One thing that UNIX users have that Mac and Windows users don’t: it’s generally quite easy to change their window manager theme – and to write/draw their own.

Window decorations – a frame, a titlebar, some buttons – are handled by the X11 window manager, which is itself a replaceable part. Window managers range from minimalist exercises in reductionism through gaudy feature-festivals like Enlightenment, the original perpetrator of shaped, translucent and transparent effects. But…

“Magic”, applied to technology, is an indictment, not a compliment.

– me, July 15 2020.

Internet Fast Lanes: Every time somebody says “Fast Lane” in this argument, I get a little more upset. The Internet doesn’t have fast lanes and slow lanes.

The Internet is not a highway.

The Internet is a railway system.

Perl is the best language if it’s the language that you remember well enough.

My father loves math puzzles. He told me about one he was working on, and I did a quick estimate of how complex the answer space was and told him that it would be faster to have a computer try out every answer than to be clever about solving it.

Of course he wanted me to prove that, so I had to brush off Perl or Python. For some reason, Perl felt better.

I got spammed by Privado – no link, they really want a link – which claims to be a privacy-enhanced search engine. Investigating their privacy policy, you can see that they are a proxy for Microsoft Bing. In effect, they exist in order to put ads in front of Bing searches: it’s another company eking out a profit margin between ads from ad networks and paying AWS fees.

Anti-recommended.

In the spirit of “the best way to get a correct answer is to post an obviously wrong answer on USENET”, I hereby present the most efficient method of mass-alteration of LDAP user entities I can think of.

You probably shouldn’t do this.

Who do you trust? And do you trust them indefinitely far into the future?

If you have specific reasons to believe you will be targetted by an interested, competent, resourceful attacker: you need serious information security measures, which will be painful and potentially expensive in both time and money. I have no such specific fears, so I’m merely interested in protecting my household against generalized attacks, the sort of thing that Google and Facebook and Amazon and every advertiser in the world carries out as a matter of course.

In this installment, I’m going to increase the difficulty of tracking my household network via intercepting DNS requests. I will assume you know a fair amount about DNS and feel comfortable configuring daemons and running them – this isn’t a step-by-step HowTo.

Since this class of bug just bit me, I figured I would write it up in the nearly futile hope that it might prevent me from making it again.

This bug is most often evident when we have a software stack that has varying levels of configuration available in each layer, ranging from simple components that are either installed or not to complex components with configuration stored in files.

Today’s example is my home theater computer, which has these relevant layers:

forked-daapd is an audio streaming server and webclient for same; it offers compatibility with:

The scientific method goes boing.

1. Form a question.
2. Observe evidence.
3. Form hypotheses.
4. Create experiments.
5. Observe results.
6. Compare hypotheses.
7. Be critical.

The scientific method runs off the rails in step 2 and explodes into uncertainty in step 3. It turns out that observing evidence is rarely easy or straightforward: it’s a great big universe, and we’re all really puny. And “forming hypotheses” is synonymous with “make guesses” – potentially educated, informed guesses, but still a creative process that is likely to baffle AI for decades to come.

That brings us to today’s problem: why does Netflix hate me?

Work asks that I bring home an Apple laptop so that I maintain some sort of fluency with the systems that the majority of our employees use. For the last while this has been a 2011 MacBook Pro with 20GB of RAM and an SSD. The keyboard finally sputtered its way to an unusable state (most of the modifier keys, shift/ctrl/alt/command/option/super/meta/hyper…) were unpredictably triggering or failing to trigger) and I asked for a replacement.

“Whatever has a functioning escape key, please.”

So they signed out a 2015 MacBookPro to me. It has 8GB of RAM (not upgradable) and an SSD (ditto).

If you have a Linux system that was using systemd as its init system, and you changed it to something else, and now nearly everything is incredibly slow:

Remove libnss-systemd; check for and remove systemd options from /etc/nsswitch.conf.

As you will no doubt recall, that config controls the methods that the system uses for various lookups. Most things are files, which is to say the system should look in the appropriate config files. hosts is usually files followed by DNS. If you have Kerberos or LDAP or some other networked signon system, this is where it would be configured.

Who knew that systemd wanted control of that, too? Not I.

The Google Nexus 6P was an excellent phone, until it developed severe battery issues when it was about a year old. Google did me the courtesy of replacing it with the Pixel XL, which was a reasonably good phone until two years in, when it developed moderate battery issues which …

Centralized facilities are easier to manage. Centralized facilities are easier to control.

Distributed facilities are harder to manage, harder to control.

Centralized facilities need expensive, difficult redundancies to maintain function during a partial outage. Distributed facilities need coordination.

Centralized is cheaper than distributed if you don’t pay for the things that can make it reliable.

If a previously reliable gigabit connection is suddenly working at 100 Mb/s, you probably have a flaky cable. Replace it. Yes, I know it hasn’t moved in months or years so there can’t possibly be any mechanical stress. Kill it with scissors.