Category: Linux Page 1 of 2

What To Expect When You’re Expecting Nothing

On August 18, 2022

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.

A Couple Weeks With The System76 Lemur

By goneaway

On December 24, 2020

In Linux

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.

Pinebook Pro Impressions After A Couple of Hours

By goneaway

On October 21, 2020

In Cool As Fuck, Linux

My Pinebook Pro arrived today. I spent a little time poking around on it after dinner and am now typing this post up on it. I didn’t go in with crazy high expectations since I’m fairly experienced with working withLinux on the desktop with much more powerful hardware supporting it.

Here are my day one impressions so far:

1. It isn’t crazy fast for desktop-ish use so far. I’m running the Manjaro version that comes preinstalled on it and using KDE as my desktop environment and it doesn’t feel quite as responsive as my other machine but, of course, my other machines are for the most part i9 class processors with enough RAM that I scarcely even touch my swap partition so that comparison should surprise absolutely no one. For $200, it’s fucking great and it does everything I would expect and a whole bunch more. As long as you’re not expecting your inexpensive machine to miraculously hit Mach 1, I think this is a surprisingly great desktop experience. It probably won’t be my daily driver for heavy lifting tasks but it runs Chromium with the required gazillion tabs open, Guake, and a few other small applications without any noticeable difficulty.

2. Again, for the price, the hardware that you touch and interface with externally feels on par with some of the better Chromebooks. The screen is perfectly workable and clear. The keyboard is chicklet style and doesn’t yield at all when you’re typing. Trackpads in Linux have always been a bit of a sore spot for me since I tend to experience a ton of phantom clicks when text editing that are probably more the fault of the window manager/DE than the hardware but this one feels comfortable to use even with the constant fear that the cursor is going to magically move three lines up at any second. The trackpad is buttonless and requires a fair amount of force to generate a click which makes things a little louder than I’m accustomed to but those clicks are muted plastic thuds instead of the gunshots you’ll normally hear from cheap trackpad hardware.

3. Every other person has mentioned that the case is a complete fingerprint magnet and I cannot disagree with that assessment. After two hours of handling it looks like I simultaneously devoured a bag of potato chips while doing so with nary a shirt tail to wipe my freakishly oil covered hands on. This is not something I consider important but it becomes apparent pretty quickly that the pretty black case otherwise unadorned by a single logo is never going to look pretty again without swabbing it with an alcohol pad.

Anyway, those are my admittedly superficial impressions from the first couple hours of actually using this little beast. I’ll likely post more thoughts on it a little further into actual use. The very short review: It won’t ever be a primary machine for me but it’s a bit of a miracle in its price and quality bracket. The KDE battery widget says I still have eight hours of remaining battery life after using this laptop for around 45 minutes. I’d say that’s worth your time and money if you want to try something apart from the pack.

Kicking Some Things Down The Road Because It’s Saturday

By goneaway

On October 18, 2020

In Apple, Link Dump, Linux, The Dollar Dances On Our Asses, This Sucks

Some quick things since my son is with me this weekend and there are some very important shows to watch and video games to be played:

1. Mozilla is completely fucked. No one, including the barely plural employees who remain, can decide what the fuck Firefox is actually about. I’ve been mostly absent from this concern but a bunch of folks who I respect have vocally advocated for FF for years. This is the proverbial chickens coming home to roost. Given the performance of the browser over the last half decade, this hasn’t been a question or issue for me for a very long time.

2. Hey! Guess what? Apple even hates its own hardware now. How long do you need to get everything completely wrong before smart people start jumping ship. Apple is lucky since they’ve been actively opposing your rights as a user for long enough that the Ouroboros manuever isn’t altogether surprising.

3. You can actually buy the Google Coral board now. Well, you can pre-order it.

4. An article about gaming on FreeBSD seems absurd enough for a weekend link dump. You can play games on FreeBSD but most of them are ancient. Linux is doing slightly better on this front in case you were wondering.

One Way To Turn an Ancient Shell Into a Functional Shell, I Guess

By goneaway

On September 29, 2020

In Cool As Fuck, Linux, Microsoft

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.

Some Tabs Need To Be Closed

By goneaway

On September 26, 2020

In Arch, Cool As Fuck, Linux, The Dollar Dances On Our Asses

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.

Blurry Billboard Text Glimpsed As I Speed Past

By goneaway

On September 25, 2020

In Link Dump, Linux, Microsoft, Security

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.

A Completely Bananas Way To Look At Your File System

By goneaway

On September 20, 2020

In Cool As Fuck, Linux

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:

Then The Stupid Week Ended

By goneaway

On September 11, 2020

In Link Dump, Linux, The Dollar Dances On Our Asses

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 Kind Of Distribution I Get Excited About

By goneaway

On September 4, 2020

In Linux

I don’t even remember how I’d heard about Serpent OS but I’ve been very sloppily following its development. Despite the fact that I wouldn’t be able to use it on a work machine because I work completely in a heterogeneous environment with a ton of Windows services that I need to meaningfully interact with and administer and I’d prefer to do that without the need for a bastion box sitting in between. But that’s me, at work.

I completely respect the design philosophy behind this distribution, from their About page:

We’re focused on building a Linux distribution that serves our own needs. Chiefly, a Linux distribution for people who want to use Linux, not a “Linux-based-OS” focusing on interoptability with macOS* + Windows*.

In a nut shell, this is not “Linux for the masses”. This is a project setting out to use Linux as Linux should be used. This will in turn help us to build a significantly advanced Linux distribution that is both modular and optimised for modern machines.

They’re also extending a raised middle finger to Nvidia and insistence on the use of mediocre binary blobs for Linux support which I also support. I’m writing this as a reminder to keep checking in with this distribution and eventually, when time is less pinched, doing a test install when they’re closer to a test release. I’m excited about this and look forward to how Serpent OS progresses and what optimizations they’re able to create by largely ignoring the non-Linux ecosystem most of us are soundly saddled with.