Geek Stuff category archive
Make TWUUG Your LUG 0
Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source. Learn how to use computers to do what you want, not what someone else wants you to do.
It’s not hard; it’s just different.
What: Monthly TWUUG Meeting.
Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.
Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk Training Room. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available.) Turn right upon entering, then left at the last corridor and look for the open meeting room.
When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, August 6.
Directions:
Lake Taylor Hospital
1309 Kempsville Road
Norfolk, Va. 23502 (Map)
Pre-Meeting Dinner at 6:00 PM (separate checks)
Uno Chicago Grill
Virginia Beach Blvd. & Military Highway (Janaf Shopping Center). (Map)
Join the forums.
And This Surprises You How? 0
Those “wearable tech” fitness doo-dads can be hacked.
Frankly, I doubt that you can doo-dad your way to fitness anyway. Free weights and a bicycle are all you need.
The Snaring Economy 1
In The Guardian, Frank Pasquale and Siva Vaidhyanathan see a precedent for Uber etc.
It’s not the precedent you would expect. Here’s a snippet (emphasis added):
The analogy is most obvious in the case of an American civil rights law itself. Uber has ignored advocates for the blind, and other disabled persons, when they claim Uber’s drivers discriminate against them. In response to a lawsuit by the National Federation of the Blind, Uber bluntly asserts that it’s merely a communication platform, not the type of employer meant to be covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act. Some judges and regulators accept that reasoning; others reject it. But the larger lesson is clear: Uber’s aggressive efforts to avoid or evade disability laws are nothing less than a form of corporate nullification, as menacing to the rule of law as defiance of civil rights laws in the days after courts ruled against racial segregation in the US.
Follow the link for the rest of the article.
Droning On 0
Boys and their toys.
“Drone users must understand that when taking to the skies they are entering one of the busiest areas of airspace in the world,” said Tim Johnson, director of policy at the CAA, in a statement.
Drone owners must be aware of the rules and regulations surrounding the flying of their craft, he said.
Recklessly endangering an aircraft is a criminal offence, said Mr Johnson, and those convicted could face a five-year jail sentence.
It’s won’t be long until some bozo brings down an airliner while playing with his masturbatory mechanical aero-vibrator.
Sauce for the Goose 0
My brother and I exchanged some emails about this. However much we both disapprove of cracking into databases, neither one of us can find in ourselves much sympathy for AshleyMadison’s clientele.
You dance to the music, you must perchance pay the piper.
Naked Browser for Android 0
I’ve started using a new browser on my Android HTC One M7: Naked Browser.
No, it’s not for naked pictures (go wash your mind out with soap)–the idea is that it doesn’t have a lot of cruft and useless eye candy to louse up performance.
I won’t use Chrome on a bet. Google probably knows everything there is to know about me, but, by God, I’m not going to help. and I’ve stopped using Opera, my go-to browser on all platforms since it was first released over a decade ago, because I don’t like the direction the company has taken for the past two years.
I tried Dolphin for a while; it was reasonably fast, but the ads got real obnoxious real quick.
I have been using Firefox for Android, which has some nice features, but the interface is a kludge and it is painfully slow; my brother, whose phone is not as powerful as mine, tried it and gave up.
I must say that, so far, I’m quite impressed with Naked Browser. It’s as fast as any other browser I’ve tried and faster than most, and it’s reasonably configurable and versatile.
The interface is quite basic, not all dressed up, and doesn’t get in the way. It allows you to sort your bookmarks into folders, but it did take me a little while to figure out how that works. It also doesn’t do plugins, but I was able to configure it to use Startpage search by default, because it allows you to enter a custom search string to be called when you enter a search term in the address bar. It doesn’t have as many configuration options as Opera Mini, but it has enough to keep me happy.
The Startpage basic search string is
https://startpage.com/do/search?
A web search for “Naked Browser Android” will turn up a number of favorable reviews. Naked Browser has its quirks, but, after a week of use, I am satisfied with it.
Naked Browser is free from the Play Store.
Easy Editor: It’s Not Just for BSD 0
Easy Editor running in FreeBSD VM on Slackware –Current.
I have lately been playing with BSD, particularly FreeBSD. (As an aside, the BSD documentation is excellent; the FreeBSD Handbook is one of the best documents of its type that I’ve seen.)
The BSD Handbook suggested that new users use ee (“Easy Editor”), a program I had not heard of before, though the far more powerful and complex vi editor is also included out-of-the-box (in *nix, configuration is generally accomplished through plain text, at least for those distros that have not yet fallen for the seductive blandishments of SystemD).
Just for grins and giggles, I went looking for ee yesterday, and it is surprisingly hard to find. For one thing, search results are flooded with links that promise to provide an “easy editor” for your drag-and-drop (pfui!) web site. As near as I can find, it hasn’t been updated since 2005.
I did find an online copy of the man page and a download page at Softpedia. Its home page, according to Softpedia, is a university in the UK, and said University doesn’t seem to want to talk about it any more.
I downloaded the sources from Softpedia and it did compile and install on Slackware —Current. The *.tgz was less than 70kb in size.
A screen shot showing the pop-up menu, which is invoked by ESC, is below the fold.
Stray Thought 0
It takes a long time to install kde4-baseapps to a VM of FreeBSD using BSD ports.
Make TWUUG Your LUG 0
Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source. Learn how to use computers to do what you want, not what someone else wants you to do.
It’s not hard; it’s just different.
What: Monthly TWUUG Meeting.
Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.
Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk Training Room. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available.) Turn right upon entering, then left at the last corridor and look for the open meeting room.
When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, July 2.
Directions:
Lake Taylor Hospital
1309 Kempsville Road
Norfolk, Va. 23502 (Map)
Pre-Meeting Dinner at 6:00 PM (separate checks)
Uno Chicago Grill
Virginia Beach Blvd. & Military Highway (Janaf Shopping Center). (Map)
A Singularity Sensation 0
At Hacker Public Radio, mirwi interviews Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Ertel at the 2014 MakerWorld in Germany on the topic of creating service robots capable of learning.
Meta: Travel Plans 0
My hosting provider tells me that it is migrating my site from a Parallels Odin backend to cPanel (which, frankly, is much more user-friendly). They assure me that the migration will be, as is said, “transparent to the user” and completed within the week.
In the five or so years that I have used my hosting provider, I have found it to be competent and reliable and I nothing but good words for its tech support.
If there is any interruption in grumpiness, please be patient. Regular grumpiness should resume in a timely fashion.