Dear insurance company,

You sent me my annual invoice. I would like to pay that invoice. I should not need hunt around on your web-page for a "To pay, you need to create an account", create an account, answer multiple security questions from my credit-report, set up a password (disallowing copy/paste from my password-manager makes it more secure, right? and only these particular Special Characters, not those other ones your password-manager generated), set up answers to multiple security questions, have an email-confirmation loop, agree to pages of fine-print legalese in a tiny scrolling-region of the web-page that makes it unreadable, then discover that I can only pay by ACH bank-transfer not credit-card, so enter the routing number (twice manually, no copy/paste allowed), and account number (twice manually, no copy/paste allowed)

All to pay something that you could have likely even accepted payment anonymously. I suspect that if I called up and wasted your support person's time, they could have taken my credit-card and had it paid in a quarter of the folderol. Because according to your invoice, I know that you would have gladly accepted a check via mail without any of that hassle.

Please do better. I'm trying to give you money for crying out loud.

Sincerely,

-Tim

@lattera Happy "National View Source" day to ya 😆

https://twitter.com/lattera/status/1448746229450543105

RE: https://deadparrotbbs.com/what-happened-to-the-desktop-metaphor/

@deadparrotbbs.com

re. your "What happened to the desktop metaphor", I suspect it died with Microsoft Bob 😆

Oof, went to test something and a small subset of data returned in the order I expected, so I scripted up a quick bit of #awk to process it. Results looked perfect. Ran it on a larger subset of data and it fell over. Turned out the ls(1) on sorts output by full path by default, so aaa/mmm.txt sorts before jjj.txt, and zzz/hhh.txt sorts after both, unless you specify -f ("don't sort"), in which case it will emit output in argument order.

Got that in place and everything worked like a charm to pull the stats I wanted. ☺

Ah, another of those "I blindly added umpteen plugins to my .vimrc and it's now doing something weird" posts. Maybe you don't need two dozen plugins? Maybe you should add them incrementally, knowing/learning what each one does, what value it brings, and how to configure it?

Fine, dear author. Bisect the list of plugins by commenting them out until you find the offender.

#cargocultProgramming 😑

You hear a lot about AI agents going rogue. You never hear about them going Nethack. #rogue #nethack #roguelike

It's not a question. | Join for free: https://patreon.com/portermason/?rr_id=443&rr_slug=hugs

Nonsense. We'll have this well before 2070.

RE: https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@gumnos/117419126274683590

FWIW, I sometimes use this with 3 or 6 to get readable hex-colors like #C0FFEE or #0B5E55 when playing with CSS. 😆

old browser wars: netscape vs microsoft
new browser wars: browser vs you

Lovely, Google.

From my sweetheart's Chromebook this morning (the one she uses primarily for simple email and web-browsing), in order to obtain security updates you suggest a process that will remove the web-browser and email programs, and then disconnect her from the Play store where she might be able to obtain replacements/upgraded versions.

If I wanted to make it a useless brick that doesn't do web/email, I'd just turn it off.

Maybe the time has come to get her a new non-Chromebook?

My latest @newscientist.com@bsky.brid.gy cartoon

Minesweeper for 2026?

Brilliant.

https://minesweeper.mikelacher.com/

to be fair, I could have also used the -F option to force a refresh. I should have checked the exit-status first (it returns 0 on successful certificate renewal, 1 on failure, and 2 if nothing changed).

blargh. Shot waaaay too much time trying to diagnose an httpd(8) + acme-client(1) issue on a recent #OpenBSD install.

I pointed acme-client at the Let's Encrypt testing/dev endpoint, got the certs/chain/keys in the right place, reloaded httpd, and refreshed. Cert-chain looked like what I expected, rolling up to the (unrecognized) root and throwing Unknown CA warnings.

So I repointed my acme-client.conf file at the *production* Let's Encrypt endpoint, re-issued the acme-client command to re-fetch them, reloaded httpd, and refreshed the browser. but still got the same errors. The chain kept showing the old dev-signing certs, not the valid ones.

Apparently acme-client only (re)downloads certs if they're coming up on needing renewal. So acme-client was running, seeing that my bad-certs were sufficiently recent, and just not requesting/writing updated fullchain/key files.

Deleted the bogus testing certs, re-ran acme-client, reloaded httpd, and 🪄 everything worked fine. 😑

Hopefully this saves someone else the trouble.

just encountered a delightful sidebar to the effect of "if you're skimming this post, beware that under certain conditions, this will explode in your face" in this blog-post

https://exa.y2k.diy/garden/git-sha256/

by @exa@pub.mastodon.sleeping.town

@readbeanicecream

Reading over

https://readbeanicecream.codeberg.page/posts/2026-05-24.html

under the "Multi-tag search" section, you can simplify the grep by using multiple -e options, which also means you don't need to escape the + for your tags, like

$ grep -rn -e +philosophy -e +sciencefiction …

Just in case that simplifies your workflows 🙂

(and since they're now static strings rather than regex, you can use the faster `grep -F`, AKA fgrep(1) if you prefer)

eep 😳 the teen passed his driving test on the first try. pray for us 🫣

Just got a mass email from our bank that essentially says, "If you give your username and password to an AI agent, you're on your own."

You've. Been. Warned. 🤣

Hah, got a text from my mom that she got an abnormally full night of sleep, and then saw @neil post a similarly extensive amount of sleep. That would explain where my sleep went last night. 🥱

4hr of sleep should suffice, right?