unreality

2025-Nov-17, Monday 07:07 pm
mellowtigger: (artificial intelligence)

I don't know how to trust anything I read or see online any more.

Just a few days ago, I started reading an article talking about archive.org and how it stopped doing some sort of widespread page collection in 2024 around the time of their DDOS attack. The article also mentioned Google stopping its "cached page" collection as a related event, leaving us now without any easy and trustworthy reference to past online experiences. Actual published information can now simply be made to disappear... gaslighting anyone who thought they remembered it.

I think the article intended to tie this chain of thinking to our current control by a few plutocrats over our broadcast and online media, providing them ample opportunity to manipulate our societies and politics for their economic benefit. It was a very long article, and I stopped reading it halfway through, intending to come back to it later. Today, I can't even remember which website it was at. It was an important article, but I've lost it in the aether. I really need a convenient replacement for Pocket, which is what I used for a long time to store webpages into categories for easy recall.

With AI videos, audio, and images all being so realistic, I just don't know how anyone can know anything beyond what they see with their own eyes. And our brain's memory is itself famously faulty. There are important political events happening on the world stage, and it's difficult to know for sure where to direct one's attention.

The only option that I can see is for everybody to record everything around them at all times. Then any disputed event can be compared against multiple data sources for corroboration. But I see people online freaking out about any recording of anything because you didn't ask permission of everyone in field of view. I'm so tired of this obligate ownership of everything everywhere. Can we stop thinking in capitalist terms?

I'm not sure where I'm going with this train of thought. I know that somehow this topic is related to technological telepathy, in this dystopian world where we suffer the manipulation of reality by forced control over recording and recall of events. Once again, I advocate total freedom instead of compartmentalized "ownership" of any experience, perspective, or opinion. The one thing I argue against is lies... the presentation of one thing as something else that it is not.

mellowtigger: (penguin coder)

For easier searching later, I decided to make a brief post today just about some HTML tags that I use.

For pre-formatted text, I discovered in yesterday's post that long lines of powershell code were not wrapping to new lines. I eventually got it working as intended by formatting the HTML tags like this:

<pre style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Text goes here. blah blah blah.</pre>

I wonder, though, if I should switch to monospace font for computer code? In the past, there was the TT (teletype) tag, but apparently that's another technology that has been deprecated. Here's an example of the new KBD (keyboard) code instead. I don't know. It looks exactly the same to me, except for the change in vertical spacing. I'll stick with PRE instead, I guess. I could use KBD inline within a paragraph if needed.
<kbd>this is a test. blah blah blah.</kbd>

Far more frequently, however, I use the HTML tag to display a little sideways-arrow which users need to click to "open up" a section of text. Using this tag liberally helps keep long posts from flooding other peoples' blog feeds. Readers can choose whether or not to read the long diatribes (or see the large pictures) in the main part of the blog post. Here is the code I use to accomplish that feat:

<details>
<summary>Click the arrow to read the blah blah blah...</summary>
All of the usual blog content goes here.
</details>

There. Now I can find these tag details again when I click the HTML tag on my blog. Bread crumbs to help a failing memory.

RIP Get-EventLog

2025-Nov-15, Saturday 07:37 pm
mellowtigger: (penguin coder)

Today at work, I wanted/needed a faster way to collect particular events in the Microsoft Windows event logs. I had the obvious way to collect them from the gui, but I needed something better. I decided to try powershell.

Click to read the powershell code and follow the small adventure...

I had no idea beforehand that the log source name in the gui is different from the one accessed by powershell. It took some googling to figure out the right mix of parameters and clauses, but it worked. Sort of. Here's the code I came up with:

Get-EventLog -LogName System -Source Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-General -After (Get-Date).AddDays(-10) | Where-Object { $_.EventID -eq 1 -and $_.CategoryNumber -eq 5 } | Out-GridView

It definitely found the appropriate events from the log. It did not, however, provide the appropriate message about the reason for the log entry. Instead of the rational reason that the gui showed me, this script was telling me:

Possible detection of CVE: 2025-11-15T20:31:07.5402125Z
This Event is generated when an attempt to exploit a known vulnerability (2025-11-15T20:31:07.5402125Z) is detected.

Whoa. That sounds bad/dangerous. After digging into other properties of the software object I was given, I finally noticed the purple note in the official Microsoft documentation that this command has been deprecated! Argh! I was probably getting CVE-similarity notices because I was still using this deprecated 32-bit command. I am old, and what I formerly knew is now contraindicated. *laugh*

I switched to the new powershell command, and it again took me a while and several consultations with Google to hammer out the new (and actually better) command:

Get-WinEvent -FilterHashTable @{ProviderName='Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-General'; Id=1; StartTime=(Get-Date).AddDays(-10)} | Where-Object { $_.Message -match 'Change Reason:.*time zone.*' } | Select-Object TimeCreated, Message | Out-GridView

Finally! This new powershell command shows the correct reason for the log entry and the directory path to the program that produced it. That's exactly what I needed. Yay, although I'm clearly out of practice with powershell. After collecting data, I opened a ticket to have our next tier of IT take a look at my computer and find why this particular event keeps showing up. Something is changing my timezone (to the wrong timezone) throughout the day, even after I manually change it back to the correct timezone.

done!

2025-Nov-14, Friday 09:50 am
mellowtigger: (food)

It is done. Yay!

They found one large polyp. I'm not worried, because all previous intestinal polyps tested fine afterward. I've been doing GI exams since my 30s, thanks to a decade of diarrhea back then. That long problem was cured thanks to a last-minute choice from a doctor to give me metronidazole before another GI exam. I still celebrate metronidazole day occasionally: 2024, 2022, 2013, and the original prescription date of 2012.

I'm back home thanks to a former landlord (I don't think he's on Dreamwidth?) picking me up at the hospital entrance to drive me home. I've already started eating my usual first post-exam meal of Greek yogurt with dry oats. If that sits well for the next hour or two, then I'll expand to the usual range of stuff. :)

I got about 2 hours of sleep last night, having taken the magnesium citrate at 12:30am for the 6:30am arrival time. Food first, I think, then sleep.

GI exam prep

2025-Nov-12, Wednesday 02:26 pm
mellowtigger: (coprolite)

I've lost count of how many times that I've needed to go to the restroom today. I don't even start the chemical preparations until tomorrow. This is just my second day of So Very Much Water with low fiber diet.

Yesterday, on the first day of this regimen, I got through work and ended the shift needing bathroom breaks every 30 minutes. I'm short on sleep now, after needing to get up 4 times last night too. Today, I worked 1.5 hours before giving up. The bathroom recurrence time shrank from 30 minutes to 20 minutes, then 15 minutes. I gave up after 1.5 hours, and I just called it a sick day and logged off.

I'm eating even less today while still drinking So Very Much Water. I switched from pants to robe, making those bathroom trips even easier. *laugh* I do my final cleanse routine on Thursday evening. I show up at 6:30am on Friday morning for the GI exam.

As usual, I'll be glad to eat regular food again as soon as it's done. And stop drinking so much water.

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