Lord Bowlich @lordbowlich@hackers.town

New #Introduction for 2020 and #MerryJoinMas

I'm a remote software engineer working the various F/OSS web-stacks from my remote cabin at 8,500 feet in the White Mountains of Arizona -- I'm prone to wanderlust and often grab some batteries, solar panels, and head out to work from my truck from whatever corner of these great open lands has cell phone reception.

Posts often about the trials and joys of remote work, venting about development (since I've got no watercooler coworkers), the usual consumptive vices of our age (film, video games, books), and chatter about returning to a more open web,
culture and society.

Oh, and I hope to meet plenty you at Defcon 28!

Don't take business dress advice from the dude who wears cardhardts to interviews.

(I mean, they are my nice pair of cardhardts. The one without the holes)

https://reallifemag.com/who-goes-there/

Long piece, but a fun read. Looking at the history of captchas and secret questions going back to banking in the 1850s -- and then relating that to how they reinforce a particular hegemonic narrative of how your life should be, what life stages you should be hitting, etc. and then with recaptcha whether you are a sufficiently trackable netizen.

I remember when I first got online and the banks would actually let you write your own secret question. Which was great. I could have both a totally nonsensical question and a totally nonsensical answer! Then they got rid of all that and made us pick questions from their short list.

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous Paperback by Gabriella Coleman is brought up near the end of the CDC book. I'd be interested in nominating it for #TechniColorRainbow

It'd be an interesting contrast to the Cult of the Dead Cow book.

Anyone out here got a favorite dead tree book on the #Lua programming language? Have a little project I want to start up, and the framework I was eyeballing makes use of it.

https://www.fanbyte.com/features/existenz/

Timely 20 year review of existenZ for the #weAreNameless crowd.

About halfway through the audio book.

Find myself reflecting about how we used to have to worry about random worms and crap taking down huge chunks of the internet at a time. It's been a while since something like that's happened.

Now we just worry about if AWS or Cloudflare goes down since everything is centralized through them. 😅

#TechnicolorRainbow

*cough* Not that I read the orange site anymore.

... damn there's a lot of bad news on the front page of that site this morning. About the only positive thing is the ancient pines in Australia are okay.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/17/digitalocean-layoffs/

Well there's the news drop on the orange site.

I run all my little side projects on DO. I like it as a nice wedge against the other outfits which are all dominated by the big players -- AWS, Azure, Google.

Need to research composting sometime this weekend. I started saving coffee grounds. I now have a 1 gal Jar of used coffee grounds.

Initially, I thought I could just plant plants directly in the grounds. But apparently I need to mix the grounds with topsoil at a ratio that isn't very favorable to getting rid of the coffee grounds.

It is nice that the counties are realizing that the economic future for the area is going to be internet and telecom... not sticking your head in the sand and doubling down on resource extraction until the entire economy falls down on our heads.

https://www.wmicentral.com/business/business_news/aca-grant-will-help-make-broadband-connections/article_3bc54931-c1b9-582c-b14b-fb43c0f2d08d.html

Yeah, a whole 2Gbps. Though it's still not getting out this far, because apparently Showlow is the end of the world for people from Phoenix and there's nothing but the wilds once you get past the Hon Doh casino.

At least it's something. 😂