What an interesting coincidence… That just happens to be the same days that store shelves are predicted to start running dry from Trump’s tariffs.

Why only “most” of the original block characters? There were only 128 characters to begin with, so why did the creator stop?

Haha ok, you got me there!

Where are these lower costs that Trump keeps hallucinating?

Since I’m 57 and have paid some attention to how I’ve changed over the years, perhaps I can add a little insight? Quite frankly, you get tired. I’ve been on the scene since the home computer revolution took off and I’ve seen so many things come and go. It’s not that we can’t learn new forms of communication, etc., but rather that after awhile you start asking yourself why bother when the “next big thing” is going to be another forgotten memory in 5-10 years. It’s not you who are being criticized for wasting items, it’s all the people like you over the years who have collectively wasted so much. Our brains remember all those things and they add up, causing us to fixate on the wrong info (although this last bit isn’t really something that comes with age).

Last night I re-watched The Fifth Element. Afterwards I was thinking about when it first came out in 1997. My god, that’s 28 years ago. I remember things from the 90’s. I remember things from the 80’s and from the 70’s. I remember that after 9/11 the 00’s were boring as fuck. But when you put all of that together, and start thinking about how much you’ve experience… holy hell that’s quite a lot to face squarely. And if I tell you something inappropriate about a co-worker… what? HR will pull me away from the monotony and have a talk with me? Experience tells us what we can get away with, and sometimes it’s fun just to see what people’s reactions are.

So yeah, I’ve observed these things, but I refuse to be pulled down into misery and monotony. Keep yourself busy doing things that you enjoy. Never be afraid to go down the rabbit hole and learn crazy new things. I’m working on assembling a couple swords from parts, looking into bluing some steel pieces I made. And just this week I learned about “rust bluing” which is a crazy concept but is easy to do at home. I learned something new and fun, and I refuse to ever stop learning. I may not care about Instagram or Facebook, but I installed Signal on my phone and I love being able to create my own 3D models and printing them out.

The future is always amazing. Age doesn’t make us care less about it, it just makes us more choosy in what parts are worth investing in. If you don’t want to become a listless old geezer, then don’t… all you need to do is keep enjoying the wonders of the world.

And Trump is probably dumb enough to believe that the characters “MS13” which were added to the photo are actually part of his tattoo.

As discussed elsewhere, the Proud Boys are cowards who hide their affiliation in symbology, while members of MS13 have always had direct and unmistakable tattoos. Since Trump is so deeply ingrained with the Proud Boys, it is believed they are the ones who offered up this laughable symbolic meaning of the tattoos with the theory that since they hide who they are, everyone else must do this also.

If you want to pretend like there’s any hidden symbology to the tattoos, why try so hard to make something that isn’t there? Let’s just stick with the first letter of each tat: MSCS, which could also stand for Master of Science in Computer Science – an aspiring goal for someone who is trying to make a better life for his family. The point is, anybody can make shit up out of nothing and come up with something that “verifies” the answer you wanted, but that interpretation is still meaningless.

Not Calvin specifically, but pretty much all cartoon characters age really slowly, if at all. And since a leap-century only happens once every 400 years, it seemed appropriate enough to match their apparent immortality.

The year 2000 was a century leap-year, therefor Calvin could be 7 now. That would also imply he’s at least 2400 years old by our normal timekeeping.

Didn’t you see the Tesla ad on the Whitehouse front lawn?

This is the Mastodon link, but he is quoting a NYT article (from which I’ll quote the meat)…

https://tech.lgbt/@joshuajfriedman.com@bsky.brid.gy/114321303656287669

Immigration judges are employees of the executive branch, not the judiciary, and often approve the Homeland Security Department’s deportation efforts. It would be unusual for such a judge, serving the U.S. Attorney General, to grapple with the constitutional questions raised by Mr. Khalil’s case. She would also run the risk of being fired by an administration that has targeted dissenters.

“This court is without jurisdiction to entertain challenges to the validity of this law under the Constitution,” Judge Comans said as she delivered her ruling, apparently reading from a written statement.

I was just reading a comment on Mastodon that immigration judges are not actual judges but are employed by the Administration. Which means they can’t even rule on the constitutionality of the information provided – so they’re really nothing but puppets to make the process appear to be legal.

So the next question is… can the ruling be appealed before a real judge?

Ah that’s good. Disk space isn’t an issue here, I have around 105TB of storage, but my desktop is an older machine with only 24GB of memory so being lightweight is somewhat of a requirement.

Agreed on Debian stable. Long ago I tried running servers under Ubuntu… that was all fine until the morning I woke up to find all of the servers offline because a security update had destroyed the network card drivers. Debian has been rock-solid for me for years and buying “commercial support” basically means paying someone else to do google searches for you.

I don’t know if I’ve ever tried flatpaks, I thought they basically had the same problems as snaps?

I’m not sure about other distros, I’ve just heard a lot of complaints about snaps under Ubuntu. Cura was the snap I tried on my system that constantly crashed until I found a .deb package. Now it runs perfectly fine without sucking up a ton of system memory. Thunderbird is managed directly by debian, and firefox-esr is provided by a Mozilla repo so they all get installed directly instead of through 3rd-party software (although I think I tried upgrading Firefox to a snap version once and it was equally unstable). Now I just avoid anything that doesn’t have a direct installer.

That’s a good point… if you can’t read messages and discussions without a login, then it’s not really facilitating public notification.

That’s what I was thinking too… If they’re running Ubuntu then they’re probably installing packages through snaps, and that’s always been the worst experience for me. Those apps lag down my whole system, crash or lock up, and generally are unusable. I run Debian but have run into apps that wanted me to use a snap install. One package I managed to find a direct installer that is rock-solid in comparison to the snap version, and the rest of the programs I abandoned.

Firefox (since it was mentioned) is one of those things I believe Ubuntu installs as a snap, despite there being a perfectly usable .deb package. I applaud the effort behind snap and others to make a universal installation system, but it is so not there yet and shouldn’t be the default of any distro.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… a social media post is NOT an official government communication. I don’t mind it being used in addition to public channels to help spread the word further, but if you are going to use one platform then you should be required to use all of them to ensure all affected people receiving the same information… and I don’t see them posting on Bluesky or Mastodon or even Reddit.

Ah that’s handy to know the status can show more detail for individual interfaces! I still use /etc/network/interfaces to set up each port so systemd shows them all unmanaged. Maybe some day I’ll try switching to that kind of setup.

Where do you find default link files at? There’s nothing relevant under /usr/share/doc/systemd/. I had to do a lot of online reading to find an example of selecting them by the MAC address, and the NamePolicy= line was critical to making it actually work.

I don’t suppose you happen to know of a way for systemd to manage a DSL connection (CenturyLink)? The old pppd setup seems to be getting hammered by systemd for some reason even though there’s no service file for it, but ppp0 refuses to try connecting on the new server until I can log in, stop it, and restart it again. It’s like it is trying to connect way too early in the boot and gets locked up.

But why doesn’t it ever empty the swap space? I’ve been using vm.swappiness=10 and I’ve tried vm.vfs_cache_pressure at 100 and 50. Checking ps I’m not seeing any services that would be idling in the background, so I’m not sure why the system thought it needed to put anything in swap. (And FWIW, I run two servers with identical services that I load balance to, but the other machine has barely used any swap space – which adds to my confusion about the differences).

Why would I want to reduce the amount of memory in the server? Isn’t all that cache memory being used to help things run smoother and reduce drive I/O?

And how does cache space figure in to this? I have a server with 64GB of RAM, of which 46GB is being used by system cache, but I only have 450MB of free memory and 140MB of free swap. The only ‘volatile’ service I have running is slapd which can run in bursts of activity, otherwise the only thing of consequence running is webmin and some VMs which collectively can use up to 24GB (though they actually use about half that) but there’s no reason those should hit swap space. I just don’t get why the swap space is being run dry here.