Back from Paris

I arrived last night, with a cold developing. Fortunately, I inexplicably got to fly back first class on both flights (Paris to Toronto, then to Houston), which afforded many opportunities to request coffee, juice, water and a whiskey, gratis.

Many thoughts to be thought after the trip. I am uploading audio of concerts to Youtube and my website and will post them later. Pictures will be on the website as well.

Calea zacatechichi

Recently I learned about a whole class of herbs used for lucid dreaming, or to cause more vivid dreams. They are smoked, taken as tinctures, or brewed in tea. One of them is called calea zacatechichi, aka dream herb. Extremely bitter, but also available elsewhere in a non-bitter version, this herb is supposed to be great for lucid dreaming.

I experimented with tea, being unwilling to smoke it. The effects weren't noticeable until I started using about 5 grams at a time, steeping it in hot water for 20 minutes. The effects were as follows:

I did not dream until the fourth night of taking the tea in increasingly large doses. One night had memorable dreams about alligators, chasing them and people being eaten by them. Not frightening, more of a friendly "How doth the little Crocodile" alligator or perhaps the alligator in Chukovsky's "Barmaley".

Other sources have noted that if the tea or an extract/tincture is taken after 4-6 hours of sleep, the effects can be increased, which I have noticed. On nights when I have taken calea tea or tincture, if I wake up early in the morning to quiet the alarm clock and go back to sleep, it is much more likely that a dream will occur. It will last longer (despite the sleep duration being less than 2 hours) and will be more memorable.

A few nights ago, I let myself sleep a little longer in the morning, after taking 30 drops (larger dose) of a Calea tincture in water.

The dream I experienced was roughly as follows: I was in a large hall, like an airport terminal. The lighting was dim, and I understood that this was the waiting terminal after death. I was dead, all the multitudes of people around me were dead, and we were all hurrying to some sort of departure gates, where planes were waiting to take us somewhere. I had lost something, perhaps a backpack, and wandered the upper levels looking for it. Then later, I went down to the lower level. It had been teeming earlier, but now was empty save for a man mopping the floor. I went all the way to the end, looking for my bag, but could not find it.

No lucid dreaming yet, but I must not be in the proper mindset.

Interesting Comment about OpenWRT

From here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13164263

User Ibenes (emphasis mine):

That's a terrible analogy. I use both cyanogenmod/XDA images on my phone and custom firmware on my routers. There is no comparison. The XDA images lack drivers, feature, and have strange bugs. While the DD-WRT is rock solid, years of uptime.
I flashed my parents classic WRT-54G with DD-WRT and 6 years later it was still running without a single reboot(networking equip on UPS). I also have another linksys that's sold as a router that I turned into a wireless bridge for the corner of my house. This also has never had to be rebooted. Finally my ASUS AC1900 has been running merlin for years now and also rock solid.
As long as you use stable branches, Merlin, DD-WRT, and OpenWrt are a huge upgrade in stability over factory firmware. Of course, you need to run them on decent quality hardware like classic Linksys or Asus.
TP-LINK is cheap chinese crap. It gets poor reviews for a reason. Even the best OS/firmware can't make up for hardware bugs.

Piratebox troubleshooting

In an attempt to learn more about OpenWrt, I tried to install bash instead of ash on my MR3020 with piratebox on it. Except I did it the stupid way and edited some conf file (shell preferences maybe) to use bash directly, even though it didn't exist on the device. Well that was that. Couldn't really get off that.

So I bought another MR3020, and bungled the install of that one. I filled with it for many hours trying to fix it, but gave up and got a MR3040, then carefully followed the instructions for LibraryBox, a project based off Piratebox, and got that one to work.

You have to keep the switch on the side to WISP.

Problem is, the LibraryBox looks awful on a smartphone (I guess because the webserver it has doesn't react properly to mobile user agents.). So I decided to retry the install of the second MR3020.

Note: I had installed the OpenWRT firmware provided on either LibraryBox or Piratebox, so had to go back.

1. I tried to reinstall the default device firmware .bin file without taking off the bootloader bit, and got an error "failed to erase block".

2. On this page I learned that I should not reboot or shutdown the router as that might brick it. Instead, I served up the OpenWRT from Piratebox, renamed as generic.bin, via netcat.

On the serving machine, I used this in Command Line in the folder containing netcat on Windows 7.
nc.exe -l -p 3333 < generic.bin

On the receiving machine I used something like nc 192.168.x.x 3333 > /tmp/generic.bin (see here at the bottom for guidance).

Then I committed the generic.bin file with mtd write /tmp/generic.bin firmware (no -r for reboot).

Now I had the "base"-line OpenWRT image that is used in the installation guide on Piratebox.cc website, on the router.

Then, I followed Step 2 of this guide. It worked fine. I was able to ping DNS from my router.

Next, knowing that version 0.3-2 of piratebox was definitely old, I decided to use a command similar to the instructions but with a newer ipk version. I went to the website http://piratebox.aod-rpg.de which turned out to be yet another website hosting Piratebox scripts. Turns out the old ipk didn't exist there at all.

But I found the link: https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/piratebox.librarybox.openwrt.routers

And followed the guide located there, and discovered that the OpenWRT box didn't have enough space for the installation. Turns out that rewriting firmwares may not remove the old stuff, which still takes up space. Searching Google turned up suggestions to repackage the firmware myself, definitely not an evening's work.

(I suspect that the automatic installation process of the PirateBox, with the separate install folder on a USB key, gets around the insufficient space issue by loading an external storage device and then creating the filesystem, with the proper directory structure, on it directly.)

Then I considered removing the /tmp directory, but it has a bunch of files that do not get deleted between reboots, so they must be important. At my wits' end, I placed the router into failsafe mode and ran the mount_root command to clear everything, served the generic.bin file via netcat again, installed it, got access to the internet, tried to install just the piratebox package from here and found I was still out of memory.

Side Note about USBs: Piratebox can only use FAT32-formatted USB keys. I tried formatting these things using Windows formatting and Linux tools, and nothing seems to work right. Kingston DataTraveler USB keys, in the 64GB size that I prefer, come pre-formatted in FAT32. The key is not to format them again, but instead just delete files as needed. When upgrading the Piratebox, your USB key should not contain anything other than the "install" folder. Piratebox, during the automatic installation,  will create the proper directory structure. 64GB is quite enough for enough movies to last you, and the people around you, a number of flights. Additionally, USB 2.0 is supposed to work better, even though the copy speeds are abysmal.

Then I used a pre-existing FAT32-formatted 64GB USB disk, put the install folder from the piratebox_install zip file, and followed the instructions on the Piratebox.cc DIY page, from the upgrade PirateBox section, waited 45 minutes, and voila the PirateBox worked again.

Another note. When I installed the generic.bin file I ran passwd, which in OpenWRT disables telnet and enables ssh, and set the root password. Now, after the Piratebox install completed successfully, this root password plus SSH was what I used to access the box. No need to disable telnet, it's already been done.

Now I will just leave OpenWRT on this little thing completely alone.

Paris!

I am going to Paris for the last week of December. A close friend is teaching English to French high-school students for eight months, in Paris, and invited me to visit. The visit will be to see him and also to see Paris. I leave on Christmas Day, to arrive early the next day, and return on January 3. The splendid factor is that Chanukkah overlaps both Christmas and New Years' and I shall make the opportunity to celebrate the holiday in Paris, with a travel menorah.

Just like Darth Vader in this little video, I'm going around trying to slip Paris into the conversations. While getting a haircut the barber said to not have any expectations of Paris. Go with an open mind.

Edit: I don't like entering an email just to download a free language lesson, so here's the Pimmsleur free French lesson to download: Link