I stand in full support of the Free Software Foundation and its ethical and moral stance on free software. I oppose the misguided recent attacks against Richard M. Stallman, the accusations against whom are baseless and lacking in factual evidence. I am a signatory to the open letter in support of Richard M. Stallman.

More Schiller

Sunday, Feb 28, 2021 Post 455 words 3 mins read

Since I’ve been working a lot lately on Hoshi (updates will follow later) and there is no better music to listen to, while working, than Schiller, I’ve been thinking a lot about their different live albums, the people behind Schiller and how they influenced the music.

Sehnsucht

Year: 2008

Band components: Ralf Gustke (drums), Cliff Hewitt (electronic drums), Mickey Meinert (guitar), Tissy Thiers (bass guitar), Christian Kretschmar (synthesizer) and Christopher von Deylen (keyboards).

Heavy electrock (a term I “might” have invented) sounds. Mickey Meinert is very good, Petra Marklund (September) does really nice vocals on “Breathe”. I love this album!

Atemlos

Year: 2010

Band components: Ralf Gustke (drums), Cliff Hewitt (electronic drums), Andreas Binder (guitar), Thissy Thiers (bass guitar), Christian Kretschmar (synthesizer) and Christopher von Deylen (keyboards).

Cliff Hewitt with long hair! Andreas Binder is ok, not bad but nothing to remember. Amazing drumming by both Ralf and Cliff. Very good “Salton Sea”.

The Propaganda Multiplier

Thursday, Feb 11, 2021 Link https://swprs.org/the-propaganda-multiplier/

It is one of the most important aspects of our media system, and yet hardly known to the public: most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.
The key role played by these agencies means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording. In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world.
A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles were based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research. Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews were in favor of a US and NATO intervention, while propaganda was attributed exclusively to the opposite side.
Swiss Policy Research

Before/After effect in Javascript using jQuery

Tuesday, Feb 9, 2021 Post 1111 words 6 mins read

Sometimes you need a simple tool to visually show the difference between two images and a basic jQuery plugin is quite suited for that (if you can stomach ~89KB just for jQuery, ~30KB if you gzip it but you probably already have it on your site, especially if you’re running Wordpress ). There are better ways to implement this, someone might suggest React or Vue or Angular or assembler or running it on the blockchain or in the bootloader but this is how I did it.

A jQuery-less version would be quite easy to implement too, perhaps in a future post.

How to waste your career, one comfortable year at a time

Saturday, Feb 6, 2021 Link https://apoorvagovind.substack.com/p/how-to-waste-your-career-one-comfortable

One common trait I’ve observed in all great engineers is their sense of adventure. People who pigeonhole themselves into a specialty and do the exact same job for years tend to grow complacent. The problem is that stability is an innate human instinct. So you need to deliberately counterbalance this tendency. Taking risks and being uncomfortable is a muscle you have to train.
A friend of mine told me this story about wild ducks — Wild ducks migrate in the winter not because of the cold but because of the food. If you feed them, they won’t migrate. Keep feeding them for a few years in a row, still won’t migrate. Then stop all of a sudden, they won’t migrate, and they’ll die. The moral is that you can tame wild ducks, but you can’t wildify tamed ducks (that’s why there isn’t even such a word as wildify). So you have to be careful not to lose that hustle.
Apoorva Govind

Erk Tha Jerk: Airplane Mode

Wednesday, Jan 27, 2021 Music 169 words 1 min read

QEMU and macOS Big Sur

Monday, Jan 25, 2021 Post 114 words 1 min read

If you try to run QEMU under macOS Big ~~Mac~~ Sur with the -machine accel=hvf flag (basically with Apple’s Hypervisor Framework ) you’ll get one ugly error; every time hv_vm_create() runs it returns an HV_ERROR. The reason is that the com.apple.vm.hypervisor entitlement (used in macOS 10.15) has been deprecated and replaced by com.apple.security.hypervisor.

You need to sign your binary with the correct entitlement. Add the XML below to an entitlements.xml file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" 
	"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>com.apple.security.hypervisor</key>
    <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

After that, sign the QEMU binary with the entitlements.xml file.

$ codesign -s - --entitlements entitlements.xml --force /usr/local/bin/qemu-system-x86_64

Starting QEMU with -machine accel=hvf will work now.