he blogger Ruben Schade, who says he’s an “aspiring human” that’s “into retrocomputing”, has had bouts of depression. He was being trolled online. I spoke to him about this in past years and I think it made him feel better. He regularly blogs about his everyday life, not just about Tech (or tech), and he promotes BSD and GNU/Linux.

“I think I’m done with the Raspberry Pi,” he wrote some days ago. I can relate. My wife sold her Raspberry Pi some years ago and I stopped using mine 2 years ago. To me, the main issue was the storage; not the cost of it… but the reliability. Running a Raspberry Pi system on a microSD card is a mistake. Even with a high-reputation card maker, the card would barely last a year. I tried about 4 times. Always the same outcome.

I, like Schade, am done with Raspberry Pi.

his morning I published a short post about cybersecurity in Japan. A friend from Japan had sent that to me.

The work etiquette of Japanese people (or devotion to one’s job) is famous or notorious worldwide. People are willing to die for their country or job or company.

When cybersecurity incidents occur, and it seems like a growing problem in Japan, what would be the mental strain on IT workers?

oday the rain is fairly heavy (at times). It’s good for cleaning outdoors and for the garden (plants), but it also means that going out is reasonably unattractive, undesirable, unpleasant.

So today I’ve decided to stay at home and focus on writing details articles. There’s no lack of topics to cover, only a lack of time.

It seems like some of my recent articles “triggered” a reaction. That reaction was counterproductive as it gave away some finer details, which help our legal strategy.

Social control media compels people to act impulsively and post short, dumb, self-harming things.

he second month of 2022 is – or was – when I finally quit all social control media. I had already stopped engaging or interacting much in it (2 years earlier), but I still posted to it and checked every reply.

No more.

As an associate has put it to me: “There’s probably a public health aspect to social control media when considered at scale. The stress and hate has to be extracting a physical cost on the overall health of the population. There are too many otherwise smart people who participate in it and are thus exploited yet seem to think that they alone in the whole world are immune to it. It’s sad to witness as people succumb to it, even from an online distance.”

Looking back, my time without social control media is the same as the full-scale Ukraine invasion.

I don’t want to have anything to do with weaponised ‘platforms’.

oday I am just 66 days away from the uptime of my laptop being 3 full years:

05:18:23 up 1029 days, 20:30, 3 users

It is so much better than my prior records. I owe that partly to a reliable power grid.

The power grid wasn’t always this reliable. Before we lived next to a large stadium we had some occasional and sometimes long outages. The issue wasn’t always upstream; sometimes there was as issue in the building itself; more than 20 years ago, as a postdoc student, some power outages (repeated) put at risk people’s electronic appliances. The building managers encouraged people to purchase a UPS just for that.

People tend to take things for granted if they work all the time.

he skeleton in cow’s skin is lying today. He is chopping off context from a sentence to change the meaning told regarding British law while he’s hiding in America. As a friend put it, “is that fraud or is it perjury or is it contempt of court?”

We’ll soon cover examples wherein the party alleging contempt of court is itself regularly (and many times) in contempt of court.

It relies on us not having the financial means to hold them accountable for contempt of court.

Nobody is above the law, not even law firms.

think that this Halloween we’ll be a bit busy, as there are two deadlines for us to meet around that time.

Halloween is about scare and fright. Some people try to scare us.

In practice, however, they keep us busy and that’s about it.

Next month we celebrate 20 years of Techrights. Nothing will disrupt this.

recently noticed that Peanut returned, though he’s older now and no longer looks like a kid. Peanut was introduced as “adopted” when Durian (Durduron) showed up and last night Durian stayed here until about 6:40PM when it gets rather dark.

Durian is no longer a youngster; the food we gave him and the training I gave him (e.g. how to stand stable on the door knob) make him increasingly indistinguishable from the adults.

Unlike him, Peanut developed little or not much in terms of size.

Birds that trust humans are bound to benefit. Just don’t trust evil humans.

t’s sunny again, but very cold (about 5 degrees this morning). Today we’ll go out a number of times, taking advantage of the good weather.

Yesterday’s “Litigation Update” seems to have struck a nerve. Good. It means it was effective.

We now have more than a fortnight to put forth some input to the judge, who said Garrett’s case was a waste of the court’s money.

azy Panda Pan Asian is still open! Phew.

The other week Rianne was a bit startled by what seemed to be a shut down local eatery, where we had brought family members and where we often celebrated special occasions.

Upon closer look, it was only closed for that day, as usual.

We don’t eat “out” all that often (taking out food from home is another matter). When we do, we’re loyalists who stick to what we know to be reliably good.

Sadly, many restaurants shut down in recent years. We’ve lost track.