Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🖼️ xkcd — International Station #3195

  • 🔤SpellBinding — CEHIVSO Wordo: GRAZE

• Technology and Free Software

  • Idiots, idiots everywhere!

    Yeah, so the title isn't really news, but I was looking at a video of someone saying they were switching from Win to Linux Mint. He was ranting (his words) and just said Mint sucked and he couldn't get the last non-subscription Fotoslop working on it. I just facepalmed internally and called him out for complaining that Win software didn't work perfectly on Linux Mint. Yeah, no fucking shit. Do you get mad when you put an N64 cartridge on top of an Xbox Series X and nothing happens? Fucking stupid asshole. It actually reminds me of people whining that A-to-Z video showed digital rental/purchase movies in their library when searching... Yeah, that's because you CAN watch it there, but you have to pay for it. Don't fucking cry about having more search results unless they're totally wrong. Some Win programs work great with Wine, but many don't. Quit fucking crying about how Win programs don't work flawlessly on not-Win when they shouldn't even work at all on not-Win, dipshit. Anyone using their fucking brain could understand this compatibility was a positive, not a negative.

    As usual, my comments seem to disappear half the time. I haven't been a good little lemming on Yu2b for the past several weeks. I went back to look at it and just sorted by recent comments. I was shocked. I'm hoping against hope that most of the commenters were just shitty AI, but the amount of comments saying "Win10 is just fine to use" or "Linux is just terrible. I've tried it 10 times and I still keep coming back to Win" is crazy.

  • Slow computing

    Now that I've got my Models 1 and 2 prototypes fully usable, I'm finally able to really explore the extent of 'slow computing' -- truly stretching the tolerability of latency using this machine with an MCU and a slowly-refreshing ePaper display. So far, it suits me. Somehow it seems like this might not be far from what it was like to use a teletype terminal at 300bps. Not only that, the juiced mode I'm using to make the screen updates tolerable also creates a ghosting effect reminiscent of cheap printer paper rolling over dirty platens. Oh, and the properties of LoRa radio for comms is another patience-building "feature". Yes, I'm embracing and promoting slow computing. Try it. You might like it.

  • Programming

    • Environment Leak

      On unix, or what passes for it these days, environment variables are passed to child processes. The shell is somewhat wacky in that it has a flag as to whether a variable should be exported to child processes, but that's the shell being special. The default is that the environ(7) of the parent gets copied into the child process, duplicate environment variables and all.

      At some point someone decided it would be a good idea to put such things as passwords and API keys into environment variables.

      This is something of a security risk, as someone else (perhaps you on a different day) might have the idea to fork to run some user-provided code as that user. A potential leak here is that the user, being curious, might look at the environment and discover various things that they really should not.