posts

notes bookshop link recommended: yes there’s not a lot to say about this. it’s a fun, quick read and apparently the first installment on a much longer series. there’s all sorts of interesting stuff swirling around in here and stephenson is doing a great job of “world buliding”. the initial character, dawn/aurora, straddles two worlds between the wars and during the rise of soviet communism. there are historical figures (neils bohr makes a sidebar cameo), events (a world’s fair) interesting digressions (polo being played by cowboys/girls in montana, etc....

notes bookshop link recommended: yes there’s been no shortage of press on this book. i suspect i’ve ingested a fair amount of what’s surrounded it. given the hype around the book you’d be forgiven for glossing over the trip to dakar and to a school board meeting. i’m not sure that i parse the dakar bits, i’m not meta/cerebral enough to grok what’s going on here. but it doesn’t feel like much....

for posterity … dear future generations, google search used to be so good that you could find primary or secondary source information quickly and reliably with a modicum of effort. failure to exert this teensy bit of effort to poke at something that needed an answer which could reasonably be expected to be found online would be met with snark and some level of disposable derision. “let me google that for you” (online, LMGTFY) was often the snark of choice....

numbers don’t lie (vaclav smil) there’s a lot of “elite” love for vaclav smil. bill gates and steven pinker wax poetic about smil. i guess i get it. he provides a dispassionate comparison of various things and stands back all neutral-ish like. this was a quick read and the follow-up elements are well laid out if you’re keen to dig into something further. the whole book is laid out as a series of brief essays on whatever the topic du jour was a weriting....

overview note - this is a WIP while i find time to write this down notes on installing mastodon in a self-hosted manner where the front end is largely proxied by cloudflare’s tunneld services and object storage is handled on an S3 server someplace in the cloud. pre-requisites you’re gonna need the following a domain with the ability to control your DNS if you want to use the cloudflare biz, you’re going to need to have the DNS and the account elements setup on cloudflare in advance of this because, well, cloudflare’s going to be the front end of things....