I have the weirdest computer problems
July 4th, 2024They’re so weird that even the explaining the context will cause many listeners to lose patience.
Read the rest of this entry »מתכון: מציה לארוחת בוקר (לא מתוקה)
May 18th, 2024נשארו כמה מצות מהפסח, ואתם לא בקטע של ממתקים – אז הנה המתכון שלי למציה לארוחת בוקר (או כל שעה אחרת של היום שבא לכם).
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Imported Rant – Why Redis and MongoDB licenses are open source
March 31st, 2024This post was originally written in response to The Linux Experiment’s “Redis ditches FOSS” item, where Nick, the presenter, was critical of the recent Redis license change where they moved from the original BSD license to MongoDB’s SSPL, a change that was portrayed (and I’m paraphrasing a bit) as “the company taking the code the open source volunteers have given them and closing it in order to monetize the volunteers’ work”.
TL;DR – the fact that OSI labels SSPL as “not open source” is nothing more than FUD by the major cloud providers, as the only meaningful difference between that and the GPL is section 13 that makes life harder for cloud providers.
Read the rest of this entry »Stack Overflow 2023 Developer Survey
June 15th, 2023The 2023 Stack Overflow developer survey results are in, and here’s my (likely controversial) take:
Rust developers are the most self-centered, with Go developers close seconds.
Here are screenshots of the very nice “Worked with vs. want to work with” graphics for programming languages, with Rust and Go highlighted:
Why I Switched Firefox from Snap to Flatpak
March 23rd, 2023This – this is the reason:
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.
Read the rest of this entry »Welcome to the Fediverse
March 15th, 2023Did you know that this blog is also on the Fediverse? Follow me @oded@geek.co.il.
Script day: check the currently set Plasma desktop wallpaper
March 13th, 2023I 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):
Read the rest of this entry »Israel and Russia, an interesting geopolitical analysis:
March 2nd, 2023This YouTube channel is mostly about military hardware, but this video I think covers a wide range of geopolitical issues quite well.
Is This An Elon Musk’s Upgrade?
February 22nd, 2023Trying to register for the Twitter API (for personal use and mucking around), and this is how the “accepts our terms of service” page looks:
Mind you, the “I accept” and “Submit” buttons still work very well, you just have no idea what you’re signing up for… 🤦
Chrome Applications and the cursed CSD
February 19th, 2023I’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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