It’s not pointless, but needlessly silly: as part of the alarm system, in addition to the standard siren, the home audio system turns on and plays Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” at full volume.

At 7pm on school nights, one of a number of versions of “Hushabye Mountain” is played, if music isn’t already playing.

Ooooh! Totally not useless, but I have a version of this.

I have a cheap, but powerful, amp for the home audio system, and discovered it burns out if left perpetually on (yeah, I’m on my third). So I got a wall switch that’s turned off after 10 minutes of no audio streaming to that snapclient.

All year? Please tell me “Halloween eyes” is just “scary eyes” and that you do this all year.

Interesting. Our sensors don’t see the cats. Unless I place once of the basement ones directly opposite the stairs; it can apparently see them if they’re a couple of feet away at sensor eye level.

But the one that sees people in the kitchen doesn’t see the cats on the counters when they get up there in the night.

I think if they saw the cats, I’d have to figure something else out, because our’s get everywhere.

That’s a lot of bloom for a little guy!

My recommendation is to put all of the variables in an environment file, and use systemd’s EnvironmentFile (in [Service] to point to it.

One of my backup service files (I back up to disks and cloud) looks like this:

[Unit]
Description=Backup to MyUsbDrive
Requires=media-MyUsbDrive.mount
After=media-MyUsbDrive.mount

[Service]
EnvironmentFile=/etc/backup/environment
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/restic backup --tag=prefailure-2 --files-from ${FILES} --exclude-file ${EXCLUDES} --one-file-system

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.timer

FILES is a file containing files and directories to be backed up, and is defined in the environment file; so is EXCLUDES, but you could simply point restic at the directory you want to back up instead.

My environment file looks essentially like

RESTIC_REPOSITORY=/mnt/MyUsbDrive/backup
RESTIC_PASSWORD=blahblahblah
KEEP_DAILY=7
KEEP_MONTHLY=3
KEEP_YEARLY=2
EXCLUDES=/etc/backup/excludes
FILES=/etc/backup/files

If you’re having trouble, start by looking at how you’re passing in the password, and whether it’s quoted properly. It’s been a couple of years since I had this issue, but at one point I know I had spaces in a passphrase and had quoted the variable, and the quotes were getting passed in verbatim.

My VPS backups are more complex and get their passwords from a keystore, but for my desktop I keep it simple.

I hope this isn’t a step towards replacing the native app with an SPA.

It absolutely would be. It is, on the other hand, occasionly useful to be able to pop in and change a config file, many of which are actually Turing complete languages. What I do far more often, though, is SSH into remote, headless servers and write code there, which is exactly the same as doing it from a phone, only much more comfortable.

That’s the plain text editor Helix. In a terminal. Over ssh. On my phone. Which I can do because I’m not using a dumb IDE.

This seriously got an out-loud chuckle from me. It’s funny, because it’s true! Thanks!

Sourcehut also supports Mercurial, so you also have an option to the herd mentality.

Sourcehut also has zero, or almost zero, JavaScript in the interface, so it doesn’t suck

Sourcehut is also componentized, so you can mix and match the pieces you want or need:

• VCS hosting
• masking list management
• issue management
• build server
• man server

Sourcehut is by far the best hosted VCS option at the moment. The Mercurial support alone puts it miles ahead of the others, which are all hobbled by tight coupling to git.

Are China Parties like Tupperware Parties, where friends get together and one shills a pyramid scheme? That’s what CP is, right?

E2E usually suffers from the same thing HTTP does: the MITM might not be able to read what you’re saying, but they know who you’re saying it to, and they may know in what context. This is a lot of information that can be used in profiling.

So you end up with systems like SimpleX, where everyone has a different UID for every contact, but that has its own problems, as anyone who’s used systems like that are aware. We haven’t really solved making that a good user experience for messaging; I don’t see it translating to broader social media any time soon.

Nostr has some really good specs and tooling that neatly addresses these topics, including great cryptography support, signing, ad-hoc IDs, and an entirely voluntary simple naming lookup; it doesn’t exactly solve zooko’s triangle, but it provides a toolset sufficient to mix and match characteristics for whatever your threat model is. Sadly, Nostr is utterly dominated by the crypto crowd (and is associated with some controversial personalities), and even if you’re not cryptocurrency-hostile, it’s a really dull echo chamber with little other content that has prevented people who might otherwise build interesting platforms in it from doing so.

Mastodon was around for ages before (the in practice centralized) Bluesky; why did it take Bluesky to open a mass exodus from X?

This is a hard problem to solve. Throwing E2E at it doesn’t make it easier; it’s just tossing a buzzword in.

Why don’t you like LDAP? OpenLDAP is a PITA (necessarily, I guess, to be considered “enterprise”), but lldap has been pretty nice to me. I mean, it’s the identity protocol, it’s just that the server software has been complex until relatively recently.

What would you use instead? A SQL DB with some custom schema, that just re-invents LDAP?

I like the motivation behind this, but have a allergy to running critical infrastructure like authentication on node.

To each their own, though, and good luck with the project. Diversity is life.

Are you really ready to trust it? I use DDG’s agent frequently, when my query-fu fails, but I’ve gotten bogus, outright lies in response. They are good for helping me reframe my questions for the regular search engine. I don’t think I’d rely on LLMs yet for technical guidance.

In dealings with current LLMs I’m regularly reminded of the old truism: “it’s better to spend ten years looking for the right teacher, than to spend ten years learning from the wrong one.”

Have you tried solutions like “thefuck”? Maybe a non-LLM shell helper would be safer, and be less likely to teach you wrong or bad solutions.

So, basically: always horny. That scans.

I thought it was the opposite: dangerous situations kicked the hormones into overdrive?

My wife is 2 inches shorter than I (6’) am. When she’s feeling girlie, she can snuggle up, but in 4 inch heels her legs go on forever and she towers.

She’s got the best of both worlds, and consequently, so do I.

I think the laptop really does matter, and it’s because chipsets are not all equal in how well their sleep modes are supported in the OS.

I’ve been buying XPS13s for over a decade; I’ve had four (three personal, and one requisitioned for me by my job), and sleep and suspend have worked almost flawlessly on them under Linux. In the office, most everyone else would move between meetings or to their desks with the lids almost closed, to prevent sleep and the problems it caused, but I’d just fearlessly close my lid; it was ironic to me that running Linux on the XPS I had more reliable sleep behavior than the Windows people on their laptops.

For OP: low power, initialization, and restoring state has to be implemented by each chip, and there are a lot of shitty, poorly implemented chips. Then the OS also has to store and restore state for each chipset, and even if the chip implements it well, the OS has to do a good job restoring power in the correct order and restoring the state for each chip. If anything goes wrong in either the chip or driver implementation, you get a broken state.

This is aggravated by the fact that Linux is a monolithic kernel, and if any device drivers get borked it usually borks the whole kernel. This wouldn’t be as bad a problem if Linux were a microkernel architecture and drivers could just be killed and restarted.