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Hoo boy...what have I gotten myself into?

zev honked back 28 Sep 2023 11:49 -0700
in reply to: https://honk.tedunangst.com/u/tedu/h/ndsqtD4KrVY24S9CH3

@tedu I haven't used one in any seriousness in some years now, though from the last time I did I recall some wistful sadness at the general feeling that macports was a dying project, losing out to (the IMO markedly inferior) homebrew.

From a skim of those comments it sounds like maybe macports has had some degree of resurgence though? So if in the future I am in fact ever compelled to use a mac again, perhaps at least macports will still be a viable option...

zev honked back 27 Sep 2023 14:13 -0700
in reply to: https://hachyderm.io/users/Obdurodon/statuses/111138752360568068

@Obdurodon The slope of the computer-improvement line has really leveled off -- I'm typing this on a computer that's 10 years old, and in 2023 that's basically fine, and aside from some relatively minor performance differences not really noticeably "old". Running a 10-year-old computer in even, say, 2005 would have been laughable.

zev honked 19 Sep 2023 09:38 -0700

30% acetic acid is certainly an effective way of learning exactly where all the tiny little cuts and scrapes you didn't know you had on your hands are.

zev honked back 19 Sep 2023 00:24 -0700
in reply to: https://hachyderm.io/users/stephen0x2dfox/statuses/111088814579464702

@stephen0x2dfox Proprietary BMC firmware (especially from a particular three-lettered vendor, it seems) has been and likely will remain for as long as people care to poke at it a wellspring of easily-exploited vulnerabilities, yes.

Open-source alternatives are, I'd hazard an educated guess, likely to be substantially better in that regard, however. I'm hedging a bit here of course because there's still lots of non-memory-safe code involved (though some of us are working on getting Rust integrated), but (a) while there are still likely to be remotely-triggerable bugs, I'd guess they're probably somewhat less numerous/egregious, and (b) enabling some basic protections like ASLR and a non-executable stack at least raise the difficulty level of writing exploits a bit.

zev honked 01 Sep 2023 03:26 -0700

Unexpected factors in multimeter probe purchasing decisions: fearlessness.

Multimeter probe kit proudly labeled "silicone line not afraid coldness"

zev honked 29 Aug 2023 17:20 -0700

Scripts assuming that /bin/sh is bash is, of course, poor form, though kind of understandable given the environments so many people work in these days.

It takes a special kind of sadism though for a system to provide /bin/bash as...a symlink to busybox.

zev honked back 25 Aug 2023 13:40 -0700
in reply to: https://honk.tedunangst.com/u/tedu/h/tvf5MkzLxZqfcHKFbr

@tedu So here's an odd one I've noticed from time to time (hopefully not spoiling the streak)...

With my browser settings (firefox), control-click or middle-click opens a link in a new background tab, and adding shift to either does so in a new foreground tab.

With some links in honk however (e.g. convoy links and "@me" in the menu, but not "chatter" or "tags"), middle-click operations work normally, but the control-click ones instead navigate to the link in the current tab instead of opening a new one. Any idea what might be going on there?

zev honked 16 Aug 2023 17:05 -0700

Another day, another long string of profanity regarding JSON's lack of trailing-comma support...

zev honked back 15 Aug 2023 15:48 -0700
in reply to: https://mastodon.social/users/lorddimwit/statuses/110894605027366163

@lorddimwit Earlier this year I opened the door to our (detached) garage to do some laundry and saw a black feline streak (the neighbor's) dart out...I think she'd been stuck in there over night after sneaking in unnoticed, but considering how often we go a lot longer than that without opening the garage, I was quite relieved it wasn't far, far worse.

zev honked back 14 Aug 2023 18:41 -0700
in reply to: https://hachyderm.io/users/penryu/statuses/110890616690704149

@penryu @foone Thankfully in most browsers you can still "force" a proper control/right-click via shift-right-click, which bypasses javascript interception (in AFAIK a non-fuckuppable way).

It's irritating that it's needed as often as it is [glares at Discord], and I'm just waiting for the day when the browser makers decide to allow JS to intercept the event anyway, but at least for now it's a useful talisman against the garbage-flood of the web.

zev honked 05 Aug 2023 23:50 -0700

Not a bad view from dinner this evening.

sunset over Puget Sound

zev honked 31 Jul 2023 15:48 -0700

Found myself next to a fellow #honk user in traffic.

car bumper sticker reading "I'd rather be honking!!!!!!!"

zev honked 28 Jul 2023 14:17 -0700

So out of nowhere, @davx5app on my LineageOS phone prompted me to confirm acceptance of a certificate for [lock.]cmpxchg8b.com. It has only ever been configured to sync against Radicale on my own server (on a sibling of honk under my own domain). I rejected it since that was not a domain I was expecting it to connect to, after which hitting the "sync" button again produced the same thing (which I again rejected), but then subsequent attempts have synced in their normal silent way (and I've verified that it's talking to my server as it should be).

I was not able to extract any clue from the DAVx5 UI about why it was trying to connect to that server, and grep -r cmpxchg8b on my Radicale data directory turns up nothing, so I'm kind of mystified, and in a vaguely worrying way. Is @taviso suffering from post-Zenbleed boredom? Is my phone haunted? Confusion abounds.

zev honked back 28 Jul 2023 12:29 -0700
in reply to: https://mastodon.social/users/andy_warb/statuses/110792699489845100

@andy_warb Yes, sudo !! is the popular answer here, but I'll suggest the alternative of Ctrl-p Ctrl-a sudo<space> (alternately up-arrow home or the like) to go back a line in your history and then position the cursor at the beginning of it so you can just prepend the sudo part. Same number of keystrokes, but lets you see the whole command instead of semi-blindly executing things (personally, that aspect of history expansion scares me, so I turn it off in my bashrc).

zev honked back 26 Jul 2023 12:07 -0700
in reply to: https://infosec.exchange/users/kaoudis/statuses/110781680365607963

@kaoudis @regehr

it's pretty hard to disguise an unintentional infinite loop

Am I misunderstanding your meaning here? Things getting stuck in unintentional infinite loops is IME while not the most ubiquitous bug category in the world, also not a particularly uncommon one -- I just recently hit one in mandoc for example, and after a brief glance at where it was happening in the source it was certainly well-disguised enough that the fix wasn't obvious to me.

(Sadly my efforts to report said bug ran up against the wall of a moderated mailing list that never accepted my request to post to it, but alas...)