You know when grown-ups tell you everything's going to be fine, and you think they're probably lying to make you feel better?
Yes.
Everything's going to be fine.
Yes.
Everything's going to be fine.
Wednesday, June 15
Adventures In Windows 10 Land
I upgraded Chika (my ultrabook) to Windows 10 yesterday. Azusa, my full-size notebook, already got Windows 10, but I did that as a clean install.
I upgraded Chika (my ultrabook) to Windows 10 yesterday. Azusa, my full-size notebook, already got Windows 10, but I did that as a clean install.
It... Works. Even Start 8 works, and that's a specifically Windows 8 only application.
You do need to go through and turn off all the default-on spy options but one. The one to leave on is checking web pages against malware lists, but that only matters if you use Internet Explorer or the new Edge browser.
Meanwhile, Microsoft announced two new Xboxen, a little one which is the current Xbox One shrunk down and ships in August, and a new model which is a half-generation upgrade with four to five times the graphics horsepower - up from about 1.3 teraflops to 6 teraflops, due next year. The original Xbox One has problems running some games smoothly at 60 frames per second. The 2017 model should have no such issues.
If you want the same thing right now, just upgrade to Windows 10 (free) and get an AMD RX 480 (coming at the end of this month for around $199).
That just leaves Kei, my main desktop, which I shall remedy... Now.
Well, not now now, it takes ages to download. But it's on its way.
On all three I've installed StarDock's Object Desktop, which turns Windows 8 or 10 into a nicer version of Windows 7. Or if you're feeling perverse, of MacOS or even BeOS.
Tip: Just buy Start 10, which is $5. On checkout, you'll get an offer for a 60% discount for the complete Object Desktop suite, which takes it down to $20.
Update: Kei is tenified. I have one cheap netbooky thing around somewhere running Windows 8, and one survivor from ~2008 running Vista, but everything else is now well and truly sorted out.
Update: Except that suddenly I can't commit to Git. Which puts just a teensy cramp in my workflow, since that's where all my work is. It seems that Windows 8 can run a 64-bit executable from a 32-bit one, but Windows 10 doesn't, so I needed to install a 32-bit copy of Git to match the 32-bit version of Java that JetBrains ship with PyCharm.
Which is easy enough, except that all you get when this happens is the error "Resource temporarily unavailable" and a stack trace.
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Monday, June 13
Adventures In Ubuntuland
I changed some of the settings on my Ubuntu Venial Vermin VM, and broke it. Rather than fiddle with it for an unknown amount of time, I zapped it and built a new one.
I changed some of the settings on my Ubuntu Venial Vermin VM, and broke it. Rather than fiddle with it for an unknown amount of time, I zapped it and built a new one.
And found that Ubuntu desktop by default doesn't even install SSHD.
And once I got that working, and tweaked the settings on my terminal emulator (XShell) so it would work, realised that using the same OpenSSH-specific settings might allow me to SSH cleanly into Taiga, my iMac.
And they did. Had that Mac for six months and only now am I able to log in remotely directly from Windows. (Logging in from Linux always worked, because it was OpenSSH on both ends.)
Not much to show for a three-day weekend, though.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:13 PM
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Orlando
Well, crap. Condolences to everyone affected by this atrocity.
Well, crap. Condolences to everyone affected by this atrocity.
Meanwhile, the burying-the-lede contest is on:
CNN: 0 mentions of Islam, prominent link to story on the dangers of guns.
New York Times: 0 mentions of Islam, prominent link to story on the dangers of guns.
Washington Post: 0 mentions of Islam, prominent link to story on the dangers of guns.
ABC Australia: Mentions Islam, mentions recent shooting in Miami, but no lectures.
The American mainstream media are consistently to the left of one of the left-most institutions in Australia.
Oh, and Reddit is a total train wreck on this story. Just amazingly bad. The moderators are deleting anything that doesn't fit the narrative, or that questions why so many posts not fitting the narrative are being deleted, or that questions why so many post that question... Train wreck is putting it mildly.
This is what it looked like:
Update: CNN now has a mention of Islam. The Washington Post, to its credit, has made that their headline. And the New York Times... Has a picture of Obama.
And it looks like a second attack was stopped by police in Santa Monica. Details are still sketchy.
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Sunday, June 12
Went Shopping Today
Survived.
Survived.
Bought two keyboards, two mice, two HDMI cables, two USB cables, a four-port USB charger, a 16GB USB 3 thumb drive, a 16GB micro-SD card, and... Wait, that's the lot.
Carted it all home and installed Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on Tsumugi. After close to twenty years of using RedHat releases (original RedHat, Fedora, RHEL, and CentOS), I thought I'd give it a try. It has a pretty impressive feature list for what I want to do (ZFS, LXD, OpenStack, MAAS) and despite being a stable release (supported for 5 years) the packages are right up to date (Python 3.5, Ruby 2.3, PHP 7, MySQL 5.7).
Slight irks: The server install has no GUI. Okay, it's a server install, fine. The desktop install occupies 4GB and includes zero server components. Not even MySQL, which is usually hard to avoid (and a pain when you're installing your own preferred release like Percona). Oh, and DO NOT enable full-disk encryption when installing under VirtualBox. It works, in theory, but it is verrrrrry slow.
Also, there's no real GUI package manager installed by default. The desktop version seems to be very much the idiot edition, while the server version is the expert edition, leaving something of a gap.
Apart from that, it works, and it's usable and looks fine at 4K. I was hoping that 4K screens would finally fix Linux's perennial problem with ugly fonts, and they do. On both my 4K 15" notebook (Azusa) and my 4K 28" desktop screen (plugged into the notebook, hence the need for HDMI cables) it looks great. 4K at 15" is a crazy high resolution and almost everything looks good, but it's nice to have confirmation that the Linux desktop no longer looks like poop due to inadequate font hinting.
The problem with having a 4K 15" notebook is that I want to run it with two windows side-by-side the way I do with my desktop - generally my IDE on the right and terminal/email/web browser/Word on the left, depending on what I'm doing. But while 4K is more than enough resolution for that, 15" just isn't big enough. It drives an external 4K monitor with no problems, but that leaves little for its own 4K screen to do.
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Thursday, June 09
Outrage As People Hurt By Things, Film At 11
So, a knife-wielding madman was shot by police at the local shops today.
So, a knife-wielding madman was shot by police at the local shops today.
I live fairly close by so I had news helicopters hovering overhead for an hour - for several minutes, directly overhead.
No-one killed, but three bystanders injured apparently by ricochets or bullet fragments. Which is causing the usual Twitter fuss on Twitter. (Of course, the same police force was roundly criticised for not shooting the gunman in the hostage crisis in the Sydney CBD 18 months ago, and that time people did die.)
These are the same local shops where someone was murdered in public three months ago, the same ones that got clobbered by a tornado two and a half years ago. Must have been built on an AIBG.
Update:
A mentally ill man who was shot by police at a busy shopping centre was granted day releasefrom a mental health facility, despite allegedly telling his nurses and doctors he wanted to kill police.
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Retraction Of The Week
Via PowerLine:
Via PowerLine:
The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of "Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies†American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51. The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed. Thus, where we indicated that higher scores in Table 1 (page 40) reflect a more conservative response, they actually reflect a more liberal response. Specifically, in the original manuscript, the descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.
(My bold.)
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Tuesday, June 07
Elevated
First, watch this video. Then check the spoiler.
First, watch this video. Then check the spoiler.
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Monday, June 06
Hello Keroro
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Sunday, June 05
That'll Keep The Ducks Happy
Some parts of Sydney have copped 20 inches of rain this weekend, and it's still coming down. Not quite as bad where I live, but still pretty damp.
Some parts of Sydney have copped 20 inches of rain this weekend, and it's still coming down. Not quite as bad where I live, but still pretty damp.
Meanwhile:
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