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How To

WELCOME TRAVELER

{ Don't hesitate to contact me. ~drummyfish }

Are you tired of bloat and can't stand shitty "modern technology" like Windows and spyphones? Do you want to kill yourself? Do you hate capitalism? And the fascist "alternatives" don't seem much better? Do you just wish for a plain, bullshitless technology designed to simply be useful without and nothing more? Do you desire sharing knowledge and wisdom freely without censorship? You have come to the right place.

We warmly welcome your presence, no matter who you are, no matter your political opinions, your past sins and acquired skills, shape or color of your genitalia, we are happy to have you. Please be assured you don't have to be a programmer to help and enjoy LRS. LRS is not just programming and engineering, it's a lifestyle and life philosophy. Whether you are a programmer, artist, educator or just someone passing by, you are welcome and appreciated, you may enjoy our culture and its fruit freely and for free. Lurking is fine. If you want, you may help enrich our world.

What This Article Is About

Well, let's say this is supposed to be a place for advice where we share learned life heuristics, pointers and all the sweet stuff that might help newcomers. This article is something to get you started on your journey, show you a viewpoint aligned with ours, here and there help you make decisions, aid in freeing yourself. Preface to this is the usual: nothing we ever advice is a commandment or a rule you mustn't ever break, that would be wrong in itself. And many a thing you'll find will yet be a "thought in progress", possibly subject to changes and refinements.

How To Read This How To

Use your eyes to read the letters from left to right and top to bottom. If this is too hard read a how to read a how to read a how to.

Required Time To Read

Depends on how fast you read.

What You Will Learn

You will learn things that are both:

Prerequisites

Where To Go Next

Wherever you want, this is no dictatorship.

Moderacy (Middle Way) Vs Extremism

A common issue connected to ideologies/philosophies/religions/etc., or perhaps a sort of challenge for their followers, has shown to be striking the right balance between moderacy and extremism. The two stances might be summarized as such:

Where is the balance? Frankly, this is a very hard question and we don't know the correct answer so far, perhaps we never will. Figuring it out may be one of the most difficult parts of our philosophy. Undoubtedly the first correct step is to realize the issue, become aware of it and take it into account in decision making. Choosing one or another should, as always, be done by ultimately aiming for our ideals, not for one's own benefit, though of course as any mere living being one will never be able to be completely objective and free himself from things such as fear and self-preservation instincts. If you make a bad decision, don't bash yourself, you are just mere mortal, acknowledge your mistake, forgive yourself and move on, there is no use in torturing yourself. One should perhaps not try to stick to either extremism and moderacy as a rule, but rather try to apply a differently balanced mix of both to any important decision that appears before him -- when unsure about the balance, a middle way between is probably safest, but when you strongly feel one way is morally more right, go for it.

Examples from LRS point of view:

Tech

This section lays out some essential steps, according to LRS, which a newcomer should take in relation to technology:

Would you like to create LRS but don't have enough spare time/money to make this possible? You can check out making living with LRS.

How To Make A Website

{ If you REALLY want something dead simple to quickly make a site, try https://rentry.co. Making a real custom website is still better if you can. ~drummyfish }

Making your own tiny independent website is pretty simple and a very good thing to do for being able to share opinions and files relatively freely -- using "social networks" for sharing non-mainstream stuff will not work as these get hardcore censored (yes, even the "FOSS" ones like Mastodon etc.). By making your own website you also help decentralize the web again, take a bit of control from the corporations, and you can greatly help others by sharing useful information with them. See also smol internet. Watch out though, getting into controversial topics on your site will nowadays greatly complicate your life, so firstly set up some "neutral" site and once you get into it, look for ways to somehow add free speech to that. Even if you keep using mainstream social media, it's good to also have your own site and have a link to it on your profile.

Also please take a look at gopher (a much better alternative to web) and how to make your own gopherhole -- mainstream web is really becoming unusable, uninhabitable and will die soon, moving to gopher (or hosting your site both on the web and gopher, which is the best option possibly) is a good thing to do, you will not only simplify your life and avoid a lot of censorship but you will also support this smaller network. Another way of sharing your stuff is through things like torrents, IPFS and so on. But back to websites now.

Here we will quickly sum up how to make a static, single page plain HTML website without TLS (https), which should suffice for most things (sharing opinions, contacts, files, multimedia, simple blogging, ...). Once you get more advanced you can do fancy stuff like this wiki (multi-page wiki written in Markdown, compiled to HTML with a shell script etc.).

NOTE on TLS (https): most sites on the web nowadays use encryption for MUH SECURITY obsession and also web browsers and search engines kinda prefer such sites etc. (in the future it will probably be required but by then we'll already be elsewhere) -- such site addresses are prefixed with https://, as opposed to normal non-encrypted http://. Encryption is huge bloat and mess to set up, normally you need to pay extra money to get a certificate for it (though services like Let's Encrypt provide certificates for free) etc. -- basically you only need encryption if you have an interactive site where passwords or other sensitive info gets sent, a purely static site basically doesn't need encryption at all, however if your site doesn't support encryption it may get some penalty by search engines and browsers as they won't "trust it as much", it's just a form of internet bullying for not conforming to latest encryption hysteria. All in all if you can set up encryption easily (e.g. with a single button on your web hosting provider site), do it just for the sake of normies; if you are experienced and can set it up yourself easily, also do it, but if not, just don't care about it and run your site on http:// only, at least for now until you get into this stuff. Also very importantly always support plain unencrypted http even if you set up https, otherwise you're bullying simple browsers that don't implement encryption.

Now do NOT follow mainstream tutorials on making website (Wordpress, PHP, static generators or even JavaScript ...) -- these are absolute horseshit and just follow ugly capitalist ways, will only give you brain cancer. Also do NOT use any frameworks; do NOT even use static site generators -- these are not needed at all! { To demonstrate this I quickly made a tiny 40 LOC shell script that does everything a typical static site generator does, including RSS. It's at http://git.coom.tech/drummyfish/drummy_stuff/src/branch/master/static_www. } All you really need for making a small website is:

For starters try to go the easiest way: use some free static site hosting without a domain name. Later, once you get comfortable, you may transition to self-hosting with your custom domain.

Now you have to make the actual website in HTML. For that create a new file and name it index.html (the name has to be such as this is the default page name for websites). In it copy-paste the following:

<html>
<head>
</head>

<body>

<h1> My Awesome Website </h1>

</body>
</html>

This is really a bare-minimum testing website -- to expand it see the article on HTML. Remember that if you want to make your site more complex, you can do 99% of everything only with basic Unix tools, HTML is just text and to generate HTML you do NOT need an HTML parser (and even for some basic analysis you still don't need a parses, regex usually do the job).

Now you have to upload this html file to the hosting server -- check out the details of your hosting server on how to do this (you may e.g. need to use git or ftp to upload the file). And that's basically it, the rest is just expanding your site, making scripts to automate uploading etc.

How To Make A Wiki Like This One

Do NOT use wikifarms (sites that allow you to easily set up your own wiki) like fandom: all are bloated and most importantly censored. Also you will tie yourself to their shitty formats, clouds and databases and won't be able to easily migrate. Just avoid this.

First step to do is set up some kind of independent "online presence" like a website or gopherhole described above. Then you may either go the mainstream way and set up e.g. MediaWiki (the software used by Wikipedia) OR, better, do something like our LRS wiki does, i.e. keep it simple and start writing articles in some super simple format like Markdown, plain HTML or even plain text. To convert these articles into a wiki you basically just make a small shell script that just converts the format you write the articles in to a format you publish them in (so for example Markdown to HTML pages) and possibly automatically creates things like a list of all articles or a simple navigation bar on top of each page. You don't have to know any advanced programming at all, the script can literally be like 5 lines that just invoke CLI utilities that convert formats and copy files.

If you want, just literally take this wiki and make it your own, you can get the source code (there is link to the git repo somewhere nearby) and it's completely legally public domain. It works basically as just described -- you write articles in markdown and convert them to HTML or TXT with a bash script, then you just upload this all to you online hosting (possibly with another script) and voila, it's done.

How To Make Yourself An Independent Solar Powered Computer

On the path towards freedom a significant leap is made when one acquires a computer that's independent of the dystopian system that will sooner or later collapse, a computer working offline and without power from the grid -- this is always very useful, even when it's very low-spec, a programmable calculator can do things that old civilizations would kill for. Of course one way is to set up a complete solar (or wind/human/water/etc.) powered electricity generator that will replace your wall plug -- this is a topic for its own tutorial because that may get a bit complicated (you have to get various voltage convertors, protections for your devices, get the voltages/currents and wiring right etc.). To make just a simple solar powered computer can be much simpler if that's all you need. See also mechanical computers, like the old Soviet calculators etc., they can serve similar purpose.

NOTE: Possible middle ways exist between full solar powered system and single solar powered device, it is e.g. possible to power your laptop directly or "almost directly" from a solar panel because your laptop already has a battery in it (so you don't need a big battery for the panel, you just charge your laptop) and it works on DC which is what comes from the solar panel (your laptop's charger has to convert AC from the plug to DC, so you just remove this middle man). Please don't just go and plug a solar panel to your laptop, you may destroy it :) Read some tutorial on this first, they can be found on the net. Here we'll go yet more simple.

{ The following is a summary of a simple setup I made and tested. ~drummyfish }

Firstly consider that many tiny devices are powerful enough to run some GNU/Linux and even much weaker bare metal devices or calculators can still be very useful -- you can take a look at various free hardware computers, open consoles, Chinese "retro gaming consoles", programmable calculators, single board computers etc., even a modified "smartphone" (i.e. with some non-shitty OS installed) can probably do a good job at replacing a computer, you may experiment with all of these. To get a true "desktop like experience" one of the best choices for this is probably raspberry pi, it's a single board computer capable of running an OS and replacing your laptop, it is powered from USB, "just werks" AND it has super low power consumption (maybe like 5 to 10 watts?) which will make it last very long, compared e.g. to a true laptop. The model tested here was 3B+. You'll plug in keyboard and mouse and then you'll just need some kind of display -- look up portable displays, you want some that's powered from USB as well (mustn't drain too much power though, so go for something small and simple), for example zenscreen MB165B is quite cheap and was tested to work with this setup. Also check out the smaller GPIO displays for RPI such as Waveshare, they're quite cheap and nice (also tested one to work nicely). Then buy some kind of power bank, for example Xiaomi Redmi 18W 20000mAh was tested to work well here. This will serve as your battery, the nice thing is that power banks aren't that expensive and can easily just be replaced if they break or die and they're flexible -- you can unplug them, carry them somewhere to be charged in many different ways (if there is no Sun you'll power it up from a wall plug on some public toilet or something :D). Finally you just buy some kind of solar charger to charge the power bank -- you don't need a "real" solar panel, any kind of pocket charger that can power a USB device will probably do; again this won't be that expensive and can be easily replaced or complemented. One possible hardship may be with installing the USB display drivers (if you can get your hands on a similar display that works through HDMI instead of USB, it will probably be better because you won't need special drivers) -- they are usually proprietary, the driver for zenscreen caused some trouble here and crashed the OS sometimes, but it finally worked like this: install the old Raspbian OS (NOT the new Raspberry pi OS); it has to be the lite, command line only version, i.e. without GUI. Then update the system. Install some simple GUI system (e.g. lightdm plus dwm) but DON'T make it start automatically after boot. Then install the zenscreen driver; now the display works if you boot the raspberry with display UNPLUGGED and once it boots up (wait like a minute), plug in the display and start X server (sudo systemctl start lightdm, you can make a script named e.g. just a, so that you just type a on keyboard and press return). This is not ideal but it's a way. Also decrease the display's resolution and refresh rate to get better responsiveness and maybe even lower power consumption. Also turn off wifi if you don't use it, save power. The things will actually last very long, the power bank has great capacity and RPI consumes very little power, so it's much better than a laptop in this sense. You can now download pages and books from the Internet for offline browsing, install some simple games (even Freedoom seemed to work well), set up your programming environment and so on. Enjoy respobsibly :)

How To Learn Compsci/Programming

TODO: some kinda way/plan to learning this from start to finish

Some articles with tutorials and how tos related to this:

How To Do Projects Well

See the article about projects.

How To Live, Dos and Don'ts

This is a summary of some main guidelines on how an LRS supporter should behave in general so as to stay consistent with LRS philosophy, however it is important that this is shouldn't be taken as rules to be blindly followed -- the last thing we want is a religion of brainwashed NPCs who blindly follow orders. One has to understand why these principles are in place and even potentially modify them.

See money, making living, homelessness etc.

How To Lose Weight

Tips are provided in the anorexia article.

How To Learn Foreign Language

See the article about human languages.

How To Look

You should look like this:

How Not To Get Depressed Living In This Shitty Dystopia

I don't know lol, you tell me. Becoming more independent of this system really helps, just accept everything will get destroyed in a few years -- yes, all you ever liked is practically already dead and gone, just deal with it and find new things to like such as reading books and watching the nature instead of scrolling through facebook etc. Unconditional love and altruism helps just as well, just let go of the hate and fight, help people selflessly without expecting rewards. One of the big challenges is also dealing with the Cassandra complex, i.e. that only you know the truth but you can't communicate it to others, they don't listen, it's like a nightmare but real, you have to deal with this by meditation, social isolation, reading and other forms of coping.

Other

Here are links to some other articles that may contain their own how to:

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