rucksack

Complaints for the most part.

Yes, this includes you

Google’s instructions will only work if everything goes smoothly, and as someone with hundreds of hours in ADB from testing various Android versions, I will guess that it will probably not go smoothly.

Source: Google’s Pixel storage issue fix requires developer tools and a terminal | Ars Technica

People forget google hates the fact they exist, which means you’re a sweaty, dirty, bloody meaty thing handling their perfect hardware and their perfect software.

Yes, this includes you Read More »

Of course they knew it was illegal. They just didn’t care.

Schwalb’s DC lawsuit cites a former “high-ranking manager” at Greystar Management Services, one of the RealPage customers named in the suit, as confirming that landlords used rent management software to collude and raise prices. “He responded that of course they did—it’s the entire reason landlords used the software,” according to the complaint.

Source: 14 big landlords used software to collude on rent prices, DC lawsuit says | Ars Technica

Say, what are the chances there are other cartels in other cities that are also artificially inflating prices through the use of software? We get that landbastards want to make it easy for themselves to maximize profits as we all live in a capitalist society, but this is egregious. There is a difference between profiting and profiteering.

There is a high likelihood there’s a cartel here in Minneapolis given how city government feels safe in fucking life up for everyone within city limits.

We hope they all get fucked.

Of course they knew it was illegal. They just didn’t care. Read More »

Smartly helping you break the law

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

Insert smart chips & building blocks in your Google Doc
Insert smart chips in your Google Doc to include information about:

Other users with Gmail or Workspace email addresses
Other Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides files
Dates or Google Calendar events
Places and map directions

Where there’s a smart chip in your document, you and other users can hover or click on a chip to get more information.

If you are dealing with confidential information you should stop using Google Sheets immediately.

  • There is no way to disable them.
  • Google will insist on forwarding or sharing the resource with people within the organization even if do not need access to it.
  • The changes are not reversible via Undo functionality. You have to revert to a previous version of the file (File -> Version History -> See Version History). Good luck to you if you’ve been working on the file for hours/days and google shits all over your file.
  • What happens when google kills the feature because no one is using it? The original data that was kept in those cells is gone.

This is particularly important if you’re dealing with FERPA or HIPAA data. Switch to excel, which is what you should’ve done from the beginning.

Smartly helping you break the law Read More »

Enduro

In the space of a month:

  • Found a new full-time job at helpdeskJerb.
  • Adjusted my schedule at bartendJerb.
  • Moved addresses.
  • Potentially finished my time working at sysadminJerb.

I’m fucken tired.

Enduro Read More »

This is being one hell of a ride

Well, now he’s truly done it. The melon husk bought twitter.

The writings were quick to arrive, particularly after the husk fired the A-levels first thing, and then dissolving the board of directors. Pretty sure all of that will result in lawsuits. Rich people don’t like not getting their golden parachutes.

The Verge posted:

What I mean is that you are now the King of Twitter, and people think that you, personally, are responsible for everything that happens on Twitter now. It also turns out that absolute monarchs usually get murdered when shit goes sideways.

Welcome to hell, Elon

The Intercept wrote:

This could have been the mission statement of pre-Musk Twitter. But now there’s one big difference: When the content moderation of Twitter remains largely the same, the sense of betrayal among Musk’s super-fans will explode with the force of a supernova. And they will scream at Musk about it nonstop — on Twitter.

By Buying Twitter, Elon Musk Has Created His Own Hilarious Nightmare.

The chaos started immediately, with the husk firing a lot of people willy-nilly all over the company, and the world. Then it started asking people to come back. The company is now also on the hook for breaking California labor laws, with a looming lawsuit and employment attorneys commenting on this.

Nine days on from the purchase, the chaos continues:

Scoop: all of Musk’s companies use MS Teams for comms, where new channels are private by default.

When software engineers from Tesla, Boring and SpaceX came in to Twitter a week ago, they created Slack channels to communicate amongst themselves.

Several channels were public

@GergelyOrosz

Twitter Co also has zero potential advertisement income coming in, due to the husk’s erratic management style and general assholery. Also, someone please tell @Jack to shut the hell up.

Ourselves don’t plan on switching platforms until they shut the servers off… but then again we came from IRC, which has greatly reduced in size and influence; we keep a foothold on a couple networks but we don’t see any kind of substitute for the glorious chaos of an open timeline. But we’ll see.

Dril predicted all this, by the way. A true prophet of our age.

This is being one hell of a ride Read More »

Trust google at your peril

It really is that simple: No one trusts Google. It has exhibited such poor understanding of what people want, need and will pay for that at this point, people are wary of investing in even its more popular products.

Source: Stadia died because no one trusts Google | TechCrunch

The wake-up call was when google killed google reader, but it was ignored by a lot of people cos it was a free service.

Then there was G Suite (Legacy Free). They got a lot of people to rely on google services and then proceeded to straight up betray them. People still didn’t care cos it was also “free service”.

But now with Stadia people will care cos the cost of this cancellation won’t be paid by google— they already wrote off the money. The cost will be borne by developers who trusted google with their games.

I’m somewhat safe as I do pay for some google services but I am looking for alternatives now. Microsoft is not a particularly viable option.

Trust google at your peril Read More »

Most streamers would rather suffer shitty wifi

This is a bit of a rant— mostly cos in the past few weeks we’ve seen some of the streamers we follow get hit with Internet issues and they’ll usually blame their ISP. Yeah comcast and charter/spectrum fucken suck but the vast majority of the time they’re not going to be the entity at fault. If you are a “professional” streamer, i.e. you have income from your streams, you owe it to yourself to ensure your Internet connection is actually functional at all times. So this here is for you. Why? Cos all the time we see people spend thousands of dollars on computer hardware (their gaming/streaming rig plus accessories, monitors, lighting, camera, microphone/headset, etc etc) and yet… they still connect their computer to the Internet via wifi.

Then they wonder why they’re lagging in fucken fortnite or why the audio is running half a second behind video on twitch. Bitch pls.

Particularly egregious when it’s people who know better but they just choose not to do it for whatever reason, chief among them that “landlord won’t allow it”. Run that Ethernet cable with command hooks if your have to, gawdamn, but do something.

We’re not a streamer but we do work in IT. A proper, trouble-free setup would replicate what we have right now here at home.

  1. Get a power-efficient computer. Doesn’t have to be expensive, we’re using one of these we bought for $30 USD.
  2. Install an extra network card on that computer (another $10 USD). If you get something like this it already has an extra LAN interface and they even throw in one year of tech support. If you’re cheap just go download pfsense and install it yourself, it’s free.
  3. Get a decent switch like this one with built-in PoE and gigabit ports all around.
  4. Get one or two wifi access points like these to handle phones, tablets and streaming boxes.

You plug the wifi access points into the switch (they get power via Ethernet), then the switch into the “router”. Turn everything on, then follow the instructions for setting up pfsense. If you’ve ever installed Windows on a computer this all works at the same level of tech skill.

With everything set up (and it isn’t that hard if you’re even somewhat technically inclined and you follow a youtube tutorial like this one) you now have a better network setup that most small businesses out there. Speaking of business… most places do know they need constant Internet connectivity to actually stay open and yet they still choose to have a $25 USD wifi router that reached end-of-life back in 2016 run their stuff, and then they wonder why their Internet fucken sucks.

Feeling fancy and want to take it easy? Go with a Ubiquiti Unifi setup. It’s nice and slick and they also have decent tech support if you have no idea what you’re fucken doing. It will cost you a pretty penny… but their setup is basically flawless and will last you a long time without having issues. If and when you have issues the system itself will tell you what’s wrong. Slick, like we said.

Once all of the things are connected and working, then you connect your computers and phones and streaming boxes and tables to that new network equipment. If you’re a streamer it is very likely there are one or two technically-inclined people who watch your streams and would help out if you ask. But that’s the thing, you have to ask.

If you’re making more than $1000 USD a month from streaming you can certainly afford to pay someone to do this for you. Hire someone, get them on retainer, and now when somethin breaks right before an important stream they’ll be able to help you figure out what the fuck is going on.

Most streamers would rather suffer shitty wifi Read More »

For shame! For shame!

Well guess what, here’s an actual blog post. For the past few years we’ve been putting stuff on twitter cos it’s easier to get stuff off the cuff, y’know? But we’ve realize that for a lot of things we want to do a bit more thought. Hence the following.


We’d noticed over the past couple weeks a coworker was downright hostile to us. Earlier we finally got the chance to ask her:

“Hey, is there anything we did to make you angry or annoyed?”

Yes

You don’t listen to anyone
You do whatever you feel like
And you drink too much at work

Which, fair.

  1. We listen to people who can actually impinge on our tasks, i.e. management or shift leads. If you want me to go clean tables cos you’d rather get hit on by the hot guy at the bar then no.
  2. We do whatever needs doing right then and there. Food needs doing and you’re busy getting hit on? We’ll run food. Guests in line and you’re busy chatting up a table of men? We’ll ring those guests right up. I’m not at your beck and call. I’m at the business’ beck and call. We’ve told the GM to fuck off cos we’re busy doing things they’d rather not do. We’ve told the fucken CEO off. You’re a mere peon just like me.
  3. This one actually threw us for a loop. We’re currently averaging .9 beers per hour, while the KM is doing about 2 beers/hour, the sous chef is doing 1 weed joint/hour. We believe the issue you have with our drinking is that we start making conversation with the men hitting on you, which means you then have to go and do actual work.

Now, we only found out cos we asked. She wasn’t going to let us know she had a problem, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to let management know there was a problem cos then they’ll look at her work performance.

(Management loves us, by the way. They can find no fault with our work, which is how we like it.)

But it is annoying. When they say that it’s hard to make friends in Minnesota they didn’t say anything about people who can’t deal with their own emotions in a healthy way.

For shame! For shame! Read More »

And fuck your cow too

Dear Spotify. I tried to search for podcasts on your Desktop app. I know you’re into fancy cross-platform Electron framework. I’ve come to terms with it. It’s fine. It’ll do. But, your understanding of interface design seems like it needs a bit of a history lesson. Back in iTunes Good

Source: Dear Spotify. Can we just get a table of songs?

Honestly if you’re using the Electron framework for anything you’re not a software developer. You’re a piece of shit who writes shit code and is out to make the world a shittier place.

And fuck your cow too Read More »

Running thunderbolts through crystallized rock to make it think is already magical enough

At the heart of the problem is that the SELinux policies themselves are sort of magical. The policies have probably been provided by the maintainers of your Linux distribution, e.g., Fedora Linux. There’s nowhere on the system where you can view the policies and look up why something might or might not work. The policies also change over time, without any warning.

Source: SELinux is unmanageable; just turn it off if it gets in your way

Red Hat has made it clear the best way to manage SELinux is for you to outsource it to someone, preferably them. I get it, security of this sort is complex, but having to trust random internet postings for instructions on how to do a small task is how we ended up with github readmes saying “just curl this into bash as root”.

Running thunderbolts through crystallized rock to make it think is already magical enough Read More »

Oh, Photoprism

mariadb_1 | 2022-04-11 18:17:42 0 [ERROR] InnoDB: preallocating 507904 bytes for file ./photoprism/faces.ibd failed with error 28 mariadb_1 | 2022-04-11 18:17:42 0 [ERROR] [FATAL] InnoDB: Error (Out of disk space) in rollback. mariadb_1 | Fatal signal 6 while backtracing photoprism_mariadb_1 exited with code 139

We recently got our hands on some enterprise hardware and we’re now using it to run some VMs and whatnot. One of the projects I’ve had for a long time is trying to figure out a way to have a web gallery. After looking around at the available options we decided to give a shot to Photoprism.

Requirements aren’t complicated:
– Display pictures and associated metadata quickly, as a gallery.
– Have wide compatibility for various filetypes, including RAW and video files.
– Mobile app helps but it’s not a hard requirement. Web first, preferably with minimum javascript thrown in.

We have about 46 thousand files including pictures and videos, consuming 265 GB of storage. A bit more than what most people would have sure, but any cloud picture solution would definitely charge a good chunk of money to store all of them.

Now, on to PhotoPrims itself. It does Docker Compose but… fine, whatever, you want me to do the devops shit, fine. It’s easy to install, after all:

# mkdir -p /opt/photoprism
# wget https://dl.photoprism.app/docker/docker-compose.yml
# vi docker-compose.yml

You just edit docker-compose.yml with the bits and pieces you need specific to your installation and you’re good to go. Being lazy I mounted pictures storage via CIFS from the storage server. Tried to get it to work directly in Docker but it kept telling me to kick rocks.

Then you run the actual service:

# docker-compose up -d

Starts up a server accesible on the local network at http://server:2342. The documentation does state securing the connection is an exercise left to the reader, but as I only plan to run this on my LAN and accessible only via VPN, it’s fine.

This is where we started running into issues. The first VM created for it had 2 vCPUs, 8GB RAM, 16GB HDD VM. It ran out of drive space after thrashing CPU for a bit. We upgraded the VM to 8 vCPU, 32BM RAM, 32GB HDD. It ran out of disk space after thrashing the CPU cores for a bit longer.

Mmmkay, now we have a bad time going here. Upgraded VM to 16 vCPU, 64GB RAM, 64 GB HDD. It ran out of disk space again after thrashing the CPU cores for a solid 20 hours. We get it, it’s using TensorFlow for AI stuff but as a comparison Digikam is able to do the same things but doesn’t consume nearly as many resources, for as long.

We suppose it really wants you to be using modern hardware of the sort that is incredibly expensive and to find given the current supply chain issues worldwide.

Oh, Photoprism Read More »

Seriously Google, what the fuck

They are altering the agreement, pray they don’t alter it further.

Source: Google to free G Suite users: Pay up or lose your account | Ars Technica

Darth Vader: I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further

A few years ago I needed to add another domain to my Gsuite account, which led me to start paying for services there. Over time we started using it for more things but we remained leery of purchasing things from Google through Gsuite accounts or free Gmail accounts.

At some point we migrated our Google Voice number from our gmail account to the Gsuite account, and it remained there. When this migration was done Google moved everything through: contacts, text messages, call history, voicemails. Everything happened without issues or difficulties; all you had to do was unlink your carrier number from one account, migrate the GV number from Gmail to Gsuite, and re-link your carrier number.

But starting a couple of years ago Google disabled the ability to migrate from Gsuite to Gmail. Not without losing everything. We’ve been looking to migrate off Google’s infrastructure for email/calendar and everything else and it’s a non-started as long as they hold my main phone number hostage. And now Google is forcing people and companies who made the mistake of choosing Google for their services to pay up or lose everything:

oh fuck

I’ve been using this for my family since Google first introduced it as a way for Families to use vanity domains together. I have over a decade (almost 2?) of purchases tied to this account and the cost to migrate to their enterprise offering for my family is bonkers.

I don’t know what I’m going to do here as I can’t migrate my purchases out of this account and into a normal gmail account. uuuuuuuugh.

While self-hosting files and email and photos is doable, self-hosting your own mobile phone number is still complicated, and on top of that the available services still cannot compete with the simplicity of GV even as Google leaves the service to wither for years at a time. We’ve been looking at using services like https://jmp.chat/ but again, they are non-trivial:

  1. You must port your number from GV to their service.
  2. You lose everything: Contacts, text messages, call history, voicemails.
  3. You have to figure out what XMPP client to use on your devices depending on operating system, as most XMPP clients don’t support them all.
  4. You have to learn the quirks of texting people who aren’t in your contacts already.
  5. Jmp.chat itself is still marketed as Beta, and some features are still in alpha, like group messaging.

Google should offer the option to convert a Gworkspace (nee Gsuite) account to a free Gmail account, or to migrate the data from a Gworkspace account to a Gmail account. They can do it, they just choose not to because nobody can force them to do the right thing.

The current state of things is absolute bullshit.

Seriously Google, what the fuck Read More »