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Happy 2025 Winter Solstice!

Happy Winter Solstice! 🌅 Here is my latest contact information: Robert . where-I-live my-Oakland-voicemail-number (voicemail) our-San-Jose-phone-number http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert http://www. My solstice update is below. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ News Lifestyle * Careers * Immersed in a bubble bath. It's funny how some terms just go by the wayside and are forgotten about. One of those is "moral hazard". Companies, especially large corporations, run themselves as if they expect to be bailed out by taxpayers if they run into trouble. Another term is "trickle down", that somehow giving more money to the already ultra-wealthy will result in everybody being better off. In the case of the so-called Artificial Intelligence companies, lowering interest rates, cutting their taxes, and giving them lucrative military contracts may line their pockets with cash, but it's not clear that it will enrich most people. If these companies are unable to recoup their investments and they fail to get a government bail out, it's likely to bring down the entire tech sector, which could include my company and likely my job. * Family * First the niece. Preparing the house for a visit from someone who has a number of allergies is trickier than I expected. With the expectation that she were going to sleep in the living room in January, we had to have the house professionally cleaned. The removal of all allergens was a big haul, more than what I was expecting. (We were unable to find somewhere for the cat.) In the end, the allergens proved to be too much, all of this preparation was insufficient, and our niece ended up staying in a hotel. (Conveniently, she also stayed in a neighbor's house just a few doors down for a few days.) Showing her the sights, we whipped around where-I-live, Monterey, and Santa Cruz. See pics at https://www.flickr.com/photos/noelle/albums/72177720323170465 . * Then the nephew. Hosting the nephew and his gf in early October was less stressful. Clearing up the living room area for a couple was straightforward. Within one day of arriving, however, the nephew came down with a sickness and was bedridden, putting a damper on most of the planned activities. He partially recovered before going to the airport and boarding the flight without getting to experience the pure excitement of the greater where-I-live area. * Problems don't just resolve themselves. Following my father's death a few years ago, I thought family meetings would be a thing of the past since there would be no issues or problems. Little did I know that issues and problems creep back up on you unless actively worked on and addressed. Our weekly online meetings have been revved back up. These meetings have become increasingly crucial due to the sustained and rapid fire change of federal government policies affecting so many in my family. It's so hard to keep up. * Friends don't let friends do genetic testing. Even more so when it's a family member. The breadth of exactly how the announcement of 23andme's impending bankruptcy in March affected me was not clear at the time. Over time, I discovered that many around me, including family, had had genetic testing done or had submitted their DNA to various entities. While I had never done so, as the Golden State Killer case well exemplifies, the "family" part was the part that worried me. If 23andme's genetic data were sold, that data linked to me could be sold to medical insurance and other companies. Months of negotiating with 23andme passed to help my family members either delete their accounts or remove their genetic data, and, even now, the account that my father, who passed away a few years ago, still exists and the associated genetic data is in danger of being passed along. 23andme has become the bane of my existence. * Home * Definitely not Woody. All the troubles began when I clicked "update" on the Arlo camera system app. At first, all the new features were welcomed, such as object recognition. Only after I read the fine print did I realize what had gone wrong. Arlo Netgear had upgraded my subscription with the implicit expectation that I would pay a monthly subscription fee, and I did not see a way out of it. Thus started a scramble to find a replacement before the upgrade period was complete and that I might be without any camera system whatsoever. There were countless Youtube videos on this camera system or that. Doing the research taught me a lot about hubs, different video formats, battery life, and the pluses and minuses of wireless versus wired connections. Privacy was important and all the open source solutions were rather complicated. The Reolink system came closest to my requirements and I went with that. * Travel * I am the roach. I shouldn't have been surprised that roaches are as prominent in New Orleans as they are anywhere, including in where-I-live, needing to juggle food in tight containers and in refrigerators, but, when I came down with a nasty cold while there in October and was quarantined to the bedroom, I began to identify with the roaches. I had a couple of illness-free days, but, for most of the week, I was miserable. We speculated that the sickness was acquired on the plane flight, but, when Noelle came down with similar symptoms after an entire week, probably from me, my thought is that it had a long incubation period and I had acquired it much earlier, possibly during a visit to the gym. The times before my sickness, it was a good romp. See https://www.flickr.com/photos/noelle/albums/72177720329745965 for some pics. * Finance * When I'm gone. Why isn't it called "death planning" instead of "estate planning"? There seem to be so many euphemisms for death. In any case, more of my assets have been consolidated into a single account so that those who survive me won't have a gigantic mess to organize and review, just a small mess. There's more work to do, but my hope is that, with what remains, I can drain or sell over time. Like with many people, the goal is to have close to nothing by the time I die, but there are many physical sundry artifacts which need to be sold, given away, or trashed. * Health * Vaccinations are getting real old. And, getting old means more vaccinations. Against the misleading advice from various federal agencies, this year has been a personal best of the most vaccination jabs in a single year. It started out with measles followed by pneumonia, shingles, COVID, flu, and a second COVID. The shingles shot was a bit of a bugger for me, but the Novavax COVID shot has been a godsend with very few side effects. Entertainment * Radio * The scientific method. Distrust in science seems pervasive these days, especially in the current departments of our federal government. So, it was with great relief in September that both of us saw big crowds in a theater in Redwood City at the recording of NPR's Science Friday (broadcasted later). It gave me hope that the anti-science trend can be turned around and pointed towards a more positive direction. Politics/Society * Voting/Elections * When someone says it's not about the money. Well, you know what it's about. Our city council person had to be replaced earlier this year since the previous one was ineligible to run due to a conviction. Enormous amounts of money were injected into the campaign and, in particular, the mayor of where-I-live aided in funneling money to his favorite candidate. Thankfully, that particular candidate was defeated but, since the first round winner didn't get more than 50% of the vote, it went to a second vote. In an obvious power grab to change the where-I-live weak mayor system into a strong one, the mayor recruited one of the remaining candidates to his side and, again, the money came gushing in. Of course, we voted for the candidate that not under the thumb of the mayor, but to no avail; she lost. I have liked our city councilpersons over the years and am now in a weird position of having a councilperson that I am suspicious of. * Misc * The 1000-year Right. It's called competitive authoritarianism and, while giving the illusion of a multi-party democracy, behaves as a one-party state. Cynically, its proponents think that, not only can individuals not be improved, but society itself can never be improved. I, on the other hand, believe that both individual people and society as a whole can be improved. Marching in the No Kings marches in both June and October were my small steps towards tamping down on our authoritarian tendencies, competitive or not. Technology * Computers * Software * PC * Linux * Shedding the 20th century. All references to i386 32-bit executables have been excised from my machines. This is in anticipation to Debian dropping compilation of 32-bit versions of packages in the latest stable release. It was suprising how many programs did not recompile out-of-the-box. The last time I compiled many of these programs was in 2008, and some of them weren't since 2003. I was only doing this to prevent any possible security vulnerabilities from entering in, but some of the programs were subject to failing in 2038 due to the Unix time bug. * Pretty somewhat good privacy. I've been running PGP-based encryption tools since 1996 on my machines and the time had come to move everything over to a newer suite, namely GnuPG. My use of GnuPGP had been wrapped by the PGP tools, but that was a bandaid implemented many years ago and, with the introduction of GnuPG 2.2, the wrappers would no longer work due to the way gpg-agent works. Once the rubicon was crossed, the PGP tools would no longer work. The project to use GnuPG instead of PGP took several days to complete. I learned a lot about how agents work and the caching of passphrases in the process. * A sip of encryption weak sauce. During the transition to GnuPG, I discovered that the passphrase key derivation function (KDF) was very poor in comparison with other encryption tools. In other words, using GnuPG was more vulnerable to a brute force attack. I made the bold choice to, in most cases, reduce the use of symmetric GnuPG encryption and use long random passphrases for the GnuPG public keys. In order to do this, the Linux kernel's keyctl was leveraged to cache credentials, such as for retrieving mail from mail servers and, when symmetric encryption was needed, put the files into memory space via /run/user. In both cases, there were appropriate timeouts for the data and passphrases to limit leakage. It took many weeks to purge all back-ups of all .gpg files. * You've got mail, or at least a mail server. There were enough accumulated vulnerabilities in exim4 running on my mail server that I had to bite the bullet and do an upgrade. My hesitancy stemmed from how it might affect the spam filtering. After slogging through the upgrade process, the spam filtering was fine, but subaddressing (local_part_suffix) clogged up the works for a while. * Windows * Hanging onto windows. After months of no Windows upgrades available, a path to an upgrade to Windows 11 appeared one day on Noelle's laptop. I had a lot of doubts about whether it would actually work given how much I hacked this laptop, particularly the boot sector. But, if I figured, worse case, that if it fell on its face, I'd just clobber Windows and replace it with Linux. (It is preferable to keep Windows in case Noelle could use it in any of her future jobs.) We clicked "upgrade" and went away for a bunch of errands. We returned several hours later, it wanted a reboot, but, to my amazement, after that, it was running Windows 11. (The boot sector was clobbered with its own boot menu, but I didn't mind.) * Hardware * Mobile devices * Losing legitimacy. It was one day in August when I tried playing a podcast episode that I discovered that something was very wrong with my podcatcher (antennapod) running on an old, outdated Android phone. An error popped up saying something about certificates. I tried several things, including clearing the data, reinstalling the app, downloading certificates, etc., but nothing worked. My conclusion was that, because I never added a Google account and never connected it to the Google Play Store, any other way to download valid certifcates was impossible, even using alternatives like F-droid and Aurora app stores. The solution I settled upon was to use an online web-based podcatcher since playing things through a web browser continued to work; also, if this device ever finally bites the dust, any old computer with a web browser can just use bluetooth to play the podcasts. * Internet * Hearing the message loud and clear. For a couple of months starting in March, Signal displayed a nasty message about the imminent deletion of my Signal account. I ignored it and figured that, if my account got deleted, I would just recreate it. Sure enough, at the end of April, my account was deleted. Recreating it was not as easy as I thought since I do not use the Signal app to register my account; I use a command line tool that interacts with Signal's API. Because Signal now has resistance from quantum cracking, this became more complicated since the command line tool was out of date and I had to upgrade it which involved upgrading my Linux distribution and scanning QR codes (again, I had to decode these using command line tools). It took me an entire weekend to get things working again.


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