Evgeny Kuznetsov

Где-то у  Ильи Бирмана проскочила мысль, которая уже долго не даёт мне покоя: писать в русскоязычном тексте Beatles вместо Битлз или Apple вместо Эпл — примерно то же самое, что писать トヨタ自動車株式会社 вместо Тойота или خیام عمر вместо Омар Хайям — дешёвый понт и бессмысленное задирание носа перед читателем.

С одной стороны, очевидно, что мысль верная. С другой — очень сложно отделаться от ощущения, что все вот эти Дип Пёпл, Ай-Би-Эм и Таламор Дью могут встречаться исключительно в советских газетах и материалах товарищеских судов; нормальный человек так не напишет. Скорее всего, правда — и то, и другое, но чем дольше я об этом размышляю, тем яснее мне, что невозможно же отдать русский язык — мой язык! — в исключительное пользование динозаврам из Политбюро, и на этом основании добровольно отказаться полноценно им пользоваться.

Мне тут намедни операции с банковским счётом заблокировали.

Я пытался перевести очередных денег за очередную покупку очередного чего-то (ремонт у нас, разные люди для меня разного покупают в разных местах), алгоритм решил, что всё это подозрительно — ну, и заблокировал. Поддержка оказалась завалена запросами, поэтому на разблокировку ушло сильно больше времени, чем хотелось бы. Но в итоге всё обошлось, конечно. Это — не пост про то, как злые банкиры отнимают у меня доступ к моим же кровно заработанным деньгам.

As I have previously stated, voice messages are evil. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of evil in this world and it can hardly ever be eradicated so we should find a way to live with it. Fortunately, there’s no stopping the progress and the new tools can make the living a little bit more comfortable.

Yesterday I suddenly realized that on a modern phone whisper.cpp should run rather well, and one could perhaps make a convenient local tool to parse voice messages. Of course, I know that Telegram, for one, has this built in, but I don’t feel like paying for a subscription for this purpose only, and then again voice messages are not exclusive to Telegram. To a local tool, on the other hand, one could send voice messages from any messenger app (at least all the apps I use allow to “share” a voice message as an audio file).

There are things that are nice and interesting to do, yet there are things you’d rather not spend your time and effort doing. People are different, and my categorization may not match yours, but on average, there are a lot of things in today’s life that one would like to delegate to some extent. Hiring a person or a team for this is something very few of us can afford, but technical progress gives some hope to wide audience, too.

Owning your own data is great. I’ve been using this website as the central IndieWeb point of my online life for over five years, and I love it. However, the joy of owning your own website comes bundled with great responsibility: as the website owner, I am responsible for what’s on my site and for what’s stored “under the hood” to make this website work.

It’s not a huge issue as long as I only post my own content on my site, but the cool thing about the IndieWeb — as opposed to “regular” Web — is its social aspect, the ability to interact with other people running other websites. To do that I usually need to put some of the data that belongs to other people onto my website. And that always makes me uncomfortable.

I recently learned that the foundations of the audiophile world are being rocked, shaken and uprooted by a horrifying scandal that has already been dubbed MoFi-gate. Everything about this scandal is so hilarious I can’t stop giggling.

Russian users are receiving letters from Namecheap stating they have until March 6 to transfer their domains to another provider.

For pro-regime users, it’s a nuisance, of course. Not a major one, though, since the pro-regime Russians tend to have their domains in the .ru zone, and have them registered at the Russian providers.

Anti-regime users, including bloggers, foundations, and other organizations, on the other hand, need to have their domains registered abroad, and have no other choice. Roskomnadzor, the Russian communications watchdog (serving as the censorship agency for the regime) is blocking anti-Putin publications left and right, and has, on numerous occasions, subpoenaed the domain registrars based in Russia to stop providing services to those violating the Russian regulations¹.

Felt like giving @Fastmail a try, got “internal error” trying to register. Now their server thinks my domain is already registered, so I can’t give it a second try. Looks like they have enough customers without me. OK, any other hoster worth trying?