THE NEED FOR NEW

I'm in one of my frustrated apathetic moods today - don't want to 
do anything, but don't want to not do anything. Top of my 
priorities is continuing to go through and update all the 
internet-facing software and devices that are now besieged by 
various evils of the modern internet. Some of this post is actually 
recycled bits of an unfinished one from last weekend when I was 
less willing to waste hours writing it.

I like messing about with software for sure, I've had good fun over 
the years setting up systems new and old in obscure ways. But I see 
them as creations, the goal is the reach the point where they do 
everything that I conceived for them so that I can slap on the 
label of "done" and walk away. This is a pain with 
internet-connected devices lately, with all of the encryption 
software demanding recent libraries to talk to, and even demanding 
encryption when it isn't even required. On top of that, security 
issues make me keen to at least keep updating OpenWRT on my router, 
but the current version is the last that will work on my model with 
only 32MB RAM and already some functions of the OPKG package 
manager are failing with "out of memory" errors. So even though 
that's working fine, and I've managed to collect two second-hand 
spares of the same model to ensure that I should be set for life 
(having figured out the serial port connections, and the TFTP 
firmware flashing procedure, and all the right modules to load), 
now I've got to go back to the start with newer hardware.

I won't really get anything new from the effort of that, nothing to 
look back on and be proud of acheiving, just another device doing 
everything that my old router did, but with the continued promise 
of security. Actually with the last update it was worse because now 
the SSH server won't support the encryption cyphers that the old 
clients on my LAN use, and they don't package a telnet server 
anymore so I can't fall back to that even though nobody is spying 
on my LAN. So now I've got greater need to compile OpenSSH, which 
as I've already complained is giving me troubles because I want to 
do it in a way that fits best without changing too much of my 
existing "done" systems.

Originally I researched and thought about everything and set 
everything up to work just how I wanted it to. I fixed problems 
along the way and got all these systems "done". Now it's all 
falling apart due to the influence of the internet, and I'm just 
not excited about going back and starting again. It's just not for 
me - I drive a car from the 80s, and listen to cassette tapes on an 
old boombox while cooking on a stove from the 70s or turning the 
clockwork timer on my microwave. If things work, I use them. If 
they break, I try to fix them, and I don't give a stuff about newer 
ways of doing them that have arrived since so long as they don't 
add anything for me personally.

A resistance towards the concept of updating things goes back to my 
youth - I've writen before about the value that I attribute to 
engineered things, and by nature I resisted parting with them. 
Later I developed more rational objections to routine updates of 
machines and such. In getting a "new" item, it seemed so often the 
case that no true new value came from the exercise. There would be 
some significant expense, a fair degree of hassle in exchanging the 
new device with the old and setting it up, then always some 
learning and change of routine required to accomodate different 
methods of usage. In most cases no practical advantage was gained, 
in that any new features weren't applicable to genuine use cases or 
simply exchanged one design compromise for another. At the same 
time, a risk was always run that a design issue would cause the new 
device to in fact be less efficient to use than the old, yet never 
would the idea of returning to use of the old device be 
contemplated.

It seems silly now. Not because I disagree with my reasoning, but 
because I realise now that it is such a fundamental and obvious 
characteristic of modern society that it should really go without 
saying. There's a blind faith in the new. A faith that goods will 
always improve in efficiency of use and cost, even though hardly 
anyone buying them really understands the characteristics that 
would contribute towards achieving those goals. Instead the buying 
public is driven by easily manipulated emotions, and some learnt 
desire to always find different ways of using machines, as 
entertainment if nothing else.

Back to my software hassles, the other one that I'm dealing with 
now will be a particularly familiar topic here on Gopher. While 
minimal Javascript-free browsers are my preference, and all that I 
can and do use on this old Pentium 1 PC that I am typing from now, 
the fact is that the horrid bloat of the web and modern mainstream 
browsers are unavoidable for many tasks, especially for someone 
running an online business. Through wise, but I wouldn't say 
exceptionally difficult, software choices I have so far been able 
to keep using a Pentium 3 laptop made almost 20 years ago for this. 
It's a real IBM-made Thinkpad and for everything except the modern 
web it still performs fine, but as Firefox gets ever more bloated 
and the design of websites gets ever more insane, the limit has 
pretty much been reached.

I have its replacement, still over ten years old and still a 
Thinkpad, though a Lenovo immitation by this point. I'll gain 
built-in USB 2.0 and hopefully be able to add an internal WiFi 
card, but loose the floppy drive for the ultrabay and the parallel 
port, both of which I still use. It's a better compromise than a 
new laptop, where the design changes would annoy me in countless 
new ways even if cost didn't put them beyond contemplation in the 
first place. But it's more change and complication just for for the 
sake of continuing to do what I was doing with the old laptop 
before. Which will be coupled with an OS update needed shortly 
before the last scraps of support for the Linux distro currently on 
my laptop end. It will surprise nobody at this point to hear that 
I'll be dodging the move to Systemd.

It's the technological links to society as a whole that try to pull 
me into the endless upgrade cycle going on in the rest of the 
world. With the internet, much as I may protest, it's a battle that 
I'll always loose one way or other, especially with encryption 
spreading everywhere now. It's no different really to the car, 
where I rely on a long list of consumable parts and fluids to 
maintain it, and little hope of making do myself if they become 
unavailable. Or with the phone - 3G will be turned off in a few 
years and that will be the end of almost all my mobile network 
related devices (though I'm one of the few who don't actually carry 
a mobile phone, or own a smart phone at all). My landline will 
probably only last for as long as the ever corroding copper wires 
keep conducting back to the increasingly unreliable phone exchange, 
I can't see them being replaced now that everyone who matters is 
onto the NBN and voIP.

It makes me angry frankly, but really that's pretty dumb of me. I 
get all of this old stuff for nothing, or next to it, because 
everyone in society is addicted to the need for new. I cling onto 
their coattails and grab at all the marvelous engineering that they 
constantly toss aside, cobbling together what things I can reach to 
build my own version of modern life. They don't care about me, why 
should they when it's mainstream society that probably makes them 
all of their money? Why should I care that they don't care? It's my 
own job to make what I can out of their technological scraps.

I guess I just like to find something to blame for my own 
compromises in life.

Now to not upload this post because I can't SFTP into anything 
anymore...

- The Free Thinker