Bob's travel pictures and stories, Linux and other open source topics, and more
Naxos was occupied by Neanderthal people during the Midding Paleolithic era, and then the Neolithic people and the Cycladic culture appeared. By the 14th century BCE, a fertility cult had established a ritual site about four kilometers south of the port, a pleasant walk. Through the centuries, the fertility cult and the sanctuary became dedicated to what evolved into the deity Dionysus. A series…
The ruins of the Temple of Apollo are on a small islet at the north end of the port, connected to the main island by a narrow causeway. The people of Naxos were devotees of Apollo, and this temple is oriented toward the Sanctuary of Apollo on the nearby sacred island of Delos. The temple dates to around 530 BCE. It was only partially completed when the local ruler was deposed. What did get…
Arriving on a ferry, you see the Kastro or fortified castle on a small hill overlooking the old town and the port. I checked into my apartment and then headed back out to explore. I got breakfast every morning in a waterfront cafe, the very greek koulouri sesame bread ring and a double Greek coffee. Lunch would be light, usually a salad, at a taverna on the waterfront. Then dinner would be in…
Introduction to a series of pages describing multiple visits to the Cycladic island of Naxos -- arrival by ferry, exploring the old town around the port, the Temple of Apollo with its dramatic doorway, and the Sanctuary of Dionysus.
Skarkos, a short walk from the Ios port, was a prehistoric settlement of the Cyclades culture. Approximately 200 to 300 people lived here through the 3rd millennium BCE. Skarkos is one of the most important prehistoric sites in the Aegean, but it gets little attention. It was only rediscovered in 1985. It was a walled settlement, with the many dwellings opening inward to the lanes and small…
The Hora starts at about 100 meters elevation above the port, and continues to a series of chapels on a peak around 150 meters. You can see the islands of Sikinos and Milos to the west, and Thira, also known as Santorini, to the south.
A range of choices of lodging and meals are within a short walk from the ferry dock on Ios. See the connections back to the Cycladic and Mycenaean cultures. Relax and watch the ferries come and go.
A beautiful ferry voyage from the caldera within Thira, also known as Santorini, to Ios. The caldera was formed around 1600 BCE in one of the largest volcanic events in history. About 100 cubic kilometers of magma, rock, and ash were expelled and the sea rushed in. The caldera is now about 11 by 8 kilometers, and up to 400 meters deep. The crossing to Ios take about an hour, best done on a ferry…
Introduction to a series of pages describing multiple visits to the Cycladic island of Ios -- arrival by ferry, lodging and meals around the port, the hilltop Hora with its narrow lanes and fantastic views, and the prehistoric Cycladic settlement of Skarkos.
It's actually very easy to upgrade a Debian system from one major release to the next. Here's how to do that, plus troubleshooting the mess caused when you manage to break the "named" DNS service. Suggestions are provided for multiple ways to solve the problem, including full-system and single-service backup, archiving, and recovery.
Mycenae, about 50 kilometers south of Korinthos in the northeastern Peloponnese, was the center of what we now call the Mycenaean Greek culture from about 1800 BCE to the Late Bronze Age Collapse around 1200-1150 BCE. What you can see today include the hilltop citadel with the ruins of the ruler's palace including the megaron, the throne room in a design shared by the Minoans and Mycenaeans. The…
Thorikos, one of the oldest settlements on the Attiki peninsula, has the oldest theatre in Greece. It dates to a period before the semicircular shape became the standard, it has an unusual oval configuration. Thorikos was an active lead and silver mining area back in the late Neolithic, and remnants of that industry persist. A Mycenaean settlement stood around the peak of the hill overlooking the…
The high cliffs overlooking the sea at Cape Sounion form an obvious site for a temple. Even more so, a temple of Poseidon, the god of the sea. The location has a 180-degree view over the Aegean, making it also an obvious place to monitor any naval movements toward Athens, some 40 kilometers to the northwest. Mentioned by Homer and Byron, Sounion is a must-visit sight on the Attiki peninsula. A…
The fortified city of Ramnous is only 38 kilometers in a straight line from the Acropolis in Athens, but it's in an isolated setting overlooking the sea. A sanctuary to the grim and implacable god Nemesis overlooks the ruined city. Ramnous and its fortified port guarded the shipping route from the grain farms of Euboea and eastern Boeotia to Athens. During the war between Athens and Sparta, grain…
The army of the vast Persian empire invaded northern Greece in 492 BCE. There was no unified nation, it was all city-states which often fought amongst themselves. Athens was nearly alone, although a much smaller force from Plataea finally joined in the defense. Outnumbered more than 2:1 by the Persians, the Greeks managed to win the battle. Several significant Greek defeats would follow, but this…
The Attik peninsula was part of the Athens city-state and is now home to the Athens airport. The town of Artemida makes an excellent base for exploring the Attiki sites -- Sounion, Thorikos, Marathon, Ramnous, and more. Artemida is on the coast, with beachfront tavernas. It's a 15-minute drive from the airport, which itself is an easy commuter train ride from the ferry port at Piraeus.
A temple to Poseidon was built at Isthmia in the 7th century BCE, although there are signs of cult activity going back to the 11th century BCE. As a Panhellenic sanctuary, it was a place of of worship to Greeks from all city-states, and neutral ground where political meetings could safely be held. The primary sight here is a Roman bath built around 150 CE.
Fascist Italy declared war and invaded Greece in October 1940, a year and a month after Germany invaded Poland. The Hellenic Army pushed the Italian forces back into Albania, an Italian protectorate at the time. While most of the Hellenic Army was tied up keeping the Italian forces in Albania, Germany rapidly invaded and captured Greece in April through June 1941. The Greek government went into…
The Isthmus of Greece is a strip of land just six kilometers wide, connecting what otherwise would be a 180x150 kilometer island to the mainland. The Greeks realized well over two millennia ago that a canal would eliminate the time and danger of a 700-kilometer sea voyage around the Peloponnese. A canal was completed in 1883, but it was obsolete as soon as it opened, and it continues to need…
A 12th century Christian basilica was built on top of a church from the late 4th century. That church had been built on top of an earlier structure that included a Mithraeum, a cave-temple in in which the rituals of the Mithraic Mysteries were practiced. Mithraic rituals had to be carried out in hidden subterranean spaces. A proper Mithraeum contains a depiction, usually carved in stone, of the…
Since the 1980s, philosophers in the field of epistemology have distinguished "lying" from "bullshitting". The liar is aware of the truth and is trying to convince you of its opposite. The bullshitter, however, ignores the truth, and may not know the truth, and is babbling his own fictional nonsense. Generative AI creates bullshit. But due to pareidolia, the strong human tendency to perceive…
Updated page by adding a report on TETRA:Burst intentional weakness or backdoor in the TETRA radio standard used internationally for industry, public infrastructure, and public safety. Previously: Added background and many links to the Salt Typhoon story, the Chinese government's cyber-espionage program that has used law enforcement wiretapping backdoors to build persistent data snooping and…
This 545-meter mountain looms over the ancient city. You can drive up to about 350 meters elevation, and then the remaining 200 meters of ascent are up to you, on foot. Its summit is within multiple defensive walls. The earliest written histories we have go back to the 7th and 6th centuries BCE. The Macedonians, under Alexander the Great, improved the fortifications in the 4th century BCE. The…
The site has been occupied since the early Neolithic, and the city was a commercial center by the time history began to be recorded in the early 8th century BCE. The Romans destroyed the city while capturing the city in 146 BCE, and then re-established it in 44 BCE. Korinthos is famous as an early center of Christianity, although it was a small Jewish splinter sect and greatly outnumbered by other…
Avoiding the confusion caused by English speakers using French spellings of Greek names: there will be no road signs pointing you toward "Corinth". I traveled between Athens and Korinthos by both train and rental car, with stops along the way at Elefsina and Isthmia. I got settled into the apartment I had rented for a one-week stay and then explored the neighborhood and the nearby harbor area. the…
Introduction to visiting Korinthos. Starting with getting there from Athens, finding my lodging and settling in. Then visiting both Ancient Korinthos, the center of Roman rule starting in 44 BCE and early Christianity, and Akrokorinthos, the 545-meter mountain looming over the ancient city.
Easter is the high point of the year in Greece, and a great time to visit. The big event is the Resurrection Service starting at 23:00 on Saturday night, with darkness at midnight followed by candles passing the light out from the altar area through the congregation and into the streets. That hour-long service is followed by a full liturgy that continues for about another three hours. There may be…
The rites of the Eleusian Mysteries came from a Neolithic agrarian cult in Anatolia. Starting some time before the 16th century BCE, and continuing for about two millennia until they were banned as a pagan cult in 395 CE and the site was sacked by the Goths the following year, they were celebrated annually. The annual multi-day rites began with a procession from Athens. When the celebrants reached…
How to use the Babel package included with LaTeX to include text in non-Latin scripts within your documents. For example, the Cyrillic alphabet for Russian (along with other East Slavic and South Slavic languages) and the Greek alphabet. The Babel system supports transliteration, a way of phonetically spelling out, roughly speaking, the non-English language in the Latin alphabet. Examples of that…
The Prince Hotel opened in 1927, and was converted to an SRO in the 1940s to house soldiers being processed out of the military after being brought to New York City in troopships. It remained as an SRO until 2011, when it was renovated and reopened as the Bowery House. A handful of permanent residents from the 1970s remained. The COVID-19 pandemic closed it down in 2020 or 2021, but then it was…
An untold number of essays and even theses have been written about the purported meaning of "2001: A Space Odyssey". However, the answer is simple and obvious. It's a movie about eating. Hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional extraterrestrial beings visit Earth, leaving large black monoliths that guide the development of humanity as driven by, and shown in the movie by, humanity's meals. They guide…
Brian Muraresku's "The Immortality Key" is about ancient rituals centered on hallucinogens and other psychedelic substances infused into beer and wine. These rituals were carried out across the Mediterranean world from Iberia to Mesopotamia in prehistoric times, continuing into historic times as secret rituals. It was apotheosis, an encounter with the divine, reached by means of intoxicants. The…
How to find broken symbolic links, a.k.a. soft links or symlinks. This is very easy to do on Linux, or actually on any operating system providing the GNU version of the 'find' command. If you're stuck with a Posix version of 'find', as is the case with FreeBSD, you can still do it. The solution is a little more complex, and it requires some caution. But then the overly complicated 'find' command…
This page now contains several minor updates describing details of the latest major releases of RHEL, Oracle Linux, and FreeBSD. It explains how to start a shell within an ssh-agent session while preserving all environment variables. It also provides guidance on taking advantage of current trends of configuration file architecture, making maintenance through package updates easier.
Traveling north on the Intercités de Nuit overnight sleeper train from Latour-de-Carol - Enveitg, in the Pyrenees mountains, to Paris. Schedule, preparing your bunk in a couchette compartment, and life on board. During the afternoon and evening before, passing through the Pyrenees mountains between Toulouse and the border. The regional train to Latour-de-Carol takes you within 500 meters of the…
Traveling south on the Intercités de Nuit overnight sleeper train from Paris to Cerbère, on the Mediterranean coast at the Spanish border. Schedule, finding your car at the station, preparing your bunk in a couchette compartment, and life on board. In the morning, passing through the Pyrenees mountains to the border. Transfer to a short hop to Portbou, the Spanish station, then buying onward…
Intercités de Nuit are comfortable overnight sleeper trains operated out of Paris. To the south, to two locations along the Spanish border, they operate out of Paris Gare d'Austerlitz. In both directions, you board in the early evening and arrive well rested at your destination in the morning. Here are suggestions for planning your trip including choosing between three classes of service. Also,…
Many promoters of AI hype claim that so-called "Hypercomputation" will somehow make their impossible dreams possible. No, it can't. There are fundamental limits to mathematics and computational logic, we have known this since the early 20th century. Claims of "hypercomputation" making AI all-knowing and all-powerful are nothing but magical thinking. Techbro blather about "breaking the 'Turing…
Updated with pictures from 2025.
Pictures from my visit to Notre-Dame in 2006, 2008, 2009, and 2012, before the devastating fire in April 2019. Then, my returns in late 2019 and 2023 while the cathedral was closed to the public. Finally, my return in 2025 when the interior was full re-opened. Beautiful! Completely unlike the old interior darkened by 850 years of candle and incense smoke.
Google decreases AdSense service and thus author-supporting revenue to a page that criticizes Silicon Valley's baseless hype of generative AI.
A quick overview of why we need asymmetric cryptography, and quantum-safe or post-quantum versions in particular. Then pictures and descriptions showing how the lattice problems are used in the officially accepted PQC algorithms.
An introduction to visiting some interesting sites in Rome that aren't swarmed by mobs of tourists.
Pleasant days on the volcanic island of Stromboli. Understanding the distinctions between stratovolcanoes like Vulcano and Stromboli on the one hand, and shield volcanoes like Rapa Nui and the Hawaii island chain on the other. Roberto Rosselini's 1950 film "Stromboli", starring Ingrid Bergman, was filmed here. She became his lover during the production and her home is a local landmark.
Traveling by ferry from Vulcano to Stromboli, arriving in a rainstorm, and finding my lodging.
Beginning a visit to the island of Stromboli, in the Tyrrhenian Sea north of Sicily.
Ascending the active volcano on the island of Vulcano. Checking conditions, and starting up the path. How to find your way without Google Maps luring you to an excruciating death in venting steam and hydrogen sulfide along its suggested route. To the crater rim at 270 meters above the town, then continuing around the rim and up to the highest peak at 386 meters.
Beginning a visit to the island of Vulcano, in the Tyrrhenian Sea north of Sicily. It was named for the ur-blacksmith and god of fire, and its name became the basis for "volcano" and related terms in several European languages.
Traveling from Palermo by train to Milazzo, then continuing by ferry to the island of Vulcano. Settling in to my lodging, and exploring the port town.
An explanation of how to use the nmcli command common to all recent Linux distributions to investigate and solve a problem regarding long-term stable IPv6 addresses. This uses SLAAC and EUI-64, which could have privacy implications if used recklessly. This describes how to get stable and predictable IPv6 addresses when in a trusted environment, and still have random interface identifiers when in…