tom jennings

i make things. The older i get the less i know. not real keen on chauvinists, tech or otherwise. traded corporations are the/an enemy of all that lives. queer supporter of queer/trans folk and loud about it.

West Coast, Norte Americano.

PS: I filter out/will not see any post with any of these words: AI, LLM, chatbot.

Public Key

npub1qd2pnra30h4mnslpdt66rweeqwnvgc00l4rv7tz0ge99zs2ypfeqw674he

NIP-05 Address

tomjennings@tldr-nettime-org.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsqx4qe37chm6aec0sk4adphvus8fkyv8hl63k09385vjj3g9zq5uspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsmvplpk

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1qd2pnra30h4mnslpdt66rweeqwnvgc00l4rv7tz0ge99zs2ypfeqw674he

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Last Notes

2026-10-28 18:56:19 UTC

The loss of Dolores Huerta is terrible, I cried for a few minutes. But she was 96, and if anyone in the world might have "done enough", it would be her. The assholes of the world didn't get her, time did. So there's that.
She would show up to the smallest events, in queer San Francisco. She knew where the people were and where the edges of things were.
She is a global-stature person, she's done as much or more than anyone, yet I think few white americans know about her.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolores_Huerta

2026-10-28 17:51:33 UTC

Stories like this tell me that in the face of serious threats, there is zero possibility of 1) my defending against such things but also 2) the likelihood of having to, both, are nil.
Almost no matter how skilled folks think they are, fighting forces like this is akin to landing an airplane or wrestling a bear; things lots of (i suspect mostly young white) men think they can do, and often fatally find out the hard way that they cannot.
Im relying on luck. Its all i got. And Harry Hay's advice that queer folk and those not in power work from askance, through our community skills, and leave the frontal assaults to those with the big guns.
https://infosec.exchange/@kimzetter/117519550073687195
The internet is not ours.

2026-10-27 16:49:49 UTC

POST ERRATA
In the last few weeks post errors I later realized I'd made:
* Referring to the fediverse I meant to type "ActivityPub" and typed another name.
* I mis-read (lazy-read, a frequent malady these days) that NetBSD does not support power mode S3; it does. It doesn't support S5.
* I mis-stated that the Digital Research macroassembler does not allow nested conditionals; it does. I fully realize almost no one could possibly care or notice. But I offer it as the sort of thing I find myself doing (and recently copped to by @nprofile…gp4e) of errors arising from areas you don't question -- a corollary of lazy-reading, which I seem to be doing more of.
There are too many things to read today, mostly small and medium. But that's just an excuse.
I'm sure there are others. Please do not feel free to remind me of them unless someone died from it.

2026-10-26 16:57:52 UTC

OMFG I thought I was going crazy. Digital Research's manuals collapse into chaos on close reads. They're TERRIBLE with naming conventions.
Only yesterday, after 3, 4 straight days working at it, do I finally understand the interlocking pointers between the Common-memory-resident .RSP data (Process Descriptor, a system queue and a data queue) and the banked-memory-resident .BRS, the code portion, with a minimal linkage to the .RSP the kernel ("nucleus") uses.
I was *lost* looking at the data, because I forgot to look at the daemon init code, which informs the kernel/nucleus of the system queue, by doing a "create queue" system call on the *data queue*, which (bingo!) contains one back-link to the system queue.
GODDAMMIT.
The manuals are ~50 years old, everyone's dead, few people wrote .RSP code even then, and as far as I know today I'm the only one foolish enough to try.
What archaeology! DR are *fkn terrible* at consistent naming. The kernel system tables are filled with pointers and linked lists, all 8080 assembly, and all references by table name + numeric offset (eg. something simple like "number of timer ticks/sec" (no name) is SYSDAT + 15. I'm OK with that; if everything had a (6 character) name the include file alone would fill memory. Stockholm Syndrome again.
But look at these terrible names! All on the same page describing two things, RSP and BRS:
RSP (Resident System Program) // OK
RSP (Resident System Process) // utterly different, should have a different acronym!
BRS (banked RSP) // technically incorrect
"the bank zero module" (BRS)
"banked RSP" (the RSP portion of the RSP/BRS pair!)
"banked RSP" (the BRS module)
"the common module" (the RSP)
I'm not really crazy, am I?

2026-10-26 00:00:26 UTC

I'm writing an MP/M banked daemon; it took me two whole days to find the definition of the banked portion -- it wasn't in the Programmers Guide! It was in the System Guide! Sheesh! Turns out to be very simple.
Then it took a day and a half to get the conditional assembly in MAC, the macro assembler to work. MAC doesn't allow nested conditionals, it was like converting code into hard-wired logic. Got it to work though; one source to define two related binaries.
Alas, MAC doesn't allow defining a symbol on the command line, so assembling both halves requires either manually editing, or a kludge with an "include" directive that I can set from the command line, and put it all in a submit file.
Or write a sed, which I will probably do at some point, but not now. (CP/M sed will be easy to write because I already have a simple GREP and also it will have almost no features, lol.)

2026-10-25 23:09:44 UTC

The new mobile Mapquest app is *good*. Takes a bit to adjust to the new scheme, but everything I use is there.
Im gonna proselytize this heavily to everyone i know for one reason: Maps is Googles final "good app" snd anything that hurts google where it counts is a good thing.
Theres a map layer to SHOW SURVEILLANCE. It highlights the flock and other cameras.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mapquest.android.ace&hl=en_US
https://www.google.com/goto?url=CAESgQEB6zswFdNwdC2--iyyM2dUiJQM9eyUvMRAPrz2l6HfChbafgGxKCSnWYri84MCea_n4g3nF-73nCEGvlW5pze5mEdhPFfz93hojJbIWnV_QPT-a4t2rojEBTJlxfFUPIeVbK6EkXgrK26_nDev9XGDaXaa-kLOv0HDeESBakMdkpk
I try and try to use Comaps, but its jist too buggy to be usable as a daily map for navigating. Im fine with block-level search results. It just does a bad job too often... And its no threat to google.

2026-10-24 18:29:22 UTC

1 of 3
Getting that batch of 25 Friendly fZ80 machines out ate all my interest in working on MP/M or related for a couple months, but decided to sort of force myself to push on to some of the backlog. This involved for starters a very close read of the MP/M II Programmer's Guide to figure out just how the hell .BRS/.RSP Resident System Processes work.
Six hours I read about 30 pages of manual, annotating my stupid small program (background clock and CPU load bargraph).
Holy crap. Its so succinct! OK that's the nice way to put it. The manual was clearly written by programmers deep into their shit. The design, the desired end result is fairly elegant, but the 8080 is a horror and impediment that few people I think ever put in this much effort to overcome.
DOS has it's TSR; "terminate stay resident", a very crude hack that puts (8086 relocatable) code up high, just under the bottom of the OS (remember its' copied CP/M: command interpreter, BDOS, BIOS) and moves the location 5 jump table jump up to hide under. Barbaric in the extreme. No one did this in CP/M because there wasn't enough memory. In DOS TSRs are bags on the side; though you can hook into the software interrupts to modify/extend systems calls (eg. the FOSSIL driver extended the primitive int 13h). Otherwise MSDOS has no knowledge or accommodation of TSRs.
Unix/linux has daemons, kernel-monolithic or dynamically loaded. Daemons are of course extend OS abilities in documented ways.
MP/M has RSPs; resident system programs (or processes; same acronym, different function! aargh). RSPs can be daemons (or anything). RSPs can provide services, and RSPs can use kernel services, can execute programs, talk to other RSPs, do things like SCHED, which is cron. RSPs are amazing.
1/3

2026-10-22 04:34:53 UTC

If one needed, even, to come up with arguments for the severe limitations of machine based [{anything}], one could do worse than reread Kuhn's STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS.
It makes clear that science -- the pursuit of understanding the world that exists outside of human experience -- requires a body with which to experience the world.
Science is inherently about the body in the world. Relativity, electromagnetism, quantum theory, and all of the computational arts, abstract as they might seem, arise from concerns of living as a body in rhe world. Intellect is required, but a body is the basis for our need to understand.
If you've never read it, believe me, its an antidote to the shit-spew of the current crop of technologists. It's the stuff they dont know or care about. It's about the difficulties of attempting rigor while living in a messy body in an unknowable world. Its a reasonably easy read, the enlarged 2nd edition is ~200 pages. Its old (1962) but reads like new. It will remind you what it is you might care about.

2026-10-20 19:21:04 UTC

Nice. As of 4 Nov eBay is changing the payout rules for sellers to one that defaults to the money not leaving eBay.
* If you are currently signed up for automatic payout, it will be reset to stays in your ebay balance. Oh, but you can re-sign-up for automatic payout, with what appears a different schedule system (maybe).
* You can buy things from eBay with your balance. Ahh, now we see the point.
You can have your own money if you ask and click a lot of things.
"Thanks for being part of the eBay community. "

2026-10-14 22:20:40 UTC

Leor Zolman wrote the BDS C compiler for CP/M. He was perfectly suited to the era, open, friendly, had no idea what he was doing but made great things.
Here's an email? from him in 1982 regarding his compiler package, available from Lifeboat, a once-significant distributor:
Date: 09/04/82 11:00:03
From: LEOR
Re: update policy
Simply, my policy is that ANYONE who EVER pays real money for BDS C, purchased ANYWHERE, is perfectly entitled to copy anyone else's newer version with my blessings. Note that NO ONE should EVER have to go to Lifeboat for updates...PLEASE tell your friend to join the user's group so he can get the newsletters and CHEAP updates. You should join and do likewise, if you haven't already!
And here's a bit of (tech) history he wrote in 2002, years after BDS C was a viable product, but for a recent final release.
This requires some back knowledge that if you are a 21st century programmer and don't know, isn't flattering. To me it's the opposite, and you will ahve to make the effort to conjure that 1974..1982 microcomputer world -- when they, we, were coding from scratch, chip datasheets, on hardware designed from scratch, from chip datasheets, all with a mission to make computing available to everyone. EVERYONE.
Reinventing the wheel was not only allowed de facto as it always is, but encouraged. We can do better! In spite of the omissions and lack of (compiler) education Leor wrote a very functional C compiler perfectly suited to the time; the binaries for the two-pass compiler are 15K and 20K bytes.
I think rewrites from scratch, of entire systems, is a good idea. This corporate mode of huge code bases patched and patched creates bloat, not spareness. It didn't used to be this way. And doesn't have to continue.
https://www.inglevale.com//README.txt

2026-10-09 04:50:43 UTC

How could people read books, back in the olden times, before post-its?

2026-10-09 04:45:31 UTC

Im rereading Kuhn's STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS as I'm thinking of suggesting it to a particular damaged autistic kid who is insanely smart but has picked up some nonsense ideas about science; it may be too much or maybe not (he was posting his crazy writing on a neocities website he set up when he was NINE YEARS OLD).
It's a pretty good read as Kuhn is fairly succinct for an academic, since he was young, and had a pretty great fkn epiphany to get across.
Now the computer technology world does not do science; its a crafty trade more like expert cooking, all recipes and ad hoc knowledge (don't fool yourself; and the crafts can be glorious and exalted practices).
But wow, where computer folk used to at least ape the general shape of science practice, as a framework for thinking about what we're thinking and trying to do, today, its just a bunch of crap to make money as fast as possible.
Even much or most open source is about deliverables, and not Good Answers or Good Insights.
How much we have fallen. No wonder I've lost all (all) interest in this state of the shitty art, and drawn back to those TAZ islands of amateur autonomy, wondering how we keep losing the thread. (Its easy: money.)

2026-10-08 22:31:58 UTC

Here's a good one.
In 1992 I was up in Seattle, where Vince Periello lived, and where I'd literally just met my now-current boyfriend, Josh. We met and had coffee, Josh, 17 years younger than me, lol, I think put Vince off but hey he rolled with the punches. Good for him.
Apparently I later mentioned the meeting in FidoNews, no big deal. NO -- in 1992, posting casually about a same-sex relationship was abso-fucking-lutely not done, but I did this occasionally, utterly dead-panned as it should be. Make the world you want to live in, etc.
And this random other guy Josh writes me, making this claim that he, and "all other people named Josh in Seattle", have been harmed, and he wants an apology!
People are insane.
https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/FidoNet/source/Fido-FidoNet/Fido-pre-12/josh.TXT

2026-10-08 20:32:13 UTC

Fragments from a 1992 FAQ. LOL
THE PRICE OF FREEDOM:
There are many reasons, mostly technical, why FidoNet uses a single list containing all member nodes. However the single most important reason is that it gives each and every FidoNet node the information and ability to contact any other FidoNet node directly, without relying on any other system. No external authority can prevent any other site from communicating freely.
Freedom costs. Efficiency is for machinery, not people. A line of text per FidoNet node is a small price to pay for self-defense and the ability to talk with whoever you wish. It is almost never needed, and when it is, it is too late -- you find yourself cutoff.
...
WHAT IT IS (OVERALL AND SOCIALLY):
The FidoNet is a large, fully functional anarchism. It is a communications system built with personal computers, modems, phone lines, and many thousands of crazy and interesting people. It is run in a profoundly casual manner. It is amazingly reliable and efficient. There is no central repository for information, no fixed structure to rely on. Last year's monolithic infrastructure has been thoroughly forgotten and completely replaced with today's seemingly endless monstrosity, which will be gone and forgotten next year. It is not possible to tell you how to join it, because by the time you read this
it will have changed (I know, I've tried before). Neither is it possible to tell you where to go to find some particular item. I'm not kidding.
https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/FidoNet/source/Fido-FidoNet/Fido-pre-12/what.faq.TXT

2026-10-08 18:42:47 UTC

There are substantial, showy "law enforcement" pushes going on today in Los Angeles, at Home Despots and other places. I assume not unique to LA.
FBI, DEA, ICE, ATF, various others with popup tents, booths, dozens of "officers" of each. Some using vehicles with CA Exempt (state) plates.
Brute showing of force for an election less than a month away.
If you have been hesitating about volunteering for community stuff NOW IS THE TIME most literally, documentation (there is no physical confrontation done) and witnesses, more is better.

2026-10-05 00:38:01 UTC

Interesting guy, Christopher Strachey. Wrote probably first video game (1952), first computer music (i doubt this, certainly one of), CPL language (influenced C) predecessor to M4, and lot of fundamental stuff.
Gay too. Much interaction with Turing.
Also right place right time. Imagine working on those first (horrible) machines! Damn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Strachey?wprov=sfla1

2026-10-03 22:45:12 UTC

I will be speaking at the VCF Montreal event in a bit over a month from now, 7 and 8 November. I was thinking of talking about amateur computing but I'm getting hints I'd be better off talking about FidoNet, time is always shorter than it is appears so that will likely be the subject.
https://cvcfed.org/vcf-montreal-2-0/invites-guests/#tom-jennings

2026-10-03 17:38:03 UTC

One of the most surprising things sbout reading Borsook's CYBERSELFISH today is how little tech has changed since 1999. The overall structure of corporations, the poor treatment of workers, the networks (snd i include the internet as well as social and economic) is today as-built in the late 90's.
It's as if nothing has changed, other than anything containing silicon is 10X faster.
CYBERSELFISH as history is incredibly useful. And, not to lessen her vision, its de facto prophecy (the result of her encyclopedic research) is enhanced by the ruthless extractive stasis of the vision of corporate america.
Also she's a great writer, it's manically energetic in every page, her insights and research are shockingly deep and broad, visible these 25 years later.
Her writing is sharp and super smart, but anti-snobby, and funny as hell.
And she calls out shits and creeps by name, and nails their crimes with fact. Its clear why she was blacklisted.
Another feminist woman fucked over and ignored. We can fix this now.
https://www.cyberselfish.com/

2026-09-23 20:47:05 UTC

Where Norbert Wiener in 1948 (CYBERNETICS) calls out the inevitable (because no one did anything to heed any warnings such as his) exploitation of technology as social control, in a warning that automating even "low" labor is a new form of enslavement:
/[...]
I have said that this new development has unbounded possibilities for good and for evil. For one thing, it makes the metaphorical dominance of the machines, as imagined by Samuel Butler, a most immediate and non-metaphorical problem. It gives the human race a new and most effective collection of mechanical slaves to perform its labor.
Such mechanical labor has most of the economic properties of slave labor, although, unlike slave labor, it does not involve the direct demoralizing effects of human cruelty.
However, any labor that accepts the conditions of competition with slave labor accepts the conditions of slave labor, and is essentially slave labor.
The key word of this statement is competition. It may very well be a good thing for humanity to have the machine remove from it the need of menial and disagreeable tasks, cr it may not. I do not know.
It cannot be good for these new potentialities to be assessed in the terms of the market, of the money they save; and it is precisely the terms of the open market, the “fifth freedom,” that have become the shibboleth of the sector of American opinion represented by the National Association of Manufacturers and the Saturday Evening Post.
I say American opinion, for as an American, I know it best, but the hucksters recognize no national boundary./

2026-09-22 20:09:19 UTC

Huge dragonfly got stuck in a window. All tangled in spiderwebs. I caught it, pulled the webs off and it flew away.
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/117/316/501/004/461/568/original/cf61ce22737cd6bf.jpg

2026-09-21 05:20:54 UTC

/Project Cybersyn ended following Allende's removal and death during the coup d'état of 11 September 1973. After the coup, the Chilean military abandoned Cybersyn and destroyed the operations room.[3]/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn?wprov=sfla1

2026-09-11 20:04:08 UTC

I suspect there is very little interest in mid-1980's 8086/8088 computers that are not "PC compatible" -- there are probably a million of theses things, various brands. Most are utterly forgotten since they can't run IBM-compatible anything. Some in this class were very nice machines, like the Victor 9000.
The 555 is pretty much a CP/M machine but with an 8088. 256K RAM, no ISA bus. A cute little pizza box.
I wonder what Sanyo was thinking when they made these? lol.
The 555 is a sad little machine. It was the most common bottom-end computer on FidoNet. The RTC interrupt stopped during floppy access. There is no hard disk option. The floppy format isn't compatible. FidoNet folk with these things often had Anchor Automation, the worst mainstream modem you could buy.
No idea if tech docs are available; you'd have to write your own BIOS from scratch but that's not a big deal when all the chips are dumb commodity stuff. There's CP/M-86 for it.
This one is very pretty. https://www.ebay.com/itm/128052562352 So cheap! This one's 250, but many are 100.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanyo_MBC-550_series
Apparently this is the 8088 version of the CP/M version,

2026-09-11 16:18:26 UTC

Our chickens lay eggs at/above 100F/38C but often the eggs are liquified and too weird to eat (eggs are gross anyway). Foreboding for national food supply.
Oh wait! We have a friendly country to our north! They'll sell us eggs, right?!
....
How much?!!!

2026-09-05 16:37:15 UTC

Leslie Mah, crucial founding member of TRIBE 8 l, ANTI-SCRUNTI FACTION and countless to other queer punk stuff, is having severe health problems and friends are raising money for her survival.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Mah
https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-with-leslie-mah-through-cancer-treatment

2026-09-04 20:28:38 UTC

Bought a dozen old 230 watt panels for 300 bucks, delivered. They're old, ill load test and take the top 800 to 1000 watts worth.
Built a 2kwh system, new batteries.
Gonna power my little lab building. First on outlet strips to test and all that, then maybe wire the subpanel to it.
Biggest load is a mini split heatpump, i havent even measured that load, it will work or not. If not it will stay on the grid.
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/117/214/651/811/610/454/original/b9d990ec9a27c788.jpg
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/117/214/652/118/931/354/original/6ba1690ab4262c5a.jpg

2026-09-03 04:59:06 UTC

I finally met a particular Famous Internet Personage tonight, we have mutual friends, in same San Francisco scenes but near zero temporal overlap. At a friends art show on echo Park
Huge AI believer, and libertarian-ish capitalist. Tried to tell me our then punk scene didnt have more money because we didnt know how to monetize our non tangible stuff (culture). Resisted the idea our decisions were then openly considered and intentional (omfg no idea how much theory we inflicted on ourselves, lol).
He did a terrible job of trying to flatten out ethics (you carry a cellphone, has child labor cobalt in it type whataboutism), changed subject when i repeatedly pointed out all four big ai corps openly court fascists. The answer to everything was that AI will solve it.
He was taken aback by my suggestion that amateurism is in itself a good thing (because denies monetization).
Im certain he thought i was a reactionary old fart. Very dismissive when i pointed out my/friends lived experience was not as he described.
Hopefully our paths will not cross again for another 30 years.
True believers really are all the same.
Then i leave the event to go home and my fat tire ebike has a massive flat tire. Got a ride ok. Lol!

2026-08-28 21:23:15 UTC

Lol, TLDs:
"In 2018, Spamhaus rated .men as the worst top-level domain in terms of spam and scamming. .men comes top with 60.6% of its 73,000 domains identified as "bad", resulting in a badness index of 6.48. The company that runs .men, GRS Domains also runs the third worst registry – .loan – with 59 percent bad domains and a 6.22 index."
wikipedia

2026-08-28 04:21:35 UTC

{ and } are just upper case [ and ].

2026-08-27 17:38:56 UTC

Photo print by my friend Bill Daniel. He took the photo (of series back in the 80s 90s, SF bike messengers) and recently did this print, by hand, on his enlarger. Fkn hell man! Life sized print!
Bill is a GOOD-ASS punk photographer.
I think my boyf is gonna buy it. It will require rearranging our entire house.
Lol, Bill mounts these in shows by staple-gun to the wall.
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/117/168/679/180/853/612/original/c1ee37e4431f93c4.jpg

2026-08-23 22:33:31 UTC

Hmm, tens of thousands of people, without electricity, for TWELVE DAYS. Gary, Indiana. Not in the US news.
Of course it's mostly black people.

2026-08-17 15:25:17 UTC

I HATE THESE THINGS stupid corporate scam. There's nothing responsible about these things. People ride them til the battery goes dead and then dump them where they die, usually just step off, shitty people flop them to the ground blocking sidewalks etc. then rhe corp sends someone around in a gasoline pickup truck to gather them up to recharge and redeploy.
There were TWENTY of these on the 1.5 mile section of rhe river bike path this morning. I counted. Recovering these involves parking the truck at many dead end roads, walking out to them and hauling each to the truck. They're heavier'n'shit too. Abject exploitive junk.
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/117/111/534/344/754/687/original/ad75e915b74cfd19.jpg
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/117/111/534/846/242/085/original/3944111cbabacaf4.jpg

2026-08-16 22:34:30 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…f2ay
What are you running that causes video problems? Is it games?

2026-08-12 20:11:27 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…eqsh
A disease known for thousands of years. Dont P100 masks do a good job here? Or is that too simplistic?
A shop that does this in a fixed place could take other measures too.

2026-08-12 17:54:15 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…h6ty
Turing had nothing, came up with it anyways.
@nprofile…tuer

2026-08-12 03:22:01 UTC

Fuck, i need to read UBIK again. Its so nuts. I don't think i understood it at all. Now i know why
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubik

2026-08-11 02:33:16 UTC

- reply

By "if it were 1995", now, meaning the existing Internet but without any of the evil corps at your disposal, what would you do? Not what would you have done in the past, but with the limited 1995 internet, what DO you do today, but with modern gear?
Do that now. Its just the old cliche of make the world you want to live in. Thats how i approach it.

2026-08-10 22:23:23 UTC

Memories (fantasies) of the early, empty internet, open to any possibility.
Make a rule of to not use any corporate service: now you are back in 1995 but with modern hardware.
Now what do you do?
Its not "personal boycott" to not use amazon or facebook. Literally anything you can think of to buy on it or similar are sold elsewhere. Finding them requires persistence. What do you think you'd be doing if it were 1995?

2026-08-09 23:46:56 UTC

Every inch of space defcon and its visitors occupies or visits is publicly traded corporate owned and controlled.

2026-08-03 19:59:07 UTC

Our rental unit has a recently done marble bathroom (don't ask...). Marble needs to be "sealed". OK fine.
One of them has come up with the idea that they needs this $1000 (!) service to come do it. They're not rich, neither are we. Seems to me all we need is to clean it (there's no stains or damage) and wipe on a sealer.
I believe this "service" is a bullshit ripoff. I have no experience with this stuff. But I can't find online anything convincing, since it's a negative-information I need, it's difficult to search for.
What possible thing need be done to marble, other than clean and wipe on a sealer?!!

2026-08-02 21:33:17 UTC

OK I restructured my AI policy for brutal clarity. Top down.
https://www.bleeve.me/AI.html

2026-07-31 01:10:31 UTC

Ok! I got 12 of the 25 Friendly fZ80's assembled and tested. 4 (and the 13) awaiting batteries to arrive. Will do the other 13 next week. Software release about ready, gotta test the packaging script. Then a bit of burnin-in time.
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/117/011/915/741/038/826/original/1c31d8c3decc83b3.jpg

2026-07-25 16:15:53 UTC

"It’s hard to convey the excitement of seeing a good FET curve displayed on the curve tracer after dipping a shard of rock into chemicals all day."
https://sam.zeloof.xyz/second-ic/

2026-07-19 01:32:17 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…u7p7
Wow.

2026-07-18 05:41:42 UTC

The first step to a general strike is a full pantry. For yourself and one other.

2026-07-16 15:33:06 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…vuvh
DI.fm if you like techno and trance. Private corp. I cutnpaste track names into beatport to buy.
No ads no bull. Real DJs, many channels. Been around for years.
@nprofile…h0ux @nprofile…gs3q

2026-07-15 20:50:33 UTC

Went to two big corp chain stores this week! Weird.
Bust Buy, i think its called, had an SD card holder, biked over instead of online. The front of the store, with a phalanx of salesmanmals, where sll the oversized TVs and impulse buy crap usually is, was empty, with stuff pushed around to hide the fact.
Last store I remember looking like this was Fry's Electronics, a couple months before they went bust.
Today went to the Target at Eagle Rock mall. Wow, dead mall, with one lively store. Wow. Surveillance plus. Got my stuff, no receipt, i asked how ill get out without being tackled... Finger to the ceiling salesmammal says "cameras".
On the way out passed at least two "plain clothes" types skulking like drug dealers. Just walked out
This does not bode well.

2026-07-10 04:19:04 UTC

Power "out" in the neighborhood. But its weird, some things are on most not. DVM says line voltage is 68 volts. Steady! Neighbors reads 48v. Very strange.
I unplugged all my computers.

2026-07-09 17:04:01 UTC

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@nprofile…u7p7
One of the side effects of doing anything involving multiple people is the effect soc media has had on "numbers". Like everything needs to be s large number, and more is a metric for better. This has soaked in deep.
70s 80s 90s at least quality was thr general focus, not exactly so that that word was used, but as, we want people here that are engaged with whatever it was, music playing or anything.

2026-07-06 22:04:29 UTC

I mentioned Wayne Green of 73 Magazine and BYTE and early computing. OK he was a bit of a pig, but he was funny.
There are his LETTERS and EVENTS page headers... bad taste funny, very punk:
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/116/875/288/595/087/440/original/5a65a5d50cf25acf.jpg
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/116/875/289/017/199/098/original/0643a18bf7c1c01a.jpg

2026-07-05 19:22:37 UTC

I had forgotten just how fucking tremendous Dr. Dobbs Journal was. Check out Volume 7.
(The Volumes contain all of that years' monthly issues.)
https://archive.org/search?tab=all&query=dr+dobbs+journal+vol&and%5B%5D=collection%3A%22dr_dobbs_journal%22

2026-07-03 17:07:26 UTC

This are my absolutelly favorite and long term use writing/thinking tools: pencil, paper, eraser.
I've only found two places that sell a wide range of mechanical pencil 0.5mm leads. There's probably more.
4H
3H
2H
H
F
HB
B
2B
3B
4B
(HB and B are best)
Pentel: https://www.pentel.com/products/super-hi-polymer-lead-0-5mm-12-pieces-per-tube-box-of-12-tubes
Jetpens: https://www.jetpens.com/Uni-Smudge-Proof-Lead-0.5-mm-HB-Aqua-Case/pd/44708
This is my #1 choice pencil: Alvin DRAF/TEC retractable. I bought a small case of them 15 years ago and still have unopened boxes. Only one of them has actually ever failed. https://salestoresusa.com/alvin-dr05-draf-tec-retrac-mechanical-pencil-0-5-mm-retractable-tip-ergonomic-grip/ They were once a lot less money. What else is new.
I don't actually use this stuff, just covet it: too expensive. Mostly I use Bienfang 10 x 10 gridded bond. But Clearprint still makes 10 x 10 gridded pads in vellum. https://www.gsdirect.net/products/clearprint-1000h-16-lb-10x10-fade-out-grid-vellum Lovely shit, vellum.
And this is the perfect eraser: Staedler-Mars white. Also ideal for cleaning printed-circuit board gold plated card edge connectors. Good general cleaner for small gadgety stuff. Very mild abrasive does not harm/remove the gold: https://www.staedtler.com/intl/en/products/pencils-and-accessories/erasers/mars-plastic-526-50-eraser-in-premium-quality-526-50/

2026-07-03 16:45:11 UTC

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@nprofile…7kna
How do you find time to post? Being so busy censoring websites.

2026-07-03 16:06:09 UTC

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@nprofile…7kna
Oh noes! Marxistsists!! I hear those are very dangerouses.

2026-06-27 20:19:16 UTC

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@nprofile…m28f
What year was 2.0 released? Wikipedia page doesn't say.
I was barely aware of it then; but I had friends who had it, and I knew at least it was something superior.
I did not know it had multitasking. Was it preemptive? Or otherwise arranged that didn't matter? (eg. all progs actually cooperated or something).

2026-06-27 19:11:14 UTC

I don't know why this took me so long to do: here's the root-down snapshot of my 1994 fido.wps.com server, a 386BSD machine ("Jolix"). I have no idea how this folder survived.
There's some 1990, 1991 source trees for archie, gopher, etc as well as /home.
First link here: https://www.bleeve.me/Texts/index.html

2026-06-27 18:59:09 UTC

Here's funny thing for you:
When gopher protocol was new, early 1990's, it was arranged as a way for individual human users to see other individual human users' home directories, utterly counter to the web today.
By mid/late 90s, the "customary" way was for a website to be arranged as a way for some sort of entity -- often a business -- to present it's made-up, non-personal self to the web.
These are two entirely different paradigms, one personal, one not.
(Of course there were, and still are, websites that say "Mary's website", but they are a minority; and you'll possibly recall that when you look at web geezers' personal sites they are often of the personal style.)
How easily we absorbed corporate thinking.
I did this too. A way to make up an entity that was fun (my old WPS.COM claimed physical presence in McMurdo Station, secret nuclear sites, etc).
I realize now (years later, I'm slow) that what bugs me, what seems lacking to me, in talking about protocols (http, gopher, gemini, ...) is that we're mssing this layet -- who is it, exactly, that is doing the communicating? Why?
WHAT IF we had a "web" that was only the equiv. of 1992 "home directories"? OK (1) that's 30 years ago's model, and (2) none but us idiot nerds have "home directories".
But the essence here was that people then were aware of themselves as a person, or many, at a machine, and I have this folder of stuff. And now you can see it (finger, gopher). And I can see yours! The relationship is there, vastly simpler, because, again we didn't know any better.
I'm certainly not suggesting a return to naivete (aka innocence) or barbaric tools. But a rethink of what personal means when there's a billion fucking users.
Do I really care if "anyone" to be able to see my stuff, even?
#retrocomputing #permacomputing

2026-06-23 15:56:21 UTC

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@nprofile…h0ux
Its pretty great, except its filled with people.

2026-06-19 13:45:49 UTC

Oh for fucks sake, this shitbag is on the fediverse. Seems real.
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/116/777/072/400/309/094/original/fceef3429e004118.jpg

2026-06-18 23:16:57 UTC

The hydrogen peroxide poured into the National Algae Pool has begun to lift off the new blue paint.

2026-06-14 04:34:57 UTC

At my kung fu place there's a clipboard soliciting everyones email address, just to stay up to date. The sheet was mostly full.
Every single one was at aol, gmail, or yahoo except mine.

2026-06-14 01:18:28 UTC

TheGuardian's website reaches a new low: accept all browser cookies or subscribe.
"Maybe later."

2026-06-11 02:42:50 UTC

(Post based on finding this photo in a folder 20 deep.)
Wynn Wagner III, author of Opus, the FidoNet BBS and network interface. More or less the head of the Texas Mafia, Wynn and I had a problematic relationship; I liked him, the other out and loud gay FidoNet programmer (he was also very religious and ended here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Christianity
"According to Archbishop Wynn Wagner of the former North American Old Catholic Church, inclusiveness and acceptance is the basic posture of progressive Christianity.[14][page needed]"
The Dallas folk were weirdly (to me) competitive, but since I'm quite strongly anti-competitive, mostly oblivious that people think that it is occurring, it ended up just being puzzling.
But Opus was very good software (and Wynn and cohort fun people -- mostly). He/they pushed the protocol, sometimes annoyingly, lol, came up with the YOOHOO/2U2 handshake scheme instead of my original one (TSYNC) from FTS001. https://brainpatchworkdx.com/viewtopic.php?t=6 Opus was much slicker and featureful (I really kept up support for the low-end of the hardware market) than my FidoNet program, about 1990? I ceded it all to the FTS and my my code fall to 20% of the net.
He'd do things like have Opus calculate and display absolute best-case file transfer speeds, vs mine doing pessimum calcs (eg. including file operations) and so an Opus xfering files between, Opus was always faster! Lol and sysops would complain fido was slow, sigh. Annoying, but always done with glee.
Imagine this guy with his very queer thick texas drawl talking me into doing some crazy shit.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160210034936/http://www.rxn.com/~net282/fidonet.wagner.echomail.txt
He was a complicated person and has little presence on the net that I can find. Bummer.
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/116/727/716/415/908/714/original/77d1875578f7acaf.gif

2026-06-09 01:03:15 UTC

This was a very cool project in 1997! It still is!
Analog video on a vinyl disk ("LP record") using a needle in the groove...
https://gebseng.com/03_vinylvideo/

2026-06-09 00:52:28 UTC

Some punk names:
Ana Thema
willa catheter
flux oersted
phil i stine
Mike Robe
rich quick
My favorite drag/punk name is:
Sharon Needles (NYC drag queen)

2026-06-07 01:38:46 UTC

#retrocomputing
Interesting and brief blog of Tim Paterson, author of 86DOS, designer of the firstcever 8086 computer for Seattle Computer Products.
https://dosmandrivel.blogspot.com/?m=1

2026-06-01 03:51:58 UTC

OMFG I had forgot how maddening fvwm configuration is. I keep learning it and forgetting it. The most recent saved config is from 2006 and I remember nothing I did in it.
OpenBSD comes with few fonts, and they're punitively small; 8 point, render about 1/16" high on the screen, and I can't scale it up past 18, which is barely tolerable (what do points even mean here) .

2026-05-31 05:30:42 UTC

I'm going through the Three Little Bears, and OpenBSD seems Just Right.
Running now on my old Thinkpad X13 with a USB wifi dongle. Install was easy, very clean and spare. Read each message carefully! Of course I did not.
I had to disable UEFI boot. Took me two tries to figure that out.
Its easiest to install fvwm with X11, comfortable to me, but wow it's pretty damn spare. But the first thing I usually do is install xfce thn delete literally every keyboard shortcut and replace with control-1 to select desktop 1, etc. and that's it.
/etc is clean. /etc/rc.d has one text conf file per daemon/service. If I was running racks and racks of servers maybe I'd want systemd. But I'm not.

2026-05-26 17:23:30 UTC

IMAGINE AD-TECH COLLAPSE

2026-05-22 04:07:46 UTC

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@nprofile…g7hw
Im writing many system tools that cp/m never came with; less, head, tail, grep, etc.
Source and everything here: https://www.bleeve.me/fZ80/index.html
Look at the big PDF manual, theyre in the table of contents.
@nprofile…4zem @nprofile…qjp2

2026-05-21 02:04:09 UTC

Got the new fZ80 User's Guide (renamed so) today. The beginnings of a modern MP/M user manual; D.R. manuals cover all the details but utterly no context to set them in, and as-shipped, MP/M arrives "CP/M compatible" -- meaning everything you'd want turned of, and no "suggested use" type setups.
The cover is lovely, I think, but utterly anachronistic. I don't care I like it, lol.
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/116/610/099/149/650/070/original/8f608971439723e0.jpg
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/116/610/099/157/338/091/original/e64d4fdcd6a4eeb5.jpg
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/116/610/099/160/752/653/original/20058777aeb9affb.jpg

2026-05-20 04:51:47 UTC

Wow -- the president of CalArts got BOOED OFF THE STAGE at commencement last weekend. Then one of the rich, literally inaccessible board members stood up to chastise the students. Talk sbout cant read the room!
CalArts (California institute for the arts) has been in trouble in for some time
I was faculty there. tuitions are insane, millions wasted on consultants that return useless reports, school never had money for snything including repairs, yet admin hss bloated up two or three times. I dod Academic Council two years; the board never showed up *once*. They fended off a strike with salary boosts (mine from 40k! To 60k, still not great) but then never fixed snything else.
There seems to be no plan.

2026-05-18 19:21:30 UTC

Am I the only one that finds Thunderbird's search feature baffling? I rarely find what I'm looking for (and know it's there), I end up just browsing manually.

2026-05-17 19:46:01 UTC

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@nprofile…8m52
Wow. Will forward to Torchinsky. Thanks.

2026-05-17 19:11:34 UTC

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@nprofile…8m52
If it wasn't for a nazi decree to remove a jew from the claim, it would be a lot less heated.

2026-05-17 18:49:38 UTC

Mercedes Benz claims they invented the automobile. Not only did they not, the lie was made by a 1940 legal decree by the german nazi government; Siegfried Marcus, an austrian jew, had made multiple cars, and driven 100 miles, years before.
(The idea of a singular 'invention' in a class of device like this is already fraught; but sticking with four wheels, internal combustion, human driven, self-contained, moving person and car over long distances, Marcus wins hands down.)
https://www.theautopian.com/a-car-website-you-all-know-is-pushing-mercedes-benz-lie-that-they-invented-the-car-and-im-not-having-it/
https://www.theautopian.com/mercedes-benz-still-did-not-invent-the-car-and-heres-more-evidence-why-and-some-difficult-questions/
M-B still uses this lie in their marketing.

2026-05-14 20:40:14 UTC

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@nprofile…ggeh
Ok that is very cool. What's it in?

2026-05-12 16:26:15 UTC

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@nprofile…u7p7
"We" think of software as something resulting from collective, skilled, human, co-labor-ative and social work. There can be much joy in that, like most skilled disciplines, mundane or exotic.
But no corporation ever be believed that.
They say all sorts of things; words never matter. Only actions matter.
Its been over for some time. Theyre saying out loud now.
I'd start snapshotting stuff of importance. Its not unthinkable repositories could be off limits in the not so far future.

2026-05-12 01:52:53 UTC

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@nprofile…8m52
That's a pre-ANSI function declaration. fn, nl and ll are declared type char *. That's normal enough
It's the far that abominable. x86 SEGMENTATION.

2026-05-12 01:48:37 UTC

Abomination, I tell you.
/* Receive one or more files using ZMODEM. */
far zrecv(fn,nl,ll)
char *fn; /* path to receive to */
char *nl; /* created list of received files */
unsigned ll; /* its maximum size */
{
int error;
...

2026-05-03 18:13:15 UTC

CPU history nerd question:
I haven't had register-to-package-pin knowledge of a CPU since the 8086. I've heard (...) that modern chips with their secure boot stuff don't actually reveal with any precision the startup state, eg. from the equiv. of RESET to first instruction.
Is it technically possible to roll your own mobo with a modern CPU? I understand that practically speaking there's few people around with the ability. But is it even possible without inside knowledge from say Intel?
corollary: what was the/a "last" (most recent, etc) CPU chip or set that provided documentation of the machine's full state from reset to first execution?
I'm not convinced I'm asking the right question, or if my assumptions are way off.

2026-05-03 05:05:51 UTC

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@nprofile…8a92
Yeah none of the players are nice people.

2026-05-02 20:49:30 UTC

If you can manage the overhead of a gcp account this is the cheapest possible website hosting. Has to be static html and port 80 only.
Price is typical. That plus dns is it.
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/116/506/943/183/392/870/original/39ff00c2f3faa6ad.jpg

2026-05-01 23:30:40 UTC

HA HA!
Some out of context quotes. It's the new trend!
The far-right Daily Wire faced mass layoffs this week — gutting the team of the long-prominent outlet initially founded by conservative activist Ben Shapiro.
CBS News’ flagship programs are reportedly on track to hit historic lows six months into the tenure of editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, who’s overseen layoffs, sinking morale and newsroom turmoil.

2026-05-01 23:24:40 UTC

HA HA!
https://infowars.com/
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/116/501/894/403/936/325/original/99ad664239652e35.png

2026-05-01 17:17:58 UTC

FIRST $100 TAKES IT. CASH ONLY.
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/116/500/451/343/114/001/original/a890afb4a6920dcd.jpg

2026-04-30 18:01:51 UTC

Here's a programming sheet for a loom. From the net, sent to me by a friend, I don't have sauce offhand.
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/116/494/944/721/183/211/original/3c038bc5c89cf5d7.jpeg

2026-04-30 04:20:22 UTC

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@nprofile…0392
I couldn't find any model number.

2026-04-29 13:39:13 UTC

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@nprofile…u7p7
People who write and deploy and gain from it, do these things. The agents are just sticks to hit us with. There's nothing remarkable sbout the agents.

2026-04-28 22:34:31 UTC

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@nprofile…0392
On mine it shows to the right of the decimal point. It would be odd ifcit did nothing on yours!

2026-04-28 20:04:18 UTC

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@nprofile…0392
Wow an advanced model! Mine shows only the mantissa, you press a button to see the fraction.

2026-04-26 20:36:59 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj
It's this tiny MP/M and CP/M computer I'm making. I'm about to make another batch, 25 this time.
It's much further along than the page shows. I need to find someone to help me make a video, a skill I absolutely do not have.
https://www.bleeve.me/fZ80/index.html

2026-04-26 18:28:49 UTC

Scrabble tile holders are so far the best SD card holders. Stupid-cheap on feePay.
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/116/472/419/563/640/321/original/74f1a25e699c338f.jpg

2026-04-22 17:14:51 UTC

Visited my friend David while visiting tucson last week. He works on tadio telescopes for UofA. Currently building the 4GHz bandwidth zillion channel AtoD system for one of the EHT (event horizon telescopes). This shit is nuts.
Heres the RF front end. About 24 inch square. Inside runs under high vacuum, and cooled to 4 degrees Kelvin (liquid helium). The outside of the box cooled to 40K.
Upper left circle is a twisted pair from a chassis feed through to one of the electronics clusters housed in gold plated massive heatsinks. Theres s meter or so of twisted pair wound sround a post; thats a heatsink to keep the heat from rhe 40K box to rhe 4K electronics.
The RF input is 345 GHz, fed from the aluminum dishes mirror, feeding rhe crazy hand made diode in the middle hestsink.
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/116/449/481/946/862/583/original/875022b436d0fb87.jpg

2026-04-21 18:36:50 UTC

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@nprofile…rtl5
Bank and credit card websites that block cut and paste, disallow characters ' " / ; Yes, security experts. In 2025.

2026-04-14 17:11:14 UTC

* It is amateurs that bring (and had brought) *all* of the joy into computing.
* Students, if they are very lucky, retain some of this joy.
* Professionalism ruins joy.
There you go, that's my thesis.

2026-04-14 03:43:12 UTC

I'm looking for text editors/word processors for CP/M and especially MP/M (there are many, and some are quite decent) and came across VEDIT, which name I guess I remember, but never used. It was commercial and I used two I had access to as was common.
New in 1978, it was actively maintained up through the late 80s, and the SAME SOURCE TREE compiles the CP/M-80, MP/M-80, and MSDOS 8086 versions!! Talk about #permacomputing.
It's in 8080/z80/8086 assembly language. THere's 20 or so source files, and some get passed through more than once. It's wild.
It relies on the TDL/PSA assembler PASM, which I used for years, both CPU versions, though it's been so long I might as well have not used it as far as memory goes.
The authors have released source to it all. I may have successfully compiled it on the z80; tomorrow I'll see if I can tell.
Its complicated.
https://github.com/johnsonjh/VEDIT
It's pretty freakin' amazing that it persisted for so long, and still does, more or less.

2026-04-14 01:03:54 UTC

I mount Teensy 4.1's onto PCBs made at JLCPCB, and so far my quantities are small enough that I just use generic .1" center strips from adafruit (part 598) cut to length. I'm now making 25 boards and no way I want to do that by hand.
I simply cannot identify the part I need, in Kicad, JLPCB Parts, or Digikey. I've tried every combination of pin, socket, receptacle, .025 inch, .635 mm, square, etc, no luck.
And honestly I'm terrified of selecting the wrong part and munging 25 boards.
Any hints, suggestions, warnings?
(inb4 40-pin socket; there's two additional rows in there.)
Someone must have done this?
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/116/400/334/349/374/667/original/7b0ebc4ad954df44.jpg

2026-04-13 17:52:56 UTC

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@nprofile…v4t3
Its a bummer they're giving modafinil a bad rep. Its not a high though, it screws with your diurnal cycle. I hope they all have Side Effects.

2026-04-11 20:52:29 UTC

So histories on the metaphors used in computer editing of text have been done, no surprise.
Only skimmed these myself, will read later.
In the timeline I'm in, there were coding sheets (recognizable; but never used though I did some hand coding), then the paper tape editors themselves (teletype reader, punch, edit one line at a time), then the "ed" family (that incorported the P.T. editors but had the crazy idea of a "screen"; includes ed, teco, emacs), then the widespread deployment of meece when it all ends and turns to shit with far too many options and our documents all looking the same "professional" (sic).
Pretty page, totally misses all points:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/evolution-text-editors-word-processors-miguel-rivas-perez-ilwbc
Oh, this one has much clue. And one of the few writings that makes it clear that the creation of jaquard loom cards was solidly "programming", in that it required fairly arbitrary transformations of data. It would not surprise me to find a loom that could count, and stop or something. Also: "women's work", an important story itself in computing generally.
https://lug.ncsu.edu/presentations/2019-11-13-text-editor-history.pdf
This idiosyncratic wiki isn't analysis or anything, but a good survey, emphasis in the early micro era. But digging out anything from the 50s and 60s would be serious work. Clearly a work of love here.
https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?HomePage

2026-04-09 17:39:49 UTC

Do all small-ish scale home solar/battery setups require "an app"? I cannot imagine anything stupider.