Anton McClure's Personal Page

Hello there.

Welcome to http://www.cascaded.org/~anton/, the official personal home page of Anton McClure. If you got redirected here after clicking on an old bookmarked link, please update it now so that your bookmark doesn't break when the redirect is removed.

World Wide Web

Web search (currently lite.duckduckgo.com):

If you use DuckDuckGo for anything, I would highly suggest using the lite version specifically. DDG has a special "no-AI" version of their search engine, but they also have duck.ai, and they strongly try to encourage AI use on the normal search engine. For now, thankfully, they still have the lite form. If it goes away, we will need a good replacement that will work fully from the Lynx Web browser.

Thoughts and Interests

It's good to understand Unix
Whether you realize it or not, Unix systems make up a large majority of technology. Even though too much of it has strayed away from the original philosophies, there are still systems that try to uphold UNIX Philosophy values. If you wish to use ocelot, you'll need to know Unix. If you don't, Cascaded has a full mirror of version 1.3 of the University of Edinburgh's UNIXhelp for Users documentation.

The ocelot computer runs FreeBSD. Documentation may be found on the system via man. The FreeBSD handbook is also installed at /usr/local/share/doc/freebsd/ in various languages.

Writing HTML documents
Here's an archive of the HTML Specification for version 2 and, for historic purposes, the HTML+ draft. Both archives were originally published by the Internet Engineering Task Force. You may also find an archive of Putting Information onto the Web as published by Tim Berners-Lee.

This version of the specifications, and select recommendations from the draft, make for a great way to ensure your pages work on virtually any browser that's worth using. As Berners-Lee put it best in Technology Review (July 1996): "Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network." Cari D. Burstein created a Web page about the Viewable with Any Browser campaign if you would like to know more about why we should strive to have Web pages that work regardless of the browser they are viewed on.

If you wish to use another HTML version, you may do so, but Cascaded does not carry a copy of other HTML specifications.

Computer Software Freedoms
I have been an FSF associate member since November 2023. Consider also becoming a member of the Free Software Foundation to help them in their efforts for our computing freedoms.

Privacy and Mass Surveillance
Do you like having some privacy in our digital-first/digital-everywhere world? That will be hard to fully restore at this point. In the meantime, however, there are helpful resources out there like the DeFlock project's ALPR map and information regarding ALPR dangers. There you may find (known) Automatic Number/License Plate Readers produced by Flock Safety and multiple other companies. Want to learn more about Flock? Feel free to read the Consumer Rights Wiki article about Flock Safety. Several current and former Flock clients have also brought forward privacy concerns of their own. Security is good to have. Unchecked surveillance that anyone anywhere can access anywhen for anything is something more of us should be concerned about.

Communities vs Hyperscaled Slop
Would you like to get higher water and electricity bills? I sure don't, but AI data centers might make high bills your new normal! There's a lot of information (and disinformation) when it comes to data centers in general. For more information, the Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting Web site has maps, statistics, photos, news, facts and myths, and a noise simulation, among other helpful resources that you can use to raise community awareness. Too many people are not aware of the full effect of AI data centers. Similarly, the Data Center Proposal Tracker also shows where AI "hyperscale" data centers and other massive data centers are being proposed. We don't need more AI data centers, nor do we need more slop. We surely don't need any more of what you can reasonably call "slop factories" everywhere.

About Myself

Like Dan Bornstein wrote on his own home page:
Remember, it's not a home page unless you have something extremely self-centered on it!

My science fiction writing is a part of the series called The Life Outside Known Space. So far, no full novels have been published from the series.

Some of my puns, haiku, and poems. There is another IDKWIJLS "PT" as of 2023.

You may have time-traveled in a different timeline already (March 2022).

Contact

If I gave you a different telephone number, use that number. If I gave you a different e-mail address, use my cascaded.org address.

Web Site
http://www.cascaded.org/~anton/

Telephone Number
+1 (425) 256-7515

E-Mail Address
anton@cascaded.org
asm@gnu.org
asm135@uakron.edu
Anton McClure / anton@cascaded.org
Sending unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE) to this address is an indication of your consent to pay me $120/hour for 1 hour minimum for professional proofreading & technical assessment.