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Once again, I'm late on putting this one together, but at least it's still Q1 of 2020 (albeit barely...). It feels like 2019 was a very full year, but somehow, it wasn't as full of new musical things as was 2018, with only 17 new albums to last year's 22. There was a lot of generally forgettable stuff this year, but there are quite a few things that ended up in my playlist over and over!

As usual, here's how this works: the rating system is relative and subjective rating system, from one to five stars. A one star album is not, necessarily, bad (unless I say it is...) — think of it, really, as how much I am excited about listening to something, so one star just might mean that I haven't really found a place for it in my regular listening habits. The more stars, the more I think other people will want to listen to it too — or, at least, the more I think other people ought to listen to it, anyway...!

Got it? Okay, well, let's get started — this year, I bought 17 albums, did 2 things of my own, saw 4 live shows, and recommended another additional 26 pieces of "extra credit", and here they all are:

--- More (2995 words) --- )

So that was 2019. What did I miss?

(Previously, 2018; 2017; 2016; 2015.)

(Also, this post was automatically formatted by a script that I wrote, and if you want it for yourself, you can get it here.)

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Mani stones along a trail.

Hiking along the trails in Nepal, you’ll often find big piles of flat stones. Upon closer inspection, you’ll find that the stones have inscriptions upon them — lettering that doesn’t appear like any of the other Devanagari script that you’ll see around the country, but instead usually in either Lantsa or Tibetan scripts (not that that’ll help you, of course, because you can read none of the three of them). They have been painstakingly carved, and there’s just an enormous number of them; sometimes, you’ll find piles four or five feet tall by thirty feet long by a few feet wide, all made of these flat stones, all with the same lettering on them. They’re a curious artifact.

om mani padme hum, and mantric innovations )
(images shot on Portra 400, on Velvia 100, and on Ilford HP5 Plus at box speed; video courtesy of Kempy.)
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Jan. 21st, 2020 08:06 pm

glorious.

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today when I left the office, it was properly angry outside. this is, of course, as distinct from just "gloomy", which is high-30s or maybe low-40s, low overcast, cold, and maybe starting to rain (despite the air feeling dry, because of how cold it is); the net result, perhaps, is the same, but the feeling is definitely not. you don't want to go outside when it's gloomy.

instead, when I got on my bike, it was in the mid-50s. 75% of the sky was clouded (to the east was, inexplicably, clear), and the clouds were roiling clumps and mixtures of dark grey and light. the air was soakingly, suffocatingly wet, a threatening guillotine of precipitation. the wind was at odds with itself, too, facing entirely the wrong direction; my usual five mile an hour headwind had turned into a fifteen mile an hour tailwind. the atmosphere was so angry, in every conceivable way. it cursed and raged and occasionally spit a few droplets at me, almost taunting. if it knew how to thunder and lightning here in California, it would've. the fury and the discontent summoned: "come and get it! you just gonna stand there?"

it was tempting to go rocketing straight to escape velocity, point the bike into the hills and just keep moving until my lungs and chest were burning.

but yet, for some reason, I didn't. is that what being an adult is like? maybe I should have after all; to hell with being an adult.

oh, well. it'll be there next time.

I hope.

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on the edge: 2019, as heard by Joshua.
(a mixtape)

on the edge: 2019, as heard by Joshua.

This year's compilation is a follow-on to 2018's, though it nearly never saw the light of day at all. As I listened to music over the course of the year, I occasionally scribbled down notes for things that I thought I wanted to include, that felt like they would represent the year. To my surprise, when I came to assemble all of these at the end of the year, I found that the mix was incredibly dark! I wrestled for a long time with the concept of a mix that seemed out of balance that way, and whether I should even bother to put it together or not.

In the end, I did find a few tracks to balance it out, but more than anything else, I couldn't argue with what I already had: it was real, and it really captured sounds that stuck out to me and represented moments. The sounds and tones might not be as diverse as last year's, but they don't have to be. Not all of this mix will be for everyone, and that's okay; you can pick and choose, because you've got your own year behind you, too.

Please find attached the soundtrack to my 2019.

As usual, I'm delinquent on my "music 2019" roundup post will come soon. Hopefully this will provide a taste of some of the things I listened to -- even if a handful of the songs selected did not come out this year!

(previously, 2018)

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Binod and Mr. Yak Poo’s guide stand in a dining room.

The end of the Manaslu circuit meets up with the beginning of the Annapurna circuit, and there really was a stark contrast indeed between the crowd on the two. The Annapurna circuit seems to attract a hashtag-bucketlist collection of folks — young, tough, fit people carrying way too much and romping down the trail in cotton T-shirts — whereas we were surprised to find ourselves, it seemed, in the bottom decile of age range on the Manaslu circuit. In part, this might be because the Manaslu circuit is lesser known than the Annapurna circuit; in part, it might be because guides are required by law on the Manaslu circuit (and, anyway, most of the teahouse owners don’t really speak English). But even yet, we met the acquaintance of a handful of interesting folks along the way.

the people you meet )
(images shot on Ilford HP5 Plus at box speed, on Portra 400, and on Kempy’s Pixel 3.)
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Binod a good distance away on a trail that is indistinguishable from its neighboring foliage

The thing about our guide, Binod, was that he wasn't a bad guy, he was just a little ... inexperienced. He was kind of a young guy, younger than we were, early 20s; he said he'd been around the Manaslu circuit three or four times before, and been on many treks prior to that, but as we found, it was kind of hard to get a straight answer out of him. But being inexperienced is fine, as long as you can find the way eventually, as long as you have three simple words at your disposal: "I don't know". Binod, we found, was not very good at using these words on matters of any import.

the shifting of the ruse )

This is the first of a handful of stories from Nepal. If you don't have a Dreamwidth account, but you want to get notified so you can read more things like this when I write them, I also have an e-mail list; I promise I'll only send mail for things that I write that go here on this blog.

(both images shot on Ilford HP5 Plus, pushed to ISO 800.)
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For the first time in a while, on Saturday, I made havdalah at home, and it got me back to thinking again about that bizarre connection between what we Jews call “the Shabbat spice” and what I feel is the special thing about !!Cons. On the Sabbath, one gets, in theory, to take a break from their busy day, and all of the obligation to go do all these worldly things, and instead to revel in the sweetness of the day of rest. Jews often refer to this sweetness as if it were a physical thing, the “Shabbat spice”; challah that you buy on Friday tastes better on Saturday because it has the Shabbat spice, and even not-terribly-observant Jews are sometimes known to “smell” it throughout the course of the day. !!Con has that feeling, too: instead of being forced to produce, we get to relish in the sweetness of joy for the sake of joy, and the feeling of being a space with people who want to share that with you for the weekend is very different then the feeling of every other day of the year.

Havdalah — literally, ‘separation’ — is the way we seal off Shabbat, and has evolved over the millenia to a kind of kabbalistic, Messianic thing, starting reasonably with a joyful nigun (a wordless tune), prayers and observation of objects that symbolize the various joys of the Sabbath and the world around us (wine, good-smelling spices, an odd-shaped flame), but shifting at the end to a conclude with an invocation of hope for Elijah the Prophet. It is said that Elijah portends the arrival of Messiah (and all the sweetness that entails, when every day will be perfused with the Shabbat spice) — but for right then, at that moment of closing, we move back into our daily business, with the hope of taking some of that Shabbat sweetness with us into our week. I felt that way acutely at the closing of !!Con West last year, too, almost right down to the Messianic hope that maybe this time, when I go back into the world around me, my day to day world of computing will be as sweet as !!Con is.

I wonder what the words are for that feeling around !!Con, the analogue to “the Sabbath spice”, where for a moment we get to pretend that everything is that much closer to the way we want it to be.


You can help me find out. The !!Con West 2020 Call for Talk Proposals is open through Sunday, December 8th. We'd love to hear about your idea for a 10-minute lightning talk about the joy, excitement, and surprise of computing. You don't have to be an experienced speaker (actually, some of my favorite talks were by speakers whose first public talk was at a !!Con!), but you do have to get a proposal in by the deadline! I'm hoping to see you there.

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a notebook, a kindle, a hot chocolate, and a croissant, in contrasty black-and-white on a wooden table

I think I promised a few people a summary of what I read while I was in Nepal. Here's a selection of what I took on my Kindle with me, with the stuff I liked the best highlighted in red:

Not Without Peril; The Secret of the Yoga Sutra; The Slow Farm; The Yiddish Policemen's Union; Marooned in Realtime; Why We Sleep; Reading Lolita in Tehran )

I suppose this almost entirely omits the most important book I brought with me -- a blank one, and a pen. I wrote about sixty pages worth of ink while I was away. Some of those will be making an appearance here soon too, I think.

(photo captured on Ilford HP5 Plus, pushed to ISO 800.)

December 20th, 2019: This post has been recently updated to reflect new information about Matthew Walker's book, "Why We Sleep".

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a few trails that lead into low brush, and subsequently up and into the mountains
you are quiet and wide open

kodak portra 400. more coming soon.

(previously)
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In the lineage of yogis that I have from time to time studied with, we note the concepts of Shiva and Shakti as two energetic bodies: Shiva, the body of Being, and Shakti, the body of Becoming. Being is raw, undiluted consciousness and observation, peace and attentive calm; Becoming is the creative, wild, powerful, energetic force of change. We do not prioritize one over the other, and we find them both equally important, but also we know that neither of them are the end goal. Samadhi, or transcendence, is where "I" is no longer, where bodies and energy is no longer, where there is no difference between me and you, the inside and the outside, or even Being and Becoming. But for those of us still on this plane, Shiva and Shakti are separate, but inextricably linked.

Kamasi Washington takes a slightly different view on this, with his two-CD thesis, Heaven & Earth. He presents Earth as a gritty view of the present, of a place of real work, of abject reality; Heaven, on the other hand, he gives as something of a dreamland, an idealistic floating place, with the challenge that it is distinct from us. He, too, gives a view of the merger in his final note, Will You Sing, conjecturing the transcendence of the merger of the two. In the mean time, while they are still separate, he presents the alternatives as equally important concepts: Heaven must exist as an ideal, and Earth must exist to remind us of what we are.

With weighty subjects like that in mind, we come to an important topic.

* * *

During the week, I wrote that the Kiwis are just deadly serious about their ice cream. Well, I suspected that to be true, but I could not really know until what they call Thursday evening (but the rest of us Stateside call Wednesday night), when I reached what must be the terminus of my little self-guided ice cream tour of Auckland. Giapo -- 4.6*, according to Google, and even more unusually for an ice cream shop, "$$$" -- was just a five minute walk from Island Gelato Co, and I knew I was in for it when I went flipping through their FAQs, and found their central claim that "We are not for everyone—we are for the dreamers, innovators, artists, and all ice cream lovers. Giapo is for the people who are ready to see ice cream as a platform for freedom and art." Deadly serious, indeed.

ten ice cream flavors, and a menu with some prices that seem exorbitant until you realize 1NZD ~= 0.60USD

Giapo sells itself as an experience, then, rather than just simple ice cream. The whole process is heavily regimented, in fact: when I walked in, they rounded up all of the Giapo first-timers, and rather than simply taking our orders, went through an elaborate tasting process, where they brought out samples of all eight flavors, and had us try each of them in sequence. This was a quite foreign concept indeed to me: my usual procedure is to choose by looking and commit to my decision, safe in the knowledge that there is always room for more ice cream later. Giapo, on the other hand, does not even have their ice cream on display, and you do not get to see the visual form of your final creation until you have ordered it; each flavor is served differently, as I'd soon discover. I went through the tasting experience along with my five new friends in my tour group, and at long last, selected an ice cream -- NZ Hokey Pokey, in a pretzel Incredible Cone. The other flavors were certainly good, but I felt I needed to compare the basics, after all, and with the fact that Giapo doesn't serve in cups, it seemed like there would just be too much going on with a second flavor.

I should take a moment to note exactly what I mean by 'a pretzel Incredible Cone'. This particular ice cream shop seems to make everything to order; this particular Incredible Cone is a waffle cone (no sugar cones to be found here) dipped in chocolate, with pretzels around it (also dipped in chocolate). They also have a white chocolate, as well as a chocolate and gold, Incredible Cone; other ice cream substrates available include their "Selfie Cone" (a cone with some sort of an edible picture frame), the King of Cones (a cone about a meter tall), a Giant Squid Cone (a cone with a giant squid shaped thing on the top in which the ice cream resides; the form is said to be 3D printed), and their Two Wearable Cones (cones that are formed to fit on your fingertips, with the ice cream on top; you get two of them, for they are somewhat smaller). As I was considering these, my NZ Hokey Pokey Pretzel Incredible Cone arrived, still smoking from its unexpected chocolate shell having been hardened with liquid nitrogen.

A small plastic ice-cream-sample spoon was sticking out out of the side of the shell, as an invitation of where I should even start with this thing. And so I did: I started with a spoonful of ice cream, and a little bit of shell. Maybe I should get the basics out of the way to say that the ice cream was truly excellent. But I had not just ice cream, but a whole adventure of flavors in front of me: this cone had what seemed like a double-scoop on top of it already, and a truly massive chocolate shell with a line of Hokey Pokey (you'll recall that to be a honeycomb-toffee-like thing) down the side of it, and that was to say nothing of my chocolate-dipped cone.

a colossal ice cream cone, about twice the height of my hand, and about the diameter of my fist, with a spoon sticking out of the top

Where my beloved J. P. Licks, or even Rick's Ice Cream, is the down-home creamery of Earth, Giapo is the explosive constellations of Heaven. Giapo is not kidding when they say that they "do not comply with the traditional meaning of ice cream [...] that most people understand it to be"; Giapo's Incredible Cone asks more questions than it rightly can even begin to answer. How should I eat it? is only the start; is this even ice cream that's front and center? is another.

I took it with me as I walked back to my hotel, about a ten minute walk. I wasn't even finished with the cone by the time I got back, and it seemed daunting at that point. By the time I even got to the pretzels, my sense of taste was overloaded. It was unusually crisp and dry of an evening, given the patterns I'd seen so far that week; the rest of the week, it had rained on me every night as I went for my ice cream (it didn't stop me, and it didn't seem to stop any of the other Kiwis, either). The weather in Auckland seemed to change on a moment's notice, which the Kiwis in the office had been accustomed to by that point: at some point, I stood up from my workspace before lunch to see bright sun, wandered into the office's depths to take a leak, and by the time I emerged again, it was pouring buckets at a forty-five-degree angle outside my window, and a moment later, it was sunny again. But anyway, here I was with my overload of carbohydrates -- just me and a moment of clarity on the city.

ice cream in front of some mid-to-high-rise buildings

Giapo is the raw Shakti of ice cream: it is the raw expressive energy, the transformation, the Becoming. On its own, it is just too much. Rick's and Licks, on the other hand, are the Shiva of ice cream: the stillness, the steadiness, the Being. On their own, after all, they may not be enough.

By the time I made it back to my hotel room, I had a big chunk of waffle cone and chocolate in my hand, with just a taste of now liquid sweet cream in the middle. I considered chucking it, considered whether it was by now too much, considered if I had now already rightly had the Experience, after all. I ate it anyway, committing myself to pushing myself over the top in sugar consumption.

Heaven and Earth each remind us of a space in between, and of our own role in bringing one to the other. Shiva and Shakti, on their own, remind us of what they each bring to us, but they also remind us of the need for both together. Giapo and the simpler creameries are duals, too: Becoming to remind us of the simplicity of Being, and Being to remind us of the excitement of what's possible. Neither are transcendence on their own, but if we can learn to hold the feeling of both at once, maybe that is where we can break the cycles and patterns that bind us.

a mostly eaten ice cream cone

Heaven or Earth, Shiva or Shakti, Being or Becoming, it was over. All that was left was the echoes of the chocolate and ice cream and hokey pokey and pretzel and waffle cone in my bloodstream. I went to bed, and the next evening I got on an airplane and went home. On the plane, they served me one last New Zealand ice cream: "gingernut and triple chocolate".

It was alright, I guess.

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a Google Maps screenshot with about a billion ice cream shops within a half mile radius

The thing that you've got to understand about this country is how deadly serious they are about their ice cream.

For instance, yesterday evening, I went to Island Gelato Company (4.3* on Google Maps), a four minute walk from MELT (also 4.3*), where I went the night before. Despite it being 55 degrees out (Fahrenheit, for I have not at all assimilated in my two-and-a-half days here), and raining, there was a line; the small glass storefront was full. The presentation of the choices was gorgeous, enough that you'd assume that the place is a chain, with so many options; as it turns out, it is a chain, but of only two stores. For my NZ$9.50 (that's US$6 or so), I got two scoops, for I needed to try two different flavors, see. The gelato I got (half Darkest Chocolate & Sour Cherry, half Buttermilk & Dulce) was, if not truly exceptional, certainly very good. The night before, when I got the national flavor of ice cream, Hokey Pokey (that's vanilla with honeycomb toffee -- and no, I am not joking about New Zealand having a national flavor of ice cream), I found, also to be excellent.

But the most surprising thing, perhaps, is that these two were not a fluke: I have reason to believe that there are, perhaps, tens, if not hundreds, of ice cream shops in and around Auckland of such quality.

Perhaps I should skip lunch today. And dinner, too, for that matter.

Deadly serious, indeed.

an array of ice cream flavors
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Hooo boy, I am late on this one this year. At the beginning of 2018, I was worried that there wasn't a lot of music that I was excited for; I was pleasantly surprised, over the course of the year, to have a lot of stuff that I really really liked! I bought a lot of music and spent a while reviewing it — but also, this year, I even did some mixes and mashups of my own, so stick around for those.

As usual, here's how this works: the rating system is relative and subjective rating system, from one to five stars. A one star album is not, necessarily, bad (unless I say it is...) — think of it, really, as how much I am excited about listening to something, so one star just might mean that I haven't really found a place for it in my regular listening habits. The more stars, the more I think other people will want to listen to it too — or, at least, the more I think other people ought to listen to it, anyway...!

Got it? Okay, well, let's get started — this year, I bought 22 albums, made 4 mashups of my own, saw 4 live shows, and recommended another additional 26 pieces of "extra credit", and here they all are:

--- More (5628 words) --- )

So that was 2018. What did I miss?

(Previously, 2017; previously, 2016; previously, 2015.)

(Also, this post was automatically formatted by a script that I wrote, and if you want it for yourself, you can get it here.)

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Just as I left the office this evening and got on my bike to head home, the sun was taking its last gasps, making its way down behind the hills. I didn't know this until I turned out of the parking lot, and saw the sky positively on fire, with tantalizingly brilliant hues of pink and orange and gold descending behind the recycling plant, and into the trees; I skidded my back tire briefly while deciding whether to take a photo then, and then figured I'd grab it when I had an unobstructed view around the corner.

an ebbing sunset behind buildings

I pedaled down the road, waiting for the opportunity to see it in its full glory, but there was always something in the way. I turned facing down the foothills, but by now, just a few minutes later, it had faded to just a dull glow. I took the picture anyway.

a grey sky

By the time I was nearly home, I stopped at a red light, and the sky betrayed no sign at all that anything had happened between me and it, now cold, grey, and unfeeling. "As is its nature", I thought.

But I knew, too, that even as it turned to black now, it would surely awaken again in all its radiant warmth, even if only for moments at a time.

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on the horizon: 2018, as heard by Joshua.
(a mixtape)

on the horizon: 2018, as heard by Joshua.

This compilation is the first of what I hope to be a series of "Joshua's picks from the year". Some of these tracks did not come out this year, and some of them did not even come out recently; the important thing about them is that I discovered them this year! In this CD-length mix, my goal is that everybody who listens should pick up something new that they didn't know that they loved, and many should also find a track that they really quite dislike: if everybody loves everything, then I'm not being pushing my listeners out of their comfort zone enough, and if everybody hates everything, then I'm not giving anybody a reason to listen.

In this compilation, I've mixed together a range of music from a variety of genres, feelings, and tones. 2018 was a year full of so much, and I hope that in here I could present some of the gamut that it spanned. Please join with me, then, in the soundtrack to my 2018.

My "music 2018" roundup post will come soon. But I did spend tens of hours selecting the tracks, mixing them, and putting this together for you, so I hope this will hold you over until then!
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sunset-painted sky through a window, with water bottles and other gym accoutrements in the foreground
(click for many more)


a window on my world

Everything seems to be happening so fast these days. April feels like an eternity ago. A lot has happened inside me. A lot has happened outside. I have been a lot of places, and experienced a lot of things. I tried to capture a lot of feelings that went flashing by me, and as I went flipping through them, they all came rushing back. The photos I shot, I hope, resonate some with you, too. Please enjoy a tiny view into my universe.

(previously, previously)
Nov. 25th, 2018 01:48 pm

pyusbip

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I spent this last Thanksgiving week at home with my family in the greater Boston area, which has been a wonderfully relaxing break from all the goings-on of my ordinary life in the Bay Area. Since I planned to get a little bit of work done for a client, I brought with me some development boards, including a Lattice MachXO3L eval kit. I had a productive Monday and Tuesday, getting quite a lot done, testing all the while in simulation, but by Friday, I was ready to test on hardware, and this posed a problem: the tool to program a bitstream onto the board runs on Windows and Linux, but I only had my Mac with me. I considered all the obvious solutions to this problem, weighed them each on their individual merits, and then discarded them all and chose the most complicated unreasonable approach possible.

--- More (1791 words) --- )
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A few months ago, I wrote a little review of the Wahoo ELEMNT BOLT, and a miniature teardown of the software on it. I was surprised to find that it, in fact, ran Android, but that the license compliance story on it was not great. Over the intervening time, though, I've been exchanging some mail with Chip Hawkins, the CEO at Wahoo, and it sounds like they're working on getting the licensing story all fixed up there -- and, to my surprise, that engaging with the enthusiast community is something that they are interested in! So, this post has a short update on some of those discussions, and my experiments so far in modifying the thing.

My initial post led off with this arguably clickbait-like statement that the device was in violation of its myriad licenses, so I think it is only fair to the Wahoo team to give an update on where that stands. As of the time I write this, source isn't available for the GPL components, and attribution isn't in place for the Apache components, but as far as I can tell, Chip and his team are pretty serious about getting this squared away. They have a release pending that has been occupying basically all of their engineering time, which also will have some UI changes; so, for the attribution components, they plan to include those in the new UI, rather than running a fire-drill to retrofit that a branch that is unlikely to see another release again. This makes sense to me. My impression is that the next release will have attributions included, then, and kernel source for that release will go out with it, too. They seem to understand what components they need to release source for, and where to look for other licenses that they need to include. So, my claim is that anyone who wishes to be mad about there not being source available yet, should wait for the next release -- it does sound like they are trying, and have a plan to get into compliance! The Android app already has an attributions tab, which is a good start, and I hope that they get the on-device software squared away soon too.

Chip also gave me some information on doing some hacking on the device, which is exciting. They plan to release a recovery image (for Android people, this is a full update.zip, including boot, /system, and userdata images) along with the next release, but until that is ready, one caveat to all of the following is that would-be hackers must be extremely careful, because there is currently no image available to restore a device from unless you create one, and further, that if you modify the root filesystem, then the device will no longer be able to take over-the-air updates until you restore it from backup.

With all those warnings said, here are some tricks to get you started messing with the device. I mentioned in my previous post that the device had an ADB daemon running, but it wasn't accessible; as it turns out, there is a key shortcut to get access to it! If you press the power button and the up button on the right side at the same time, the ADB daemon should unlock. Chip notes that it's best to press them a few times in a row in order to ensure that the event actually happens; after you do that, unplug the device from your computer, then plug it back in, and you should be able to adb shell in. For me, the ADB daemon was already running as root, but if this wasn't the case for you, I am told that adb root should work.

Since there isn't a recovery image available yet, I recommend that the first thing that you do is to make your own. To get a bare minimum backup of the system image on your device, you might want to run something like for i in boot system recovery nvdata ; do adb pull /dev/block/platform/mtk-msdc.0/by-name/$i elemnt-backup-$i.img; done, which will grab a backup of, at least, everything you need to reflash a known-good bootable configuration onto your device.

Once you have boot and system partition images, you are now in a much safer position to explore the device. The other step that you might want to take is to unlock the bootloader on the device, so that you can flash those images again if you need to. The ELEMNT devices run Fastboot, but they have a very finicky version of Fastboot running on them; as far as I can tell, after every command, you need to unplug and plug the device back in, or else it will not respond to you again. Unlocking the bootloader will wipe any data that you have on the device, so make sure to back up anything that you want (either using ADB, or over MTP with Android File Transfer) before you do it!

To boot the device into Fastboot, turn it all the way off, then hold the "down" button on the right side while pressing the power button. If everything goes well, it will give you a black screen, and present a Fastboot interface over USB. Run fastboot oem unlock on your computer side; you'll get a message like "waiting for user" or something of that nature. When you do, press the power button once, and wait; you'll eventually get a message like "erasing user data...", and then the device will be unlocked. To be sure of that, you can unplug and plug the USB connection back in, and then run fastboot getvar all; in there, you'll see the message "unlocked: yes". When you're ready, you can then run fastboot continue, and your device will continue to boot. If you get yourself into trouble later, you can restore your backup with something like fastboot flash:raw boot elemnt-backup-boot.img, and similarly, fastboot flash system elemnt-backup-system.img.

I had been putting this post off for a while, since I had planned to try to modify the .apk that runs the thing. Sadly, I never really got time to do that. But I did get mail from Chip saying that he didn't have objections to people redistributing modified system ROMs -- and modified BoltApp.apks. So what I'm hearing is that, for the enterprising hacker with spare time, this could be a fun toy! He notes that the launcher is pretty careful about monitoring the main app for crashes, and that there are intents that you can send the launcher to make it happier; I tried decompiling the launcher, but found that the version of Android that runs on the device is not compatible with any of the de-odex tools that are out there. So that also sounds like future work.

Anyway, I'm still using mine. I still wish it would boot faster, and especially that it would restore a paused ride faster. I also wish that it would show me sunset times. But I've put a few hundred miles on mine by now, and it hasn't eaten a ride yet. And that makes it better than my Edge 510.

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a havdalah candle reflected in a fingernail

I don't usually write about current events -- here, or anywhere else, really -- because, for better or for worse, they don't usually reflect my own lived experience, and anyway, someone else probably has done a better job writing about them than I have. There is an argument that, in this time as I make preparations to make havdalah [the closing prayers, service, and meditation for Shabbat] -- something I do approximately once every never at home -- that I should not be writing about this subject at all yet, but the peace of the Rest Day has already been shattered by eleven deaths in Pittsburgh earlier today, and surely my koteb ["writing"; a prohibited activity on Shabbat] shall not breach it any more than it already has been. And I'll give myself a pass on the other front, too: as I expected today's news to pass through me, I found this afternoon that I could not tear myself away from news and Twitter and messengers, hoping in some way to make sense from something that doesn't. And so I write.

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Oct. 12th, 2018 10:51 pm

episodic

joshua0: (Default)

This post has been a long time in the works. I've had it on my disk for five or so months, and I never really got it into a state where I liked it enough to post. Oddly enough, five months ago, when I wrote the first draft of this, #DeleteFacebook was trending, and I originally wrote:

"I had been planning another post for a while, with the thesis being an answer to the question: if we #DeleteFacebook, then what? I have been meaning to sit down and write that for a while, but I either haven't had the time to do it or I just didn't want to. It might not be coincidence that this post feels more pressing and urgent at this second at my fingertips; the two are inextricably linked in my head. (T.C. Sottek's piece from 2016 in The Verge, offers a different perspective on this.)"

I didn't "#DeleteFacebook" then, and I haven't now, but when Facebook was compromised and logged me out a few weeks ago, I never bothered to log back in. I was having a rough time around then, and the escapist urges to disconnect ran high.

I've dug this out because it seems apropos for this hashtag-holiday that's trending this week. As much as I above describe a coherent structure for a post that I wanted to write at some point, this post continues in the recent trend of having no such; instead, I offer, perhaps, a collection of vignettes on mental health -- in general, and mine in specific.

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