Great Blue Heron

  • 5 Posts
  • 103 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • This is one of the things that frustrate me about Debian based systems. I know most distributions ship with lots of different tools to do the same job and you pick the one you like. But with something as fundamental as system timers it just feels wrong to me - when I want to change the timing of something I first need to figure out is the cron job real, or just a stub referring to the systemd timer, or visa versa.

    So for a while I had removed cron from all my systems and fully committed to timers. Now I’ve decided I don’t like systemd and gone fully the other way.

    I know it’s not that bad, but that’s the way my brain works - and I can remember getting really screwed up with some early Ubuntu systems.



  • Saying Redhat is based on Fedora just seems wrong. I know there was discussion about this when the simpler version was posted and I think I understand that, today, RHEL is downstream of Fedora. But Redhat existed before Fedora so it still feels wrong to say Fedora is based on Redhat.

    “Fedora Core 1 was the first version of Fedora and was released on November 6, 2003.[15] It was codenamed Yarrow. Fedora Core 1 was based on Red Hat Linux 9.”


  • This is perfectly logical and I agree. Except that this controversy has prompted me to go learn about Lennart Poettering. I’ve been using systemd forever and I like it - I like journald and remote journald, I like networkd, I even deleted cron off my systems and use systemd timers exclusively. I knew there was some controversy about Lennart, but I didn’t really care. Now that I’ve read a bit about his background and, maybe more importantly, his new company - I don’t have a good feeling for the future of systemd.


  • I’m thinking the same. I understand the people saying it’s no big deal, it’s just an optional field. But the existing optional fields (GECOS) have been there since the beginning of time. The original Unix user database (/etc/passwd) was created in a different time. Things have changed in the last 50 years and we now know that a simple field in an OS level database is not really an appropriate place to store PII. I don’t know what the solution is, as these laws are coming and there will be some people that need to comply, but I don’t think the current change to systemd is the right approach.

    On the plus side - this controversy has prompted me to look into other options for my home servers and I’m loving the minimalism and simplicity of Alpine. (This isn’t a knee jerk reaction - I’ve been frustrated by the bloated feel of mainstream distributions for a while - more the straw that may break the camel’s back)



  • We are spoilt these days - there are lots of options. You can get that level of resolution from $20 in ear monitors. But, if you’re after that level it’s not just the headphones - it’s the whole chain (assuming you’re listening to digital):

    • you need a decent DAC - again, it does not need to be expensive - a $10 Apple USB-C to 3.5mm adaptor will do it (but the built-in one in your laptop, or older phone, may not).
    • you need decent, or preferably no, compression. Turn up the bit-rate in whatever streaming app you’re using or preferably use CD or uncompressed (FLAC).
    • perhaps most importantly, and most overlooked, you need good source material. Lots of music out there has been horribly recorded and/or mastered. With low quantity reproduction this isn’t an issue, but once you’ve taken care of the rest and you’re spending time really listening to your music you will find yourself from time to time thinking “this sounds horrible”, and you know you’ve done everything at your end and it turns out you’re listening to a bad master. There are forums dedicated to discussion about the relative merits of various versions of different recordings.

    It’s a huge rabbit hole, which stereotypicaly is very expensive - but doesn’t need to be.

    I’ve only scratched the surface, but with my old, damaged, ears there’s no point digging further.






  • I’ll disagree. The Israeli leadership is doing horrible things and the only way for those of us not in Israel to attempt to stop them is to boycott all of Israel - we have no way of picking and choosing products/services from Israel that will help/hurt the regime. Moves like this by NVIDIA are seen as subverting the boycott in a very significant way and draw out the negative responses you see here. The only people that can legitimately change the Israeli leadership are the Israeli people and they are going to face negative opinions from outside until they do. I understand very well that I’m extremely lucky that I live in a country that has not been taken over by fascists and I do what I can to keep it that way.