Here are some clicky things I came across over the past few days and didn’t feel like writing too many words about:
1. PiBakery is a very timely discovery for me since I’m started plunking Raspberry Pis all over the place in my house. It’s an application to build Raspberry Pi OS (a name I can’t take entirely seriously) locally on either a Windows or Apple machine (there is a source package but I can’t seriously imagine myself building an Electron app from source) to preconfigure the install for minimal amount of futzing around afterwards. I kind of enjoy the manual builds but most people aren’t as excited about manually building servers. I plan on at least taking this for a test drive in the future.
2. Here’s an interesting examination of the what and why of VS Code becoming a dominant text editor. I rarely write anything more complex than Powershell and administrative Python scripts these days but I also have found VS Code to be pretty damned good. The me from twelve years ago is resenting this statement and I’m fine with that. I agree completely with their assessment of its growth and generally find simple editors with the ability to customize and add on to as the best outcome. A lot of editors began with this goal in mind but typically fail the can I quickly edit a text file without learning a whole new command set and a bunch of quirkily implemented features before hand test. It’s simple and can be made more complex if that’s your thing. Good stuff from a potentially questionable source. Microsoft is better (relatively) but the relativity of that is worth keeping an eye on.
3. The Blacklight privacy inspector is worth taking a look at even if you, at this crushingly late date operate under the assumption that you have nothing anyone would want to look at, because you routinely hand out information that you might not want to have out there and collated by someone else. It’s pretty creepy. Just try running your top visits through there and you’ll start thinking that it might be time to install a tool like Privacy Badger so you can feel a little less like a mark. A bunch of cash is changing hands and proves that having a complete picture of what people do online is easier to assemble than ever and maybe it’s something you want to protect.
Category: Link Dump
I’ve been a pretty steady buyer of both Das Keyboard and Happy Hacking keyboards for a very long time and love both the aforementioned products dearly (and dollar-ly) but when maniac on the internet builds a 450 key keyboard I start thinking bigger and noisier. I don’t think my current desk would reasonably host something that large but the idea of doing something ridiculous has definitely lingered in my mind after reading about this project.
Some things:
1. If you’re familiar with the Right to Repair movement (is it a movement, even or just a group of people tired of not actually owning things that they buy?) then you’ve likely heard that John Deere is not friendly to those who prefer to keep their own machines running. This is noxious as fuck on many levels but much less despicable than what JD has followed up with: that passage of laws to protect consumers ability to repair their stuff without the use of typically more expensive ‘official’ repair options dictated by the asshole company in question make people more vulnerable to sexual predators and other scary people. This, of course, is alarmist bullshit of the very worst kind and should be met in response with torches and pitchforks especially companies that make farm equipment.
2. This is a look at how badly reporting security vulnerabilities can go. This hole was eventually rectified and the involved parties talked things out but the initial report and response were about as terrible as you could ever hope for.
It is kind of a bummer that Giggle uses AI to validate robotically gender instead of just allowing people to identify the way they feel. I both get the motivation and don’t simultaneously. It’s a tough thing but I dislike it anyway.
3. This is somewhat click-bait-y but interesting nonetheless: Mark Shuttleworth commenting about being the less visible face of Ubuntu these days and the uncertainty it’s causing within that community. I keep thinking that Ubuntu shouldn’t even be a thing that people really concern themselves with given that an above average number of their users are actually using derivatives anyway. I’m still bitter about the abuse of Debian upstream but mostly I’m just bitter.
The long holiday weekend didn’t end up yielding many spare hours for me so I switched back from one firefighting mode to the other with not a whole lot of that time awake and doing anything interesting. I did throw one pretty interesting link on my Pinboard for later reading though
A rundown of how each fast charging technology works doesn’t sound particularly interesting at first glance. I started reading mainly because I wanted to see how the Warp Charge I use on a daily basis (you really don’t want to know how many of these chargers I’ve purchased since I got my OnePlus 7 Pro) differed from the other fast charging specifications. The article is interesting since it also provides a bit of context in some cases for what the author thought was the thinking behind the differing specs. It’s far more entertaining and insightful than I assumed it would be when quickly scanning the opening paragraph and marking it for later consumption. I genuinely appreciate efforts like this that not only answer a question but are entertaining in the process.
That title was supposed to evoke drama or intrigue but it’s also mostly true. The company I work for which, as always, shall remain nameless is bucking real hard for a sale. You can hear the potential of big dollars in every contrived story about how we desperately need to conserve cash despite allegedly sitting on huge piles of it. There’s a huge pile of shit in there somewhere and whether or not that bullshit is about the amount of money the company is setting aside for a rainy day despite being stretched beyond functionality or about how all this paper shuffling is actually in the name of dominating the market for whatever it is that our software is supposed to be really good at doing this quarter. We’ve basically thrown all of our resources at hiring impressive-sounding executives and haven’t backfilled any of the positions that do things other than attend meetings and affix their names to ghost written glad handing for the pages of some trade magazine.
The feeling that it was past time to chew my leg off and flee from the trap started during a meeting when I found out concretely that most of the projects, at least the ones that have real impact on my workload and sanity, have been shelved. To be fair, we did also hire a CTO and wanted their input on how to prioritize the work we need to do to stop drowning in tech debt and running all of our capex into the ground with hardware refreshes gradually making their way into the five year cycle. At the same time, I’ve been fucking over my fellow rank and file workers to handle a bunch of firefighting tasks to make the C level folks look good and being expected to handle all of the wrath from people who can’t have their issues addressed in a sane span of time any more. Any operations role contributes to feeling like a punching bag on the particularly bad days but I was losing my mind by 10:30 AM this morning. I also found out that some work I’d promised to finally complete for our support staff was going to be pushed aside so another C level Sales hire could have their laptop a full week before their start date because, reasons. Fuck every bit of that. I logged off early today after completely running out of fight. The worst part is that I’m stopped caring at all about the day to day because I can’t plan and can’t prioritize and feel like I’m working in a call center or something.
Anyway, so disasters in professional life and my horror about them aside, here are some things I thought were interesting today:
1. I had a great time working with a Raspberry Pi for the first time and have enjoyed how little advertising I see due to the deft hand of Pi Hole. The first hit is always free and I ended up buying another Pi and setting up openmediavault early this evening. I’d nearly forgotten how much fun setting up personal servers can be. Yes, it was a matter of snapping together some inexpensive pieces of hardware and attaching an unused 2TB external hard drive to that but it was more fun than I’ve had working with any other bit of technology in ages. It was also an expensive alternative to the pricey NAS hardware that I’ve been eyeballing lately especially while spending most of my life in my house. I guess it’s about time to find somewhere accessible to store the gigabytes of comics that I’ve been downloading. That way I’ll be able to not have time to read any of them from any device! It’s going to be like living in a dystopian Jetsons!
2. I’d be more intrigued about the story behind some guy flying with a jetpack near commercial airplanes in Los Angeles if it wasn’t so damn likely that this was result of a start up, flush with cash from a new round of funding, disrupting air traffic control or something equally inane and contrived. The headline from that story definitely grabbed my click but I was really hoping less for instant millionaire publically measuring dicks against all the other millionaires trying to be the first to endanger planes full of passengers and more for something like the hilarious (and also intensely sad) story of Larry Walters and his solo lawn chair flight into commercial air space.
3. If you needed more reasons to despise the way that Amazon treats its employees then here is a super gross story about buying their own Pinkertons to spy on employees organizing. That is blatantly disgusting and shameless. Imagine interviewing for that job. Is there a personality test? Do you enjoy helping drastically increase the fear and distrust at your workplace? We have the perfect job for you and your lack of human empathy.
I built my cute and tiny PiHole server today and that made me happy since I can preemptively clear garbage on my network and prevent some potential tragedies from happening to the clickier of the people who live with me. Since I am the IT person in the household I think of it as a time saving measure that will likely save me from having to have credit cards cancelled.
Some things I read today while waiting for progress bars to move:
This and the fact that the victim of this garbage has to publicly call out the non-anonymous harassers makes me fucking sick. The toxic and douchey tech bro stereotype exists for a very good reason; the tech bro is the absolute embodiment of entitlement and makes me fervently wish for another technology crash, despite the fact that it would hurt me in the worst ways possible, just to make these fuckers see that sometimes when you act like like a tantruming four year old there are potential consequences beyond being punished with diversity training purchased from a 3rd party that is likely a frat house for the types that would be actually need this sort of coaching to treat the people around them like fucking people. As the stereotypical white tech guy: I am so fucking sorry and wish that there was something more concrete that I could do apart from waxing poetic with my grab bag of four letter words. I wish I knew how to do more.
While I’m 100% in support with the ideas behind The Polite Type and wish wholeheartedly that the Covid-19 virus would be replaced with a virus that fixes whatever broken part of the human brain that allows people to demean other people, I’m not sure if this implementation is the best possible implementation. I’m not going to talk shit about this project because I respect the ideas and motivation behind it but I’m doubtful if any of the people that would normally type out the word ‘slut’ in reference to another person would actually have revelatory moment as result of their words being dynamically changed while they’re typing them. Maybe I’m far too cynical for efforts like this but I sincerely hope that the cynicism is entirely offbase and that at some undefinable point in the not so distant future that people can just start being decent to the other human beings that their words might reach. As always, there is hope behind the doubt.
You should check out this Noam Chomsky video where he runs down the every increasing potential for nuclear war which only compounds the hopelessnes we’re already feeling due to the pandemic, the endless killing of people of color by police, widespread unemployment of service workers with little hope of meaningful recovery or recompense before these issues escalate into hand-to-mouth problems when folks are worried about where money for food is going to come from, and the usual myriad of problems that come along with living in the United States in a time when we’re hovering over the precipice of utter collapse and the utter relinquishment of all of the qualities, expectations, and freedoms, for and from, that have distinguished this country thus far. It’s a debasing time to be an American and it doesn’t seem like there is going to be any reason to stop white knuckling until the clownish sociopath currently in charge of the country is (fingers double and triple crossed) is replaced with a different brand of sociopath that is better at approximating empathy for people outside their immediate socio-economic bubble. It’s all so fucking depressing.
There is no stable place to comment on this from but apparently Tim Tebow is a QAnon guy now. It is quite possible that we should just shut this planet down now and cut our losses. Every day just becomes that much more oppressively stupid.
Some things I had a few seconds to throw on my pinboard before the next steaming pile of crisis came squibbling down the pipe:
1. When Belarus shut down internet access, people actually noticed and fixed it. When what I’m totally comfortable calling a dictator decides that footage of its citizenry being brutalized for peaceful needs to be contained it’s a damned good thing that those protesters and their allies in outside countries prevented that bullshit from happening for more than an hour. People and information want to be free.
2. This afternoon I placed an order for my first ever Raspberry Pi with the intent of setting up a Pi Hole server to mitigate the flood of shit from hitting my network. I didn’t think that it was worthwhile when I first heard about this project but lately the amount of both visual crud and less visible adtech makes it seem like a good idea. I opted for the model 4 b since gigabit ethernet was available. The gear won’t be here for a few days so I’ve decided to try to notice the amount of ad related pollution that I’ve lived with for a while. Will I notice any real difference? My guess is no but I like the idea of opting out the most direct way and just not allowing any of that traffic at all.
3. After a few disasters (disaster meaning that I lost more than 10 minutes worth of work) I started relying heavily on Draft for writing posts. I’d forgotten how much I love this editor. When I was still using WordPress for this site I used to generate the entirety of my posts in Draft using some weird ass voodoo they make available. It’s the only web editor that I pay money for and it’s still worth it however many years later. No affiliate link bullshit and just something worth mentioning because, despite paying full price for it, it’s a goddamn pleasure to use and makes all of the half-baked ‘solutions’ I’ve used in the past (my completely lame combo of Tomboy Notes and Dropbox probably slots me into some eligibility for a Darwin award) look like the weak fuckery that they really were.
4. I’ve seen a bunch of coverage for the recent Bonobo WS release by System 76. I am a fan of of System 76 for a number of reasons not the least of which is they’re based out of the same city that I live in. I’ve actually purchased 2 Gazelles (one of which was left behind at an old job) and a Darter from them over the past 5-6 years and have liked all of the machines despite the branded Clevo-ness. I cannot for the life of me remember whether or not the Darter was actually called that when I purchased it but that was the only machine of the bunch that I wasn’t completely happy with which had more to do with the HiDPI display being impossible to use comfortably and the fact that running my external monitor from it (it is a 37″ display so that’s likely part of the problem) caused continuous flickering no matter what I did. I enjoy the fact that they’re releasing these ridiculously powerful desktop replacements. I also purchased a Serval for a developer once too. He loved how freakishly fast and powerful his machine was and I got to tease him about not being able to make it through a 45 minute meeting without running for the charger. I guess that’s the price you pay for a desktop processor in a laptop. I really do want one of their Oryx Pro machines but finances being what they are that is unlikely to happen any time soon.