It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

16: Badger

If you like, put on Badger Badger Badger. (Personally, I'm here for the Mosesondope.EXE Demoscene Edition, because of the visuals and the sound, but the original is also good and will serve.)

The key word for this entry comes from the Lucy A. Snyder piece Installing Linux on a Dead Badger: User's Notes, and then the subsequent book, Installing Linux on a Dead Badger (and other oddities) that took the single article and created more from that world, packaged up into a small set of pages.

I'll admit that replacing the operating system on a computer is not a task for the faint of heart. This is also another one of those cases where having a spare machine, or even a spare hard drive to devote to the installation, makes things much more approachable than they might otherwise be in trying to make things happen with just one drive and one computer and therefore one chance to get it right, without additional help from recovery utilities. For a good amount of time, I had Linux on one drive and Windows on another. Actually, I still do, it's just that Linux now gets the faster and better drive now, instead of Windows.

To make some of those situations less frightening, there exist things like the Windows Subsystem for Linux, that you can install and enable and then download a compatible distribution to get terminal access to that distribution. (It doesn't do GUI.) Or there were projects that basically set up an image inside the already partitioned drive, so that there wasn't any need to repartition the drive and worry about what might happen to data as it gets shuffled around. And most Linux distributions have a live environment on their install images so that someone can at least poke around a little bit and see what it might be like to use that particular distribution, how it manages software, what things it includes as a default, and what desktop environment it believes is the best one, and therefore is the one it puts forward as the default option.

Because just about every Linux distribution is Opinionated about these things, it can take a certain amount of trial-and-discard before you find one that you're willing to work with long enough to figure out whether you're truly compatible, or whether it still does things over time that will annoy you to the point where you find you have developed Opinions of your own about how you want your Linux to function, and then you will be able to read distribution documentation and hype statements to find out whether or not their Opinions match yours. I started trying to run Linux in my undergraduate university days, and the experience was so rough I jettisoned the idea entirely for my undergraduate period. By the time graduate school rolled around, and a Linux environment was the best option for me to do some of my schoolwork, instead of trying to flatter Apple by buying into OS X, sufficient improvement had happened that the process of installation and use was much more on the Just Works side instead of the problem-ridden situation I ran into. It could be that I selected very poorly in my first distribution choice, as well. In any case, graduate school and my first few years of independent living were relatively smooth in terms of making it all work out, and I had a Linux machine with a TV tuner that I could use to watch most of the cable channels I had available to me. in my apartment.

So, in the sense of not necessarily needing large amounts of technical skill and fiddling with configurations, and that most distributions contain an installation wizard to set specific environment variables, partition drives appropriately, and install the software, it's not that difficult to install Linux on a desktop machine. Laptops are a little fiddlier, and the single-board computers, like the Fruit Pi lines, are the fiddliest of the lot. That said, the desktop installers work 99% of the time for laptops, and the Fruit Pis generally have their own installers / image writer programs to ensure that everything gets put in the right place. Significant amounts of work goes into the installers to make sure that they function well, cleanly, and without errors, so that someone can feel confident that the potentially most dangerous part of the process is simple enough, and that all of the options they need to make sure their machine will come out the other side running optimally and with any and all of the tweaks or packages it needs to do so already enabled.

The story that provides the keyword for the entry is much more like what it can be to try and port Linux to a new set of hardware, or trying to figure out how to get all the drivers in place and running smoothly, and any adjustments that need to be made to the kernel to make it happen. All of which is arcane wizardry well beyond my level of current understanding. I am in user space, not in kernel hacking space. (And there you can see why I think "Oh, I'm just running other people's software" is an appropriate deflection for any kind of praise for things that I'm doing with that software.) It's a lot easier than it has been to install Linux on a dead badger, or any other animal of your choice, than it has been before, and it will likely get easier as time goes on and the installers and distributions are refined even further, and Linux is available for a wider range of possible hardware and components attached to that hardware. Because Linux people want us to adopt a distribution (and preferably theirs), they're trying to make it as simple as they can to get it done. So having done it several times at this point, and changed distributions, and mostly just used the tools available to do it with, I don't consider having installed a Linux to be a particularly praiseworthy thing for me in most circumstances. (It's recipe usage. Just follow the directions and you'll be fine, pay no attention at all as to how following recipe almost always has an underlying assumption that you know all the techniques that it's going to ask you to do.)

George, the original-model Chromebook, is an exception to this. It was still recipe-following, but I had to be a proper information professional to find and extract the recipe from where it was being stored. Pulling the same feat again with a different model of Chromebook is pretty impressive, since that still meant finding the appropriate spots on the circuit board to disable the write protection and doing the thing the recipe needed to do that disabling. (I think it was removing a screw, in this case, instead of using electrical tape to prevent a connection.)

Putting aftermarket operating systems on phones and tablets is still recipe following, but in my case, for Android things, it requires operating from the terminal to achieve the desired results, as well as manipulation of buttons or finding ways to ensure that the correct places are being booted into to use those recipe tools. And while I've had success at every item I've attempted, there was one time where I straight-up botched the process by flashing the wrong thing to the device! While this would normally be a straight-up brick problem, on this specific device (an old Amazon Kindle Fire), with some digging in the information and reading more of the troubleshooting parts of the recipe, it turns out there's a pad on the circuit board that if you create the right kind of short to it, you can force the device into a firmware-upload acceptance state for a little bit of time. Which involved the dexterity and care needed to disassemble the device to expose the pad, to have the right kind of wire on hand to create the short, and to have the terminal command only needed the carriage return, so that I could hit my window of opportunity and flash the correct item to the device. And then, after that, to reassemble the device, after confirming that it had, in fact, taken the correct flash and could now function properly again. That was an adventure, and it'll teach me to read things more carefully the next time I get a wild hare in my bonnet about doing various things. (That said, this device was old, it was not mission-critical, and while it was much improved for having been put on this path, it still wasn't a very powerful device, and the version of Android built for it was several version numbers ago. So botching the flash was a question of whether I could do the recovery, not whether I had to do the recovery. Much less pressure.)

[Diversion: There is at last one cellular device carrier who locks the bootloaders of all their devices and refuses to provide any means of unlocking them to their consumers. The problem is, unless the seller already knows, and/or has already installed an aftermarket operating system on the device, there's no way of knowing whether a used phone that you're interested in will be one that you can put aftermarket software on, or whether it will be one of these bootloader-locked devices from this carrier. It's remarkably hard to source new old devices because of this, and there's enough confusion between carrier unlocking, where a device can be used on any of the carrier networks in a country, and bootloader unlocking, to install software, that a device proclaiming itself "unlocked" is often carrier-unlocked, and unknown about whether it's bootloader-unlocked. I would happily source a device from the manufacturer to avoid such nonsense if I could, but buying direct from the manufacturer is often hella expensive, and needs to be paid all at once. (That, and they usually only carry their newest models of the niches they're looking for, so trying to sneak an older model from them usually is a no-go.) I'd rather test phones that I'm getting from the used market for their suitability before buying them, but that can also be difficult to do over the Internet, unless, of course, the seller knows what I'm asking for and can do those tests themselves and show me the results.]

There are two exceptions that I know of to the idea of making Linux easy to install and then just use, so long as you agree with the opinions of the distribution creators. The first is Gentoo, which, having now read the Wikipedia article on the distribution, seems to have a few more options for providing pre-built ways into a system, that then get taken over by the way that a Gentoo system really wants to work, and was previously installed: by compiling everything from source, according to preferences set by the user to ensure that the software that they used was exactly the way they wanted it to be (and that had been optimized for their hardware and use cases, so that it would go faster and potentially use less RAM on that system compared to others that had not been optimized.) Even I, supposed computer-toucher and polymath-in-training, have never attempted to stand up a Gentoo system according to the official instructions and handbook there. Just from how it is described, I feel like it offers a jam choice problem to everyone who doesn't already know all the answers to the questions it will ask in advance, and therefore can just set the flags and switches in the manner they desire and leave the machine to compile everything. (Plus, updating the system for Gentoo has to take significant amounts of time to do all the compiling, so I would hope that the performance improvements more than make up for the increased amount of time spent building all the packages from source.)

I have, however, tangled with the second exception to the rule, and stood up several Arch Linux systems using their official methods. Arch's Opinion on Linux is that they actively try to avoid having one, past making sure that packages are built according to their specifications, and that they do not particularly care for large amounts of abstraction. Past the basics to get a system up and running, they have no defaults, they have no recommended packages, they have no application suite or desktop environment that they install by default. There are now a couple ways to go about setting up an Arch Linux system, one with a guided installation and one that follows the official installation process on the Arch Linux wiki. The Arch Linux wiki is the reason that Arch Linux isn't a niche distribution that only the hardest of hardcore users takes on. The documentation on the wiki is excellent, although sometimes it is esoteric, and the documentation is frequently more helpful than the forum users, who often demonstrate the kinds of stereotypical attitudes that people have come to think of Linux users, and of people who generally are unhelpful until you do the exact thing they're demanding, at which point they may give you a curt answer with no explanation to help you understand. So, for someone who believes in their ability to follow recipe, having a nice detailed recipe to follow and to refer to when things get a little squirrely is just the thing desired.

Thankfully, despite the flaws of its users, Arch is a distribution that fits with the idea of how I wanted to work with systems. On other systems and architectures, the developers and maintainers make easy the pathways they want users to use, and make very difficult pathways that the user might want to take that aren't what the maintainers want. And the update schedule for many distributions is slower than what I would like it to be. Debian updates, but there's enough that's been changed in the interim that I wouldn't be surprised if they recommend reinstalling rather than version upgrading in place. Ubuntu releases every six months, and Mint follows that schedule. Arch (and Gentoo) and their derivatives are, instead, rolling-release distributions, where updates to the packages are available immediately, rather than at specified update intervals. By remembering to keep the system updated regularly, or at your own decision of intervals, you can control a rolling-release for your own schedule, rather than having to set aside time when someone else wants to update. And because an Arch install from something other than the guided script has very few decisions made for you, it's perfect for cobbling together all of your favorite programs in one distribution, never mind how they might have clashing appearances with each other, based on what toolkits they're using for graphical styling.

Valve Corporation, in creating the operating system for their Steam Deck devices, SteamOS, took Arch Linux as the base and provided significant support to the distribution to ensure that it could continue to be used as the base for SteamOS. And, as they have done with many other things, the corporation created a very nice wrapper around Arch so that they could run Steam in Big Picture Mode on the device, and still allow for people to use the Deck as a desktop-style device, or to game in high resolution and power if they hooked it up to a dock. Arch's aggressive opinions about keeping the decisions in the hands of the user make it a great base for Valve to build upon, since they can choose what they want to apply and only what they want to apply.

All of the pure Arch installs I've done so far have eventually wound up with certain kinds of problems that necessitated their reinstall or my choice to move a machine to another system. Usually it had to do with storage problems. On the one that had enough storage, the problem was essentially that the discrete graphics card in the machine was no longer supported by the proprietary drivers for the corporation that made it, and so the desktop environment choices were very limited, and even then, the machine was starting to struggle with doing all that many things. These could have been defeated in various clever ways, but eventually it was clear that the problem was going to only keep creeping up on me and getting thrown back after a little bit. So, admittedly, having done the thing, I eventually abandoned doing the thing for a more opinionated setup that still runs the Arch base, but goes from there to provide some better quality-of-life features, and which has a gaming edition, which is what I wanted in the first place. I'm not sorry that I did the Arch from scratch approach, it introduced me to some neat tools that I can use in the future if I ever need to stand things up, or use console commands to try and achieve various situations like starting up wireless Internet. And, doing the whole thing from the command line meant that I got a little more confident in my abiity to do things from the command line. (And, subsequently, understand why there are so many warnings on the Internet about not using combinations where you download code you haven't looked at and then pipe it directly into your shell. Even though I probably wouldn't be able to examine such scripts to see if they were malicious before executing them. I don't have that kind of specialized knowledge, I operate firmly in user space, and so I do a lot of trusting that the people providing this software aren't doing it for malicious reasons, and that they haven't had someone introduce malicious code into their project, whether by force or by social engineering to get themselves attached to the project and then push malicious changes. That it's worked out marvelously so far is a testament to what people can do when they cooperate with each other and are able to use tools at their disposal to sign their work and make sure that it's trusted.

Installing Arch isn't quite like installing Linux on a dead badger, that would have been if I'd managed to successfully get the Linux experiment I did in my undergraduate days to get up and running and doing what I wanted without a lot of frustration and aggravation. But it is something that rightly suggests that at least my abilities to follow recipe and to troubleshoot when something other than the expected result comes out of the recipe, so as to get it back on track and working again. This happens regularly, and in the distributions that I'm running now, the updater script they provide tells me when there are things that may need my attention, like new configuration files that I might have to tweak to make work again. It's good, it's powerful, I like the aesthetic of it, and the machines that need to run it can. (And I'm still taking care of all the rest of the fleet of devices as well, with their specific purposes in mind. Update day is usually an all-day affair for all of my items, but the nice thing about package managers and update scripts is that they do most of the work for me, and I just have to run the commands to make sure everything is in order.

So, if there aren't reasons why you have to stay on a particular operating system, maybe give a Linux a spin for a bit and see if you like it? Or several of the Linux-type items for a spin, and see if any of them appeal. Each time Microsoft decides a Windows version gets no further security updates, or Apple decides that certain computers no longer get macOS updates, or phone manufacturers decide they're done providing updates to their devices, there's an opportunity for a Linux to step in and keep the device going, so long as you can install it. And so long as you trust the community of developers who are interested in keeping that device going past the end of official support from the manufacturer. It's worked out for me pretty well since I switched to Linux as a primary driver of things, and now I can say that a lot of gaming is actually coming along nicely on Linux systems, so that's pretty cool.

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

14: Terminal

Being a child of DOS sometimes gives me an advantage and a bit of comfort whenever a project or a task that I have to do involves the command line. I still love a good Graphical User Interface (GUI), and I firmly believe that most applications these days are well-suited to having a GUI, even if it's basically a visual wrapper for three command line applications dressed in a trenchcoat. Having a GUI makes your application more accessible to the person who does not feel at home running cryptic commands and not understanding what they will do. I especially like the people who provide the GUI in a terminal (a TUI) when it makes the most sense for their application to be run from the command line and manipulated in such a way.

Others extol the terminal and the command line as the superior option for all things, because the terminal runs faster than the GUI does, needs smaller files to produce the same outputs, requires less clicking and typing, and because being able to run a thing from the terminal generally means it can run on a much wider variety of things, instead of being locked to those things that have enough horsepower behind them to run graphical environments.

Still others, the people who get the side-eye, say that the terminal is the superior option for all because it functions as a skill gate. People who cling to their GUIs are still n00bs and lusers who have not demonstrated sufficient computer touchery and geekery to be allowed access to this particular tool, and therefore anyone who wants to use this jewel has to git gud. Snobbery is not a good look on anyone, but technological snobbery can be particularly vicious, and there are more people than we'd like to admit who fall into the third category of "people who don't want the less technical 'polluting' their spaces with demands for things like accessibility or an easier-to-use interface or syntax."

It is a potentially scary thing to type in a command that someone has put on the Internet, or in a script, or to run as an executable, and hope that it doesn't do something awful to your machine. And even scarier when the potential for malice is not embedded in an executable program, but instead a script inside an innocuous-looking document, or even as things that may or may not require someone to do anything before their system is compromised. And unlike many GUI programs, the command line is a place where the assumption is that you know what you're doing when you type the command and press enter. Great power, great responsibility, great potential for disaster. Not everyone necessarily wants to learn how the syntax of the command works, what it does and any tertiary pieces of knowledge that go along with it, like how to construct regular expressions, how to pipe the output from one program as input into another for further manipulation, or how to construct Boolean logic to capture all the possible conditions and find the correct one for the situation. These people are still valid users and they should have access to tools just as much as the people who want to run everything through the terminal.

Some of the most common situations I had for working with the command line as a youngling were, naturally, in pursuit of playing games. As described in the first post, once I left the comforts and constraints of Automenu, I learned how to navigate around in DOS and do things with it. As games progressed and started taking up more and more memory, there had to be some tricks involved to ensure there was enough available memory for the game to successfully run. DOS in those days had what they called "TSR" programs (no relation to the company that developed Dungeons and Dragons) - Terminate and Stay Resident. Most of the time, these TSRs were drivers so that hardware attached to the system would function properly. Others might be ways of taking advantage of greater amounts of system memory, and setting things up for something like bank switching, so that from the "conventional" memory space, you could still address, store, and retrieve things from "high" memory or "upper" memory that wasn't subject to the 640k limitations of "conventional" memory. (The deep dive into how to store and retrieve information from a Game Boy cartridge was intensely fascinating, and also helped me understand a little more about clever solutions used in limited circumstances.) The difficulty with TSRs is that they had to stay in the "conventional" memory space, and while there were all kinds of solutions and methods to access and use the higher memory spaces, many of them relied on there being enough conventional memory space available in the right places to implement their tricks. So, as time went on, while there may have been enough available RAM and processing power to run Sierra family games, the setup wasn't distributed properly to work.

Thus, the boot disk. From the TUI of the game installer, there was always an option of creating a "boot disk." In those days and times, DOS progressed through the various drives available to determine what to boot from, and the floppy disk drives were always assigned letters earlier in the alphabet than hard disk drives., so they would always be earlier in the boot order than the hard disks. By sacrificing a floppy to the installer, it would craft a DOS boot environment where the bare minimum of TSRs would be loaded to make playing the game functional, with the assumption that after using the boot disk to load the correct environment, you'd then proceed through the directory structure to the hard disk and load the game that way. And they worked very well, loading the drivers for keyboard, mouse, sound card, and sometimes the CD drive, as well as the tools needed to access the higher memory blocks. Once I was done gaming, I'd reboot the system so that it could return to normal operations and access to things like Windows. These days, we don't need to fiddle around with such things, even as RAM requirements and availability have grown. And these days it would be something more like a boot image of some sort, a way of loading a specific environment and then booting directly into the game itself. I wonder what kind of game might take that on as their packaging method, trying not to allow installs, even if they might allow for the mounting and running of the image inside some form of container, but otherwise trying to keep the entire thing on the disc image created.

Boot disks were another way of helping me get comfortable with the command line, and with giving me an incomplete understanding of how a computer actually sets itself up to run and produces the environment that the user will be working in. That's all basically abstracted away, and we only see a little bit of it when watching the console output scroll by as my current machines load up. I'm glad of not having to make boot disks any more, and I'm glad that we have more sensible ways of managing memory and startup now, so that people don't have to do arcane things to set themselves up for playing games and running software. Terminal comfort can come from other sources than hacing to rearrange your entire environment just to play a game.

For some time after that, as Windows got better, and then became the way that most games were played, and DOS eventually found its way to emulation, rather than being a major part of everyone's lives, those command line skills didn't pick up a lot of use, although they also never really went away, because, as I was getting older, this somewhat new-fangled object called The World Wide Web had joined the scene (again, telling you more about how old I am than not) and the interconnectedness of computers was now not only possible, but achievable to people who weren't on defense or university networks. The early parts of this interconnectedness relied on a few different protocols to make it all work - HTTP for HTML document transfer, FTP for binary file transfer, there was Gopher around, and a few other protocols. (All of these protocols still exist, although not many people are maintaining FTP servers any more, I suspect, having found it easier, faster, and better on the bandwidth to seed large files through BitTorrent.) ECMAScript/Javascript/Typescript were promising new ways of doing things, and a lot of website addresses at the time had a /cgi-bin/ in their paths, so even at that time, there were attempts to bolt interactivity and responsiveness onto the more static HTTP protocol.

Since I missed the BBS scene entirely, and never had newsreader access, I don't have the experience of dialing in with a modem and using a program to peruse the bulletin boards and the newsgroups - that would come later, with things like phpBB and other implementations of forum software, before we all decamped for our individual blogs and tried to link them together through rings and RSS. What I do have, however, is that there was a…surge? resurgence? rediscovery? of the Multi-User Dungeon and the use of the telnet protocol to connect to such things and interact with them. I won't say I was any good at any of them at all, and a friend of mine wanted to have me build some things for their own MUD, but I didn't get very involved with that, and so I didn't contribute all that much to it, either. I could have possibly learned a few things about scripting and other such things if I had persisted with the building aspect of it, but I didn't have the time nor the always-available Internet connection, to do most of my building and scripting work with. A more involved me might have instead grabbed the ability to run a local server on a non-Internet-connected machine and put together all of the things that needed doing to make it work, before uploading all of that to the live instance when I had an Internet connection. Which very well may have required either exporting in some way or retyping everything that I did in the local copy onto the non-local copy.

As it is, I entered university days with some amount of telnet experience with the MUDs, and a little more from having used the earliest form of using computers to make requests from other locations in the library system. (With the added bonus of being able to use that same system to look up and make requests from home, instead of having to be at the library to do so.) This made me particularly well-suited to using whatever computers were handy to do things like work on assignments, check e-mail, and do the occasional bit of socializing or other such between classes. While the university provided us with a disc of useful programs to put on our personal computers in the dormitories, or off-campus, I don't remember how many, if any, of the machines that were in the shared computing labs had those same programs present. As a further not-really-complication, since most students were comfortable with Windows machines, that usually meant the available machines were on the Macintosh side of the lab. As someone who could get things done in both of those environments, it mostly meant that I was on the Mac side of the lab instead of the Windows side. (Even more so in graduate school, as the Macs had a good text editor with syntax highlighting that I could use when I was away from my own Linux machine and its syntax highlighting.) The University e-mail system had a command-line interface and interaction point, and I think that was accessed by telnet as well. (What I remember much more clearly about it was that all of the servers we could connect to were identified as being arcade games. While we used a single point of entry to connect, the server we were assigned at random always was a classic arcade game. Zaxxon, Xevious, Pac-man (and Ms. Pac-Man), Asteroids, Battlezone, etc. I liked being able to get the reference and wondered which game I would be working with every time I signed in.) Pine was the system, I remember that, and it was a perfectly serviceable TUI to check, manage, and respond quickly to various e-mails that had been sent out and I was looking at in the time between classes, or when I was in the lab. I felt smart and technologically awesome that I was able to use the terminal for this kind of purpose, and to do it well. And, yes, I did feel a little smug and superior that I could do this on whichever machine was available, instead of having to wait for a specific machine to come available or to trek to a specific laboratory where those machines were available. My university-aged self is still unlearning things as much as they are learning things, and so I have to treat them with patience and understanding.

So when it comes to the terminal and the command line, I have decades of experience in using it, in having things blow up in my face, in having to use it because various utilities, servers, and tools run best (or at all) from terminal, and in using it because I want to see what a piece of software does, and whether I can get things to go faster from there than from other methods. I'd say that comfort with the command line is a second-order comfort when it comes to computers, because you can't really get comfortable with a command line until you are properly comfortable with the machine itself, and feeling competent and curious enough to try things, have them explode, recover from them, and otherwise recognize that many things that wreck a computer can be recovered from, although what form the recovery takes is different depending on how big of an explosion happened, and that most systems with a GUI will ask if you're sure before they do something destructive. This is the kind of thing that a spare machine is perfect for, because spare machines are what you do things that are destructive or explosive on, and then when they do explode or do unwanted things, you have gained knowledge about what to do or what not to do, or that the thing you tried to do was not properly formed, even if it was accepted as valid. Sometimes you discover some really cool things you can do and then take that knowledge back to the main machine to make it run better and more according to your needs.

Once you have the willingness to experiment and see what happens, and the knowledge backstopping you that you can get out of most common bad situations, and perhaps even the knowledge of how to reconstruct a system from scratch and start again, then you can start getting more comfortable on the command line and using the terminal when it seems appropriate or useful to do so. Because, again, many terminal commands don't ask if you're sure, they just do what you told them to do. (More of them probably should ask, but most of the core utilities and commands on any operating system were developed and used by people who did know what they were doing, and they probably found it annoying to have to confirm it every time they wanted to do something. For Linux specifically, even though many distributions of Linux are better about not requiring the use of the terminal or the command line, there's still a certain assumption baked in that the terminal is the real heart of using Linux, and everything else is eye candy, abstraction, or concession made to those who don't want to do everything from the terminal. The terminal-centric focus of Linux makes it both very powerful and very portable, since the terminal itself, and the core utilities don't require a lot of fancy anything to work, and can be put in embedded or underpowered systems to provide functionality and flexibility to their operation. Terminal commands and abilities are also part of creating scripts and programs that will chain together commands to produce useful output, which is the part where the possibilities expand outward exponentially.

I'm trying not to make the terminal sound completely intimidating, and that you need all the time and experience that I have with it to produce useful things and be comfortable with it. But especially in Linux systems, grasping the terminal and what you can do with it is almost a prerequisite for unlocking the full potential of such a system. And I don't fully know everything that I can do with the terminal, because I haven't had to learn it yet, so you don't have to know everything and read all the man pages before you can start using and experimenting with it. I do think, though, that having grown up in an era where the command line was the primary method of accessing programs and using the computer has made it easier for me to re-adopt a terminal, now that I've chosen an operating system that relies on it. I'd still rather that people took the time to put in interfaces and help for people when they release programs to users, or that, if it makes sense, they build a GUI component for their program so that it's more widely accessible, but that is not always the case.

I guess the point is to say that computer touchery does not have to involve terminals and text editors, and that there are several fine programs that require neither to run admirably and well. And that for as much as I have experience with it, there's still plenty that I don't know and may never know. It's one of the places where I can have a growth mindset about myself, and I think it's one of the places where others can, as well, so I'd encourage you to dive in, in whatever way that you can. There will be gatekeeping jerks, there will be unhelpful StackOverflow answers, and sometimes the thing that's the best and most useful response for you will be a blog post from decades ago, but there is a certain satisfaction, at least for me, that comes from accomplishing a task through clever program use or even writing the script yourself and seeing the output that you wanted to have happen scroll by in the console. I am unlikely to claim that I'm good at any of this, but I could venture forth that I am at least semi-competent.

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

12: George

I call it a habit of mine that I can make outdated hardware do things it may or may not have ever intended to do. "I" is not quite right in this statement, because much like how my cooking is following recipe and then being surprised that it turns out delicious, much of my computer touchery is following recipe that others have developed, and occasionally deviating from it if I need to for troubleshooting, or to mess about in the thing that the original creator said could be messed with or customized to meet the needs of the person using the software.

Much of the confidence and practice I have with computer touchery comes from having had a machine to experiment on, one specifically designated as the one that if things explode, I can reset back to a working state and then go forward from there. I don't actually want to have to do that kind of thing, because resetting an exploded machine usually means losing progress or having save files get nuked that I want to preserve, but there is a certain amount of risk affordance you can put on your spare machine that your main machine won't get. Spare machines are the best kinds of machines, usually put together from spare parts, or specific small parts that have been purchased to swap out from one thing to another. They're great for people who want to experiment or to learn how to assemble their own machines, or who want to try some other operating system. Everyone should have a spare machine somewhere along the way, preferably one they've assembled or that they've changed some components on, but single-board machines and spare phones are also ways of doing some amount of experimentation, even if you can't change their components quite so easily.

Spare machines are great for working through problems that arise when you do things. Like when I finally saved up enough money to purchase a 3dfx Voodoo2 3D rendering card. I thought I was going to be blazing hard through various games now, with my relatively unimpressive machine (it barely met the specs for Final Fantasy VIII!), but after I'd dropped it in, and tried to boot up my machine, having hooked it all up, the motherboard beeped at me and refused to boot. After a certain amount of troubleshooting, I finally figured out the thing that hadn't been obvious to me at the start: the 3dfx card was a companion to the video card I already had installed, and that other port on the 3dfx card wasn't for show - I needed a specific cable to take the output from my video card and feed it into the 3dfx card, and then after they'd daisy-chained their way merrily through the requirements, they gave me the output I desired. Which made Final Fantasy VIII playable. (And then I would have a bit of a time with the game wondering why I was seeing things like "B6" during Zell's Limit Break instead of the keyboard controls I wanted. Eventually I figured out that I needed to unplug the gamepad that I had connected to the machine and that it was detecting and assuming that I was playing the game on the gamepad primarily. This was back when discrete sound cards were a part of your rig, and they often also had a port on them for gamepad input.)

So I've done a lot with spare machines, tinkering, experimenting, and trying things with them that I wouldn't do to the "family computer" and that I wouldn't do to my work computer. My "spare" machines have proliferated in my adult life, as I continue to move things around and new machines enter my life. But also, so have my appliance machines. Instead of a full tower desktop running in the bedroom, I have a singe-board machine there. Much quieter and less of a power draw, still does all the desktop environment things I want (as well as some other things, like allowing me to remotely control the TV it's attached to, the one without a working IR receiver.) I definitely had a second machine for much of my time in the bad relationship, and for a time, I used a cell phone dock and some nice cabling to turn a single-board machine in to much more of a laptop. It could at least run XChat at a few other things at the time. A secondhand Surface I'd gotten from someone served as my "work" machine during the shutdown, before receiving an official work laptop. (That Surface eventually suffered from the batteries trying to burst forth from the casing and had to be retired, but we salvaged the SSD from it for purposes.) And I kept two desktops working side-by-side as soon as I reclaimed my house, so that one machine could be used for media purposes and Windows stuff, and the other could be used for Linux purposes and handling all the things I was doing with Android phones and other things where it turns out to be easier to do things from a terminal on a Linux box than it is in Windows. And since nothing "vital" was on the Linux box, I could experiment with it, change distributions, and otherwise use it as the spare that it was. This combined with the experience I had from using Linux as a driver since graduate school to make me comfortable enough to use Linux as the driver on my main machine as well. Something that started because one of my classes meant learning a little Ruby on Rails, and it's way easier to run a local Rails server from Linux than Windows. My main machine has now come around to being a machine that I can watch streams on, game on (all hail Proton), and otherwise continue to give life to by running a Linux on it. Since I wanted a machine that I could buy and hold as much as possible, instead of thinking I needed to change it from one thing to the next, this pleases me greatly.

After purchasing my first phone with an aftermarket OS on it, I have basically been doing the same thing to every phone I've owned since, especially because those phones would otherwise have reached the limit of their manufacturer OS updates, and instead, I can merrily roll along on old hardware until the things physically give out themselves. They do sometimes complain when I try to do things like play Pokemon Go on them, but it's fine. And by the time I have to be in the market for a new phone again, so many of the flagships of a previous time will have come down in price to the point where I might consider them, or consider asking for them as holiday gifts from people who like to spend money on me, despite my clear failures at capitalism.

So as a cheapskate with regard to technology, it's always nice when I can take the old things and make them run smoothly and swiftly with new software or by respecting their limitations enough to not tax them with software that's not suited to them. (One of my next projects, whenever I have actual need to do so, is to do some exploration of software that can be run from the terminal, so that my spare Model B won't feel left out from the fun and can contribute to some important part of house functions.) That cheapskate nature meant that when I got to examine the original model of Chromebook, and was told that I could do what I wanted with it, since the original model Chromebook stopped receiving updates at Chrome 65, I consulted the Internet, and while there wasn't much information available, there was a website that was dedicated to the prospect of converting such a Chromebook into a fully-fledged Linux machine by replacing the firmware on it with a specific kind of compatible BIOS, and then from there making it possible to put a Linux on it. (It's a very nice machine, actually - 64-bit, a couple gigabytes of RAM, and a 5GHz-compatible network card internally.) Well, I should say the website existed at some point in time, but didn't actually do so at the moment I set my mind to it. Thankfully, the Internet Archive had crawled the entire thing, and I could download it into a zip file, giving me the opportunity to follow the instructions and examine the pictures. I was initially stymied by the first instruction of turning the developer switch on, because I couldn't see a developer switch in the spot where the pictures said it was, but once I discovered that it was behind a small bit of electrical tape, we were ready to go. (That piece of electrical tape would come in handy later, as the thing that was used to disable the write protection on the firmware on the laptop.)

Again, low stakes project, no worries if things didn't go according to plan, because it was otherwise not being used, and great potential for use if it succeeds. Which it did! I followed the recipe exactly as the website archive instructed, got the new BIOS in it, and then put a Chromebook-related Linux on it, boggling the developers of it, because their Linux was not meant for a Chromebook that old. They weren't even sure it would run on it, despite me showing up with such a thing. Eventually, I scrapped that project, since it hadn't updated in a very long time, and instead went with the distribution that was powering one of the "spare" work machines that had been designed with Windows XP in mind and had fallen out of use as a mobile reference tool. I had been using those machines for all kinds of shenanigans and other material that official machines were not being used for, and they have served me well, even if only one of the original pair survives.

That Chromebook still runs BunsenLabs, and does so wonderfully. So long as I don't try to tax it too hard by running too many tabs on it, it rewards me with snappiness and speed, and most importantly, a system that can be updated and kept patched against security vulnerabilities. (When the second of the pair of netbooks finally refuses to boot, this Chromebook will likely take its place as machine-outside-of-boundaries.) And having done it once, when I was alerted to the possibility of getting another Chromebook of a later parlance for a little bit of nothing and doing the same thing to it, I jumped at the chance, and with a similar sort of process, and using some scripts developed by others, I now have a compact and useful Linux laptop that I do a lot of composition on, and that I can take with me to events like the local GNU/Linux conference so I can do interactive bits, or run programs, or just hang out in the chat rooms and post on social media my running commentaries about the sessions that I'm listening to. I've also used it as a presentation machine for such things, when I'm the one doing the presenting instead of listening. After trying to run a form of Arch on this Chromebook, and eventually running into the problem of install creep and strict size limitations (as well as the nasty tendency for it to hard freeze at some point when it ran out of memory and swap), I put BunsenLabs on it during this last update cycle, and it's much happier with me and seems to function better. We'll see what happens when BunsenLabs finally makes the jump to a Trixie base instead of a Bookworm one, but I feel pretty confident I'll be able to get all of that to work, and it'll be nice to have old hardware running modern systems.

I'm doing this because of the work that other people have done to port boot systems to Chromebooks and other machines, and to automate the process of installing things to the right places, and the people who build and maintain the packages and the installers so that all I have to do is download the image, run it, install, and then run the update commands on first boot to get to a system that's ready to work. It doesn't feel like computer touchery to do this, because it's just using other people's stuff, but there's the tale of knowing where to make the chalk mark as one side of it, and the other being whatever arguments you want to bring to bear about how "not invented here" is terrible as a practice, and therefore if someone else has created the thing that you want to use, use the thing they've created and spare yourself the turmoil. (Or, in my case, use the thing because you couldn't create it yourself anyway, and be grateful to the people who are using their time and knowledge to make it so that you can do this thing.) Doing things in userspace is still valid, and as an information professional, a lot of my skills are in finding and surfacing the thing that will be useful for the situation, rather than in trying to create the thing completely from scratch, or in trying to get the person I'm helping to do the same. The world is too large and complex for any one person to understand, or even to necessarily understand the entirety of their discipline, and so it should not be a mark of shame to rely on the work of others and to trust that their work will be accurate and not malicious. (It just makes me feel much more like a script kiddie playing in the kiddie pool instead of a Real True Technologist, even if this is another one of those situations where if you press me on the matter and start making me tell stories and explain myself and solve problems, the claims I'm making look flimsier and flimsier, a fig leaf of modesty because I'm still afraid of the reaper looking for tall flowers.)

There's a lot that I have done, and that I can and should justly consider as achievements and Cool Things. Doing things like December Days and the Snowflake / Sunshine Challenges and other such writing prompts are my way of indirectly getting at those and showing them to others. If I came out and said it directly, I'd be worried about it sounding like boasting or penis size comparison, and someone else would come along to put me in my place. But if I'm talking about how there's a wealth of software and instructions out there to extend the life of old technology, and I'm a cheapskate who's willing to invest the time in following those instructions and prolonging the life of that old technology, it doesn't sound like I'm boasting about anything other than getting some extra cycles out of my machines, and that is something I can safely be proud of. (Why? It's not saying I have any particular skills or capacities, just that I know where to look and how to follow recipes.) Indirectness is one of the best ways to get me to show you my actual potential and abilities, and I can do it to myself just as well as anyone. Full understanding may need a little bit of either reading between the lines or knowing me well enough to see what I'm doing, or to ask the right question that makes me squirm or tell stories. (Please do.)

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

10: Accessibility

As you may have gleaned from this series and many others of the type, I am not what you would call typical. This is in some physical manners, because I am Long Being, but mostly, where this is important is in the mental matters, as while I can do most of the necessary functions of life, there are some things, like time and memory, that don't function in "normal" ways. Variable Attention Stimulus Trait means that there are many things that I will tick as done that are not done, but I will only be reminded of that not-done status when it becomes contextually relevant again. Or I will try to remember a thing, and then it will not trigger again until someone else mentions it or there is some other reason for that piece of memory to fire. And sometimes, when I'm doing something that gives me actual dopamine and the feeling of accomplishment, it's not easy to get me to focus on other things. At least, not until I hit some goal of my own and can switch tasks. Which I may not remember the need to, especially if there's been some sort of progression in the game that is now presenting me with new options to explore.

These kinds of situations can happen even in spots where I am attempting to pay attention. So I devised systems to ensure that I had all the things I needed to do done first before engaging in anything that might produce the flow state. And I still use those systems. Even as I type this, there's the lure of other games and things to solve that I would also like to indulge in, but I am refraining because those things are likely to become time sinks, and I want to enjoyably spend my time, rather than recriminate about how I wasted it doing things I enjoyed and neglecting things that should have had higher priority. With appropriate supports and support from other people, I can function as a human being in a society. Mostly, what that takes the form of is "please write the thing down and give it to me, or send me a reminder e-mail or message that I have agreed to this thing, because once I leave this context, I will not remember it until I am in this context again, or at some other random, unhelpful time." This also means a certain amount of not giving me grief about the messiness of my spaces, because my working memory is often embedded in objects that are present in my workspace. They remind me to do certain things when I spot them. Once they are out of my sight, my brain often marks them as completed, even if they're not. Concentration sometimes means having fidgets available to keep the distractions part working on the fidget so that I can concentrate. Or it means taking notes, because taking notes means processing the thing that is happening. Systems at work, and they are always only as good as fixing the last thing that managed to evade or break the system and become a problem, so that will also mean having to be patient with me while I figure out how to prevent the problem from reoccurring. (The solution might very well be, as I wrote above, "please e-mail me when I agree to do a thing.")

Accessibility and accommodation is important to me, because without it, everyone expects me to behave and think and do things the same way they do, and at least one manager tried to fire me because she didn't understand that the things I was doing. She classified them as rude and personal failings, and didn't particularly like my explanations of "I would rather stand up and stay awake than stay seated and fall asleep" (at the time, the things that were interfering with my ability to have restful sleep were not yet diagnosed, so I was working on systems that worked for me at university without understanding why) or "I am paying attention to the participants in the program as I also try to puzzle out this situation in front of me." (Apparently, trusting children and teenagers to be responsible and at least do some amount of managing themselves is completely wrong.) Or even, "I forgot at that moment that this edge case existed to a regular rule, I'm sorry and I have created a flowchart of how the process works to demonstrate to you that I do understand it and I will try not to forget again." (The person being upset at me trumped any and all apology and demonstration that I could put together that this was an honest mistake.) My continued longevity at my place of work in my profession is mostly due to the fact that this manager retired before she could complete the process of getting me fired, and every subsequent manager I have had was either not in place long enough for issues to arise or actually understands that at least some part of your job as a manager is to help your employees do their best work, and sometimes that will mean having to do things in a particular way.

In many other aspects of my life, I benefit greatly from the curb-cut effect, making traversing physical space easier and having greater understanding of what is going on in media programs by being able to turn on subtitling or captioning and read to ensure that what is being said and done matches with what I'm hearing. (I don't use Descriptive Audio, but I think it's great to have available as well.) I can magnify text and pictures so that it's comfortable to view from several feet away, even if I can read it at the smaller, more original size. I have a fair number of tools developed for accessibility that I take advantage of when I get the opportunity to do so, even if they are things that I do not specifically "need" to function. I have not met people who think that I am either somehow taking advantage of something that doesn't belong to me or that I am somehow less human because I use those tools. Not yet, anyway. Most people who have taken me to task do so on the strength or compatibility with their worldview of my ideas and statements, and not because I use certain tools.

Because of the communities I work with, however, and the repeated parts of the instruction that I do on library resources, I am very sensitive to how accessible software packages are, and how many steps it takes to accomplish things, and where there are pain points, annoyance points, or where I end up saying the same things over and over again because they continue to be obstacles and impediments to a successful process. And while I would like to say that any such things that I discover are taken seriously and fixed by the people who make the software, or who control out environment, the reality is that library software and systems is the kind of place where you can count the number of products that do certain tasks on two hands, with some fingers left over, and you can count the number of companies that own those options on one hand and you might still have a finger or two left over. If competition is supposed to be the biggest driver of innovation and the threat of leaving is supposed to be the thing that gets companies to improve their products when there are complaints, then in library systems and software, we don't have enough options to be able to force either of those desired outcomes. And, as both publishing and library systems and services consolidate, we end up with fewer companies in charge of more things, making it even harder to change in the face of a company sucking. In a world where the government was on the lookout for anti-competitive behavior and starting giving serious side-eyes to conglomerates and making menacing gestures with a sledgehammer in hand, we might have that competition, but regulatory capture is a thing, and it's much easier for those who have money to buy politicians and legislation than those without.

So, with the understanding that DRM is an abomination unto Nuggan, but without it, nobody would license material to libraries to lend (and that all of that is basically controlled by one company, Overdrive, even oif other companies and projects exist to try and break that practical monopoly), allow me to complain about the inaccessibility of things that I encounter in my workplace.

First up, Windows. Obviously, our IT department does not want to give us free reign over our staff machines, nor to give the public the ability to make permanent changes to our computers or run or install malware on them. But it appears that their ability to control whether various items in the Control Panel are present is mostly controlled by the categories those items appear in, and perhaps some fine-grained control past that. Which resulted in me filing a ticket with them because the "Do Not Disturb" mode was kicking on while I was doing other things, and it meant I was missing e-mail and chat notifications because the machine assumed that I didn't want to be disturbed. I couldn't turn off DND, it turns out, because DND had been classified by Microsoft as a "Gaming"-related function, and the policy IT set removed the ability to access the Gaming part of the Control Panel. They were able to fix this. This feels like someone at Microsoft said "only the people playing games will use applications in full-screen or maximized modes, and so they're the only ones who will care about whether notifications will interrupt them or not, so stick the do-not-disturb settings in the gaming area," and nobody with the ability to get things changed pointed out that this was a foolish idea and made unfounded assumptions about the users of their product. (The integration of their LLM into basically all Microsoft apps and Windows itself is similarly a foolish decision based on unfounded assumptions about the users of their products, but at least there someone could argue that some people actually do want to use LLMs.)

Another large Windows Accessibility gripe I had is that the Ease of Access features (Microsoft's name for their accessibility features) are not available by default, so that when someone wants to log in to one of our computers, we do not have the option of showing the on-screen keyboard, or several other accessibility features that would make it possible for the machines to be used independently by people with physical disabilities. I had a person with a caregiver who came into the library, who had a USB-A pluggable control mechanism that allowed them to move a mouse cursor without needing their caregiver to do so. But because our Ease of Access functions aren't available by default, this person could not independently sign into our machine. Once the caregiver had typed in the appropriate numbers on the keyboard, then it was possible for the person to navigate merrily along in what they wanted, and to then access some of the Ease of Access features so they could do things independently. I do not know why all of those features are not available right from the jump. Some of them have become so, because I've seen people using the magnifier at the login screen, and then had to undo that work to make the machine ready for the next person. But still no on-screen keyboard toggle anywhere so that a person who can't use the keyboard can still type. (There's probably some sort of security reason to not do this that I don't know about, and I have questions about why we're using software where the presence of an on-screen keyboard somehow introduces a greater security risk than the attached physical keyboard does.)

After a months-long data breach incident, the details of which have not yet been fully revealed to the public or to the staff, we were staring down the barrel of a fair number of paper library card applications that needed to be put into the ILS, once it had been stood back up and the transactions that had been put into it had been run through. I didn't want to spend my time clicking through all of the form fields, so I tried to tab-navigate them, so that I would use as little motion as possible. Which is where I discovered that the form itself is only completely tab-navigable if there's only one entry in the autofill for a given ZIP code. If there more than one option and I have to select from the modal that pops up, the tab navigation resets to the top of the page, and when I get back to that ZIP code, I can't tab through it, even though I've already entered the information, without popping the modal back up and then getting kicked back to the top of the page. I filed a ticket about this, because surely this is a known problem and someone has already figured out how to move the cursor to the next field after the modal has been dismissed. It hasn't been fixed yet, so I still have to do at least one click to do a library card application. I'd hate to have to deal with that as a screen reader user, or someone who doesn't have the ability to consistently click a mouse to the right place.

Most of my accessibility headaches, however, come from the suite that we use to control user access to the computers and that manage the printing from those user accounts. First and foremost among them is the discovery that while the computer access and printing system has to communicate with our ILS, it doesn't actually generate any kind of account on its own systems until the first time that a card number and PIN are used to sign in to a computer, or to make a reservation for a computer. We had a fair number of people who have had cards for a very long time get stymied the first time they try to use our "print from anywhere" option, because the number is right, the PIN is right, and yet the system told them they were an "inactive user." While the fix is relatively simple (make a reservation for them, then cancel that reservation), how much simpler it would be if, say, every day or so, the computer access and printing system would query our ILS for accounts, and then create access and reservation entries in its own system for any numbers that it didn't already have such accounts for. This would not normally be an issue, but the print system runs on a sixty second timer that resets when you press the touchscreen.

Well, I should say that's the only visible timer that runs on the print release station and system. There are several hidden timers running all throughout the printing retrieval process, starting right with the beginning of it. Since we offer such things as print from home, the prompt at the end of the process that involves the person's device is to enter an e-mail address. The print release station is the place where we have an on-screen keyboard, and for people who don't do things particularly quickly, a long e-mail address can take several minutes to type on the keyboard. Several of the people I've been assisting have had their attempts disappear suddenly because we've reached some sort of hidden timeout that starts when the login screen is opened, and which does not reset itself in any way on any kind of keypress on the keyboard. I have been known to type their email addresses in on the second go-round simply because this timer is unforgiving and entirely invisible.

Another hidden timer runs while someone is waiting on various screens to either pay for their printing or use their library card credit, and no, we haven't been allowed to take cash for printing or copying for nearly a decade at this point. (This, too, is a matter of inaccessibility, even though our payment terminals are equipped with NFC readers so that the "tap to pay" options available with various cards or apps all work appropriately. Being cashless has pretty well made us hostile to the unbanked and to those people who would rather flip us a dime for a one-page print, rather than faffing about with a credit card charge of the same amount.) This hidden timer comes into play when we have to activate a supposedly "Inactive" user - even at my fastest, I would still not be able to complete it in the single minute of the visible timer. So I tell the people that they can reset the countdown timer just by pressing on the screen, but at about 45 to 60 seconds of sitting at the payment screen without pressing anything, the system drops back a level to the spot where you would select what you wanted printed from the available options. So, when the user becomes "active," they then have to go back through a couple of procedural steps, including re-scanning their library card and re-inputting their PIN, to get to the spot where they were before and discovered that the system didn't know who they were.

I'm not opposed to timers that exit out automatically and re-set the kiosk for the next person. I am opposed to secret timers that do this, because they create more problems than they solve. And especially secret timers that don't reset themselves.

The interface itself, especially the spot where the payment options are selected, has one glaring inaccessible part to it - only the button is touchable and will engage the labeled function. The text that is next to the button that describes its function is completely not part of the touchable space, and yet, I consistently have to help people who have touched the text, expecting it to be a target space, and who then get confused because something should have happened there. It sometimes takes me an explanation or two of "you have to push the button to the left" before they get to the right target area. And while these are not small buttons, neither are they particularly large, and so I can only imagine what someone with a disability or difficulty with being able to touch the same spot on a screen consistently would experience, in addition to massive frustration that this system doesn't have large enough touch targets for a crucial part of their function.

Oh, and also, apart from the first screen, which can be pinch-zoomed to make the target to start things easier to hit, everything from that point forward is of fixed size and is not zoomable or arrangeable in some form of larger blocks, or otherwise can have a mode for people who need larger touch targets or larger text to read or any other such accessibility concerns. And, while there's supposedly a button to change the language from English to Spanish, the only thing that gets translated is the interface where you put in a library card number and PIN or the e-mail address from the Print from Home option. Once signed in, everything is in English again. I filed a ticket about that, too, and apparently the company came back and told IT, when IT escalated the bug to the software developers, that they only intended to translate that first screen, and not the rest of the options that someone would have to go through to successfully print. That kind of sloppy, inaccessible work would have me advocating really hard for switching to some competitor product that actually gives a single shit about accessibility or language translation. That, of course, assumes there is one. I'm not entirely sure there is, at least with enough corporate support to make it something we would consider purchasing. (If we had an IT department that didn't have all their time consumed by putting out fires, I'd strongly urge us to find solutions that we could basically run and maintain ourselves, so that we could be responsive to comments and queries, instead of expecting and receiving the shrug emoji from the companies that we escalate these issues to.)

So I have multiple complaints about the software that we use, and zero faith that any of the issues that I raise about them will be fixed in any future release. And that's before I start complaining about our website, and our marketing materials, and so many other things that are also probably inaccessible. (although I did finally manage to get the text size bumped up for our digital advertising displays when I pointed it out to the marketing person how small the text was when they were at our location. I think they also need some refreshers on minimum contrast for images.)

The most recent gall for me, however, has been that other IT departments in our public schools have made foolish decisions of their own that render school-issued devices unable to get on our Wi-Fi. Our Wi-Fi uses a captive portal system, which is not my favored way of doing things, but it is at least a system that happens mostly automatically, with the user input needing to be to connect to the network and then to click the "Agree and Connect" button on the captive portal page. For most devices, this works fine, and people can then merrily use the Wi-Fi. For these school-issued devices, however, while they can supposedly connect to the Wi-Fi, they never get the captive portal page to appear, and none of the tricks that I know of to make said page appear work on these devices. As I was helping someone with this particular problem, I think I gained sufficient insight to know what's going on. Both of the sites used to try and generate the captive portal page timed out, and they both wanted to route through the same server and weren't able to do so. Which made me think "oh, no, someone's hard-coded a proxy for all traffic to pass through first." Which would work fine on school networks, or on Wi-Fi networks where you enter a passphrase to connect to the network, and otherwise then have access to the whole Internet from there. But on a captive portal network like ours, we need the connection to go to the captive portal page to start with, and then from there, we can open up the Internet at large. But the computers insist that all traffic has to go through this server first, including the captive portal page, no doubt, and so we have an impasse where the captive portal page needs to be acknowledged first, but the computer has been set up to route through some other server for everything, and therefore it will never let the captive portal appear and be acknowledged.

sigh

So to fix this, we'd have to convince the school IT to let their machines connect to our captive portal (and presumably other ones, too), and then to use their proxy server. There's probably CIPA and/or COPPA compliance issues there somewhere, and other things about who would theoretically be liable if a school computer were used to access age-restricted things, and so forth. Which, since we have trouble connecting with schools anyway, is probably a pipe dream of mine to get these conversations going and the desired result. Our best alternatives here are to use a desktop or library-provided laptop, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's somewhat hard to access your school learning modules and environments from a non school-issued device. So instead our Wi-Fi is inaccessible and students can't do their homework at the library, like they would like to.

And these are the things that I have direct contact with, or that show up in what I work with the public over. I'm sure there are so many other things that are accessibility concerns, or just concerns about whether or not someone feels represented, or safe, or that the library acknowledges their existence. I'd like for use to be better about all of this, but so much of that is in the hands of people with more decision-making power and resource allocation power than I have. And so I don't expect things to get any better any time soon, because the priorities of the library aren't doing a lot of pushing on those things, and the companies that we could be leaning on don't have incentives to improve, because they know we won't really be able to use a competitor product, assuming one exists.

But still I complain, and I file tickets, and I try. That's what I'm supposed to do, and hopefully, one day, things will get fixed. Preferably before someone decides to take us to court over accessibility issues. (This is an exercise in futility sometimes, and it bothers me, but I still try.)

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

08: Disappointment

It's a remarkably human thing for someone who is looking for a response to ignore the response that they're being given because it doesn't match what they are expecting to hear. People who work in public-facing positions know this intrinsically, and often have to devote considerable resources and time to making sure that what is happening in front of them is not a failure to understand, but instead a decision not to accept what they understand. That particular insistence on a wrong position being correct generally only comes out when there's money involved. Even so, good places that deserve repeat business are willing to work with people when it's genuine mistakes that have been made, or someone realizing that they've ordered the wrong size shirts to surprise someone with.

I, on the other hand, rarely am dealing with money matters, and instead there's a lot of "oh, I did return that book, I remember doing so" and a fair amount of "Oh, shit, I think I returned that book to City Library System instead of you, County Library System." On that last one, I can reassure them that things will get back to their proper places in some amount of time, because this happens very frequently and we trade materials between ourselves on the regular.

What I encountered recently was, instead, people who were expecting a specific response and didn't get it, and refused to hear what was actually being said, because it didn't match their expectations. I don't think it was malicious, since it was about getting information, but it does crop up regularly. A person who was asking about renewing a digital checkout, for example, kept insisting that they have never seen the thing I was describing to them in all the amount of time that they have been using the site, while I patiently kept trying to get through and say "that option doesn't appear until about three days before due date, and it should appear here, on this page," but it was at least three or four times around the block of "no, I've never seen that, I don't know what you're telling me" before I finally managed to get this person on a working situation. Mostly by having them first go to the spot where the thing would appear, and then explain that this is the spot where it will appear, but it will still have to be about three days before the due date before it will appear. And that it still might not appear if someone has a request in for it. I think that finally got through by having someone actually do the steps, instead of insisting that the thing that I know exists has never been part of their experience.

Same day, later on, someone is calling to get information about a half-remembered thing where one of the local Christian megachurches put on something like a "Living Christmas Tree" and they wanted to know what the details would be about getting tickets for the program. I found the thing, a Singing Christmas Tree, and which church it was associated with, and there was a nice note on their homepage saying "Hey. We know that we've done things in the past that have been big spectacles, but this year, we're taking a different tactic and giving you awesome Christmas experiences for each Sunday in December. No tickets, no cost, just Christ." Which I relayed to the person on the telephone, and they wanted to know about the ticket cost and the performance dates. And so I gave them the times for the Sunday services, and they said, "No, those are regular church times." And so we went through this information dance a second time before it went through and the person understood that the big extravaganza they were hoping to either get tickets for or relay information to someone else about was not going to happen, and then they hung up. A little bit more research, now that I had the right name, showed that the big extravaganza had finished up a final show in 2022, and so this hadn't been an actual thing for three years now. If that note hadn't been on the church's front page, I might have had a helluva time knowing that I had the right thing, even when I eventually would have discovered the article about the show hanging up after fifty years of performances. I'd be confident in my answers, but saying "no, that doesn't actually exist any more" is one of the answers that tends to get a more disbelieving answer. Probably because the expectation is that the answer will be something other than that. When that happens at work, I can either react to it with "well, I've disappointed someone," or with "just because I told you something other than what you wanted to hear does not mean that I'm the villain here!" Depending on how the interaction goes, it'll lean one way or another.

I took some serious psychic damage last week, when, because they were offering, I accepted a free roof and attic inspection from people looking to drum up business for their roof replacement services, thinking they might give me a good idea about the state of my roof. And what they gave back to me was the possibility that my roof was structurally failing and would need to be replaced, well ahead of the schedule that the original roofers had put in for it. And so, then they provided me with the sales pitch for their services, and after all of that, we started talking numbers, and that's at the point where I started giving pushback on the matter. The numbers that came in were "it'll cost you what it's cost you to get rid of your ex" numbers, and if there's one thing that has saved my ass multiple, multiple times, including when I was in a really bad headspace, is that I know, viscerally, what I can do with the resources I have available to me, and I can calculate and budget. This particular offer was going to be a non-starter, because I don't have that kind of slack in my budget. Ask again once I've paid off the loan I took out to get rid of my ex, and I still might tell you no. I explained to the now sales person what my situation was, and what kind of monthly payment might be within my ability, and then it was "well, I can take some money off of it up front, and give it back to you as a rebate, that'll let you get a few months into this, or you could use it for Christmas presents." While I was still having a complete despair of "my roof is falling apart and I definitely do not have the resources to do this replacement," I wasn't going to budge on the part where I had to actually be able to afford this situation, and in a battle of "pushy, get-to-yes salesperson versus Silver who knows what they have to work with," pushy salesperson loses. Especially pushy salesperson who is not listening to me about what I'm telling them. They left without their sale, and I threw up a flare to people who may have been able to finance such things about the situation in a panic.

Looking back on this, I realize that the emotions and issues I was feeling regarding this were the same kinds of emotions and things that I was feeling when my ex was pushing back on me to do something that we couldn't afford. I felt terrible because I was disappointing someone by not giving them what they wanted, and with my ex, my own disappointment at failing at capitalism was then reinforced with her disappointment or upsetness at not getting what she wanted. So, yeah, I was ready to blame myself for the roof falling in because I hadn't noticed the signs, and I hadn't put together anything for maintenance once I was actually back on my feet and more clear-thinking, and there wasn't going to be anything I could do about it, so I was just a disappointment to everyone, and this massive ADHD tax was just what I deserved. Those were some unhappy neural pathways, and they were definitely well-oiled from all the time I'd spent with my ex.

After I'd calmed down a little bit through the magic of sleep, I also decided to call the people who had put the roof on and see what their opinion of the situation was, and possibly to set up a maintenance contract so that I could get as much life out of my failing roof as before. Their person that came out explained to me what would need to be done to the roof to bring it back into good work, and with the idea that doing the work of getting the roof cleaned, and then treated, and changing some things so as to prevent water damage to brick work, and then reinsulating the attic, and things would be better. They also quoted me a price for all of this that was more in line with what I believed I had in wiggle room for my budget, so I accepted that, and set up the financing paperwork, and informed the people I'd sent the flare to about the situation changing and how I was feeling much more confident in my ability to make it work, based on the new and lower price that I'd been quoted for maintenance work instead of replacement work. So yet more time spent on the "all my money goes to making sure my house and my people are healthy and well, and maybe once all that gets paid off, I can think about possibly contributing more than the absolute minimum to retirement plans" situation, but I've been managing for aleph-null years now, so what's a few more.

I think my ambient "constantly disappointing others" and panic meter have been increased because of things happening at work. While I'm not in danger of being RIF'd, a lot of people around me are, and their disappearance will result in some serious rebalancing of the work that's going on, to the point where everyone, except upper administration, loses. The justifications for this have ranged from utter bullshit to rank bullshit, and despite all of the big and loud pushback they've received about how this set of changes (and all the other changes they've pushed on us) are the exact opposite of good public service and show a contempt for both the staff and the public that we serve, they continue to barrel forward with all of them. So there's heightened tensions around, as well as a certain amount of uncertainty about what's going to happen when the supposed deadlines roll around and the next set of changes gets put into action. There might be some ambient anxiety leaking out of my otherwise controlled self, because of all of this uncertainty, stubbornness, and general fucking-up of making change, communicating change, implementing change, and ignoring feedback about changes. If it persists, there may need to be conversations about establishing a more effective routine of anxiety dissipation, but for the moment, things are being managed. (Oh. There's another well-trod terrible neural pathway, the one that says that all the problems at my workplace are my fault. The manager who tried to get me fired instead of helping me establish good ways of work and reminders. The other supervisor who took away my collection management responsibilities because I made her look bad in front of upper management. The coworker who complained about various fidgets of mine to my supervisor. And all of that related material.)

I am still a disappointment to others, because sometimes other people expect something out of me that I cannot give them, or they expect me to work in ways that I cannot do. And sometimes because things slip through the cracks and I don't do the things that I said I would. (Or I got distracted.) And being a disappointment to others, outside of very specific and controlled circumstances, feels like a failure to live up to my potential, or more practically, that I am not a flawless and perfect being and therefore I can expect someone to make fun of me for that or otherwise express strong negative emotions at me for that. (Because my ex. And that manager. And the classmates in primary school.) And the only way to get out in front of that is to express stronger negative emotions first, and otherwise self-flagellate sufficiently that someone else doesn't need to. It's not a healthy way of looking at things, and breaking out of it will mean accepting a baseline principle that I have yet to see enough evidence of (or that I have enough self-confidence to assert in the face of a horde of biting weasels, take your pick): that I have worth as a person, regardless of what I do or don't do, regardless of how other people perceive me, and that worth is not conditional upon anything else.

You know, the kind of thing that other people take for granted as a part of themselves, and will look at you funny when you say that you're still working on that.

(But someone said, having come back to the library, that they still remember the people who were there when they were much smaller, and that they understand a little bit better now what we were doing and how we tried to help them, now that they're having to do academic work. So some of that help stuck, or at least they appreciate the help more now. Not a total disappointment, then.)

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

06: The Bar

I regularly have people tell me that I have optimistic expectations of people. Especially when I'm boggled at some act or statement or thing that happens in the world, and I cannot possibly fathom why someone would do such a thing, because it is immediate and clear to me that the thing they are doing, or the opeining they are aiming for, or the choice in pick-up material, is so very much not going to work, and is also going to produce some impressive backlash.

The Internet, of course, never fails to produce as many examples as you would like of bad behavior from people of all places, creeds, political orientations, wealth levels, and attitudes. Some, yes, more thatn others, because some of those things do tend to make someone more prone to making terrible decisions. (Some of those things also make it easier to avoid the consequences of those decisions, as well.)

News accounts of these behaviors tend toward either a position that abstracts away some of the terrible behavior or spins it in such a way as to present the behavior as positive or a position that leans very hard into the salaciousness of the behavior and how terrible the person must be that's making that decision. Which doesn't do a whole lot of centering a question on the behavior itself. Less refined accounts, such as one might find on social media, Reddit, or Ask A Manager, are usually better about describing the behaviors in detail, and letting the reader come to any conclusions they would like to about the moral compass of the person involved.

Now, I admit that I don't actually go to those kinds of places on the Internet, because, well, I already get enough of those incidences and their accounts in my current life and places that I look on the blogs, and with enough explanation to know right from the beginning that they're often the kinds of things that contain psychic damage and a whole lot of people behaving poorly. To seek them out would suggest that I'm looking for opportunities to feel better than other people, and that's usually a sign that I'm not doing well at all.

Even with not actively trying to seek them, though, there are times where I look at an account and want to know "why?" Or, I can understand, as the narrative progresses, how deeply in trouble the person will be when they meet Consequences. Because, apparently, I not only have standards, I have trouble understanding why people would behave in ways that are underneath those standards. An awful lot of those times, it's something like "My mother taught me better than that." Or "I have heard and read enough stories about what this person is doing that I know it's not going to end well. Surely they have done so as well, with as much time and experience in the world they have?" Or even "This does not sound like something that would advance the cause of this person is championing."

This is not because I have some kind of special insight, or great experience, or any other similar such thing. I spent my teenage years mostly playing single-player video games and being a student, either in required schooling or at university. This was probably a good thing for me, since I probably wouldn't have known what to do with a relationship if I had one, much as I believed I was interested in having one. (On the flip side, it's possible that if I had had a few relationships by the time I got to the one offered to me that was terrible, I would have recognized it as such and refused, or recognized it as such sooner and bailed before it did as much damage as it did to me.) Even now, with browsing my social feeds and the like, someone had boosted into my timeline a thing that was just "[finger pointing at you] YOU deserve love and happiness" and my first reaction to it was "You don't know me, how could you be so sure about that?" Yes, I realize that's not the usual reaction to such things, but I've spent a lot of my life convinced that this is not the case. (It's still somewhat of a wonder, honestly, that I didn't fall into the spaces that now are grouped under "manosphere," and that I didn't need someone pulling me out of that space to get me right with the world.)

And furthermore, I'm about as perceptive as a brick when it comes to recognizing that people are flirting with me or interested in me. If it's not spelled out in front of me, or someone says something obvious and explicit, I'm not usually inclined to believe that someone is flirting with me. I have not spent a lot of time being admired for my physical capabilities, at least, not in my hearing range. And my "technique," such that it is, seems to be "be a friendly person who contributes meaningfully to a discussion, who listens to what is being said to them, and who doesn't treat other people like they're puzzles to be unlocked, prizes to be won, or characters that you just have to set the right relationship flags with and everything will just naturally happen." There's no mystique to it at all, and I mostly think of this as the base standard by which everyone clearly operates from.

About the time that I articulate a thought of "this thing should be table stakes for interactions with other people, regardless of whether you have pantsfeels for them or not," just about everyone else at the table laughs. Not in a cruel way, but in the way of "never lose that spirit of optimism you have there." Because the lived experience of just about everyone else that I might be articulating this thought in the presence of says that the lowest setting of the bar is not where I think it is, it's several notches lower, if not actively being driven even further into the ground. I know that I only learn by proxy on these matters, not having had any of the experiences that then are shown to me to demonstrate just how far under my minimum acceptable standard behaviors can go. I'm not saying I disbelieve those experiences, far from it, but I'm usually appalled at the behavior that's been captured, because it feels like I'm studying a completely different species at times. There's a visceral wrongness to a lot of it, and especially so when there's persistence in error, or when it's clear to me that someone is approaching the situation with a mindset that is completely different than how I would do it. It's understandable, if I really put some effort into it, but it's not desirable, admirable, or something that I want to emulate in any way at all.

I suppose this kind of thing, this inability to understand without effort the kinds of things that people do and think are okay, makes me someone who is okay to be around? This has also been brought to my attention by others, about who is present when I'm there and who isn't when I'm not, because, again, clueless. (Clueless to the point of "if someone says they're interested in a person with my name, I assume it's the other person with my name in the space.") And other people do say that they value my input on things, and they talk to me about subjects that they might not with others, because I at least understand it (if only by proxy). These are all things that are intellectually understood but not viscerally felt, because my self-image still tends to be "I'm a nobody with no knowledge or understanding of the experiences of others, why would anyone think of me as anything worthwhile?" Which is why this series came into existence, so I could talk about the things that I do well, even if they're not things that I think I do well. I need the practice of acknowledging that that feeling of knowing nothing and being uninteresting to people exists, and that it's wrong.

Because, I suspect, I'm actually getting over the bar a lot more than I think I am.

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

04: Repair

I tried very hard not to absorb any of the things my father was trying to teach me about tool use and how to approach problems in logical ways, and how I might understand things about electrical circuits and the ways that things were constructed (or deconstructed). Often because those learning experiences forced on me were at times where I wanted to do something else, or when I wanted something to be done, instead of learning all the process behind it and then having to do the thing anyway, and to work through all the problems that would inevitably crop up while I tried to do things. I would rather have been using my skills to solve game puzzles instead of having to help out with real-world ones. These were also supposed to be bonding exercises or other opportunities for father-child interaction outside of playing board or card games together, and in the way of most children, I was not necessarily interested in having my father interested in the same kinds of things I was getting interested in, especially the ones that I was studying on my own and that I knew he would neither approve of nor be interested in learning anything about to have discussions with. (This general rebellion was supplemented with actual knowledge and experience on these matters, so it wasn't just that I wanted my privacy, it was that I knew conversational attempts would be impossible regarding them.)

To my eternal annoyance, not only did I learn things from my father about tool usage, repair, and how to diagnose and approach problems, they turned out to be useful. Especially when I became the class of person designated "homeowner." Because now I had situations where a thing needed a screw tightened, or a fixture replaced, or a piece of wood cut, or objects hung, or holes drilled, and so forth. The tool kit that I bought for myself when I became an independent being with an apartment of their own has followed me everywhere I have gone since then, and while it's been supplemented by a small number of power tools over time to assist with specific tasks, like carving up things or more firmly ensuring the screws are put into the right places, I have at least managed not to invest in some kind of handyman cave of my own. Because I still don't like doing those various things, even if I know how to do them, and I will end up doing them because I know how to do them. And I did this throughout the relationship that hurt me, and beyond that time.

It's not that I dislike doing various projects, like pulling up carpet and the tack blocks under them, or destroying a closet so that the people building the moat can get to everywhere, or hanging rails, brackets, and shelves to make a very neat book storage space, so much as I dislike doing the work of the projects themselves, and there's always an annoyance factor in there because doing projects inevitably reveals that some other tidbit of information from my father did, in fact, lodge in my brain, and it is now useful to me at this point. "Thanks, Pops." That's the kind of thing that lets me understand when a particular wire is still hot, even though the power to that box is supposedly turned off, and how to carve up large-sized bits of debris into things that will actually fit in containers, and how to use lawnmowers and trimmers, and many things. If I were better at capitalism, I'd probably be paying other people to do some of the things that are annoying and necessary, but I'm still stacked several deep in the "these things are expensive and necessary, so they're being financed" department. At this rate, I doubt I will have a situation in my life where I'm not making payments on something. But that's for a different entry.

I've picked up a new skill this year. It's not something that I think I'm great at, but it is something that I'm getting practiced at. You see, one of the things I did treat myself with were socks in my size that have things like cats in sweaters, or red pandas, or the Duck Hunt birds and dog on them. I wear them to work and try to keep them cycled so that I'm only wearing one pair for one day a week, and then laundering them. Well, the first set I bought has begun starting to develop holes in them simply from the years of use that I've put on them, and rather than discard the socks and buy new ones, I got taught how to use my needle and thread and do some re-weaving of the socks in the places that had developed holes. (It's nice to have someone with expertise in the thing you are trying to learn to guide and make suggestions as things go along.) Many of the same principles apply to other pieces of cloth that need to be rejoined to each other, although so far, the technique that I've learned tends to produce puckering, scarring, or other parts on the clothes that are of a different texture than the original. The socks are still wearable, and reasonably reinforced from having been re-woven in the spots experiencing failure.

Knowledge stars being transferable to different scenarios after enough practice, and so, when my lunch pail of many years had one of the cloth pieces that were the grab points for the zipper break off, I repaired it with the needle and thread. It's shorter now for the repair, but it works just as well as it did when it was longer. I repaired a hole in a cloth case for an object that I still need to think about how to display it in a place of prominence. I did repair a shirt that had been cat-clawed, but after that was done, the suggestion was to get some embroidered patch or similar and cover the entire scar with the patch to make it artistic.

Practicing skills on broken, but mendable, objects is effective practice. After all, if it's already broken, the best thing that can happen to it is that it comes back to a repaired state. And the worst thing that can happen to it is that it stays broken, or that it becomes more broken, or that it breaks in new and exciting ways. The complete low-stakes-ness of it all once again allows me to sidestep the need to repair something to a perfect state. And it's not like anyone is going to be looking at the heels of my socks so they can critique my sewing technique. And if they are, one, we're in a situation where I've taken my shoes off, so hopefully these are people who can figure out how to offer useful suggestions rather than flat critiques, or two, someone has very much invaded my personal space to take my shoes off and complain about my socks. If it's good enough for me to wear, or to use, and I'm not actively making it worse, then it's a success. The secret to success at new things, when you are plagued with perfectionism, is to keep the expectations subterranean, so that accomplishing the thing at all is the only thing you're hoping for, and then to turn out to have done it well is a happy bonus. (Because the anxiety is always there that it's not perfect, but being able to use, wear, or otherwise demonstrate to yourself that the thing you repaired works fine can go a long way toward at least coming to a satisfaction about it.)

Like so many other things, if you ask me if I'm good at something, I'll probably tell you no, and this applies in the domains of tool use, repairing things, replacing things, handyperson matters, sewing or darning, and all the rest of the skills that I've picked up, practiced some, but haven't turned into a specialty or a professional grade of work. My amateur, hobbyist, script kiddie skills are that way because they're often just-in-time skills, or things where I've learned something for a specific purpose and not for anything else, and I don't expect that knowledge to be transferable to any other domain. (It often is.) And they stay usable because I haven't let the perfection weasels at them, or tried to make them a core part of my identity, to the point where something not coming out at a high grade of quality feels like a complete failure, even if it was a success. And so, there will be humility about the skill applied, even if it might seem like false humility or ducking a compliment (because taking a compliment means admitting to the possibility of skill, and admitting to the possibility of skill inevitably leads to attempting something that is beyond my skill and receiving criticism or ridicule for it.) This is maladaptive behavior, but you tell the child that the people making a big deal about having made a mistake are doing it for hostile reasons, yes, but this particular mistake will pale in comparison to blunders yet to come, and you'll manage to get through them, as well. Or a similar tack that is somehow supposed to help that child feel okay about making the mistake, even with all the people around them making a big deal out of it, and the young career professional feel any kind of confident that they will be able to continue in their pathway with a manager that seems incredibly poised to weaponize every mistake into a personal failing of "why can't you just?"

I'll wait. Possibly while practicing some of the repair skills I've had to pick up for my psyche, if there aren't any physical things that I want to or need to repair at that point.