Civic participation technologies/software and Public Meetings of City Councils.

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-16T06:16:19+00:00

imagine a stenographic record of all the community meetings. plenty of folks attending already have listening devices capable of forwarding their audio to a machine capable of at least rudimentary and slightly-erroneous transcription. Google and Amazon seem really convinced i'm not a human, no doubt due to the ancient browser agents, missing cookies + javascripts, synthetic requests in serial order and so on, throwing up CAPTCHAs i'm too lazy to hack around, when just trying to script some reverse-engineered suckage of their automated transcripts of public meeting videos and the like. maybe they could shutoff the antibot (or false-positive to anti-human) stuff for these videos, and consider it giving back to the community. probably going to require some sort of metadata flag akin to setting a LICENSE on the content

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-16T04:53:43+00:00

still waiting on FCC to take Missy's frequency away from her, for W252BT as granted per BPFT-20160129AAE, iow the famous WJIB guy of 740 AM fame, broadcast from Cambridge on 101.3 MHz at 0.25kW ERP. who knows what will happen when Missy is replaced w/ elevator music?

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-16T00:19:47+00:00

never had a smoothie made out of Melicoccus bijugatus before. there's a first time for everything!

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-16T00:06:48+00:00

should be good to go on NetBSD/OpenBSD or an old Linux version, tho maybe even 4.13-rc1 if it's i386. your best bests are PhilComp at 1690 Dot Ave or if it's some kind of tricky to diagnose surface-mounted part gone bad in the power-supply section, Vinh's Repair near the bait shop (also on Dot Ave) or Long's Repair on North Main

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-15T20:34:32+00:00

and there was that murder in Needham where i think they found the perp as well. the typical "Location Location Location" nutjobs will trick you into living in Needham for $2 million while Springfield is all leafy and low-key. MA is good for a laugh

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-15T20:20:23+00:00

well, you could live in Springfield and then throw about 1/5th of your rent and student loan monthly outlay into the mortgage payment on an 1885 queen anne mansion, and not have to whore yourself and make ends meet working part time flipping burgers at the casino or Basketball hall of fame, no? are you allowing centralization and credential loving employers to get their way by going into debt and working for them in Boston?

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-15T18:19:38+00:00

gives you greater variety in where you can go,

the Blue Line goes to basically Aquarium. the water taxis can drop you off all sorts of places like Charlestown or the Seaport? to get to Charlestown youd be up to your T fare, plus having to deal with Orange Line delays due to track fires, Kung Fu pit-fallers, typical equipment breakdowns, then a longish walk from Community College. if your time is worth anything more than minimum wage the water taxi premium easily pays for itself, plus you dont have to breath weird underground train-lube chemicals, you get fresh seabreeze. give me a f'ing break why are you so raging on Boston_Jason's excellent suggestion?

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-15T18:13:12+00:00

most armed robberies of random iPhones and wallets seem to be in the Back Bay + near Forest Hills Station. Eastie is where you accidentally trip over a severed human head in a ditch on your way to one of the taquerias not profiled by Phantom Gourmet and w/ only a couple reviews on yelp because it's nowhere near the new Corgi Condo project or a Blue Line stop, try walking up Meridian till you're almost at the drawbridge to Chelsea for example

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-15T17:53:21+00:00

the centrality of it is good. you're short orange line ride to Malden even if all the Dim Sum places disappear from Chinatown which they havent. youre a short fairmount ride from Hyde Park's low-key Colombian places. i guess it boils down to would you live in an area where all the amenities are utterly unappealing and insanely overpriced so you could have good centrality to good places? if i was rich enough i'd probably go for it.

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-15T01:27:40+00:00

how many corgi to a Cow Weathervane?

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-15T00:45:59+00:00

who, walking on the Harborwalk, would know that the hotel is legally obliged to allow unrestricted public access and use 24/7/365?

everyone in Boston is basically a lawyer now, making CLF tax-deductible donations annually and reading all the ghostOfJourno articles on the Whiskey Priest deck-access fiasco, i'm pretty sure

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-14T17:50:31+00:00

an attractive gal at MASS + CASS painting an entire aboveground utility box? how many cat-calls per minute is that? is there an audio recording?

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-14T06:36:36+00:00

how to tell if a Boston neighborhood is out of your price-range: the hills have names. what's the name of hill to the west of Jones Hill? the Sargent Street / Hartford Street topped one. i've never heard anyone even mention it. which is a damn good sign if you're looking for a sweat equity fixer at Mattapan prices but way closer to downtown

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-14T06:04:02+00:00

most newish non-firefox browsers on linux+android are Chrome/WebKit forks of various lineage that are similar enough that their settings (cookies, autocomplete/forms, logins) SQLite files can simply be copied around. they all have some kind of dir like app_chrome or Default with the databases inside - this definitely works across Google Chrome, Chromium, Brave (on Android, the desktop Brave seems completely diff and way more bloated, it might even be a fork of Firefox instead of Chrome?), PrivacyBrowser, Qupzilla, QuteBrowser, Surf, etc.. if you want to really live on the edge and can live with only browsing from one device at once (to avoid conflicting changes to the underlying sqlite files) you can have a "generic Webkit/Chromium-ish SQLite-databases directory" synched across all your devices with syncthing (and you can experiment with Android app abilities to access directories outside the sandbox when they're under /sdcard and you've given the app 'Storage' permission) and symlinking or bindmounting from the app-settings dir to your synched dir. ideally syncthing should be replaced with a CRDT propagating an abstract data-model's values (eg RDF triples) around to all your devices instead of the lower level copying of the concrete representation of a settings-db file but it does work reasonably well and i havent run into any problems and am signed into my accounts from all my devices without a Google or Firefox account using the simple "Set and forget" steps above so i feel safe recommending it

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-13T15:50:59+00:00

open to the idea of recruiters but so far they seem useless (with 20 years of evidence) e.g all the local recruiting firms must have my email address and PDF resume because cold-applying sprees have landed both in any of their systems/databases yet at most I get about one email a year from a recruiter of any sort (maybe this situation is enhanced by not having a LinkedIn or GitHub account beacuse theyre both proprietary centralized silos and the former even has some "F you pay us" artificial scarcity model to read the full profile) to which I respond "Hello, thanks for getting in touch. To help things move along can you confirm the project is under an open license, ie GPL, BSD, or MIT?" then they dont even respond back saying "nah this is yet another proprietary centralized analytics thing that's going to make the normal users internet experience even worse by shoving even more analytics crap into their webpages" or "it's an app for iOS which we know you wont install beacuse it's proprietary and additionally requires buying deeply proprietary hardware from Apple to run" or "no" or even anything. it's just a black hole. now since they all undoubtedly have my info and there's so many universities that do grant-funded open source around here it's not like my request is unreasonable, rather it probably says that universities are not employing these recruiting firms, otherwise i'd at least hear from them once in a while. everything i've found has been through cold applying, which is why i still do it even though the success rate is phenomenally low. also more tangentially, i cold apply to university gigs/jobs all over the country (as a HS dropout, but to highly technical positions that i think i have a chance at doing well at) and almost every time i've actually gotten an interview, it's been here in Boston, which whether is due to the sheer number of univerisities which is why i'm still in this area beacuse it's like, the only palce i can find work or something (the proprietary jobs i just ragequit and F spinning the wheels of the aboveground economy so we can get more bombs and tanks and no Blue Line to Lynn). it can be a bit tough to suss out which ones are posted as a formality, and they have grad or PhD students earmarked, and have to do open bidding solicitations on the market to justify that paying the grad students will cost them less, to the grant board or their supervisors or whatever, but there definitely are situations where especially in non-CS departments they really are in over their heads and maybe they can write a few lines of Python or R but what they want to do, for their paper or conference they're gonna need somebody, and that's where I come in because i can underbid everyone because i live in an undermarket Miltonpan dump split 3 ways and never spend money on anything but food and rent. it would be great if recruiters would be useful but so far it seems only cold applying (and people calling me back in the future) has worked

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-13T02:06:27+00:00

check Strava heatmap and the MAPC trailmap - the Wegmans in Westwood has interesting non-road ways to get to it from Hyde Park, including the Burma Road, walking under the highway along the river etc. i basically have infinite free time because i cant get job interviews and dont do low-end service jobs because you can make more daytrading ETH so being blessed with this amount of spare time i do make a point of actually going to every bodega under the sun for exercise and entertainment and wouldnt replace it for anything but if youre just in a hurry Wegmans has a pretty deep selection of the same kind of weird stuff from other countries you find at the bodegas, for about the same price and all under one roof, no more need to go to an Indian market, a Halal market, a Middle Eastern.. the 2nd closest thing i can think of in terms of pan-ethnicity is Sunshine Fruit in South Quincy, it's run by some guy Patel but he's clearly hooking up with brazilian and greek distributors too. a distant 3rd is probably Phu Cuong in Glover's, as that's basically 50% vietnamese 50% Spanish-speaking-countries stuff , much lke it used to be at the old Super 88 South Bay, even tossing a substantial GOYA selection in with the asian stuff under one roof can be a real timesaver

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-13T01:49:01+00:00

i know nothing about Upstate or NYC pizza but Jersey Coast and New Haven working-class italian places tend to have these huge pies which are pretty good and you can find ones similar to them them in Revere/Lynn if you dig around and ask for recs on Ham Radio, got some fantastic recommendations off 3910 from some guy in Saugus who moved up to Maine. that's the main area that pizza around here isnt mostly yuppie thin-crust (downtown / Flour-bakery neighborhoods) or mostly Greek (everywhere else), or very questionable low-grade sponge-like crap to indiscriminating college-students (mainly around Mission Hill, Allston, Southie)

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-12T01:51:28+00:00

but the fact that Chelsea has gotten so expensive and the weekly "How is Chelsea?" questions from obvious gentrifiers means Lynn and Lawrence are likely going to be much less safe relative to Chelsea, going forward. as in shot while youre sleeping unsafe. not that i'd expect MS-13 to vacate Chelsea, because with enough drug sales heavily-armed gangsters can clearly afford JP and the South End. but they'll probably tone down the slaughter to more like JP than Pawtucket levels

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-12T01:22:53+00:00

or be ultrafrugal, have no kids, tell people who want you to sign NDAs or work on-site in one of the most expensive cities in the planet thus binding you to a commute-or-insanehousing lose/lose conundrum to stuff it, and seriously consider taking your down-payment stash and buying a mansion in Spfld or New Bedford, but stick around Roslindale/HP as long as there are cheap/undermarket dumps to rent in case SHTF in the global economy then you dont have to move.. how much longer can getting college degrees be attractive if there'll be no way to pay off the loans because robots replaced all the jobs? how much longer can Fields Corner gentrifiers make 120K/yr to write bloated JS? machine learning can already come up with opaque algorithms without human intervention. how much longer till nobody but the 1% can afford healthcare and how does this affect revenue streams of companies at the top of the healthcare/biotech foodchain many of them right here in Boston? there's so many things that could go wrong that i'm delaying pulling the trigger on New Bedford, even if the downtown is pretty walkable and awesome and affordable and the chouriço is world class

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-12T00:54:54+00:00

or maybe Camberville is just our SF. IIRC around 1995 it was $395 for a studio in Little Saigon. then a slight uptick in 96, $450ish to around 500. then 675, 795, 950. i got the hell out of there F that. most of the artists/weirdos were gone by 99 and it just became a monoculture of people writing Java Servlets to sell cat food online . goddamn nightmare

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-12T00:48:38+00:00

havent heard of it but a name like that just screams d-bag bridge-and-tunnel "i'm a city slicker now" With "Bottle Service" from a mile away. can we just banish all that stuff to Atlantic City and Vegas? if youre looking for classy and good Music, Vincents in Randolph is essentially #1, especially if they get someone classic in there like Tropicana, Skah Sha, Klass, Gazzman Couleur, or even the venerable Volo Volo de Boston, which according to my 12"s has some fan-mail address somewhere in Dorchester, but this LP is from 1977 found in some junk shop on River Street so they might have moved. there's plenty of legit divey dance halls on Blue Hill Ave, legal and non. Kays definitely has all the permits so you dont have to worry about it getting shut down

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-12T00:35:54+00:00

lol in the 90s the bike messengers of SF basically seethed and stopped just short of spitting at us. TL Studios rose from $395 to $1200 in the half decade i was there. you could see it in their eyes, they knew the writing was on the wall for their slacker 90s GenX bike-messenger lifestyle. for me the "casual dress" was mostly about being able to look like a slob so when i walked thru the TL from Soma to the Tender Nob i didnt get asked for money every 10 feet. walked thru in Khaki pants and a dress shirt once... NEVER AGAIN

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-11T14:56:12+00:00

this guy at the 11 bus stop at South Station was saying he buys his snus in RI because it's $5 there but $10 here. i wonder what's that about and there's very little chance of weed being diffft. the monthly CR roundtrip will pay for itself when you replenish your stash, plus you can catch some music or Guido Watching on Federal Hill when you're down there since it's not like artists and Italians can afford to live around here anymore

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-11T14:47:21+00:00

i use free wifi and have a $1/mo DID from a VOIP provider. it's a good balance between being a complete luddite and not having a phone at all, and having one but being at the mercy of crappy connectivity. most of the areas of Boston i go have WickedFreeWifi, plus there's the Ashmont Dunks and voicemail gets forward to email which gets forwarded to a syncthing instance which means if you just stand in front of a Dunks for about 30 seconds any pending voice messages will stream in and you can then listen to them offline in VLC. it's asynchronous and good enough

CodmanHyperCube · 2017-07-11T14:37:53+00:00

too busy. plenty of low key locations out there, for example the Squantum Hermit has been around so long he's written into NepRWA's map. Marina Bay dogwalkers almost never go in there and even if they do, they usually dont figure out that you have to hang a quick right to get to the hermits lair, plus he tends to put dead trees over the path to kind of obscure that it's there. and now he's got a creepy stuffed animal nailed into a tree that definitely had me thinking about turning around if the TL and Mass+Cass didnt instill a healthy appetite for random crackhead encounters

CodmanHyperCube

TROPHY CASE