RE: https://hachyderm.io/@mlabowicz/117427835711192104
If you're deftly sidestepping passkeys at every turn, like me, but you're concerned about your TOTP codes being stuck in Google Authenticator, worry not: I wrote a tutorial last year on how to #Degoogle your TOTP codes and extract the secrets: https://imrannazar.com/articles/degoogle-otp
Stuck at a surprisingly political set of temporary traffic lights this morning.
A couple of weeks ago, @TheRealNooshu put together a petition to the UK Government, to make public websites available free of charge on mobile data. I've just been informed that the petition is now live and available to be signed: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/781594
If you're eligible to vote in the UK, do sign if you can; New Zealand have proved it can be done, and as Matt states in the petition text, nearly 4% of people in the UK can only get online from their phone, so they shouldn't be penalised for that when trying to access government services.
Alright, I'm having a clear-out in advance of moving house, and I have a bunch of books to give away to a good home; just pay shipping, or if you're in/near north #Manchester (England) we can arrange mutually convenient pickup.
Available for your amusement and delectation, details in the alt text:
- A partial #Discworld collection (16 books);
- A partial Iain M Banks collection (6 books);
- A heavily worn 3-volume Lord of the Rings;
- Project Hail Mary and The Martian, by Andy Weir;
- A pile of textbooks relating to computer science among other disciplines.
Let me know if you're intrigued, and we can work something out.
#bookstodon
RE: https://dice.camp/@jalanhenning/117368834765807906
I tend to flip through DAB radio channels on the school run, and the local Christmas music station has started up for the year already.
Mariah has already fully defrosted and is actively walking the Earth; I'd say "I regret to inform you", but I actually like that track.
Just as algorithmic social media limited who it was possible for us to contact, generative AI limits what it is possible for us to think. In this essay, I will
Fog layering #SilentSunday
Ok, another piece migrated to Codeberg. This time it's my interactive debugger for the Mornington Crescent esoteric programming language: https://codeberg.org/Two9A/mcresc
Originally written ten years ago, it uses Transport for London's Tube map SVG to render the journeys made by the interpreter; I had to make a few patches to get it working again, but no major surgery. The advantage of writing readable JavaScript in the first place.
And if you haven't come across Mornington Crescent before, it's a very fun esolang, but I don't know of anything serious that's been written in it; here's the interpreter running Hello World.
On November 13th and 14th 2026 I'll speak at @sfscon - to be more precise it'll be on Saturday 14th at 10:20 in the morning.
My talk, 15 minutes, is "reclaiming our choice: why digital independence needs accessibility in FOSS"
It's a 15 minutes speech where I'm going to explain what's right and what's wrong in current approach. Why blind people rely on politically/technically vulnerable tech? What has been already done and what should FOSS community improve?
SPOILER: making all people feel guilty about commercial and expensive tech is not the right direction. Not for us, at least.
I'll also mention the effort made by @Two9A Imran Nazar, who inspired by @stefano -Stefano Marinelli-'s FediMeteo, has built a Fediverse project to allow Muslim believers to be warned about when to pray. (1/2)
The #equinox is upon us, and it's been fun to see the angles slowly trending down towards flat on this daylight chart, as I receive prayer time updates in my TL.
If you want charts like this alongside alerts of Islamic prayer times, all delivered to your Mastodon, just head to FediAdhan.org and pick your location to get started. I'm still seeking beta testers for the service; the last call-out garnered exactly zero users, so it'd be good to know it works for someone who isn't me.
Alright, I'm having a clear-out in advance of moving house, and I have a bunch of books to give away to a good home; just pay shipping, or if you're in/near north #Manchester (England) we can arrange mutually convenient pickup.
Available for your amusement and delectation, details in the alt text:
- A partial #Discworld collection (16 books);
- A partial Iain M Banks collection (6 books);
- A heavily worn 3-volume Lord of the Rings;
- Project Hail Mary and The Martian, by Andy Weir;
- A pile of textbooks relating to computer science among other disciplines.
Let me know if you're intrigued, and we can work something out.
#bookstodon
RE: https://mastodon.green/@Sarahw/117262762783463647
So we're considering buying a new-build 4-bed across town; it'll take my life savings and then some to cover the cost.
Do I buy the place if we're going to get denaturalised and turfed out of the country in a couple of years? There's no way to know whether it'll happen, but that kind of money would go very far back east in Pakistan...
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@SnoopJ/117259282286529899
In another piece of Two9A lore, I'm the maintainer of the Decronym bot, which drops into Reddit and Lemmy threads to expand acronyms and/or initialisms it runs across (that are in its community-specific database). It leaves a comment that starts:
"Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:"
Acronym is one of those words that has ...expanded beyond its original meaning.
I’d like to say that grapheneOS is legitimately excellent for hardening Android, for sandboxing google play services, for making AOSP and private Android relatively usable
but now I have a lot of information about what they consider exploit analysis (throwing an LLM at it because everyone else is doing it) and threat analysis (fedi is kiwi farms). my confidence is shaken. these people have been confidently asserting that their practices are best in class or near best in class. are they really?
I’m not sure the people using LLMs who couldn’t accurately talk about LLMs, and who deleted the posts where they talked about all this just to disrupt conversation once the backlash came, are people I can trust to honestly analyze their own work
RE: https://discuss.systems/@ricci/117222221200199197
Astounding work, people. Don't think any of us could've planned it better.
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@jerry/117224192058880564
Off-topic: Are y'all doing spooky profile names already? It's still (meteorological) summer, for crying out loud.
Turns out either the Pixel 9a has no optical zoom, or Graphene doesn't know how to use it; this was shot at 3x, and you can tell from the pixels.
So the band CHVRCHES came up elsewhere a couple days ago, and I mentioned that around ten years ago I put together a mashup of their standout banger Clearest Blue with that one Alan Walker track, Fade, and I did it the "traditional" way by matching waveforms in Audacity.
Turns out I did a mashup of the music videos too, which I found in backups this morning: https://makertube.net/w/jZ2diTKagsXHRoAejK6fjs
I should go back to doing mashup MVs at some point: this turned out great.
So in light of the #Debian vote to allow proliferation of generated code (can we call it the Debian Debacle yet?) I'm looking to drag my mailserver over to Gentoo, which has a policy more in line with my own.
Now, I last used #Gentoo back in college, a literal half a lifetime ago; can I rely on scraps of half-remembered stuff about ebuilds and stage1 installs, or should I do the sensible thing and read the documentation?
If I don't get your email for the next two weeks, you'll know which of those options I picked.
