UPDATED: 18 March 2019 - External display adapters that actually work with this model (and Arch Linux) added.

For various reasons, I found that I had a need to upgrade Windbringer's hardware very recently.  This might be the first time that a catastrophic failure of some kind was not involved, so it's kind of a weird feeling to have two laptops side by side, one in process and one to do research as snags cropped up.  This time around I bought a Dell XPS 15 Touch (9570) - I was expecting things to be substantially the same, but this did not seem to be the case.  Some things that I found myself ignoring because I had no use for them aren't in this newer model, and some things have changed as technology has advanced rather a lot in the last five years.

As before, first I'll post the hardware specs, and then follow up with everything I had to tinker with to get working as well as how I went about it.  As usual, I went with 64-bit Arch Linux (2019.02 installation build).

There are few better ways to kick off the holiday season than with a good concert.  2018 was no exception in this regard - the DNA Lounge brought in a trio of goth heavy hitters spanning the last 40 years in.  The night was opened by Curse Mackey, who seems to have worked with just about everyone on just about everything from Thrill Kill Kult to Pigface.  Second up was a relatively new group called the Bellwether Syndicate (whose work I've grown quite fond of since that show), comprised of William Faith (best known for being one of the founders of Faith and the Muse) and long-time goth DJ Scary Lady Sarah.  They really capture the feel of classic goth and post-punk while still sounding fresh.  Last and certainly not least were gothic veterans Clan of Xymox, still going strong and sounding as powerful as they did when they were first founded in 1981.ev.

Anyway, here are the picture I took.  If you're curious, the Internet Archive has a copy of the concert's livestream to listen to.

Taken from the balcony.  Here you go.

Pictures taken from the front of the theatre at the Willie Nelson concert on 13 December 2018.

 It should come as little surprise to anyone out there that I have a bit of a problem with hoarding data.  Books, music, and of course files of all kinds that I download and read or use in a project for something.  Legal briefs, research papers (arXiv is the bane of my existence), stuff people ask me to review, the odd Humble Bundle... So much so that a scant few years ago I rebuilt Leandra to better handle the volume of data in my library.  However, it's taken me this long to both figure out and get around to making it easier to find anything in all that mess.  If I can't find it, I can't do anything with it, or even figure out what I do or don't have.  I also don't often have console access so it's not as if I can SSH in and grep for what I need.  I use Nginx as a web server on Leandra so actually getting access to files when I need them is trivial.

A couple of weeks back, I found myself in a discussion with a couple of friends about searching on the Internet and how easy it is to get caught up in a filter bubble and not realize it.  To put not too fine a point on it, because the big search engines (Google, Bing, and so forth) profile users individually and tailor search results to analyses of their search histories (and other personal data they have access to), it's very easy to forget that there are other things out there that you don't know about for the simple reason that they don't show stuff outside of that profile they've built up.  If you're a hardcore code hacker you might find it very difficult to find poetry or the name of a television show you saw once unless you take fairly drastic action.  The up-side of this profiling is that, inside of your statistical profile search results are great.  You can find what you need, when you need it.  But outside of that?  Good luck.

The point of the discussion was that there were ways that we could escape this filter bubble through application of self-hosted software and a little cooperation.

Ironically, searching through my conversation history I can't seem to find the thread in question so I'm relying entirely upon on-board storage (as it were).  So, go ahead and laugh while I geek out.  First, a little bit of Internet history.

If you've been kicking around on the Net for the past year or so, you've probably come across a thinkpiece or two about Mastodon, an open source social network that's kind of like Twitter, kind of like Facebook, and kind of like... well, nobody's really sure what else would fit there.  It's a bit of a wildcard.  That seems to throw a lot of people, and because this is the Internet we're talking about that means a lot of "this could never possibly work" posts, nevermind a busy network of several thousand instances and several hundred thousand users doing everything from venting their spleens to asking for (and surprisingly oftentimes receiving) assistance, collaborating on projects, goofing around, and mourning their fallen...

This ambiguity and confusion makes it hard to understand why you'd even want to consider joining yet another social network.  Let me see if I can help a little.

principle of definitional equivalence - noun phrase - Often shortened to the ≡ symbol.  A polite way of saying "Because fuck you, that's why."  See also judgemental equality, homotopy type theory.

I know this is kind of late, but I thought I'd put together a list of the podcasts I enjoyed listening to in 2018.ev, in the hope of introducing folks to the work of some really talented people:

Weird Things

Roleplaying Public Radio's Actual Plays

The Neo-Anarchist Podcast, an in-character ongoing series set in the world of Shadowrun.

On Her Majesty's Secret Podcast.  More about James Bond than you thought it was possible to know.

The Black Vault

The Secret Broadcast

Enjoy!