I lived in the UK for four years. There's some things I miss from there:
* easy access to good fish and chips
* a dense railway network
* power plugs that don't feel flimsy
* power plugs that are easy to insert
* power sockets with on/off switches
* my friends over there
The European ones (Schuko, Type C, Type F, whatever) are often difficult to insert. The pins are often wonky, apparently due to the required tolerances being bad, but that's my guess.
Typos of the day: open cod, source cod.
By brain has a feature where if I mistype a word once, I'll keep mistyping it the rest of the day unless I'm diligent.
There are days when I take excessive pleasure in destroying misbehaving virtual machines with extreme prejudice: kill -9, then wipe the file system where the image file resided. It doesn't really help, for more than a few seconds after the deed is done, but some days that's enough.
Status quo et quo vadis(*) of Radicle CI: https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2025/radicle-ci-status-quo/
(*) I read too much Asterix as a child.
The IPv6 chapter in @mwl's "Networking for System Administrators, 2nd Ed" is number 4. I wonder if that's a subtle joke.
I suddenly have flashbacks to the 1990s and bringing an update to the distro I was using on a few tens of floppies from the university back home and invariably having some of them fail during the hour the trip took.
So for an extra fee I can provide extra floppies encoded in a Shamir secret sharing manner so that any N of M floppies will work. The customer gets to pick positive integers N and M, for a small extra fee of 2^N^M euros.
My latest startup will be selling this data to whoever wants to buy it. I have a special price for AI companies of only 100 euros/floppy.
Transferring 7 TiB of file system images takes a while. Computing checksums to verify the transfer worked take further time.
I like what @algernon wrote on his blog: https://chronicles.mad-scientist.club/tales/you-probably-shouldnt-block-ai-bots-from-your-website/
Some choice quotes:
"Large scale fraud is not revolution."
"If you look past the shit-stained windows of BigTech’s walled garden, there’s a whole world of beautiful, working internet out there."
"Luckily, the bots are dumb as fuck. Three ifs in a trenchcoat gets rid of most of them"
"Fuck off you privileged elitist prick."
"I like computers, I like technology. But I like humans a whole lot more"
I told some friends recently about the on sentence in German I can still manage, and now I'm going to inflict it on you too:
eine kleine Tasse Schokoladenschnitzel mit Bananenkartoffeln und Kabelsalat auf der Hauptbahnhof, bitte
In their recent episode @europeanspodcast mentions that Mastodon (a.k.a. the fediverse) is where they have the fewest followers and the most interactions.
I've avoided commercial social media for a while. I'm here because I've found interesting people with interesting things to say, and I'm not being manipulated into trying to buy stuff, or being force fed stuff I'm not interested in.
Thank you @cwebber , @evan , @Gargron , and others who've built this place for us.
I had a discussion with all the other programmers in the world, and we've agreed that it's time we stop creating bugs. I hope this comes as a relief to everyone.
I maintain, for myself, a "dates in geek history" calendar in my Google Calendar, from where I spot things to post to the fediverse about. If I had tools to maintain it as files in Git, I'd do it that way and then share it publicly, but alas, I've never had the energy to find or write such tool. Maybe some day.
On this day in 1998 the first module of the International Space Station, Zarya, was laucnhed. That's 26 years ago.
Yesterday I moved 60 terabyte of data in about 15 seconds.
I removed drives from my old file server in my office and carried them to the dining table where I'm assembling the new file server.
Then I carried them back, because I need to shuffle data between drives so I can keep only some of the drives, as the new server is physically much smaller.
I like these keyboards a lot. I've been touch typing since 1983, when I learnt it on a portable mechanical typewriter. In contrast, no Keyboardio keyboard has ever drawn blood.
More seriously, they're a pleasure to type on. I spend much of my life in front of a computer, typing, and it's worth to me to spend money on really good keyboards. I'm lucky to be able to afford them.
(Not getting compensated for saying this. I'm merely a very satisfied customer.)
I have switched to my winter keyboard.
I use Keyboardio Model100 keyboards, which have a wooden enclosure. Wood expands and contracts with the seasons and humidity. I've sanded off a little from a couple of keys on the winter one so keys don't get stuck when they wood contracts. It's a minor blemish.
The winter keyboard has light colored wood (maple?), the summer one is dark (walnut?). I enjoy the variety.
Designed from the ground up to work the way your hands do, the Model 100 features 64 hot-swappable mechanical keyswitches, RGB LEDs under each custom-sculpted keycap, and open source firmware, all housed in a precision-milled adjustable hardwood enclosure.
Keyboardio (shop.keyboard.io)
cc @jesse
I have more hobby projects that I can shake a stick at. (Disclaimer: I don't have a stick, although I've thought about getting a stylish walking stick.)
I wrote up a first version of how to contribute to my projects, should someone be inclined to do so. It's meant to be helpful and to lower the bar for helping me make the software better.
Is there a respected tool for scanning source code for passwords, private keys, API tokens, or such?
Hooray for "efibootmgr" for letting me choose what UEFI target to boot to on next boot, without having to fiddle the firmware via its UI.
