Danny @danny@fosstodon.org

Dual booting with GRUB2? Go patch your system now. https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/174059

A snippet in a newsletter from Fortune today best sums up the reason for me trying to move away from the FANGs: The market capitalizations of Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple constitute about 15% of the S&P 500.

That was scary. I pruned my docker volumes the other day. Today I couldn't access my containers. I thought I'd nuked my active volumes by mistake. Then I tried sshing to my home server and couldn't reach it.

I visited the server, (which is an old laptop under the TV). Turns out the TV guy who installed our set top box yesterday must have unplugged it.

So all is well, but I learned three lessons:

1) Back up all docker volumes
2) I need a proper server cabinet
3) HBO was worth the hassle

I've been playing around with Portainer.io, which is a Docker container management UI. It makes setting up and playing with containers a lot easier.

Aside from the general collegial atmosphere and the fact that I learn so much from people here, one of the reasons I like Fosstodon is that it practices what it preaches and helps develop the community: https://hub.fosstodon.org/donation-results-round-3. Props to you guys. You don't see this kind of thing on Twitter. If you didn't know about this yet and haven't donated to help keep the site operating, please do consider sending a few bucks their way: https://hub.fosstodon.org/support-us

Does anyone know whether you can integrate Activitypub somehow with a static website?

Turns out that creating custom right-click menu options for files in KDE isn't that hard. You need to create a servicemenu file and store it in the right directory. Now I have a right-click command to automatically convert .mkv files to .mp4 format using ffmpg. That makes it easier to convert phone interviews that my SIP software only records as .mkv. The biggest issue was fiddling with Bash vars and dealing with ffmpeg ideosyncracies. I"m a n00b at both.

Apparently you can now access the personal papers of Charles Bourne, who apparently invented one of the first search engines. https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-bourne-collection-online-search-is-older-than-you-think/

Today's achievement - set up git on my home server and used it as a remote repository to sync between my desktop and laptop. It wasn't that hard and I learned quite a bit about Git along the way from this online book: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2. Bye bye, github account.

I was worried yesterday that the GPU on my month-old PC build was dead. It kept power-cycling and taking the machine down. Turned out it just needed reseating. Now she's working just fine again. She's the most powerful machine I ever owned and I built her from the ground up. I am very proud. Just look at her in all her 16-core, 64Gb, 8Tb-of-SSD-only awesomeness. Ain't she swell?

Visual Studio Code lets you run and debug Python code inside Docker containers so you can set up and run isolated development environments integrated directly with the IDE. I've been playing with it tonight and it's crazy good.

Syncthing really is great. I happily synced around 400Gb between this Manjaro PC and an instance running in a docker container on my home server overnight, without a hitch. Bye bye, Dropbox.

I’ve been teaching my 16 yo about text adventure games on his Windows gaming laptop. I spent the last hour nudging him through The Lurking Horror, which is still one of my favourite games ever. He liked it! But he didn’t recognize the floppy disk ‘save’ icon because he’s never had occasion to use one. It prompted me to install Frotz again on my new Linux rig so I can play it in terminal mode. I really love the old Infocom stuff.

Thanks all. Seems like most ppl favor Manjaro and I do like the rolling distro aspect. Think I’ll give it a shot.

My PC parts arrive this week and I'm building my dream box. That means I also finally get to switch away from macos to Linux as my daily driver. I'm thinking Manjaro or Pop! OS. I like the idea of a rolling release distro. What distro do people here prefer, and why?

Just ordered a PinePhone. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/20/apple-whistleblower-goes-public-over-lack-of-action

A little over four years (four years!) after he passed away, #davidbowie has a new track out. Because only Bowie could. https://www.davidbowie.com/blog/2020/2/6/nuts-available-for-streaming-now

How do people share information about the books they've read and discuss them? Do you just do it bilaterally and privately with individuals you know, or do you use some kind of social tool? It would be nice to know what others here have enjoyed reading. I Just went to access my long-unused Goodreads account, but am thinking twice as I'm not a fan of the Amazon ownership and don't particularly want to give them any of my data.

Yikes! AT&T blocking #Tutanota? https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/att-blocks-tutanota/

Woot! A couple of months ago I donated to the fabulous #Wireguard project. I mailed them to ask for some stickers. Look what arrived today! Thanks guys.