Documenting my attempt to set up my raspberry pi as a CJDNS node. I use a Macbook as my main workstation.

Materials

• a raspberry pi with power cord
• a 32 GB microSD card
• my macbook
• an ethernet cable

Setup

Installing Raspbian on the SDcard (credit to raspberrypi.org)

1. [Download a copy of raspbian](downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_latest), this is the OS of choice for the raspberry pi.

2. Unzip the file into your root directory.

3. After the download is complete, open a new Terminal session. Run

df -h

and take note of the listed devices.

1. Connect the SD card reader with the SD card inside. Be sure the SD card is formatted as FAT32.

2. Run df -h again and look for the newly added device. Record the device name of the SD card’s partition, for example, mine was /dev/disk3s1.

3. To overwrite the disk, you must unmount the partition:

sudo diskutil unmount /dev/disk3s1

1. Determine what the...

Joining the EU has proven disastrous for many Romanians.

Rather than asking what the Romanian people should have done or could have done differently, maybe it’s better to come to understand the way they were thinking and feeling and wanting at the time to have allowed it to happen. In understanding those sentiments, we ask ourselves: how then shall we live moving forward?

It’s taken me a few days to digest the goings-on in Paris on Friday. What follows is my best attempt to hash things out.

Freedom

“They hate us because we’re free.” This always seemed like bullshit to me. Growing up, this was the line we were repeatedly fed in the years after 2001 and it felt artificial. But I see now that it rings true. I heard someone call ISIS nihilists after Friday night, but that is the very opposite of what they are. They do stand for something. Their aim is very specific: a society governed by a twisted religion, where men cannot dance or sing or drink or be merry and where women are traded as objects.

If their intent is on making us less free, I pray that our leaders recognize this and shy away from doing just that. In the years after September 11, our leaders imposed stricter controls on personal freedoms, began monitoring electronic communications...

Quick steps for backing up and zipping your Raspberry Pi image onto a Mac OS. There is a TL;DR at the bottom if you’re just looking for the commands.

Having spent considerable time setting up and installing new software on my raspberry pi, I thought it would be nice to save the image before I did something stupid. Three hours later that short time investment paid dividends when I essentially bricked it by writing over the network interface file. The following steps will hopefully save you some pain.

Listing All Devices

Before putting your SD card in, list all current devices with:

diskutil list

Now put the SD card and run diskutil list again. Look for the new device.

In my case:

Take note of the device name (in my case /dev/disk3). Be extremely careful to note the right device. One of those other devices in the list is your hard drive, you do not want to be messing with...

I’ve come to understand government as a necessary evil: it is a “local monopoly on force”. But how many or few control that force and for how much or little that force is responsible lie in completely separate dimensions. We must study these dimensions carefully to understand the nuance of Bernie Sanders’ oft-repeated self-assessment.

Bernie Sanders calls himself a “democratic socialist”. It’s easy to allow those two words to collapse down into a single point on the media’s liberal-conservative (left-right) line. And they’ll have you believe he’s a radical because of how far left his point lands. But it’s important that we do not mistakenly flatten two orthogonal vectors of government when trying to understand what they mean. Because they’re right: Bernie Sanders is a radical, but he’s not a radical in the dimension they like to talk about.

Let’s step back.

Socialism lies in the...

The goal here is to define an ideal pattern of information access in the most broad terms. That is: we must lay the internet out to allow for cheap and universal information access while protecting the freedom of the individual to set bounds on private information.

The Internet

The Internet has been an enormous leap forward in the development of the organism that is humankind. The network effect of information drives growth at a rate that is something on the factorial order of the osmotic information relay of the pre-internet world. yada yada yada… wtf is he talking about. In a sense, the internet is the brain and nervous system of our organism. Its senses are billions of cameras, microphones, text editors, accelerometers, and more. Its memory lies on servers that blanket the globe. Its strength lies in its distribution, its power in its accessibility by all of its human cells.

...

The following is the syntactically cleaned (but still long-winded) transcript of an encounter with a climate ostrich.

No reasonable human should ever wish to read through the entire conversation. But may this serve in the public domain as a resource for those who wish to separate what is from what isn’t.

Climate Realist Marc Morano Debates Bill Nye the Science Guy on Global Warming

I’ll watch it. But before watching it I did a quick search of Marc Morano’s name.

He’s a communications guy. A political publicist. He’s worked as the communications director for a number of politicians and lobbying firms.

As such I’m going to hold his opinion in a much lower regard than any scientist on the matter. Not that I’m saying Bill Nye is necessarily a scientist, I don’t know his credentials… but the juxtaposition is already false. If Marc Morano would like to do some research and get...

This is NOT sponsored content.  These are my personal reviews of my favorite privacy and security tools

These practices are designed to maintain a reasonable browsing experience while looking out for your privacy. They are NOT the most secure settings. There will always be tension between ease of use and private browsing. I’m trying to find a happy medium.

I. The Browser

Use Firefox. Firefox is a world-class browser run by a world-class non-profit. It has a far more robust privacy policy than any other browser, particularly Chrome.

The Solid Settings:

Firefox -> Preferences -> General

• Make Firefox your default browser.

Firefox -> Preferences -> Search

• Make DuckDuckGo your default search engine.

DuckDuckGo takes some time to get used to. And you will miss the amazing search experience provided by Google. Google somehow just “knows” what you’re looking for. But that’s...

A conservative approach to a pressing problem

NASA gives a brief overview of all of the scientific organizations that have come to the conclusion that climate is warming and that humans are the cause:

Multiple studies published in [peer-reviewed scientific journals](iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article) show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities. In addition, most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position.

Another peer-review publication studied 1,000 other peer-reviewed publications that mentioned climate change. They also found that 97% of those that took a position agreed that climate change was man-made.

If you think you’ve heard alternatives to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), you...