Atheist, technopagan and vegan.

➡️ Important thing: If you have your phone set up as a "tap 'yes' on your device" device, remember to disable that in your Google account before you go all in. Once you went to an alternate Android OS, your device will NOT receive this kind of message any more, so make sure you have a few backup options available, like backup codes, a phone number for a text message, or an MFA app on…

A few years ago I bought a new phone. A FairPhone, because I like their business model and how they work hard to keep devices going by making them very repairable. It's a very reliable phone, feels good for me, looks good for me. Works as it should. After installing the DuckDuckGo browser and activating the app snooping option (a VPN which blocks trackers from tracking), I found there are many of those things going on.

I don't use AI. Not knowingly. If something smells like AI, I will step away from it. AI is a lot of A(rtificial) and a lack of I(ntelligence). It's a lot of software crammed together in super large computers running on many cores, gobbling up loads of memory and scavenging enormous amounts of databases. That is not intelligent. That is driving the world's power consumption (and heating of the atmosphere) up enormously. Of course, there…

I finally found the peace of mind, on the first day of my long weekend, to actually record my Theremin playing (using a Roland Boss RC-30 looper). I played "Gymnopedie #1" by Eric Satie. For accompaniment I used a music score from MuseScore. I exported the audio from MuseScore, mixed that with the recording I pulled from the Boss RC-30 using Audacity.

On various sites I post my books. PaulKater.com has the 'decent' ones, in English and some in Dutch. Zjuzdme.org has the naturist fiction ones. All in English. It's fun to know how many books are sold or downloaded (not all books have a price tag, many of them are free on paulkater.com, go check them out if you want). First attempt to keep track was stuffing the numbers into a few MySQL tables. By hand.

4.5MB of data on 62.500 punched cards. 1955. Margaret Hamilton in 1969, standing next to listings of the software she and her MIT team produced for the Apollo project.

Too good not to post here. When atheists attend church weddings...

Neurodivergent. I had to look up what it means. I read about it on the Fediverse quite a lot, so I had to know. According to the Cleveland Clinic (version of 2024-01-31 YYYY-MM-DD): Neurodivergent is a nonmedical term that describes people whose brains develop or work differently for some reason. This means the person has different strengths and struggles from people whose brains develop or work more typically. While some people who are neurodivergent have…

I've been messing with command line website creation tools. Specifically with HUGO and 11TY. Downer for me: I couldn't get it to work. After following the install instructions from the Hugo site, the sample didn't work. After discovering there was (and is) an error on it, I couldn't get it to work either. I have no idea why not, but that failed gloriously, so exit Hugo. Bummer: the default creates subdirectories with the name of…

"Before I was six years old, my grandparents and my mother had taught me that if all the green things that grow were taken from the earth, there could be no life. If all the four-legged creatures were taken from the earth, there could be no life. If all the winged creatures were taken from the earth, there could be no life. If all our relatives who crawl and swim and live within the earth…