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Oddities
by Linus Sphinx 31 Mar '25

31 Mar '25

Poking Fedora 41 gently with a stick, are odd versions still bad juju? Feeling like I should wait for 42.

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meeting tonight at the Raley's in Natomas. Topic Clojure.
by Brian E. Lavender 19 Mar '25

19 Mar '25

Diego Martinez will present clojure. https://www.saclug.org/articles/2025/march-2025.html https://www.raleys.com/store/447 6-8pm Raley's 4650 Natomas Blvd. Sacramento CA, 95835 See you there! Brian -- Brian Lavender https://www.brie.com/brian/ "There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." Professor C. A. R. Hoare The 1980 Turing award lecture

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rc.local
by Gary 16 Mar '25

16 Mar '25

Before, I could just add things to rc.local if I wanted them to run at start up.According to the systemd docs, I should still be able to do that. According to the web, and my experience, it doesn't work. NP. I'll just make a systemd unit and do it right. There are 12 different kinds. Trying to read the docs and figure out what to do is going to be fun. I just copy a template from the web that is suppose to do what I want. There apparently aren't any tools to make this easier because, "It's all really simple already." Conceptually, it does look fairly straightforward, if I had the info I needed. Which is probably there. I just have to do a lot of reading and get a lot of religion. My executable runs and does what I want. Let's fire up the systemd service and see what happens. Oh, SELinux happens. I haven't played with SELinux. Perhaps now is a good time to learn. I am somewhat curious why the SELinux interface tells me a temporary workaround and not a permanent fix. But, with what it does tell me, I figure I have to learn about SELinux policies. Are you kidding me? I have to install an _devel package. I can follow the cookie cutter script, which has 10 nontrivial steps. I start, but I don't get the results that the script tells me I should. Since I don't know what I'm doing, I have no idea if this will be a problem or not. There are only 10 or so man pages I need to read. I'm sure none of them are short. How long has this stuff been around now? Am I missing something? Because it looks like something I stepped in once. We went from adding a line in a file, to all this. It is allegedly more secure.But it looks to me that things could be a lot easier and someone made a big mistake somewhere. I haven't decided how I'll proceed. I either turn off SELinux and start my stuff automatically. Or keep starting it manually, as I do now. It's on a box I like to keep secure, so there is that. Is there a way out or around that I have missed?

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Systemd
by Gary 13 Mar '25

13 Mar '25

After my last post, I started thinking that perhaps systemd is designed to take advantage of multicore processors during startup. That might explain a lot. After doing a bit of googling on whether on not different CPU's can access RAM at the same time, since start up is all about getting things into RAM, it turns out probably not. In fact, one post indicated that a "boot CPU 0" is used for the whole startup. While it may be nice to have the system figure out what needs to run in what order, was it really that hard to execute things in lexical order and just name them appropriately. You pretty much have to do that math anyhow. In my little unit, my script needs the firewalld. Both my unit and the firewalld unit want "multiuser". Mine runs first and dies. I have to expressly tell systemd to run after the firewalld, which isn't a target. How is this easier? On a separate note, I found it really nice that neither the nft docs, nor the firewalld docs tell you how to persist changes. You have to read the firewall-cmd docs. Google told me that. Eventually. This is really poor too. I recently realized I can still use iptables even though the distro dumped me into nft. I don't really see an advantage to nft and I'm not even sure of firewalld's role. I'm thinking of going back to iptables. It is a complex thing to make things simple and a simple thing to make things complex. It looks like we've really gone down that rabbit hole.

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March meeting Clojure, Wednesday, March 19. new location!
by Brian E. Lavender 24 Feb '25

24 Feb '25

We will have the next SacLUG meeting on Wednesday at the Natomas Bel Aire market https://www.raleys.com/store/447 6-8pm Diego Martinez will present Clojure, episode 2. More details will come on the SacLUG website. I believe Diego will summarize his notes form the previsous meeting as well. Stay tuned for updates. https://www.saclug.org/articles/2025/march-2025.html Brian -- Brian Lavender https://www.brie.com/brian/ "There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." Professor C. A. R. Hoare The 1980 Turing award lecture

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Clojure meeting Feb 18
by Brian E. Lavender 19 Feb '25

19 Feb '25

Don't forget the next SacLUG meeting at the Bel Aire market on Arden! https://www.saclug.org/articles/2024/february-2025.html Diego will talk about Clojure! I am looking forward to it! Meeting starts at 6pm. Brian -- Brian Lavender https://www.brie.com/brian/ "There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." Professor C. A. R. Hoare The 1980 Turing award lecture

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Privacy
by saclug＠garymcglinn.com 13 Feb '25

13 Feb '25

I know that there are a lot of ways to have your online activity tracked. And, I thought I understood many or most of them. But, I tried out Gemini with the request, "write a two page article on Stoicism." The results were interesting and pretty good and give me an idea of what Gemini can do. A week, or less later, yesterday, I get an email from Facebook suggesting that I join the "Daily Stoicism" group. WTF. I never use Facebook and basically ignore their reminders on how many notifications or messages I have. AFAIK, there is no legal way Facebook should know what I am doing with Google, unless Google is providing them the information on a back channel. Am I missing something? Everything I know suggest that I would have had to visit a Facebook site sometime between my Gemini request and my receipt of an email from Facebook. Or possibly have visited a Facebook site before my Gemini request and not have directly entered a URL or used a bookmark in the interim. AFAIK, those things didn't happen.

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Re: Privacy
by Gary 13 Feb '25

13 Feb '25

OK. They have a cookie. I'm not at their site, they can't read it. They can't read other sites cookies either. That's the spec. I have to go to their site or use an associated site, to pick up the pixel. I didn't do that. There is no magic.:) Regardless of all that tracking, how would they know my query/request? To me, the only reasonable answer is that Google and Facebook share info behind the scenes, i.e. directly. As I understand it, a tracking pixel works because it is on the page you visit. It comes from, .let's say, Facebook's server, and they know the page that requested it. And they can get the info in the request header. To know who you are, whoever wrote the page has to have known who you are and encoded that in the pixlel somehow, maybe through it's name, or some other attribute. I haven't really been following a lot of the changes that have been made to store more information in caches on browsers. I'm wondering if there is something going on there. I really don't like the fact that browsers have taken this direction. Perhaps I need to look at those specs and see what is going on. On Wed, Feb 12, 2025 at 09:10:47PM -0800, Diego R. Martinez wrote: > Facebook tends to have cookies in your browser and advertising pixels that > basically track everything you do. > > And the thing about it is that, once you're in their system, you will get > tracked for life. So that probably explains that... > > On Wed, Feb 12, 2025 at 8:56 PM <saclug(a)garymcglinn.com> wrote: > > > I know that there are a lot of ways to have your online activity tracked. > > And, I thought I understood many or most of them. > > > > But, I tried out Gemini with the request, "write a two page article on > > Stoicism." The results were interesting and pretty good and give me an > > idea of what Gemini can do. > > > > A week, or less later, yesterday, I get an email from Facebook suggesting > > that I join the "Daily Stoicism" group. > > > > WTF. I never use Facebook and basically ignore their reminders on how many > > notifications or messages I have. > > > > AFAIK, there is no legal way Facebook should know what I am doing with > > Google, unless Google is providing them the information on a back channel. > > > > Am I missing something? Everything I know suggest that I would have had > > to visit a Facebook site sometime between my Gemini request and my receipt > > of an email from Facebook. Or possibly have visited a Facebook site before > > my Gemini request and not have directly entered a URL or used a bookmark in > > the interim. AFAIK, those things didn't happen. > > _______________________________________________ > > Lug-nuts mailing list -- lug-nuts(a)bigbrie.com > > To unsubscribe send an email to lug-nuts-leave(a)bigbrie.com > >

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BRACE FOR IMPACT
by Linus Sphinx 03 Feb '25

03 Feb '25

2025 will be the year of Linux desktop, Happy Holidays.

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Social meetup at Kupros Tuesday
by Brian E. Lavender 19 Jan '25

19 Jan '25

See everyone at Kupros on Tuesday 6:30pm! https://www.saclug.org/articles/2025/january-2025.html Many thanks to Sen for nudging me to get the word out! Brian -- Brian Lavender https://www.brie.com/brian/ "There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." Professor C. A. R. Hoare The 1980 Turing award lecture

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