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I have some tobacco seeds on order and I was gratified to discover that the subject was already being discussed on SoylentNews. I've previously grown tobacco and the result was curious.

Firstly, I grew them in the office of a start-up company. This led to some interesting conversations:-

Investor: Oh, that's a pretty plant. What is it?
Me: Tobacco.
Investor: Tobacco!? Is that legal!?
Me: It is if you pay the capital gains tax.

Investors like businesses which are financially rational and a business which has cash crops as office plants is viewed as maximizing opportunity. In practice, most tax on tobacco is paid by the shipping container. Any attempt to pay a significantly smaller quantity of tax will be deemed as time-wasting by officials.

Secondly, tobacco seeds are astoundingly small. Many people smoke cannabis with tobacco. Although I strongly recommend against smoking concentrated cannabis, people mix all forms of cannabis with commercial tobacco. Some people find that good quality cannabis opens their lungs too much and therefore commercial tobacco is used to compensate. Given the similarlies of the grown plants, the seeds are surprisingly different. Cannabis seeds often have an 8mm diameter whereas tobacco seeds are often mistaken for poppy seeds and have a diameter of 1mm or less. An advantage here is that it is difficult to purchase less than 200 tobacco seeds and they are typically less than US$0.01 each whereas cannabis seeds may exceed US$3 per seed. A seed of each, if viable, often leads to 1kg of dried material. However, tobacco is significantly cheaper and comes with its own insecticide, nicotine, which kills almost anything except tobacco weavils (which are able to metabolize nicotine) or apes and monkeys who smoke it or chew it.

Thirdly, tobacco is a strange looking plant. When it is very small, it looks like lettuce. As it grows and flowers, it looks like foxglove planted among rhubarb. At the top, the flowers look like Digitalis [foxglove] with a long, willowy string of bell flowers in white, pink and/or light purple. At the bottom, the leaves are bulbous, round and look like rhubarb. Each leaf may exceed a square foot (0.1m²). Like cannabis, tobacco grown outdoors may exceed 9 foot (2.7m), even when grown in Northern latitudes, such as London or New York.

Fourthly, tobacco is is one of the tuber plants. It is closely related to potato, tomato and poison ivy. All of these plants can be cross-bred although the result is more poisonous than the initial breeds. Tobacco cross-bred with tomato is commonly known as tomacco. There is an episode of the animated series: The Simpsons in which Homer Simpson starts a tomacco farm. Obviously, this poisonous crop has no commercial value. However, most people thought that tomacco was a work of fiction whereas some people grow tomacco for fun.

Fifthly, organic tobacco is very different to commercial tobacco. Technically, commercial tobacco is not food. Therefore, it is not subject to food regulations. Therefore, tobacco has additives such as arsenic. What is the purpose of such additives? Some additives increase the speed and intensity of a nicotine hit. Others increase the burn rate of tobacco to increase consumption whether it is smoked or not. Commercial tobacco is also processed with solvants. Many people assume this is to ensure a homogenous product which smoothes natural variation between batches. However, the opposite is true. Tobacco manufacturers have teams of field representatives who ensure that stock is correctly presented to maximize sales. The field representatives also ensure that stock is rotated in lockstep. Meanwhile, manufacturers (who invariably produce multiple brands) ensure that nicotine dosing follows a ramping sawtooth pattern. The intention is to rachet consumption from 20 cigarettes per day to 40 and then 60. Switching to another brand fails to satisfy the deliberately intensified nicotine cravings because each brand is racheted out of step. Organic tobacco is significantly more like organic cannabis. The natural buzz from the plant can take 15 minutes or more to have full effect. Indeed, if anything is to be smoked, it should be smoked communally and socially in the chilled manner of illicit cannabis or a peace pipe of tobacco or cacao.

Sixthly, although smoking tobacco or cannabis is harsh on lungs, it is preferable to smoke both without solvants or accelerants. When smoked in this state, it is difficult to consume an excess which feels sickly. Although it is possible to chew tobacco and eat cannabis, both have downsides. Chewed tobacco has a particularly concentrated risk of mouth and throat cancer. Whereas, "space cookies" and similar may cause an overdose which may feel worse than a norovirus. Regardless, cannabis advocates are horrified that tobacco companies may wish to process and package cannabis in the manner of commercial tobacco while lobbying for restrictions which would make personal cultivation of cannabis and tobacco equally illegal.

Seventhly, the downsides of smoking have only become apparent as life-spans have extended. When a person was lucky to reach the age of 40, nicotine provided an effective fumigant. Bedbugs, which are able to obtain all moisture from air, are particularly inhibited by micro-particles of tobacco tar. Negative effects, such as lung obstruction, peripheral circulation obstruction, blindness or cancer from long-term smoking were very secondary considerations. Furthermore, smoking was seen a sign of sophistication and disposable income. Indeed, to cultivate sophistication, schools, such as the (male only) Eton College, made smoking mandatory. It amuses me greatly that people have been expelled from school for not smoking tobacco. Unfortunately, since then, advertisers have used false ruse of female empowerment with the intention of doubling sales and have used cartoons to lure children into smoking particular brands for life. Advertisers have also used doctors and professional sports to increase sales. Even when smoking commercial tobacco was known to be harmful to the general population, the same techniques were repeated as each country industrialized.

Eighthly, despite advances in hygiene and associated increases in life-span, tobacco retains a social rôle and a means of aiding drug delivery; most notably the stimulant nicotine partially counters THC and CBD, the active ingredients of cannabis. Perversely, we may be in an age where tobacco provides the most benefit to unhealthy people. Some people with epilepsy find that cannabis reduces symptoms but leaves them "stoned" and non-functional for much of the time. Although "stoned" is preferable to a potentially fatal epileptic fit, many in this situation do not find the benefits of commercial tobacco to be worthwhile. Organic tobacco, with or without cannabis, may also provide a creature comfort for elders in terminal decline.

Ninethly, organic tobacco may be preferable to electronic cigarettes or vaporizers. Although the heating element burns liquid in a more controlled manner, the reduced cost may increase nicotine consumption by a factor of two or more. Consumption of all additives may also increase by factor of two or more. Although the controlled burn reduces lung damage, the reduced tar reduces effectiveness against parasites, such as bedbugs. Electronic cigarettes are also a source of lithium battery explosion; typically when used, when carried or when charged.

Tenthly, a fair comparison of drugs has been hobbled by decades of prohibition which left, at most, one adulterated upper (commercial tobacco), one adulterated downer (alcohol) and a long list of chemical coshes on prescription. Despite this, it is within many people's first-hand or second-hand anecdotal experience that some legal drugs (prescription opiates, alcohol) are more dangerous than some illegal drugs (cannabis, mushrooms), when used by responsible adults, with the best of intentions. Although this is the optimistic case, it is generally accepted that juveniles will get "smashed" or "crunk" on anything available. With very few exceptions, the minimum age for cannabis, tobacco, opiates and possibly other drugs should be raised to 40 or more; historically the age of menopause, andropause, tooth loss and general decline. Whether or not this is considered extreme or impractical, the option of home grown, organic tobacco provides an additional path away from high intensity drugs, such as distilled alcohol, commercial tobacco or concentrated cannabis (which causes cannabis psychosis in juveniles due to use of unregulated, low quality solvants). Cannabis has often been demonized as a "gateway drug". Furthermore, if a succession of mass media reports are true then cannabis exceeded 100% known active ingredients by the 1990s. However, it is commercial tobacco and, increasingly, prescription opioids which are the gateway to drug fatality. This process would be deferred if home grown tobacco was intermittently available and reduced if it was consistently available. Likewise, partial legalization of cannabis in the US shows the benefit of cannabis when it is not concentrated, smuggled and sold alongside smuggled opiates.

Eleventhly, in the UK and the US, a disproportionate number of opioid deaths occur in rural areas. A cynic would suggest that urban rent/mortgage reduces disposable income. However, remoteness, even relatively, reduces opportunity. To these people, I urge them to grow their own tobacco outdoors. To anyone who does not have this opportunity, rural or urban, I have a partial solution. It requires some technology and is not ideal. However, cost may be minimal. Specifically, it requires growing tobacco indoors. Many have attempted "indoor horticulture", typically of cannabis where it is illegal. This has involved a serious level of shenanigans such as fully-enclosed environments which have been bricked-in to frustrate search warrants or smuggled children who don't speak the local language (or any language) to work as unpaid gardeners. It has also involved exotic air filtering and light cycles. The most profitable of these ventures have involved electricity meter rigging, meter bypassing or fraud. However, all of this can be averted by growing legal varieties of plants in harmony with nature. When it is legal and beneficial to expose plants to natural sunlight, the worst of the subterfuge can be stopped.

Theft remains as a problem. However, it is possible to implement an augmented light cycle where natural light is boosted with artificial light rather than replaced with artificial light. This is typically achieved by having an overlapping phase of artificial light which increases the apparent length of day but not the peak intensity. The optimal choice depends upon electricity pricing, available space and lifestyle. Given a free choice, I'd follow Bennett's Laws Of Horticulture:-

1. Houses are for people to live in.
2. Gardens are for plants to live in.
3. There is no such thing as a houseplant.

Unfortunately, I know many people who live in a space of 15m² or less and have no access to a garden. Please understand that the solution given is suboptimal but may be preferable to no solution. After much consideration involving control theory and circuitry (and a trivial amount of programming), I have implemented an augmented light cycle controller suitable for deployment on a micro-controller with an Arduino compatible API. This code is licenced for personal use, for growing tobacco or tomacco only, under a maximum of 1kW LEDs and further restrictions described in the source code. If this doesn't meet your needs then write your own or pay someone else to do it.

This implementation uses a LDR [Light Sensitive Resistor] and one persistent variable which maintains an accumulated total. This is sufficient to trail the natural light cycle by almost five hours. (Specifically, 2^24 milliseconds or so.) The output is six binary values which are intended to be connected to banks of LEDs of different colors. After a status LED briefly lights, nothing happens for more than four hours. This is very similar to the lucid dreaming glasses featured in Make magazine which should never be constructed due to the increased risk of fatal photo-sensitive epilepsy while sleeping. However, rather than periodically blinking one channel to indicate dreaming, six channels are sequentially raised from 0% to 100% using PWM which is specifically outside of the frequency which typically triggers photo-sensitive epilepsy. It is intended that the first channel is connected to red LEDs, the second to orange LEDs and suchlike. This provides a broad spectrum of light. Also, the resulting color temperature will be similar to the Sun when viewed from Earth. In particular, in a temperate region, LED blue light should be proportionate to season. However, this may require tweaking. Debug of horticultural software can be tedious due to timescale. Therefore, a second set of constants can be selected which skips the initial wait and reduces a day cycle to a few seconds. Ideally, -DQUICK should be added to compiler parameters. However, in the patronizing Arduino interface, it may be easier to bodge an #ifdef to #ifndef. Finally:-

1. The licenced 1kW power limit is partly for your safety. The Arduino API does not implement safety features available in a micro-controller, such as watchdog timer or parity exception. Scaling this system and deploying in an unattended environment is contrary to licence and outright dangerous.
2. Ensure that all electronics are splash-proof and raised from areas where water may collect in puddles. Make a pessimistic calculation and raise it above that level.
3. You are strongly advised to use a linear, wound, Galvanically isolated power regulator even if it costs at least four times and much as a switch mode power supply. Switch mode power is not typically Galvanically isolated and may be fatal where electricity and water are mixed. If you really want to use a switch mode power supply then ensure that it is a Galvanically isolated variant of a Ćuk converter.
4. You are strongly advised to use power factor correction.

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(Usual instructions for uudecode process.)

(If you enjoyed use of "eleventhly", search for Mark Twain's use of the word. For Mark Twain's opinion about tobacco, search for "old soldiers".)

I gave a spherical cow plushie to a physicist who works for a tech company. It has been on my friend's desk for a month and it has greatly cheered my friend and my friend's colleagues. My friend now wants to learn how to sew. This is for two purposes. Firstly, my friend wants to make a spherical penguin. Secondly, my friend wants to repair clothes. I am extremely willing to help because it has elements of a definitive plan. Specifically:-

1. It has a relatively finite scope.
2. It is a realistic, achievable goal.
3. It has a reward.
4. It has a sensible time-scale.

Admittedly, time-scale is the least constrained. However, I have instigated a plan to make this achievable. I met near my friend's office in the hipster part of London and I introduced my friend to the many haberdashery shops in Ridley Road Market. In particular, Dalston Mill Fabrics has the widest selection of cheap synthetic fur fabric. While in the area, I showed Fassett Square to my friend. The market and the square were used the basis for the BBC's main soap opera and on the second occasion that the set was created, it cost at least £86 million to re-create these unassuming streets in East London.

While wandering around, we made arrangements for a regular sewing session. This is now an open invitation to any member of SoylentNews who wants to meet in Central London.

After the London HackSpace closed for four months and then re-located to the vicinity of a failed makerspace (and midway towards a budding makerspace which failed due to the presumed suicide of one of its founders), many people from the London HackSpace chose to meet in Central London on Tuesday evenings in lieu of the London HackSpace social evenings (also on Tuesdays). This has now settled on the Montagu Pyke Public House in Charing Cross Road, Central London. (Nearest London Underground stations are Tottenham Court Road and Leicester Square.)

Some people boycott this venue on principle. The Montagu Pyke Public House is a Wetherspoon Pub and the founder, Tim Martin, is notoriously pro-Brexit and anti-Europe to the extent that he has removed French champagne from the menu, regularly writes about the topic in the pub's magazine, has pro-Brexit slogans on pub menus and even insists that staff place pro-Brexit signs at entrances which lambast the alleged British Prime Minister, Theresa May. Although, to remain competitive, most of the staff at the Montagu Pyke appear to be Spanish. Regardless, Soylentils are typically libertarian and with signatures, such as UID5690's "Secession is the right of all sentient beings", support for Scottish independence, British independence, Catalonian independence and/or Californian independence is more likely than not.

With few exceptions (most notably, Tue 25 Dec 2018 and Tue 1 Jan 2019), Tuesday meetings have continued for almost one year. We meet at 7PM sharp. Sometimes we stay at the pub and eat fish or steak. More often, we go to one of three restaurants in London's Chinatown: the comically named Wong Kei restaurant on the West side of Wardour Street (famously described by churnalist, Zoë Williams, in TimeOut magazine, as "the rudest restaurant in London"), the Kawloon Buffet in Gerrard Street (by the West Chinatown Gate) or the classier Mr. Wu buffet on the South side of Shaftesbury Avenue (on the same block as the Wong Kei). Actually, these restuarants are all within 100 metres of each other. A friend is also keen on McDonald's and so we've occasionally visited the local branches in Charing Cross Road and Leicester Square (on the West side of the square, to the left of the Lego shop).

We now have a standing arrangement to eat at the far end of the basement of the Leicester Square branch of McDonald's from 7:30PM on the first Tuesday of every month because it has the most space and best lighting to teach sewing. Although there are many sewing groups in London, this is best described a Sewing For Physicists. Indeed, after I mentioned De Broglie wavelength, my physicist friend instantly understood that any sewing error smaller than the length of fur would be completely hidden. Indeed, this is part of the reason that I chose spherical plushies to teach sewing. Synthetic fur is the easist material to use and the spherical shape incurs the least sewing for the most reward.

Anyhow, the invitation is as follows:-

• Meet on any Tuesday at 7PM sharp at the Montagu Pyke Public House for general discussion.
• If you want to learn sewing or make a spherical plushie then meet at 7PM sharp at the Montagu Pyke Public House or meet in the basement of the Leicester Square branch of McDonald's from 7:30PM or so on the first Tuesday of any month.
• Bring two car washing sponges to use as the filling of a spherical plushie. Three car washing sponges for £1 are currently available from PoundLand.
• Synthetic fur, cut to size and suitable for one spherical plushie, can be swapped for one McDonald's £0.99 cheeseburger. I will bring sufficient supplies to make three spherical plushies. My friend will bring a similar quantity of supplies. Patterns vary. They may include black and white Holstein cow print, tiger, leopard, ladybug and/or Sulley from Monsters, Inc. Alternatively, source your own fur. This is likely to cost £8 or more and leave you with a considerable surplus of material.
• All other sewing supplies can be borrowed or kept at no cost.
• If you want to do any other sewing project then please keep it very small. This excludes most clothing repair.

We had a practice run on Tue 5 Mar 2019 and we made significantly less progress than expected. I can hand sew and machine sew and I've worn entirely home-made clothes in public. So far, I've also made 19 spherical plushies. The first took me more than 90 minutes to sew by hand. They now take less than 45 minutes - and about the same again if adding ears. Unfortunately, a geek sewing newbie is unlikely to finish a plushie before the third session. Indeed, you can very probably defer plushie filling. Taking into account drinks at the Montagu Pyke Public House, eating and talking about random geek stuff and the basement section of McDonald's closing at 10PM, we may only have 90 minutes for each sewing session. Regardless, we have confirmed empirically that staff are unconcerned about a bunch of geeks sewing after we've eaten.

We're semi-seriously going to make a furry ball pool. After I gave away seven of my 19 spherical critters, the remainder are on my bed. I've slept while hugging three with each arm. From this, I believe that it would be worthwhile to explore a considerably larger quantity. A friend agrees. Unfortunately, cost and effort are issues. Plastic balls are £1 per 10 and considerably cheaper in volume. Each spherical plushie is about 25 times bigger. In small quatities, material and filling are cheaper per cubic unit. However, an expert with a sewing machine may require more than 15 minutes to make each ball.

Some final notes: Firstly, McDonald's in the UK went cashless at some point I don't remember over the last 10 years. Although I'll swap fur for food and a friend swaps food for cash, this works best if you bring cash in small denominations. Secondly, if you don't know us and we don't look geeky enough to approach then look for a black and bright orange tiger stripe furry ball with a six inch (16cm) diameter or a light gray wolf/husky hat. Thirdly, no video recording, no photography and definitely no flash photography.

We hope to see you on:-

• Tue 2 Apr 2019 (on the reasonable assumption that we have electricity four days after Brexit).
• Tue 7 May 2019.
• Tue 4 Jun 2019.
• Tue 2 Jul 2019.

and/or any other Tuesday.

I hoped that I could summurize 10 days of SoylentNews every week. I'll have to be significantly more brutal to achieve this and I'm concerned that the volume of text has doubled from Nov 2017 to Feb 2019. Regardless, this is an attempt at summarizing one day of articles from SoylentNews. I have a further three millions words covering three months. Quotes aren't attributed because I de-duplicate headers and then use text to speech at 300 words per minute. This makes sources indistinguishable with the exception of about three blowhards. The most prominent is UID6614 rôle-played by UID4512. Summaries select for insight, foresight and comedy:-

1. Samsung Galaxy Upcycle Initiative is Needed but Shouldn't Be - Given the energy consumption of cryptographic currencies (see here) this is generally seen as a greenwashing exercise. Concern that re-purposing old phones may reduce stock of old phones, encourage consumerism (and associated environmental cost). Also concern that re-purposing may require restrictive EULA and/or prevent use of radio interface. The latter may be a benefit if it was guaranteed to be disabled. May be preferable to run SETI@Home or Folding@Home on stock hardware.

2. Startup in Desperate Search for Ideas - Start-up repeatedly fails to make money with trivial ideas (slideshow, calendar, location tracking) and then adds block-chain before that also fails due to legal regulation. Comments about failing upward, "Success is when preparation meets opportunity and luck" and lottery winners going broke. For best snark, search for "So, let me get this straight: TMB and khallow, both noted billionaires of tech" and "I HATE you, khallow! I Hate YOU! You are an uncaring conservative ideologue, and I just wish I could just get quit of you! // Signed, your Brokeback Mountain Time Friend. p.s. When you coming home?"

3. RIPE75 Presentations Online - Apparently, Réseaux IP Européens couldn't find a venue in Europe and instead decided to hold a conference in the United Arab Emirates where European practices (such as alcohol, homosexuality and casual sex) are all illegal. RIPE is also incapable of publishing slides in a standard format, unlike NANOG.

4. Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Ends, "Follow-On" Launching Soon - GRACE. Catchy gibberish acronym.

5. ESPN Can't Afford Monday Night Football Any More - 108 comments about sportsball! I thought this was going to devolve into partisan politics or the merit of military funding being diverted into corporate sponsorship. However, discussion was on the merit of celebrities raising awareness about matters such as police brutality. "We are talking about justifying moral authority from an industry that is known for its murderers, rapists, abusers, armed robbers, cheaters, drug abusers, and other criminals. For decades, professional sports has turned a blind eye to the moral standards of their employees because the only thing that mattered was winning. As a result, now the public isn't remotely surprised when a player beats his girlfriend on camera, or murders someone." "My gym has ESPN playing on the giant TV in the mens locker room. For a very long time I've been subjected to 5-10 minutes of ESPN at a time. My observations are 40% commercials for old men products, 40% old male sportscaters and occasionally guests yelling nonsense about nothing at each other, and maybe 10% highlight reel commentary the kind of stuff you'd watch a youtube clip for if you weren't watching TV. The other 10% is weird banter, flirting with the elderly yet still hot MILF (GILF?) female hosts who appear to know nothing about sports and their only hiring criteria was affirmative action/hotness. // The commercials are moderately interesting because some day I want to age into being a cranky old man. Assuming I'm not already. So I know all the pills I should be taking in 30 years from watching ESPN ads, all of which have minor side effects like death or my dick falling off. For 5 minutes a day its kind of novel, the commercials I mean, not having my dick fall off." These demographics may explain why 15,000 account per day drop ESPN. Double dipping (or perhaps triple dipping) of subscription, advert breaks (up to 22 minutes per hour) and sponsor logos don't help. Also gives backgound about Rodney King. He was a scumbag.

6. AI and Quantum Algorithms Together Can Compute a Better World - "Fucking 100% marketing drone wankery." "What sort of problems in physics can AI (as we currently understand it) solve? // Look in TFA and you won't find answers to these questions. In fact, you won't even find the questions. // About the closest is the assertion that AI needs a lot of compute power and quantum computers are really fast thus, good for AI. But the big problems in AI are not because of inadequate compute power and it is far from obvious that quantum computers can help AI problems that are related to compute performance." "Current AI amounts to increasingly sophisticated curve fitting."

7. Alexa Can Help You Check Your Credit Score - "sudo make me a credit score sandwich" (Or perhaps, "Can I afford two tonnes of corn?") "where's the eula for when I do not agree to amazon and google saving my voice when I go to a friend of family members house?" "will the Facebook crowd eat this up?" "Of course they will, they've been mind-bleached of any thought about their privacy - they're the perfect product. After they'll eat it, they'll wipe their mouth with the latest advertised toilet paper (assuming their credit is in good enough standing to afford it)" "I agree, the crowd will rush over the cliffs, again. IQs have gone negative, humanity is now at risk." "Black Mirror - Nosedive" "Alexa like most silicon valley shit is made for SV hipsters who have no family or friends and live alone with their cats"

8. Consumer Reports Closes Consumerist - Insecure computing requires Consumer Reports more than ever. However, "Corruption is taking a very firm foothold, talk about the warning signs of a downfall." "There's no need to dream up conspiracy theories. Consumer Reports has been losing readership, subscriptions and therefore money for a while now. I even canceled my subscription." Difficult to use reviews when products are readily re-badged.

9. Set Up Private Blockchain With Ethereum - "I am interested in obtaining some of your Snowcoin, I hear your blockchain is very high-tech! If i get in on the ground floor, can you make me filthy rich? Yours, former Bernie Madoff investor." "If i get in on the ground floor, can you make me filthy rich? Yours, former Enron investor."

10. Bad Rabbit Used NSA "EternalRomance" Exploit to Spread, Researchers Say - "I have a bad feeling about this. Malware, that breeds like rabbits? At least it is not Tribbles, yet."

11. Hubble Observes Titanium Dioxide "Snow" on Hot Jupiter Exoplanet - "Oh, don't thank our taxpayers, thank our military who wants to be sure the whole world knows: A) we can drop whatever size bomb we want, wherever on the planet we want, whenever we want B) we have the optical sensing and data processing capability to see a ladybug on your ass no matter where on the planet you are, including indoors, and C) don't you forget it, thus the continued publication of ever more impressive miraculous feats of putting big things in orbit and bringing back incredible pictures of whatever."

12. We May Not Have Enough Minerals to Even Meet Electric Car Demand - "oh look, one of the electric car makers also has an active space program :D" "What a mess! We need that wall YESTERDAY. Like, the 1950s. To keep American minerals and vitamins in. We make beautiful nickels in this country but THEY won't tell you about it." "We've got plenty of irony. It's nickely, cobalty and lithiumy we need to find." "I had an environmental chemistry professor bring up this point a year or two ago. Our current methods of producing batteries, solar panels, and windmills can often be just as environmentally devastating as their combustible counterparts. NREL and other national labs have been pushing research into improving batteries and utilizing abundant metals, but I personally don't expect any quantum leap in the technology to solve major problems. It will take a multifaceted approach to achieve a sustainable future, all the push about for an electric fleet is pretty ridiculous when there are still many issues with the technology that have to be solved before implemented in scale. But hey, if it convinces snowflakes to re-elect you, set deadlines that you probably can't make, we're going to save the world right? All we need are 'conflict minerals', it's not like they're as bad as blood diamonds..."

13. Aliens May be More Like Us Than We Think - "Homo sapiens will go extinct in this very generation**. It will be replaced by Homo Faecebookensis. // ** We must allow some exception, though. There are fortunate people in this world without access to Internet, they'll last one generation longer." "Thats not blood, you've just popped a zit." Astrobiology? "It's hard science. With a sample size of 0. What could possibly go wrong?" "it could be argued that this is a field with much more grounding in reality than string theory. for instance the predictions are definitely easier to test." "A free and easy way of life is great, up until some other culture comes and destroys it." Dolphin sex. More dolphin sex. The merit of living in the Oort cloud with or without a fusion reactor.

14. Technology Seeks to Preserve Fading Skill: Braille Literacy - Braille literacy in the US has fallen from 30% in 1974 to 13% in 2018. Rely on technology? Cost is a significant issue and this assumes your native language is supported. Speech to text also assumes that you aren't dictating something sensitive. Braille literacy versus sighted literacy?

15. Nurse Who Was Arrested in Utah Receives Half Million Dollar Settlement - Nurse refuses to draw blood without patient consent, false arrest is filmed. Police officer who was being investigated for corruption was initially "counseled" then fired. Blood test was intended to exonerate police officer in coma. "will donate some of the proceeds to a fund that will help people obtain body camera footage and provide free legal aid for open records requests." 'one of the parties paying out the settlement is "the university that owns the hospital." They failed to protect the nurse from police violence, so they're at fault?' "Police officers need to carry their own individual liability insurance. Just as some other professions do. Police departments could subsidize these policies at the rate that ordinary officers would pay. But bad police will either face increased premiums or inability to get any insurance -- which will automatically disqualify them from police work. And without any flack from the union. Furthermore, the insurance underwriters would be motivated to investigate bad police and get to the truth because they are the ones financially on the hook." "Some sort of Federal anti-corruption agency that does undercover secret-shopper encounters with police would also be a good thing. If a cop beats the shit out of the FBI for no reason, I think it'll be taken a lot more seriously than if it happens to the rest of us." "The real award is closer to $300k after taxes" and risks jail if the tax is not paid. "The lawyers get 33%!" "She was pressured into doing something highly illegal to the point of handcuffing her and leaving her in a police car for 20 minutes. If she had buckled under to the pressure, she might have lost her job. And nobody did anything about it until her video ended up on the internet a month later." "Police officers will be barred from patient-care areas at a hospital in Utah that drew widespread notice when an officer handcuffed a nurse, hospital officials said this week." "Police departments and individual officers are still not getting the message after years of being in the public eye and poisoning the public trust." 'I don't get why people are so keen on huge fines to "the group" when they can just throw the culprits in prison. All this "big fines to the org" are the reason why bad CEOs and cops keep doing evil stuff. Nothing really significant happens to them. The more sociopathic or evil they are the less it matters to them that the group suffers. Yeah they get yelled at, or they lose their jobs and end up working for a different Police Department/Company, big fucking deal.'

16. Rylo: A $500 360-Degree Camera With Image Stabilization - "4k is not enough to match good FullHD or even HD if you have to crop a lot out."

17. Q4OS: A Very Flexible Linux Distro - Review - 32 bit support. Five year support. "And then someone mentions that apparently it uses systemd, so there is a limit to the flexibility after all. As in it's no more flexible than any other systemd based system." "This is like saying that the new Windows Creators Update is soooo flexible, it allows you to choose between notepad and wordpad." antiX 17 recommended due to removal of systemd. "If you want new, you should try Windows 12." "No thank you, I prefer being anally probed by a stick wrapped in barbed wire." "You're two revisions back! The new Corporate Motivators Edition comes with standard razor wire stick dipped in salt." "Remember the time you upgraded because you wanted to run the latest games... now you just need it to use the web... *sigh*" "we have web browsers that are an RAM hungry as Crysis. Crysis. Go figure."

18. Microsoft Engineer Installs Google Chrome During Presentation After Edge Freezes - "It wouldn't really surprise me if MS eventually wants to get rid of maintaining windows and concentrate on cloud services and office software. Those are the actual cashcows after all and windows is just a means to an end (selling office). Windows was very useful for keeping their customers locked in as long as it was a near absolute monopoly, but now that so many folks have de facto switched to android/ios as their main OS it might be more important for them to show their software works there too." "There are some shenanigans going on. More and more of their webstack is running in linux. DotNetCore, Visual Studio Code, Kestrel web server, MS SQL, Roslyn compiler (think C#). I think you can host just about everything in linux now. Development still seems partially stuck in windows but there are a lot more cli tools instead of ui. I'm seeing some weird shit in the ms dev world right now." "Nowadays they've stopped making usable GUIs and started telling people to use PowerShell." "The Windows 9x UI was actually quite an improvement over previous stuff. Nowadays you need stuff like Classic Shell to make the newer versions of Windows tolerable." Microsoft Edge was cancelled about one year after this incident.

And so I found a decent Debian Stretch build (from here), and it seems to be much more suitable for my purposes than Ubuntu Bionic. For one thing Debian seems to be actually maintaining an ARM build of Transmission 2.94 even if it is in Sid, something which the Ubuntu Transmission PPA doesn't have, much to my irritation. NextCloud proved fairly easy to install, but I found some irritations with setting up MariaDB as its database backend. The mysql_secure_installation script that is the minimum that one needs to do to secure MariaDB/MySQL is broken. Though it says that it will change the MariaDB root password, after prompting you for a new one, IT DOES NOT ACTUALLY DO THAT. MariaDB still uses a blank root password even after that rigmarole. You have to do this bit of black magic in order to actually change the root password:

use mysql;
update user set password=PASSWORD("mynewpassword") where User='root';
update user set plugin="mysql_native_password";

Then restart MariaDB. I then had to check whether the script even actually did all the other stuff that it said it did. That shit's beyond idiotic.

Moving the old LetsEncrypt certificates I got for the dynamic domain I have with afraid.org from the Odroid to the ROCKPro64 was relatively trivial, as was the dynamic DNS update script I've been using, so now I can get some access from the outside to the NAS.

NextCloud was relatively easy to install after that, but there's some weirdness involving php-imagick and libgomp in Apache ("cannot allocate memory in static TLS block") that I was never able to satisfactorily fix. I've begun uploading pictures from my phone to it with the NextCloud Android app but I noticed that it's dog slow doing that, and it might actually be faster to use the web interface to do bulk uploading of that kind. The app has all sorts of missing in it, as you can't tag pictures with it for one (you have to use the web app to do that for now), and I've been thinking of using tags to organise the rather sizeable collection of pictures Mrs. Wyrm and I have been accumulating. But I suppose it's a start, and I can install it on Mrs. Wyrm's phone and have it automatically upload the pictures on her phone to the NAS whenever she's at home. I'd rather keep such things there than continue to entrust them to Google as we've been doing.

Now, it's off to building Kodi. This is proving to be as big a challenge as I've expected it to be, given the way the current LibreElec builds are described as alpha-quality. Looks like I'm going to have to Use The Source, and the information on doing that is sparse to say the least. This is complicated by the fact that no one seems to have built a working X on the RockChips and so Kodi needs to run on framebuffer. I found one reference that seems like it might be a good start, but there's scads of dependencies that need to be installed before Kodi will even build. And so I'm partying in Dependency Hell like it's 1999... More updates on this as I make progress. If I get really pissed at this I'm going to stick to Kodi on the Odroid with my movies and TV shows on an NFS or other distributed file system mount from the RP64. I want to later repurpose the Odroid as a secure auth server for my home machines once I've gotten Kodi working on the RP64, but if this is not feasible I'll have to buy some other smaller SBC to do that.

As it turns out Pine64 shipped me a pair of bad cables or so it seems, as after getting replacement cables, the drives never produced any I/O errors again, and a long SMART test passed. A minor problem is that sometimes the system comes up and Linux can't detect the drives. A reboot generally serves to fix that but I wonder why it occasionally happens.

Some annoyances are that the system images that are provided don't come with proper defaults for most settings, even such things as Unicode support in the default locale, and so forth. The fan is controlled by software, and this software isn't even installed by default (grumble) and isn't available directly by an apt-get. Information on how to set these things up seems to be scattered about so I'm going to try to gather all that up here for my own quick reference in case I need to do this yet again (rather likely actually).

A big annoyance is the lack of proper UTF-8 locales. Apparently the following commands suffice to set it up:

locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
dpkg-reconfigure locales
update-locale LANG="en_US.UTF-8" LANGUAGE="en_US" LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

Change the locale as desired if you don't want to use en_US. Setting up the timezone is one command:

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

The fan control software is a package known as ATS (Active Thermal Service), and what that page doesn't tell you about setting it up is that the default kernel it requires isn't installed on the current ROCKPro64 system images as of this writing, and needs to be installed manually. This forum post gives instructions on what kernel to install before setting up ATS.

The user community is much smaller than RPi's and so a lot of these small but important things aren't set up to be done automatically. Next step I'm going to try to take is set up the software I'm planning to use for it. Most of the stuff like Transmission might be relatively trivial, but since those folks running the transmissionbt Ubuntu PPA didn't make ARM builds, I'm probably going to have try to roll my own .debs for Transmission 2.94. I had to manually kludge 2.94 for the Odroid box I'm using today, and don't want to do that for this new system. Most of the basics such as web service and Samba appear to be a matter of apt. The big one is going to be Kodi. The LibreElec builds available are said to be of alpha quality, and that makes it sound like getting that part going is going to be a lot of work.

I had some extra money from the company Christmas bonus, and decided to use it to buy another one of these single-board computers. I have a few of them lying around, including an old Raspberry Pi Model B with a broken memory card slot, and an ODROID C2 that has been my workhorse NAS server, torrentbox, and HTPC for the past several years. I heard about the ROCKPro64 from someone here (thanks, coolgopher!), and saw how they had some pretty damn sweet-looking silicon with better I/O than USB, and a mean-looking NAS case which I could deck out with two drives.

So I ordered one from them, and I was at first rather disappointed at their rather tardy customer service as it took them more than a few days to respond to my emails following up on my order. Eventually, it seems they decided to stop ignoring me and they began corresponding with me properly, and I got my stuff soon enough.

All of the spinning rust drives I own are Western Digital: they're the only manufacturer I've had much luck with. I have a 1 TB WD Elements I bought in 2009 that I have to give them full marks for, since at one point I tripped on one of the cables while I was copying some stuff to it from my computer, sending the whole thing flying with a crash to the floor. I was terrified that the drive might be destroyed, but not only was it not destroyed, it is still working fine a decade later. It didn't see a lot of heavy use thereafter though, plugged in once in a while whenever I needed to back up my files or whatnot. Not so though with some of the other WD drives I have though. My current ODROID-based HTPC/NAS system is based on a 3TB WD My Book, and it has worked well with almost continuous use for the past three years. I've never had that kind of luck with Seagate or other manufacturers on the other hand.

And so once I got the gear from Pine64, I started building the system. I had a 3TB WD Blue lying around that I originally planned to set up as extra storage for the ODROID but never got around to setting up, and bought another 4TB WD Blue to fill it up. Building up the ROCKPro64 NAS case was not so easy though, as the interior of the thing has very little extra room. Cabling the drives in particular was rather tricky, and they had to twist and turn. Now I'm getting some I/O errors from the drives as I copy some data from the 3TB to the 4TB. I'm not yet sure if it's because I've finally gotten a bad disk from WD, or if it's because of the ugly cabling on the inside. The drives pass SMART, but the kind of ugly, twisting cabling I've had to do inside the case is also a possible source of trouble.

I'm going to try to rearrange the cables again, and perhaps buy new SATA cables tomorrow as the cables that Pine64 sent me along with the case might have problems. I've noticed that swapping the cables around seems to change which drive experiences errors, so that might be it.

After writing some scripts around espeak, I'm working through a very large backlog of text. I have espeak reading at twice its default rate of 150 words per minute and I sometimes "read" more than 100,000 words per day.

Unfortunately, my backlog includes SoylentNews. For more than one year, I've not been following SoylentNews very closely. Indeed, I've only been skimming SoylentNews since Apr 2018. So, I plan to read articles of interest on SoylentNews from Nov 2017 to present. I also plan to summarize the more thoughtful comments and the wittiest trolling. A digest may be intermittent and may purposefully lag by one year so that it acts as a retrospective.

Would this be useful? Is there anything that I should include or exclude? For example, I find astronomy presentations to be fascinating but I find astronomy articles to be samey. Even when an astronomy article gets my attention there isn't much I can contribute by commenting. I'll also avoid regional politics. To me, US politics seems like an endless procession of people who have escaped my attention. (I think Charlie Brooker and/or Adam Curtis had a similar opinion about political news.)