Ideas similar to the ones in my earlier monster post: The Internet: We’re Doing It Wrong

Centralized internet services are vulnerabilities. They can be co-opted for profit by short-sighted corporations, or they can be subverted through force by power-hungry governments. Distributed services are the solution: even unlimited application of lawyers and money accomplishes very little against a system which has no central control and no physical address.

What if we could take all those millions of computers racked up in giant datacenters around the world and distribute them among Internet users, creating our own global services less vulnerable to snooping and censorship? “Cloud computing” has come to mean little more than “rent your server time from our datacenter”, but there’s an older meaning in projects like Folding@Home: a big pool of computation power donated by people who want to help the project succeed. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and the rest spend billions on their datacenters – but there are millions of us, and computers have become cheap.

Bittorrent is a resilient content-distribution network with no datacenter; it can’t be shut down, because it doesn’t live at any specific address and doesn’t operate under any single person’s or organization’s control; it is a network which emerges from the cooperation of millions.

Why can’t we do email the same way? Why can’t we do social networking the same way? Why can’t we give these giant corporations the finger, run our own services, ourselves, in distributed fashion, simultaneously crippling the Internet advertising industry and NSA programs like PRISM? How are they going to secretly snoop on your email if you and the people you correspond with all have your own private mail servers in your basements?

But nobody is going to run their own server, you say; only a few geeks like you will ever have the time or the inclination to do it. And that may have been true for a long time, but there’s no reason it still has to be true. We are very, very close to having plug-and-play home server appliances. Everybody has a furnace, but nobody expects to poke around inside it and understand how it works – you just leave it running and enjoy its services, and if it breaks you call the repairman.

It’s a software problem, basically. What we need is a turn-key home server product which comes configured with a distributed backup system – something like Bittorrent Sync with a bit of Usenet, some mesh routing via distributed hash table, all glued together with strong encryption… Even a distributed Facebook system wouldn’t be that hard; you could build it on top of RSS and email. The hard part, as always, is the network effect.

The technology just isn’t that far away. It is a software problem, not a hardware problem. There are no mega-profits in such a project, but it could be a good steady commodity sales business: figure out the right assembly of software and protocols, bolt it all together, lock it down tight, and bake it into a plastic box. Put a USB port and a “share keys” button right on the front of it so visitors to your house can stick in a thumb drive with their public keys…

I can just about see a bridge to this world through the emerging home-NAS business. Sell people turn-key storage devices which just happen to be loaded with a bunch of software that builds a distributed backup / email / query service mesh… people would buy it for what it would do for them personally, but the more people who buy in, the more useful it gets for everyone.

It’s a dream, anyway. It would be a better world for everyone who isn’t in the business of controlling other people.

12.5 kWh total, 2174W peak

random idea: what if you funded a music festival using Kickstarter, or something like it? Instead of selling tickets, you’d promote the fundraiser, and if commitments failed to reach the cutoff level, you’d just shrug your shoulders and the whole thing would vanish into a puff of good intentions.

The perk associated with the lowest contribution tier might be “we send you an email the day before letting you know where the venue is”…

Kickstarter is kind of a one-to-many escrow service.

The encrypted email provider Edward Snowden used has been forced to shut down, for reasons they are prohibited from telling us. In this case, it’s not hard to guess, and I applaud its owner Mr. Levison for his conscientious and doubtless costly choice. How many other businesses have experienced similar demands from three-letter federal agencies, but lacked either the strength of character that required or the security of circumstances that allowed Mr. Levison to take the high road?

America is a country with secret police, secret law, and secret verdicts rendered by secret courts.

This is the kind of horror story we used to tell about East Germany or the Soviet Union.

Today’s stats: 13.0 kWh total, 2134W peak.

Today’s solar power production was 13.2 kilowatt-hours, with a peak output of 2145 watts.

The sky was dark grey and overcast today. The solar panels peaked at 562 watts, and today’s total production was 2.7kWh.

The inverter says all-time max output so far is 2900 watts – very surprising since the panels are only rated to produce 2650 watts!

I just swapped my fancy expensive desk chair with the mesh back for one of the much cheaper conference room chairs, because the conference room chair has a rigid, upright back. I hate the way normal office chairs encourage you to slump down as you sit! Is it supposed to be comfortable that way? I would rather have some help keeping my back straight.

I used to know this guy who had a real beef with traffic cameras (“outsourcing law enforcement to robots is fundamentally unjust”, he would say); he’d carry around an ordinary spray bottle, filled with one part white glue and one part water, set the nozzle to “stream”, and squirt the gooey mess all over the camera lens, temporarily and nondestructively blinding it.

From Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, here’s a more complicated contraption that can be used to disable overhead spy cameras: it’s like one of those overhead pruning poles, with a linkage set up to activate a spray-paint can, so you can stick the spray nozzle up next to the camera, then pull the cord to blind it.

Beautifully photographed account of a motorcycle trip around western Europe – 6802 miles in 62 days.

It’s been a good twenty-five years since I read my dad’s copy of Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”; I remember really enjoying it but also being aware that the author was smarter than I was, that there was a lot going on that was over my head. It made an impression, though; I bought my own copy a few years ago, when I saw it on the shelf at Twice Sold Tales, but I didn’t get around to starting in on it until last night.

Not twenty pages in, I’m astounded: how on earth did I completely miss the fact that it’s a blatant Sherlock Holmes homage? I was a big fan of the Holmes stories back then, too, so you’d think I’d have noticed. The style, the mannerisms, the physical description, the whole deduction-from-seemingly-insignificant-details performance-art thing, with the narrator playing his Watson role to a T. And then Eco names his Franciscan monk character “William of Baskerville“, just to really drive the point home…

Video tour of Bodie, via quadcopter. I wish they’d supplemented the gorgeous aerial views with some glimpses of the frozen-in-time interiors, which are kind of the best part of the Bodie experience. Still gorgeous, though – especially that closing sunset shot.

While looking up that Wikipedia link I discovered that there is also a ghost town named Bodie here in Washington. Three hundred miles each way? Sounds like a great summer motorcycling day.

Solar panels keep buildings cool: they don’t just produce energy, they save it, by reducing the amount of air-conditioning necessary to make the building comfortable.

I signed up for Internet service at the new house, which is located on Martin Luther King Junior Way East. The customer service rep who took my call must have hit the Tab key at the wrong moment because the latter half of that address got grafted onto the “name” field in their database. I now receive form letters which begin like this:

Dear Mars Saxman Jr Way E,
Thank you for choosing CenturyLink High-Speed Internet. We want to make sure you know blah, blah, blah blah blahblahblabblub

It is hilariously obvious that no human eyes have ever reviewed any of this, and I have no intention of helping them fix their mistake.

A crew from A&R Solar is busy today installing an array of photovoltaic panels on my roof. It’s a 2650-watt system with a ten-year warranty, grid-tied (no batteries), and they guarantee that it will produce at least 2.3 megawatt-hours per year. We haven’t gotten our first electrical bill yet, so we don’t know how much power we actually use, but the contractor estimates (based on the average consumption rate for a house this size) that the panels will supply 60% of our annual electricity. I bet we’ll do even better, since we have brand-new appliances and a shiny new suite of LEDs occupying almost all of our light fixtures. It’ll be fun to see how it works out!

Financing couldn’t have been easier – we got an “energy smart” loan from PSCCU at 4.75%. We’ll pay the loan off in five years and the panels should pay for themselves in seven; after that it’s pure profit, and the system is supposed to last for at least 20 years.

following up on yesterday’s comment about Austra – start with this track: Painful Like. It sends chills up my spine… if you like it you’ll probably like the rest too.

Latest music discovery: Austra. Two albums so far: the first one is very good, and the new one, “Olympia”, is just plain magic. Rich, strange, operatic voice, solid danceable music, soaring lifts from minor-keyed moods. I’ve been playing it over and over for the last three days.

How did I miss the idea of a distributed hash table until last year? This article was published in 2003! I think I first heard the term last year. I suspect that some of the systems I used at Google must have been based on algorithms like this, though I never had a chance to learn enough about them to know for sure.

Kim O’Grady discovers the reality of gender discrimination when adding “Mr.” to his resume dramatically improves his job prospects.

Two home-made teardrop travel trailer projects: this one is 8’x5′, using fiberglass insulation panels as walls and a translucent polyethylene sheet as roof; this very detailed instructable describes a wood-framed 8’x4′ trailer with aluminum cladding. All of these designs seem to start with one of the cheap Harbor Freight trailer kits – and really, why build the trailer from scratch when it’s the habitat on top that you really care about?

Vole is a distributed, peer-to-peer social networking system based on Bittorrent Sync. There’s no big data center; participants’ computers relay encrypted data for each other.

We had a semi-random potluck dinner in the back yard on Friday. It’s fun to have a place where people can come over and socialize – that was one of my big reasons for wanting to buy a house, after all. We hung out and ate and drank and smoked Shelly’s hookah, and eventually moved out back around the firepit and watched logs burn. I think the last guests left around 2 AM. It was fun, but we were tired and hung over on Saturday… uff.

We’re still spending most of our free time working on the house, but the end is near. I redid the baseboard trim in the bathroom yesterday – there was a gap where the old vanity had been, so I ripped it all out and installed new stuff, then painted it. I recentered the mirror, over the new sink, and finished painting the remaining wall with the darker turquoise paint. The turquoise still needs some touch-up and the trim needs another coat or two, but it’s looking pretty good in there now.

The living room won’t really be usable until we get a couple of couches, but it’s all cleaned up and put away now. I leveled out our array of shelves and bolted them to the wall, and we filled them all with books. Ava did most of that; she alphabetized the fiction by author and sorted the non-fiction by subject. Wow. She did almost all of the painting down there, too: red, gold, and cream. It looks great.

How to make a recurve bow out of a pair of skis

Q&A with Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower, via the Guardian. Good stuff; the guy is smart, has a great turn of phrase, and clearly knows exactly what he is doing and what he is risking. I hope his gambit succeeds, because the man is a hero; the feds are most emphatically not the good guys in this story.

Adafruit how-to: make a plug-and-play TOR node using a Raspberry Pi. Once you’re done, you just plug it in to an Ethernet jack, power it up, and it acts a Wifi base station named “Onion Pi”. Simply connect your phone or laptop to this network and your Internet traffic will be anonymized through the TOR network.

This guy in Colorado built his own teardrop-style camper trailer. He has a step-by-step walkthrough of the project, in case you want to build one too.

I love backpacking, and I enjoy primitive camping, but sometimes I think a little travel trailer would be nice too. I might go camping more often if it could be a simple drive out, park, sleep, wake up, make breakfast, enjoy the day event, without all the packing, unpacking, repacking, reunpacking, and unreunpacking that comes with tent camping. Now that I have a street-accessible back yard, I actually have someplace I could store a travel trailer… and it makes perfect sense to build one, since I really don’t have enough projects under way. There’s all this time I spend staring at the wall and drooling, and I could really use another project to work on instead.

The washing machine arrived before I’d had time to drink my coffee this morning. Ava spent the rest of the morning shopping at Ikea while I went off to Home Depot. Then we worked. For hours. I am sore.

Two more Billy bookshelves will expand our bookshelf space downstairs. We had lined one long wall of our old apartment’s living room with bookshelves, but they were stuffed overfull, and the new living room is bigger so we needed to expand.

There’s a wide closet in the downstairs bedroom which came with hardware at either end for a dowel. Strange thing, though: wood, as a material, is less than perfectly rigid. When you stretch seven-plus feet of it across an unsupported space and then hang a lot of weight in the middle, it bends! Shocking, right? So I bought four angle-bracket things with a semicircle at the end, designed to solve this problem; and since they also solve the problem of supporting an overhead shelf, I decided to install one of those, too. And now the bedroom we are going to use as an office has better storage than either of the bedrooms we’ll use as actual bedrooms.

Speaking of which, we have two big chests of drawers which contained our clothes in adequate fashion but which had a bad habit of looming out into the room. Enter one 5×5 “Expedit”: raised up on little feet and bolted to the wall, it’s basically a not-exactly-built-in “builtin”, and while white melamine is not my favorite material it does brighten the room up.

What else? Oh, yeah, I installed hooks on the back of the bathroom door, and I fixed the bedroom light (two sockets, one of ’em wasn’t wired up properly).

Nine of the upstairs lights are LEDs now; only seven incandescents to go. Downstairs, I’ve only replaced two – there are still fourteen more incandescents wasting power and creating heat down there. Oh, well, I’ll get ’em all eventually.

Funny, it seemed like more work while I was doing it than it does now while I describe it.

It’s a beautiful sunny day. An impromptu biker pack formed up on eastbound I-90 this morning, staggered left and right along the HOV lane. I split off and took the ramp north on 405, where I cruised up north with a couple more bikers. In the parking garage, the motorcycle zone – which I had all to myself over winter – was packed full, my bike the last one to squeeze in. Welcome back, everyone.