2025-04-09 | Tech
Was it a flawless transition? Kinda.
It would have been better if I’d spent some money on new disks. But I kinda got the shits up when i opened the start menu and there was yet another notification bubble on the gamified thing where you collect Microsoft points for somethingarather by doing something. Then there was a thing about unicorns. And then Copilot was back, telling me that with AI I wouldn’t have endless search results in my start menu.
I don’t want search results in my start menu, unless it’s an application I have installed on my computer.
So anyway. A bit of a hiccough with my ownCloud and I’m syncing that down from the cloud again (sorry, old-old work hosting it still, but your upload is going to be about 700GB in the next couple of days (you have my number if you want me to stop)).
Email is rolling in. Signal and Whatsapp are linked. Browser stuff is all working fine. 1Password was disturbingly easy with the QR code scan. I’ve mounted the NAS drives. Music is playing.
Todo:
- tidal-dl
- yt-dlp
- Torrent client until I set up a “proper” setup
So far so good.
This is the first time that I’ve used Ubuntu and apt on a properly powerful machine, and I’m kinda blown away by how fast it all goes. I’m used to being able to read what packages are, but no chance with a desktop CPU, 32GB of RAM and an M.2 disk.
2025-04-08 | Tech
IT security has been in the news lately with the theft of money from superannuation funds. It’s bad, but when you consider that they only made off with $500,000 from the $4.2 trillion that Australians have in super funds it’s pretty inconsequential. It’s not going to ruin anyone’s day. Not even devops, because they’re saying it was a credential stuffing attack.
To do a bit of maths: $500,000 from $4.2 trillion is 1.2×10-7%. Or 0.00000012%. When it’s easier to work in scientific notation you know it’s insignificant.
But it could have been bad.
Preventing credential stuffing is pretty easy – don’t reuse your passwords. This becomes nearly trivial when you use a password manager. You don’t need to remember the passwords that are generated and they can be long and random. The one password that you need to remember to log in to your password manager can be long and simple. (You can look at the maths behind it here: XKCD.com.)
Then there’s that second factor authentication. When you try to log in, you get an SMS or email with a code sent to the number or address on file that you need to enter before you get let in. Or you need to dig out a number from an app that changes at regular intervals in sync with a service that you’re logging in to.
There’s a third factor that is tricky to implement – some sort of biometric factor. Like eyes, fingerprint, DNA (Severance style).
<pretend I found a jif of the fingerprick scenes from Severance>
I don’t think my super fund has 2FA (or MFA) set up. So I can’t rely on that as a second factor. But I do have an email service that allows for subaddressing email addresses. That link goes to a very dull publication about what subaddressing is.
In short, it’s that you can add details to the left side of an email address – the bit before the @. So if my main email address is ko@example.com, an email sent to ko+sometext@example.com will be delivered to ko@example.com, but with the +sometext as part of the to field. This is really handy for filtering emails.
It’s also handy to find out whether your email has been part of a breach or has been sold. If you suddenly get emails to ko+company1@example.com from Company 2, you know that your email address has either been sold or stolen. Handy for the curious but not that useful.
But where it might come in handy is to add another factor of authentication to limit credential stuffing. If you’ve happened to reuse a password somewhere, but if the username for the places are different, then you’re steps ahead in protecting yourself because there’s no match.
I hope.
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2025-04-03 | Reading, Tech
In many ways they never left. But often they were ignored, left to collect cyber-dust and possibly go horribly out of date, needing many updates as they are revived. But they’re coming back. The Great Centralisation that started in the early 2000s with the advent of Facebook seems to be coming to an end. At least in my circles. Old blogs are being revived. New blogs are popping up. People are talking about RSS feeds again. Platforms. Favourite way of doing formatting.
It’s really magnificent.
But then – how do you keep track of everyone’s blogs? How do you know what to pay attention to, if there isn’t an algorithm that manages it all for you?
There are ways. And here are mine.
Some blogs let you subscribe to a newsletter that sends when the blogger posts a new posting. I do this with a few of my blogs. Not this one, though. It’s a nice way of doing it if you don’t hate emails. I don’t actually get many good personal emails any more – it’s mostly notifications – so getting an email full of delightful content from people I like is really refreshing.
RSS. Really Simple Syndication. A standard that’s been around for 26 years (yikes!) and not changed in the last 16. It’s a standardised XML file of the content on a website. There are many ways you can subscribe to an RSS feed. Your browser can (or should be able to) create what looks like a bookmark folder that updates with all the latest postings from a website. You can get a special feed-reader app on your phone. Or a feel-collecting page on a website. Or in an email client in a similar way to the bookmark folder in a browser.
Or my favourite way: RSS-to-email. You can run scripts in Git Hub that will gather all the updates from a collection of RSS feeds, format them neatly into an email and send it to you however often you like. I’ve got my email set up to be delivered around 6am, so it’s there to skim as I’m waking up. It’s a bit of a fiddle to configure initially but having updates delivered daily, without me needing to open Yet Another App. I’m checking emails anyway.
I’m trying to collect a nice blogroll here, too. It’s a work in progress, obviously.
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2025-03-29 | Reading, Tech
I don’t read a lot. I think it’s because I read slowly. I have occasionally posted reading-log (and one reading-slog) entries here. But I’ve moved that over to Futzle’s Bookwyrm instance.
So. If you’re curious about what I’m reading: https://outside.ofa.dog/user/KO
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2025-03-28 | Tech
Enshittification.
noun Colloquial the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.
Macquarie Dictionary word of the year in 2024. Relevant.
I’m never moving to Windows 11. I can’t list all of the reasons, because I can’t remember them all at the one time, but here is a short list of reasons why I think the operating system, and maybe the company in general, is going to shit. Windows 10 is bad enough. And most of these things are Windows 10 related.
Telemetry. Microsoft are over-reaching with what information they collect. I don’t want an operating system that spies on me when I’m using it. Escaping this in all software is getting harder and harder (especially with even Mozilla/Firefox going down a privacy-invasion path).
The Start Menu. It used to be the place to launch programs that you wanted to use. But now it gives you search results, lists applications that you don’t have installed, the weather, the stock market, sport results, and services that aren’t actually on my computer.
Default Settings. A fresh installation of Windows 10 takes up 75% of the task bar with a search bar, weather (“Temperatures set to rise!” – what is this? SimCity??), stock ticker, a start button, and a system tray. It’s all to cramped that the programs you open end up as just icons. Two instances of one program running and they’re grouped so you have to hover on the icon to open the instance that you want. In Windows 10 this behaviour can be changed, but I don’t understand why anyone would want to have their computer work that way. It’s as though people at Microsoft don’t use their own products.
OneDrive and MS365. Everything is OneDrive. Everything is MS365. But not quite well enough. On my work computer where I have to use OneDrive, I have two Desktop folders. One is C:\Users\bitterswede\Desktop and the other is C:\Users\bitterswede\OneDrive – placeofemployment\Desktop. Just let me store things on my computer.
Anyway. I promised a non-exhaustive list, so that’s what this will be.
So, with support for Windows 10 ending, what will I do, since I’ve taken the stand to never move to Windows 11.
Linux.
This year is, indeed, the year of Linux on the desktop.
The only issue I have with moving is that I need to abandon Affinity’s suite of software. It’s no massive loss and there are replacements, but I spent good money on them.
I’m going to order a new M.2 drive, and then install Ubuntu on that.
Stand by for the post on that.
