Vagrant Netizen's topics - tribe.net

Atviro darbo vajus - ne vien Internete -- The Campaign for Working Openly not only through the Internet

2009-04-14T19:49:54Z

Consider the following:

http://www.ms.lt/en/workingopenly/atvirodarbovajus.html

Atviro darbo vajus - ne vien Internete --
The Campaign for Working Openly not only through the Internet

The description of the project suggests overlaps with both the vagrant netizen ( http://tribes.tribe.net/netizen ) concept and the pubwan ( http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/Pubwan ) movement.

There is an overall tone of social entrepreneurship, which I suppose is to be expected in a former Communist country. The need to help set people up in paying gigs is undeniable, and if the public domain is a means to that end, we can have no objections.

There is always the question of how to balance the possibly competing objectives
of public domain content (except as it clearly notes otherwise), and advancing the "Min?i? sodas" brand...as consultants to Lithuania's corporations.

<blockquote>Our target group is independent thinkers with marginal Internet access, especially in the countryside and towns of Lithuania. Independent thinkers are people who not only think, but regularly return to their thoughts and develop them further. In this sense, they are self-directed, self-educated, and willing to work for free on projects they care about. They are slow to agree with others, and so everywhere they find themselves in the periphery. They are united by a shared value of "caring about thinking".</blockquote>

The advancement of pubwan, of course will entail similar dilemmas. We wish them well.

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New Version of Internet Explorer

2008-07-31T20:01:08Z

The public library has 'upgraded' to a newer version of Microsoft Internet Explorer. It is nice that this version offers the 'tabs' feature I had come to like in Firefox, but it also offers some value-subtracted features. Two value subtracted features that I have noticed concern how the 'File|Save As' feature is implemented. First the default format is the proprietary .mht (Microsoft MHTML) format. This conveniently packages the graphics, framed pages and the like into one file, but is unreadable by 2.0.0.1. Next library trip I shall check to see if a more recent Firefox is available. The new IE offers the option of saving as HTML, but the resulting files no longer identify the original URL. This is a major headache when I would like to add a link to a "to do" list (see http://geocities.com/n8chz/webtodo/ ), but the file which is the source of the link uses relative addressing for internal links. Another annoyance is encountered during offline reading of .mht files on IE 5.00.2920.0000. Displaying these files really slows it down, and right mouse operations such as 'Copy shortcut' (of central importance for creating 'to do' lists) tend to 'blank out' display of larger files.

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The vagrant netizen emails

2007-10-02T16:49:14Z

You can email the present netizen at n8chz AT yahoo DOT ca, but don't expect a timely reply.

I currently use Yahoo! web-based email. About a year ago they "improved" their front-end to be more interactive and to have more of the look and feel of a client-type email program. This has definitely slowed down my use of the system, as my email method, like my browsing method, is based on offline reading, and highly optimized use of connect time, which I am not in a position to take for granted.

The old Yahoo! email system implemented the inbox as a hypertext page, with the individual messages implemented as linked-to hypertext documents, with subject headers as anchor text. I could simply use their check-box system to delete spam, and use the right-mouse "save target as..." functionality to "download" messages. This had the disadvantage of requiring at least one mouse click for each message processed in either fashion, but in the new system I haven't yet figured out a method of "downloading" messages other than copy-paste, which requires an instance of Notepad for each message "downloaded." As a result I have become pretty much unreachable by email, even on a vagrant netizen's timetable.

I see this as an illustration of <a href="http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2006/09/see-your-favorite-author-on-salon-and.html#116948013467284268">my "loss of innocence" hypothesis</a> concerning technological progress, and of course the accompanying evolution of "business models." What Moore's Law giveth, bandwidth dilution taketh away. In the early nineties, my portal to cypherspace (for all of $100/yr) was a dial-up UUCP bulletin board of the "public access Unix" variety. Offline mail reading was as simple as downloading /usr/spool/mail/lori. At 2400 bps (probably less than 1/1000th the connect speed at the library where I currently exercise my netizenship) I spent a small fraction of the time (connect time or PC time) per message.

Hopefully I can find an email system (preferably free/gratis, alternatively "nominal" fee) that is both "web based" and "batch oriented." Sounds oxymoronic, but such are the needs of the vagrant netizen.

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The vagrant netizen tries 'wget'

2007-07-20T19:51:06Z

Wget can be got as part of the <a href="http://www.weihenstephan.de/~syring/win32/UnxUtils.html">UnxUnils</a>.

I have found this utility very useful in conjunction with my <a href="http://geocities.com/n8chz/td070602.html">web "to do" lists</a>.
I come to the library with a /wget directory on my USB key.
In this directory is wget.exe, wget.hlp and wget.GID (the last of which appears to have been generated by wget).
Also is a file called 'webtodo.bat,' which consists of the following single line:

<code>wget -e robots=off -rH http://geocities.com/n8chz/td070602.html -l1 -p -T30 -t5</code>

'robots=off' causes wget to disregard robot exclusions, which is bad netiquette, but is a practical
necessity for vagrant netizens, since we often get only one shot at an online session, with weeks between such
opportunities, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/">wikipedia</a>, <a href="http://alltheweb.com/">alltheweb</a>
and many other very important sites exclude wget.
The greed of 'robots=off' is offset by the modesty of '-l1' which instructs wget to go only one level deep.
'-T30' and '-t5' prevent wget from waiting indefinitely, since connect time is often of the essence for the
vagrant netizen. '-p' makes sure you (usually) get your pages with pictures, and '-rH' gives you recursion (r)
and spanning of hosts (H). Without the -H option you only get files from the host at which wget is aimed.

At the library, I pull up 'My Documents,' select (in my case) "Travel Drive (F:\)" (your brand and drive letter may vary),
select folder 'wget,' right mouse|edit file 'webtodo.bat,' providing the URL of the current web "to do" list.
Close 'webtodo.bat,' saving changes, then double click its icon. It runs in a command line window, which disappears
(in XP, anyway) on exit. I typically check my web-based email while the wget batch runs.

Back home, on my own computer, I do offline reading of my bulk downloads.
This can be frustrating due to several shortcomings in wget:

1. URL pathnames are replicated as local disk pathnames, so html files tend to be leaf nodes in the directory tree.

2. Un-suffixed URL filenames are saved as un-suffixed files on the USB disk.

So far, the most efficient method I have found is as follows:

1. Start|Search|For Files or Folders, or right mouse|Search... on the \wget folder icon.

2. Look in: F:\wget (or whatever drive letter the USB gets assigned to)

3. Containing text: <html

4. In 'Search Results,' rename (F2) files with .html extension as necessary.

5. If picture frames come up empty, try editing source, replacing (Ctrl-H) <code>src="http://</code> with <code>src="../</code>

6. Save (in Notepad) and Refresh (in Firefox or other browser) after any html edits. Save pages to hard disk for future reference
as desired.

7. Re-run search utility for non-html files such as .txt and .pdf

All in all, a pretty cumbersome process, but in the offline reading. Makes much more productive use of connect time
than manually clicking through to do lists, and can actually retrieve several weeks' worth of reading material in a half hour,
making some measure of boredom relief and alternative (noncommercial) reading material possible without paying actual $ for residential
internet access.

Needless to say, suggestions for and discussion of other retrieval agents, and their usefulness on public access computers,
are always welcome
here at the Vagrant Netizen tribe!

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The vagrant netizen blogs

2006-12-22T17:56:06Z

My usual method for participating in online forums is copy-and-paste;
pasting pre-written text into text boxes in forms; the usual space
provided for interactive websites. I read and write between library visits.
The visits themselves are rare opportunities requiring efficient use of time;
if you were to observe me in action, my activities would be seen as a rehearsed,
and in real-time mindless, frenzy
mostly of uploading, saving-to-file, zipping directories, copying and pasting to posting
forms, and clicking links in my to-do lists.

Most places (as here at tribe.net) I post plain-text.
I use inline HTML tags in forums I know to interpret these tags in a consistent and predictable way,
which is not very many places in today's typically value-subtracted online world.
In wikispace, I use the local wiki-markup dialect, to the extent that I understand the local dialect.
This sometimes results in embarrassment, as markup-language-learning by trial-and-error
requires the learner to use the wiki or other engine interactively.
My own modality of vagrant netizenship requires a reversion to some of the
methods of batch processing. I would like to think this has led to marked improvement
in the quality of writing I have posted online, but it has definitely impaired
my ability to learn new markup languages and dialects.
Nowhere in my growing webliography has this been more apparent than at blogger.com,
where I post entries to my blog, which can be seen at n8chz.blogspot.com.
While I take some pride in some of the writing I have posted there,
I am very embarrassed about the sloppy formatting.
The problem, it seems, rests in what blogger.com calls 'templates.'
As is to be expected, there is a language for making templates.
I have yet to learn this language. For me, language learning is
always a trial-and-error process. One thing which can definitely
hasten this process for me is a non-interactive tutorial, which is to
say a textbook, or better yet a synopsis or reference card that furnishes examples.
The difficulty I have had so far in obtaining such tutorial resources using
search engines is troubling. It leads me to wonder whether the template language
I seek to learn is itself proprietary. Such a discovery would dampen my hopes for the blogosphere
as an at least partial revival of the communicational democracy of Internet Classic, which is to say the Internet's age
of innocence prior to the Clinton-Gore-era commercialization.

Another problem I have had with the blogger.com interface (both plaintext and their brand of pseudo-HTML)
is their handling of line breaks. I hope to find a more batch-friendly way to interface with blogger.com.

My hope for the coming year...that by the end of 2007 the present (Vagrant Netizen) tribe
will have a membership roster! I can't be the only one...

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Repertoire of computer techniques of a vagrant netizen...

2006-07-31T14:02:14Z

_techniques using diskettes_

The world of vagrant netizen venues is justifiably paranoid about
floppies. I've seen diskless workstations used as public terminals.
A less austere example: my own usual venue used to[?] use a bootkit
package that self-destructs the current power cycle upon detecting a
floppy that is "system," "unformatted," or "non-FAT." I assume there
are also unadvertised features, as I had `noticed' a high
`correlation' between crashes of the autoboot type at the library, and
presence in their floppy drives of floppies I had purchased
IBM-preformatted, never re-formatted, but floppies which had been
unfortunate enough to have taken a spin in the floppy drive on my
Linux box.

I have had a much easier time with floppies since they upgraded[?] to
Windows XP. Perhaps the library people view the more recent
Windows-supplied floppy hygiene (or DRM) methods to be more
serviceable than those of the other software $upplier, whose name
I don't quite remember. At any rate, for me it has been an
upgrade in the meaningful sense, and has literally multiplied the
effective amount of bandwidth I have been able to utilize. This is a
college library (which is {so far still} open to the public, in case
you were wondering) so I can only imagine that MCC's XP upgrade has
spawned a creative revolution in the north side suburbs.

The single most frustrating thing about floppies is their miniscule
(by today's standards) capacity. The public terminals here do have
USB-ports. I haven't brought any USB peripherals to the library to
see if they work. I probably won't any time soon, since even a $20
flash thingie is a little non-austere by my miserly standards. Also,
even if I did own a USB key (is that what they're called?) it might
not do the trick, as neither of the Linuces I'm running as of yet
offer USB support. I could download a kernel, but I would first have
to chop up a large file into floppy-sized subfiles and reconstitute
and somehow figure out how to compile and/or install later. This
approach is clearly within both my technical and (near term) economic
capabilities as a vagrant netizen, but I can't help but think there
must be a better way. This is a problem of the `bootstrap' type.
Maybe I'll break down and simply `buy' a Linux distro CD.

_the vagrant netizen and operating systems_

I have seen Mac-OS's in public libraries, but it's been a while. I
haven't yet seen any kind of Unix® or Linux, but have encountered
proof-of-concept in the form of a book of the `travel' genre I once
(very cursorily) browsed at one of those ginormous book$tores.
Apparently (at one time, anyway) in Amsterdam there were public access
sites where one could play with Linux and/or the Internet itself. I
was unclear from the context which sector (public, for profit,
nonprofit, akademic etc.) these computer labs were part of, which is
why I express some skepticism as to their continued existence.

In public access provisioning, as in most aspects of the computing field,
the dominant operating system is clearly Windows®.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as Windows itself implements
many features of cardinal utility to a vagrant netizen, such as USB support.
Also, the sheer generosity of Bill and Melinda Gates to vagrant netizens
and vagrant non-netizens everywhere--and even the occasional nonvagrant netizens whose
cyberlives take them to the public library now and then--must not be underestimated.

_techniques using file compression_

My favourite file compression format is TGZ, or `tarball,' as it has
come to be known. A traveling vagrant netizen might be wise to use
ZIP by default or at least for some backups, as it seems to have more
universal acceptance and can be used, it seems, at a sizeable
majority, if not all, of the public access sites I know of.
I have decided to upload a zipfile to illustrate my own use of
file compression as a technique of netizenship and samizdat.

Try the address http://geocities.com/n8chz/scratch/current.zip
or perhaps http://geocities.com/n8chz/scratch/current.tgz

Usually my current archive contains whatever at the time
is the current installment of my ongoing `to do' list. The current
file in that series typically bears the name `webtodo.html,'
with archives namespaced as tdYYMMDD.html. An index
(which probably won't be -quite- up to date if you visit it)
is maintained at:

http://geocities.com/n8chz/lori.htm

The role of the tdYYMMDD.html files themselves in my
online technic is explained in some detail in the files themselves,
so I won't go into it here. Suffice it to say that the
primary `technology' is the `webbit,' an invention of Fravia:

http://www.searchlores.org/rabbits.htm

next...

Medium-term economic goals of a vagrant netizen...

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Public access site locator

2006-04-22T19:46:10Z

Apparently the State of Delaware will be implementing some sort of public database of public access sites for those of us (in Delaware anyway) too po to get internet access at home. It's nice to know there are people in policymaking who get it.

http://www.state.de.us/ltgov/News/2002/news-locator.shtml

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Vagrant netizens and bandwidth issues

2006-02-03T18:50:13Z

Since I have no internet access at home, my only connection to the Internet is at a local public access site. Fortunately I have found one with non-diskless workstations, i.e. diskette drives that aren't absent or somehow "dis-enabled." "Unfortunately," I haven't yet found one that supports read/write portable media any larger (in capacity) than a 1.44MB floppy. The word "unfortunately" is "quoted" for a kind of de-emphasis because I don't believe in looking a gift horse in the mouth. In a pick one universe, I'd pick a CD-RAM over a DVD-ROM, but who am I to say that the needs (or should I say interests) of vagrant netizens outweigh those of, say, starving film studies majors?

Since I usually find it convenient enough to keep a 10-pack of floppies in my purse, and I can usually find my way to the public access site once every 1-2 weeks (let's split the diff and call it 1.5 weeks on average) I calculate (guesstimate) the average rate of data transfer between myself and the Internet at (hold onto your lidar gun) 133 bits per second.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that my appetites in online content tend toward the textual, factual and sign-ificant as contrasted with the multimedia, disinformational and noisy (or noificant). Although my age (40, the "age of reason" according to Sartre) makes me a "leading edge baby boomer," my level of informational sophistication is still at the pre-television stage.

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Vagrant netizens and online fora

2006-02-03T18:48:46Z

27 Jan 2006

Online fora, of course, include such phenomena as mailing lists,
newsgroups, webboards, wikis and perhaps blogs.
One thing I have encountered again and again with web fora, for a disturbingly long time,
is actually two things. These two things combine to create a sort of "Goldilocks effect"...
Most online fora either move way too fast for me to catch up with or way too slow for
me or seemingly anyone else interested.
An example of the former is the <a href="http://actuary.ca/">Rebel Oatpost</a>.
An example of the latter is the seemingly
<a href="http://geocities.com/n8chz/PubwanWiki/DeadWiki.html">dead wiki</a>
called <a href="http://consumerium.com/">Consumerium</a>.

For this reason, readers who approve of courtesy are requested (when reading
or writing to the present tribeboard, and perhaps (or not) no other)
to be patient with a small few practices
which might be considered of questionable netiquette or taste in conventional fora,
such as (for example) digging up "old" threads.

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Welcome to the vagrant netizen tribe

2006-02-03T18:44:25Z

On average, "http://geocities.com/n8chz/lori.htm" access the Internet every 1-2 weeks, so my posts here as anywhere will be sporadic. I access the Internet from the <a href="http://www.macomb.edu/library/default.asp">Macomb Community College library</a>, which is available to the public with the understanding that students of the college have priority. Since classes run Monday-Thursday, I am most likely to be online Friday-Sunday.

This is the only public access site in the Detroit area that I know of that allows for writeable removable media. Unfortunately, the only supported media are 1.44MB floppy disks. Nevertheless, I find this sufficient to the tasks of maintaining an unscripted website.

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