*Memory Matrix

Joshua Stylman’s essay on refusing to give the digital identification is a great read and definitely worth sharing.

The system requires your participation to work. The catch is that this may also be its biggest weakness. It only becomes a cage when adoption is near-universal. In other words, when opting out means you can’t participate in daily life. When cash still works, and analog alternatives survive, resistance may be inconvenient but still livable. That’s why they need you to volunteer.

Don’t give it.

via The Authentication Layer – Joshua Stylman.

Discernment regarding the technology choices that one makes continues to remain important.  In many cases, doing away with social media entirely is the best choice.  Freedom and knowledge for posterity is given up bit by bit.

The infrastructure for systems in which you “cannot buy or sell without an ID” is being assembled one prompted selfie at a time by Meta, Uber, banks, app developers, and verification vendors. This often happens before governments even pass the final laws.

via Private Biometrics Are Building the Digital ID Prison: No New Laws Required. – The Burning Platform.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile256GB bs=1024 count=268435456 status=progress
chmod 0600 /swapfile256GB
/usr/sbin/mkswap /swapfile256GB
/usr/sbin/swapon /swapfile256GB
echo "/swapfile256GB     none   swap    sw     0     0" | tee -a /etc/fstab

Document z260205wa, last modified 21 May, 2026
See z260205f (an earlier note related to swap file creation).

It is possible to configure the behavior of Linux with regards to the use of swap memory. The default setting is a swappiness of 60, which means the kernel begins using swap memory once processes use 40% of the system memory.

To view the current swappiness setting, use the command
cat /etc/sysctl.conf | grep swappiness or use the command
cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness or the command
/sbin/sysctl vm.swappiness

To immediately change swappiness, use the command
sysctl vm.swappiness=1 or another number other than 1. In the case of 65536MB of RAM, a swappiness setting of 1 means that once 655MB of memory remains, the kernel will start swapping data to the disk.

To make the change permanent, add vm.swapiness=1 to /etc/sysctl.conf. It is also possible to achieve the same effect by adding the sysctl vm.swapiness=1 command to a crontab that takes effect upon reboot using @reboot /sbin/sysctl vm.swappiness=1 in the crontab editor.

Document z260521wa, last modified 21 May, 2026
See z260205f (earlier referece note on configuring swappiness)

This page contains details on the numbering conventions for my zettelkasten.

For purposes of organization, these are case insensitive. Sometimes I write them in all capitals and sometimes in lower case. All notes identifiers start with the letter z. That is because Joplin requires a character rather than a number in order to search. Then comes the date code. After the date code, a letter identifier specifiying the medium of the note. It is preferred to use lowercase for the letter portions of the names.

z260519w – web document
z260519l – loose/large page, archived in three-ring binders
z260519j – Joplin
z260519p – pocket notebook
z260519m – main notebook
z260519z – Zettlr document

Each one then has a letter, a-z, following the intial portion. z260519ja is the first note of the day in Joplin. z260519jb is the second. Zettlr documents consist of MarkDown (.md) files. These files may be created in Apostrophe or another markdown editor and saved in the Zettlr vault or be created within Zettlr itself. The Pandoc User’s Guide contains a guide to Pandoc’s Markdown.

This web document is z260519wa. The Joplin note related to this is z260519ja.  For example, I just created z260519za-ark-ascended-notes.md in my Zettlr vault with some cheat codes for Ark Ascended.

This allows me to track thoughts and records across time and media.

Linvega contains excellent information on historical computation devices such as calculators and slide rule mechanical calculators.

Scientist Sees Squirrel convers the importance of writing from the perspective of an evolutionary ecologist and entomologist in Canada.

The Mathematical Reason Most People Never “Make It” is an article that details why it is necessary to create, even when it seems that the payoff is lower than it should be.

Price’s Law states that the square root of the number of people in a domain does 50% of the work.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• In a company with 100 employees, 10 people produce half the output
• In a field with 10,000 scientists, 100 produce half the meaningful research
• On a team of 25, 5 people carry the entire operation

…The formula is simple: √n = your high performers, where n is the total population.

Oh, and it wasn’t exclusive to research papers—this pattern showed up everywhere he looked.

This applies to many different things.  This article was a good read.

Document no. z260525wa, last updated 25 May, 2026

[+] = Added
[*] = Changed
[^] = Moved
[=] = No Changes
[x] = Deleted
[!] = Bugs
[_] = To Do
[>] = Migrated
[<] = Migrated

Linux Operating System Notes:
[_] Increasing watch handles on Linux
[_] Adding external local disk storage to Nextcloud
[_] Manually set the time zones and sync time on Linux
[_] Configure Boot on Devuan Excalibur (ref. z260205a)
[_] Window resize script for X11 (ref. z260205b)
[_] Creating SSH keys and using them on multiple machines (ref. z260205c, z260307a, z260309a)
[_] Excellent backup and restoration scheme using lrzip (cf. z2605919zb)
[_] Monitoring network activity on Linux (ref. z260205d)
[_] Disabling IPv6 in Debian and ending errors appearing in Journalctl related to it (ref. z260205e)
[z260205wa] Creating a Swapfile
[z260521wa] Configuring swappiness levels

Linux IRC paste bins:
Debian pastebin | OpenSUSE pastebin | #Linux chat pastebin | Pasteboard Image Uploads

Bash Shell Functions:
[_] Bash shell function webarchive (ref. z260305a)

Quick memos:
Use apt-get install ./x rather than dpkgi -i x when installing third party debs.

nano -c -i -q --guidestripe=79

Software Articles:
[_] Disable Updates in Thunderbird
[_] Disable DNS over HTTPs in Mozilla browsers
[_] Remove OneDrive from Explorer via Group Policy on Windows

Redshift was not installed on Debian 12, yet color temperature kept changing without manually doing it.  xsct 6500 restored default color temperature.  Switching to a Gnome session and disabling night shift worked.  After logging back into xfce the temperature issue returned.

dconf reset -f /

brought back the normal color temperature.

Disabling Microsoft 365 Copilot from Startup on Windows 10 is a bit of a challenge for those familiar with Windows from the old days. It does not appear in Autoruns anywhere, nor does it appear in MSCONFIG. It only appears in the task manager startup section.^[1] I have done this to run H & R Block tax software, which is the last program tying me to Windows. I have succesfully migrated to Linux otherwise. That covers Steam gaming, document scanning with Brother scanners

Apple requires British customers to provide a physical identification card or they will face content restrictions on their mobile devices.^[2] The measures are not required under the U.K. Regulation.^[3] Apple apparently chose to pursue a maximilist identification verification strategy on their mobile devices. The U.K. Regulation requires websites to verify rather than operating systems. The approach by Apple removes no liability from the services. They must continue to verify.^[4] That makes this a data gathering expedition for Apple to obtain identity documents associated with devices on pain of restricted website browsing. In addition to web browsing controls, the lock down activates monitoring of photos and video calls for nudity. That means that every single device from Apple will default to monitored photos and video calls. “The British government does not require Apple and other OS providers to institute device-level age checks”.^[5] Apple recently sought to allow iPhones to serve stand-ins for passports^[6] and this is the beginnings of their thrust for a complete identification device.

An excellent essay appeared in February. That author titled that essay “Hold on to your computer hardware”.^[7] ”HP, on the other hand, seems to have already prepared for the hardware shortage by launching a laptop subscription service where you pay a monthly fee to use a laptop but never own it, no matter how long you subscribe. While HP frames this as a convenience, the timing, right in the middle of a hardware affordability crisis, makes it feel a lot more like a preview of a rented compute future.”^[8]. It might be useful to learn how to map around memory failures if one will keep the old hardware.^[9]

One unfortunate feature of AI is that it will erase a great deal of the historical record. Dee Mclaughing recorded an instance of attempting to profeed historical quotes in ChatGPT wherein the service refused to profeed certain quotes.^[10] Many authors will simply remove the quotes that the mechanisms refuse to analyze. Some of history’s greatest written works allowed us to know of other works by quoting them. Now such works will fail to contain all possibilities. The relevant quote was related to the war in Iraq, from back in 2007. This relates to one of the Sem-descendant nations targeted for destruction, and the major English speaking AI companies are controlled by adjacent interests. It is sad that the young may not care for old books. Old books are the only way they will know the truth in the future.

A court ordered Meta to pay $375 Million in damages for failing to protect children.^[11] This is one of the reasons for the coordinated efforts to push identification to the device. They want to remove liability from the services provider. Apple naturally aligns with that since they want the smart phone to be a global universal digital identification device.

Fighting for freedom, privacy, and digital sovereignty is not a lost cause. The EU Parliament abandoned mass observation of Chats. The Apple monitoriting mentioned earlier will now contain greater levels of monitoring than the EU.^[12]. It is important to celebrate the wins.

The 2026-03-24 Tiny Takeover Java Edition, 26.1, requires an upgrade to Java 25. The previous release, 1.21.11, used version 21.

The Castle is a book by Franz Kafka.  It entered the Public Domain the United States.  It is a wonderful book. I picked one up at a Friends of the Library book sale. That is one of those sales where American libraries sell their old books.  Most American Libraries keep no old books.   When Ceasar burned the Library of Alexandria, it was a tragedy because of the ancient knowledge that was lost.  If Caesar burned an American Library it would make the morning paper and they would simply order replacement copies of the literature since they rarely span cultural eras.  For some reason, our communities dislike the idea of people communing with their forerunners.

Most everything written in America will be long forgotten due to the 95 years of copyright protection on it if a business created it and the 70 years after an authors death.  They have gauranteed the vanishing of most great stories into the sands of time by locking anyone out of republishing them for a century.  Most stories will simply never be told against since only the stories sought and purchased by the rich will be republished.  The old books that Google scanned had only 28 years of copy protection and that is why they survived for hundreds of years in reprints.  Back then, anyone could repriting someting that was thirty years old, and many did.  Now one has to identify rights-holders and pay a license fee, assuming that one could even locate a licensor.

The term of copyright for a particular work depends on several factors, including whether it has been published, and, if so, the date of first publication. As a general rule, for works created after January 1, 1978, copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years. For an anonymous work, a pseudonymous work, or a work made for hire, the copyright endures for a term of 95 years from the year of its first publication or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever expires first. For works first published prior to 1978, the term will vary depending on several factors.  [1]

I was going to compare some aspects of society to the castle, but am posting this now and may get back to the castle comparison later.

1. How Long Does Copyright Protection Last?, U.S. Copyright Office, accessed 6 March 2026 at https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.htm.