Fascism Watch for 22 March 2023 (Evening Edition)

Uganda’s legislature has passed a bill making LGBT people illegal in all cases, with penalties between years in prison, life in prison, and execution for being LGBT. It’s a horror and they’re racing each other to see who can be the most cruel.

Texas Republicans, having passed laws necessary to beat down trans kids, are now 100% predictably moving up in age, with the introduction of a new bill to ban gender transition up through age 25. Rightists are, of course, demanding a complete ban.

Idaho Republicans want to bring back firing squads. No, literally. They want to make execution by firing squad legal again.

Republican legislators in eight states have introduced bills requiring device makers to include censorship on phones. It is, as always, “for the children,” about which Republicans give exactly zero fucks, see above. But boo to MSNBC for the subhead, “their reach could be deeper than intended” because oh no. That’s intentional.

Some of them just come out and say “fuck yeah censorship,” like West Texas A&M University president Walter Wendler, who banned a drag show on campus – and made absolutely clear he knows what he did is unconstitutional and that he doesn’t care.

Also, honest to christ, where – or rather, when – did they get that A&M guy? Look at the picture! It looks like something taken in 1962 of someone who was old then.

Meanwhile:

Republican House Representative Jim Jordan has issued large-scale information “requests” to universities researching disinformation, attacking them for working to counteract far-right disinfo, calling it aiding “Biden’s censorship regime by advising on so-called misinformation.” Despite the wording in the link, it’s not a subpoena, but it’s a demand from Congress nonetheless.

In highly related news, the rightist Brendan Eich – CEO of Brave, the browser maker – launched and integrated an AI chatbot which is sourced from far-right fringe websites and distributes disinformation, including saying that it is “widely accepted that the 2020 presidential election was rigged,” which it absolutely was fucking not.

Republican activists are also working on declaring the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey is trans activism and generating outrage which will inevitably lead to a demand that it be banned. The NY Post, Washington Free Beacon, and Fox News are all in on it with basically identical stories, all quoting the same individual and one anonymous complainant, who, let’s be real here, is likely made up.

Utah’s Republican governor signed a bill banning “abortion clinics,” meaning that all abortions still legal in the state have to be done in hospital, which costs more money and reduces access dramatically, all of which is of course the point.

Elon’s still bringing fash back to Twitter. This one’s been in jail a few times. Elon is also censoring Canadian posts in India because they’re talking about civil liberties. That’s been going on internally to India for a while, but it’s getting worse. And it’s always a good day to leave Twitter.

Finally, because it’s always also about looting, Florida Republican Joseph Harding, the legislator behind the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, has plead guilty to defrauding the Covid-19 relief fund. Guilty of embezzlement, guilty of fraud. And yet, a Republican legislative star.

There might be some big news tomorrow morning. I don’t really expect anything to happen, but I figure, eh, I sure hope I’m wrong, so let’s get this out tonight just in case I am.

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Okay then. It works! The wireless relay block works!

I am finally going to get remote control going on the fresh air intake vent – with expansion for three more. (And I have plans for those relays! Or at least ideas. Ideas. Yes. At least ideas.)

It’s not much to look at right now. I mean, it’s a little block of relays with a wifi transmitter on it. But it’s arduino programmable, which means that once you find all the firmware you need you can use it to turn things on and off using commands over your LAN. If you’ve done more than I have with Arduino, I’m sure it’s really quite straightforward – it’s not conceptually difficult for me, either, it’s just been incredibly fiddly given all the many stupid little things I didn’t already know.

LinkSprite LinkNode R4

The supplied firmware wants to talk to a cloud server in order to use it. Thankfully, Steve in Colorado said fuck that and wrote some replacement code, and it works. And now I’ve learned how to use curl for REST API calls, which I’ve never done before even though it’s like normally the first thing you do instead of the zillionth.

What this is going to let me do is roll actual temperature-driven air-exchange into Summer mode in my passive/air-exchange-driven HVAC assistance system – you know, the one where the core code is on my github. This has been a blocking issue for fucking ages, and I’ve just never had the combination of time and organisation to solve it.

But now it’s fucking solved, mate.

I still have some other things to do. This is a … holy shit I just realised something. I’ve been thinking I’d need to put in a power outlet down by the furnace eventually (which means pulling a permit) just for the stupid little 5v power adaptor, but I don’t, I can draw a little off the 24V DC provision for the current timer-driven system and use a buck converter to get it down to 5V for this thing.

And this after I went to all the trouble of wiring up a mains power 5V adaptor for this thing. Joke’s on me I guess lol – <BelaLugosiVoice>this simplifies everything!</BelaLugosiVoice> xD

Anyway. Once I have software control over the external fresh air intake, I can set it up so smoke mode is always closed, winter mode is… on a schedule I guess, since you always want some fresh air. I’ll have to write something to expose that as an interface clearly. But summer mode can finally be entirely temperature driven (with some kind of minimum exchange time again of course).

Or maybe if I get a CO2 sensor added into the system, I could drive it partly based on that. All year round. Or…

…or if I had an outside air quality sensor too then relative air quality could be a trigger. Whichever is cleaner! And if I can put in more intakes then I could have them on at least three sides of the building without having to open interior walls which means I could pull from the best available source temperature…

…! Lots to think about here. Finally!

Anyway. Um. Right. So I remember:

Turning relays on and off:
curl -X POST http://[boardIP]/api/relay/X/{on|off} where X is between 0 and 3 inclusive.

Turning all relays on and off:
curl -X GET http://[boardIP]/api/relay/all/{on|off}

Status of all relays:
curl -X GET http://[boardIP]/api/relay

This is going to be so fucking cool and I’m going to have it operational before summer. 😀

eta: am I aware of possible covid-19 applications? yes. i am. this is not a medical device. but yeah. i’m aware. 😀

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