Neil: I should take an even more robust line on "removing non-essential software". Starting today.
Also Neil: drat, I've accidentally removed my desktop environment.
(Now reinstalled :))
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@neil Which is out of interest?
(just a fluxbox-user here without a DE 😉)
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The "You guys are getting paid?" meme, only it's "You guys are using a desktop environment?"
@neil
Do you mean you missed the opportunity to find a VT100 in a vintage shop and see if it would work with your setup?
@neil At my previous job they rolled out some specialized laptops with "extra security". The first thing that happened was people started noticing things they had come to expect from a regular modern desktop were missing.
Things like a mouse cursor.
Can't click on dangerous links without a mouse cursor I suppose.
Back in my AT&T UNIX days, our biz ran a Sage accounting system on such a box. Our semi IT-literate Financial Director managed to restore a copy of the bought ledger folders from tape into the root directory instead of the right sub-folder, so he mass deleted all b* folders and tried again. Later on after maintenance downtime and a bit of head scratching, we had to deal with a missing /boot folder on startup.
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@linker3000 Yikes! And thank goodness for tested backups.
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@neil I vaguely recall that once we'd worked out what happened, we brought up a minimal system off floppies to get the tape unit running and then restored /boot.
@neil Oof.
Shades of the time I was stuck in desktop support, and helped a new guy decruft his Debian laptop.
The apt command for removing unnecessary software turned out to be a little overzealous. Half the packages it removed were critical system ones, and I had to help the poor guy reinstall. Lucky he hadn't done anything important with it yet.
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python3.Not many experiences since have replicated that sinking feeling, seeing the system get removed in front of my eyes, kicking myself for having not spent 2 seconds looking at the list of packages to be removed.
Like you @KatS@chaosfem.tw I ended up reinstalling the whole thing, maybe it was salvagable but I for one had no idea how to do that 😀
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@matthew @neil Ah, the quiet "oops" that sends chills down the spine of any IT veteran :)
One of my early Unix mentors actually recovered from accidentally deleting crucial parts of the system. He got it to write the kernel back to disk, along with a few other things that were still in RAM. Just enough for it to be able to reboot cleanly, and reinstall the rest of the system in the slightly-less-hair-raising manner.
I'm not sure that's even possible these days; that was a much simpler time.
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I almost want to try deleting random parts of a throwaway install, but then doing that on a real system is something else entirely. I'd definitely be worried that I missed something subtle/important.
Trying to schedule while in deadline hell, and being overwhelmed
Husbeard in my voice: "I've got DYSENTRY or whatever the fuck"
Me, corpsing: "DYSCALCULIA"
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@JenJen "HUSBEARD, I have too much work to do before the deadline in this schedule I have created. HUSBEARD. HUSBEARD, why must the rules of causality exclusively burden me, your wife who had NO control over the situation? HUSBEARD. Why is there cause AND effect, HUSBEARD? That's too many. I have turned my life into a battle royal between me and 99 deadlines, and I am ill-equipped after 40 years of battle passes as the poison cloud of the month's end slowly encroaches upon me, HUSBEARD. HUSBE-"
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Amazing :)
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@neil @PedroLaBarba this is what I live with everyday Neil. Send help
Time to prepare some Hallowe'en Debian installer USB stick treats, for any visitors later...
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@neil Can't help feeling that a Windows installer would be much scarier...
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@neil not OoooooOOOoobuntu?
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@neil bazzite might be a better choice, as most of their games will probably work out of the box on that.
Not the latest online shooters though due to the aggressive rootkits err I mean anticheat
Thought: I should dress my bicycle up as a human crawling on all fours for Halloween, then I will dress myself up as a bicycle and ride it around.
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No, I am not drunk or high right now, why do you ask?
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#Google trips over its own words, when they sell you #Android it's the best computing device in the world that does everything. After you bought it Google doesn't let you do anything *you* want to.
#Sideload is a made-up term. Putting software on your computer is simply called “installing”, regardless of whether that computer is in your pocket or on your desk.
What Do You Talk About When You Talk About Sideloading?
What does Google?
Here's #FDroid: https://f-droid.org/2025/10/28/sideloading.html
My “old man yelling at clouds” moment is: we shouldn’t have allowed html in emails, markdown (without any html tag) is enough.
This! Buy from local (independent) stores instead of online giants; attend live shows, and buy merch directly from the bands; eat locally-grown (organic) food; use privacy-focused, community-built online services; buy used gear & equipment instead of brand new ones; and of course, do it all based on what you can afford and as a best-effort thing, without being hard on yourself if/when it just isn't possible.
For sure, it won't change the world, but it will feel good 😎
https://terminal.ahumanfuture.co/posts/2025-10-17/the-world-is-something-that-we-make/
I have written a blogpost about my first mainline driver, that lets you use night light on #LinuxMobile smartphones from the last 10 years, but also laptops and tablets.
Please support your local decentralised messenger and stop this parasocial relationship with the blue messenger. You will never be able to fix him. Your decentralised alternative may not work as well, but that's because it's not effectively subsidized by big tech hyperscalers.
But hey, maybe we're not meant to have seamless calls everywhere and everytime and not pay anything! *loses 90% of the crowd*
Awww. We're fucked.
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@tarakiyee adding that people actually pay several hundreds of bucks worth of personal data every year for their 'free' services can maybe help in some cases
Do you turn off your alarm clock and continue sleeping? Get the new VimAlarmClock: you need to type :q to quit. The Pro version has an unsaved buffer in the background.
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I don't understand how lazy can people be? Just one default alarm clock is more than enough to wake up
A little more than 2 months after Debian, we’re finally releasing Mobian Trixie as our new stable release! We’re also taking this opportunity to start rotating the PGP/GPG keys we’re using for signing both our images and package archive.
You can read more on our blog: https://blog.mobian.org/posts/2025/10/new-stable-rotating-keys/
If you design an on-hold audio loop, you shouldn't put it into production until you spend a day trying to do your regular job while on hold. If so, you'll learn:
1st: offer a callback queue if possible.
2nd: offer user the *choice* of pure silence or audio loop while holding.
3rd: the audio loop should:
* have completely consistent volume level.
* never break in w/ human voices in the loop (eg: “Remeber our website…”) once loop starts. It *will* sound like live agent every time to most users.
apk upgrade when I am on the tube and know I'm about to lose connection?I started migrating from #NextCloud to #Radicale, but iOS threw a spanner in the works (turns out accountsd only checks for A and not AAAA DNS records!) I decided to go into a "half-migrated" state: pointing myself to the new instance to continue testing while leaving my partner pointing to the old one.
That caused a problem: any events we created in the meantime wouldn't be synced to the other's devices.
vdirsyncer came in super handy and enabled a three-way sync between NextCloud, Radicale and my laptop! So, despite being on two completely different #CalDAV servers, we both see exactly the same state and all updates flow through seamlessly. And, when they switch instance, it will be like nothing ever happened, despite being on different servers for a few weeks.
Thank you #openStandards and #freeSoftware!
UK Politics, civil liberties [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
I can highly recommend listening to this Prospect Magazine podcast featuring the late Conor Gearty.It's a scary but very worthwhile listen. It covers public support of civil liberties, the right to protest, the proscription of Palestine Action as well as what Labour should be doing to fortify against an authoritarian takeover.
I have thought a good bit about what government could do, and I believe there are a number of simple things they could do that they're not doing. And those are to fortify democracy against the forthcoming fight.So you could - obviously, obviously - change the voting system. Don't have any stupid internal independent commission, don't have any stupid royal commission, don't consult, just have "Single Transferable Vote - PR Act". You'll get Liberal support, Labour support - push it through. Unfortunately it's not in the manifesto, the Lords would try and delay it.
You would ban foreign influence on elections - it would be straightforward. You would make it impossible to have something like GB News. You would not allow Mr Marshall (lovely man though he is) to run a whole lot of outlets in pursuit of an obvious and transparent political agenda.
It's called parliamentary sovereignty, it's called legislation, it's called having will. There used to a requirement that all media was balanced - return to it. A lot of this is return to the past! A lot of this is recover what Mrs. Thatcher began shredding. The community that benefited from the end of the cold war, through the lack of fear of communism, they destroyed many of the social entitlements originally, and they've turned now to the civil and political, and they're seeking, in my opinion, to perpetually empower themselves. But we can fight back.
Let's have some fights with the right enemies. And if you go down, you go down. That strikes me as a more attractive set of scenarios than simply surrendering on the basis that you didn't achieve some growth that you set out to achieve in 2029.
@neil there are degrees of self hosting, too. I "self host" many services, but it's on rented VPSes on other people's servers.
It outsources the tedious "keeping servers and networks alive", while giving me control over the actual services. Does that count as self hosting?
(to my mind, yes, but not in the purist path of having it running on a computer you can see and touch...)
@neil Even if it's only a few tools and applications, self-hosting increases people's understanding of how digital infrastructure works on a small scale. Then people can have better and a bit more constructive conversations about how the large scale companies are running the digital infrastructure business.
The links that I forge online are incredibly important to me.
I don't have "online friends" and "offline friends", just "friends".
Friends come and go over time, as our paths cross and diverge. That is inevitable.
But losing friends because of legislation sucks particularly hard.
> The Taliban in Afghanistan have imposed a nationwide shut down of telecommunications, weeks after they began severing fibre-optic internet connections to prevent what they call immorality.
Interested readers may note that "disruption measures", including access restriction orders, form the backstop of the UK's Online Safety Act.
Over next 1-2 weeks,I'd appreciate an extended thread re: #FrameworkLaptop, #mntreform, & #FOSS.
TL;DR on my idiosyncratic needs:
* minimize binary firmware blobs¹
* Having 2 disks in RAID-1²
* Runs stock Official #Debian stable³
* Understanding best current replacement keyboard options⁴
* Form factor that works for my travel needs.
Is @frameworkcomputer or @mntmn better for me?
I'd be glad if ∃ active engagement on this!
@dianea free open source software on my hardware is something more akin to #droidian and getting away from an android project that is dependent on Google’s aosp -with an uncertain future, also powered by google hardware.
Graphene has a lot of dependencies on google being generous and those gifts are drying up quickly.
We need to be supporting more TRUE open source solutions. More #linuxmobile options and focus is what we need.
“We are not saying we are going to boil the ocean in one go as the public would be really sceptical of that. We startering with right to work checks first but there are loads of other applications for digital ID.” Josh MacAlister. They are literally saying there will be future function creep of digital ID and this is about merging records across Government.
UK politics, digital ID [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
Dear Estonian government: could you please schedule an embarassing leak of all digital ID records for sometime in the next few weeks? That would really help us out.
OV is saying goodbye to his beloved ICR! Bye bye single deck international VIRM 😢💕
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OV on table with goodbye pin
So, after blockchains, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, metaverse, VR, AI-for-everything... what is the next bubble?
Any chance that it will be small, sustainable, local computing?
@jonquark @openrightsgroup It is definitely a significant risk, I think the HO eVisa app works like this. And of course, eVisas don’t work except on an app; in both cases the systems will make some people very dependent on relatives or partners who are abusive.
We're in a cost of living crisis and Labour wants to bring in digital ID cards for everyone 🤡 They're risking turning the UK into a pre-crime state where we constantly have to prove who we are to go about our daily lives.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/sep/25/keir-starmer-expected-to-announce-plans-for-digital-id-cards #precrime #digitalid #idcards
# Digital ID cards to be compulsory for all UK adults under government plans
*sigh*
Tiny details, like what to do about people who don't have a compatible smartphone, still need to be worked out..
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g54g6vgpdo
(Fixed link)
@neil I wonder if that's a reasonable bit of digital legislation that could be implemented 🤔
"Services cannot be provided purely through a downloaded app and there must be feature parity between a mobile-optimised web application (to be accessible through a browser of the user's choice) and any developed mobile application."
I've just had my credit card forceably moved from Sainsburys Bank to Nat West. Nat West asked me to select a four digit code and a twenty characters password.
All routine stuff so stored the password in my password manager (using a password it offered me so a random string of characters) and then tried to log in.
(1/2)
Can someone explain the context I'm lacking for all of this? Non-UK person here 😅 Thanks!
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UK Politics, flags [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
I'll do my best from my perspective (based in London, I don't want to speak for everyone or other nations in the UK).Generally speaking, many in England find nationalistic flag-waving distasteful (with the exception of England playing in a major sporting event, or, for some, when there's a royal event).
In the last few weeks, far-right groups have tried to push the narrative within their circles that "we are 'not allowed' to fly the flag and 'be proud of our country'" (dog whistle for ethnic nationalism and anti-immigration + anti-asylum viewpoints). This led to people putting up flags on lampposts, spray-painting it on pedestrian crossings and bus stops etc. Councils initially started taking them down off lampposts, but then the far-right people were able to say: "look, it's proof that we're not allowed to fly our flag" (aka "the 'true Brits' are being suppressed by the 'others'") so councils have largely backed off.
I think it is essentially used as a dog whistle to make "others" feel unsafe. Certainly that is how I feel when surrounded by these flags.
That is not to say that everyone is putting them up for these reasons, but if you are putting them up now, I think it is a way of showing a particular point of view.