Buelldozer

Black screen with cursor can be bypassed by pressing ctrl+alt+del, at least on my HP laptop with Mint and KDE Plasma 5.

Working system until you need to upgrade something.

Why are you attempting to upgrade slack? You install, configure to purpose and leave it be. When it’s purpose changes you re-install and re-configure! Nothing could be simpler!

I think I blew up my first Slack install in about 12 minutes while trying to get a video camera to work as a webcam. It took me 3 god damned days and more than a few re-installs but I did get it going…and then spent 30 minutes web chatting with a guy from Serbia. The video was the size of a postage stamp.

Well, yes. That is how it works!

As someone who started with slack in '97 these modern distros function so “automagically” that I sometimes distrust them. They’ve hidden so much of the complexity of Linux and whatever Desktop Environment is running on it that most users have very little idea what’s actually happening or how it works.

That’s been GREAT for getting more people to use Linux but it’s creating the same problem that Microsoft did with Windows. The old DOS users often knew quite a lot about their PC and how it worked because they had to but as the technical barriers went down so too did the knowledge of the users. You no longer had to juggle IRQs, Memory Maps, or DLLs because Windows just did it for you.

That’s not a bash (lol) on Linux or users of modern distros either, I myself am on Linux Mint as I type this, because it was always going to work out like this. A lot of very smart people put a lot of their time into MAKING it work out like this.

Head to Vegas and bet all 100 Million that the Earth will be destroyed by an Asteroid in the next 25 days.

Earth not destroyed? 100 Million is gone and the Billion is yours. Earth IS destroyed? You aren’t alive to know that you won the bet but lost the Billion.

You literally cannot lose.

For so many of my use cases the Echo and Echo Show products by Amazon are exactly what is needed. For instance in the living my full sized echo is ideal for voice commands and playing music but in my bedroom a Show 5 / 8 is what you want in order to see the time, play music, and have wakeup alarms. I wish I could either find a company building a generic version of them or find a way to reload them to work with HA instead of Amazon. :/

I’d buy Android tablets and run the HA Companion App on them but it still doesn’t have wakeword support.

I could build a small fleet of rPIs in touch screen cases but even then you have to bolt on a microphone and speakers so they still wouldn’t have a finished / polished look.

I have no problem spending a reasonable, or even maybe unreasonable, amount of money to get a nice looking Wyoming Satellite but I’ll be darned if I can figure out HOW. I’m actually kind of astonished that no over-seas manufacturer has started making something like a gutted Echo / Echo Show that you can slide a raspberry pi board into.

“NGI provided the seed funding for many of the leading (fediverse / activitypub) projects, such as ActivityPods, Bonfire, Castopod, Flarum, ForgeFed, Funkwhale, GNU social, Hubzilla, Indigenous, Kbin, Keyoxide, Lemmy, Mastodon, Mobilizon, Owncast, PeerTube, PixelDroid, Pixelfed, Pleroma and Xwiki. NGI also funded bridging mechanism for various communication protocols, such as XMPP, Matrix.”

If you’re reading this comment then you benefited from NGI funding. The full 85 page report is available here: https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/257ae66f-23c7-11ef-a195-01aa75ed71a1/language-en/format-PDF/source-324755022

it was the 80s/90s, windows didn’t exist

Wow, that’s a pretty narrow gap. The 80386 started mass production in 1986 and Windows 3.0 (the first actually usable one) came out in 1990.

I refused to use Windows until Win95 and even then I was experimenting with OS/2. In 1997 I installed Slack 3.4 and have been around every since. I’m currently running Linux Mint but I sorta miss SuSe and may go back to it.

What are you referring to when you say "when can we use the weather forecast on our dashboards? "

I’ve probably got the simplest and most “Out of the Box” dashboard stuff going on you can imagine and I’ve got forecast data showing with automations that run against it. What am I missing?

Welcome to the Club!

So this is a system-wide DNS hijack for the purpose of filtering and monitoring?

It shifts DNS from Default Allow to Default Deny. AD DNS should have had this two decades ago.

So say an attacker can enable this service

If an attacker has already penetrated your Network Infrastructure to the point that they can setup ZTDNS you’ve already got problems so serious that DNS over TLS with DNSSEC is not going to save you.

I really missed my opportunity on that one!

I began my struggle with F/OSS and its drivers with Slackware V3 shortly after it’s release. I long ago memorized absolutely every argument you could possible come up with and have myself repeated many of them over the years. That doesn’t change the fact that Networks and Systems are not configured for your convenience and YOU are responsible for how your own damn hardware works.

Now get the hell off my lawn.

I apply QoS at the edge so wired or wireless doesn’t matter to us for performance but either one is still going to our Captive Portal and forcing you to agree to our ToS.

Fun Fact: I started applying QoS at the edge because of the people dragging their laptops in so they could Torrent. They’d blow out our bandwidth for everyone else and we were racking up DMCA warnings from our ISP.

Someone should let the IT staff know that wi-fi does not work for everyone, including:

HI there. I’m someone in IT for a Public Library so let me review these points.

People running a free software platform that lacks support for a wifi NIC that needs a proprietary driver and firmware

That’s a you and your hardware problem, not a public library IT problem. You need to purchase hardware that is adequately supported by your chosen Operating System.

People running free software who ethically object to running the proprietary non-free driver and firmware their wifi NIC requires

This is a you and your hardware problem. Buy hardware that is adequately supported by your chosen Operating System.

People without a mobile phone to perform the captive portal-mandated SMS verfication

This one is a semi-serious complaint however I’ve never seen a portal system where the Librarian’s didn’t have the ability to issue a day pass for use. Aside from that you sound like someone who should be technically able to stand up an ephemeral phone number for the purpose of receiving SMS.

People with a mobile phone but who want to exercise their GDPR right to data minimization

Same as above.

Pro-environment people who prefer not to spend 30 times more energy needed for wi-fi radios

What an absolutely petty complaint.

People who want the security of other wi-fi users not eavesdropping on their traffic by simply pointing a yagi antenna from a block away.

I’d bet that as soon as you enter a code your VPN stops being blocked. They’re not trying to block VPN they are preventing you from sidestepping their ToS.

I’ve dealt with Patrons like you before and the instant someone starts yammering at me about ClearNet / Tor I know exactly what kind of person I’m dealing with.

You selected your path for whatever reasons you chose and the inconveniences that come with that path are yours to deal with. Suck it up buttercup, you weren’t promised that a privacy respecting internet lifestyle would be easy or convenient.

BTW if you’d plugged your laptop into one of my systems you’d have gotten vlan’d into the same Captive Portal System that the WiFi has which is precisely how any publicly available Ethernet port should function. Your little length of wires coated in vinyl with plastic shoved on the ends still wouldn’t have gotten you where you wanted to go.

What did you to move the curtains?

They do however see Sponsored search results on google.com and that’s how this attack chain starts. You search for one those tools, get a sponsored result and click it. You’re then whisked away to a spoofed site.

Huh, I haven’t installed SUSE in at least 10 years and seeing the Gecko is giving me a bit of nostalgia. I may have to run an install and see what’s changed.

What happened to Hanlon’s Razor?

Rossman happened. He has videos that need watched.

Reolink.