I’m a bit of a stickler when it comes to metadata, so I was surprised to see an older episode of my silly podcast used as an example of MP3 metadata by the Freedom of the Press Foundation:
Example: a cool podcast from The Internet Archive (.mp3)
That’s probably the coolest (only?) thing it’s ever done for someone.
Hello, I’m john from $LEGIT_PLACE. We are one of best manufacturers of Sexy Lingerie & Swimwear.
About us,
NO.1 Production base for Cosplay Sexy Lingerie. Top 3 Sexy Lingerie/Gown/Corset/Swimwear Manufacturer in China, 17+ Years Export Experience …
If we have a chance to cooperate? I?d like to provide more information for you.
I’d like to cosplay as a spam filter, can you arrange that? I imagine this person with a huge net, and cargo pants stuffed with nefarious letters.
My sleeper PC game machine posts have generated feedback from people asking why I bother dual-booting FreeBSD with Linux (technically it’s triple-booted with NetBSD, but that’s for another post!) I’ve done variations of this post more than a few times now, but I’ll never shy from taking people’s questions as an opportunity to talk about one of my favourite platforms.
Linux is now my game platform. I used to dual-boot Windows like most people, but Steam and Proton have got so good at what I want to play, I was able to leave desktop Windows and its frustrating mix of patches, telemetry, ads, and bad UI behind. Couple that with Kubuntu’s well-integrated KDE Plasma desktop, and I’m actually happy to boot into it. I can’t overstate just how much dread I had booting into Windows (I run Windows Server enough at work!) that has been alleviated thanks to the tireless efforts of Valve.
(Kubuntu LTS, being based on Ubuntu, is officially supported by Steam. I ran Debian previously, but having stuff just work, or knowing I’m not running anything exotic when I need to troubleshoot a launcher makes my life easier).
Which then raises the question, why continue to dual-boot with FreeBSD? I use Plasma there too, and the same desktop applications. Clara has joked in the past that she can’t tell from walking past my screen which I’m booted into. I’ll admit there have been times I’ve fired up Konsole and typed the wrong system commands.
It all comes down to the toolchain. Linux has things like Docker, but FreeBSD jails and OpenZFS snapshots are so ingrained into how I work now, I tinker and test everything with them (ditto illumos, now that I think of it). It’s a genuine feeling of relief and joy to use this stuff compared to Linux.
I treat desktop Linux now like my work Macs: a graphical environment that’s officially supported by applications I need such as Steam and Microsoft Office, and supports consoling into something better when I need to do real work. Even my Kubuntu partition still accesses our FreeBSD home server for the heavy lifting.
FreeBSD’s graphics driver support is also sufficiently advanced that I can play games like Minecraft without having to reboot, which is where I spend most of my time. The progress the team and the Foundation have made on the Linuxulator is also mighty impressive, and leads me to hold out hope that one day we’ll be playing accelerated Steam games on FreeBSD too. That’d be the dream :).
Eli Stokols summarised just what Putin has done for the world:
So far, Putin’s war, borne of his own insecurity and nihilism, has:
• unified the West • unified Ukraine • drawn condemnation of even Orban (!) • exposed the weakness of his own army • cratered Russia’s crap economy • made Zelensky into a legend [though I’d argue he’s done that himself]
I’d also say he’s further galvanised the opposition in his own country, put the finances of his cronies in peril, exposed just how sycophantic the likes of the GOP and Farage were, and demonstrated that the world can agree on things sometimes. I hope to see more of this.
I don’t know who started the joke, but at this rate NATO will want to join Ukraine. It’s hard for me to communicate just how much respect I have for what they’ve accomplished and gone through already, and how resilient they’ve been in the face of overwhelming odds. If we’re to believe the reports that captured Russian soldiers are also being given the opportunity to phone their parents back at home, they’re also doing it with humanity.
Also, it cannot be overstated: fuck you Putin. Whatever’s coming to you, you deserve more of it.
I find it oddly comforting in our current world that these exist. They make me smile every time I walk past.
The fall from grace of this once respected and essential tool has been sad to witness. 1Password dropped this news last Thursday:
Cryptocurrency? We got you. 💸
We’ve partnered with $NONSENSE to create a simpler, more secure way to manage cryptocurrencies, tokens and NFTs on the $NONSENSE blockchain.
This wasn’t a once-off, it’s now the account’s pinned tweet. This means people arriving on their profile will see this news above anything else they post. This is a clear signal of the company’s ethical stance and priorities.
I stopped buying and recommending their software after their move to Electron and the unnecessary shifting of technical debt onto their users. These concerns seem quaint in light of legitimising hostile technology.
I’m sure people will analyse this ad naseum, but what I’m interested in is how they thought such news would be broadly received:
Positively, which I can scarcely believe.
Negatively, but they thought the positive press among blockchain spruikers would offset this wider impact.
Whichever; someone thought the feature was a good idea and they didn’t think that far ahead.
None of these are encouraging. Which leads us to why?
Companies that seemingly act against their own interests are usually influenced by an external force, or something we can’t see. We don’t know how many strings came attached to their venture capital injection, or what influence those people are now having on the direction of the company. But the timing seems awfully coincidental.
I don’t envy AgileBits’ position right now. Their software is under threat of Sherlocking from first parties, and their competitors have caught up in feature set and polish. But from the outside, their shenanigans over the last seven months haven’t won them many friends, and have alienated their advocates and base.
There’s also the broader question about the continued viability of user/password authentication, something AgileBits are in the perfect position to offer legitimate thought leadership on. I think this is what makes me sad above all else.
Most of the industry professionals I talk to have already decided the company has lost the plot and have written them off, but I still think there’s time for them to turn around if they commit to developing good and ethical software again. There’s a reason people used to respect them and love their tools.
When you’re led by bean counters, don’t be surprised when all they end up doing is count beans.
I’ve written before about how we’re always quick to write about a negative experience, but we don’t take the time to talk about stuff we appreciate, from restaurants to IT support queues. I want to get better at this.
Earlier this week I received another batch of parts from PC Case Gear for my Compaq sleeper PC build. It was packed very well, arrived quickly, and came with a treat!
Having experienced a different company with their months-long returns policy, bad packing, and completely opaque communication, it’s important to take care of retailers who take care of us. They’re now my default unless they’re out of stock or don’t have a part I need.
Give them a look if you’re building a computer in Australia.
Relinquish your duties as a chair. Call Putin, call Lavrov, to stop aggression.
And I welcome the decision of some members of the council to meet as soon as possible to consider the necessary decision that would condemn the aggression that you will launch on my people.
There is no purgatory for war criminals. They go straight to hell, Ambassador.
There are still infocomm designers, developers, and managers who believe tech is intrinsically neutral, despite what I’d consider a transparent preponderance of evidence to the contrary!
NetBSD extraordinaire Benz of Bentsukun.ch (RSS feed) reminded me of Patrick McKenzie’s 2010 post about false assumptions made of names. These were partly informed by Patrick’s experience living in Japan; I’ve had a similar experience from time in Southeast Asia. I’m sure Benz has the added fun of living in a multilingual country who’s forced to interact with software developed by English-speakers.
The example I always cite is the last name Ng, which is common in Singapore. I remember one CRM back in the mid-2010s that refused to accept it based on:
Digging into the rats nest of client-side validation code, I realised it was checking for the presence of a vowel if the supplied name used Latin characters. Because naturally, every word and name has to have one. Except the ones that don’t.
Trombone sounds!
This also applies to locations. So many systems assume people have a city, state, and country. It’s a running joke among Singaporeans that you need to receive deliveries for Singapore City, Singapore State, Singapore, or Singapore City, Singapore, Republic of Singapore, because a surprising number of sites still assume:
Luxembourg and Singapore are out of sight and out of mind for most of these developers, but you’d think Mexico City, Mexico would be an obvious counterexample to them that’s closer to home. What about Texas City, Texas? Or Kansas City, Kansas? Wait, scratch that last one.
The defence I hear of these systems is that they’re edge cases, as if being wrong about a chunk of the world’s population is technically excusable, if not morally defensible. In the formal vernacular of my two home countries: yeah, nah and wa lao eh.
