I have washed Dirtfox and brought them a new friend, Rocktopus. They keep watch behind me. #BikeTooter

Nix's chaotic naming practices(?) mean I have no way to predict that a phrase like "make shell" will be called mkShell, makeshell, makeSh, m͑ͯa̗̍k͖e̸͚ sh̲e̠͞͡ll̄, or simply the name of an Old One that, if spoken, would instantly drive the speaker to madness.

AHha yess the "Power Off" menu is best served when it only offers "Suspend"

Maybe that's why Fedora's playing around with atomic/container OS stuff because computers are really best if you reboot every time you change one thing. </sarcasm>

I really just want computer to do what I want, but I am naive.

Today's fuckery -- I'm trying to debug a fedora firewall issue. I've added the port to the firewall, but it doesn't allow traffic.

FINE i'll read the manpage... and it horrifies me further:

"The permanent option --permanent can be used to set options permanently. These changes are not effective immediately, only after service restart/reload or system reboot."

This kinda shit is gonna be my villian origin story, I swear.

So, anyway, shout out to cloud-init for somehow not showing logs that this is why my systems are just kinda stalling forever on first boot.

"YAML is a strict superset of JSON"

Except when my editor inserts a tab character instead of a space while I'm writing some JSON by hand... and then it isn't.. or, isn't according to at least one yaml library.

lol computers.

Mmmm funny coil whine(?) from this tiny hp prodesk when it's asleep. The front led blinks slowly, and the 'on' produces a different, audible tone than the 'off'. I do not enjoy hearing these tiny electronic sounds... might need to find a new home for these computers

None of this software needed to get left behind, and hopefully soon, some of it can return to function on Wayland environments <3

(but why!?)

Talon (voice control software) uses Python to talk to X11 to send keystrokes and other stuff. This obviously doesn't work on Wayland. Talon's python code is buried somewhere inside its binary, so I do the completely insensible thing and hook all its X11 messages instead... It invokes libX11 directly sometimes, but others it dlopen()'s libX11 or libxcb instead, and I need it all.

And much to the nightmare of Wayland compositor developers, I now have a proof of concept that translates X11's Forbidden Magic into equivalent gnome/kde/wlroots.

Many wayland compositor developers consider X11 concepts to be unlawful carnal knowledge, like a program knowing what window is active, or where on the screen it is...

I'm bringing it allllll back...

Hooking dlopen and dlsym via LD_PRELOAD is definitely one of the messiest things I've ever done on Linux. (that is, intercepting dlopen and dlsym calls)

A++ would do it again.

"Signal is being launched with the plaintext password store by
default due to database corruption bugs when using the encrypted backends."

lol software in 2026 is a hoot.

It's fun to run integration tests on desktop distros because halfway through the whole system just goes to sleep because it thinks it is idle...

One day I'll remember to disable this, but that day is not today.

maan, mgmtconfig is so fucking good. I deploy a new change and it's already *done* by the time I switch terminals, press up-enter to return 'systemctl status' to check on a thing I'm fixing.

And like, fast is only part of the satisfaction in using mgmtconfig... there's more <3

Big spidey hiding under a blade of grass wishing I would leave it alone to hunt. It may give wolf spider vibes, but the eyes tell you the truth -- it's Zoropsis spinimana! (I think). Photo from 2020.

#arachtober #spider

This might be intense (or, intensely boring), but I wrote down everything I know about differences between Mac and PC keyboards today. It might be useful for people who design cross-platform apps, especially web apps!

https://unsung.aresluna.org/deeper-dive-keyboard-differences-between-windows-and-macs/

On Fedora 44 GNOME there are 4 separate DBus daemons running at the same time. Two use a relatively safe DBus-broker implementation. The other two (IBus and atspi) use bespoke DBus servers from glib which have substantially less safety features.

Never mind that DBus has an “look at me. I am the captain now” feature where you can take over a named address (like orca keyboard monitor) from another process.

There are 3 main channels on GNOME alone I’ve found to sniff keyboard events.

The newest is GNOME’s Orca keyboard monitor (why it’s named orca when there are other accessibility tools, I don’t know).

Another is via IBus, which I’m not sure gnome can run without? It’s on by default.

Third is with an extension and can be installed silently.

Each of these have multiple vectors to access the keystrokes. 🤷‍♂️
But please keep telling everyone Wayland (as it replaces x11) is impenetrable to this… 😀

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@whack/116859617710054286

Heh, another person reporting on keyboard sniffing in gnome using one of the same techniques I found — pretending to be the orca screen reader.

I suppose since these are publishing now I should write up all the ways I’ve found that work on gnome/kde/cosmic/etc. there’s a lot.

I wonder if a certain gnome/flatpak maitnainer will accost this author the way they did me months ago on the same subject.

https://linnemanlabs.com/posts/hello-my-name-is-orca/

@lritter <releases you're proud of>.<boring releases>.<releases you're ashamed of>