bsdice
Claiming the astronauts where stranded by the Biden admin is just one of those things for the left hand. Of course had Kate dared call it the Gulf of Mexico, she'd be in serious trouble only an hour later. Defiantly, without a job two hours later once CEO heard from lower management.
Something any dictator sooner or later gets into serious trouble, because he is only surrounded by obedient people from his bubble. Warping the view of reality. All others fell out a window or best case, got fired.
Only thing missing really is landing on land and crew offboarding just like that by themselves.
That is why for projects I resolve everything by hand, add all coarsely audited 3rd party libraries to ./lib/, and the main entry file then does this:
#!/usr/bin/env -S /bin/sh -c "_top_dir=\"\$(dirname \"\$(realpath -s \"\$0\")\")\"; cd \"\$_top_dir\"; exec \"\$_top_dir/python/install/bin/python3\" -W once::DeprecationWarning -X dev \"\$0\" \"\$@\""
import os
import sys
# Insert ./lib/ in front of search path
sys.path.insert(0, os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), "lib"))
...
I like the excellent standalone CPython by indygreg, now under astral-sh's github organization. Unpack as is into ./python/ and done. Because Arch Linux would just roll forward to whatever version is latest, introducing new warnings every month or two and havoc on any new major version.
Project is fully portable, copy anywhere that has glibc, run.
There has been news about Broadcom and NVidia testing their designs on Intel process nodes. Which is arguably worse in at least two respects, they are behind TSMC in density and also proprietary software tooling at Intel. After the 13000/14000 CPU chip death issues possibly also in regard to reliability. But they still want to do it.
Although this page in the history books is not yet written, companies hedging their bets this way is a really bad sign.
If you are on Arch Linux, try ungoogled-chromium:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ungoogled-chromium or precompiled https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ungoogled-chromium-bin possibly with https://github.com/NeverDecaf/chromium-web-store and possibly using a .config/chromium-flags.conf like this:
--extension-mime-request-handling=always-prompt-for-install --enable-features=AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL --wm-window-animations-disabled --animation-duration-scale=0
Timely updates, team defending manifest V2, no user data stealing or background scanning b/s, browser as it should be. Got a 10 year old machine with Intel iGPU and even video acceleration in the browser works.
One step could be to replace what Israel replaced, for more independance. Wouldn't buy their solution though, they sell bad pagers.
Trump has the soccer world cup in USA soon. Spectators could make it hell, boo the USA anthem at every game. I think they will.
Like fts-flatcurve, an archive plugin for dovecot that can find stuff in 30 years worth of mails in a second, over IMAP in Roundcube. Or rspamd settings to blacklist not a single IP but an entire ASN of misbehaving colo clients. IMAP with namespaces is also a true pain to configure. Or setting bzip2 compression for an auto-expunged journal for spam, and archive without expunge. Painful.
If you made it this far, you will find that your IP address is tainted. So choosing a hoster that keeps his backyard clean from spammers is necessary, otherwise you will suffer by association. Did I mention SPF records in DNS.
So I consider our server a piece of art. 30 years in operating systems certainly helped.
No affiliation except that I like to look at naked PCBs.
Version 10 also now without any startup errors due to slightly wrong sqlite database structure.
Together with vscodium a joy to use.
A couple years ago I would sit at my desk thinking about a really hard problem in silence. The phone rings. Spam call. Every 30-180 minutes another one. If you now think turn the phone off, well not that easy as CEO of a business when people expect you to be reachable.
It creamed my corn so much that I recorded my own voice samples as a senile "Opa Denny" (german grandpa Denny), modelled after Lenny. Complete with background ducks hanging out on the couch to Opas dismay, later in the call. It works on autopilot without interaction because on Asterisk, and with the largest German SIP provider at least, you can extract the calling peer identity from the SIP header. So I wrote a scoring system based on indicated number, black and whitelist regexs for number and for calling peer, greylist for the geographically surrounding number prefixes, etc. A legit mobile call would show up as [email protected] for example, while a spam call would say [email protected].
Asterisk would record the call in wideband stereo, normalize the audio, and mail it to me as MP3 attachment. Funny for a while, but these days I just throw all such calls onto the mailbox. Since they need a real person to scam or create a sale, the call is finished right away.
It works great to this day, because I never published it.
The publication of high quality fonts since WindowMaker was a thing 25 years ago and expired patents for font rendering also needs to be mentioned. Desktop Linux has evolved nicely.
Until recently, tear-free video playback necessitated double buffering hacks and older Intel drivers, or using a compositor like picom. Results were always sub-par imo.
Along came Mr Sultan Alsawaf: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/commit/0dacee6...
Been running the patch set through Arch's xorg-server-git package ever since it came out, and with mpv as player spaceships have never been zooming smoother along the starry sky. For ultimate playback smoothness I scan the video file for dimensions and refresh rate and then set a custom modeline using xrandr to match display timing with media fps, while maxing out the capabilities of the display link.
Now a gap of almost 20 years has opened, where basically no young engineers have been interested in the field, let alone trained. The biggest companies with the deepest pockets have been mopping up anyone they could find. Top talent went abroad. And so the majority of German businesses which are SMB get hacked more every day. Nobody audits anything. Unfortunately, anything networked is a security risk these days.
I caution that it is highly naive to bet on this getting thrown out at higher court levels. Defendant is looking at YEARS of wasted brain cycles, trying to go from AG to LG to OLG to BGH. My guess is a 100k EUR of fees also wasted. And for what. Because a company couldn't properly secure their data, you told them that, and as a "thank you", they sued you in court?
My advice: If there is no clear bug bounty program, or it is not your own company, or you weren't tasked in writing and paid by the very company to find any holes, don't make it your problem. Suppress any good samaritan helper complex you might have. Wipe all files and talk to nobody. Especially not in your place of employment. Once a lawsuit is involved, anyone questioned will say "Oh, Mike from DevOps figured that one out from the hexdump". You will regret it.
Some of the older German infosec dogs are aggravated by this so much, that they refuse to help any governmental organization if there is an incident. Lernen durch Schmerz.
xinput --set-prop "Kingsis Peripherals Evoluent VerticalMouse D" "libinput Scroll Distance Scale" 2 2
aside from
xinput --set-prop "Kingsis Peripherals Evoluent VerticalMouse D" "libinput Accel Speed" -1.0
for cursor speed which already worked. HTH
Edit: Patch by 3rd party, I fixed it up so would apply cleanly to most recent package.
2.6 GB ungoogled-chromium (Browser) 150 MB kitty (Terminal) 50 MB udiskie (Automounter) 46 MB picom (Compositor) 36 MB pulseaudio (Sound) 26 MB gpaste-daemon (Copy Paste) 21 MB polybar (Bar on top of screen) 20 MB dunst (Notifications) 17 MB i3 (WM itself)
Plus a bunch of services below that, which at this point is only noise. If palemoon works for you as a browser, that will only use 320 MB RSS empty on startup.
Machine has 64 GB RAM, no idea if Chromium by design would eat less on less beefier machines. At 4 GB RAM, zRAM is certainly an option, if you can't or don't want to upgrade. Without such tweaking, modern Linux desktops profit from 8 GB RAM. No matter what WM or DE you run. Once you start a web browser, game over. ;-)
Tape like LTO 6 is quite cheap these days and will last a long time when stored vertically in a dry, cool, dark place. Also at 2.5 TB net capacity per tape with barely used tape prices of 5-10 bucks one can easily write a couple more tapes just in case one is damaged. I think for leader pin damage there is a repair kit and if tape rips in two I remember there was a repair service by IBM which can fix even that and send you a fresh tape with the data or a repaired tape.
One method for business continuity would be LTO in a fire-proof safe to bootstrap the business back into life. Malware couldn't infect or encrypt the data on tape, because of the air gap and inherent "offline" nature.
LTFS seems dead and tar will not nearly extract all possible good stuff from LTO technology.
Plug: I repackaged the open-source Bareos tape software for Arch Linux a couple of days ago. Here are some screenshots of the web interface to give an idea:
https://seitics.de/files/bareos/screenshots/
One up in the tree are AUR build files and quite a few moderately complex new examples, covering scripting to run ZFS snaphot create/delete around jobs, how to turn on/off external tape units using a USB box to cut down on power and noise (involves drilling a hole on the backside of your formerly 2000 USD drive!), how to write disaster recovery files to tape as well, in case that's all you got left, etc. Software is AGPL3, being a Bacula fork, my contributions here are CC0. Been running it on Arch since around 2017 with multiple LTO drives.
The gist is that HP heads were harder material than IBM heads and if you used alot of out-of-spec abrasive MAXELL tapes, especially always fresh ones, then on IBM drives, the drives would suffer from premature "pole tip recession" and could no longer read or write any tape. HP drives seemed less affected.
To find out what manufacturer made the tape, you had to insert the tape into a drive and read the MAM chip over SCSI/SAS. With tapes basically everyone did alot of rebadging, so if you got a "HP" tape it could be anything from MAXELL to Sony to Fujifilm. "IBM" tapes were usually Fujifilm, i.e. good to use everywhere.
Since I self-host e-mail anyway, I switched to a well-greased Roundcube web UI for desktop and FairEmail on the phone. Searching through 20 GB of mail, including text in PDF and Office formats, is more or less "Google-instant" thanks to dovecot-fts-xapian. Having everything in Maildirs for me is very pleasant.
For calendaring I now use Radicale and either Infcloud web UI on desktop or CalDAV-Sync on phone. Could be tighter integrated with e-mail but the old Unix ways of one tool for one job have merits, like all calendar entries are now file system objects and under Git control. Impossible now to fat-finger half the calender and having to jump through hoops to restore entries.