Evelyn Woods (aka eevee) has posted some venerable takes over the years (she also wrote my personal favourite rant of all time: "PHP: A Fractal of Bad Design"), but this one, where she connects industry's generic idea of "content" to what she refers to as a "Whatever machine" is really quite excellent.

I think a lot of people out there are fundamentally misunderstanding the reasoning behind the big tech companies (and their investors) pushing AI into everything. We want to believe that it's just tech bros trying to woo idiot investor cash into their systems — and it is that, a little bit anyway — but the big players: Microsoft, Google, Meta, and even Visa know exactly what they're doing and it's not good news for the rest of us.

Anyway, I wrote this a few days ago to break down the problem as I see it. I'm hoping it proves helpful.

It seems like a great initiative, and I'd be happy to help out, but I don't have a venue myself.

I've been a Steam customer for a very long time, having spent a few thousand dollars over the years with them. Like many of you, I've got a (small?) group of games that I bought and barely-if-ever played, and I'm cool with that. As they say, piracy is a service problem, and Steam is just... easy.

That was until I bought my Deck. Suddenly, I had two devices on which I could play my games: my proper gaming rig upstairs and my Deck plugged into the TV downstairs.

I also however, have a kid that likes video games, so sometimes I let her play a few games on the TV... and that's where everything breaks down. If she's playing Lego Marvel on the Deck, my copy of Dyson Sphere Program flakes out upstairs with a warning that "someone else is playing a game, so this game will have to shut off" or some nonsense like that.

I'm suddenly face to face with the fact that I don't actually own my games and those few thousand dollars weren't spent on what I expected. It's... enraging to put it gently.

I can appreciate that there would be an attempt to prevent me from playing the same game on two devices (though I think that's bullshit too), but to prevent me from playing two different games on two different machines when both are legally purchased running on my own hardware is not ok.

I find the whole "Ctrl+b followed by another key" way of navigating tmux to be too cumbersome to warrant a switch away from something like Tilix where I can hit Ctrl+Alt+| and the screen splits vertically, or Alt+Left to switch to the terminal on the left. I think it's the mandatory release of all keys followed by more keys that does it.

Is there a way to tell tmux to understand that "Alt+Left means switch to the terminal on the left" and bypass the whole Ctrl+b song and dance altogether?

This is what I see in both Firefox and Chromium

I'm a web developer, mostly with Python and have close to zero Java or Kotlin experience, but I want to build a bunch of tools for my phone where I can Share a URL (for example) to an app that simply takes that URL string and sends an HTTP POST request to a pre-arranged URL with some pre-arranged headers or POST data.

So basically I'm looking for an app that:

• Lets you define a series of endpoints
• Accepts share intents from other apps to then bring up a selector asking "Which endpoint do you want to send this to?", sends it, and exits.

It seems a little nuts that I should have to develop a separate app for each endpoint, when the app experience isn't really something I'm interested in. Can someone here point me to an app that already does something like this? I'd prefer a FOSS option if possible, but at this point I don't even know what to search for.

Example use-cases:

• Send a YouTube URL to a service that downloads said video and stores it on a share on my VPN
• Send a text snippet to a service that stores that snippet as a Markdown file for use as ideas for future blog posts
• Send an article URL to a service that strips the ads and images out and saves a Markdown file for future reading.

I've recently learnt about Gemini and I'm reasonably sure that I can write a Django extension to allow the same code I use to run my website also serve more-or-less the same information over Gemini. Unfortunately, while I'm familiar with Django internals, I've always relied on Gunicorn + Nginx/Traefik to handle the HTTP portion of the request/response.

So if I'm going to do this, I need to know what to use to speak Gemini. I found the very simple aiogemini, which I can improve upon and probably link to Django's URL handler, but it's based on asyncio, while Django only partially supports async. I also have no idea what might be fine to replaced the traefik (let alone cert-manager) portion of the process.

I could try to write something from scratch, but there's no sense in reinventing a square wheel, so I thought I'd ask here.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/33126960

From time to time, often after I've restored from sleep or finished playing a Steam game, one of my CPU cores is pinned at 100% with no indication of what might be doing it. Running htop, btop, or GNOME system monitor all show the same thing: CPU0 at 100% while the rest are doing near-nothing, and no process in particular seems to be using those resources.

If I restart, it's back to normal, and sometimes I can play a game in Steam or let the computer go to sleep and it doesn't do this, but it happens often enough that's annoying/confusing so I'd like to know if there's a way to either (a) diagnose which processes are using which CPU cores, or (b) somehow "reset" the checking of these values to make sure that something's not just being misreported.

This is a desktop system running Arch & GNOME.

I've been writing code professionally for 24 years, 15 of which has been Python and 9 years of that with Docker. I got tired of running into the same complications every time I started a new job, so I wrote this. Maybe you'll find it useful, or it could even start a conversation, but this post has been a long time coming.

Update: I had a few requests for a demo repo as a companion to this post, so I wrote one today. It includes a very small Django demo user Docker, Compose, and GitLab CI.

...so I found out how to fix it

It would seem that I have far too much time on my hands. After the post about a Star Trek "test", I started wondering if there could be any data to back it up and... well here we go:

Those Old Scientists

| Name | Total Lines | Percentage of Lines | | ---------------- | :---------: | ------------------: | | KIRK | 8257 | 32.89 | | SPOCK | 3985 | 15.87 | | MCCOY | 2334 | 9.3 | | SCOTT | 912 | 3.63 | | SULU | 634 | 2.53 | | UHURA | 575 | 2.29 | | CHEKOV | 417 | 1.66 |

The Next Generation

| Name | Total Lines | Percentage of Lines | | ---------------- | :---------: | ------------------: | | PICARD | 11175 | 20.16 | | RIKER | 6453 | 11.64 | | DATA | 5599 | 10.1 | | LAFORGE | 3843 | 6.93 | | WORF | 3402 | 6.14 | | TROI | 2992 | 5.4 | | CRUSHER | 2833 | 5.11 | | WESLEY | 1285 | 2.32 |

Deep Space Nine

| Name | Total Lines | Percentage of Lines | | ---------------- | :---------: | ------------------: | | SISKO | 8073 | 13.0 | | KIRA | 5112 | 8.23 | | BASHIR | 4836 | 7.79 | | O'BRIEN | 4540 | 7.31 | | ODO | 4509 | 7.26 | | QUARK | 4331 | 6.98 | | DAX | 3559 | 5.73 | | WORF | 1976 | 3.18 | | JAKE | 1434 | 2.31 | | GARAK | 1420 | 2.29 | | NOG | 1247 | 2.01 | | ROM | 1172 | 1.89 | | DUKAT | 1091 | 1.76 | | EZRI | 953 | 1.53 |

Voyager

| Name | Total Lines | Percentage of Lines | | ---------------- | :---------: | ------------------: | | JANEWAY | 10238 | 17.7 | | CHAKOTAY | 5066 | 8.76 | | EMH | 4823 | 8.34 | | PARIS | 4416 | 7.63 | | TUVOK | 3993 | 6.9 | | KIM | 3801 | 6.57 | | TORRES | 3733 | 6.45 | | SEVEN | 3527 | 6.1 | | NEELIX | 2887 | 4.99 | | KES | 1189 | 2.06 |

Enterprise

| Name | Total Lines | Percentage of Lines | | ---------------- | :---------: | ------------------: | | ARCHER | 6959 | 24.52 | | T'POL | 3715 | 13.09 | | TUCKER | 3610 | 12.72 | | REED | 2083 | 7.34 | | PHLOX | 1621 | 5.71 | | HOSHI | 1313 | 4.63 | | TRAVIS | 1087 | 3.83 | | SHRAN | 358 | 1.26 |

Discovery

Important Note: As the source material is incomplete for Discovery, the following table only includes line counts from seasons 1 and 4 along with a single episode of season 2.

| Name | Total Lines | Percentage of Lines | | ---------------- | :---------: | ------------------: | | BURNHAM | 2162 | 22.92 | | SARU | 773 | 8.2 | | BOOK | 586 | 6.21 | | STAMETS | 513 | 5.44 | | TILLY | 488 | 5.17 | | LORCA | 471 | 4.99 | | TARKA | 313 | 3.32 | | TYLER | 300 | 3.18 | | GEORGIOU | 279 | 2.96 | | CULBER | 267 | 2.83 | | RILLAK | 205 | 2.17 | | DETMER | 186 | 1.97 | | OWOSEKUN | 169 | 1.79 | | ADIRA | 154 | 1.63 | | COMPUTER | 152 | 1.61 | | ZORA | 151 | 1.6 | | VANCE | 101 | 1.07 | | CORNWELL | 101 | 1.07 | | SAREK | 100 | 1.06 | | T'RINA | 96 | 1.02 |

If anyone is interested, here's the (rather hurried, don't judge me) Python used:

```python #!/usr/bin/env python

This script assumes that you've already downloaded all the episode lines from

the fantastic chakoteya.net:

wget --accept=html,htm --relative --wait=2 --include-directories=/STDisco17/ http://www.chakoteya.net/STDisco17/episodes.html -m

wget --accept=html,htm --relative --wait=2 --include-directories=/Enterprise/ http://www.chakoteya.net/Enterprise/episodes.htm -m

wget --accept=html,htm --relative --wait=2 --include-directories=/Voyager/ http://www.chakoteya.net/Voyager/episode_listing.htm -m

wget --accept=html,htm --relative --wait=2 --include-directories=/DS9/ http://www.chakoteya.net/DS9/episodes.htm -m

wget --accept=html,htm --relative --wait=2 --include-directories=/NextGen/ http://www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/episodes.htm -m

wget --accept=html,htm --relative --wait=2 --include-directories=/StarTrek/ http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/episodes.htm -m

Then you'll probably have to convert the following files to UTF-8 as they

differ from the rest:

* Voyager/709.htm

* Voyager/515.htm

* Voyager/416.htm

* Enterprise/41.htm

import re from collections import defaultdict from pathlib import Path

EPISODE_REGEX = re.compile(r"^\d+\.html?$") LINE_REGEX = re.compile(r"^(?P<name>[A-Z']+): ")

EPISODES = Path("www.chakoteya.net") DISCO = EPISODES / "STDisco17" ENT = EPISODES / "Enterprise" TNG = EPISODES / "NextGen" TOS = EPISODES / "StarTrek" DS9 = EPISODES / "DS9" VOY = EPISODES / "Voyager"

NAMES = { TOS.name: "Those Old Scientists", TNG.name: "The Next Generation", DS9.name: "Deep Space Nine", VOY.name: "Voyager", ENT.name: "Enterprise", DISCO.name: "Discovery", }

class CharacterLines: def init(self, path: Path) -> None: self.path = path self.line_count = defaultdict(int)

def collect(self) -> None: for episode in self.path.glob(".htm"): if EPISODE_REGEX.match(episode.name): for line in episode.read_text().split("\n"): if m := LINE_REGEX.match(line): self.line_count[m.group("name")] += 1

@property def as_tablular_data(self) -> tuple[tuple[str, int, float], ...]: total = sum(self.line_count.values()) r = [] for k, v in self.line_count.items(): percentage = round(v * 100 / total, 2) if percentage > 1: r.append((str(k), v, percentage)) return tuple(reversed(sorted(r, key=lambda _: _[2])))

def render(self) -> None: print(f"\n\n# {NAMES[self.path.name]}\n") print("| Name | Total Lines | Percentage of Lines |") print("| ---------------- | :---------: | ------------------: |") for character, total, pct in self.as_tablular_data: print(f"| {character:16} | {total:11} | {pct:19} |")

if name == "main": for series in (TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, DISCO): counter = CharacterLines(series) counter.collect() counter.render() ```

My father is 75 and not very capable on a computer. He's got an old MacBook Air at home behind a typical ISP router for which he has no access controls (so no port forwarding).

My immediate need is actually not his machine at all, but the Raspberry Pi I installed at his house before I left the country and forgot to enable cron on so it's not doing what I need yet. However, it would be really nice if I could also do one of the following as well:

• VNC (or something) into his computer whenever something "isn't working" rather than doing the talk-him-through-it dance over Skype.
• Install a new OS (the Mac is no longer supported by MacOS). I don't know how plausible this is though.

My current plan is to email him a shell script that should create a reverse SSH tunnel to a server in Montréal or something and then I can shell into his Mac through there. It's not ideal though since we're still talking shell scripts and he's easily frustrated.

I know that in Windows land there are all sorts of tools scammers use to take over a machine remotely. Does Mac allow for the same thing? Note that I only have Linux machines available to me on this side of the Atlantic.

I'm working on a some materials for a class wherein I'll be teaching some young, wide-eyed Windows nerds about Linux and we're including a section we're calling "foot guns". Basically it's ways you might shoot yourself in the foot while meddling with your newfound Linux powers.

I've got the usual forgetting the . in lines like this:

$ rm -rf ./bin

As well as a bunch of other fun stories like that one time I mounted my Linux home folder into my Windows machine, forgot I did that, then deleted a parent folder.

You know, the war stories.

Tell me yours. I wanna share your mistakes so that they can learn from them.

Fun (?) side note: somehow, my entire ${HOME}/projects folder has been deleted like... just now, and I have no idea how it happened. I may have a terrible new story to add if I figure it out.

I've got a very simple Kodi setup:

• Arch Linux on a laptop behind the TV
• Media files on a server upstairs, shared over NFS

I've been running Kodi quite successfully on this machine for years, but with the Omega update, videos play without audio for about 10seconds, then freeze. Sometimes if I wait a while, I see subtitles for the episode while the video is frozen. Music doesn't play either. The interface freezes too, to the point where I have to kill -9 it. Switching from Wayland to Xorg hasn't had an effect.

I tried deleting ~/.kodi and restarting, but nothing changes.

Has anyone else run into this?

A break from the usual in this community, but I trust it'll be appreciated. I think this is very solarpunk: using technology to improve the lives of all creatures.