Hey all! trying to make sure this RSS stuff works the way I'm wanting it to at 2 in the morning!
Im using RuSShdown to add this post (and I used it to make this feed in the first place), but I want to find a different way to do it so that its easy to update when I make a blog post, either find a more self reliant way to edit the XML directly in the Neocities editor or auto update or something, idk
If peeps have any advice let me know in the usual spots!
I finally got a bunch of stuff working on the new Sockpuppet website, including the music browser. Now people will have the ability to actually find something in my vast sea of content!
I still need to finish tagging a bunch of stuff to make it useful but having the functionality in place gives me motivation to do so.
I’ve also improved the “buy box” and added way more streaming providers to the sources (which of course requires more content to be filled out, too), and there’s a bunch of other functionality like being able to browse lyrics and song notes and such from album pages.
The really neat thing is that most of this stuff, even the dynamic stuff, is done using pure CSS! There’s a little bit of Javascript for a couple of things but I have some ideas about how I can remove that stuff, and it’s not like the javascript is particularly heavyweight anyway.
At some point I should release the templates as Publ samples, so that others can use this as a basis for building their own music sites too. Or something. I’m doing a lot of stuff that’s really taking advantage of Publ functionality under the hood.
Anyway, for those who follow me via a feed reader but haven’t added that site yet, it’s definitely ready to be added at this point, and I’ll be posting most of my music-related blogging over there from now on.
#music #web design #Sockpuppet #Publ
Hi again! Sorry for the wait between posts!
With Cohost gone and Elon Musk's Hellsite actively burning to the ground, I decided to join Bluesky - as a digital artist in the internet age, I think it's important to keep my eggs in several baskets.
Unfortunately, that means I've been using Social Media again, and uh... as someone with ADHD, it's really easy for me to fall back into the endless-scrolling dopamine loop.
So I'm back here again!
I don't have much to say about one particular topic, so here's a quick-fire round of a few thoughts and stuff:
If you're not aware, BotB is a site for music jams - they host several one-hour competitions (or two-hour, or month-long, or whatever) to write music based on a given theme.
I'd heard of it before, but a few fellow musicians said it was a really nice community, so I decided to give it a try.
And it's really cool!! There's a lot of friendly people there, and it's fun to hear tons of music from independent artists.
My profile is here, if you want to check it out. At time of writing, there's a big event introducing a bunch of new formats, and I'd also recommend going through that to hear everyone's cool tunes.
Progress on Dreamshine is slow, but good! I'll be starting a devlog here, so keep an eye out if you're interested.
Over the last month or so, I've started rebuilding it from scratch. I have a bad habit of making things more complicated than they have to be, and it was quickly getting hard to manage. Now, everything's either more modular, or handled by a plugin with a much nicer interface!
Furthermore, I've switched the game to full 2D, instead of having 3D environments. I still think the 2D-characters-in-3D-worlds thing is a more fun visual style, but the truth is I'm just not good at 3D modelling. Using 2D maps will help the game look better, and also be less frustrating to produce.
Speaking of 2D art, here's a crop of a character sheet I drew recently!
I'll be sharing the full piece with the first proper dev log. I'm hoping to share a new character with every entry - there's a lot of folks here on the Isle!
I'm thinking about updating the site a little. There's a few easter eggs I want to add, and maybe a proper gallery page for my art.
If there's anything you'd like to see, leave a comment below!
My partner just finished playing Moon RPG!
Now that I'm not worried about spoiling anything for them, I'd like to write a blog post about it specifically. It's easily my favourite game of all time, and I think Dreamshine is very good proof of its influence on me.
Also, I tried eyeliner recently and it turns out I'm super pretty. :3
Probably not super important to you, but it's nice to visibly present as more queer (that's why my hair's pink, after all), so I wanted to share that joy with you!
That's all for now!
I'm not expecting to write many posts like this. Unless I end up spending a long time away from the blog again, I'd like to stick to smaller, more-focused posts instead.
See you next time!
Finished up a new album for Withered Worlds last night, contains 18 tracks, most of which are more experimental in nature than my usual works! But it still has a lot of good piano pieces in there too!
I recently came across several podcasts about neighborhood wireless mesh networks. The first was an anarchist podcast covering Tuscon Mesh, and from there I went looking for podcasts about NYC Mesh as it was called out as a source of inspiration for the group in Tuscon. There were a few, but I think the most interesting to me was an interview some NYC mesh people did with freifunk radio1, a similar organization based in Germany and in turn part of the model the New Yorkers were working from. The Tuscon Mesh interview focused on the basics of what a mesh network can do as well as the organizing strategy and overall goals. The freifunk one spent more time on specific hardware and software as everyone involved was pretty technical, but it managed to capture the spirit behind the project in a meaningful sense too.2 This is going to sound like a jargon-heavy tech blogpost at times which is a little unavoidable (sorry! sometimes the computer person slips out), but I was much more curious about the motivations of everyone involved.
Locally, I’ve seen a number of call them.. alternative ISPs? around here over the years. CondoInternet was one, where a bunch of network engineers struck out on their own (from Speakeasy, I heard?), ran fiber to a bunch of condos in downtown Seattle, and sold it for fairly cheap (wayback machine has 1 gbit for $120 a month in the early 2010s which is damn good for the time). They got bought out by Wave, now Astound. Another was Clearwire - a WiMAX ISP which a friend used because she couldn’t get other service on First Hill. It was, to hear her tell it, good unless it was raining which is maybe not so good if you’re in the PNW. They also got bought out (by Sprint) and then the whole nationwide network was shut down a few years later. There’s also Seattle Meshnet, which I remember reading about when I first moved to the city over a decade back. They had like, a google maps page of locations and I think the idea was mostly to set your router SSID and config settings to some specific value, then people walking by could use it. The furthest I saw it get was two non-overlapping networks by me in Capitol Hill, and it’s now a graveyard of a reddit subreddit which is mainly people from years back asking if anyone’s around and this link back to an archived wiki.
With all that in mind, I’m still a mark for this kind of thing. I like thinking about potential networks, I like thinking about people pooling their resources, and I would love to see an actual mesh network succeed at doing an end around the ISPs. But the tech nerd in me needs to know - why wireless? Why a mesh? And what exactly is the ultimate goal?
The Tuscon podcast actually covers this fairly well when asked to describe the network, but I’m going to rehash it mainly to emphasize a few points.3
When you visit a website, you connect to a physical server hosted somewhere (usually, a datacenter). That may be in your city, or it may be halfway across the world. The way you get there is by connecting over the network to an IP address - namely, from your computer or router’s IP to the server’s. Because they are on different networks, you need a route to get there. There’s not a direct physical line from you to the server, your connection is first aggregated with a bunch of other local residential connections, and then all of that is sent towards a central routing facility - often a local Internet Exchange (one day I’d love to work in the SIX!!), where it’s sent to the most appropriate network to be forwarded on. Each participant can decide the IP ranges they announce as available to their various counterparts. A special case is that of transit providers, which announce all internet routes - meaning, for any IP address, you can give me your traffic and I will make sure it is delivered through my network.
The part that’s a little glossed over is that the companies that have the ability to announce all internet routes solely through their own infrastructure are enormous telecom corporations. Often that overlaps with ISPs or are otherwise companies you know - your AT&Ts, Verizon, Lumen (which has naming rights to the stadium here and is also branded CenturyLink). Other times, you don’t hear about them normally but you’ll see their name spraypainted on a sidewalk above a fiber line, like Zayo or PCCW. Regardless, sooner or later if you want access to the full set of internet routes (and who wants half an internet?) you will be paying one of them for the privilege. And duplicating that work, well, how hard could it be to purchase and operate 100,000+ miles of fiber optic cable?4
The goal here is less to create a completely segregated network as an Internet2 (shit, already did that one, Internet3?) than to replace the path from the exchange to the end user. Does this mean building your own mesh network is worthless? No! By focusing on the last mile of delivery, you are at the very least cutting out the middleman and avoiding a bunch of shitty monopolistic ISP practices, whether that’s content prioritization or just refusing to provide adequate service in certain areas. The prices for transit are not free, but they’re likely gonna be better than anything you’d get residentially. As mentioned in both podcasts, refusing to track or log customer data. And there’s the community aspect too, working together to provide a common good.
The first obstacle here is using wireless networking to begin with, by which I mean Wi-Fi, one of various 802.11 variants, 2.4 or 5.8 ghz or somewhere in there. You know, your typical wireless router.
Whenever a friend is asking me for help debugging their home network, the first question I have is “can you plug in through ethernet somewhere?” Wired ethernet, up through at least 1 gigabit speeds these days, is fairly simple and cheap and easy IF you have close physical access. Many people don’t though, so for a moment, let’s think about some of the stuff that can go wrong over wireless indoors:
Cool. Now let’s go outside. Take all of those problems, and add in trees, transmission power limits, tall buildings blocking line of sight, weather attenuating signal, wind blowing things out of alignment, much larger distances, more interference including things like radar arrays, oops a bird made a nest on your antenna.. the list goes on.
Let’s contrast it with underground conduits carrying fiber. Two strands of optical fiber these days can carry one wavelength of signal that does 100 Gbit/s (or 12.5 GB/s) of traffic each way simultaneously, easy. Need more bandwidth? Turns out you can put multiple frequencies on top of each other and if they’re far enough apart they won’t interact. This is called DWDM (or “rainbow makers” - much better name IMO) and you can do that many times over, meaning the same fiber pair can carry multiple terabits of traffic. The tradeoff is that you need better and more expensive optics to get that precise - but just to contrast, with current WiFi standards even 1 Gbit/s can be optimistic sometimes. Anyway, these fiber paths are vulnerable to their natural predators, the dreaded backhoe on land and the hangry shark at sea, but aside from that are MUCH less subject to all the nonsense going on outside where the WiFi is.
So why use wireless at all? I was very puzzled by this at the start, but it did eventually make sense. The part I was missing I think goes back to what I never understood about the late Seattle Meshnet being so ad-hoc - maybe a fine idea, but without much momentum.5 Further, a bunch of routers individually configured do not a network make. Many routing protocols are fragile and require regular tuning and maintenance. So when I heard “anarchist” and “mesh”, I sort of thought well, how would that even work if it’s not organized?
The simple answer is that it wouldn’t! So both the Tuscon and NYC members talk about this, but the whole “supernode” setup is mainly where you get internet from. These supernodes are located in highly visible places and connected together on a high speed backbone as well as to one or more local transit providers. The “mesh” part of the mesh network is all the nodes hanging off of the supernodes through wireless connections (and then other nodes hanging off them). Go too many hops away, and you will lose significant bandwidth and increase latency (this gets deep into wireless routing but just trust me kay?)
Why not then just make all nodes supernodes and run fiber everywhere if it’s as good as I pointed out above? Well, infrastructure costs, entrenched monopolies, dealing with the local government for every single install, a nightmare of red tape! The current NYC mesh map shows this in practice. So there’s high bandwidth (fiber or microwave point-to-point) links to the supernodes, and then a bunch of surrounding single nodes, as well as hubs which further distribute the signal - never more than a few hops though.
For individual installs, this seems like it’s relatively consistent between Tuscon, NYC, and Berlin - show up, ask people if they want to join, work with them to get roof access and power and do your best to find the signal. Be honest about what they can expect (speeds, customer service, cost of equipment) and see if they’re still interested. Treat people as partners rather than customers (ex. asking them to talk to their building management to get access to the roof, seeing who else in the building might be interested, I heard in another podcast about people doing apprenticeships!)
To come back around then, I was mistaken in that the organization is in fact a big focus here. It influences where they spend time and even the hardware used. Having people working on outreach and installs enables expansion to anywhere you’re able to make inroads, and that amount of friction is minimized because there’s so many possibilities. Didn’t work at one building? How about next door? And using WiFi allows for purchase of high volume cheaper electronics which can then turn around and serve the signal to a phone or laptop pretty easily. This gives relatively quick setup for new sites but with community members still involved to guide the process.
Broader network strategy revolves around shoring up places where you really do need consistently high bandwidth and reliability and investing in those links instead of using commodity equipment and hoping for the best. In managing the network, rather than there being no direction and anyone can do what they want with their node, it’s more… group stewardship, I think? People join in where they feel they can contribute.
Alright now that I have all the tech stuff out of my system, I would really like to talk about the social and political aspects for these projects. The Tuscon Mesh people were very upfront about not knowing any networking when they started which - wow - and also, cool. I always love when people aren’t precious about technology, you know, whatever OSPF I guess it does the thing. Funny enough, some of my favorite people I’ve known in tech professionally are the same way. I like the explicit anticapitalist focus and the stated motivation of showing people what’s possible in terms of community rather than just like, an ISP but not so bad.
Berlin didn’t get talked about too much but a lot of the tech sounds like it’s being prototyped out there (in some of those enormous european meshes, Guifi being another) and then is incorporated into documentation and software making it easier for smaller networks to pick up on them (even if written in german lol). There was an entire section about hardware they’ve used and had to move on from, but to be honest this is like shop talk in every tech job ever and a little refreshing that they’re to the point of complaining about such a quotidian aspect. Finally, it seems like their local government is backing them in a meaningful way both in providing sites to mount antennas and also funding?
Part of this calls back to “why wireless” but it does seem to me a huge advantage that with a mesh you can start as soon as you have the first few nodes linked, and then point to that when you go asking more official bodies for discounts/permits/funding. Negotiating from a place of power, as opposed to a traditional non-profit where it seems things are much more about funding and partnerships (and then on the other side metrics around results or whatever).
Last but not least, NYC, which struck me as the most uh “traditional tech people doing this for fun”6? What I liked about it though is that none of them seemed to be in it for things like ancap blockchain bullshit. On the contrary the results and what they got enjoyment from was like, yeah, the networking, but also really pragmatic and ended with connecting more people to the network and not having to deal with their crappy ISPs anymore. There was another podcast where the NYC Mesh interviewee mentioned the best part being the installs, because people get so excited about participating.7
In most tech places I’ve worked, there’s a huge aspect to the work which at least rhymes with the anarchists in Tuscon just trying a thing (fewer box truck orgies though). Where it’s like, someone suggests something, and someone else goes “no that would never work!! wait, maybe it would?” and then everyone goes off and 3 hours later they made something brand new and amazing. I wish there were more opportunities for those people to apply the same exact skills to something like this, rather than yet another way to sell ads and user data.
There’s a bunch that’s still unanswered here of course. In one podcast an NYC mesh member was talking about potential DMCA litigation around torrenting, which, yep I was wondering about that. When you’re connecting back to the internet I assume there’s always gonna be the risk of legal action, and I wonder how dangerous that is in the longer term. Similarly, sites and services directly hosted on the mesh - does that ever become a thing? Tuscon emphasized in-person community as more a priority and that makes sense to me. I did read an article about a greek? (I think?) network once where people were writing their own blogs and stuff hosted locally but I think that was mainly because the outside internet connectivity for the whole city was so terrible, so maybe it’s the external sites being even worse that tends to jumpstart that ecosystem.
Funding and continuity seem like another risk, what if the money for transit at the exchange runs out? Or people just get bored and stop showing up to keep it running? Similarly, reliability and how much leeway folks get compared to a traditional ISP (and speed as residential fiber service continues to make inroads). My hunch is that some of these projects will succeed and others will have schisms and all the normal drama that tends to happen with any group. But I dunno, some of these networks are still growing after like a decade, and even if a few do fold well points at the private companies that got bought and rebought or went out of business in the first section
Selfishly, I really would love to just shadow some of the people installing all these devices for a few weeks and maybe I’d have a better answer to some of my questions (and just cuz it seems cooooool 👀). In the meantime, I hope they continue to grow, and maybe one day we’ll see something similar up here.
