Stuck in Big Picture Mode in Steam? Here’s How to Exit Big Picture Mode
Steam, the popular gaming platform for Mac, Windows, and Linux, has an optional Big Picture Mode that takes over the screen of their device or computer, and changes the interface quite a bit. If you’re like many Steam users, you may at some point accidentally enter into Big Picture Mode, and then wonder how to … Read More ⌘ Read more

The field near my second home… Walking here reminds me of when I walked here a year and a half ago, debating whether to accept the new job offer. It feels like an eternity ago. But it was a good decision! ⌘ Read more

More data contradicting the existence of “echo chambers”. As I’ve argued many times before, the concept of an echo chamber or information bubble is not real. The podcast below is an interview of an author of a study where they actually intervened and changed the information diet of 20,000 people (with consent!), then surveyed them after three months. They observed essentially no changes to the study subjects’ beliefs and attitudes. They also observed that the typical person, while they tend to gravitate towards people with similar political leanings, only get about 50% of their content from such like-minded people. They get the rest from neutral sources and maybe 20% from non-like-minded people.

Varied information diet + No change in attitudes when information diet is forced to be different = no echo chamber.

Listen to the podcast episode here

On Wisdom
We come across much “wisdom” throughout our lives. Inherited from people from old, past periods, or from religious books and teachings, or from our parents—for those, like me, lucky enough to had had good ones. It seems that just about everyone, from yesterday to today, has some wisdom to convey: from world leaders, religious leaders, and the common folk amongst us. Some of their “wisdom”, depending on the nation, or ethnic group, or religion, or another myriad of small factors, tends to contradict itself.

Now, wh … ⌘ Read more

The #opentofu name is not that great… AFAIK it has nothing to do with Trust On First Use. I don’t love overloading terms like this. ⌘ Read more

AWS: Cannot Escape IPv4

more than 90% of all AWS service API endpoints do not support IPv6

Sounds like AWS is instituting an IPv4 tax soon.

Snikket: State of Snikket 2023: Funding
As promised in our ‘State of Snikket 2023’ overview post, and teased at the end of our first update post about app development, this post in the series is about that thing most of us open-source folk love to hate… money.

We are an open-source project, and not-for-profit. Making money is not our primary goal, but like any business we have upstream expenses to pay - to compensate for the time and specialist work we need to implement the Snikket vision. To do that, we need income.

T … ⌘ Read more

going thru my own old drawings, exploring those distant worlds, like an archaeologist. tracing origins and evolutions #draw #art #trip #mind

funny how looking at someone’s sketchbook might very well be like looking at an entire hidden world #art #draw #trip #phyilosophy

How Google Authenticator made one company’s network breach much, much worse | Ars Technica

🤦‍♂

WHY are these big companies treated as though they are the be all and end all of infosec? These are rookie mistakes Google’s making, at scale.

Unfortunately Google employs dark patterns to convince you to sync your MFA codes to the cloud, and our employee had indeed activated this “feature”. If you install Google Authenticator from the app store directly, and follow the suggested instructions, your MFA codes are by default saved to the cloud. If you want to disable it, there isn’t a clear way to “disable syncing to the cloud”, instead there is just a “unlink Google account” option.

Like, never ever put your multi-factor tokens into a single cloud storage location! The whole point of this being “multi” factor is that there is a separate, independent physical factor involved in the authentication process. If the authenticator app on your phone puts the tokens in the cloud, then it reduces the security that comes from having a second factor. This is basic stuff.

Of course, never ever use Google Authenticator. All it does is generate TOTP and HOTP codes, which you can do with any OTP app, preferably an open source one that’s been vetted.

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

The USENET management committee has reconvened and there are green shoots of growth in the original, pre-World Wide Web social network.

I like FIDO2 as a replacement for passwords. But you gotta keep track of the little dongle

a bit like deep sea vents, former landfills and scrapyards now host all kinds of machine life - carefully fenced in lest they develop an appetite for the surrounding cities, and occasionally visited by hunters and scavengers

@prologic@twtxt.net thank you! Yup, a full half century. Quite weird feeling. I feel like I’ve finally earned my curmudgeonly personality 😆

@mckinley@twtxt.net I do the ls thing regularly. I even do it after I’ve already lsed the directory but have run some other command afterwards. I tend to think of it like the LOOK command in text adventures.

Hovsa det var i dag, at vi skulle holde Mastodon Meetup.

Vi mødes i aften kl 19 på People Like Us (Jagtvej). Jeg tager nogle Nørrebro.space stickers med.

Boost gerne. Vi ses! ⌘ Read more

With no crop or pasture, Allie wondered if flowers were the blooming solution
Planting flowers in the middle of a drought doesn’t seem like the obvious choice to diversify but this family has said goodbye to sheep and hello to hundreds of Geraldton wax plants. ⌘ Read more

The XMPP Standards Foundation: The XMPP Newsletter August 2023
Welcome to the XMPP Newsletter, great to have you here again! This issue covers the month of August 2023.
Many thanks to all our readers and all contributors!

Like this newsletter, many projects and their efforts in the XMPP community are a result of people’s voluntary work. If you are happy with the services and software you may be using, please consider saying thanks or help these projects! Interested in supporting the Newsletter team? Read more … ⌘ Read more

“fail forwards.” I like that.

Fedi is like email ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I use the gmail webapp for work, and I have to say that over the years it’s gotten less and less usable. There are so many little usability things that it’s bad at. For instance, if you select a message and hit the Delete key nothing happens. The message is not put in the trash like you’d expect. There are issues like that scattered all over the app. I suspect they spend most of their energy on the spyware side of gmail and dedicate less to making it a useful app for end users (which seems to be true of their search engine too).

@adi@twtxt.net I think it is, and one benefit they have is that you can add third-party repositories to the F-Droid app as you discover them. So, for instance, if you know of a developer who pushes builds to an F-Droid compatible repository, you can add that to your F-Droid app and start tracking updates like you would for any other app in there. Can’t do that with Google Play!

F-Droid tends to focus on open source applications that can be built in a reproducible way, which limits the inventory (though of course tends to mean the apps are safer and don’t spy on you). There are non-free apps in there as well but they come with warnings so you’re informed about what you might be sacrificing by using them.

That said if you have a favorite app you get through Google Play, there’s a decent chance it won’t be in F-Droid. Many “big corporate” apps aren’t, and vendor-specific apps tend not to be either. But for most of the major functions you might want, like email clients, calendar apps, weather apps, etc etc, there are very good substitutes now in F-Droid. You’re definitely making a trade-off though.

What I did was go through the apps I had installed on my last phone, found as many substitutes in F-Droid as I could, started using those instead to see how they worked, and bit by bit replaced as much as I could from Google Play with a comparable app from F-Droid. I still have a few apps (mostly vendor-specific things that don’t have substitutes) that come from Google Play but I’m aiming to be rid of those before I need to replace this phone.

@adi@twtxt.net oh yeah, no doubt. I just like to keep an eye on these things because I hate being blindsided.

Here it’s 6.40 am. I like to get my twts done early

@jmjl@tilde.green I’m sorry that I’m not super knowledgeable about alternatives to jmp.chat but I’ll tell you what I know.

You’re probably right about jmp.chat not working for you, at least as it is now. You can only get US and Canadian phone numbers through it last time I checked, so if you’re not in either of those countries you’d be making international calls all the time and people who wanted to call you would be making international calls too.

I’ve seen people talk about using SIP as an intermediary: you can bridge SIP-to-XMPP, and bridge SIP-to-PSTN (PSTN = “packet switched telephone network”, meaning normal telephone). You can skip the SIP-to-XMPP side if you’re comfortable using a SIP client. I don’t know very much about SIP or PSTN so I am not sure what to recommend, but perhaps this helps your search queries.

There are a fair number of services like TextNow that let you sign up for a real telephone number that you can then use via their app (I wouldn’t use TextNow–they had tons of spyware in their app). I don’t know if that kind of service works for you but if it does perhaps you’d be able to find one of them that isn’t horrible. This page (https://alternativeto.net/software/jmp-chat/) has a bunch of alternatives; I can’t vouch for any of them but maybe it’s a starting point if you want to go this route.

Good luck!

@mckinley@twtxt.net Yes, I’m still with jmp.chat, and still very happy with them overall. Their beta period ended and their pricing increased a bit, so that’s worth a bit of consideration. I also managed to get one of their eSIMs. I’m slightly less happy with that aspect of their service, though they seem to be actively working on improving it and I knew in advance this was an early beta kind of thing and likely to have issues.

The only unreliability with calls that I’ve noticed was traceable to the unreliability of my own internet connection. I’ve confused incoming calls by simultaneously making and taking calls from the computer and the phone, but I think it’s understandable that problems might arise and that’s not a real use case for me. Once or twice I did not receive a text transcription of a voice mail, but the support is usually quick to address things like that.

I host my own XMPP server and have for a good decade now, and that’s what I use with jmp.chat. I can’t speak to the quality of their hosting options.

Group texting works fine for me if one of the other parties initiates the group text. I haven’t tried to initiate my own group text in well over a year; last time I did, it didn’t work. That may or may not be a problem for you, and it may or may not have been fixed by now. Worth investigating more if it’s important. I should also say I’ve only ever used group texts with 3 participants, and can’t speak to what happens if there are more nor whether there are upper limits.

Group texts don’t use MUC. Rather, they use a special syntax in the JID, something like “+1XXX,+1YYY,…,+1ZZZ@cheogram.com”, where the + and , are required, the XXX, YYY, through ZZZ are the phone numbers (no dashes or other special chars just digits), and the @cheogram.com at the end is required.

I recommend the cheogram app if you’re on android. It has a lot of nice features on top of the Conversations base. I use gajim on my (linux) computer and it works well with jmp.chat.

I’m happy to answer other questions if you have them!

Early here, not yet 7am, I like to get everything done before the posse

Pronunciation
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Pronunciation
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In my second apartment, I really like sitting in the winter garden (more some kind of balcony or loggia but with windows) in the evening and looking outside. The neighbors aren’t very close, and you can see the sky well. It’s very relaxing to sit here in the dark, thinking and enjoying the time. ⌘ Read more

Sea Lemon – Breakdown
On the verge of the release of her stunning Stop At Nothing EP (coming this Friday!), Seattle’s Natalie Lew aka Sea Lemon follows up her previous instant dream-pop classics “Cellar” + “Vaporized” with another gem from the new record, a hazy and wistfully bittersweet duet with like-minded dream pop auteur Day Wave… Continue reading… ⌘ Read more

I saw a report today that the number of wrong-way driving incidents in the UK has risen by 13% in the last year. As an American who drove in England for the first time this May, I’d like to officially apologize for my contribution to 12 of those 13 percentage points.

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net No, Google does not predict this. “Google AI” has been self-promoting like this for decades. Remember when they used to brag that they could predict the onset of flu season weeks before it started? That silently went away because they got it badly wrong many times and people caught on to how bad their “predictions” actually were.

They can’t stop themselves. Anything about AI coming out of big tech companies these days is marketing, not real, and certainly not science.

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net because of course they have.

Emily Bender, a computational linguistic and excellent critic of this generative AI nonsense, uses an analogy of an oil spill to characterize what is happening as a result of generative AI. It’s polluting the world with false information, false images, false “academic” articles, false books. The companies that create this stuff are not cleaning up their misinformation spill; they’re letting the mess spread all over. It’s being used to commit crimes, and that’ll only get worse. Just like an out of control oil spill will destroy entire ecosystems.

Writing Long Form Content With Obsidian
An evaluation of the viability of using Obsidian for long form content as opposed to tools like MS Word, Google Docs, & Scrivener. ⌘ Read more

I think I’m like a battery and I have maybe a hundred units of energy every day and every time I go up and down the stairs here one unit is drained from me.

Car Wash
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Car Wash
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The XMPP Standards Foundation: The XMPP Newsletter June & July 2023
Welcome to the XMPP Newsletter, great to have you here again! This issue covers the month of June & July 2023.
Many thanks to all our readers and all contributors!

Like this newsletter, many projects and their efforts in the XMPP community are a result of people’s voluntary work. If you are happy with the services and software you may be using, please consider saying thanks or help these projects! Interested in supporting the Newsletter te … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net hmm, bummer. I was hoping that translating the docker commands to podman syntax would work but it looks like it’s more subtle than that. Thanks for trying!

The weird thing was I wasn’t getting errors like that on my end when I tried it. podman thought the connection was created, and it set it as the default. But I don’t think it was sending anything over the wire. When I have more time to tinker with it maybe I’ll play around and see if I can figure out what’s up.

@prologic@twtxt.net what do you mean when you say “Docker API”? There are multiple possible meanings for that. podman conforms to some of Docker’s APIs and it’s unclear to me which one you say it’s not conforming to.

You just have to Google “podman Docker API” and you find stuff like this: https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/podman-rest-api

Podman’s REST API consists of two components:

• A Docker-compatible portion called Compat API
  
• A native portion called Libpod API that provides access to additional features not available in Docker, including pods
  

Or this: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-system-service.1.html

The REST API provided by podman system service is split into two parts: a compatibility layer offering support for the Docker v1.40 API, and a Podman-native Libpod layer.

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t get your objection. dockerd is 96M and has to run all the time. You can’t use docker without it running, so you have to count both. docker + dockerd is 131M, which is over 3x the size of podman. Plus you have this daemon running all the time, which eats system resources podman doesn’t use, and docker fucks with your network configuration right on install, which podman doesn’t do unless you tell it to.

That’s way fat as far as I’m concerned.

As far as corporate goes, podman is free and open source software, the end. docker is a company with a pricing model. It was founded as a startup, which suggests to me that, like almost all startups, they are seeking an exit and if they ever face troubles in generating that exit they’ll throw out all niceties and abuse their users (see Reddit, the drama with spyware in Audacity, 10,000 other examples). Sure you can use it free for many purposes, and the container bits are open source, but that doesn’t change that it’s always been a corporate entity, that they can change their policies at any time, that they can spy on you if they want, etc etc etc.

That’s way too corporate as far as I’m concerned.

I mean, all of this might not matter to you, and that’s fine! Nothing wrong with that. But you can’t have an alternate reality–these things I said are just facts. You can find them on Wikipedia or docker.com for that matter.

@prologic@twtxt.net @jmjl@tilde.green
It looks like there’s a podman issue for adding the context subcommand that docker has. Currently podman does not have this subcommand, although this comment has a translation to podman commands that are similar-ish.

It looks like that’s all you need to do to support podman right now! Though I’m not 100% sure the containers I tried really are running remotely. Details below.

I manually edited the shell script that cas.run add returns, changing all the docker commands to podman commands. Specifically, I put alias docker=podman at the top so the check for docker would pass, and then I replaced the last two lines of the script with these:

podman system connection add cas  "host=tcp://cas.run..."
podman system connection default cas

(that … after cas.run is a bunch of connection-specific stuff)

I ran the script and it exited with no output. It did create a connection named “cas”, and made that the default. I’m not super steeped in how podman works but I believe that’s what you need to do to get podman to run containers remotely.

I ran some containers using podman and I think they are running remotely but I don’t know the right juju to verify. It looks right though!

This means you could probably make minor modifications to the generated shell script to support podman. Maybe when the check for docker fails, check for podman, and then later in the script use the podman equivalents to the docker context commands.

@prologic@twtxt.net hmm, now I get this:

$ ssh -p 2222 -i PRIVATE_GITHUB_KEY GITHUB_USERNAME@cas.run add | sh
sh: 135: docker: not found

The quickstart says:

## Quick Start

  ssh -p 2222 cas.run add | sh

so that’s why I tried this command (I had to modify it with my key and username like before)

Edit: 🤦‍♂ and that’s becasue I don’t have docker on this machine. Sorry about that, false alarm.

Another part of this crisis is that I like the idea of what I was doing with gemini, but the main issue here is that hosting from my house when my internet is terminated every month for 10-15 days is a problem. Not just for my sanity, but also for reliability

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net hello @prologic@twtxt.net here’s another feed that’s spewing multiple copies of the same post. This one above is repeated 8 times. @awesome-scala-weekly@feeds.twtxt.net now has 13 copies of each post every week. This definitely looks like a bug in whatever code is generating these feeds, because the source feeds don’t have multiple copies of the original posts:

• Has 8 copies of the above post: https://feeds.twtxt.net/New_scientist/twtxt.txt
  
• Has only 1 copy of the above post: https://www.newscientist.com/feed/home/
  

I forget whether I filed an issue on this before, but can you tell me where I should do that?

Pinellas County - Long run: 10.70 miles, 00:11:36 average pace, 02:04:13 duration
had a lot going against me today (all self inflicted). got about 4h30m of sleep with too much to drink late in the evening. no hangover or anything, but probably didn’t help my rest nor hydration. also it was supposedly 80F with a feels like of 93F when i started and 89F with feels like of 111F when i finished. the legs felt heavy and didn’t have the energy to up the cadence and sustain it. it was definitely nice to get out but just one of those days.
#running

This is what a StarTalk Live show looks like 🎤 #neildegrassetyson href=”https://we.loveprivacy.club/search?q=%23startalk”>#startalk** ⌘ Read more

💻 Issue 375 - Go-like channels in Scala: receive, send, and default clauses ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net attacking the person, not the idea. It’d be like if you said “yarn is better than mastodon because it isn’t push based” and someone who disagreed with you said “well you think that because you’re an idiot” or something like that.