# On life, Music, PPC, GopherProxy, Kindle
Things have been odd lately. It has been hard to play music. For years this was all I did. Music for me was always spontaneous. I never wrote songs as such. I jammed, worked out musical phrases, then hit record. Lyrics were always taken from images that occured to me as playing the instrument parts (drums / guitars / bass / keys / whatever).
Maybe I should attempt a different tactic. Sitting down and hashing out a song in a text editor first. Planning out the segments of it. Fleshing out the whole before I pick up any instruments. This will be new for me...
A recent blog by Jirka[0] mentions once again the GPD Pocket. I have been lusting after this device since I first saw it online. The form factor of a PPC (ish) but with hardware that makes it usefull by being able to run a modern OS. I keep hearing about issues with Linux where the screen display is rotated. More research on my part will need to be done to see if this issue can be overcome... so basically if it is worth the large pricetag.
In other hardware related news: I attempted to move /usr to a thumbdrive on my Arch Linux laptop, since it has a 32GB SSD. The issue I had was that the thumbdrive would not be mounted during boot, which would cause boot to fail due to the lack of init. Maybe on my next days off I'll try again with /usr cleaned out except init, then once booted have the thumbdrive mounted to /usr. The clearing out completely is what of course caused the booting issue. For right now I have rsync'd /usr back to the SSD.
Solderpunk speaks of his professional job versus fantasy[1]. As an oil field worker, I have hated my job at various points -- sometimes for years at a whack. I was a programmer / IT person in my prior life and came to the patch as an electronics technician for the dollars. After 13 years in things have changed a bit. I have an office and do not work 18 hour days out in the weather anymore. I have also developed personal philosophy that involves strict seperation between work and private life. My fantasies typically revolve around living in a cabin like it was 1820 (because in my mind the events of the 1830s led to the portions of the current system I dispise, therefore it is too late). I super relate to job related loathing, however.
Slugmax decided to use my gopher proxy[2]. That's pretty neat. As to HTML handling - I never gave it much thought that HTML would be used via gopher:// until I found MetaFilter. At some point I got distracted, but I thnk my plan was to simply do a str_replace("<html", "<!-- html", item) probably lcase'ing the <html... then doing a preg_replace for <body ...> to insert the -->, same with closing tags. Or just saying screw it and replace with ""... Also, thanks for the PDF stuff, I'll stick it into the copy I'm using on my next days off.
I have been using my Kindle a lot more since I deAmazon'd it. I found a huge book site on tor, and have a bunch on my reading list. So, this brings me to my thoughts on piracy. As a musician, I love pirates. I made friendships with Ukrainian pirates to promote my music. When I would release an album, I'd upload to bandcamp, archive.org, and provide a copy to the pirates directly. The majority of my traffic on bandcamp came from these pirate sites. No apologies. If you think differently we'll have to agree to disagree.
* [0][gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jirka/Phlog/2017_10_01.txt](gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jirka/Phlog/2017_10_01.txt)
* [1][gopher://sdf.org/0/users/solderpunk/phlog/delusional-ambo-fantasies.txt](gopher://sdf.org/0/users/solderpunk/phlog/delusional-ambo-fantasies.txt)
* [2][gopher://sdf.org/0/users/slugmax/phlog/new-gopher-proxy](gopher://sdf.org/0/users/slugmax/phlog/new-gopher-proxy)