My California Fuschia free seeding failed. Not sure if I did a poor job of germination or I had bad seeds though.
In better news, today I harvested around 30-50 California Hummingbird Sage (Pink flowers). These are much larger seeds, so it's a lot easier to identify ones that seem healthy. I"ll be planting them by hand.

#gardening #nativeplants

Got some free wireless routers for my home network buildout.

Router 1: Won't support modern browsers because it uses some stupid javascript and I can't fix it.

Router 2: Doesn't support AP mode, doesn't have OpenWRT or DDWRT support because drivers were not released. Requires you to install a fucking app and have a Linksys account?

Both of these products infuriate me. Two perfectly good pieces of hardware ruined by greedy and shortsighted software.

#homelab

@patrickcmiller I think this falls into the "Well, duh" category.

@patrickcmiller And I'm still mad about it.

@Secure_ICS_OT I still remember planning SLC to ControlLogix switch overs that had only a 5 minute downtime window. At least we got to run it in parallel for a while though.

Supposed to do homework tonight. Did none. Supposed to do regular work today. Did none. Supposed to do housework yesterday. Did none.

What did I do? Fucked around on the internet.

This was a good use of my time.

@catsalad @kajer @rootwyrm @Dio9sys It is.

@Secure_ICS_OT Routing? On my ICS network? Ridiculous! Next you'll be telling me to use DHCP instead of static IP assignment. I refuse to use any standard developed after 1990.

#sarcasm

@draeath @Taco_lad @stinerman @kjuh @simonzerafa @NanoRaptor @da_667 Thats not only true, it's intentional by design. You get security updates but no 'feature' updates. I'm still running a W10 LTSC install from 2019. It's perfect.

I've waxed poetic about my first netbook and my journey with it into Linux. Last week I decided to make MXLinux my daily driver, and gambled an entire 75$ on a used X270 Thinkpad as an upgrade.

I want to say I'm shocked that Linux is this fast and smooth on such 'old' hardware, but I'm not. Instead I just wonder: How is windows so bad?

I'm officially a convert. I've moved my mother to Linux Mint, and my father better watch out: He's next.

#mxlinux #thinkpad #linuxmint

@Secure_ICS_OT When you worked your way through 999 of 1000 problems in a day but didn't quite finish the job before the weekend and now you've thought of the final answer but can't apply it.

Computers were a skill. They were taught in classrooms as a skill. Skills give you power over your tools because you work them as an expert and that is leverage to multiply externally.

And then computers became an A/B tested telemetry-based advertising conduit to brains for SaaS recurring revenue.

This could be said of technologies before. Doesn't make it wrong.

My phone has full optical character recognition of 47,000 photos. I can search individual words.

I cannot search three words in quotes.

Computers used to be powerful. That power meant something. It was power for making your life better in sovereignty to your own interests.

And now we have condescending mollycoddled shit.

@Dave3307 I'm with you, thanks for the reminder to get my vote in. This cup is going so fast!

Ran into some gardeners at work today, cleaning up a mess of Bradford Pear branches being dropped and watersprouts growing all over. Finally got to have a nice conversation with the people actually working on all the potentially beautiful spaces, and they welcomed any work I have to put in to them.

What timing. I have Palo Verde, California Fuchsia, and Western Redbud seeds all germinating right now... #nativeplants

@Secure_ICS_OT Sadly, most SCADA vendors are still using technology invented in the 90's. I think the odds of them overcoming technical debt and succeeding in getting away from Windows before it's too late is almost nil. New platforms like Ignition are already eating market share, and I see that accelerating.

ICS/OT SCADA vendors have little time to port software off of Windows.

I think the writing is on the wall.

This is a valuable lesson for any manufacturer: never awaken the nerd sleeping inside your customer, because his wrath shall be terrible.

In this case the warning was quite literal.

The company annoyed a buyer enough to push him into full blown nerd mode. He tore the product apart, reverse engineered every part, and then published a step by step guide showing exactly how to disable "kill switch" that prevented the use of the product without the vendor spying on the user.

What started as a minor grievance became a public, technical exposé that left the maker exposed and embarrassed.

Moral of the story: underestimate your users at your own peril.

The Day My Smart Vacuum Turned Against Me

Update: This post seems to have struck a nerve and went very wide. As I will not be able to answer every comment, I want to add a few points:

• The linked article was not written by me. It came to me on a different channel (Discord). I only wrote the post on Mastodon.
• The top image in the article looks AI generated. It is no a good image, but in my view less irritating than an advertisement (which is far more common).
• Some people suggest the article itself is AI generated. I don't think this is the case. I wouldn't rule out he author wrote the text in a different language and used AI for translation assistance.
• The claims in the article are not fully backed by the linked repo, but the general statement is correct and IMHO important.

@MineralCup I'm already ready to fight about this because Copper is native metal, which I'd argue doesn't count as an ore.

Work gave me an "Employee appreciation gift". But the vendor requires me to create an account, no guest checkout.
Oh no, I created an account last year, but I of course don't remember my username and password for an account I never used.

Now I've spent 20 minutes trying to get in to an account I don't even want to have, which has cost my employer more money than the actual gift they are paying for.

I'm tired of being watched and tracked. I'm tired of having to remember dozens of passwords to accounts I don't even want to have. I'm tired of the constant data breach notifications for companies I only interacted with once.