mckinley

twtxt.net

A guy on the internet. https://mckinley.cc/

Recent twts from mckinley
In-reply-to » @bender Standard twtxt is a microblog in its purest form. A blog, but smaller. It's just a list of posts to read, and that's an echochamber in the same way my regular blog is an echochamber. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

@bender@twtxt.net Makes sense. We definitely need the ability to mute feeds from the Discover feed.

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In-reply-to » QOTD: How do you back up your files?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I remember your solution. It’s very simple, I like it.

Yes, my backup target is my home server. I have a hard drive dedicated to Restic repositories. It’s still not a real backup as I don’t have anything offsite but it’s better than my previous solution. I had two very old hard drives I kept plugged in to my desktop PC and I would (on very rare occasion) plug in another hard drive and copy all the files over to it. Luckily, I’ve never suffered any significant data loss and I would rather not start now. Once I have automated backups on each of my machines, the next project is getting those backups offsite.

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In-reply-to » @bendwr and I discussing something along the lines of: Media I.e: How to deal with or reduce noise from legacy feeds.

@prologic@twtxt.net I think one-way feeds are okay and we shouldn’t discourage them so strongly. On the other hand, I think it’s the duty of a poderator to filter out feeds that are just noise from the Discover feed. I definitely consider a truckload of one-way posts mostly in another language to be noise. Did you get rid of Gopher Chat too? I’d call that noise, for sure.

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In-reply-to » @prologic Your position doesn't make any sense: it's closing down and arbitrarily limiting the use of the Twtxt protocol. One more reason not to use https://twtxt.net/

@bender@twtxt.net Standard twtxt is a microblog in its purest form. A blog, but smaller. It’s just a list of posts to read, and that’s an echochamber in the same way my regular blog is an echochamber. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

@prologic@twtxt.net I support the delisting of ciberlandia.pt in the Discover feed due to the sheer volume of posts from there and the fact that most of them are in Portuguese with this being a predominantly English-language pod.

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In-reply-to » @bendwr and I discussing something along the lines of: Media I.e: How to deal with or reduce noise from legacy feeds.

@prologic@twtxt.net Why do we need to avoid posting to the void? That’s pretty much what twtxt was made for. I don’t like the “Legacy feed” terminology, either. I support the delisting of ciberlandia.pt but I think this change is heading in a bad direction.

I like @sorenpeter@darch.dk ’s suggestion. It gives the users the information and lets them make their own decision instead of putting a big scary warning in their face. That’s what Microsoft does, and we shouldn’t be Microsoft.

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QOTD: How do you back up your files?

I asked this one almost a year ago and I started using Restic shortly after that. When I started, I was only backing up my home folder to the repository over NFS. Now, I’m backing up the entire root filesystem to a repository using the REST backend so I can run Restic as root without breaking the permissions.

I’m working on automating it now and I’m trying to come up with something using pinentry but my proof-of-concept is getting pretty obtuse. It will be spread out in a shell script, of course, but still.

systemd-inhibit --what=handle-lid-switch restic --password-command='su -c "printf '"'"'GETPIN\n\'"'"' | WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-1 pinentry-qt5 | grep ^D | sed '"'"'s/^D //'"'"'" mckinley' --repository-file /root/restic-repo backup --exclude-file /root/restic-excludes --exclude-caches --one-file-system /

I’m curious to see how everyone’s backup solutions have changed since last year.

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In-reply-to » Bitwarden is truly excellent. Highly recommend

I use KeePassXC because I really only use one device. I imagine it would be challenging to rsync the database around if I needed my passwords on more machines. It’s probably fine if you’re deliberate enough, but I don’t think it would take long before I’d lose a password by editing an outdated version of the repository and overwriting the main copy.

I like the simple architecture of Pass, and it would indeed lend itself well to a Git repository, but I don’t like that service names are visible on the filesystem. pass-tomb might mitigate this somewhat but it seems messy and I don’t know if it would work with Git without compromising the security of the tomb.

What’s so good about Bitwarden? Everyone seems to love it. I like that it can be self-hosted. I certainly wouldn’t want a third party in control of my password database.

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In-reply-to » @mckinley That may be true. I tried some "decentralized exchanges" but I have issue with "trust" so this is proving to be quite hard to figure out how to support accepting XMR as a "payment method" đŸ€”

@prologic@twtxt.net I use LocalMonero (onion) to buy Monero with cash sent by mail. You can sell on there if you want to convert back to fiat. People also like Bisq, which is peer-to-peer software for buying and selling cryptocurrency.

To accept Monero, all you need is a wallet program. I recommend Feather Wallet. Create your wallet in there, then you’ll copy the wallet files into monero-wallet-rpc for use with MoneroPay, see docker-compose.yaml.

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In-reply-to » QOTD: Hello Linux users, what do you use to monitor your network traffic?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s very useful. I always start my music player in a tmux session so I can SSH in, attach it, and control the music from another computer. It’s also handy for letting long-running tasks on a remote machine continue in the background even if the SSH connection is broken.

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In-reply-to » @prologic I might have mentioned this already but you might want to look into MoneroPay for payment processing when you get to that point with cas.run. It's a completely self-hosted backend service for receiving and tracking Monero payments and it's written in Go.

@prologic@twtxt.net Monero has stayed a little more stable than Bitcoin but it’s still a cryptocurrency and it’s still going to fluctuate quite a bit. It also uses proof-of-work algorithm so it still consumes quite a bit of electricity. I think the value of being able to send any amount of money, any time of the day, to anyone on the planet in 20 minutes (appears in 2 minutes, spendable in 20) completely privately with near-zero transaction fees exceeds the drawbacks.

Unfortunately, the characteristics that make it useful as a global currency for day-to-day transactions also make it useful for people doing illicit things. Many exchanges, fearing regulatory action, won’t accept Monero for the same reason they won’t accept Bitcoin from a mixer.

Monero shouldn’t be banned just because people use it for bad things. It’s just a tool and it can be used for good or evil. It’s the same reason countries use when they ban or restrict Tor usage.

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In-reply-to » Does this sound reasonable for running small workloads? đŸ€”

@prologic@twtxt.net That sounds great. The only other container-level hosting service I’ve heard of is PikaPods which seems much more managed than cas.run would be. It has customizable tier-based pricing and the minimum specs are ÂŒ of a CPU core, 256 MB of memory, and “about 100 MB” of storage for $1/mo which seems awfully steep compared to a low-cost VPS. I don’t know if PikaPods offers an IPv4 reverse proxy or not.

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In-reply-to » @prologic I might have mentioned this already but you might want to look into MoneroPay for payment processing when you get to that point with cas.run. It's a completely self-hosted backend service for receiving and tracking Monero payments and it's written in Go.

Monero uses cryptography to make transactions anonymous and the coins completely fungible. With most cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, the transactions associated with an address are public and you can trace those coins all the way back to their origin. This means that not all coins are the same. For example, some exchanges won’t accept Bitcoin that comes from a mixer because they assume you’re doing something untoward.

With Monero, it’s not possible to trace any transactions with just an address. People can’t see what you’re spending your money on or where your coins came from. Transaction fees using Monero are also very small. It’s less than the equivalent of 1 cent in USD.

Minuscule transaction fees and anonymity make it the best choice in my opinion for buying goods and services online. Monero is much more like “digital cash” than Bitcoin, which I think is better described as “digital gold”.

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In-reply-to » QOTD: Hello Linux users, what do you use to monitor your network traffic?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de You could always keep it running in a detached tmux session and attach it when you see the spike. Processes that were recently using the netwotk stay in the list for 10 or 15 seconds after they’re finished so you don’t have to catch it in the act.

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In-reply-to » Does this sound reasonable for running small workloads? đŸ€”

You could get better value for money with a super cheap VPS without IPv4 connectivity but it wouldn’t be worth it if you didn’t need the extra resources as a VPS wouldn’t be practical with such low specs. It would also require significantly more effort on the part of the operator.

I would understand paying a small premium for using the lowest-cost tier, convenience, and especially if you operated a reverse proxy with IPv4 connectivity.

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In-reply-to » QOTD: How do you listen to your music?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Interesting. mpd + ncmpcpp seems to be a common setup among our type but I really like cmus. Whipper is my CD ripper of choice and it is excellent. It queries AccurateRip for checksums and MusicBrainz for metadata, and can encode to any format you want. It also creates a nice log file like EAC does (it can even create EAC-compatible logs with a plugin) so you can verify that it was ripped properly.

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QOTD: How do you listen to your music?

I’ll start. I have a meticulously organized FLAC library stored locally on my laptop and played with cmus. Everything is manual but I have a collection of home-grown shell scripts that help me maintain folder structure, manage metadata, calculate information about the recording like dynamic range and spectrograms, and do transformations like cue splitting. Once an album has been processed, it goes into the music folder on my laptop with a duplicate copy stored on my server.

I have been thinking about letting beets do all of that boring stuff, but I’m not sure I can trust it to do it right. I also really want some kind of (self hosted) algorithm to pick songs for me. As it is, I can’t just shuffle my library or even genres because there are a lot of songs that don’t go well together as well as songs I just don’t like. I haven’t found anything that can do that.

Anyway, I’m curious to see how you guys do it.

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In-reply-to » Microsoft’s new era of AI PCs will need a Copilot key, says Intel Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and AMD have all been pushing the idea of an “AI PC” for months now as we head toward more AI-powered features in Windows. While we’re still waiting to hear the finer details from Microsoft on its big plans for AI in Windows, Intel has started sharing Microsoft’s requirements for OEMs to build an AI PC — and one of the main ones is that an AI PC must have Microsoft’s Copilot ... ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net He didn’t like LibreOffice Writer? Is he used to Microsoft Word or Apple Pages? I’ve had success getting non-technical Office refugees on LibreOffice, specifically Writer. Most people don’t need any fancy features and most things are located close enough to their counterparts on Word.

I show them how to export their documents as PDF before they share them with others and I use the (somewhat) immutability of PDFs and their portability (bundled fonts, rigid formatting, etc) to sell it. Those are two real benefits, but the main reason is that I don’t trust other software to handle ODTs and I don’t trust LibreOffice to write DOCXes. Although, I don’t know if I really need to be worried about either of them with basic documents. It’s probably worth investigating.

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In-reply-to » Microsoft’s new era of AI PCs will need a Copilot key, says Intel Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and AMD have all been pushing the idea of an “AI PC” for months now as we head toward more AI-powered features in Windows. While we’re still waiting to hear the finer details from Microsoft on its big plans for AI in Windows, Intel has started sharing Microsoft’s requirements for OEMs to build an AI PC — and one of the main ones is that an AI PC must have Microsoft’s Copilot ... ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Nice. I hope he likes it.

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In-reply-to » Microsoft’s new era of AI PCs will need a Copilot key, says Intel Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and AMD have all been pushing the idea of an “AI PC” for months now as we head toward more AI-powered features in Windows. While we’re still waiting to hear the finer details from Microsoft on its big plans for AI in Windows, Intel has started sharing Microsoft’s requirements for OEMs to build an AI PC — and one of the main ones is that an AI PC must have Microsoft’s Copilot ... ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net What does he use now?

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In-reply-to » Microsoft’s new era of AI PCs will need a Copilot key, says Intel Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and AMD have all been pushing the idea of an “AI PC” for months now as we head toward more AI-powered features in Windows. While we’re still waiting to hear the finer details from Microsoft on its big plans for AI in Windows, Intel has started sharing Microsoft’s requirements for OEMs to build an AI PC — and one of the main ones is that an AI PC must have Microsoft’s Copilot ... ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net You’re right, but they’re not going to stop until people vote with their wallets.

@bender@twtxt.net I’m not suggesting that people should use an old Windows version to avoid this. I’m saying that Windows in general should be considered a legacy operating system, and continued usage will only make you subject to more of this tracking and unnecessary garbage.

In other words, the situation will never improve. It will only get worse from here, so you might as well get out now while there are still plenty of life boats. Otherwise, when they do something that’s really over the line, you either have to go along with it or dive right into the cold ocean.

Windows is only kept alive at this point by a lack of knowledge about the alternatives, apathy, fear, and some enterprise software and games with support in Wine improving by the day.

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In-reply-to » Microsoft’s new era of AI PCs will need a Copilot key, says Intel Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and AMD have all been pushing the idea of an “AI PC” for months now as we head toward more AI-powered features in Windows. While we’re still waiting to hear the finer details from Microsoft on its big plans for AI in Windows, Intel has started sharing Microsoft’s requirements for OEMs to build an AI PC — and one of the main ones is that an AI PC must have Microsoft’s Copilot ... ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Only if you stick with legacy operating systems

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Cutting edge server monitoring from McKinley Labs: Detect when the heavy compute task on my server is done and play a sound on my laptop

ssh server 'while true; do test $(</proc/loadavg cut -d . -f 1) -lt 10 && break; sleep 10; done' && qmpv sound.opus

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In-reply-to » if you are not in a "central country" you are screwed. I thought it would be a good idea to promote a LiberaPay page to build some patronage to my free/open projects, but in Brazil LiberaPay can only handle PayPal and it integrates poorly, it doesn't accept Reais! If you try a direct PayPal donation button it works much better: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hostedbuttonid=5B4MZ78C9J724 ... this is so frustrating.

@bender@twtxt.net I also use the Discover tab and I do wish I could mute some of them that only post in Portugese. I just didn’t know they were on Mastodon.

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In-reply-to » if you are not in a "central country" you are screwed. I thought it would be a good idea to promote a LiberaPay page to build some patronage to my free/open projects, but in Brazil LiberaPay can only handle PayPal and it integrates poorly, it doesn't accept Reais! If you try a direct PayPal donation button it works much better: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hostedbuttonid=5B4MZ78C9J724 ... this is so frustrating.

Ah, the Ciberlandia people are on a Mastodon bridge. I thought we got rid of that.

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In-reply-to » if you are not in a "central country" you are screwed. I thought it would be a good idea to promote a LiberaPay page to build some patronage to my free/open projects, but in Brazil LiberaPay can only handle PayPal and it integrates poorly, it doesn't accept Reais! If you try a direct PayPal donation button it works much better: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hostedbuttonid=5B4MZ78C9J724 ... this is so frustrating.

@@villares@ciberlandia.pt Sounds like a great use for Monero: https://www.getmonero.org/

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In-reply-to » @mckinley Here's a summary of my setup:

@prologic@twtxt.net I looked up BurmillaOS and this is definitely one for my thread about unique Linux distributions. Very interesting.

Everything in BurmillaOS is a Docker container. We accomplish this by launching two instances of Docker. One is what we call System Docker and is the first process on the system. All other system services, like ntpd, syslog, and console, are running in Docker containers. System Docker replaces traditional init systems like systemd and is used to launch additional system services.

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In-reply-to » QOTD: What do you host on your home server? How do you host it? Are you using containers? VMs? Did you install any management interface or do you just SSH in? What OS does it run?

@xuu Wow. txt.sour.is has IPv6, so are you hosting it on one of those VMs or is it a reverse proxy back home?

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In-reply-to » I can't believe software developers are still trying to get people to do curl | sh. It's easy to miss the problem if you're still in the mindset of Windows software distribution, but these people are writing software on GNU/Linux, for GNU/Linux. You would think they'd realize that this is never a good idea.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Maybe it’s just a cargo cult thing (pun intended) because it’s somehow an accepted way to install a piece of software.

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