Recently, I picked up a Dell XPS 13 9300 – while a few years old, I picked it up for quite a bit market value ($500 CAD – when equivalent-ish models range from $600 to $900 on the used market). While I don’t plan to use it as my daily driver, I did have a need for a newer Intel machine – I didn’t have anything after Haswell; just my Ryzen desktop and M1 MacBook Air. However, I decided to give a shot, and overall was pleased by what I saw, albeit with some caveats. Here’s what I think…
I had recently upgraded my NAS from FreeBSD 13.0 to FreeBSD 13.1. Unfortunately, I found out that the Deluge package was faulting on startup. It turns out that when FreeBSD updated the libtorrent-rasterbar package, it had broken the Python bindings, and thus Deluge. However, the old Deluge and Python binding package were still installed – they just didn’t work anymore due to libtorrent ABI.
While it’d be ideal if this were fixed upstream, I didn’t have the patience for this right now. So, I decided to downgrade the libtorrent-rasterbar package to be compatible with the Python bindings. There were no other dependent packages, so I figured this was safe. Unfortunately, I had to deal with a few curveballs along the way…
If you get this error message from WordPress:
Sorry, you are not allowed to add a term to one of the given taxonomies
It’s seemingly because you can’t publish new tags from the XMLRPC interface, used by client-side blogging tools (I was using MarsEdit.). I removed the tags from the post I wrote, and it seemed to work fine.
Online communities spawn, grow, and die. Why? How? What can be done? Here’s my story of my time online.
Quoting a friend from years past: IRC channel death is similar to the slow process of erosion. Conversation has ceased, yet it may be years before the channel is empty. I think about that frequently.
This post was inspired by some controversy with Valve and their support for Linux, but the bulk of it comes from long-term observation. One of the biggest impacts with the viability of Linux on the desktop was Valve’s Proton, a Wine fork integrated in Steam allowing almost any Windows game to work out of the box. To Linux users, life was good. However, with the recent announcement of the Steam Deck, a handheld device powered by Linux, Valve’s marketing towards developers explicitly mention no porting required. Valve’s been aggressive with this message enough that they’ve allegedly told developers simply not to bother with Linux ports anymore; enough that it makes commercial porters like Ethan Lee concerned.
However, I suspect this is the long-term result of other factors, and games are only one aspect of it. After all, we all know the Year of the Linux Desktop is around the corner, along with nice applications. Linux won’t rule the world just from games, even if some people really want it to be true. How did it come to this, and why?
I collect vintage computers and phone systems. Why? They frequently require repair, obscure knowledge, or dwindling parts supplies. Let me tell you how and why.
Continue readingWhile making devices more repairable is pretty much seen as universally a good thing, right? Unfortunately, engineering involves tradeoffs, but some of those tradeoffs that are seen as bad for repair (or are actually desirable in spite of it), or actually improves reliability. These are some things I suspect right to repair advocates forget.
This article is intended to unify some disparate thoughts on the subject I’ve had on Lobsters comment, this blog (i.e. the ThinkPad one), etc. as one post. I intend to do this more often for other things…
Continue readingAfter being successfully up and running for over a year with very few major changes needed, now seems as good a time as ever to break down how sporks.space runs, what secret sauce we use to run it how we like it, and so forth.
Continue readingInspired by cb’s post earlier this week, and by the same friends’ musings, I felt it would be fun to go over what my every day equipment is. This probably won’t convince you to use it, but serves more as a clarification of why I use it. With that out of the way, let’s talk about what’s on my desk.
Continue readingThis is a stream of consciousness (so don’t expect my usual polish) based off of some friends’ musings on the tools they use. I’m doing this to explain some of the tools I use, in the hopes of conveying my feelings on them. I doubt (and sometimes probably hope I won’t) I’ll convince you on the merits or if you should use any of these tools, but you’ll at least know why I care. As I write this, I consider the tools I use to be fairly pedestrian, but perhaps this document might have sentimental or historic interest later. Consider it like usesthis.com – and I also use a Mac!
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