Posts by Chewi

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Vivaldi

Fellow developers always seem surprised when I tell them I don't use Firefox. It's not that I fell out of love with it sooner, I never really fell in love with it in the first place. I get fed up with Internet Explorer back in 2000 and jumped ship to Opera way before Firefox was even a thing. I did feel adrift in the final days of classic Opera when it failed to keep pace, and they then took a long time to deliver its rather lacklustre Chromium-based reincarnation on Linux. I did look elsewhere, briefly at Otter, but it was still in its infancy, and at Firefox, but it didn't appeal. If I remember correctly, it still didn't handle dark desktop themes well, which was the case for a very long time. If it had, I might have stayed. Fortunately, I was saved just in time by the arrival of Vivaldi. Yes, I'm sure many of you will be all too quick to point out that it is also Chromium-based, but it doesn't feel like it, and it doesn't come with the usual spyware baggage. The Vivaldi team, being a continuation of the original Opera team, have always been strong on this point and have earned my trust over these long years,

The 12 KB that Windows just can't seem to quit

Heh, I'd forgotten all about that. Good times.

Uncle Sam kills funding for CVE program. Yes, that CVE program

Might be a good thing

I say this with a heavy sigh, but this might be a good thing if better funding can be secured from elsewhere. I believe there is a shared feeling among those who work closely with this data that the organisation has not been operating as well as it should for a while now. Seemingly urgent CVEs are known to languish in an "awaiting analysis" state for quite a while, and the scores assigned are often questionable, suggesting a lack of proper research.

4chan, the 'internet’s litter box,' appears to have been pillaged by rival forum

I would never let my cat go anywhere near 4chan

Not even on Caturday?

User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse

A case of mistaken identity

Easily done!

Linux rolls out the welcome mat for Microsoft's Copilot key

Re: Microsoft makes keyboards?

It's not just MS, my new HP laptop has the key.

Telcos scolded for unwanted erection of utility poles in race to wire up Britain

It was quite funny when these went up around my house a few years ago. Everyone in the neighbourhood was complaining, but it wasn't clear what the poles were actually for, so I approached one of the engineers.

"It's for broadband."

"What, like mobile?"

"No, no, fibre."

"Oh, fantastic. Carry on!"

"You're the first person we've met who's been happy about it!"

It was actually very impressive how they laid the fibre over the nearby Forth Road Bridge in one continuous 3km strand.

Admin took out a call center – and almost their career – with a cut and paste error

Vicidial

Heh, we tried Vicidial at my old place. The 90s web UI looked right at home with our other aging crap. I don't think we ever actually used it in anger though. Probably just as well!

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

I had an awkward moment like that once

During an interview, I was shown some code (Ruby with SQL IIRC) and asked to explain what it did. Me, being a little forthright, commented "This code is terrible! Who wrote it?"

"Err, I did," said the senior engineer. Huh. You don't say.

They made heavy use of the open source Asterisk PBX, so I also told them the story about how I once got shitfaced with its author after the LinuxWorld Expo. Naturally, I got the job. :D

PiStorm turbocharges vintage Amigas with the Raspberry Pi

Re: Distractions

That is nice in that it doesn't require Linux underneath, but it only works with Workbench. Something like that isn't viable for most games.

Re: Distractions

That's a bit cold. Like I said, it's taken a while because I have kids. We were playing with some balloons together right before I read this. Thanks.

Distractions

I have had PiStorm32-Lite since December, but I'm yet to actually try it. WHAT!? How could I resist!? Well, I'm a notorious tinkerer and perfectionist, and I've got too sidetracked trying to prepare my own unique Gentoo-based setup. Also I have young kids. I am getting closer though.

Although a lot of the interest is in the bare-metal Emu68 now, I'm actually more curious about Musashi. I owe my software engineering career to the Amiga, but I've been a penguin-head for far longer, and I would love to mix the two in weird and wonderful ways.

The first idea I've been working towards is using Sunshine to stream video from the Pi wirelessly, so that you can use the Amiga from anywhere simply by providing it with power. I have had Sunshine running on the Pi already, but it's currently far too slow. Convincing it to use hardware encoding is the first step.

I will try Emu68 too though. Running the two from the SD card is currently considered to be a boss level procedure. I think I can some up with something easier. In fact, I have already prototyped a tri-boot solution where the Amiga can boot directly from the SD card without a Pi at all.

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

My SanDisk stick died last week. No, not some recent purchase, but one from 2008. I didn't write to it all that heavily, but I did read from it all the time. I was actually quite sad about it. I highly doubt its replacement will last that long, but I'll be sure to choose it very carefully!

Corner cutting of nuclear proportions as duo admit to falsifying safety tests 29 times

Re: How did they find out?

Also why did they do it? Were they just lazy?

UN boss recommends nuclear option for AI regulation

I saw the headline and thought he meant to put AI in charge of the nukes.

Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget

Nope, Collingwood. Barnard block.

I was a student at Durham Uni in 2001, living in halls at one of the colleges. My friend lived upstairs in a block that cornered onto mine. We wanted to share files and play games, but this was in the days before wireless was common, and only the newer halls had been wired up to the network. What to do? Naturally, we decided to have him swing a long ethernet cable out of his window for me to catch. We wanted to be discreet about it to avoid getting into trouble, but that didn't quite go to plan. Aiming and catching the cable was a bit harder than we anticipated. Our rooms looked down over the big common room window, and within a couple of minutes, we had attracted a crowd of onlookers who were enthusiastically cheering us on. "Oooooooh.... awwwww!" After several attempts, we finally managed it and got a big "Hurrah!" Fortunately, no one batted an eyelid after that.

Beer icon because we probably had a few after that!

FTC sues VoIP provider over 'billions of illegal robocalls'

Re: Caller 2-step identification

No need. There is standards-based technology that is already dealing with this problem and it's completely transparent to both caller and recipient. Look up STIR/SHAKEN. It's all based around cryptography with regular EC keys and X.509 certificates. The US have made it mandatory for all telcos to use it, but I don't believe many, if any, are actively blocking based on the results yet. Instead, they are using it to feed a reputation database for now. I think some teething issues need to be resolved before it could be used to block, such as the inconsistent formatting of numbers (e.g. include country code or not). It seems the reputation database alone has made it easier to spot who the real abusers are though, so it's still being effective.

UK tax authority nudges net 'influencers': You may owe us for those OnlyFans feet pics

Indeed, taxes sometimes can cost you an arm and a leg.

If you were going to post the same thing, then that would be two pedants. I guess I'm now the third pedant!

Just $10 to create an AI chatbot of a dead loved one

Horrifying

I think this is horrifying. It's almost certain to make someone's trauma worse in some cases. It also reminds me of the 2020 film, Archive, which is quite good, if a little slow.

Removing an obsolete AMD fix makes Linux kernel 6 quicker

There may have been clues a few years back

Some of you may recall the early Ryzen CPUs had an issue where they would just randomly freeze up after hours or days under Linux. It only seemed to happen when the system was very idle. I said half-jokingly that this wasn't seen on Windows because it never gets that idle. I then heard through the grapevine that people inside AMD thought that may indeed be the case.

I'm no expert, but I now reckon this kernel bug was causing it to happen more often than it otherwise would have. Maybe it's just as well. If it hadn't happened so frequently, AMD may have taken much longer to fix it.

Post-quantum crypto cracked in an hour with one core of an ancient Xeon

Oh well

At least they can afford a better computer now.

openSUSE Leap 15.4: The best desktop on the RPM side of the Linux world

It's a breeze

My wife and daughter are both long time OpenSUSE Leap users. Me? I'm a Gentoo developer, but when it comes to your nearest and dearest, you want something that just works. There's the odd issue now and then, usually due to newer hardware, but for the most part, it's a breeze. It was the first distro I tried things like EFI and Secure Boot on. I love how they continue to maintain a rich feature set while keeping it polished. Long may it continue.

Microsoft reanimates 1995's 3D Movie Maker via GitHub

I was once a lousy bum, just like you.

You lousy bum.

(Anyone remember that?)

Devs of bcachefs try to get filesystem into Linux again

LVM snapshots are slow

I'm surprised you didn't mention that LVM snapshots are really slow. Because it operates at the block level, it has to make a copy of each block before it gets modified. I still use them on the odd occasion but only for brief periods.

Apple seeks patent for 'innovation' resembling the ZX Spectrum, C64 and rPi 400

Re: 1980s

Don't forget the MSX!

Time to party like it's 2002: Acura and Honda car clocks knocked back 20 years by bug

Ford C-Max

My 2008 Ford C-Max seems to follow the Mayan calendar. It doesn't let you manually set any date after 2012, as it just wraps back round to 2000. Ford evidently didn't think this car would last longer than 5 years! You can work around it by setting the time and date to just before midnight on December 31st and letting it naturally roll over a few times, but you have to be really careful not to touch the year. Bloody annoying.

Reg reader returns Samsung TV after finding giant ads splattered everywhere

My smart TV seems fine

The LG OLED55CX5LB I bought at the start of the year doesn't do anything like this, despite being connected to the Internet. I did opt out of a few things though. If I hadn't, it might have been worse. I definitely don't use the voice recognition feature, that just creeps me out, plus my employer insists on turning such things off. I do at least want mine connected to the LAN because I send it commands using a Python library.

Fatal Attraction: Lovely collection, really, but it does not belong anywhere near magnetic storage media

I have a classic 160GB iPod with a spinning drive. It's old but I was using it in the car back when I did regular commutes. I had a dashboard magnet, designed for holding a phone, and it would have been perfect for holding the iPod. I knew it probably wasn't going to like it, but I couldn't resist the temptation to try. Sure enough, it made a horrible noise, and the screen glitched out. For a few moments, I thought it was totally buggered, but it eventually sprang back to life with seemingly no permanent damage.

Chiptune to brighten your afternoon: Winning 8-bit throwback music revealed

SID metal

Good stuff! If you like your tunes on the heavier side, check out Sweden's Machinae Supremacy. They really rock that SID. They do some amazing covers too. A Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies mash-up? Oh god, yes.

Real world not giving you enough anxiety? Try being hunted down by the perfect organism in Alien: Isolation

Re: Have you tested it on Parallels hosted Windows?

It natively supports MacOS and Reddit tells me the Steam version works fine on the M1.

I play it on Linux and it runs great there too. I have had the odd issue over the years but I think they were entirely driver-related, and not the game's fault.

Keep moving!

I've been playing this on and off over the years, not sticking to it because I found it so brutal. I think I had it on Hard to start with, then lowered it to Medium, but still struggled. It was only a few weeks ago that I realised what I'd been doing wrong all this time. Having left it for so long, I'd forgotten exactly what I was supposed to be doing so I watched a video on YouTube to recap. I watched in amazement as this player strutted around the ship without a care in the world, and no alien in sight. Surely they were playing it on easy? Apparently not. Just to check, I watched another video and saw much the same thing. I then tried this for myself, not slowly inching around the place, but casually walking about, just doing what I needed to do. I made it to the next save point without incident on the first attempt, despite having failed dozens of times before. Honestly, I was gobsmacked. It turns out that the alien takes time to home in on you. Stay in one room too long and it'll certainly find you. Keep moving and you'll probably be fine. I haven't had time to go back to it yet, but when I do, I'll probably crank it up to Hard again.

Radioactive hybrid terror pigs have made themselves a home in Fukushima's exclusion zone

The great Okkoto rises again!

I look forward to hearing about the hybrid deer with a human face.

Microsoft warns of serious vulnerabilities in Netgear's DGN2200v1 router

Re: The consumer brand networking gear is hot garbage

Their higher end stuff is no better. I'm no security researcher but even I figured out how to get root access through their telnet interface on the SRX5308 a few years back. It was enough to allow me to flash OpenWRT onto it, despite not being supported by the distro at all, though I never did get the weird network hardware working properly. I was going to report the issue but I realised they'd already fixed it in a subsequent firmware update, probably only by accident though, as they'd changed much of the software stack.

Google will make you use two-step verification to login

Re: You've crossed the line

I may be misunderstanding here as the article isn't clear but if existing TOTP 2FA is still sufficient then that can be done entirely offline.

Shadow over Fedora 34 as maintainer of Java packages quits with some choice words for Red Hat and Eclipse

He's right

Former Gentoo Java lead here. I totally feel his pain as I burned out some years ago. It's even worse when you're trying to allow users to build the stuff from source. I'm familiar with many languages, including those that are known to be particularly troublesome for distros (like Rust and Ruby) but trust me, Java is the worst of all worlds.

One reason for this is its approach to optional dependencies. Take log4j 2, for instance. When I last looked, it had about two mandatory dependencies but tens of optional ones, most of which hardly anyone would care about. That's fine if you're grabbing the precompiled jars with Maven or Gradle or whatever. Grab just the ones you need. Or hey, just grab them all, it's only a few more KB to download. If you need to build from source though, as Fedora policy dictates, you're screwed. Although it's possible, no one uses a preprocessor with Java so all those dependencies that are optional at runtime suddenly become mandatory at build time. And guess what, those dependencies have more dependencies and so on and so on, and before you know it, you've had to package and build half the Internet. Maintaining a single distro package, particularly in Gentoo, carries significant overhead that just doesn't scale in the context of the Java ecosystem.

Gentoo is not as strict about building from source as Fedora is so I considered just using precompiled jars where possible. You then have to ask what the point of packaging Java stuff is at all though. There are some small benefits but I didn't feel it was worth my time so I moved onto other things. I'm now the Gentoo Games lead. That's much more fun!

Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

Re: Who's the fool?

Wait, now I'm not even sure that article was fake. You linked to it in this article. This one is just about the decision being made formal?

Who's the fool?

I felt foolish for falling for the April Fools article for a minute. Evidently I shouldn't have.

As battle for future of .UK's Nominet draws closer, non-exec director hits a nerve with for-profit proposal

Re: To: [e-mail]

Thanks, I'll check them out. I meant to ask about this too as I really don't know who the good ones are. I use Zoneedit for DNS, who seem very good, but they don't sell .uk domains.

To: [e-mail]

Dear IONOS,

As a very long-standing customer of yours, I was dismayed to learn that you have reportedly voted "no" in the forthcoming vote to oust the current Nominet execute board, despite years of despicable behaviour. If you have, in fact, not voted "no" then please declare your support for the campaign publicly immediately. I will otherwise be taking my business elsewhere at the earliest opportunity.

Regards,

James

P.S. I will be publicly posting this message to the recent article on this matter at The Register. You're lucky I don't use Twitter.

CD Projekt Red 'EPICALLY pwned': Cyberpunk 2077 dev publishes ransom note after company systems encrypted

A good opportunity to open source these games? We could get some native Linux versions out of this! You never know, the community might even fix a few of those pesky bugs. ;-)

I'm only semi-serious, of course. Whatever they choose to do, this is still a shitty thing to happen to any company.

Tab minimalists look away: Vivaldi introduces two-level tab stacks

Re: Some people

I try not to do this but it's hard. To be fair though, Vivaldi doesn't load the tabs until you click on them.

The API that will not die: Microsoft opens crypt to unleash Win32 on Rust

FFI

I think this is basically what FFI gives you for many languages but this approach is never as nice as proper hand-crafted bindings.

Signal boost: Secure chat app is wobbly at the moment. Not surprising after gaining 30m+ users in a week, though

I did wonder why 4 somewhat unrelated people among my contacts suddenly appeared on Signal within 24 hours. When one of them mentioned Elon Musk, it suddenly made sense. They are comprised of 2 physicists and 2 business leaders!

To put that in perspective, that's about the same number of new users I'd seen in the previous year. I've been using it for a while. It could be better in places but it's certainly not bad and it's long been my default SMS app.

Beagleboard peeps tease dual-core 64-bit RISC-V computer with GPU, AI acceleration, more for $119

"…and include a GPU from PowerVR designers Imagination plus open-source video drivers."

I did hear of this a while back but I'll still believe it only when I see it.

Why make games for Linux if they don't sell? Because the nerds are just grateful to get something that works

Sorry for posting again but I had another thought. The willingness of the Linux community to fix any issues could extend to them actually working with the code or even creating native ports in the first place. I know I'd certainly be up for the former and probably the latter if I had more time. Game studios generally aren't prepared to trust their crown jewels to third parties like that though. One fantastic recent exception is the original Unreal Tournament (99). Epic, of all studios, trusted their old code to a small group of community developers and https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches is the wonderful result. Granted, it's an ancient game now but it still has a great following.

When looking for new games to play, I certainly favour ones with native Linux ports over those that don't. Proton does work remarkably well these days but I'm always left feeling like a second-class citizen. What's even more frustrating is when games initially have Linux ports and then drop them later on, leaving them bereft of bug fixes and updates. One such game I've started playing with my daughter recently is Dungeon Defenders. Based on the Unreal Engine, it must have been one of the best-looking games on Linux at the time of its release. As is so often the case, Ryan "icculus" Gordon did the port, but seemingly on a one-off or time-limited basis. It was eventually left to rot with a heap of known bugs. Most of these bugs weren't even Linux-specific. It then lost multiplayer compatibility with Windows, a key feature in this game, and eventually multiplayer stopped working entirely when GameSpy was shut down. We were forced to give up and switch to the Windows version under Proton. Yeah, it's fine, but it still feels shitty and it's no thanks to Chromatic Games.

You don't hear it so often now but the other thing that annoys me is the assumption by some that Linux somehow cannot handle these AAA games. When Valve ported their games to Linux, they found they ran slightly faster than they did under Windows. I recently finished Shadow the Tomb Raider. I gather it looks every bit as stunning on Linux as it does on Windows. Kudos to Feral Interactive for their hard work on this and other games. There's even a somewhat unsubstantiated story that Doom 2016 was successfully ported to Linux during its development but that never saw the light of day.

How'd they do that? It's classified: Microsoft's Azure cloud goes Top Secret

Re: Talking about Windows 95

I haven't tried it but I gather DOSBox is the way to go here.

Sod Crysis, can the 21-year-old Power Mac G4 Cube run Minecraft? The answer is yes

Re: Why does minecraft need a beefy computer?

Java Edition is quite demanding but the alternative Bedrock Edition (generally the only option on consoles and tablets) is a bit speedier. Only Java Edition is officially supported on Linux and MacOS but the mcpelauncher project hacked Bedrock Edition into working. The difference is certainly noticeable. Although Bedrock Edition on the Xbox 360 is presumably built for PowerPC, I think mcpelauncher needs the Android version, so it wouldn't help in this case.