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Seems obvious that the lack of color in nearly all printed text is for reasons of economy, and earlier, also reasons of technical difficulty.

But now, with color graphical displays so common, maybe we ought to think about using color more? Sure, there's making movies instead of writing books, but I am thinking of more color in the writings, somewhat like the syntax highlighting that many source code editors can do. Suppose quote marks were dropped entirely, replaced with text printed differently, like with a different background color? Here's a little vim syntax highlighting, to demonstrate:

" Simplistic way to hide quote marks

syn region quoted matchgroup=Quote start=+"+ end=+"+ end=+\n\n+ concealends
syn region quoted matchgroup=Quote start=+'+ end=+'+ end=+\n\n+ concealends
syn region quoted matchgroup=Quote start=+“+ end=+”+ end=+\n\n+ concealends contains=iquoted
syn region iquoted matchgroup=Quote start=+‘+ end=+’+ end=+\n\n+ concealends
if &background != "dark"
  hi def quoted ctermbg=lightmagenta ctermfg=black
  hi def iquoted ctermbg=lightcyan ctermfg=black
else
  hi def quoted ctermbg=magenta ctermfg=black
  hi def iquoted ctermbg=cyan ctermfg=black
endif
set conceallevel=2

Source the above into vim while looking at a text that uses quotes. I tested it on Project Gutenberg's copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles. It is mostly correct, but there are a few spots where the use of the same character to close a singly quoted section of text and to serve as an apostrophe confused it. I would like to take this further. Syntax highlighting mostly confines itself to coloring the text. If colors were leaned on more heavily, more characters could be eliminated. Perl style regexs in particular look a lot cleaner without all the backslashes. Let ordinary text be set to some other background color, and backslashed escaped characters left the default background color. Instead of

print "Hello!\n";

it can be

print Hello!n;

A regex such as

tr{/\\\r\n\b\f. }{_}; # change strange chars into an underscore

would look like (sort of, because, yeah, most forums also can't support colored text)

tr{_/\rnbf_. }{_}; # change strange chars into an underscore

You would be able to tell that there is a space in the match, just after the dot, because it would have a different background color. The slash, backslash, dot, and space characters would all be in the background color used to indicate they are literal, while the r, n, b, and f would be in whatever background color is used to indicate they are not literal, but are representations of special characters.

Here is the vim syntax commands I've hacked out to do this. It's far from complete or even working well.

" hide quote marks of string literals and the escape character of escape
" sequences.  Display the text of the literal
" in a different background color.

syn match esc '\\[^\\]' contains=escchar
syn match escchar '\\' conceal contained
syn match escesc '\\\\' conceal cchar=\
syn region dquoted matchgroup=Quote start=+"+ end=+"+ concealends contains=esc,escesc
syn region squoted matchgroup=Quote start=+'+ end=+'+ concealends contains=esc,escesc
syn region regex2 start='/' end='/' contains=esc,escesc
if &background != "dark"
  hi def quoted ctermbg=lightred guibg=#ffd0d0 ctermfg=black
else
  hi def squoted ctermbg=magenta ctermfg=black
  hi def dquoted ctermbg=magenta guibg=#500050 ctermfg=black
  hi def regex2 ctermbg=magenta guibg=#500050 ctermfg=black
  hi def escchar ctermbg=red guibg=#500000 ctermfg=white
  hi def esc ctermfg=magenta
endif
set conceallevel=2

For the new year, got me a nice new capacious desktop PC: AMD Ryzen 5600G, 32G RAM, and a fast 2T SSD. I'm very tired of being perpetually short of space. A 100G partition just doesn't cut it when things like a LibreOffice build take 11G, an Android development environment takes another 10G or so, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search data files take 3G, fooling around with AV1 and video in general takes yet more Gs, and even a modest game such as Stardew Valley takes half a G. On the video, I see 4K versions of movies eating up near 100G, for just one movie. Even a 1080p movie with all the bells and whistles can burn through 40G. On my old computer, I don't have the space for a WINE installation or a virtual machine, for a blockbuster game such as WOW.

So, just what to install? I'd already decided on Linux without systemd. Also will see if I can do without pulseaudio. Devuan sticks the user with an ESR version of Firefox. No, I want the latest. So, looking at Artix, with LXQt. Gentoo may be worth trying again. Last time I tried it, the machine spent too much time compiling updates.

Next, which file system? Ext4, or btrfs, or something else? Am leaning towards btrfs. Further, I'm thinking it might be nice to have a small partition for the system, and a big one for /home. That way, I can turn data compression on at the file system level for the root partition, and leave it off for the home directories.

Then, what about wayland? Seems I should hedge there, and run xwayland, don't try to set up a pure wayland system, without X.

Windows apps and games are real hard to avoid. Am hoping I can run them with WINE. A virtual machine is another possibility, but I read for that, I really should have a dedicated graphics card, and I don't. Graphics cards are insanely expensive right now, sigh. So I'm running with the integrated graphics.

Would've liked both AV1 decode and encode in hardware, but x86 CPUs and graphics cards with that are hella expensive.

Then there's the matter of security flaws in the hardware, such as Spectre, Rowhammer, and Meltdown. That's a factor in why I chose AMD rather than Intel. I might look into disabling AMD's equivalent to Intel's management engine.

I've discovered I ought to upgrade my home network. My 100M Ethernet switch is now the bottleneck on file transfer speeds. If prices for such things have remained steady, I'm guessing a new 8 port switch with 1G Ethernet should run around $20.

What else should I consider? A distributed FS such as Gluster? Hadoop?

Business's handling of documents is a travesty. 40 years into the home computer revolution, and they still use too much paper. When they do use computers, they do it badly. Handling of signatures is especially screwy.

First, it's almost all MS Office and PDF. Ask them why, and if they answer at all, you get FUD, business-speak, and the one reasonable answer, that MS Office is a de facto standard and everyone uses it. Some of it amounts to the idea that "you get what you pay for", and therefore software that is free can't possibly be any good. Even now, with over 20 years of Linux dominance in the server room, they still feel uncomfortable. Gallingly, the business case isn't even correct with Total Cost of Ownership talk that MS Office is actually cheaper simply wrong. Not that those were the real reasons, they're just the talking points and excuses.

I have yet to see a digitally signed PDF that was done correctly. The verification always fails, often with a date of Dec 31, 1969. And no one cares. Businesses want to get on with business, not worry about the validity of a signature. In a way, they are right, because of course a written signature is now ridiculously easy to forge, just need a sample. Stunningly, business accepts a person's name in a font that looks like handwriting, such as Lucida Handwriting.

When they do insist on a handwritten signature, it often goes like this:

1. Write up a contract in Word, export it to PDF, send the PDF to be signed.
2. The recipient prints the PDF, signs it.
3. The recipient scans or photographs the signed printout, creating a series of JPEG images in a PDF wrapper, and returns that.

Thus, what started out as an editable and searchable document has been rendered into bloated and computer unfriendly images of text.

Also, on the 1st part, why not send the Word document? They're paranoid that the Word version will be too easy to copy or alter, that's why. As if the PDF version isn't, despite not being intended to be easy to edit! Also, the minions who prepare the documents prefer to keep their Word versions to themselves, to make them harder to replace, thus keeping their jobs more secure.

As an archival format, PDF stinks. Even when it is still textual, it is bloated, thanks firstly to having to include fonts, and secondly to its incredibly wasteful and inefficient language. Data compression cannot fully compensate. A typical text PDF is a series of commands to set the spacing between letters, then the text of a single word. Usually, the letter spacing is changed slightly for each word. One tremendous waste is that the command to set that spacing must include another parameter, the opacity. Most documents never use any opacity setting other than 100%. But because that parameter has to be in there, the PDF document will instruct that the opacity be set to 100% over and over. Yet even if that glaring inefficiency were fixed, PDF would still be awful. The main problem is that the format explicitly specifies text positions that could be computed, if only they had settled upon a standard for doing so. They were too paranoid that the computations could not be accurately reproduced.

I got a nasty email today:

"Dear xxxx Water Utilities Customer,
Water service for your account at xxxx (Account # xxxx) is scheduled to be terminated on 6/17/2021 due to failure to pay the past due xxxx Water Utilities bill of $-10.49."

Yes, that negative sign on the balance is correct. That's right, for being more than fully paid up, they want to disconnect me. I called the city, and they assured me I would not be disconnected, and that the letter was automatically generated. Uh, huh. What happened? I enrolled in automatic payment last month, and something somewhere went wrong. Somehow the wrong bank account number ended up in the system, and the bank doesn't have any idea how that happened. The city said I must have entered the number incorrectly. I informed the city that I did not enter any numbers. All I had to do was click on a few buttons, there was no entry of any numbers anywhere.

Last month I got another nasty letter from the IRS:

"AMOUNT PAST DUE: $19.80
You must pay by May 20, 2021 to stop further penalties and interest.
if you don't act now, the IRS may consider levying (seizing) your income or bank account."

So I paid thousands in income tax for 2019, and again for 2020, and now they want to seize my bank account over a $20 late penalty? When it turns out that they withheld far too much last year, and owe me far more than $20? I dare them to seize my bank account. Among other things, that'll really mess up paying the water bill.

This is on the heels of an earlier letter in Feb., in which their system got confused and assigned my payment to, apparently, no one. Came threatening over taxes that weren't in fact owed, because I had already paid.

And there was trouble over the tax even earlier than that, last year. Their system rejected my e-filing, because someone else had fraudulently claimed my child as their dependent. Seems to be a hole in their system that it is too easy for another to claim a dependent. Just need that magic SSN. All kinds of places could've leaked that number, which is in any case hardly a big secret. So what does the IRS do? Demand that I submit my income tax on paper. Wouldn't let me e-file, had to print it out and mail it.

In sum, I find this automated bullying and threatening unacceptable, disrespectful, insulting, and offensive. It might be funny, but those threats, if they actually followed through, aren't particularly amusing. That is no way to talk to a citizen. Could explain some of why people hate government.

Our communication methods have suspect reliability. Happy New Year, the service is ended.

For years, I've had suspicions about Yahoo Mail. Occasionally, I don't receive messages. They don't even land in the spam folder, they just never make it to my email account at all. I was able to verify that this happens by talking with one of my correspondents as he tried sending emails to my Yahoo account. He never received any notification that delivery had failed. Occasionally, messages I send out are never delivered. When they do go through, seems that just coming from Yahoo is enough to trigger the spam detector, and into my recipient's spam folder my message goes.

Today, I have noticed that my VoIP service with NetTalk is down. Could've been down for several days.

Some 15 years ago, I lost access to my ICQ account. The email service I had used for password reset was shut down, so I can't reset it anymore. And I recall hearing that ICQ itself was shut down some years ago.

I have 3 Facebook accounts, one of which I cannot access even though I have the correct password. The account is "locked", and they demand I enter my birth date to unlock it. I don't remember what fake birth date I used.

On another Facebook account, I attempted to send a message, only to see the messenger web popup spin forver and fail to deliver. I left it spinning for a full day. But it seems Facebook Messenger was down.

I have several Google accounts, and one of those is locked. Said they need to verify it is really me. I did everything asked, and they still weren't satisfied. I responded with the code it sent to my email address. That wasn't good enough and it asked for my phone number. I gave it a phone number, received another code in a text message, and entered that. Then it said:

"It looks like someone else might be trying to access your Google Account. For your protection, you can't sign in right now. Try again later or sign in from a different device."

I have a Skype acccount I haven't tried for at least 2 years now. MS buying them and breaking old versions of Skype was a definite discourager.

I sometimes create burner accounts when I want to participate in some activity anonymously. For this purpose, I usually sign up for a new Google, Yahoo, or MS Outlook/Hotmail account.

They're making it more difficult to stay anonymous. And I understand that they don't like having their services used for sending out spam. I don't like that either. But the measures they are taking do more than cut down the spam. They now insist that you "verify" your account by giving them a phone number that can receive a text. They resort to sneaky lies and false claims about what is really going on, maybe saying vaguely that it's "for your protection" without going into any details about why and how, or maybe claiming it is to reduce spam.

This time it was MS Outlook/Hotmail. I log into a burner account, and their system announces that my account has been locked. I must give them a phone number so they can verify me. That's a lie. They want a phone number they can connect to what is likely a real person. What if I have only a landline, and cannot receive texts? What if I don't want to give out my cell phone number? Also, I especially dislike how expensive texting is. The price is too obviously not based upon the amount of data transmitted. Or, I've already used my number for another account, and they won't let numbers be used for multiple accounts? On that last one, how would they know, unless they are indeed tracking that bit of data? I could also go buy a burner phone, but that's far too much trouble and expense for a lousy burner email account.

There are some online services that can receive SMS texts for you, using their own phone numbers. I tried it. As I expected, that did not work. Outlook claims that they cannot sent a text to that number. Bull! They mean that they won't send a text to such a number, because they have a blacklist, and those numbers are on it.

* * *

I also ran into an old trick a day ago, the old "Give us your credit card number to start your 'Free' trial. You can cancel anytime before the trial period ends and not be charged!" The site in question is a genealogy site, myheritage.com. As expected, reviews of the site talk of "mistakes" being made with charges nevertheless being charged after cancellation.

I thought of trying a fake credit card number again. (I tried it several years ago for something else, and it didn't work.) You can't just make up any old 16 digit number. Like with Windows license keys, only a small subset of the full range of values is valid. However, there are credit card generators. Didn't work of course. The site checked with the credit card issuer, which rejected the fake. But that does tell me that they do check the number right away, and do not wait until the first payment is due.

I've also had to improve fake street addresses. Used to make up something completely fake. Now I pick a real address, of a church or used car dealership or some such, in a city I've never visited.

Removing a splinter = surgery. $320 please.

This was about as simple and easy as a splinter gets. It was just one spine of a sand burr, in the foot, and it wasn't deep. No bleeding. No cutting done, no disinfectant used. They used a needleless syringe to apply a little suction, then tweezers to pull the thorn. Took all of 5 minutes.

(In case anyone is wondering why we even went to the doctor at all for such a trivial thing, it was maternal anxieties and histrionics. Maybe I should be thankful she didn't insist on going to the emergency or urgent care?)

Cost: $40 copay. At first. I thought that was plenty high, but that's just the cost for an office visit. The insurance is refusing to cover it, because the doctor was in network but is no longer. The doctor's office classified this as "surgery", and their fantasy list price is $320. The insurance reduced that to $136, and that's what the doctor's office is asking us to pay, in addition to the $40 we have already paid.

One of the infuriating things about this whole system is the calculated waste of time. Need information, need to dig into the details, and the medics aren't cooperative on that part. Just to learn of the existence and general idea of a medical cost code system, it's like that's secret knowledge. What code did they use? Why do I have to badger them to get that simple bit of info? Nowhere in all the Explanations of Benefits (EoB) was the code mentioned. I asked Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS), and they blamed it on their security policy, for my protection. I said I didn't want to be protected that way, and they have my permission to put the actual medical codes on the EoBs. Then they blamed HIPAA for why they couldn't do it. They flood us with info. It's disgusting how little of that info flood is to the point. That EoB is 9 pages long, and only the 1st page has anything specific, the rest is all boilerplate.

Anyway, this morning I was able to learn that the code for this is probably 10120. BCBS confirmed that the doc had indeed used that code. However, there are "subcodes", additional codes that can modify a main code, and the one of interest to me may be "52", which means "reduced services", meant for particularly simple cases, if I understand it aright. I called the doctor's office and asked them to resubmit the claim with that code, 10120-52. They got right on it. Hmmm. I don't know what that will do to the final cost. I asked BCBS, and they claimed they couldn't tell me. From what I read elsewhere, might be $60.

This morning, I took a quick look at the website of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, https://www.venganza.org. I got a very short web page: "You Are Banned." text centered on the top line. Hmm. Was their website down? What's going on? I tried a proxy website, and that worked. Checking with Chrome (I use Firefox), I had no trouble viewing the web site. I ran Firefox under another user account, and had no problem viewing the website that way either. On the user account with the problem, I could view other pages on the FSM website, eg. https://www.venganza.org/join/ but when I hit the Home button on the FSM site, I got the "You Are Banned." message again.

And then, as I continued to investigate, things mysteriously just started working. Pulling up another window in the browser, I was able to see the FSM site. I hit refresh on the page with the message and the site came up like it should, no more strange message. On the one hand, no more problem is nice, but I really wanted to learn how my browser had been compromised. Cookies? Add-ons? Some other website I visited? Maybe it's not my browser, it is the FSM site after all, doing some sort of browser fingerprinting? Or, could it be my ISP? A quick search for "You Are Banned." in the page source turned up nothing.

There are a lot of problems with academic publishing and the peer review system of evaluating scientific research. I have found peer review very capricious. Rather too often, trash is accepted while good research is rejected. Partly, this is because doing a review is at heart an exercise in charity. Reviewers aren't paid, not even with reputation. Any peer facing the pressure of Publish or Perish is not going to want to devote time to doing reviews.

Another bad problem is that the system is clearly struggling to adapt to changing technology. Maybe last century and earlier, a delay of several months between submission and notification was acceptable. But today, no. Doubly so when one receives a poor quality review. That custom in combination with their jealous insistence on exclusivity means a paper can spend a lot of time in limbo. May have to miss submission deadline after deadline from other journals and conferences while waiting on a reply, and if the reply is a rejection, one has been denied the opportunity to try elsewhere. The least that serious authors deserve for putting up with that is a decent review.

What really is the reason for this lengthy peer review system? It made sense to screen research when publications were printed. And when there weren't that many. But now, no, it does not make sense. Cost and limited space are no longer real barriers. Now it's just the inertia of customary procedures. Interested members of the public should be able to look at raw, unpolished, and unreviewed research, and even review it themselves. Others who prefer their searches be restricted to prescreened, professionally reviewed material can still have that.

Of course, the problems with copyright are well known. It is an outrage that private publishers are allowed to paywall publicly funded research. Plan S, if successful, should take care of that.

So I am wondering where to go to escape this system. Arxiv? Sci-hub?

I called the nursing home where I and my father had visited my aunt a year ago, to ask if she was still there and how she was doing. They would tell me nothing. Claimed that HIPAA forbade that. But HIPAA says no such thing. They are wrong. I called back and tried to inform them that by HIPAA rules, it was okay to answer. They were rude. Tried to hog the floor, and when I would not go along with that, talked over me, then hung up. I called again.

They changed their story, said the privacy requirement was actually in the contract with their residents. Proudly claimed that they take their privacy seriously. I began to wonder if they were covering up something. I called the police and asked them to do a welfare check. The police did so, and told me my aunt was still there and seemed to be okay.