I'd like to try passkeys out. I actually tried again on Amazon in response to reading the comments here. But it just.... doesn't work?
I'm on a laptop running Ubuntu, I use Firefox as my browser, and I use 1Password as my password manager. I have both the browser extension and native Linux application installed, and they sync/communicate with each other (so if I unlock the native Linux app, the browser extension also unlocks).
When I open my Amazon.com item in 1Password, it has a helpful link to https://passkeys.directory/details/amazon which tells you clearly, step-by-step how to set up a passkey. Great! I love clear directions.
But when I get to the step when I click the "Set Up" passkey, Firefox gives me an address bar pop-up saying "Touch your security to continue with www.amazon.com".
Huh?
I don't have a security key. My laptop does have a fingerprint reader, which I use to unlock my screensaver (and it's integrated with some KDE keyring thing), so I tried putting my finger on that. Nothing. I opened the 1Password extension. Nothing there, just normal view of my login info. I opened the 1Password native application. Nothing there either.
Maybe it's a Firefox issue, or a Linux issue? So I tried setting it up on my phone (running GrapheneOS and their Chromium-based browser), which has the 1Password app installed. I logged in, and this time got far enough that 1Password brought up a prompt asking "Do you want to save this passkey?" I tapped Yes, and it then immediately told me "Unable to save passkey: For security reasons, 1Password did not save this passkey. The associated URL for this passkey does not match the selected app." So... does that mean 1Password is refusing to touch the passkey because it didn't come from the com.google.chrome Android application?
This whole experience has re-affirmed my skepticism of passkeys in practice. I think it would be awesome to have public/private key security on my online accounts. I think it would be great if I could log in without having to copy/paste passwords (when autofill doesn't work, or for TOTP codes). But I have zero confidence that this opaque stream of bytes will actually work to get me logged in to my account. When the 1Password input field detection fails, I sigh, copy/paste my username and password, and then forget about the mild inconvenience after about 30 seconds. I don't even want to think about what would happen to an account if the only way to log in to an account was via passkeys.
Microsoft also didn't do themselves any favor with that naming scheme. In the current generation (I think?), you have:
- Xbox X
- Xbox S
- Xbox Series X
- Xbox Series S
Compared to:
- PlayStation 5
- PlayStation 5 Pro
or:
- Nintendo Switch
- Nintendo Switch OLED
- Nintendo Switch Lite
Anyone who's literate in English (and knows that OLED means "nicer screen") can immediately rank the PlayStations and Switches into "good, better, best". But with the Xbox, how is anyone supposed to know which one is which? Is the Series version better or worse? Is it a whole new generation, with whatever backwards-compatability implications that a new generation brings? I need a chart and I probably still won't be able to tell you if you ask me in a month.
Okay, though, for very small hobbyist payloads, though, wouldn't hydrogen balloons be feasible?
Some quick math tells me that you can lift approximately a kilogram of mass per cubic meter (at sea level, anyway). If your balloon's full weight is a half of a kilogram, you'd only need about a large beach ball filled with hydrogen to lift it. That seems like something that would be attainable for an outdoor DIY electrolysis setup.
To anyone going down this route, there's a surprisingly deep rabbit hole when you look into "how copy the bits off the drive and into a .wav file". There are a lot of places where errors can be introduced: the quality of the CD drive, the condition of the disc itself, how fast the drive is spinning for the rip, etc. I didn't think this was a big issue until I got a load of cheap used discs, started ripping them with my laptop, and later discovered issues with some of the rips, even on discs which looked perfectly fine.
There's a tool called cdparanoia[1] whose goal is to babysit the CD drive and ensure that it gets a complete, perfect, uninterrupted stream of bits off the drive, and will use a lot of tricks to go back and re-read any data that didn't come back cleanly. I always used it with abcde[2], which was a wrapper around it with album lookup, tagging, and ffmpeg support. I highly recommend anyone amassing a CD rip collection take a look at it, both are still packaged in present-day Ubuntu.
Do you have any tips and tricks to share? I'm running a self-hosted instance on an old desktop PC in my basement for me and a couple family members. Performance is kinda meh, and I don't think it's due to resource constraints on the server itself. This is after following the performance recommendations in the admin console to tweak php.ini settings.
In my case, I want file/photo syncing, calendar syncing, and contact syncing.
Nextcloud provides all 3 in a package that pretty much just works, in my experience (despite being kinda slow).
The Notes app is a pretty nice wrapper around a specific folder full of markdown files, I mostly use it on my phone, and on my desktop I just use my favorite editor to poke at the .md files directly.
Oh, and when a friend group wanted a better way to figure out which day to get together, I just installed the Polls app with a few clicks and we use that now.
I am a bit disappointed in the performance, but I've been running this setup for years and it "just works" for me. I understand how it works, I know how to back it up (and, more importantly restore from that backup!)
If there's another open-source, self-hosted project that has WebDAV, CalDAV, and CardDAV all in one package, then I might consider switching, but for now Nextcloud is "good enough" for me.
If they make their own distro, though, they're not really gaining more control. They're just enabling even more choice for someone who's looking for alternatives.
Let's say, hypothetically, that Valve releases SteamOS to the general public, and it's received generally well, and it becomes much more common for people to use "that Linux thing" than it is today. Then let's say, hypothetically, that Valve turns evil and... I dunno, starts charging money for updates? At that point you've got a large population already using Linux, I'm sure there would be a pretty big migration to Ubuntu or some other mainstream Linux desktop.
I was about to comment that SteamOS is based on Arch, but after looking at the actual graphs, they've got SteamOS as its own separate category.
I wonder how much of that is "hackers and experimentalists", versus random gamers* preferring Arch Linux's bleeding-edge latest-and-greatest packaging approach versus Ubuntu's seemingly-slower-paced development?
* though I suspect even the most casual 25% of PC gamers are probably significantly more tech-savvy than the average PC user of the population in general.
and for me, the one (rather niche, I might add) game that didn't "just work" was working just fine after trying a different Proton version - which is literally as simple as opening the "Properties" page and using a drop-down menu.
Is there any reason to believe that deleting a ChatGPT conversation is anything more than "UPDATE conversations SET status='user_deleted WHERE conversation_id=..."?
Apparently they have a "unexplained crashes must have an explanation determined" policy ever since there was a trend of uninvestigated unexplained crashes that were canaries in the mine for a security issue.
> But [the Cloudbleed sensitive information disclosure security incident] wasn’t the only consequence of the bug. Sometimes it could lead to an invalid memory read, causing the NGINX process to crash, and we had metrics showing these crashes in the weeks leading up to the discovery of Cloudbleed. So one of the measures we took to prevent such a problem happening again was to require that every crash be investigated in detail.
Since then, they have a "no crashes go uninvestigated" policy, which for the scale Cloudflare operates at, seems pretty impressive.
Some alternators ironically require electricity to make electricity. They don't have permanent magnets inside, but instead use electromagnets. So from a stone cold battery, if there's not enough power to get those electromagnets functional, you don't have a way of converting that rotational energy into electricity.
As of 2013, manual cars (at least Mazdas) can still be roll-started, as long as the engine computer has enough power to function.
My CX-5 even has a wireless-pushbutton start, not a physical-key-in-the-ignition start, but I've still been able to roll-start it when the battery is too dead to crank the starter motor but still has enough juice for the electronics (lowest I've seen is ~8v if I recall correctly, but don't quote me on that).
The process is pretty much the same: put the car's ignition into the "ON" position (in my case, press the pushbutton twice without touching the pedals -- once to ACC mode, then once to move from ACC to ON), then it's the same as normal: clutch-in, shift to your preferred gear, get rolling, and pop the clutch. Engine computer sees "oh, looks like the engine's spinning, let's add gas and spark" and you're good to go.
Anecdotally, I've seen the described behavior of the engine computer ("detects spinning and adds gas/spark, even if the initial motion wasn't from the starter motor") on automatic transmission vehicles, too. On a 2008 Chevrolet, I found that if you revved the engine up a bit (for inertia), turned the key to OFF, then quickly turned the key back to ON (without turning all the way to START), the engine computer will catch it and keep it running.
Can confirm. Daily drive Linux for software development, and have a Linux on a laptop for gaming (Silksong anyone? :D). I keep a Windows 10 partition around on the laptop for Fortnite with friends, but that's about it.
I was actually pleasantly surprised the other day, I booted into Windows for the first time in several months and it was surprisingly quiet. No nags, no bs. Just "normal" stuff like Epic Games forgetting my account again and Windows updates going on in the background.
My friend whose laptop has Windows 11, on the other hand, that was a WILD experience. Similar situation, he mostly only brings it out for gaming with friends. He also had gone several months without booting, and the system was borderline unusable. Like, the battery settings page would refuse to open until he waited for the updates to finish and rebooted. No error, just an infinite loading spinner. Windows 11 also seemed much more aggressive about hogging the laptop's Internet connection -- our laptops were both downloading Windows updates and Fortnite updates at the same time, and my Fortnite update was literally progressing at twice the speed (~200mb/sec vs his ~90mb/sec).
Anyway, all that to say, I don't miss Windows, and anytime I'm exposed to it, that attitude is constantly re-affirmed.
I recently bought a Samsung television, which came with a bunch of the smart nonsense. During the whole setup process I was thinking "I have made a mistake, I need to return this ASAP" but forced myself to continue clicking "no" through the setup screens.
After about 5 minutes of setting up (never once connected to Internet), it's pretty much exactly what I wanted: a display for broadcast TV and for HDMI inputs. A pretty good one, too. The only "tricky" part was getting it to remember the last channel/input at power-on instead of going to it's "home" screen, but that was just a setting in a menu somewhere, not particularly hard to find (though I'm the kind of person that does a depth-first-search through the entire menu tree just to see what all is there).
I think the key is never letting it get a taste of internet. No internet, no ads :) The internet-related things I do want to watch (like youtube, etc) are easily accomplished through the Linux PC I have connected.
Can you share what the experience is like debugging with gdb directly?
I'm new enough that my first debugger experience was Visual Studio, and I currently use IntelliJ IDEs which provide a similar experience. That experience consisting of: setting breakpoints in the gutter of the text editor, visually stepping through my source files line by line when a breakpoint is hit, with a special-purpose pane in the IDE visible, showing the call stack and the state of all local variables (and able to poke at that state any point higher up in the stack by clicking around the debug pane), able to execute small snippets of code manually to make evaluations/calculations based on the current program state.
I'm not so naive to believe that effective debugging tools didn't exist before GUIs became commonplace, but I have a hard time seeing how anything TUI-based can be anywhere near as information-dense and let you poke around at the running program like I do with my GUI-based IDEs.
(Pasting this comment under a few others because I genuinely want to hear how this works in the real world!)
Can you share what the experience is like debugging with gdb directly?
I'm new enough that my first debugger experience was Visual Studio, and I currently use IntelliJ IDEs which provide a similar experience. That experience consisting of: setting breakpoints in the gutter of the text editor, visually stepping through my source files line by line when a breakpoint is hit, with a special-purpose pane in the IDE visible, showing the call stack and the state of all local variables (and able to poke at that state any point higher up in the stack by clicking around the debug pane), able to execute small snippets of code manually to make evaluations/calculations based on the current program state.
I'm not so naive to believe that effective debugging tools didn't exist before GUIs became commonplace, but I have a hard time seeing how anything TUI-based can be anywhere near as information-dense and let you poke around at the running program like I do with my GUI-based IDEs.
(Pasting this comment under a few others because I genuinely want to hear how this works in the real world!)
Do you know how the GoG version handles achievements? I'm very used to the Steam achievement system, but obviously that's not an option when you're not using Steam.
I'm on a laptop running Ubuntu, I use Firefox as my browser, and I use 1Password as my password manager. I have both the browser extension and native Linux application installed, and they sync/communicate with each other (so if I unlock the native Linux app, the browser extension also unlocks).
When I open my Amazon.com item in 1Password, it has a helpful link to https://passkeys.directory/details/amazon which tells you clearly, step-by-step how to set up a passkey. Great! I love clear directions.
But when I get to the step when I click the "Set Up" passkey, Firefox gives me an address bar pop-up saying "Touch your security to continue with www.amazon.com".
Huh?
I don't have a security key. My laptop does have a fingerprint reader, which I use to unlock my screensaver (and it's integrated with some KDE keyring thing), so I tried putting my finger on that. Nothing. I opened the 1Password extension. Nothing there, just normal view of my login info. I opened the 1Password native application. Nothing there either.
Maybe it's a Firefox issue, or a Linux issue? So I tried setting it up on my phone (running GrapheneOS and their Chromium-based browser), which has the 1Password app installed. I logged in, and this time got far enough that 1Password brought up a prompt asking "Do you want to save this passkey?" I tapped Yes, and it then immediately told me "Unable to save passkey: For security reasons, 1Password did not save this passkey. The associated URL for this passkey does not match the selected app." So... does that mean 1Password is refusing to touch the passkey because it didn't come from the com.google.chrome Android application?
This whole experience has re-affirmed my skepticism of passkeys in practice. I think it would be awesome to have public/private key security on my online accounts. I think it would be great if I could log in without having to copy/paste passwords (when autofill doesn't work, or for TOTP codes). But I have zero confidence that this opaque stream of bytes will actually work to get me logged in to my account. When the 1Password input field detection fails, I sigh, copy/paste my username and password, and then forget about the mild inconvenience after about 30 seconds. I don't even want to think about what would happen to an account if the only way to log in to an account was via passkeys.