Welcome to Incremental Social! Learn more about this project here!
Check out lemmyverse to find more communities to join from here!

rekabis

@rekabis@lemmy.ca

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

rekabis ,

I used to take pride in that I could fully set up, configure, secure, minimally provision (with software) and neuter the more egregious aspects of Vista/7/8/8.1 within a 16hr time frame.

With Windows 10 this increased to 20 hours, and with my own Windows 11 install I am currently clocking in at 24hrs - three whole work days. The last day of which is spent in the Registry and doing multiple reboots to ensure the new UI fuckery has been appropriately castrated.

I have a handful of programs, both current and vintage, that are either inadequately or completely unable to be serviced by Wine. With that said, I am now down to only two rigs on Windows, the remainder being various flavours of Linux or BSD.

rekabis ,

Canada doesn’t exactly have a peeps culture. I didn’t even know about them until I was in my late 30s, and encountered them in some HP fan humour sketch. Had absolutely no context, and no idea what TF they were.

rekabis ,

This is part of the reason I still have an HP 4050DTN and an HP 5000DTN. Plain B&W, but absolutely bulletproof and lacking all tracking, subscription, or DRM bullshit.

Hell, I can still get overstuffed cartridges that can do 20,000 prints at 5% coverage. I’m on my third one in two decades and two degrees with my 4050.

rekabis ,

You cannot print nearly-invisible yellow dots with only black toner, no matter how much you want to.

rekabis ,

Especially with the flat-screened Trinitron CRTs, the screen face itself was by far the heaviest part due to all the reinforcing glass. They were ridiculously heavy and front-heavy.

So you had the TV face you, and you bellied up to the screen. Then you put your arms over the top and down each side. The trick was to get the top corners poking out from under your armpits so the TV couldn’t turtle over backwards. Then you grabbed the bottom on either end - towards the rear, but not along the rear - and lifted. Rocking the TV side to side was likely needed to get your fingers under it. What also helped is if the TV was up on something and could be leaned towards you.

Provided your arms were long enough - and I am only 189cm tall, with normally-proportioned arms - this was doable clear up to a 34″ Trinitron. The only models I couldn’t do this on were the 36″ one and that strange 16:9 aspect ratio one that was released especially for viewing widescreen movies.

rekabis ,

"just marry a man you can stand"

My uncle in law married the first woman who would have him. He didn’t think long or hard about it, just thought that to be the most expedient and simple. Thought that all women were good and kind and reasonable people like his mother and sisters.

She’s been a complete demon to him, totally solipsistic and money-obsessed, and is not only working him into an early grave but is also stressing him out such that he looks like he’s in his late-eighties. He’s only 64.

Never took to the idea of sex outside of marriage or an LTR (= min. 6 months, usually 12 or more), but daaaaaang… people need to percolate more before filtering down into a cup.

rekabis ,

A woman’s cycle varies between 15 and 45 days, averaging 28.1 days, but with a standard deviation of 3.95 days. That’s a hell of a lot of variability from one woman to the next. And the same variability can be experienced by a large minority of women from one period to the next, and among nearly all women across the course of their fertile years.

On the other hand, the moon’s cycle (as seen from Earth) takes 27 days, 7 hours, and 43 minutes to pass through all of its phases. And it does so like clockwork, century after century.

Of the two, I am finding the second to have a much stronger likelihood of being the reasoning behind the notches.

Strange how gender-bigotry style historical revisionism and gender exceptionalism seems to get a wholly uncritical and credulous pass when it’s not done by a man.

rekabis ,

Why not use a real and confirmed example, then? Because they do exist.

Making a story up - such that it can be actively undermined - certainly does the job poorly at best, and actively hurts the objective at worst.

Roku Issues a Mandatory Terms of Service Update That You Must Agree To or You Can't Use Your Roku (cordcuttersnews.com)

Over the last 48 hours, Roku has slowly been rolling out a mandatory update to its terms of service. In this terms it changes the dispute resolution terms but it is not clear exactly why. When the new terms and conditions message shows up on a Roku Player or TV, your only option is to […]

rekabis ,

This just ensures that I will never get a Roku. Thanks for making that decision for me, Roku!

Now if only Sony could make an OLED 4K dumb TV about 78″ or larger. Yes, I know the alternative is called “Digital Signage”, but almost all of DS is still just standard LCD and entry-level visual tech.

rekabis ,

You can use Win10Privacy to bodily castrate nearly all built-in spyware and telemetry.

Downside is that it’s a damn powerful program, with few guardrails, so if you don’t have good knowledge of Windows internals you run a non-trivial risk of accidentally lobotomizing an important feature of your install by enabling the wrong setting. I mean, all settings can be easily reversed, but you gotta know which specific one did the nerfing in order to undo the oopsie.

For example, even the midrange firewall settings are mostly safe, except… a single one of them completely kills Microsoft Office Click-To-Run. It won’t install, and it won’t launch even if you installed it before you applied Win10Privacy. So if Microsoft Office is an essential (Access or Excel absolutely needed, for example), be careful.

rekabis ,

Or you just use Rufus to create your USB installer. It provides the ability to add that option to the installer just before the burning process. Mouse clicks only, no CLI needed.

rekabis ,

Win+e doesn't even open to a panel that lets me open the c drive without clicking other shit and waiting for it to appear first.

I have been seriously considering creating a “graphical registry editor” that would be feature-focused and could be both portable (for one-off application) and installable (for constant on-login resetting of any changed preferences). Just open it up, browse the offerings, select the feature mods you want, apply and restart.

There is a lot of File Explorer shit that you can do to mod it back to WinXP days. Had to do this to a Win11 install for my Octogenarian father who has become very intolerant of unexpected changes, and while it needs regular maintenance to “keep”, it has worked out well for him.

rekabis ,

Link to the program?

https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=win10privacy

rekabis ,

While I can understand the need for wifi in places where it is next to impossible to run a physical hardline (renting a house or extensive renos needed), I fully agree. Absolutely nothing can beat a hardline.

rekabis ,

Where I live, that would be pretty much 100% of landlords.

The last time rent on an average 2bdrm apartment was only three times the income of the average-income married couple was back in the 90s. Now it’s more like 50% of their monthly pre-tax income. Or something like 65-70% their post-tax income. For single people who don’t want roommates it’s even worse.

The Canadian housing situation makes the American one look like the bottoming-out of a housing crash.

rekabis ,

Not at all. Most any sauna worth the name operates at 65-70℃ at the absolute low end, and typically sits at 80-90℃ at ideal operating temperatures.

Then you go an splash an entire ladle of water over the rocks and feel the scorching heat wash over you.

Invigorating.

rekabis ,

Simple answer: Mary had a reptile disfunction.

rekabis ,

And that’s why hardlining is still by far the best option available.

  1. Hardlined cameras need to be physically accessed and the cables snipped in order to disrupt them, and most cameras offering hardlining now feed Ethernet through their bases, providing additional protection.
  2. Most sub-20 camera systems can run for up to an hour or two on a 500VA UPS, and up to a week or more with PowerWall backups, defeating intentional power outages.
  3. A fully airgapped system can defeat any sort of direct Internet intrusion.
  4. Shielded Ethernet can help protect from crosstalk attacks provided they are correctly grounded with the appropriate switches.
  5. Hardware auth between cameras and the DVR can help defend against direct attacks via an unplugged cable or an open wall jack, in that only approved hardware can make the needed connections with either end.
  6. Encrypted communications between cameras and DVR can enhance the security of data across the wire.
  7. A brace of identical dummy cameras - similarly powered, if they have external indicators - alongside real ones will waste the time and effort of attackers who conduct physical attacks, while keeping recording-infrastructure needs to a minimum.
  8. Bonus if identical but “dark” Ethernet is similarly spoofed throughout the building, as not only will it confuse physical attackers, but it’ll also be already in-place for future communications-infrastructure improvements.
  9. DVR needs to be in a secured location, ideally fireproof. In combination with № 7 and № 8, a dummy DVR (with live screens showing actual content) can exist elsewhere to distract any physical attackers.

Sure, this list isn’t 100% coverage, but it gets you nearly there with a minimum of effort.

rekabis ,

If you are in the middle of a frame-off gut of a home, as I currently am, much of this is trivial to implement.

Even my parent’s 1978 home, with it’s drop ceiling in the basement, would not make most of this all that much more difficult.

Across America, clean energy plants are being banned faster than they're being built (www.usatoday.com)

Across America, clean energy plants are being banned faster than they're being built::The clock is ticking toward a deadline to meet renewable-energy standards. But USA TODAY's analysis finds local governments banning wind turbines, solar plants.

rekabis ,

Some are NIMBYs. Most, however, are alt-right reality-hostile whackadoodles who see any “renewable” energy generation as a liberal plot to destroy America.

These people actively think that renewables will harm America.

How do I know this? We have the same crazies up here in Canada. Some of them, despite having been born here, routinely confuse the two countries, spouting US legislation - like the constitutions and amendments - in “defense” of their “freedoms” being “infringed upon” by things like wind turbines.

rekabis ,

Fail2ban bans after 1 attempt for a year.

Fail2ban yes; one year, however, is IMO a bit excessive.

Most ISP IP assignments do tend to linger - even with DHCP the same IP will be re-assigned to the same gateway router for quite a number of sequential times - but most IPs do eventually change within a few months. I personally use 3 months as a happy medium for any blacklist I run. Most dynamic IPs don’t last this long, almost all attackers will rotate through IPs pretty quickly anyhow, and if you run a public service (website, etc.), blocking for an entire year may inadvertently catch legitimate visitors.

Plus, you also have to consider the load such a large blocklist will have on your system, if most entries no longer represent legitimate threat actors, you’ll only bog down your system by keeping them in there.

Fail2ban can be configured to allow initial issues to cycle back out quicker, while blocking known repeat offenders for a much longer time period. This is useful in keeping block lists shorter and less resource-intensive to parse.

rekabis ,

That makes a lot more sense for your setup, then.

rekabis ,

Opera in particular is a dangerous browser to run these days, it’s owned by confirmed scammers and investment-scheme operators.

If you want something with the same ideological history as Opera, run Vivaldi, which was created by ex-Opera engineers.

But yes, for true openness, Librewolf, Waterfox, or Firefox is the way to go.

rekabis ,

Do either of the options you mentioned provide custom nameservers? As in, the ability for ns01.yourdomain.com to resolve to your account on their DNS servers?

rekabis ,

reads the article

considers the triggers prompting the outburst

He’s… not wrong.

Not right, but definitely not wrong. There is a big difference between effective security and total security. He was dumping on total security, which in many ways is worse than no security at all.

rekabis ,

That’s why I was particularly clear about him being “not right”.

Because being abusive is definitely “not right”.

But sometimes you have to make a point and you just have no other way of doing so, because the deed is already done, and anything less shocking is just gonna get ignored wholesale. That foot-stomp has to be loud enough and clear enough to be heard even by the people in the back. And there are only so many (frequently limited!) ways of grabbing everyone’s attention by the nuts.

I don’t agree with how Linus handled it. But I can understand it.

rekabis ,

Well, that's just an excuse for bad leadership.

You can’t be a leader to people who have no desire to follow you in the first place. And you can’t force anyone to accept you as a leader.

The world is not as black and white as you make it out to be. Sometimes you need to throw your weight around for the overall good of the community. It’s why law enforcement exists within every functional community - there will be people who intentionally ignore “leadership” and break rules for their own selfish purposes regardless of how good said leadership is, and the only thing that will make them behave is the threat of social censure or outright punishment.

And Linus has no ability to directly correct or punish, so social censure is the next best functional tool.

rekabis ,

Even in my sixth decade, I beat people about the head with this, becoming the pedant from hell until they finally revert to clockwise and counterclockwise. And if they become specific enough to be “right over the top”, I go, “well, why not just say clockwise and avoid all that ambiguity?”

Being on the spectrum, it took me into my very early teens to even figure out right from left. I was two grades ahead of my peers in math, and could read a map and navigate better than most adults, but I needed a high degree of specificity when it came to physical directions. Any assumptions that were inconsequential to others became massive roadblocks to me due to the innate ambiguity of assumptions.

rekabis ,

Clockwise, blockwise

That’s a new one for me. Thanks.

How to get a private car

Hello internet users. Someone in my family is looking to buy a car and wanted some recommendations for a private one. They are looking to buy new, and need Android Auto and CarPlay. I know all new cars suck for privacy by default, but I was hoping someone here could offer some insight as to which cars can be made better and what...

rekabis ,

A lot of vehicles prior to 2005 will not have a black box that records everything (and for which you will not have the encryption key for), nor will it phone home in any capacity.

Pretty much 100% of vehicles prior to 1995 will definitely lack these features.

If you want a vehicle that you control 100%, get a vintage vehicle.

rekabis ,

Wealth and power always strips away empathy, ethics, and morals.

rekabis ,

The fact that they have yoinked their self-hosted option that was perfect for small/individual operators means their priorities no longer include growing organically.

A rabid fanbase of individual users is how you achieve meteoric growth. A sysadmin coming into a company that’s looking for a solution is only going to rave about products they have personally had an opportunity to use themselves.

Just like Microsoft with the former MSDN and its low entry costs, Atlassian has shot themselves in the foot and don’t even realize it.

rekabis ,

There are better tools these days than blanket prohibition.

The signals that voice and data go over are different from each other, so not all modern cellphone jammers jam the entire spectrum. Some can be set up to allow voice calls over the traditional channels while jamming data. This forces students to use the school’s wifi network for any Internet connectivity, whereupon their connectivity to apps and services can be whitelisted/blacklisted as deemed necessary by system admins.

Ergo, a system that keeps students off of their smartphones while allowing parental connectivity.

rekabis ,

I have a need for a printer and HP is solidly in the don't-touch list.

The only HP printers I still recommend are the vintage ones from the pre-2005 era. HP 4050DTN and HP 5000DTN and the like. Absolutely rock-solid laser printers that don’t have DRM or any other shite. Hell, I can get overstuffed cartridges for the 4050 that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage… who does that these days? And they’re capable of taking JetDirect cards clear up to the gigabit level.

rekabis ,

I may have 128Gb in my current rig (Dell Precision T7610), but if this is the way you’re gonna be bloating Windows 12, imma gonna be running to OpenSUSE or some BSD.

Yes, I use Win10Privacy to lobotomize all of the spyware and cruftware that comes with Windows. But it’s gotta be re-run after every significant Windows update.

rekabis ,

Native speaker here, never had any issues with this or any other common homophone in English. I mean, yes, spelling mistakes did occur, and we now have autocorrect to further screw things up. But I never “learned the rules” and still got everything consistently correct from a rather early age.

“Learning by ear” is just another excuse for laziness and/or ignorance. Pick up books, read extensively, and like anyone else not marinating in cultivated ignorance, you too can utilize the language effectively and correctly.

rekabis ,

In many parts of northern and western Canada, fire season never ended, and is projected to merge seamlessly with the one this year.

As in, permanent year-round fire “seasons”.

Yay for climate-change induced droughts.

rekabis , (edited )

Posted in a Canadian channel before, because I am Canadian:

The housing crisis arises out of one problem, and one problem only:

Housing as an investment.

That’s not to say foreigners are to blame - at less than 2% of the market, they don’t have any real impact. British Columbia’s laws against foreign home ownership is nothing more than a red herring, a bullshit move designed to flame racism and bigotry. Yes, some of them are just looking to build anchors in a prosperous first-world country, but most are honest buyers.

A better move has been the “speculation tax”. By taxing more heavily any home that remains empty, it encourages property holders to actually rent these units out, instead of holding out for people desperate enough to pay their nosebleed-high rents.

But all of this misses the real mark: housing used purely as investment.

Now, to be absolutely clear, I am not talking about landlords who have a “mortgage helper” suite, or who have held on to a home or two that they previously lived in. These are typically the good landlords that we need - those with just two or three rental units, and that aren’t landlording as a business, just as a small top-up to their day job or as an extra plump-up to the retirement funds they are living off of. By having many thousands of separate landlords instead of one monolith, healthy competition is preserved.

No, there are two types of “investors” that I would directly target:

  1. Flippers
  2. Landlords-as-a-business.

1) Flippers

The first group, flippers, also come in two distinct types:

  1. Those that buy up homes “on spec” before ground has even been turned, and then re-sell those same homes for much more than they bought shortly before these homes are completed. Sometimes for twice as much as they paid.
  2. Those that buy up an older, tired home, slap on a coat of paint, spackle over holes in the walls, paper over the major flaws in hopes that inspectors don’t catch them, and shove in an ultra-cheap but shiny Ikea kitchen that will barely last a decade, then re-sell it for much more than they paid for it.

Both of these groups have contributed to the massive rise in housing purchase prices over the last thirty years. For a family that could afford a 3Bdrm home in 2000, their wages have only increased by half again, while home values have gone up by five times by 2023.

And this all comes down to speculation driving up the cost of homes.

So how do we combat this? Simple: to make it more attractive for owner-occupiers to buy a home than investors.

A family lives in a home that they own for an average of 8 years. Some less, most a lot more. We start by taxing any home sale at 100% for any owner who hasn’t lived in said home as their primary residence for at least two years (730 contiguous days). We then do a straight line depreciation from the end of the second year down to 0% taxation at the end of the eighth year. Or maybe we be kind and use a sigmoid curve to tax the last two years very minimally.

Exceptions can exist, of course, for those who have been widowed, or deployed overseas, or in the RCMP and deployed elsewhere in Canada, or where the house has been ordered to be sold by the court for divorce proceedings, and so forth. But simple bankruptcy would not be eligible, because it would be abused as a loophole.

But the point here is that homes will then become available to those working-class people who have been desperate to get off of the rental merry-go-round, but who have been unable to because home prices have been rising much faster than their down payment ever could.

This tax would absolutely cut investors off at the knees. Flippers would have to live in a home much, much longer, and spec flippers would be put entirely out of business, because they can’t even live in that house until it is fully completed in the first place.

2) Landlords-as-a-business

The second group is much simpler. It involves anyone who has ever bought a home purely to rent it back out, seeking to become a parasite on the backs of working-class Canadians in order to generate a labour-free revenue stream that would replace their day job.
Some of these are individuals, but some of these are also businesses. To which there would be two simple laws created:

  1. It would become illegal for any business to hold any residential property whatsoever that was in a legally habitable state. This wouldn’t prevent businesses from building homes, but it would prevent a business from buying up entire neighbourhoods just to monopolize that area and jack up the rent to the maximum that the market could bear.
  2. Any individual owning more than 5 (or so) rental units (not just homes!) would be re-classified as operating as a business, and therefore become ineligible to own any of them - they would have to immediately sell all of them.

As for № 2, a lot of loopholes can exist that a sharp reader would immediately identify. So we close them, too.

  • Children under 24 “operate as a business” automatically with any rental unit. They are allowed ZERO. Because who TF under the age of 25 is wealthy enough to own rental units? No-one, unless these units were “gifted” to them from their parents, in an attempt to skirt the law. So that is one loophole closed.
  • Additional immediate family members are reduced by half in the number of rental units they can own. So if a husband has the (arbitrary, for the sake of argument) maximum limit of five, the wife can only have two herself. Any other family member who wants to own a rental unit, and who does not live in the same household, must provide full disclosure to where their money is coming from, and demonstrate that it is not coming from other family members who already own rental units.

By severely constraining the number of investors in the market, more housing becomes available to those who actually want to stop being renters. Actual working-class people can exit the rental market, reducing demand for rental units, and therefore reducing rental prices. These lower rental prices then make landlording less attractive, reducing the investor demand for homes and reducing bidding wars by deep-pocketed investors, eventually reducing overall home values for those who actually want to buy a home to live in it.

Plus, landlords will also become aware of the tax laid out in the first section that targets flippers. If they own rental units that they have never lived in as their primary residence, they will also be unable to sell these units for anything other than a steep loss. They will then try to exit the market before such a tax comes into effect, flooding the market with homes and causing prices to crash. They know that they are staring down two massive problems:

Being stuck with a high-cost asset (purchase price)
that only produces a low-revenue stream because renters have exited the market by buying affordable homes, allowing plenty of stock that is pincered by the spec tax that heavily taxes empty rental units, thereby lowering rental prices well beneath the cost of the mortgage on the unit.

By putting these two tools into effect at the same time, we force a massive exodus of landlords out of the marketplace, crashing home values to where they become affordable to working-class people, thereby massively draining the numbers of renters looking for places to rent. Those places still being rented out - by owners who have previously lived in them, or by investors who couldn’t sell in time - would significantly outnumber renters looking for a place to rent, thereby crashing rental prices as renters could then dictate rents by being able to walk away from unattractive units or abusive landlords.

Full disclosure: I own, I don’t rent. But I have vanishingly little sympathy for greed-obsessed parasites that suck the future out of hard-working Canadians who must pay 60% or more of their wages for shitbox rentals to abusive landlords in today’s marketplace. Most people (and pretty much anyone under the age of 30) who don’t already own no longer have any hope of ever owning a house, as their ability to build a down payment shrinks every year, while home values accelerate into the stratosphere.

rekabis ,

Apartments can either be owned by families that upgraded to a house, and are now renting it out, or it can go full social housing where it follows the same model as Vienna, for example.

You need administration to manage an apartment or any physically combined housing, but nothing says that the building itself or the underlying land needs to be owned by a corporation. In fact, true social housing is “owned” by the people, the rent you pay is just for upkeep and to pay off a very long term cost-of-construction bill. Some families in Vienna’s social housing pay less than 20% of their income on rent. You get in young enough, and you’re paying a pittance by the time you retire.

rekabis ,

This would get messy with inheritances.

So make this an exception, on the condition that the child can be classified as an adult by the courts.

And if it’s someone under 25, there is a high likelihood that they’re still living at home and have already occupied the home for some time already. The passing of the parents would have triggered an insurance payout on the home (which is standard in Canada) so there wouldn’t be any kind of mortgage to continue paying, only property taxes. Remaining in the house would be achievable even with a minimum-wage job.

Also, would this apply to non residential rental properties?

My proposal targets only residential properties. Why would it have any effect on non-residential rentals? The entire purpose of that proposal is to deal with parasitism in the rental market, not anything else.

rekabis , (edited )

A $2k CAD phone I can justify if it’s going to hold me in good stead over the next 6 years and have another 6 full OS upgrades straight from the manufacturer. My iPhone X held up great for 6 years, and only started struggling in 2023.

A $3,500 USD fashion accessory? What are they smoking, and can I have some?

rekabis ,

Whoops. Yes, thanks.

rekabis ,

I think that there are probably quite a large number of groups that are trying to control things.

The thing is, stochastic chaos and multiple groups working in concert, in the same general direction, and even at cross-purposes greatly affects their ability to create lasting change that matters (even if only for them).

As such, for any one issue that is “progressing”, there is likely one or more groups working successfully in that direction combined with other groups that are either inadvertently affecting the results, or succeeding or failing to oppose that direction to various degrees.

There are likely vanishingly few examples of a single group attempting to affect a significant issue unopposed.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • incremental_games
  • meta
  • All magazines
    •