Tuesday: teddiursa

Yes, that tiny little box that I've stuck to the side of the tv stand is a proper full computer.  I'm reasonably sure that it'll be a perfectly valid replacement for kadatheron.  I'm still getting things set up on it, but I haven't run into any major issues yet.  It knows the network, it's crossmounted giant disks across the network, it can see and use the webcam, and it displays to the television with only minor glitches (I'm pretty sure that HDMI-1 on my tv is broken).

I think the hardest question I've had to confront is what to name it.  Kadatheron could be followed up with anything from the set of {thraa, ilarnek, sarnath}, but those are all kind of bad names (the reason I chose kadatheron in the first place).  That suggested taking a new path.  I'm planning on using it to monitor a bunch of things automatically, and have low-level AI attempt to diagnose and notify me of any issues.  This led to the idea of tachikoma, but I already used that name for a laptop (which doesn't really exclude it, as that laptop has been dead for years).  Even though I'm pretty sure they're etymologically distinct, that led me to 熊 pronounced kuma or "bear."  Next on the logic train was the realization that if this works well, I may end up buying more, so it'd be good to have a large supply of assignable names.

Of course, the largest supply of assignable names is Pokemon, so I went with teddiursa, partially because it's cute.

And as a side note, here's the CDF for when I post things to my blog.  I've plotted both the raw times as well as a folded set of times, where posts before 6AM have been appended to the previous day as hours 24-30.  Like today's post is going to end up being because I was busy this evening and didn't get things done on time.

Note how the 50% point is something like 9:30 PM HST.

• Raspberry pi troubleshooting page.
• Squirrel.
• Brock.
• The Largo is very good.
• Side complaint: I was listening to this as part of a giant "99 classical songs for $1!" thing from amazon.  For the album this is on, I have 91 tracks.  For another, 67.  WTF, amazon?  The support response I got was "here's a coupon for the price you paid so you can try buying it again."  Of course, it's now $7, so the $1 coupon doesn't fix things.  I think this boils down to the fact that I'm annoyed that the amazon computers have stolen 40 songs from me of total value $0.40404.  Computers are supposed to be reliable, especially when you have to transfer the music files from your magic mp3 vault to the section of the magic mp3 vault that you've assigned to me as my "cloud player."
• I want to play the game and then get immediately bored, but it doesn't start until the 25th.
• “I fixed the problem. Problem solved.”
• Why people are so crazy that they've shut down the government.  Tl;dr: they're old white people who are scared of anyone who isn't exactly like them, and since they're too dumb to realize that this is just the result of demographic change brought on by globally increasing population and rapid transportation, have decided that it's all the fault of Lucifer, and therefore it's the end times.
• I made this point in grad school to someone from a different country, and I think I've come to a more logically sound view on the subject.  The US is an excellent choice for the world's reserve currency because it has something that you really want in that position: permanence.  Having giant stockpiles of nuclear weapons is not something you keep around to force people to use your currency.  You use it to assure those that do use your currency that you will be there next year and you will be there in thirty years, as there are no outside groups that can destabilize you.  Note "outside groups."  The previous link illustrates that there are a lot of people who not only don't care about stability, but actively court instability because that's a herald of their psychotic millennialism.