jc blog - tales of a modern-day nomadic hunter-gatherer

Follow jcomeau_ictx on Twitter This is the weblog of Intrepid Wanderer. You never know what you might find here; graphic descriptions of bodily functions, computer programming secrets, proselytizing for the antichrist, miscellaneous ranting and kvetching, valuable information on living off the land... if you don't share my rather weird interests you may want to try slashdot instead.

You can consider my Del.icio.us links an extension to my blog, as are my LifeTango goals and my other to-do items. My to-buy list is also public, but only for sharing any useful ideas that might be there; I'm not requesting charity, neither do I offer it.

You can find me easily in google searches, as jcomeau, jcomeau_ictx, or jcomeauictx. There are lots of other jcomeaus, but AFAIK I'm the only jcomeau_ictx out there so far.

If you want to comment on anything you see here, try the new Facebook comments, reachable by clicking the "[comment]" link at the end of each post. If for some reason that isn't working, go ahead and email me, jc.unternet.net. You know what to do with the first dot. Make the 'subject' line something reasonably intelligent-looking or it goes plunk! into the spambasket unread.

This RSS feed may or may not work. Haven't fiddled with it in forever. RSS Feed


2021-02-28-0416Z

So I bit the bullet tonight, and resent the stalled transaction with a much higher fee, over 16000 satoshis total. It went through almost instantly. Didn't have to do any of the crap listed here, just had to import the keys into Bitcoin Core from the Coinomi wallet using Ian Coleman's tool mentioned previously, and sent the same amount to the same address, but this time let bitcoind choose the fee.

Tonight I finished that pemmican I made a few weeks ago. Tasted just as good as the day I made it. Great way to preserve meat and fat, and though I'm far from certain, I still think that hot pepper was what kept the ants off it. They sure get into the machaca (shredded jerky) whenever they get the chance.

I've really been enjoying the Costco organic peanut butter. It reminds me of the Erewhon (ingredients: "just us peanuts") store where I first found real peanut butter. I've got to find some creative uses for it. [comment]

2021-02-26-1840Z

Followup to my last post...

I got the two "change" addresses successfully in clamd, and rescanned twice using clamd stop, waiting for pidof clamd to come back empty, and then clamd -rescan. The rescan from importprivkey doesn't work.

I can see the transactions that contain the change. But the balance isn't showing. No idea what I'm doing wrong.

clamd listreceivedbyaddress 0 true shows the relevant addresses with a zero balance. [comment]

2021-02-26-1426Z

Some "gotchas" to watch out for when rescuing coins abandoned by Coinomi, or otherwise lost, using Ian Coleman's BIP39 tool.

First, the "change" addresses are hidden. You have to set the "External/Internal" flag to 1 to get the keys for change.

Second, using Bash anyway, you have to make sure to insert an extra space when typing the clamd importprivkey asdfasdfoahsdfadsfasdhfasdfhasdasdf coinomi false command, or it will get saved in your bash_history. There's a configuration setting that needs to be there, or that won't work. Test it on something less serious first.

Third, clamd at least gives an error message even though the command actually works: error: {"code":-4,"message":"Error adding key to wallet"}. You can verify using clamd getaddressesbyaccount coinomi, or whatever label you used. If you didn't use a label, they'll be under the "" account.

Fourth, remember that anything you copy and paste is still in one of your two copy buffers. Clear both using echo test | xsel and echo test | xsel -b before doing anything else. One time I accidentally pasted a private key into Google because of that. Had to immediately send my funds to another wallet.

Fifth, you don't want to rescan after each import, or you will be waiting for days if you have a number of keys to add. Make sure the 3rd arg is "false" on all but the last one.

Sixth but very important, save the standalone version of Coleman's page (see "Offline Usage" near the bottom of the page) to your own disk, and make a special Firefox profile with a nonfunctioning proxy to view it.

Clamd isn't done rescanning yet but I checked using clamd listtransactions and I know those two change addresses I just added were the ones with the missing funds. [comment]

2021-02-26-0401Z

Found this cool website for testing endian-aware software. Basically install qemu-system-ppc (no longer ppcw as the article says), change sources.list to archive.debian.org, set the nameserver in /etc/resolv.conf to something that works (like 1.1.1.1), and a few other changes I've already forgotten... oh yeah, I used squeeze instead of wheezy.

The emulator is, of course, painfully slow on my underpowered Acer netbook. But it's working! [comment]

2021-02-25-0731Z

I was wrong about the pip-installed base58 script. It encodes by default: -d is correct for decode, but -c is for appending a checksum. That was the "trailing garbage" I was seeing. I know I've been bit before by this, but I tend to forget such things over time not using these. [comment]

2021-02-25-0523Z

I thought I'd blogged on this base58 spec years ago, but if so I can't find it. It's utter garbage. There are two errors in the test vectors, for fucksakes. The given encoding for "Hello, World!" decodes to "Hello World!" without the comma, and there's an extra "1" in the encoded string for the hex number. And that doesn't even address the descriptions of encoding, which doesn't work correctly, and that for decoding, which is totally unintelligible.

The pip-installed base58 decoder, version 1.0.3, gives trailing garbage when encoded text is fed right back through the decoder. But how can you blame them when the spec is so bad?

I'm now using jgarzik's code as a basis for my own. [comment]

2021-02-22-2005Z

Tried with 2 different cards to pay my electrical bill at www.cfe.mx. Their payment processor is useless. They have a super-strict recaptcha that has me clicking 20 or 30 boxes before it lets me through, then it simply says the transaction was rejected (rechazado). I'm thinking I'll need a Mexican bank account for it to work. Meanwhile I could have paid at Oxxo or at the CFE office, but I wanted to make sure I could pay it online, so I was able to do it at Xoom.com. The fee, USD2.99, was more than the bill, though. [comment]

2021-02-19-1927Z

Installing APKs from the net is dangerous. I installed a few on my newly-wiped phone, and noticed a bunch of new games that weren't there before. I deleted them, but it makes me wonder what other crap is going on under the hood. [comment]

2021-02-13-1729Z

My backup phone had gone into a reboot loop. Enabled oem flashing in settings, then in fastboot, which wiped it clean. Now I'm reinstalling apps. Haven't decided if I want it logged into Google yet, or not. I can always do it later. One downside of not doing it is that I won't be able to track it if it gets lost or stolen. [comment]

2021-02-12-1337Z

A lot of people may be unaware of this, so even though I may have blogged about it previously, here goes: you don't need to accept the ridiculously high fees of current Bitcoin transactions if you can wait. I successfully sent money a week or two ago, from Coinomi using the "custom" fee selection, for 5 satoshis a byte. And on the 8th, I tried again using about 2.5 satoshis per byte, but that one still hasn't cleared. I may have to wait a week or three for that one. You can track progress at blockchair.com; a lot of the other block explorers show pending transactions as "invalid", saying that some of the inputs "may have been spent", based on some unknown and obviously invalid assumptions. Blockchair also shows the relative priority of your transaction among others.

But now, while typing this, I also found a nice site with graphs, that shows me I can expect it to clear over the weekend. [comment]

2021-02-10-1845Z

Whatever health issues I was having were almost certainly bacterial, since it manifested first in my bowels. I felt pretty much back to normal yesterday evening, and drank a 1.2L bottle of Indio. No problems so far today, in the bowels or throat. [comment]

2021-02-10-0342Z

my primary phone, the one which I wiped clean and haven't since logged into Google on, has been caching ridiculous amounts of data lately. about half a gig in 2 or 3 days. I rebooted into TWRP this morning and took a look, and it was all under the cache file for com.android.vendor. tonight I went into Settings|Apps, and found something named Google Play Services for Instant Apps, or something similarly named, and it was removable! so I removed it. also disabled Google Play Store itself, since I can't even use it unless and until I sign the phone into the global data collection agency.

we'll see if this solves anything, or causes more problems... [comment]

2021-02-09-1639Z

Left my pemmican uncovered last night, and expected this morning to find it covered in ants: nope. I'm thinking it was the capsicum from the hot peppers used in the Korean beef from which the tallow came. They can probably smell it in the fat before they even touch it. A good thing to consider when making your own pemmican. [comment]

2021-02-08-2341Z

Yesterday morning, on our walk, I suddenly had to cough. Just once, but since that moment my throat has been feeling weird. I've cut out beer for a while until my body feels right again. [comment]

2021-02-05-0013Z

Just thought of an easy-ish way to extend a browser, say for ipfs. Write my own DNS daemon, using my dnsforwarder script as a base. Point everything to my own box, where my own script listens on ports 80 and 443. Use mitmproxy or my own trusted CA certificate to get around SSL encryption. Filter everything going both ways, and of course return valid DNS replies for ipfs and ipns hashes, or somehow handle ipfs:// and ipns:// queries, something I'm clueless about. Add this to my endless to-do list... [comment]

2021-02-04-1615Z

Getting back to KSR's Years of Rice and Salt chapter Warp and Weft...

In the Internet age, clans can be worldwide, and in every conceivable area of human endeavor. They will be able to assess the skills of everyone claiming membership, and have ranking systems which may someday be the equivalent of college degrees. This decentralized system will be far more reliable in terms of getting a sense of someone's capabilities than the current, centralized, expensive, system of colleges and universities. [comment]

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