S10E01 Uncle Chris Gives an Update

This is the Chris Abraham show. Hey, this is Chris Abraham from The Chris Abraham Show. It is Monday, December 22nd and I'm going to start a new season. I forget what season it is. So whatever season it was, it is one season more.

And I have not done a Live Human Chris Abraham podcast for an entire year. I think I've been writing substacks that I've been feeding to that I've been feeding to notebook LM and then have been uploading as a podcast. At first I actually had my own recordings and then had them transcribe and then uploaded them to notebook LM. But then I pivoted and started doing sub stacks and so I just went completely all AI. Like all I would do is orchestrate. Like I like to say that I'm like Rubens or Rembrandt where I have a school of painting and I just come up with the idea and maybe sketch it out.

And then I have a room full of AIS going ahead and filling out the artwork, filling out the podcast words, creating the entire sub stack. And all I do is act as the editor who revises and revises and revises until it's kind of the same kind of point that I want my entire idea. If it's manifest then I post it as my as my own but it's all AI anyway. But it did start a lot of conversations which makes me happy. I think that if I had a DJ name it would be DJ slop or AI slop DJ slop. But I think that I'm probably the least heinous user. So what's going on?

I don't know. I had my second ablation one week ago and my heart is humming along. For those of you who don't know I had I got a arrhythmia and I've been struggling with sinus rhythm and a an ablation is actually a relatively invasive but sophisticated surgery that goes in and like zaps nerve impulses that are not consistent with the sinus rhythm. So it goes in there and tries to map and then discontinue extraneous impulses that result in in arrhythmia and in my case, atrial fibrillation. So the second one seemed to work, the first one didn't, and it really dispirited me. I think that dispiritedness resulted in me gaining all my weight back and now I'm working hard and also probably buying some Ozempic type stuff to really kind of get back into the saddle.

Because I feel good now, right? My heart is working correctly and I'm sleeping well and I'm on bi pap and all the other old guy things that I'm doing. 20 years ahead of everybody else, I guess. But hopefully because I'm in sinus rhythm, I'll be able to get out some of the get off some of the drugs I'm on like the anti arrhythmia medication or maybe even the blood thinners, who knows. But yeah, I'm hoping that I am out and about.

More often people are wondering why the ubiquitous walking around the neighborhood, Chris Abraham isn't walking around the neighborhood ubiquitously. And that's really just me, right? I mean, the lethargy is real, it's no joke. So I did cancel my year commitment to cycle bar, but I really want to go there. But until I get back on the saddle and literally get back on the saddle, I have a stationary bike, a Kaiser M3, and I have a Surly Steamroller, a single speed, three single speed city bike that I turn into a three speed with an internal hub, My pride and joy. And once I kind of get back into the saddle and I'm also getting back to my kettle bells, which I had right before I made a turn in the wrong direction.

I went to a courthouse area, was a courthouse, a courthouse adjacent tattoo parlor and literally had a competition style kettlebell. No actually it's a a cast iron hard style kettlebell tattooed on the web of my left hand and then proceeded never to touch a kettlebell ever again. It was that one of those last gasp things like I'm having a struggle to do it so if I tattoo it on my hand then maybe it'll make me do it. So probably also going to get a concept 2 logo and also a muted horn. A mute horn, muted horn icon from Thomas Pynchon's book, Crying of Lot 49. Other than that, business has been going well. I've been doing a lot of Google Business page recovery and I've been doing a lot of SEO and a lot of artificial intelligence SEO as well.

And other than that, I don't even know if I have the audio editing tool download it into my Linux box. What else nerdy thing that I did recently 2 very nerdy things that I am really proud of 1 is I installed. I don't know if you guys ever seen or read or watched the series of Ghost in the shell. The legit comic strip version cartoon version, but they're these little blue robots these little blue tanks. The name eludes me, but I'll include it in the show notes. And they're my favorite thing about Ghost in the Shell because there's these little, these little battle bots, these little autonomous battle bots that are synced via a, a satellite, a satellite server and they collaborate and they back themselves up.

They back their souls, if you will. They're they do full backups to the server every night. And upon the growth of the, as the story develops, you start to realize that at one point you realize that at one point the little blue battle tanks, the adorable comic, the adorable Comic Relief battle tanks are now sentient. And they have their own agency and their own knowledge, their own loyalty and their own tribal nature and their love for each other. In Loki, they kind of worship the satellite that they sink to, and they consider the backups to be their souls, which is cool. So I was thinking about that and I decided that I wanted every single one of my 7 identical X220 Lenovo Thinkpads circa 2011, each installed with Linux Mint. I wanted every single one of them to have the exact same document folder.

So I was working for one client and they had a pretty cool like application environment where you could create a droplet, which a droplet is basically like a virtual Linux box, a virtual server, and you have a lot of control over it. And it's great for git based application environments. And so I did the application for the client and then I went ahead and turned around and create a little 8 GB to droplet or 25. I think it's a 25 GB, maybe a 10 or 8 or five. However big it is. It I set it up using this really cool Linux command LINE app called Sync Thing.

And Sync Thing isn't a backup device. It's not a network backup device. It is a node in a sync network. I love the fact that the TV show Pluribus happened right when I started doing these things because it's very mesh network. Because I also out of nowhere decided to join the Mesh Tastic network.

I plan to do it forever. But the final straw was that Adam Curry was talking about Mesh Tastic on the No Agenda show. So I decided to look for a cheap one that would allow me to put my foot in and I found one on Etsy that was fully done based on the H3 internals in a little vice that's called the H1 and got it home. And now I'm the Abra node is Arlington Heights, Virginia, and the full name is Abracadabra because I initially called it Abraham, but that's just a little bit, not private enough. So I made that and it's really cool.

It's been up for five days now, completely autonomous, hanging from my 8th floor window, looking out through an open window so that there's not the glass restriction. And it's very cool. It's stupid, but it's very cool because it's not a vigorous and rigorous Discord like chat space. There is a there is a chat area, a group chat area, everybody who's locally connected through an emergent mesh network. And the cool thing about this device, this meshtastic device, which is a little a little purple plastic 3D printed enclosure that has inside of it a little OLED screen and it's got the radio circuits and it's got AI guess a foot long whip antenna and and a USBC and a low energy Bluetooth. And it just sits there and it says hello world. And it's like it takes advantage of a of a Gray area where it can be secure, it can be encrypted.

You don't need a ham license or any FCC license. You just turn it on and you become part of the mesh and you become an essential part of the network and you make the network stronger. It's sort of like being a, being a note on a, on a Bitcoin network or on an Ethereum network, right? As long as you go ahead and become part of the of the mining and become part of the the Ledger, then you are a valuable contributor and you add to the health of the network. And there's no chatting in terms of voice, no voice, no Morse code, nothing.

It is exclusively short message. It's not rich message and it's and it's either peer-to-peer as in Adm or it uses the network kind of like is a TCPIP network or it uses the network as a mailbox relay. And there's repeaters which are similar to ham. But it is also very similar to really early nascent DARPA Internet type of things, except instead of using CAT5 or or T1 cables, it uses radio waves. Which was a perfect, perfect thing that in my life I spontaneously, even before the Apple plus Apple TV Gilligan production of Pluribus PLUR, the sorry PLUR, the the number 1B USPLURIBUS, but in the typefaces PLUR number one, the one numeral BUS. And it's an amazing it's an amazing show. And there's nothing I can tell you at all about it because I want you to experience it fresh and I don't want you to know anything about it.

But maybe you can intuit that I was so excited to be a brand new node on an emergent prepper radio based mesh network that I could either peer-to-peer DM or there is AI guess one would call it a, a group text where you post to a group text and whoever is within the sound of your mesh network will be able to see that. But most of the time it's like, can you hear me from Adams Morgan? You know, I can hear you or I can hear you in three hops. OK, so you understand how a mesh network works, especially you guys who are in Modern Warfare or understand how how those little understand how those what are those called? They're called tags or etags or whatever work, right?

Like it's, it's a local network based on everybody who allows their little mesh tastic device to be transmitting and receiving as a node or as a repeater on the network. You don't have to organize it with somebody. You don't need to say hello world. You don't have to say a thing. All you need to do is turn it on, set it up, tell it how many hops or jumps you're willing to go. Apparently best practices say that you stay at 3, but there's also 5:00 and 7:00.

And then you get to see on this live little network via Bluetooth on my Android phone, what's going on? How many nodes are local? I set it up so that it also connects my phone to the Internet and then reports that my network exists on the Internet so that people can see it. Is it MTQQMTQQ? Something like that? It was really thrilling to go on to the Internet, mash mesh tastic map and be able to see Abra in the vicinity of Arlington Heights S Arlington, VA. It's not precise.

I'd like it to be more precise, but maybe I should hardwire the address into the device and not just rely on here I am stuff triangulation anyway, so yeah. So after spontaneously joining a mesh tastic network as a node with the short code abra in the long code abracadabra because Abraham felt too intimate, I had aspirations of buying a repeater and spending spending spending. But I realized that the fact that I have a reliable node even though I haven't updated my firmware means that I'm value add to the community. Most of the meta conversation happens on Discord though, and I think it's like mesh dc.org maybe. Anyway, it's very exciting.

It's very exciting. I was very excited last time we spoke about my Abraham dot SU Mastodon server, and I almost shut it down. It would have been shut down today or yesterday, but I went in and rescued it last minute. Apparently the SU Soviet Union top level domain is going to go out of business in 20-30. So I really only have four years left. So I'll commit to hosting Mastodon for another four years until it goes bye bye and then I'll give up on Mastodon. I also, thanks to Jason Guljar, I also set up a micro dot blog account and while everybody was doing everything cool, I scored Chris a dot micro dot blog.

And then while everybody was trying to be cool, I decided to search for a domain name to go with my microblog and I was able to register Chris ACH risa.org, which I think is freaking awesome. So cool. So now I'm Chris a.org. In the microblog world, I am Abraham dot SU. In the world of Mastodon, I am chrisabraham.com. In the world of websites, I am chris-abraham.com. In the world of Tumblr.

And I don't know what else. So yeah, you all have to see Pluribus. See it, see it all before Friday. Friday is the final episode and the season finale. Ever since our our our spoken word Chris Abraham old man podcast, I have, I don't know if I mentioned it, but it's been a while.

So I joined a dungeon Dragon's quest and it is the curse of Stroud. And I've been going on to Discord, video on the discord dedicated to this curse of Stroud campaign run by apparently the DND famous Sean Scanlon. And I'm also on there with apparently D&D famous Carrie Abend, Abend Abend. And I'm on there with Tripp and other Sean and Enrique. And depending on whether we can get a quorum of three, we play.

So we played on Saturday from noon till 5. We try to do Saturdays, noon to 4-5 or six, depending on availability. One of our guys is in Germany outside of Frankfurt, so he's actually quite a bit later. And it's like night night when we're day day and it's so fun. My name is Radley, and I am a I'm a human fighter, and I have spells, which means I'm a eldritch night, I think, and I refuse to read the player's manual, so it's very slow going in. The DM is very frustrated with me, and we're running it off of D&D Beyond.

So all the rolling, all of the initiative, all of the saving throws, all of the two hits and damages are all done through virtual dice in the system. And all of our characters are run on D&D Beyond character sheets. And all the maps and all the fighting and all the everything is run by Sean via the Dungeon Master Tools and D&D Beyond. And he's mostly frustrated, but I'm mostly impressed. And so it's slow going. We constantly roll terribly.

We constantly throw ourselves at danger and then handle everything terribly. We always zig when Sean prepares for us and expects us to zag and it's a lot of fun. Everybody's face is on video. We're all old dudes and even my friend Linda who I want to start a podcast with, even she is surprised how old and grizzled we all are. So it's hilarious. So laugh riot.

I love it very much. So the fact that I watch pluribus have a meshtastic node have oh back to sink thing which. Which is where I started. So now are they takayamas? Takidamas Takidoris.

Anyway, the name of the blue tanks in Ghost in the Shell who become sentient, sync their souls with a server. So I haven't committed to this yet because every one of my Linux boxes have a unique Lenovo or ThinkPad based pun named like like I know Lenovo or I don't know Lenovo. Is that already? So anyway, they're all either ThinkPad, Lenovo or Linux based node names. I have 7X2 twenties, none of them are ever open at the same time. And I have a a W 520, which I call the Big Bertha. I call it mento.

I don't know why I call it mento. Can you think of why I would call the Big Bertha Mento anyway? So each one of them is a node and they're connected to this droplet. And the droplet is not a backup place. It is a it is a sync point. It doesn't backup.

What it does is its only job is to make sure that every time one of the boxes, one of the 8 Linux Mint Lenovo ThinkPad boxes that I have come online, every moment that happens, it pings the droplet and it checks to see whether or not the documents on its local hard drive are the same as the documents on the droplet. And then it syncs them. It moves all the documents that are not on that local box onto the documents folder on that box. And then make sure any documents that are on the local box are synced with the, with the sync thing droplet box. And then when it finally syncs and everything sorted that it just it stops unless anything changes.

And then when I'm done with the day, I close that box and let's say I open another box. And then after updating it for like a million years with, with update modules and universal updates and, and flat pack and all that other fun stuff. Then automagically think thing comes up, looks for the droplet server and does the same check and then uploads all the documents that it has on that box, syncs it to the droplet. And then the droplet syncs all the ones that are on the droplet, but not the not the, not the box that I just opened. And then it deals with any conflicts.

It does a concurrence check. It checks to see and apparently sync thing is extremely sophisticated. And so the silliness that I'm making it do or like an insult, you know, like Marvin the Martian are Marvin the Marvin the sorry Marvin the robot is always insulted by the menial tasks he has to do. Considering that he knows everything about everything, he could do everything and is has a brain bigger than the universe. I'm just making him sync files off of between asynchronously opened slave boxes and like the the droplet is kind of like the master.

And each time I open up a new box, I have to install think thing. I have to make sure it's it checks, it works and I have like 1-2 three boxes out of eight. But you know, it doesn't take that long, but there's always a problem. And then once it's sorted, it means that every time I open up and it's not a backup thing, like my document folder is so minimal, but I didn't want like something like I didn't want something like Dropbox or whatever. I wanted something geekier and tech year and cooler. So yeah, that's what I'm doing.

So that makes me happy. That takes up time that I can't bill until I get them all done and then they're done and they're working. But they're not backing up. They're just, they're just redistributing across all networks. And the only reason that the droplet needs to exist is because all boxes will not be open. No two boxes will.

The only box that will be always on the droplet, all the other boxes will be on. Periodically they'll say hello world. They'll say here are the documents I've made. Here are the documents I've deleted. Here are the documents I've changed. What documents are up on droplet that I don't have? What droplets have changed on droplet that I don't have? What documents have been deleted on Droplet that I don't know, that I don't, that I haven't deleted? So and then there's the Meshtastic, and then there's D&D.

And then you have to see Pluribus. I wish I could share about Pluribus. I'm not going to share about Pluribus until the final episode because I would have completely made this entire episode about Pluribus. However, when I was on my last step, my last game last Saturday, which was the 20th nobody. And they're all sci-fi geeks.

They're all complete. Like, like they're all sci-fi and superhero and like cosplay games and gaming and like cons like conferences and pop culture references guys. And none of them had heard about Pluribus. And unless I've been universally gas lit, which there's no agenda to it 'cause I'm happily enjoying it. I'm even on the Pluribus. I'm even on the Pluribus Discord and on the Pluribus subreddits. And I watch all the Pluribus you. But I love it that Pluribus is going to be my my Better Call Saul or my The Wired or those kinds of series. It's so good and it made me think of mesh networks. And of course, the only thing I can tell you is that the reason why the entire world, everybody is part, everybody became a node and a mesh network.

And every node is welcome and every node uses body electrical field and every node has a is part of a mesh. So it's very fascinating. Maybe they maybe they have repeaters, maybe the satellites, maybe all the technology in the sky, maybe Glonaz and GPS, maybe Elon Musk's Starlink. Maybe all of those devices are repeaters for the radio frequency that connects all of the visitors together into their mesh network. But I felt all of a sudden really groovy being part being literally a node and also having sync thing running between all of my boxes.

And that reminds me, I need to re watch the entire all the episodes and all the series and all the seasons and all the cartoons of Ghosts in the Shell because it's been since the been since the mid 2000s since I've seen them. And the only reason I saw them is because I rented the Netflix DVDs. I literally saw a Ghost in the Shell based on Netflix DVDs on a cathode raid, a cathode ray television. No shit. Anyway, I think that's it. It was really great talking to you. I don't know if anybody is still listening, but it was great to catch up with you.

I will spend the rest of this year catching up with you and then maybe we will talk about particularly important thing. Epstein, literally Hitler, Russian Ukraine war, Israel and Palestine, populist nationalism, all that fun stuff that you know that I will shamelessly share what little I know. But until then, until the first of the year, it'll just be Chris Abraham catch up and talking to you about my nerdy little delights and just personal things. Oh, this is weird. I've actually become quite dedicated to the gospels of Jesus.

Who would have thought that? And I listened to Hello, which you've seen all over your online and TV and YouTube and podcast and radio advertisements and I don't know, pretty awesome. But it's limited to the Gospels. I am going to just read and reread the Gospels until the cows come home, and then when I feel like I know them and I'm integrated with them, then I'll explore other parts of the New Testament. And then I'm also trying to enjoy as many episodes of Complin of the Episcopalian Complin as I can.

At night I think complin is really nice, but I'll listen to any of the other morning, noon, and night and go to bed. Episcopalian prayers, I really love them. They're just so beautifully written and they, you know, use part of the Psalms or it's just good stuff. So anyway, that's new. And are you going to be playing the lottery tonight? It's over $1.6 billion on Powerball. I am definitely going to waste.

Is it tonight? I'm going to waste $20 on it. So we'll see what happens. I probably am not going to re re up my my my membership to TTJTJ gym, TJ community gym, TCTJ community gym until tomorrow evening. I'm got such a late start. It's actually 321 now and I really kind of just checked my e-mail and did some random stuff. I know this is a Christmas funk, but starting tomorrow morning I hope to swing some kettle bells and maybe use my TRX. And I'm even planning on getting my butt tough enough to be able to do some of my work from the gelled saddle of my Kaiser M3. And when I finally deferralize my apartment, I'm going to get back onto my rowing machine, which makes me very sad that I have it up on its nose with its tail up in the air. Anyway, Aloha, mahalo Nuiloa.

Thank you very much. I really appreciate you coming back on board. I don't think, I think I'll be very clear in terms of which episodes are mine and which episodes are. And you know what, this one, I might upload this to notebook LM anyway and see what kind of crazy things they can do and have fun that way. But really this is all about kind of sharing and sharing is caring and I love you very much. And I hope you guys are having an amazing, I hope you've had an amazing Thanksgiving.

I hope you had an amazing winter solstice. I hope you are having and have had an amazing Hanukkah and I hope you have an amazing Christmas. And I'm sure I will have another episode before New Year's. Thank you very much. Love you.

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