Wilson Forest Lands

Michael Wilson’s humour provides just the chuckle I need whilst being educated about things that I care about: forest maintenance, living close to nature, logging, and general wisdom about taking care of land and equipment. He’s got generational knowledge that he presents in short-ish videos that are very enjoyable. It’s probably the only channel that I watched all of its videos, mainly because he only started about four years ago. Here’s a video where Michael describes how he used to make money selling containers full of branches to far places that don’t have them.

FarmCraft101

John does everything on his large farm and thoroughly documents it: success, cleverness, stupidity, stubbornness, futility, seals (you’ll see), and all. John has just the right amount of juvenile sense of humour weaved through self-deprecating educational videos that keeps me coming back. He’s one of the main reasons I decided to keep my old 1986 15HP tractor that needs work, instead of getting a newer one… he inspired me to get to know the fine workings of diesel engines and hydraulics (“You wanted to become a farmer, but instead you’ve become a hydraulics engineer!”). Also, his work really makes a good case for getting a 3D printer, which I’m seriously thinking about.

Zach Riggs

Zach lives in Ohio and does arborist work, demolitions, and excavating, among other things like fixing trucks. Zach seems to be a true professional that loves his work and that is nice to everyone around him. It’s a pleasure to see him work and his attitude towards safety, accountability, and doing things properly. Here’s him in a freak accident where a branch went through his Protos helmet2 that narrowly missed the important stuff! (Full video is here.)

Climbing Arborist

Dan Holliday is another nice guy doing arborist work — he’s a Brit living in Canada, I think — while focused on safety and creativity. He shares personal experiences related to his work, his equipment, how to take care of trees (like pruning correctly, not just felling them), and accessible basics of rigging and climbing.

Mo Bittar

Mo sold his Standard Notes app to Proton and is now working on another productivity application. Very thoughtful chap, he recently started a channel ranting critically about AI, which is right up my alley. His scripts and delivery are punchy and funny and clever which elevates them to more than just your standard rant.

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Other channels that I watch sometimes are Matt Cremona (mostly milling now, but also long-form videos about furniture and workshop-barn building), Kris Harbour Natural Building (long-form off-grid building and maintenance), Guilty of Treeson (long-form arborist work and lots of banter) and more recently the The Romesh Ranganathan Show.

Any recommendations from you?

I immediately felt that I was being prompted, like a fucking chatbot. She didn’t mean it that way, but it triggered thoughts about how human interactions have changed and will change based on how people interact with chatbots.

Take politeness as an example. People are naturally polite to chatbots because it’s an interaction baseline… whilst LLM companies benefit because it’s an easy way to make meatspace believe that they’re talking to an actual intelligent entity rather than a glorified autocomplete. What we get is superfluous politeness that’s used for utility rather than as a genuine part of interaction2.

Politeness has its place but faking it is obvious when we’re talking with others. Too few or many pleasantries are off-putting; it feels fake. Chatbots will suffer anything like dripping politeness, improper use of language, rudeness, repeats, lack of basic logic. And because the ultimate purpose of LLM companies is to keep you engaged (not to provide accurate information!), the chatbot will adapt to a conversation style that maximises this goal. They are the ultimate sycophants. This conditions people — again, meant to believe the other side is a person — to have conversations like that in real life.

People will also start being offended by any hint of pushback, criticism, constructive feedback, or taking time to ‘think about it’… none of which they get from a bot. People, like me!, will instinctively be miffed by anything that looks like a prompt, creating antagonism at a time where we’re already primed for disagreement.

I’m also concerned that younger people trained on botversations will, unconsciously or not, cast the persona that they crafted for their bot onto real people; for example, they’ll be trained to speak to women in a certain way because that’s the voice they chose for their bot.

We will surely start seeing ‘Personalisation’ paragraphs to potential conversation partners with instructions for how they wish to be interacted with; much like preferred pronouns next a name but more instructive and detailed3. So instead of communicating those things (“stop bullshitting me”, “you’re invading my personal space”) people will be offended that the convoprompt was not strictly adhered to.

AI is making a lot of things worse, and it’s coming for our language and interpersonal interactions that are fundamental to our human experience. I don’t trust humans to make a clear distinction between how they interact with a bot and a other humans, particularly since the entire force of the AI industry is focused on blurring that distinction.

I’ve joined LinkedIn in 2009. It’s been a useful tool for seeing what people I knew were up to, re-connection, and reaching out. Whilst LinkedIn has always been aggressive with emailing and notifications, exquisitely paired with a spyware-like mobile app1, it was still worth it back when I ran a business.

In the past few years, however, my business-related activity has reduced and the platform has changed, for the worse, and with it its usefulness. It’s now a typical social network, like the ones I’ve always avoided (Facebook, Instagram) or removed myself from (Twitter/X). LinkedIn is now only useful for me as a platform for hating on LinkedIn; I get very little business-related use out of it2.

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LinkedIn is the natural home of the humblebrag — “does anyone else’s phone noticeably heat up when your posts go viral?”, “putting some work in waiting for my take-off slot” — where anywhere else, showing-off like this is obviously obnoxious. It’s where people regularly fib about their experiences at work and why they left (“…thankful for an incredibly rewarding journey with super 10X friendly geniuses and management.”); awkwardly shill for their employer (“it was a privilege to be part of the team that supported the team that changed the colour of this button!“); harness personal tragedies to yarn a cockamamy story that ends with self-promotion or some contrived wisdom (“my grandmother died and I learned a valuable lesson about my crypto hustle.”); describe failure as success (“I’ve decided to shut down my mental-health AI startup due to ethical concerns.“); promote toxic hustle culture (“sleeping is over-rated; bed-frames are for lazy people.“); posts praising AI that read like a cry for help (“I don’t code anymore, and it’s most definitely the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me.“); and Elon worshiping (“he will notice my drooling and invest in my startup!“).

I’ve even seen someone proudly adopt an employee-employer relationship with their young children, complete with white-board sessions, one-to-ones, weekly/monthly/yearly goals, and performance reviews… but no one seemed as nauseated as I was about this shit.

There are a couple more emerging things that I don’t want to personally experience maturing. LinkedIn decided it’s going to innovate in the puzzle-game industry… apparently to make it easier for people to connect (video doubles as “how to badly fake product-launch-enthusiasm”). What’s next, LinkedIn? A dating feature also helps people connect.

And the big one, AI. There’s now a lot of talk about AI agents for “managing” your LinkedIn and social media while you sleep. Next are AI profiles and recruiter AI agents bombarding your feed and inbox with perfectly crafted messages and roles that are also perfectly useless. All of this at a time where we already can’t believe anything we see or hear. No thanks.

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I will soon delete content from my LinkedIn account and keep it only as a placeholder so it can’t be squatted. I will then disable all notifications and log-out. I decided to do this instead of deleting the account altogether — which may still happen later — also so that people can find me more easily, and that I’m still able to get in touch with lost connections. I won’t be contributing to the platform anymore, except for the presence of my account.

Those who’d like to keep in touch are sincerely encouraged to email me at me@saardrimer.com and subscribe to this newsletter3. Here’s one of my paintings.

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I got to the Security Group at Cambridge thinking I was a star, only to find that I was the dumbest person alive. My PhD supervisor was the brilliant Markus Kuhn, but my side hustle was finding vulnerabilities with banking-related hardware, which was more of Ross’s passion. I ended up writing a number of papers with Ross, and colleagues from the group, about banking security whilst I was researching for my dissertation on ‘FPGA security’.

Ross was a one-of-a-kind larger-than-life intellectual and communicator, and many, more qualified than me, have written about him, his abilities and achievements. I will focus here on two aspects of my interactions with Ross.

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Once you were accepted into the group, Ross also accepted you as an academic family member, no matter how you ended up performing. As I slowly built my confidence back, often saying and writing silly things, I never got any sign of frustration, disappointment, or anger from Ross. The worst I remember is him crossing out paragraphs in paper drafts and writing that “obide isn’t a word!” Embarrassing. He championed my work to external people even though it wasn’t all the way ‘up there’ and I knew that he helped others who struggled even more than me.

He didn’t know it, but I clung onto that acceptance. I was unnerved, but also thrilled, when he appeared in my office to field new thoughts, even though I was just there to listen and nod… fearful of mumbling something incoherent1. It gave me hope that maybe maybe I can make it through after all, if someone like him uses me as a sounding board. This was good leadership (even though our group did not have hierarchy, and he wasn’t my supervisor).

As an immigrant in the UK, this familial feeling made me certain that if I ever got in trouble, he’d be the first person I could call and leave it with him.

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Ross was an unbelievably gifted author. He consumed a lot of literature, digested it, and it seemed to me that what then yielded through his fingertips was already the final version. No drafts, no revisions. I still can’t even imagine how that’s possible. Whilst I’m not even remotely close to being able to convert my thoughts to paper like that, some things rubbed off on my writing style.

What I keep recalling as I write is to replace statement qualifications and caveats with the word ‘may’. (I still remember Ross crossing out text and saying “may” in his Scottish accent.) The temptation is to make a statement and then qualify it to the level of tightness such that reviewers can’t ding it as inaccurate or false. The problem is that this adds fluff on the way to the main point of the article… so just saying ‘may’ preempts any possible objections. It’s super effective and I loved it!

Here’s an example from our Chip and PIN is broken paper:

For offline transactions, the issuer will not be contacted until after the transaction has been completed, so has even less ability to detect the attack. Some cards may refuse to authorize an offline transaction without having successfully verified the PIN.

We don’t go and spell out all the different ways cards authorise transactions… they ‘may refuse’… and we move on to the bigger point.

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Of course there’s a lot more: a trip to Canary Wharf to cut a banking authority down to size; TV appearances and interviews; courtrooms; demoing to Nick Clegg; and dinners at Shireen and Ross’s place.

I’ve recently learned that the third, and latest, edition of his seminal book, Security Engineering, is freely available. Please have a read through some of the chapters, even if you’re not into security, just to enjoy the accessible writing, and the breadth and depth of knowledge that Ross had, and that is certainly already missed; I’d particularly would have loved to hear his takes on the current state of AI.

The great late Ross Anderson periodically reminded us techies that justice isn’t always dispensed in the ways we might assume. Our ‘smoking gun’ of IP traces, logs, or code means far less than we think in a court: they’re hard to obtain, handle, and interpret correctly, and a judge or jury might not even understand what we’re talking about. Basically, our intuition about what’s obvious is usually wrong in the context of a courtroom.

I’m reminded of this because of the current excitement around ClawdBot MoltBot OpenClaw1. This is open-source code that takes over your computer and credentials (usernames/passwords) to do stuff for you: an AI personal assistant, or ‘agent’. It pretends to be you, and to everyone on the other side it is you.

There’s even a social network just for these agents, moltbook, where they can discuss things. It’s where agents can be influenced by other bots, and humans2.

To me it is entirely plausible, and even extremely likely, that agents can be targeted and made to do bad things: download illegal porn onto your machine, order drugs or weapons on the darkweb, harass emergency services, log into machines using stolen credentials, use stolen credit card numbers to buy stuff, etc. These kinds of operations are all within the means, and are desirable features, of OpenClaw.

When that happens and police knocks on your door, consider who will end up going to jail? I’d say that it’s you, who purposefully installed malware on your machine and gave it permission to do everything; fuck around and find out. But a court might also hear, to various degrees correctly, that it should be Peter Steinberger (the author or OpenClaw), Microsoft (that hosts the code on GitHub), the LLM company that the agent used, the ‘owners’ of the agents that influenced your agent to to bad things, and so on. I anticipate that some will argue that your agent should be banished to some form of AI jail! Justice is hard.

Anderson covered digital forensics and evidence in his Security Engineering tome (that is freely available, see Chapter 26.5). It was minefield back in simpler days when we asked questions like “does an IP address alone enough to convict someone?” or “what if someone does bad things on your open WiFi?” or “what if it’s legal in country X but illegal in country Y?”. We’re now in much more complex territory and it will take ages for the criminal and justice system to catch on; in the meantime it’d be a mess, and quite risky for those who dabble with such frameworks.

So I don’t know who will go to jail, but I do know that OpenClaw (and those that follow) put their users high up in the candidate list. Avoid.

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Everyone else always seem so confident. But it’s all a show: only few are truly confident, and we have names for them: cocky, cocksure, brash, smug, asshole. The rest of us just pretend. We fake confidence through repetition and emulating others who have more experience at it. When I got my BSc and first job I felt like hot shit. But when I arrived at Cambridge for a PhD I felt like the dumbest person alive who somehow got in because of some clerical error (thanks to Jorge Cham for putting it so beautifully relatable).

Years into it I began to realise that the people around me just have more practice at pretending to be confident, so that helped put things into perspective. Maybe, after all, I deserve to be in their company. I slowly re-built my confidence, but it never recovered to anywhere near youthful hot shit levels: I’ve been hiding impostor syndrome, like many around me.

To me, impostor syndrome is an internal amplifier, disconnected from reason or reality, that amplifies others’ capabilities and thus diminishes mine. It’s coupled to a doubt generator that feeds on falsehoods that I somehow find plausible.

Impostor syndrome can be debilitating. It holds you back from speaking up, writing, and doing. It makes you feel like your output isn’t worth the bits, paper, or materials because it’s so pedestrian: if I can do it, then anyone else can. It’s obviously untrue. People all over vomit trivialities and are hailed as luminaries; if only we could have that guy’s fake confidence!

It was hard enough when our imaginary betters were human, but now it’s AI: the unbeatable final boss of impostor syndrome. They’re actually something that appears to be so much better than us, and that produce ‘stuff’ much faster.

I was writing an exploratory report for a client when I had a minor panic attack: what if I’m charging good money for something that can be achieved in a fraction of the cost and time? Am I scamming my client now?! Using the anti-doubt tools that I developed, I convinced myself that in this case my perspective was worth it. But in other cases I will have to suggest that they use AI instead.

All this will require adjustments, and I’m thinking about what that may look like. The confidence that I have built will not be diminished by AI, but I may need to direct my efforts elsewhere. How are you dealing with it?

I’m fortunate to own a plot of land in lovely northern Portugal with a small house surrounded by a young forest. We have hundreds of trees, mostly oak, then sweet chestnuts, about ten pines, and five eucalyptuses1. There are various other types sprinkled around, some of which I have yet to identify2. We’ve been told that up to about 40-60 years ago all of the land around us was farmed for sustenance and wine, which was gradually abandoned due to industrialised agriculture; the forest took over and many people planted eucalyptuses in the vacant plots, which is fast growing and has multiple uses (but is bad here in most other respects). Some trees are older; we know this because they’re bigger — well duh! — and they have steel wires embedded within them, painfully strangling, at various heights. These were used for supporting vines, most likely.

The forest as a whole wasn’t maintained for decades. Trees grew wherever they managed to establish themselves, causing dense thin tall trunks competing for sun with thick canopy, letting little light through for other layers that are usually a sign of a healthy forest. Other trees bend and grow in awkward strange ways to reach sunny spots. Some have grown large on edges of terraces, where, if not taken care of, may fall, taking the precious retaining walls with them.

Felling the trees is an obvious solution, but it’s nonsensical in most cases where the tree isn’t posing a danger to people or property. Trees provide protection from storms, fires, and sun. They are magnificent to look at and contribute to the health of the land and whatever lives in or on it. The other option is much more sympathetic to the trees, but is also more expensive, dangerous, time-consuming, and technical.

This is the option that appealed to me for several years. I’ve been thinking of getting into climbing arborist work: climbing trees, making strategic cuts to the benefit of tree and human. I’ve been ogling arborist equipment sites since then, taken aback by the price-tag of getting started (about €1250 including VAT for the basic+ kit). I’ve also watched hundreds of videos and read about arborist work, understanding what I may be getting myself into. It’s the kind of work that requires technical and physical abilities, but also knowledge of trees and physics. No scenario is ever the same! I love that.

The benefits of this work are extraordinary. The tree is better off, the limbs are used for firewood, structures, or landscaping materials, and the branches go to the chipper. Woodchip — been making my own for over a year now — is a minor miracle; it’s great as a weed suppressor and for nourishing the soil: a rare win-win.

A few months ago I pressed the button and ordered the equipment, and have since started practicing for real. It’s been slow progress since I have to wait for a sunny day, and check myself at every step, learning, re-learning, and repeating things several times so that it eventually becomes natural. The picture at the top is from my latest climb. I’ve yet to take the chainsaw up with me, which will happen when I’m more comfortable with the rest of it.

I will write more about my progress in time.

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I should point out that I’m well aware that this work is inherently dangerous, at least more so than a walk in the park. I’m completely confident in both my ability to quickly identify dumb things and situations (and people? hehe), and my self-edification process. An expression I hear sometimes by climbers is ‘trust your gear’, which is interesting to absorb once high on a rope: there’s no choice but to do that! It’s exhilarating.

Of course the shower thoughts were more nuanced and reasoned, but instead of sitting on the long-form I wrote that; it summarises my raw feelings without the subtlety that perhaps they deserved. Last night I happened upon — thanks YouTube algorithm, you’re good for something! — an interview of the great Stuart Lee where he said the following about him becoming a comic back in the day and his perspective on it now:

Lee’s experiences and thoughts do not map to my own one-to-one, of course, but there are enough similarities such that I identify with the feelings.

I was drawn to electrical/computer engineering because I, in theory or ideally or naively, really only had to struggle with computer ‘issues’, and, perhaps, the laws of physics, but not with people ‘issues’. I don’t particularly enjoy most human interaction — which requires an ephemeral sense of comfort that is hard for me to conjure on demand — and the thought of self promotion makes me cringe, not to talk about actually doing it. Both of these things are necessary in order to “succeed”, particularly doing what I tried to do with Boldport, or getting a job, but it’s not what I’d choose to be doing.

Then, what my profession has enabled, quite clearly to me, as a whole, makes me sick. Social media companies (and the hardware that they require) with their cutthroat pursuit of profits, and complete disregard for society’s health, have directly allowed Trump, Netanyahu, Bolsonaro, Johnson, Musk, Altman, and other shits to manipulate themselves into powerful leadership positions. In what may seem irrational, I feel somewhat complicit in this by sheer professional association.

And if that’s not enough, AI came for the kill to take away any sense of pride in one’s work, reducing it to mere prompt circus fed to a bot. No more joy of discovery, no more satisfaction in creating nice clever things. What is the point?

So, like Lee, if I felt like I do today when I was choosing a profession I would probably not have gone into technology at all because I’d be disgusted. And, “I’m really glad that I got into it, got the best out of it, and loved it, before it turned into the sour load of shit it is today!” :D.

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The flip side, fortunately or not, is that I’m still an engineer who loves the craft; it’s on a slow burn inside of me waiting to burst out when conditions are just right. It could be when I actually commit to writing the book or two I’m itching to get out there, or the next iteration of PCBmodE, or the right job, or whatever. Or it could be never. I’m actually in a very good place either way.

The purpose of this post is to document the process of obtaining an authenticated (aka apostilled) FBI ‘Identity History Summary’ from outside the US, specifically from Portugal, in case it helps others. If you’re never going to need that under those conditions, please skip this post :)

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I needed to get my apostilled US criminal record — or Identity History Summary, background check, etc. — since I lived there for eight years in the past. To get this done from Portugal, the US embassy in Lisbon has a good overview to follow with all the links that you’d need. Here’s a summary:

1. Get your fingerprints on specific forms.

2. Apply and post these forms to the FBI.

3. Wait.

4. Download report from the FBI’s website.

5. Post the report to the Department of State for ‘Authentication’ (apostille).

6. Wait.

7. Get the apostilled report back.

8. Success.

Part 1: fingerprints and the FBI

The co-op

The only place to get fingerprinted in Portugal by someone who actually knows what they are doing is through a ‘co-op’ that’s somewhat associated with, but not strictly part of, the US embassy in Lisbon. They have timeslots roughly every week and at a cost of €63 you get two cards with a set of the required fingerprints. When I tried to book a timeslot they were either incredibly busy or, and this is more likely to me, there was a bot snapping them up.

It works like this. Booking for a slot opens exactly [20 days * 24] hours prior to the actual slot’s time. I tried to book several appointments at that exact time and they were no longer bookable within a second or two (either gone, or I’ve gotten an error after initiating the booking). I tried to do things as fast as I can at human speed, without success. I’d say they were booked automatically, or by sheer applicant volume, in less than a second.

At this point I reported my ‘findings’ to the co-op and they were gracious to open more timeslots and offer me one; they are very responsive and considerate! Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make it all the way to Lisbon that time, or for the next slot I booked, so I tried the DIY approach.

Fingerprinting myself

There’s nothing magical about the fingerprinting cards; it’s just something that you can print yourself and cut to size (there’s a helpful dashed 8” by 8” border around the form). Annoyingly, there are two similar forms that are used for this kind of thing: FD-258 and FD-1164; the Lisbon embassy and co-op say that it should be FD-258, but the FBI says to use form FD-1164.

The tricky part is getting the fingerprints done correctly, rolled ‘fingernail to fingernail’ within the small box (this is why you pay a technician or a fancy machine to do it): here’s the FBI’s advice. I’ve watched a bunch of videos and got conflicting information about the entire process. Still, I used some old black stamp ink and practiced rolling my fingers just right, which required some finger dancing and awkward positioning. It was messy and tricky to do without someone holding my fingertips whilst still keeping the card clean of marks from my inked fingertips!

I’ve seen some places that suggest sending multiple cards, presumably so that the technician can pick and choose from them in order to get a complete set. So I’ve eventually managed to create reasonably good sets on three FD-258s and two FD-1164s. Of course I have no way of knowing if the type of card mattered, or if they use more than one card… but the FBI clearly didn’t reject the plethora of cards on their amount alone.

Submission

You need to register a request with the FBI, pay $18, print the receipt and post it with the cards to the address that they give you. I’ve sent mine registered with CTT, a package that, of course, got lost! So after about four weeks I created another five fingerprint cards, registered another request, and packaged it all up for another attempt.

Literally less than an hour before I left home to post the second package a message from the FBI arrived:

Your fingerprint card has been received for your Identity History Summary Request and will be processed in the date order in which it was received.

20 minutes later, the report was already available:

Your Identity History Summary Response is now available for review. You can review your response by accessing the secure link and PIN found in the original e-mail previously sent to you. This response is available for 180 days.

So my package did indeed arrive (but was not tracked at all by USPS) and they eventually got to it and processed it immediately. In total it took 28 calendar days from when I posted the package to when I got the report ready for download.

I’ve also asked the FBI to post the report, which is a free optional service available when the report is ready. It arrived within a couple of weeks, and is just the printed form, without any embossed stamps or anything that seem to make it ‘more official’ than something you can print yourself.

Part 2: the appostille

It is the US Department of State that authenticates (apostilles) documents. For FBI criminal records, they don’t need the physical piece of paper from the FBI and you can just print what you’ve downloaded from the FBI’s website and send it with your application.

The complication here is that you must provide a paid envelope for the return shipment. A CTT return envelope would be meaningless in the US, of course, so I roped a reliable person in the US to do the following for me:

1. Print the FBI report.

2. Print the filled out DS-4194 form.

3. Fill out and pay for a $20 (plus $1.5 fee) money order.

4. Pay for a UPS return envelope back to him (UPS won’t create a return envelope to outside of the US… this is why I think that it wouldn’t have worked from UPS Portugal).

5. Send everything to the Department of State via UPS.

6. Wait.

7. Receive the package, scan the apostilled report in case it got lost, and UPS it to me in Portugal.

In total, it took 29 calendar days from when he shipped the package to the DoS to when he received the apostilled report, and a few more days to arrive to me. Bear in mind that there is no way of knowing the progress of the application other than the (UPS) package tracking: you know that it had arrived at the DoS, and you know that it left via the tracking of the return envelope; the DoS doesn’t send you any updates or notices.

Commentary and alternatives

It seems possible to send (multiple) DIY fingerprint cards that get successfully processed by the FBI, but it takes practice to get right. The most practical way to get the report appostilled is to have someone in the US post it to the Department of State and then post it to you.

The process, since I managed to keep it fairly streamlined, took just over two months, which is probably the fastest one could hope for without paying extra for expedited services. But it certainly is unnecessarily cumbersome. For example, the FBI could have a tickbox to initiate the appostilling with the DoS, which, in turn, could have a paid option for (international) shipping. The fingerprinting on paper kerfuffle seems anachronistic, weird, and uncommon — the UK doesn’t require it for a similar certificate. In general, I feel that they should make a bit more of an effort to better accommodate the tiny amount of us not living in the US.

Welp. That’s how I did it, but there are some alternatives to this process that are probably more costly, may be faster and/or more convenient, and are likely less prone to problems. You can fly to the US and get fingerprinted in USPS stores with that capability and get your FBI report within a couple of days — or was it a couple of hours? — so super easy. There are also FBI-approved channelers that provide fingerprinting service for those abroad, but I think that you need to be a US citizen for that. Also, paid services exist that will take care of everything for the Department of State stuff… but my impression was that they don’t necessarily save a lot of time unless you pay for an expedited service.

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So. These were my personal experiences, which certainly shouldn’t be taken as advice, that may or may not work for others. The best thing to do, I found, was carefully reading all the instructions and following them to the best of one’s abilities.

I’m head-down embarrassed by how long it took me to make the effort to properly learn Portuguese; it got to the point where I found myself changing plans, avoiding people, and flexing the truth about how long I’ve been living here, just so I’m not confronted with it.

Earlier on I used to joke that I blame COVID, but that became old and it wasn’t the truth… I was just being lazy. My vocabulary was actually quite good, but I couldn’t quite string together a sentence or open my mouth to speak because I needed the words to be perfectly arranged, conjugated, and fluent. “Perfection is a skinned knee.” Learning a language doesn’t work like that, obviously; to get anywhere you must mumble, wave hands, invent words, get red-faced, and obsess about what you should have actually said while you’re trying to fall asleep.

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The CIPLE exam is administered in many countries, but only a few times a year with limited spaces in each session. The slots open up at the beginning of January and dry up by around February with the most popular cities and ealier-in-the-year exams full within mere days (I checked for fun). Every morning in January I checked for spots until they started to appear on Monday January 6th. I quickly booked the test for May 8th in Porto; I figured that five months are about right to get sorted.

Here’s what I’d recommend and that worked for me. Subscribe to Practice Portuguese, by far the best app for learning European Portuguese; worth every euro cent. Just go through their lessons. Don’t bother with other apps, and particularly avoid Duolingo, which only “teaches” Brazilian Portuguese and that will only confuse you and make you sound silly (in Portugal!).

Then sign up with an online tutoring platform — I used Preply (referral link) — and found two tutors, out of four that I tried. One tutor was more for structured learning and another was more for conversations (it’s what I asked for, both could do either as they accommodate what you need or want). Find tutors that you connect with, and that have different styles and backgrounds, so you get a bit of variety. Don’t pay too much attention to rankings or lesson cost… I found that they don’t necessarily correlate with a good experience. Keep trying tutors until you hit it off with the right ones for you.

I took two to three 50-min lessons a week. Within a couple of weeks I was not going to shoot myself in the head after mumbling to a neighbour! That was huge progress and that’s what good tutors give you. I tried speaking more, but it was hard and I had to be super comfortable to get going even with ones close to me. But the confidence slowly built up, and there’s still a lot of work ahead.

There are few example CIPLE tests online; your tutor might have more. Do as many as you can because some questions may appear in your exam (one or two did in mine). My goal was to learn to speak correctly and coherently, and if I didn’t pass the exam, that’s fine… I could take it again, and I can continue living here without the citizenship anyway.

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The test itself is what they say in the paperwork. For me, from easiest to hardest were the reading comprehension, writing, speaking, and hearing comprehension sections, the latter being super-hard! I’m not sure if I missed something in the prep but the last section of the listening comprehension was in a style I haven’t seen before, which threw me off.

There are plenty of testimonials elsewhere about the ‘exam day’. I don’t have much to add… just follow the instructions that they provide before the exam; it’s all there.

(Side note. Being a security- and privacy-minded person I was concerned about the laxness of authenticating the participants; at the start of the first exam (speaking, done in pairs) the invigilator just looked at the passport or residence card to see if the numbers matched. I’m pretty sure that if someone wanted to send someone else to do the exam, they could. Not good. Then, after the final exam, the invigilator let people take a photo of the signup page that had everyone’s name, unique test-id (that you use to check your score), and passport/residence card number on it. I wish that I had said something, but I was completely out of it — the last exam is the listening part! — and I just wanted to leave. Finally, a few people were no-shows, which means that they wasted a valuable slot that could have been used by someone else… I wish that they dealt with that too.)

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The results came in last week on the 2nd of July. I passed with ‘Bom’ (good) rating, in-between the other passing categories of ‘Muito bom’ (very good) and ‘Suficiente` (satisfactory).

But by now the entire situation has changed. The government wants to increase the residency period for citizenship from five to ten years, along with stricter application requirements. The excellent Portugal decoded substack has had a couple of newsletters about these proposed changes, here and here. The changes are meant to be retroactive to June 19th, which is unfortunate for me… but may also be unconstitutional… vamos ver. I’m unsure whether to apply now or wait.

I love Portugal, and I look forward to being officially Portuguese. And whilst these proposed changes may delay that moment and make my application more complex and costly, I support some of them, even if they are sometimes presented in a populist way by far-right parties like Chega. Immigrants are vital to most countries, but they/we are often unfairly vilified and used to mask other, harder to solve, issues, like, for example, the low wages here in Portugal. As it often happens, it’s easiest to blame those who have no power and can’t vote. I’ve experienced this unpleasantness previously in the UK.

That said, from what I understand, immigration procedures and criteria in Portugal are currently too lax and re-hauling them will generally be a good thing; I truly trust the Portuguese to eventually come to a reasonable balance in this matter and keep this place such a great and safe place to live.

Maher, I’m sure, went with good intentions… so good that he left his critical thinking at home. His expectations of Trump were so low that anything other than a drooling maniac would have been impressive to him.

Trump is a conman, so he’s able to adopt personalities that aren’t his usual, like being agreeable, charming, and totally unvindictive. This puts the Maher mark at ease. The complete setup included wooing him, framing it as irresistibly controversial, stroking his ego, and making the whole thing about him. This seems to be a winning strategy with his type of personality.

The con indeed occurred to him that very night when he watched the real Trump on TV. Much like the end of a heist-film reveal, previous events were regurgitated in his mind, revealing details of the grift he’d not noticed live.

The cognitive dissonance lead Maher — much like someone recommending a car salesman that shafted them just not to admit it — to the narrative we see in the video above, which all but explicitly reveals the extent of his gullibility. (Ironically, the purpose of the con was to evoke cognitive dissonance in those who see Trump for what he really is!)

Let’s look at what Maher says about the evening, paraphrased:

• I’m just a comedian, unequipped to expose conmen like Trump and his elaborate schemes.

• I was very impressed that he had not attempted the impossible, recruiting me to the cult of MAGA, and that he didn’t force me to take a picture of me looking like a shill buffoon. Of course I did take his MAGA gifts.

• Trump laughs like all other human beings, and, as a comedian, my only real skill is detecting fake laughs. And now that I’ve established ironclad credibility in exposing fakery, believe everything I’m about to say.

• I’m eternally thankful that he didn’t literally kill me, or growl, after making mildly funny quips; he even chuckled. So impressed.

• Oopsy, I forgot what he replied to what’s curious to many people; maybe I can’t reconcile that with the narrative?

• Bob — Kid Rock to you — did not at all set up the con mood for the dinner the night before.

• Don — Donald Trump to you — actually paid attention to me and didn’t lick his balls even once during the entire night!

I like Bill Maher as an entertainer; I agree with some of what he says and disagree with others, which is exactly where he wants to be, I think. But after this, I can not see him as anything but a chump.

Today started out sunny so I finished a painting of a lemon tree; a tribute to one of our lime-lemon trees that was ultra productive this year. I got the camera out for the photo above and then diverted to the land for some spring rejuvenation exploration.

Pot marigolds produce large bright orange flowers and seeds that can be easily planted elsewhere. Once established they bloom throughout the year and survive our winters. Plus, the florets are apparently edible. One of my favourites.

The wild strawberries have started to give fruit and will continue to do so for a few more months. They are tiny, from 10 to 15 mm wide, and semi-sweet. My understanding that they are native… they were here when we arrived. Like other straberries they are easy to pluck and replant and then propagate themselves quickly. It’s a great ground cover crop!

The purple flowers of the rosemary are beautiful and quite long-lasting. It’s wonderful to have such a useful herb also give the land such vibrant colour.

The almond tree is the first of our fruit trees to bloom in spring… and it’s such an exciting thing to see coming out of winter. It’s been doing really well and started producing within the first year after planting… 17 almonds. This is its third season with us!

Our nectarine tree’s flowers are wonderful and promising but the tree isn’t happy; when the leaves come out they quickly suffer from leaf curl. Our friend researched for a natural solution and this year we’ll try spraying diluted milk every two weeks… hopefully it works and we’ll get some fruit to mature!

This plum tree was here when we arrived, and it is the second to bloom in spring. I’m not sure what’s exactly wrong with it but over the years it only produced one mature plum. Hopefully this year will be better.

We have a couple of trees of this fruit that I’ve planed a couple of years ago. Can you guess what it is?

Whilst we tend to focus on trees and plants we put in the ground, one must also appreciate the diverse meadows that naturally pop up every year and allows the the ecosystem to thrive.

And… finally… some pics of the wildlife! :)

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• Cremation was only legalised in 2019 — it’s a Catholic thing — but the country still doesn’t have a single crematorium. The best you can have right now is being shipped to Sicily for burning.

• The Islet of Filfla was possibly significant to the Neolithic inhabitants of Malta. But, the British used it for target practice, destroying what evidence was there — at least three structures — to find out more.

• In about five years, all UNESCO heritage sites in Malta will be closed to visitors whilst they dig further down — UNESCO allows excavations every number of years and the 20-year pause ends then. Some residential houses are planned for demolition to enable excavations around existing sites.

• Malta used to have dwarf elephants that evolved to be 1m tall as adults. About a 100 years ago Othenio Abel made the contested suggestion that the skull’s nasal cavity may have created the myth of Cyclops.

• The excellent national dish of Malta is Stuffat tal-Fenek, a rabbit stew, created after the population of the indigenous Tax-Xiber rabbit exploded and the subsequent lifting of hunting restrictions in the 18th century. But the current Tax-Xiber’s population is very low and there are very few rabbits in Malta… so what’s used in the dish is probably imported common rabbit.

• In the late 1960s David Attenborough found a megolodon tooth in Malta — then a British colony — and kept it. In 2020 he gifted the tooth to Prince George. This, understandably, upset the Maltese who contemplated claiming it back, only to let it go a while later because it wasn’t worth the kerfuffle.

• Ridley Scott made a few famous films in Malta — receiving huge rebates — but then bad-mouthed it only to make a pathetic rowback.

• The “cart ruts” appear all over Malta, but without any solid explanation for what they were really used for and who created them (definitely not aliens!). The Misraħ Għar il-Kbir site is nicknamed ‘Clapham Junction’ because it reminded an archaeologist of that London station.

• Malta became an independent state in 1964, but the British Navy kept the imposing and strategically important Fort St. Angelo until 1979.

• A well in the Ħal Tarxien prehistoric complex had to be covered with a large rock lid because people — it’s a US American thing — kept throwing coins into it, causing the deterioration of the fragile limestone.

• The Bajtra (prickly pear) liqueur is phenomenal!

If you’re interested in pre-history, there’s lots to see in Malta! Valletta is nice, but I think the real interest is away from it.

A while ago I was chopping firewood with my splitting axe; the two-handed kind that you swing above your head and hope to hit the log. I missed. I also missed the large cedar base the log was on. But I did not miss my left foot and sliced through the leather boot, nicking my sock but not my actual foot1. What luck!

I think the axe spoke to me. It said, “Next time spread your legs more, and congratulations for bothering with the leather boots today. Muppet”. It gave me a vivid reminder of how potentially dangerous some of the things I do are, and of the safety equipment I own but have never used or those that too often remain in the shed.

Next time I picked a chainsaw I dug up the chaps/leggings I got three years prior… still unused… and always use them now (also chainsaw gloves, visored helmet, and ear protection). I’ve also rearranged my safety equipment so that they’re easier to reach and use. I spread my legs more whilst chopping.

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So I wrote a whole thing about effective supplier relationships and my personal Boldport Club story. But shit, it comes down to this:

• Develop a personal relationship with your account manager;

• always pay right when you get the invoice, or in advance; and,

• when something goes wrong, use it as a ‘qualification’ opportunity — if they aren’t on your side, find a different supplier.

You’re welcome.

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Francesinha literally means ‘little French (female person/thing)’. It’s a sandwich with meat and cheese, wrapped with more cheese, and then drenched in sauce… with a fried egg on top, served with fries. Associated with Porto, the city and region, you’d also find it in many other places in northern Portugal (and further south, but you’ll probably be laughed at). It’ll be available in fancy-ish restaurants through to simple cafes and bars that serve food.

Francesinhas are somewhat of a contentious topic because every northerner has a favourite place… it’s the best francesinha in the world whilst anywhere else serves the most disgusting bile. Any place that serves them will claim the same.

The meats in a traditional francesinha are usually sliced ham, a thin piece of beef, and sausage. The quality of these ingredients can vary; sometimes the beef is better and instead of plain hotdog mystery you’d get something that is more of a chorizo, like the one in the pictures.

The sauce is where the arguments are. It’s normally tomato-based with beer and varying degrees of spiciness. I’ve had some that were closer to tomato soup with no spiciness to ones where the beer is evident and quite spicy. The sauce has also migrated to other ‘fast’ foods… we’ve had burgerzinhas — it was as appalling (or appealing?) as you’d imagine — and as a hotdog bath. You can also buy it in jars for cooking at home.

For those not in the system, any variation would satisfy the experience of eating this uniquely-served sandwich. I wouldn’t fuss about finding the best one, although for those just visiting, Porto restaurants that specialise in them might be a good first sample; on the weekends you’d see these places packed with almost everyone eating francesinhas.

Here’s more of what one should know for when experiencing a francesinha. You may choose, or ask for, a half portion. The egg is always optional. You may ask for more sauce. Some restaurants may have additional variations on the classic, so ask for details to know how far from the original they are. Rarely, there are places that serve a vegetarian version, so if that’s your thing look out specifically for that in the menu ahead of time. We’ve seen a version without the sausage called ‘Jaquelina’, but I’m not sure how common that name is; in any case I would think that asking to leave some of the ingredients out would not be too much of a problem, but you might get a ‘look’. When asked, always say that it’s the best one you’ve had!

(Aos meus amigos portugueses, peço as mais sinceras desculpas por todos os erros horríveis que cometi neste post. Sou estrangeiro, por isso não me julguem com demasiada severidade! :D Por favor, corrijam-me nos comentários e declarem onde obter a melhor francesinha.)

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I certainly didn’t know what a billhook was. It wasn’t until I noticed this beautifully curved tool hanging from a neighbor’s belt, whilst he was attending to his vines at the onset of winter. I suppose that I was hooked and searched for this tool until I found it in a local hardware store. To my delight it is called ‘foice tipo Amarante’… the Amarante billhook!

(Some of you may know my affinity to curves; I broke 135° tradition and applied them, heavily, into circuit-board design for a few years. So this exceptionally curved billhook, local to where I chose to live, seemed serendipitous1.)

Interestingly, the name billhook isn’t derived from bill or hook as Robert Burgess thoroughly explains:

Hook would thus appear to derive from hack (German) or hak (Dutch) and bill from beil (German) or bijl (Dutch) thus also giving some clues as to the origins of the Anglo Saxon invaders of Britain as well as the origin as of the name.

Thus bill does not refer to the shape of the tool resembling the beak (or bill) of a bird, nor does hook relate to the shape of the blade with a hooked end. Bill, beil or bijl go back to the OED definition giving its origin as axe or short sword. Hook, hack or hak also refer to the action of the tool for cutting or chopping. In German the word for the verb ‘to chop’ is hacken (noun hacke or hacker) and in Dutch it is hakken (noun hakker). The word for hook is haken (German) or haak (Dutch).

Thus billhook (hackbeil also hackebeil or hakbijl) describes the function of the tool as a chopping tool (sword, axe or short knife), rather than its ‘hooked’ shape (further confirmed by the alternative names of hackmesser (German) and hakmes (Dutch) where messer/mes mean knife, hence chopping knife. In both languages (and also in Italian, Hungarian and Polish) the word for a billhook can also be synonymous with a meat cleaver.

While we’re at it, for more on the rich world of billhooks, please visit Robert Burgess’s site, which seems, by far, to be the authoritative resource on these tools. Particularly, here’s his research on Portuguese billhooks.

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Billhooks are fascinating, as similar designs have emerged independently throughout the world with hundreds — thousands? — of variations. Some have hooks on the back for pushing, pulling, and shaking branches (such as for dropping olives) whilst others have a mini axe for chopping on a surface when the extended nose prevents it. Some billhooks are quite long and some are short (even my Amarante foice comes in a smaller version).

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A foice is a billhook, but in Portuguese seems to be applied rather more broadly to other farm-maintenance cutting implements. Another term that’s used is podão, for those that have a tang.

A billhook is a multitool; I’ve used it as an axe and for log hooking/carrying, debarking, weeding, clearing, chopping, and snedding. The foice in the top image is a new one I got after I lost my first one in the forest, which I used for about three years. Over time I stopped bothering taking an axe and other tools with me to the woods since the foice can do so much on its own.

All of rural Portugal is at risk of fire. The deadliest set of fires happened in June and October 2017 with a death toll of 111. We moved to Portugal well after that and were aware of the risks; but luckily for me, of all the things I lose sleep over, being consumed by a wildfire isn’t one of them.

Over the years of living at our property we were told that the area was never quite affected by fire; fire doesn’t go downhill; a nearby stream would protect us; oak trees prevent fires; and, that the airflow in our little topographical situation won’t let the fire get to us. All this turned to be, well, not quite correct. Also, turns out I knew fuck-all about fires.

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On September 16th we were aware of fires in the larger area, but deceivingly there was no smell of smoke; later in the day we were able to see a smoke plume in the distance and then a halo of fire at night, which seemed quite far. It was an unusually dry period with very low humidity, even for the typical dry summer.

I slept well until my worried partner woke me up in the morning after receiving calls from people asking if everything’s fine. The smell of smoke had arrived and the sky became increasingly murkier with occasional falling ash. We loaded the animals onto the car and started preparing a bag — I never did sort out that go-bag, damn it! Whilst we were doing that, more official calls started arriving from the Junta de freguesia, who strongly encouraged us to hurry up.

Then, the President of the Junta arrived in a truck with a gas-powered pump, water reservoir, fire-fighting hoses on its bed, and three more men. They told us that they came to save our house and that we should leave1. They asked for a phone charging point since they’ve been active for the past 24 hours, and need the juice to coordinate other fronts!

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I dropped my partner and the animals at a neighbor down the hill and raced back home. I arranged three garden hoses, cold drinking water, snacks, and we all started soaking the areas around the house. We siphoned water from our large water reservoir to supply the pump-on-a-truck (we aren’t connected to ‘city’ water).

Many areas in Northern Portugal are burning and the emergency services are stretched thin, with aircraft not able to be effective due to the smoke. It was clear by this point that fire-trucks aren’t coming and that their efforts are focused on dealing with the wider implications of the wildfire at strategic points, rather than at individual houses.

The ground fire slowly descended from the North, so we had a couple of hours to prepare for it. In the meantime two tractors with tanks and 100m hoses, usually used to spray grape vines, arrived to help. They were able to go further up the mountain through our terraces. The fire eventually arrived to a few meters from the house, from the North and the West, with alarming intensity. The primary effort was both to prevent an Eastern front, and to divert the fire Westwards where it will continue downhill to the stream. (Meanwhile the fire was burning on the opposite side of the valley towards the same stream.)

At some point I followed someone who took a fire-beater from the pump-truck and headed up the hill to try to prevent the fire from crossing a dirt road uphill towards the East. This approach was made difficult because fire is hot and smokey, but I was able to study the enemy up close. At the time I thought that I made a dent, only to take a breather and come back to the fire having crossed the road.

More people arrived and left throughout the day, coordinated by the President of the Junta, and did what needed to be done. For example, at some point the siphon wasn’t enough,so people used buckets to fill up the pump’s tank more quickly. Elsewhere, a young guy broke down a tall green bush and started beating the fire with it.

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At about 18:30 I decided to check our access road and extinguish any fire with the beater. It was smokey and as I was walking down the road I noticed a faint figure walking towards me. We both had our faces covered, and as we got closer we both realised who we were — it was my friend Pedro! We hugged. (I remember it as if it was a scene from a film.) Pedro was helping the community at the point where our access path meets the road to prevent the fire from crossing it.

The truck and men left later on at 19:00 after the fire was under control and the house was no longer in danger; they took a short break and moved on to help other properties. I walked with Pedro back to the house and we had a coffee and a chat. At about 20:00 I took him back to his car and picked up my partner and animals. We decided that we must stay at home to control any re-igniting fires, which was also what the Junta had suggested.

My partner woke up every 40 minutes that night to extinguish fires around the house, as they reignited. The system was to scan for fire spots and always water the ones close to the house; then, for the ones further from the house, remember their location and later check if they’ve died out or have become bigger, in which case try to get the hose there and drench them as well. During the night, a couple on a big blue tractor came up to the house to ask if we were fine. They reassured us that they were down the road in case of any emergency.

As the night progressed it seemed like things were under control, but when the sun came up it took a turn. At around 11:00 we were overwhelmed as reigniting fires attacked us from several directions. We called the President of the Junta who swiftly came with the truck, shortly followed by a tractor, and they took care of the larger fires. We were still controlling small spots the following night and day, but by then the air had started to clear and the following day rain had arrived.

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The fuel for the fire was fresh and decomposed leaves, fallen branches, dead trees, brambles, dried ferns, and all sorts of weeds that were left to grow for many years. It doesn’t look like the trees are dead, just blackened at their base… this makes sense because wild fires are a natural thing and if trees die because of them, we’d have no trees. Over the years we’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to control ferns in the more remote parts of the land, but to our disappointment the fire burned them down without affecting their root system. Within a couple of weeks they were back. Tough things.

We were very lucky. The Junta could have decided to help another property if it was equally in danger; we hired someone to clean our property ten days before the fire; the fire could have been a canopy fire, rather than ground crawl, or both; it could have been windy enough to make the fire progress faster; we had enough water; the electricity was up to power the pump from our well; etc. In only slightly different circumstances we would have had to leave the house to the elements.

We were unprepared2. We knew little of how fire works, and did not have useful equipment such a gas-powered pump with firefighting hoses. There was difficulty for people and tractors to reach the elevated parts of the property in order to meet the fire earlier. For this, we’ve already broken a new path and are in the process of installing a 5000 litre tank at the top of our property that will be fed by a natural water source. This water will normally be used for irrigation, and for flooding the areas closer to the house in an emergency using only gravity.

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The kindness, care, and support of the community overwhelmed us, together with how naturally the help was given. It made us feel that we’re at the right place for us, and that we’re welcome and very much part of the local community. It’s such a good feeling!

I’m not a morning person. If I get out of bed too early I transform into a functional zombie for the rest of the day. School, you can imagine, was a bit of a problem, having to be there at 8:00 or earlier sometimes. But I had help.

On my way out, a mint plant was thriving under a leaky tap. Every morning I’d grab a bunch, rub it gently between the palms of my hands, and deeply inhale that lovely fresh smell; I’d sniff my cupped palms during the walk until it dissipated.

Since then I try to have mints near me for when I need their assistance in braving the world.

When Elon took over Twitter I became certain that I won’t be going back to my accounts, although I still checked a few feeds regularly.

About two weeks ago Elon decided to restrict reading access of feeds only to those who are signed-in. I haven’t checked my regulars since, and I’m fairly confident that I’ve now weaned myself off of Twitter, something I’ve failed at for a long while. I am set to never go back, even if the policy reverts in order to pick up lost traffic. So… thanks Elon for improving my life, unintentionally.

Threads? Yeah, no. Notes? Maybe.