I much prefer Librewolf. They are a little more transparent about it is, an independent, open source repackaging of Firefox with Arkenfox(ish) patches applied to it, rather than an entity which signs up for deals with other businesses.

ntfsclone /dev/sdc /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb was a blank filesystem and /dev/sdc was my Windows filesystem.

ntfsclone man page

It ran for less than a second and didn't take me long to figure out what happened. That's the story of how I stopped using Windows.

Securing proprietary hardware against peeps installing alt OSes

https://forums.debian.net/ exists for Debian

Something that often gets missed is the difference between packaging conventions between distros.

For example, Debian has Apache httpd packaged as "apache2" and has wrapper scripts for enabling sites. Fedora/RHEL has "httpd" and includes conf.d from the main conf. Arch also has "httpd" but doesn't have a conf.d out of the box. Of course you can pretty much configue Apache to your heart's content and have an identical setup between all three distros.

From what I've read, Debian tends to patch and change software to fit more into their overall system whereas Fedora and Arch tend to be more upstream.

RPM and Arch both have group packages and metapackages. Debian just has metapackages AFAIK. Debian also has "recommended" and "suggested" levels of soft dependencies, the former which is enabled by default. RPM has the capability for weak dependencies but AFAIK most RPM distros don't use it. Arch doesn't have soft/weak dependencies AFAIK.

When you install a new system daemon on Debian, it's generally enabled and started by default, whereas RPM-based and Arch don't do that.

When I think of the base of the system I tend to think of some of those more subtle idiosyncrasies that tend to spread around the ecosystems, like Ubuntu and Debian behave quite similarly for instance.

I sold my car last year and barely gave it a secomd thought (I still have access to a car on weekends). Money, environment and space-saving were all factors.

I don't think government should be in the business of subsidising driving (which is currently the case in multiple ways). Instead that money should be used to make public and active transport safe, convenient and reliable.

I have a bicycle crate in my rear rack (40L from memory). I can just throw my backpack and/or shopping in there and be on my way. No issues transporting when empty. I avoid riding in the rain but I guess a waterproof bag would help for that. It's durable, the main concern is the rear rack. I had to replace the cheaper rack that I bought last year after the welding snapped in a few places over time (I had it held together with duct tape for a while). My new rack should be much more sturdy this time around.

I have access to borrow a car which I do every few weeks so I don't need to over engineer my bike setup too much.

yggmail is a fairly obscure and experimental take on email on a mesh network: https://github.com/neilalexander/yggmail

In my country that would be a civil offence, not criminal.

I'd recommend at least taking some precautions (e.g. use TLS or Wireguard, firewall if possible).

Bash scripts will only get you so far and I can wholly recommend Ansible for automation.

Basically the main advantage of Ansible is that its builtin tasks are "idempotent" which means you can re-run them and end up with the same result. Of course it is possible to do the same with bash scripts, but you may require more checks in place.

The other advantage of Ansible is that there are hundreds of modules for configuring a lot of different things on your system(s) and most are clear and easy to understand.

There were gates put in place and bouncers to prevent people from riding straight through. You could still get off your bike, walk past the bouncer, and then ride to the next gate, which plenty of cyclists were doing.

Personally one of the issues is the casino bouncers doing traffic control. Even as a compliant citizen I have been berated and harassed by bouncers.

Even with a 10% pay cut the VC will be remunerated over $1,000,000 per year, even despite the university's poor financial performance.

Having worked at a university the waste is in plain sight. Vendor lock-in, consulting fees (especially with the Big 4), high executive pay, and compartmentalisation between professional and academic staff are high on the list.

In my area (different university) there was a constant stream of poor decision making. Moving to the cloud? Let's hire a consultant to tell us what to do, and then do it in the worst possible way, instead of using internal capabilities! I suggested that the contract include provisions for "best practice" as listed by the vendor (HashiCorp) but this was ignored. The consultant gave us spaghetti Terraform code and an inefficient, high cost subscription layout.

The professional and academic staff barely talk in my experience. Academics do their own thing as much as possible. Professional staff throw solutions over the wall, mostly because of the existence of the wall in the first place.

The university was looking at using "crotch sensors" (motion sensors under the desk) to measure desk utilisation, spending money on "smart" ambient sound solutions etc. in the executive building, and other high cost solutions looking for a problem, at the same time as freezing staff and threatening redundancies. I was denied training but offered access to an LLM subscription (GitHub CoPilot) along with other IT staff, because AI is the going buzzword being parroted by the executives.

The higher education sector seriously needs an external review... and a proverbial kick up the bum.

Last edited 2014-01-12 12:30:18 UTC

Trying to talk to a human at the big tech companies is nigh impossible these days. It's actually quite concerning how unaccountable they have become. If a billionaire can't do it, what chance do us commoners have?

Victoria also has a vacancy tax. It's good but downside is exporting would-be investors to other capital cities. It's almost as if federally-coordinated action is required.

Yeah, sorry it was a long time ago (like 10+ years) but I checked and it would've been the --overwrite arg.

The manpage for the older ntfsclone command has it:

Clone NTFS on /dev/hda1 to /dev/hdc1: ntfsclone --overwrite /dev/hdc1 /dev/hda1

Moral of the story was to RTFM 😂

The outcome was already predetermined when the legislation was passed, and the report is being written with that in mind. The report basically has to push it forwards. If this had been done by the ALRC it would have looked quite different.

I wonder if they're planning road diets on the surface. Maybe some bike lanes, bus lanes and wider footpaths.

(For the record I highly doubt that, but if such a wasteful project were to go ahead that would be the best concession IMO).

Why would it? Super is its own scam

Scam: a fraudulent or deceptive act or operation

Can you elaborate on super being its own scam?

Meanwhile I've been arguing with council about getting bike racks at a new-ish shopping centre (a few years old) that is legally required to have one.

(Technically they do have a bike rack, but it's on B2 of the carpark hidden behind a car wash and completely unsigned)