Why I Switched Firefox from Snap to Flatpak

This – this is the reason:

Snap update notification

Unlike other software packages (which includes, I believe, Flatpak) Snap packages will not update if the application is already running. Instead you get this annoying popup “Oh boy, you have 13 days to close your app otherwise nasty things will happen!” Which wouldn’t be such a bad idea in and by itself, except that if you close the application – it doesn’t update. Even the notification doesn’t go away.

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Script day: check the currently set Plasma desktop wallpaper

I like to have some kind of slideshow as a desktop background wallpaper, and there are various ways of doing that – using your local picture library or multiple variations of remote image sources (everyone love NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day), and you can find a lot of discussions online about how best to go about automating setting the desktop’s background wallpaper image – in KDE Plasma it is particularly not that easy as you have to contend with multiple “activities”, with each has multiple screens, with each has multiple “desktop containments” – fortunately Plasma no longer supports different wallpapers for different virtual desktops – otherwise it would really have been a massive mess.

But sometimes I don’t want to change the wallpaper – just to figure out which one I’m looking it (maybe I want to delete it?). There isn’t any discussion about that on the internet, so I wrote this script and here it is for posterity (and also in this Github Gist):

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Chrome Applications and the cursed CSD

I’ve ranted before about Client-Side Decorations (CSD), here and elsewhere, and here’s another one – mostly as a reminder to myself about how to disable CSD on Google Chrome web application windows.

The gist is – CSDs are horrible – they make your desktop look like a mishmash of different operating systems on the same screen, where it is often not clear how to interact with the application windows. The worst case is of course the MS-Windows XP RTL reflected UI, where you had some windows with normal operation buttons (close, maximize, etc) on the right side of the title bar and some windows were in “RTL” mode, so their buttons were on the left side 🤯.

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Imported Rant – Why I Hate MacOS

I’m starting a new thing on this (otherwise quite dead) blog, mostly as a service to myself: “Imported Rants”. Its going to be basically copies (sometimes maybe better edited) of rants I posted as comments in other places (mostly YouTube), that have grown long enough to almost be an article in and of themselves.

Today, in response to Brodie Robertson’s question – Should Linux Users Hate Apple As Much As Microsoft? here’s the rant from my comments:

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Why Are Linux Software Distributions Methods Are So Different?

Don’t do this:

Do this:

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Newest demo in Microsoft’s stupid reverse WINE, says: “we need Linux on Windows to grep”

Microsoft recently demoed a Windows Subsystem for Linux1 feature where they can run commands on a Linux shell under WSL from the Windows CMD shell – which, according to the demo that pipes the output of ipconfig to Linux grep, they need becuase the CMD shell is a 30 year old joke shell that can’t even do grep properly.

  1. stupid reverse WINE : its a Linux system call translator for Windows, like WINE does for Linux, but doesn’t handle X or OpenGL and does a piss-poor job of file IO []

SSH-over-HTTPS for fame & profit

In the past, I’ve discussed using SSH to circumvent restricted networks with censoring transparent proxies, but that relied on the restricted network allowing free SSH access on port 22 (what we call in the industry – the single network requirement for getting work done).

Unfortunately, there are restricted networks that don’t even allow that – all you get is the transparent censoring HTTP proxy (which has recently became the case with the free Wi-Fi on the Israeil Railways trains).

But fortunately for us, there is still one protocol which they can’t block, they can’t proxy and they can’t man-in-the-middle  – or else they’d break the internet even for people who only read news, search google and watch YouTube – that is HTTPS.

In this article I’ll cover running SSH-over-HTTPS using ProxyTunnel and Apache. The main consideration is that the target web server is also running some other websites that we can’t interrupt. The main content is based on this article by Mark S. Kolich, but since it only covers using plain HTTP and in addition to some simple changes in the example configurations I also wanted to cover getting an SSL certificate, here’s my version of the tutorial:

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Is Precise Canonical’s XP?

Canonical, makers of the Ubuntu operating system, have just announced that their about to expire “long term support” version is getting a longer “security only” life extension.

Sounds familiar?

Like other vendors who have similarly offered such life extensions in the past, the new support contract will only be offered to corporations who subscribe to the pricey commercial support package (at $250/year per VM and $750/year per physical server).

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Fix RVM “run script from the internet to install”

On Wednesday I complained about the latest UN*X fad of installing software by running scripts from the internet, without any regard to how your operating system handles software installation.

Docker, that I complained about last time, at least has a script that takes into account the local software management solution (uses apt for Ubuntu, yum for Fedora, etc), but RVM – the Ruby Version Manager which is a popular tool among rubyists everywhere, just downloads a bunch of executable stuff (granted, most of it are scripts, but the difference is lost on most people) into arbitrary location on your file system. At least it doesn’t install system software, oh wait – it does.

While I can’t help with RVM’s desire to install system level software (that it actually needs because one of the things you want RVM to do for you is to compile ruby versions from source), I can try to help you figure out how to install RVM where you want it and use it how you want it.

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Docker and the horrible “one line installation” fad

One of the weird things that sane (or some would say “old skool”) system administrators complain about lately is that with the rising popularity of UN*X systems (mostly Mac OS X and Linux) in the world, and in particular in the software development world, people using UN*X system want less and less to understand how to manage their systems and the culmination is the

to install this complicated system level software, just copy and paste simple wget command to your terminal

with Docker being the most horrible example of that behavior. No sane person (who understand UN*X) will ever think that installing Docker by feeding the content of a URL to bash is a good idea, but for some reason this is the documented and recommended way by the Docker people. Other examples are abound, but lets concentrate on fixing the Docker scenario.

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