Google cripples ad and tracking blockers: In January, Chromium will switch to Manifest V3 which removes an essential API in favour of an inferior one. As usually, Google is being deceitful and touts security concerns as pretext.

That hits all Chromium based browser, such as my beloved Vivaldi. The team argues with their own browser internal blocker, but that's far worse than uBlock Origin. One of Vivaldi's core promises was privacy, and that will go out of the window. The team simply doesn't react to people pointing that out. They're fucked, and they know it.

So what now? Well, going back to Firefox because that will include the crippled new API for extension compatibility, but also keep the powerful old one specifically so that ad and tracking blockers will keep working. Google has just handed Mozilla a major unique selling point, and miraculously, Mozilla didn't fuck it up.

Fuck you, Nvidia. Uhm no, this time not from Torvalds, but EVGA: they're fed up with Nvidia's antics towards their AIB partners. No 4000 series EVGA GPUs anymore.

Source: https://forums.evga.com/Official-Me...

25 years Judgement Day! 🥳

Linux Mint 21 has been released! 🥳

Details: https://blog.linuxmint.com

WOOOOOSH!

Did you see him? That's the superhero we need and deserve: Weekendman!

Customer call.

Customer: what's the status of the software?
Me: it's a bit of wood work.
Customer: wood work?!
Me: yes, I think it would work.
Customer: ...
Me: ...

The Tale of Mouse and Watch

Once upon a time, a mouse wanted to know what time it was. So it asked the first guy who came along, but it didn't understand Suaheli. Anyway, he just had mumbled, gotta kick the cat in its lazy ass.

So the mouse moved on and nearly got it when it met another mouse who bad been sewn to a dead elephant's ear exactly 27 years ago - but unfortunately, it had forgotten the time of day when that had happened.

The seeking mouse came up with the idea of doing something with the sun, but since it was only dumb mouse, it looked right into the sun and was blinded.

Now pretty desperate, it tumbled through the gutters that were full of trash. Accidentally, it fell over a dumped watch, and the mouse broke its nose.

The lesson: sometimes, even a blind mouse may find a broken watch!

Fucking customer industrial machine doesn't work properly because the dumbass who designed the control algo failed to consider basic physics how this shit is even supposed to work. Just to be sure, he also included some race condition in the measurement part of the software.

The good: use the hardware watchdog in your application control flow.

The bad: don't use a watchdog.

The ugly: trigger the watchdog from a fucking timer interrupt.

Wasted a day as Shitlock Holmes with the build chain.

It would not reproduce the firmware hexfile that had been checked in. Reverse engineering that along with the mapfile to find out the cause, it was a const string that was guarded by an ifdef from another file that was auto-generated as prebuild step via a script that fetched some version control info.

Or, it would have been if the installation instructions had been correct and someone had described that no spaces in the absolute path name of the project are allowed. Otherwise, that shit just failed silently.

I then had to reverse engineer the intended workflow from the commit history in the version control to figure out that the last dev obviously hadn't quite understood the project specific workflow and how the version control interacts with these build scripts.

At least, I finally did get a matching hexfile.

Asus announced their AM5 board X670E Extreme. The E already stands for Extreme, which makes it an Extreme Extreme.

My feeling is that AM5 will be extremely - expensive!

That's because the AM5 LGA socket moves cost from the CPU (formerly PGA) to the mobo, but AMD certainly won't drop CPU prices, rather the opposite, and then there's also DDR5 as cost driver, not to mention tons of PCIe 5.0 where we don't even have AIBs.

On the upside, that would finally end the days of GPUs causing a disproportionately large share of the system cost - if only because the rest gets more expensive.

Nvidia might stop being a douchebag about Linux: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/... Right now, that doesn't change much yet, but it opens a possible road.

​​​​​​​

Story of a penguin fledgling, one of my end users whom I migrated from Win 7 to Linux Mint. She had been on Windows since Win 98 and still uses Windows at work.

Three months before. Me, Linux might not be as good, but Win 10 is even worse. User, mh.
Migration. User, looks different, but not bad.
One month later. User, it's nice, I like it.
Three months later. User, why does Windows reboot doing lengthy stuff?
Six months later. User, I hate Windows. Why is everyone using this crap?
One year later. Malware issues at work. User to IT staff, that wouldn't have happened with Linux. Me, that's the spirit!

You think jQuery would finally have died after the IE era? Or that it would only be used to still pander to IE users?

Well... nope: https://w3techs.com/technologies/... says jQuery 3 has overtaken jQuery 1, which was the only version to even polyfill IE.

WTF is wrong with web devs, just WHY?! jQuery's use cases are shit that would be simpler and with less code without jQuery, shit that should be done in CSS instead, or shit that doesn't belong on websites to begin with.

I ordered a reduction sieve for my espresso cooker from Amazon, but got this instead (Euro coin for size comparison). They'll resend the correct article, but WTF is this shit even?! Crazy crap!

LOL Have I Been Pwned has pwned itself, cost-wise. Here the steps:
1) Go all in on cloud shit like Azure
2) Think you're a smartass
3) Trick the cost side with even more cloud, this time Cloudflare
4) Be not quite as smart as you think
5) Enjoy your 7000 EUR bill
6) Make some tweaks and continue with step 2.

Source: https://troyhunt.com/how-i-got-pwne...

Bonus laughter: he's a "Microsoft Most Valuable Professional", though not an actual employee.

Special 2022 greetings to the last of us who still run truly static websites: update your footer template, recompile, upload.

Wanna know why Windows sucks so much? It's because of the Windows users. No, really!

Windows user: But but but I can't switch away from Windows because MIMIMI!
Microsoft: Ah, is that so? Then why should we even try to make (and pay for) an effort?

Oh, nice. Now Windows 11 doesn't just fuck up AMD CPUs with lack of performance, but also SSDs. NTFS at its finest, but see the tags.

OMG I'm such a hero - I can print duplex on a simplex printer!

The bouba/kiki effect is a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects. It was first documented by Wolfgang Köhler in 1929 using nonsense words.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The Linux circle:

I have a question on the Signal app.

Two family members have an extensive chat history. One of them accidentally deleted the data. The backup function was not active. However, the other side still has all the data. Both are using Android smartphones.

How to transfer the data? Re-sending works only five messages at a time, which is not practical with some thousand messages.

Is it possible to export the data from one smartphone e.g. via USB to a PC, then import that via USB on the other?

Context: a co-worker had sent an email and was worried about possible collateral damage.

Co-worker: uhm, you know how it is when something just doesn't feel right?

Me: sure, every time I clock in here.

Intel: our new 12th gen CPU beats Ryzen in gaming!
Also Intel: benchmarks on a buggy version of Windows 11 that takes a big performance hit on Ryzen.

Yeah, Intel... you and your benchmarks. It's just so ridiculous.

Apple at it again.

The new iPad mini suffers from "jelly scroll", and Apple tries to gaslight its customers into believing that this is normal.

No Apple, this is not normal. It's you. You and your shitty engineering, your shitty testing (too much secrecy, hence too few testers), your shitty marketing, and your shitty customer service. You are shitty as usual.

(Reference article: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/... )

Phone call with customers and their minutes-of-meeting writer.
Me: Blabla round robin algorithm.
Customer's MoM writer: What? How do you spell "robin"?
Me: Robin like in Batman.
Customer's MoM writer: Ah, ok.

Hmmm... the GNOME paradox: make a desktop that is total shit without extensions and themes. Provide no stable API for them. Break them upon every release.

Top it off claiming that themes are bad anyway because if not all Gnome installations look alike, that hurts your "brand recognition". WTF?!

Apple vs. Microsoft: who sucks more?

At first glance, it's obvious that Apple sucks more. Their overpriced products are so bad that they rely heavily on vendor lock-in and cult-like brainwashing.

Then again, Apple's vendor lock-in also acts as buyer lock-out so that it's easy to avoid Apple. Basically, Apple sucking more also means they suck less. Think different indeed.

Microsoft on the other hand sucks more because their crap is so ubiquitous that it's difficult to avoid Microsoft.

That looks like a draw - but here's the tie breaker: Microsoft tries to ape Apple, BUT! Microsoft even sucks at copying Apple's suck.

So here's the final verdict: Microsoft sucks more.