A person with way too many hobbies, but I still continue to learn new things.
Why only "most" of the original block characters? There were only 128 characters to begin with, so why did the creator stop?
Haha ok, you got me there!
Where are these lower costs that Trump keeps hallucinating?
Since I'm 57 and have paid some attention to how I've changed over the years, perhaps I can add a little insight? Quite frankly, you get tired. I've been on the scene since the home computer revolution took off and I've seen so many things come and go. It's not that we can't learn new forms of communication, etc., but rather that after awhile you start asking yourself why bother when the "next big thing" is going to be another forgotten memory in 5-10 years. It's not you who are being criticized for wasting items, it's all the people like you over the years who have collectively wasted so much. Our brains remember all those things and they add up, causing us to fixate on the wrong info (although this last bit isn't really something that comes with age).
Last night I re-watched The Fifth Element. Afterwards I was thinking about when it first came out in 1997. My god, that's 28 years ago. I remember things from the 90's. I remember things from the 80's and from the 70's. I remember that after 9/11 the 00's were boring as fuck. But when you put all of that together, and start thinking about how much you've experience... holy hell that's quite a lot to face squarely. And if I tell you something inappropriate about a co-worker... what? HR will pull me away from the monotony and have a talk with me? Experience tells us what we can get away with, and sometimes it's fun just to see what people's reactions are.
So yeah, I've observed these things, but I refuse to be pulled down into misery and monotony. Keep yourself busy doing things that you enjoy. Never be afraid to go down the rabbit hole and learn crazy new things. I'm working on assembling a couple swords from parts, looking into bluing some steel pieces I made. And just this week I learned about "rust bluing" which is a crazy concept but is easy to do at home. I learned something new and fun, and I refuse to ever stop learning. I may not care about Instagram or Facebook, but I installed Signal on my phone and I love being able to create my own 3D models and printing them out.
The future is always amazing. Age doesn't make us care less about it, it just makes us more choosy in what parts are worth investing in. If you don't want to become a listless old geezer, then don't... all you need to do is keep enjoying the wonders of the world.
And Trump is probably dumb enough to believe that the characters "MS13" which were added to the photo are actually part of his tattoo.
As discussed elsewhere, the Proud Boys are cowards who hide their affiliation in symbology, while members of MS13 have always had direct and unmistakable tattoos. Since Trump is so deeply ingrained with the Proud Boys, it is believed they are the ones who offered up this laughable symbolic meaning of the tattoos with the theory that since they hide who they are, everyone else must do this also.
If you want to pretend like there's any hidden symbology to the tattoos, why try so hard to make something that isn't there? Let's just stick with the first letter of each tat: MSCS, which could also stand for Master of Science in Computer Science -- an aspiring goal for someone who is trying to make a better life for his family. The point is, anybody can make shit up out of nothing and come up with something that "verifies" the answer you wanted, but that interpretation is still meaningless.
Not Calvin specifically, but pretty much all cartoon characters age really slowly, if at all. And since a leap-century only happens once every 400 years, it seemed appropriate enough to match their apparent immortality.
The year 2000 was a century leap-year, therefor Calvin could be 7 now. That would also imply he's at least 2400 years old by our normal timekeeping.
Didn't you see the Tesla ad on the Whitehouse front lawn?
This is the Mastodon link, but he is quoting a NYT article (from which I'll quote the meat)...
https://tech.lgbt/@[email protected]/114321303656287669
Immigration judges are employees of the executive branch, not the judiciary, and often approve the Homeland Security Department’s deportation efforts. It would be unusual for such a judge, serving the U.S. Attorney General, to grapple with the constitutional questions raised by Mr. Khalil’s case. She would also run the risk of being fired by an administration that has targeted dissenters.
“This court is without jurisdiction to entertain challenges to the validity of this law under the Constitution,” Judge Comans said as she delivered her ruling, apparently reading from a written statement.
I was just reading a comment on Mastodon that immigration judges are not actual judges but are employed by the Administration. Which means they can't even rule on the constitutionality of the information provided -- so they're really nothing but puppets to make the process appear to be legal.
So the next question is... can the ruling be appealed before a real judge?
Ah that's good. Disk space isn't an issue here, I have around 105TB of storage, but my desktop is an older machine with only 24GB of memory so being lightweight is somewhat of a requirement.
Agreed on Debian stable. Long ago I tried running servers under Ubuntu... that was all fine until the morning I woke up to find all of the servers offline because a security update had destroyed the network card drivers. Debian has been rock-solid for me for years and buying "commercial support" basically means paying someone else to do google searches for you.
I don't know if I've ever tried flatpaks, I thought they basically had the same problems as snaps?
I'm not sure about other distros, I've just heard a lot of complaints about snaps under Ubuntu. Cura was the snap I tried on my system that constantly crashed until I found a .deb package. Now it runs perfectly fine without sucking up a ton of system memory. Thunderbird is managed directly by debian, and firefox-esr is provided by a Mozilla repo so they all get installed directly instead of through 3rd-party software (although I think I tried upgrading Firefox to a snap version once and it was equally unstable). Now I just avoid anything that doesn't have a direct installer.
That's a good point... if you can't read messages and discussions without a login, then it's not really facilitating public notification.
That's what I was thinking too... If they're running Ubuntu then they're probably installing packages through snaps, and that's always been the worst experience for me. Those apps lag down my whole system, crash or lock up, and generally are unusable. I run Debian but have run into apps that wanted me to use a snap install. One package I managed to find a direct installer that is rock-solid in comparison to the snap version, and the rest of the programs I abandoned.
Firefox (since it was mentioned) is one of those things I believe Ubuntu installs as a snap, despite there being a perfectly usable .deb package. I applaud the effort behind snap and others to make a universal installation system, but it is so not there yet and shouldn't be the default of any distro.
I've said it before and I'll say it again... a social media post is NOT an official government communication. I don't mind it being used in addition to public channels to help spread the word further, but if you are going to use one platform then you should be required to use all of them to ensure all affected people receiving the same information... and I don't see them posting on Bluesky or Mastodon or even Reddit.
But why doesn't it ever empty the swap space? I've been using vm.swappiness=10 and I've tried vm.vfs_cache_pressure at 100 and 50. Checking ps I'm not seeing any services that would be idling in the background, so I'm not sure why the system thought it needed to put anything in swap. (And FWIW, I run two servers with identical services that I load balance to, but the other machine has barely used any swap space -- which adds to my confusion about the differences).
Why would I want to reduce the amount of memory in the server? Isn't all that cache memory being used to help things run smoother and reduce drive I/O?
And how does cache space figure in to this? I have a server with 64GB of RAM, of which 46GB is being used by system cache, but I only have 450MB of free memory and 140MB of free swap. The only 'volatile' service I have running is slapd which can run in bursts of activity, otherwise the only thing of consequence running is webmin and some VMs which collectively can use up to 24GB (though they actually use about half that) but there's no reason those should hit swap space. I just don't get why the swap space is being run dry here.
Oh China did much more than that... Over the weekend they basically imposed a ban on shipping rare minerals to the US. The stuff used for all those chip fabs Trump wanted to build in the US. Minerals used for medical equipment. Minerals used to make bullets hard or allow missiles to aim for targets. They essentially shut out the majority of tech and military in the US. China knows how to deal with an idiot, and the idiot's response was "more tariffs, that'll teach 'em!"
Non-paywall link: https://archive.ph/c427l
Why doesn't systemd read updated config files?
I built a new firewall under Debian 12. The machine has eight network ports, and during configuration I accidentally used the same name for a couple of the ports in the files under /etc/systemd/network/*.link. I ended up with two link files referencing two different MAC addresses but naming each of them as WAN0, and once systemd got that configuration it wouldn't let it go.
From what I could find online, normally I would just issue systemctl daemon-reload followed by a update-initramfs -u and after a reboot systemd should have had the updated information... but no dice this time. The way I finally discovered the problem was when I noticed under ifconfig that my wan0 port was pointing to the wrong MAC address (even though the link files had been corrected).
After several hours of fighting with it, I finally managed to get it to work by renumbering all of my link files, and now the information for each port matches up correctly. But my real question here is WHY did systemd ref
Problem with console blanking in Bookworm
I'm building a new rack server (Poweredge R620) and am using the option "consoleblank=600" in the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX setting. During the setup I used the wrong memory stick and installed Bullseye, and screen blanking was working correctly there. Since I had already finished nearly all the configuration this week, I thought it would be easier to just do a regular dist upgrade than reloading the whole system.
After upgrading to Bookworm and rebooting, I notice that now when the screen blanking is supposed to kick in (which normally just turns off the display), I am instead getting what looks like rolling static on the screen. I have several other R620 racks running Buster so I know the screen blanking should work with this hardware, but this appears to be an issue specific to Bookworm.
Note that even when I try something like setterm -blank 1 or setterm -powerdown 1 I get the same resulting static after 1 minute. To be clear, this is specifically for the command line, I do no
Acting on Trump’s order, federal officials opened up two California dams
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers just opened up two California dams. A spokesperson says the flows are 'controlled' and being coordinated with local officials.
This is all pretty bonkers for a lot of reasons.
U.S. public health officials have been told to stop working with the World Health Organization, effective immediately. A U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official, John Nkengasong, sent a memo to senior leaders at the agency on Sunday night telling them that all staff who work with t...
Any sources of JSON data for live US election results?
I'm wondering if anyone has found (free) sources of data to use for live elections results, specifically the Presidential race? I've been building a map of poll results but would also like to put something together to watch the race tomorrow night.
Can we get the ten commandments posted in both US houses of Congress?
I would love to have them light up like a scoreboard as each representative takes the floor, showing all of the commandments they have broken. If people want so badly to bring religion into politics then lets just show them exactly who they've been voting for. Maybe we can get the news networks in on this too, displaying it on the side of the screen similar to a sporting event.
Insurrection happening in the Capitol? MTG is such a joke
Marjorie Taylor Greene, the bastion of factual information, has once again shown the nature of her character by claiming that peaceful protestors at the Capitol are in fact an "insurrection of terrorists". Don't you see all the violence and mayhem being caused in this video clip? No, me either...
If you want to make such bold comparisons, lets start out by checking how many people are running for their lives or the number of deaths involved between these two events. Or maybe we should be asking why MTG thought it was an "honor" to meet with the people responsible for murder and the attempt to destroy our democracy?
On Saturday, Oct. 14, Longmont will experience an 80 % annular solar eclipse
The Saturday, Oct. 14, 2023, annular solar eclipse will cross North, Central, and South America. It will be visible in parts of the United States, Mexico, and many countries in South and Central America.
Just in case there are others like myself who rarely check reddit any more, I thought it would be helpful to cross-post this. It won't look like much unless you have the solar eclipse glasses, but I plan to break out my tracker and camera (with solar filters!) to try and get some pics.
What are your tweaks to bring down POST times on new servers?
I've spent the past day working on my newest Poweredge R620 acquisition, and trying to nail down what things I can do without checking. Google has shown me that everyone seems to be having similar issues regardless of brand or model. Gone are the days when a rack server could be fully booted in 90 seconds. A big part of my frustration has been when the USB memory sticks are inserted to get firmware updated before I put this machine in production, easily driving times up to 15-20 minutes just to get to the point where I find out if I have the right combination of BIOS/EUFI boot parameters for each individual drive image.
I currently have this machine down to 6:15 before it starts booting the OS, and a good deal of that time is spent sitting here watching it at the beginning, where it says it's testing memory but in fact hasn't actually started that process yet. It's a mystery what exactly it's even doing.
At this point I've turned off the lifecycle controller scanning for new hard
Your dreams are a gateway into a parallel universe -- Can you prove it?
Your dreams and imagination evolved as a view into another universe. As with the current beliefs, you cannot decipher technical information -- no words in books, no details of how devices work, so even if you can describe things you see from another place, you could not reproduce a working version.
Now how do you convince others that the things your are seeing are really happening without being labeled insane? And how could you use this information to benefit yourself or others? Take a peek into the multiverse to see how other versions of yourself have solved these problems...
Self-hosted captcha for matrix-synapse registrations?
I have a self-hosted matrix-synapse server up and running on a Debian linux server, but before I open it up I want to at least get a captcha service in place to reduce spamming. The only module I've seen to handle this function appears to require setting up a Google recaptcha though, however I would prefer to keep all of this entirely self-contained for the privacy of my users. Can anyone recommend a module that allows for a local captcha option? For that matter, can anyone also recommend a captcha system that is pretty straightforward to set up (which is compatible with matrix-synapse) and uses basic preinstalled code bases like perl or python?
And while I'm here, I would also like to provide the option of registering with an email address, but I'm having trouble finding any clear how-to pages on this. Seems like that function might be built directly in to matrix-synapse but I'm just not finding anything helpful. Any suggestions?
I'm fairly new to matrix in general, but I have
Just a random thought, but has this been proposed before?
I was reading another article which discussed taking measurements of distance stars at 6-month intervals to create a 3D map of their relative positions and direction of movement. This got me to thinking... has anyone proposed 'dropping' stationary satellites outside of Earth's orbital path for continuous monitoring even when our planet is no longer in that spot? It seems like such an arrangement could provide constant monitoring of things that are happening on the far side of the sun, and they could each act as a relay to each other, bringing the signals back around where we could receive them.
It could be fascinating to be able to constantly monitor the path of know comets, or perhaps even to detect large meteors which are safely away from us now but might some day pose a threat. Studies like mapping star positions could rapidly expand with the availability of continuous data feeds, and I'm sure if such a tool were available scientists would come up with a host of new experiments
Any recommendations of countries to block from server logins?
I run my own email server, and a friend received a compromised laptop from work which resulted in a spam attack from Russia yesterday. Turtle settings saved the days with thousands of emails still in the queue when I saw the problem, however it made me realize that everyone with accounts on my server are local, do not travel, and have no requirement to send emails from outside the country.
I found how to use the smtpd_discard_ehlo_keyword_address_maps setting in postfix to block a CIDR list of IPs, then found a maintained list of IPs by country codes on github. Cool so far, and a script to keep my local list updated was easy enough.
Now the question is, what countries should I be blocking? There are plenty of lists of the top hacking sources, but it's hard to block #2 (the US) when that's where I am located. But otherwise, does anyone have a list of countries they outright block from logging on to their servers? From the above google searches I have 17 countries blocked so far,
Openfire chat missing features when clients log in to multiple devices under the same account
I have Openfire set up with the monitoring service plugin which we have been using with Pidgin on the desktop. One of the things I've noticed is that when I sign in to another computer on the same account, I do not get a history of recent messages (which I thought the monitoring plugin was supposed to provide).
The other thing that doesn't seem to be working right is when I am logged in to two computers simultaneously (using the same account). I expect to see chat messages showing up on BOTH devices so I can go between machines, which again is something I thought the monitoring plug was supposed to provide.
The settings I believe are related are under "Offline messages" which I have set to always store, and retain for up to 30 days. Should I bee looking for anything else?
I have been using Pidgin with XMPP on Google for years, so I know both the XMPP protocol and the Pidgin client are capable of handling this functionality. I've been digging around trying to find a solution, and
The Chinese consulate general in Odesa was hit by Russian missiles on July 20 following the Kremlin’s pull-out from the deal that provides Ukrainian grain to hundreds of millions of Asians.
In addition to damage at the port terminal where grain for China was stored, a second attack has now resulted in damage to the Chinese consulate.
Anyone else getting vehicle damage from all the potholes?
Usually we see some potholes at the end of the snow season which get repaired fairly quickly... but this year... oh boy. Seems like they didn't start showing up until all the rain hit, and then they were everywhere, and so far I've seen very few getting fixed (and some that were fixed have opened up again).
My SUV has been pulling hard to the right the last few weeks. I finally got a chance to jack it up today, checked the wheel bearings and A-frames as the common culprits. Instead what I found is the lower A-frame has actually been pulled over on one side by nearly 1/2". I moved it back to roughly where it's supposed to be so I'm not tearing up my tire until I can get in for a proper alignment, but sheesh, could we maybe get some crews out to start patching the worst of the potholes at least? Usually our fair city is so quick on getting these things fixed!
Hooray another fungus amongus!
I love seeing these groups pop up everywhere! They are such a fantastic resource to help prevent deadly mistakes, but also great for learning more about the incredible variety of mushrooms all around us, many of which are too tiny to casually notice but contain such beauty. As a kid I would hunt morels with my grandpa and that probably inspired me to keep my eyes open. Several years ago I had some huge mushrooms pop up in my yard, and after getting a positive ID I fried them up and ate them. Sometimes you just get lucky with what the squirrels drag into your yard.
Now I've finally taken the next step to growing my own, and yesterday transferred my first starts of oyster mushrooms to grain jars. I also managed to start some cremini spawn on boiled cardboard, and just giving it a little more time before transferring that to grain jars as well. Can't wait to taste all the results!
Just a reminder, if you can't see a community from your lemmy instance
Like Mastodon, Lemmy is a federated group of servers, however in order for a server (also known as an 'instance') to be aware of content from another instance, someone has to let that server know the community exists...
In my case, my home is on mander.xyz. If I go to the communities tab and search for Longmont, nothing comes up. From the post on reddit I knew that the home of this group is at "https://lemmy.ml/c/longmont" so I simply put that whole string in the community search, and that tells my server of its existence. Then I can immediately go back and search for "Longmont" again, and now the group shows up and allows me to subscribe to it.
And of course this works for any other communities you are interested in, but which aren't hosted on the Lemmy server you have an account with. Once you or someone else on your server has subscribed to a community, anyone else on your server will also now immediately see that community without needing the full path.