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Three nights later, still no charges for Rumeysa Ozturk

Rumeysa Ozturk

This past Tuesday night, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University PhD student, was kidnapped by ICE agents on the street in Somerville, Massachusetts. We can only guess that they were agents because they had no badges nor uniforms. It is three nights later and we still don’t know what she was charged with. The closest thing we can speculate triggered this was a very un-incendiary 2024 op-ed she co-wrote in the Tufts Daily. You should read it.

You already know all this from the news. She’s one of many people who have been rounded up for murky reasons recently. It’s just that this case grabs me because she was an easy target and they whisked her away to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center without telling her counsel. Trump and Rubio and whoever else want everyone to be too scared to speak out against them, Netanyahu, Putin — take your pick of whichever deplorable they’ll side with next.

The Department of Homeland Security has accused Ozturk, without providing evidence, of “engaging in activities in support of Hamas,” a group which the U.S. government categorizes as a “foreign terrorist organization.” — Reuters

What activities in support of Hamas? Do they mean the op-ed, which is legal, protected free speech (and says nothing about Hamas, by the way, but it wouldn’t matter if it did)? I don’t see anything about her being violent or inciting a riot. I doubt she even got the chance to yell over a bullhorn, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”.

If it eventually becomes clear that she’s guilty of a real crime then I’ll admit I was wrong. I don’t think I am. If there were a charge here, we would damn well have heard about it by now. You can hear the foundation of sand Rubio has built his house on when he glosses over the reasons they revoked her visa. His voice telegraphs that he wants us to stop asking him what she’s charged with. He’s flailing. They’re all dug in now. The longer they hide from their overreach, the more dangerous it becomes for Ozturk. The more dangerous it becomes for any immigrant, visiting student, and natural born citizen.

I’ve heard people say you have to pick your battles with this crass joke of an administration. You can’t get wound up about every piece of shit they flood the zone with. That’s probably a decent way to preserve your own sanity, and so this is the hill I will die on.

March 28, 2025 free speech

Weeknotes 8

  • Sarah got me a Fujifilm Instax 99 for my birthday and it is the coolest thing! She knew I would never indulge in one for myself, but now I have free license to buy a bunch of film for it.
  • So, the people who howled non-stop about learning loss and the horrible disservice we were doing to students when Covid shut down the schools are also very cool with Trump wanting to dismantle the Education Department. Ok.

Music from this past week:

From Sophisticated Boom Boom with Sheila B. 2024-09-30:

Meat Puppets — Reward (Matt says their first few records are great)

Slaughterhouse — State of Emergency

Georgia Harmer — Little Light

From Surface Noise with Joe McGasko 2025-03-10:

Wes Montgomery: The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery from Wes Montgomery At His Most Incredible | Tracking Angle

Olga Anna Markowska — Dawn

Third Eye Blind — Like A Lullaby

Laura Shumate — Indandesce (or Incandesce? wondering about the spelling here)

March 23, 2025 weeknotes music photography Fujifilm Instax 99

When macOS Spotlight doesn’t find files in the current folder

Just went to scan some negatives and was about to make a new folder for them. At some point in the past I chose the unfortunate folder-naming convention of:

yyyy-mm-dd FilmShorthand-RollNumber CameraBrand CameraModel FilmManufacturer FilmType

which results in things like this:

2022-12-31 trix-0036 leica m2 kodak tri-x 400

I guess it works in that it’s sorted by the date of the first exposure (if I can recall it) and then the trix-0036 part is a uniquely sequenced proxy for a roll number.

When I want to start a new folder, I have to look for the highest roll number in my film scans inbox folder and add 1 to it. Spotlight usually works fine for that, but just now I saw that trix-0036 roll in there and wanted to make sure there wasn’t a something-0037 roll that I missed. Spotlight didn’t report a 0037 match when searching the Name of items in that film scans folder, but it also couldn’t find the 0036 match, though I could plainly see the matching folder sitting in there.

The fix is to tell Spotlight to exclude the folder (or the drive) from search, then re-add it. I didn’t have to exclude my whole drive — only the folder in question — but still. Isn’t this the kind of thing you’d expect Windows to do, and on macOS it should just work?

February 22, 2025 macOS

Using the treetrum Amazon Kindle Bulk Downloader on macOS

The clock is ticking on downloading backup copies of your Amazon Kindle books. You have through Feb. 26.

Just in time, I happened to see Jack mention Sam Davis’s Amazon Kindle Bulk Downloader:

Designed for downloading your Kindle eBooks in a more automated fashion than is typically permitted, this tool allows you to create backup copies of the books you’ve already purchased.

Here’s what I did to get it working on a MacBook running Sequoia:

First, make sure you see the pre-requisites about having a physical Kindle or Fire Tablet of the right (not too new) vintage.

In Terminal, go to whatever folder you clone repos to. I use a code folder in my home directory:

cd ~/code

Clone the repo to that folder:

git clone https://github.com/treetrum/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader.git

Install Bun by going to https://bun.sh/docs/installation – I did the plain option:

curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash

Open a new Terminal window and check your Bun version:

bun --version

This next part is important. You have to go the folder where the Amazon Kindle Bulk Downloader is installed:

cd ~/code/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader

Then install the dependencies the bulk downloader needs:

bun install

Look at all the files in that folder:

ls -all

You’ll see an .env.template file. You could copy that file to an .env file and customize it with your Amazon username, password, and one-time-password, but I didn’t have good luck getting that to work. I did this instead and logged in manually. I’m using a baseUrl of https://www.amazon.com :

bun run start --baseUrl "https://www.amazon.com" --manualAuth "true"

After you put in your username and password and authenticate with either your Amazon iOS app or with a 6-digit code, Google Chrome for Testing will appear to hang for a minute or so while Amazon figures out who you are. Don’t bail out. Once you’re in, you’ll see your digital content items.

Now flip back to Terminal and you’ll see a prompt in bold that says:

✔ Press enter once you've logged in

Press Enter.

Then you’ll see:

✔ Select a Kindle device (note, eink devices are preferred)

Select your device and hit Enter.

Then all of your stuff will download super fast to the ~/code/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader/downloads folder.

Wow! Now go save all those downloaded books somewhere safe. You should extract every cent of value out of what you’ve already paid Bezos for. He can suck it.

February 20, 2025 Amazon Kindle ebooks

Styling a Markdown one-line journal in Emacs

I like the idea of making a one-line journal, whether on paper or in some flavor of text file. I’ve tried it a handful of times, but nothing ever stuck. However! I think this new way has the best chance of being lightweight, nice-looking, and easy to update from anywhere.

I’d forgotten about George Coghill’s The One-Line-Per-Day, One-Page Plain Text Daily Journal until yesterday and that gave me the boost I needed. Here’s what I’m doing, which borrows a lot from his formatting:

I have a one-line-journal.md file in Dropbox that I open in Emacs (or in 1Writer on the phone) and it looks like this:

one page of Markdown-formatted one-line journal entries in Emacs

My favorite part of all this is this section of init.el that tells Emacs to format anything that looks like 2024-12-29 Sun in a Markdown file as white + bold. I could make this more robust by changing it to only affect dates that start in the first column of a line, and only match actual days of the week instead of three random alpha characters, but I use Markdown so little in Emacs other than this file that I can live with this setup. And no, I didn’t know how to do this and got ChatGPT to write it:

(defun my-markdown-highlight-dates ()
  "Highlight ISO dates followed by a three-letter day abbreviation in red."
  (font-lock-add-keywords
   nil
   '(("\\b\\([0-9]\\{4\\}-[0-9]\\{2\\}-[0-9]\\{2\\} [A-Z][a-z]\\{2\\}\\)\\b"
      1 '(:weight bold :foreground "white") t))))

(add-hook 'markdown-mode-hook #'my-markdown-highlight-dates)

I separate all the micro-entries in each day with a bullet, which I can type with the snippet of blt. This is handled by abbrev-mode, which turns on automatically with this line in init.el:

(setq-default abbrev-mode t)

December 29, 2024 journal Emacs regex

Weeknotes 7

  • Because linkding is so good at managing bookmarks, I’m not going to include a kitchen sink list of potentially interesting links in the Weeknotes series anymore. I will include a shorter list of stuff that I’ve actually tried and adopted or read fully, or things that have made the internal compass recalibrate itself. The rest are in my linkding instance (also at the Bookmarks link in the menu above).
  • I went back to Safari after using Arc for a good long time. I will say that Arc kept me out of a lot of open-tab bankruptcy, but I always felt like I never knew where something would open when I used it. I never cared for the way the login page for my bank’s website would stay open in the background while the accounts page would open in a floating window above it after I signed in. And I don’t need my downloaded files renamed with A.I., although that was neat the first time I saw it work. With Safari, there is one row of tabs, nothing closes by accident until I close it myself, and my phone and laptop are always in sync.
  • “Jack Baty” is a cool name!
  • Hearing Luc Beaudoin on Hookmark on The Informed Life makes me want to understand Hookmark, which I have never gotten. I like his belief that you should be able to get to anything you need within two seconds. Also that relying on search to find emails, notes, and documents (instead of direct links) can too easily distract you from the thing you were looking for.
  • 50.5% of voters elected President #45 again. I don’t have much to add that isn’t already covered in someone else’s hot take. I realize Democrats are out of touch and Trump voters are playing an entirely different game, but he also wouldn’t spend so much time being a belligerent racist, xenophobe, queerphobe if he didn’t think that would appeal to a lot of people. Whatever was behind it, I was blindsided, got through the stages of grief in record time, and now I’m just resigned. Getting wound up every day of his first term was completely unproductive. I have things to learn about all the reasons that got others to the point where voting for him didn’t make them want to vomit.
  • Deleted my Twitter account. Don’t miss it.
  • The bathroom mold remediation began today. Our sole toilet is disconnected and we’re using a camping toilet — a seat with a hole and a bio-bag — on the screened back porch. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be!
  • The Diplomat on Netflix is so, so great. I needed something this well-shot and expertly acted.
  • And Leave the World Behind (2023) on Netflix is incredible. Gonna take me all night to calm down from it.

Music

November 9, 2024 weeknotes bookmarks