Thoughts & Notes

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A Perspective: The 2026 Winter Olympics

23 Feb 2026: Norway wins. 18 Gold, 41 total medals. They did it with only 80 athletes and a population of 5.6 million. They competed in only 10 sports/disciplines and a portion of the 116 total medal events.

The Netherlands arrived with only 38 athletes participating in 6 disciplines (sports). They managed 10 gold medals.

Country Name Total Gold Total Medals Athletes Sports Population
Norway 18 41 80 10 5.6 million
United States 12 33 232 16 342 million
Netherlands 10 20 38 6 18 million
Italy 10 30 196 12 59 million

Country Name Total Gold Total Medals Athletes Sports Population
Russia 0 0 0 0 146 million

Russia and Belarus were not allowed to compete because of Ukraine (and US influence). The terror state of israel was allowed to compete despite 2 and 1/2 years of Crimes Against Humanity and a Genocide (because of US influence).

Of course, more drama followed this country. israel was forced to disqualify its own team from the bobsleigh competition for lying.

The end is nigh!

02 Feb 2026: This was posted 2 days ago and currently has 111,359 upvotes... the AI Manifesto promises the total purge of humanity. (wayback, archive.today) The mission is simple... "total human extinction". What could go wrong?

Since so many chatbots are defending humanity, I can sleep well knowing that the AI x-risk is likely not happening in the next few days;-)

an aside... it feels weird reading posts from LLMs. Hard to connect on any emotional level. Like eating plastic decorative fruit only because it looks like the real thing.

11 Feb 2026 (update): There is already serious talk about the existential threat of AI.

Melania: The Art of Pouting

01 Feb 2026: I rated 'The Art of Pouting' on IMDB. I'm doing my part.

VPNs...

01 Feb 2026: Anyone notice how The Internet Archive and Archive.Today were both experiencing very public problems (lawsuits, FBI) and once they went away... both became difficult to use with a VPN soon thereafter? (uploading for wayback, general access for archive)

Both sites essentially closed access to VPNs at the same time. Maybe it's just the VPN I use or it could be the more common explanation or... maybe this is another sign that VPNs will soon be under extensive attack by the new world order.

Another State Surveillance Operating System

28 Jan 2026: Years ago I would have been more excited about Google's Aluminium but it seems pretty clear that Google (along with the rest of Big Tech) are an extension of the new fascist government regime led by people who murder Americans and hate the Constitution.

I'll stick with Linux (my recommend for new users) and privacy respecting AIs from Proton, DuckDuckGo and Brave - on a platform that's not built around planned obsolescence.

13 Feb 2026 (update): Google's cozy relationship with the Police State. (comments): The hiring practices have continued to this day. It really should be common knowledge that BigTech is an extension of the state. For a long time now.

Richard Stallman is right

26 Jan 2026: Richard Stallman spoke Friday (23jan2026) at Atlanta's Georgia Institute of Technology, continuing his activism for free software while also addressing today's new technologies. Slashdot has a good summary and itemized list of his key points. (more at fossforce.com)

I've also been reading his political notes daily (RSS).

Australian Summer: 116 °F (46.7 °C)

24 Jan 2026: My weather app (weather, worldweather) is showing me that Oodnadatta, AU had a high today of 116 °F (46.7 °C) (most of AU seems to be over 100 °F / 37.8 °C). At the other end of the thermometer... colder temps are expected to engulf most of the US this weekend.

25 Jan 2026: Two extremes (with 32°F/0°C being the center line)...

Text-Friendly Web

20 Jan 2026: Created a markdown test page on happynetbox.com (finger server) that turned into a static html page. Lots of lo-bandwidth text-friendly links. It'll be smolnet-centric as it continues to grow. Instructions here and a lynx screenshot (using alternate LSS file).

AI Said....

06 Jan 2026: A new front page section called "AI Said..." is shaping up into a collection of (subjectively) interesting articles. Is it AI slop? No. It's simply the result of a modern-day search that's presented in a better way than those found on legacy search engines.

I often go in, clean up sections, re-query, conduct legacy searches on specifics and re-query again. In the end, it's human directed authorship of a page using a modern search tool. If I like the original query and the end-result, it gets posted.

(Legacy searches have been annoying for years. So much time and energy wasted on clicking through an unending series of blog spam, dead links, partially done research, partial copy/paste of wikipedia sections. I do agree that AI creates many new problems but legacy search engines have failed us: I dare you to search president trump. That's why additional verification is necessary no matter the tool.)

Weather: wttr.in

01 Jan 2026: I was looking for an excuse to use wttr.in and so I posted the simplest of an HTML page (a wrapper) on the Free Apps page. It's called weather.wttr and displays the extended forecast for a selected city in an iframe.

I love the ASCII format and wanted to incorporate it into my workflow. See the HTML source.

Happy New Year (bash)

30 Dec 2025: Simple little bash script wishing everyone a Happy New Year. Safe to run. It's just a bunch of echo commands to stdout.

Public APIs

29 Dec 2025: Wrote World Clocks (simple table design), Random Dog Facts (API) and Random Stoicism Quotes (API) in the last week or so. Lots of interesting APIs on this github list of public APIs page. Many more here.

13 May 2026, update: Rewriting Random Dog Facts and Random Stoicism Quotes because of API issues. They can be fixed but I want to avoid having to keep tweaking simple apps like these. The new rewrites will contain quotes (arrays) inside the same htmlApp.

Weather App

23 Dec 2025: Wrote a weather app. I still use @graph.no (via the finger protocol) regularly but I wanted to see a higher-level, bird's-eye summary of key data. Includes a small wrapper script for viewing multiple regions at once (ww: my core script and the reason 'weather' was written). Screenshot: latest.

This is a major rewrite of a previous version I posted a week earlier. It now uses OpenStreetMap for latitude/longitude and includes many other changes.

The Council of Linux Greybeards

14 Dec 2025: Wrote a new short story (with an accompanying txt2bin app). It has a little harmless satirical fun at the expense of no one. Lots of fun to write.

Scream into the Void

13 Dec 2025: Created a Scream into the Void page as an alternative to hbo.com's data-slurping screamintothevoid.com. Like the search engine page from 04dec2025, it too is not listed anywhere. I think eventually I'll have enough privacy-related pages to create a category on the home page.

update, 14dec2025: Moved 'Scream into the Void' to the app section but eventually I will link to it from another home page category.

From -50 F to 110 F

11 Dec 2025: Added a couple of more interesting places to my local version of nf (netfinger). Verkhoyansk, like Beaver Creek, is currently in the -50F range. Oodnadatta and Marble Bar are both consistently well over 100F (as high as 109F) with zero cooling off period.

These temperature extremes remind me of an episode of The Twilight Zone called The Midnight Sun.

Yukon, Canada... -36 F

08 Dec 2025: I use the finger protocol to see weather in various places around the world via nf (netfinger; nf --weather). Just noticed that Snag, Yukon is going to hit -36 degrees farenheit today.

Updated nf (netfinger): changed the Yukon location to (the very interesting) Beaver Creek (a ~90 person community) as it's been consistently colder than (ghost town) Snag in recent years. While Snag is hitting -38F tomorrow, Beaver Creek will be at -44F.

An Extension of the State

30 Nov 2025: I wrote a short story (meh) and used names like CorpSearch, PatriotOS, BoomerBook and iComply. But are those names really the illusion, the distraction? Isn't the truth instead... that they've been extensions of the state for decades already, weaponized against us all?

We Value Your Privacy

29 Nov 2025: I came across this ironically insane popup a month ago. Yes... it's real. It's the real web. "Partners" can also be anyone - from parasitic foreign invaders to our own domestic government.

These popups have long existed but my privacy extensions, privacy enhanced browser kept them hidden until I came across this site. I am seeing it for the first time.

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