Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

My technologically inclined friends will probably not be surprised to know that today I called the 3 largest ISPs in Israel and asked whether they offer IPv6 service on their fiber connection, and 2 of them flat-out said “no” and the third said “only if you use our bundled router”.

כשר פרווה לפסח, נטול גלוטן

להכנה בתבנית קפיצית 22ס”מ (גובה 7ס”מ)

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They’re so weird that even the explaining the context will cause many listeners to lose patience.

נשארו 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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This 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.

The 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:

This – 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.

Did you know that this blog is also on the Fediverse? Follow me @oded@geek.co.il.

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):

This YouTube channel is mostly about military hardware, but this video I think covers a wide range of geopolitical issues quite well.