• Our purpose is joy

    Posted in Everything on Jul 02, 2018

    I wrote the following in response to a friend who was saying there was no obvious purpose, and quoting Kierkegaard on how we create our own purpose until we realize it is absurd:

    I believe there is a purpose, and our purpose is "joy," and suggest that we are at the very initial phase in achieving that purpose. We are learning the extent of what is Not Joyful, so that as we one day arrive at the final phase -- where all is Joy -- we have no doubt whatsoever that we have exhausted all possible alternatives wherein joy is less. To have no doubt is to be absolutely certain.

    Having certainty that o...

  • Love is the standard

    Posted in Everything on Jun 12, 2018

    Love Won the War

  • Shortcut to start VPN connection with a single click in Windows 10

    Posted in Developing Software on May 22, 2018

    Alas, Windows 10 introduced an absurdly complicated way to start a VPN connection where it used to take only a couple clicks. Turns out you can make a shortcut that will allow you to single-click your way into a VPN connection like the good old days.

    Winaero.com does a great job of describing how to set up the shortcut link for a VPN connection, but note that this approach will pop up a CMD console which awkwardly sits there the whole time it is connecting. Fortunately, you can turn that off by setting the Shortcut Property for "Run" as "Minimized" instead of the default "Normal Window."

    That ...

  • Hilarious notes on a programming task that got absurdly complicated

    Posted in Developing Software, Everything on May 17, 2018

    In the end, it looks like I should have searched through the code for all SQL commands like "SELECT" and "UPDATE" and "INSERT" and determined which tables I needed. Might have saved a few days. But you know how you get tunnel vision when you're down the rabbit hole. So, instead of something simple yet tedious, here is what happened:

    • in order to run app, need to connect to certain tables in database
    • only need a couple but not sure which, to be sure need to trace through a bunch of code so... quicker to download all tables
    • except... there are a dozen tables some of them gigabytes on...

  • You cannot step outside infinity to perform an operation on or within infinity

    Posted in Everything, Postinfinity Tergiversation, Pre-Preprint Stuff on May 04, 2018

    Okay, it's a pretty raw tangle of thought experiment, but here we go: You can't. There is no such thing as multiple infinities. Imagine if there were, all such multiple infinities would simply exist within a "larger" infinity that is ultimately singular. That ultimately singular one is the only true infinity, as any smaller ones are "not as infinite" in comparison to it, and cannot rightfully be considered actually infinite, although they could be considered as approaching infinity.

    Consider having a cake, with a book beside the cake that contains 144 ways to cut the cake. Now cut the cake acc...

  • Configuring Iridium Browser with even more privacy than default

    Posted in Developing Software, Everything on Apr 18, 2018

    Iridium is a privacy-oriented browser based on Chromium, so it has all the advantages of Chrome without flooding Google with a continual stream of telemetry as you surf the web. From looking at it and playing with it recently, I find it to be pretty much what it advertises, and am happy using it to browse while leaving a smaller footprint in the online world than, say, the default settings for Firefox, which have grown increasingly non-private for years. However, as I went through configuration, I found that there are a few configs which could be made more secure. So I took screenshots as I ma...

  • More on the tergiversation

    Posted in Mathy Stuff, Postinfinity Tergiversation, Pre-Preprint Stuff on Apr 12, 2018

    Found this article which goes into a little more depth on this obscure mathematical comment by Winston Churchill about a moment when his life changed. I still consider it to be one of the deeper insights into the true nature of infinity.

    I had a feeling once about Mathematics, that I saw it all—Depth beyond depth was revealed to me—the Byss and the Abyss. I saw, as one might see the transit of Venus—or even the Lord Mayor’s Show, a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly how it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable: and how the one...

  • A boatload of cool JavaScript animation widgets for you web designery types out there.

    Posted in Developing Software, Everything on Apr 12, 2018

    Well this is just delightful. There are enough tips and tricks on this single website to keep a web designer happy for a long time. Thoroughly enjoying trying to get impress.js working in a site that I'm working on.

    Delicious crumb here:

    https://1stwebdesigner.com/css-effects/

    https://1stwebdesigner.com/css-effects/

  • Installing FreedomBox inside VirtualBox on a Windows Virtual Machine with a dedicated IP

    Posted in Developing Software on Mar 14, 2018

    Normally when installing FreedomBox inside VirtualBox, you can use Bridged Mode and get on with things, but you can't use bridged mode when installing a VirtualBox image running on a VM with a dedicated IP address. This is because bridged mode requires DHCP which you don't have in this scenario. You can waste a lot of time like I did trying to make it work (or you can tinker with two network adapters, which I didn't want to do) or you can follow these steps, which is what finally worked for me, and I'm quite pleased with the result:

    1. Follow the canonical directions for installing FreedomBox as...

  • Kabbalah provides a clue to solving the Cosmological Constant Problem

    Posted in Everything, Mathy Stuff, Postinfinity Tergiversation on Mar 13, 2018

    A clue to resolving what is likely the most difficult problem facing physicists for the past few decades appears to be buried in the kabbalah. For those who are not entirely familiar with the Cosmological Constant Problem, here is an excellent article published today talking about it: Why the Tiny Weight of Empty Space Is Such a Huge Mystery.

    Halfway through the article is a vivid illustration of one of the things that perplexes physicists: basically, for all the math to work out nicely, something astoundingly incredibly profoundly miraculous had to happen during the early stages of the begin...