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From Wired:

The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens wired.com

Read: www.wired.com

Wired doesn’t do much besides pointing fingers and raising the alarm, but it did lead me to this PDF from the DNI (Director of National Intelligence):

www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ODNI-Declassified-Report-on-CAI-January2022.pdf dni.gov

Read: www.dni.gov

Data brokers “maintain large, sophisticated databases with consumer information that can include credit histories, insurance claims, criminal records, employment histories, incomes, ethnicities, purchase histories, and interests,” among other things. They are so effective that even the government prefers to go to them to get whatever their after.

In turn, these data brokers have special rates for local and federal governments to encourage these entities to buy this information.

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The fireworks started here in NYC. Since COVID, I hate those with passion. The sleepless nights for these couple of weeks is not something I want to experience again. Glad to take a vacation for the 4th.

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The Thing, 2011 - ★★★

I'm not sure I watched The Thing, or I don't remember if I did, but this movie makes me want to watch the original. The story is not too unique, but the execution kept me guessing and entertained. This is a good movie to watch with friends while eating popcorn. Don't eat meat though; it might come back up.

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The Thing, 2011 - ★★★

I'm not sure I watched The Thing, or I don't remember if I did, but this movie makes me want to watch the original. The story is not too unique, but the execution kept me guessing and entertained. This is a good movie to watch with friends while eating popcorn. Don't eat meat though; it might come back up.

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“The Cage” on West 4th Street in Manhattan 🏀. I watched an intense game between the Greens and the Reds for a few minutes.

A black link fence in the foreground, with a pink sticker of a skull symbol. The sticker says Smetsky. In the background, a group of players in red and green uniforms playing basketball. An audience is watching.

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Installing Emacs from source

Thursday evening I felt smart and decided to clear some space in my boot partition on my Linux Mint computer with apt autopurge. What this does is to clear the old kernels and clear space along with any libraries apt figures we don’t need.

The issue with this is that apt didn’t know I needed certain libraries that came with Emacs. That’s because I didn’t install Emacs with apt, but built it directly from source - to get a later version. The next day, Emacs didn’t launch and complain some essential library was missing.

The solution was to follow my instructions and install Emacs from source, but here I encountered a catch-22: the instructions were in org-mode inside Emacs, which wouldn’t launch.

Instead of taking out my laptop or switching to the Mac, I decided to deal with it sleep deprived, which is something that happens to me often. This, in turn, led to more frustration as I forgot the steps. Eventually, I gave up and went to sleep (which was the smartest thing I had done up to that point).

The next day I looked for help in Emacs IRC. The folks there helped me enough to fix the issue. Now that I have my notes again, I’m putting those here in my blog (as well as on my wiki), so I always have it handy for myself and for you, if you happen to be that sort of geek.

Here are my original instructions based on xahlee’s blog with some additional notes to help.

One last thing regarding Emacs chat on IRC: When going there using the web interface, use the UI to connect to the Emacs channel. Typing “Emacs” directly will open a new Emacs channel with you as the only person in there.

The Process:

  1. Download the gz file from the GNU at savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs.
  2. Untar using your file manager or tar -xvf path/to/file
  3. In the Mint menu, look for Software Sources, under Optional Sources turn on Source code repositories.
  4. Install essential build tools in the terminal: sudo apt-get install build-essential
  5. Get the dependencies using alt: sudo apt-get build-dep emacs

You can now build emacs:

  1. cd to Emacs download dir, run ./configure
  2. run make
  3. now run sudo make install
  4. launch Emacs from terminal
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I thought I’ll make a nice little video about CSS “reverse engineering” on my blog. Started out ok, but quickly went off track as I had to look things up and got tangled in CSS quicksand. An hour later I gave up recording, thinking, there must be an easier way to do this.

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The old and the new. NYC.

Steinway Tower, a narrow glass supertall skyscraper in NYC. In the foreground, a wall of a cathedral
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So I bought Diablo 4

Out of nowhere, I bought Diablo 4 🎮 yesterday for full price. It came up to about $75 bucks, tax and all. It’s Blizzard, so I know I’m not going to see a sale anytime soon, and I was tired, and it looked pretty… I’m working my way up slowly from regretting it.

The game’s good; it rolls out like a classic horror story of gloom and doom, which I enjoy. The combat is as simple as it can be (point the bad guy, the good guy bonks him on the head, rinse and repeat), though I’m learning there’s more to it slowly. There’s also multiplayer, and I saw some dude kicking ass near me yesterday, so I sent some bad guys that were giving me a hard time up his way, and my silent friend ate them for breakfast.

It’s going to be one of those games that pull me in and do not require much brain power, which is going to be perfect for my training breaks - study a bit, play a bit, and in the end, you end up cramming more knowledge in your head you knew is possible.

Can I play on Linux? Maybe, probably not. Game launchers are the bane of Lutris and the others, and AAA games all (pretty much) have their launchers.

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Meanwhile, in NYC… I skipped my morning run today. Sitting here with an air purifier we just got by chance (I ordered one last week) on full blast. 😦