kbal

I went looking for coverage of this from the big news media and didn’t find a whole lot.

When the best the CBC can do is one brief mention that civil liberties groups had “several issues with the bill” right at the end of a lightweight report that mostly stresses how urgent it is to combat foreign interference, many Canadians will resort to trashy “news” sites like The Canada Files which from the looks of some of the things it publishes has a pretty high probability of itself being a foreign disinformation campaign.

I’m not a fan of the idea at all, but come on, it can’t really be that bad. There’s got to be somewhere you can tell it what environment variables to use. Probably something like run0 systemd-edit /usr/system/systemd/systemrun/run0-environment --system-default=system

the harm caused by vaping and why it is not a good way to stop smoking

I’m not up to date with the latest research on the dangers of vaping. When I did look into it some years ago things were very much inconclusive. The only thing that was really clear was that it’s nowhere near as bad as smoking, despite many well-funded people trying their hardest to prove otherwise. Presumably more evidence has come in since then.

But I do know that it is still a very good way to quit smoking. The only way that works for some people. There’s been plenty of research to support that, but it seems pretty damn obvious to many of us who’ve done it.

It’ll probably be a little less easy if the tobacco companies succeed in fully taking over the market with their shitty cigarette-shaped disposable products, so perhaps we can hope that someone considers that when deciding how to regulate the market.

There were some tools available to make it easy. For instance, to get a modeline that might work for your monitor just fill out this simple form.

My linux experience:

1993 - Hey, there’s a new Unix-like thing for the PC. You can check it out down at the university computer club.

1994 - Wow, I finally managed to get X running

1996 - It was somewhat normal for more nerdy software developers to run linux full-time on their desktop at work.

1998 - Linux was taking over servers to the point where you rarely saw Solaris, HP-UX, AIX around any more.

2002 - Everyone agreed that linux was pretty much ready to take over the desktop as well.

It’s the one with the glasses. He doesn’t give a damn about God, gays, gender, or guns, except in that they are useful tools for achieving power.

…more fancy such as using tar -X, which works for me. I’d never actually tried it before. The ‘weird globbing’ it uses is regular expressions, which are worth learning how to use. Run grep "$expression" $_tmpfile where $expression is a line from your exclude file to see which files it’s going to match and exclude.

I don’t know what fd does, but at a guess maybe what you’re missing is that tar includes all the files in directories you give it? So if you exclude ‘foo/bar’ but include ‘foo’ then foo/bar will be in your tar file.

What I do is basically tar cf `ls ~ | grep -v $files_to_exclude` but if you want to exclude something that isn’t a top-level directory you’d need to get slightly more fancy.

Suddenly I’m worried about AI’s energy draw. “6 percent of global electricity” is not a small amount of electricity.

Mark Carney, apparently. I thought he was still Governor of the Bank of England, but he went on to work for Brookfield and Bloomberg and is now being talked about as a likely successor to Trudeau. Perhaps Canada will follow a few years behind the UK. Some seemingly endless years of thorough mismanagement by the increasingly delusional Conservatives, followed by a nominally left-wing party lurching to the right to occupy the conservative but slightly less-insane position the Tories once held.

If it’s that bad, could you maybe give people a hint as to why we’d want to watch it and what it has to do with linux?

The problem remains: Who else have they got?

… rather than advocating for a two-state solution comprised of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Oh, so those are the two states everyone keeps talking about. Thanks for explaining, National Post!

The contrast illustrated here between the reporting on the least salubrious of the groups angry about Israel committing genocide and the reporting on Canada First, which gets a very brief mention, is certainly interesting.

Sure, the project is already bloated with so much complexity that what’s the harm in adding a little more? If you’re genuinely confused about it, see the entire rest of the Internet for details.

It has some advantages. It can be configured with simple text files and normal filesystem permissions. The sshd code is mature and has a proven record of good security. It doesn’t add yet another thing to systemd that has no business being part of systemd.

If they annoyed everyone in the area, became a public nuisance for a year, and left behind a big mess, well that is a small price to pay for the nation’s children finally being saved.

If they manage to do it by 2029 it will have been roughly one quarter of a century since it became obvious to anyone who cared to look into it that it needed doing.

It really isn’t. Today’s unpowered gliders are astoundingly capable compared to anything the Wright brothers lived to see, and that they’re not suitable for replacing all of commercial aviation as it exists today should not be taken as a slight against them.

Most of it will need to be replaced by ground-based transport.

It’s more appealing to everyone, irrespective of age. Wikipedia suggests that it’s been popular since the 19th century at latest. It was flavoured cigarillos that were the first tobacco products that tempted me, at a young age but not a child. Later, when I was much old, if pleasingly-flavoured vapes had been unavailable I would’ve had a much more difficult time quitting the nicotine.

But anyway, it’s the misguided notion that enjoying things which taste good is childish that I find offensive. Advocate for banning all tobacco and I can’t really say you’re wrong to suggest it, but don’t fall for that nonsense.

first commercial flight on an electric plane

Oh, it’s a flight school. Perhaps it’s not a scam, then. Places where electric planes might make commercial sense: Pretty much anywhere you could use an unpowered glider.