Recent content on /home/anelki
This is a piece that I wrote for the University of Minnesota Center for Austrian Studies back in the fall that I’d been meaning to post here for a while…and now need to update. Austria has been without a permanent government since the election in late October 2024. The collapse of ÖVP-SPÖ-NEOS negotiations left the ÖVP Moderate Leader and Chancellor, Karl Nehammer twisting in the wind…
following some discussions both on Mastodon and IRC after my post yesterday about Linux vs. Mac I think (and here I have Nora Tindall to thank for asking) about the apparent difference between my experience with MacOS and Void Linux+BSPWM which made me realize that I am much much closer to what I want tht Linux experience to be on Mac and the Mac Experience on Linux. But wtf does that mean? It…
My first computer, which we got when I was 6 years old was a second-hand Macintosh SE from my aunt. It was a Big Deal in my household. I remember the smell it made when you turned it on. The tiny black and white CRT. The sound of its 3.5" floppy drive. It was a great computer. Or what an upgrade it was when we got an iMac in the late 90s. Or an eMac in the early 2000s. Or my first Intel Mac, a…
by popular demand, I am finally expanding on my occasional fediverse post about how terrible brew is for Mac OS package management. 1 But also, a few caveats: I am a curmudgeon. I do not give a single fuck. Don’t try to persuade me to use brew . see (1). Many of the things that I am about to mention might have been fixed in the five years since I last installed and used it. I still…
I’m really annoyed! people need to stop. I’m annoyed by the software puritans who go on about “JavaS’creep” or “Micro$haft.” About their special browser extensions that they run in their fork of Firefox 27 that “protect” them from non-AGPL3 Javascript. It’s not browser fingerprinting or ads or whatever that’s the problem, it’s…
It pains me to have had to bid adeiu to the WMATA Riders’ Advisory Council. At last week’s WMATA Board meeting, Chair Paul Smedberg elected to terminate my service after a single two year term. I regret it very much. What follows below is an email I sent to members of the Arlington County Board on Sunday. As I doubt I’ll actually get a reply, I’ve decided to just post it…
Earlier this year I wrote a post called “ email madness ” about the generally alarming increase in the number of emails I receive per year. I was thinking about producing one of those posts again this year when a friend shared this post on XMPP (aka. Jabber) and IRC. I’ve been on IRC for approximately a year and a half. I dabbled when I was a kid, but the ocean of networks was…
Sometime in the middle of February, I started noticing a marked increase in failed SSH logins on my two servers. Using the program fail2ban , I have long blocked logins by IP addresses that attempt to use root , www-data , or similar generic logins via SSH. IPs are blocked for a full year. Root logins and password authentication are both disabled in the SSHD config. In other words: I’m the…
Music : Thee More Shallows “2AM” this post was completely rewritten on 2020-04-06 Back in the day, I wrote a livejournal. I still remember my username and I’ve gone back to look at it a few times. It’s just as embarrassing as you might expect. But the one thing that I still think about from that time is the fact that I made some genuine (if indeed tenuous) friendships. And…
I’m extremely lucky to live where I live. In more normal times, I’m two blocks from a station on the Metro line that runs to my job, have plenty of grocery stores, drug stores, etc., live near beautiful parks, and am not far to fantastic trails and urban wilderness. During this…challenging…time, I am per order of the Hon. Ralph Northam , meant to stay as close to home as…
Music: Nine Inch Nails “ Every Day is Exactly the Same ” Ausnahmezustand When I lived in Austria my newspaper of choice was either Die Kurier (a solidly middle of the road and plainly written broadsheet) or Die Presse, a higher brow broadsheet that I read partially to put on airs of being deeply integrated in upper/middle class culture. 1 Part of my choice had to do with my working for…
In my tiny little plastic box Where caffeine is the only drug The doors and windows never open Something contagious could come up -Hundreds “Happy Virus” fate To be perfectly honest, by the time I came back from Pittsburgh I had kind of resigned myself to the idea that I would, at some point in the coming months, contract Covid-19. Despite being a consistent handwasher, despite taking…
at a loss for words I’ve been trying in the past few days to come up with a way to describe the situation we find ourselves in. It was foreseeable back in January, all things considered. When “The Virus” (this is all anyone talks about nowadays and always as “The Virus”) spread from China to other parts of the world—South Korea then Japan then Italy and then…
‘Cause every footstep was a lifetime passed Every pin prick left an autograph Sign the old familiar photograph Too old to last Too young to fall apart Too young to fall apart Too young to fall apart Too young to fall apart –Lane 8 “Yard Two Stone” we don’t talk about burnout enough in the US. It’s just something that people who are lucky enough to have health…
It feels tough to admit this, I guess. But especially in such a public way. Alas. Coding makes me anxious. I’m still very much an amateur, despite using it at work. I have a lot to learn and seemingly little time to work on it (for a lot of complicated reasons almost all to do with the pile of hats I’m wearing right now). 1 That means I don’t have a lot of time to focus and…
Too much. It’s really become all too much. Since I started using DevonThink last year I dump all of my email from the previous month into two databases, one for work email and one for personal email. When I went to do this yesterday, I decided it would be much more helpful if I created subgroups for each year of email. So, I decided to split out all of the pre-2015 email from the main…
CW: Discussion of Saddam Hussein and PTSD Who remembers 2006? I sure do. As evidenced by my first post , obviously I do. Who remembers when Saddam Hussein was executed? I remember that too. It was a late Friday night. I used to read Daily Kos several times a day and that day was certainly no exception (this may seem like a long walk to my point but stick with me). It was also the first time, I…
I thought it might be helpful for folks who (quite reasonably) don’t want to login to Red Hat’s opensource.com to share their collection of cheat sheets. Or at least the ones I’ve grabbed. These come in handy in a pinch, especially given the varied quality of what you can find on Stack Exchange. I’ve put them up on my Nextcloud instance here .
To say that I’m paranoid about backups is like saying…well, it’s hard to find a point of comparison that’s fulsome enough. I keep everything. I have archives of old MacOS installers on a RAID drive at home. Yes, I’m aware you can get them from Apple , the question being how long that’ll last. I have TimeMachine Backups going back to ~2009. Why? As another post…
CW: brief allusions to violent crimes near the bottom of the post “What does it matter if I have your location pings?! We delete them after 24 hours!” privacy. fucking. matters. We live in an age where privacy should be more important than ever. An age when we have the technologies to track and surveil with alarming precision. And that all exists in a regulatory framework that…
Life in the Devonian Era I am a data hoarder. I have personal emails going back to 2004. Some papers from undergrad, lots of stuff from my time in Austria, and more stuff besides. This is all to say nothing of my grad school work, thesis, etc. etc. etc. There’s a reason my 8TB NAS only has 1.5TB still free. I also have a lot of current stuff to manage and in a growing number of text and…
Just a stray thought re Thursday night’s post on nostalgia that’s probably better kept to myself. When you interview for a job, most people put their best foot forward, or try to anyway. When I interviewed for my current job in 2017, I know I did. But the one thing that continues to strike me is the volume of everything there is to do. How can you get to the projects/goals/ideas…
in which I attempt to thread some needles I am by nature a very nostalgic person. I have vivid memories of things most people would—I hope—forget. To make matters worse, I’m the kind of person most people would describe as an “old soul,” I’m increasingly cautious of new technology, developments, flashy political candidates, untested policy, I could go on and on.…
the internet is a series of tubes Between my 18th birthday in 2006 and my 20th in 2008: thefacebook became just Facebook Twitter was founded (and I’ll never forget thinking what a horrible idea it was hearing this on NPR). 1 Youtube came into being and was bought by Google. 2 Amazon Web Services releases its first product, AWS S3. The iPhone was introduced (and to everyone’s shock and…
Without much in the way of introduction, I’m posting the September 2019 WMATA Riders’ Advisory Council Report. This one is one of three I’ve written in the past few months. Fiscal Year 2021 Budget The RAC is grateful for the chance to consult on the coming FY 2021 budget at such an early point in the budget process. To that end, we had the pleasure of hearing from Yetunde…