This wasn’t nearly as interesting as the headline made it sound.

It’s a physical box you purchase to effectively break the law, so some of the architecture is going to be shady because it has to be.

• it polls multiple domain servers to get around blocks (and probably updates that list regularly)
• it obfuscates the endpoints it hits because they’re trying to secure a box they’re handing to someone else from tinkering that would allow people to access their (pirate) services without buying a box.
• it obfuscates its user agent when connecting to a weather service to avoid being blocked.

There’s nothing special or nefarious here. Indeed I’ve worked on projects that had to take the same considerations into account.

The “someone else’s Hulu account” claim sounds like bullshit to me because it doesn’t make sense from a business perspective. They’d want to control the accounts in question and rotate the passwords regularly, again to avoid freeloaders. More likely they’ve paid for 25ish Hulu subscriptions in every region (hence the initial call for IP geolocation) and are then relaying credentials to a box based on this info.

The only really sketchy thing in this whole video was the disabling of TLS checking, which was likely done to get around sketchy pirate websites with bad or nonexistent certs. It wasn’t clear though which part of the OS this applied to. If it’s only doing this for the pirate streaming, that’s sort of a bullet you have to take if you want the service. So long as the only data being sourced unencrypted/unverified is some audio and video, you’re fine (assuming you’ve already accounted for streaming such data in your jurisdiction, ie. you’ve got a VPN). If you’re pulling down software updates though, you’re gonna have a bad time.

At my first-ever tech job back in 2000, I was given a little Celeron desktop computer to do my work: mostly writing some ColdFusion and cutting up images in Photoshop. For the most part, the machine worked fine, except whenever I scrolled down on a webpage in Netscape, the box’s PC speaker would start screaming. I tried to ignore it, but I was in a small room with two other nerds and it was getting really annoying.

One day, my frustrated colleague decided it was time to investigate. As part of the process, he noticed that there was very little air coming out of the power supply fan port. “Must be a busted fan and that’s causing an overheating alarm” he declared. We unplugged the box, popped it onto my desk, and opened it up. The internals were pristine. No dust, nothing. The computer was practically brand new after all.

We were just about to crack open the power supply (not recommended, but we were getting desperate) when my colleague noticed that something was wedged inside the fan… it was the biggest (dead, thankfully) cockroach I have ever seen, at least 10cm long. For context, this was in Vancouver, Canada. Those just don’t exist there.

My colleague jammed his screwdriver in there to grind up the cockroach carcass, then plugged the box back in. After a shittone of dessicated cockroach guts spewed out the back, my little computer was operating normally.

As best we could guess, the monster crawled into the fan in Malaysia when as was assembled and somehow got pinned in there, died of starvation, and then stowed away to Canada.

There’s a nifty project on Mastodon where someone is running an instance entirely on solar (and I think a battery?). They’ve been tinkering with some of the code to do things like optimise images for reduced weight or CPU cost.

The project is called @solaradmin@solarcene.community and the account for the person running it is on a separate instance, presumably so people can message them about problems: @smallsolar@techhub.social.

The right time to look elsewhere was when Microsoft bought it.

The next best time was when viable alternatives like GitLab and later, Codeberg appeared.

The next best time was when it became clear that they were stealing your code to feed into their sparkly autocomplete and were going to sell it back to you.

The next best time was when they dumped a bunch of vibecoded garbage into the codebase and killed the uptime.

The next best time is now.

You don’t even have to migrate all your stuff. Just start all your new projects on Codeberg, or GitLab, or something self-hosted. Once you get used to the new place, you can migrate your old stuff when you’re ready.

There are some serious gaps in the article around what the riders were colliding with. The only detailed account was with a car, in which (surprise surprise) the scooter rider was the one penalised.

These scooters are new, but that doesn’t make them a bad idea. I see parents using them to drop off their kids at school every day for example. Every person you see on a scooter is someone who would otherwise be in front of you in a car.

If we’re really concerned about the health and safety of kids riding these things, we should:

• reduce/remove car traffic
• patch potholes

I think you and I are on the same page, but everything I know about this country and government has stripped me of your optimism.

Evaluating a six year old based on their likelihood to perform as a worker is deeply fucked up, and identifying them for “help” to become employable is not what they need.

It’s addressing a problem from a backward position. Underemployment is objectively a problem with availability of work paying livable wages, so a reasonable solution would be addressing that fault, not pigeonholing children based on their likelihood to contribute to GDP.

The fuck is wrong with this country?

What do you use for voice synthesis?

I really liked VOY: “One Small Step” (s06e08) wherein the crew work to salvage the wreckage of an ancient Earth probe from a dark matter asteroid

It’s a nice acknowledgement of the reality that space is fucking dangerous, and of the bravery of the men and women who shot themselves into it with little more than a few layers of metal and their wits to protect themselves. All this in the name of advancing science and exploration.

It closes with Seven reading a eulogy for the centuries-dead astronaut who died diverting all power to the sensors so that knowledge would be preserved.

Repentance is s07e12.

I started using it 'cause I was working with a lot of Linux nerds and they convinced me to try it out. I liked the politics of the GPL and the potential in the Free ecosystem.

25 years later I refuse to use anything else. Windows & Mac are built to take options away from you, to force you do use your hardware their way, and I hate it. My machine does exactly what I want it to, with hundreds of keyboard shortcuts and a solid UI built atop transparent subsystems. Windows ties my hands while pushing ads and AI into my eyeballs. Mac only “Just Works” if you’re using it precisely the way that want you to and exclusively with other iShit. No thanks.

As this is your first go, I’d recommend not tinkering with USE flags at all. Take the defaults, find what you don’t like, and consider tweaks later. USE flags can end up like a sort of “dependency hell”, with one package not working correctly because it expects another package to have something you’ve excluded. It’s uncommon, but frustrating when it happens. It’s best to start with the defaults.

Absolutely not. We should regulate them into transparency and prevent them from experimenting on children.

…but that’s not what he’s doing is it? This is punishing children by excluding them from their community because he lacks the courage required to stand up to American techbros.

“Act”? Like, “just stop oil”? Nonsense. That’d be terrorism. /s

I didn’t understand what you meant by Joplin not being “fully FOSS”, so I went looking for the license. Is really quite strange. Basically they’ve used a “personal license” for some parts and the AGPL for the rest. That’s… annoying.

Every now and then I need to make a presentation, and LibreOffice Impress to Microsoft PowerPoint isn’t that good. I resort to Google Slides for now.

It may not be your thing, but personally I’ve had a lot of success with RevealJS. You just write HTML (or even Markdown) and it automatically builds your slides for you such that they run on any browser. You can make it as complicated or as simple as you like (I’ve done some wild stuff with CSS) and everything can be versioned in git and published to anywhere that supports static files.

Here’s a reasonably professional-looking presentation I occasionally give about Kubernetes if you’re interested.

Are you using GNOME? If so, I remember there being an extension for that.

You might like Krita a little more. It’s far more powerful than Paint, but its interface is very familiar.

I would be less concerned about the GPU driver and more about the entire distro. Like most distros, Ubuntu has a release cycle where versions of everything are deprecated over time in favour of newer ones, and to expect that the entire OS will be fully supported in 10 years may be asking a bit much (I’m not sure if even their LTS release goes that far).

On top of that, Ubuntu could go bankrupt or get bought out, or simply enshittify (more than it already has) in that time. Expecting Ubuntu specifically to be supported on your laptop in ten years is anyone’s guess.

However, what you can be reasonably sure of is that Linux will continue to support your system, GPU and all, for a very long time. I heard a kernel developer once say that due to the kernel’s modular design, there’s support in there for stuff just one or two people in the whole world use.

As someone else has already pointed out, FOSS support for hardware generally gets better over time, and a GTX video card is ubiquitous. There’s going to be a hell of a lot of those floating around on laptops, servers, and homelabs for a lot more than ten years.

You just might not be able to stick with Ubuntu. The older the hardware, the more you might have to lean toward the more technical distros that make it easy to customise the kernel or that favour old hardware. I like Gentoo for this job, but even Ubuntu or Debian have paths to do compile your own kernel for example.