While I tend to downplay it, I'm sure it's obvious to my friends the joy I get from performing as a DJ. It really is a special honor for me to share this with you. To all of you who have been a part of this journey for me in so many different ways, thank you.
I just saw a post in another place that read 'And the truth is: I pretend to be a cynic but I am really a dreamer who is terrified of wanting something I may never get.'
That hit too hard and too close to home. That was upsetting.
I regularly want things I may never get. Probably will never get. I'm 50 and still living with parents (although technically they are living in my house now rather than me living in theirs…) I'll probably be single forever. I'll probably never get round to making a lot of costumey stuff I've had in mind for literal decades now. Same for web services I want to build. I'm mostly resigned to it now, though. Maybe I'll get to some of these things someday. I don't know.
When I say I really want cities where drivers and pedestrians, cyclists, people into other modes of transportation can get along. This is a great example of that.
I’d love to live in a place like this. And I think more places should be like this.
Taking lanes away from cars should make traffic worse. But when you combine a road diet with a roundabout, something magical happens— for bikes and cars!Buy...
Oh jeez. I don't suppose anyone here has experience with EAP certificates for RADIUS servers handling Wifi APs? I generated a root key+certificate and a server certificate for FreeRADIUS a couple of years ago and apparently I generated a new cert last year, but I cannot for the life of me figure out where I put the root cert key or how I generated last year's cert. I thought I was using gnomint (and there's a gnomint database right there) but it doesn't seem to have the right root cert and I can't seem to figure out how to generate a new cert in it this year anyway.
So my question is: are there many common Wifi clients that actually need (or benefit from) the CA public key being imported and cert verification turned on for connecting to that AP? If not, maybe it's unlikely any of the users will have turned on verification, in which case I might well be able to get away with just generating a new root key and cert and starting over. If it's common to import the cert and turn on verification I probably ought to keep searching all my computers and servers to see if I can find the flippin root CA key.
Have I mentioned I hate computers? :( I basically hate my chosen line of work, it seems.
in my experience with EAP-TTLS and Apple, even if you important and trust the root, it still asks you to accept a new cert everytime it rotates anyway (usually with a warning it’s untrusted even if the root is trusted for everything else). Windows I don’t think checks, and I know Linux only checks if you explicitly specify it, I can’t speak to anything else though.
If you’re using EAP-TLS, then you absolutely need to have the root trusted, but this is pretty advanced.
@Ghost Ah, thanks. I don't remember for sure which method it's using, but as I'm using a self-generated CA I guess I can't be using EAP-TLS. It's definitely tunnelled as I remember configuring inner and outer authentication methods, that must be what the extra T is in TTLS. So yeah, sounds like I can probably just shove any old certificate in there and not cause more problems than usual. That's reassuring, thank you!
@B4ckBOne No, haven't heard of any of them before and am not planning to change, but thanks. This was all sorted out a month ago and the client isn't complaining any more so I'm not planning to touch it again until next certificate renewal time. Thanks anyway.
*sigh* Well, I've successfully duplicated my nagios monitoring server, which has been hosted at Bytemark for over 16 years, and now have a clone successfully running on my own infrastructure. For the last day or two, notifications and statuses all seem to have been matching between the two so I think I can cross that off the list. (I would prefer to monitor from off-site but this will do for now.)
I have also duplicated my collectd statistics collection server too, but my next job will be to log into 85 separate servers one at a time and reconfigure each one of them to send their statistics to the new server. Then I can copy the rrd archive files over from the old box to the new one and, with any luck, end up with only a reasonably small gap in the graphs. (Then I'll need to log into each of the 85 servers again to stop them sending to the old statistics server!) (Yes, I know there are tools that automate changes like that, but I can't say I trust that kind of automation.)
Then I think the only other things on my Bytemark footprint are (1) several domains still using one of the VMs as a nameserver, and (2) just about everything still using one of the VMs as an NTP server. At least NTP is just a matter of changing DNS and then poking each machine's NTP daemon until it notices the change. The nameserver bit involves changing the notify/transfer topology and adjusting delegations to point to my little DNS CDN, but I think there are only a few dozen domains left to do, so it shouldn't take forever. (Yep, just checked, just 43 domains still secondarying to that server, shouldn't take too long.)
I have just over a week until the smoking remains of Bytemark turn off their VM hosting servers forever. No pressure, then. And they used to be so good.
Oh Fffffffff. Now my primary transit provider has done maintenance and knocked my network offline for (so far) 2×3 minutes and 2×1 minute. I'm absolutely certain the notification a few days ago said midnight-4am 30 January and I had set myself alarms for 29 January to shift traffic to the backup transit before the maintenance, but when I go back to their NOC site to check the notification it now magically says 23 January. WTF.
Oh well, this is the same transit provider that's shutting down their transit service at the end of February and I've been working on finding a replacement in between trying to move stuff away from Bytemark. Ugh. I'm just grateful that my datacentre provider relented about making me migrate everything out of one of my main rack cabinets by 31 December so they could put a cooling unit in its place (their plans changed and I got a temporary reprieve). But there's no way I'm going to get my tax return done on time this year. Just gonna have to pay the fine. Oh well.
It occurs to me, as a person that does some writing, that computers are actually a bad thing in a way. Here's a great example.
J.R.R. Tolkien. A number of books he's written were published after his death because his surviving family found more of his writings that he never published.
If he were a modern writer, anything he hadn't published might just have been lost completely when he died. Because it might have all been done online, or be stuck in some other digital hell.
It makes me think a lot about how permanence matters. And how so much of what we do today is done in the digital world where there is no permanence. How many writers today will write great things that we'll never get to see, because when they die, all their unpublished work will just be lost to the ether with their online accounts and old computers?
@souldessin I've been actually writing in a journal to about the same ends. But learning how to do that is pretty cool. I might have to look up how myself.
I'll always find kinda <weird/funny> how the cross is the symbol of of christianism
I mean, the concept of sacrifice is fancy and all, but imagine dying and the one thing people most remember you by is the thing that killed you and the image of you dying
imagine being shot and almost all images of you include a gun
imagine being stabbed and to honor you people put up images of a knife and carry little depictions of you being stabbed
It's completely different because it's a parody, er, and now I remember that you can't do a parody by just being exactly the thing you parody. Concur; isomorphic.
Also, I notice that it has no concept of the fourth "patch" number used for "oh man I screwed up the packaging AGAIN but it's binary the same crap." There's no need for a parody of that because packaging version is also isomorphic to "oops version."
It’s not just tech bros bending at the knee of #Trump, it seems the American judiciary is too.
In the UK we are familiar with the Divine Right of Kings…it’s been rubbished for several hundred years now, but the US seems to have dredged it up and created the Divine Right of Presidents. This is not progress.
"Is this a prank?"A Los Angeles tech entrepreneur found himself trapped in a self-driving taxi last month on his way to the airport, with the car repeatedly ...
The next sci-fi author that wants to talk about alternate origin stuff should use Xenophyophorea. They're a deep sea organism that grows up to 20cm (8") but they're a single cell. They make specialized shells made selectively of minerals including uranium. We don't know how they reproduce and we can't find them in the fossil record.
now those last two are just a matter of not having observed them enough yet (they hang out half a kilometer down at shallowest!) and we expect they probably reproduce like some other Foraminifera where they use alternation of generations, but we currently don't know for sure.
Clearly it's a perfect chance to write a story about how they're actually biological resource miners sent to collect the volatiles from earth's oceans
after all, we can't find them in the fossil record (though there's theories that some other things we see might be very different ancestors of them), clearly they just showed up shortly before they were first discovered in the 1880s.
a deep sea submersible once collected a spatangoid urchin 3km down that was wearing a cloak of over 200 Xenophyophores. It is unknown if the urchin was specifically collecting them, or the Xenophyophores specifically sought out the urchin to grow on.
they're the dominant organism in parts of the ocean floor. It's been theorized that they are "ecosystem engineers": a creature that significantly impacts a habitat, such as how beavers significantly impact the flow of rivers with their dams.
I'm not SAYING there's an alien macroscopic single-celled radiation-powered thing xenoforming the earth's abyssal plain, but that you could look at the current state of the science and definitely make an argument.
I love it whenever there's a "yeah, nah, we don't know how these creatures work." Like people not knowing definitively how eels reproduce, until recently.
Everyone always wants to say worthy things about the qualities that make a good programmer. But I occasionally think that "a sense of humour" isn't given enough credit.
In programming, you're constantly making mistakes, and being told you're wrong (by code reviewers, bug reporters, and the computer itself). If you let that get you down, you'll quickly find another career.
When I realise I've made a mistake, my reaction is often to find it amusing – smile a bit, maybe laugh out loud, share it with a friend if it's funny enough.
I can't remember how I got that attitude in the first place. Perhaps just luck. But I sometimes think it's the main reason I stuck with what would otherwise be a frustrating profession!
@steckschwein_6502 you could see it that way, but I honestly don't experience the feeling I mean as frustration. It is actual _amusement_, like when you get a joke. The combination of understanding why something seemed sensible to me at the time, and also why it's totally wrong, often has (for me) that same contrast and unexpectedness that makes jokes funny.
I do feel frustration (of course), but more often when I'm failing to come up with a good idea at all, rather than when I do something and it doesn't work.
I understand what you mean. It's fun to finally catch that bug. I think there lies a lot of frustration in the underappreciation of the IT profession. Like when your work only becomes visible when something breaks. And then you are viewed as the culprit, not the bug solving hero. That's when humour comes in handy.
I find it's a really useful habit, or talent perhaps, in playing games too. In person or on computers. If something goes absolutely disastrously horribly wrong I'm almost guaranteed to find it hilariously funny.
@lnr when I was at school, we had a guy come to give us a talk, and he started by saying "I'm going to teach you how to juggle". In fact he discussed the mechanics of juggling not at all – what he taught was a technique for transforming frustration into amusement during the initial phase of learning when you're doing nothing but drop the balls and pick them up again, on the theory that that's why most people give up before succeeding.
His suggestion was: every time you drop a ball, tell yourself a joke, and bend down to pick the ball up just as you get to the punchline, so that you learn to associate picking up balls from the floor with amusement.
(And then he went on from that starting point to apply the same ideas to exam revision, which was the main point of his talk.)
Sadly, I'd already learned to juggle when I heard this talk, so I couldn't test whether the idea worked!
@lnr I remember one juggling teacher who started with "throw the ball up in the air and let it fall to the ground on purpose, several times. That way you won't always associate it with failure when it happens by mistake, which it will a lot."
@diffrentcolours @lnr I think the well-known 'Klutz' guide gives similar advice, but if I remember rightly, their rationale is different: you're going to be doing this a lot, so better get in some practice
@genehack Pretty sure I've told this story here before, but I was once responsible for a team that managed daily log file analysis. For various reasons sometimes some of the necessary log files might be missing when the scheduled job ran, so I built a tool admins could use to rerun the daily analysis after trying to fetch the missing logs. In certain circumstances that tool could restart itself, leading to a subtle bug related to an open filehandle.
I (eventually) found and fixed the bug, and added a Bart Simpson style comment below the bug fix:
#I will always close my filehandles. #I will always close my filehandles. #I will always ...
Months after I left that job, I got a text from somebody still at the company, containing just that code comment. He'd gotten a big laugh out of it.
@fedward @genehack I actually hadn't predicted that this toot would cause people to share their funniest bugs/fixes, but I'm completely happy with that unforeseen consequence
@fedward I have a friend and former coworker who is currently maintaining a stack of bioinformatics/sequence analysis stuff originally developed by ...let's be kind and say, "non-coders", that I completely rewrote during a period of pretty high stress, and he periodically toots out comments that I left behind. It's amusing.
(As a sample, the first line of the project's README.md was "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate"...)
@genehack @fedward I suspect that's a fairly common opening line of terrifying comments, along with variations on 'here be dragons'!
One of my favourite comments I ever wrote occurred when I found an incomprehensible source file, spent an afternoon making sense of it, and since there wasn't an explanation already, wrote up what I'd found in a big comment at the top, with the opening paragraph
"This module is totally incomprehensible without hours of drawing small diagrams and swearing, so I'm going to write a comment for the benefit of the next poor sucker."
The reason I liked this so much was that, ten years later, it turned out that the next poor sucker was Future Me, who was very grateful to Past Me!
you may also have a history of jobs where you could feel safe generally. The first thing we all need is to normalize mistakes and feel like they're ok and part of learning. Laughing at what we've done can't happen when we're afraid for our jobs. Glad you're in a tolerably healthy place, however you got there tho!
totally agree – a workplace that puts you under constant pressure to never make a mistake is utterly toxic. _Especially_ if you feel under that pressure from day 1 when you're still learning your way around, because it's even more obvious that people will make mistakes while learning than that they'll carry on making mistakes once they're up to speed (though both are true).
Not only that, but a workplace of that kind isn't even serving its _own_ interests, because if it's trying to incentivise employees to never make a mistake, what it's really doing is incentivising them to never _look_ as if they make a mistake. So the mistakes get covered up and the company never finds out about all the problems.
Google's new TV's will have built in mics, so your TV will hear you without your direct intervention. gemini "AI" assistant built in. And you no longer have to use a trigger word like “Hay Google" to get it's attention. Basically this means that a Google TV with this trash in it will be always listening and collecting data on every word said within earshot.
Google will use more mics and Gemini AI to get you to talk to your TV https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/6/24337314/google-tv-gemini-integration-ai-ces-2025
Makkora, the bird barbarian boy, charges into battle despite his wounds, collecting unexpected strength and energy thanks to the aid of his ancestral guardians. These spirits not only empower him in combat but also protect him from harm. Among them are ancestors from an ancient time when his species had only wings and no hands, reminder of his lineage.
This piece was created for a charity auction and donated to Nutrias de México, an initiative dedicated to the scientific study and conservation of otters in Mexico. Picture for Flurrabell
Digital. Procreate
There is a short video where I show the time-lapse process of this piece, you can find it on the first comment of this submission on my Telegram art channel: https://t.me/panda_paco Or you can watch the full video, download the full resolution version, and see WIPs and other works by me that I haven't shared publicly yet, at supporting me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pandapaco or Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco Thank you! :D
Atari 130ST and 520ST first public demo from the Winter Consumer Electronics Show 1985, hosted in Las Vegas in January 1985.In it the unknown announcer discu...
My dad has this very old piece of cross-stitch art in his house. Every time I see it I'm struck by how much it anticipated 1990s pixel art on 16-bit micros like the Amiga, simply because the artist was working under similar constraints: a low-resolution grid of square pixels, and a strong incentive to use as few _different_ colours of yarn as possible, with much less constraint on what those colours should be – just as the Amiga and similar machines let you have a palette of 32 colours on screen at once but they could be chosen from a much larger space.
And the artist has used the same stylistic tricks to compensate for those limitations as Amiga artists did, or at least some of them. I could easily imagine someone having drawn this in Deluxe Paint, and perhaps even used it as an interstitial image in the middle of a period-themed Amiga game, with some important plot dialogue subtitled on the bottom.
I keep thinking it would be kind of cool to digitise it back to pixels + palette. But for proper style the result would have to be stored in an IFF ILBM instead of any more up-to-date image format.
I went once to an exhibit of the Gobelins tapestries workshop. Zone women explained that they used scissors blades to get some fluff and thus blur the stitches on diagonal lines. By the XIIth century, someone had discovered antialiasing.
Beautiful, Simon! I’ve been similarly interested in seeing pixel type from the lens of cross-stitch, weaving and knitting patterns, and studying traditional patterns across scripts has been nothing short of revelatory (I even wrote a little something about it last year https://us12.campaign-archive.com/?u=00db3d2423772a3f86d6e22a1&id=4fa7cefeef).
Vaguely remembering that old X11 displays had a similar constraint: there were 256 different colors max, dynamically mapped from a much larger set. Then, when the stuff displayed ran out of those colors, things got literally ugly...
@martinvermeer yes, I started writing X apps myself when that was still a real possibility. Indeed, the GTK version of PuTTY still has code in it to handle that case – search unix/window.c for function calls starting 'gdk_colormap_'! Surely hasn't been tested in years, though.
The standard Amiga GUI (at least in the original A500 days when I had one) just said "Here are the colours you have, use them or make your own separate Screen". X11's idea of trying to let multiple apps _share_ a limited-palette display and ask for the colours they need is much more ambitious!
I remember seeing cross stitch art in the mid eighties, and being confused at how much crossover there was between the super cool futuristic demoscene graphics of the homecomputer underground, and these ultra dorky grandma things.
@pixelambacht I think that this is actually tentstitch or another tapestry stitch rather than cross-stitch.
There were many adaptations of European tapestries onto canvas needlework patterns available from a firm in France in the 1990s. For those, one chose tapestry wool oneself rather than having it come in a kit.
Cross-stitch isn’t the only one that’s natively pixelated.
Even some of the rug hooking patterns that are trending again are very pixelated.
As you've probably already guessed, I'm not remotely an expert on tapestry or any other kind of stitching, and my interest in this kind of design is focused on its relevance to computers, so I just had to make my best guess out of types of stitch I'd heard of.
The use of long (horizontal) threads for the half-tones (as opposed to dithering patterns) also has parallels with compression under RLE (run-length encoding). Not sure if computer artists ever changed their style just for a few bytes under RLE, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ahoySoundtrack is available on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/album/6P6RP2Ad0L4klna5GdiBlIalso on Bandcamp:https://xahoy.b...
there were companies selling these images as kits, and designers working for these companies; it would be great to investigate their choices and processes..
I said in that post that it would be cool to digitise it back to a paletted image suitable for actually loading into Deluxe Paint. I didn't get round to doing it … but someone else did! https://kaberett.dreamwidth.org/ put in a *lot* of effort (more than I would have dreamed of asking for) and sent me a PNG.
I thought the only reasonable thing to do with that was to convert it back to IFF ILBM, transfer it on to an Amiga floppy image, and load it in _actual_ Deluxe Paint. Tada!
But even given a starting PNG, getting it into DPaint was a challenge. (1/8)
.jpg "painting by Johannes Vermeer at Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Germany")
