--- /dev/null
+---
+postid: 01b
+title: Some of the things I've read
+excerpt: Previously dubbed "On reading".
+author: Lucian Mogoșanu
+date: March 15, 2014
+tags: books
+---
+
+*Inspired partly by [dAImon's laziness][1] (in Romanian).*
+
+Contrary to popular belief, reading is, I believe, more than simple
+consumption. In fact I would go as far as to say that reading is complex
+consumption, as it involves not merely going through a text, but understanding
+its main ideas, its meaning as a whole, and acknowledging that they have
+changed us in some way or another. Of course, very frequently there are texts
+which do not change us in any way, but then again we might as well say we
+haven't really read anything in that case.
+
+Reading is also a prerequisite for writing, in such a way that the writer must
+continuously train to keep his mind focused on the stream of words that come
+and go, while making sure the proper ideas linger. That is why I will always
+feel like I am unable to put my words on the paper if I haven't read in a
+while, and that is while (from my experience at least) the lack of reading is
+bound to turn people into dumb creatures with an extremely limited grammar and
+vocabulary. Not to speak of style, which is more than mortals such as myself
+can handle. Surely, language has an impact on the human mind, and reading has a
+deep impact on the mental mechanism of language.
+
+Thus I strive to read. I read many blogs' daily writings, but I will leave
+these for another time, since I feel that they deserve a separate post. I also
+read books, short stories, poems or lyrics and also scribblings which are more
+mathematical or scientifical in nature, but nonetheless art. For the sake of
+brevity and simplicity, I will focus on the small number of works of fiction
+which I have attempted to read in the past ten months or so, some of which I
+have finished and some of which I haven't.
+
+**God Emperor of Dune**: This one's the sequel to the so-called "Dune trilogy"
+(also written by Frank Herbert), namely Dune, Dune Messiah and Children of
+Dune. I've either had too much of the Dune universe or I was tired with Frank
+Herbert's rather difficult style, but the fact is that I haven't managed to get
+past the third chapter or so. Maybe it's because, in contrast to other stories
+which stretched out over more than two volumes, the Dune universe doesn't seem
+to be heading anywhere in particular. I had no problem reading Asimov's full
+Robots and Foundation series for example, and these went way longer than six
+books. Well, maybe I'll re-start sometime later.
+
+**The Hobbit**: It's not a coincidence, I wanted to read it before viewing the
+movie. I later realized that reading The Hobbit wasn't enough to do a
+canon-check on the movie so I had to consult other Tolkien fans to see whether
+the movie is true to the books. The Hobbit is definitely a children's book, and
+a lovely one if I may say so; I'm now waiting for the right time to get to LOTR
+and Silmarillion, which I heard are even more interesting and full of stuff
+which is bound to turn one into a fanatic. Hopefully I'll even assimilate some
+self-changing ideas from them.
+
+**David Copperfield**: If there's one thing Charles Dickens is known for,
+that's long and extremely boring stories of unhappy children living in the
+early industrial England. To be honest, I really enjoyed Dickens' depiction of
+those times, but what I enjoyed at least as much was the superb quality of
+writing and the beautiful English language, which I rarely manage to find in
+nowadays' writings unfortunately.
+
+**2001: A Space Odyssey**: Now, I might find myself in the position of the
+stupid guy here. I watched the movie some years ago and I found it extremely
+boring. I know it's innovative and stuff, but I can't say that I liked it, and
+let me tell you, I watched Russian movies which looked more static and I
+enjoyed those. Anyway, I only managed to get past the first chapter with the
+book, hell if I know why. Could it be because I read it in Romanian? No idea,
+but I don't see myself attempting to read it again anytime soon.
+
+**Crime and Punishment**: This is yet another example of a book I haven't
+managed to read and I have no idea why. I'm quite a fan of Dostoyevsky: I read
+The Brothers Karamazov and it blew me away. I read The Possessed and The Idiot
+and very much enjoyed them and found some of the ideas there inspiring while I
+disagreed with others. Well, I couldn't follow Raskolnikov's tale. I must be
+growing impatient or something.
+
+**The Trial**: This one I finished, albeit with great difficulty. The plot kept
+me hooked, but the lack of continuity ruined it for me. Plus, I didn't manage
+to get where the whole thing was heading, so I finished the book more
+frustrated than I had begun it. I'll give Kafka one more try sometime, but I'm
+somehow afraid that might be the last one.
+
+Finally, there are a couple of authors whom I haven't managed to read yet. I
+feel sorry about this, because they're particularly good writers and/or
+speakers and I know I have a lot to learn from them.
+
+**Cory Doctorow**: While I'm reading his [blog][2], his Guardian columns and so
+on, I haven't managed to read any of his novels and I don't recall perusing any
+of his short stories. That's too bad, because he's one of the most no-nonsense
+public figures living on the American continent, or in the UK for that matter.
+He is also one of the few artists who manage to see how much crap
+industrialized music, movies and books have brought to the market, including
+the whole slew of anti-sharing lobbies pushed by the industries. In other
+words, a ray of hope in an ocean of idiocy.
+
+**Richard Feynman**: I feel ashamed that I haven't read any of his books by
+now. Although he's not a fiction writer, he's quite possibly one of the most
+inspirational people of our times, and by inspirational I don't mean
+"inspirational". Besides, I love mathematics and I still have a thing for
+physics, so he's on the top of my list.
+
+There are others, but I feel that this list is more than enough for now.
+
+[1]: http://daimon.me/blog/2014/01/14/in-care-arat-c-am-fost-un-lenes/
+[2]: http://craphound.com/
--- /dev/null
+---
+postid: 01c
+title: 3D printing: what you (probably) haven't considered (yet)
+excerpt: A few predictions regarding the future of open hardware.
+author: Lucian Mogoșanu
+date: March 22, 2014
+tags: asphalt
+---
+
+A couple of days ago I was reading an article called "[The Hardware Hacker
+Manifesto][1]", in which the author laments on the sorry state of user freedoms
+in regard to hacking devices. He makes a fine point, but he only barely
+scratches the surface of the problem with the tip of his finger; because let's
+face it, "hardware hacking" wouldn't be possible without the help of actual
+open hardware, as well as "software hacking" wouldn't be possible without
+actual "open software", be it "open source" or "free software".
+
+In a fashion quite similar to software, hardware offers various degrees of
+freedom. The main difference between the two lies in the nature of the
+restrictions which get to be applied upon users or hackers: while software
+artificially imposes a so-called "license" which allows or disallows the user
+to modify, redistribute or sell a given program, hardware restrictions are,
+well... hard. Vendors could in theory come up with a piece of silicon on a PCB
+along with a schematic of said PCB, and market it as "open"; this already
+happens in practice with the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Galileo and other wonderful
+pieces of hardware. There's only one tiny problem about them: they're not open,
+or rather, they're not fully open.
+
+So at this point you find yourself in the rather nasty situation of trusting
+the chip producers[^1]. Even more, you find yourself in the even nastier
+situation of trusting the chip designers[^2]. So what's all this nonsense about
+"trust" anyway?
+
+Well, for example Intel implement this neat instruction called [RdRand][2],
+which is supposed to provide users with a "trustable" source of random numbers.
+There is however a non-zero, and most probably non-negligible, probability that
+Intel, being an American company, are politically influenced by parties which
+are anything but trustworthy, namely the NSA, nowadays hated by most people who
+have an interest in security. The same goes for any other hardware
+manufacturer, which begs the question: are we going to implement our own
+pieces of hardware anytime soon?
+
+This isn't news; open hardware enthusiasts have been thinking about this for
+[more than a year][3] now. The goal is attainable not only with a CPU, which
+can be easily designed by a second-year Computer Engineering undergrad, but
+also with GPUs and other high-performance hardware that would catch highly
+secretive hardware makers such as Nvidia off-balance. This is doable, in fact
+[MIPS cores][4] have provided a starting point for years, while [OpenRISC][5]
+has the true potential of becoming the Linux of hardware. Still, there's only
+one tiny problem about that: we don't have the technology to brew our custom
+pieces of silicon at home; not yet.
+
+Surely, FPGAs are a fairly good solution, although their cost can go at least
+one order of magnitude higher than the Raspberry Pi. Still, FPGAs are more
+trustable than a Pi, while ASICs are even more trustable and expensive as shit.
+Otherwise if you're looking for security at the expense of large-scale
+integration, then you might as well go solder your own stuff, just like dad
+used to thirty years ago.
+
+Now consider the following idea: at the time of writing, the costs of 3D
+printers vary about the same as FPGA costs. Printing electronics is still a
+[hot research topic][6], so by the time this goes mainstream, FPGAs will
+probably cost less than the Raspberry Pi does now. Single-board computers will
+probably cost less than $5. A couple of decades later everyone and their dog
+will be able to print custom phones, or even better, hire robots to design
+their favourite tech junk according to some informal specification.
+
+I'll admit that I'm sounding like an over-optimistical prick right now. But as
+a science and technology enthusiast and a person with an educated view on the
+subject, I predict without even the slightest hint of optimism that this will
+certainly happen. Mark my words, there's no way around it; it's either this or
+the dark ages.
+
+More in the news:
+
+* [The $12 Gongkai Phone][7]
+* [Debian Ported To OpenRISC Architecture][8]
+
+[^1]: Intel, Texas Instruments, Samsung, Freescale or some other more or less
+American hardware manufacturer.
+
+[^2]: Intel, ARM, IBM, Nvidia and that's kind of where the story ends. See how
+they're all western? Even if we take ex-designers such as Sun (now Oracle) or
+MIPS Technologies (now Imagination Technologies), we still remain on the "left
+side" of the world. Also, the list is pretty short.
+
+[1]: http://daeken.com/the-hardware-hacker-manifesto
+[2]: https://lwn.net/Articles/453651/
+[3]: http://lkcl.net/articles/fsf_endorseable_processor.html
+[4]: http://opencores.org/project,plasma
+[5]: http://www.openrisc.net/
+[6]: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/engineers_pave_the/
+[7]: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3040
+[8]: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTYxNzM
projects / thetarpit.git / commitdiff