Category: Make Orwell Fiction Again

Quarterly inventory – 2026 Q3

Dear FutureMe,

Today would be a good day to do a quarterly inventory.

How is your personal life going?

How is your work life going?

How is your Volunteer Service life going?

Future Me

Personal Life

Near the end of July, I will retire from 37 years of “doing computers” for my employer.

I have done so.

I have yet to get a good routine going. On the other hand, I have had a day or four that were wonderful.

Mom is gravely ill

At the beginning of the year, she was fine, if a little unsteady on her feet. The underlying problem is that she wasn’t getting enough exercise. In years past, she would do some gardening and go on trips with Frank. There were four falls in four months, although thankfully, she hadn’t broken any bones. But she was unable to get back up on her own feet by herself. Her cardiac condition has been deteriorating, and her doctor forced a pacemaker on her. Within a day, she was in the emergency room at Kaweah Delta and couldn’t get herself out of bed. She’s been almost entirely bedridden ever since. From KDDH, she went to a physical rehabilitation nursing home but didn’t really make much progress. Insurance stopped paying, so now she is at home getting palliative care. I’m visiting almost every day, but her health is in slow decline.

Twitter/X

I deactivated my paid account on 2026-07-02 because these unhelpful people couldn’t figure out how to get me logged in via email with a second-factor via SMS. I never did find out why my account was flagged for lockout. My suspicion is that what I was reposting was deemed offensive by some, and they reported me, and no one at Twitter is tasked with reigning in butthurt bullies even when it leads to the loss of a paying customer. But it worked: I’m off Twitter now.

Weekend in Las Vegas

I tried mobile ticketing with the Las Vegas monorail, and that was a disaster.

Actually, on the way out of the monorail, there was a placard announcing “This way to Freedom Fest”. Huh, I had heard about that from the Andrew Heaton podcast. I looked up their agenda, and yes, I would have really liked to have heard from Andrew and Spike Cohen. I went to see how much it costs, and … $250 for the day. Oof, I’m out. By now it’s already 10 AM, and the day would have been over with by 4 PM (and there would have been downtime too as they break for lunch).

So now I’ve spent money for two nights on a hotel room, $50 for a mediocre breakfast, felt scammed by the monorail (although really it was just bad software programming), and essentially napped and played a video game. Just staying home would have been better. Well, I hoped Jimmy Carr would be funny.1

But really, I would have been far better off getting a room in the Wynn, where the Jimmy Carr show was, and doing the Thursday night show (cheaper room rate) instead of the Friday night show. If I’d simply done a one-night stay and turnaround, I wouldn’t have tried to mess with the monorail, and I wouldn’t have had to walk outside in the heat and wouldn’t have paid for a rip-off breakfast buffet.

Retirement Life

I explored a few new computer languages to learn. I think I’ll go with Racket, which is a version of Lisp.

One thing I’ve wanted to do for four years now is to 3D print some button covers for my Anker PowerConf S500. There’s a whole story behind using it in a Zoom meeting every week as a portable microphone in a room of 30+ people, but fighting the fear of needing to scream at people: DON’T TOUCH THE BUTTONS!!!

And, by the way, stranger, welcome to the meeting. But please don’t touch the buttons.

That is to say, the Anker PowerConf S500 has four buttons on the front, but only one (the power button) is a press-and-hold-to-activate button. The other three are insta-kill for Zoom.2 The middle button for answering a telephone call: wow, does that ever break Zoom. One must actually power down the PowerConf S500, unplug the dongle from the Zoom laptop, Windows registers the microphone as gone, plug the dongle back into the Zoom laptop, and then power up the PowerConf S500. Windows registers the microphone as present again. Zoom reattaches. Meanwhile, the online meeting attendees are filling the Zoom chat with messages that they cannot hear anything anymore.

It’s a little stressful.

The in-person people want to be helpful. They reach for the speakerphone to pick it up and hand it to the microphone runner. Sometimes they touch the insta-kill button. Sigh. 3

Nicely enough, the Racket programming language and the OpenSCAD computer-aided design program are a match made in heaven. Here’s my button:

This is from the underside; the top has smooth curves.

Anyway, this quarter, the real reason I bought the Anycubic Photon Mono resin 3D printer was realized. And I had a lot of fun getting Racket to emit an OpenSCAD file directly. The only thing I didn’t try was to get the edge that will be glued to the PowerConf S500 to curve in the same way that the PowerConf S500 curves. It doesn’t curve much, so glue ought to be enough to fill in the gap. But the perfectionist in me would like to find out the Bezier curve of the face where the three buttons poke out and then slice away that top plane (in the Z axis) to match the curve.

Work Life

I have built one last mail relay server to replace one made in 2009. The one in 2009 was a big mistake (Tenets of IT #47). But to test it, I need to be able to use swaks from many places. The security team has been a little slow to update the firewalls to let boxes and networks talk to my new server. I finally got it done, and every time someone sends an undeliverable email, my server sends not just the bounce but the original message! This will vastly help the people who have configured systems with bad email addresses. Their biggest problem is identifying which system or process is generating the bouncing email.

I got my retirement going-away lunch on Wednesday, July 22, 2026. There were probably more than 25 but fewer than 30 people in attendance. I gave a speech about my 37-year journey in IT; I’d set the timer for seven minutes4 and finished up 15 seconds before the timer went off. 🙂

Volunteer Service Life

On the drive to Las Vegas, I listened to a fabulous podcast episode directly tying to what our organization does. It was just wonderful and made me grateful to go on the trip.

Clubhouse volunteer

I’ve started volunteering at a local clubhouse two days a week for 4 hours a day. Mostly, I’m a janitor, but I also run the cash register, selling sodas, bottled waters, and candy. There was a board meeting, and it looks like they would like me to become their IT guy too. Really, they need a server to run CiviCRM, but thankfully I was given a Raspberry Pi 5 as a retirement gift. My personality wants to price out a refurbished Dell Optiplex with an LSI 9207-8i connected to an ICY DOCK MB326SP-1B disk enclosure running TrueNAS over six SATA SSDs…. This project could quickly become unwieldy before I even start. A friend asked if I couldn’t just do it on a Raspberry Pi, and sure, I could.5 I just need to plan to eventually build a low-cost robust server and migrate away from the Pi. I also have a leftover Protectli Vault V1210, so I’ll set that up with HA Proxy to let the local box host CiviCRM and a Nextcloud instance.

Chairman for New Year’s Eve Party

I have volunteered to be the main planner/chairman of our New Year’s Eve party. The fun part so far has been that I recorded the audio of the two planning meetings (so far) and (installed and) used my local LLMs to turn the audio into summary documents. Next month, I’m going to ask if we can start buying a texting service so that I can use a web page for texting to communicate with volunteers.

SF 2026 Master of Ceremonies

For our most recent dinner-and-a-speaker event, I got to be emcee. A nice thing is that this service commitment gave me motivation to lose some weight, and I did drop twenty pounds over eight weeks. My clothes for the event certainly fit me better than if I had not lost the weight. A bummer is that I lost my hat. I loved that hat67. Perhaps it will show up in some sort of lost-and-found box, but I probably won’t hear about that for a week.

  1. Yes, he was funny. ↩︎
  2. Well, two of the three are insta-kill; if you tap the Bluetooth button while already on Bluetooth, nothing happens. ↩︎
  3. I actually sent in a product enhancement request to Anker for a firmware fix to make all the buttons press-and-hold-to-activate buttons but they didn’t implement that. I understand that: No company of mass market consumer appliances wants to complicate their technical support by first having to ask, “Which version of the firmware are you on?” Heck, how would anyone even figure that out? ↩︎
  4. No-one remembers anything if one talks too long, so brevity is the essence of a good speech. 37 years in seven minutes, with thank-yous and everything! ↩︎
  5. The major problem with using a Raspberry Pi as a server is that /var/log gets written to the SD card, and writing to it is continuous. SD cards are built to store data; they are not built for continuous writing – they wear out after months or a year or two. If you know that it will wear out and die, you build a routine of backing up the SD card periodically. Then when it dies, it’s not a catastrophic loss of data. ↩︎
  6. I’m surprised that I didn’t post about my hat back in 2024. The first one I bought was from Etsy, for $32. It is a green baseball cap with embroidery that says “Make Orwell Fiction Again”. Along those lines, I later deleted my Google account. I wanted to buy these hats for Christmas gifts, so then I went with Rockatee, which was a mistake. Those were $27 apiece, but Rockatee didn’t deliver. Well, they didn’t deliver until I threatened to have my credit card company rescind the payment. But by that time, it was too late for Christmas. I placed a new order with Amazon, which did arrive in time, but those were $35 apiece. Rockatee shipped, so I ended up with product, and I did pay for them, and then I had extras to give away as gifts. ↩︎
  7. I had deleted my Facebook account way before. ↩︎

Google chooses misandry

I recently got a Future Me email (an email sent to my future me):

Dear FutureMe,

Today is International Men’s Day. Every year, Google celebrates International Women’s Day with a Google Doodle. And every year, Google gives the finger to International Men’s Day. Can you spell misandry?

I deleted my Google account today. I don’t need misandrists in my life.

Me, November 22, 2024

I also deleted my Google account on the theme Make Orwell Fiction Again. I have a hat I bought for myself and as gifts. It seemed hypocritical to have a Google account and be promoting Make Orwell Fiction Again.

Google might have recognized their own misandry and decided to treat men with as much respect as they treat women with a Google Doodle on November 19. But I would not bet money on 2025 being that year.

“Wicked: For Good” – Disney dials Orwell up to 11

The name of the movie: Wicked: For Good

I don’t know that I could come up with a more Orwellian name for a product than that.

There is this word: “wicked” which means morally evil, sinful, of vice, and intentional wrongdoing.

There is this word: “good” which means just about the opposite of that.

Putting these two words together in your product name like that is … perverse.

Wicked, even.

Not good.

Anyway, this post was originally written on 2025-10-21. I went to the movie theater this weekend and watched Tron: Ares 3D. I liked it. Unfortunately, it was a Disney film; I wasn’t thrilled about throwing dollars at them. Of course there were trailers for upcoming Disney movies, and Wicked: For Good was one of them.

SMH.

Orwell would be turning in his grave.

Today, I received an email from twelve years ago

Twelve years ago today, I sent an email to myself via FutureMe.org

I included a link to a YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yw1Tgj9-VU

That was the link to Linkin Park – In The End (Official Music Video) for a really long time. But when I try to visit it now, Google denies it, saying I must log in, first.

What is weird is that I can remain logged out and search for “Linkin Park – In The End (Official Music Video)” and YouTube does show it to me, but at a different URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVTXPUF4Oz4

The email I sent was about Edward Snowden and his (then) recent whistleblowing activity.

Edward Snowden was a part of the NSA, but his trust fell apart. He had to blow the whistle, but then flee to Russia, to escape USA persecution.

It should have been the ultimate shame of the USA government that they were not trustworthy enough for their own citizen to face an honest trial in the USA.

me, September 15, 2013

I, too, had seen the YouTube video of the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress that every American wasn’t getting the terrorist treatment. Here’s another copy of the video – the spicy part begins at the six minute mark. Shortly after, Edward Snowden blew the whistle.

Nothing has really changed, though.

The government still surveils everyone without a warrant. They still subvert elections.1 They still use taxpayer dollars to astroturf Reddit to push narcissism like it is a good thing. C’mon, liberals: band together to fight your imagined (insane) oppression! Only your clicks can save our self-esteem!

Well, that and the occasional premeditated murder. Hooray for those murderers, though! Amiright?

Wikipedia couldn’t get Charlie Kirk’s assassination off their front page fast enough.

Almost all the major media vilified Charlie Kirk after his death. He was popular, talked sense, and held people’s attention (and they don’t). It wouldn’t be so angering if they weren’t flat-out lying about him. They happily pervert what he says to make it malicious, and then they hold him up as malicious to justify their vilification. It is the classic straw-man argument.

Not almost: all the major media suppressed the Iryna Zarutska story for two and half weeks, because it didn’t fit their narrative. And when they were forced to acknowledge it, they used it as a platform to decry the conservatives for getting uppity about wanting to not be murdered.

You don’t hate the media enough.

The only good news is that Banksy made a splash, with a recent painting. What sort of perverse world do we live in where this is good news?2

Jeffrey Epstein was taken care of, and Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison for trafficking hundreds (if not a thousand) children to absolutely no-one. Half of Congress wants to protect the child rapists, and Congressman Vince Fong has still not signed the resolution to expose the child rapists.

If I’d known then what we know now, I’d have started giving away “Make Orwell Fiction Again” hats twelve years ago.

I somewhat would like to send another email to myself via FutureMe.org for another twelve years in the future.

But with the state of the nation today and the direction it is going, I’d have to generate unimaginable horrors to temper what the future could look like.

  1. As it turns out, Russiagate was fraudulent and an authorized government action. The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story by Twitter and Facebook was done at the behest of government actors protecting their desired candidate. ↩︎
  2. The good news is that with this, the UK government was confronted with their behavior. ↩︎

Amazon (Audible) stole from me

Another instance of Make Orwell Fiction Again.

The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man was a purchase I made in 2020 or 2021. It was purchased with gift card money; my mom’s boyfriend bought me 12 credits worth of an Audible subscription for Christmas. I registered the code, and used the gift card / subscription to purchase this book.

I listened to the book in 2021:

It’s there in the middle:

That 12 hours left text is an artifact of hitting the Start button again, after having listened to it once.

John Perkins wrote this autobiography. He says his job was to convince leaders of underdeveloped countries to partner with USAID (an alleged CIA front) to take on huge loans for development. And if the leaders (or newly elected leaders) don’t go along, they might happen to die in airplane accidents….

This book is particularly annoying to certain really corrupt people in government. It is not surprising that it would end up on Big Brother’s to-be-memoryholed list.

So, I’d paid for it, downloaded it, and listened to it. But many months ago, I noticed that in my Audible app, it switched to “Unavailable.”

Today, I reached out to Audible support, and their story is that the book was moved to Plus Catalog. By moving it to Plus Catalog, they also got to remove it from my library.

If I want to listen to it, I’m going to have to buy it again.

Thieves.

That’s how I reconcile their web page saying:

Can I keep titles marked as “Buy for $0.00”?

Yes. When you select Buy for $0.00, the title is yours to keep forever.

versus their customer support rep telling me that they have moved the title to another category, and I’ll have to purchase it again if I want to listen to it again.

And now, what is particularly Orwellian, is that within the the Audible web page of my list of titles I own, The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man has disappeared. I foolishly didn’t take a screenshot of it in there before reaching out to Audible support. But when I did the chat session with the Audible customer support rep, he went ahead and updated my account to make it align with Big Brother’s view. I asked him about that, and he blamed it on automated systems.

Either way, I cancelled my membership. Why would I continue to do business with a company that abuses me by taking my money and then deciding they can change the deal?

pfSense 24.11 is not good

I had purchased the Netgate 3100 from the company because I thought that would get me the best compatibility and support. Well, an update was made available: 24.11-RELEASE (arm) and I made the mistake of applying it six days ago. My whole router/firewall has crashed thrice since then.

I’ve been pretty unhappy with Netgate for a while now, so a couple of days ago I pulled the trigger on purchasing a Protectli Vault V1210 Mini PC1. I’ll install OPNsense on it and duplicate what I have in the Netgate. Then the Netgate 3100 will go to the landfill.

When I bought the Netgate appliance, I didn’t know about the shenanigans the Netgate owners were doing with their staff. I wish I had known that; I would have started with something other than Netgate.

In the Make Orwell Fiction Again category, I remember reading several articles about how the Netgate owners screwed a former employee, and it ended up in lawsuits. Those stories have now been memory holed. Sigh.

Later, I found a definite bug in their SMTP over TLS implementation, in the initialization routine. Mind you, I’ve been doing SMTP for more than twenty years. I know how to do SMTP via telnet, and can do really low-level commands with it. Everyone with that particular version of pfSense would be affected by not being able to do SMTP over TLS to an outside mail server because of this initialization bug.

I wrote up the bug with the steps to duplicate it, and I tried to submit it to Netgate technical support.

Their answer was “You don’t have a current support contract. Buy a support contract, and we’ll work on it.”

I am not paying you to fix your shit. You should be paying me for so clearly identifying where your software fell down.2 The pfSense user interface under System > Advanced > Notifications has a checkbox to Enable SMTP over SSL/TLS. This should work, and it did not. I went through the steps at the command line level, and everything was there and workable. The certificates validated, and email flowed like it should – if I did it manually.

That they wanted me to pay them to fix their broken software is galling.

I do miss the days of Novell, where their published policy was “Yes, you need to pay to open a support ticket, but if this turns out to be our bug and not something you could have fixed on your own by RTFM3, then we will refund you your money.” I think in the twenty years I was a GroupWise admin, almost every support ticket I opened with them ended up being zero cost for us. Once, the support technician said that yes, they had already known about the bug, but the Technical Information Document (TID) was only a day away from being published. Heh. If I’d waited a day, I could have RTFM’d the TID and not bothered with opening a ticket. Yes, he refunded us the support ticket cost. Sure enough, the next day the TID was published, with exactly the same steps the support technician walked me through to solve the problem.

  1. I would later buy the Vault V1410, because really, I need more that two ports to support my wireless network as a DMZ network ↩︎
  2. I’m pretty sure it was an extra carriage-return character when calling OpenSSL. ↩︎
  3. The Novell folk were always nice and polite, so in this case it is Friendly manual ↩︎

The surveillance state makes things screwy

One of my volunteer service opportunities is to record speakers at meetings and then put the recordings on a website. I use the Sony ICD-UX570 Digital Voice Recorder, which I’ve talked about before. I take the MP3 file and edit it using Audacity, trimming off everything before and after the speaker. Then I export the audio with a smaller bitrate to make a smaller file. Lastly, I rename it and upload it.

Today, a friend called me, and asked if I could burn a recording to CD. His friend, the gentleman who spoke, is almost 80 years old, and he would be best served with a physical CD – none of this Podcast Feed nonsense or USB stick which his truck may or may not be able to use. Sure, I said. This should be easy.

Okay, first I tried Fedora Workstation KDE Spin and got errors. I tried Brasero first, but it was super grumpy. Then I tried K3B which is my old favorite, and it was grumpy too.

I gave up and went to a Windows laptop. Did I want to use Microsoft Windows Media Player or Apple iTunes?

I went with iTunes because I’m not a fan of anything Microsoft.

Freaking iTunes worked, but….

What the hell is the name on this CD?

audiocd:/Philip Kerr – 01 – Game Over – Track 01.wav?device=/dev/sr0

At 80 years old, I’d be acutely aware of my mortality.

Oh! That is certainly what I want this 80-year-old man to see when he pops this gift CD into his truck CD player display:

Philip Kerr - 01 - Game Over

If I’m him, there’s no way I don’t think to myself: What the hell? And then he’d have to say some Hail Mary’s to apologize to God for the cursing.

This gentleman’s name is not Philip Kerr. I did write his name in the various properties fields in iTunes. None of those appear to have come over.

I know that the music industry wants to keep tabs on every sound file ever, so they can in theory collect royalties. But this was my recording, done live and in-person.

This is just screwy.

And apparently, this isn’t a problem on the CD, it is a problem in Fedora. I didn’t know that yet. All I got was the Orwellian vibes.

Okay, back to Fedora KDE Spin.

Ooooooooffffffff.

Thank goodness for Perplexity.AI. It turns out to only be an 8 step problem.

One: Check group memberships – must be a member of cdrom – I’m good

Two: Adjust K3B settings

K3B > Settings > Configure K3B > Programs > Permissions > Change Permissions > Apply

Three: Add a system policy

sudo vim /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/85-cdrecord.rules
polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) {
    if (action.id == "org.freedesktop.udisks2.filesystem-mount-system" &&
        subject.isInGroup("cdrom")) {
        return polkit.Result.YES;
    }
});

Four: Restart services

sudo systemctl restart polkit

Five: Update udev rules

sudo vim /etc/udev/rules.d/99-cd-burner.rules
SUBSYSTEM=="block", KERNEL=="sr[0-9]*", MODE="0660", GROUP="cdrom"

Six: Reload udev rules

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules

Seven: reboot the computer.

Eight: try to burn the CD with K3B.

Thank goodness it worked.

I had forgotten that CDs are as small as they are. The older gentleman actually had two recordings on file, one for 45 minutes and another for 55 minutes. That’s too much for a single audio CD. Heh.