Hope's Notes

  • O is for OJ Simpson.

    O is for OJ Simpson. Well… so after last week, I decided to put this in. Simpson was my first case. I started following in February 1995, and continued following cases to this day, with quite a long break in between. I did follow the civil trial, but without cameras, that was harder to do back then. I only got to watch about 30-35% of the case back in 1995, because well… I’m a blind person. OK OK, I know that’s a strange way of putting it. I had to stay after school to do mobility lessons. I won’t talk about that here because it isn’t relevant, but I have a lot to say on why that whole thing mostly didn’t work for me. I also had to go on a family trip to Hawaii during the trial, and stay at a resort with no TVS in the rooms. Before I found out that slight fact, about the TVS, I wanted to go, after that, not so much. Not at all, actually. I got to go back in 2003, when I wasn’t following a case, and it was much more fun for me! During the innitial pendency of the case, I was 11, turning 12. Given that fact, and the fact that I only saw around 30-35% of it, or it was a fairly small portion, I decided to go back and revit Simpson. I knew the trial was long, and that it would be quite an undertaking. I did this in 2022, while following Depp V Heard. That took place in Virginia, which was in the Eastern timezone. After that was over each day, I wasn’t following anything else, so I didn’t have much anything going on after that. It took me 5 months to complete the entire Simpson trial. Breaks were taken out in Court TV’s archive, and in the recorded version I was watching on Youtube, which is surprisingly good quality, but has major gaps. I did not do this straight through. I put the trial on pause to follow a couple 2022 cases. Had I not done that, I probably would’ve gotten through it in 3-4 months. I won’t talk much about what I found, but the thing was a mess, and it was made that way by both sides. No, the media was not complicit in that one. both sides definitely made it worse by talking to the press, but that’s their choice. I continue to research to this day. We’re very close to the 30th anniversary of June 12th, which is the date the murders happened. After I found out Simpson died a week ago today, I went to the trial subreddit, and noticed that it was having an influx of users join. Since 2022, I’ve thought about doing something with the case. It’s my belief that all original court documents need to be released, in both cases. In order to more effectively advocate for this, I’m thinking about blogging through the entire archive next year. This will likely take more than 5 months. In order to more effectively do so, I would set up a domain that I’m not using right now, but when I registered it, I intended to use it for purposes like these..

  • N is for names.

    N is for names. Or more aptly, the name change process, I suppose. I’ll be talking about names though too, so both things. I tend to obsess over them. Does this one illiterate with that one. This is strange, I know. I also have had an interest in what people were naming babies. I mean it’s kind of a passing interest, but it’s something I like to check up on once in a while. I’m not sure how much research into the numerology behind names there is, but some people really do believe in it. I had a caregiver that did. In fact, she changed her name based on this: www.kabalarians.com/cfm/Your…. She wanted her name to be balanced, and this is what they say about that: www.kabalarians.com/cfm/balan… I think it’s interesting. When I did mine, I just went with what I had. I suppose this is what took me so long to actually do it. I had to go through a decision making process. I knew i wanted Hope, but I didn’t have a middle name for years. Finally I decided on something scriptural. The name change process is easy here. It may not be easy in all states. I didn’t even have to have a court hearing, I just had to file a petition form. In a lot of states, you do have to go in front of a judge. It’s mostly to make sure that your changing your name for ligitimate reasons. In other words, you aren’t in legal trouble, or have a whole bunch of debt that your trying to avoid.

  • M is for Mastodon, Memes.

    M is for Mastodon, and Memes. Mastodon is a decentralized and fedderated social media protocol, for anyone not living in the 2020s, or like 2017, for that matter. It’s had an influx of users over the past year in particular, because X ended free API access. I joined last year, when X didn’t make an exception for clients like TWBlue, and Tweesecake, which are accessibility-focused programs for blind people. I would have to say I like it most of all, because it supports RSS, which X didn’t, and still doesn’t. The way I describe Mastodon, is like early Twitter, because most people don’t know what it is. Early 2007 Twitter still supported RSS. Of course, I also say, it’s decentralized and federated. Most of the people I’m around don’t have an understanding of what that means when it comes to social media though. The other thing is Memes. No, I’m not talking bout the newer definition, image macros. I’m talking about blog memes. Here’s something that explains what they are. www.chrisg.com/what-is-a… There are two kinds of blog memes, the ones you get tagged in, and things like Wednesday Hodgepodge, which I’m surprised but very glad is still around, I think I’ll do one one of these days. [http://www.fromthissideofthepond.com/2024/04/hodgepodge-questions-volume-546.html] Sunday Stealing is also still around, and a great place for collecting questions, which I’ve done many times! [http://sundaystealing.blogspot.com/]This is also one of them. newthursday13.blogspot.com There used to be more of these things, in the earlier days of blogging. They’re definitely fun. There used to be a directory that cattaloged these called the daily meme, but the domain was for sale when I last visited. Now it looks like it’s experiencing technical difficulties. [http://thedailymeme.com/] I used to participate in these things, for some fun. Now I wish there were more.

  • L is for four things.

    L is for well… uh… long post! This is going to be pretty long, because I have four things to write about. I had five, but I decided to take one out, and put it into another post coming up next week. I’m going to start with a list, I think that would be the easy way of doing things. then, I’ll take them, in the order I listed them. 1. Lavabit. 2. Libertarianism. 3. Life-long learning. 4. Lists. I’ll start with Lavabit, I think I’ve explained here before, so I don’t really want to go into the really long case explanation. It was Edward Snowden’s email service in 2013. It was shut down by it’s founder, in order to avoid turning over private encryption keys to the government. After the service was shut down, Ladar Levison, Lavabit’s creator, was found in contempt by a district court judge for not complying with the court orders to turn over SSl keys. I will link to the article from Wikipedia here so that anyone reading who isn’t familiar with the case can get a better idea of what I’m talking about. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit] April 16th, is the tenth anniversary of the Lavabit loss. It is the tenth anniversary of the fourth circuit ruling. I didn’t particularly like reading that document. I went back to read it in 2016, when quite a tranch was unsealed in that case, there were two one in 2013, and the big one in 2016. The redaction error in 2016, was when Snowden’s email got left in. I’m pretty sure I saw it before everyone else, and I have the tweet, because that’s what it was called back then, to prove it. I couldn’t tweet anything, because I was so shocked at what I was reading! I just tweeted, “I saw the confirmation, the thing that confirms it. Unfortunately I just spent a whole lot of time trying to find that particular thing, but the way X works now, it’s impossible to find anything there. After the Lavabit case was lost, I began to study libertarianism. I never consider myself libertarian before. If anything, I was slightly left of center. However I was starting to become a bit more conservative at the time. I find that in the past decade, the two major parties have merged more, and become more like each other. Of course this isn’t something they’ll ever say when they’re campaigning. However it’s something they do when they’re on the floor, legislating. Just yesterday, we all got stuck with FISA again, because a lot of people in the house seem to vote down all the good amendments, and like all the bad ones. OK OK, most of the bad ones failed. There was a tie vote on an amendment requiring a warrant, and unfortunately, the speaker decided he just had to break the tie. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/12/fisa-surveillance-house-republicans/] [https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/04/tyranny-house-passes-bill-renew-fisa-warrantless-spy/] Explaining libertarianism would take me a really long time though. Here’s a fairly short article on what it is: [https://www.cato.org/commentary/key-concepts-libertarianism] I’ve always considered myself a learner. School wasn’t always easy for me, because between my teachers and parents well… the correct term is placing demands on me, but I was about to write giving me orders, all! the! time!!! It seemed like I never really got to do much kid stuff. I did like certain subjects in school though. I really appreciated biology in high school. I also liked high school history, and definitely government class. When I was younger, I liked art a lot. I did a lot of pottery. Today, I like to do a whole lot of research. It doesn’t really matter what the subject is either. Well I mean, there are certain subjects that may not interest me, but if you can get me interested, you probably won’t get me to give it up anytime soon. I kind of think that’s how school should be, actually. Just learn what your interested in, and discard the rest. I mean, if your really interested in something, things will come naturally. I wasn’t interested in reading children’s literature in school, like we did in the 90s, in like 3rd or fourth grade. However when we got to high school, and I got to read books on 1st aid, it was more interesting to me. When I was growing up, I didn’t have access to the internet, until like 2000. When I finally did, it took me a bit to understand what was going on with everything of course. Not too long, because in hopes of me having access to the internet, I was already preparing for that eventuality. I was doing so, by consuming TV programs on internet-related things, yeah, those were a thing back then, and reading articles that my teachers had prepared for me. I really enjoy making lists! I probably like it too much! I think I have one for most everything, well not everything you could ever come up with, because I haven’t thought about it all yet, that’s God’s job. My thing is, where do I keep the lists? I would rather not keep a whole bunch of files cluttering up the documents folder, I’ve tested a couple things, and I really liked the micro.blog notes feature! I like to do an extensive amount of testing too though, so I’m open to any suggestions. I can’t use things like notion or obsidian though, or at least I haven’t tried with obsidian. I’ve definitely looked at some notion things, and I would say that I probably wouldn’t be able to. Also, I just need a place to drop lists with automatic ordering. I’m starting to use more reminders in my phone, but it’s not the most efficient thing in the world for me. I mostly use it for texting, some music here and there, to set timers, and as a phone hah.

  • K is for Kung Pao Shrimp.

    K is for Kung Pao Shrimp. I got to K, and could only think of my mom’s name to talk about. A while ago I had decided I was not going to mention any family at length in this challenge. In the past I’ve been well ya know, I’ll just say “talked to” about mentioning my family on my blogs, so I try to avoid that as best I can. I never mentioned any names, just parents, mom dad etc. KungPao Shrimp and chicken is one of my favorite chinese dishes, when I don’t have a migrain. Spicy foods tend to trigger them, I still like to eat it anyway though. Here’s the recipe for Kung Pao Shrimp, found from here: www.spendwithpennies.com/kung-pao-…

    Marinade

     ¾ pound shrimp peeled and deveined

    1 tablespoon soy sauce

     2 teaspoons cornstarch▢

    StirFry

     2 tablespoons vegetable oil  1 small onion chopped  1 red bell pepper cut into chunks 1 green bell pepper cut into chunks▢1 green bell pepper cut into chunks  1 tablespoon garlic grated  1 tablespoon ginger grated  ½ teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes more if desired  3 green onions thinly sliced  ¼ cup dry roasted peanuts

    Sauce

     ⅓ cup low sodium chicken stock  ¼ cup soy sauce 2 tablespoons hoisin sauce  1 tablespoon dry sherry  1 teaspoon brown sugar  1 teaspoon sesame oil  1 teaspoon cornstarch

    Instructions 

    1 Combine shrimp, soy sauce, and cornstarch in a small bowl. Let marinate 10 minutes (while prepping the other vegetables). Combine sauce ingredients and set aside. 2 Heat vegetable oil in a skillet over medium-high heat. 3 Add shrimp and stir-fry 2-3 minutes or just until it turns pink (it will continue to cook in the sauce). Remove from the pan and set aside. 4 Add more oil to the pan if needed and add onions. Cook 2-3 minutes or until they start to soften. 5 Add in the red and green bell pepper, garlic, ginger, and red pepper flakes. Cook for about 5 minutes or just until the vegetables start to soften. 6 Add the sauce and cook until it begins to thicken. Stir in the shrimp and simmer 1 minute more or just until cooked through. 7 Stir in green onions and peanuts and serve over rice.

    Notes

    Leftovers can be kept in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 3 days. 

    Reheat in the microwave or in a pan until heated through. 

  • J is for joyful, and jurnaling.

    J is for joyful, and journaling. I consider myself to be a ffairly joyful person most of the time. My favorite scripture verse is Philippians 4:4. Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. This particular one was ESV. I really do enjoy dancing in worship during church! Yes, I go to that kind of church, hah! You’ll often find me doing some strange version of the twists, that probably looks like I just showed up from who knows what decade? I also used to sing in choir, both in elementary in middle school, so I do have some choir training. I would like to sing in one, if our church decides to get one going. J is also for journaling. I probably put this last, because I really, really do want to do this, but I can’t seem to keep up with one. You would think, with all the questions I have lifted from various places, I’d have enough to keep me writing for quite a few years. I would say I probably do, but for some reason I just can’t seem to get on the journaling regularly thing. I think I need to remind myself more often to do so. I started medication reminders in my phone, and they seemed to have worked for me, so maybe a journaling reminder a couple times a week will get me writing. I don’t think I could do a daily one..

  • I is for internet, and Indieweb.

    I is for internet, and Indieweb. Why both of those things? because after all these years I still believe there’s something cool about the internet, and I believe the Indieweb is it. In other words, small, personal sites. It’s why I hate Google so much. Mostly because blogging is all about SEO these days. I refuse to participate! Sure there are a set of protocols for the Indieweb, including Webmention, but it can also just be the directories of personal blogs and/or pages out there. You might ask, why I believe the internet is still cool, after all these years of censorship, centeralization , and surveillance? I suppose the answer is that if you rely on it every day you would want to take measures to protect it. However the other answer is that I enjoy doing emmense amounts of research, that I could never do without the internet. I do rely on open standards like RSS, although I’m still looking for good RSS hosting.

  • H is for headaches, Hope.

    H is for one not-so-nice thing, and one very nice thing. Headaches and Hope. Unfortunately I have chronic headaches on a daily basis. They’re considered migrains. I get Botox for them every three months. We don’t know what’s causing them, but I tend to think they’re from my lack of pituitary. My doctor thinks otherwise though, which is rather annoying. Caffeine does not help them, unfortunately. I just had my last Botox appointment on April 4th. H is also for Hope. Hope is the name that God gave me. I’m not going to divolge what my former legal name was, but you can find it if you do enough research. I say it’s the name that God gave me, because I wanted to change my name but really couldn’t decide on one. I was part of a prayer group at church, and someone there started to call me “Hope.” It was around that time, that someone on our church bus also started to call me that. It took me a couple years of reflection, then I decided to use the name online. I finally decided to make it official in February last year, but not before I was baptised a second time using the name. I’m sure it’s still on Youtube, it was on Easter Sunday in 2022. Oh OK, I’ll go look it up and link to it here. [www.youtube.com/watch

  • G is for Girl Scouts, Gymnastics.

    G is for Girl Scouts, Gymnastics. Why both of those very random things? Well I think I was mostly thinking about cookies lol. I did Brownies for like two years when I was a kid, which is a part of Girl Scouts. I don’t remember selling cookies myself though. I did however get to order some this year, because I finally decided to go look that up. I did have one ceremony when I was in the group. I was earning a badge, now I don’t remember what for. G is also for Gymnastics. This is also something I did when I was a kid. It was a lot more fun hah. Well I enjoyed it! My sister apparently didn’t though, because she wanted to quit after like, a year. I definitely did not want to quit though. I still follow Gymnastics from time-to-time, mostly around the Olympic trials, and the Olympics. I still follow Figure Skating that way as well. Mostly around the Olympic seasons.

  • F is for figure skating, flying, and food.

    F is for Figure Skating, Flying, and Food. OK OK probably food first. Although I enjoy flying more than well, a lot of things. I do have a lot of favorite foods, but chinese and pasta have to top the list. On the other hand I also have a lot of food aversions, things I absolutely will not eat. I will not eat any pie whatsoever. I do not like the texture of it. In fact I don’t eat anything made with whipped cream, or cream cheese. There’s probably a longer list of what I won’t eat, than what I really, really like. Why do I say I enjoy flying more than a lot of things? It’s a whole bunch of fun, that’s all! I’m not really talking about jet flying! I’m talking about private flying, or body flying, or the flying sensation in general. Passenger flight is awfully boring these days. However, this definitely would not be, and I would like to try! [https://www.iflyworld.com/] For those who didn’t click, that’s a link to the iFly wind tunnels,. I’ve done the real thing, but that basically simulates skydiving. My instructor said that’s where they do their training.. Back when I was a kid in the 90s, I used to watch Figure Skating on TV. Figure Skating isn’t what it used to be. There was an entire season. Starting in around October, and ending in March or April, depending on when worlds finished. This is because there were quite a few professional competitions. These don’t exist anymore, and now what we have are more Olympic eligible competitions with professional ISU rules. In other words, back in the 90s, people competeing in Olympic Eligible ranks could not use lyrics. Now they can. In a way that’s good, because it modernizes things for them. However it completely does away with the fact that the professional circuit has disappeared.

  • E is for epic!

    Before I go celebrate my niece’s birthday, I thought I would write my A to Z post. Today is my day five, so letter E. E is for one of my favorite words, epic! Why “epic?” I say it all the time, mostly when it comes to food. I also say that fun things like skydiving are epic! I couldn’t find a modern definition, besides a very questionable source, so instead of a definition I’ll link to a Stack Exchange article. [https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26182/is-the-word-epic-being-used-correctly-these-days]

  • Catching up with letter D.

    First, yeah I missed my A to Z post yesterday. I had Botox for my Migrains, and as I result I was asleep most of the day. I’ll be posting today, tomorrow, and Sunday to catch up. That being said, today is letter D. for me. D is for Diabetes insipidus, and Doctors, which I happen to interact with a lot of. I’ll explain Diabetes insipidus. It’s like water diabetes. Wikipedia says the following, which I happen to agree with, and experience myself, as someone who has the condition: }Excessive urination and extreme thirst and increased fluid intake (especially for cold water and sometimes ice or ice water) are typical for DI.” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetes_insipidus] I was diagnosed at 13, after a hosptial stay. To this day I can’t go on really long trips without large amounts of water. Speaking of that, my other letter D thing was to talk about my Doctors. I have four of them now. No, I don’t always follow orders lol. I mostly have four because of the strange US requirement that everyone have a GP, or primary. If I didn’t have to have her once a year, I wouldn’t have four. The newest one is conducting a whole bunch of tests on me on April 22nd. It’s been long suspected by my parents and teachers back in the 90s that I’m autistic. This was back in the 90s though. When I had the test back then, it was more of an interview, conducted in school, by a vision specialist. When I went to have my hearing for denial of services, I saught to put an evaluation in as evidence, but could not get the appointment in time. I received an appointment for an evaluation on the 22nd of this month. I told the state, that I would provide records to them. It’s only as a result of nearly 7 years of research of treatment tactics and techniques of autistic children, that I have come to realize that the suspicians of my parents and teachers may in fact have been true at the time. I disagreed with them back in the 90s, and up until around 2022 or so, I would say I still disagreed.

  • C is for Church, and Chad Daybell.

    C is for church, and Chad Daybell. Ok, there’s a reason why I switched these around lol. I’m going to church tonight for Bible study, so I thought I would write about my church. Chad Daybell is a case I’m currently following, the Husband of Lori Vallow. I attend a FourSquare church here in my local area. I have since 2007. For about the first 8 months of me going to the church, quite a few people wanted to pray for my healing. I can’t say it hasn’t happened after that, just not constantly, every Sunday. Recently, well since 2022, I faced issues getting rides to church functions. Thankfully, I was able to work that issue out, a couple weeks ago, but the small group I’m in probably won’t be around much longer. It’s the Pastor, and his wife’s home group. I’m going to Bible study on Wednesday nights, but it’s a timed one, and will end at the beginning of June. Our church used to have a bus, but we stopped when we didn’t have enough people to provide rides to. Apparently I’m the only one that needs consistent church transportation on a regular basis. I doubt I’m actually the only one now though. We’re having a women’s dinner coming up Friday. I’m glad, because we’ve just started holding ladies events a few months ago. C is also for Chad Daybell. Chad Daybell is Lori Vallow’s husband. Vallow was convicted last year of the 1st degree murder of her children, and conspiracy to commit the murder of Chad’s former wife, Tammi Daybell. Daybell’s trial has started this week. Originally these cases were to be joined, but then the judge granted Daybell’s defence attorney’s motion to sever. [https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/crime/article272671803.html] Judge Boyce also changed his mind, and allowed the entire proceeding to be live streamed, after not allowing this for Lori’s trial. [https://www.ksl.com/article/50803417/judge-will-allow-livestreaming-of-chad-daybells-trial-rules-on-other-motions] The short explanation, is because Judge John Judge in the kohberger case allowed court controled live streaming. Judge Boyce did the same thing. Media cameras are not allowed, and it will all be controled by the court. [https://lawandcrime.com/live-trials/idaho-four/it-is-the-intense-focus-idaho-murders-judge-issues-key-ruling-on-livestream-of-bryan-kohbergers-trial-cites-lori-vallow-case-to-take-control-over-what-is-being-videoed/]

  • B is for blindness and social media in 2024.

    B is for blindness and social media in 2024. I was going to write about a couple other things, but I think I need to address this. I’ve come across a whole lot of antidisability retoric lately in the fediverse. I’m not just talking about a post or two. I’m talking about someone advocating euthanasia. Well what it was, was someone sharing someone’s opinions advocating euthanasia. I was summarily blocked by a person while trying to confront them on their anti-disability views. Tip, to the person who blocked me others, I reach nowhere near left, or left-leaning status. I’m a registered Libertarian. I can’t support Trump, because of his surveillance state stances, and stances, or lack-there-of, on Assange and Snowden. I’m also: 1. pro 2nd amendment. 2. prolife, but not just when it comes to abortion. 3. Pro 1st amendment, and free speech. However, when you use public forums to insult a whole group of people you don’t like, en masse, over and over again, I think you yourself need to correct your errors in thinking. In other words, some things are parents taught us are good. If you can’t say anything nice is one. 4. I’m against open borders, sanctuary cities, or any immigration policies a lot of LP members are for. 5. As I said earlier, I”m anti-surveillance. I think PATRIOT and FISA need to be repealed, and thrown into the ocean. I would go a bit further though, I would end the agencies that are doing these things. 6. I’m anti-war. Obviously if someone comes over here, and starts killing us, that’s a different story, but I’m against foreign wars. There would be a few exceptions. 7. I’m a biblical Christian. In other words, I oppose torture, locking people away, unless they comitted a crime, and killing them, unless they’ve committed a certain set of crimes. Of course, you might say it’s all who I’m following. However not really. People on the left do not like people on the right because they say that we’re intollerant. I have to say that this is true, especially of late. People on the right do not like people on the left, because of the recent anti-freespeech practices they have taken toward us. It’s a valid concern. However the reasons are because a lot of conservatives refuse to update their thinking. When you use words from the 1970s and 1980s, it makes you look like you’re doing it to be stupid on purpose, you just don’t care, or you don’t like the group of people your attacking. Yes, language can update over time, without getting into newspeak. It has done that. We all know that words from the 1800s don’t mean the same things anymore. A couple months ago, someone who will remain anonymous here, wrote a post saying they were leaving social media. They gave some what I thought were interesting reasons at the time. However what they said in the end was that social media is a good idea on paper, but people ruin it. Unfortunately I’m unable to find it, and I didn’t save it to my bookmarking service which is rare for me. It also said that it has become a cult mentality. They were especially talking about the Fediverse. Well, the way I see it, there are two sides in the Fediverse. There’s leftism, and conservatism. Nothing in between. There is an instance for libertarians, but I’ve only seen and/or followed one account posting from it. Anyway, this post got really long, I just needed to address what I’ve seen happening lately. I suppose it wasn’t about my blindness persee, and I’m sorry about that. Maybe I’ll do another 31 questions series at some point.

  • April a To Z challenge, A is for Adventure, and Antipentrap.

    Today is the first day of the April A to Z challenge. I picked two things for A. A is for Adeventure. Some already know this about me, and some don’t. I’m definitely a thrillseeker. I enjoy jumping out of airplanes, ziplining, bungee jumping, parasailing, and things like that. I always say that I enjoy the flying sensation. I do have skydiving videos on Youtube. I’ll try to paste them here in a pastebin, because linking to seven short clips that did not get put into a playlist, because Youtube’s playlist feature is a bit iffy with screen readers, or at least it was last August, it did not provide for ordering features. OK not Pastebin, because it was being strange, but another service I actually had to register for to get the thing to stay up. [https://controlc.com/8750fce3]] The second thing i picked for the letter A was my X username, Antipentrap. It actually comes out of Lavabit, of course. It means what it says, basically. Pen-trap is short for pen register, trap and trace. Quoting from Wikipedia. }The term pen register originally referred to a device for recording telegraph signals on a strip of paper. Samuel F. B. Morse’s 1840 telegraph patent described such a register as consisting of a lever holding an armature on one end, opposite an electromagnet, with a fountain pen, pencil or other marking instrument on the other end, and a clockwork mechanism to advance a paper recording tape under the marker.[2] The term telegraph register came to be a generic term for such a recording device in the later 19th century.[3] Where the record was made in ink with a pen, the term pen register emerged. By the end of the 19th century, pen registers were widely used to record pulsed electrical signals in many contexts. For example, one fire-alarm system used a “double pen-register”,.] and another used a “single or multiple pen register”.. As pulse dialing came into use for telephone exchanges, pen registers had obvious applications as diagnostic instruments for recording sequences of telephone dial pulses. In the United States, the clockwork-powered Bunnell pen register remained in use into the 1960s. After the introduction of tone dialing, any instrument that could be used to record the numbers dialed from a telephone came to be defined as a pen register. Title 18 of the United States Code defines a pen register as: a device or process which records or decodes dialing, routing, addressing, or signaling information transmitted by an instrument or facility from which a wire or electronic communication is transmitted, provided, however, that such information shall not include the contents of any communication, but such term does not include any device or process used by a provider or customer of a wire or electronic communication service for billing, or recording as an incident to billing, for communications services provided by such provider or any device or process used by a provider or customer of a wire communication service for cost accounting or other like purposes in the ordinary course of its business This is the current definition of a pen register, as amended by passage of the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act. The original statutory definition of a pen register was created in 1984 as part of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which defined a “Pen Register” as: A device which records or decodes electronic or other impulses which identify the numbers called or otherwise transmitted on the telephone line to which such device is dedicated. A pen register is similar to a trap and trace device. A trap and trace device would show what numbers had called a specific telephone, i.e., all incoming phone numbers. A pen register rather would show what numbers a phone had called, i.e. all outgoing phone numbers. The two terms are often used in concert, especially in the context of Internet communications. They are often jointly referred to as “Pen Register or Trap and Trace devices” to reflect the fact that the same program will probably do both functions in the modern era, and the distinction is not that important. The term “pen register” is often used to describe both pen registers and trap and trace devices.” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register] I wasn’t going to use both terms in my X username, so I just combined them, which we do in today’s legal orders, anyway, for the most part. If you’ve ever seen an order written for a pen register, or trap and trace device, it’s usually written as pen-trap. I guess it can be written with a space, for instance, as in this article, [https://www.eff.org/issues/pen-trap] However, that’s the first time I’ve seen it written this way. They are also written separately, but the distinction is not important these days, as the Wikipedia article said, the devices do the same things in the 21st century.

  • April A to Z quick introduction.

    I just wanted to post something quick about where I’ll be during my April A to Z challenge. Primarily I’ll be posting links to my Mastodon instance, [https://theres.life/@ladyhope] i’ll also be posting to an X account, but will probably only do so for the first week or so. @antipentrap Mostly because I don’t plan to keep up with things over there. Although I will when I go to post my links. I do have a trial coming up, so I’ll probably be following some from over there as well.

  • I missed a hearing this morning, here's what happened.

    Today, Julian #Assange was granted partial permission to appeal. consortiumnews.com/2024/03/2… We, the US has until April 16th to provide assurances that he won’t be deprived of his 1st amendment rights, if the UK extradites him here. That cannot actually happen. The espionage act has no public interest defence. April 16th is the 10th anniversary of the loss of the Lavabit case. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit]

  • Finally getting to the Assange hearing.

    This is just the first part. I have more. Right now I’m having computer audio issues though. I would like to start the hearing thoughts by saying that it’s good to see the community just as active, despite The fact that X completely ended freee API access last year. The fact that more of us have not left centralized services for decentralized ones as I have, does not give me much hope for the future, though. I have come back from time-to-time, but not too often, as the web interface does not allow me to follow realtime events too easily. Thankfully I did figure out a solution to this, but it takes some doing on my part. In order to use X, I need to turn on post notifications for accounts who I know are going to have access to the hearing. This time this was done via a document that a member of the community was keeping. It can also be done by X lists. I also kind of followed the Lori Vallow verdict this way. I just let the notifications come in during vallow though. I wasn’t using the web interface to do the live reposting. I then enable the notifications in my phone’s settings. As the notifications come in, I use the web interface to follow them by refreshing each time my phone goes off with a new one. I would like to talk about my efforst with credentialing. I did seek a credential for me for this hearing, I wasn’t sure if I would be able to come up with a solution for the use of X. I didn’t actually, it was kind of on the fly. When I did send my first notice to the court that I was seeking a credential, I did so on February 6th. Three days later, I got back an attachment with the February 1st order. When I read the statement that said the court would not provide a credential to someone if they weren’t in England and Wales for the hearing, I understood that to mean that if you couldn’t provide sufficient reasoning as to why you couldn’t be in England and Wales during that time, etc. No, this is not my first time reading legal documents either, including Brittish ones. When I realized that everyone from outside of England and Wales was getting denied access to the video feed, I couldn’t believe it. That didn’t happen last time. It was extremely easy to be credentialed in 2021, as a member of the public. I just had to send an email, tell them I wouldn’t be able to attend, that I was living in the US etc. this definitely wasn’t huge surprise though. My X account is not this old, but I have an older one, and we’ve all done this before. from 2010-2012, during the swedish thing, and in 2020, during the trial portion of the US extradition case. I will say that I separated accounts in 2017, when I performed a username change on my personal account that was more inline with my personal identifier. When I did send back reasons for my credentialing to the court, they did not respond. I didn’t get an email saying my request was denied, like most of the journalists did.

  • Yeah, I'm going to finish the Julian Assange hearing posts.

    Yeah, I got distracted, and failed to finish the #Assange hearing post. It’s probably going to be more than one at this point. That was the longest distraction phase ever. It’s actually more about credentialing, and how I managed to use X. There will be posts about #Assange’s hearing, though. I also have some stuff to say about someone writing on leaving the fediverse, and my theories about the fedi in general. I guess I just decided to flake on the blog for a while, blah!

  • Things coming up here.

    I just came here to say that on April 1st, I’ll be starting the Blogging from A to Z challenge. No, I don’t have a theme, I don’t usually pick one. I’ve been wanting to blog more though. I plan to complete a round of #NaBloPoMo in November, or try anyway. That used to be a thing where you would post every day for 30 days. I’m not sure if it’s still around, so it will be like me trying it unofficially. If that’s successful, perhapse I’ll attempt #100DaysToOffload. I did blog 365 in 2011, not that I want to attempt that again. Here’s the link to the challenge. [http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com/]

  • I’m still writing from the last couple days. It’s taken me some time, because I had Bible study last night, that I forgot I needed to go to until about 40 minutes before going, and my shifts are weirdly shceduled right now. Hopefully I should get it all done tomorrow. Will probably be a couple of posts, instead of one huge big long one.

  • Just ordered like a lot of girl scout cookies! If you want to do this too, you can go to this link: [https://www.girlscouts.org/en/cookies/how-to-buy-cookies.html]

  • X/Twitter has killed Nitter. [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/twitter-front-end-nitter-dies-as-musk-wins-war-against-third-party-services/]

  • I just got done following the second day of Julian #Assange’s extradition hearing. I did a whole lot of tweets! I do intend to put thoughts together later today, or tomorrow. I have a weird schedule with my caregiver’s shifts. Right now, I just need to eat breakfast, and recover from being up since like 1:15 this morning.

  • Yes, Google has been killing the web for a while now with it’s absolutely detrimental pagerank changes. In fact, I think they should eliminate rankings altogether. [https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/]

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