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• Post #4379488

  Do I know anyone who [knows anyone who] works at Grafana Labs? I promise: not a support request.

• Post #3986394

  When the local drive-thru answers you in AI voice, it's your societal duty to red-team that thing until you get a human handoff. “Oh, could I add an order of triple salted uncooked fries, extra small, and a diet water with no ice, but make the ice extra cold? Plus a sundae with double pickles and make sure I don't get the same toy as with the fries. What's your favourite flavour of ketchup?”

• Post #3613100

  Highly Available Home Assistant HAHA

• Post #3587723

  RBC has been emailing me for the past few weeks to get me to fill out a survey. This feels like work to me. I expect to receive no benefit from doing this work. I already pay RBC a lot of money every month; I'm certainly not going to willingly do free work for them. Today they (my bank) emailed “FINAL REMINDER” which got my attention… until I realized it's just for this survey I’ve obviously been ignoring. k.

• Post #3572691

  Security-minded #devops folks who are adding package cooldowns to your deployment rules… …how are you possibly dealing with zero day fixes? (Short of auditing everything, which… you're lying to yourself if you truly believe that is happening, thoroughly.) (defs: Cooldowns: "don't update this package until the version you'd update to has been available for at least 48h” zero day fixes: “vendor-provided fixes for a previously-publicly-undisclosed vulnerability that is not yet be...

• Post #3546837

  The topic of pirate television in Montreal came up, today, and I made this. For the 8 of you who understand both niche jokes… I think it's pretty good!

• Post #2926757

  Didn't get my phone/camera out in time, and very hard to make out in the bright sky, but I saw SNBD4 as 3 or 4 planes flying in a cluster, north of the field (and above the pattern) at CYUL. https://scoat.es/@yulalerts/116641706128627569

• Post #2926756

  A while back, I was mostly-lurking on a regional #Meshcore (like #Meshtastic , but different) discord, when someone on there tried to update a repeater and accidentally soft-bricked it. They needed to climb up to where it is to get a physical connection. But there's a raven nesting near where they've propped up the device, so they're lamenting the chore of climbing up to it. I replied “Nevercore.” It barely got a reaction. I am sad for this community. (-;

• Post #2926754

  Even as someone who has only ever used SwiftUI (not AppKit or UIKit) as my primary macOS/iOS dev toolkit, this article rings so true. There's a whole bunch of stuff that #Apple could fix, pretty easily, and they just… haven’t. It's sad. A big part of what keeps me on macOS is the platform itself—letting everything become mushy web-pages-pretending-to-be-apps makes it much easier to entertain the idea of Linux as my daily driver, if I have to endure that mess, anyway. https://p...

• Post #2926753

  If something on your computer/phone were to make a joke about slapping you around with a large trout, would you get the reference?

• Post #2926752

  Canadians with any sort of online fluency, please read + sign: https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-7416

• Post #2864253

  Lazy Web of Real People (maybe, hopefully): is VictoriaMetrics good? I'd like to hear real-world experience only please.

• Post #2864252

  There's a chain of #Montreal chicken sandwich restaurants… Whoever called it “Madame Poulet" and not "Chick Poulet" really missed an opportunity. They should also offer waffle fries. (There's no Chick Fil-a here.)

• Post #2864251

  The deluge of recently-discovered (more like: recently-disclosed) --Linux-- EVERYTHING vulnerabilities got me to finally shut down a ~10 year uptime box that I should have shut down two full `tN.micro` generations ago. So… thanks I guess? Also, webadvent.org (phpadvent.org) is static now, like it should have been since before 2012 when it was last published. 🤷‍♂️

• Post #2864250

  Snowbird; thought this was YMX when I first got the alert. Looks like it's setting up for YHU now. Probably in town for Grand Prix this weekend? https://scoat.es/@yulalerts/116608542464201624

• Post #2864249

  This stage of capitalism where we've let companies become so big they can buy everyone around them to get even bigger is absolutely exhausting. > As of April 1, 2026, EssilorLuxottica Canada Inc. acquired the eyebuydirect.ca website from EyeBuyDirect Inc. As a result, EssilorLuxottica Canada Inc. now holds and processes your personal information.

• Post #2864248

  I was in #Toronto visiting the kid this weekend. Stopped by an #electronics store I had heard about, called "Supremetronic”… Really, it was a section in the basement of a Home Hardware, directly next to the paint counter. What a strange little nook of availability that was. Hundreds of bins of discrete components, a few bins of ICs, and some essentials like ribbon cables, perf board, and connectors. A few kits, and some project boxes. 🤯

• Post #2574541

  Today's #Swift lessons: 1. the `switch` version of `consuming func …` on `variable` is `switch consume variable` (`consuming` is a good way to disarm some footguns) 2. The compiler gets REALLY confused when I do optional chaining with an otherwise-consuming call. I continue to enjoy this language (though I do take issue with no visibility keyword that indicates "private but extensions within this same module can access”, even though "private" + extension *in...

• Post #2574540

  IMO it's going to get *much* worse before it gets better. The cost of discovery has gone from “months of expert time” to maybe “hours of expert time" with this new wave of tools; and most of the experts *might* not even have access to the “best" tools, yet. (citation needed on that one, but… there are power-multiplier tools, certainly, for people who use them). I think we've barely scratched the surface on software that is exploitable (spoiler: nearly all of it...

• Post #2574539

  If I didn't have the experience to know better, and if I was a new user of the AWS Console, I'd swear that the performance of their cloud offering is terrible. It's just really slow/heavy browser code, plus WAY too many requests, but that *must* make a bad impression on new-to-AWS folks. (…if there are any of those left? maybe that's the problem…)

• Post #2574538

  I just discovered and used @geerlingguy 's `rpi-clone` and it worked perfectly. Now I've got a new RPi 5 booting from the [PoE hat's] NVME.

• Post #2367928

  Last night I had to do some above-the-OS work on a machine that's in the homelab "rack" (read: shelves). I plugged in my @jetkvm and it was actually really helpful. Last time I tried this, it was right after the kickstarter (and shipping), and it was definitely not-quite-ready then. But with the updates in the meantime, it was actually really nice for accessing the BIOS and providing a virtual disk image over USB. It's worth another fresh look if yours has bee...

• Post #2367927

  First world problem of the day: would be great if you hose nozzle manufacturers could make internal seals and springs that… y'know… withstand *water* for more than a season. These *rarely* work when I dig them out after winter. I never let them freeze; I manually drain them when they come in for the winter… Anyway, adding Stanley Fatmax to my never-going-to-buy-again-because-you-cheaped-out-on-the-spring list. Next up… Dramm? Lee Valley brass twist? (prefer lever to twist, but… desperat...

• Post #2216669

  It is 2037. You are being paid $7250/hour for your services. (Before you get too excited, a can of cola costs $129, and so does 15 seconds of LLM tokens.) There are not many left who can do what you do. You are the tradesperson of your time. It's messy work unclogging these metaphorical pipes, but someone's got to do it. A decade of nothing-but-vibecoding (artisanal “acoustic" performances aside) has left the world in tatters. The Y2K38 problem looms. The day’s task:...

• Post #2123934

  Looks like this got rolled back, but… if you use VSCode for source control… Microsoft has a new chore for you. (check your commits, I guess? this is bonkers.) https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/310226

• Post #2123933

  Had to add a `repeat…while` to our #Swift code this morning. So, that's how it's going today.

• Post #2123932

  The wailing siren at the local chemical processing plant reminds me that #Montreal is testing the emergency alert system today. Hope this helps. (-:

• Post #2123931

  I'm at @foulab for Mesh Night tonight. We'll be here for at least a few hours. Stop by if you're in Montreal and curious about #meshtastic , #meshcore , or #reticulum .

• Post #2106144

  I recognize that this is not a *new* idea, but it occurred to me that if Google wanted to start pushing “51st State" propaganda (or any other disgusting ideas) to a whole generation of children in #Canada , we don't really have a viable alternative to Google Classroom and Chromebooks. This is why I think data/technology sovereignty is so important, but from what I can tell it's not even a question for our schools/education ministries… seems like a very long uphill batt...

• Post #1982277

  I spend a lot of effort on noise reduction. Turning off alerts, reducing the size of (especially redundant) messages I don't really need to see—that kind of stuff. It's REALLY disruptive when software I use decides to get rid of those filters. Like not even just turning the noise back on, but fully removing my ability to even filter things. I regularly mourn the wonderful period of time when software worked for us. (This *is* open source, but maintaining a fork is more work tha...