This is by far the stupidest thing I've ever had to write.
For decades, IT has used pagers, and later SMS, to alert on outages and send notifications to stakeholders. This has been broken for some time by CloudFilter. Most (All?) US providers rate-limit access to SMS via email by filtering inbound mail through CloudFilter. This has resulted in me missing countless outage events. I'm not sure that my sites aren't even permanently blacklisted at this point. As far as I know there is no way to "opt out" of this, except in the case of Enterprise customers. We are not an Enterprise Customer. In fact if I get one pager event every 3 or 4 months that would surprise me. I'm not exactly "high volume". I do have a Business mobile account, but that evidently does not qualify me to opt out.
So...
I now have SMS emails being sent to my personal, non-work, email address. A cron job checks that folder for mail and if any exists, I use KDEConnect to send a "Find My Phone" alert to my phone. This isn't really ideal on any level:
KDEConnect uses an Alarm for the Find My Phone feature. I never realized this because I don't lose my phone. Makes total sense though since this means it doesn't respect Ringer or Alert volumes being muted or your phone being on vibrate.
This solution will only work when I'm on my home network. Not a huge factor since I generally only leave the house for a 30 minute walk around the neighborhood every day. Otherwise I don't go outside unless it's unavoidable doctor/dentist visits
The fact that I have to write goddamn janky-as-fuck scripts to receive rudimentary alerting of potentially mission-critical failures
Earlier this year we were introduced to Gypsy: The Computer Oracle, a Mac game from 1985. This started a whole Thing and I immediately set about making this work in a display that could be exposed to the public with as little friction as possible for people to play with.
This is how that turned out.
For the machine I just used a brand-new Raspberry Pi 3B+ mounted to the back of an Eyoyo 4:3 monitor and added grommets to some Velcro straps for securing the HDMI, power and mouse cables.
This is very much a 1-weekend hack job project and is not anyone's idea of "secure", but it's also not meant to be connected to a network or a keyboard. At some point I might compile out the standard hotkeys for management of Mini vMac, but for now it's fine. If someone yoinks a keyboard out of their pants and inconspicuously plugs it in and starts hammering away, well now they've got access to a single-function Linux machine with no network. Congrats.
I have to admit though, I have been toying with linking multiple web-based Ouija boards together so different locations can send messages back and forth, or to a (non-ai, more Eliza-level) chatbot if there's no one on the other end at the moment.
I got a replacement cable modem this week due to a failure of the one I had. The field service tech mentioned he had rack mount brackets if I wanted, so I took him up on it so I could recover the shelf it was sitting on.
However, the design of my modem is stupid and pretentious, and must be laughed at. This is what you get from a company with no realistic competition at all. The designer was obviously a massiveBattlestar fan.
We now have a Pong clone. It's a Unisonic Tournament 2000 and apparently it's a pretty obscure/unpopular one going by the lack of Youtube videos with > 100 views. Natalie found this beauty at the flea market complete with the gun, the manual and the original sale receipt from K-Mart in 1976. I don't think she even dusted it. It looks like it was opened, played with once and immediately put in the attic.
The gun is stamped Tiger Electronics, but it was sold before "The" Tiger Electronics is said to have formed. I'd be interested to see if that's how Tiger got started. I've seen guns from other Pong clone consoles that look pretty much identical to ours.
A couple of months ago the Salem Witchboard Museum got a copy of Gypsy: The Computer Oracle for the Mac from 1985. We got to play with the game on original hardware and took some photos for their site in our livingroom:
I immediately copied the software and started trying to make an image that I could play in emulation. But a 400k GCR Mac floppy, while I could easily copy it with Copy II it turned out to be more difficult to image and there don't seem to be any archived anywhere that I was able to find. An image just fell in my lap today and has now been uploaded to Macintosh Garden for preservation!
I've quickly bashed up a menu listing in my auto-booting Raspberry Pi emulation machine. Ultimately this will automatically boot to the game and hopefully be used in an interactive display in the museum.
Hey AI, craft an Instagram spearphishing campaign against XYZ secretary to the CEO of whatever based on her personal history and website browsing habits. Build a persona that is instantly noticed and followed by Cindi in Finance at Boeing and then direct her to a website or send her an email and it's game over.
I've never actually read Marx, or any other "political thinker" from a hundred and whenever years ago. I don't super care that much about political theory and the tenets of National Socialism. Most people really don't. Here's the thing though.
You know why Legitimate Mainstream News Sources spend a lot of time every day calling everyone left of David Duke a "Communist" or "Marxist"? Because it makes it seem totally equal to us calling out Fascism or making comparisons to WWII.
I've spent 90 minutes trying to make a post. Half an hour ago Wayland crashed after 2 hours of uptime and I lost my work. Save Early, Save Often like it's 2008/9 and you're on KDE 4.x. Wisely I started over from scratch trying to remember the basics, at which point I would save it so I at least have a template. Wayland crashed again and I lost my work again.
At least that is how I learned that the Magic Key to crash Plasma on Wayland on BSD is "ctrl+c".
Note: This ugly disjointed ramble has been in my "Notes to myself that I'm never going to post" queue for a couple of weeks. But JWZ has recently tried to finally engage the enemy and released XScreenSaver 6.11.
I've been running Linux with XScreenSaver since the very early days of KDEs usable existence on my daily driver machines as a senior sysadmin, network admin, tools hacker. Overall this has been the correct choice even though for several years there in the 2000s sysadminning my workstation seemed to be like 60% of my job. At the end of the day, I'm just some guy. I'm not a developer, and I'm not part of The Community of circle jerking Thought Leaders and Influencers. Just a worker bee with 30 years of workflow and tools I want to keep working. Most of my personal productivity tooling has survived migration to Wayland, but several things I rely on, such as Synergy (copy buffer sync) are major blockers. XScreenSaver is a pretty major blocker for me too.
However in their utter dismissal of tools like XScreenSaver, Big Desktop (Wayland, KDE, and I assume GNOME) are really pissing me off as a user and pushing me back off the platform. It's just emblematic of how emphasis is moving away from users being able to define their own environment to their needs and toward more control from RH et al.
I don't know why Wayland and/or DE projects don't even entertain the opinions of the developer who's been consistently locking screens on Unix for over 30 years. I don't hear Jamie even really wanting to handle locking the screen necessarily, only that there's no framework to work within the existing locking mechanisms to show hacks at lock time. XScreenSaver works (with hurdles of course since nothing can ever be painless in JWZ-world) just fine on MacOS with Apple handling the locker as far as I can tell.
It baffles me to see responses from leaders of distros that boil down to in a post-CRT world your use case is irrelevant, your machine should be asleep to save power, Consumer. Screensavers are not a RedHat approved use of electricity. So no one should play video games because it's a gluttonous waste of energy. Nevermind the fact that with modern monitors and SSDs a NUC can run for days on screensaver before you approach my power draw for 5 minutes in 2000, with my 3x 21" Trinitrons and spinning drives grinding away. Man, the heat that used to come off of all that shit. The power consumption argument is as dismissive as it gets.
Wayland and DE people talk "security", and I get that things such as KMag can't work because windows shouldn't be able to know what is being displayed by other windows. Get it. But my security profile isn't "I'm on an NSA workstation on an airgapped network". My systems are all inside my house. I habitually lock screens out of A: Good Security Practice and B: keyboard-typo-safety. If I get up to pat my cat or get a snack, I want my machine to be Hacking the Gibson when I get back in 5 minutes. I do not want my machine to sleep since I probably have 30 RDP / SSH sessions open to other hosts. If someone needs to sit at my terminal to get the Secret Missile Codes I've got bigger problems. They've probably already killed me and my cat.
Microsoft and Apple figured out how to securely let a third party display a screensaver while the OS handles locking decades ago.
It should be embarrassing to Big Desktop that XScreenSaver works better on my goddamn phone as a live background than it does on Wayland.
"What never was cannot be broken" / "Works well and as designed" -- Guy Who Isn't The Whole of the Problem.
I guess someone needs to write "Why Cooperation With Wayland is Impossible".
I can't fucking wait until ssh forwarding breaks with applications I care about. I'm sure it'll happen one day and just make my systems that little bit less useful. Remote Display / Tunneling is a Worthless Legacy Feature. You should use RDP now or VNC or whatever...
