If you want the resource monitor running in your drawterm, draw a little window and run stats. Right click the stats window to add or remove resources. Resize it as needed. NOTE!!!! The remote rio session is not local so make sure you draw new windows in YOUR rio session, outside of the remote rio window, for local use. (remember to hide it if you need it out of the way)

That's all for now. Stay tuned. My next entry should be a guide to install the OS to a VM as a CPU and disk server leaving the gui to drawterm.

If anyone is interested in doing a meetup in the grid, let me know and we will work out a date and time. I should be on tonight around 9pm eastern USA time. I hope to get a few you you on board. We're going to build our own internet, with black jack and hookers.

1. http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/rc

This is hopefully going to be one of many new journal entries I'm going to write. I'm at a point in life where I'm thoroughly bored and frustrated. My problem is one of isolation so I've been trying to find something technologically and socially oriented. I did the maker space thing but found it full of IoT wankers and webtards. If it wasn't arduino, raspberry pi and/or javascript you were SOL. I'm the technological rebel type. I hate the direction computing is headed. Boring neutered, walled gardens: the septic white suburbia of computing. No thanks. So last night I made a discovery that has reignited the dim flame of intrigue so sit back and read on.

I've been very interested in plan 9 for quite a while. It's concepts are both intriguing and at the same time abstract and confusing. Remember the old Unix mantra: "everything is a file!" Well we all know that's crap because networking (and more) is accomplished via syscalls, not files. This is where Unix broke. The creators knew this and decided that Unix was broken and it was time to replace it with something that more Unix than Unix itself. This is how plan 9 came to be. It was Unix 2.0 designed to fix all the ugly hacks and shortcomings of Unix. (they even eschewed dynamic linking and shared libraries). The first thing that came to my mind was "wow! I can build a cloud without a cloud" Now just remember, plan 9 was started in the 80's. We've had distributed cloud computing since the fucking 80's and no one noticed.

But like the early days of my exploring Linux/Unix, it is abstract and confusing. The big hurdle I always face is "okay, I got this damn thing booted. Now what?" So my problem is one of utility, not technical understanding. Now that I have a working system, what do I do with it? With no goal beyond installation and poking around, there is little motivation to further explore (I attribute that to my ADD/Asperger's/whatever where I need continuous reward otherwise I crash and abandon. rinse, wash, repeat.)

This past month I've taken a hard run at learning Plan 9 and started tinkering with it more and more. I downloaded and build Harvey. Got a version of drawterm running and tried connection but nothing but frustration and failure. I then got Inferno (plan 9's sibling designed by the same bell labs people) built and running on my raspberry pi but beyond playing with the demo's I couldn't figure it out. So I set about looking for more plan 9 guides and trying to find an activity or application I can get into and the motivation to continue will follow. So in my search I stumbled on http://ants.9gridchan.org/.

I realized I found exactly what I was hoping I would find: a decentralized grid of plan 9 computers on the internet to explore. So I downloaded the iso, popped it into virtual box and fired it up. Once booted, I followed the directions, ran gridstart, and was greeted with a new rio session (rio is the plan 9 window manager). In the new rio session a chat window, wiki, Acme editor, and a png are loaded automatically. I was prompted to enter a handle for an irc like chat, punched in my handle and was promptly greeted by a user, mycroftiv. That person kindly helped this n00b get on his feet and get things running. It was my teenage years all over again, discovering the internet. I swear, I welled up a bit and it bought a tear to my eye. Lost in a strange, digital place was both exhilarating and intimidating and there were people helping. I'm home again!

Think of the grid as a cloud of plan 9 systems linked together using nothing more than plan 9's 9p protocol and utilities. There is no special software needed to accomplish the networking, it's all built into the OS. The grid offers chat, wiki's, radio, file sharing, and more. So now I'm hooked. The idea that a radio station is just a remote file system that you mount and play like a regular audio file is pure bliss. No protocols, clients, servers, ports, etc. You are directly served the damn file using the same protocol the entire OS is built on. This is how the cloud should work, distributed operating systems sharing their resources. Not walled gardens hidden behind proprietary clients, servers and yet another protocol (YAP). And in keeping within the spirit of Unix, discreet tools and scripts are the foundation of user land. mycroftiv even pointed out that the connection is served up by just a small script that is the server. No special software necessary.

My goal is to not only learn and use plan 9, but to also become part of the plan 9 community, develop the system, and get more people to help. I also have an idea for getting others involved: I would like to propose creating a soylent 9gridchan community with the ultimate goal of somehow bridging soylent news to the 9 cloud. We can offer services via 9p to those interested and possibly run our own CPU and disk servers to host everything.

I hope a few soylentils will join me on this journey. Stay tuned for my next post!

Look up aphasia in Wikipedia

I'll let you know what the doc says