Notices by Chris Siebenmann (cks@mastodon.social), page 10

@GeePawHill Free as in puppy.

I know ZFS is very nifty and all, but I rather wish that all 'ZFS on root' guides for Linux (for regular distributions like Debian) came with a big disclaimer of 'this is for experts, things can go wrong and you will be in a world of pain, consider ext4 for root and ZFS for everything else'.

(I say this as someone who's had his $HOME on ZFS on Linux for what turns out to be almost a decade now.)

@lorddimwit I've assumed that the speakers thing is more 'non-speaker phone use sucks/is too quiet', and once you're doing that you may well not trust that the microphone will pick up your voice from very far away.

Of all the things I expected to be hard in GNU Emacs, getting it to auto-indent the next line when I hit RETURN and/or C-j in Go code was not one of them. This is supposed to be Emacs' core thing! Why am I hitting tab all the time? What have I done to my Emacs and/or what is go-mode doing?

I know it might not make sense, but I'd love a weather site feature that shows how the forecasts for a specific time (eg, tomorrow) have changed over time. What did they think it would be a week ago, a few days ago, etc. Was there a sudden change (as some weather system showed up)? Did they steadily get more optimistic or pessimistic? Etc etc.

It has been '0' days since Firefox decided to put itself into a loop of spamming popups trying to tell me that an update was available, forcing me to switch to another virtual terminal to kill Firefox because there was no other way to get control back.

I wish I could force Firefox to never automatically check, because it screws it up at least half the time.

@lanodan Running Firefox on the remote server will either try to run an entire Firefox over SSH-forwarded X (guaranteed to be much worse than just the remote control protocol) or, at the best, try to do the same slow X property manipulation that I do with a little program[1].

(All browsers can remote control themselves locally, although the mechanism varies. Remote control through X properties works over forwarded X, but not remote control over eg D-Bus.)

1: https://github.com/siebenmann/ffox-remote

To clarify myself: I use SSH-forwarded remote X today, so today I can be on a remote system and feed URLs to my local Firefox via its remote control feature. It is just rather slow over my current DSL link, because it involves a bunch of round trips to manipulate X properties (and it requires a hacked Firefox that uses X-based remote control, which I have for now).

On Linux, Firefox's modern remote control normally uses D-Bus, making it intrinsically local-only AFAIK.

I'm going to have to write a client/server URL opening system that runs over SSH, aren't I. Run the server locally, it SSHs to your remote session and starts the client, which listens for requests to open a URL, passes them to the server, and the server spawns appropriate local Firefox or whatever processes.

I can do this with X, but there are issues, including that Firefox increasingly wants to use D-Bus for remotely opening URLs, not X properties.

Current status: thanks, GNU Emacs and MH-E, for offering spelling correction for the URL in a message I'm reading that I'm trying to click on like GNU Emacs claimed I could. I can't even edit the buffer you're showing me the message in to do spelling changes on it, can't you engage something there?

Current status: poking at MH-E in GNU Emacs for Reasons. I wonder how much of a pain it will be to customize replies and forwarding the way I want them to work.

Also wow is the list of header fields to ignore not complete. (I customized it to take out all X-* headers because life is too short, but then there's eg User-Agent.)

@jef My 'real' (N)MH setup runs everything through a giant sed script[1] to drop a ton of headers, among other things, but I decided not to try to teach MH-E all of that. Or the smaller, more brute force list exmh sometimes uses.

1: I was more inclined to be clever back in the days when I first started writing this sed monstrosity, which was ... a while ago. It should not be in sed. It uses sed tricks. Too many sed tricks.

@glyph I'm a system administrator at a university. The process here is that we have 'company' charge cards that are paid directly by the university, but we generally need manager approval for buying things. So 'approval from manager but no specific reimbursement needed'.

(Getting reimbursed for a charge you accidentally put on a personal card is apparently A Process (and I never want to have to touch it).)

Hot take: packaging open source software is actual work (and is sometimes what we demurely call 'non-trivial' in this field). I say this as a sysadmin who has sometimes had to deal with the results of not packaging software and then not keeping up with the state of the software we didn't package but installed anyway.

(Sure, sometimes you get lucky and the packaging instructions are easy to write (Debian rules, RPM specfiles, whatever Arch uses, etc). And sometimes they aren't.)

This is my face when linux-nfs.org has an expired HTTPS certificate. From Let's Encrypt. That expired in early July.

Well, I guess everyone's automation can break.

The inertia of history is why I have a 'mozilla-hg' directory with a 'gecko-dev' subdirectory in it that is a Git repository. And there's more inertia of history than you might expect, because the reason it's 'mozilla-hg' and not 'mozilla' is that I once pulled Firefox source with CVS, back in the days, until they moved over to Mercurial. So my new Mercurial checkout got put in 'mozilla-hg'.

My phone landline abruptly stopped doing anything today at 16:18, for no apparent reason unless there was a Bell Canada tech in the area at the time (I was at the office). This may be extremely fun because I have third-party DSL and Bell keeps threatening to switch everyone to their "fibre to the home" system, which may not support that. If they force switch me to 'fix' the phone line that they themselves broke, well, I will be unhappy.

I will be missing TBN's annual Picnic ride tomorrow because Bell Canada cannot keep appointments and my DSL Internet is a vital service for me that I'm not willing to take chances with. I am extremely unhappy with Bell Canada at the moment, as you might imagine.

One of the things I am thankful for is that my phone has no-nonsense hotspot/tethering and Linux (Fedora) supports it (over USB, in this case, because that's a lot easier than figuring out Bluetooth on this desktop).

It turns out Bell Canada broke phone service for some amount of my entire neighborhood and they will be 'repairing' it with a forced transition to fibre, which may or may not happen tomorrow but definitely won't happen today. Missing the TBN picnic ride was entirely pointless since the service technician only showed up to tell me this.

I have feelings. You can probably guess what they are.