talking, listening

Is it everybody's responsibility to advice. If everybody starts advising, who will be listening. If anybody advises, will everybody listen or will anybody for that matter listen. Will people listen to persons with authority. Will people generally listen. Listening is a capability like many other hard to obtain ones. Talking is easy. That too talking about others mistakes and ones own successes is very easy. It is difficult the other way round. It is very rare people talk on the other side of the spectrum. So, you think people will listen when you tell them that something is wrong and something is right. You dont want them to do the wrong and you would like them to do the right which you thought is right. Do people really care about your opinion. And, are people ready to talk to others regarding the right and wrong. There are plenty of people who know much rights and wrongs and beyond that. But they cant talk, or not interested to talk, or when they talk they cant get their points across, Or they try to simplify it so much that it becomes a procedure and not that higher level thought. Is talking important or the listening. Which ability will make you understand more. There are people who when talk and see the response and decide whether what they talked was right or wrong. Why after so much of human civilization we lack the basic premise of our societal existence, communication.

Why is it so complicated. People want to listen to more of what they know. They may listen to somebody talking about a wrong which the listener himself has classified as wrong. This will cement the wrong in the listener but the same cannot be talked about the person talking. But it does not work the other wary round. The person talking might give up seeing the response. There are situations where people dont want to hear anything which is out of their belief/knowledge system. If somebody has identified a wrong, is it his responsibility to communicate it to the world. Will the world which knows it might be wrong but continue to do so listen to him. Or the person talking has only the responsibility of talking without gauging its effect. Is his responsibility over once he has made his statement. I in many of configuration posts put up a disclaimer relieving myself of all the dangers of my actions which are to be copied by others. Is this right. Thought my statutory responsibilities are over, are my moral responsibilities met.

Much of the research on communication has concentrated and suggested better listening skills. Are these skills to compensate for the bad talking skills. Are we humans better at talking and bad at listening. Why not we concentrate on how well we talk so that we can relieve the pressure on the listeners. Since there is more pressure on the listener to "really" understand. The presenter should prepare well so that the listener gets it. But again, full responsibility on the presenter does not augur well for the communication. But, the presenter is in focus. He wants or commands the limelight. If you have to be special, then your preparation has to be special. As for the listener pressure is definitely there to assimilate as much as possible. But, he is large in number and it is very difficult to gauge who has understood how much. But the presenter will b judged by all the listeners. This gap between the person talking and the person/s listening is broadening day by day as humans gain more insights and form their own "understanding". It is becoming hard to convince people of what is wrong and right. Both the sides have their own argument but both cannot communicate enough to prove the other wrong. If, so, the communication is a continuous debate, which will never be won......Will it....

Endangered/Minority

That is the word I would use for all the minority of living beings. Why? Well there is not much of a problem if we have a problem with the number of chairs in a room. So, do the minority and the endangered lives mean the same? Yes. The minority are always endangered. Or the endangered species are always in a minority. So, if the minority are important, does that mean the majority or the non-endangered species not so important. Well, both are important. How do we know a group of people are endangered? By seeing who is not. So both are co-existing in all forms of societies. Now, you will ask me will they have to co-exist. Well, since they are co-existing we have the problem of minority and majority. What if all unique living beings asked for their own place under the sun. Maybe a different country for all the classifications we have made. The earth is not enough. The universe itself might not be enough considering the number of divisions and classifications we have made. Can a world exist which honors every trait in an individual. Can an individual exist in such a setup.


    Who is important? The endangered or the opposite. Whom should we protect more. Who are more vulnerable? The answer is very clear, we should talk about the minority. The minorities are to be protected more. They are to be brought up in the societal setup. Why should we do it. You are telling me that this will create a problem. If everybody is non-endangered then nobody will be. Correct. Cant we reach that situation. That is a theoretical situation, maybe, We dont know for sure. It is not a perfect science. As humans have continued with killing of non-human endangered species instead of protecting them, in fact going as far as eliminating even the last one, we really dont have much hope for the human minority. Every government has some sort of budget allocation for the betterment of the minority. But when it comes to the real issue of discrimination all the governments turn a blind eye. Some times the minorities themselves dont help the cause. There will always be people from that side participating in majority politics playing the minority card. But by doing this, this individual is doing more harm than all the majority joined together. He is weakening the minority further.

How do the minority, the endangered tell the world this is happening(as though the world dont know what is happening). Should they tell the world what is happening instead of the world tackling this issue. Are the minority confident on this majority societal system that their voices will be heard. I dont think that there are much examples in our society where the endangered have won a major victory. A minor victory here and there is what would have happened. That again, would be politics played by the majority. By giving the minority a little leeway, the majority has again stamped its supremacy. So whom do you fight against. Do the minority have the facility, the oomph in terms of financial, political, moral, intelligence to beat the majority setup. Should they do it. Should they resist the majority. What should be their demands. What if done by the majority and overlooked by the majority will bring better conditions and safety to the endangered.

Whenever there has been talk of safety, some portion of the individual freedom has been foregone. Now, if we see the plight of endangered animals. What is the best way to protect them. Track them. Put a tracker in the body of the animal and give it a serial number, the human tracks it. The animal, whether it likes to be tracked, we dont know. What I gave was just a small example when you ask protection from the majority. Equality of humans has been a myth. Instead of asking to reduce the power and funding to the police, which also can be asked so that the funding starts to flow towards health services which will be direly needed in the nearing apocalyptic world, the minority should ask for equal treatment. They should ask for disparity of treatment to be punished. The demand should be all encompassing. It should demand disparity of treatment by an individual or government should be punishable. I am not asking preferential treatment. I am asking a response at par with whatever response is given by anybody to the majority. Preferential treatment creates one more class in the endangered who come out premium endangered since they know the working of this preferential treatment. This is not going to solve the problem but complicate it.

All the living being have full rights to lead the life they like in their own style within the boundaries of the society. But when the tenets of the society is discriminating people based on many traits, it is time to change the society and its thinking. Societies have evolved and will evolve. If sufficient force is not applied then the society will continue its rot. A society has to continuously change and adapt. The time for change is, always. The society should always look for inclusiveness. But, the people in the society will always look for exclusivity. The society as a whole should fight for removing this exclusivity. Since majority of the societies are majority based. It is the responsibility of the majority to set things right for the minority and work towards the removal of minority traits. That is how equality can be achieved.

Well, What is on my raspberry pi 4

The first thing I install is my client for the cloud based notes application. I use simplenote. It has the advantage that it is available on all the major platforms. There is a terminal client called sncli. This is my go to client.
The next thing is to install terminology for the terminal. After trying out many, I observed that terminology is the fastest on the pi.
i3 window manager. I cannot live without it. None of my Gnu/Linux installations is complete without this. It is lightweight, easily configurable and simple.
For the browser, since I have started using computers I have sided with Firefox. I am at home with this browser. I install noscript, ublock, privacy badger and dark reader plugins. I like it. It has always met my expectations.
For the application launcher i go with rofi. The run menu is shown in a small window in the bottom left corner of my monitor.
For searching on the command line I use ddgr(DuckDuckgo client for the terminal) and surfraw. After installing surfraw I install a small script called menu-sufraw available on github. This integrates beautifully with rofi. Must try.
For the office suite, My choice was OpenOffice before it went to the butcher's table with the Apache foundation. Now it is libreoffice. I like it. It gets the job done.
For my text editor, wait, wait, I use both Neovim and Doom emacs as demanded by the situation. I use emacs with the client/server model. It is quick and very snappy to start and to work.
Feh for my wallpaper needs.
There is one more plugin which I install on firefox, it is called play-with. This I combine with mpv. We now have an awesome combination for playing streaming content on the pi. For this configuration to work there is one more piece of software required and that is youtube-dl. A beautiful example of the unix philosophy working for the modern age of the internet.
Not to forget that all the apps are in dark mode, if available. I like the dark mode. It has been excellent for my eyes. Even now when firefox flashes before loading a tab, I close my eyes for a while. Thank you, Apple, only for bringing the dark mode into vogue.
My hardware setup is already discussed in one of my previous posts.
font-awesome for that "graphics" in the terminal.
d2code for the font, wherever possible. I like its legibility.
I use i3status showing the date, time, empty space, processor speed and the temperature.

Thanks to all the devs/users of all the freedom software. My respect to one and all without which this post wouldn't exist.

raspberry pi os 64 bit on the raspberry pi 4(4 GB)

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any damage to your pi for following any of the instruction below. These instructions are what I have used  on my pi. There might be no gurantee that it might work on yours. You have been warned.

So, now you know that there is a 64 bit beta OS for the raspberry pi. I dont know about you, but from the day I bought the pi 4 I always wanted to run the 64 bit version of any Gnu/Linux distro. I tried many flavors. I tried ubuntu, manjaro and gentoo. I rolled back to the 32 bit raspbian because it was a complete and highly optimized OS for the rpi 4. But I was sad that though the board supports 64 bit OS, we were holding back on its capabilities. The problem as always while distro-hopping is that you have to re-start majority of your configuration and app installs. So, things in the home directory can be moved easily, but other tiny optimizations we do, we forget it. This process has to start afresh. It is not an easy thing to do. The rpi does not fly in terms of computing power.

Anyhow, we are now holding the efforts of the rpi foundation in releasing a 64 bit OS with a more beefy pi with 8 GB. That will be happy news for people running servers on their pis. For us desktop users, the 4GB version will be fine for a certain amount of time. That is a very subjective line. Let us not dwell more on it. It is indeed time to laud the efforts of the rpi foundation for supporting pis from the first generation to the present with OS updates across the devices. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate and thank the rpi foundation and the numerous contributors, beta testers and users for bringing the 64 bit OS to our favorite pi.

Thanks is also for bringing the USB boot support. This make the rpi application more universal. I had a pi 4 which had the sd card slot damaged. I taped the sd card in the slot with much difficulty and then flashed the latest bootloader. There we have it, the pi is now alive again. Thanks again to every person involved.

To start off with the USB boot support.

1. Download the latest 64 bit beta raspberry pi OS(raspbian is now renamed to this)
2. Install it on your spare sd card(8GB min is recommended)
3. Boot your rpi from this sd card
4. You now get a taste of your new rpi os 64 bit
5. Go through the setup and it will automatically upgrade all the packages.
6. reboot
7. sudo apt-get update
8. sudo apt-get upgrade
9. sudo rpi-update          ---Now, be careful here. This installs the bleeding edge kernel an other bleeding edge blobs. This is also a disclaimer regarding any damage to you pi after this. You are on your own. I have done it and many others as well and have not faced any issues.
10. reboot
11. sudo apt-get update
12. sudo apt-get upgrade
13. reboot
14. sudo nvim /etc/default/rpi-eeprom-update
    and change the "critical" to "beta"
15. reboot
16. cd /lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/beta/
17. check the latest files starting with pieeprom-
18. Now run
    sudo rpi-eeprom-update -d -f /lib/firmware/raspberrypi/bootloader/beta/latest-file from step 17
19. poweroff
20. Repeat step 1 and 2 with your ssd
23. unmount the ssd and re-connect again
24. Now the boot partition which is a fat partition will get mounted or you have to mount it on your GNU/Linux.
25. Open the file config.txt and edit the file with the following information regarding the overclocking of your pi(A disclaimer again here. This overclock has been safe on my pi with a fan connected and with heat sinks on the processor and the graphics unit. I am not responsible for any damage to you pi)

 over_voltage=6
 arm_freq=2140
 arm_freq_min=400
 gpu_freq=750

26. If you had slower ssd speeds previously dont forget to enter the quirks into the file cmdline.txt
27. Connect your ssd to your usb3 port of the pi and remove the sd card.
28. Power on the pi
29. If your boot is painfully slow then you should refer to this post. https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=245931


Enjoy the fruits of freedom software and its ethos. Dont forget to spread the ethics of freedom software and this may not include the price you paid for the software.

India, A million mutinees now by V. S. Naipul

A common thread to be observed about anything you want to read and watch about India is that the sources are from people outside India. It is like we Indians lack the ability to look inward. We are so used to see the other state, the other country, the other city. We know so less about ourselves, our locality, our country but somehow we seem to know a great deal about he "other". It is a shocking and fascinating thing. So when Naipul came to India, he saw what we ourselves dont want to see. He saw that we dont want to see. He saw a million mutinees for which the people opened up. There are other trillions which people did not open about. There were several of his mutinees he couldn't prod further because people wouldn't. They wanted him to leave it as it is. If knowing about a country is knowing about its extremes, then to know India, you should be reading this. Indians should read this book. Every Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist & the other plethora of unscientific societies should read this book. It is like a mirror held up to them. People visiting India should read this book. They know the extremes and they know that safe zone now. India is easy to travel an move about in that safe zone.

I loved the book. It is well written. It is well researched. And majority of the people he has talked to are real people and somehow he has made them comfortable to talk about things which people dont talk in their normal sense of mind. It is not a secret. It is just that we dont want to talk about it. He has understood that modern India as it stands today would have been a million pieces if not for the modern advent and administration of the British. But at the same time he has laid bare the brutality, unjustness, usurping, Plundering, Caste politics, Famines and many other synonyms related to these words. What I liked about his choice of interviewees is their innate purity. Everyone wants to be good. Every one wants to do good. But they are result of circumstances. Circumstances are staged by one group and the results spread across the community creating chasms between individuals. These chasms then end up in physical barriers. These then extend to fighting for rights. This then gives rise to leaders, sects, followers and what not.

I loved the way the history seamlessly gels with the present in Naipul's India. The transition from historical perspective to the present is one of the best I have read in any book. It is like India itself where the old co-exists with the modern seamlessly. I love this flow. It just shows how beautifully the author has envisioned India in his travel. Once he catches a thread, on a majority of cases he has followed it on his own because he was not ready to be biassed. This though is awesome. Once he sees that a particular individual is pushing certain things down his throat, he will take only what he thinks applies and then travels around to confirm or negate it with completely unknown individuals.

When you talk about India, foreign nationals and the commercial media is bemused by the mystic rather than the core India. They are also interested in the destitute. So here again, the author has added sufficient amount of both these aspects. But I did not mind much since he tries to juxtapose the mystic, the destitution, the middle class, the affluent class, the billionaires in a complete round up. So if any reader is expecting just "slumdog millionaire" he will be disappointing. This is much more. The narrative is not linear, and I liked that style of writing. It is like when you start to have a preset image of India, he will stop you and take you on a different ride. Only this time, your thoughts change to something else and when you come back to the same topic, you no longer have that previous notion.

The book is thoroughly entertaining and bold in certain aspects. The bold aspects are cleverly hidden and is available only to the more interested and demanding reader. It is not a book to finish in one sitting. It has to be savored. It has to be understood. Ultimately the author is happy with how India has turned out. The last few pages become dull after so much action in the majority of the portion. It appeared as thought the author was finished. He was tired and he couldnt find anything more interesting. And one more noticeable thing is the coverage of south India. Normally majority of the authors stop at the middle and the northern part of India and dont look south. But the author here has spent sufficient amount of time in the south also. There is good work on periyar of Tamilnadu and the wodeyars of Karnataka. All in all, the book is a testament to the never die spirit of India.

Long live the freedom software movement

There have been many examples of organizations taking up GPLd code and trying to spin a business model around it(Let us call it organization A). The catch here is that the code is available in the public under GPL. If an individual or another corporation(Let us call it organization B) sees that the offering is costly and the terms offered are too stifling they still have the access to the same code. Let us say that that A has now sweetened the deal with improvements and additions to the code base and offers that as the premium to B. Now, B has the option of taking the improved deal form A or asking for A to give out the improvements to the original code base since the original code base was GPLd. This is where A loses its head. This is where A drops its towel. This is where many organizations understand that it is not a viable model.

But there have been examples of organizations making money out of GPLd software. The important ones coming to the mind is Redhat and Suse. At a time when even redhat didnt have a commercial offering, suse had only the commercial offering. All these people started working "around" GPLd software. They did not work much "on" the GPLd software. Whatever utilities they developed to wrap around the GPLd software making the users adopt GPLd software was aimed with ease of use and technical support and customization for the clients. This worked and companies were successful with this. The object of business is profit maximization. There are plenty of strategies to do it. The problems while doing business with GPLd software is the ethical dilemmas. You want to be true to the GNU philosophy and you have to maximize shareholders profits. As you start wanting more returns from GPLd software that is where you start spiraling down. That is where you are extracting blood instead of milk from the cow's udder. Now, the money you are making is blood money.

Now comes a biggie who thinks that he knows how to make more money from GPLd software and buys the smaller and a better ethical vendor. Without even having a plan to integrate the ethics and the working of this company. The integration plan is one of the most vital thing for a successful takeover. You decide whether you want the smaller firm to continue with its ethics or completely break it down and merge with your profit making culture. There is no road in between. Many mergers and acquisitions have failed because of this. For big corporations it is better you kill it totally like google or microsoft. Take out whatever assets that can be proprietarized and throw out the GPLd ones. The problem arises when you think of proprietarizing GPLd code. There might be plenty of code written by the acquired company under GPL. But just because you wrote it, you dont own it. It is in the GNU world.

Efforts are on to kill the free software movement. Efforts are on to destroy the free software foundation. Efforts are on to kill the GPL. And this time it is a totally co-ordinated effort from all the bigs. We dont know how it is going to end. But we know for sure that the GPL document has stood its test of time. It has been framed with the core human societal values at its core. It has not been framed for profiteering. It has been framed with the basic human ethic of "sharing". They all thought that they bring down RMS they bring down GPL. They are wrong. They should have done it the other way round, then it might have worked. But, now it is not working. People are sratching their heads. All their lawyers and PRs are working overtime to malign the GPL.

So, clearly now is the time to advertise freedom software. Now is the time for all the individuals and ethical groups to spread the word of freedom software. Now is the time to share. Now is the time to side with the free software foundation and identify the blobs in the free software foundation and replace them with GPLd code since we have already lost the Linux foundation for the blobs. Now is the time to start GPLd software. Yes they are not flashy, Yes they are not easy to use. Now is the time to make them flashy. Make them more usable. Make them more known to the public. Now is the time to celebrate the contributions of one and all made to the freedom software world. Now is the time to provide due recognition to all the developers who work both for earning and for human ethics. Now is the time to spread the names across the public network. Now is the time to dig out the the name sof the contributors on which all the proprietary world of software is standing. Now is the time to tell that Macos and ios are visual shells on BSD code. Now is the time to shout that the flashy PS4s are just an interface to the awesome BSD code. Above all now is the time I request all developers developing for fun for serious ethics to please release their code under GPL and not under any other permissive licenses.

As a long time GPLd software user, I salute all the freedom software developers and thank them from the bottom of my heart for providing the world an ethical alternative.

Long live GPL. Long live RMS. Long live the sharing ethos.

Education and logic

All this while the world has been telling that education is what is going to save the world from illogical conclusions. Yes, education has been successful on many accounts. It has been instrumental in telling the people about their past follies. It has been instrumental in making the people to read what is being presented to them. Is education the know-how of reading? Is education the imbibing of logical thought? Is education the know-how of writing a language. Is the result of education to read? What is education. In India there are night classes for the under-privileged and the senior people. The stress is on learning the alphabet, framing words and understand the dictionary meaning of the words. So once they can read a newspaper, they are educated. Now, what after the person can read a newspaper? Is education not bothered about how he should interpret it? Or should education not bother about the interpretation. Should the interpretation be forced on to the reader like in some countries? Should the interpretation be allowed to run free in all directions like in some countries. What is really the purpose of education? Is it to create a more radical consumer of goods/services/information?

Majority of our educational tools rely on "laws". We are told that we are not to question them. If this is not accepted by the child then the future of his education is a mess. Because all the future information he will get will be based on these laws. If the basic premise is not accepted then the kid will have a hard time to come to terms with the present world. If he accepts, it is smooth travel. He will come out a brick in the wall. Now, the thing is if given an option of accepting or not accepting, if the child chooses non-acceptance of the present laws of physics, of moral sciences, of mathematics, of logic, he has to make some of his own and he does make them as he progresses over his journey of life. This will be made based on his experiences, his interactions, his feedback, his successes, his failures,....The resultant human might become a brick in the wall, a special brick in the wall, a hammer which breaks and disturbs the wall, a builder who brings more brick into the wall. So the result can be pro-system and anti-system. Now, again, the meaning of system and anti-system might be different for different people based on their education.

So how should the educational system work? Should the system put only the questions and extract answers for all the questions from the student? Where does the student search for the answers? If he searches it within the present system, he will agree or disagree. If he disagrees will the educational system allow it and allow him to continue to the next question or try to play logic with his answers? Once the kid comes out with his answers how will he be able to cross-check his results? How is he going to cross-reference his conclusion. How is he going to validate his conclusion. Normally conclusions related to politics/society happens immediately. Either you like it or dont or you are not concerned/affected by the conclusions. Drawing a conclusion is one thing but pushing it down the throat of others is another. There are plenty of people in the "not concerned" sphere. These people can be very easily converted to the other side with a slight nudge normally through emotion altering strategies. The happiness of making people agree on your ideals is un-parallelled and this is exactly what is happening with f^&*b*&* and other walled social networks. All these networks are feeding on exactly this aspect of human education. Either they re-inforce the previous education or try to negate it emotionally. All this is again happening for identity. So, is the job of education to give identity, The general syllabus for all the students point to the fact that we want all kids to grow up in the same "particular" way, the same identity.

Will education save the world? Will education give the superpower of reading what is offered and analyze it, fact check it, prove it right or wrong. Will education make all people logicians? Will all the people of the world be logicians? Will logic rule the world and beat out all the ready to eat "isms"?Will.....?