Occasionally, I'm reminded just how long we've known we were fucking up the planet. This recording ( is from '61, and before the successful redirection pitting the lower and middle classes against each other, country music singers were singing the same themes as hippies (

There is vastly more difference between high and low quality incense than there is between high and low quality wines or beers.

I was doing a remote system software upgrade and the machine became unresponsive. Now it boots directly into the BIOS. Years ago, I'd have a sinking feeling of disaster. Now, I'm merely exhaustingly annoyed that I have to spend a good chunk of tomorrow with a rescue USB figuring out what fucked the UEFI Configuration, and unfucking it. With any luck it'll only blow a couple of my Sunday hours.

I wonder if morbid fascination is universal? Like, if aliens came to Earth, would they be all, like, "Wittgenstein... yeah, yeah. But tell us more about these _scorpions_."

Which Nostr node software supports all of NIPs required by 0xChat? Several don't.

Recommendations for a next-gen cron? I have a half dozen systems running systemd... and one experiment running dinit. I find myself enjoying dinit immensly. It's incredibly fast, compared to systemd, and a pleasure to work with. However, on that one dinit system, I'm running cron, and I _don't_ like that. I'd forgotten how bad it was; systemd timers are far better. What's a next-gen cron replacement that isn't systemd? That treats non-root users as first-class citizens, acts sanely in an X session, and can load session vars?

Recommendations for people to follow who *don't* talk about zaps, or bitcoin, or cryptocurrencies? There are no end of people to follow for that content; I'd like some other content in my feed.

I fought the IRS' idiotic automated system, and I won. Very few organizations make it so hard to give them money.

I shouldn't be as old as I am and still discovering new vegetables at the grocery. "Ramps?" Really? A new sort of garlic/scallion/green onion thing?? WHERE ARE THESE THINGS COMING FROM‽‽

Someone on Mastodon just posted a discussion titled: "Right of Reply, or: who should be able to reply to your posts on a social network, and how do we technically enforce that?" I'm going to put it out there that people will one day look back and say, "this is the day Mastodon jumped the shark." The first step was this effort to create defederation lists based on subscription to the defederation list; the second was the assertion by some people that, if you run a node, you have some moral obligation to police your users -- the words used were "this was the job you signed up for." This concept of "right of reply" is absurd. You're posting content *publically.* You want the right to selectively silence people responding in the public sphere? You get to talk, they don't? If they don't reply directly to your comment, but reference the comment in a completely separate thread, do you get the right to silence them there? I can't even begin to wrap my brain around the ethical gymnastics needed to justify this, much less the technical impossibility.

No matter how often I see that new grill on BMWs, it never gets any less ugly.

Is the translation bot for posters, or viewers? How does it work?

It'd be nice to be able to find accounts to follow that talked about something other than crypto, or the platform itself. Mastodon went through this phase during the Great Twitter Migration, but it seems especially difficult to find non-navel-gazing accounts.

How many of you keep a file with lists of software options for different purposes? Or when you need something, do you just test every option, choose one, and then stick with it forever? There is so much software, and so frequently new options, I do not remember, e.g., all of the possible image viewers and why I don't use any given one. I have to keep notes, especially on the infrequently used stuff. And sometimes, when I need a tool for a purpose, I get sucked down a rabbit-hole of installing and testing and making notes. I love the work people put into 'Awesome X', and sometimes Wikipedia comparison pages help, but often there's no good alternative to just trying everything yourself; especially when you have unconventional requirements. Open Source begets information overload, and I'd have it no other way. But, boy, does it often prevent me from being productive.

Test content sent by publish.