Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 09/03/2023: Mesa 22.3.7, Samba 4.18.0, Peek Discontinued



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • conflicted

        i've never had a hard time making decisions. when conflicted with two options, i always chose fast and logically. this is why this situation i've encountered myself in is quite odd for me.

        i don't remember the last time i couldn't make a decision swiftly. i'm debating wether i should let a random chance choose for me.

      • Abyss of links

        If your capsule has URLs with numbers in them, and the resulting pages have a link to "next" that adds a constant to the current number, you have this issue, and crawlers may well crawl all the possible numbers. I found another one of these that accepted very big numbers indeed, up to the point where it gave an error about not being able to translate a string to a number.

      • Well-defined Blacks and Stark Whites

        I soaked up myriad musings stretching back to the dawn of the universe as I sat on that bench. I *was* the babe without a single drop of remembrance. I absorbed and penned a novel about the collective consciousness of every being that ever crossed the perimeter of the park. I experienced once again that one must remind oneself to clear the mind completely when traversing a space one has traversed before. If not, the danger of letting one's own past interfere in the current moment looms.

        What I was trying to say, surely, in a non-elliptical tangle, was that it'd be groovy were the park an accumulator of memories from all that traversed it. A container of sorts. Given that, I'll write about something tangential to it.

      • Spring is here!

        Formally is is still winter (night temperatures are still often under zero degrees) but during daytime temperatures are going over 10C here and my spring allergy is back once more.

        It seems that I wrote no phlog after the last SDF server OS upgrade (to the NetBSD 9.3) because only no I realised that the par(1) is not installed.

      • The Nature of Home

        I've found myself in Nightfall City during a layover on my journey back to my hometown, so I figured I'd take a break from typing away in some old office suite on my Motorola Droid Pro and hop into the pub while I'm here.

        Throughout my travels today, the nature of what home is has been on my mind. As a college student, studying hundreds of miles away from where I grew up, it's a peculiar split. On the one hand, my hometown is an integral part of my identity, It's where my partner, parents, brother, and dog are. It's the central point where I can see all my friends who scatter to various corners of the country most of the year. It's the place I go back to so I can connect to all of the people that are close to my heart.

    • Politics

      • Integration

        In Swedish politics, the faction (the blue-brown alliance of KD, M, L, and SD) that has claimed “integration and immigration” as their main talking point has policies that are the opposite of integration.

    • Technical

      • Low Tech in the Midwest

        The double-whammy of a warmer planet and a cooler economy has renewed my interest in reducing my consumption of resources and my impact on the world around me. To that end, I spent the last few evenings reading many posts at Low Tech Magazine ^, a site dedicated to identifying problems caused by modern technology and proposing low-tech solutions to them.

        Some of the ideas proffered by the site made me consider some of the particular challenges I face. I live in the American Midwest, not far from a large metropolis, and conditions in the area seem a tough fit for a number of the site's proposals.

      • Hypocrisy of enterprise IT security

        Quick rant. In work I've been debuging issue with some customers. Recently we updated how our virtual camera works on MacOS. Before we use the DAL interface and now switched to the more secure system extension. DAL works more like how Windows implements virtual camera using Direct Show. The system loads a dynamic library into apps that wants to use it. There's obvious problems, any DAL plugin can execute arbitrary code at that point. Including reading the process's memory and steal confidential information. Also, since DAL is executing as another app. You need a daemon to transport video frames from source to destination.

        So Apple introduced the new API, System extensions. It runs the extension in it's own "sandbox" (ignoring technical details here) and the system does the IPC. Basically a microkernel design so app developers can have low level access to the system while keeping system integrity. Extension can't read anything it shouldn't. After we released this upgrade. Some of our enterprice customers started to complain that they can't install the system extension. We did soem debugging with them. Turns out MDM software can and commonly will block 3rd party system extensions from loading.

      • Losing Signal

        Warning to my friends : Until further notice, consider I’m not receiving your Signal messages.

        Signal, the messaging system, published a blog post on how we were all different and they were trying to adapt to those differences. Signal was for everyone, told the title. Ironically, that very same day, I’ve lost access to my signal account. We are all different, they said. Except myself.

      • Loopy links 🔄

        One thing I found by looking at where my #hashtag crawler went was that some people have a bottomless pit of links.

        The first one I saw was someone exposing a repository of the site content. That included a link to the content itself. Not a link to the actual site, but to the copy of it in the repo. That had a repo link, where you could find a site link, and so on. I spotted this when it got to several levels of site/repo/site/repo/site/repo and told the crawler to give up. I'm mildy curious how deep that could go. I suppose it's limited by the maximum length of a gemini request (assuming that either the server or the client respected that limit).

      • Re: Why it's bad that the web is so feature-rich

        The thing I really hate about stage 4 web (to borrow idiomdrottning's terminology) is being gaslit by webdevs about accessibility, especially as it relates to JavaScript. When I bring up the topic, it's like, "JavaScript isn't harmful for accessibility. In fact, the web is inaccessible without JS." Yeah, I much prefer being able to use the web with command-line tooling and other comfortable tools. But the thing often doesn't even work from the environments that web designers and developers insist that I use.

        This morning, I've asked Deedra to pay our Internet bill, because I couldn't manage it with either Firefox or Chromium on Linux. She tried Brave on Linux, and now she's booted into a Windows VM. If Windows browsers don't work, I'll try my phone. If that doesn't work, we'll try Safari on her iPhone.

      • Video Switch hack

        It seems that I can't concentrate on software much these days.

        A friend had asked me to see what I can do with a broken 80's video switch with about 100 lit pushbuttons. Ah, I remember seeing one of these at a high-end studio back in the day. I found myself drawn to it. How does one light up dozens of incandescent lamps with a microcontroller?

        Well, all the lights were blown out, so I stuck LEDs into the switches. Reverse engineering the board I traced past the drivers to flip-flops for the lamps -- and it worked. I McGivered these into a shift register through creative soldering and lead-clipping, but it the thing was unreliable and after replacing a few chips I gave up on in-circuit modification. I think that someone attached a 12-volt power supply to 5-volt logic, blowing out every lamp and making the logic flaky.

      • Programming

        • Returns

          I've got an old macbook air. The "Enter" key also says "Return" on it. An old Smith-Corona that lives near my desk also has a "Return" key. My PC just says "Enter" at me. Neither word makes a lot of sense in the modern world, but I think "Return" makes more.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



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