tom jennings

I make things.

Bite the hand that feeds you shit.

Not real keen on chauvinists, tech or otherwise.

West Coast, Norte Americano.

website: https://www.bleeve.me
website: https://www.sensitiveresearch.com
website: http://www.wabiteksabi.com

Last Notes

2026-03-15 23:29:58 UTC

OK I just re-created the reason I got in trouble with libreoffice writer in the first place.
I'm making a printed book, so I need left and right pages.
The front part of the book, maybe a dozen pages, preface, index, colophon, etc, I want no page numbers.
About a dozen pages in, I want to start page numbering, with 1.
Libreoffice can''t seem to do this. Each page style must select "next style" which means the first N pages need to each have style N, where style 1 "nexts" to Style 2, 2 to 3, ... n-1 to N.
Style N then links to "Left page" which links to right which links to left.
It's a disastrous design. I'd done all this and somehow it broke.
Lots of other folks have similar issues with style and the answer from the org is "LO is designed around styles" which is a non-answer.
I will probably punt, break the book into pieces, have the front matter book use one set of alternating styles, then the rest of it another, produce PDFs, and assemble in PDF.
OH WAIT I CANT: the table of contents requires it to be one document.
What a shit show.

2026-03-15 20:33:13 UTC

Fkn Libreoffice has corrupted my 150 page book, and it's been damaged for over two weeks, in a section I wasn't working in.
None of the recovery features I find in web searches exist.
There's a page (8) that is a black hole -- page 7 is OK, page 9 OK, but between is a blank page 8 where inserts or deletes that would wrap text over the page boundary essentially delete the text.
Can't DEL can't backspace, can' select over it and cut or delete, fkn damaged file.
150 pages of months of work. What a fucking disaster.

2026-03-15 19:07:36 UTC

#Permacomputing is about the future. Old CPUs suck (but can be fun). Permacomputing has little to do with #retrocomputing, except insofar as we can examine our past solutions for synergies and such. And pre-enshittification versions of current software. The rest is nostalgia.
Used gear is the future too. There are so many "adequate" systems made in the last 10 years, alone, that meet most peoples needs.
The only non-enshittified OSes today are *nix OSes; freebsd, netbsd, derivatives, and the various linux.
I run Debian 13, as vanilla as I can get for the least effort involved. But linux/etc today are essentially server-class installs used on the desktop/laptop. OK lots of folk on the fedi lurv to wield complexity for it's own sake and that's fine. And eg. Debian is shockingly, wonderfully reliable and given the underlying complexity, surprisingly easy to install and maintain -- if you have the skills.
But I keep wondering about how much could a linux distro be pared back to cut size and complexity? A brutally stripped distro that runs Libreoffice and not much else; and a fancier one with networking (browser memory hogs).
Is there/are there super low end linux distributions I'm not aware of?
I'm not seeing a lot of traffic about permacomputing that aren't entangled with retrocomputing. I'm hoping that's just a feature of my feeds and follows!

2026-03-14 00:21:38 UTC

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The Epson LX 350 is still sold, is a classic brick-shithouse, has serial, parallel!, usb interfaces. 9 wire dot matrix
Sheet or tractor feed.
The brand name ribbon is 6 us bucks rated for 4 million characters. Print head rated at 40 million or 400 million characters.
It has a really effective standby low power mode.
It is an example of what happens when a technology is allowed to actually *mature*.

2026-03-12 16:37:47 UTC

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Lots of old tucson mexican houses/ranches have an inside kitchen, and an outside kitchen under a ramada.

2024-10-02 23:45:25 UTC

Mastodon apps present the fediverse in a bewildering way. What am I doing wrong here? Both apps (tusky, fedilab) and www do this:
I haven't looked in an hour or four, so of course there's a zillion new posts. Let's say I'd read to the top, prior.
I come back, on app pull down, www scrolls automatically in tl;dr way.
The apps present me with an inline LOAD MORE button. Clicked, it inserts new posts DOWNWARD, below, previous. Ok I get it, chronologically correct. But now my relative position is meaningless; how do I pickup where I left off? Impossible.
Shouldn't it hop the focus to the most recently viewed post? Or approximately?
The end result is reading forward, older to newer, then later newer to older (downward), or just go all the way to top/newest and read in reverse?
None of this makes sense to me. I've been at it a year and can't puzzle it out. Maybe I'm missing something? Any hints?

2024-10-01 02:49:22 UTC

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I watched two of ours work together to strip nuts from nut tree branches. One was fetching branches from the nut tree across the street, transported them to our patio, under a chair (I feed them, years now, so they know our yard is safe) while the other dehusked them. They did this for half hour or more, it was wild.

2024-09-18 19:13:00 UTC

Anyone have the resources to read this half inch 1600 vpi tape from 1987?
It's a backup tape of J. M. Hill's (Univ of AZ, Astronomy) FORTH drive, dated 20 sep 1987.
Probably nothing earth shattering on the tape. Seven inch reel with 2 cm (thickness) on it, probably one megabyte.
Even raw block dumps would would be ok.
No idea what hardware it might be from. Probably not hard to figure out.
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/113/160/136/046/179/101/original/a7807bbe3268d13c.jpg
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/113/160/136/048/340/008/original/bfaf22430191d586.jpg

2024-09-12 21:21:09 UTC

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My websites, all static HTML, are Google buckets and cloudflare for https.
They're all passive copies of files on my laptop. I edit locally then gcs "rsync" them up.
Singing the Google cloud complexity is not fun but it is super cheap. Assuming low traffic.

2024-09-05 16:35:40 UTC

I'm in Santa Fe NM doing a bit of work for a friend, borrowed her antique ebike to go eat breakfast...
Eflow E3 Nitro. Original battery still good! She bought it used, at least 5 years ago.
It's like driving a 1930s car. Familiar but alien, nicely simple. No pedal assist! Throttle only, plus pedalling. Reasonably light. Quick enough. Disc brakes.
LCD system a bit wonky from age. Solid machine.
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/113/085/916/133/514/664/original/d6d0983d67c64f3f.jpg

2024-09-05 16:04:07 UTC

I'm in Santa Fe NM, and there's a lot of uber-macho trucks. Many "coalers" (rigged to intentionally create huge impenetrable black diesel soot fogs).
This is the definition of "tiny dick energy". An ugly phrase in an ugly framework, intentionally applied.
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/113/085/792/039/376/264/original/7bc822547d3e1dbd.jpg

2024-09-03 18:26:26 UTC

The execution of in-band data is insane. All of our security problems lead from that. The solution? More of same.
I fully realize the alternative is utterly unthinkable, but there you go.

2024-09-03 03:29:50 UTC

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It is! And fascinating. Nonhuman intelligence. There's some reason for this coupling, though I'll probably never figure it out.

2024-09-01 02:41:38 UTC

Within the last two days, the two boy dogs, headed up by Disco, ja r determined that the cooking timer on the stove, that makes five flat ~ 800 Hz beeps when it reaches time, has some relationship to the animals that burrow into the ground out in the yard.
(Disco is obsessed with the little yard rodents, he catches a couple each weeks and bites them until they stop moving. He calls us out to observe the result with a particular bark at the door.)
When it beeps he, then his boyfriend Devo, rush out at high speed. Every time.
When I nearly duplicates the five beeps by whistling, the boys flew into a frenzy, inspecting my mouth very closely, and snarling at each other in surprise and generally acting shocked and surprised jumping on each other, with pauses to look outside.
Dog science is fun to watch develop.

2024-08-31 00:51:02 UTC

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Well you can enjoy BM or not, I was more wondering about the numbers -- 800 to 3000 jets is a lot of metal flying and landing in a silt pile. I'm skeptical.
One private jet is too many, I agree. But what passes for facts these days...
qz.com is the only source of this number. I call bullshit?

2024-08-30 05:37:07 UTC

Wtf -- 800? To 3000? Private jets? To burning man? How is that physically possible?
https://qz.com/burning-man-private-jets-nevada-desert-black-rock-city-1851634047