Happy Fantasies of Material Prosperity

Posted on February 22, 2011 by ehurst

It’s not really new, but I wanted to propose a thought experiment. Go to any of several high technology gadget reviewing websites, like ZDNet, CNet, Ars Technica, etc. Look at discussions about, say the Windows 8 roadmap, or the plans for the next new batch of tablet computers and smart phones. Now, overlay that with the more conservative estimates of global economic meltdown. We might get a Windows 8, but will anybody be able to afford it, with food prices projected to more than double this year?

Surely you realize the unrest in the oil producing regions of the Africa and the Middle East will drive up the price of petroleum. It already has, and it’s going to continue. Not so much because supplies will be cut off — they will be reduced, inevitably, but we could handle that. Rather, it’s because the entire market is controlled by speculators who don’t give a rat’s patootie about anyone but themselves and their own bottom line in the short term. If they really were seeking their own welfare, they’d not be so eager to bleed the host dry, but they lack the long view. We, the consumers who offer the market where they sell their stuff, can not sustain much more of a price increase.

It’s not just the price of the fuel you burn getting around, but the fuel everyone burns bringing stuff to the stores and other places you spend your money. That, plus the fuel for climate control and lighting in those places. Everything you touch is stained with vast amounts of that petroleum, so the current sudden vault over the $100/barrel mark is just the beginning. Estimates I’ve seen from those who know far more than I suggest $200 this year is entirely likely. Doubling the price of fuel has a ripple effect, more than doubling the price of other things.

Some operators will simply be priced out of the market, no longer able to operate. Does one supplier have sufficient resources to take up the slack when one of their competitors collapses? There aren’t many competitors in some markets, and many are closing outlets right now. Some have already folded because of the economic decline — empty factories, warehouses in ruins, ghost-town neighborhoods where workers once lived.

Don’t look for a tipping point; we are already past that. Those uprisings are about food, not luxuries. They are about tyrants and oligarchs holding a gun to people’s heads and demanding they do without even as they bust their tails to keep working. The noise in Wisconsin isn’t about food just yet, but two brands of oligarchs duking it out over who gets to crack the whip over the slaves. Nobody in that battle is starving. But the rest of the world really is about food and basic human dignity, not privilege. Once it starts, it spreads like wildfire, and we are to blame.

We Americans are to blame because we refused to believe when whistleblowers warned us, and we entrenched that unbelief into a cultural bias several generations back. Sign posts are easy to find, but let’s just point out the birth of the Federal Reserve in 1913, or the birth of state-centered public education about the same time. In a thousand ways we turned a blind eye to the truth of evil in our midst, and by our own beloved leaders. We preferred the lies to the truth about them. So we ended up a big nation, the biggest and nastiest tyrant in the history of the humanity thus far. We are the ones who put those evil thugs over those nations now in revolt, by allowing our various government agencies free rein, refusing to see their crimes. It won’t matter why; the sins are ours.

That wild and happy consumption ride is about over. Our cheap and over-powered rattle-trap monstermobile will finally lose one piece too many and crash into some barrier. When the misery we’ve foisted on so many others comes home, it will be the full weight of all our evils combined. Justice from God’s hand is sweet to His children, but woe to those who have ignored Him by virtue of lying to themselves about what He said.

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Rebellion versus Revolution: Two Wrongs Make Nothing Right

Posted on February 21, 2011 by ehurst

The only statement which seems unfailing in this world: “This too shall change.”

There are changes in our world. What we have in all these mass uprisings is mostly rebellion. A revolution implies a radical change in government, but most of what we see right now is not a real change. That does not answer the question whether any given rebellion is justified, on what grounds, and to what degree. By God’s immutable Laws over this universe, opposing a tyrant is always justified. Some methods are justified, but not all. The only other question is motives and tactics.

Opposing Mubarak’s regime should have been immediate, but opposition at any time is justified. It’s quite possible the impetus was impure itself, given the nasty habits of the CIA and similar agencies. It is unlikely we will ever get the real story, though I am certain the momentum was a matter of middle class folks tired of Mubarak and friends scraping the lion’s share off Egypt’s economic activity, enforced brutally. There are a host of other sins, but this was the primary complaint we get from the participants. Much the same in the case of Tunisia, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, etc. Given our current intellectual and political climate, the best one can hope for is not a government which doesn’t cheat the people and oppress them, but one which knows when to stop. Had Mubarak been more sensible and restrained, the cosmic morality would have been much more tolerant of him, and so would the people.

That doesn’t mean the “will of the people” — regardless whether it can be known — is equivalent to morality. Most Americans want things clearly immoral in one sense or another. Our culture arose not from the fantasies offered as “American History” in schools (which I once taught in those schools), but from a rather greedy and materialistic middle class merchant culture with a pretense to aristocracy. The sacred names of forefathers is shot through with snobby elitists, and too often the impassioned speeches about liberty and equality did not actually mean to include the lower classes, particularly those who were actually productive. Many of those forefathers were unconscionably greedy and arrogant, willing to crush those who were actually producers of goods under the unbearable burdens of taxation they often decried having to pay for themselves. Their beef with Parliament and King George was not taxation itself, but into whose coffers the taxes went. Most Americans today have no problem with taxing someone else for welfare programs to salve their conscience.

The rebellion in Wisconsin is a double wrong. First, you have a governor who gave tax cuts to his buddies, which buddies would be anyone contributing to the right campaign funds in sufficient amounts. He created a budget shortfall in the process. Second, the public employee unions are hardly any closer to God, willing to lie and cheat, so as to continue consuming what isn’t rightfully theirs, taken from those who actually produce. Those public employees easily receive in their pay envelope far above what the average tax-payer in Wisconsin ever sees. Need I mention again my low esteem for what passes as “public education”?

There is no right side on this question, because the people with the moral high ground — the taxpayers — are not represented in Wisconsin. The new regime claims by right of election to hold that mandate, but there hasn’t been a single honest election in the US since the rise of the two-party system. A choice between two evils is no choice at all.

God’s Laws approve only one function for civil government: Protecting the rights of those governed. Not promoting, but defending those rights from attacks. What that boils down to is keeping a minimal level of order, and defending from attack. Period. The laws of such government must align with the Laws of God, particularly in the Covenant of Noah. In case you can’t quite read between the lines, amassing wealth and power, while not prohibited directly, are uniformly an indicator of something deeply immoral. Those who are truly moral will hasten to distribute their wealth to those in need (voluntarily!), and will do their best to lift up the powerless by divesting themselves, granting power and freedom to others as much as possible.

In other words, the only path to justice is to act like an extended family. The only just ruler is the one who binds to you like a father or mother (as such parents ought to be, not as they too often are). The impersonal bureaucracy is a sin by definition. I doubt we’ll ever see such a genuine revolution in our time.

Thus, I give a grudging approval on moral grounds to the rebellion in some of the countries in the Middle East, particularly when the protesters remain non-violent. But I can offer none at all to the noisy union protests in Wisconsin. Nor do I support the governor of Wisconsin. Things will surely change. In all cases, I’m dubious the changes coming will be all that nice.

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Debian Squeeze: Browser Wars

Posted on February 20, 2011 by ehurst

All browsers suck. Some suck less than others, but none of them are actually good. (Note the sarcasm warning.)

I’ve been testing and tweaking the various graphical browsers available for Debian Squeeze: Iceweasel, Epiphany, Iceape, Opera and Google Chrome. The Chromium version available is simply too old and not slated for update, as far as I know.

The primary flaw with old reliable Iceweasel (Firefox) is it tends to drag on pages using a lot of JScript. Loads good, but when you scroll, it’s glacial and jerky. Selecting smooth scrolling only makes it smoother at being slow. I’m watching the CPU meter spike with each tiny twitch of the mouse wheel. This is unacceptable to me simply because I know they can do better, and have chosen not to bother. None of the others do this.

The related Iceape (Seamonkey) project is slightly better, but suffers the slower pace of development. Too many things on too many sites, particularly with heavy JScript, just don’t work. Controls written into the page don’t appear in the display because developers haven’t gotten around to implementing them.

Epiphany suffers the major plight of all GNOME related packages. If you aren’t on the rolling release bandwagon, you aren’t simply dis-invited, you are given a hostile reception. GNOME developers are downright snotty about this. So when Debian chose their freeze point for stability, that meant the better features, which had been missing for some time, were not included because the GNOME devs held that stuff back for the next release. Epiphany needs Flashblock, and without it, it’s a piece of trash. Without the ability to stop the distractions built in by the unconscionably evil advertisers, the developers are deservedly suspected of being in bed with them. If it’s complicated for the user to implement, it’s because the devs don’t care what users want. It’s actually easier to simply block Flash objects via CSS than to get any sort of Flashblock control working. I sound unforgiving because that’s the what GNOME people understand. (The underlying GTK toolkit is much more forgiving.)

Google Chrome is a moving target. You may have heard the latest news about the 10 beta being faster than ever. Fine, but so far, Chrome still suffers from this persistent inability to cooperate with some websites on which not a single other browser has trouble — unable to load linked pages, incomplete loading of images, etc. This is partly the blame of the Webkit folks, but without the extensions which limit advertising and other useless page crap, we might as well all restrict ourselves to text mode browsers and forget it. If those extensions in Chrome cause page loading errors, I’m not so sure it’s the fault of the extensions in every case. When Chrome developers dare to suggest to Windows users they have to turn off their anti-virus to get pages to load, when not a single other browser requires that, it’s because Chrome is junk. With all the tricks and troubles I’ve had to explore getting Chrome to work as it should, I recommend you avoid it, because these folks are just playing games.

Which brings us to Opera. Yes, I’ve had mountains of trouble with Opera, too, over the years. The biggest boondoggle continues to be the dirty hacks they find necessary to get multimedia objects loaded into the proper player within the browser. Opera’s developers act like they have never seen Linux or BSD. Yet, when help is offered, they seem to be almost bloodthirsty in how they treat volunteer developers, going by the comments made by such volunteers later. There are still major issues with keyboard input, particularly with input fields on webpages. The new pure-X interface is still not half as good as the older QT version, because it’s slower and the widgets don’t work as well. The much ballyhooed extensions are uniformly worthless under Linux and BSD.

Yet for all my complaints, I still end up with Opera being the least annoying of the lot. The one redeeming virtue is the ability to control the most annoying elements on the fly. I can put any preference controls I want on the bottom of the browser frame. I typically have these:

  • Enable Plug-ins
  • Enable JavaScript
  • Enable Cookies

I tend to keep cookies and plug-ins turned off on most pages, and often hit the JavaScript switch after the page loads to prevent the constant reloading business built into some elements of many webpages. Opera had the ability to turn off animated GIFs a long time ago. And who hasn’t needed to occasionally invoke the “wrap text to width” on some badly formatted pages? Best of all is the selective blocking of images without any silly addons or extensions.

Finally, while Opera may not fix every bug you claim to find, their bug reporting process is about the easiest and most sensible thing I’ve ever seen. It seems the Opera folks do understand one thing: Users are their lifeblood. I hope they never lose that single most important feature of their operation.

Addenda: Further testing confirms a suspicion I did not mention above. After using several different WebKit browsers, I find all of them share one very major flaw: At some point in your surfing, they simply stop loading some pages. It won’t matter whether I middle-click on a link to load a page in a new tab or simply move to the new page in the same tab, too often the page simply does not load. Trying to reload, or waiting a bit and trying again do not help. Once WebKit decides the page is blank, or decides to exclude certain elements, it refuses to do any different. Yet trying the same action on the same pages and links in any other browser works just fine — always.

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The Limits of Knowing

Posted on February 19, 2011 by ehurst

Can you know the nature of anything on this plane of existence?

The ultimate sin of Western Civilization is the obsession with being and doing. The nature of something — being — is not within our grasp, because none of us is God. The hubris of such presumption, that we could know the nature of anything, is monumental. The obsession with results — doing — as if we could hope to control all the factors is also a monumental presumption. The looming collapse of the West is entirely just.

You and I are up against the double whammy of broken awareness plus the broken existence. There are two layers of falsehood. Certainly we can reach for an understanding, but the drive to understand is not the accomplishment. So long as we remain skeptical and cynical about ourselves, about our abilities, we are freer and wiser than most of humanity.

The more noble path is to realize you cannot hope to know anything more than what is required of you within the context of the moment. That is, you could conceivably catch glimpses of imperatives which amount to a functional awareness. You can understand enough to act. You can realize enough about things to choose wisely only in the sense of fulfilling your own commitments.

If you have no real commitments, then, you are utterly useless, an enemy of peace and sanity.

You may recall a past hit song about a fellow who is torn between his beloved wife and his music. He promised her the world if she would back him during his early career, because he would change the world with his awesome talent. It didn’t happen. Instead, he was just a man driven to music, and in the night when he stumbled into the kitchen for a drink of water, the music calls to him, and he can’t go back to bed. And he knows she weeps in the bed, waiting for him to come back to her. The music remains his first love, and she knows it.

This portrays well the reality of our broken existence. Frankly, this singer has it about as good as it gets in this awful world. He at least has the means to pursue his imperatives. Consider how sad the life of one driven only by the consumption of that music. They don’t even count as human, on that level; they are potential humans. The highest state of existence on this plane is to find something which drives you to do. It’s not the doing, but the driving. Consumption, the passive mode of receiving, is not enough. You have to be driven to act in order to become an active part of seeking to make the world more sane.

Nobody should suggest there is no time and place for passive absorption. The deadly flaw is acting when you should pass, and passing when you should act. There is a moral imperative woven into the ways of this world, and the single most important thought we have on such things is our individual imperative to seek out that moral imperative. We can state in general terms certain principles, but even those are mere estimates of where you should aim when you are driven through any moment. It’s on you, and you will surely fail, in ways both small and grand, but failure itself morphs with the context and viewpoint.

You cannot know the nature of things, only some functional estimation of that nature. You are permitted that much only so you may estimate your course of action based on your commitments, your imperatives. If your imperatives are no larger than your self, you are wrong regardless of any other factors.

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Civility: The Slavery of Coercion

Posted on February 17, 2011 by ehurst

I want you to be free. I cannot do it for you; my path is not yours. But I can tell you where it is and let you find it on your own.

When you place reins or chains upon another, you are as surely bound as they. Civility means you avoid situations where you would be on either end of chains or reins. You should hope to season with grace your encounters with other humans, but the majority of humanity lacks grace. However, all humanity is accountable to God’s Laws, and civility is an expression of His moral law. Your path to peace and sanity over the broken ground of this world will require feet shod with civility.

Civility assumes voluntary cooperation. In this world you will often be thrust into moments of decision which inevitably affect others. Even as you strive to be true to your own convictions, those convictions are invalid unless they include a sense of accountability to those affected by your choices. You need not yield to their demands, needs, hopes, wishes and feelings, but you must take note of them. That’s because you must be prepared to bear the consequences of any necessary disregard.

Even when the affect is strictly imaginary, when they have zero legitimate claim, simply seeking some excuse to throw a fit and play the victim, you must take into account whatever you could know of such things. Any failure to consider them takes you down the path of neurosis or psychosis. In other words, you have to steel yourself far in advance for such moments, particularly when those moments are matters of emergency, and decide how you will need to react in general terms. It won’t hurt to rehearse. Indeed, to be truly yourself means not simply absorbing everything portrayed before your eyes and modeling that, but realizing you are not that person, and must have your own reaction. Those of you who love TV and movies take note — don’t lose your sense of self in entertainment. You cannot control the factors of any context; you cannot script the behavior of others.

Every dysfunctional relationship I’ve ever seen hung on one or more members demanding a scripted result from situations. The fantasy of making someone move their hands and feet at your will, of shaping their thoughts and desires, is the ultimate slavery, because the chains are stronger than any tangible material. Every other human must be free to choose their own path. If you cannot come to amicable terms of cooperation, separate. There may well be compelling reasons you can’t fully implement geographical distance, but there is more than one way to separate from others. It may require you consider carefully before committing yourself to such situations, whether you can afford forced association with wackos, and what your options may be. Civility is the art of crafting multiple lines we should not cross within a given context.

Civility is planning for your lines to be transgressed by others. Peace is not letting someone else have your reins, of seizing the power to make you react in this or that way. It’s the creative art of human interaction, or refusing to interact,  not bound to any script, but to underlying principles. It requires you divest yourself of the emotional commitments to predetermined results, yours or others. It’s balancing between competing needs and necessities, knowing what price must be paid for this or that sacrifice. It’s calculating in advance the price of your departure from this prison existence on the lower plane.

No one will ever meet your standards, not even you. Civility is negotiating an existence between various degrees of failure. Peace and sanity is celebrating how well things turn out in spite of it all.

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The Trail: Now with More Bike!

Posted on February 16, 2011 by ehurst

I recently added an annex to my fitness trail in the woods. The idea was to open an alternative entrance which does not pass through old barbed wire fencing, so that I can ride my bike more easily.

I’ve been working on this trail system for about three years. I only have hand tools: ax, camp ax, tree saws, limb loppers, shovels and machetes. This past December I corrected some bad routing and got a usable, maintainable loop running some 1.5 miles over hilly terrain, mostly wooded. You can get some idea of by using either Google Maps or Google Earth. Cut and paste the follow address into the search bar:

13501 se 29th, choctaw, ok

Select the satellite view. While you won’t get much idea of the relief, you can see the scale of things. This address will be the center of our trailer park. Slide north a bit and you’ll see some of a 150 acre wood and grass area. Near as I can tell, this satellite image comes from April 2010, when the trail was mostly finished. Along the right side are a series of ponds, and I don’t go anywhere near them.

So if you slide north, you’ll see immediately someone attempted to plow down a street layout for development. This was not less than six years ago, probably more like ten. We don’t know what caused development to stop, but that was a far as it went. There are two straight cuts east to west, with a long curving cut running back down to the ponds, which are the lowest elevation. In fact, three of them are kept filled merely by the water table. That long curving road is what I call “the draw” because it follows a fold in the elevation. Either side is higher ground, with the trailer park on high ground (the wester loop, at least).

Farther north, colored as exposed soil, is a long branch with a separate bulldozer path. That long east-west branch farthest north is actually a cut into the hill side, which I call “the canyon.” It’s a six-foot drop in places, and washout has made it deeper than the bulldozer cut. As you examine this whole thing, you may be able to detect well worn paths, slender threads here and there.

The trail begins near the western loop of the trailer park. On the northwest corner of this loop is an open field. You can barely pick out a trail hugging the treeline on the eastern edge of this field, running northerly into the woods. The woodline coincides with the barbed wire fence (east-west). The trail runs a jagged path north to the first cut, crosses and appears to run down that cut eastward, down to the draw, meandering back up the other side. Near the end of the cut, it sharply turns north into the woods.

Wandering through that wooded section, it pops out into that shorter cut to the north right near the end, and heads back into the woods. That path comes to a steep drop back down to the long curving draw. The path cut down the draw is no longer clear, so ignore that. Near the bottom of the draw, where it turns east, you can just barely make out the trail again in the open. Depending on how good your resolution is, you may also see running back up the draw, not a trail, but a drainage ditch I cut to keep the seasonal rains from flooding that part of the draw. It was originally swampy with several bog terraces, but I dug a trench to direct the flow back into the lowest part of the woodland. You may be able to detect a dark line alongside the old trail down the draw.

My trail cuts across the draw, runs through a field northward, and back into some thin woods. I can see the trail peeking out here and there. Eventually it comes out the north side and sweeps around near the canyon, then back south into the woods. But before it gets too far, I cut back west to cross the other curving cut which runs south from the canyon. My trail cuts southwesterly, then along the woodline, peeking out again south of there. Then it’s back into the woods and crossing the same cut again where it bends around westerly. What looks like a trail along that cut was made by four-wheeler RVs. They haven’t been out there in the past year since then.

The trail drops southerly through the woods, which is now slowly uphill. It zig-zags across the next cut, and back into the woods, rejoining the trail where it first runs along the southern cut.

The annex finished yesterday is back on the far eastern end of that cut. If you go back to the trailer park, the farthest north trailer on the eastern loop sits very near where my new entrance cuts into the woods. At the edge of the mowed yard on that northerly edge is what appears to be an open grassy area (dark brown), which is right about where I head into the woods.

The soil throughout his area is sandy, covered with leaves. The older trail loop has seen quite a bit of foot traffic and just a few passes on my mountain bike. It’s pretty well packed. My new trail is not much packed at all, and easily bogs down my mountain bike, particularly in sharp turns. Today I made two runs back and forth, but it wore me out, because that little bit is not packed at all. Perhaps if a few neighborhood kids notice the trail it will get some more traffic, but it will be at least a month of regular use before I can get out of A-2 gear.

The other thing I noticed after today’s ride were about six places where I really must take down a sapling or two on the larger loop, because a few corners are simply impossible to navigate. I don’t mind passing between two trees close enough to scape both elbows at the same time, as long as the handlebars fit through without stopping. But being forced off the trail by dodging a tree on the inside of a sharp bend is simply too risky. The whole point is my knees have been giving me a lot of trouble lately, even if I limit myself to just walking the loop once. Riding, so far, doesn’t hurt my knees, even if I have to stand on the pedals some.

Posted in cycling, personal | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Basic Computer Help Service

Posted on February 16, 2011 by ehurst

This is an outline of what I do when people bring me a computer which isn’t working properly. Aside from undoing mistakes and diagnosing hardware failures, most of it consists of cleaning up the operating system. There are no secrets here, and this has been pretty successful with most of my clients. You can save a lot of money using these ideas.

1. If possible, I convince them to switch from Windows to Linux. I’ve never seen a personal computer running Linux compromised, nor heard of one. I’ve not seen any misconfigured by user mistakes once properly installed, even when the user knows the root password and understands how it works. I am always eager to devote significant amounts of time teaching folks how to get used to the Linux way of doing things. I select the Linux distribution based on how they use it, but my choices are limited to Debian, Ubuntu LTS, and CentOS for the simple reason each of these will be stable and supported for a minimum of three years for each release.

2. Assuming they stick with Windows, drop into safe mode and run virus and malware scans. As soon as the BIOS starts to hand off to the operating system, hit the F8 key, and select “Safe mode with networking” so you can download updates to the scanners which offer it. My favorites are Vipre Rescue for viruses (updated daily) and Malware Bytes free version for spyware. Allow significant time for each scanner to complete, and remove the junk they find. If you can’t even boot the system, you can get a bootable rescue CD with a scanner which might be able to recover the system enough to try booting again. I would never trust McAfee or Norton, but I have used the BitDefender and Kaspersky CDs to good effect. They take a very long time to run.

3. While in safe mode, make sure a good AV and malware package are installed for regular use. You can purchase the full version of VIPRE from Sunbelt/GFI, but I find Avast works better for most people. The free version will do if you can’t afford the regular. After installing Malware Bytes free version, you can leave it on the system, but you have to run it manually, because live protection comes only with the purchased version. I recommend running it weekly, but be sure to update first each time.

4. Still in safe mode, uninstall software you are not using, or which weakens security and privacy. The greatest threat comes from entertainment. Those who produce entertainment know you won’t likely pay much up front — not nearly as much as they want, anyway. So they let advertisers pay for it by saddling you with advertising. Those $10 and even $20 games at the big box stores are some of the worst, eclipsed only by the freebies you can download online: Wild Tangent, Pop Cap, iWin, etc. Each of them insists on installing their gameware server, or browser toolbars, and other associated junk software which slows down the system, allows them to track your every touch on the computer, and frankly opens the door to spyware and viruses. Very few download games are safe, and it takes time to learn those which are. Similar warnings apply to music downloaders and players.

The other kind of software which risks security is social software. Don’t download stuff related to Facebook (like FlipToast) or any other social networking site until you understand what risks are involved. Each of them is basically tracking you all over the Net, and they are loaded with vulnerabilities exploited by criminal elements. Don’t let your instant messengers load automatically unless you are using something like Pidgin, which is considerably safer than most alternatives.

Finally, a major culprit for bundling useless and resource-hogging software is Apple and their Safari-iTunes package. If you don’t desperately need what they do, get rid of them completely. Even QuickTime can be replaced with good, free and secure alternatives, such as the K-Lite package. Get the Mega package, and use the bundled Media Player Classic as your default media player. Another is Adobe. You can get a decent and very secure PDF reader called Sumatra. Not fancy, but adequate. If you need more features, try Foxit or PDF-Xchange. Both are less of a threat to you than Adobe.

5. Check security settings. Turn on updates, at least to the point of being notified when they are available. Turn on the Windows firewall; it may not be the best, but it’s better than nothing. If you can afford it, find out what sort of firewall/router device is appropriate for your Internet connection and buy one. If you don’t understand firewalls, use whatever wizard comes with the package. You must change the default password for accessing the device; choose a good one based on something such as the first letter of a phrase or song lyrics you know you’ll remember. Keep the mixed capitals and lower-case and punctuation, and substitute a numerical digit for at least one of the letters. Make sure it’s not less than 8 characters.

6. Consider changing your Net surfing habits. Especially with Windows, use just about any browser but Internet Explorer, saving it for those few websites which simply will not work otherwise. Install Firefox configure it with security addons. Use this for basic surfing and all the random stuff you do; make it your default browser. But for strictly business, or sites where you have to login often, even if it’s as frivolous as blogging or Facebook, use a different browser. I recommend Opera for Windows, though it will take some time to understand and browse the configuration options. It remains one of the most secure browsers, and it’s built-in email client is excellent for security uses. You can also use Google Chrome, but it’s not as fully developed, yet. It’s challenging to configure some of the settings you might want to change. However, it includes the advantage of built-in Flashplayer and PDF display. Again, it will take some time to dig around the configuration settings, and getting used to a very different set of functions. It has some of the same security addons as for Firefox, called “extensions.”

For some, the safest way to handle email is using one of the webmail providers, instead of downloading email directly to the computer. This will surely compromise privacy, particularly with Gmail, but any viruses will be on their computer, not yours. Yahoo and a few others will scan attachments for threats before you download them. Frankly, I like to use foreign-based webmail providers. A good example is GMX.net, based in Germany. The interface is in German, but there are others like them who accommodate English language users. GMX does have an American-based operation (GMX.com), but their site has been pretty rude about blocking browsers other than IE. You can always try Hush Mail and others.

Finally, stop using Google, Bing or Yahoo as your default search engine. Both will track your searches in such a way they can be traced back to you personally, and sell that information to advertisers. Use StartPage or DuckDuckGo. Either of them will preserve your privacy much better.

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Blocking Animated GIF Images with User CSS (Updated)

Posted on February 15, 2011 by ehurst

Warning: The instructions here are obsolete in that Blink (the engine underneath Chrome) does not support user style sheets. If you find animations a problem, the single best solution is to use Slimjet, an alternative browser built on Blink/Chrome. In the configuration options for Slimjet is a toggle to disable animations as a built-in function. So far as I have tested, all of the Chrome extensions work in Slimjet.

Original post:

This basically applies to Google Chrome. Since I am not a CSS expert, this took a lot of digging. Why it is so very many tutorials leave this out, I don’t know.

You cannot selectively block animated GIFs. You can only block all GIFs, but even that is a little complicated. Since Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera all include switches in the configurations for turning off animated images, this is an issue only with Webkit browsers, such as Chrome and Safari. For the latter, see this. For Chrome, you have to use a secret incantation.

First, start Chrome from the command line with the proper switch:

google-chrome --enable-user-stylesheet

This creates a folder in the config system where you can add a User CSS:

~/.config/google-chrome/Default/User StyleSheets/Custom.css

Open this in your favorite editor. You should add this one line to block all GIF images:

img[src*="gif"] { display: none !important; }

It took some digging to find out how to set the selector. Adding that asterisk before the equal sign indicates any item on the displayed webpage where the img tag defines a src which includes the sequence “gif” in any portion of the URL. This line tells your browser not to display it regardless. That “!important” makes it imperative, and the power of CSS is to honor the user’s style sheet over that of any webserver instructions.

Granted, it makes some pages look funny, but at least in Chrome I can read without fighting the animations. Since the “Pause! Pause! Pause!” extension is broken, causing a race condition on many pages, there really is little else you can do. Maybe someday the Webkit developers will listen, since this has been a rather noisy demand on the Chrome discussion boards, but I am dubious.

Oh, and if you want to remove that broken extension from Chrome, just delete the entire folder at:

~/.config/google-chrome/Default/Extensions/gpgcolmilkcnccpllfdleobpflemehec

Update: Better yet, there is a greasemonkey script which simply removes only the animated GIFs, allowing the others to remain when you press the ESC key. Here’s how.

Go here and copy the JScript from the display box, and save to a file. I named it stop-animation.user.js and left it in my Home directory. Then I opened Chrome, hit CTRL+O for “open” and found my JScript file and clicked on it. Chrome asked if I was sure I wanted to install this “extension” and I clicked “Continue.” Now when I visit a page with animated GIFs, I hit ESC and they all disappear.

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Get Acquainted with Hunger, America

Posted on February 14, 2011 by ehurst

Never mind the official definitions; for you and I the real issue behind a recession or depression is a decline in the standard of living. In other words, everything we have gotten used to will cost more, and we’ll be getting along in the future with less of it.

Here in the West, our technological advances are no longer resulting in more jobs for more people. Basic unalterable fact: If people aren’t making or harvesting stuff other people want, there is no economy. Entertainment and information isn’t “stuff” by that definition. Such intangibles have to be supported by something more fundamental to life. Well, we long ago passed the point of saturation on stuff. And now we aren’t coming up with any wholly new technologies, at least not here in the West. You should expect to see them in places like China, India and Brazil, as their economies blossom, but they won’t really get roaring until they work out how to break loose from the Western banking powers.

So if that’s not bad enough, we got more problems. It may be pretty hard to get food at any price after this whomping big freeze, following upon a couple others. We kept reading all these experts talking about how, any day now, the sun should reawaken the heavy sunspot activity because it’s that time in the cycle. It’s not happening. That single greatest factor in our climate is not cooperating, and the mythology of Global Warming is coming apart, even as the faithful proclaim all the more loudly how this is all a result of anthropogenic climate change. The point is, we have every reason to expect this winter was just the first in a long series which could so easily become an ice age.

But just for the current time frame of this year alone, we will have serious food shortages coming on top of a general decline in economic activity, and government oppression coupled with profligate borrowing which could hardly be sustained in the best of times. Think about this: An awful lot of people alive right now here in the US will soon die before their time. No other result is possible.

The wealthy elite know it’s coming. We can argue they planned it and caused it, but the point is they knew it was coming and have taken measures to ride out the storm. Not that they should necessarily escape the wrath of the masses, or at least the few out of the masses with an understanding and a penchant to act, but they have prepared. Most of us have not. Instead, we kept buying into their lies and buying their junk, and neglecting the preparation for disaster. Fear we have aplenty, but action is missing. Instead, we are going to see vastly increasing activity based on panic response, along with an exponential increase in predatory crime. That predation will come as much from government people as from the non-government competitors. There is no restraint largely because we have tossed aside any real civilizing influences in favor of something cheap and superficial. The wealthy elite have been preying upon us so quietly and secretly all these years, promoting that decline as they consolidated their control.

Not that it was so challenging to bring us to this place. Western Civilization was never much to begin with, being so completely materialistic and worldly. When all you have to hope for is more and better stuff, you completely ignore the moral nature of everything around you. All the energy was expended in getting and keeping things which just don’t matter. Thus, it peaked very high and very quickly, and the decline will not be gentle.

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Simplicity of Madness

Posted on February 13, 2011 by ehurst

If you want simple answers, you shouldn’t be reading my blog. While I do try my best to make certain aspects of Linux simpler and less mysterious, I can’t do that with reality in general.

However, I can save you a lot of time in one respect. Start with the blanket assumption anyone with power and money is scum. In this world, you don’t get power and money without major moral compromise. For purposes of this discussion, “power” is roughly equivalent to “influence” of any sort. A very popular mainstream journalist has power, in that sense. The same journalist most certainly has wealth you can’t match. Once we establish that distrust, then we are in a position to note when someone with power and wealth isn’t quite such a complete psychopath. It’s bound to happen, since most psychopaths have no talent, and building empires requires a certain amount of talent. A few of  the harmless, and even the rare good guy, is going to get hired by the psychopaths because they actually need to get some work done once in a while.

If you observe closely how Julian Assange acts as a player on the stage, he is exactly the same sort of psychopath-in-effect as the government and corporate psychopaths he claims to confront. He keeps secrets, manipulates public opinion with carefully staged press releases, and is simply one more actor on the stage using exactly the same theatrics, with exactly the same motives, as everyone else. Real revolutionary leakers simply expose the information when they get their hands on it. They understand, on some level, the most fundamental moral code of all Creation: Truth wants to be free. That’s similar to the hacker’s assertion, “Information wants to be free.” The point here is, information is not necessarily truth. It’s not always accurate and not always pertinent. Truth is always truth regardless of niggling measures of accuracy, and thus is always pertinent. Assange is not about truth, but about making Assange more wealthy and powerful.

It requires a mystical bent to grasp the difference. Truth is God, a Person who is determined to break through all human boundaries and bondages. If you manage to participate in His process of revelation, you’ll be rewarded — that part is plain and simple. If you are mercenary about it, you won’t get much, but you’ll be rewarded. If you are committed to it, you will already have the most valuable rewards.

At any rate, this is what percolates in the back of my mind as I observe the wacky theatrics of the Wikileaks saga. The latest act stars Glen Greenwald and some truly disgusting thuggery by a handful of corporate PR companies. I suppose we can believe the idea several of the company honchos who disavowed the operation really did not know what their subordinates were up to, but I really doubt they were surprised by the skulduggery. They were surprised by the exposure of said skulduggery. If it can be plotted this once, it was always a part of their repertoire, and surely a part of their normal business operations. In other words: Don’t trust them to be totally honest. On the other hand, I tend to believe so far Greenwald is mostly a good guy, somewhat misled about the nature of Wikileaks and Assange’s dreams.

Assange is part of the Hacker Culture. I could care less about distinctions of black hat versus white hat, simply because the standards are not a matter of morality, but of competing ethics. Ethics may reflect a moral commitment, but a moral commitment isn’t necessary. It’s just a commitment to playing by certain rules which are commonly accepted within a given context. Morality is far more fundamental. So the hackers of the world are simply a competing force with their own skewed ethics. Individual hackers can surely be as morally pure as the driven snow which recently covered the ground outside my window, but as a whole, the Hacker Community is much more diverse. That community includes all sorts of criminal elements, simply because the Hacker Ethic ignores the standard definitions of “criminal” in favor of a competing standard. Whether it is more moral is a matter of debate, though it does draw some admiration as the underdog in this fight.

I think Greenwald does understand this part:

After Anonymous imposed some very minimal cyber disruptions on Paypal, Master Card and Amazon, the DOJ flamboyantly vowed to arrest the culprits, and several individuals were just arrested as part of those attacks. But weeks earlier, a far more damaging and serious cyber-attack was launched at WikiLeaks, knocking them offline. Those attacks were sophisticated and dangerous. Whoever did that was quite likely part of either a government agency or a large private entity acting at its behest. Yet the DOJ has never announced any investigation into those attacks or vowed to apprehend the culprits, and it’s impossible to imagine that ever happening.

Thus, while Wikileaks gains some cachet as the underdog, we should not be fooled over the questions of morality. Assange is a wretch, but comes off as the lovable rascal in this play. HBGary and friends are permitted not a stitch of redeeming virtue, and rightly so. The US government as a whole is the biggest and baddest of all wretches, and rightly so, completely unable to even fathom ethics, much less morals. Poor Manning is a pawn in the game; not particularly moral himself, he did what he thought might serve to help in some small way to level the playing field. He gains credit for being brave, if devious, and for understanding clearly no one in actual authority would dream of doing the right thing on any level. He is already paying a very high price for this, and deserves a bit of applause.

That the handiwork of bad people can still bring salutary results is manifestly obvious. Don’t confuse the general moral goodness of bringing truth to light, and a relief from human suffering, versus the fundamental commitment to truth and justice. Simplistic evaluations and labeling don’t serve any good moral purpose, and certainly can’t help us in our search for sanity in this world.

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