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notes bookshop link because i’m a sucker for pretty much all things KSR. this was a fun read, pulpy in all of its 1990s aspects with an interesting take on the fictional internet and wrist phones. there’s an interesting meta discussion in here about the relationships between scientists/elites, politicians and the masses at large. some of it parallels the tensions and the lack of trust between the technocrats/scientists in our bureaucracy and society at large with a heaping helping of political messiness....

i updated my mastodon installation the other day and it looked like everything went swimmingly. but, i discovered that they’d changed the structure of the docker containers. this was evident if i was using the docker-compose.yml that was in the repo and just blithely using that. but, durrr, i’m not. this seemed to chug along for a while with little/no apparent ill effects, but i restarted the containers the other day for something else and lo, the mastodon-streaming container was unhappy....

bookshop link notes this has been in the reading queue for a while now. a trip to zenith books provided the irresistible impetus to grab a copy. this was not the book i was expecting. for its page count heft it’s a remarkably sparse book in terms of text. there’s a lot of white space in here. it’s less a treatise on the creative process and … living up to its subtitle, more of a discussion on a way of living/being....

notes bookshop link this was a dense and often redundant read with a lot of the classic, academic need to spend a lot of time on (re)naming things. to summarize … tunnels are the new internet. you might not necessarily realize/recognize what’s going on, but the focus of today’s internet is no longer end-to-end connectivity and addressing, etc. it’s what you can accomplish with tunnels. this is true, pretty much everything that you’re going to do in internet and enterprise engineering for the remainders of our life time is going to be in the service of some form of tunneling....

notes bookshop link this was a disturbingly current read. it’s reasonably fresh off the press and i wrapped it up a couple of days before the election. it’s an exhaustively researched and referenced work that digs into the politically charged battles over education and the desire to create a glossy, positive history from those on the right. there’s a lot to unpack in this book despite it’s pretty short length. it ranges from discussing the german repackaging of history pre-WW2 to florida’s book bans and dismantling of their instutuions of higher education....