bemused

so Chrome 94 will be released on 09/21 and Firefox 94 on 10/05 .. what a coincidence, seems like 'my version number is bigger then yours' is still a thing in 2021 ;)

anyways, I like having these aligned - one number less to keep track of

The security superiority of Linux in contrast to Windows is rooted in its server/headless form - all of that changes as soon as you start good old X

Wayland is supposed to fix most of those legacy shortcomings enabling proper app-level sandboxing. It took a while, but its implementations are more or less usable as daily drivers these days - if you're interested in desktop security, help to push Wayland to become a hassle free replacement of X is appreciated a lot

thanks a lot for the curated collection! I've been tinkering a bit with milkdrop visualization on the raspberry pi 4 using projectM [1] and found the amount of mediocre presets in the full collection quite high :/ will certainly be using your curated list as a new starting point for finding my own favourites

[1] https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm

this dns server only needs to run for 5 minutes every 4 weeks while renewing certs - no open ports otherwise

set up your own dns-server for wildcard certificate validation on all your domains:

https://github.com/joohoi/acme-dns

quite straightforward to set up - works great here for ~50 domains from various registrars

"Twitter for racists" - the common mindset in this echo chamber is a lot easier to tell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gab_(social_network)

got a 24" LG 1080p monitor in the van that needs less than 20W - doable with a small extra battery and 100W solar. the 4k monitors from LG are quite energy efficient as well (<30W)

webkit was based on khtml (LGPL) - not much of a choice for apple

been safely driving a van with 140km/h top-speed on the autobahn just fine for years - there might be a correlation between the maximum speed of a car and the owners inability to drive safely, but the explanation is probably more a psychological than a technical one ..

your mindset is quite common among german car makers though, maybe the reason they are unable to offer competitive answers to a technologically rather boring challenge - bringing down the price for electronic vehicles by mass production

SHA2017, 4th to 8th of August, near Amsterdam/Netherlands https://sha2017.org/

second that, there is and always has been a strong attitude against all forms of discrimination and right-wing movements in the ccc - see the unvereinbarkeitserklaerung [1] from 2005 for example. you can argue, that the reaction of the ccc in some cases of community-members acting against this spirit came too late, but not by making disguided accusations when you have no idea what you're talking about (like levine did in that interview)

[1] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

The kākāpō truely is an eccentric creature - in the 80s Douglas Adams and zoologist Mark Carwardine went out to find one for the BBC radio documentary series "Last Chance to See". The chapter in its accompanying book is called "Heartbeats in the night" - even more fun to read than watching the documentary[1] Carwardine did with Stephen Fry some 20 years later:

.. when eventually European settlers arrived and brought cats and dogs and stoats and possums with them, a lot of New Zealand's flightless birds were suddenly waddling for their lives. The kiwis, the takahes - and the old night parrots, the kakapos.

Of these the kakapo is the strangest. Well, I suppose the penguin is a pretty peculiar kind of creature when you think about it, but it's quite a robust kind of peculiarness, and the bird is perfectly well adapted to the world in which it finds itself, in a way that the kakapo is not. The kakapo is a bird out of time. If you look one in its large, round, greeny-brown face, it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, though you know that it probably will not be.

It is an extremely fat bird. A good-sized adult will weigh about six or seven pounds, and its wings are just about good for waggling a bit if it thinks it's about to trip over something - but flying is completely out of the question. Sadly, however, it seems that not only has the kakapo forgotten how to fly, but it has also forgotten that it has forgotten how to fly. Apparently a seriously worried kakapo will sometimes run up a tree and jump out of it, whereupon it flies like a brick and lands in a graceless heap on the ground.

By and large, though, the kakapo has never learnt to worry. It's never had anything much to worry about.

Most birds, faced with a predator, will at least realise that something's up and make a bolt for safety, even if it means abandoning any eggs or chicks in its nest - but not the kakapo. Its reaction when confronted with a predator is that it simply doesn't know what the form is. It has no conception of the idea that anything could possibly want to hurt it, so it tends just to sit on its nest in a state of complete confusion and leaves the other animal to make the next move - which is usually a fairly swift and final one.

it's frustrating to think of the difference that language would make. The millennia crawl by pretty bloody slowly while natural selection sifts its way obliviously through generation after generation, favouring the odd aberrant kakapo that's a little twitchier than its contemporaries till the species as a whole finally gets the idea. It would all be cut short in a moment if one of them could say, 'When you see one of those things with whiskers and little bitey teeth, run like hell.' On the other hand, human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

The trouble is that this predator business has all happened rather suddenly in New Zealand, and by the time nature starts to select in favour of slightly more nervous and fleet-footed kakapos, there won't be any left at all, unless deliberate human intervention can protect them from what they can't deal with themselves. It would help if there were plenty of them being born, but this brings us on to more problems. The kakapo is a solitary creature: it doesn't like other animals. It doesn't even like the company of other kakapos. One conservation worker we met said he sometimes wondered if the mating call of the male didn't actively repel the female, which is the sort of biological absurdity you otherwise only find in discotheques. The ways in which it goes about mating are wonderfully bizarre, extraordinarily long drawn out and almost totally ineffective.

Here's what they do:

The male kakapo builds himself a track and bowl system, which is simply a roughly dug shallow depression in the earth, with one or two pathways leading through the undergrowth towards it. The only thing that distinguishes the tracks from those that would be made by any other animal blundering its way about is that the vegetation on either side of them is rather precisely clipped.

The kakapo is looking for good acoustics when he does this, so the track and bowl system will often be sited against a rock facing out across a valley, and when the mating season arrives he sits in his bowl and booms.

This is an extraordinary performance. He puffs out two enormous air sacs on either side of his chest, sinks his head down into them and starts to make what he feels are sexy grunting noises. These noises gradually descend in pitch, resonate in his two air sacs and reverberate through the night air, filling the valleys for miles around with the eerie sound of an immense heart beating in the night.

The booming noise is deep, very deep, just on. the threshold of what you can actually hear and what you can feel. This means that it carries for a very great distances, but that you can't tell where it's coming from. If you're familiar with certain types of stereo set-up, you'll know that you can get an additional speaker called a sub-woofer which carries only the bass frequencies and which you can, in theory, stick anywhere in the room, even behind the sofa. The principle is the same - you can't tell where the bass sound is coming from.

The female kakapo can't tell where the booming is coming from either, which is something of a shortcoming in a mating call. `Come and get me!' `Where are you?? 'Come and get me!' 'Where the hell are you?' `Come and get me!' `Look, do you want me to come or not?' `Come and get me!' 'Oh, for heaven's sake.' `Come and get me!' 'Go and stuff yourself,' is roughly how it would go in human terms.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrmi5UV6-wk

maybe focusing the generation perspective on the tech involved can help with moving this forward - as much as I'd like to contribute to a sane linux desktop in general (and LXQt is definetely the most promising one atm), theres no way I go back to write c++ based 'old school' UI-code anymore. I think for writing UIs you really want the flexibility of a declarative approach - haven't kept up with QML lately but v1 wasn't that great, same with gtk.Builder. people are not shipping a bloated copy of chromium in their apps without reason: we got so used to the power these monsters of layout engines offer, that people think its worth it! even though there still is no decent set of UI-widgets/components for the browser .. (something that can compete with QT or GTK with accessibility etc build in)

things are moving fast in the app-centric world right now, and while this has its downsides, it also populizes ideas that really do make things better - declarative layout, the functional (reactive) approach to ui-programming, using a network capable (rest-) interface between front- and backend and sane sandboxing. a desktop environment that offers a runtime for these kind of apps has the potential to bring back some developers to the linux desktop - KDE imho not only shines in regard to the Frameworks and KWin, their efforts in using QML as the basis for the whole desktop could lead to a more hackable experience for a new generation of developers in general.

bottom line: while electron really is an ugly hack atm, this approach to write cross desktop apps offers a developer experience that is superior in many ways and something that QT should really keep on moving forward: high quality ui-components and functional QML based frontend code combined with language agnostic backend code (c++ for resource heavy stuff, python et al for everything else)

chrome on linux doesn't seem to get much attention for quite a while now: got affected by this [1] more than 2 years ago and been quite happy with firefox for surfing & dev ever since

[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=393395...

agreed, but not sure if Red Hats embrace&extend is any better - all corporate entities seeking too much influence/power in the oss ecosystem should be carefully watched

- the tails project lacks the manpower take a different path than its debian mothership

- the devs don't seem to be bothered by increasing their attack surface with systemd

- systemd makes life easier when building a distribution, so the tails-devs like it (not only because they are lacking manpower)

- sure you got to be a bit paranoid when working on this kind of project, but tails doesn't seem to be a very welcoming environment for contributors

follow tails irc / the mailinglist for a while to get your own picture and have a look at Whonix/Qubes for more security focused alternatives

Well I really dont want to critize GNOME developers for working on free software, paid or not. But GTK is still perceived as a more universal toolkit than "just GNOME" and this might be a time-consuming surprise that hits application developers

furthermore it is still advertised like this as well (from gtk.org):

What is GTK+, and how can I use it? GTK+, or the GIMP Toolkit, is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Where can I use it? Everywhere! GTK+ is cross-platform and boasts an easy to use API, speeding up your development time.

from my point of view, this is not exactly true anymore ..

"the best Linux desktop toolkit" depends primarily on the language you choose and the quality of its bindings to the toolkit

but consider that Qt aims to blend nicely into a GTK-based desktop environment, while its sometimes not even possible the other way round - eg using the "native" widgets of the desktop environment like file dialogs etc

"cross desktop environment" or whatever you might call this, is definitely not a top priority for the gtk-devs (see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=735211 for example)

its all fine if you develop for GNOME only, but you should be aware of GTKs current limitations when it comes to writing applications that look nice on all linux desktops

and porting from one toolkit to another can be heaps of work, so choose wisely..

worked with GTK2/3 and QT 5+ years and got the feeling that GTK has been turning into the GNOME toolkit as well. not very pleasant to work with if you want your application to support the look&feel of different linux-DEs and not suited for cross-platform applications at all

GTK3 is perfect if you want to develop for the GNOME desktop. for anything else it would need way more developers that are not focused on GNOME

coldfusion!?

sure, but thats exactly why I was asking - I am looking for some background on this decision and hoping that someone with more insight can share a link or something

dont wont to criticize any of the great & mainly voluntary work of the debian folks, but not quite sure how to interpret these statistics [1]

looks like jessie is going to be the first debian stable to be released with rc-critical issues and not "when it's done"

some of the bugs referred [2] seem quite critical indeed, maybe someone with more insight could comment on this?

[1] http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2015/04/24-Debian_Relea...

[2] https://udd.debian.org/bugs.cgi?release=jessie_and_sid&patch...

my experience with python3 unicode has been just the other way round - there are some minor troubles with python3 in regard to unicode too, but when doing anything user facing (starting with i18n/l10n) I'd take python3 without thinking twice. its 2015 and bugs like the unicode usernames problem in GTA V lately are just embarrassing for developers

I'm not saying you can't do this with python2 but you have to pay attention to unicode all the time. this gets worse A LOT when trying to serve python 2 and 3 from the same codebase, something I wouldn't recommend at all if you want to do eg. application development. of course this is a bit frustrating if you learned to properly do unicode in python2 the hard way, but for new developers not having to worry about unicode issues really is a blessing

hm, maybe pass that question to someone from finland?

second that, this gives very interesting insight about the mixture of 60s counterculture, then still legal psychotherapeutic and/or recreational experiments with psychoactive substances and the beginnings of "personal" computing

reading this helped a lot realizing the innovation and impact "The Mother of All Demos" really brought and getting a understanding about the environment in which this was envisioned and implemented http://www.wired.com/2013/12/tech-time-warp-engelbart/