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22 April 2025 (Tuesday)—5:40:24 AM I got a new black and white laser printer (a Canon imageCLASS MF3010 VP). It works on Linux (Xubuntu 22.04.5 LTS). I'm happy. I've been printing lots of sheet music (primarily sheet music that you can download yourself on HymnWiki.org, but also the new hymns for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, other church songs, and my own compositions, among possibly other things). I've been putting my music in binders in sheet protectors, in alphabetical order. I've got about 500 songs, so far, I think. I ran out, so I'm ordering more. This printer is pretty awesome. Oh, but just so you know, it doesn't really come with instructions (and the ones it does have are unlabeled pictures); it does come with a large list of warnings. Once you finish reading all those and look up the actual instructions for operating it here, you'll realize that the printer is pretty simple to use. One thing you'll probably want to know before buying it, is that you're supposed to plug it directly into the wall (not a surge protector, not an extension cord, lest you have to do that). You can get the Linux printer diver here (for my system, I used the 64-bit version of `UFR II/UFRII LT Printer Driver for Linux V6.10`). The VP in the printer name meant that it came with an extra toner cartridge. As for my old printer, it used to work on Linux, but then it didn't. I tried to fix it, to no avail (except on Windows, and the copy feature). So, I got a full black cartridge in it and I'm giving it to someone who uses Windows. On another note, I've been thinking about making my own book of sheet music that includes most of the sheet music I've engraved. That way, it can all be in one place, it'll be easily shareable, and it'll be easily printable. On another note, Great Value cottage cheese tastes amazing right now. It's possibly the best-tasting cottage cheese I've ever eaten. 1 April 2025 (Tuesday)—6:16:37 AM After reviewing my options for allowing people to contact me, it seemed like getting and linking to a Discord channel was a good option. I got one for HymnWiki.org, too. Discord is pretty mainstream, so I imagine spambots don't flood the channels too often. Discord seems to have a lot of nice options for chatting. I alphabetized my links. One of these days, I should write a script for my Shule text editor that automatically alphabetizes by the HTML display text (rather than the HTML source code). 5 February 2025 (Wednesday)—1:56:09 AM Today, I did a web search looking for the meaning of Row Row Row Your Boat. I found a number of people describing its history, but no one mentioned its meaning, nor the original lyrics. So, I looked up the earliest known publication from publication and read it. Here's what it says:

Row, Row Your Boat OR THE OLD LOG HUT As sung by Master Adams of Kunkels Nightingale Opera Troupe Music by R. Sinclair. Published in 1852. [Part 1] There stands the tree we used to climb, And the mill with its rolling din, And the old wharf boat, there it used to float Where the school boys used to swim. High grass grows on the master's grave, And the river keeps rolling along, And the birds and the bees, the blossoms, the trees, Are singing the same old song. [Part 2] Down by the river our log hut stands, Where Father and Mother once dwelt, And the old door-latch that was worn by our hands, And the church where in prayer we knelt; Years, years have past since that happy time, But the river keeps rolling along, And the rippling sound on the mossy bank, Is singing the same old song. Row, row, row your boat, Gently down the stream All that's past is gone you know, The future's but a dream. Row, row, row your boat Gently down the stream, All that's past is gone you know, The future's but a dream. Chorus [for both parts]: Row, row, row your boat, Gently down the stream, All that's past is gone you know, The future's but a dream. Row, row, row your boat Gently down the stream, All that's past is gone you know, The future's but a dream.

16 October 2024 (Wednesday) I updated the website, today. Now you can download and use some of the software that I've made. I'm particularly anxious for you to try Shule, if you use Linux and are looking for something new. 6 December 2022 (Tuesday)—5:51:19 PM I'm a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. If you're interested in hearing what the leaders of my church have to say, you can listen to General Conference. General Conference is an event that happens twice a year (around Easter and the beginning of October). The Church keeps records of previous conferences, and that's what this entry is about. Here's an M3U playlist of the URLs for the General Conference talks from April 1971 to October 2022 (so you can stream them all in a media player like Audacious or mpv). If you like using the command-line, I recommend using mpv; if you like using a GUI, try Audacious instead. If you want to listen to them in the order they are on the playlist (chronological order), using mpv will probably be easier. You can download all the General Conference talks with wget: • https://www.gnu.org/software/wget/ (main page; on Ubuntu you can do `sudo apt install wget`) • https://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/wget.htm (Windows version) To download the MP3 files, do `wget -i talks.m3u` (or use my download script mentioned in my previous entry: `wg talks.m3u`). There are thousands of files to download (so it'll take a while). As a reminder, you don't need to download them if you're fine with streaming them. If you want more Church-related playlists (including for scriptures, music, radio, and other things), download this. These playlist aren't comprehensive. The Church has more content (such as more languages of scripture audiobooks) than are currently on the playlists that I made.

3 December 2022 (Saturday) I made a makeshift downloader that uses wget, but allows you to add more than one argument, and allows you to queue more things to download after the downloads finish. It only downloads one item at a time (and this is intentional, desired behavior, for my purposes). It also automatically does `-i` with wget on files. You can download it. It might have bugs. Here's the link: https://vertex.alwaysdata.net/downloads/wg.zip The way it works is like this: wg myURL anotherURL someFileWithURLsInIt Then you can run it again while that one is downloading, and it will wait until the other one finishes before it starts. Run `wg -c` if the program crashes or the computer turns off while it's running (or if the program isn't working as it should).

25 November 2022 (Friday) So, we just had Thanksgiving. We had a pre-sliced hickory smoked ham, instead of a turkey. It turns out that we already had the ham (we just realized this fact a few days ago). We have a turkey reserved for Christmas Eve (we have a very Thanksgiving-like dinner on Christmas Eve, too). Much of the reason I’m interested in programming is because of my interest in other creative works—primarily those involving stories. I’ve been making a framework for creating stories. Have you ever wanted a publishing company? I have. I still do. However, owning a publishing company involves a lot of things: • A building, utilities, etc. • Equipment • Employees (probably a lot of employees) • Probably fees, licenses, permits, and similar • An advertising agency, or equivalent • Constant attention (you might not be able let it go for a month and come back to it later) • Success (if a publishing company doesn't succeed, it might have to cease to exist, after a while, and it may not have the luxury of popping back up again when things improve) • And so on and so forth. Did you know, you can accomplish much of what a publishing company accomplishes for free, without owning a business? Well, you can. People even have been known to do it (on rare occasions), but they probably don't realize they’re doing it. The way I have on mind is by publishing a writing framework. Yep. That’s all you have to do: publish a book, and gain some popularity. In fact, you don’t even have to publish a book traditionally; you can make a website that contains the content, or whatever. A story-writing framework is something other people can use to create stories (or derivative works of your framework). The framework does the low-level work, and lets writers focus on writing, rather than nitty gritty world-building. However, because you own the copyright on the framework (and outside of a legal context, you’re the owner of it who can say if a derivative work is official), you can set the rules whereby people can use the framework (including things like royalties, if you want to make money). However, you can’t be greedy. You can’t hog all the intellectual property to yourself (you have to leverage your fans, and you can’t do that if the only right you give them is to be able to purchase and consume your work). You have to share, and give many things away for free. We’ll get back to that later. For now, you need to know that a framework can be multiple things. It could be a story. It could be a series. It could be a guide. It could be a dictionary. It could be any creative work. The important thing is that the framework has a license that allows other people to make derivative works, without giving up certain things. No, it shouldn't be a Creative Commons style license (as great as the ideology behind those is), because Creative Commons licenses give the creator very little leverage over what those derivative works are, and no ability to make money on the derivative works (so, it removes much of the commercial incentive). Publishing companies need to have a say in what they publish, and they tend to want to make money, too. The license is much of what gives you (or doesn’t give you) this say. However, it’s not you that is publishing stuff (beyond the framework), particularly; it’s your fans. The stuff your fans publish is akin to the books a publishing company publishes. Your job is to attract, empower, and direct the fans. Have you ever noticed that some TV shows and movies collect a lot of fans? Have you ever wanted to write fan fiction, but been worried about the legal consequences of doing so? Have you ever wanted to write popular fan fiction (that isn’t just popular with fan fiction enthusiasts)? Have you ever wanted to write commercial fan fiction where you make money? Have you ever wanted to participate in a fan fiction community, but found unsettling or disturbing content that made you change your mind? If you’ve wondered about those questions, odds are, you’ve been disappointed. Why: Because fans are not traditionally empowered. They scrape by on fair use and the idea that the companies won’t sue them, because they don’t care (or more optimistically, because they’re helping to advertise them). Fans, however, can be very ambitious, and need more than this to thrive. They need motivation; they’re not going to get that with 'All rights reserved'. Frameworks are designed to put an end to these frustrations. Anyone can make a framework. I’m not worried about other people stealing my idea (go ahead and make your own framework; I’m still going ahead with mine). So, frameworks leverage copyright law. Derivative works have to follow the rules of the license of the original work (and every work it is derived from). You can set rules like these: • Derivative works have to follow certain family-friendly criteria, and avoid a long list of disturbing content. • Writers of derivative works don’t have to pay royalties on money they earn until they earn a certain amount. This removes most of the red tape that could scare people away from experimenting with your framework. I mean, if you only earn like $100 in sales, do you really want to have to bother paying royalties? People care about that sort of thing. Be compassionate, and only take money from people when they’re motivated to give it to you. Making it free for those with less money is going to be good advertising; if you don’t make it free for them, you’re making it frustrating). Royalties probably aren’t going to be super frustrating for someone who’s already on their way making a decent amount of money. • Derivative works have to include a similar license as the original work offered. This means, you can leverage your fans’ fans, too. It means people won’t be super frustrated when they want to make derivative works of derivative works. Like it or not, you don’t own the copyright of the derivative work (you only own the content they used from it); so, you need to get them to grant a license, too (effectively making their work function more like one of your own). Then you can make arbitrary or random rules such as, for example, these (not all at once in the same framework): • Every story must contain at least three cats, a pumpkin pie, and bread bowls. • The main character must be a child/adult/woman/man/etc. • The story must have under 60,000 words. • All chapters must be named and have a subheading. • There must be at least one illustration per chapter. • The chapter introduction itself must be illustrated (but not take up more than a certain amount of vertical space). • All works must contain footnotes, have a glossary, an appendix, an epilogue and a prologue. • All works must have a time-travel theme. • All works must contain singing characters. • All human characters must have identified surnames and middle names. • Someone must fall in love with the main character in every story. • There must be no romance in any story. • The story must take place in Greenland or Peru. • The primary setting must be rural, but the protagonist must be a corporate executive. • Movies made from the work must follow a certain set of rules. (Yes, that is likely to reduce the number of movies made from the work, though, and narrow down the scope of which movie-makers are willing to make it.) Note that your fans can also add extra rules like this on the license for their work, if you let them. Now, on to the concept of officialness. There are some things that copyright doesn’t cover. How do you handle those: You have a list of official derivative works created by your fans. To get a work on this list, fans have to follow the rules that copyright doesn’t cover (as well as the ones it does, because some people might break the license, and you might not want to bother suing them). Fans have no legal control over whether they’re on the list. Only you have that power (although you may or may not need to explicitly give that power to yourself in the license, to make sure people aren’t offended). Sure, they don’t have to follow your rules if they don’t want to be official, but don’t worry about that: unofficial works are a good thing. This helps everyone. You don’t need everyone to be official; you just need some people to be. And, of course, you can make multiple lists for multiple purposes. Speaking of movies, you should know that movies/shows of a work are derivative works of a work. So, the license applies to them, too (although you may or may not want different licenses for movies, shows, books, etc.) Derivative works need not be limited to stories. Fan art is incredibly common, for instance. Many of these artists are very talented, but they lack the ability to make any money on their art (beyond what they earn from advertising on the pages that publish it, or other tricks like that). Copyright law prohibits them from making money on it, and they’d likely get sued if they tried (especially if their works became very well-known). The art industry is an area of special interest, because it can easily be leveraged without conflicting with traditional publishing, movie making companies and such. So, while it may take a considerable amount of time for traditional publishers and movie makers to get on board using any works that use such frameworks, it should be pretty easy (by comparison) to get individual artists on board, and gain value from their work (and for them to benefit from it at the same time). The idea is for the initial works to focus on becoming popular via independent publishing (and build off of each other). When enough of those accrue, then traditional publishers might be more likely to adapt, participate, and publish works that use this framework. I suppose they’re probably more likely to adapt if they choose to do it themselves than if an aspiring author asks them to do it, however. So, we need to make works wherein they want to get in on the action of their own accord. We need good advertising. Fans are actually good advertising; so, it’s a good thing we’re empowering them, and getting them on our side—but we don’t want to end there. The idea of frameworks kind of disrupts the current fan fiction culture. I mean, people are used to doing things without a license. So, they might be weirded out when they see an actual license that says they can and can’t do certain things. They might resist the fact that they can’t do certain things, even though you’re also giving them commercial and publication license that they wouldn’t have otherwise had. (Which is another reason you want to harness the power of officialness—and the fans of your framework.)

22 November 2022 (Tuesday) Well, things have been interesting. I’m not done, yet.

8 October 2022 (Saturday) I’ve noticed that it can take a long time to access cloud-based digital media purchases. Today, I’ve been making an HTML file that lists my videos (of past purchases, up to about June 2022, when I stopped buying digital videos so much, on account of ideological differences with the companies that sell them; I’m still using my gift certificate money, though!), with direct links on the name of each to the page where I can access them. So, now I can just open up my list of links, examine them, and click on the ones I want, instead of locating them via the websites. The list is finished, now; yes, it’s unpublished. So, apparently, you can run telnet through an SSH tunnel, which I’m guessing means you can have more-secure telnet. I’m planning to make a command-line email client that supports encryption (via GNU Privacy Guard). I already have most of the code written (in a text editor that I made, which can be used to send email), but I haven’t ported it to the command-line (for use in Nano). Speaking of the Nano text editor, I’ve been noticing that, regarding Nano, very few people (I’m thinking like one or two other people I’ve seen online, myself, and the makers of Nano) know that you can make keyboard shortcuts to run external commands, and that you can manipulate text that is already there, too. But it’s totally doable. You can make Nano do pretty much anything you’d want it to (with some exceptions). The trick is to make keybindings in your Nanorc file that utilize verbatim input (with Alt+_v). In the string that is usually just inserted with the keyboard shortcut, you can do macro-like commands (using verbatim input for each keypress of the macro-like command). Because you can do macro-like commands, that means you can Press Ctrl+t to run external commands. So, you can do cool stuff like make Nano open a new buffer with `Ctrl+n` instead of `Ctrl+t; Alt+f; enter`. One of my pet peeves is that The Hobbit movie is rated R, if you get the extended edition (my pet peeve is that is has the sort of content that makes it rated R—not that they chose to make the movie as is rated R). I’m pretty sure it was a children’s book (violence notwithstanding). The previous movie was a children’s cartoon movie. Anyway, since becoming an adult (and especially after the age of, maybe 32, or so), I became more proactive in avoiding media that wasn’t family-friendly. As a child, I actually loved the violence in The Hobbit (like the swords, killing the spiders, and stuff), but as an adult, while it contributes to the story, I prefer to avoid violence, as it can be desensitizing (and make violence fun, where it would otherwise pain you to see it; not only that, but it dulls certain positive feelings that don’t seem to relate to violence). The first negative thing I noticed about violence in media (such as video games and books) wasn’t that it was desensitizing. The first thing I noticed (and I began to notice it as a teenager) was that it made it incredibly difficult to come up with video game ideas that weren’t violent. If you want to be a video game designer, I highly recommend learning how to do it before you ever play any violent video games (and don’t make violent games). You should know, though, that non-violent video games are very possible (and not just physics puzzle games and stuff). If you’ve already been exposed, then don’t lose heart. It’s still possible; you just need to realize what makes a game good. Violence is fun because it’s so interactive (and because it’s dangerous); also, the competition where you can prove your skill. However, those aren’t the only things that make games interesting (and I posit that they can even make games uninteresting; violence can be overstimulating, such that the other things in the game might lose meaning if violence exists); you don’t always need to feel a thrill to have fun. Meaningful things can be fun. Love can be fun. Culture can be fun. Interpersonal relations can be fun. Mystery can be fun. Stories can be fun. Personal development can be fun. Education can be fun. Non-violent adventure can be fun. When you remove violence from a story, you’ll probably notice that you have to start caring about people, and really developing them. I mean, you can’t just kill things off to solve your problems. You have to find another solution. Some stories do this the same way violent stories do, without the violence; that can work, but there are better ways, in my opinion. Here are some rules: • Don’t have characters be attacked. Make the antagonists non-violent, too. If characters are being attacked, that means there’s some big conflict that is probably going to make violence alluring. • Nix the monsters. Try having creatures instead. • Don’t use the level-up system all the time. That was pretty much designed for violent games (there are exceptions, though). Do something else. Yeah, that’s hard if you’re super attached to it, but it can be done. You can let it go. • Realize that challenges, limitations, and even frustration, can breed creativity. Don’t give up. If you keep trying, you’ll probably succeed. • Try making a really good non-violent text adventure. 3-D games often seem to focus on what you do with your hands and what they’re holding. Try focusing on something else, like what you do with your mind and heart, for example. I believe, avoiding violence in media can help you care about good stuff that you didn’t care about before—in good ways. I believe that it can help you be more cultured, empathetic, sensitive, and such. Well, I need to make some peanut butter and honey sandwiches. I’ve been hearing some owls outside. I accomplished most of the stuff on my to-do list, but not all. That’s a good thing—really nice, actually. I have so many things I want to do, but focusing on too many things stresses me out (and I’ve been focusing on too many things). It has been a productive day, though (according to my plan). So, I’m using my desktop computer again. I got extensions to cords and cables, and Bluetooth adapters, and now I can use my desktop where I used to use my tablet most of the time. It’s so nice, especially now that I know more about Linux, and the command-line. Now I better make those sandwiches. It’s late.

Before 8 October 2022 (Saturday) I’m learning stuff about ssh, right now; it’s pretty cool what you can do with it! Did you know you can actually mount remote shares (not just log in to another computer as if you’re on that computer)? It’s super easy, too (especially compared with NFS, Samba, and whatever else), but FYI, it doesn’t work on a proot system (unless it’s the remote device). However, on a proot system, you can ssh into a local non-proot system, and then use that to use ssh, scp, and sshfs. Once upon a time, I knew how to use FTP, but people always said SSH was more secure, and I didn’t know how to use SSH in the same way as FTP. The trick there is to use scp (which comes with ssh) instead of ftp. The trick to mounting is to use sshfs: • sshfs username@devicename:/remote/directory /local/directory/mount/point If you’re using ssh to get into a local device, either use the IP address or put `.local` at the end of the device name. Now, if only I knew how to use it for the same purposes as Telnet (for online text games and stuff). I’ve also learned that you can use rclone to mount DropBox shares. That’s pretty cool. So, that means I could (in theory), like, install rclone here and then maybe use a service to use rclone to mount DropBox and such for extra storage, if I needed it (if rclone is installable here; I haven’t checked that out enough, yet). This site currently does not use cookies. So, you’re safe. Nevertheless, if it’s illegal for you to use this website for some reason, you are not authorized to use it, and you are not part of the target audience.