• 0 Posts
  • 60 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle

  • I’m hoping for MacroSD. About the size of a 3.5" floppy so you won’t lose it easily.

    Seriously, it’s interesting that now that we have the tech to make a useful-capacity storage device the size of a credit card, we don’t. Not like those crappy giveaway flash drives printed with a card design, where they had a captive USB head and were 4x as thick as a card, but something with just contacts like a chip card, so you might need to use an external reader but it really preserves the wallet-size concept.

    I’d love to have a cheap 16GB card in my wallet with all my health records and a cryptographically signed copy of my will as a one-stop, no cloud required, emergency kit.




  • Runit works well enough for me; I’ve only added one nonstandard service (launch a custom tool to drive an external stats display) and it works fine. My ,xsession has to load some polkit and pulseaudio stuff but that could be because I’m not using a full desktop like KDE/GNOME/XFCE that do those things for you.‘’

    I don’t really try to do custom package recipes because I tend to ./configure;make;make install stuff I want at random.

    EFI boot is no problem. I think my root is btrfs, but the /boot/efi is vfat. Refind is pretty first-class, but sometimes it has stupid conditions where it tries to default to the wrong kernel version if you have multiples installed (I think it sorts by timestamps or filenames in a way that sometimes work counterintuitively; discarding old kernels largely fixes it)

    Haven’t really had too many showstopper problems with xbps. I probably sledgehammer it a bit-- occasionally when it says a repo certificate is out of date, I usually end up doing a full update rather than selectively upgrading packages.





  • I tried pulling in the theming from there, and while it works miracles, I still want to do the three-headed dragon meme:

    • Real Motif apps
    • Qt5 apps (where there’s a Motif-like theme baked in)
    • GTK apps, which don’t honour the same fonts and the theme is far more divergent from the “real deal”

    There are a few other “Solaris 9” and “Perl Tk” lookalike themes that also come close, but they’re all sabotaged by GTK’s lack of bitmap font support (The old bitmap Helvetica is my go-to UI font)




  • American security guarantees are the only thing propping up that stupid narrative.

    They’ve always made the claim “TSMC will blow up their own fabs in the event of an invasion”. So, they’re dependent on a lose/lose spite play. If an independent Taiwanese state survives, they’ve demolished one of its major economic engines. If, as far more likely, it falls, everyone involved gets locked up or worse for gross sabotage, and you bought, what, 5 years of global economic distress (oh, no, it might pop the AI bubble…) before everyone else gets back to par with your top-line process? Or maybe you successfully blackmailed bigger and more equipped militaries to fight WWIII for you, and even in the unlikely event Taiwan survives the carnage intact, irradiated corpses buy very few semiconductors.

    If America washed their hands of the situation, they’d pretty quickly switch to angling for a deal, perhaps expecting that they’d go for a HK-style “one country/two systems” play, which continues to let them make out like bandits. HSBC doesn’t seemed to have suffered too badly after reunification…






  • The experience could be somewhat tamed by a lottery process.

    Accept a token deposit for a week or two, and then draw from people contending for a given seat, then give them another week to pay the balance. Any unclaimed seats are put up at will call night-of-the-show. Limit the number of deposits taken from any given card to prevent “I’ll claim 30 seats and only buy 1” gaming of the lottery.

    There’s probably some more complexity about it (if you want N seats together), but I think that would dramatically cut back on the frustration for “the tickets were only available for 14 seconds and the server was being DDOSed by scalper bots.”

    Having to put down a deposit with no guarantee of a ticket also makes “buy All The Seats” scalping theoretically impossible and economically riskier. If there’s 5/1 contention for a ticket, you’d have to find a way to get 3 lottery slots for a better than even chance of getting it. If the deposit was $10, you’re spending $30 for the chance to buy a $50 ticket-- so if you can’t resell the ticket for at least $80, you lose. Under current policies, if you can sell that $50 ticket for $51, you’re ahead.



  • Also on modern firebreathers.

    I like runit better than systemd, the packages are current, and it has most of what I want in the main repos.

    I also found the documentation excellent in thst it’s a cohesive list of real-world topics rather than a 500-km-deep wiki or forum archive.

    I should try a modern Slackware one day. I loved it back before I had broadband and just ordered a burned CD for each new release, but I should try following -current and the Slackbuilds stuff.


  • We get, for some reason, a huge number of window replacement contractors coming door-to-door. Because I really want to be high-pressure sold $10k worth of low quality glass from the people who are running big enough marhins to put a full page colour ad in the local newspaper every day to go with their 6 hours a day of local TV spots.

    I actually said to one “We’re a Linux household. Not interested in Windows” and slammed the door on them.

    I now realize cocking a rifle would have made the effect even better.