Mike Gerwitz @mikegerwitz@mastodon.mikegerwitz.com

Over the 15+ years I've been using GNU/Linux, there are many programs that have become second nature to me. As a hacker, I enjoy tinkering with my system---why use a desktop environment when I could do the same thing with 100s of programs and hand-written scripts...!?

Each day I feel up to it, I'll give thanks to a free/libre program that has made a positive impact on my life, from every corner of my operating system, with the hope that others will find them interesting too.

#thanksfreesw

Over the past year, my GNU Social timeline has gone almost completely silent; it seems that many people have moved to Mastodon and maybe those instances have stopped federating.

Further, GNU Social development has been stalled for a long time.

So this seems like an inevitable decision to give Mastodon a try. I'll start by following people and will post both on here and GNU Social initially. See https://social.mikegerwitz.com.

Let's start with a program that knows how to get out of the way: unclutter.

I don't ever see this program run, and I usually forget it exists. I have it placed in my ~/.xsession as `unclutter -idle 1 -root`, which hides my mouse cursor after one second of inactivity. This is great for me, since on a typical day, the only time I use the mouse is when I use a web browser; otherwise, it gets in the way of whatever I'm reading or typing.

#thanksfreesw

Over the 15+ years I've been using GNU/Linux, there are many programs that have become second nature to me. As a hacker, I enjoy tinkering with my system---why use a desktop environment when I could do the same thing with 100s of programs and hand-written scripts...!?

Each day I feel up to it, I'll give thanks to a free/libre program that has made a positive impact on my life, from every corner of my operating system, with the hope that others will find them interesting too.

#thanksfreesw

A little known fact about me: half a lifetime ago, as a teenager, I studied and practiced illusionism and mentalism for a period of a couple years. I learned a great deal and got quite good at it so that I could help defend others against certain cases that I considered to be unethical deception. I could expose how it was done.

A recent conversation with someone reminded me of cold reading and the Forer (Barnum) effect, which people ought to be aware of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect

The toxic, polarizing politics in the USA has forced me to reflect a great deal on my own terminology in recent years as an activist; it can be challenging to both get one's point across while at the same time not being divisive / polarizing.

I have much to write on this topic, but in the meantime: please consider how you may contribute constructive discourse, rather than hatred and negativity. Where you see problems, present suggestions or solutions, not overt negativity.

Writing As a Means to Another End: https://mikegerwitz.com/2020/06/writing-as-a-means-to-another-end

On writing, exploration, and some personal experience with Imposter Syndrome.

(I feel like an imposter just claiming that I may have Imposter Syndrome; I don't want to offend anyone who may have it worse than me.)

When I'm bored and need to unwind, I apparently enjoy working with regular expressions. Here are some well-documented examples using sed (together with a script to animate them), including things like base 10 multiplication; a dynamic environment with assignment and retrieval; string comparison; and game-like animation resembling cellular automata:

https://mikegerwitz.com/projects/night/tree/regex

Some train of thought reminded me of an article I read many years ago about exploiting properties of ELF to create really tiny executables:

https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html

I remember printing out the resulting hex dump and marking every single byte and its purpose. That article was the first time I took the time to really explore ELF and understand at the lowest level what it is and how it works, and I enjoyed every moment of it.

To anyone who sees me posting on Mastodon and not doing the thing you're waiting for / expecting me to do: my very fussy newborn has made it nearly impossible to get into any sort of flow, and my productivity is at a near stand-still. So I fill much of my little free time with things that don't require much focus.

I hope that changes soon.

I thought 2020 would be something I'd be desperate to forget, and instead it's become a landmark year for common sense civil rights and human decency in the United States. And two of those things happened despite a conservative-leaning Supreme Court. And they're happening under (despite) a Trump presidency.

My thoughts go out to all of the people whose lives are so positively impacted by these changes, and to those who have suffered and still suffer so much from their absence.

A writeup on some of the obfuscation techniques used by Snapchat:

https://hot3eed.github.io/snap_part1_obfuscations.html

I just shake my head at how wasteful this all is. I'm a free software activist. I think of ways to make code more accessible to less technical users. I type this on a system that's full free/libre from the BIOS upward. And this article is about _one program_ that is more opaque than the entirety of my daily computing.