One of the only pleasant side effects of the Covid-19 shutdown of public life is that the tedium of confinement to certain spaces and the disappearance of physical interaction gave people a bunch of time to fill. Many of us just watched everything on Netflix while others built silly and amazing stuff like a DOS subsystem for Linux. The underlying mechanisms are totally bonkers and it’s pretty amazing that it works given the amount of emulation that’s going on.
It’s available from here if you’re looking for something pointless and rewarding to play around with.
Month: September 2020 Page 1 of 2
I’ve been reading a ton of excellent and also very disheartening writing about experiences home schooling kids. For me, it’s completely exhausting even though my level of effort towards my twelve year old getting logged into a Google Classroom on the days when he’s with me is minimal. It’s the other stuff like figuring out how to feed everyone lunch while remembering that I need to eat lunch too that compounds the fatigue. I also don’t spend much time doing technical support for distance learning either. Maybe my kid has just absorbed some basic IT troubleshooting by osmosis? He did fashion a cover for his webcam out of masking tape and a bottle cap.
Working from home and schooling from home is a reality that everyone I know has been dealing with at varying levels of success for the better part of a year now and it does completely suck at least in terms of overall happiness. Apart from the utter lack of boundaries between work and real life which for me mostly stem from home life intruding into my workday, there are all kinds of pressures to seem more present when remote. I’ve heard more than a few horror stories about teachers demanding that webcams remain on while they’re teaching and empathize with that as I’ve heard the equivalent demands from my work while in an all hands meeting where over a hundred people were attending.
It seems like school and all of the parental requirements that come along with it that often require you to be somewhere that isn’t work at unreasonable times like 4 PM on a weekday is the way we’re manifesting our misery. Everything changed for most people because the moron in charge decided that he didn’t want to spook the stock market so here we are. Maybe it’s slightly better because we are talking less about the survivability of this year and perhaps spending less time recreating old timey Antarctic survival food out of sheer boredom and desperation.
The end of the day ended up being busier with more inappropriately complex things on my plate for a Friday. Today was much better in my mind as a slide into the weekend but that was not the case.
1. I was much more surprised to hear that Linux Journal was back from the dead before I read the announcement. Will it actually have new content? It’s alluded to in the announcement but will likely remain preserved remains for a while longer. I’ll admit that the print magazine wasn’t my favorite but it’s also nice to see the resource that it often was preserved and available for the forseeable future.
2. I ended up back in Arch Linux land again via an alternate entrance with Arco Linux. I chose that particular derivative because it’s as close to stock as it can be and still wrapped in a straightforward Calamares installer. That installation isn’t fast and often gives the impression that the installer is stalled or frozen but it’s a lot less fussy than a vanilla Arch install.
I ended up with a ridiculous workstation class laptop with a very new Intel i9, an insane amount of RAM, and not a whole lot to really do with it other than the usual tinkering more than using for anything productive that I typically do with any piece of hardware. I originally threw Debian Testing on it because it’s super easy and straightforward to set up. Unfortunately, Debian isn’t a great distribution for messing around and struggling to get everything working the way you want it.
3. I’d looked at this New Yorker article about the hidden cost of streaming music earlier today and wasn’t astonished by any means but if you think that streamed content just launches of the void then it might be worth your time to read. I can’t really check my work on my initial read since the New Yorker website really, really objects to me not allowing ad tech on my network. Sorry folks but poking holes for something that I was dismissively making fun of isn’t anything I’m budgeting time for today.
4. Because I don’t work at a company that thinks very much about its technology infrastructure like at all, the alleged demolition of knowledge heavy open source solutions in the path of Snowflake doesn’t mean that much to me per se. If the marketing copy sticks to pavement I look forward to another batch of system administrators even more stupid and incapable of troubleshooting further than dialing a toll free that will make me seem comparatively brilliant. Who could argue with the innate craftmanship that accompanies managing platforms that manage things for you. Maybe inexpensive, B string tech bros are the grim future now?
5. I’m not up for throwing cash at preorders these days but this amazingly featureful case for Raspberry Pi has put my wallet on notice once a generation or two has rolled out. They have a bunch of features inexpensively baked into this that are things I want. Damn it.
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.
I enjoyed the Netflix series Altered Carbon more than I enjoyed the books written by Richard Morgan. They numbered among those guilty of my least favorite criminals in the science fiction genre: exciting worlds full of engaging ideas written poorly, presumably at top speed in order to pay the goddamned bills. It’s an unfortunate pattern I’ve been haunted by more than a few times and a hypothetical (following my own assumption that books were issued hastily) situation that I empathize with. I hope that the Netflix money provided the author some more time and resources to invest in his creations. The preceding makes me feel somewhat mean.
The reason for this personal attack on a writer (sorry!) is that I read an overdue explanation of the reasons that Netflix keeps cancelling shows after two seasons from Wired and it really points to how little algorithmic trickery and how much the simple cost of production and the oddball bonus incentive structure tied to attracting creative talent has to do with it. You’d think there were many more data points under consideration and for a longer period than 28 days but apparently it’s watched one and watched all spread over a slightly less than month long period weighed against costs that will rise per additional season after the second:
Netflix tries to make itself more appealing to TV show producers by giving them bonuses and pay bumps as a series carries on. Harrington says that shows on Netflix are more expensive after season two, and even more expensive after season three, with the premiums going up each season. “They have to give [a show] more money per series, and if they decide to recommission it, it becomes more expensive for them to make,” he says. “Because of that, so many more shows are canceled after two series because it costs them more.”
Financially, it makes more sense for Netflix to commission a new show than to renew an underperforming show that is only going to get more expensive the longer the series goes on. Tim Westcott, research and analysis director at Omdia, says that in terms of investment in content, Netflix is still in the growth stage. “In the US, subscriber growth has leveled off a bit, and they’ve now got a lot of competition in the US. But they’re adding many hundreds of thousands of subscribers every quarter around the world. They’re still in a phase where they’re still throwing fuel on the engine to keep that subscriber growth going,” he explains, adding that it’s ultimately looking to increase volume so that it can churn out new shows that it can promote to attract more subscribers.
This strikes me as absurdly since so many intriguing series that have excited me were doomed from the start by their release date or what was going on in the world when they were released (would Tiger King be nearly as successfully as it was had it been released before the Covid-19 quarantine? I have my doubts.) and that part of the algorithmic decision making breaks my fucking heart. I guess it’s marginally better to know than to be clueless but the ruthlessness of this decision making process makes me not want to get too emotionally involved in anything that Netflix produces.
I wrote this long and excruciating post last night about having a bad case of the Mondays and failed to post it because it felt more purgative than like something I should make available for a hypothetical (read:imagined) audience to read. What it did make me realize after venting a godawful amount of venom is that I’ve let the burnout progress too far and I now dread every work day because I can’t succeed. The most I can realistically hope for is to put out most of the fires by the end of the day and, if I’m super lucky, have time to eat lunch.
Obviously this isn’t a sustainable job for me any more and although there are still a few jobs that aren’t paying grossly below pre-pandemic market I still feel a bit stuck after accepting this position (for less money and less responsibility — only one of those two is still true now) and approaching chew my leg off to escape this trap levels of needing to get the fuck out. I’ve walked away from more rewarding (both financially and in terms of what I was working on and learning) positions in the past mostly due to feeling restless. I’m fixating on retroactive regret about that and it doesn’t feel like things are going to improve any time soon.
I don’t take job hunting very seriously and I never have. The process is so drawn out and awful that I barely like to think about it before an actual interview takes place. I think this particularly awful situation and the impending recession that is going to bump salaries down yet again has galvanized me a bit more to actually, you know, try a little bit harder. Typically I don’t have difficulty with the human interaction parts of interviewing. Despite being a pretty introverted person I’m also a social pragmatist that can usually make the best of undesirable social interactions. I feel like I need to put a little more effort in but I’m also having an inordinately rough time caring very much. I recognize the need or the expectation but I can’t summon enough genuine interest in the process to pass for someone invested. That’s sort of the golden litmus for burnout; utterly lacking the energy to fake enthusiasm or the will to tell the lies I know are required for positive outcomes. It isn’t making me happy with either my current situation or my own outlook on the world.
If you’re tired of looking at your file system in ways that don’t look completely insane, then please check out Eagle Mode. You’ll be stunned by how much fun it is to play with and, despite the somewhat kooky interface, how useful it can be pretty quickly. I was a little worried about it being an insane resource hog but it coexists happily with all of the other crap I’ve got going on at the same time with top barely noticing its existence. The zooming function on a 37″ monitor is kind of intense.
Watch the video for the full effect and then install your very own mad scientist file manager. There’s even a installer for Windows 10 so you can get nuts across platforms:
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.
I’m currently waylaid in unplanned emergency project land so my time has, yet again, been short and my reading seemingly only happening in 45 second chunks. I had a moment of terrible deja vu during dinner last night when I learned that my entire company was unable to access any Office 365 applications. It turns out that our accounting department had failed to pay $7K in invoices due to the reseller. I guess that’s the new new normal. I’m feeling more than my usual amount of fried.
Some things I’ve found interesting enough to take note of over the past few days:
1. To the surprise of absolutely no one, folks are getting hit with malware/adtech (is there any real distinction between the two anymore?) when using Internet Explorer to access porn sites. Ugh. This bothers me for a couple of different reasons. The first is that IE has never, ever been the best browser for anything even when it dominated market share. Why would you ruin your viewing experience by using the very worst viewing platform available. You might as well just slink back to your childhood hideout and try to decipher scrambled porn on good old fashioned cable. Why, stupids, why?
2. You should also give this post by a deeply religious but politically liberal person that examines the conservative obsession with child trafficking a read because it’s very well composed and gives you a bit of insight into how an intelligent believer would interpret the current and persistent insistence that a shadowy legion of pedophiles is abducting children and mining adrenochrome for Satan (?). It’s a much more balanced examination that I’m capable of making because I’ve already blazed through a lifetime’s supply of patience with trying my best to respect religious beliefs that I entirely disagree with and would just drop the that-person-is-fucking-insane mic at top speed and move quickly away and onward with my life. I gained an immediate respect for the author. I may not have the faith that he does (or really any belief in the non-concrete) but I respect the amount of thought that went into this piece of writing. It comes from a place that is relatable above and beyond religious beliefs.
3. This is kind of old news at this point but the seizure of ‘counterfeit’ ear buds by Customs and Border Protection is weirdly emblematic of the world we’re living in right now. Did Microsoft
Apple file a legal complaint against OnePlus? Nope. Is CBP actively pursuing sellers of actual knock off Air Pods? Nope. Does this feel like petty and political bullshit? Yep.
4. This is a sensible explanation of the various forces at work behind Oracle’s sudden emergence as the buyer for TikTok. It’s a lot more complex situation than the typical Trumpian defiant corruption scenario that we’ve become so accustomed to wincing at. No surprises at the ickiness of Oracle’s leadership at all. We’ve all known that Larry was human garbage for ages. I wonder how much time in the courtroom these maneuvers are going to consume after this toxic administration is banished back to hell. I look forward to reading about those minus the white knuckled terror of being governed by that toxic cesspool of the most shameless Americans.
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.