=======
 Books
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This month was themed with the local censorship reaching YouTube,
employing DPI to drop some of the packets directed to it (making
YouTube videos challenging to watch without censorship circumvention
tools, but still possible to extract information out of), while
claiming that those are Google's technical issues. From personal
observations, even casual users are unhappy about it, discussing "VPN"
(by which they mean proxying, but apparently even non-VPN proxying
software advertises itself as "VPN" now: just as X.509 certificates
and TLS are advertised as "SSL", and numerous other common
inaccuracies), though apparently understanding the situation even to a
lesser extent than it is viable from the currently available
information. There are other things going on, of course, of the
violent kind, but those do not affect daily lives of most people as
directly.

I decided to revise my backups, including those of public
(non-personal) data, and to look into bookbinding: maybe will try
making paper backups of books. That is, print and bind physical
books. Books are relatively information-dense, and such backups may be
useful in case of an even worse censorship and isolation.

So far considering an A4 laser printer (likely Brother, I hear good
things about those), which is relatively small and inexpensive, and
some ISO 9706-compliant paper, which is also inexpensive and easy to
acquire. That would suffice for A5 books with single folding and
stitching, which is a nice bookbinding method, and A4 books (perhaps
the majority of books of interest are like that, and hard to reduce to
A5: PDFs and scans of textbooks) with individual pages, bound using
binding screws, which would not be as nice, but easy, and still
long-lasting (unlike gluing, as with "perfect binding", although I
hear that some people reinforce such gluing with side stitching, even
though side stitching is said to be only suitable for thinner
books). Or maybe I should aim an A3 printer at once: books themselves
would take more space than the printer would anyway, and it may be a
relatively good use of money. Or not as good, if things will finally
improve here.

While considering which books I would like to print, I decided to read
a few as well. Started reading a few philosophy books, though only
finished one of those so far: "Think: A compelling Introduction to
Philosophy" by Simon Blackburn. It looks good, even though it is
brief, and yet again I noticed that I read books in a wrong order:
would have been better to read this one much earlier, delaying some of
the others, but better late than never. Perhaps I should pick future
ones more carefully, though I imagine it can be tricky: as with most
things, reading goes well when there is an interest, which may spark
unexpectedly, and which is tricky to plan for.

But now reading a history book: The Cambridge History of Russia,
Volume III (the XX century). This is the topic most censored and most
actively rewritten here, and quite interesting to me now, since it is
hard to not wonder how the current mess came to be, what led to it.

Other than that, still slowly working through the physics textbook
(still chapter 6, solving problems after it, 1-2 per day), and skimmed
some RPG rule books (Ironsworn in particular looks nice, and freely
available, though I still have not tried to actually play any such
RPGs), which also seem potentially useful to have stored.

Maybe I should look into some e-zine (or other periodical, blog)
archives: I imagine that textual ones (including, say, LaTeX sources)
can be also quite information-dense and fun to read. Especially if
there is nothing else to read. This whole situation gives me
flashbacks to boredom in the pre-Internet times (back when it was not
available to me here, that is), without decent books or guidance for
those.

Meantime, I have finally set USB flash drives for an off-site backup:
flash memory is not ideal for backups in general, but more robust than
HDDs when it comes to physical transfer. 256 GB thumb drives are
inexpensive these days, a little above $20 here; Kingston ones
actually have less usable space than even 256e9 bytes (possibly
starting with 256e9, which also includes spare and bad sectors):
something close to 231 GiB, which is 227 GiB of total space with ext4,
215 GiB of available space (though perhaps it makes sense to disable
space reserved for root on such USB flash drives). Write speed was
about 1 MiB/s on average, though apparently higher once I switched to
writing from a laptop (since the workstation had occasional USB
disconnects) and started writing onto another USB stick via another
port. I skipped dm-integrity for those, since wiping would have been
too slow at such a speed, and without wiping there are errors on ext4
creation; besides, that authenticated disk encryption support is
experimental, and would have reduced the available space even further.

In other news, I have leveled up at pull-ups a little more: switched
to single sets of 16, though the last one is challenging, and it took
a while. Apparently reached a plateau, at least with the current
exercise regime and diet, though my aim is just to stay in a fine
shape, which does not necessarily involve ever-increasing numbers of
repetitions.

Speaking of a diet, I tried a peach cobbler for the first time,
loosely following the <https://preppykitchen.com/peach-cobbler/>
recipe (but with a little more flour, to reach a suitable batter
consistency, with less sugar, with cinnamon added into peaches as
well). It is delicious, and the recipe is quite easy: similar to
pancakes, allowing to eyeball the proportions and adjust for a
sensible consistency, and having few ingredients.

Work and chores go mostly as usual, new ones keep coming. Sometimes it
reminds me of the Red Queen's race, or even the myth of Sisyphus when
it is more annoying, though either of those works as a metaphor for
any kind of upkeep.

Also considering ear training lately: I imagine that it would be nice
to be able to transcribe (and then play) melodies from memory or upon
hearing them. Though I suspect it may take a while, and there is not
quite enough of time and energy for all the things as it is. So likely
I will postpone this, in order to have a chance to complete some of
the other planned activities.


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:Date: 2024-08-25
