Sam Trenholme’s blog
In memorandum: TJ Porter
October 15, 2026
I remember a musician, one TJ Porter, who died a couple of years ago.
But first, a Chess puzzle.
Chess puzzle
In the following position, White has an overwhelming advantage.
Indeed, White can deliver mate in only three moves:
k
b
N
p
p
p
p
p
b
p
q
r
P
n
p
P
B
N
P
P
Q
P
P
R
R
K
White
to move and mate in three
Solution below.
Remembering TJ Porter
Back in early 2015, I discovered an artist by the name of TJ Porter.
He had just released an album called “A World Adrift”, and I downloaded
this album on Bandcamp, and enjoyed listening to it a lot in those
days, which were just a few short months after my first wife died.
Later on TJ Porter made many more albums, and since the album was a
“name your price” download, Bandcamp apparently had a quota about how
much free music he could have on their servers, so this album got
deleted to make room for his newer albums.
A few years after that, TJ Porter passed away.
His newer music is still online at https://tjporter.bandcamp.com/.
While “A World Adrift” is no longer on TJ Porter’s Bandcamp page, I
downloaded it back then and am making available MP3s of his songs Gasterbeiter II
and Velvet Hammer
from that album so that these excellent songs are not
lost in the sands of time.
Some more information about this album is in a Gearspace thread
announcing the album, as well as a third party description of the album.
TJ Porter used the following synths to make this now-lost album: Moog
Minitaur, Arturia Minibrute, Korg R3, Korg EMX, Korg Volca Bass,
Waldorf Pulse 2, Waldorf Streichfett, Waldorf Rocket, Novation
BassStation Rack, Roland JV-1080
Solution to mating puzzle
Round up
October 6, 2026
I discuss various topics in today’s blog.
Chess puzzle
In the following position, White has an overwhelming advantage.
Indeed, there are two ways White can deliver mate in only two moves:
b
p
p
p
B
p
k
Q
P
P
N
P
P
R
K
White to move and
mate in two
Find both ways to deliver mate in two. Solution below.
Bill Phillips’ workout plan
Here are links to Bill Phillips’ current workout plan, which is the
template I use for my workout:
Traditional wives
I lamented in my last blog
that the
radical left doesn’t like traditional wives. Most women I know want to
marry a man who she can start a family with, and that includes women
who have slept with over 100 men. Women want marriage and family,
so why is the left wing press publishing articles discouraging marriage?
Here’s one article,
which
looks at consent and why we need more than consent to determine whether
a given sex act is OK; it looks at how a woman is treated overall by
someone affects how she views sex with them.
There’s a quote there
that
explains some of the left-wing dislike of traditional marriages:
a husband who believes, often with the backing of a church that
teaches wifely submission, that sex is his right and her duty, and who
treats her like a servant in the rest of their life too. It isn’t the
commitment that makes the difference. It’s the degree to which he sees
her as a person or as property.
Let’s look at what scripture has to say. Let’s go to that part of
Ephesians which the radical left hates:
Wives, be submissive to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the
husband is the head of the wife, and Christ also is the head of the
church, being himself the savior of the body. But as the church is
subject to Christ, so let the wives also be to their own husbands in
everything.
Women don’t like being treated as slaves obviously, and Paul who
wrote this passage agrees. The above scripture continues:
Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and
gave himself up for it; that he might sanctify it, having cleansed it
by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church
to himself gloriously, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing;
but that it should be holy and without blemish. Even so husbands also
ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own
wife loves himself.
If men aren’t doing their side of the deal where wives are led by
their husbands, that is not a marriage following Christian principles.
Since some men don’t follow both sides of the bargain where the husband
is in charge, people are understandably turned off by traditional
marriage.
Solution to mating puzzle
-
1. Qf5+ Kh6 2. Qh5#
-
1. Qh5+ Kf6 2. Qf5#
Sex and marriage
October 2, 2026
I discuss the left-wing media’s attacks in traditional marriage, and
the “Cornell 7” sex scandal.
Traditional wives
My first marriage was a traditional marriage: I worked and paid all
of the bills while my wife took care of our baby. That in mind, I am a
great supporter of the “Trad wife” lifestyle.
The left wing media doesn’t support this lifestyle: The New York
Times posted a hit piece about one former Trad Wife who divorced her husband,
implying that
traditional marriages do not work out. New York Magazine went further,
and used this New York Times piece and some other examples to make the case traditional marriages can’t work.
Never mind that, while it was a challenging marriage, I stayed with
my wife, faithful to her (and, yes, the sex was fantastic) until her
untimely death from cancer.
We are in a fertility collapse right now. People who follow this
left-wing agenda promoted by the New York Times and New York Magazine,
an agenda which discourages conservative traditional families, will
tend to not have children. People who ignore or fight back against this
left-wing agenda will have more children, and show their families a
world view encouraging a traditional marriage where the man brings the
bacon home while the woman raises the children, leading to there being
more traditional families.
The Cornell 7
I should comment on the Cornell 7 case. For people who haven’t heard
the news, here is a BBC summary
and here is a well written summary of the actual legal documents which have been made public.
The radical left is following their agenda here: Since any sex
that is consensual goes, they have to pound on the “rape” drum when
deeply immoral and vile sex like this happens. However, in this case,
whether or not the actual sex is consensual is a side show.
As someone who has never had sex outside of a lifetime monogamous
commitment, asking a woman who likes you to not only have sex with you,
but your friend too, is a vile and immoral act. Having more guys enter
the scene, even if she consented, is even more disgusting. And sharing
about it on a group chat is hateful and disrespectful towards women. A
gentleman never “kisses and tells”—if he does something immoral like
that, which he shouldn’t, he at least should do it discreetly 1-on-1
with the lady in question, and have the decency to not tell anyone what
happened to protect the girl’s honor.
The details of the case are very messy, and “Jane Doe” should had
shut them down as soon as they talked about perversions such as
threesomes. Doe just having sex with the guy she liked without other
men being involved would had been less immoral, but I doubt he
was on the track to marrying her.
The good news is that it appears Jane Doe is doing OK. If the
identity which Internet sleuths dug up is really her, not only is she a
very beautiful woman, she now has a boyfriend who loves him; they post
pictures together on Instagram and it would seem he took her on a nice
vacation to Europe. I hope she marries this man, I hope he doesn’t hold
what happened against her, and I hope till death do they part, making
beautiful children together.
MaraDNS release 3.5.0039
September 26, 2026
I have released MaraDNS 3.5.0039 today. It fixes two minor security
bugs and has other updates.
Changelog
-
Two AI-assisted minor security issues patched:
-
It was possible to perform a denial of service to disable Deadwood’s
DNS-over-TCP feature. (DNS-over-UDP was not affected)
-
RFC8482 replies made public 19 bytes of memory in the heap. There
does not appear to be any vulnerable private data leaked.
-
askmara now has a raw mode, showing the raw DNS packet received, as
well as support for AAAA queries. (one can now do
askmara Lname.foo. to ask for name.foo’s ipv6 address)
-
Improved formatting of HTML documentation: They now look nice on both
modern desktop browsers and on mobile (i.e. phone) browsers.
-
Deadwood’s default compile no longer generates any known Valgrind
warnings.
-
Deadwood’s entropy pool now uses a combination of /dev/urandom, the
timestamp when Deadwood was started, Deadwood’s PID, and 112 calls to
clock_gettime().
-
lunacy (“maralunacy” if you will) updated to compile more cleanly and
have working optional lfs and spawner support.
Security
Here in the age of AI, the number of security reports has really
bloomed. Two minor security issues were found with the latest batch of
AI security reports I have received.
One issue allowed someone to disable the DNS-over-TCP service with
specially crafted packets. The DNS-over-UDP service was not affected,
and this won’t affect most users since DNS-over-TCP is disabled by
default.
The other issue is that ANY queries in Deadwood, when forming an
RFC8482 reply, would transmit over the network 19 bytes of unallocated
memory. There does not appear to be any sensitive data in those 19
bytes, and the bug has now been patched.
AskMara
askmara is a tool included with MaraDNS to perform DNS queries. It
was originally written in 2001; with IPv6 having wide adoption, it has
been updated to allow one to perform IPv6 queries more easily. In
addition, askmara finally has a formal version number (1.0.0001) and
its documentation has been updated.
Lunacy
The built in version of Lunacy (a Lua 5.1 fork with security
hardening) has been slightly updated, to allow one to optionally have
support for the lfs package (list files in a directory) and spawner
(open up a sub-process with a two-way pipe) again. The build process
has also been updated and is better documented.
MaraDNS’s version of Lunacy is very slightly different from the stand alone version of Lunacy,
but both versions can run the same
scripts (as long as the MaraDNS version of Lunacy has lfs and spawner
enabled).
coLunacyDNS, which uses Lunacy, had its entire build process updated
to make sure its embedded Lunacy correctly compiles without lfs nor
spawner.
MaraDNS’s documentation
Lunacy is used to build all of the documentation from MaraDNS’s own
Easy Journal format to various other formats (text files, man pages,
markdown pages, and HTML pages).
The process for building HTML pages has been updated to have the
pages look nicer both on modern desktop browsers, as well as on phone
screen web browsers.
The entropy pool
Deadwood uses a cryptographically secure pseudo random number
generator (CSPRNG) to combine multiple sources of entropy and then
generate numbers which are very hard to guess; this is used to
determine the query ID and query source port to make spoofing DNS replies more difficult.
Because of how the CSPRNG works, the randomness of numbers is at
least as good as the best source of entropy it gets. For example, if
the CSPRNG is seeded from four sources of entropy, and three of them
don’t actually have good entropy, the CSPRNG is still making high
quality random numbers if the final source gave it secure random
numbers.1
Back in 2007, I had Deadwood use the following sources of entropy:
-
/dev/urandom (CryptGenRandom() in Windows)
-
The timestamp when Deadwood was started
-
Deadwood’s process ID
-
A couple hundred bytes of uninitialized allocated memory
Using uninitialized allocated memory has always been described as
leading to “undefined behavior”, but in 2007, the behavior was that we
would get some kinda-random looking bytes which would give us a little
more entropy.
Here in 2026, testing shows that the uninitialized memory is
frequently replaced with 0s, giving us no entropy, and since using
uninitialized memory does generate Valgrind warnings, I
decided to find another source of entropy.
Deadwood now uses the following sources of entropy:
-
/dev/urandom (CryptGenRandom() in Windows)
-
The timestamp when Deadwood was started
-
Deadwood’s process ID
-
Deadwood now performs 112 calls to clock_gettime(),
initializing a dummy copy of the CSPRNG between each call. Testing in
Cygwin, Ubuntu 26.04, and Alpine Linux on x86_64 systems shows that
each call to clock_gettime() generates at least
one bit of entropy, giving us 112 or more bits of entropy independent
of /dev/urandom. The Windows port, alas, can’t get good
entropy this way (since its clock has less resolution than the POSIX
standard clock_gettime()) but can get about 24 bits of
entropy from its sub-microsecond timestamp.
The reason for this system is because, while /dev/urandom
is secure on modern Linux kernels, Deadwood is designed to be compiled
on a variety of POSIX compliant systems, and, in particular, embedded
devices could very well have a /dev/urandom without good
entropy. For example, there were issues with Linux’s /dev/urandom
on Raspberry PI devices a while ago, resulting in people using a
program called haveged
to get better entropy. Indeed, Deadwood’s use of clock_gettime()
is very similar to how haveged got entropy.
Compiling with newer
compilers
Post-C23 compilers have broken a lot of programs, making programs
that used to compile without issue no longer compile. That in mind,
MaraDNS now has hardcoded in all of her makefiles the -std=c99
flag, to make sure MaraDNS always compiles to the 1999 version of the C
standard.
The reason for using the 1999 standard is because, while I have
updated MaraDNS to be able to compile with a C23 compiler, the majority
of MaraDNS’s and Deadwood’s development was done while C99 was the
current C language standard.
MaraDNS’s future
Now that I have cleaned up MaraDNS to be current here in 2026, the
main updates will be security updates: While MaraDNS is remarkably
secure (there has never been an attack stronger than remote
denial of service found), AI assisted reviewers are able to find many
more security bugs than they could in the pre-AI days, so there’s a
pretty good chance I will need to make more security patches as other
bugs are found by AI.
Footnote
1: There is theoretical attack where, if a given “entropy” source is actually malicious, and if said source has access to the numbers generated by other entropy sources, such source could, in theory, control the output of the CSPRNG. It would take 2**n work to control n bits of the output, and it requires being able to read the memory of the victim process. Once one has access to the memory of the victim process, one can perform easier and far more effective attacks, so this is not a real world concern.
Grab bag
September 17, 2026
I discuss various topics in today’s blog.
Fuel price riots
It would seem that the war against Iran is causing fuel prices to
skyrocket worldwide, resulting in riots across the globe.
Here in Mexico, fuel prices have stayed constant; it helps a lot that
Mexico has its own source of oil and doesn’t have to rely on foreign
oil. Prices at gas stations are highly regulated here; the price of gas
is essentially the same at the local CostCo as it is at a gas station
in the middle of the desert in northern Mexico.
Tate’s prison conditions
The Tates are apparently in horrible prison conditions.
Yes, these conditions are inhumane. Maybe having the Tates be under
these conditions will get the attention of people in charge of the
prisons, who seem to ignore the problem when brown-skinned people have
to endure those conditions.
Dirty laundry
Don Henley once wrote a song about how unsavory the press can be
called “Dirty Laundry”.1
Seeing how the press is fanning the fires of the Lindsay Clancy
situation, I can see how much this song still applies today.
First, the left-wing press doxxed one of Clancy’s jurors,
the one who refused to declare
Clancy not guilty for reasons of insanity.
So the right-wing press retaliates by doxxing personal information about Clancy’s lawyer.
The right is now painting that same juror as a hero.
The sensationalist press also posted a woke screed saying the juror
deserved to be doxxed. The right was not amused
(Alt link).
Here’s one stupid quote from that article: “The jurors voted 11-1 for
insanity. This indicates that public opinion breaks down along similar
lines.” Actually, public opinion is, as I type this, 46% feel she is guilty, 21% feel she is not guilty by reason of insanity, and 33% are not sure.
As Don Henley sang many years ago, the press is motivated by our
baser instincts, with “crap is king; give us dirty laundry” being the
key lyric from that classic song.2
Footnotes
1: Considering that three of the six members of Toto play in this song, it is almost a Toto song.
2: Since someone has posted slander at Genius that a prostitute was found dead at Henley’s apartment, that did not happen. Henley, in sworn testimony, explained that he hired a prostitute without knowing she was underage, they used a lot of drugs together, and didn’t even have sex. Nobody died. Despite this, the press had a field day dragging Henley through the mud over this incident.
Round up
September 16, 2026
In today’s blog I touch on various topics.
Lindsay Clancy
Let’s look at some actual quotes from a couple of pro-Clancy women I
found online. The first one comes from DailyKos:
I have been reading several articles about Lindsay Clancy. The
response from many men is very disturbing. It's like they can't even
imagine hormones changing the way we think and feel.
The second one comes from Reddit:
The fact that men are banding together to think that the answer is to
deprive her of, yet again, the healthcare [Clancy] needs, is fucking
terrifying.
In both cases, we see women who have an intense hatred of men, and
want to blame anyone besides Clancy herself for murdering her own three
kids with her own hands.
As you can imagine, the radical right is having a field day with the whole Lindsay Clancy issue,
falsely claiming supporting Clancy is some kind of mainstream
feminist cause.
Yes, there are women out there with an intense and
unreasonable hatred of men. I have had the dubious pleasure of knowing
many of those kinds of women; needless to say, they are no longer in my
life. However, the majority of women aren’t like that, and the women in
my circle of friends simply have no opinion on Lindsay Clancy. The one
female friend I have with an opinion on Clancy feels her actions were
immoral and vile.
Twitter and Reddit scrapers
Now that both Reddit and Twitter need people to log in to read
content on their sites, and now that Twitter is playing the
whack-a-mole game trying to take down Twitter scrapers, I will provide
both a list of Twitter scrapers
and a list of Reddit scrapers.
¡Viva México!
Last night I celebrated Mexico’s independence with my family. We had
a lovely evening. Amazing how much more stable, balanced, and loving
people are in real life compared the the monsters we have online.
Round up
September 12, 2026
I discuss various topics today.
September 11
I have discussed September 11 multiple
times previously.
This time, on the 25th
anniversary of the attacks, I ended up being only one block away from
where I was when I saw the north tower collapse live on TV because my
girlfriend asked me to visit her there.
Nikita Tyukalo’s parties
It would seem that Nikita Tyukalo had extensive loud parties,
parties which were
apparently funded by him trafficking women to be online pornographic
models.
Andrew Tate: Denied bail
Andrew Tate and his brother have been denied bail
in their extradition proceedings. They remain in jail.
Tate has allegedly trafficked webcam models to earn money,
among other charges.
Nathan Cofnas update
Nathan Cofnas, who accused a Black professor of plagiarism, has had
his suspension ended,
but is not allowed to teach classes. It would seem
they don’t want to fire him—but I very seriously doubt they will renew
his contract either.
Nathan Cofnas has a right to be a “race realist” who believes, to put
it bluntly, that Black people aren’t as smart
as other races. I strongly disagree
with that belief, but he has a right to have it. Where he crossed the
line was digging up dirt to harass someone for being Black.
Woke 1 was crazy
The same left-leaning media who were part of the “Woke 1” movement
are now realizing how out of touch that movement was.
The New York times, who forced an editor to resign
back in 2020—peak Woke—for publishing
the opinion of a US Senator, recently published an article about how crazy “Woke 1” really was.
How times have changed.
Lowering memory prices
One startup is working on a much cheaper process to create computer memory.
This process will
hopefully make memory cheaper by the end of the decade. I personally
feel the AI bubble will burst before then.
Either way, it should be possible to get a ThinkPad T14s with an
Intel i7 processor, 64 gigs of memory, and 4tb or more of hard disk
space for under $2000 within three years.
