@arielmt@computerfairi.es cover
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arielmt

@[email protected]

✨ Kind 'Net Help Desk fairy by day. ✨
✨ Weird & furry Unix fairy by night. ✨
✨ Sometimes a retrocomputer fairy. ✨
✨ Pays the ComputerFairi.es bills. ✨
✨ Sparkly✨shellscript✨princess. ✨
✨ Age: Mere days younger than ✨
✨ the Intel 4004 & Unix 1st Edition. ✨
✨ Follow requests welcome. ✨
✨ :flag_transgender: :flag_aromantic: ✨

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@arielmt@computerfairi.es avatar arielmt , to random

Good news: It's possible to install Firefox in the ChromeOS Linux development environment using the regular Debian apt commands now, not just with Flatpak.

Bad news: It's a straightforward yet daunting task straight out of a '90s Linux hacking guide. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/run-firefox-chromeos

Other news: No matter which way it's installed, Firefox 148 on ChromeOS 144 is so unstable that it crashes unpredictably within a few seconds to a few minutes.

arielmt OP ,
@arielmt@computerfairi.es avatar

I'm weighing options for a Chromebook browser that's generally decent and doesn't actively sabotage good ad blocking like Google does.

So help me, one of the options I'm considering is Microslop Edge.

@arielmt@computerfairi.es avatar arielmt , to random

That's a first, and if my futile searches are any indicator, a first ever for anyone.

Everything I use in is installed from ports, not pkg, yet I somehow managed to bork my pkg database so badly that pkg-static keeps randomly removing vital packages like www/firefox and x11/xorg-server while upgrading (and later reinstalling) completely unrelated ports.

arielmt OP ,
@arielmt@computerfairi.es avatar

Ahah. The first pkg in my path is /usr/sbin/pkg from base, while the first pkg-static is /usr/local/sbin/pkg-static from ports-mgmt/pkg, the two sources got out of sync (ports a higher version number than base), ports-mgmt/portmaster explicitly uses pkg-static, and I never noticed which pkg and pkg-static I was using outside of that. Yep, that would do it.

arielmt OP ,
@arielmt@computerfairi.es avatar

While I slept, portmaster descended thousands of levels deep into a circular dependencies loop: deskutils/zim > devel/xdg-utils > textproc/xmlto > www/w3m > graphics/imlib2 > graphics/libheif > multimedia/ffmpeg > graphics/libcaca > graphics/imlib2 > graphics/libheif > multimedia/ffmpeg.

Make-installing zim and restarting portmaster without zim somehow broke the circular dependency loop, despite nothing being functionally different.

@arielmt@computerfairi.es avatar arielmt , to random

The feature of morging bugfixes from rel continvoucly into develop as Tim moves backward has been removed, but the Wayback Machine captured the Microslop: https://web.archive.org/web/20260216165612/https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/introduction-to-github/3-components-of-github-flow

arielmt OP ,
@arielmt@computerfairi.es avatar

BRB, morging purr sidequests.

@arielmt@computerfairi.es avatar arielmt , to random

I just unfollowed some supposedly curated image bots because they started using gen-ai for their alt text instead of simple look-ups or an even simpler alt-text table that could've been curated at the same time as the supposed image curation.

arielmt OP ,
@arielmt@computerfairi.es avatar

Altbot is not a solution. It's multiple facets of the problem.

@arielmt@computerfairi.es avatar arielmt , to random

Boxing Day
AKA
Christmas for Cats

A photo of a cat in a box with a caption overlaid and attribution bar. Caption: OH MY GOSH! Look! I got a box for christmas! Just what I wanted! Attribution: ICanHasCheezburger.Com
ALT
@arielmt@computerfairi.es avatar arielmt , to random

Find of the unspecified time period:

Markdown to HTML in pure AWK: https://git.sr.ht/~knazarov/markdown.awk

It works in BSD AWK & should work in any POSIX AWK, not just gawk.

@arielmt@computerfairi.es avatar arielmt , to random

This is peak TV channel website design:

The Travel Channel via the Wayback Machine, captured 1997-04-18 09:30:54 UTC: https://web.archive.org/web/19970418093054/http://www.travelchannel.com/index.htm

arielmt OP ,
@arielmt@computerfairi.es avatar

Related, the best movie website design is still online, having migrated slightly over the decades:

from spacejam.com/index.cgi

to spacejam.com/jam.htm

to warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm

to spacejam.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm

before finally moving into its retirement home today at www.spacejam.com/1996

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

Screenshot of the Space Jam movie website's landing page, originally at spacejam.com, as captured by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. It's a solid black page featuring a picture of busts of Bugs Bunny (left) and Michael Jordan (right) from the movie, tinted blue, and the underlined word "click" in red beneath the picture. Clicking on either the photo or the word "click" (or waiting 25 seconds) would take you from the landing page to the iconic Space Jam home page.
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    @arielmt@computerfairi.es avatar arielmt , to random

    Newsroom (NZ), "When students' brains go quiet": https://newsroom.co.nz/2025/10/02/when-students-brains-go-quiet/

    The lede is spot-on: "Students starting to learn with AI is the difference between using a calculator after understanding math versus never learning math because calculators exist"

    Even with a bias in favor of (the LLMs pretending to be) AI being effective tools when in expertly knowledgeable hands, the conclusion of it being harmful in general is inescapable.

    @nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar nixCraft , to random

    An Experimental AntiBot Reverse Proxy https://github.com/pulkitsharma07/OnlyHumans-Proxy Serve your static website as image(s) so that crawlers, bots, etc cannot steal/scrape/take your content. This is what it comes to now.

    arielmt ,
    @arielmt@computerfairi.es avatar

    @nixCraft Great! In addition to inventing yet another layer of complexity that makes websites inaccessible to a large number of Web users, they invented a tool that helps mail spammers get past anti-spam tools better than current page-to-image spam generator tools as a nice bonus! Good job, techbros!

    @nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar nixCraft , to random

    Why did you use variables like ‘i’ or ‘j’ in for loop instead of verbose names like “counter”? 👨🏽‍💻

    arielmt ,
    @arielmt@computerfairi.es avatar

    @nixCraft Because I grew up on dialects of Basic that either limited variable names to 2 characters or ignored name differences after the 2nd character, and "I" meant "index."