Tonight, not for the first time, I learned about a “breaking news” item from Mastodon. That’s been happening more often over the past few weeks, whereas this time last year I’d have gotten this kind of thing via Twitter first. This seems significant to me because Mastodon is making the leap from “a small group of people talking about the service itself a lot” to “several of my friends are here and there’s some community” to “a news source” rather quickly....

Here it is, finally, the last day of 2022. None too soon. As the meme says, I’m going into 2023 real quiet-like and hoping for a better year. I’ve set aside the idea that a new year means a new me, or that I have the ability to embark on a massive self-improvement campaign just because the odometer has rolled over on another year. But I like to reflect on some things I’d like to have done come this time next year....

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....

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....

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....

This strikes me as more wishful thinking than likely, but Nikki Usher over on NeimanLab is predicting " the year of the RSS reader" to replace Twitter and curb the deluge of newsletters in our inboxes.

Too many tabs open in the browser today, even compared with my usual tab overload. Good piece on Ars about space debris. Pull quote by Moriba Jah, an astrodynamicist from the University of Texas at Austin, “I also predict that we will see a loss of human life by (1) school-bus sized objects reentering and surviving reentry and hitting a populated area, or (2) people riding on this wave of civil and commercial astronauts basically having their vehicle getting scwhacked by an unpredicted piece of junk....

Today I was setting up some VMs on Fedora in Cockpit and decided to clone an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS image, which immediately pulled the same IP as the original. I hadn’t had that issue with CentOS or Debian, not quite sure why, but the culprit is a duplicate machine ID. Here’s how to fix that.

I’ve been doing a lot of “set things up and tear them down again” lately, and the combination of Fedora 37, Cockpit and the Cockpit Machines application, plus an old Core i7 machine with 64GB of RAM is making that a piece of cake. The Cockpit Project is a fantastic project that doesn’t get nearly enough attention. It’s a web-based graphical interface for Linux systems, and it can shave a lot of time (and reading man pages…) off basic system administration tasks....