Jon C. Jensen
I live in Provo, Utah and work with Internet-related projects: web applications, databases, scalability, system administration, and security, and in the past, ecommerce and Android app development. I’m a radio amateur (“ham”) with call sign KG7TXN.
I sometimes write on Somusing, the blog of my wife, Erin, and wrote a lot on the End Point blog when I worked there.
Other places to find me on the web:
LinkedIn
Twitter
Facebook
Instagram
My email address is jon@swelter.net — since 1999! You may encrypt messages to me using PGP/GnuPG with my current public keys (2026 ed448 ECC + Kyber, 2019 ed25519 ECC, 2012 4096-bit RSA), which superseded my historical keys (1998 DSA, 1994 RSA).
A quotation
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Wu suggests that “the use of demanding technologies may actually be important to the future of the human race.”
Wu goes on to draw a distinction between demanding technologies and technologies of convenience. Demanding technologies are characterized by the following: “technology that takes time to master, whose usage is highly occupying, and whose operation includes some real risk of failure.” Convenience technologies, on the other hand, “require little concentrated effort and yield predictable results.”
Of course, convenience technologies don’t even deliver on their fundamental promise. Channelling Ruth Cowan’s
More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave, Wu writes,
“The problem is that, as every individual task becomes easier, we demand much more of both ourselves and others. Instead of fewer difficult tasks (writing several long letters) we are left with a larger volume of small tasks (writing hundreds of e-mails). We have become plagued by a tyranny of tiny tasks, individually simple but collectively oppressive.”
But, more importantly, Wu worries that technologies of convenience may rob our action “of the satisfaction we hoped it might contain.” Toward the end of his post, he urges readers to “take seriously our biological need to be challenged, or face the danger of evolving into creatures whose lives are more productive but also less satisfying.”
—“Why An Easier Life Is Not Necessarily Happier: Remembering Albert Borgmann (1937–2023)” by L.M. Sacasas, May 10, 2023, summarizing the Tim Wu essay “The Problem With Easy Technology”, in
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/why-an-easier-life-is-not-necessarily
Travel notes
A map of the route my son & I took on our 2019 trip to Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova: Jon and Seth itinerary in June 2019.
An interactive map of various churches we visited in north England in 2013, with links to our blog posts and photos about each: Churches in north England, 2013.
Important causes
A few organizations Erin & I support:
- Institute for Justice, litigators for liberty who fight bad policing, civil forfeiture, occupational licensing cartels, First Amendment infringement, eminent domain abuse, and educational choice limits.
- Secular Pro-Life follows the science on the topic of abortion to shine light on bad arguments and lead important conversations beyond partisan and sectarian tug-of-war.
- Partners In Health builds local systems to support health in underserved areas. Erin and I learned of it through the book Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder (see Erin’s review of it).
- Atlas Network supports the global freedom movement in areas such as land title reform in post-Communist countries, rule of law, and personal enterprise within fair rules rather than permanent poverty support.
- Lifting Hands International provides aid to refugees, both those who have resettled and those still in problem areas of the world.
- FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) defends the rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought, regardless of topic or political slant, picking up work the ACLU abandoned decades ago.
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation works to preserve freedoms in the electronic world.
Work talks
Presentation slides from talks I have given at technical conferences and company-wide meetings are available.
Free software
I support free software and open source. Don’t be a sharecropper!
I am on GitHub as jonjensen and have contributed to projects including PostgreSQL, Interchange, DevCamps, and Bucardo. I also keep old miscellaneous scripts around.
Other free software I work most often with:
awesome,
X.Org X11,
Sway,
Wayland,
alacritty,
kitty,
tmux,
Screen,
zsh,
bash,
Firefox,
Chromium,
Vim,
Git,
Rust,
Go,
Perl,
Python,
Ruby,
PHP,
PostgreSQL,
Linux (mostly
Red Hat/CentOS/Rocky,
Fedora,
Ubuntu,
Debian),
Android,
OpenBSD,
OpenSSH,
Apache httpd,
nginx,
Postfix,
Dovecot,
Pine (now Alpine),
Signal,
GnuPG,
Standard Notes,
Zulip,
MediaWiki,
VLC,
rsync,
less,
ripgrep,
fzf,
pspg,
par,
mtr,
and Nmap, just as a sampling.
Thanks to all free software developers for your time and efforts!
Once upon a time I created some RPM packages of free software for use on Fedora Linux. The source RPMs may still prove useful for building on a newer version.
Human languages
Some Unicode things I keep handy:
Language family maps for reference:
My novice linguistics research: I wrote a paper for Linguistics 490 (senior seminar) taught by John Robertson, winter semester 1998 at Brigham Young University. It examines how Hebrew verb patterns (binyanim) may be semantically grouped using C.S. Peirce’s universal categories. The paper: Hebrew Verb Pattern Tendencies Clarified by Peirce’s Universal Categories (8.5″ x 11″). Reference chart: Roots in various binyanim chart (11″ x 17″).
Writing
Some of my free verse:
Many years ago, a tree fell on our car, so I wrote up the story to share.
Religion
Links about religion:
Johann Sebastian Bach composed some of my favorite music. See these freely redistributable Bach sheet music PDFs and the James Kibbie complete Bach organ works recordings. Mutopia collects freely usable music scores. Thanks to those who typeset the music and gave it away!
Hymns:
Liberty
Miscellany
mod.zayda.net is a collection of old Amiga-era music “modules”, including the whole U4ia and F8 collection by Jim Young, mostly created on his Amiga.
End communication.
