If you don’t subscribe to Naked Security from Sophia, you really should. I’d say 6 of 10 of the emails they send to me are pretty entertaining even if they’re covering topics I’ve already heard about and digested.
Usually I don’t even click through the email but did today for reasons that I can’t remember and near the end of the web version was astounded by the inclusion of videos from Sleep, Monolord, and the Melvins. It’s nice to see some familiar faces in security newsletters.
I started writing this overly wordy post about how burned out I’ve been feeling lately. This is not news to anyone since I’d wager most people who didn’t have their work lives wildly disrupted during the pandemic are equally fried and as ready for the scrap heap as I am.
I had a few free hours this weekend and tried to just concentrate on writing that smaller thing that seemed less intense than the much, much longer thing I’m also puttering away on. I was completely wrong about that. The end result was an intense wave of brain fog and fatigue that knocked me entirely out of commission at 10 PM on a Friday night. This is not at all normal for me.
After I concluded that absolutely nothing worth sharing with any one was going to be accomplished that night, I just poked around on the interwebz for a length of time likely equalivalent to what I’d spend writing something that wasn’t a link dump with a lengthy explanation.
As a side note, I’m giving Ulysses a trial run as an editor for things longer than 1000 words. I have not yet decided whether it is for me yet but it does give me some separation from a web browser which is a nice break if nothing else. I recently acquired one of the M1 Pro Max (it just flows off the tongue like a song) MacBook Pro’s and decided that I should stop doing everything in the damned browser if I was going have a machine that substantial. I still have very mixed feelings about Apple but this generation of machines is pretty damned good at least until the new version of the OS comes out and makes me regret my earlier words. The weird part is that I actually enjoy this keyboard which is significant because I often go to ridiculous lengths to avoid ever typing on the keyboards built into laptops. So, yeah, real tools like a goddamned grown up. Totally weird, right?
Unfortunately, this wasn’t prompted entirely by a fervent need to complicate my workflow. Draft is performing strangely for me over the past few weeks and the ‘Oh boy’ moment was watching my cursor, unmanned by me, mow backwards over something I’d just finished up and losing 650 words or so. Nope, haven’t reported as a bug or anything yet but until I have some free time that actually feels free I’m going to stick to editors that save text locally. There are too many unstable layers to that stack although I’m guessing Chrome is the guilty party. I’ll come back to that extraordinarily handy tool when I’m less terrified of it potentially eating a bunch of words while I watch in horror.
Things I saw recently:
This hardware-centric examination of a 1996 photo of animators working on Final Fantasy 7 is one of the those things that I started reading out of general interest in all things FFVII but ended up being far most interesting. The idea that an SGI machine had the capacity for 8 GB of RAM in the 1990s when hard drives were generally measured in megabytes is mind blowing. SGI and IRIX were always fascinating to me but, mostly because I work with excruciatingly boring commodity hardware even on the server side of the house, I’ve never had to opportunity to do much with that family of machines other than stare slack jawed at it. I made the mistake of looking at ‘vintage’ SGI hardware (specifically the Onyx line mentioned in the article) and I am now reassured with complete certainty that I will never own any piece of hardware from Silicon Graphics.
Holy shit! A Next Level Burger opened in Denver! I will soon venture out on another leg of my ultimate quest to become the most overweight and unhealthy vegan ever. I’m not happy about the potential impact this will have on our local heroes Meta Burger but I suppose this was somewhat inevitable.
I would have never guessed that DMCA takedowns were an escalating issue on Reddit. Maybe it’s because my use is largely limited to geeky/work/funny areas. If you follow the link, the actual number is startling.
Unsurprisingly, dictionaries are too risky for Florida schools now. I wish I had adequate words to describe the sounds that came out of my mouth when I originally read this. It’s also saddening that I now have a Google Alert set up for book banning in the United States. That’s really where we are folks. Maybe the uncertified veterans being welcomed into classrooms as teachers will just start shooting books deemed offensive?
So, yup, it most definitely has been a year or slightly more since I’ve paid much attention to this place. Typically the near daily notifications that some plugins were updated are the only real reminder that this site, or more properly domain, has been spitting on the floor and making the Midwestern tourists uncomfortable for coming up on 20 years. That is terrifying and I almost wish that I’d kept copies of the earlier versions of this site so I could be sure when it first lurched into motion. The earliest versions were Movable Type and before that some random and awful Perl I cooked up.
That was a completely different time for weblogs. This was the “before times” when readers of web pages hadn’t yet had all of the attention span beaten out of them and slideshows would have been novel but not the content that truly drove eyeballs. I was never immune to any of this so I dropped off posting here in much the same way that most of the people who read this site regularly back then would have stopped reading what I posted. It does not really matter but the habit of writing something about the things rattling around in my brain also hit the ejector seat button during that time. Social media has never held much attraction so I basically exiled myself from the web for a very long time other than work related stuff. In retrospect, it would be better to remain offline since most of what I loved is long dead and over. Pardon me while I take brief respite in yelling at a cloud.
Possibly more interesting things:
1. For reasons that I cannot pinpoint, I’ve started using Notion for work. This is not usage mandated by my employer since the hated Monday.com is their tool of choice. I started looking at applications that let me create to do lists without requiring me to learn some TLA Esperanto and keep a list of the shit that I actually did on a day to day basis. The most common question that my managers ask me is what the hell do I do all day. This is a fair question since my work style involves bouncing from thing to thing all damned day and sometimes ignoring major project work to grab some of the low hanging serotonin yielding fruit of quick piece work to feel like I’m actually getting things other than reading terrible documentation and smashing my face into the keyboard done. I ignore most of the features of Notion other than these two (and have banished the Gratitudes from the diary section like the lingual STD that they are) and have cruised along with a free account for the past month or so. If I had to use all of the features, I would absolutely hate this software but being able to pick and choose the useful parts while pretending the parts I don’t need/find noxious don’t exist is pretty damned useful. I’m also a big fan of being able to flip between the desktop client on my work computer and the web interface on my own machines if I suddenly remember something when I’m goofing off after work. It’s awfully handy to copy and paste the contents of the day in question directly into Slack when the inevitable request for details comes in. I like that it doesn’t seem like work to use it and that I’m able to avoid becoming one of those workflow obsessed goobers whose accounts of building tiny and lifeless worlds in Notion. Reading accounts by these insane people actually made me avoid considering this tool for a long while.
2. In the spirit of bringing back the culture of BOFH workplace vengeance, I’m composing a list of things that will cause one of your account passwords to suddenly expire and possibly require a very long and very complex password for its reset. The gold standard for this is always the Excel format spreadsheet required for some ridiculous thing or another and, in the process, wasting a bunch of irreplaceable minutes futzing around in an application that I have absolutely no use for. In the interest of equitable exchange, you will waste your time changing passwords and possibly repeat on a bi-weekly basis if you are particularly insistent. I haven’t yet formulated proper punishments for being pushy about fantasy sports via work communication channels but that is most definitely a work in active and malicious progress.
3. If you’re a linux person and, for this particular link an Arch user, then it might be time to consider something other than the default kernel. Those default kernel builds are great for making sure that almost any machine can boot but they tend to be more than a little flabby. Here’s a guide on switching kernels on Arch. At this point, I have a hard time using a desktop linux system that isn’t using the Zen/Liquorix kernel. I get disappointed when I have an extremely powerful processor and the desktop feels about as responsive as it did when I was running a PIII 233 desktop with a spinning disk.
4. The mayor of Venice does not fuck around with tourists being idiots. This made me happy.
Now that we have someone relatively sane occupying the White House and along with that change comes the hope that we’ll eventually get the Covid-19 (and all of its new and super fun mutant variations) under control, I’m going to try to gravitate towards more sane things myself. The way for me to get there, at least in the short term, is to read about things that aren’t political. That said, Wonkette lives forever in my perpetually open tabs. I just need a breather.
1. This article about Russian Avant-Garde painters that may or not have even existed is one of the more fascinating things I’ve read this week. The idea of creating fictional painters to sell the style of work popular with American collectors is one that makes me want to do more digging since the commerce of art isn’t something I often think about. I do love the whiff of simulacra exuding from the complicated mess.
2. Heartbreakingly especially given how many Hall of Famers have passed recently, Hank Aaron has passed away. Aaron was legendary on so many levels and is yet another crushing loss to delineate this span of time from any kind of feeling of normalcy or continuity.
3. Microsoft were just granted a patent for some creepy dead people AI chatbot idea that I’m not quite ready for. Did no one see Devs? Jesus.
4. AZ man (trying to compete with Florida?) pulls a gun on a customer for wearing a mask which just about epitomizes the state of things in the US right now. Take off your protective wear and risk your life for my bullshit politics or I will shoot you.
I am delighted to be on the other side of the inauguration of a president who isn’t an utter moron and see that DC wasn’t overrun by mobs of Truck Nutz enthusiasts. I didn’t watch any of the live streams of the inauguration out of superstitious dread that something awful was bound to happen if I did. It’s the same sort of superstition that I apply to important pitches during baseball games; if I watch every pitch something truly horrific is going to happen and if something glorious happens then, well, that’s what replays are made for. The ick in the White House has been scrubbed away at least until the impeachment begins.
Some things to keep in mind for tomorrow when the sense of immediate relief wears off and we need to start worrying about the aftermath:
1. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an excellent piece in the Atlantic about how white supremacy was the only consistent unifying thread of Trumpism that you should really read. Even if the content wasn’t pressingly relevant, Coates is such a gifted writer that it is well worth a once over even if you don’t want to invest another smidgen of mental capacity trying to understand what the fuck happened in the United States over the past 4 (italics for sarcasm) years. The expulsion of their poster boy from a seat of power doesn’t lessen their numbers or anything.
2. Of course, Dear Leader had to be persuaded not to promiscuously hand out pardons that might put him in danger both politically and legally. Shameless until the very end.
3.Telcom lobbyist Ajit Pai is out of the FCC which is good news for everyone who leans heavily on an unrestricted internet which, these days, is everyone who does anything and is another thing worth celebrating. Seriously, fuck that guy.
4. The Q cults don’t know which crazy lies to believe now! This would be a lot more funny if there weren’t so damned many of them. I am enjoying the slapstick comedy of watching the Q-anon folks alternately deciding to viciously turn on each other or that maybe Joe Biden is Q.
I’ve been quiet for an extended stretch. I think that utter inertia and borderline despair that affected so many folks during the various lockdowns, open back ups, and subsequent hasty retreats that we’ve lived through over the past year finally settled on me in a bigger way than I ever could have anticipated. I’ve been a wreck lately. Most nights I am in bed before 9 PM because I can’t think of a single good reason to stay awake and I’m exhausted about it.
The pulverizing Primitive Man put out a monolithically heavy record this year that is so perfect for this dark and claustrophobic year that it’s almost too on the nose. I’ve listened to this record a ton since it was released and it cathartic if only by proxy. I’ve barely picked up a guitar since the real lockdowns started and when the hope of this just being a month or two lark started to dissipate. Give them a couple of listens. They’re a local band for me for whatever that is worth. Maybe grab some stuff from their Bandcamp as well since folks gotta eat.
I recently bought the new System 76 Lemur mostly because I think the S76 folks are good stuff, they’re based in Denver, and because getting reasonable battery life on a Linux laptop has been a 10+ year dream of mine. So far, my experience has been great other than the NVMe drive being in the wrong slot which, you know, first iteration of new hardware that only requires me to unscrew a bunch of screws to fix. In any case, I’ve been living in Linux a bunch more these days since sexy new hardware despite having a case that attracts fingerprints like no other chassis I’ve ever seen. Battery life is stellar; I’ve been running this on battery for almost three hours and done things like installing updates, fired up TorGuard VPN a couple of times for completely above the board and legally legitimate reasons obviously, and bench marked my hard drive performance (to determine that my hyper fast drive was only doing data transfer at super fast speeds thus cursing me to open the goddamned case to reslot something which I think is a logical extension of the IT curse of needing to open every piece of hardware for some reason or another and therefore prolonging the existence of ice cube trays to keep all of those goddamned screws together and in the correct order) and still have 10 hours of battery remaining. I really like that which is heightened by the fact that the power adapter is only a couple feet long and keeps me from ever wanting to use this machine on AC power. Anyway, it’s a good piece of hardware that works extremely well with Linux and was only marginally soiled by having the machine take over a month to ship and the hard drive installed in the wrong slot. I can mostly live with that given my current state of venting is refreshing, purgative, and that I basically disassemble improperly assembled laptops for a living anyway.
In any case, the new machine is a ton of fun to use and I’m actually just using Pop OS instead of immediately scraping the drive and installing an Arch derivative. So far I’ve been pleased with this distribution and happy just having everything work out of the box. Is this a review? I have no idea if I’ve done enough here to earn that that designation but I am enjoying working on this machine. I hop boxes like crazy but I think I’m going to use this one for a while if only because I can run it on battery forever which is a fairly new experience.
After all of the outages, I guess it’s a good idea to send out endless notifications about how nothing is broken now, right? I’ve seen like 15 of these in the last hour.
I have a super important national standard to propose: Let’s standardize whether large images come before or after items in a list. I cannot be the only person occasionally baffled after reading several paragraphs of a story below a particularly enticing image only to realize that it has absolutely nothing to do with the picture. I guess there’s an element of mystique that comes along with it when you’re trying to divine what this stock photo of Winston Churchill has to do with XML but I could honestly live without that most of the time.
Maybe I just need to spend more of time reading things on my phone screen and less looking at them on 36″ monitors?
I’m starting to think that the perceived ending of the pandemic might actually be effecting my overall mental health more even more than the apocalyptic uncertainty at the beginning of it all. My motivation to do anything even as strenuous as starting a new series on a streaming service has completely fallen off. I’m sure there will be ton of academic work done on the impact of Covid-19 on our collective sanity but it’s hitting me harder than at any point that I remember so far.
The feeling of a continual and torturous walk on a malfunctioning hotel treadmill is the only approximation I can come up with. Maybe that burn is striking in conjunction with our national post-election malaise where something that should have been resolved in a few days keeps dragging on and on until we’re completely burned off all of the outrage built up over the past year. Maybe we’re just tired of better being slightly over the horizon and tantalizingly out of reach. Oh yeah, and then there was the whole series of police murdering people of color to add to the misery as well in addition to the number of people who can’t feed their families because a catastrophic number of businesses have either gone under or struggle to stay open in a time period where a lot of foot traffic is a truly terrible idea. I guess the things I’ve written about above are things I need to think a lot more frequently and seriously about since comparatively I’m only suffering existentially and the Black Lives Matter sign on our lawn doesn’t actually do much of anything.
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