/ˈbɑːltəkʊteɪ/. Knows some chemistry and piping stuff. TeXmacs user.

Website: reboil.com

Mastodon: baltakatei@twit.social

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I am fond of a partial shuffle algorithm I wrote in Bash for my music playlists that often preserves neighbors of the input list in the output list.

    Image

    • Blue: input sequence.
    • Red: complete shuffle.
    • Green: partial shuffle.

    The result is like skipping through my media library in order but occasionally randomly enabling shuffle to jump to a new place. Since the input list clumps albums together and since albums often have a similar vibe, if I want several similar songs of a particular feel to play one after another, I just have to manually advance through the outputted playlist until I hit a song that has what I’m looking for; then I can let the playlist continue automatically since each subsequent song is likely to be similar to the previous song (until another random jump occurs).





  • Rent extraction: Passive cash flow from doing nothing but owning something without actually producing anything. Such income can be used to buy more such cash flows until monopolies form. Unless monopolies are broken up by government, monopoly owners collude to maximize rent extraction until heads roll during the next revolution.



  • It handles ambiguity too. Want to say something lasts for a period of 1 month without needing to bother checking how many days are in the current and next month? P1M. Done. Want to be more explicit and say 30 days? P30D. Want to say it in hours? Add the T separator: PT720H.

    I used this kind of notation all the time when exporting logged historical data from SCADA systems into a file whose name I wanted to quickly communicate the start of a log and how long it ran:

    20230701T0000-07--P30D..v101_pressure.csv

    (“--” is the ISO-8601 (2004) recommended substitute for “/” in file names)

    If anyone is interested, I made this Bash script to give me uptime but expressed as an ISO 8601 time period.

    $ bkuptime
    P2DT4H22M4S/2023-08-15T02:01:00+0000, 2 users,  load average: 1.71, 0.87, 0.68
    






  • It should be noted that “being certain of the environment the pages run” requires controlling the client software being executed which requires preventing the user from modifying said executable which requires the browser to either be closed source or, more effectively, controlling the user’s hardware via blackbox verification chips (e.g. TPM DRM). It’s not just advertisers that would benefit but any website that wants to DRM content.


  • Maybe try out FreedomBox? freedombox is a Debian package which automatically sets up apache2, firewalld, fail2ban and Letʼs Encrypt. It also automatically adds pre-canned configuration files for applications you install with it (e.g. Mediawiki, WordPress, Matrix, Postfix/Dovecot). The theoretical goal of FreedomBox is to allow anyone to set up a webserver and administer it via a webUI. So, although I would say itʼs not quite there yet for command-line-illiterate users, I have found the software useful as a turnkey server to see what makes certain web applications tick, albeït in mostly vanilla form.

    For example, after installing a new app like WordPress, you could examine what exactly the FreedomBox scripts changed in the /etc/apache2/ or /etc/fail2ban/ configuration files.