Tux Machines
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 06, 2023
=> Games: AMD Grows Linux CPU Share, DOSBox in Ubuntu, X-Com: UFO Defense, and Steam | Videos: Ubuntu Mini ISO, PCLinuxOS, Shotcut, and More
A Gemini client* is needed for the following links.
=> ↺ Bombadillo
My friend caiu (🦆) found a floppy drive with her name written on it in her dad's stuff. She had no idea what was on it and gave it to me with a smile. Could I get what's on it? What 1.44MB of mysteries can it hold? I love these kind of challenges and since my laundry room is currently the storage room for our hackerspace's stuff, I had a lot of parts to try to read it, and of course it was out of the question to buy a fancy USB floppy disk drive, so this note is about how I got the files back.
Alright so I found three floppy disk drives, all covered in dust. First issue: they all have IDE ports only, and I don't recognise the power supply port: turns out it's actually a dedicated floppy port that modern PSUs don't have anymore. I don't have IDE-to-something converters so I found the only motherboard in our stuff that have IDE ports and decided to build a computer with it. Of course it has no RAM nor CPU nor anything, but my accomplice Kholah found in his own mess a matching CPU, an Intel Pentium 4 with bent pins — yeah since we got kicked out of our place in Aubervilliers last October, we all have our own pile of electronics cluttering our homes — and I had the antistatic bag holding all our RAM bars (20 of them maybe), and only one had the matching format, whew! 256MB. The motherboard has no video output I can use so I plug a stupid video card with a VGA output and it can use my TV as display. I also have no power button so I'm just shorting it manually using cables and a breadboard. I manage to straighten the CPU pins and successfully plug it. Let's boot it!
Some obersvations on Google's tracking and not always telling
I left my mom to housesit for a couple of weeks; when I came back, my youtube got totally polluted! More on that in a second.
I certainly would never log into youtube; it is way too much fun to see it figuring out who I am (well, not that much fun). Now, I've never used youtube much (an occasional search leading to some tech or cat video...), but lately I've been stuck alone, and needed stimulation. So I've been watching from a couple of TVs - often in the background while I wire-wrap some crap or code some other crap.
And then it was just outrage and ads. Content making you consume as much as possible, content that will make you want to buy lots of makeup and clothes and small useless trinkets and accessories. Content that made you hate yourself in the mirror. Everything was decided by likes and followers. The snarkiest and edgiest comments got the most attention and won the fight. Being seen meant being a target for unwanted images, harassment, doxxing, etc. by someones large fanbase.
=> 180s
I’ve had a couple of 180s in my life.
I went from being a copyright zealot to being a copyright abolitionist (this was in 1999 so most of y’all know me after). I realized the limitless potential of sharing & caring. Copyright abolitionism was also my gateway to anti- and post-capitalist politics.
I went from rules light RPG to rules heavy gradually but pretty early on in our 5e experience. Maybe CoS/ToA era. Having engaged players who are into this playstyle makes all the difference.
=> Forced Password Changes...Really?
Way back in 2006 I wrote about how password changes were a bad idea [0], backed up commentary by Euene Spafford [1]. I'm dismayed that the password change policy is still very prevalent at the corporate level, almost 17 years later. It's an annoying practice for users that needs to stop. Where I work, policy forces use of two-factor authentication but still forces users to change passwords every 90 days. This is completely non-sensical.
=> Killing All Processes When Logging Out
I happened to run the Xfce Task Manager to troubleshoot an unrelated issue. And I noticed that the previous user of my computer had processes running in the background. I thought this was strange because my assumption is that all processes are terminated when a user logs off. In this case, I'm sure the user logged out instead of switching users.
It turns out that Arch Linux and Manjaro have a different default configuration. By default, Arch and Manjaro allow their service manager, systemd, to run in the background after logging off. The reason given is this allows terminal multiplexers--like tmux and screen--to work. So, in my case, it was systemd and a group of child processes that I saw running in the background.
I've been spending a lot of time with older web content recently. Mainly I've been improving the capabilities of Stargate, my proxy that provides a Gemini-to-HTTP gateway, by reading web content via a Gemini client.
. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
=> gemini.tuxmachines.org This content has been proxied by September (ba2dc).Proxy Information
text/gemini;lang=en-GB
