Stuff posted in this site by me.
Biden decided to bomb Syria cos it’s what the US does, after all. Bomb the shit out of brown people.
We’ve got some memes going around (this is but one example) about Democrats continuing the Republican tradition.
If it actually happens IRL many lulz will be had at Biden’s expense and he’ll fucken deserve it.
That and Kamala is probably pissed that pigs en’t getting money to terrorize people of color.
Rewrite-it-in-Rust has become a moral imperative. Well, here’s a moral argument: throwing away serviceable computers every couple of years to upgrade is a privilege that not all of your users have, contributes to climate change, and fills up landfills. As far as security is concerned, some matters demand leaving the norm: old hardware is the only kind that can avoid proprietary firmware blobs, Intel ME or AMD PSP, and UEFI. Novel hardware which addresses issues like microcode and open hardware, like POWER9 and RISC-V, are also suffering under Rust’s mainstream-or-bust regime. Anyone left behind is forced to use the legacy C codebase you’ve abandoned, which is much worse for their security than the hypothetical bugs you’re trying to save them from.
Source: Drew DeVault’s blog
As someone who almost exclusively uses older hardware I am extremely annoyed by developers and system administrators who tell me I need to switch out my hardware every 3 to 5 years for the sake of convenience. It’s a very entitled position to take and it got me annoyed enough to go on a little twitter rant about it. If your old hardware works it should be used for as long as possible. You don’t need a server with an AMD Epyc CPU with 1 TB RAM and multipe SSDs with ZFS to… run a simple WordPress blog like this one.
I certainly don’t have the money to develop software in Rust-recommended hardware, which can also double as gaming hardware with the addition of a nice GPU.
How about a memory safe language that can run on “old” or “slow” hardware of the sort that is most often used outside of the US and Europe? If you were to listen to these people they’ll tell you it can’t be done.
About a month ago we picked up at work a SuperMicro X9SCM-F in a 4U rackable case; we didn’t know who the case maker was until @thegpfury noticed it was a Norco case.
This is all well and good but we had a major problem for usage: The noise! This being enterprise hardware no consideration was made for acoustics since the device would live in a datacenter but in my case we want to use it at home.
This is what it sounds with all the fans on (NBM-MAT case fans, the lot of them):
Super loud. Like a 70s VW Bug that has had zero maintenance.
So then I tried with only the fans in the back:
And finally with only the CPU fan
At this point it was clear all the fans were buggered to hell. With them all being 80x80x25 it turned out Noctua do have great replacements available; for the backplane I got NF-R8 redux-1200 and for the read I got the NF-R8 redux-1800 PWM so the motherboard can control the speed on them. The power supply is still fully functional and with it being a Corsair AX760 we know we don’t have to worry about the noise coming from it.
This is how it sounds with two backplane fans and both back fans installed:
Much, much better! So quiet very stealth!!!
For the time being it should be okay to run it with just these fans; the apartment is kind of cold and the additional cooling will not be needed until the summer, by which point the thing will probably get upgraded storage. If only more manufacturers had in consideration the acoustics of their devices; there’s an HP ProLiant DL160 G6 laying around that is also loud as fuck but there’s no clear path to making it quieter; I know 1U devices don’t have the most space but even 2U devices are still loud as hell when they can be much improved.
Perhaps a 2U system with quiet fans and good gaming hardware, mounted under a desk top. That’d be nice. Like a Lack rack but for actual desk use. That’d be nice.
I forgot that I enabled MFA on my Nextcloud instance and it broke rclone. This is something the Nextcloud documentation makes clear but neither the instance nor rclone itself will tell you what’s actually wrong or how to fix it.
First, on Nextcloud:
You can always start over if you don’t copy it so depending on your password policies you might want to save it in your password manager.
Now, switch over to your shell:
$ fusermount -u /home/nullrend/Nextcloud. Do not just kill the rclone job. Apparently the rclone devs think it’s too hard to implement a rclone umount /mount/dir command or sum’thin’.$ rclone config and delete the current Nextcloud remote endpoint. Much easier to start from scratch.At this point you can save the password on Nextcloud so it actually allows rclone to connect through WebDAV.
To mount the new remote endpoint do something like $ rclone mount endpoint:/ ~/Nextcloud --daemon --dir-cache-time 120m --max-read-ahead 256 --no-modtime --vfs-cache-mode full --vfs-cache-poll-interval 120m. You will need to play with the caching flags depending on what you’re doing and what your needs are.
For my own use case I’m mostly using vim to interact with my vimwiki files so I also often do :set noswapfile to stop vim from bitching about files that are likely open elsewhere.
NOGALES, Mexico — North of the border, the .50-caliber sniper rifle is the stuff of YouTube celebrity, shown blasting through engine blocks and concrete walls. Deployed with U.S. troops to foreign wars, it is among the most destructive weapons legally available in the United States.But every week, those rifles are trafficked across the border to Mexico, where increasingly militarized drug cartels now command arsenals that rival the weaponry of the country’s security forces. In many cases, criminals outgun police.
Source: Mexico guns: Sniper rifles are flowing to Mexican drug cartels from the U.S. – Washington Post
Los carteles todavía no se animan a realizar asesinatos tácticos de una bala, prefiriendo mostrar sus poderío enviando comandos armados.
Pero para allá van.
‘k, so in a previous post I wrote how I reworked my note-taking and went back to plain text. I had to make a few changes since then:
Switched out Epsilon for Markor, which is prettier and less of a pain in the ass. But trying to set it up is when I started running into an issue with Nextcloud:
It does not support bidirectional folder sync. At all.
The way Nextcloud syncs everything means you have to access your files through the Nextcloud app instead of being able to use your usual app to open a file. It’s not that much of a change but it does prove annoying because that change is forced on you by the application instead of you (the user) adjusting your workflow organically. People have been requesting this ability since 2016 and the app still doesn’t have it.
When I was using Dropbox as my syncing backend my workflow would be like this:
With Nextcloud it goes something like this:
To replicate the default desktop behavior (syncing to local filesystem) you end up having to use other apps like FolderSync. This way files and folders are available just like any other file on the Android device, letting you use automation or customization apps without issues, and saving you from having to configure syncronization settings for each app. Looking at you, Joplin.
My suspicion is Nextcloud developers are doing it this way to increase your awareness of the brand and the application, following the footsteps of Dropbox. For the longest time Dropbox was a rock-solid syncing application that did one thing and it did it really well, but now they’re trying to force changes nobody likes in an effort to make more money.
If this is indeed the case Nextcloud developers are learning all the wrong lessons from Dropbox’ failure to understand what it had. Instead of strenghtening its core they’re throwing a million other things at the wall to see what sticks:
Nextcloud has a chance to do that one thing well and do it better than Dropbox ever did— that is, file syncing. I feel they’re consciously choosing to throw it away because they want to get a bit more clout and a bit more money. If they keep at it they’re going to end up like Mozilla.
I like Flickr. I have been a paying user for years, since the heady days of Web 2.0. Very photo, so web.
But their documentation fucking sucks. It went down in quality when Yahoo took over, and SmugMug isn’t doing much better. But anyway.
Here’s how to reorganize the order in which albums in the Flickr mobile app show up:
Making this change will have effect in two places:
– The Albums page on the web
Neither the Flickr Help Center nor the Help Forum have any posts about this. Now, I’m using the Android app but I assume the iOS-based versions will also follow the ordering set in the Organizr panel.
I wish Flickr enabled a few things:
– Sorting by album metadata (alphabetically, album creation date)
– Sorting by picture metadata (make bigger/smaller albums show up first/last). This would include sorting by last album upload, so albums used the most get shown first.
– Make Collections a first-class citizen on the site. They’ve been relegated as a little used organization tool that no one uses and when it does get used it isn’t showcased.
Flickr has so much to win now that Instagram is being integrated ever more into facebook’s grubby infrastructure.
Source: Chapter 1: The Ancients’ Bucket List – The Analog Antiquarian
This blog is so, so good, should you like to read about ancient history.
Pirate Care is a research process – primarily based in the transnational European space – that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of “care” and “piracy”, which in new and interesting ways are trying to intervene in one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the ‘crisis of care’ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions.
Source: Pirate Care – Pirate Care
This is a worthy goal. Piracy not for the sake of avoiding to pay for things, but rather as a way to learn about the world and its processes when the entities in power would prefer you not to— whether they be people, corporations, or governments. For these entities any form of non-compliance is to be crushed and its practitioners made customers of the carceral industry.
The Mississippi Park Connection says the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will lower the water level on the river immediately below St. Anthony Falls so it can inspect the infrastructure that’s normally underwater.
This looks to be special! I’m going to be right there freezing my ass off to see this.
Schools often run deficits in normal times; in 2019, nearly 1,000 private colleges were already borderline insolvent. Covid will cause many to shutter for good. It is accounting, not epidemiology, that drives university administrators to push for a rapid return to business as usual, effectively demanding that faculty and staff sacrifice their lives for the financial health of their employer.
Source: The End of the University | The New Republic
You can attend college, the price is death.
Or you could not attend college, in which case the price is poverty.
As the historian Barry A. Crouch recounts in The Dance of Freedom, Ruby warned that the formerly enslaved were beset by the “fiendish lawlessness of the whites who murder and outrage the free people with the same indifference as displayed in the killing of snakes or other venomous reptiles,” and that “terrorism engendered by the brutal and murderous acts of the inhabitants, mostly rebels,” was preventing the freedmen from so much as building schools.
Source: What Black Lives Matter Has Accomplished – The Atlantic
The Orange Maggaot calls people who support BLM “thugs”, “criminals”, “terrorists”, saying he’ll impose Law and Order however necessary.
White people have always been the one to terrorize their communities, and those of people they don’t deem acceptable.
The cold cultural war heats up.
Social networks are universally more restrictive than web pages but also more fun in significant ways, chief amongst them being that more people can participate. What if the rest of the web have that simplicity and immediacy, but without the centralization? What if we could start over?
Source: A clean start for the web – macwright.com
Mozilla is knowingly walking away from any of these options because they’re bitter they could not come to dominate the Web after Firefox helped bring about the downfall of Internet Explorer. Big Tech will not support a reimagining of what the web could be since it will mean less profits. Can’t have that in a capitalist society, now can we?
There’s hope now that the Servo engine is cut loose, but the time window to avoid having a technological cycle (about 30 years or so) be dominated by corporations is closing.
This article suggests a few techniques for finding personal websites on the Internet.
Source: Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website
I’m here and I’m not being that quiet either.
It’s not that I’m invisible. It’s that we don’t even figure into the Peasant Internet anymore(1) even though there’s a lot of activity on the twitters, facebooks, and instagrams of this here planet.
(1) Peasant Internet: Those who surf the waves thinking they’re safe in the embrace of social media or corporate firewalls.
The last valid comment on this here blargh was in 2008, even though the blog had been running for longer than that.
Time flies when you’re doing other things.
Anyone who knows me knows that I was among the biggest Apple Evangelists to ever live. Apple was in my DNA. I believed in Apple’s products, Apple’s services, and Apple’s mission (or at least what …
Source: Dear Apple: Your Services Are No Longer Required. | Low End Mac
I agree with everything they say but this entire fucken thing could have been avoided if someone hadn’t been a nosy person.
I thought of using stronger language but hopefully she knows what her stupidity begat.
I love NYC. When I first moved to NYC, it was a dream come true. Every corner was like a theater production happening right in front of me. So much personality, so many stories. Every subculture I loved was in NYC. I could play chess all day and night. I could go to comedy clubs. […]
Source: NYC Is Dead Forever… Here’s Why – James Altucher
Is NYC truly over? For the longest time it was the place to be in this entire planet but now it certainly feels like it’s spiraling downwards, and we say this from my relatively comfortable perch in the Midwest, which does have problems of its own.
City government is still throwing billions into its police department even though nobody living in the city wants that anymore. Nobody likes De Blasio, who keeps thinking salvation will come from somewhere even though Trump has repeatedly said he’s more than willing to let NYC die. NY state government have their own issues, which depend a lot on the economic might of the city. Landlords are about to start throwing themselves off roofs—let them, no one stop them!
It reminds us of Tijuana when I arrived there so long ago. I was told Avenida Revolucion would be teeming with people, people who would be drinking, laughing, partying; usually loud boisterus Americans, yes, but they’d bring along people from all over the world. It all came crashing down on 9/11 and the economy of the city took a big hit when the border closed entirely. After that, there would only be light crowds and those usually on the weekends.
We worked on La Revo for years. We remember. It took nearly a decade for the city to recover, and then that stopped with the cartel drug wars.
Reading this article about NYC reminds me of all of that. It also takes into account the availability of broadband for most everyone, which changes things when you can do your job from anywhere on the planet that has the bandwidth to let you.
Other cities are suffering from the same issues. London is seeing this compounded by Brexit. Hong Kong, compounded by the hostile takeover by PRC. San Francisco, compounded by sky-high rents. With broadband you don’t have to deal with any of these issues; You can now have your dream house in the country and have good wifi.
NYC will recover first but it will take decades.
I find I Love MDN demeaning to technical writers. It reminds me of breaking into spontaneous applause for our courageous health workers instead of funding them properly so they can do their jobs.
Source: I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action – QuirksBlog
Another article related to the fall of Mozilla. Back in the day we relied heavily on quirksmode.org and doing that sort of data mining, collating, writing and publishing is not easy. For a while myself helped out writing documentation for WordPress during the <.09 era and we found out for myself exactly how hard technical writing is. It’s something we’re good at and, more importantly, enjoy. We appreciate the skill, nuance, talent and even luck that goes into writing good documentation.
It is something that we complain about often on teh twitter derp corn; often using ultraviolent language cos most developers are assholes. We’ve mentioned on this here blargh of using vimwiki. Their documentation looks like… actually, not even going to bother with a screenshot because they don’t have anything on their github or wiki that actually says “Documentation”. They take the easy way out and tell you “oh run :h vimwiki in vim”.
No, fuck you, lazy assholes.
Another few great examples of technical writing gone wrong:
:h for, except without hyperlinking.
I just had to use a gif for Apple. It’s that bad. Most Android apps don’t have any documentation of any kind whatsoever. Windows applications used to have documentation built-in but now they just direct you to their website, where documentation changes and disappears depending on the A-level goals for the quarter.
There are many more examples out there but these are some of the ones I can think of right now. The gist of it is this kind of thing is hard and people who do it should be paid for it, and if they’re good at it they should be paid well. If a developer doesn’t want to write proper documentation then… they should either have someone do it for them and listen to that feedback, or get their ass handed to them so they get on writing it themselves.
Going to go eat something now before the hunger makes me angrier.