TESTING OUT FOSS

For the past year I've been mainly using Linux Mint as my daily driver, but sometimes returning to Windows 7 when I want to use Photoshop. 

My laptop is running Mint Cinnamon 21 (a two year old version from July 2022), while my PC is set up with the latest version, Mint 22, which was released in July 2024. Part of the Linux learning curve is choosing which software to use from a huge range of Free Open Source Software (FOSS) available on Linux. 

I'm trying out all sorts of programs and this is what my laptop looks like at the moment - so much software to try out! Once I decide which option I like best I uninstall the other options that I won't be using.

 I'm running a tighter ship on my PC and not installing or testing as much new software. There is really not much of a difference between Mint 21 & 22. One of the things I like about Mint is that they don't change much with each new release, just gradually refining things rather than trying to be spectacular. 

I tried out about half a dozen Linux distros and Mint Cinnamon was my pick. Other distros I liked were Mint LMDE & Zorin 17. What I'm looking for in a distro is simplicity, reliability, & a user interface resembling Windows 7. And no geek stuff or use of command line.

I'm not a fan of Ubuntu and expect at some point in the future to be switching to the Mint Debian Edition in order to escape the woke clutches of Ubuntu. Clearly Mint are preparing themselves for that day.

 https://www.linuxmint.com/

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Mint

HOW TO MAKE FACEBOOK USEABLE

A way to make Facebook more usable is to always view it in your browser with an app called F.B Purity – the main thing this can do is turn off all the crap (no more side bars or notifications)

https://www.fbpurity.com/

I’ve used FBP for years and regard Facebook as totally unusable without it because of all the crap they put in there.

https://www.fbpurity.com/

The other important thing to do is to switch to "feeds" so you see everything in chronological order, and not in Facebook's bullshit algorithm feed.

---

SIX SIFT BLOGS

This post is mainly to help me keep track of what on earth I'm doing with them all.

Although we first registered the www.sift.co.nz domain back in 1998, it wasn't used for any websites at that point, and we mainly used the "SIFT" name for a range of t-shirts parodying the "SHIFT" motor-cross clothing brand.

SIFT BLOG #1

https://web.archive.org/web/homepages.paradise.net.nz/wheels/sift

The first SIFT blog was set up in 2002 using Adobe Dreamweaver (back when it was cheap, & Adobe wasn't yet evil) and hosted on Paradise.net. That blog is long gone now, but backup copies of it are on Wayback Machine dating back as far as 2003, and even back then I was already going hard out about a range of subjects including 911. 

It was quite cool really with its red white and blue on black colour scheme, exploding head gifs, and twin vertical menus. Looking at it a quarter of a century later, I'd even say it was ahead of it's time. All the subsequent SIFT blogs are modeled on it to some extent.

SIFT BLOG #2

 http://wheels-frot.blogspot.com/

 The first SIFT blog using the Blogger platform was set up in 2009 mainly just to test out Google Blogger. 

I had other websites on the go, and never took that one very seriously, but I did do occasional short posts on it right up to 2015. It's still on there but despite having been online for over 15 years, it's only had 88,500 hits, an average of 16 hits per day. So it's never been exactly pumping!

 SIFT BLOG #3

 www.frot.co.nz/design/sift.

As a bit of an experiment in 2022 I set up a SIFT blog on our FROT server using WordPress - The problem was that by then (during the Covidhoax) everything on our server was grey listed and getting barely any hits. So I soon gave up on that experiment, and didn't do much with it, but it is still online. 

SIFT BLOG #3

 https://sift666.blogspot.com/

Disillusioned with my FROT blog, that was still only getting around 50 hits a day post covid hoax (down from over 2000 a day before covid), in late 2023 I decided to switch back to using Blogger, and at the start of 2024, I stopped posting on www.frot.co.nz altogether and started only posting on a brand new Blogger blog with my www.sift.co.nz URL pointing at it.

Apart from only getting about 100 hits a day, that went OK, until the end of 2024 when it started having technical issues. Firstly a post disappeared, and then the colours of my text and links started changing all by themselves. I was unable to change them back, and at one point it had black text on a black background with dark blue links. So it was totally unusable.

I temporally got it visible by putting it back to the grey default theme, although it looked hideous in grey, but after having another crack at fixing it I gave up trying to do a black background, and made it bright purple instead. Just like my first FROT website from 1998.

I stopped using it altogether at the end of 2024 and made it an archive, but then the hits started climbing, so I decided to share my new posts back to it for the first three  months of 2025. So that is how I ended up with a bright purple mirror of my current black SIFT blog.

SIFT BLOG #4

 https://sift2025.blogspot.com/

 Not able to properly fix my 2024 Blogger blog, I started over again with another new Blogger blog for 2025. Which all worked perfectly as far as the theme and formatting went, but not surprisingly the hits stated out really low again, as they always do on new sites.

That is my current blog, and it's where I'm posting my new content first, but I only realised after about six weeks that choosing the URL "sift2025" wasn't the sharpest of ideas, because it will look out of date next year. 

So I later decided to set up another new blog with the URL "sift-nz" which is more timeless, thinking I might eventually switch over to using that one. But in the meantime, sift2025 is my primary blog and it's where the www.sift.co.nz URL is pointing to.

SIFT BLOG #5

https://sift911.blogspot.com/

 After making various changes to my blogs such as changing themes to try them out, I found that it was all too easy to stuff up a bunch of settings, and have to waste ages sorting them out. So I decided to set up a blog purely for test purposes. It just has a few samples of my posts, so I can play around and test things out without worrying if anything goes horribly wrong.

I only used the 911 URL for this because it was available and easy to remember. I did used to do a lot of posting about the 911 psyop back in 2002, but I'm long over researching that old dinosaur these days. (It's in the too easy basket, along with other classics like "moon landing")

SIFT BLOG #6

https://sift-nz.blogspot.com

The newest sift-nz blog is a copy of my current blog that was set up 15 March 2025.  Being brand new it's not really getting any hits apart from my own refreshes, but  if anything goes wrong with my 2025 blog, I can switch over to this copy of it.

Probably this will ever happen, but I figured it might be a good idea to have a backup blog. I don't trust Google for obvious reasons so I also have all this content backed up offline, and if it ever gets censored by Google I will probably set up a seventh SIFT blog, most likely going back to using WordPress, but hosted on a new server space that isn't grey listed.

In the meantime, the sift-nz blog is set up to look the same as my 2025 one, except it doesn't have all my blog content, or most of the extra content like links, pages, or image galleries.

 

 

PS. Choosing between black and purple

 

After thinking more about all this, and watching the growing hits on the purple site, which is still getting more hits than my stylish looking new black site, I deciding to go back to having a purple blog.

 

 

In a world devoid of colour, where just about everyone has a black blog, a purple blog stands out like dog's balls, and I like purple.

40 MILLION FREE EBOOKS

Anne's Archive is an amazing resource with over 40 million free ebooks online. It is described as the largest truly open library in human history. All their code and data are completely open source, and the way the site is set up pretty much side steps all issues of copyright (they are only sharing download links rather than the books themselves).

It currently has 42,424,101 books and 98,536,735 papers in it's database, all available to download, and these numbers are rapidly growing. It includes a lot of conspiracy books, some of which are heavily censored and hard to find elsewhere.

I have been asked how it all works, so here are some basic instructions showing how to download eBooks:

First go to the Anna's Archive website and enter the author or title you are looking for in the search box - https://annas-archive.org/

The results of your search will rapidly appear, & if you want to filter by format, tick the formats you are after, (for example, I like PDF or EPUB) in the file types on the left

After you select the book you want, click on one of the two "slow download" options - If you are new to the site you won't be a paid subscriber, but these will still both work fine. Don't get carried away, you can only do one download at a time from each of the options.

 

There are daily limits on how many books you can download, I'm not sure what they are, possibly 10?. If you do too many downloads the site stops working. Leave it a a day and try again. Anne's Archive is certainly not the only site to find eBooks, just the easiest on to use. This website describes a bunch of other ebook download alternative sites

Next, remember to hit the "Download now" link to start the book downloading

Save your eBooks in a folder (don't change or rename this folder once you start using them on your eBook reader or your books will disappear from the reader & you will have to add them again) - I edit the names of the new books before adding them to my eBook reader because the file names of eBooks downloaded through Anne's Archive tend to be very long.

On my Windows PC I use Calibre eBook reader which can be downloaded here

I was trying to keep things simple for people new to eBooks and tested some other more basic eBook readers such as Ice Cream reader, but I prefer having all the features of Calibre (which is free anyway) - it's slightly more complex at first but it does everything I want.

For reading books on an Android tablet or phone I use the Read Era app which is really good. It's not set up for all the more complex text editing stuff that Calibre can do, but is great for displaying and reading your eBook collections. Although its not designed for PC use, it apparently can be installed on a windows PC - I'm about to try doing that and instructions for installing it on a Widows PC are here

 

Having access to 42 million eBooks is pretty amazing, and before you know it, you can have your own vast library.

MY EVIL PLAN PART 2

If my blogs were still getting thousands of hits per day, like they were before the covid hoax, some geek would probably read this and tell me I was talking complete bollocks.

But that won't happen because barely anyone reads my posts anyway, and the comments are turned off, because 99.99% of comments these days are AI spam.

By 2023 the hits on my WordPress blog had dropped from 2000 a day to about 50 and I couldn't be bothered soldering on with the complexities of WordPress any longer. 

 I have always found Blogger much quicker and easier to use, even if it is owned by evil Google, so I thought sod it, I'll go back to simple old Blogger, I might as well because probably nobody will see my posts anyway.

At the start of 2024, I stopped posting on www.frot.co.nz and started posting on a brand new Blogger blog with my www.sift.co.nz URL pointing at it. Everything seemed to work OK, and I still really like the Blogger interface, but it got bugger all hits, only about 100 a day. Admittedly I did almost nothing to promote it, but that is not very inspiring.

Then right at the end of 2024 I started having technical issues with it. Firstly a post disappeared, and then the colours of my text and links started changing all by themselves. I was unable to change them back, and at one point it had black text on a black background with dark blue links. So it was totally unusable.

Not able to fix it, I thought, "Oh well, I'll start over again with another new Blogger blog for 2025". Which I did, and it all worked perfectly as far as the colours went, but not surprisingly there was no increase in hits. "Too bad" I thought, as that seems to be happening to everyone posting none "woke" content on the woketard controlled internet.

Then to my surprise, the hits on my now archived Blogger 2024 blog started climbing. I wasn't posting any new content on it, but had since changed the background colours to shades of grey, so that the text was visible again. 

I thought it looked hideous, but after having another crack at fixing it I gave up trying to do the black background, and made it bright purple instead. Just like my first website from 1998.

And this is where I'm at now - my current www.sift.co.nz blog, is looking how I want it to, and all working perfectly, but it could take all year to build up more traffic (if it ever does), while my buggy purple archived blog is now getting 3x as many hits and seems to be growing, without any new content.

Which got me thinking, "What would happen if I started copying all the new posts from my current blog back across to my old blog? Would that make it get more traffic? Or would it just become more heavily grey listed, and actually have a drop in traffic? There is really only one way to find out isn't there? Yes I'm going to do an experiment. I can't help myself... 

MY EVIL PLAN

Back in 1998 when I got my first internet connection and the internet was still an exciting new frontier, within just a few days I wanted a website of my own. I promptly registered two domain names www.frot.co.nz and www.sift.co.nz, so I've now had those domains for 27 years!

Our personal sites weren't even called "blogs" back then because the word hadn't yet been invented. Apparently "blog" was coined by Peter Merholz, who first used it on his blog peterme.com in May 1999.

As things worked out, I mainly went with Frot, and that URL got most of the use, while Sift, which I later came to regard as the better name, was just pointed at a series of little viewed blogs.  

 

But there are copies of some of them on Wayback Machine dating back as far as 2002, and even back then I was already going hard out about a range of subjects including 911. 

It was quite cool really with its red white and blue on black colour scheme, exploding head gifs, and twin vertical menus. Looking at it a quarter of a century later, I'd even say it was ahead of it's time. Yes this blog is modeled on it!

The intro from 2003 read:

I Sift, therefore I am sifty

Sifting can potentially cultivate a much more aware state of mind than, say, mindless consuming and generalised believing. Hidden underneath all the worthless misinformation that flows freely out to us everyday, are some rare gems of truth. But you have to sift for them.

Sifting about on the net, I've found myself drawn to some seemingly diverse subjects such as nutrition, health, marijuana, hemp, consumerism, capitalism, chaos theory, organics, censorship, drugs, doctors, warez, hacking, advertising, corporations, chemicals, GE, computers, free trade, and of course the USA and it's uncontrolled world domination fetish.

That's a wide range of subjects and I'm too lazy to get into all of it, so a lot of the stuff on this site relates to health issues, as lately I've been spending a lot of my time working on my health, and researching diet and nutrition, But the thing I have found repeatedly, is that once you start digging around, everything starts to follow a similar pattern. Basically, it seems that if something is widely reported, it is probably false, whether it's about healthy food, or terrorist attacks.

The way these things tend to interlink, and the patterns they each repeat, open up a clearer way of looking at things. An alternative perspective, distilled through sifting. A bigger picture. There are many people on the Internet who are trying to distribute quality information. But most punters are not ready or willing to even consider it - they are too thoroughly indoctrinated. So it stays submerged.

One of my friends responded to this site with "I just maintain a state of apathetic cynicism and avoid thinking about all this stuff" And that's a reasonable reaction, there's no point getting stressed about it all. But on the other hand, we are getting shafted and lied to so frequently that it's hard to just ignore it. And I think that right now there are enough people becoming aware of what's going on to start fighting back.

Knowledge is power. For example, if enough people are aware of the real reasons that America attacked Iraq, or of America's history of world domination and how taking over Iraq fits into that, or that the "war on terrorism", like the "war on drugs" is a complete scam, intended only to increase America's power, then maybe that will help to make the actions of the US backfire on them.

Every aware person is only a drop in the ocean, but every drop can help dilute the tide of oppression that's coming from the likes of the US government, and the overbearing evil of multinationals such as Monsanto. The Internet is still a place where the individual can fight back. Let's keep it that way.

As I find interesting new stuff, I'll post some bits of it along the way, and make a sort of documented sifting scrapbook. Siftings from the sifterhood. As a rough guide, the text in red is generally stuff I have slapped together myself, while the blue text is stuff I have shamelessly ripped off wholesale from other sites and books, with as little editing as possible.

I am a firm believer in the motto "information wants to be free" Once something is posted on the net it's like tossing a bottle in the sea - who knows where it will end up... So feel free to recycle anything on this site - if it's in red it may even be original and a credit to www.sift.co.nz would be much appreciated. Wherever possible I have left in credits for the sources of all the material I have ripped off, and that to me is cool - I realise not everyone agrees with that, but as I am trying to show on this website, there are generally two sides to most arguments. (And the other side are generally a bunch of idiots!)

Much of this site contains personal opinion. But I believe the factual content is accurate. If you have clear evidence that would dispute or add to any of the statements on this site, feel free to send it to me. I have just added a feedback page for responses to the site.

The most popular page on this site has been the Coca-Cola one. It's my theory that is was getting the most hits because I had put the link to it as "coke". That's now been changed to Coca-Cola, so if it becomes less popular, I'll take it as a sign that people really want to read about drugs. That they want to read about Colombian drug dealers hoovering up mountains of coke off glass top tables in expensive nightclubs. Maybe they want to look at porn and read about coke. There's certainly some good sifting material in those subjects, so who knows...

People keep paying me to do stuff for them. It takes time and interferes with my sifting. Sometimes it's a problem. Sometimes I just sift anyway, and things I was going to do remain undone. This site still hasn't got much stuff on it yet.... But it's on my list. It's number 186. I'll be back.

The Curator 

 

 

BOOKS ARE OK

Over the past few weeks we've had a very dodgy internet connection. It turned out to be a bad cable connection to a phone pole, and after a lot of pissing about with phoning help lines and changing modems and other hardware, a technician came around and fixed the problem in under 10 minutes.

 

As they say clouds have silver linings, and in this case it lead to me reading a lot more books. And that inspired me to start doing short posts about books that I've enjoyed. They will basically just be copy and pastes from the Amazon site, because I can't be bothered writing book reviews. I'm not a fan of Amazon and I don't actually buy anything from them, but their website is really convenient for copying stuff from. 

I check out quite a few books because I download literally thousands of eBooks, and if I don't find a book engrossing I don't usually persist with reading it for long. So any book I do a post about is one that I highly recommend. I'm going to compile my book posts into a new page called "RECOMMENDED READING"

This is the first of my book posts:

CHAOS WITH CHARLES MANSON

Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (2020)

by Tom O'Neill (Author), Dan Piepenbring

4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 11,571 ratings

 

 RECOMMENDED READING