TrenchcoatFullofBats

Shijo-Ohashi is a bridge representative of Kyoto that crosses the Kamo River over Shijo Street. It is also called Gion Bashi.

No, it was definitely him. I was just paying tribute to him as an aficionado of a democratizing system of long range communication.

The GNU thing is a reference to author Terry Pratchett, who wrote about a democratizing system of long range communication similar to the telegraph but with semaphore towers, called the "clacks" (because of the clacking sounds the semaphore flags made when they moved). Each clacks tower was in visual range of another clacks tower, and each one was manned by an operator who would read the incoming message and then send the same message on to the next tower in the line until the message reached the intended destination. This system is one of the main subplots in the book "Going Postal", which is a critique of unchecked capitalism, corporate greed and privatization of profit over public service and worker safety.

In the book, the clacks system is the victim of a hostile takeover by a rich capitalist named Reacher Gilt, who either directly via one of his agents (similar to the Pinkertons), or indirectly via cost-cutting that leads to safety issues, murders/kills the creator and previous owner of the clacks system, John Dearheart.

After his death, clacks operators up and down the line of towers memorialize him with the message "GNU John Dearheart", which was inserted into the "overhead" of the messages (also literally over their heads in the towers), which were sent in every single clacks message on all lines as additional information for operators about the message.

"G" meant "send the message on" "N" meant "do not log the message" "U" meant "at the end of the line, turn the message around"

In the book, the reason they did this is because "A man’s not dead while his name is still spoken".

When Pratchett himself died, GNU Terry Pratchett became a thing as a way for fans to remember him. Some even created the "X-Clacks-Overhead" code, which can be inserted into the header of websites as a tribute to those who should not be forgotten.

So GNU Terry Pratchett and GNU Garry Shandling.

GNU Garry Shandling

Oh no! My patriotic merkin startup plans are ruined! I guess 'MericaMerkins was never meant to be...

Fun fact: Kelsey Grammar (Frasier) is a proud Trump supporter and Christian who also publicly supported Roseanne Barr after she was fired from her show's reboot for tweeting that one of Obama's advisers was what happened when the "Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes had a baby".

If you run Home Assistant, Sleep as Android can publish events to an MQTT broker so you can create automations based on those events, like "smart_period", "awake", "not_awake", "alarm_alert_smart", etc.

There was a book series called Micro Adventures that featured a kid named Orion who used a TRS-80. There were BASIC programs in the books that you could run if you had a TRS-80.

Star stuff

The internet certainly forgets...but a Usenet service with good retention will remember for about a decade

My Gen 2 only had whispernet, which relied on the Sprint EVDO network, both of which no longer exist (the company and the network type).

FWIW, Amazon deprecated mobi files recently and epub is the new "sideload" standard. You still have to email the file to the kindle address to be able to read them, or convert to azw3.

If you're already using Calibre, check out Calibre-Web, which essentially uses a Calibre database as the back end. The interface is so much nicer than Calibre.

Have you seen how expensive bootstraps are these days?