Hello all! I’m Rose. Also a Fediverse chick. Unlike Nicole I don’t spam people. Also I’m not on Friendica (not many people are) and you probably shouldn’t add me as a friend on any Fedi platform because I’m a hella boring nerd.

Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy and Bookwyrm. They all seem to cover most of my social media needs which (in all other cases beside Lemmy) can be described as shouting in the void and being happy if someone else is there too.

I never got such a survey. Guess they figured that bunch of people would cancel the subscription in the month before an announced price hike.

SQL is an Old Language of Ancient Power. You have to write the keywords in all caps.

(Fortran is basically the same, but it’s rarer. Lisp is too, but you don’t need to capitalise everything, as the Ancient Power is contained in the parentheses.)

There’s always the old piece of wisdom from the Unix jungle: “If you write a complex shellscript, sooner or later you’ll wish you wrote it in a real programming language.”

I wrote a huge PowerShell script over the past few years. I was like “Ooh, guess this is a resume item if anyone asks me if I know PowerShell.” …around the beginning of the year I rewrote the bloody thing in Python and I have zero regrets. It’s no longer a Big Mush of Stuff That Does a Thing. It’s got object orientation now. Design patterns. Things in independent units. Shit like that.

You can add me on Friendica

Well that’s a huge red flag right there. Nobody uses Friendica.

“…and ripping that CD was annoying, because you then had an over long last track with the secret song, and you had to split the tracks manually and come up with tags on your own, or…”

(Seriously, the only reason I listened rarely to the last song in Halo CE soundtrack was because of this.)

There’s this website that listed bunch of stuff about Kim Dotcom and his ventures. (the list barely scratches the surface. But the important thing is that people thought he was hack decades ago.)

When I visited the site last time, I was like “ohhhhh, they’ve found a picture of Kim wearing an SS helmet. I really didn’t know what else I was expecting.”

Aka “karate chopping the Plausible Deniability right in the throat”

Luckily for Zuckerberg, then, Meta isn’t unfairly punished. It’s going to be punished quite fairly.

And Calibre, a third party software for managing ebooks, has a plugin to crack Kindle files.

Unfortunately currently broken for the latest version of Kindle for PC, which switched to a different encryption scheme. It also uses KFX file format that nobody likes, which fortunately can be converted to EPUB with another plugin, but de-DRMing doesn’t seem to work right now. It still seems to work for titles in AZW3/MOBI that didn’t get DRM update or didn’t have DRM in the first place.

No, that’s martial arts. Martial law involves less improvisation and adaptability. However, it loses to martial science.

Voyager.

Used Sync, but it’s not maintained. Liked Connect a lot. But, well, if the platform is open source, why not use an open source client too? Switched to Voyager and I’ve been very happy with it, actually.

Previously, you could just download the books on the Kindle for PC, use a random decoder software or install a plugin for Calibre, and boop, decoded books, readable in Calibre, can be converted to EPUB.

For ssssssome reasonnns I’ve been looking at how to do the same thing again, but apparently you need an old version of KfPC because the new one uses new encryption/file format that hasn’t been sussed out yet. Weirdly enough, even with the newer app, I’ve still been able to download a bunch of books that didn’t have DRM to begin with, but of course Amazon doesn’t exactly advertise if a book is DRM-free anywhere on the store page.

Also weirdly enough this quest of mine actually started last year when one Finnish ebook store was closed down, but that was less of a problem. I just downloaded all of my purchases as unencrypted EPUBs. Guess the local publishers are less dickish, worst thing they asked for was watermarking.

Long ago, I used Debian on my main PC but decided to go with Ubuntu on the laptop because it was easy to set up.

Later I switched to Debian on the laptop, too, because ultimately I felt Ubuntu was just Debian with extra steps.

Reminds me: long ago, one comedy website made a bunch of awards that you could put on your own website with if you didn’t get awards from anyone else. (Having a bunch of random awards was the style of the time.) One of these was the coveted Titanic Navigation Award. I don’t think it can be awarded to anyone any more, as the developers of React have been the most deserving one to receive it in recent years, for their unending efforts in making navigation more confusing for everyone.

Yay, I didn’t get spammed! …so the stuff I have on Codeberg is officially stuff nobody but me cares about. (Sadness, or an opportunity?)

Well, duh, where else would a pro-Hitler, Holocaust-denying ad be?

It’s a startup. Startup websites aren’t meant to convey information, they’re there to befuddle the investors. Convince them everything is fine and they should invest now.

(Well it isn’t actually a startup, but Elon runs it like it is)

Yup, the bottom line is, there was this dude who, upon buying a website, fucked it up.

Upon attaining unprecedented government position, he got access to government systems, and fucked them up.

Did anyone vote for this? No, no one voted for this. Were there supposed to be checks and balances to stop this from happening? Well, theoretically, maybe, but, urgh, the Founding Fathers didn’t expect anyone to unleash the Ultimate Idiot on crucial data infrastructure.