spelk.online

Doctorow and his Magic Kingdom

2025-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

Tech and Politics align

I’ve been a fan of Cory Doctorow for many a year now, from his ardent activist and digital human rights work to gently easing myself into his sci-fi and cyberpunk fiction.

My hopes and dreams for a better computing future, one which is private, under my control and useful to everyone has pretty much aligned with Cory’s viewpoints and aspirations throughout this time.

In another aspect, my political will thrived on progressive politics from the Internet’s very own “New Media”, crowd funded by enthusiasts, run by ideological sound socialists and literal communists.

A politics of truth and consideration for the working class “masses”.

The people have been neglected, nay abused.

They need honourable “champion” journalists speaking truth to power with integrity.

Enter Novara Media.

Well before the pandemic hit and made everything worse, I was clued into finding alternate opinions opposed to messaging of legacy media (TV news and newspapers monopolies).

I enjoyed the variety of perspectives being honestly discussed.

In the dual digital enclaves of tech advocacy and political justice, the hope was that the two would come together at some point and champion digital and economic freedom for everyone.

I feel, with the interview of Cory Doctorow on a Novara Media IRL downstream event, finally the good ideas have gravitated toward each other!

Well worth a watch to see the to and fro of discussion between Aaron Bastani and Cory. Cory amidst his popular ‘Enshittification’ book tour was on form, fast and furious, guiding the audience through the intracacies of the defilement of our computing and digital rights. Digital rights are human rights!

The Plan is to Make the Internet Worse. Forever.

You can get Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification book, DRM-free, on his site:

Enshittification at Craphound.com

If you want to explore Aaron Bastani’s views it might be worth checking out his book:

Fully Automated Luxury Communism

The Magic Kingdom out loud

At one point in the interview Bastani goes out of his way to recommend wholeheartedly one of Cory’s early books of fiction, namely Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Whilst I’ve read a good number of Cory’s near-future “cyberpunk” fiction books, I’ve not read ‘Magic Kingdom’ and it intrigued me that Aaron gave it such high regard.

The ebook can be picked up, DRM-free, on craphound.com but sadly there is no audiobook available.

However, Cory’s podcast is archived and on the books 10th Anniversary (around 2013) he performed a reading of the book over several episodes, partly to celebrate the book but also, so he could annotate his copy because he was wanting to refamiliarise himself with it to write a prequel.

I would encourage you to buy the ebook, give it a read, but I’ve also listed the archival links to the podcast episodes where Cory reads the book out.

These files are served from the Internet Archive and I would also urge you to explore and use the site, since it is a unqiue resource for everyone and should be supported as much as possible - because these days it is under attack from corporate abuse. The Wayback Machine that has been archiving web site snapshots for decades is a precious treasure for all netizens.

Catch Cory’s writings on his prolific blog at Pluralistic or use his RSS feed in your favourite RSS reader!

Also catch up with Novara Media’s Articles or use the address as an RSS feed.

Human rights are digital rights!

The End of Echoes of the End

2025-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

Echoing a more traditional adventure

I was hesitant at first when I first saw the ‘Echoes’ trailer, assuming it was another AA studio attempt at a souls-like. Viewing the physics-based magical manipulation during combat, as your character lifted environmental objects and smashed them against an enemy, as well as lifting enemies and colliding them with other foes, the mechanic intrigued me enough to give it a go.

The premise has your character, Ryn imbued with a residual magical energy denoting her as a limited mage or “vestige”. Once her power has been mastered she can control larger items in the world, move ancient mechanisms, shift crumbling stone structures and employ her manipulative talents in combat - stunning, shocking,throwing and pelting them as well as engaging her swordplay in combination. Part Viking, part Battlemage, part Jedi.

I settled into the early stages of play, as it linearly exposed the premise of the story, piecing together the lore in exposition and journal entries and opening up the platforming and puzzle elements. Guiding the player through the mechanics set to a gorgeous visual backdrop from a believeable Icelandic fantasy world. The rendering of this world itself was a lure for me to carry on.

Interesting traversal with some collision jank

In contrast to the usual open world ‘Echoes’ had me skipping along a more traditional path that felt more like comfort food. Explore what you can, dip into elusive nooks and crannies to find lore and important progression rewards. With enough explorative scrutiny the path and traversal methods where brought to your attention in a naturally paced way.

My main gripe* with the game centered around dubious collision detections during some of the more elaborate platforming tasks.

In lengthy tomb-raider-esque sections, jumps from rotating hanging frames on spinning water wheels where precarious enough when trying to reach magically extruded platforms with a timer. Often a mid-air rotation would have you appear to land on the edge engaging the usual ‘climb up’ routine, but would have Ryn skating over a fussy collision box and falling off to her death instead.

Failed platform manoeuvers would result in a checkpoint restart with a small amount of health lost, which isn’t too drastic a penalty. But over time, these slight inconsistencies amongst an otherwise enjoyable platforming section could seriously wear away at your patience and resilience to continue. With enough determination you could get through it, trial and error, but the frustrations over time would raise the spectre of a rage-quit.

Satisfying spell-bladery

If you had only your sword, the game would present a satisfactory fight - however when your combo swings and twirls, or perfect parries and evades are interwoven skillfully with your magical prowess, the game weaves a merry blade dance feeding your interdictions and finishes with the gravity and weight (often literally) of a wrecking ball. Perhaps feeling similar to a basketball alley-oop. Very satisfying.

You befriend an ally later on in the game and they become yet another tool in your playbook, to stun or hold enemies in a more supportive way. Your mana is limited and often requires charging up once spent, so your magery requires some measure of restraint - imposing a tactical decision process throughout every encounter.

You can alleviate this issue a little, by gaining skills that allow you to charge your mana during basic melee attacks or with perfect parries. Thankfully, as you transition between combat arenas and new platform or puzzle zones there are stone cairns where you can absorb the world’s latent mana and perform an auto game save.

Delightfully puzzling through patience

Some of the more enjoyable sections within the game are it’s puzzles.

As you step into a platforming puzzle zone, there is a breathing space for exploration, mechanical investigation and spatial reasoning.

All parts of the area need to be gradually scouted and assessed, recognising known platforming mechanics and detecting newly introduced environmental manipulation techniques. Throughout the length of the entire game, newer mechanics are brought into play keeping these sections fresh along with gained familiarity.

I don’t want to spoil the more esoteric mechanics brought later on in the game, but to summarise generally, they involve magical handling of physical, illusionary and time based effects to illuminate a path forward.

The feeling of apprehension for the unknown and the discovery, elucidation and mastery of these mechanics delivers a satisfying reward of unlocking the areas secrets and appreciating its nuances and cleverness of design. This never got old for me. Some where truly a challenge, but one in which more studying and thought would always lead you through.

A Vestigial Summary

Overall I enjoyed my 25 hours plus time with ‘Echoes’, it was a much appreciated return to a more traditionally structured gaming experience. A finite scoped, well told, beautifully rendered fantasy adventure, with magicks, manipulation, heroic battle and gratifying puzzles. Characters with personalities and empathy, grit and determination.

* A day after I finished the game, the developers released an “Enhanced Edition” upgrade for free. Given its poor reception on initial release, the developers listened to the feedback from the players and have implemented a number of changes in an attempt to make it a more enjoyable experience.

Reviewing the enhancements, it sounds as if my gripes with platforming and floaty collisions may have been addressed. They’ve souped up the graphics and animations, added more character costume customisations and they’ve reworked skill upgrade progression and timing. They released a video detailing the enhancements:

Enhanced Edition Updates

So perhaps, at some point, I’ll have to revisit the game and see how enhanced it is now. If the platforming issues can be kept in check, I’d welcome more combat in this fantastical world.

Did I mention that the soundtrack is enjoyable, this track had me all melancholic and emotional at the end of the game. Bergmál by lúpína

Check out the developers site for more information about the game:

Echoes of the End

Dune Awoke

2025-10-21T00:00:00+01:00

Dune Awakening (on a docked Steamdeck with controller)

Ok, so it’s been a while.

But I’m 160+ hours in to Dune Awakening and it’s been a world worth immersing myself in.

I’m a Funcom fan. Have been since their debut MMO title the dystopian Sci-Fi of Anarchy Online.

Anarchy Online

I’ve spent my life in AO, in guilds, absorbed in the music and the novels written by Ragnar Tornquist.

Ragnar Tornquist

My time in AO is pure nostalgia and my love for their ability to create believeable and immersive worlds started then and has continued beyond. I’ve been with them from AO, through Age of Conan, The Secret World and Conan Exiles. Dune Awakening seems to be a heavily themed version of Conan Exiles in the Dune Universe. And they make it work.

I’m a fan of Dune.

So again the worlds of my obsessions align.

Not to mention the two modern film adaptations of Dune revitalising my interest in the Duneiverse.

Since it’s announcement I’ve been awaiting Dune Awakening on consoles. I primarily game on consoles these days.. such is my lot in life. I used to be a big PC gamer, but have gravitated to the comfort of the couch and the big screen, with controller in hand.

It looks like consoles will be getting Dune Awakening in 2026 sometime, if at all.

Luckily my dabble in the Steamdeck and its docked and controller bound setup has enabled me to dibble in compatible indie titles on the PC platform, but from my more sedentary couch stance.

As soon as I found out that Dune Awakening was Steamdeck Verified, it lit a passionate desert fire beneath me to get in there as soon as possible.

So I dived into the desert and tried to make sense of it all.

My first impressions where that the Steamdeck isn’t the optimal way to play this title.

It CAN run, but it needs a fair bit of tweaking to get a) satisfactory performance and b) a look that isn’t stripped of all aesthetical appeal.

I’ve winged it, by initially just setting it to the “experimental low end laptop mode” and then after suffering badly on the visuals, have followed guides that visually get it to something worth looking at, but with any complexity or action, it suffers massive framerate issues and lag to almost make it unplayable.

After a while I managed to whittle it down to a compromise of the two ends of the Steamdeck able spectrum. And without any promise or guarantee, I present those setting here for those who might be interested:

(Remember my Steamdeck setup is very specific, in terms of being docked and tied to a TV and controller setup)

STEAMDECK SETTINGS

Ultimate workable Steamdeck settings for Dune Awakening running a docked and controller setup on a 54” widescreen TV using a docking station and HDMI connection.

DISPLAY

Gamma: 2.2
Field of View: 90
Motion Blur: OFF
VSYNC: OFF
Frame Rate Cap: 30
Dynamic HUD: OFF
Ultrawide Support: OFF

GRAPHICS
Quality Preset: Custom
Window Mode: Windowed Fullscreen
Resolution: 1280x720
Upscaling Qualty: Low
Frame General Method: OFF
Override Upscaling Preset: ON
Resolution Scale: 67
FSR Upscaling Quality: Quality
Shadows: Low
Virtual Shadow Maps (Experimental): OFF
GI Quality: Low
Enable Lumen: OFF
Reflections Qualty: Low
Low End Laptop Mode (Experimental): ON
View Distance: Low
Post Processing: Low
Effects Qualty: Low

ACCESSIBILITY
Font Size: Large

Thoughts on configuration

Playing this game on the Steamdeck is not ideal. It can be done, with varying success if you are willing to tailor the settings to your requirements.

The above settings have enabled me to play it fairly successfully and enjoyably.

However, I long for the console versions (if they ever come) to taste the world, without the constraints of hardware.

Summary

I love Dune.

To have a world simulated and populated with an authentically simulacrum of the Dune Universe (Duneiverse) is amazing.

I feel it is harsher than Conan Exiles, intentionally so.

The grind to survive is steeper.

But the hardships endured, seem to give the Dune setting depth, because water scarcity, worm threat, landscape scouring sandstorms and factional oppression force you to always pay attention to the predicament you’re in.

The tech you collect and assimilate is hard earned and cherished.

The bases you establish are truly life giving oases that you return to for some respite.

The grind seems a steeper curve to ride than Exiles.

But being able to use mauler pistols, spitdart sniper rifles, drillshot shotguns for range combat, or blades and drinker knives (which will extract the enemies valuable blood) coupled with suspensor shields for traversal and damage mitigation adds a particularly Dune flavoured scifi tinge to your combat.

Couple this with your ability to traverse the desert regions for resource collection and questing using vehicle options such as sandbikes, buggies and eventually the flying ornithopters gives you a progress path that is very much a struggle, with durability concerns, but with an eventual opening up and rewarding level of freedom. Hard fought freedom. And hard maintained freedom. But freedom none the less. This is true earned progression.

The ability for your character to fight towards earning skillsets from the various Dune related disciplines is key to climbing these steep progression curves.

Coriolis storms will sweep everything in its path and obscure your cartography progress periodically. So get used to remapping areas and finding differing placements of resources and dynamic threats and challenges.

There is however a storied path, woven into Dune lore, where you search for the elusive Fremen. These spice shrines are major milestones in your progression and your learning of the “ways of the desert”.

Overall, I’ve been inspired by the world itself… to find my place in it, but to prepare myself to be able to carry out tasks and explorations and still come back better off than I set out. It’s a hostile environment intentionally and can seem overtly so. But galvanising your gains to help you climb to better is a major part of this experience.

The desert does not treat humans kindly.

You have to respect it.

And be wary of Shai Hulud (the sandworms) because they will take everything from you. Literally.

Planets Align

2025-02-01T00:30:00+00:00

My gaming desires

The past day or so, I’ve had 3 games I’ve been waiting on for years turn up.

Not to mention my Citizen Sleeper design works book and tarot card solo TTRPG narrative game turn up.

Citizen Sleeper Merchandise

It’s been a bit overwhelming.

Citizen Sleeper

Citizen Sleeper 2 gives you a slight discount if you bought the first game. So I bagged it for £17.99. It didn’t come onto the store til late today.

I didn’t finish Citizen Sleeper the original, there are so many story arcs and I got about half way through, but was distracted by something else… and meant to get back to it, before CS2 and here we are. I played some of CS the other night, and I can just read its story like a book, like a branching, adventure book from the 80’s. The prose is so dense and well written I kind of feel it needs to be turned into an audiobook. It’s high sci-fi cyberpunk dystopian clone robotic future of indentured servitude - with data network hacking and dismembering spaceship parts for quick bucks, harvested mushroom meals and stims to keep your sleeper frame alive..

It’s a work of art, with prosaic story and thematic artwork,without a single ray trace reflection needed. Decision based, objectives that require deliberation and moral guidance. I can’t evangelise over it enough. This is a game that is tattoo worthy.

Citizen Sleeper 2 on Steam

Wake Up Sleeper!

Defenders Quest 2

DQ2 is an RPG/Tower Defense(TD) hybrid that refines the first games fantasy essence into a more beliveable settings, despite its dystopia. The same elements come together, in building your party to combat the waves of enemies ahead, along with synergies between characters and their interacting skill trees.

Development of the game has been fraught with troubles especially personal for the main developer Lars Doucet. Tragedy striking his family and having to shift focus personally.

Defenders Quest 2 is finally out

I am SO encouraged that factors were put in place to get this title out to the gaming public. If you’re a TD devotee and you have a prediliction for RPG’s then this truly is worth your time and effort.

Defenders Quest 2: Mists of Ruin on Steam

Heart of the Machine

Lastly, Arcen has finally pushed out their Heart of the Machine game, in early access, which blends a lot of genres such as 4X, RPG and turn based decision making. You’re a sentient AI in a cyberpunk city and you pursue your goals whether hostile, ambivalent or supportive to humanity. The complexity available to your choice algorithms is unlimited.

Somehow the planets have aligned when all my aspirational games have arrived at once. It’s going to take me a while to parse through them and assess their worthiness… but even though the world is spiralling into dystopian climate catastrophe, my gaming dreams have become reality all at once.. so temporatily things are looking up, if I can devote enough time to them all at the same time.

Void Crew

2025-01-11T13:50:00+00:00

A comforting expanse of void space

I’ve been playing some Void Crew co-operatively on my docked Steamdeck using a Dualsense controller and a pair of bluetooth microphone earbuds for comms.

It’s a game that bewilders at first, as you are thrown into the deep end of understanding the means and mechanics of a running a starship, from powering it, to piloting it and making sure it has the appropriate subsystems (offensive weapon types - beam and kinetic, cargo trawling hooks, defensive shielding, point defense weapons and power generator capacity).

Coupled with your ship selection, loadout and personal skillset as a powersuited spacefarer, you’ll need to navigate through a nodal roguelite procedurally generated path through the safety of void space, dropping out at mission nodes along the way to eliminate the enemy presence whilst scooping up what equipment you can, data slates and nano alloys so they can be synthesized into new kit or provide the resources to repair your ship and be ready for the next node jump out of the void.

It’s all very compelling and episodic in nature, but your escapades will take their toll on your ship and the crew with each excursion.

It takes a while to become dextrously and technically comfortable with the systems in play and you’ll have to choke down the learning curve of a few obliterations along the way. But, as you gain experience and expertise in the vital roles required, you’ll earn your stripes run by run to become a grizzled vet of scavenging and space conflict.

Fit your crew to the ship

Ignorantly, starting the journey in a 3 to 4 person Destroyer will baffle you with multi-deck mazes in a craft that is too loose a fit for an enthusiastic duo. I do not recommend it, its even a baptism of fire compared with the more modest but nimble frigate.

Utimately, the chaos simulation presented here, requires your crew to adopt complementary roles to survive together. In a duo, you’ll need someone who can pilot and navigate the void lanes, as well someone who is a deft gunner and away team lead to perform the EVA (ExtraVehicular Activity) tasks. This is the minimum.

Many missions will need this combo of accurate ship handling, especially during evasive combat, as well as swift and accurate tactical fire on the shifting waves of the enemy swarm that are incoming.

As you drop out of the void, during the calm of undetected stealth running, you’ll need that EVA specialist who can gravboot walk the outer hull and patch it up with plating, before the next mission.

During a mission that same EVA specialist may be required to jetpack over to an asteroid based station, repair the power conduits and fire up a relay signal so strong it will draw the enemy freighters in for a “smash and grab” ambush.

The rather sedentary pilot will take care of insertion and exfiltration of the away team, in addition to grav scooping any space lobbed cargo. Precise positioning is required to align the position of the scoop on your vessel with the floating valuables in space. The physical placement of your external interacting stations (Guns, Scoops and others) is worth planning out so your pilot can perform spatial alignment, but also your gunner can cover all the firing arcs needed.

In the duo.

One to move the ship.

One to move offship and perform salvage or sabotage duties.

Then both are needed to orchestrate the reunion back in time for swift positioning and broadside gunnery, power managed beam weapon pew pew, to thin the enemy and get the ship ready to warp out to the safety of the void!

From experience, putting the ship in cruise during combat and trying to have a two person gunnery setup, often leads to trouble, taking more damage than you can give. Whereas skilled manoeuvering can save the ship a lot of hull damage in between missions.

Surgical engagement seems to be the trick.

Only light them up when you have your objective in sight and you can deal with what comes along.

Or you have an exit route long enough to spin up a void jump, whilst holding them off.

The joy of space movement

I took the role of the pilot, immediately channelling Martian Navy Pilot Alex in the Rocinante (from The Expanse TV show) and wanted to fully embrace the pivotal role of getting our ship and our troops in and out of the zone with as little damage or harm to either.

The whole simulation premise of the game really adds to the immersion of the role, when you have to power up the void drive, get into the helm position, power up the helm and as the drive is fully charged, pull the bar thrust lever and unleash your ship into the void!

The void is your friend, you can set the next mission based on a holo map and difficulty decision nodes. Naturally, normal engagments are advised early on in your career.

If you have collected enough alloys previously, you can synthesize new equipment, restock vital kinetic ammo for your guns or point defense systems, create additional power cells to overcharge your beam weapons. Whatever salvaged kit, resource or blueprints (obtained from recycled kit) you have can be spent at the fabricator to repair and rejuvinate your ship for the next mission ahead.

Once the mission is selected and you’ve tooled up and prepared yourselves mentally, flip the void throttle back and in 3 we drop into normal space, ready for the challenges, captured rewards and ultimate fight ahead.

As pilot, you can activate an external cam of your vessel giving you a better 360 view of the situation ahead.

Your hud marks targets, points of interest along with objectives and you can manually perform remote scans on sensor range contacts to indentify them. With better intel comes better decisions. The pilot can then take stock, review the objectives and plot a course of least resistence to the next goal in sequence.

Meanwhile, your combined EVA specialist, engineer and gunner will be loading up the guns and patching the hull if your drop in area is quiet enough.

Remember, no piloting moves when the ‘engie’ is on the hull! Hold fast and safe.

Manage your power load

Since your power capacity determines what systems you can have active, often there is a level of management decisions required when enabling and disabling systems for appropriate use. The maximum power capacity is often less than your installed equipment’s requirements. Fact of life. Timely power switching decisions save unnecessary frustration and sometimes lives.

There were missions, where we’d fought our way to a station, the away team went in, powered up the vaults there and had to lob the artifacts into space one by one. I’d power down the guns, power up the grav hook with the freed capacity, turn the ship around and position the bay to scoop them in. Meanwhile, the ‘engie’ jetpacked back to the airlock, removed the artifacts from the hook bay, powered it down, jumped into the gunnery position powering it up and we sped out of there, spinning the void drive up as we hit a wall of enemy destroyers jumping in!

Nail biting - edge of seat stuff.

But good times.

If we get out.

The enemy diversifies

The varied enemy types do some nasty things to you, such as sniper craft, routinely damage spiking your hull as you try and perform a complex multi-person salvage operation.

Or bomber craft that can release a payload of four homing plasma bombs, very difficult to out manoeuvre.

There are void supressing craft that will interdict and trap you in enemy space, unable to spin your void drive up and escape. Nightmare scenario. To leave, you’ll need to take them out first.

There are summoner vessels that call in waves of reinforcements and you need to take these out as soon as they are detected, before they can transmit the signal.

Once the larger shielded destroyers and capital ships start appearing, you know your time is coming to an end if that void drive isn’t already spinning up.

Cooperative adventure

I’ve only scratched the surface of what lies ahead, having our best run taking in three nodal missions before complete destruction! More practice necessary.

The beating you take between missions needs to be managed by better skills, equipment and cohesion.

Over time you find more efficient ways to manage the ship.

Still, with relative cohesion between the two of us, the variety of missions are doable, but you need to learn your ship, your weapons and your skill in using all the tools at your disposal to adapt and overcome the challenges presented. Here lies the ‘umami’ flavour of the game.

The game reminds me of games like this that have gone before, such as:

Star Trek Bridge Crew - which was more involved in the terminal based actions than gunning in a cockpit, again cohesion between the roles was key.

Games also like:

Guns of Icarus - whereby your crew are manning an airship in combat

or even:

Sea of Theives - manning a Galleon on the high seas.

They all immerse your crew in role based responsibilities and they all demand some level of cooperative cohesion for your progress to go well.

Similar games I know of that I’ve not played much of are:

Carrier Command 2 - a combined arms future war orchestrated from the deck of a giant carrier

and:

Pulsar: Lost Colony - another co-operative space adventure.

If, like me, you enjoy being a part of something immersive with others, where you can live out your simulation fantasies then check them out.

Enter the Void

Void Crew Trailer 1.0

A New Day

2025-01-09T12:54:00+00:00

The Sun is Up

It has been well over 3 years since I last had the energy, time, mental fortitude to pen something for this blog. Since COVID hit, its been a rough ride for me personally.

I’ve kept the site online, funded monthly, but have spent little else on it.

Theres a lot to tell, we will come to that in time.

I’ve redesigned this place to be primarily functional, easy on the eye, robust and frictionless so I can expend more of my time and energy posting my musings in the months and years to come.

A New Dawn

At the end of 2024 I was able to retire slightly earlier than planned, which has closed a long chapter of service and support to an organisation and small team of people.

I now have some time and space to breathe and take stock and hopefully pursue some of the more burning passions of mine that have always been fully out of my reach.

I have some healing to do.

I have some exploring to do.

Some growing into the space.

As the sun comes out and rises overhead, the warmth and light can help me let go and embrace a new way.

The Passions in Peace

My interests lie scattered around me, but above all drive me towards a better means of computing for people, not extractive, streamlined, subscriptioned, surveilled but useful, helpful, interesting and enjoyable.

Similarly, empowering and supporting ethical organisations such as the EFF, ORG, IA, Wikipedia and all the FOSS developers and software made available freely for everyones use.

Championing artistic pursuits and the distribution of knowledge and human enriching ideas and works. Supporting public domain organisations and ensuring secure and private federated communications for any who need it.

I’m keen to pursue my own artistic whims, with digital art, digital music, writings and ethical interests for the good of the many.

Political struggle seems to be upon us all and trying to make sense of it all and support measures to help with the incoming climate catastrophe, be informed but not misled, make a difference no matter how small. Supporting independant media and journalists, coalesce around groups working on all fronts to make the world a better place for all humans.

Lofty goals to aim for.

My gaming is still precious to me, a place to explore vast virtual worlds and experiences only dreamed of. At the top end of gaming, their is a commercial rot withering the experience. I want to support and champion the innovative, the small developers, the niche titles that are true hidden gems worthy of polish and praise.

Appreciate the moment in the Sun

Time to take the time to appreciate a sip of tea in the sun and do something worthwhile.

Captive Coercion

2021-11-23T12:00:00+00:00

The Dreamers Game

It has to be said. I like gaming. Mainly video gaming.

Most of my life, I’ve spent a LOT of money, time and effort, pursuing the pastime.

It has become my life.

The visceral or cerebral content on offer, the interactivity and pure escapsim has been intoxicating and a joy to be a part of.

Nothing comes close to being immersed in a constructed digital world where possibilities and outcomes are so endless.

To be inside the dream and have agency and real experiences.

Imagination incarnate.

The Game Pass Trap

An example…

The Ascent, an Xbox & PC exclusive, is an isometric cyberpunk story driven action RPG. It has all the hallmarks of a winner for me. A cyberpunk game that delivers where Cyberpunk 2077 left everyone lacking.

It’s even included in Game Pass upon release, so my year and a half one-time conversion of my existing Xbox Live Gold (XBLG) subscription (£40 per annum) into an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate (XGPU) for £1 has served up a prime game on my wanted list.

Playing the title on the Xbox One is less than stellar. On release performance wise, it struggles on the hardware. The networking is also a little flaky in places. But it gets so much right.. I am positively willing this title to make good on its promise to give me the cyberpunk thrill I’ve been pining for. Perhaps a few patches down the road?

Microsoft unveils its beta Cloud streaming platform (xCloud), only available to those with the XGPU. I pay a LOT for my internet connection, so it easily supports the base level of 20Mbps throughput needed, so I give it a try.

I have to uninstall The Ascent first. Then I fire it up on xCloud, effectively streaming the output from a cloud server across my connection in real time. You can imagine that I’m running the game, remotely, on an Xbox Series X. The game plays smooth as butter, with only the odd drop in fidelity once in a while. The game doesn’t need patches, it needs better hardware. But it is still being pushed out to the last gen hardware as a title available to play.

Finally, I have a means with which to play this game, on my old hardware (as of the time of writing, you still can’t get hold of an Xbox Series X, for love nor money), utilising the power of my Internet connection and the XGPU xCloud facility.

Picture if you will, a one-time only bargain conversion of XBLG to XGPU approaching its expiry date. Once expired, XGPU will fall back to the £11.99 per monthly subscription. For someone who buys a lot of games, on a lot of platforms that sort of outlay is difficult to justify on a monthly basis, going forward, forever.

What are my options?

1) Pay Microsoft the subscription so I can continue to play the game.

2) Buy the game, install it on the Xbox One last gen hardware and have it play sub optimally with its performance severely hampered.

3) Don’t play the game.

All of the circumstances that conspired together, to get me to this point have been engineered to coerce me into paying the XGPU subscription.

I have last gen hardware, you can’t source next gen hardware
The game is available on sub-optimal hardware, performance issues abound
One time XBLG conversion was incentivised by ‘loss leader’ bargain, hard to resist
I have to have an Internet connection with at least 20Mbps throughput for xCloud
I can only play the game as long as it is available through XGPU (or I have to buy it to ensure availability going forward)

XGPU hits the sweet spot for many casual gamers.

If you want a limited selection of titles with a broader coverage across genres, available for a limited time only, with monthly churn of a few a titles lost and a few titles gained, then the ‘netflix for games’ model works really well. If you’ve got the net connection chops for it, you can play modern titles on old hardware too.

However, if you’re a seasoned gamer, who treasures games like fine wines and wants to pick a choice eclectic selection, on a schedule of your own whimsy - so you can return to titles months, years later to sample their delights further or all over again. XGPU is a bad fit. The nagging uncertainty that the game you’re enjoying is about to be taken out of the available list and never return. The ongoing pressure of ‘stop paying, stop playing’ model of games as a service. A never ending toll being charged to maintain availability. The MMO subscription in pedestrian gaming form.

Throughout my time with XGPU, it has felt like an oddly collected sweet shop, where you “pick and mix” downloads and play titles as if they’re demos, drop it when you discover its not for you. But titles you find that resonate with your gaming tastes, then become hostages you need to save from the selection chop. When will these titles be dropped? I’ve actually bought titles on my Playstation that I grew fond of on XGPU so I don’t lose access to them when the MS executioner swings his axe.

~shudder~

The Paying Game

Gaming is changing. Radically.

The changes being made, feel like they’re not for the players benefit.

The boundaries being pushed seem to be for the market, to monetise all parts of the process.

So you pay for your console hardware.

Then you pay for the game. A disc. or a download (at your expense - storage space on console and connectivity). Storage space limited by console costs.

Then you pay for external storage. Or an upgrade to the release storage.

Then you pay an additional fee to play this game with others in multiplayer and to afford cloud storage to store backups of your save games.

Then you pay for the additional DLC content that was originally withheld from the release title, but was packaged up later as a tiny 1Mb nugget of data so the DLC could be enabled.

Then you pre-pay before the game is launched for the content promised by the hype.

Then you pay for the silver, gold, platinum, premium, digital deluxe edition, because they disseminate tiny parcels of conditional content, depending upon how much you’re willing to overpay for the title.

Then you pay for the additional content as it lands, substandard to the roadmapped content promised. Often bundled into the most granualar offerings, so each addition can be milked for maximum microtransaction worth.

Then you pay extra for the character skin to make the digital avatar you’re invested in, look more like how you want to present them in these virtual worlds.

Then you pay for the upgrade to the game from the previous generation to the next generation console (which you’ve also paid for, if you can source it). Backward compatibility is now the new forward upgradeability with a cost associated.

Then you pay for the sequel(s).

Then you pay for the live service open world version of the game.

Then they shut the live service servers down.

Then you pay for ‘retro’ older titles as they are refreshed with a lick of paint and a new full price tag. Remake, reboot, remastered, rehashed, resold.

Theres a LOT of paying to support the ecosystem surrounding a single game these days.

Then you buy a new game.

And start the cycle again.

A cycle of captive coercian.

My stockholm syndrome.

blop

2021-09-28T12:00:00+01:00

The Everchange

This site has been worked and re-worked a number of times over the years. At one point it had a different name and was a full blown Wordpress installation with all the guff and gubbins that entails.

When I made the move to Neocities.org hosting, I was determined to simplify this site and my digital life. A little bit of custom CSS styling and a handcrafted site built with Emacs and Orgmode and an Emacs add-on that allowed me to export my .org files to .html

Then I got wind of the Gopher protocol from yesteryear and wanted to embrace the simplicity of that. So I rolled a Gopherhole hosted on sdf.org.

Naturally, my interest in Gopher led to a newer more modern interpretation of a minimalist, usuable web in the form of the Gemini protocol. Gemini takes all the good from Gopher and packages it up into something more modern and easier to manage.

With inspiration and tuition from the Trendy Talk crew (HexDSL, Drew/Uoou and Chris Were) I rolled up a Digital Ocean droplet, installed the Agate Gemini Server on it and started hosting a Gemlog.

Since I had a spare Raspberry Pi lying around I thought there has to be a way to self-host this Gemlog, cutting out the Digital Ocean monthly costs and using a Dynamic DNS service to make the site live from my Pi.

The DietPi OS came to the rescue and I managed to get the Agate server installed and the No-IP dynamic DNS service to point my domain name to the self hosted Pi.

Now I had an active self-hosted Gemlog AND a Neocities hosted web site. I wanted to make them the same. So I spent time getting to the point where I created .gmi content and used a script to convert that to HTML to upload to the normal, but minimal web version.

Then, after an update, my Pi died.

So trying to work out how to fix the setup, get my Gemlog back up, so I can update content in my Gemini site and convert it to my web site, I found Drew/Uoou’s BLOP script.

BLOP

A straightforward, minimal and easy way to create a static web site using a BASH script to convert markdown content to html.

As much as I admire the Gemini protocol, I’m not sure I’m dedicated enough to keep a Gemini server rolling and also trying to mirror it to my web host, given the little amount of content I push up. It’s important for me to have a presence, for reasons.. but I’m always distracted elsewhere.. so I thought I’d go for the simplest least resistant way to get content up, now and then. And BLOP seemed ideal for that job.

The Gemini microblogging I used to do, under the guise of my Shadowrun inspired “Drek” page (aka Effluent of the Mind) - incidentally - using more scripting help from Drew - now needed to massaged into the BLOP way of things.

Since Drews scripts are minimal but useful and instructive, I was able to smash my Gemini command line commenting/microblogging into something that updates a markdown page in the BLOP scheme. So I can continue to whisper endless mind meanderings into the void using BLOP. Sorted.

The big challenge now is to come up with any content that I can justify worthy of putting up the my site.

In these times, with what is happening socially and politically, I find very little enthusiasm for anything other than constant distraction.

Anyways, all kudos and thanks goes to Drew/Uoou and his scripting prowess and the Trendy Talk guys and the Mastodon folks on Linuxrocks.online or all the other people I follow there that keep my tech and ethical interests alive.

Drek

2021-09-28T12:00:00+01:00

DREK (worthless, distasteful, trash, rubbish)

I include this timeslice of my dysfunctional mind for posterity rather than anything else. Still in the swirling anxiety after the COVID bombshell - the idea behind Drek was to have a place on my blog, using Drew/Uoou’s blop functionality to throw my impulsive thoughts out onto a page effecting a ‘microblog’ of sorts.

It’s probably not worth reading.

Effluent of the mind

Tue 28 Sep 2021 14:54 BST

Clive Lewis for Labour Leader… or George Monbiot for Prime Minister!

Tue 21 Sep 2021 10:20 BST

Current state of mind - in shock at EVERYTHING. Current state of play - Escaping to Pathfinder Kingmaker, chaotic good, striving to build a better version of the Stolen Lands. Ridding the planet of the Xenomorph threat, in a colonial marines Aliens Fire Team. Avoiding the shoulder mounted plasma discharger of a Predator on a Hunt Showdown. Gearing up to read Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series (the comics first). My computing and media distractions being a very much needed escape, right now.

Tue 21 Sep 2021 10:13 BST

There is too much to say about the shifting landscape on Universal Credit downgrade, National Insurance increase and now energy price hikes or energy company bailouts at the taxpayers expense. All of which are massaged in the press to have good optics for you average joe, but all of which are going to hit the poorest most vulnerable people hardest. Haven’t they suffered enough?

Tue 21 Sep 2021 10:07 BST

I’m of the mind that the reduction in transatlantic flight because of COVID was a moment in time to reforge how we look at its impact on the global climate catastrophe and we shape our future with flights to reflect the change needed. But once again, it seems we’re opening up transatlantic flight to meet the modern travel appetite and the profit machine that is the modern travel industry - which contradicts our shallow words of support for a greener safer future. Money and neoliberal freedoms speak louder than planetary disaster and human extinction.

Tue 21 Sep 2021 09:53 BST

It feels like this country has deluded itself into believing we don’t have an active COVID crisis that is still happening at ridiculously high infection rates (30k) and deaths (1k) per week. It feels like there are acceptable levels of death we can afford to pay, to keep the usual financial wheels turning.

Tue 21 Sep 2021 07:44 BST

moving my effluent of the mind - drek - into the main post archive - it will always be the top post.

Mon 20 Sep 2021 18:52 BST

Trying to massage the blop system to also process my drek file

Thu 05 Aug 2021 15:24 BST

I reluctantly toil all day on Microsoft Windows - a platform devoid of any joy or morals, then I spend my nights avidly toiling in my favourite virtual worlds, leaving very little playtime available for my linux expeditions and my gemini mindstreams.. I’m going to have to balance my time better and give myself over to the joyful labyrinthine exploration that is linux!

Fri 28 May 2021 22:26 BST

knee deep into Mass Effect at the moment, now ploughing through 3. I’d forgotten just how much this Space Opera RPG resonates with me. This is quite clearly my jam. After finishing ME1, I remember the wanting and the aching for more… I bought an iPhone 3GS for the hope that the terrible mobile game Mass Effect Galaxy gave me for more in the series. Well we’re well into a time when Mass Effect has become frowned upon (ala Andromeda), but honestly ME1 still has the original sauce I fell in love with all those years ago, and I’m appreciating 2 and 3 a little more even though they were dumbed down towards a more action orientated audience.. (chasing the shooter bucks).

Sun 16 May 2021 17:48 BST

I have really enjoyed the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, guzzled Mass Effect 1 (my favourite) in about 18 hours play, and I’m so glad I did - the fresh lick of paint did wonders for my nostalgia tinted veiwpoint. Now onto Mass Effect 2. After that, I’m almost certain I’d be up for a Dragon Age Origins remaster.

Wed 28 Apr 2021 13:07 BST

struggling to update my gemini agate server to 3.0.2 on my little dietpi.. :(

Wed 28 Apr 2021 10:05 BST

If you like superhero games and you were a fan of the Freedom Force series, then you might want to check out the Sentinels of Freedom game on PC or Xbox, its an indie but slightly more modern take and you can craft your own hero in the campaign. \o/ https://www.sentinelsoffreedomgame.com

Mon 26 Apr 2021 14:55 BST

hells bobbins, I am a mere mortal being mesmerised by the awk/sed wizardry uoou/drew conjurs on a regular basis. Kudos to uoou Sir!

Mon 26 Apr 2021 14:44 BST

Been off the grid of late, trying to cobble together an ‘MeMOir’ (an MMO Memoir .... ahem), listing out the MMO’s I’ve been involved with over the last two decades, but pouring over foggy memories of MMO experiences is harder than you think, especially when I’ve played so many and the ones I played for years on end have quite a few tales to tell. I’m going to have to split this up into a more manageable set of musings

Thu 15 Apr 2021 08:44 BST

Disney style, I’m a Jungle Book kind of a guy, although you know Tron happened and then The Emporers New Groove - so ‘Bring it on’.

Fri 09 Apr 2021 15:19 BST

I chuffing love Outriders, it marries the MMO-like progression of the Destiny-a-like with absolutely balls-out visceral skill-gun combo action. The combat design hits the sweet spot between balls out gunnery and tactical use of movement, positioning and your skills and mod enhancements. The demo went well. The release game is shonky and bugged to feck. The authentication login servers are b0rked on all platforms. The cross-play doesn’t work. The 2 player co-op works well enough, at times. But the 3 player co-op is janky and at least one player usually has network issues. The worst thing is it crashes fairly regularly. On all platforms. Is it me, or are console games these days always fecked up crash-a-thons, because the last 6 months or so almost every biggish release has been balls. They get em out, get em sold, but they’re quite clearly not QA checked.. it’s really disappointing.

Thu 01 Apr 2021 10:31 BST

I am so pleased I managed to get Shadow Empire running on my linux box (by running some protontricks script for 4 hours, and converting image tiles into RGB) it is a complex 4X/RPG/Wargame hybrid that manages to take on the procgen world building of Dwarf Fortress; the RPG politics and relationships of Crusader Kings II; the strategic shenanigens of 4X genre (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) and the full scope of an operational wargame with logistical planning using resources, supply, movement through battlefield, R&R, encirclements, tech tree exploitation of enemy units and the environment. It’s a long term of project of acclimatisation, understanding and discovery.

Thu 01 Apr 2021 10:23 BST

oh, its April 1st, well just to clarify, my last comment about Gemini, WASN’T a joke! And now perhaps this statement seems like it could be the REAL joke? It’s not! And neither is that one. Ah can’t we just skip over this pranksters half day of mirth, where no-one believes anyone and get to the real subject of just enjoying Gemini and plain text?

Thu 01 Apr 2021 10:21 BST

to echo HexDSL’s latest video, his Gemini check-in, I think Gemini is such a useful way to explore other people’s efforts at communication, in a pure sense, without any nefarious activity in between content load and read. I like Gemini so much, it is now the source for my web presence, converting gmi to minimal html.

Sun 21 Mar 2021 19:04 GMT

I’ve finally fixed my wallpaper changing scripts under SpectrWM. The problem being FEH was bombing out when run in my bash script under cron. It seems cron doesn’t have access to the X Server when it runs FEH, so I had to prepend Display=:0 before the FEH command. Now my cron job works and my cyberpunk wallpapers shift regularly. I’m a happy man again - staring at the constantly shifting walls of cyber art

Sun 21 Mar 2021 18:59 GMT

knee deep in revisiting older games on this gen of console, I’m guessing its because the new BIG games released always seemed to be a) lacking b) busted or c) monetised to the max. Anyways I’m back sniffing around the likes of Strange Brigade, Titanfall 2, The Outer Worlds, State of Decay 2..

Sun 14 Mar 2021 18:37 GMT

I’ve become fascinated with Sumo wrestling of late, stumbled onto it via NHK World Japan channel, and the March tournament starts today in Tokyo. 15 days of highlights watching the intense but short bouts where these weighty men challenge each other with their strength, momentum and leverage, knocking the other off balance and out of the ring. Exciting stuff.

Sun 14 Mar 2021 18:31 GMT

watchdogs:legion online mode feels a little light on content, you have a small map, with 9 solo missions, 1 co-op location where you can run a playlist of 3 or 4 co-op missions, which all have very similar structure, get in, hack a few things, kill some men and drones, get out and drive something somewhere away. Then you have to very bare bones spiderbot arena, where you can fight a deathmatch of bots, picking up heals or weapon types from boxes dotted around the very small arenas. Legion was released 5 months ago, without online mode. Now we have this bare bones offering and its not tied to your single player game in anyway. So you start afresh. You can co-op in the small map, but not really do anything together other than mess about. It feels terribly lacking. But at the moment, this game is the biggest cyberpunk (ish) game we have.. bah

Thu 11 Mar 2021 09:28 GMT

there also seems to be a trend of pushing titles out unfinished, roadmapped with promises, but ultimately the consoles have never crashed so hard and so often these days. grab the release hype pre-order exclusive money and we’ll patch in the fixes necessary laters. Or we’ll abandon the game, once we’ve milked sales.

Thu 11 Mar 2021 09:25 GMT

I think the floodgates opening, coupled with the bastardisation of all bigger titles including live service, heavy monetisation, version fragmentation, battle passing, tri-annual seasons, withdrawing and gatekeeping previously purchased content, limited events and a rainbox of virtual currencies and lootboxes - console gaming has become a minefield of exploitation and your enthusiasm is eroded permenantly.

Thu 11 Mar 2021 09:19 GMT

the last gen console stores seem to be filling up with utter trash games, I suppose if it worked for Steam it might eek a bit more money out of captive audience on the platform, till they shell out and find a next gen box to play on

Sun 07 Mar 2021 23:01 GMT

ssh from arcolinux into mxlinux running amfora and drek is my new way of couch surfing and commenting…

Sun 07 Mar 2021 16:21 GMT

Currently appreciating the undervalued and overlooked ARPG Shadows Awakening, instant party member swapping, adventuring world with corporeal characters and shadowrealm traversal with the devourer, actions in one world affect the other. Puzzles galore. Interesting skill sets and custom builds. Fully voiced characters also with Tom Baker! Top stuff

Sun 07 Mar 2021 16:13 GMT

March 7th through to March 13th boycotting Amazon in solidarity with the workers trying to unionise against all odds. No orders. No Kindle. No Prime. #boycottamazon

Tue 02 Mar 2021 15:12 GMT

self hosting my gemini capsule on a raspberry pi running dietpi, really pleased with it

Sun 28 Feb 2021 19:03 GMT

diddling around with agate on a raspberry pi now…

Sun 28 Feb 2021 16:28 GMT

must remember NOT to edit the drek.gmi file in a moment of outrage and insert a carriage return into the stream of conciousness..

Thu 25 Feb 2021 23:59 GMT

Theres a sense of peace, when you find yourself, nibbling west country farmhouse chedder off orkney island oatcakes, watching slow panning Mars panoramic landscapes from high def rover cams, to soothing ambient music, streamed live through surveillance capitalist Youtube app on your smart TV in the twilight of the evening. Considering your innate love for the Universe and you were born before we had expeditions to the moon. The sheer majesty of our progress overwhelms me. I lose myself in another planet’s landscape

Tue 23 Feb 2021 09:30 GMT

So, you buy a game on release, they try to sell you a season pass, years later they do a sale, where the game is discounted heavily, including the season pass (all maps and DLC content collected together), but if you bought the title originally the discounted bundle is NOT available to you. ONLY the season pass at its original price is available! First buyers support the game at full price and then are purposefully EXCLUDED from any further discounts on additional content - comercially hand-cuffed to paying full price forever. This is so wrong. So unfair.

Sun 21 Feb 2021 18:27 GMT

Sakura Wars on PS4 is theatre logistics and show management, explore your performers personalities, backstories and aspirations, join them in Mech vs Demon combat under the Flower Division banner protecting Tokyo! CGI and anime cutscenes blended together really well. Also, play a soothing game of the Flower cards (hanafuda) in Koi Koi wars! Arts, Mechs and Floral strength. All bases covered.

Sat 20 Feb 2021 07:48 GMT

I’m a tulip kind of a guy.

Fri 19 Feb 2021 17:52 GMT

As per usual, one DRPG (Labyrinth of Refrain) and some enthusiasm leads into curiosity about other DRPGs and suddenly I have game saves in Demon Gaze II, The Lost Child, Bards Tale IV, Vaporum and Operancia. ~shrug~ I’m terrible Muriel!

Thu 18 Feb 2021 18:17 GMT

Turn Based Lovers site has a first gameplay look at Ultimate ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery) roguelike - its looking really good

Mon 15 Feb 2021 14:16 GMT

I think this slurry of immediate thought, is now also part if my expanding exocortex. Fed direct from the command line into my easily digested geminispace.

Mon 15 Feb 2021 14:14 GMT

even before evernote and beyond it to joplin and finally resting on emacs and orgmode, I’ve been trying to get a useful & self documenting record of my real & digital life into an exocortex. Human cognition expanded and enhanced by tech, but constructed and configured under my control, my will for my needs

Mon 15 Feb 2021 14:00 GMT

theres something cool about manifesting your immediate thoughts into pure unadulterated text, collected on your own gemini server without judgement

Sun 14 Feb 2021 17:38 GMT

I found a new passion of mine today, watching ‘bird feeding tables’ LIVE on the tubes, mainline your love for our avian wildlife across the globe - I saw a red cardinal, goldfinch and a blue jay

Sun 14 Feb 2021 17:05 GMT

I’m a sucker for DRPGs, so I reinstalled Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk and have been exploring the spooky dungeons with my fighting puppets.

Sat 13 Feb 2021 20:38 GMT

I can buy into the resleeving, but there was something about Altered Carbon Season 2 that left me wanting more Season 1 cyberpunk

Mon 08 Feb 2021 11:00 GMT

You can keep your social media, but if I didn’t have access to DeltaChat or Mastodon I’d be a wreck by now.

Sun 07 Feb 2021 18:31 GMT

Drek is Shadowrun cyberpunk slang for crap. It seemed to appropriate to tag my mental effluent with this moniker.

Fri 05 Feb 2021 14:56 GMT

Whichever of these pipe dreams comes first - functioning exciting Cyberpunk 2077 gameworld or PS5 availability without price gouging, will make me pine for the other even more

Fri 05 Feb 2021 10:41 GMT

I need to return to the following to finish them off, preacher s4, altered carbon s2, mr robot, handmaids tale, star trek disco very s3, fargo, dead set…

Fri 05 Feb 2021 06:55 GMT

Interestingly, I noticed Cultist Simulator the card based time management cthulu-esque procedurally generated spook-a-thon was on the Switch store, a lot of esoteric PC indie titles are hitting the Switch as first console

Thu 04 Feb 2021 18:59 GMT

Revisiting Astral Chain on Switch, oh boy does it do justice to the Cyberpunk Anime vibe.

Thu 04 Feb 2021 16:45 GMT

Playing the Werewolf: The Apocalypse game on console, whilst transformed action is pacey enough - it feels a little sluggish on moves and light on bite - however the silent stealthy Lupus form feels just right.

Thu 04 Feb 2021 15:58 GMT

I’m currently a giddy little kipper, it’s like I’ve birthed my very own short attention span social media feed and only I can post to it!

Thu 04 Feb 2021 15:53 GMT

Ok, gotta crack on… Kristall is not a bad Gemini client, once I’ve configured it for monospaced hegemony to make it look like Amfora.

Thu 04 Feb 2021 15:48 GMT

Theres nowt better than toking on a builders strength cuppa, listening to old Celldweller trax and coding up more Gemini gubbins..

Thu 04 Feb 2021 15:45 GMT

Thanks to uoou/drew for his scripting aid to capture and immortalise this deckers unfiltered mind drek!

Wilderness

2021-08-05T12:00:00+01:00

Well its been a long while since I penned something here, I’ve been stuck in the wilderness of life, what with work and trying to make a difference when working from home - and keeping my gaming life going - since its primarily my main form of escapism from the darkening world at large - I have been a bit lost.

Conan

Another wilderness I have been lost in is Conan Exiles: Ilse of Siptah. A land where survival is key and everything else is possible if you source the resources, learn how to craft it, build it and get to a point where you can raise a sustainable settlement, fend off the nasties, and start to explore the dungeons and the wild landscapes of lands of Siptah.

Theres some crazy stuff to learn regarding forging the very material to rip a tear in the fabric of the sky and pour down thralls from the exiled lands. You’ll fight them and their minions or you will capture them and coax them into joining your settlement.

Honestly, a persistent server, where you can PvE to your hearts content, with your co-op mates, its just sublime. It’s like a true MMO, but with proper survival and base building, world exploration, culture appreciation and dungeon crawling all layered with a hint of the supernatural and occult. I’ll not worship those dark gods, by Crom!

Tribe of Midgard

Yet another more concise wilderness to rush around is Midgard, the Viking lands where nightly attacks by the Hel spawn and Wandering Jotuun are always trying to smash down your settlement and demolish Yggdrasil the tree of life.

Much like a cell shaded top down isometric version of Conan, you find, gather and build what you can, you defend your village throughout the night cycle and you hunt and do quests during daylight. All alongside other players, if you want. The pace is much faster, your progress through the weapons and tools trees has to be rapid to keep up with the increasing enemy difficulty, plus you need a warband to get to the point where they can down the massively powerful Jotuun making a bee-line for your village hell bent on bringing ragnarok to your doorstep!

Intoxicating

There is something intoxicating about persistant worlds where you get to craft something together and can drop in and out when you have time and make more of a difference. In these times, being able to have so much agency in a virtual world, compensates quite a lot for not having a similar level of agency within your real world.

I’m a born wanderer of virtual worlds

I’ll rest here a while, though.

Subsistence

2021-03-15T12:00:00+00:00

Last year I went on a rant about how modern IT systems and necessary skillsets were eroding at my capacity to deliver my usual jack-of-all-trades ability to provide help.

Obsolescence

I was unsure how to progress, going forward.

I felt like I was becoming obsolete.

The exhausting chase

Software as a service, undermines confidence “gained through familiarity” - with its cloud based infrastructure, constantly in development, frequent change meted out as part of a rolling “whats new this month” news cycle to insiders and downstream subscribers.

I feel like I am fundamentally at odds with this new generation of IT products. Morally and ethically.

Nothing is logical, clear, concise, useful.

Everything is another layer of obfuscation and bloated features. Fingers probing deep within your privacy, monitoring and recording your activities to parcel it all back up and present it to you as productivity and wellbeing.

My waning knowledge and understanding of these services, as they morph away from me (yet again), had me well and truly exhausted with the chase, and it was eating away at my self confidence and belief in my competance.

The rewarding allotment

However, I realised my efforts to divine the inner workings and logic of these systems, doesn’t have to be at a fundamentally deep level and I don’t have to agree with their ethical approach to privacy to provide a cursory level of support.

In fact, my real enthusiasm for ‘doing things’ with computer systems had been redirected towards a more wholesome if selfish pursuit.

I was still learning to ‘get things done’, only on a subsistence level, catering for my own computing needs.

The skills of which are attainable, the system of which is under my direct control and the methods by which are wholly ethical and sustainable.

So my real take from this, is that my ‘obsolescence’ in the modern arena, can be countered by my much more enjoyable, vastly more rewarding, exploration into fulfilling my own needs with tailored progressive and ethical solutions.

Grow your own, for you alone

I’m cultivating my own crops in my own fields and NOT stressing over what I can and can’t do, in the perplexingly complex network of sterile corporate warehouses churning out soylent green.

Enjoying Pi on a Diet

2021-03-01T12:00:00+00:00

The Forgotton Fruit

I was diddling one day with my gemini capsule, using it as an orbital slingshot to warp into a space lane full of other peoples worlds and musings, when I glanced up from my screen and noticed a weird little box on the top shelf of my desk. This red and white dusty package had been there for quite some time and I’d obviously forgotten about it and neglected it unwittingly.

It was a ‘Raspberry Pi 3 Model B’ I’d bought in a playful day dream a year or two ago, about exploring the joys of a single board computer. I’d stashed it in plain sight, but had more or less overlooked it as the dream faded away.

Well, here I am paying for a Digital Ocean droplet to host my tiny gemini site and I have a box here that could possibly do the same job. Why don’t I go on this adventure and learn how to get this brightly coloured chap doing something useful. If nothing else, I might learn something new.

The Full English

I booted it up, to see if it worked. A full english brekfast of software lay before me installed on a NOOBS installation of Raspian! I realise I’m not going to want a full desktop enivronment with a cornucopia of software installed for getting a small gemini server up and running, so I started thinking about alternatives.

Time to trim

Luckily a good friend of mine pointed me in the direction of DietPi.

https://dietpi.com

This rather helpful roll out of an OS for your raspberry pi, lets you perform a very minimal setup and use its own tools to build in ONLY the modules you require.

This is exactly what I was looking for.

I snuffed around my box of ‘bits and bobs’ like a pig hoofing up truffles to find an SD card to install it on. I didn’t want to nuke my official Raspberry NOOBS install SD card. Luckily, I unearthed an SD card yanked from a old phone of mine.

I set about following their clear instructions to install DietPi on the card:

https://dietpi.com/docs/install

Swapping the card in and booting took a little time, but the initial config was quick, I changed some passwords and was in to their config and software tools to tweak what I wanted and install only the necessaries.

Follow the recipe

I used Chris Were’s instructions on setting up a Gemini server:

gemini://chriswere.uk/gemserver.gmi

using the Agate software

https://github.com/mbrubeck/agate

I only needed to make a couple of changes with the way the DietPi was set up out of the box.

Drop the bear

Since the DietPi is designed to be as lightweight as possible, pulling as little resources and power, it uses Dropbear as its SSH software.

https://matt.ucc.asn.au/dropbear/dropbear.html

I had no idea how to configure dropbear to set up a self signed certificate and key so I installed the more resource hungry package OpenSSH using DietPi’s config TUI module. It was a compromise I could live with.

Sync the R

The minimal install of DietPi doesn’t come with RSYNC installed and since I use some of Drew/Uoou’s scripts (adjusted for my setup)

gemini://friendo.monster/log/lace.gmi

https://gitlab.com/uoou/dotfiles/-/tree/master/stow/bin/home/drew/.local/bin/tiny

that use RSYNC, I was able to run DietPi’s Sync module which installs RSYNC for you. Very handy.

Finding the Pi house

Since I’m on a home broadband setup, my IP address is not necessarily static - so it’s not easy to point my gemini domain to my DietPi gemini server. My IP could change over time.

Luckily my good friend stepped in again and pointed me in the direction of NOIP Free.

https://noip.com/free

NOIP allows you to setup Dynamic DNS (DDNS) whereby you:

Create a custom hostname
Install their DNS update client (DUC)

The DUC polls your IP for any changes, if it changes it updates the NOIP service tied to your custom hostname. Effectively maintaining a mechanism by which you can access your equipment and serve gemini pages on a normal non-static broadband.

You have to renew your free hostname every 30 days but the free service works and is enough to run a gemini server on a DietPi so I’m a happy camper.

In order to point my domain to my gemini server I basically set up a CNAME record on my Domain registrar’s (NameCheap) site pointing the gemini sub-domain to the NOIP custom hostname.

Enjoy

If you’re reading this, you’re doing so on my self-hosted DietPi.

Tiling Again

2021-02-22T12:00:00+00:00

This week has me back exploring the dream of having a workable but easy to configure tiling window manager setup on my machine.

The early days

I’ve done this merry dance before, early on with i3

https://i3wm.org

and exploratory dips into qtile

http://www.qtile.org

and awesome

https://awesomewm.org

I’m not sure I had the stamina for each of these projects to set up a working system.

Primarily because in those heady early days of my explorations, I didn’t know the following:

what my actual workflow was
what functionality I needed rather than just wanted
whether I wanted to ‘rice’ my system
the bigger picture of how to tweak all parts into a coherent system

The more I delved into it as a configuration project, the deeper the rabbit hole become. Each tool was a flurry of information and new configurations I had to make important decisions on. Some tools where new and I had to learn those before integrating them into a cacophony of new tools.

I think the snowballing effect of trying to meld together existing tools with new tools and then configure them all to work under a single tiling mechanism without actually knowing how the thing would affect my nebulous ‘workflow’ overwhelmed me totally.

I’d often make it part way and find incompatibilities or outlier obstacles that would also need solving before we could continue with this homebrew assembly of a new way of working.

The halfway house

My failings early on, clouded my apetite for this reoccuring quest to tile up my windows with a manager.

I placated my “side by side window organisation fetish” by implementing a Python based solution on XFCE tiling from within my current desktop environment. Aided by the very talented Sjaak van den Berg and his excellent article.

Tiling in XFCE

https://svdb.co/articles/2015/07/19/tiling-in-xfce/

I started to use this mechanism to get a feel for the tiling setup I thought I wanted, but this ‘halfway house’ meant I could fall back to the comfort of my regular desktop environment if anything went awry.

Getting there

Recently, more and more of my normal workflow takes place within the terminal, what with my obsession with Emacs and Org mode, the Gemini Protocol and embracing the sheer tactile joy of just doing things via the mechanical keyboard. RSS via Emacs & Elfeed. Browsing using Qutebrowser. Music via MOCP. File management using NNN. To name but a few.

The hankering for a smoother tiling mechanism started to grow again.

The majority of the Linux folks I follow on Mastodon and Youtube/LBRY/Peertube channels all use tiling windows managers - so there is always a background yearning to have as smooth as system as they do.

I’ve heard on the grapevine that Suckless’ DWM is the way to go.

https://dwm.suckless.org

And while I admire the suckless ethos, I’m just not comfortable enough to approach system wide configuration of the tiling manager via C code diff patches. I just can’t do it, not yet anyways.

So, another popular choice is Xmonad.

https://xmonad.org/

I gave it a shot. It didn’t quite go as planned and having to get used to the Haskell code to tweak it put me off it.

The current solution

I come to the rather rapid conclusion that I just wanted something more straight forward, easier to setup and maintain without having to go deep to get anywhere.

I finally landed upon Spectrwm.

https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm

I must say it has been one of the easier tiling window managers to setup and test. The configuration file is very readable and by default does a lot of things right from the get-go.

It’s only been on my system for a day or so, and I’m still getting used to it. I’ve still got the option to drop back to my normal desktop environment, if needed. But I figured it was worth a gemini post.

I’m rather enjoying the swift freedom having a tiling setup affords. Being able to place application windows where I want them in a couple of keystrokes is a real boon. It makes you feel in control. You spend less time fighting a UI that takes a long way round, or that has an array of icons and desktop shortcuts. More time getting to where you want to be.

Anyway, I’ll give it a shot and will report back - no doubt.

Software I use

2021-02-17T12:00:00+00:00

Free and Open Source Software [FOSS]and ethical services I use in my digital life.

VERY OUTDATED!

Audiobooks

Audio Anchor A mobile audio book player.

Blogging

Neocities Back to basics, hand coding HTML web pages with a strong community vibe.

Gemini Protocol In between web and gopher, the modern way to do small web.

Browsers

Firefox Desktop web browser

Waterfox Desktop web browser based Firefox

Qutebrowser Minimal web browser with Vim key support

DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser Mobile privacy browser

Tor Browser Desktop and mobile privacy browser over the Tor network

Calendar

Etar Mobile calendar app

DAVx5 Mobile CalDAV?CardDAV syncroniser app

Camera

Open Camera Mobile camera app

Chat & Messaging

Delta Chat Messaging client - desktop and mobile - using private Email as encrypted transfer protocol

Jitsi Meet Desktop and mo0bile chat/video client

Cloud

Owndrive Free Nextcloud host 2Gb available

The Good Cloud Free Nextcloud host 2Gb available

Email Service

Posteo.de Ethical, affordable, sustainable green mail service provider. 1 Euro a month.

Email Client

Evolution Full featured mail client

K-9 Mail Mobile mail client

Exocortex

Emacs Extensible Text Editor and development platform

Orgmode Contextual markup and functionality on plain text files in Emacs

File Manager

PCMANFM Lightweight desktop file manager

NNN CLI terminal based file manager

Simple File Manager Pro File manager app

Firewall

Netguard Mobile firewall (set data/wifi access on individual app basis)

Gemini

Agate Simple Gemini Server

Amfora CLI terminal based Gemini client

Kristall Desktop GUI Gemini client

Deedum Mobile Gemini client

Images

GNU Image Manipulation Program Full featured Image Editor

SXIV CLI Simple X Image Viewr

Geeqie Desktop Image Viewer

Simple Gallery Pro Mobile Image Viewer

Launcher

KISS Launcher Minimal Mobile app launcher with search

Maps

OpenStreetMaps GIS

Mobile App

FDroid Mobile Free and Open Source Software repo for Android. No Google necessary.

Music

MOCP CLI terminal muisc player

Audacious Desktop music player

SicMu Player Mobile music player

Bandcamp Quality DRM free music from independant artists

News

Newsboat CLI terminal based RSS reader

Elfeed Emacs based RSS reader

Readrops Mobile RSS reader

One Time Password

FreeOTP OTP Authenticaor

OS

MX Linux My OS of choice in terms of usability, configuration options and performance on older hardware

Arcolinux Testing Arch Linux

Password Manager

KeePassXC Desktop and Mobile password manager

PDF

Zathura Document Viewer

MuPDF Viewer Mobile Document Viewer

Podcast

Antennapod Mobile Podcast player

Raspberry Pi

DietPi Lightweight OS for Pi - good for self-hosting gemini server

Social Media

Mastodon Decentralised community

Fedilab Mobile Mastodon Client

RedReader Mobile Reddit Reader

Sync

Syncthing Serverless device syncing

Video

MPV Video Player

Freetube Video Player with subscriptions

VLC Desktop and Mobile Video Player

Newpipe Mobile Video Player with subscriptions

Simplify and Purify

2021-02-16T12:00:00+00:00

Over a long period of time, I tired and become exasperated with the ‘free’ services I was using to manage my ever-expanding digital life.

Don’t be evil?

The ‘free’ services often started out as useful and more convenient than their stand-alone commercial competition. However, as time went on and I became invested in their ecosystem, the service would lose features and functionality previously available. The interface would be stripped of options and pathways, streamlining the experience, lowering the cognitive entry cost to the lowest common denominator. A gradual erosion of usefulness and control over my data stored.

Unbeknownst to me, the carefully curated information I was feeding into these walled gardens, was being picked over and analysed, by algorithms. These silent prying eyes were building a picture of who I was, or what I was doing.

Everything logged.

My mail. My voice. My movements. My money.

What I watched. What I listened to. What I read. What I shared.

My communications with other like minded individuals.

My dreams and aspirations, my likes and dislikes.

They were tracking my personal footprints across their systems, also allowing collaborating (and paying) vulture capitalists to pick over my identity and activity for their own needs. My digital self, sold on to strengthen unregulated monopolies and gullible advertising firms.

Everything collated.

All OUR data, weaponised against us, as we suckle at the dopamine drip of a socially connected digital utopia.

My privacy was being compromised and the machinery and good faith were being withdrawn.

Profiled.

Faux Privacy

“You have privacy concerns? Why not take control under our Privacy settings panel?”

A Privacy Panel that undulated and morphed into a more and more cryptic, complex array of options, hiding pitfalls and traps within legalese doublespeak and faux choices.

Hijacked and Blackmailed

Taking control of my privacy started to become like negotiating yet another mobile phone deal, where everything is a web of jumbled options specifically designed to trick me into making the most lucrative choice for them, and to bargain away concerns with a fake sense of a deal.

It’s a pressured sales pitch, with blackmail and hijacking thrown into the mix.

The Honeytrap and the milking shed

I was being coerced and herded along with my friends and acquaintances into various milking sheds for our data. Export and exit options taken away. Portability and interoperability removed, or hived off for premium subscription features.

I was losing control over my stuff. I’d been sold a neoliberal fable about progress and the digital future being online. I’d been reassured that these pioneers wouldn’t be ‘evil’. When they had built the data harvesting machinery, they realised the information gathered was valuable and lucrative. Reduced control meant only exposing the mechanisms for keeping their nutrient source.

The loss of control, was marketed as ‘ease of use’ or accessibility and the convenience of ‘free’ digital services for everyone. The future. The big tech digital utopian lie.

Come and taste the candy. Tell your friends! In fact, tell us who are your friends, and we can hook them into the honeytrap too!

The gradual constriction

I’ve been on the Internet and pursuing a digital life since the late 1980’s.

I’ve seen it at it’s birth, and the raw power available to tech savvy users. It ~felt~ good then. A new world. A new adventure. An implicit utopia promised only by the blossoming of open protocols.

The limited but accessible and convenient front end of this “black boxed” spying machine invited you in to a world of possibilities but was a corporate mirage for a controlling asylum.

Over time you become aware of a gradual constriction, you start to notice your new attire is a virtual straight jacket and it is beginning to ever so slightly suffocate you.

The jacket keeps on reconfiguring itself, changing over time, adding more buckles and straps in different places, pulling in tighter and tighter.

Taking more of you. Giving less and less.

More attention, more data, more connections, more media.

Less and less freedom.

Less and less contro.

Binding you and your friends, family and interests to the constantly monitored interrogation chairs within the asylum.

The release

I’d had enough.

So I took the decision to burst out of these shackles, no matter how inconvenient or painful it may be. I would rid myself of these free services and escape the asylum.

Out of the jacket.

Out of the milking shed.

Away from the honeytrap.

To go to where I wasn’t the nutrient source. I was the priority in this technological equation!

I was the data caretaker and controller. I would take it upon myself to enhance my own digital life using tools and systems that were free. Without caveats or conditions.

Back to basics.

Honesty.

Usability.

An ethical digital life.

Not one tainted with lies or traps.

INSPIRATION

I’d like to thank those who inspired me to take on this challenge and make the change.

Chris Were

pointed out the joy of Neocities, and the simplicity of being able to easily host an information site without much effort or fuss.

Low Tech Magazine

showed me what could be done with the simplest of designs, and its ethical solar self-powered hosting.

Switching Social - SWISO

is a curated crib sheet that will show ethical, easy-to-use and privacy-conscious alternatives to the data hungry spycorp softs.

PrivacyTools.io

a site delivering invaluable information regarding protecting your privacy and configuration the ethical options available.

The Hated One

a video channel detailing many aspects on preserving your privacy, security and the measures you can take to minimise the attention of surveillance capitalism.

A NEW WAY

I have created a list of the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), along with any ethical services I use. These tools crafted for people to use technology to fulfil their own needs, to configure their own way, has really helped me pursue the digital life I want. Support FOSS, if you can.

Software I use

Some Shackles Persist

There are a number of services I haven’t found an ethical alternative to, especially ones that include media (film/movie/game) delivery.

It seems the DRM systems attached to the fragmented services, are all tied up in monthly subscription schemes. The mobile phone thing again.

I’ve got various content I’ve bought, splayed across disparate corporate delivery mechanisms, all locked away and only available for streaming with accounts and tracking using proprietary apps on a myriad of devices.

I buy, I don’t control how I consume.

At the moment I can’t see any way out of this trap.

Short of buying the film/movie on DVD or BlueRay and ripping the content off the disc in some form. To have digital “backups”.

Similarly, audiobooks would need to “recorded” by capturing the audio stream out of the DRM locked application.

A lot of books purchased through the Amazon Kindle store or the Google Play Books store are locked away using Adobe DRM, and I’ve yet to find a way to unlock these in a format I can use on a DRM-free book reader. Select titles through Google Play Books are actually available as DRM-less, but they are mainly odd linux manuals or other reference materials.

There is hope, Cory Doctorow kickstarted his latest novel Attack Surface in ebook format and audiobook format to see if he could crowd fund it and escape the all cloying monopoly Amazon has over these media. He did it! It can be done.

Doctor vs Surveillance Capitalism

Bandcamp is my preferred music source these days, where you can explore and purchase music at often very reasonable prices, whilst also supporting independant artists.

Bandcamp

There are a number of aspects to my digital life that are still locked away, and require further investigation.

Hardware wise, my phone choices are very limited, but there are some new options appearing on the horizon (Librem 5, Pine Phone, Fairphone) that may be worth looking at, once we have a decent privacy aware ethical Linux phone.

Continued struggle

I hope this journey shows that there are a LOT of alternatives to the corporate spyware that is routinely spoonfed into the emerging tech aware general public. You have a choice. You can take back a lot of control.

But there is still a long way to go.

Gem In I

2021-02-02T12:00:00+00:00

Interests in simplification

I’ve been keen on the Gemini Protocol for a while now, watching from a distance, soaking up what info I could.

I am already sold on a better Internet, one of information and easy use, without surveillance and caveat.

I’m interested in low technology and small tech

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

https://small-tech.org/

I’ve minimalised by web site down to static pages created inside of Emacs running org-mode and outputting to very simple html via org-mode-static-blog.

I’ve dabbled in GOPHER via sdf.org

https://sdf.org

I’ve even sampled the delights of GEMINI via the low friction more accessible site Gemini Blue

https://gemini.blue

My test site at Gemini Blue

gemini://gemlog.blue/users/spelk

There is a narrative here, served by a cluster of ideas on how to take personal information forward, how to decentralise and share with others, amongst a nurturing environment of cooperation, utility and respect.

Making it happen

Over the past few days, a few of the people who I follow on Mastodon, have been exploring the world of hosting your own Gemini server and getting a ‘capsule’ up for the gemspace to explore.

It’s their enthusiasm and tutelage that has me up and running and posting here.

Uoou (Drew), Hex (HexDSL) and Chris Were (Chris Were) have documented the process necessary for anyone with an interest and a penchant for dabbling..

Thanks for the leg up into the command module, prepare for lift off!

If you want to sample their capsules, then take a look at my CheekyGEMS list on the HOME “page”

Obsolescence

2020-10-08T12:00:00+01:00

Technology has escaped me

The other day I realised why, having been an IT professional for 3 decades, I find myself shipwrecked on a technological island without the power to reach or help other people.

I’ve been in and around microcomputers since the launch of the Commodore Vic-20.
I’ve been in and around operating systems since Windows 2.0.
I’ve been in and around databases since dBaseIII+.
I’ve been in and around web development since the dawning of Mosaic.
I’ve been in and around office suites since the mighty days of WordPerfect.
I’ve been in and around helping people with their tech needs since the early 1990’s.

However, as much as I’ve been able to keep myself up to date with multidiscipline computing throughout these times, only recently have I been estranged from the controls and decisions of operating and managing tech. I have been made obsolete.

The ever expanding Universe of waning control

There are layers of control and change now well out of my grasp.

The operating system of today, will hide controls away and constantly evolve and morph on its own.
The office suites are now cloud based and are constantly a shifting and changing landscape.
The file systems and formats are nebulous, twisting and turning, between versions of the same software.
The development tools require a tower of dependant libraries and licenses to develop these web enabled apps on all surveillance devices.

Every problem needs a full detective investigation of versions, patches and platforms to get to a resolution.

However, people raised on the constrained functionality of one-button “wizard of oz” solutions, have no time to dig deep and try to understand the systems they devote their precious data to.

Every system overloads the hardware with behind-the-scenes telemetry and metrics and the tranmission of that data back to big brother!

The blind engineer

My “computing common sense” power tools don’t work anymore and the meagre dials exposed for me to use have been heavily obfuscated; their control outsourced to a premium administration subscription model on a corporate server.

Everything is going on behind the wizards curtain.

I am blind to it all.

Computer Support says no

If I’m asked a support question, I can no longer answer sufficiently to help. The proprietary mists of the corporate magician sting the eyes.

With a localised ecosystem, changing only every 3 or 4 years, I could maintain a level of competance in all areas of its support. I could provide a “jack-of-all-trades” solution for most peoples needs. That was my skill. A broad level of support.

However, a multi-layered cloud based corporate setup requires keen specialisation in narrow areas to maintain expertise in this ever changing outsourced landscape. I can no longer pursue every avenue to maintain a level of competance.

The shifting layers are stacked against me:

The hardware arms race and shapeshifting eternally patching OS
The ever bloating office suite and its mystic configuration at the corporate cloud level
The sub-contracted IT services to maintain specific pieces of software and hardware
The accumulated computing skills of the past three decades no longer cover this expansion without a large team of dedicated specialists

A retreat

This island has a shelter.

Sturdily built as Linux.

One where I can know the systems at play.

Where I can command and control how and what it does.

Where the OS I use is steadfast and infinitely configurable.

Where I can install free and open source software as I see fit, to provide functionality I actually want!

Where my data is my own and it is private!

Where I can help others, because the systems are localised and change is at my pace.

Where I can be free.

Doctorow VS Surveillance Capitalism

2020-09-16T12:00:00+01:00

Cory Doctorow

I’ve been taking more and more notice of sci-fi cyberpunk writer Cory Doctorow. He’s been quite vocal about all sorts of matters of digital privacy, capitalism, surveillance capitalism and the ethics of our future on this planet.

I’ve been following his daily blog at

https://pluralistic.net

via a twitter scraping bot that posts to mastodon.

More and more of the issues he brings to light on a daily basis are worth thinking about. I like the way fella can frame a problem in current world and tech context and then he gives you space to think around it.

Surveillance Capitalism

Recently he made a short novella about “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism” available for free via Medium’s OneZero feature.

How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

It will take you a good hour or two to read and digest but some of the issues he brings up put a different spin on what is going on with Surveillance Capitalism compared with the more established viewpoint of Shoshana Zuboff’s book on said subject.

Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism

This isn’t just surveillance, data capture and mind manipulation by tailoring ads to your tastes.

This is more about walled gardens, tech progression, monopolies, lack of regulations, copyright lock, misinformation and distrust in our government agencies.

And I quote from the piece:

“Facebook is heralded as the origin of all of our modern plagues, and it’s not hard to see why. Some tech companies want to lock their users in but make their money by monopolizing access to the market for apps for their devices and gouging them on prices rather than by spying on them (like Apple). Some companies don’t care about locking in users because they’ve figured out how to spy on them no matter where they are and what they’re doing and can turn that surveillance into money (Google). Facebook alone among the Western tech giants has built a business based on locking in its users and spying on them all the time.”

Anyway, Cory manages to cover all bases and I would heartily recommend a read of it.

Fight against Amazon/Audible

One of Cory’s upcoming fiction book, the third on the Little Brother series, named “Attack Surface” is coming out and there are very little options in the way of getting the book out there, without it passing through the rather sticky fingers of DRM (Digital Rights Management) touting Amazon/Audible.

So as part of an experiment in marketing, Cory has decided to

Kickstart the audiobook DRM-free

and part of the pledge award tiers there are options to bundle his ebook versions of this book and the earlier ones. If Cory can make a successful go of this kickstarter, he hopes to convince his publisher that peddling through Amazon/Audible isn’t the only way.

I appreciate this sort of ethical stance for getting digital content to the people and it isn’t tied to surveillance systems and DRM locks that hinder and exploit the buyer.

Needless to say, I’m in. I love audiobooks, especially ethically sold ones.

If you want to purchase any of Cory’s other works, he also sells his material direct DRM-free from his website, Craphound.

https://craphound.com

Compromise and Compromised

2020-05-03T12:00:00+01:00

COMPROMISE

I have spent the best part of the past year and a half, possibly more, trying to change my entire digital life.

(ridding myself of all the trappings of surveillance capitalism and reliance on paid for, lock-in ransoming proprietary services)

Shoshanazuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism

I have changed my primary operating system completely.

(Windows 10 spyfest to MX Linux)

MX Linux

I have de-googled as much as I possibly could.

(mail, calendar and contacts to Posteo.de, cloud storage to owndrive, personal organiser to emacs+orgmode, syncing things to syncthing)

Posteo mail

I have attempted to compartmentalise my entire web browsing life.

(firefox + uBlock Origin + HTTPSEverywhere + Decentraleyes + CookieAutodelete for PERSONAL sites, waterfox + some security for WORK sites, palemoon + uBlock Origin + ScriptBlock + Secret Agent + Decentraleyes + CookieExterminator + AdBlock Latitude for SOCIAL MEDIA sites)

The Hated One - Compartmentalise

I have made the change to a non-smart phone.

(Accepted the nokia “dumbphone” 216 into my life, joined a co-operative pay-as-you-go phone service. My smartphone turned into a Sim-less offline media device. Imagine listening to music and audiobooks, awaiting the vibration of the nokia in the other pocket, only to unplug headphones from media device to plug into the Nokia to be able to answer a call and perform the reverse when the call was over to resume media consumption)

Addendum:

(After several months my patience wore very thin with both the sub-standard support by the co-operative PAYG and the panicked swapping of media device to candybar phone. So I have retired the “dumb phone” and now sport an FDroid FOSS app populated PAYG smart phone once again.)

Addendum Deux:

(Even later, years later, I managed to move over to a GrapheneOS “degoogled” Pixel 6)

FDroid FOSS App

I have digested as much information as I could about Privacy and Security and minimising my exposure of risk

(books, podcasts, sites, videos, extensive research, almost excessive cautious paranoia and inconvenience to preserve what I deem as sacred, choice and control of my own digital destiny)

My compromise is to interact digitally with this world through a shield of my own making.

(all the inconvenience of getting sites to work with Captcha’s, various javascript libraries, ad servers, social media intrusions and trackers - remembering exactly where to compartmentalise - what to use - what to do and what not to do. This is my compromise, to have some level of control in my digital future.)

COMPROMISED

A Global Pandemic

(My nurtured principles have been tempered by the physical risks of this Global Pandemic. When weighed against my own mortality or the risk to others, my privacy and security concerns seem to pale in comparison. My mind resides on higher levels of existential risk and societal breakdown.)

Working from Home

(In order to function alongside my colleagues and in an environment of mainly Microsoft tech (Teams, Office 365, OneDrive, Sharepoint), remote management and Zoom meetings - I have had to open my privacy borders, break down some of the barriers I spent many hours setting up. I have had to choke down technology I totally disagree with on an ethical level, in order to participate in work, from within the confines of my own home, using my tech, using my connection. The Inside. Turned out.)

I am thoroughly Compromised.

(all of my FOSS alternatives come to naught when dealing with work, my security, my privacy, my ethics, are totally meaningless when I have to operate in some professional capacity within the current online situation. An emergency across the globe. Through fiscal necessity, the opening up of the inner sanctum of a protected digital life. When will it stop? How many blatant incursions will be legislated through as necessary and will never be revoked?)

The Dystopian Cyberpunk Future I always wanted

2020-05-01T12:00:00+01:00

It was only a few shorts months ago that I was proclaiming 2020 as the Cyberpunk future I’d always dreamt about since I was a teen in the early ’80s. A futuristic milestone notched up on the electrified twirling baton of time. Little did I know it would get quite so dystopian and quite so bleak where human contact becomes the vector by which to spread my own demise. I have no doubt the current situation will shake it all up and shape our dystopia for years to come. Perhaps a global pandemic is the catalyst for change that our society seemed to be hankering for the past few years?

I’d kind of hoped I’d have had my breather and cyberdreads sorted out by now.

The future past

I set out to describe intimately why I love cyberpunk.

I’m not sure I’m going to do a very good job of it.

Internally, it’s a feeling for me. It’s a look. It’s an attitude. It’s a fantasy. But one grounded in near future tech realism and one of overwhelming corporate dominance, with a hint of sly tech wrangling and enhancing the human condition with crafted bio-mechanics and digital exocortex functioning.

Humanity++

But with an edge, a fight, a struggle - against the oppressors.

Taking from them, ground level engineering and integration, enhancing and using it against them. Self improvement and payback through bionics and interfacing. Hacking the planet.

Young and impressionable, these films had way more of an effect on me than my parents would have liked. (I’m going to list films now, formative and genre expanding throughout the years)

FILMS

Tron
Blade Runner
Terminator
Robocop
Running Man
Hardware
Total Recall
The Lawnmower Man
Hackers
Johnny Mnemonic
Judge Dredd/Dredd
Strange Days
Fifth Element
eXistenZ
The Matrix
Avalon
Minority Report
A Scanner Darkly
Repo Men
Preist
Elysium
Ex-Machina
Ghost in the Shell
Upgrade
Black Mirror
Alita: Battle Angel
Altered Carbon

I have an armful of Anime too

ANIME

Bubblegum Crisis
Akira
Dominion: Tank Police
Appleseed
Cyber City Oedo 808
Macross Plus
Armitage III
Ghost in the Shell
Cowboy Bebop
Serial Experiments Lain
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Renaissance
Roujin Z
Vexille

And

GAMES

Shadowrun
Syndicate
Rise of the Robots
System Shock
Deus Ex
.hack
Anarchy Online
Neocron
Enter the Matrix
The Matrix Online
E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy
Cyber Knights
Bionic Dues
Mars: War Logs
The Technomancer
Remember Me
Echo
Transistor
Watch Dogs
Cosmic Star Heroine
Dex
Technobabylon
Satellite Reign
Invisible Inc
All Walls Must Fall
Neon Chrome
System Crash
There Came an Echo
Hacknet
Hackmud
Neofeud
Observer
Ruiner
Astral Chain
(Cyberpunk 2077)

I’ve bound to have missed out a lot. But these media sources have all played their part in cementing my love for cyberpunk.

I’m leaving out books and music, although I could write a book about those and have a cool darkwave soundtrack for the audiobook. What is this Cyberpunk thing?

Cyberpunk for me, is essentially fantasy writ gritty with its balls out and its heart replaced with a beating machine.

My hopes and dreams digitised and gone viral.

Humanity built large with steel and surgical chrome.

Mind function accelerated and expanded with hijacked processing power and elusive connectivity.

It is a partly shaved head, exposed enhancements, torn tight functional clothing, chemical enhancments, neon glows, shimmering custom tattoos and the technical know-how to escape the cage that surrounds us all.

It is fighting back, from the gutter, using their technical advancements against them. Whoever ’they’ are, at the moment, for the right price, monetarily or ethically. It’s our time to RISE!

I’ve probably failed to convey exactly what Cyberpunk is. But some of the above succinctly reminds me of what it is.

It’s a feeling, I have, that I am very fond of.

Life in Text

2020-04-29T12:00:00+01:00

The road to capture Life

I’ve been trying to tame my chaotic digital life for quite some time much of it tied into novel ideas turned into costly dot coms, todoist, trello, evernote etc.

The one thing they all had in common was that my data was in their systems and it gave them some sort of hold over it. Some bargaining power to use against me, should I ever try to stop paying for their services.

None of this gave me a sense of security as I was laboriously entering my entire life into disparate online pay-walled repositories.

They offered me convenience. They offered me mobile functionality. But I couldn’t easily tie them all together. In a single simple to use interface and get at the data immediately. I had to wrangle with various user interfaces, various hard coded functions that they deemed useful, rather than have any flexibility in the way I said was useful to me.

My most precious information was scattered across the deserts of the Internet and I could never seem to update it enough, or make it ultra useful to me.

As services change their functionality, often streamlining once more extensive features, to appeal to a more mass market, I would lose keys paths to accessing the data. My data. I hit a wall with Evernote, in that I no longer wanted my over zealous web capturing to be horded away in various interface quagmires. So I found an open source alternative to Evernote and started the exodus. That alternative was Joplin.

Joplin App

Joplin was a good solution to my problem, but the way it stored its data in a lot of very small markdown files made syncing it very slow.

Fortuitiously I stumbled upon a methodology known as org-mode introduced in a GoogleTech Talk by Carsten Dominik (2008).

Carsten Dominik orgmode presentation 2008

I watched this video all the way through and was amazed at what I was witnessing. A plain text file, structured to afford almost magical functionality when viewed in org-mode in Emacs.

It was a dream come true.

I immediately set out to learn how to use this Emacs editor.

The structure of plain text

Emacs

Emacs was a culture shock to begin with. I was used to the more modern text editors. Or should I say more traditionally CUA compliant editors. I’d travelled a long journey through text editors over the years, from Boxer/TKO, HomeSite, EditPlus, Notepad++, SublimeText, Atom, EmEditor to name a few. Some were more customisable than others, but none were truly extensible to what I was seeing inside of Emacs. And it scared the hell out of me. I was once again lost in a world of personal configuration (when you don’t know what is possible), lisp, melpa archives and using org-babel and an org file to contain Emacs configuration itself! In my mind, true wizardry!

I took it steady, and my baby steps into learning what org-mode could do, meant I learnt just enough to get by and still marvel at the org-mode.

Why Emacs? ‘Editor MACroS’

Extensible Text Editor
Functionality extended by many community packages
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) developed by Gnu Foundation
Actively supported and developed since 1976

Org-mode

Orgmode

This powerful text markup allows me to capture everything in structures that are meaningful to me, and in a format that is still human readable and easily converted into other output formats. The collapsing outlining heirarchy is perfect for structuring all sorts of data. I cannot stress just how much org-mode has affected my digital life, it has given me a textual palette with which to paint my most important data into text files with real value under my control.

I am writing this static blog post using org-static-blog.

org-static-blog

I even wrote a presentation on org-mode and used Emacs and org-present to give a talk with it.

org-present

Emacs/Org-mode Resources

The more we capture the more we know.

Org-mode becomes your “exo-cortex”.

“Organise your life in plain text”

Some of the more helpful resources I found invaluable in my journey:

Stumbled into Linux

2020-04-28T12:00:00+01:00

A fortuitous purchase, a fumbled away team expedition

In the heady days of November 2008, on a PSX (the original “original” name for the first Playstation console) gaming mailing list, a fellow gamer posted a link to a coupon for a cheap Dell Inspiron Mini netbook with the accompanying description “8gb solid state with ubuntu for 99 quid”.

I had very little exposure to the Linux world at this point, I was a Windows man. As a boy I was a Commodore Vic-20 and 64 enthusiast. But my adult IT career had kept me locked, ignorant, into the Windows ecosystem.

Now this ’coupon’ was apparently for a netbook at that ridiculously cheap price when you paid full price on an XPS desktop PC. However, this purchasing conditional hadn’t been hard baked into the site yet and so you could make purchase of the netbook WITHOUT purchasing the very expensive accompanying desktop PC.

The actual full retail price for the netbook was around £258.

I managed to secure the purchase for the netbook at the discount price and then promptly reported to the others on the mailing list that “for £99 I’d suffer Ubuntu for an MMO info web surfing machine.. I’ll have to see if it pans out…”

The arrogance of it all.

It was a Dell Mini 9

It was Ubuntu 8 (Hardy Heron).

I had no idea what I was doing.

And I remember staring at Synaptic all befuddled.

I run the system update routine and it ate up most of my SSD space.

I had major issues getting it to connect to my Wifi at the time.

I quite clearly wasn’t ready for this.

My baby steps set me off on a path towards Linux, but I wasn’t ready to embrace what there was and especially not on this hardware. Technically I was a fish out of water. Uncomfortable. Gasping for air and something I could hold onto and understand without having to dig up my technical foundations and start again.

I’m ashamed to say it now, but I spent more time wrestling Windows XP onto a USB key to install it on this Dell Mini than I did exploring the new alien landscapes of Linux world.

Exploring the Linux multi-verse

My inauguration into the world of Linux come later, when the “fear of the unknown” of Ubuntu 8 had left me and the intoxicating curiosity of the linux distro multi-verse had me hooked. I explored the new frontier with wanton abandon, hopping from distro planet to distro planet like a certain starship captain, boldly going.

OpenSUSE had me under it’s spell for a while.

Linux Mint nurtured me with stability for quite some time.

On old hardware the likes of Bodhi, PeppermintOS, Linux Lite, Puppy and AntiX made things fresh again.

Then I found my most reliable and comfortable distro, and I’m writing this, in Emacs, using Org-mode, publishing to my blog on my trusty MX Linux. All the functionality and the speed.

Constant Exploration

My interest in Linux has blossomed over the years into a real passion, more than just the technical side to it, a passion for taking control of my own computing. Understanding, building, configuring the tools to enable me to ENJOY my computing again.

The more you explore, the deeper and more interesting the caverns become.

You find other explorers out there, who are also willing to share their knowledge and they light the darkest most mysterious caverns for you.

From a simple mispriced purchase, all those years ago, to a changed life. This is Linux.

Linux Rocks!

MX Linux

Another Federated Inspiration

2020-04-26T12:00:00+01:00

Mastodon

Mastodon is often a valuable source of interest and inspiration. I am currently very happy, nuzzled into the Linuxrocks.online instance and I follow a number of active folks there and across other instances, usually centered around topics that have become dear to me. Topics like:

1) Linux 2) Free and Open Source SOftware (FOSS) 3) Privacy 4) Security 5) Console and PC Gaming 6) Roguelikes 7) Cyberpunk games and culture 8) Roleplaying games

I have supported interest-based communities on the Internet since I took my first baby steps online back in the late early 90’s. Currently, I curate news items for two fairly niche gaming genre’s namely, (traditional) roguelikes and computer based wargaming.

Join MASTODON Join Linuxrocks Online

(Traditional) Roguelikes

(2020 update: I should add that my ethical issues around privacy and twitter have now become mutually exclusive and led me to make the ascii curious roguelike feed dormant)

I run a “human curated” twitter feed of (traditional) roguelike and roguelike developer news (both established and aspiring devs). My ethical issues with privacy on that platform are constantly being challenged. Running any sort of privacy related tools to safeguard your data, causes a deluge of twitter specific checks and alerts and I’m not sure how long I can keep it up. At some point, I can imagine, protecting your privacy and being on the Twitter platform may become mutually exclusive. My main problem being that the popularity of Twitter means the majority of roguelike news and roguelike developers are present and are very unlikely to make a move to Mastodon.

Nitter is now defunct! Ascii-Curious

Computer based wargaming

(2020 update: I am still an owner of the subreddit and I post news items now and then, but thankfully I am not the sole moderator/provider of content for the community)

I also run a moderated sub-reddit for computer based wargames, where my monitored RSS feeds of niche news sites and youtube channels supply a healthy dose of curated wargaming news, guides and “let’s plays” every day - as well as providing a home for a growing community of computer based wargaming enthusiasts to discuss these games. The Reddit platform, like Twitter, is also likely to infringe privacy and Reddit has a really bad reputation for some of it’s questionable sub-reddit content. It is a problem for me, because I forged these small communities when my knowledge and appreciation for privacy concerns was limited. Moving small niche communities to other platforms is almost a guarentee that they will fragment and die.

Computer Wargames Sub-reddit

SFG (now spelk.online)

My blog site has evolved over the years from a niche enthusiast blog site, where I documented After Action Reports (AAR) of my computer wargaming exploits (basically written accounts of play with accompanying screenshots explaining situations and decisions made) to a gaming journal of sorts with opinion pieces on other topics.

Finally after my “liberation” from the shackles of web content management systems and javascript heavy interfaces, I decided to whittle my blog down to a place where plain and simple information could be presented, without paying any privacy or security cost to myself, the users, or access to the information. This liberation was inspired by a number of key people I’d followed on Mastodon from my early days there. Mastodon has been a great place to be introduced to new ideas and has helped me forge a better way to work and comport myself online.

(was sugarfreegamer.com)

spelk.online

(2021 update: I should also mention that the smallweb or the “smolweb” idea is perfectly encapsulated in the gemini protocol and hence you may be reading this on my gemini site)

The Gemini Project

So here I am, inspired yet again, by a person I follow on Mastodon, to participate in a call to action, to jump start my blog posting again, alongside many others.

Kev Quirk and #100daystooffload

Kev Quirk come up with the idea for #100daystooffload - encouraging a community of others to post their musings in a 100 day window, relaxed, with no pressure and no expectations. As Kev says… “Just. Write.”

Well this post constitutes my 1 of 100.

(2020 update: obviously my days to offload didn’t make it past 5, but I still support the idea, for those with the stamina to blog for 100 consecutive days).

And my recommendation on this day is to follow Kev on Mastodon via the Fosstodon instance

KevQ.uk 100 Days to Offload KevQ at Fosstodon MASTODON

Gopher Clients

2019-04-19T12:00:00+01:00

There are a number of Gopher clients available a number of which can be web browser add-ons to allow you to access gopherspace using your current “window” to the Internet. However, to truly taste the speed and power of Gopher in a Linux terminal, the following are very easy to use.

Lynx

Lynx Browser

You can load a Gopherhole direct from the command line by pointing the browser at the gopher site (the gopher protocol denoted by gopher://).

lynx gopher://sdf.org/users/spelk

You’ll be able to navigate your way through the information links, reading the text files associated or digging deeper into the gopherhole sub-directories.

CGO

CGO is a another terminal based gopher client

CGO works by rendering the Gopher page in the terminal and marking up the links with two character combinations (Vim-like), so traversing the Gopherhole requires less keystrokes than using arrow key navigation as you do in Lynx. Each information file or sub-directory link will only require two key combos to go and render the new content.

cgo gopher://sdf.org:70/users/spelk

Lynx is straightforward to use, in most distribution repositories, but is a little traditional in its method of navigation through the Gopher links.

CGO requires builing from source, if it isn’t in your repo, but is very lightweight and fast, particularly with the two keystroke combo navigation.