Joshua's weblog

It never goes smooth. How come it never goes smooth?

I have had a lot of trip reports in the queue to write -- or, perhaps I should say, I have taken a lot of trips recently, and some of them had moments worth writing about. I have half of a trip report written about getting shut down on Mt. Shasta; after it became clear that it was a simple recounting of a day, with nothing terribly interesting to say about it in that light, I gave up on that incarnation of it. In my mind, too, was brewing a set of thoughts about a recent cycling trip to make a lap around Lake Tahoe. On my laptop is also a draft of a post about mental health -- or, really, the things that go along with the absence thereof -- that I never seemed quite satisfied with enough to post.

It seems like what I was looking to write is a synthesis of all of these. Over the past few months, I have entered a handful of experiences with expectations for how they would turn out; some of them went exactly as I'd planned, and some of them were entirely the opposite. To be honest, I'm not sure exactly what my thesis is here -- is it that expectations influence outcomes? that they don't? that expectations influence experience? Regardless, here are a collection of moments of each of these.

"The best climber is the one having the most fun." — Alex Lowe ( --- More (4108 words) --- )

There have been a lot of exciting changes for me in the past month -- maybe the most exciting being that I left my job, and so I've been spending the last month biking and hiking and generally getting outside. I've been meaning to write about those, and I have a post drafted about that, but this is not that post. Instead, this post is an unrepentently nerdy dissection of a new toy that I got, in which I unintentionally buy yet another Android device -- a Wahoo ELEMNT BOLT, which is a bike computer with GPS (and other data) logging support, phone and internet connectivity, and a whole bunch of exciting gadget and doodad features.

Update August 6th, 2018: I am in contact with Chip, at Wahoo Fitness, about the licensing issues -- and with promising news about hackability! I'll write a little more later when I get a chance, but I figured this update should be front and center....

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So, last night, I went to So Stoked: Rave to the Grave 2 at DNA Lounge. So Stoked is DNA's once-a-month kandi rave; I don't usually attend, but I confess that I do really miss getting to dance to high-BPM trance. Rave to the Grave is a kind of unusual event, where the So Stoked promoters join forces with the Death Guild promoters; upstairs, are the Death Guild DJs playing (maybe a little bit older, and faster) Death Guild tunes, and downstairs, are the standard kandi rave DJs. In the two times they've done this, they've had one big-name EBM DJ and one big-name rave DJ for each one; last time, they had Ronan Harris, of VNV Nation and Darude^[1], and this time, they had Daniel Graves, of Aesthetic Perfection and Kyau & Albert^[2]. (Both DJs played both rooms.) The event is, anyway, weird enough, and enough fun, that I try to make it a point to attend when it comes around.

Anyway, jgrafton and I arrived around 10pm or so, a little while before Daniel Graves's set, and we stuck around downstairs through some of the later sets, too. As far as I can tell, the two of us were basically the only ones dancing with glowsticks, and I was dancing pretty darn hard.

Eventually, this kid walks up to me. As far as I could remember, he wasn't wearing a wristband^[3]; I'd seen him getting a light show from someone with LED gloves earlier that evening. He looked impressed -- and somewhat transfixed -- so I obliged, and turned my glowsticks in his direction.

"Dude. Are those just glowsticks?" Yep. The best 4.5-star glow that Amazon can sell you for $20.

"Dude. Do you ever use gloves?" Nope. Just glow. LED gloves are after my time.

"So you never used gloves before? Just that?" Nope.

"That makes it even more impressive!" The best of the knightofstarz Roselawn 7 School of Dance, my young friend.

He says something. Mumble. I can't understand it over the noise.

He pulls out his phone. He opens Snapchat. I nod, and turn up my dancing a notch to give him another light show. He doesn't seem to be aiming his phone at me to video; instead, he leans in to say something. Mumble. I don't understand.

He pulls up his QR code. Snapcode. Whatever it's called. I understand.

I grab my phone and launch Snapchat, and aim the viewfinder at his snapcode. It doesn't automatically scan. I realize that I don't know how to scan a snapcode. I try going to the "add friends" tab, and tap on "snapcode". It asks me to select an image from my camera roll; I didn't capture one. I fumble in embarrassment. Clearly, I am not a very competent Millenial.

He looks at me, and I hand him my phone. He expertly finds my snapcode, and just types my name into his phone somehow. I didn't think my profile was public, but maybe I am just the only "joshua" on Snapchat. He adds me, and smiles, and goes on his way.

I now understand. He uses Snapchat and gloves; I use IRC and glow.

Tomorrow, he will see my Snapchat story, with snaps of heckling my coworkers, and shitposting about my impending disappointment with a screenshot of buying MP3s of the new Above & Beyond album on Amazon, and he will be as confused as I.

* * *

(Young raver friend, if you come across this, keep on rocking. I am at least as much making fun of me as I am of you.)
[1] You heard me. Darude. Like, Sandstorm Darude.
[2] Who, by the way, were also freakin' fantastic.
[3] i.e., he was not of drinking age. So Stoked is an all-ages event. This is, on occasion, somewhat unsettling. I am pretty sure that the song Sandstorm was older than the median age at the event when they had this last year.

Tomorrow afternoon, I'm scheduled to get LASIK. I have some trepidation about this. Not, like, worried about the outcome: I'm pretty sure that, on the whole, having a LASIK flap is going to be much safer and much less of a liability than being dependent on corrective optics while I'm outside exploring. To tell the truth, I was planning on doing this last year, and backed off at the last second -- like, the day before I was supposed to come in for measurements. I've worn glasses since I was 6 or so (so, 22 years!), and glasses have just kind of become part of who I am. Who would I be if I didn't have my glasses? Who would I be if I couldn't choose to see or not see?

*   *   *

Tonight, I went and practiced asana at Planet Granite. The same studio I have practiced at for years, the same class I have taken for quite some time, with a teacher I knew well. Sometimes when I practice, I put my glasses on, and see through my glasses. Sometimes when I practice, I very intentionally take my glasses off: let my vision be blurred, as a way of turning inwards. I did today: today would be my last opportunity to do that. It felt like a turning point, and I tried to savor it when I could. The soft defocused view, the warm color temperature of the filtered floor lights, the knowledge that I was practicing in the company of many others, but without the distraction of any in particular ...

Some time ago, I used the metaphor of avidya for glasses with scars on them. When I have my glasses on and I see the outside world with crystalline sharpness, am I seeing reality more clearly, or less clearly? When I take my glasses off, and the outside world is blurred, am I now seeing reality more clearly, or less clearly?

*   *   *

In April, I talked about my experience of a morning practice. I promised myself that I would be honest when I talk about my experience of yoga, rather than trying to cultivate an image, and so it is only right to say: I haven't been doing it recently. In fact, I haven't been sitting at all recently. I've gotten out of the habit of it. Or, really, I couldn't make myself do it. For a while, I was beating myself up about it, feeling guilty after every day that I didn't sit. Then, the weeks went by, with my mala sitting on my cushion, untouched, but at least not unnoticed.

I'm given to believe that it is a very rare individual indeed who does not, at times, struggle with the practice of meditation -- or yoga, in general. I'm certainly not one of them.

I don't know when I'll come back to it. I take some comfort, though, in the knowledge that, like an old friend, it will be there for me when I return.

*   *   *

“You take practice. Practice, practice, practice. That is method.”
— Guruji Pattabhi Jois

Let's talk a little about High Exposure. High Exposure is this famous route in the Gunks, which themselves seem to be the Northeast trad-climbing mecca. When you get to the Trapps -- the specific part of the Gunks where High E is -- it's easy to see why people go there: it's about a mile-and-a-half long carriage road with a cliff on one side of it, with classic route after classic route after classic route back to back. The local ethic is not to add bolts, and it makes sense, because the rock is eminently protectable: many of the routes have perfect gear placements the entire way up. The Trapps have climbing from 5.2 all the way to 5.hard, and great climbing at every grade: the very first 5.3 that I got on there had a mix of every style of climbing, from stemming to pulling on a little overhang. If you've never been there, you'd expect "amazing 5.3" to be a pair of words that don't go together; a Gunks climber would say it unhesitatingly, and they'd be right.

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tl;dr: you can boot TWRP on some bootlooping Nexus 5Xs if you are really careful and use the image that I provide. Skip to the instructions if you don't care to hear me blather. And if you liked this, you might also like the hard mode version.

Yesterday evening, my Nexus 5X (a refurb from July 2016, after the fingerprint sensor on my original October 2015 Nexus 5X failed) succumbed to the disease that seems to take all of them: while I was at dinner, I sent someone a message, and as I hit "send", the device hung, got shot by the watchdog timer and rebooted, displayed the "Google" logo, and continued to cycle through being shot down by the WDT and rebooting over and over again. This failure mode is apparently very common in these devices, and is known as the dreaded "bootloop"; it is so widely known that the Google Store has indefinitely extended the warranty period for devices matching these symptoms, and the Nexus 5X subreddit is basically overrun by bootloop posts.

The actual root cause, as far as I can tell, is not publicly known. There has been a lot of speculation about what causes it, and what triggers it, and what exacerbates it -- and there are a lot of very hocus-pocus remedies to attempt to prolong the life of the device, or to recover from it. Indeed, information about this seems scarce even inside Google; reliable sources indicate that for a time, microkitchen refrigerators were full of Nexus 5Xs, in an attempt to stave off issues while updating the devices. All that seems to be certain is that the "bootloop" is a hardware defect. There seem to be many different syndrome families of bootloop. For instance, some devices seem to exhibit unusual behavior before they fail entirely (perhaps reporting "no SIM card", or having touchscreen issues); some devices fail in a fashion that is temperature-sensitive or voltage-sensitive (freezing the phone can give some extra life, or discharging the battery to a low percentage can also give the phone some extra time); and some devices fail in a fashion that seems to indicate storage issues (there's no temperature or other sensitivity, and the system usually crashes when trying to read from storage). There seems to be a long tail of symptoms, but the "temperature-sensitive" case seems to be the most common.

In any event, that is the bucket that mine fell in. Mine would boot into recover for about five or six seconds after being put in the freezer, but did not last long enough to mount the filesystem, let alone get data out of it. One enterprising user on XDA-Developers noted that low-battery-voltage cases caused the system to disable the Cortex-A57 (high-power, high-performance) cores, and experimented with a patched kernel that forced the phone to only run on the Cortex-A53 (low-power, low-performance) cores, and lo and behold, found that doing so allowed his phone to boot.

I tried booting his boot.img on my phone, and sure enough, it at least got to the boot progress spinner. But, really, I wanted all the data from my phone, not to boot my phone up and potentially corrupt more stuff if it crashes. So, I used mkbootimg_tools to tear apart the boot.img that he supplied, and also to tear apart a TeamWin Recovery image. Then, I glued the TWRP ramdisk into the "A53-only" boot.img using the same mkbootimg package; and after I had an A53-only-plus-TWRP boot.img, I booted that on my phone. And sure enough, TWRP booted without trouble, and I could pull data off my phone! (For good measure, I wrapped it in an ice pack while it was mirroring, just in case.)

( how to pry data out )

Whether you imported your LiveJournal account or not (my opinion: you should; then you will have continuity), you should also remember to claim your LiveJournal OpenID, which is a non-obvious part of the LJ-to-DW transition process. Go do this now to save yourself and other people headache.

(Why? When you import your LiveJournal account, you create subscribe-and-access links to a bunch of LiveJournal people, but you still exist twice, according to DreamWidth -- once as "you.dreamwidth.org", and once as "you.livejournal.com". So if people imported their LiveJournal accounts, and have you as friends, you still won't be able to see them, because they gave access to your LiveJournal instance; you need to link the two, so that DreamWidth knows that they actually meant to give access to your DreamWidth instance, too. For bonus points, this also means that all of the comments that got imported by your LiveJournal name into other people's journals will now be attributed to your DreamWidth name, too.)

Like many others seem to have these days, I've moved. You can now find my weblog at joshua0.dreamwidth.org. Public posts will continue to be crossposted to LiveJournal for some time, but my LiveJournal account will be phased out.

I wrote this over on Facebook:

Here's a handful of resources and thoughts that I've collected over the past 14 hours since I woke up. Some of these are a place of hope, some a place of caution, and many are disturbing. Take care of yourself. I've continued to update this in the days after the election. I've also added * to the best things.

• the effects begin to appear
• * this thread, by @absurdistwords: finally, empathy starts many tweets up, ends many tweets down. you'll have to click 'show more' a few times. keep scrolling up past the top until twitter's useless interface stops loading more tweets.
• * this thread, by @LibyaLiberty: a connection to the middle east
• a church protects an undocumented immigrant for 9 months (caution: autoplay video)
• * this thread, by @polotek: white people are divided. you'll have to click 'show more' a few more times.
• Zeynep Tufekci: this, among others (this, this, and tangentially but importantly this) about social media, and its impact on how information spreads. I cannot in stronger terms state: if you are involved in an algorithm that controls how people communicate, the responsibility for what happened last night was in part yours.
• Maciej Ceglowski: this, among others on the industry of selling your data to advertisers, and the data collected; this, and this.
• relatedly, me, on apps that sold you out.
• the ACLU is ready to fight. "If you do not reverse course and instead endeavor to make these campaign promises a reality, you will have to contend with the full firepower of the ACLU at every step."
• this is how the future voted.
• Lambda Legal.
• Southern Poverty Law Center.
• * National Domestic Workers Alliance.
• "Seattle will remain a sanctuary city."
• US sanctuary cities.
• "All the research that we have suggests that this isn't really a problem." -- Zuck on filter bubbles
• No, I Will Not Give Trump A Chance
• * Autocracy: Rules for Survival
• Let's talk secure communications
• * "You belong here. This is a country of immigrants and common people. No vote will ever changed that."
• I worked for Congress for 6 years, and here's what I learned about how they listen to constituents.
• * 6 Reasons for Trump's Rise that No-One Talks About (or: "How Half Of America Lost Its Fucking Mind"). Really good post on what I like to call "closing the empathy gap".
• * The 2016 Election Isn't Over Yet (opportunity to act: there is a senate candidate remaining in Louisiana)
• * Forget "Why?", it's time to get to work. How to do the work.
• Holy Fuck. Now What? Opportunities to volunteer and get involved.
• Risk of Democratic Erosion -- Reading List

Take care of yourselves, your friends, your families. Be there for each other. And then once you have some time to spare, be there for your community.

The work starts now, but it doesn't end tomorrow, or next week, or next year, or even in four years.

"God gave Adam a secret — and that secret was not how to begin, but how to begin again."

          — Elie Wiesel