A short interjection. Ben Bartlett (@bencbartlett) posted this over in twitter. Has to be the best chapter in a book. Short and to the fucking point! Absolutely. And very true as well. Ha ha.
Shortest chapter in a book!
By the way, this is from a real book by Joseph Conlon, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Oxford no less. It’s called, Why String Theory?
Thomas Osadzinski
So, did you guys hear about the arrest of a 20 year old DePaul University student, Thomas Osadzinski in Chicago yesterday? It was all over the tech news circuit. Apparently, the dude is an Islamic nutbag who was into Python scripting to automate fetching videos from the social media handles of ISIS, saving and sharing them on other platforms. In addition, he was also developing a minimal Linux distro based on Gentoo for ISIS. His intention was to make it fast, lean and solely focused on the social media aspect of their operations. He wanted to remove a lot of packages and programs and according to him that would make his OS difficult to hack and take control of. All well and good goofball, but you did the age old mistake of talking to an undercover FBI agent, I am guessing in the dark or deep web. Not one, but to two agents, divulging his Gentoo fork plans. As he found out later, it was certainly not easy to fork Gentoo the way he wanted and FBI busted his sorry ass and as a result, will spend the next 20 years in the slammer.
Normally, I am no fan of convicting hackers who just did something stupid due to their curiosity. Remember Iceman? Poor dude is staring at a longer sentence due to his recent exploits. To this day, I wonder what would have been the case if he had never been convicted after his very first hack. But this case is different. Dude’s obviously a Muslim convert and based on some of his social media posts, was a big time ISIS fanboy. So, the punishment is kinda deserved. Still, the nerve of forking Gentoo? That alone deserves 5 years rigorous imprisonment. LOL! Instead of Larry the cow, it would be Lathif the camel.
I just realized that I had completely forgotten to mention CRUX. Any hardcore BSD user ought to love CRUX. I used it occasionally back then and may be I should give it another shot. It was the legendary kmandla who persuaded me to give CRUX a shot. Due to my growing collection of older hardware back then, CRUX was a perfect choice. Anyhoo, time is ripe to install CRUX again.
Now, getting back to Gentoo, I am sure some of you might be aware of the famous Gentoo dance, courtesy of InstallmanGentoo on the tube. If not, here are a few clips. They capture the essence of every late night coder who is completely overawed with himself after compiling or installing some shit successfully. I have performed this ritual quite often with pants, without pants, you name it. These clips are for the ages. Sort of lets you know what’s on the other side that can only be accessed after a successful installation (its not just cookies!).
Without further ado, here they are. Marvel at these gems.
1. How to install Gentoo in less than a minute – LOL!
The song is called A Piece of Magic Mix by Lizardking. Remember the golden age of Amiga music? A huge collection of such songs are also available on YouTube. Great listening material for a night long hacking experience.
2. Install Gentoo for the first time – Oh that feeling!
3. My favorite – Getting some ass after installing Gentoo
4. Unrelated, but totally worth it – Fighting off filthy Mac fags
Hey guys. Work and some health related things kept me out for a while. Anyway, let us get back to business. So, a relative of mine asked my help in setting up a Gentoo installation for college. He has been using Ubuntu for a year or so right now and he felt that he wanted to explore more. I advised him to use BSD, but he wasn’t ready for it, not just yet. He wanted help with Gentoo as he was focused on source based distributions. Most of my readers know about my love-hate affair with Gentoo. Still, I wanted to help him out. It was no hassle of course, but he was sort of confused after the whole thing. Gotta see how long he sticks with it.
When it comes to Linux, nothing beats the awesomeness of source based distributions. But time and other constraints have almost put them out of business. Gentoo is still the go to source based distribution and for a good reason. The other choices from back then are either dead or dormant, with very little to no active updates. If you checked out some of my earlier posts, I had spoken a lot about Lunar Linux, a fork of Sorcerer GNU/Linux (later Sorcerer OS). At a time, it was my Linux distro of choice. It is still under development, but not as extensively as it used to be. Source Mage is another fork of Sorcerer. It had a larger team back then, but their latest updates, at least in their webpage dates to 2017. Both Lunar and Source Mage are git managed right now, so you could pull the sources and build your own. But I wonder how many people still do it, at least in comparison with the much more straightforward installation of Gentoo.
Personally, I really loved Sorcerer and its forks Lunar and Source Mage. The simple philosophy of using nothing more than bash scripts to fetch, install and update a package was a testament to KISS, instead of using complex programs and tools other distros used to manage packages. Even the installation routines were pretty simple compared to Gentoo. That’s why it was pretty easy to sort of shift between Sorcerer and Lunar for me. Kyle Sallee’s Sorcerer was way ahead of its time back then and it is a shame that it is dead now. Anyway, while I was recuperating, I had time to put an older iso on another one of my Thinkpads and was able to hack a few shit and cast a few spells here and there and was finally able to set it up for use right now. It was awesome and took me back to that time when I used to do this kinda shit at 3AM in the morning with some bullshit still overdue at 8 in the morning. Exciting times.
Anyway, seen above are a couple of obligatory screenshots. I went for CRT green for this machine, as I initially used back then. WM is xmonad with my old config and the font is Monaco. Wallpaper is Pinstripe from my old collection. If you guys need anything else, please ping me.
P.S. Right click on the images and open them. If original size is compromised, please delete the width parameter following ? towards the end of the image address and reload. You will have the original size.
El Camino
Hope you folks are doing fine. After some testing travel, I had a pretty relaxing time today and finally watched El Camino. Needless to say, it was fantastic. It feels like it was just yesterday when Breaking Bad ended. Difficult to believe that it was six fucking years ago! It has to be one of my all time favorite dramas ever. As a big time Xphile, it was so easy to fall in love with Breaking Bad. Vince Gilligan has written some of the best X Files episodes and when I caught the first episode of Breaking Bad, it felt so fucking familiar. After The X Files, Breaking Bad was the show I started watching religiously. These days though, with just so many shows on TV and streaming platforms, it is so difficult to keep up. Word of mouth, great reviews sometimes pique my interest and I watch some shows, but not consistently like I did earlier with The X Files or Breaking Bad. Hell, there was a time, when I even watched The Bold and the Beautiful every single fucking day. I remember regularly popping a rod watching Brooke and nutting many times. She was my dream woman back then. She’s almost 60 now and has matured like fine wine. Cannot believe that she’s a grandmother now.
Brooke Logan – Extreme Rod Popper
Coming back to Breaking Bad, I loved the music that was part of the show man. A good scene becomes great with a perfect song/music. There are many examples of such wonderful synergy in Breaking Bad, but none so brilliant like DLZ by TV on the Radio. In this case, I don’t know if the scene elevated the song or the song made the scene so great. That death stare on Heisenberg’s eyes when he warns the guy to get out of his territory with DLZ slowly building up gave me the fucking goosebumps.
Again, my mind went back to The X Files and how great some of the song choices in it were. Relating to DLZ, there is a song called Hey Man, Nice Shot by Filter. It was featured in D.P.O, the third episode in Series 3. Great episode by the way and the song comes on when Giovanni Ribisi’s Darin Peter Oswald zaps Jack Black’s Bart Liquori. Perfect song for the perfect scenario. I never forgot that song ever since.
Similar slow buildup and the rock explosion towards the end. Sick shit! The second song that stayed with me forever was Unmarked Helicopters by Soul Coughing. Similar vibes like DLZ and Hey Man, Nice Shot. It was featured just briefly on Max, the eighteenth episode on Series 4.
Soul Coughing captured the very essence of the show and it described the situation in that episode perfectly and it was also a wonderful tribute to Fox Mulder. All three songs were pretty similar in my opinion and the connect between the two shows was felt across so many levels. Great stuff that!
Travel mode on. Will post more stuff over the weekend. Anyway, Twitter is quite easily the thing that you would love and hate the most. I stayed away from it for a long while, but I ran into one of my greatest inspirations at Copenhagen Airport totally by chance some six months back and he told me to get in touch on Twitter as he responds quickly. He posts updates on his work on Twitter first, before talking about them on his website in detail much later. And if he isn’t grumpy and if your question is worth it, he will respond directly. This is quite motivating to be honest.
So, I took to Twitter. That was it. Suddenly, I was getting involved in discussions about woke ass liberal idiocy, conservative shit, guns and other conversations, regardless of national geographies. Call me old fashioned, but the bullshit spread by the Alphabet people, especially the trans thugs, the vile anti Trump vitriol and the general stupidity of the large populace in mocking traditional structures and religious freedom certainly got to me. Twitter sure does a great job of bringing ’em all out. So, I got banned a couple of times earlier. Each ban lasted a day. First, was when I addressed a moron who wrote lame ass article after article about a sportsperson. When she won the World Championships recently, he changed his tune. I pointed it out and told him to shove the words he had written about her earlier down his own throat and choke on ’em. Twitter said I was encouraging suicide! What the fuck? I raised an issue, but those morons overruled. The second time it happened was when I called a fucking opinionated douche a retard. Strike two, so you cannot use that word on Twitter apparently. I explained the context again, but no, overfuckingruled! The third ban happened last night for calling a terrorist apologist and a disgusting moron a skank. Strike three. Now I am banned for a fucking week. Skank, really? Again, Twitter said that I was threatening her. Damn man! If you read the kind of shit this asshole has written over the years, you would call her something even worse. But skank? Gimme a fucking break Twitter.
Twitter’s fucking dictionary of words it thinks are threatening language is stupid. Words like faggot, retard, skank gets you banned sofort. Stupid man, real stupid. Fuck you Twitter, see you in a week!
As usual, how about a screenshot of one of my work machines? It’s a Thinkpad T420 with pimped up specs – i7 processor, 16 gigs RAM and coreboot (I should probably document my experience with implementing this in a separate post). Nothing beats the badassery of ThinkPads in my opinion, especially the older ones. I was given a brand new thin laptop with all the bells and whistles at work. I couldn’t survive a week with it. Hustling is a major aspect of my job these days and my boss was of the opinion that a thin laptop will help me with traveling light. Sure, but it ain’t no fucking Thinkpad. I was using this machine as my primary development box as well and not just for presenting shit. The backlit keyboard with the MacBook like flat keys was downright criminal and I could never get used to the fucking clear screen.
Thinkpad T420
So after a week trying, I returned this abomination back and told the boss I will find my own machine. She just had to pay. Long story short, found a fantastic dealer dealing exclusively with refurbished ThinkPads and got my current machine. It had been used very lightly and it looked and felt like it was brand new. Pimped it up as I had mentioned earlier and it has been my greatest companion ever since. Wife comes a close second.
I am running Debian Bullseye on it. It definitely wasn’t my first choice. But other devs are insistent on using it, so I had no other choice. Also, in spite of a being a coding heavy job, I am senior management and naturally some devs look at me as a code monkey. I don’t really care about it as long as the job’s done. Anyway, as I was saying, Debian was not my choice. Actually, I didn’t even want to use Linux. I put FreeBSD on it. Linux is better in this case, said top management. Wanting to get around systemd, I went back to Gentoo, after so so many years. Emerged out pretty quickly as time was becoming a constraint. Then I found Void. It was what I believed to be exactly what I wanted. But there were some strange issues with it after a few updates. WiFi used to drop quite consistently and a few other minor annoyances got me worked up after a while. Never really figured out a proper reason for this behavior. So, I finally relented and knocked on Debian’s doors again, after ages. It is my base OS now. I still run OpenBSD, FreeBSD on a couple of other machines, OpenIndiana Hipster and Illumos on my other laptops. I will post shots from those machines soon. For the moment, here’s Debian Bullseye on a ThinkPad T420. KDE for a change. I alternate between xmonad and KDE.
KDE on Debian Bullseye -ThinkPad T420
KDE theme is Carl from jomada and also includes the wallpaper. Urxvt colors are just ported from Carl konsole color scheme. Icon theme is Candy icons. UI font is Roboto Condensed. Window Font is Fjalla One. Urxvt font is Pragmata Pro Mono.
If you guys need any other information, please comment.
I am back!
Hello friends. Long long long time, I know. Life threw a series of stink bombs at me over the last few years and man I thought I was dunzo. But God had other plans. I soldiered on and learned a lot during this time and have emerged fucking stronger than ever before. I am ready for anything now. It’s been what, nearly six years since I posted here? The years have flown so quickly man. Although I had been blogging a bit over the last couple of years by operating some new domains here and there, I missed Skinwalker as this is my first home on the internet. So I got it reactivated and today being highly auspicious in this part of the world and all, decided to start posting shit again. Also, with UNIX50 having been commemorated just a day or two back, I really wanted to post my thoughts, but I wanted to do it right here.
I just hope at least a few of my faithful blog readers/visitors are still online and they might be still interested in what I have to say about things. The title of the post by the way just refers to the madness that was the last few years of my life. Lost some of my closest family one after the other. But it was not all gloomy, got married to a wonderful woman.
Anyway, I am back and hoping to see continued support from you folks.
Sorry about the long delay folks. Had a lot on my platter. Anyway, I would like to talk about something that has been a long standing passion of mine – Ghost in the Shell Universe. The re-imagining of the origin story that was Arise had be captivated as usual. With the new Ghost Whispers just a few days old, I think it makes sense for me to post my thoughts over the coming weekend. I will be posting my analysis of both the episodes and would discuss elements of computer science, biology (specifically Virology), philosophy amongst many other things.
So, watch out for this space this weekend!
Omploader – Down!
Hi guys, sorry about having disappeared for a while. Had to deal with a few personal tragedies and work related stuff kept me occupied. Anyway, I am aware that the beloved Omploader is dead. But I always had a hope that it would come back. It has happened a few times with Omploader. Sadly, I think this time it is for real 😦 I wanted to quickly mention this here because I had a few files hosted on Omploader – some Fluxbox themes, XfCE4 themes and some configs. If you guys encounter a 404, do drop a comment here. I will re-host the files elsewhere.
Also, just wanted to mention a bit about my blog’s new design. I was getting a bit bored with my itunes 2 theme. It is one of my favorite themes and who knows, I may revert back to it in a few days. I currently dig the BonPress theme and like it’s very clean interface. I particularly like how the theme renders on my old Xperia E C1505 phone.
BonPress Theme on Xperia E C1505
If the viewing experience is not that good with this theme please let me know. I would revert back to itunes theme.
Reflections on the Strange and the Not so Strange 