Tech

Ars and The Register (and probably others) are reporting that Google and Mozilla are working on “browsers that break current App Store rules.” You know, browsers that aren’t dependent on Apple’s rendering engine. Actual full-fledged browsers. For various reasons I use iOS as the least-bad option (for me) between Android and iOS. But this is a thing that’s bugged me a long time. To be honest, I don’t really understand Apple’s reasoning here. Allowing a slightly hobbled version of Chrome doesn’t really provide adequate “defense” of Apple’s walled garden. It seems to me that Chrome loyalists would prefer a mostly Chrome-ish experience to Safari, even if it’s not the full deal. ...

I like Cory Doctorow a lot, and tend to agree with him on most things, but this screed about Netflix changing its “family” settings is not one of them.

I’m probably late to the party, but Distrobox has to be one of the best open source projects to drop in the past few years.

Need to make a presentation, but don’t like using a GUI app? Take a look at Marp, the Markdown Presentation Ecosystem.

Spent some quality Sunday time today refurbishing some older mini PCs that had been gathering dust so I could run a few personal projects. One of the projects I’ve had on my to-do list an embarrassingly long time is to set up Pi-hole for ad blocking / filtering. If I’d known it’d be that easy I’d have done it a long time ago! I installed Pi-hole on an ancient Core i3 NUC with 8GB of RAM running Debian. It took about two minutes, five if you count reading some documentation and maybe seven minutes if you count logging into the admin interface and quickly setting my laptop and phone to use Pi-hole for testing. ...

Some observations on a Friday evening about the realities of home offices and technology. Fa A laptop’s cabling will always be located on the maximally inconvenient side. Especially power cords with bulky connectors. Internet only fails before or during an important teleconference or the most suspenseful part of a movie or show. This is also true of power outages. Hotel internet is most reliable at mid-range hotels. Fleabag hotels and swank resorts have uniformly crappy internet. The most aloof house cat will only want cuddles when you’re trying to focus. The dongle, connector, cord, or other item you know you own and see frequently when unneeded goes into witness protection when it’s wanted. It will resurface when a replacement is obtained. All deliveries and service calls happen while in meetings. UPS and FedEx only ring the doorbell when it’s inconvenient. Otherwise deliveries are made with maximum stealth. Packages requiring signatures will be announced in a whisper from across the street. After troubleshooting a system or application extensively it will turn out that the problem is a faulty cable or coincidental internet glitch. However, you are likely to have introduced a new, unrelated problem in an attempt to fix the symptoms. Technology: The solution to, and cause of, most of life’s problems! ...

Home from a great visit with my brothers. Enjoy some cat pics! Bubby looking dignified Willow giving side-eye

Apple has decided that my 2015 MacBook Pro isn’t deserving of the latest macOS, so I’m looking to run Linux on it to get a few more years out of it. My first plan was to put Fedora on it, but Fedora 36 and 37 have failed to " set a new efi boot target." Chrome OS Flex installed just fine, but I don’t know if I want to stick with Chrome OS long-term. It’ll do if all I use it for is couch surfing, but I might like to turn this machine into a home server running a few VMs or similar. ...

Long day, let’s hit the links. Great post from Cat Valente about the continual ruination of online social communities by corporations and malicious actors. (My words.) " Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media." From Cat, “It’s the same. It’s always been the same. Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control. Stop being human. A mindless bot who makes regular purchases is all that’s really needed.” ...

Bit of a rant here, so be warned… Caught two threads today with the general gist of “why don’t people just…” –specifically, why haven’t people learned from Twitter or just sucked it up and started using 2FA, no matter what level of computer literacy they might be at. Why don’t open source projects just stand up Mattermost instead of Discord? Why haven’t users finally learned and started adopting 2FA? In the first instance, I think people just imagine standing up a service and don’t think about the long-term implications of offering a service like Mattermost for a project. There’s a ton of work, and potentially a fair amount of money, involved in offering up a service that’s going to be used by a lot of users 24/7. ...