Happy "finding out which of the healtcheck alerts you created in the last six months weren't timezone aware" day to my fellow European sysadmins.

We're staying at my parents tonight, in my old room. I went to brush my teeth before bed, and apparently we're sleeping on the floor tonight because the entire bed is Dexter's.

Well they waited until I was driving home, the bastards, but we're updated now. (Better than being asleep I guess). Looking forward to reading the details in November when they release them and realising none of the issues applied to us 🙄

Fortigate, I've already had my week ruined patching vulns. If you're going extend it and ruin my day today, could you please either give me notification *before* 5am, or at the very least tell me somewhere what time I can expect my day ruining to commence (patch release time is not in the email nor the linked blog post, so odds are it will be at some point in the day California time after I've gone to bed :@)

#fortinet #vulnpocalypse #ImGivingUpOnComputersAndGoingToLiveInTheWoodsAsAHermit

Today's radicalising tech moment: I was patching all our servers to remove the compromised CAs, and testing them after. All of them were working, until I hit one that was reporting timeouts on the script running in the venv I'd just patched.

Cue 10 minutes of frantic checking to work out what I'd broken, only to realise the remote server the script was connecting to had taken its API offline because it was written in PHP and was waiting for the patches.

At least let me fix one fucking security nightmare before the next one hits; I'm fully onboard with the plan to just burn the entire fucking tech industry to the ground at the moment.

#php2shell

https://chaos.social/@fluepke/117474156947559280 "the private key is 4" Is one of those phrases you can use to spot techies. The average person will look blankly at you in response to that statement, the average tech worker will look like you've just played every horror movie in existence before their very eyes

Recently unsealed from the cert mailing list (after it got spoiled on Mastodon, but I can't find the OP 😢)

"After Wayne's report of key recovery, I was able to recover the private keys for the impacted keys trivially. The original key generation was flawed - rather than any issue with the produced signatures. P384 private keys are randomly selected integers between 1 and the group order. The 8 impacted keys all used integers less than 256. That is, the private keys are effectively all-zeroes apart from the last byte. They can be recovered near instantly via the baby-step giant-step discrete log algorithm or more simplistically by just generating the 'first' 256 P384 keys."

That's... agh. Fixing everywhere these trivially exploitable certs exist is going to be a Fucking. Nightmare.

I took Dexter out for a walk at lunchtime. I, trying to make summer last as long as possible, wore my flip-flops. So, of course, a bee or a wasp decided to fly under my toes and sting my toe. That hurt like fuck, but by the time I got back to my desk, it had stopped.

Fast forward to ~6pm, after work had finished, and I went to Tesco to get supplies for dinner. By the time I got back I could barely walk from the pain, as it appears I had dug whatever remnants of the sting further into my foot

Thus my partner had to effectively *milk* my toe repeatedly to get the remains of the sting out. So no matter how bad your day has been, at least you haven't a) had to cope with a multi-hour sting in your foot; or b) had to rhythmically squeeze someone else's foot to extract a sting.

Count. Your. Blessings.

Canonical's servers are having a little lay down this morning, so yes I am using Bittorrent to transfer my Linux ISOs. What else would I use it for?

#Linux #Ubuntu #Torrent #Bittorrent

Thanks everyone for your kind words, they mean a lot to me and Caz. We've been sat on the sofa this evening going through old photos and videos, and I feel the need to share a bonus Marley Pic of the photo edit I commissioned in 2021 of Marley as an astronaut :)

We ended up having to have Marley put to sleep today. He's been on a slow decline for a while, but today things took a massive downturn, and in the end, anything else felt like prolonging his suffering. It doesn't matter how prepared you think you are, it's still absolutely devastating.

Six years ago, when I met Caz I couldn't stand dogs, and the fact she had a big Labrador nearly kiboshed the whole relationship. But Marley wormed his way into my heart, and I loved that dog so so much. RIP mate, you will be missed.

Photo from two weeks ago, when he'd worn himself out on his last visit to a National Trust property

WHERE ON EARTH ARE YOU FROM, WE'RE FROM ING-ER-LAND, WHRE YOU COME FROM DO YOU PUT THE KETTLE ON

#Bellingham #England #WC2026

If you'll forgive me for one moment...

DON'T TAKE ME HOME
PLEASE DON'T TAKE ME HOME
I JUST DONT WANNA GO TO WORK
I WANNA STAY HERE
DRINK ALL YOUR BEER
PLEASE DON'T, PLEASE DON'T TAKE ME HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOME

#WC2026 #England

Not getting carried away, our defense was poor, Rice is now injured, and we can't finish half our chances.

Ahhhh, who am I kidding ITS COMING HOME.

#wc2026 #England

Gotta say, 30 quid on an indoor aerial so I'm getting the #England game without the delay of using streaming apps is money well fucking spent. #WC2026

Dexter was very unhappy we went to the garden centre without him today, so now he's asleep on my arm to ensure I can't leave again.

#DogsOfMastodon

Could I get the boys to stand still and look at the camera for a #dogsatpollingstations picture? Could I buggery.

Sabastian Sawe's performance in the London Marathon today was incredible. Ever since the 2 hour mark was broken in controlled conditions, it was obvious it would only be a matter of time before it happened in a race, but I certainly thought that barrier would hold for a couple more years. For three runners today to go inside the old world record, and two of them sub-2 hours is an insane achievement.

I went for a nice 10k run this evening, and at the end of it decided to see how far I could run at the average pace they'd managed for 42.2km. I consider myself quite fit, but that pace is basically a sprint for me, I couldn't even make it to 100m before I was gassed. Truly unbelievable running.

Just because it's a bank holiday doesn't mean the need for blood goes away, so a quick trip to the NHS vampires is called for. If you can, give blood.

#giveblood

Minor victory of the weekend: My partner wants to use her #Kindle without using #Amazon anymore. "No problem", I thought, "I've already jailbroken mine, put #koreader on it, and hooked it up to my #calibre-web server" (where all our drm-free ebooks get stored). "I'll do the same for hers" - both our kindles are 7th gen paper whites, so it's a relatively easy jailbreak.

And yes, the jailbreak and install was no problem, but then I realised I couldn't just reuse my workflow, because it involves way too many menu taps to get to the books, that I only navigate because I know the system well.

Thus I spent a couple of hours optimising the experience on her kindle, so getting a new book is never more than three taps away, with only one menu to navigate in that. (Ok. It might be more than three taps if she has to paginate through her book list, but two taps and one menu to get to the list of epubs, at least)

I'm very much not a UX person, the hacky workarounds I perform on a daily basis to avoid spending ten minutes building a better workflow are both numerous and hideous; so I'm kinda of proud that even if it took me longer, I've built a really useable workflow for her.

Koreader itself is not the most user-friendly thing out of the box, but the customisation it has is pretty amazing!