Russia and Ukraine

Now that Russia is actually invading Ukraine, thoughts about what both sides could have been doing to de-escalate the situation and avoid war become irrelevant. It’s a clear case of a large country bullying a smaller one, and the Russian leader deserves to be reviled. There was a lot of nonsense spoken about how such military intervention and aggression is no longer possible in the 21st century, and that the build up we were seeing was “actually the war”. Subtlety of that sort doesn’t exist in Putin’s world; people were forgetting his long record. I also feel incredulous at wars and military campaigns. I feel like that every time Israel embarks on its periodical campaigns against Gaza. But it is dangerous to project one’s personal value system and think that leaders and nations share it. They don’t. It’s the same group violence we have known for 10,000 years, using the technological means and systems of the current era. It isn’t likely ever to stop, just to adopt new forms.

The question is now what the world needs to do now. I’m stumped. I will wait to see what develops.

Diary and links

2022-02-02 22:22 – Wow that’s quite a time and date! Not intentional, I swear. Today was also my brother’s birthday, and the day my eldest son moved to his new house. Our own house suddenly got bigger since they were moving out from the part that we divided off to rent out. I think we’re done with renting, so we’ll have a couple of guest rooms.

Org-static-blog

I was messing around with the settings this morning. Bechtold added javascript and CSS especially for math and I don’t need that. I also added a no index, no robots meta tag. But really this is a nice blogging program. For now I am hosting it on Fastmail’s server. They are fine for static blogs like this. They also have a reasonable option for photo albums and D put her MBSR recordings there for her mindfulness students. Fastmail wrote this morning to say they will shortly be closing down FTP access, but I have started to use webdav from Thunar file manager. (Thunar is the file manager that comes with XFCE desktop environment. That’s the default for MX Linux.)

Triangle speaker

I have set it up to stream from an old phone. Somehow it’s hard to get the connection set up each time when I keep changing it. Old phones and tablets actually have various uses. Some people use them as alarm clocks or wall clocks. Tablets make nice photo screens. I bet there’s a lot more that can be done with them. I was checking a while back if it isn’t possible to use them to create web servers.

Keyboard engraving

There’s one place I know near Tel Aviv that engraves keyboards. They can engrave them in practically any language. Tomorrow I need to add Arabic to a couple of laptops that already have Hebrew and US English. Not cheap, at 170 shekels each, but a lot better than putting cheap stickers over the keys of a new laptop.

Amnesty’s report

I wrote about that yesterday. Today we were talking about it at the office as Samah went for the launch ceremony in Ramallah. From Israel there were just a couple of organizations represented. Samah took her son along and he later told her about the rumpus that had erupted over the report on social media. Israel probably recruited its battalion of social media warriors and Palestinian organizations probably recruit

Wordl

New York Times buys viral game Wordle for seven-figure sum | Games | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/jan/31/wordle-new-york-times-buys

I guess I won’t be playing this anymore. I played a dozen games altogether, winning one game after 2 guesses, 5 after 3 guesses, 5 after 4 guesses, and one after 5 guesses. I never got as far as the 6th line or got knocked out.

Links

Google Fonts lands website privacy fine by German court • The Register https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/31/website_fine_google_fonts_gdpr/

Navidrome https://www.navidrome.org/ FOSS Personal music streamer software Looks interesting.

Belgian civil servants given legal right to disconnect from work https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/31/belgian-civil-servants-given-legal-right-to-disconnect-from-work