I really need to get a new chair for the home computer room, but I dread shopping for one because it's sure to be a giant pain and I have specific tastes. The days when I was enthused about trekking off to Ikea to audition chairs are long over.
(I don't want a chair with a back that slumps back on its own, I want a chair where the seat and the back rock back together. Everyone prefers the former, though.)
RE: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/117561266900895367
My first thought was that this was easy to explain and then I thought of the huge leaning tower of system administrator knowledge that backed up my understanding. It's not just general sysadmin stuff, either, it's specifically wrangling installers and dealing with physical media, the file images to write to them, etc etc. And "virtual machine (disk) images" & VMs & etc.
(We don't even write the 'ISO 9660' images to CDs or DVDs any more, they go to USB sticks. We are a pile of obscure history.)
It's "fun" how the passage of 20 years¹ have turned Ubuntu from a clearly better take on Debian to a somewhat inferior one that isn't yet so bad that it's worth the effort to migrate an existing environment away from. So it goes with commercially funded Linux distributions, I guess.
¹ and to some extent the pressure of wanting to make money
I have deliberately not told you which bit of sudoers functionality Rust Sudo doesn't support and where in the sudoers manual page you can find this discussed. Your challenge, should you care to undertake it, is to try to find it yourself and see how long it takes you, and assess whether you would have found it at all without being prompted.
It turns out that the Rust Sudo is casually incompatible with standard Sudo, something that they mention in the last paragraph of one part of the sudoers manual page after several paragraphs of describing functionality that they don't have and don't support. Because 'fuck you' to people who are skimming the manual page and see them describing standard sudoers functionality and don't read *every last fucking word* of something that we've read for years already.
TIL about a-Shell¹² (via ³) by @nholzschuch, which is an iOS app that provides a local shell on your iOS device that gives you access to a bunch of on-device commands and functionality, including things like nslookup and ping (sadly not traceroute, but I'll take almost anything here). Also, command line file management.
¹ https://github.com/holzschu/a-shell
² https://holzschu.github.io/a-Shell_iOS/
³ https://cosocial.ca/@mce/117547698018631016
Ah, charming, the Rust sudo on Ubuntu 26.04 is ignoring our /etc/sudoers.d files and their instructions, with no logging about it. That's a yeet, thanks for trying, now go away.
Theory: "/tmp is for small files, so that's why we can make it a /tmpfs"
Actual reality: 33 GB parked in /tmp on one of our compute servers. I guess no one told the people using it about that /tmp thing, eh.
(More exactly no one told the programs they're running about that /tmp thing. Including a bunch of LLM agents.)
Hot take: it's too late for meaningful general liability for software in practice because there's too much software out there and in use, and a lot of it is FOSS. Imposing liability at this point means bankrupting companies and individuals, either through direct penalties or by killing products, and as you know, capitalism.
At most we might put it on narrow sectors where it isn't too damaging if the sector mostly evaporates or gets much more expensive.
Today I caught myself thinking "is 16 GB of RAM enough for the new iteration of this server, or do I need to scare up extra DIMMs to make it 32 GB?"
Dear reader, this machine's work (and basic software) hasn't changed in years, and 8 GB was fine years ago and 16 GB (what it has today and would have on new hardware) is also fine. I have just been brain-wormed by the idea that we need to always increase the RAM every generation because … software. You know.
Current status: idly wondering if there are any currently made (USB) mice with three buttons on top and the scroll wheel on the side¹, ideally with some rocker buttons too. Probably not. You can get a lot of weird mice but there are limits.
(I use the middle mouse button a lot. Having it be a scroll wheel too is bad for various reasons.)
¹ this necessarily makes such a mouse handed.
One client option that some people™ would undoubtedly like me to mention is of course mastodon.el¹ for GNU Emacs, since I sometimes use GNU Emacs. But I'm not sure I want to go that far to try it out, and frankly I like the pre-5.0 Mastodon interface and I would rather like to keep it. Dear everyone, can you stop moving the cheese on perfectly good UIs?
Well congratulations to Mastodon on their 5.0 design for once again creating a design for young people with great eyes who don't mind the combination of small fonts and bad contrast (even in light mode, even in the high contrast setting). You may not see me around here as much any more because I can't read this and I don't know if there's a Linux client that I'll like.
This is my extremely unhappy face.
Your server isn't capable enough but efficiency is hard? Try using 14000 to 15000 watts of power, you will certainly not regret 15000 watts of power.
Your server is using 15000 watts of power but you can't see how to get rid of the heat? Try 40 to 50 fans, you will certainly not regret 40 to 50 fans.
Ah yes. After grinding the morning coffee beans, it helps if you remove the ground coffee from the grinder and put it in the Aeropress. Fortunately this is an easy mistake to observe and recover from.
Current status: coffee (now).
In the xterm, backspace crosses lines camp: urxvt, kitty.
In the backspace stops at physical lines camp: alacritty, wezterm, ghostty, and all VTE-based terminal programs.
In the "failed to work right now that I try them" camp: Terminology.
Well this is annoying, now I have a new restriction on acceptable terminal programs.
TIL of an annoying difference in X terminal programs. In xterm, if you print or enter a line longer than the screen width (so it overflows to a new physical line), you can backspace a character at a time and wipe out the entire logical line; your backspace will move to the previous physical line at the right time. In Gnome-terminal/VTE and konsole, backspacing stops at the end of a physical line.
(You can see this with 'cat >/dev/null' and then enter stuff. Readline/shells work differently.)
Phishing problem: people have MFA.
Creative phishing solution: (phishing) forms with "enter some of your backup codes here".
University MFA problem: there are login-required websites that are used during exams, where phones are prohibited, and the university is now requiring MFA from on-network logins.
University MFA solution: "print out some of your backup codes in advance and use one of them to log in during the exam".
I am sure there will be no problems.
It's Toronto election season so my least-favorite¹ local political email spammer has crawled out from under his rock and is spamming me again. Congratulations on spamming so many people that your new host promptly got listed by Spamhaus, that's a good accomplishment for a small-time local political spammer.
(They earn bonus points for being politically noxious as far as I vaguely remember, I don't read their screeds.)
¹ I don't have favorites exactly but I have spammers I especially despise
On the good news front I believe that my Fedora 44 upgrade was ultimately successful (despite the transaction officially failing) and did run all of the scripts it was supposed to. Well, apart from the script for 'pax', which exploded and took down the whole edifice with it. Determining this took extensive digging and a certain amount of luck.
Pax has been yeeted from the island, obviously.