The Zone

Blog

  • What software freedom means today

    A computer is the equivalent of a bicycle for the mind.
    (Steve Jobs, 1990)

    The computer, used as a creative tool, is a wonderful thing, and the bicycle is an apt metaphor: It lets you go further, under your own power, than you otherwise could, and takes you places that you couldn’t have reached without it. The freedom to use, study, share, and improve the software on that computer is essential for those trips into the unknown. If you couldn’t make your own tools, you would merely be playing within a predefined area, not exploring anything new.

    For this reason, Free Software arguably is what makes computing exciting. In particular, it was the key ingredient of the rise of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, and all the inventions and developments connected with it.

    I’m here to argue that software freedom is still essential — but also that it isn’t enough, and hasn’t been enough for at least 20 years.

    That’s because of some major developments:

    • AWS EC2 was launched in 2006. Now instead of a computer that sat on your desk or in your rack, there was “compute” that you could simply rent whenever you needed it. AWS EC2 monetized computation in a new way.
    • In 2007, Apple launched the iPhone, and a million smartphones followed. Technically, they are computers. In practice, they are so locked down that they don’t function as explorative, creative tools in the same way that the personal computers before them did. Instead of bicyles for the mind, they are at best described as a kickboard, or perhaps a shopping trolley.
    • Around the same time began the rise of the walled gardens. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and all the others, from WhatsApp through TikTok, replaced the open web with closed systems, in order to monetize your relationships.

    Then things quieted down a bit, perhaps because everyone was busy wit blockchains. The next big change was the appearance of LLMs for public use. ChatGPT launched in 2022, starting the effort to monetize our thinking, let our skills atrophy, and then rent them back to us.

    Radical monopolies

    LLMs are a naked grab for political power. The investors behind the “AI” companies, with Peter Thiel as a sort of dark emperor figure at their center, are not shy about admitting that they’re trying to build a technocratic dictatorship; and LLMs are their tools.

    In 1973, Ivan Illich described the concept of “radical monopolies”: a technology that is omnipresent, so that you can’t meaningfully participate in society without using it. There may well be many suppliers of that technology, so it’s not a monopoly in the strict economic sense. But its dominance means that everyone is forced to do things a certain way.

    Cars are an example of such a radical monopoly. If riding a bicycle in your city is stressful and dangerous, that’s because the city was designed and built for cars. You’re not forced to own a car; but if you don’t, some things – like visiting your parents in the countryside – become difficult, expensive, or even impossible.

    LLMs are just such a radical monopoly. They are being integrated into everything, and it will become increasingly hard to avoid them, especially if you have a job in tech that you’d like to keep. So not only will the money keep flowing towards Thiel and Musk and Andreesen and their ilk. In fact, we are currently in the process of rearchitecting our society to put their LLMs right at its heart, giving them unthinkable amounts of authority over what is possible and, ultimately, imagineable.

    The technology is incidental. It just has to work good enough, most of the time. Even the money is just a means to an end; and that end is power.

    Tools for conviviality

    In the same essay from 1973, Illich also introduced the concept of “tools for conviviality”. For Illich, society-wide systems like health or education are “tools”. These tools can be designed in one of two ways: If they are conceived as “industrial” tools, they maximize productivity and drive individualism. In other words, they are pulling society apart. Conversely, “convivial” tools let people realize their individual freedom, in interdependence with others. We do things our own way, but we rely on cooperation. We build upon the things that others have built before us.

    Free Software, of course, is an approach that lets us shape our IT landscape, and the internet in particular (Illich would probably just consider this entire sphere a “tool”), in a more convivial fashion. We rely on the programs others have written, and we share the ones we write ourselves. We help each other. We do things our own way; but we invite cooperation.

    Beyond software freedom

    The effort of reshaping society to be more convivial (or maybe just to keep the existing convivial aspects from being eradicated) is a political project. Many of the people involved may not see it that way, but that doesn’t change the nature of the work. We’re dealing with the question of who gets to make decisions about the technology we use. That is a question of who holds power; and the discourse about how power should be distributed is what we call politics.

    But the site of that question is no longer the computer on our desk, and hasn’t been for two decades at least. Cloud computing, locked devices, walled gardens and monopolized knowledge all add additional layers of complexity. The fight for a convivial society needs to happen on and across all of those layers, at once.

    We must recognize that a narrow conception of software freedom — the traditional “use, study, share, improve” — is not enough. It’s a necessary condition for convivial technology, but not a sufficient one. Even 40 years after the principles of software freedom were formulated, we all depend on proprietary, coercive services to live our daily lives, whether it’s taking the train, making a bank transaction, having a job or a social life.

    We must also realize that software “freedom” is something of a misnomer. To avail yourself of this freedom, you need highly specialized skills and years of training. That is something that rather few people have access to. And while it’s possible in principle to teach yourself the necessary skills to make meaningful changes to software, that’s not a realistic goal for someone who may already be holding down two jobs, or who may be raising a family, or who may have a disability that takes up a lot of time and energy.

    Software “freedom”, in practice, isn’t for everyone. And freedoms that not everyone can enjoy are not actually freedoms. These things are called “privileges”.

    Free Software for a convivial society

    This does not mean that software freedom is without value; quite the opposite. But by itself, it’s far too narrow to be a goal worth striving for. As advocates, we need to understand this.

    To actually create a better society, we need to collaborate closely with many other people who have similar goals, but work with different fields and methods. Our most effective contribution is to let people experience that they can have agency over the technology they use.

    “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders.
    Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
    (Antoine de Saint-Exupèry)

    Helping someone to install Linux on their computer, showing them that this is a thing they can do? That’s giving them agency. Help them replace a proprietary, coercive service with a more freedom-oriented alternative. Solve a problem they’re having using Free Software. Show them that it’s possible to help yourself, and that they are capable of learning the necessary skills. That will allow them to find their own path.

    In practice, this means taking the conversation about software freedom, and about creating a better society, beyond activist spaces. It means strengthening our involvement in all the other spheres of life, and finding people where they are.

    If we want to be effective, we also need to learn to read power. When we move into a new setting or group, we need to make an effort to understand how decisions happen there, and how we might influence them. In the end, the magic ingredient is time and persistence. Like in many other areas, 90% of politics is showing up: being there when the decisions are prepared and taken.

  • Family camping

    We spend all our family vacations camping, out of both necessity and preference. Necessity, because we have four kids, and there’s no way we can afford three weeks in high season in a hotel. Preference, because both my wife and I grew up this way.

    We’ve come to view camping as a skill, and that’s what I want to talk about today. When you search YouTube for camping advice, the videos you find fall into two broad categories: Folks telling you how to find the best 100.000€ RV, and folks telling you how to survive in the forest with nothing but a Swiss army knife and a pair of shoelaces.

    Unsurprisingly, neither category is a good fit for how we spend our vacations. Yet I suspect there’s more people like us out there: Rich enough to afford vacations, not rich or boring enough for hotels, and more interested in a simple, relaxing experience than in material comforts. I see some of those families out here on this campsite right now.

    Camping, especially with kids, is a bit of a craft really. Your equipment slowly grows over the course of years, and you build skills. I want to share what we’re doing, and what we’re using, in the hope of helping others (especially families) to have more, and more relaxing, times together.

    Accomodation

    Having four kids, in an environment where everything is designed for families with two or three children at most, means we often need to go a bit bigger than others. As the core of our camping setup, we’re using a Trigano Odyssee folding caravan. It’s a smallish trailer that we hitch to our car, and that folds open into a comfortable tent for four people — if need be, it can sleep up to eight, though I wouldn’t advise trying that. Ours is from the late 90s, and cost us 1200€ when we bought it in 2012, from the sort of people who call the police on parking offenders, so it was in great shape. It’s starting to show its age though.

    These days, it’s where us parents and the two younger kids sleep. The two older kids get a separate 3 person tent to themselves. In addition, we have a shelter (3.5 x 3.5m) for rain protection, and a large tarp (4x5m or something) for shade.

    All this gives us plenty of room for sleeping and luggage. It’s perfect as long as the weather is good. On rainy days, we can retreat to the tents and the shelter; the tarp can’t take very much wind, and sometimes needs to be hauled in.

    The trailer also is where we store our camping tables and chairs. When we set up, they go under the tarp or in the shelter, depending on the weather.

    Cooking & eating

    We used to have a foldable kitchen cabinet that we would set up inside the shelter, with a two-flame gas stove. But last summer, I finally got round to building a shelf for the trunk of our van (a Renault Trafic). It’s designed for Euro containers, and has space for the stove, too. This makes organizing the kitchen a lot easier.

    So we cook in the back of the car, using a gas bottle stood next to it. Supplies and kitchen gear are stored in the Euro containers. Meals tend to be simple. Cooking and cleaning duties are distributed among the fanily members in pairs, on a rotating basis. These days, all of the kids are old enough to handle all of the tasks: Cooking, washing dishes, shopping.

    A couple of years ago we invested in a proper cooler, and it’s doing a great job.

    Entertainment

    There’s a beach just 50m away. In the trailer, we have various geological strata of toys and gameas for different age ranges. We play board and card games together.

    We always carry a large inflatable canoe, a Gumotex Scout. Often, we take an inflatable standup paddle board along as well. Since we’re a kayaking family, there might be some additional boats, but that’s just us.

    Oh, and we have at least three hammocks strung up, if at all possible. The family consensus is that we’re here to chill. Whenever someone gets itchy feet — usually it’s me — they can just devise some activity, and head out on their own. For example, I love hiking, or going on overnight kayaking trips. The rest of the family, not so much.

    Advantages and limitations

    This setup is good for stationary vacations in sunny climes. Pick a nice spot, drive there, set up, and stay for 2-3 weeks. It certainly wouldn’t work well for families who would like to move somewhere else every few days. We’ve actually spent our vacations in the same campsite for the past decade.

    OK, it does lack novelty. But when we arrive, the kids jump out of the car and start scouting to see whether our favorite spots are available. They check whether their favorite greengrocer is working, and which of our acquaintances are there. There’s hardly any stress. Everyone knows what to expect, and it works for us.

    Of course, we depend on drinking water and power being available. Toilets and showers are nice, too. But that’s true for pretty much any place where you plan to spend significant time, especially with kids. We’re set up for campsites, not for the wilderness.

    Our way of camping is far from basic, but lacks various things that I see our neighbors use: air conditioning (heat waves are a problem), TV, and so forth. We don’t miss any of it.

    Conclusion

    This setup, built over the years with growing experience, works really well for us. We constantly find details to improve; but the key components are pretty much fixed.

    No doubt things will change when the kids grow older, and our vacation team dwindles in number. That’s fine, we’ll adapt. But for now, we’re happy with what we have. It’s enough.

  • Daily practice (kayaking edition)

    I’ve discovered the benefits of daily practice. Quite possibly as the last
    human being on Earth, I’ve found out that doing something every day makes you
    get better at it.

    A few weeks ago, I took a course to learn some basics of freestyle kayaking. At
    the moment, I’m not really interested in learning how to run more difficult
    whitewater sections. Instead, I want to do more fun stuff on the bits of river
    where I already feel comfortable. In my case, “fun stuff” means getting my boat
    vertical, pirouetting on the stern, sliding along rocks, and jumping over them.
    (Short plug: the kayak school, Outdoordirekt is excellent. Great concept, run by a woman, LGBTQ+ friendly. If you’re in or near Germany and want to learn kayaking, or improve your skills, they’re a great choice.)

    Now I’m on a two-week camping vacation on the beach, with my family. The kids
    are no longer little, and even though there’s four of them, it’s a very chill
    affair. For the first time in literal decades, I can actually decide pretty
    freely what I want to do with my day. In fairness, the answers I find tend to
    include the words “hammock” and “cold beer” quite frequently.

    But I brought a little boat along. It’s a Dagger Centrifuge –
    something called a “rodeo boat” when it came out in the mid-2000s. It’s longer
    than today’s playboats, but its flat front and stern mean that it performs well
    beyond just freestyle waves. You can actually paddle this down a river. The
    trade-off is that it’s not quite as easy to get vertical, because the ends have
    air in them, and therefore like to float.

    Most days during this vacation, I’ve been taking the little boat out for
    flatwater practice: Freestyle moves that don’t rely on current to push the
    boat, only on the paddler’s technique. It’s honestly a bit frustrating: I know,
    in theory, how most of this stuff should work. But in practice, getting all the
    little details riight turns out to be supremely difficult. For these moves, you
    need exact, sub-second timing on where you put your weight, how you rotate your
    body, where you put your paddle and where you move it, and how you manage the
    boat’s edges. Get any of these factors wrong, and the move won’t work.
    Maddeningly, a lot of the details must be executed exactly opposite to what
    I’ve been taught as “proper whitewater technique” for a decade.

    Despite the occasional frustration, I’ve now gone out on the water almost every
    day for a week, and some things are actually starting to work! I’ve learned to
    do Lean Cleans – rotating the boat in a flat circle, without using the paddle! This is an
    important foundation for other freestyle techniques. My stern squirts are finally
    beginning to work, though I have yet to succeed at turning them into a stern
    stall (ie. not just getting the bow up in the air, but actually holding the
    boat vertical).

    Of course, the technique I’m actually improving most is my roll. A lot of
    times, the move fails, and I just tip over. But then, a kayaker can never have
    too much rolling practice. All those freestyle moves require significant core
    strength, especially if you have to compensate for less-than-perfect execution;
    so I get a free core workout with my kayak sessions!

    My progress isn’t rapid by any means. I keep having to dial back when
    practicing a move, focusing on an easier version or a foundational element
    first, before trying again to string all the little bits together. I get
    frustrated. When I’m tired, I notice that the moves work significantly less
    well than at the beginning of the session.

    And yet. Every day, something works a little better. The Lean Cleans, a
    challenge at the beginning, have become almost effortless. On the stern
    squirts, I can now focus on the finer details, instead of just struggling with
    the basics. Sometimes I try a new move, and notice the learning curve ahead.

    I’m finally realizing that that learning curve is actually the point.
    Everyone thinks the goal is to execute the move I want, perfectly, whenever I
    want to; hell, I certainly thought so. But it just became clear to me that I’m
    out on clear, turquoise water, in a beautiful corner of the world, with people
    I love, and without any pressure. I’m doing something that I’m passionate
    about, with no conceivable profit motive — exclusively for the fun of it! (OK,
    some of the toddlers at the beach think I’m pretty cool.)

    Call me silly, but I feel like I’ve just invented the practice of having fun.

  • Configuring Debian post-update

    Debian Stable has been my go-to distro for several years now. If I dislike anything about it, it’s the frequent updates 😉 Jokes aside, it’s a distro that matches my needs, and — more importantly — that I’ve gotten used to.

    Besides a couple of laptops for myself, I’m also administering a few additional machines for my kids. Every now and then, I end up doing a fresh install for one reason or another. It’s always a bit of work.

    This cries out for automation. So I finally sat down with an AI tool1 and had it build a script to take care of the usual post-install steps.

    This script does the following things:

    1. Run a system update (apt update, apt upgrade)
    2. Enable non-free repos
    3. Download and install the iwlwifi firmware package. I typically buy used ThinkPads, and this gets the wifi going.
    4. Install proprietary codecs, so that the user can watch Netflix
    5. Set up a weekly cron job to clean out logs and such. Otherwise Debian tends to slowly fill up its hard drive.
    6. Set permissions for ssh, so that the user can use it
    7. [optional] Configure a few custom keyboard settings for Gnome. Specifically, make CapsLock an additional Ctrl key; ensure that both German and US keyboard layouts are available, and use Win+Space to switch between them; and set a keyboard shortcut so that I can open a terminal by pressing Ctrl+PgUp.

    If you feel that this sort of thing might be helpful, here’s the script. Download the zip file, unzip it, run chmod +x debian_setup.sh, and then run sudo ./debian_setup.sh . That should pretty much do it.

    If something doesn’t work as desired, please let me know.

    1. Justification: I can’t code, and based on 20 years of unsuccessfully trying to write shell scripts, I can confidently say that I would never have gotten this to work by myself. ↩︎

    setup_debianDownload

  • Read: Captains of the Sands

    Last night I finished re-reading one of my favorite books from my youth: Captains of the Sands (Capitães da Areia), by Jorge Amado. Published in 1937 in Brazil, the story follows a gang of street children in Salvador de Bahia. The boys sleep in an abandoned storehouse, and live by stealing and begging.

    I found the book extremely gripping now, just as I did when I was young. Amado’s perspective relentlessly stays with his protagonists. The rich people and the police are sometimes antagonists, but more often just the background for the children’s daily fight to stay alive.

    Amado’s storytelling is raw and unflinching. He doesn’t even try to pretend that his protagonists are perfect. These are children growing up in extreme poverty, with no protections. The police brutalize them whenever they get the chance. The kids have a moral framework to match. There’s a lot of routine violence, including rape, on the part of the protagonists.

    The language reflects the deep-seated racism of Brazilian society. For the most part, this strikes me as simply descriptive: In 1930s Brazil, the color of your skin determined very much how others saw you — and that is still the case almost everywhere today. A lot of the kids, and of the adults that sometimes help them, are Black. Still, Pedro Bala, the leader of the gang and the book’s main character, is a white kid with blonde hair.

    A couple of strong female figures notwithstanding, there’s a lot of routine misogyny, too, again reflecting the social status of women at the time. The boys see young girls mostly as sex objects. Yet the female sex workers among the secondary characters get equal billing and full agency.

    It’s fair to say that most of the ugliness in the novel stems from the society it describes, not from its characters. The writing is often beautiful, though sometimes a bit clumsy. The editing is somewhat rough, particularly towards the end, where formulaic repetitions creep in.

    If you can get past these very real weaknesses, the book is quite powerful. The authorities at the time certainly thought so: In 1937, the Brazilian military publicly burned over 800 copies of the book, and put Amado in prison as a communist agitator. He later went on to become one of Brazil’s most celebrated authors.

  • Upgrade your reading list with this one weird trick

    A couple of years back on the Fedi, I came across a few people discussing how white men were hogging all the attention in literature. Though the point was expressed a little more subtly than that, someone came up with an interesting challenge:

    For a while, try to read only books that aren’t written by white men.

    Back then, I wasn’t getting much time for reading, and felt a bit bored with my usual fare. The idea stuck with me. I remembered how much I had enjoyed Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James not too long ago, a Black author from Jamaica. How different that that book had felt – how much more alive. Reading it, I could feel the heat of a mythical Africa on my face, full of demons, and of and heroes with tall tales.

    So I figured that I could try my luck again. Through a library, I got hold of Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata from Japan. A woman recoils at the perspective of a typical lifestyle, and opts to pass her life working in a convenience store, where there is a rule for everything, and every day is predictable.

    A little later, I happened upon My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite. Short, punchy, and very smart, this was excellent reading, despite the heavy themes.

    Somewhere around this time, I came across Nnedi Okorafor, again on the Fediverse. A Nigerian-American author who defines her perspective as Africanfuturism, she writes mainly SciFi. Having read a fair number of the classics of the genre, her novella Binti felt incredibly refreshing. Her most recent novel Death of the Author is masterful. (Even so, it doesn’t have a Wikipedia page? What gives?)

    The latest adventure was Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga. The Zimbabwean author published this incisive, powerful novel in 1988, and I only learned about it recently. “I was not sorry when my brother died” is the opening sentence; and the pressure on the reader never really lets up as the narrator recounts what it was like being a teenage girl in a patriarchal and deeply racist Zimbabwe under colonialism. A book, hard and sharp-edged like a piece of crystal.

    Sometimes I don’t feel like challenging myself. Then I give myself a break and read some Terry Pratchett. Or I let Thomas Pynchon take me on a head trip with one of his classics. (They made Vineland into an excellent movie, One Battle After Another. Both very enjoyable, in slightly different ways.) But eventually, I feel like I need to come up for air. And then, the first direction I look to is south, towards Africa’s excellent female authors, who are just waiting for me to discover them.

    Note to the sceptically inclined

    If, having read all this, you feel like shouting “identity politics”, then yes, please go ahead. I’m not interested in stopping you from being wrong. Just know that there are so many brilliant, sparkling identities out there. Maybe go read a book.

  • You’re more relaxed

    You’re more relaxed

    “You’re more relaxed”, says my wife.

    And she’s right. I am!

    I like my work, and I work hard. It’s just a corporate job, but I enjoy it. I also try to be a good partner, and a good dad. That means co-running the household together with my wife, doing whatever needs to get done. It means helping the kids with their homework and their troubles, listening to them, and just spending time together.

    At some point, 24 hours in the day were no longer enough. When the job had eaten its share, I would spend any energy I had left on the kids, and simultaneously try to put the house in order.

    I did get time for hobbies every now and then. But frequently I would have a day of whitewater kayaking planned, only to wake up and notice that I really had no juice left, and also a bunch of urgent things at home that needed taking care of. I noticed how I was never quite refreshed after a weekend. I saw a couple of colleagues heading into burnout, and coming back after months, taking on reduced responsibilities.

    Some years ago I read a newspaper article from a middle aged dad like myself. He described how he had slowly given up on all the things that gave him joy. How he was working hard to provide for his family, to be available and supportive; but how he felt himself wearing thin. He called this mode of existence the “dad diesel”, running steadily and reliably, without much excitement – until it would break down one day.

    When we came back from Christmas break in January, our manager announced that one of my teammates would be working a 4-day week for twelve months. This is a possibility the company offers, so people can try out whether this schedule suits them. Immediately I knew that I wanted this, too. So I looked up the part-time trial scheme, scheduled a conversation with my manager, filled out a few forms, and waited a bit .

    Then in March, my four-day week started. Fridays off. And it’s wonderful.

    There’s more time to get my housework and parenting done, and then do things for myself. On one of the first free Fridays, I hopped on a train in the morning, rode into the mountains, and took an all-day hike. It felt incredible.

    But there’s more to it than just having more time. Going part-time changed the way I look at work. I’ve always been a somewhat competitive person. I want to achieve things. I want to learn and grow, and get recognition. (I’ve since realized that I was probably overvaluing the recognition thing, like so many people do.) I’ve done reasonably well, mainly by working hard. In other words: I was a happy participant in the corporate ratrace.

    Reducing my working hours meant bailing out of that game. If I only work four days, it makes no sense to try and out-work those I think I’m competing with. Instead, I now feel that I’m working to live. I still like my job, and find it meaningful. But I don’t think about work so much anymore. It’s no longer the main part of my life.

    For me, this is enormously liberating. I hardly ever feel really stressed now. Even when things get hectic at work – and they do -, I’m usually quite chill. It’s just work, nothing personal. To some, this might have always been obvious. To me, it was a revelation.

    At the same time, my wife and kids notice that I’m much more available and attentive. There’s less arguing in our house now, and more quiet, flowing conversations. The pressure is off.

    All this is easily worth the 20% of my salary that I’m forgoing. We’re fortunate to have enough money to get by without worrying much. The old car will need to live a bit longer, but nobody minds. The kids are getting older, and if they want money for fancy clothes or other stuff, they can go get a job. We weren’t vacationing in the Caribbean before, and camping at the beach in Croatia will continue to do fine for us.

    Soon the time will come for me to decide whether I want to make that four-day week permanent. I’ve been thinking, and the answer is yes.

  • Sea kayaking in Croatia

    Our summer vacations in Croatia typically consist of camping on one of the country’s beautiful islands, while doing as little as possible.

    But I got a sea kayak last year, and this is a great area for it. Clear turquoise water, mostly calm seas, lots of little beaches everywhere. Just perfect. So, once I felt I’d gotten enough rest and wanted some action, I took the kayak for a little overnight trip.

    View of the sea, shot over the bow of a green sea kayak

    I’m still gathering experience with this sort of thing. Wanting to travel as light as possible, I took just the basics:

    • a light sleeping bag
    • a hammock (the ground around here tends towards the spiky, and it’s hard to find a level patch
    • bottled water for two days, six liters in total
    • camping stove
    • food: instant ramen, instant porridge, instant coffee, and a few muesli bars
    • a shirt, plus a down jacket just in case

    I had to wait a few days for the right combination of stable weather and the absence of social events. When the window came, I started in the afternoon, when the heat had let off a little. Paddled along the coast for three hours. I’m a fairly novice sea kayaker, but I’ve had my butt kicked by enough whitewater rivers to deeply respect the water. So I wore a PFD (life jacket), and stuck close to land for the most part. I should probably take a few trips with more experienced paddlers to learn their ways…

    There were plenty of little pleasure boats out there, but they left me alone. At a few points along the way, when rounding a cape, the wind and wave situation changed. That sometimes felt stressful, even though I certainly wasn’t in danger of flipping. Still, it was a bit of a mental challenge. (I can roll a kayak fine, but I’d prefer not to test this in open water with a boat filled with luggage.)

    In a low forest, looking out toward the sea

    I saw quite a few animals. Glistening swarms of sardines jumping. Various seagulls and other birds. A flying fish – something I’d never seen before. And, as the high point, dolphins!

    One dolphin surfaced maybe 20 meters from my boat. I noticed it when it made a noise that frankly sounded a bit rude. It swam in parallel with me for a minute or two, surfacing periodically and breathing. Amazing! Later, I saw some more dolphins, jumping and playing. They were quite far away though, at least 500 meters.

    Around 18:30, the wind picked up a bit, and I was on a more exposed part of the coastline. I still had a bit of a way to my intended night spot. But the wind and the waves were pushing me towards the shore, which was lined with rows of very pointy rocks. Also, I was getting tired.

    So I decided to play it safe, and pulled into the first little bay that presented itself. It turned out to be a good choice! It was lonely, and behind the immediate beach, there was a little depression. So I landed, hid the boat in the depression, and looked for a place to discreetly string up my hammock.

    Sunset over a rocky beach

    Why the secrecy? Well, this is a touristy area, and the Croatians have wisely decided to ban wild camping. So I tried to avoid being seen, but a few boats did pass by that probably noticed me.

    A Trangia camping stove, with chocolate porridge bubbling in the pot

    I made my dinner, and watched the sunset on the beach. It was a clear night, and the stars were beautiful! Eventually, I retired to my hammock.

    The night was a bit shit. I was woken up around 2am by a motor boat that was passing very slowly, shining a questioning light in my direction. Either one of the boats from earlier had ratted me out, or it was a routine inspection. In either case, I felt a little paranoid. The boat left eventually, though — only to come back two hours later.

    Hammocks aren’t great for sleeping in, and it was getting cold by now. Add the excitement of hiding from the rangers, and the whole affair wasn’t very restful. In the end, I put on my down jacket and crawled back into the sleeping bag for another couple of hours.

    A sleeping bag lying on the ground, underneath a ripped hammock

    Around 7am I was debating whether to get up, or try to sleep some more, when my hammock made the decision for me, and simply ripped apart under me, lowering me gently to the ground. So I got up, had a little swim, and made breakfast.

    Striking camp was a quick process. Of course, I made sure to take all my trash, and leave no trace behind. Then I got into my boat, and went back the way I had come.

    The night took its toll, and I had to take a break every hour or so, seeing a few more lovely beaches. When I arrived home, I dropped into the family hammock, and enjoyed some well-deserved rest.

  • Installing Debian 11 from scratch

    Pre-scriptum

    I wrote this post a while back. Debian has progressed, and so has my understanding. Debian 13 “Trixie” has just been released.

    Still, there’s some info in this post on setting up non-free audio/video stuff. It’s useful to me, so I’m reposting it.

    Intro

    So my ThinkPad just borked itself. It was running Ubuntu LTS. I got tired of Ubuntu’s faffing about with ads in the terminal, pushing private data to Amazon, and general asshattery. From a previous install I knew that installing Debian wasn’t as difficult as I recalled from the before times, so I went with that.

    Unless otherwise stated, everything here happens in the terminal. Don’t be afraid, it’ll be ok. Just open a terminal.

    The default on Debian 11 would be gnome-terminal.

    Moving your data onto your freshly installed machine

    You had backups, right? Before we do anything else, take that hard drive (or whatever) with your old data on it, connect it to your computer, and start moving the files over.

    The fiddly stuff below will take a while, so let’s make good use of the time.

    Getting up to date

    While your data is being copied over, let’s get the OS up-to-date. Who knows how long that install ISO has been lying around there.

    In your terminal, become root:

        su
    (Enter root password)

    And run the update commands:

        apt-get update
    apt-get upgrade

    Enable sudo

    UPDATE: You can skip this step if you’re smart during the installer stage.

    It works like this:

    When the installer prompts you to set a password for the root user, leave the field blank. In the next screen, the installer will then let you create your own user. Sudo will be enabled, and your user will have sudo privileges.

    Thanks @neil!

    Or just keep doing it the hard way

    So far, so good. On to more interesting things. We want to install the sudo command, because… I’m used to it, and I hate having to change my habits. That’s a perfectly cromulent reason.

    Install the sudo package:

        apt-get install sudo

    Now we have to amend the PATH variable in our bash settings, because otherwise we won’t find the command we need. (No idea why this is necessary. Whoever set things up this way: I have words to say to you.)

        export PATH="$/usr/sbin:$PATH"

    Now close your terminal, and open it again – just to make sure the new path is loaded. Become root again:

        su
    (Enter root password)

    Then add the user account in which you need to use the sudo privileges: 

        adduser yourusername sudo

    If the damn box still says “adduser: command not found”, just do

        /usr/sbin/adduser yourusername sudo

    I swear, it’s there. Debian just doesn’t want you to know. Whatever.

    Doing the evil thing: Add contrib and non-free repos

    While I don’t want to recommend running non-free software, it can be rather practical for some things. Like getting your wifi working, if you’ve ended up with one of the many machines where that requires proprietary drivers.

    So let’s add some package repositories! In your terminal, do

        nano /etc/apt/sources.list

    and after each “main” that you see, add

        contrib non-free

    Save and exit with Ctrl-O Ctrl-X, and run

        apt-get update

    Getting wifi to work

    Now with the repos for the dark side enabled, we can install the wifi drivers that at least my ThinkPad needs. You’ll have to figure out which ones are needed for your machine. I do:

        apt-get install firmware-iwlwifi

    Good, that should do it. We’ll see after a reboot.

    More evil proprietary stuff: multimedia codecs, playing DVDs

    The steps in this section come from this page, which was recommended to me by the most excellent Neil Brown. Thanks!

    You’ve done the update / upgrade dance described at the start of this post, right? If not, do it now.

    Then let’s install the libraries that let us play DVDs:

        apt-get install libdvd-pkg

    This will give you one of Debian’s lovely blue config screens that always pop up for the more serious stuff. Not to worry, just select the defaults and run with those.

    At this point, in order for stuff to work I had to close my terminals, start them again, and become root as 

        su -

    Maybe this is about loading the path variable that we modified above. Who knows. Who cares.

    Now download, compile and install libdvdcss. (This sounds way worse than it is. The reason you need to do this at all is the absolute state of global copyright law.)

        dpkg-reconfigure libdvd-pkg

    Another blue config screen, another click on the default, off you go.

    Next, we install the regionset command:

        sudo apt-get install regionset

    and finally, all those juicy codecs:

        apt-get install libavcodec-extra

    If your DVD player refuses to play your discs, use the regionset command to set your machine’s DVD region code to whatever the DVD demands. The region codes are listed on the regionset man page. (1 is for North America, 2 is for EMEA / South Africa / Japan, etc. I don’t make the rules.)

    You’ll also want some software to, well, actually play those DVDs:

        apt-get install vlc

    Now it works for me! I tested it with one of those top TERF wizard kid movies that I happened to have lying around.

    Making CapsLock an additional Ctrl

    The Ctrl key is in the wrong place on modern standard keyboards. (No, I’m not interested in your views on this point.) Let’s fix that.

    While this has to be one of the most popular modifications to the keyboard layout, it has apparently
    been less than straightforward historically.

    Fortunately, things are better now. Open the gnome-tweaks tool, and you’ll find everything you need under “Keyboard & Mouse” > “Additional layout options”.

    This will require a restart, which by this point is probably advisable anyway, what with all the stuff we’ve been installing and configuring.

    (Optional) Restoring passwordless ssh login

    This use case is a lot more specific than the rest, so feel free to ignore this section.

    I have a managed server that I can ssh into. That’s nice! I’ve set it up so that I can just type “ssh (server shortname) on the console, and I’ll be logged in. This is also very handy for running scripts. Unfortunately, it didn’t work after the Debian install, even though I had restored my old ssh keys from backup.

    The error message read:

        sign_and_send_pubkey: signing failed: agent refused operation

    This turned out to be a permissions problem. I fixed it in the following way (all this happens on my laptop, not on the server):


    1. Go to your home directory:


      cd ~


    2. Set the correct permissions for the .ssh directory:


      chown 700 .ssh


    3. Go into the .ssh directory:


      cd .ssh


    4. Make sure the permissions for your ssh key files are set as they should be, like so:


      chown 600 id_rsa
      chown 644 id_rsa.pub


    5. Add your private key to the OpenSSH authentication agent:


      ssh-add

    That’s it. Now everything should work as before.

    Done. I think.

    With this, we should have most of the boxes ticked. Of course you’ll want to install more stuff as needed.

    Enjoy your new Debian system!

  • If corporations can have rights, so can nature

    If corporations can have rights, so can nature

    Good books entertain and inform. Great books bust open your worldview and leave you with a different, much broader way of seeing things.

    “Is a river alive?” by Robert Mcfarlane is one such great book. From the cloud forests of Ecuador through the violated rivers of India to a wild stream in Quebec, the author makes a persuasive case for giving legal personhood, not just to rivers, but to forests and mountains too.

    Photo by beadwoman on Flickr. CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0

    In western society, we are used to treating nature as an asset — as money in the bank. A mountain is granite or coal to be mined. There’s oil to be drilled out from under the sea. The river’s flow is just waiting to be turned into electricity. We use up nature, and discard the remains. We give legal personhood to the corporations that do all these things. In many places, they have more rights than people do.

    Indigenous people around the world have always seen nature as alive, and have treated it as a sacred relative to be honored. McFarlane acknowledges that he is merely narrating this argument for western audience.

    Much of what he tells us comes from the courageous indigenous activists who, joined in the global Rights of Nature movement, have been fighting to safeguard the lakes and rivers, the forests and the mountains for a long time. He makes repeated reference to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass“.

    It’s an important story beautifully told. It’s also an urgent call to action. The rivers, the mountains and the forests sustain our lives on this planet. We are destroying them a little more every day once enough of them are gone, so will we be.

    We can prevent this, and we must. Giving nature standing to defend itself in court is a crucial first step.

    Related reading