fratermus

between 2AM and 6AM internet would start dropping packets like crazy

about 20 years ago I was remotely troubleshooting a microwave connectivity problem that occurred at a clients workplace about 10pm each night. Lasted about an hour. There was no one at work then but data transfers between their server and the mothership would fail.

One night the client went to the site at night to check an alarm and noticed there was a bobtail truck parked next to the building. The aero deflector attachment on its roof blocked line-of-sight with the tower, causing the problem. He asked the driver to nap at some other location in the parking lot and the problem went away.

I feel crazy for thinking it is correlated to do bad weather, as if that should somehow affect my indoor WiFi quality…

well, if it’s raining more people might stay indoors on their wifi, exacerbating any channel interference problems

ARM is perfect for this, but does Linux play nice with it?

to paraphrase the saying, “Millions of Raspberry Pi can’t be wrong”

When you do aliased commands, can they take arguments? Like to download a playlist with yt-dlp, could i do download-playlist [URL]?

They don’t take arguments in the sense that functions do but in bash at least they are passed on as part of the expanded string. Pasted from bash:

alias argtest='echo arg is'  
argtest foo  
arg is foo  

So yes you could alias your yt-dlp commands and invoke the alias with the URL.

If you have been using Linux for +10 years, what are you using now?

I distro-hopped every few years until about 2015. Since then I’ve been trending toward Debian for everything.

That’s the one I use, too. Works fine.

I’m not certain this is a “leopards ate my face” scenario, as I doubt many had illusions about their survival rate in the first place. Getting out alive would be a nice outcome if it happens:

…signing bonuses of up to $50,000 — life-changing money in a country where average monthly wages remain below $1,000. The incentives go beyond cash, with pledges of debt relief and free childcare for soldiers’ families and guaranteed university places for their children. Criminal records, illness and even HIV are no longer automatic disqualifiers. For many men with little to lose, the front has become an employer of last resort. – source

[emphasis added]

Personal note: my enlistment bonus + GI bill benefits from the 80s would be ~$88k in 2026 money. I wasn’t as desperate as the Russian recruits are but I was, as noted philosopher K. Rock once remarked, “straight out the trailuh”. We weren’t worried about normal shooting war stuff (we were surrounded by and protected by infantry) although there were other scenarios where we’d stop existing rather suddenly. A common remark in the unit was “It doesn’t matter; we’d be vaporized anyhow”. I mention this to illustrate that people can choose paths that others might think of as leopardy. The difference is the leopard folks had illusions to begin with.

I’m honestly regularly shocked at how many people use Chrome on Linux.

I generally prefer to run firefox (ESR) on my debian machines. But I regularly open a couple dozen tabs during a research session and sometimes FF eats eat all my RAM (16GB), then swap, then locks up the machine. If I catch the degradation before lockup sometimes I can kill enough tabs to recover. I had a few of those lockups last month before I got tired of it.

So for now I’ve swapped back to chromium to get around that problem. Same behavior on my part, ~same extensions, but chromium’s RAM usage stays sane.

for the first time someone has contributed to the code. This may seem trivial, but it is important to me

I’d definitely feel good about that!

Seems like self-deportation to a faraway island would be a win-win. Thrive, die, they can do whatever they like with minimal impact on the rest of society.

I don’t know what the rumors were in the 70s, but in the late 80s it was AIDS.

and satanic panic

I just don’t make a habit of visiting any particular website to read it. That’s what the threadiverse is for.

Alternatively: that’s what RSS is for.

I’m a noob and I prefer… Debian?

The beauty of linux is you get to run whatever you prefer. Have fun and be productive in the way you like. :-)

In the past I’ve mainly used XFCE or openbox because of my old hardware. A couple years ago I picked a Debian+MATE image to install on a fresh box and have been using it by default since then.

None of that “touchscreen UI uber alles” BS.

My Mom recently left MAGA. Rest her soul.

Same with both my parents.

While I was helping with my father’s home hospice care he told me that he likes watching Newsmax because “it’s pretty much in the middle”. FFS. He was about 5% conspiracy kook already but really took the bait once he started listening to Rush Limbaugh. Then it was anti-Clinton bumperstickers everywhere, and stuffing crank political into every conversation he could. Went downhill from there.

People fight back against the leopards who ate their faces

1. you’re on a plane, minding your own business
2. a group of radicalized hijackers take over the plane and are determined to crash it
3. some hijackers get queasy about it and either stop participating in the highjack or even start to fight against it
4. [do what with them?]
5. once you land add all the hijackers to the no fly list, prosecute, etc

We are at step 4.

There is no claim or language that indicates it’s anything else.

Agreed, the SSA itself is not making claims that mislead the public.

Police however are prompted up by things like “protect and serve”

I agree that’s a problem.

a lot of other language/guidance/media to be portrayed as protectors, when that’s not necessarily the case.

I don’t want to beat the dead horse, but IMO the public language/guidance/media discourse regarding the SSA is as misleading as “to protect and to serve”.

If I were pushed I might say that the security part of social security is an implied guarantee that it will provide security of some kind. It does bolster financial security for many at the moment, but there is no guarantee it will do in the future.

Yet they demand our obedience and cooperation.

And people willingly bootlick these brave heroes who “f34r for muh life!!!” and start blasting when an acorn falls. Or when they step in front of a moving vehicle.

Police are not required to help you under any circumstances.

When I want to see heads explode I mention

• Warren v District of Columbia (the basis for the situation you mention); and
• that Social Security doesn’t work the way people think
  • there is no personal account that holds your contributions
  • you have no right to get any of your contributions back in your old age – the benefit is defined by Congress and they could make it whatever they want (including nothing)

In both cases one are required by law to pay but the recipient is not required to perform. As they say, “it’s good to the the king”.

No matter what plugin you find that supposedly will do the job, in my experience it is always a PITA that ends up involving a lot of programming.

I had a good experience with jekyll’s wordpress->jekyll import tool. But see below.

I would go for a database-less static site generator like Hugo

Graybeard here, so it’s probably just braindamage specific to me, but I’ve found ruby dependency setup and troubleshooting to be extremely frustrating. Hard for me to wrap my head around.

When jekyll is actually dead (right now it is “only mostly dead”) I’ll change to something that does not require ruby (eleventy?) or just go back to the nineties and do something barebones with gtml or whatever. Already playing with the latter.