@glent@aus.social

Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Jul 31, 2026

Replying to @h2onolan@infosec.exchange

@h2onolan@infosec.exchange There is no shortage of ISPs who will sell a service which is presented as a port on a ethernet WAN bus rather than as an internet service. But honestly, that's like Step One of what is needed. For example, consider that it took Mandiant a month to check that the SCADA system of Colonial Pipeline had not been compromised. The best people. One whole month. SCADA design needs to get a lot better.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Jul 24, 2026

Replying to @timnitGebru@dair-community.social

@timnitGebru@dair-community.social fully thought this was about EVs until the second paragraph

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Jul 18, 2026

Replying to @glent@aus.social

@ascentale@sfba.social @uxMark@cosocial.ca @cainmark@mstdn.social @bikenite@fedigroups.social A6. I'd like to add a caution about cycling in the vicinity of bushfires. The winds on such days are often huge. So if the road has a section where you need to cycle into the wind, you can be making inadequate progress no matter how fit you are. If you think car drivers are stupid normally, bushfires add a big gulp of the red cordial drink. When in smoky conditions driving away from a fire you want to be doing about 40Km/h, as realistically the greatest danger is running off the road or hitting a fallen tree or stopped car -- then you are in a car which is not drivable, with smashed windows, with an approaching fire. But YouTube has no shortage of drivers 'escaping a bushfire' at 120Km/h along a smoke-covered country road. I don't want to overstate this. Since using a bike to evacuate in a threatened periurban area may make sense. #bikenite

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Jul 18, 2026

Replying to @ascentale@sfba.social

@ascentale@sfba.social @pete@masto.hypertelia.com @bikenite@fedigroups.social A7. Happy to take friends and family to a bike co-op sale and help them find a bike which fits and will suit what they want it for. But in the end they choose. Because a lot of beginning cycling is about motivation, and if the blue bike motivates them more, you can't argue with that. Related: I have fitted a lot of baskets, bells and handlebar streamers to kids bikes, and upgraded a lot of tyres on adult bikes. #BikeNite

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Jul 18, 2026

Replying to @ascentale@sfba.social

@ascentale@sfba.social @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org @bikenite@fedigroups.social A5. [Australian health system, YMMV] Most doctors don't seem great with the rehabilitation of muscular system injuries. Physiotherapists are, but they need diagnosis and preferably imagery, which can only be ordered by a doctor. So you end up having to be the manager of your own health care, and do a lot of message passing between health professionals. #BikeNite

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Jul 18, 2026

Replying to @ascentale@sfba.social

@ascentale@sfba.social @bikenite@fedigroups.social A4. The amount of pain varies by airline, and their rules also change over time. Australia's Qantas already has a baggage allowance for two items, and they sell cardboard bike boxes with generous width. You'll need suitable transport from the airport as abandoning a large empty box at an Australian airport is the same terrorism offense as leaving unattended any other luggage. I had a good experience in Sydney strapping a furniture slide to the box and wheeling the box to the train station. Adelaide hosts an international bike race, and so its airport, taxi and buses are set up. Hobart has a bookable box disposal, so you can ride from that airport. Melbourne's airport bus will take bikes, but you'll then need a maxitaxi from the CBD as the box won't be allowed on a tram (still cheaper than a maxitaxi from the airport). Note that it is legal to gaff tape a box opener to the box. This can make opening the box simpler. Especially as Qantas may add more tape. Note that you may have to open the box whilst at the airport for quarantine (international, Hobart, Adelaide). If the bike is too muddy or otherwise can carry seeds then they'll want to clean it. So include a roll of gaff tape in the box so you can re-seal it. In more recent years I simply hire a road bike. So I pack my helmet and shoes and that's it. It's expensive, but so much simpler when the bike is already in your hotel room. #BikeNite

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Jul 17, 2026

Replying to @ascentale@sfba.social

@ascentale@sfba.social @uxMark@cosocial.ca @cainmark@mstdn.social @bikenite@fedigroups.social A6. It depends. A woman died simply stepping off a plane in Canberra, the momentarily still winds allowed the smoke from the ORRORAL fire to densely settle. Whereas the smoke from the large LONG PLAINS fire coloured the sky but was very high. The other concern is simply being caught in a fire front whilst cycling. LONG PLAINS was a grass fire pushed by huge winds, burning 120Km in about three hours. So cycling in an already smoky atmosphere means a fire can arrive without warning. This happened to a few people in the very large GOSPERS COMPLEX fire with its multiple fire fronts. The older N95 masks, with the exhaust port, look the goods for cycling in smoke. I'd suggest wearing close fit goggles rather than glasses (eg, uvex ultrasonic). When you get home change and have a shower, you don't think you stink, but you do, and moving the smoke smell from sofas and the like is a tough job. #bikenite

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Jul 12, 2026

Replying to @Hyperiontrails@tech.lgbt

@Hyperiontrails@tech.lgbt Genuinely wondering what my phone with Telstra + Optus SIMs is going to do.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Jul 06, 2026

Yet another academic who says stupid shit then walks away with career unaffected. "Pioneer of ‘extreme male brain’ theory of autism now says phrase unhelpful" https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jul/05/autism-extreme-male-brain-simon-baron-cohen

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Jun 28, 2026

Adelaide friends Looks like the State Development Area for Osborne -- intended for works for the Aukus submarine project -- is far larger than needed. See the map below. It's basically the entire LeFevre Peninusla which doesn't currently have residential housing plus all but the central streets of Port Adelaide. This includes Victoria Drive and the Port River and its shores. The SDA makes it easy for the South Australia government to ignore local government and community concerns about a development. I'd encourage you to have a good look at the map and ask "Why does this street need to have residents' views put aside?" Why the cruise liner passenger terminal? Why both the sailing clubs? Why the new high density residential construction in Port Adelaide? Why the new light industry area north of the Port River Expressway? Why both power stations, the cement works, and the fuel storage; all of which were satisfactorily constructed under the current rules? None of which have anything to do with making submarines. The Port Adelaide - Enfield Council is incredibly supportive of industry in the Port and Peninsula. As are the people of the Port. There is no Nimby going on here, not even in the local environment group. We've had decades of unemployment since containerisation in the 1970s, and whilst the corner has turned on that, people are still keen for a future which involves making and doing. Wanting that done right is part of making that future secure. If you too feel the size of the proposed Osborne State Development Area is an over-reach far beyond Osborne itself, you can comment here: https://yoursay.sa.gov.au/osborneSDA #adelaide

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Jun 07, 2026

Replying to @jonuriarte@tldr.nettime.org

@jonuriarte@tldr.nettime.org This isn't just an AI story. It's also about how the chaebol class is so disconnected from mainline South Korean society that they did not see the problem. This is stoking anger more than any AI aspect. The chaebol class don't need the help of AI to be right wing: their grandfathers being the supporters of the President who murdered the Gwangju May 18 demonstrators; and their fathers opposing the ultimately-successful 1987 demonstrators.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 31, 2026

Cybersecurity is a failure.

It has turned the idea of personal computing back into a mainframe. Like computer security got stuck in the 1970s and never left.

The idea that you or I might use a computer as a computation device in its own right is verboten in the Halls of Cyberism. Programming is done by The Other, and the messiness of product development, let alone learning or research, is simply forbidden.

The only exception is the Excel programming environment, because the Cyberists know their game is up if they treat finance as they do everyone else.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 29, 2026

Moving the Australian population census to the web should never fail to a denial of service attack. The amount of data to be transferred is tiny, let's massively overestimate and say 100KB. It has to be secured, but that's what encryption is for. The business requirement for the transaction speed, it's nowhere near the usual 200 milliseconds. 200 minutes would be fine.

Constructing a huge central web and transaction processing enterprise application tells me that the designers built what they knew. Rather than using the inherent distribution of the data to win through computer science.

#auspol

aus.social

Aus.Social

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 24, 2026

The LibreOffice "startup tips" are surprisingly good.

I had turned them off expecting the usual mix of irrelevance and marketing. But having turned them on, this is the one time a program has made this concept actually work.

#linux

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 23, 2026

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio heading to India to convince Prime Minister Modi that what Rubio said in Europe does not apply to Asia. La.

#auspol

aus.social

Aus.Social

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 23, 2026

fedora$ sudo dnf update --refresh

Does not update the kernel today,

#linux

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 23, 2026

I don't know what Microsoft threatened the BBC with, but so much UK TV showing Linux screens.

#linux

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 11, 2026

Replying to @ruari@velocipederider.com

@ruari@velocipederider.com The car ads which feature bikes :-) (There's a saying about the predominance of ads with bikes: every industry but the bike industry knows how to sell bikes.)

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 10, 2026

Replying to @GeePawHill@mastodon.social

@GeePawHill@mastodon.social Mentioning programming languages, waiting for the inevitable article "Epstein Considered Harmful".

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 10, 2026

After recent excitement you might want to check that your fedora kernel is

$ uname -r
7.0.4-100.fc43.x86_64

Now undo whatever module loading prevention you had in place for the recent issues. You might need to reboot.

--

You might want to update the system rescue kernel.

Find the files with

$ sudo find /boot -name '*rescue*'

and delete them.

Remove an older kernel, anything 6.9 is old enough.

Now recreate the rescue kernel with

$ sudo dnf reinstall kernel kernel-core

If this has no effect look into 02-rescue.conf in /usr/lib/dracut/dracut.conf.d or /etc/dracut/dracut.conf.d to make sure the recue kernel is enabled.

#linux

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 10, 2026

Replying to @krupo@infosec.exchange

@krupo@infosec.exchange @girlonthenet@mastodon.social We use invoices because that's the simplest way of dealing with the Goods and Services Tax, changes in ownership, and fraud. It's such an obvious choice that the legislation used to acquire use of the land isn't written with another choice in mind. This is true for most Australian land leased to infrastructure -- pipelines, electricity, telco and so on. As you have seen, when on site we do check that people know to bill us. Bad, bad things are said by our legal people if we can't track down an owner and we're behind on payments: there is no way our lawyers want to pay the costs of a court case which would make them expert on the liabilities of events at unpaid leases.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 10, 2026

Replying to @girlonthenet@mastodon.social

@girlonthenet@mastodon.social It's not just creative people. My employer has little plots of land leased from farmers all across the country. For which we are both endlessly grateful, and willing to pay. Upon the receipt of an invoice for the rent. The number of times I visit a farm and they say "You haven't paid us." I now have a little spreadsheet I give to farmers which will generate an invoice on the other tab, complete with the email address to send the PDF to. With a little column which adds a row each time this is done so the farmer knows when they last asked us for what they are owed. I've even helped bigger farms set up their accounting software for this regular invoice (and btw farmers, a Chart of Accounts is a thing, stop lumping everything into one category). It's basically the human condition. Except for some freaks (waves at our delightful CFO) we all have to be dragged to the paperwork. The only answer is structure and reward and not letting it be delayed so it becomes overwhelming: every Friday afternoon before going to the pub, that sort of thing.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 08, 2026

Replying to @wendinoakland@beige.party

@wendinoakland@beige.party @tg@indieweb.social Well, you are posting this on Mastodon, so I'd go with 'yes'.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 08, 2026

Replying to @dalfen@mstdn.social

@dalfen@mstdn.social The Obama administration bailed out car companies for no equity. You can read Jay Alix's article in Forbes on how GM was restructured and his delight in the US Government wanting no say in 'NewCo', the unencumbered assets. Part of the Maga movement is protest against these insider deals, where the taxes of workers pay for the companies of the already wealthy. So of course the Trump administration was going to ask for equity in an airline coming to the government for a bailout. That's just prudent use of government funds. Businesses better get used to that because they are never again getting the free ride of the Obama and Biden years. Trump is also lining his and his friends pockets in his second presidency. But why use a failing company to do that? Trump is levying successful companies which need to jump a regulatory hurdle. These two activities look very similar, but one is wise, the other corruption.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 08, 2026

Replying to @bradr@infosec.exchange

@bradr@infosec.exchange Here is a year in South Australia. Green for solar+wind, black for gas and diesel, purple for battery charge/discharge*.

Such is the height of the daytime solar generation across Australia, mostly from residential solar, that there will be three hours of free electricity from June.

The South Australia state Premier says all electricity in the state will be zero carbon by 2027.

Edit: a caution about interpreting these figures. This is electricity usage as seen by the grid. There is a huge amount of daytime power consumption which is powered from on-site solar panels, and so not seen by the grid at all. No one knows how big this 'behind the meter' usage is, but based on panels sold it is expected to be huge, as part of the rationale for a household installing solar is to run the summer air-conditioning for 'free'. There are pleasant spring days (no heating or aircon) where the entirety of the state is powered from residential solar alone.

Battery charging is solar+wind in SA, so count that as non-fossil.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 06, 2026

You know how old I am? I had to explain the actual history of the collapse of the Berlin Wall to a coworker who was old enough to have just had a baby.

(In case you are wondering, church youth groups were more of a cause than Ronald Reagan.)

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 06, 2026

Jeff Goldblum & The Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, Adelaide Festival Theatre, Saturday last. "Night blooms" tour.

Movie stars fronting a band playing jazz have a long history. Jeff Goldblum is no Cary Grant, but Goldblum knew the tradition and got the job done.

Opened with thirty minutes of verbal game playing with the audience, dropping of famous names, and a guest appearance (for Adelaide, hometown director Scott Hicks). Long enough so that people who came to see Jeff The Movie Star got what they came for.

Then Goldblum played jazz piano competently, but mostly showboating whilst the band did the heavier lifting. Obviously songs he cared for. But since no one would have come to see "Jeff listens to his favourite songs being played by a great band", then of course has to play and occasionally sing.

Best of the band was saxophonist James King.

Guest singer in four songs was Khailah Johnson. She was excellent, and clearly destined for even greater things than a minor role in Broadway's "+juliet". We were lucky to see her in Adelaide, because her career won't bring her here again.

Closed with Moanin', a piano-led instrumental Goldblum had clearly intensely practiced to do the jazz classic justice, and that also allowed the band to kick it up a notch.

Overall, a good show and a wonderful Saturday night out. Nice of Goldblum to go to the trouble to bring it to our small city.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 05, 2026

Replying to @futurebird@sauropods.win

@futurebird@sauropods.win I'd argue those carefully-done films just got cheapened into PowerPoint, and the bad money flushed out the good. But I am also willing to hear a counter-argument which says 'enthusiast youtube'. Which is currently one of the easier ways to learn a small task or overcome a learning blockage.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 03, 2026

Dear math teachers. Could we please teach people doing senior school maths about terms and expressions? Because the typical order of operations falls naturally from those definitions. Every time someone treats PEDMAS as a definition, rather than as an aide memoire, a kitten dies.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 03, 2026

When you charge the bike lights and computer, lube the chain, pump up the tyres, and only then read the weather forecast which promises rain, and maybe lots of it.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 03, 2026

A note on the US withdrawing 5000 troops from Germany.

The US is pulling back every missile it can which is not in the Middle East. Finding something a German politician said to take offence at was just a way to lower the political price.

As a result these 5000 troops are not cooks and cleaners. They are the operators and weapon systems Europe most wanted to counter Russian expansionism.

The troops and their equipment won't be coming back, because the US is now desperately low on war stocks. Not only because it shot away half of its most necessary missiles in a few weeks, but because the rate of consumption was far higher than their war planners imagined. They thought Ukraine had been profligate, but in fact they were parsimonious.

There remains one vital question: will the US license missile production across the globe, or will Europe and Asia need to develop their own.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 03, 2026

Replying to @MyView@aus.social

@MyView @colinpurrington Councils would prefer that standing water be removed from domestic premises. They're particularly not keen on fish ponds, as people dispose of the contents of those into waterways, leading to foreign fish and weed infestation. Councils themselves are huge users of BTI, for the areas used for waste water runoff control. The products from Bunnings are wetting agents, work fine on small areas of still water, and have no possibility of increasing resistance.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 01, 2026

Replying to @bastardsheep@aus.social

@bastardsheep My brother always said that there was nothing given so much space as a drab camoflauge army truck with a small sign saying DANGER - EXPLOSIVES.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 01, 2026

Replying to @TagYourToe@mastodon.social

@TagYourToe@mastodon.social @theothersimo@mastodon.social @therealnews@mastodon.social Even if that were the case, it happened well outside Israel's territorial waters. 'Freedom of navigation' is one of the issues over which Israel and US are fighting a war with Iran. So there is hypocrisy which it is fair for Albanese to point at. Edit: if attention whoring on boats in the Mediterranean is a crime, there are so many millionaire yachts off the coast of Greek Isalnds that Israel will be busy for a century :-)

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · May 01, 2026

The US primaries -- where political parties choose their candidates -- is completly alien to Australia. Why is the state even involved? Why is litigation about candidate selection even possible, surely that allows a triumvirate by the courts rather than parliament being the ultimate power (as established by the devastating English Civil War).

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Apr 30, 2026

Replying to @cR0w@infosec.exchange

@cR0w @scottwilson @GossiTheDog Meta must have expected this. I mean when was the first CCTV security camera installed at a university?

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Apr 30, 2026

Raspberry Pi folks worried about CVE-2026-31431 'copy fail'.

Add this to the end of the line in /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt

initcall_blacklist=algif_aead_init

Then reboot with sudo systemctl reboot.

Check that it worked with

dmesg | fgrep 'blacklisting initcall algif_aead_init'

expect to see

[ 0.000000] blacklisting initcall algif_aead_init

You're now good against this issue.

#raspberrypi

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Apr 29, 2026

Replying to @MarkAsser@beige.party

@MarkAsser@beige.party To be fair, wouldn't want to claim the Australian passport. Which doesn't have gold printing. But also doesn't lay flat.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Apr 28, 2026

Replying to @pixx@merveilles.town

@pixx @skinnylatte Yeah. What security there is is tied to the trademark system. So for corporations, not for you.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Apr 28, 2026

Replying to @98Percent@mastodon.nz

@98Percent@mastodon.nz @lackthereof@beige.party @aj@gts.sadauskas.id.au Also, the Australian Constitution has an open invitation for New Zealand to join should it ever wish to. Not that it ever did want or would ever want to :-)

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Apr 21, 2026

Replying to @krono@toot.berlin

@krono@toot.berlin @petrillic@hachyderm.io Those are really built for telco networks. Previous standards didn't deliver enough power for the transceiver to produce a coherent signal for mixing into a longlines DWDM system without a transponder card. You're not going to need that sort of power to cross the datacentre floor. A good thing too. Most of the power used by an OpenZR+ switch is sent to the transceivers hanging out the front. Makes sense if you're removing the need for transponders -- the most expensive element of a DWDM system -- but insane otherwise. These will bring sophisticated DWDM systems within the reach of corporate sysadmins. Much as happened previously with passive CWDM. If you run a big campus network I'd be looking to install a 1310+30ch DWDM multiplexor underlay across the campus fibre network. Then dark fibre core counts can fall, and these are currently too high: a break in a 300+ core cable can take days to fix.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Apr 21, 2026

Replying to @avojak@mastodon.social

@avojak @airwhale we've been using Jira for so long that we remember when it was good :-) The lack of investment in their core product is mind boggling. Still waiting for it to work on a smartphone-sized screen.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Apr 14, 2026

Replying to @dalias@hachyderm.io

@dalias @ska SPF bought this upon themselves. There was a distinct SPF record type, which they abandoned for wider reach of TXT records.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Apr 12, 2026

Replying to @MattHatton@aus.social

@MattHatton "Yes. I have endured many talks made worse by this product."

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Apr 12, 2026

Replying to @NotRappaport@mindly.social

@NotRappaport@mindly.social What am I missing, why don't these kids already have library cards before they get to school?

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Apr 12, 2026

Replying to @tiggy@mastodonapp.uk

@tiggy @bytebro @tlayoyo local practice varied in Australia at the start of the 1980s. Some data entry teams were ALGØL 6O (Canberra CAE), other teams in the same suburb were ALGOL 6Ø (Australian Bureau of Statistics).

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Apr 10, 2026

Replying to @SaanichGuy@mstdn.ca

@SaanichGuy @Mikal When they started jailing Australian board directors for worksite deaths, guess what happened with safety on worksites :-) Every reason to do the same for road deaths.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Apr 09, 2026

Replying to @dec23k@mastodon.ie

@dec23k This is rubbish. 750Hz is around F5#, the F# in the octave above middle C. So the claim is that if you put on your ANC headphones and run your fingers up the white and black keys, then a few notes will be particularly louder. If you have a piano or a keyboard, give it a go now. See for yourself. One of the cases where a cheaper instrument is better. If this really existed, audiophiles would be besieging the HQs of Sony, Bose and Apple over poor headphone performance whenever near the huge amount of popular music in F# minor. --- So of course I had to read the paper. Turns out the claim isn't that 750Hz is louder. The claim is that 700-800Hz is psychometrically more noticed. So this need not be a feature of ANC at all. It could be a feature of humans. And why are these frequencies more noticed as bicycle bells by human listeners. That would be because these frequencies are often used by bicycle bells. People pay more attention to the things they are listening for. Shocked I am.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Apr 08, 2026

Replying to @annaecook@mastodon.social

@annaecook Orban is losing, whatever Vance does. This is Vance auditioning to be the Republican candidate for US President.

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Glen T, heated, not stirred @glent@aus.social · Apr 07, 2026

Replying to @9to5google@mastodon.online

@9to5google In what way is this remotely adequate.

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