using the internet 101: RSS readers

A lot of people seem to be unaware of the fact that an RSS reader is probably the most essential program to install on your phone or PC, right next to a web browser and an email client.

An RSS reader allows you to to do a very simple thing: subscribe to any website, news feed or blog and regularly receive all the new articles from those sites. This is how you stay up to date and receive the news that matter and are important to you.

RSS is supported by any modern website: from Mastodon user profiles to Pixelfed photo feeds, Youtube channels, Subreddits and users, blogs as found on Substack, WordPress.org or individual websites, scientific journals, and the list goes on and on. In the past often websites featured RSS logos to signal support for it. But nowadays it has become a core technology and goes without mentioning.

Simply put the URL of the website or user profile into your RSS reader and you are subscribed.

You can then have a quick glance at your RSS reader on the loo and don't have to check any website by hand.

People who do not use RSS readers basically live under a rock.

That's really all there is to it.

everyday environmental toxins you can easily avoid

Mercury

Mercury is toxic and detrimental to health at any dose in a myriad of ways, but especially so to the nervous system. The longest half-life is estimated around 3 years. The long half-life implies that it works in an accumulative and subtle "poisoned for life" manner, rather than that you notice any immediate ill effects from being poisoned, unless a single dosage is so high that it borders lethality. This is a characteristic that is replicated by aluminum, lead, dioxins, PCBs and PFAS as well. People who are poisoned by those substances largely remain oblivious of the fact, as they are unable to draw any causal connections between their behavior and symptoms. Those symptoms tend to creep in so slowly over time, that they escape any sort of recognition as such in the first place and are attributed to other factors instead. This also makes them almost impossible to recognize in scientific studies, in which exposure was not extreme. Mercury accumulates in the brain and is extremely neurotoxic. But also a large part of the intestine accumulates mercury, as cells try to remove the toxin as fast as possible from the blood. But these cells then may release it again slowly over time to varying degrees when detoxifying themselves. Mercury like other heavy metals, is by far most detrimental to children and the developing brain (orders of magnitude worse than in adults) and can cause or worsen a wide range of developmental issues, such as autism, low IQ or learning disabilities, impaired growth, immune function, gut health, etc. But also in adults and at a lower threshold of harm, it can cause a wide array of "everyday issues" such as increased fatigue, worsened gut and organ functioning, increased frequency of headaches, susceptibility to disease, decreased stress tolerance and mental performance, anxiety, depression, low self-confidence, apathy, bad memory, irritability, and so on and forth.

Sources:

  • some vaccines
  • silver amalgam dental fillings
  • seafood from contaminated regions, such as fish but esp. algae
  • fluorescent lightbulbs (includes energy-saving lightbulbs)
  • Ayurvedic medicine (Rasashastra)
  • foreign skin bleaching creams
  • old thermometers

Aluminium

The longest estimated half-life is 7 years. Aluminium is almost identical in neurotoxic effects to mercury. The main difference is, that aluminium is about 100x less potent than mercury, that the absorption rate from food is about 100x lower, and that it doesn't have as high of an affinity to distribute into fatty tissue, i.e. the brain. However, the half-life is higher, its use in food packaging still persists to this day, and it is sometimes injected directly into the body bypassing low absorption rates. This is why it is such a considerable health concern, just as mercury is. Its longer half-life also amplifies the effect, that you can be poisoned for life by this substance, commonly without even immediately noticing anything at all. Regardless it is just like mercury toxic and detrimental at any dose that reaches the bloodstream. Especially so if you somehow genetically or otherwise lack the capacity to eliminate it as effectively as other people.

Aluminium automatically forms an protective oxide barrier on the outside. We usually only encounter it in solid chunks or chemically inert forms within soil, which makes it very very safe to handle. However acidity from food or heat can weaken this barrier and dissolve elemental aluminium into the foodstuff.

Sources:

  • almost all vaccines
  • food packaging
  • cooking ware that has eroded, esp. if it was not manufactured by iodization
  • dust or welding fumes from workplace exposure

Lead

Lead has historically been used for a wide range of applications, such as water pipes and their solder, kitchen wares, paint and as a gasoline additive. Sometimes we still are exposed to these sources, albeit lead has been outlawed to be used for most of these purposes for 30-50 years. Lead shares many of the neurotoxic and ill effects of mercury, but differs in a few aspects, such as potency, absorption dynamics and symtoms. It accumulates in the bones for a lifetime (30+ years), and may constantly reabsorb from there into the bloodstream. Leaded gasoline has been described as the biggest crime against human health of all time. Plants and animals largely do not accumulate lead in the edible parts.

Sources:

  • lead solder fumes (electronics)
  • airports (old engines are still allowed to use highly leaded fuel)
  • food that has been grown on contaminated soil, especially tea (low-growing plants with high surface area have much more lead)
  • the soil under old large steel structures, such as electric towers (lead-oxide anti-rust paint)
  • in some countries, all sorts of paint e.g. used for homes and the soil beneath it
  • any sort of soil, esp. surface dust (due to historic leaded fuel use and certain industry, all soil is somewhat contaminated with lead)
  • older or foreign espresso or coffee makers (lead solder)
  • copper (lead solder) or lead water pipes
  • Ayurvedic medicine (Rasashastra)
  • rainwater from rooftops (many are fitted with lead sheets)

BPA

Bisphenol A has historically been in widespread use for the manufacture of certain plastics, and still is used today for this purpose, as awareness about it is rather new and low. It is also an essential component of epoxy resin, where it is for the most part chemically converted, and otherwise encased and thereby rendered inert. BPA is a xenoestrogenic endocrine disruptor. It has detrimental effects on the developing brain, and can result in (or contribute to) developmental disabilities as well as feminization and other disturbances of normal sexual development. A wide range of other issues such as cancer, and autism, obesity or diabetes and impaired immune function are also associated with BPA exposure. As it is rendered mostly inert within solid plastics, it is only released when the plastic is allowed to chemically react with foodstuff. This is especially so if heat or acid are at play, or if the plastic is chewed upon. The acute toxicity to adults by comparison is very low and it does not stay in the body for long. So BPA primarily concerns infants, children and to some degree adolescents.

Sources:

  • baby bottles in the US and some other countries (not Germany)
  • certain often brittle and heat-resistant plastics, such as found in water cookers, some reusable water bottles or plastic kitchen ware
  • recycled food packaging and other plastics
  • epoxy lining inside metal food cans
  • sometimes plastic toys
  • workplace exposure from pouring, sanding or cutting epoxy resin

Dioxins and PCBs

Dioxins and PCBs have been released into the environment by a wide range of industrial activity, such as manufacturing paper, pesticides or smelting. They are found everywhere, as sediments in rivers, sea and in the soil, but the most so in populated and industrialized regions. The Baltic sea for example is so contaminated, that you cannot safely eat any fish from it. However fish in the Norwegian sea have virtually no contamination. The foods highest in dioxins are dairy products, followed by fish and (fatty) meat. Dioxins and PCBs are cancerogenic endocrine disruptors, can damage the immune system and accumulate in the bodies of animals over time, including humans. Their half-life overall is estimated to be around 10 years. So ill effects and symptoms are usually not recognized and attributed to them, like it is the case with mercury, lead, aluminium and PFAS.

Sources:

  • fish and seafood from contaminated regions
  • liver meat and liver oils
  • fatty animal foods (dairy, meat), but also to a lesser extent animal foods in general (esp. relevant if region is contaminated)
  • burning certain common plastics, such as found in furniture, building materials, commercial packaging, textiles, etc.
  • ingesting soil or unfiltered river waterfrom contaminated region

PFASs

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances are long-lasting chemicals quite similar to dioxins in most ways. The main difference is that they are not just an unwanted pollutant released into the environment, but specifically produced to serve industrial applications, such as Teflon in frying pans. Their detrimental health effects have only recently been recognized and studied and there is a lack of laws to regulate their use. This is why they may or may not be found in a wide range of commercial products. I am not an expert on PFASs, so I am not sure if they accumulate in animal tissues in a similar way to dioxins (liver, then fat), but I would suppose so. As they are less omnipresent than dioxins, they are easier to avoid and less of a general concern.

Sources:

  • environmental pollution (e.g. fish, water wells)
  • non-stick cooking ware
  • parchment paper
  • stain-resistant coatings for fabrics
  • some brands of dental floss
  • some cleaning products
  • teflon grease and chain oils
  • sometimes food packaging
  • ski wax, water or stain repellant or other similar products

Fluoride

In almost all of the world, fluoride does not occur naturally in drinking water or food to any significant degree. This is why the human body is not really adapted to fluoride in the environment, and it essentially mistakes the element for calcium. Calcium is not only involved in bone and teeth formation, but also integral part of the nervous system. This is why high doses of fluoride can not only result in malformation of bones and teeth, but also lowered IQ, learning disabilities and other mental issues. However, as fluoride still functions to a certain extend in a similar way than calcium does, the doses required for a measurable effect are extremely high (about 10-50x higher than what is added to drinking water in the US). Fluoride is therefore very very weak and rather harmless compared to all the other substances in this article. Regardless it makes no sense at all for you to consume fluoride, however benign it might be in low enough amounts. Studies have shown that fluoride does not have any measurable advantage over calcium on teeth or health. To the contrary, if too much of it is consumed, e.g. when doing lots of exercise and drinking too much fluoridized tap water, it only results in health disadvantages, such as dental fluorosis.

Sources:

  • toothpaste
  • tap water in the US
  • pesticides
  • tea

my diet

I have experimented a lot with nutrition and also know a lot about the science behind it. This is how I have come up with a diet plan, which as I personally find, is vastly superior to any other. One thing to note about ketogenic diets and meat-based diets is, that people often report magical effects such as a dramatic increase in mental clarity and decrease in tendencies towards mental and physical diseases, such as anxiety, depression, IBS or other autoimmune conditions. I can only confirm this myself. The most extreme difference I had was between the vegan diet, which fairs almost as bad as eating just fast food and alcohol. On the other hand the "standard diet" is very bad itself, which is why anyone should see substantial improvements. Most remarkably is the mental clarity, and why I originally started eating what I eat today since over 15 years. I don't think it is actually ketogenic, but almost.

Unfortunately there are a lot of misconceptions about nutrition, such as that meat is bad, which are simple non sequiturs and not actually supported scientifically. I wrote a seperate article about this.

basic principles of this diet

  • no processed foods (exception are traditional pure fermented foods as seen on this list)
  • only whole cuts and whole pieces of food (i.e. "not processed")
  • no simple sugars, little carbohydrates
  • a lot of meat
  • very strict "exclude most of everything" approach
  • increases physical as well as mental health and performance

This calculation is for a 180cm tall person. If you are substantially shorter, you need to eat less accordingly.

breakfast

  • slice of pure whole grain rye bread with butter, slice of cheese (such as gouda) and ham
  • 0.2L of aged kombucha (sugar-free) or 20ml of apple cider vinegar

snacks in between

  • 0.2-0.5L self-made Kefir (supermarket buttermilk and kefir are not as good)
  • 65g soused herring (without canola oil, without any sort of sauce, just salt)

dinner

  • 500g of fresh pure muscle meat from large mammals (whole cuts, virtually no white parts) fried very briefly in olive oil
  • 50g chicory 50g other lettuce (or just 100g chicory)
  • 3 garlic cloves
  • 50g of potatos, sliced and fried
  • 50g of zucchini, sliced and fried
  • 1 onion, sliced and fried
  • 300g yoghurt

I put small amounts of vitamin C in my water, but you could also put lemon over your meat/lettuce.

This diet has all the micro nutrients you need, so you can eat it every day.

You must not eat other foods such as bread, cake, chocolate, noodles, etc. and not switch out anything, especially not the meat. You must check the packages if it is really a "pure" food. E.g. yoghurts must not have added sugar or aroma, and "pure rye bread" must only be made from rye without wheat added. This diet only really works if you stick to it 100%. If you were to e.g. eat less meat and more potatos, it might no longer be so healthy anymore, as you e.g. increase your gout risk by combining a lot of meat with a lot of carbohydrates (but not if you consume just either or). The herring contains lots of of vitamin D, much more than any other food. Leaving it out our substituting it with other fish would be a very bad idea. Similarly chicory contains vitamin A, which would otherwise be somewhat lacking (but you still get 30% of the RDA without it). If you leave out the kefir, you don't really get enough calcium and so forth. In short: don't change the plan, because you prefer to eat differently, or you have heard other things to be better. A lot of common wisdoms are misleading, such as that meat causes gout, and are actually not true if you follow a balanced and thought-through diet plan. If you were to tip the balance, because you follow conflicting simplifications and dogma about nutrition, which would only be true within a different diet scheme, then it will not work out well.

Ideally you should not eat for 5-6 hours before the large meal in the evening, so that you feel quote hungry for 1-2 hours before. Feeling hungry cleans the liver, at least a little bit. Eat at most 3-4 hours before going to bed.

After 3 days you should already feel much much better in general. But it might take up to 7 days for you to adjust, especially if you have never eaten large meals and if your diet before relied heavily on carbohydrates, or if you have medical issues such as IBS. It takes time for your fat metabolism to ramp up and your body to derive energy from fat, rather than sugar in your diet. If you do a lot of physical activity you might feel low on energy at first or get cravings for bread, candy and such. This goes away after a while. If you do extreme sports, such as running marathons, you cannot just eat this diet, as carbohydrates are necessary for extreme amounts of physical activity. Most people however should already feel much better after just the first day.

Other foods that are safe to eat for me and healthy: tomatos, peppers, most fruits (up to 200g at a time, ideally 100g), zucchini, pumpkin, other kinds of unprocessed meats, certain nuts and seeds but not all. If you want to try this diet for health reasons, ultimately after a few weeks you could try out other foods multiple times and see if they make you feel worse again. But don't do this right away. There is no need to eat tomatos or anything else, it would be just for the taste. This diet is absolutely complete with just the 3 meals listed, and can be eaten indefinitely without any sort of malnutrition.

Another important thing is to source high quality and fresh meat. It should be tasty if eaten raw, not apprehensive or slimy to the touch, not smelly in any way, that's how you know. It is always best to buy pieces sold inside oxygen-removed atmosphere, not loose pieces without proper packaging. I found that vacuum packaged and frozen meat is often very old for some reason, hence rather something to avoid. If you want to get into eating liver and kidneys, those should never be bought from the supermarket and need to come from animals which are not farmed industrially. Some countries have very poor meat quality, such as the USA, and you might need to pay a little extra to get somewhat reasonable quality. However in Germany, you can find common supermarkets which sell high quality meat regularly at half the price, so that you only pay 4-5 Euros per Kilo.

Troubleshooting

  • low energy, fatigue -> wait at least a week for metabolism to adjust, do more exercise on the long run to get more competent at metabolizing fat rather than carbohydrates
  • dinner is somehow too stressful/painful to digest -> might be a sign of very poor health if it persists beyond 7 days. In this case, divide the meal into two or cut out 1/3 of the meat from your plate and eat it the next day as snacks.
  • meat too fatty chewy/dry if fried -> fry on maximum heat and only for 90 seconds each side
  • heart issues after eating -> meal contains too much fat, choose even leaner cuts, work with less oil - or poor health -> divide meal
  • too much weight loss -> drink more kefir, buy slightly fattier cuts for dinner, put more butter on bread, eat more herring, or worst case fry bacon as snack food

understanding nutritional science - a personal 3000 meter overview

Thanks to Sci-hub, its predecessors and open journals, I have had the opportunity to read far more than just the abstracts in thousands of medical studies in my life, if not tens of thousands. A fair share of them were about nutrition and other personal interests, such as being able to recognize the shortcomings of science and the current zeitgeist. Although I am just a layman, the extreme amount of studies I have read in detail far surpasses that of most practitioners, and puts me into a rather strange position.

If you want to understand nutritional science, you have to understand a bit about how medical science works. In medical science you have something called placebo controlled randomized double-blinded trials and prospective cohort studies, without which the greater whole of medical science would essentially be discredited and an unreliable nightmare, where no one really knew what was true or false to begin with. Unfortunately such trials don't exist in any form or shape in nutritional science and cohort studies are also very different. For double-blinded studies, you would have to force-feed people all the food they consume for decades with feeding tubes. And if you had placebo groups, the people in it would just starve to death. In prospective cohort studies on the other hand, people are rarely if ever force-fed strict diet plans the same way as if taking a certain type of drug, and this kind of study is much less commonly done than it is in medicine. So there are clearly huge issues with how studies are conducted, and due to the complexity of food compared to just single substances and pills, the conclusions we derive from them are not the same as we can derive from scientific studies in other fields.

Ok then if we so to speak can't really have reliable or robust scientific studies, we do still understand something about metabolic function and nutrients to be able to make conclusions? Yes this is true, but what we understand is very limited as well. Vegan studies and fasting studies for example have shown, that even if people consume wildly insufficient amounts of vitamins and other micro nutrients, at least most people's bodies get very very efficient at budgeting whatever little is left and still made available almost indefinitely, such that no hard physical signs of malnutrition will manifest. What other effects this budgeting has on mind and body, we don't really know. We also do not understand the gut microbiome much at all, which is at the heart of good health and nutrition. We do not understand what individual differences in people exist, that make semi-essiential amino-acids more essential in one group of people but less in the other. We do not really understand how an abundance or relative shortage of substances such as DPA, EPA, tyronsine, Q10, creatine, carnosine, B vitamins, choline, carnitine and so forth influence health on the long run, and how much people are individually constituted to metabolize them from one food source or the other. In summary, what we understand on a cellular and metabolic level is so limited that you hardly can draw any if any at all concrete nutritional advice from it, and individual differences between people due to genetics or old age can be enormous. Often even worse, due to scientific reductionism (aka scientism), whenever people attempt to argue on this basis, the conclusions can be misleading and wrong (e.g. about dietary cholesterol being harmful, or fructose as a better sugar alternative), as they do not factor in the whole picture that you can factor in if the scientific understanding wasn't as fragmentary and incomplete as it was or is at the time.

But then how do observational nutritional studies work at all? Often people are essentially given questionaires about what they ate the last 20 years, and then studies make seemingly outlandish findings, such as that eating more than 2 eggs a week is associated with adverse health outcomes just as much as smoking cigarettes. Or that eating white meat is associated with better health than red meat. Or less meat with better health. It is not that those studies are wrong, too small, or have methological problems. It is just that we cannot draw any actually useful conclusions from them. People who do this, or suggest that this is possible, commit to various non sequiturs, such as the converse error and that correlation does not imply causation. In actuality, people might simply crave to eat eggs if there is something wrong with their cardiovascular system, because they crave cholesterol which the body needs to patch damaged endothelium inside the blood vessels. Also people might recall what they ate wildly incorrectly, and they may not adhere to strict diets much at all, despite stating so, especially if they are very strict and very complicated. Or the methodology has issues, such as categorizing or not categorizing fast-foods and food preparations as "eggs", simply because they contain eggs as a minute ingredient. This is indeed one of the main drivers how we have meat studies that associate meat with adverse health outcomes: meat is everywhere, especially highly processed foods and "meat" such as burgers or sausages. But this is by no means the same "meat" you would eat inside a healthy diet scheme. People who choose chicken wings (white meat) and salad at Burger King, instead of the big Double Whopper with cheese (red meat) and icecream, are the people who end up driving those kinds of statistics. Someone who is health-conscious however, eats lots of vegetables and naturally avoids take-away fast-foods, because of whatever dietary constraints, will often be the one who is counted as someone who has "reduced meat" in their diet. On the other hand, people who don't think about what they eat, aka eating "the standard diet", will be counted as "meat eating" or "not meat reduced" in studies. And people who eat more meat when trying to be more health-conscious, do hardly exist at all.

But what exactly is "the standard diet" in research? If you were to go to a supermarket and grab one piece from every shelf, this is more or less the standard diet: A pack of flour, a pack of sugar, a pack of bread, a banana and an apple, a yoghurt with sugar, a pack of cheese, milk or milk with cacao and sugar, sausages, a jar of pickles, a can of beans, a pack of noodles, a pack of rice, a sack of potatos, a bottle of wine, a sixpack of beer, a bottle of gin, a pack of bonbons, various pieces of chocolate and candy, two packs of chips, prezels, a six pack of mountain dew, a pack of pizzas, chicken wings and lasagna. Plus everything you can buy at fast-food chains such as McDonalds or Pizza Hut. In short: The standard diet is to simply mindlessly consume whatever you feel like and what sells cheap, because you just don't care and think about what you eat. Regardless if it makes sense or not, this is "the standard diet" (also called "meat-inclusive" or "meat diet" in vegetarian studies) and the actual scientific baseline to compare anything in nutritional science to. Obviously it isn't hard at all to find a diet style that shows some kind of measurable improvement to it (such as reduction in obesity or cardiovascular issues). Even if this diet style would fair worse than following some other healthy diet plan, which it will be never compared to.

But this also escapes common sense: We don't need science to tell us that eating crap like a mindless idiot somehow is unhealthier than thinking about what you eat. Or that processed foods and fast foods are unhealthy. But this is sadly what a lot of people are trying to sell when advocating nutritional science by overstating or oversuggesting what research findings can really tell us. At least insofar as that we don't suffer from certain severe medical conditions to begin with, which do warrant greater concern and might be subject to greater medical insights.

Also many other issues need to be factored in when analyzing studies. For example the government might be very keen on funding lots of studies on how people can live healthier lives while eating a diet of corn syrup and insects, algae and other cheap dirt - so they have more farm land to support their biodiesel and bioethanol scam. But no one ever funds any studies on how to live healthier on a diet that is mostly made up of wild grass fed water buffalo, phesants, whale liver oil,  truffels, Nakazawa cows' milk and Manuka honey - which might or might not be wildly superior somehow. In fact little research has been done even just about ketogenic diets (i.e. diets that mostly rely on meat, and fat for energy), although it has been scientifically known and suggested as an option for decades to address a wide range of problems, such as obesity, mental health issues and diabetes. Funding bias and lack of research due to selective funding is one of the single most biggest problems in science we face today.

Red meat (pork & beef) requires over 6 times more feed and much longer timeframes to produce the same amount of meat as white meat (poultry, fish). It also produces about as much more emissions plus other costs. This has put the industry and government on a hunt in tandem, to manufacture data that associates red meat with adverse health effects. Conversely no one funds studies to the contrary. Red meat studies that do not include processed meats equally do not exist.

But not only science is affected by heavy bias. Considerable lobbying efforts exist on the internet that distort nutritional information, such as the vegan and vegetarian lobby, who create a large portion of nutritional blogs and Youtube videos. This is not only because of advocacy, but in part also because it is just so complicated to follow their diet scheme, and the amount of information put forward is just orders of magnitudes higher than in any sane diet style. One that you can entirely explain on essentially just one page, or with just a few uncomfortable bullet points, that no one really wants to hear. Vegans and vegetarians however do not eat food for health reasons, but for ideological reasons, i.e. for animal wellfare or to save the climate. This alone should make you question if their advice can be taken serious at all. And the same problem leeches into research as well, as prescribing veganism and environmentalism is somewhat of a bigger fad amongst highly educated people. To the contrary though, studies have found that the majority of vegans suffer from malnutrition in western countries such as Germany, UK or US. Yet this research is buried and denied so much that it will strike most people with total disbelief, and of course the people affected somehow manage to remain totally oblivious of the fact. It might be that one out of a felt one hundred people is genetically constituted to naturally cope with vegan nutrition. And this is the guy you see on Youtube advertizing it. But for the rest of us, essentially anyone who has ever seriously tried, it will not replicate this experience and be a total nightmare, which studies reflect and acknowledge to some major degree, with very high drop-out rates and people showing concerning blood markers.

The amount of distortion you have to face in science even with placebo controls and rigorous prospective studies is staggering. But if you don't even have that, it is all just a huge confounded mess.

The only diet plan that is somewhat scientifically well-supported in its positive health effects is the "mediterranean diet". This is not actually a diet that people eat in the mediterranean region, but it developed from a fantasy that scientists had about it in the 60s (olive oil, red wine and fruits) and it just was spun further and further within scientific circles over time to support research findings. Now it denotes an entirely different style of diet, that doesn't really have much of anything to do with mediterranean cousine. Even if the research about its health effects seems solid, it is still very important to consider, that this research was initially and mainly done with sick people in mind. This automatically means, that it includes or targets mainly old people, since the older you are the more chronic health diagnoses you get. Old people also make up a major part of the population nowadays. It might make perfect sense that the average 67 year old with diabetes,  arthritis and high blood pressure, is much more likely to become incompetent to digest normal healthy meals, because of impaired organ function. Thus of course in those kinds of people it will show substantial health benefits to e.g. reduce the amount of protein in the diet or even cholesterol, and this truly makes sense for them. However if the same is done to healthy subjects, at least in animal studies, often the reverse turns out to be true. This is why we simply don't know if it truly makes sense for normal healthy people to reduce the amount of meat in their diet. But likely at a certain low threshold of reduction, normal people can just easily cope with it while old and sick people would certainly not, without dietary intervention. Hence studies show significant benefits from reducing red meat by some 30% over average. The government obviously just loves it as well, and it is put forward everywhere as a one size fits all advice. But if you are not old and frail to begin with, you might just be the one trying to save at the wrong end and don't do yourself any favors. Especially so the younger you are.

 

 

To summarize all this, I have drawn this cartoon on how you can think of the capabilities of nutritional science to draw conclusions about certain diet styles. I am not exaggerating in that most of the why and hows in research findings still remain a mystery. And everything you hear in blogs and official health advice must be questioned and taken with a grain of salt. Most diets will lead to improvements, simply because anything is better than not thinking about what you eat. Even if it makes no sense at all, such as eating only red foods on Monday and only green foods on Tuesday, yellow foods on Wednesday and so forth (hence excluding a lot of fast-foods most days). In the end what is best or not cannot simply be bought by listening to opinion pieces, or following government advice. But only with critical thought, common sense and by reasoning about it outside of the current paradigms.

What is important to recognize however is that strict and sophisticated diets, such as my diet style, are simply not researched. We only know from anecdotes, be that scientifically with "ketogenic" diets or sites like meatheals.com, that people not only experience health benefits but often even impossible improvements, such as curing type 1 diabetes, IBS or ADHD, by eating essentially just meat and nothing else. People don't seem to report such extreme improvements on such a comparably large scale for a fringe minority, with any other food or diet style. So it shows what potential this one single food has.

Also meat and animal products contain many substances that people have never even heard of, and that do not occur much or at all in plant sources, but which exert surprising health benefits if consumed in excess quantities. Some of which do remarkably increase physical fitness, athletic or mental performance or longevity. For example: choline, 4-hydroxy-proline, DHA, DPA, EPA, carnitine, creatine, vitamin K2, vitamin D, calcium, B12, and even extremely potent anti-oxidants such as carnosine, anserine, coenzyme Q10 and taurine or cofactors to antioxidants such as selenium, zinc, or vitamin E. Research about those endogenous substances is often very sparse and new, while research of exogenous anti-oxidants is "somehow" extremely abundant and overwhelming. So there is not telling how many substances and their astonishing health functions are yet to be discovered.

For certain it can be said, that meat is much much closer to what our body needs, simply because our bodies are mostly just made up of it. It might be possible for our bodies to go the extra mile to convert plant material to meat material, because of extreme evolutionary adaptation. However there is a certain logic to it, that cutting out the middle route might come more natural and easy to our metabolic systems. With less challenges involved, such as metabolic conversions, fighting anti-nutrients, endocrine disruptors and other latent plant poisons that were developed over time against us. Those things might not work properly anymore in people with poor gut health, or who are just genetically constituted differently. Or they never worked that well to begin with, because the biochemistry and microbiology for it just has to be too complicated to yield great results. Those are all big unknowns when considering whether it is better or worse to reduce or increase meat in your diet.

While I don't think that eating just meat and nothing else is really a good diet style, the new "carnivore" internet phenomenon, with some scientific background, challenges everything we thought of as substantiated before in nutritional science, and what we believe to be healthy. First it illustrates that meat contains virtually all the micro nutrients that the body needs (although it is obviously lacking here and there especially on certain electrolytes), while plants only really contain single nutrients, such as lemons containing just vitamin C, with certain seeds being somewhat of an exception to that, which most people don't commonly know of. But it also shows at numerous examples, such as vitamin C requirements being reduced by orders of magnitude when not eating any sugars, that it is the particular combination of foods that matter. And that we can likely attribute this to simply evolutionary adaptation. I.e. that our ancestors were forced to survive on meat and nothing else for months at a time during winter. Most of what we understand scientifically often only holds true to the "standard diet", which consists mostly of wheat products, refined sugar, and to some extent also meat and alcohol. On the other hand, conflicting information such as from the carnivore diet or different diet schemes, is simply by far and large ignored in nutritional science. If I were to drink a beer or two in the evening, like a lot of people after a meal with a lot of meat, I would certainly get gout and kidney stones. And this reflects in scientific studies as meat being associated with gout. Although we know now that meat alone does not cause gout. But how does that make sense for me personally to draw smart conclusions from for my own life? Should I cut out the meat, or should I cut out the beer and potatos?

If you live very health conscious, and are not careless in what you eat, then you will find that nutritional advice is often very limited, single-minded, simplified and misleading. We actually don't understand a whole lot about the body, gut and metabolism. What is good or bad is still best addressed by common-sense decisions, and just personal experience and trial and error. Don't eat just what tastes good, but what makes you feel heathier. Experiment what works best on your own body. Try one radical style, such as veganism, and then try another radical style, such as carnivore and find the in-between that is best. See what difference it makes. Reason and guess why it makes sense to eat some foods and not others. For example evolutionary speaking, wheat is still quite a new thing for the human race, and there are countless minorities who still have issues with it, because they lack the genetic adaptation. Some things like alcohol and refined sugar are just bad. On the other hand people have survived for hundreds of thousands of years on mostly just meat in winter times. Eggs and fruits were only available during certain times of the year and in limited quantities. This reflects in the science. We now find that too much fructose consumed all-year around will lead to detrimental liver changes. And maybe you really should not eat an egg a day. But 30 years back, science was advocating fructose as a healthier sugar. We could have seen this coming, with simply common sense, and thinking about what our ancestors ate.

When science is limited, appealing to scientism makes you blind and is more often than not ill-advised and misleading. Nutrition can certainly benefit from scientific insights, however it would be very premature to root it in science entirely. Especially so if the people advocating scientific findings, do themselves not understand them properly, or have ulterior motives that do not have your best possible health status in mind. This could affect your mental performance, emotional or physical wellbeing all alike.

Some people do really fine by just eating fast-food. Most people just think they do. For others it has more serious consequences, and even crippling disease. It is important to experiment and find a diet style that is healthy and works best individually.

At the end, another little story about a mushroom called paxillus involutus. It was eaten for hundreds of years, and not recognized as poisonous. Most people didn't experience any issues from it at all. If you had conducted studies on it, it would have shown that it is a healthy food for most people, and only small minorities would show sensitivity reactions, similar to how only very few people experience full-blown Celiac disease (gluten sensitivity) or Chron's disease when eating wheat. So this is a healthy food right, if most people are fine, there is no reason for concern? Wrong. We now know that this mushroom gets more poisonous over time, sometimes many years, because it stimulates autoimmune reactions and it can eventually lead to organ failure. But it took hundreds of years of science to advance to the point of being able to recognize this. From just people's observations, the mushroom was really fine to eat. You could have asked 10 people if this mushroom was good, and 10 would have said yes. This is not to say that wheat can be deadly, but similarly it has been associated with immunological processes that can have detrimental effects on health to various degrees that only really develop over long timeframes. Food is just a very complex thing in nature. As there are hundred of thousands of chemicals in food, hundreds of foods, hundreds of microbes, proteins and enzymes involved in digestion, it stands to reason if there aren't just as many points of failure. Small minorities go entirely unnoticed in scientific studies and natural observations. With food we might face a situation where most things work out for most people and some things just don't work out for most people, we just don't know what the latter are, because it is so individual. It is up to you to conduct some science on your own, to see what works out for yourself.

how to approach censorship

Censorship goes against basic fundamental rights guaranteed by our democratic constitutions and thus against democracy itself. Just like you need free elections for democracy, you need a free press and absence of censorship. This is why the German constitution states in article 5:

"Everyone has the right to freely express and disseminate their opinion in word, writing and image and to obtain information from generally accessible sources without hindrance. Freedom of the press and freedom of reporting through radio and film are guaranteed. Censorship does not take place."

However in practice this is far from true. Modern laws such as the Media State Law and the NetzDG grant undue powers to the government to remove any sort of information in an almost arbitrary fashion, without trial and without any effort. They do this under the pretense of removing information that does not meet journalistic standards, or is to be considered hate speech and other illegal forms of opinion under highly subjective criteria, that do not consider what is actually said, but rather how it might be received. The extreme and wild abuse of these laws have been documented during the Covid pandemic, and the Ukrainian war, where entire news outlets were shut down simply due to reporting in a different style of narrative. Journalists had their bank accounts frozen and were put on criminal charges. Novel laws like the Media State Law have been explicitly engineered to target individuals who somehow have a large public reach, but make exceptions for small outlets like this blog (insofar as that it is disconnected from public channels such as Youtube and Facebook) which don't reach a certain amount of viewers, to give off the false impression of a free democratic society. A very common scheme of censorship in Germany would look like this:

Due to reaching a certain amount of viewers, e.g. more than 20,000 per month, a blog like this one will be put under the same scrutinizing laws as a large media outlet such as the New York Times or Facebook, and any claims made and information put forward needs to be proven and triple checked, even if it is in the form of interviews and reader comments and even if it is run by just one person without financal backing, with a disclaimer about it, who cannot possibly put in the same effort, legal fights and standards held by billion dollar companies. Those laws also demand that whatever opinions are disseminated, must not contradict the opinions of authorative sources, such as the WHO or other government agencies, to be not classified as "misinformation". If for example an independent source, such as it has happend in the case of Julian Assange, states that war crimes have been commited by the government by proof of classified documents, this source is to be considered invalid and as misinformation, as classified documents do not constitute a valid source in the standards of journalistic conduct.

Another important pillar in censorship is deanonymization, which is heavily enforced and ensured by German law for people who publish any sort of content online. Once people start speaking about important issues, it is bound to create controversies and hate in some minority of those who are either in agreement or disagreement. This is just the very nature of public discourse. Some of those people with a more radical attitude then start various attacks on the speaker, such as threats against their lives and family. But most popular are unrelated fake criminal accusations by anonymous phone call, such as child pornography, drug dealing or fraud - which can be done without effort to someone who is required to have their full name and address listed right next to their publications. If the outcome is in line with state agenda, the police then starts acting on those fake accusations, however dubious and nonsensical they might be, by confiscating all computer equipment such as phones, servers, USB sticks, harddrives or notebooks for at least 1.5 years or longer. This is possible because in Germany probable cause is not required, and any sort of utter nonsense can be acted upon once a state attorney issues a search warrant. In the recent years, this has happened to some journalists and peace activists every few weeks dozens of times in a row, which crippled their ability to speak online. But it doesn't end there. In Germany it is also common to detain people for extended periods of time (half a year or longer) without trial, so again bogus charges have been used against peace activists to imprison them and shut them down. Which is arguably not only totalitarian censorship but a violation of their very human rights.

Furthermore double standards and undue outlandish scruteny will be employed at the arbirary disgression of the government to take down dissenting alternative news outlets. For example, the New York Times might publish hundreds of articles, such as on victims of  institutionally discriminated groups, such as black people or disabled people, without any cited statistical backing by the CDC, police or other authorative agencies. But as soon as alternative news outlets interview people who are as equally affected by discrimination on a topic that the government does not approve of, such as vaccine damage, the government will put anyone who defies their narrative at gunpoint to prove their position by backing of a wealth of authorative sources. In Germany, the goverment has all the legal powers to instantly remove this unwanted information, and laws like our constitution that gurantee freedom of the press are ignored, by the logic of being superseded by other laws. We know from the covid pandemic, that even expert politicians on pandemic outbreaks, who have been employed by the government in the past for precisely this matter, are discredited by the government, and not accepted as "valid sources" to give opinions on such topics, according to state institutions and censorship laws. Thus if interviewed, the government has the power to arbitarily choose what sources are acceptable and which are not, regardless of the qualifications of interviewed experts and regardless of how they have been employed and accepted in their fields of experitise.  To say then that those laws are designed to be used in a reasonable and appropriate fashion, is simply ill informed and naive. As it has already been proven to to not be the case multiple times, and all warnings about potential ill effects and abuse have long become a reality. No one has any idea about the true extent of this censorship, due to self-censorship and under-reporting.

What can you learn from this?

There are a couple of very easy answers to this:

  1. The censor is always wrong. It does not matter at all why censorship takes place. But if it does, the censor always loses the argument. It is not important why someone censors, or what their motives are, only that they do. If for example, the government feels like censoring holocaust history, or the Ukrainian war - by whatever personal interpretation - then whoever gets censored wins the argument. There is no middle-ground in this. If you feel like punching someone in the face, because they offended you, then you lose the argument. No one cares if they did beat first, did beat your wife, if they burned small children or an angry mob wanted to lynch them. As the arbiter of justice, you simply lose due to gross misconduct, no matter the circumstance. The same must be true in  the case of censorship as well. Trying to look for a quick fix in censorship is harmful, because it destroys democratic foundations. If we have granted voices undue credit, due to censoring them, then we can fix this situation by removing the censorship and having an open discussion. If there are laws in place which provide loopholes to censor free speech, such as misinformation laws, then we must fight and abolish those laws. Many people are censored because their content is unpopular or apprehensive, and the government hides those amongst them who were censored for illegitimate reasons. Censoring people only suggests that there is truth to what they are saying, which the government and powerful groups are not able to deal with, if that truth became widely known. We must not give people who make illegitimate claims undue credibility, by censoring free speech and public debate, such as it happened in the case of Zundel. Now with censorship running rampant, and government and large institutions discrediting themselves with 1984 style actions, we only erode trust and empower large groups of people capable and willing of critical thought, to question all kinds of other established historic facts in retrospective. The only sane way out of this is to censor less, not more.
  2. Protect yourself from censorship. Use search engines like Yandex for political searches, don't use Google (as of 2023 the censorship is extreme). Don't put blind faith into herd mentality and large institutions. Use alternative platforms first.
  3. Put your content into censorship-resistant and decentralized alternatives to big-tech outlets, such as Facebook or Instagram. Use Pixelfed and Mastodon instead. The software we elect to use is just as important as the political parties we elect. You don't want to vote for the NSDAP or the communist party, just because it gives you certain benefits and is more comfortable for whatever reason. You want to vote for and decide for what is best for society. Also consider alternative anonymous networks, such as LokinetI2P and TOR.
  4. Governments are the single biggest source of disinformation, and this disinformation is replicated without critique by large media institutions. It does not matter if that is foreign media or domestic media: both sides do this. You should therefore either rely on primary sources or on friends and people of trust to determine what is going on in the world.
  5. Misinformation is a ruise to justify censorship - People in power try to sell the idea that being misinformed warrants censoring those who provide poor infromation. But what information is "poor" or false to begin with? Many stories such as the Hunter Biden Laptop or the inefficacy of the Covid vaccines and various measures, later turned out to be true by no mistake, regardless of whether or not large institutions like the WHO or CNN have put forward conflicting viewpoints. In the end, without a 1984-style ministry of truth, no one has the authority to say what is true or false. If they did, we would live in a totalitarian state. In the end, misinformation laws can only exist as so far as they violate our freedom of speech, which makes any cosideration or discussion about "misinformation" in a legal context invalid and inherently anti-democratic and dangerous.
  6. Protect democracy - by not voting for large established parties which have proven to trample on our rights and are undermined by lobbyists and fools. In many places of the world, the elites have managed to steal people's votes by not making them vote for anything at all, but simply against the other party. Defy the system, reclaim your democratic sovereignty. Don't fall for tribalism, polarization and false promises.

I want to encourage anyone to study the history of soviet Russia and China as well as Nazi Germany. The parallels to nowadays shift towards totalitarianism are absolutely mind-blowing.

Further reading:

JACOB SIEGEL - Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation
"Medienstaatsvertrag" - Zensur freier Medien?
Zensur durch die Hintertür via neuem Medienstaatsvertrag
Apolut - Zensur russischer Sender und Gegenmaßnahmen

how to bypass German censorship of foreign news agencies on Kodi TV

Since almost a year foreign news agencies that contradict EU war propaganda have been banned from public broadcasts and censored online. Germany has the worst censorship laws of all western coutries, giving the government immense powers to criminalize all journalism it deems as misfit. Many German independent journalists and bloggers already had to flee the country years ago, leaving mostly only sham journalists behind that blindly swallow narratives pushed by the state without contradicting or criticizing them.

The criminalization of journalism in Germany has forced RT news to stop online-streaming specifically to German IP addresses. This is distinctly different from the blanket EU ban of RT, which only grants the EU censorship powers within the EU, but doesn't make it a crime per se to perform journalism in other countries and offer it from there.

Fortunately you can still watch RT on platforms such as Rumble and Odysee (LBRY), which are dedicated to uphold our now-abolished basic fundamental democratic freedoms such as freedom of the press, and won't be bullied by rogue states such as Germany making outrageously anti-democratic demands and threatening them with fines. Although there are LBRY/Rumble plugins for Kodi, they only work for normal videos but not livestreams (at least on the Kodi version I use).

However, you can manually download the livestream playlist and then play it with Kodi on your TV:

  1. Open the page that contains the livestream
  2. right-click the white background of the page, then choose "Inspect"
  3. Go to the "Network" tab
  4. Press F5

You should now see "playlist.m3u8" (or similar) in the list of files. If not, then press the play button in the player to play the video.

  1. Right click "playlist.m3u8", Copy link address, then paste it in the browser and download it.
  2. Edit playlist.m3u8 with a text editor. It should contain three lines with new m3u8 files. All you have to do is to add the full "playlist.m3u8" web URL in front of the new m3u8 files (but without the "playlist.m3u8" at the end). Like so:
#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-VERSION:3
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=1063000,RESOLUTION=640x360
https://rumble-foxo.cdn.rumble.cloud/live/hr6yv36f/slot-30/ngrp:srak-wx8r_all/chunklist_b978000.m3u8
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=2713000,RESOLUTION=1280x720
https://rumble-foxo.cdn.rumble.cloud/live/hr6yv36f/slot-30/ngrp:srak-wx8r_all/chunklist_b2478000.m3u8
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=4528000,RESOLUTION=1920x1080
https://rumble-foxo.cdn.rumble.cloud/live/hr6yv36f/slot-30/ngrp:srak-wx8r_all/chunklist_b4128000.m3u8

Please do not copy the above example from my website directly, since it changes and stops working every few months.

  1. Now simply save this file on your Kodi box in the video folder and open it from the UI.

Please keep in mind that RT is a Russian propaganda outlet, very similar to how DW or France24 are German and French propaganda outlets respectively. RT's big appeal has always been to provide high-quality independent journalism, take sides with democratic movements, key activist, represent the interest of the people and of course to be able to criticize governments and their policies. It then intermixes this very desireable and legitimate journalism with Russian propaganda narratives. Conversely, almost everything broadcasted by DW is propaganda-driven and nothing it broadcasts has any sort of journalistic integrity to it, other than what it needs to make state narratives sound more legitimate. In the current world of struggling, bancrupt, state-funded and malleable legacy media, RT is just too much of a stronghold. Watching RT makes you aware of how the Russian propaganda works, which in turn makes you aware of how the domestic propaganda works. It makes you sceptical and ask simply questions such as "why am I shown those events specifically?", "who is showing them to me, who profits from me believing in this?", "what events are left out of the picture?". Those are the actual reasons why the EU wanted to get rid of RT.

Please note that the website RT.com is also censored in Germany via DNS. If you live in Germany, you have to use Google DNS servers (8.8.8.8). If this is too complicated for you, you can also use the TOR browser.

Apolut - Zensur russischer Sender und Gegenmaßnahmen

food packaging complaint message to supermarkets and manufacturers

Please send this message to supermarkets and manufacturers.

The problem: I saw a "made from 100% recycled plastic" label on my soda bottle and other food packaging

Why it is a problem: Plastic that comes into direct contact with wet foodstuff should never be made of recycled plastic, because it will chemically react and release unwanted substances into the food, which always happens with all plastics to some degree, especially if the food is acidic (juices, lemonade, vinegar, tomatoes, etc.) or the container is subjected to heat or sunlight.

Concerning recycled plastics, consumers and manufacturers cannot escape to rely on blind faith alone in order to determine if the source materials have not been contaminated with toxic substances commonly found in other plastics, such as Bisphenol A, plastic softeners, other auxiliary chemical agents or whatever potentially harmful substances from the utilized waste stream sources that may have accidentally entered the recycling chain. Some of the substances that are commonly found in high quantities in plastic waste are highly potent in the microgram range and can for example cause abnormal mental and physiological developments in children, such as feminization, diabetes, obesity, ADHD or autism.

In addition to that, the percentage of additives and pollutants found in the material necessarily increases with each additional recycling cycle. A plastic bottle that has already been recycled 10 times in a row also contains 10 times as many additives. Additives are a necessary part of the recycling and production process. This way we could easily end up drinking from plastic bottles that are hundreds of times more contaminated than pristine plastics. All plastic additives are a potential health hazard and have only been classified as safe, because they are rendered mostly inert inside the polymer, so that the small amounts released into the food from pristine plastics are generally considered to be negligible. However several studies have shown that this is not universally true, especially if heat and acid are at play, and the assumed rate of release is multiplied by orders of magnitude.

Recycled plastic has no place in food packaging like drinking bottles, cheese or meat wrapping, in which the food comes into direct contact with the plastic and the food is in a wet/processed state, which makes it chemically reactive. This plastic must always be freshly made, as it has always been the case so far, in order to avoid potential health concerns.

 

German version:

So what should we do now?

Concerning bottled water switching to glass bottles is comparably very expensive, and for very good reasons. A reusable glass bottle is almost as heavy as the water that it carries, whereas a single-use PET bottle can hold 100 times its weight in water (it weighs about 15g). Glass also needs to be transported inside heavy plastic boxes that shield it from damage, and the empty bottles also need to be transported back to be reconditioned and refilled. This means that the trucks transporting the bottles use more that twice the fuel, which makes up most of the carbon footprint of PET bottled water. In addition to that glass bottles have to be made inside extremely hot furnaces running at around 20 times the temperatures required by PET bottle manufacturing. At 100 times the mass of a PET bottle, this is not negligible, even if a glass bottle is on average reused 50 times in a row. It translates to roughly 2000 times the energy from heat during glass bottle manufacturing, or 40 times the energy for each time you use it. This calculation is obviously much much worse for single-use glass containers, which have by far the worst carbon footprint of all food packaging. On the other hand PET bottles from a refund system have a close to 100% recycling rate and can be made into other materials, e.g. polyester fabrics, non-food packaging or casings for electronic devices, which means that they are not a pollutant to the environment.

So due to the high carbon footprint, glass bottles are obviously very bad for the environment. Naturally, this directly reflects in price (twice as expensive), as it also does with any other product, at least roughly as a rule of thumb.

Fortunately water quality in Germany is very high, and you can simply use tap water here. In a lot of regions the tap water is on par or even superior to a lot of bottled water brands. However due to the recent drought and heat wave here, the quality of our water reservoir has suffered somewhat, which is why I personally had switched to bottled water temporarily.

I also preferred to use PET bottles as drinking bottles, because they were guaranteed to be food-safe and free of pollutants. When you buy a plastic bottle on Amazon, you really don't know much of anything about it. The original manufacturer could be in the developing world, where standards are as low as 8 year old children permanently living inside giant waste dump towns and making a living by collecting any sort of plastic item for recycling. There could also be harmful additives in it to make it more durable. Metal bottles will cause more mercury to dissolve from amalgam fillings by electrochemical reaction, and aluminium is toxic much like mercury itself. This only leaves glass bottles now that PET bottles have become questionable. They are a huge waste of space though in a back pack, twice as heavy too, and they damage easily.

Concerning other food packaging, there seems to be no option but to write complaint letters or go into politics. If you only consider how pervasive aluminium has been in food packaging, despite its extreme toxicity with up to 7 year long half-life, then it is obvious that this will probably just lead nowhere at all. Up to this day some aluminium still comes into direct contact with food, due to lack of plastic lamination, and in fact most of a person's aluminium load is directly caused by food packaging. If people are not outright dropping dead from the poison but only poisoned a little bit, it just doesn't pack enough punch in politics to change much of anything at all.

This recycling fad is clearly going too far where it is starting to impact our health and it pushes us into alternative solutions that are in fact much worse for the environment. People need to move away from the idea that recycling is universally good, and that plastic is universally bad. Such a blind attitude only proves to be exploitable and harmful to everyone.

transgender tolerance short educational flyer (en & de)

in Germany about 0.008% of the population is diagnosed as transsexual [1]. This makes transsexual rights an extremely low priority in terms of minority rights, and it means that discussing this topic at all diverts our attention away from the great many of other minority groups that we could be more considerate and mindful about. Such as people suffering from depression (500 times more prevalent) or PTSD (1000 times more prevalent), or the thousands of people who die every year, because they are denied access to new experimental treatments. An almost endless list of similar topics exist that are literally thousands of times more important, because they affect much more people much more seriously, we can exert much more influence on them and we share more responsibility of them. It is therefore objectionable to even mention transsexual rights, in terms of improving society, in almost any situation.

Yet it seems this topic has become a cultural gag to many, a part time hobby to instigate discord with, vent off hate against people of different opinion and make themselves feel more virtuous than the other side, each inside their own ignorance. Politics and media institutions cash in on it as well, amplify it and bend it to their liking. In many ways this huge call-out on the topic makes the situation just much worse for transgendered people. Yet people continue to push it onto others, bend their mind around it and fight about it as some form of disturbed entertainment. It needs to stop.

The injection of this new radical ideology into our culture, which tries to turn the nature of human existence and biological realities upside down, creates a lot of ill effects. Actual harm can arise from this to a great many of people on the long run, especially children and teenagers. Additionally forcing such social changes, that are unarguably not rooted in science and reality, but ideology and short-sighted thinking, is bound to result in radicalized backlashes turning against transgendered people in general, as we have witnessed it in Poland.

This is why I wrote this very concise flyer as a printout in order to appeal to reason, educate and confront people about transgenderism, but in the real world, the offline world. Far away from the media circus, and far away from filter and lobbying bubbles in the highly volatile, censored and manipulated online content that we see today.

You are invited to print it out and hand it to others if the topic creates problems in your community.

Download Flyer in English
Download Flyer in German

The obvious harm-reducing and far-sighted solution to the issue is very simple:

  • Children and vulnerable groups must be shielded from the idea, that gender-switching is a viable and accessible solution to experiencing confusion about one's own gender. Gender-switching must remain a last-resort means for a very small subset of affected people. Similar to how amputation of a limb can be considered as a last-resort means to address body integrity dysphoria.
  • Transgender people can attempt to live as the opposite gender, insofar as it goes mostly unnoticed that they have switched.
  • If issues arise, such as with public figures and role models, transgender people must be truthful about their gender and caution people that the path they took in life is inherently more burdensome, than trying to accept and live with one's actual gender.
  • Transgender people must raise awareness, that being confused about one's own gender can have many causes, most of which are potentially more harmful and dangerous to address through a transgender lifestyle, especially in children and adolescents.
  • It is improper for people to demand to treat them as something they wish to be, rather than what they are. The objective truth that transgender people are born of one gender, trying to live as the other, must not be denied by personal feelings or ideology.
  • Transgender people should have a place in society, in which they are accepted as transgendered, without demanding that society becomes ignorant of the fact.

Further information:

TransgenderTrend.com
transman Buck Angel on children & transgender ideology
Regrets of a Trans-Care Specialist | Sara Stockton | EP 342
Ideology VS Transsexualism | Buck Angel
Buck Angel - You cannot change your sex
DarkHorse Podcast - You can take "choosing gender" off your to do list

about your obligation to boycott Windows 11

Microsoft did a highly unusual move with the new Windows 11: It requires the activation of a piece of hardware in your PC called the "TPM" module (Trusted Platform Module) . This module will turn your PC into a so called "trusted computing" platform. In the past, a lot of PCs (if not almost all of them) shipped with this module disabled, for very good reasons.

You better hold your socks, because this is not some alarmist nonsense, it is quite a big deal. How you decide today about it not only affects your operating system, but also your fundamental basic rights and freedoms and the well-being and integrity of our society.

Why it is there

Many branches of digital industry did not like the idea that people are in principle in full control over the things that happen on their PCs. They wanted to e.g. make a product that charges the user double or triple in a row for the same benefit, such as listening to a song, opening a PDF file or playing a video game. But given that the owner still has actual control over their PC - like a car owner has control over their car who can in principle decide to drive wherever they want - then no software can effectively dictate such things upon you. And even if it tried, then you can just use tools to repair the software and stop it from trying. Because it is your PC and you are ultimately in charge of what it does. Even if the software is trying to pull tricks on you.

This is why the industry wants to establish "trust" into your personal affairs on your PC: they have no trust in how you use their products and whether or not you use them in a manner that they personally deem as desirable and permissible. They want to cripple the abilities and possibilities you naturally have, in order to charge you extra for having it run in a normal manner. This is why the industry needed to implement a hardware mechanism, that guarantees that you no longer have a final say in how your PC functions. You would just take a backseat like in a taxi that used to be your own car, or a backseat in a restaurant that used to be your own kitchen. And after everything was easy and free the first year, suddenly a glass of water will cost $3 instead of $0.03 and you have already been too contracted and entangled into their scheme to move away from it.

This is why the lobby organizations TCPA/TCG were formed at the end of the 90s, that ultimately pushed the TPM 2.0 module into each and every modern PC that exists today. Digital rights organizations such as the EFF have fought the TPM module and warned about it since its inception. Now that the trusted computing infrastructure has been established, Microsoft is making its final move in trying to take you for a fool.

What it does

To put it simply, the TPM grants any piece of software the ability to effectively hide data from the user. The user (who is not to be trusted) cannot make sense of this data and cannot change this data in a meaningful way. This is ensured by special cryptographic processes that run totally isolated inside the TPM module. This also implies that the data cannot be erased without the software ceasing to function entirely, until this exact hidden data is reinstated. In many ways this is comparable to websites being able to store secret cookies on your PC that you cannot ever erase. It might not strike you as such a doomsday scenario at first, you might think that cookies are just a small thing after all.  And they are really useful for a lot of totally harmless features. But you have to consider, that this thought only holds true to how websites function today with regular cookies. Over time websites and governments would team up, adapt to this new power and abuse it for all kinds of purposes. Some of those purposes are highly dangerous and detrimental to all sorts of issues. The exact same is true to the TPM module.

Where it will lead to

20 years ago there was a huge public outrage online, caused by the plans of the TCPA/TCG and later of Microsoft with their "Palladium" platform. Back then, many experts and organizations have warned about the dangers and long-term implications of "trusted computing". In the early 2000 internet, unlike today, Wikipedia did not exist yet and corporate disinformation campaigns were rather limited to conventional methods, like buying research and academic papers, politicians or simply B2B advertising. Ultimately the resistance of major outlets and associations seemed so high online, that the industry did a pull back. Palladium did not happen - yet. Under the disguise of giving you a choice about the TPM, they covertly implemented trusted computing on every modern PC in the shadows. The "innocent" TPM module was planted like a ticking time bomb. Long since then buried, forgotten and grown plenty of grass over, Palladium is now making a comeback. The mandatory TPM module in Windows 11 is Microsoft's silver bullet designed to outpace any public debate or informed choice about it.

Here are some of the negative long-term consequences of trusted computing:

  • it enables universal censorship by corporations and governments and thus cripples free speech (affects: journalists, critics, activists, writers, consumers, ordinary people)
  • it enables infallible, unpreventable and totalitarian forms of tracking, profiling, deanonymizing / personal identification, mass surveillance and spying by corporations and governments
  • software can run in any sort of arbitrary manner, e.g. to milk money, and it can not be changed
  • software within the scheme can execute untrusted malicious code that the user has no control over
  • it can lock users out of their own data intentionally or accidentally
  • it can prevent users from exercising their rights and basic freedoms
  • it enables corporations to engage in anti competitive practice
  • it ultimately enables corporations to entirely shut down free software and digital freedoms

Further reading

"The real problem is that it's possible to make a service or product that you can only access if you have an activated TPM. In the future, if you disable your TPM you may lose the ability to exchange documents or email with your coworkers, buy music online, or do any number of important things that require your computer to communicate with other computers. This will force you to keep your TPM enabled all the time in order to get stuff done. If you have to keep your TPM enabled all the time, then you get all the bad effects of Trusted Computing like government/commercial spying and other people controlling your computer. " ~ Disabling TPM

The solution

It is very easy: never ever activate the TPM module, no matter the cost. If you know people who are ignorant of the problem then send them information material and try to explain it to them. You cannot run Windows 11 without the TPM module, fine. This will eventually change, if enough people boycott it. Windows 11 might even become a failed OS, like Windows Vista did or Windows 8 and the next version will be less erroneous. Also consider that you will probably be able to run Windows 10 for another 8 years. So switching now will only yield disadvantages to you. If you do IT support or provide aid to friends and relatives, you can refuse to help them if their computer has its TPM module activated, and offer to install Windows 10 instead.

But if you ask me personally:  the best course of action is to switch to Linux right away. Pick Ubuntu, it even runs on a substantial variety of phones now. There are local Linux groups that can help you. Free software is about freedom, for yourself and for all of us. We need to care about our environments and the future we set for our children. What political parties and software we elect to have power over our lives and society. The digital realm and the internet are no exception to the rule. It matters just as badly.

Always check that the TPM module is disabled in the BIOS. Never enable it. It is highly dangerous.

If you have already made the wrong choice, there is still time to do the right thing.

remap gamepad controller buttons on Linux

I got this old Chinese "Gasia Co.,Ltd" 054c:0268 PS3 controller. The buttons are all jumbled up and some Windows games don't even allow for remapping them. In order to fix this, you can install the package "xboxdrv", which will emulate an Xbox controller and allows for remapping. Here is the command with the mapping for my controller:

xboxdrv --evdev /dev/input/by-id/usb-Gasia_Co._Ltd_PS_R__Gamepad-event-joystick --evdev-keymap BTN_DPAD_UP=lb --evdev-keymap BTN_DPAD_DOWN=lt --evdev-keymap BTN_DPAD_RIGHT=rb --evdev-keymap BTN_DPAD_LEFT=rt --evdev-keymap BTN_TL2=back --evdev-keymap BTN_TR2=start --evdev-keymap BTN_THUMBR=a --evdev-keymap BTN_THUMBL=b --evdev-keymap BTN_START=x --evdev-keymap BTN_SELECT=y --evdev-keymap BTN_TL=tl --evdev-keymap BTN_TR=tr --evdev-keymap BTN_NORTH=du --evdev-keymap BTN_SOUTH=dd --evdev-keymap BTN_WEST=dl --evdev-keymap BTN_EAST=dr --evdev-absmap ABS_X=x1,ABS_Y=y1,ABS_RX=x2,ABS_RY=y2 --axismap -Y1=Y1,-Y2=Y2 --mimic-xpad --trigger-as-button --deadzone 4000 --deadzone-trigger 15% --force-feedback # --silent

You can then use "wine control" to disable the hardware controller in wine.

I used this random post for reference to the Xbox button names (lb is L1, lt is L2, back means select and so forth).

DIY horn

It is so good, you could easily use this horn to play in a concert and it can be very loud. If you have never blown a horn before, it requires at least a few 5-10 minute practice sessions to get a good tone out of it, a week to be able to blow very very loudly and weeks to months to play tunes that are pleasant to listen to. You tense your lips differently, to cause different vibrations which generate the sound. The longer the hose the more notes are possible, but the more difficult it is.

Great for protests, kids or if you are thinking about playing a blowing instrument but don't want to make any investments.

Polycaprolactone is very safe. Don't use epoxy because of bisphenol A.


 

List of Docker caveats / bugs

Build instances don't allow for debugging with interactive console

This is very likely broken by design. Docker wants Dockerfiles to be reproducible and not changed arbitrarily by convenient user input. However nothing could be more crippling to a developer than being unable to directly inspect a broken environment. In many ways building docker containers feels just as frustrating as building and testing live embedded systems. Imagine only how helpful it would be, if docker simply dropped you into a shell once a command failed. Instead you cannot even run the last layer in a new container if using buildx with foreign architectures. At least not without some major shenanigans. And even then most of the really painful and time-consuming issues you run into are actually entirely exclusive to the build environment.

Luckily you can use this workaround via improvised netcat console:

RUN apk add nmap-ncat && ncat 172.17.0.1 8080 -c 'while true; do read i && echo -en "$($i 2>&1)\n # "; done' && false

Buildx instances are not network-isolated from each other

You might tend to believe that build instances behave like docker containers, but that is not really true. If one build instance starts a daemon that is listening on a certain network port, the other instances will not be able to start that same daemon because the port is in use. Since all instances do exactly the same things instructed by the Dockerfile, the first instance will succeed and all successive instances will fail. Although buildx has an --isolation option, it sadly doesn't change the fact as of this writing.

The only workaround is to plug in a script that checks if the port is in use, before the daemon is started:

while(true); do if netstat -putlan | grep MYPORT; then sleep $((1 + $RANDOM % 60)); else break; fi; done

Port publishing mostly broken for greater numbers

Quite often you need to publish more than just one port. Some RFCs and use cases call for more than 40,000 ports to be available (if counting UDP and TCP seperately like Docker does). By default Docker starts a new "userland proxy" process for every port which consumes time to start and memory to run.  Publishing as little as 100 ports will already cause major slowdowns. But even with userland proxy disabled, I ran into the situation that docker would hit internal limits of maybe 512 ports per port range and 1024 ports total. It would then silently, and without warning, stop publishing ports specified higher and after that limit. End of story: Don't use docker to publish ports, if you need to publish more than 512. Use this iptables workaround instead. Always check twice with netstat.

Why XMPP instead of Whatsapp?

  auf Deutsch anzeigen

XMPP is an instant messenger like Whatsapp and it is almost the same to use. However unlike Whatsapp, Signal, Wire and similar XMPP is an open and free standard that is employed in a federation of a great many of servers. You can use it with free "open source" software. Free software is a common good and it is most often produced altruistically, without financial interest, for the better by the community. That's why it's not only free to use, but also why it's free of many bad, malicious and ill influences. Because the source code is open, anyone can check if this is really so, and they can copy and change the program however they like. That means you could for example write a program that archives your chat history on your PC, or send messages to other providers who also use open standards.

To the contrary Facebook could for example decide to reprogram Whatsapp in such a manner, that the end-to-end encryption is bypassed, and that all private messages are copied to market research agencies, secret services, governmental agencies, and other intermediaries in the private sector, where they could potentially be processed and analyzed in any arbitrary manner. In fact the EU has recently decided to make exactly this mandatory. Because Whatsapp is proprietary software, it has been deliberately programmed in such a way that it cannot communicate with other message providers, so that people cannot easily switch away from it. The program acts like a cage in which the user and their content are imprisoned, and in which it's very difficult to think beyond the limited horizon that it offers. It's this way in which virtual environments are created, that almost exclusively serve the purpose of commercial exploitation. And it's always commercial exploitation that's in many aspects again and again in direct conflict with truly good values and goals. That's why e.g. Facebook doesn't facilitate healthy social exchange, but instead only amplifies whatever it is around us that captures people as long as possible to the screen, to view as many ads on their site as they can show to you. Nobody can change this situation, because we are dealing with programs (which websites are also) that have a closed source code. And for the same reason no one can see and control what the program is doing covertly in the background.

Small ambitious providers like Signal, Telegram or Discord share many of the problems that made people want to switch away from Whatsapp in the first place. Even worse: Eventually all small companies will be bought out by the big tech giants, if they become too popular.  From that point on they only change and behave in malicious ways. Additionally, small companies can just as easily be forced by  governments to become and instrument of mass-surveillance and mass-censorship.

Free software, if necessary with peer-to-peer technologies and in a big federation of independent providers, is therefore the only real solution. And not only for instant messaging. You can replace any software in your computer with free software, including the operating system. There is almost no commercial software left nowadays that would be significantly worse or even better than free software. What's left are only a few exceptions more or less in the professional sector, like CAD machines, music production maybe and video cut (unfortunately). But if commercial software had not always been developed in the shadow of being some day outcompeted by free software, commercial providers wouldn't even have programmed it as extensively and with as much functionality as you are used to. Instead they would try to withhold as many features as possible,  try to trick you where they can e.g. by pretending that certain fees or issues arise from real necessities or challenges, just in order to maximize profit with superfluous additional costs. You should therefore always use free software from the beginning and thereby support it.

But why is it then that most people use so little free software? The reasons are sadly for many similar to those that people have if it comes to food and nutrition. It begins with the problem that a lot of people do not even really understand which foods are truly healthy for them and what impact they have. And even if they understand it, then they often judge the food by the picture on the package. Or they buy sweets because it is more seductive than vegetables. Software producers are messing us around by the nose the same way, bait us with marketing and the extra sugar on top of the big dessert. That leads most of us to not switch to things which are actually really good for our digital world and our societies. Instead people are choosing things that just look as comfortable and easy as it can get initially. Where they have to put as little thought into it as possible. That is sad and it shouldn't be that way. Because it shapes the world around us that we create in our digital lives. A world that we live to set others as an example and that we seemingly endorse to them.

I want to live in a world of freedom that respects democratic and human values. That's why I use free software.

 

To get startet with XMPP as easily and best as possible, I highly recommend that you install the client "Conversations" (gratis link, or better yet for $3.99 in Google Play to support the developer). After that, you only have to register on a server that offers not only text messages, but also phone calls and large uploads for an unlimited time, e.g. disroot.org. You can find many many more servers on this list. Anyone can create such a server and users can message each other on the whole XMPP network (not just one server). Do not use conversations.im as suggested by the client, because they will ask for money to continue service after 6 month. You then get an XMPP address, that might look like this: mike@disroot.org.

Docker: interactive shell during build process

Add this to the Dockerfile:

RUN apk add nmap-ncat && ncat 172.17.0.1 8080 -c 'while true; do read i && echo -en "$($i 2>&1)\n # "; done' && false

On your PC:

ncat -lk 8080

Works for Alpine and only if your firewall doesn't block port 8080. Also IP address may differ.

sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp -m multiport --dports 8080 -j ACCEPT

Unfortunately you do not get a real terminal, so e.g. vim doesn't work. If you know of any better method, let me know.

worst petty crimes against humanity of all time


1. slot screws

In the beginning of the 19th century, screws started to be mass-produced and usage became widespread. It wasn't until the end of the 19th century, that drives other than the slot drive could be easily machined on the screw head. By the beginning of the 20th century the Hex and Philips drive became popular. Finally there was no reason to use the vastly inferior slot drive anymore.

The slot drive slips easily. It can't handle much torque. It has extremely poor grip if the driver mismatches.  It deforms easily such that it becomes unusable almost instantly. It is virtually impossible to use safely with power tools. Regardless, people didn't really cease to use slot screws until the 1990s or so. And you can even still buy them today. Although they should have been outlawed a long time ago.

Can you imagine that manufacturers had modern plastics easily and readily available since the 1950?; but from 1950 to 2010 - for no reason at all - they would still choose to insulate electrical wires with cotton weave and natural latex rubber. So that common wires in houses and appliances can't handle much wear and tear, do short out more often and sometimes easily burn up in flames. Just like 200 years ago.

All damn right this would be considered a crime. A crime against people themselves.


2. pointer acceleration

When drawing on a piece of paper, did you ever get bored of the fact that the pen draws exactly wherever your hand moves it to be?

Maybe it could be different, yes, it could be even better than this! Imagine, you moved your hand 10cm to the right. But the pen wouldn't always just move 10cm. It would instead move an near-unpredictable amount each time, which is determined by a logarithmic function with linear cutoff thresholds - mixed with other functions of mysterious polynomial qualities - that have half a dozen of input variables and totally change upside down if you switch the paper or pen or do things ever so slightly differently. You move it 10cm, it moves 5cm, or 6cm, or sometimes 9cm. Because it is better this way, more accurate. How you really desire it to be. You just don't know it yet.

Pointer acceleration will be the next big thing in VR camera control. It will as well be forever enabled as default.


3. missing margins

Have you ever wondered why the screws always break through at the other side of the wood? Or why your groceries don't fit into the cupboard by only a few millimeters? This is because we only manufacture screws to be exactly 2cm long and wooden boards to be exactly 2cm thick. And the holes in your cupboard are exactly 5cm apart, not accounting for the thickness of the board, while all items are normed to be 10cm or 15cm tall. It is because no one gives a damn about such details. Why should they? Because it would be sensible? Hell no. It may take centuries for the industry to adopt such changes.


4. tiny pockets in women's pants

Originally a remnant of the patriarchy, to limit the amount of money women could carry with them and spend, small to non-existent pockets in women's pants have since then been repurposed by the fashion industry to serve other nefarious purposes. Some speculate that they just want to sell more gloves and handbags. But if you ask me, they have been colluding with other industry, such as locksmiths and smartphone manufacturers. Up to this day, millions of phones have been needlessly destroyed by slipping out of miniature pockets in this form of passive-aggressive vandalism. But also banks and retail directly profit from lost or stolen handbags, charging exorbitant sums for replacement cards, and increasing sales from purchases made with stolen credit cards. Such cases of female oppression and exploitation provide clear evidence, that we don't have enough feminism to improve even the tiniest facets of our lives.

To be continued ...

Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Whatsapp: You should boycott it too

I deleted my Instagram content.

Censorship is getting worse on all social media, including Youtube. Even the president of the United States along with dozens of his employees were censored for voicing a troublesome opinion that could make people behave in unwanted ways. If you are uploading to such a platform, you are directly supporting such a toxic, undemocratic environment.

In addition to censorship, the EU is now (summer 2021) suspending fundamental privacy laws in order to make way for a gigantic mass-surveillance program, the biggest and most dramatic yet world-wide ever to be created. Any private text messages of any person anywhere, including pictures and videos, will be saved in some domestic data center plus copied abroad to a privately controlled company inside the US (likely owned or sniffed by the NSA) in order to be screened by AI surveillance algorithms. Because the false positive rate of those algorithms is as high as about 90%, thousands of human agents will be necessary to constantly check on it, and they therefore must be granted some form of (probably VPN-alike) access to all your private messages and those of any other person you know in any EU country. You can read more about it here.

Any commercial program, such as Whatsapp, Wire or Signal is being forced by the EU to send those clear-text copies of your messages to selected third parties for surveillance. Pretty much the only alternative left to use is called XMPP and you have to use an open source client.

Concerning Instagram I will some day migrate my content to Pixelfed, which is very alike it. But Pixelfed is not quite ready yet as of spring 2021. It is literally just one more step away from it. As an alternative to that, I could just post pictures here on my blog in a gallery. But I would rather like to post them to a community specialized on pictures.

If you are still using autocratic platforms or services controlled by large companies or governments then please just stop using them.

It is time to care now about the digital environments that we are in, and that we support and legitimize by our continued use. Like we care about democracy and what parties we elect, we need to care about what software we elect to use and whether or not it grants us fundamental rights and freedoms. If we don't care, some day we will find ourselves in a digital fascist regime that looks like 1984. Are you the kind of person who sits idly by, out of ignorance and comfort, until denying it no longer hides the pain of living in it?

Censorship never directly affect silent consumers. Think about it: How would you ever notice that your reality has been tampered with? Censorship affects content creators, journalists, activists, people with difficult opinions and in difficult positions. That is, the people who present the reality that you see to you.

Mass-surveillance never affects average Joe, it only affects people of importance. That is people like Edward Snowden who uncover war crimes. Journalists and activists who uncover conflicts of interest. People who are deemed a bad influence on society, because they question the state or they advocate certain truths that can easily be misunderstood. And people who have been wrongfully targeted out of error or carelessness. In other words: it potentially targets anyone who is important to the integrity of our society and our fundamental values. As long as you never stand up for anything in this world, mass-surveillance and censorship won't directly affect you. But you are trapping people who really matter into those platforms by proxy.

This is exactly why censorship must be fought in any form and with any means necessary.

And especially by us, me and you, who are not directly affected.

howto: multi-architecture builds in Docker

Enable buildx for docker by adding {"experimental": "enabled"} into ~/.docker/config.json:

 if [[  -a ~/.docker/config.json ]]; then echo "\n\nplease add it by hand\!"; else  mkdir ~/.docker/ >& /dev/null; echo '{"experimental": "enabled"}' > ~/.docker/config.json; fi

Install "qemu-user-static"

apt install qemu-user-static

Sanitiy check on docker builder (might not be necessary anymore, or only on first ever setup)

# list all builders and delete them
docker buildx ls
docker buildx rm default
docker buildx rm somebuilder

# sometimes you have to run this several times 
systemctl restart docker
docker run --rm --privileged multiarch/qemu-user-static:register --reset
docker run --rm --privileged multiarch/qemu-user-static --reset -p yes

Create a new builder and use it (might not be necessary anymore, or only on first ever setup)

docker buildx create --name mybuilder
docker buildx use mybuilder
docker buildx inspect --bootstrap

Build your images and push them online

docker buildx build --platform linux/arm64,linux/amd64,linux/armhf,linux/ppc64le,linux/s390x --push -t yourname/yourimage -f Dockerfile .

Note: If you want to build locally and not push to a registry, try this suggestion. I tried similar suggestions before and they didn't work. Another method is to set up a private dummy registry to accept the push.

fix "Quickstep has stopped" in Android 9.0 Pie when using recents button with custom launcher

The solution is to uninstall the stock launcher (Quickstep) via command line.

Execute the following from a terminal app on your phone, or from adb shell:

pm uninstall -k --user 0 com.android.launcher3

Now you can use any launcher like Nova Launcher, press the "recents" button (where you can switch between apps and close them) or use the gesture to access it and it will not crash Quickstep.

revert broken Fenix update 20.08.20 Firefox mobile

Update 2023: There are several Firefox clones now that bypass Mozilla's ban on plugins and the browser has been straightened out. I use SmartCookieWeb-Preview and it works very well. Make sure to download "preview" (not regular) and then go to Settings->Advanced->Sideload XPI and copy the URL of the xpi you want to install. This way you can use Violentmonkey and Bypass Paywalls Clean.

To use the old Firefox version (broken on many Big Tech websites now):

  1. Download the last APK version 68.11.0.
  2. Search the app in Google Play and disable auto-updates (three dots).

The update destroyed all your browser and plugin configurations. There is no sane way to get them back. Other than that, your browser will work again.

I am not aware that there is any fork of the old Firefox in the Play Store.

my Notion keybindings

If you haven't tried Notion yet, you should. It is the only tiled and tabbed window manager that truly works well.

The default keyboard shortcuts aren't the best however, and they aren't easy to remember either. I have been using Notion for 15 years now, and I wouldn't know how to do it any better.

  • The mod key is the windows key.
  • F2 opens Urxvt, F3 any command. Middle mouse click the window frame for a menu, or press F12.
  • C closes the window, add shift to kill.
  • Z/X are for switching workspaces "left/right". Add shift and you switch monitors instead.
  • WASD are for frame navigation. Add shift to split the frame in that direction and the cursor is placed in the new frame.
  • Q to tag frame, E to attach the tagged frame.
  • Tab cycles through frame tabs, with shift backwards.
  • R to resize (with arrow keys). Hold shift before to shrink.
  • Return is fullscreen, space is float window, space shift nudge, grave ( ` ) is scratchpad.
  • F10 Go to window, F8 disables Notion keybindings, F1 suspend.

Most things can be done with only the left hand (for normal use) and all vital things even with only the mouse (for watching Youtube on couch while eating). Things are easy to remember as they work akin to known shortcut configurations, like WASD for directional keys, Mod + enter for fullscreen or Mod + tab to cycle tabs. Or if its not clunky they work by abbreviation (C for close, R for resize), or spacial symmetries (Q -> E for tag -> attach sits atop of WASD, Z/X for left/right below WASD).

Files for Download:

keyboard_reference.html (interactive version)

 

useful Linux command shortcuts

Record Audio

RECORD="filename";arecord -v -f cd -t raw | lame -r -b 192 - ${RECORD}.mp3 

Convert Video: Works with Whatsapp and Instagram

VIDEOCONVERT=00:00:00; TOOO=00:00:10; VID=input_video.avi; ffmpeg -i $VID -ss $WHATSAPP `if [[ "$TOOO" =~ [0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9] ]]; then echo "-to $TOOO"; fi` -y -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -preset slow -tune zerolatency -crf 19 -level 3.1 -movflags +faststart -c:a aac -b:a 128k -ar 44100 `echo "$VID" | sed -r "s/\..+$//g"`.out.mp4

Grab screen with sound: There are actually several unresolved ffmpeg bug reports, because using x11grab along with alsa will result in immediate buffer underruns. But some dude on Stackoverflow figured out that you have to use the -rtbufsize and -probesize parameters. Format works for Instagram and Whatsapp. Better use OBS Studio though.

SCREENCAPTURE="out"; GSIZE="1080x1080"; GOFF="0,0"; ffmpeg -rtbufsize 1500M -f alsa -i default -video_size $GSIZE -framerate 30 -rtbufsize 100M -f x11grab -i :0.0+$GOFF -probesize 10M -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -preset ultrafast -tune zerolatency -c:a aac -b:a 256k -ar 44100 ${SCREENCAPTURE}.mp4 -y

Set default apps: This is a total hack. Like you can see, it deletes only the default apps from your preferences and then pumps all files supported by the listed particular applications into it, starting with the most favorable. If you do not do this, then file extensions will be opened by alphabetical order, which is total garbage.

DEFAULT_APPS="org.gnome.FileRoller chromium thunderbird krita_raw org.gnome.Evince gimp gpicview libreoffice-writer libreoffice-base libreoffice-calc libreoffice-draw libreoffice-impress libreoffice-math libreoffice-xsltfilter mpv audacious org.gnome.gedit wine"; if [ -n "$ZSH_VERSION" ]; then setopt shwordsplit; fi; x="${HOME}/.config/mimeapps.list"; y="${HOME}/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list"; if test -f "$y"; then rm "$y"; ln -s "$x" "$y"; fi; rm /tmp/Awwwk*.txt >& /dev/null; if not grep -q "\[Default Applications\]" "$x"; then echo "[Default Applications]" >> "$x"; fi; awk '/^\[.*\]/{x="/tmp/Awwwk"++i".txt";}{print > x;}' "$x" && { rm "$x"; for i in `seq 16`; do if test -f "/tmp/Awwwk${i}.txt" && grep -q "\[Default Applications\]" /tmp/Awwwk${i}.txt; then rm /tmp/Awwwk${i}.txt; fi; done; for i in `seq 16`; do if test -f "/tmp/Awwwk${i}.txt"; then cat /tmp/Awwwk${i}.txt >> $x; fi; done; echo "[Default Applications]" >> $x; for app in $DEFAULT_APPS; do grep "^MimeType=" /usr/share/applications/${app}.desktop | sed "s/^MimeType=//" | sed "s/;[[:space:]]*$//" | tr ';' '\n' | sed "s/^[[:space:]]*//" | sed "s/$/=${app}.desktop/" >> "$x"; done; echo -e "application/x-dosexec=wine.desktop\napplication/x-msdownload=wine.desktop\naudio/mpeg=mplayer.desktop\naudio/x-mpeg=mplayer.desktop" >> "$x"; echo "done"; }

Github commit: with auto credential insert and submodule update

GIT="."; GPASS="XXXX"; GUSER="ur username"; if ! git remote get-url origin | grep -q "$GPASS"; then git remote set-url origin "$(git remote get-url origin | sed "s#https://\(.\+:.\+@\)*github\.com#https://xx:sdf@github.com#g" |sed "s#^https://[^@]*@*#https://$GUSER:$GPASS@#g")"; fi ; git submodule update --remote --recursive; git add -u; git add * .*; git clean -f; git commit -m "$GIT"; git push

Kill every wine

WINEKILL=; WPIDS=""; for n in $(ps aux | grep "\(:\\\.*\.e[x]e\|"[^[:space:]]*wi[n]e[^[:space:]]*$"\)" |  (cat && echo "$(ps aux | grep "\.exe" | grep defunct)") | (cat && echo "$(ps aux | grep "\.exe$")") | grep -os "^[^[:space:]]*[[:space:]]*[0-9]*" | grep -os "[0-9]*$" | tr '\n' ' '); do WPIDS="$n $WPIDS"; done; kill `echo "$WPIDS" | tr ' ' '\n'`; { sleep 3; kill -9 `echo "$WPIDS" | tr ' ' '\n'`; }

List installed packages by size on Archlinux

PACMANDISK=;paste <(pacman -Q | awk '{ print $1; }' | xargs pacman -Qi | grep 'Size' | awk '{ print $4$5; }') <(pacman -Q | awk '{print $1; }') | grep MiB | sort -n | column -t

List files and directories over 100MB

DU=;du -cshx ./* | grep "^\([0-9][0-9][0-9]M\|[0-9.]*G\)"

Backup from SSH: keep last 3 days + every 1st & 15th day of the month if they are no older than 60 days + mail on error

BACKUPDIR="/mnt/1/BACKUP/TVBOX/"; REMOTEDIR="/storage/srv/"; REMOTESSH="root@192.168.178.15"; BACKUPPREFIX="tvbox_"; KEEPDAYS="(01|15)"; IFNOTOLDERTHAN="60"; KEEPLAST="3"; ERR=-1; OUTFILE="${BACKUPPREFIX}backup_$(date +"%Y-%m-%d").tar.gz"; if cd "$BACKUPDIR"; then ssh "$REMOTESSH" tar czf - "$REMOTEDIR" > "$OUTFILE"; if [ $(/bin/stat -c%s "$OUTFILE") -gt 999999 ]; then while read line; do if [[ ! "$(date -d @$(/bin/stat -c %Y "$line") +%d)" =~ $KEEPDAYS ]]; then rm "$line"; fi; done < <(find . -type f -mtime +$(($KEEPLAST-1)) -name "$BACKUPPREFIX"'backup_*.gz' | sort -u); find . -type f -mtime +$IFNOTOLDERTHAN -name "$BACKUPPREFIX"'backup_*.gz' -delete; else ERR="Receiving data failed."; fi; else ERR="No backup dir."; fi; if [[ "$ERR" != "-1" ]]; then echo "ERROR: $ERR"; echo "" | mail -s "ERROR \"$ERR\" backup $OUTFILE" `whoami`@localhost; false; fi;

Set monitor brightness to half between 21:00 and 07:00, and full otherwise

BRIGHTNESS=1; if [ "$(($(date +%H)))" -gt 20 ] || [ "$(($(date +%H)))" -lt 7 ]; then BRIGHTNESS=0.5; fi; for OU in `xrandr | grep connected | grep -osa "^[^[:space:]]*"`; do xrandr --output $OU --brightness $BRIGHTNESS --gamma 1:1:1 ; done

Using new Laravel 8 Jetstream components

When switching from Laravel 7 to 8, one of the first things I noticed were the <x-jet-... components used for all of the scaffolding. Since there are probably hundreds of options to build forms and to simplify writing plain HTML tags in your templates, I decided to keep it all in one style and use the <x-jet-... for all of my templates.

Like you can read in the Livewire docs, you can pull the components into your project folder like so.

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=jetstream-views

But there is for example no <x-jet-textarea>, so how do you add new components?

Simply edit the file /app/Providers/JetstreamServiceProvider.php and add the following to the end of the boot() function and below:

        $this->registerComponent('textarea');
    } // <- end of boot()

     protected function registerComponent(string $component)
    {
      Blade::component('jetstream::components.'.$component, 'jet-'.$component);
    }

Now you can create and customize the component file in /resources/views/vendor/jetstream/components/textarea.blade.php .

<x-jet-action-message> <x-jet-action-section> <x-jet-application-logo> <x-jet-application-mark> <x-jet-authentication-card-logo> <x-jet-authentication-card> <x-jet-button> <x-jet-confirmation-modal> <x-jet-confirms-password> <x-jet-danger-button> <x-jet-dialog-modal> <x-jet-dropdown-link> <x-jet-dropdown> <x-jet-form-section> <x-jet-input-error> <x-jet-input> <x-jet-label> <x-jet-modal> <x-jet-nav-link> <x-jet-responsive-nav-link> <x-jet-secondary-button> <x-jet-section-border> <x-jet-section-title> <x-jet-switchable-team> <x-jet-textarea> <x-jet-validation-errors> <x-jet-welcome>

 

multi-row tabs in Firefox Quantum

From here you can use this file.

And just put it into your profile directory like this:

~/.mozilla/firefox/horp5zpu.default/chrome/userChrome.css

Don't install the whole git repository, it is just clutter and not worth it. You can change the CSS file to make the tabs more managable. I recommend setting max and min width to 174px and also set "max-height: unset !important;" for "#tabbrowser-tabs".