Joshua's weblog

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.