Category: Uncategorized

How do YOU recommend films to people when what makes them worth a watch is an amazing plot twist (that you don’t want to spoil/telegraph)?

Rather than imagine the implications if it were, simply accept that is the greatest “pump and dump” scam in history and adjust accordingly.

It’s been a long time since I asked for any help in the open source community and I am thrilled(!) to discover very little has changed.

The first response I had was from someone with clearly good intentions but zero expertise.

The second response was somebody asking why I want to do it anyway.

I haven’t officially had the third response but I know that will be: the dev in charge of this element of the project has unilaterally decided not to maintain this functionality because basically said dev doesn’t need that functionality and/or has no way to test it. However, there is no public record or explanation for that decision so literally the only person that can even confirm that is the dev.

But the dev is only human and only has so much time they contribute to the project because, after all, they are a volunteer. So the chance of me actually getting a response from the dev are very low anyway and even lower when the answer is some version of “I can’t/won’t”, which no-one really likes to say.

However, with the benefit of knowledge from experience on my side, I have completely given up already, so I won’t be wasting any of my time, at least.

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Wow. Apparently I have been using Mastodon for 3 years! Who knew?!

Anyway, my one top tip for new desktop/web browser users:

If you want to share a post you saw on Mastodon offsite (e.g. via WhatsApp or something), don’t just visit the toot and copy the URL from your web browser (which might look like this https://mastodon.social/@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social/115457182787979481). That’s not really where the post is located. Instead you want to go the ellipsis menu (…) and click “Copy link to post” (which looks like this https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/115457182776398187).

The latter will play much nicer with “rich previews” generated by other services. I feel like this is more an issue with the “other services” but what’s important is that whoever you share the link with sees what you intended, right?

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I run this site on a VPS. I recently had some problems because there was no log management configured for SQL and a harmless warning completely filled the storage. The irony was that, as the storage filled, the more applications failed and the more errors were generated, so it totally snowballed.

In the following week I had two portable devices start to display odd behaviour too. Turns out both of them were also short of storage. Several apps on one iOS device had apparently cached gigs of data that could only be removed by uninstalling and reinstalling the app. This feels like a problem we solved decades ago but then developers started relying on increasing storage capacity instead and stop caring.

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Recently found that one of my users, bob, could not log in. I tried to check the user in the Synology Control Panel > User & Group but got the message “failed to load the user data”. No other users seemed affected.

I logged in with <span class="code">ssh</span> with suspicions that some file permissions had been messed up. Took a bit of time but I discovered that some ill-advised and careless use of <span class="code">chown -R</span> in <span class="code">/volume1</span> (switching ownership of some shared files) meant that bob no longer owned the files/folders in <span class="code">/volume1/@userpreference/bob</span>.

I <span class="code">chown</span>ed them back to bob and it fixed the problem.

Sorry, bob.

I was today years old when I learned that I own an NFT 🤣 Turns out I’m a massive hypocrite and I didn’t even know.

(Yes, it’s a Reddit “Collectible” avatar)

My friend now has a mandatory, annual “AI objective”. I suggested this:

Minimise the risk of inclusion of mathematically certain, AI hallucinations, for which I would be blamed, by avoiding any usage beyond simple sentences rephrasing/proofing