Some weeks ago I managed to kill my old #pell for good. I never expected it to hold that long at all when I built it back in 2016. To be fair I slacked off a lot over the last year but thanks to recent events forcing everyone to stay at home I stepped up my #training again.
Don’t train alone, it only embeds your errors.
Vesimir, The Witcher 3
Well, Vesimir is right, but that choice do we have? So I spent the late afternoon refurbishing my fallen #pell.
Preparing new struts. Two old struts were gone. No idea where.
Luckily there was another beam, that was part of the kitchen wall some years ago (#hausbauquatsch), with the same dimensions. I could even re-use most of the old post.
Some of the old screws were broken and I had to persuade the leftovers with a crowbar (I probably learned this in Half-Life ;))
180mm screws again
And that’s it this time. I never came back to adding any sort of dampening mats. Some use carpet or rope. I’ve even seen tires used for this. Somehow I became very fond of flying splinters all over the place though. It’s a very satisfying feeling and I even made a video about this some years ago.
I played the visual novel game Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth. I admit I didn’t even look up the details before when I got all three parts dead cheap as a bundle. I’ve a very faint memory of reading the book/s but that’s all. It looked like a decent point-and-click adventure available for #Linux and the idea was to play it via Steam Link in the living room with the kids around. Hint: Don’t do that.
The story is an emotional roller-coaster not shy of splattering blood all over the scene. There are dramatic moments where decisions have to be made [in time] but also peaceful chapters and fun moments. Some have to be spotted and can be missed. The story builds up slowly based on character development and decisions made. Or so it feels. All strings come together in the end and some scenes may change in detail but the overall outcome is probably the same. I’d have to read up on this or do another play-through to be sure though.
It’s not a difficult game. There are no riddles (minigames) to be solved. The only minigame included is some sort of timing game (“quick action”) where one has to click at the right moment. That was mostly annoying but mercifully simply reset the scene when it really mattered so one could try again.
Depiction of a town in 12th century England
The character style may be an issue for some. Animations are not very smooth and there seems to be no lip sync. Sometimes the animations don’t fire at all. The audio however is very good and makes up for this. Music and scenery are awesome. A lot of research went into this, unlike most #mediaeval games, and the depiction of 12th century England looks adequate [to me]. Since this is a hobby of mine I’m really thrown off if this does not match up in games [or movies]. I also catched the vibe of architectural love for cathedrals that I can relate to. While it’s timberframed buildings for me I can certainly understand the fascination. I visited Guédelon some years ago after all 😉
So if you like #mediaeval stories for your #linuxgaming do yourself a favour and get this game. It’s worth every penny.
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Sadly it looks like their Sharepoint is currently overloaded and throttles new connections. Hope it’ll work again soon. Totally going for Timber–Framed Buildings 😀
This is for parents who struggle explaining #corona to children. There’s this really old animated series “Once Upon a Time… Life” from 1986. It shows how our body’s systems, organs and defence mechanisms work. Each episode describes a different part in detail while the battle against viruses and bacteria that threaten the body is never ending. The series was translated to various languages so chances are good you’ll find it for yours as well.
My little ones suddenly wash hands [and don’t cheat while doing so]. This series, and the lesson with hand cream and glitter to show how germs spread, really helped. The kids now have an understanding why washing hands is so important by now.
Examples from the series made it easier for us to explain the current situation to them. Beside that they learned a lot of other stuff as well, of course 🙂
Today I had to access my computer via VNC. There are several manuals how to enable VNC on a typical Linux desktop nowadays. It usually involves some sort of clicking on Sharing => Enable Screenshare and you’re done. It’s really that easy.
How would I do this however remote when I can not access my already running desktop computer via VNC? SSH is enabled on my machines since most of my work involves jumping and tunneling my way through various networks to get stuff done. Just forwarding X was not enough today.
Turns out this is really easy as well. The screensharing feature on my distribution is done with Vino. That’s an integrated #VNC server for #gnome and this is exactly what the user starts by enabling the screenshare feature. Since #Vino is part of gnome it can be configured using gsettings.
So after enabling the screenshare for testing on my laptop I tested for all existing keys by running this listing:
gsettings list-recursively | grep Vino
It’s really short and basically all settings are no-brainers. Only the password had me wondering but it turned out this is just base64 encoded (and also optional). All that is left is running the vino-server binary in the end. This needs the correct environment variable $DISPLAY set since our target is a running X session. This one we can determine by executing the command w and looking for the TTY in use. Hint: It’s :1 in this case.
beko ~ w
20:35:15 up 5:12, 1 user, load average: 1,92, 2,33, 2,37
USER TTY LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
beko :1 15:24 ?xdm? 2:02m 0.00s /usr/libexec/gdm-x-session --run-script /usr/bin/gnome-session
Oh and you should also not connect with the X11 forward option -X because running the vino-server with this will result in some really funny endless picture in picture mode that I did totally not try out by mistake 😉
Now that I had all the information I needed I hacked together this little script that does this more or less automatically so I can forget about this again [and look it up two years later in my own blog]. It’s really crude and your mileage may vary. It does not account for multiple users or multiple running X Sessions:
export DISPLAY=$(w -oush | grep -Eo ' :[0-9]+' | uniq | cut -d \ -f 2)
echo "Display is $DISPLAY"
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino require-encryption true
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino use-alternative-port false
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino disable-background false
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino alternative-port 5900
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino icon-visibility 'client'
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino disable-xdamage false
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino authentication-methods "['vnc']"
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino prompt-enabled false
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino require-encryption true
#pw is just base64 so basically just echo -n 'awesomeness'| base64
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino vnc-password "YXdlc29tZW5lc3M="
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino view-only false
/usr/libexec/vino-server &
export VINOPID=$!
echo "Try vnc://$HOSTNAME:5900/"
echo "vino-server pid may be $VINOPID"
Evaluating micro.blog finally myself. All I know of it before was from presentation or FAQ and I recommended it a lot already as your one-stop #Indieweb solution. Time to take a closer look myself. My first trial expired because I never finished the sign up process when confronted with adding credit card information upfront. I hear this is not or no longer required and @manton, creator of all this, kindly reset my trial.
So far I’m pretty impressed. Oh and it’s also powered by #Hugo – my latest favourite toy I started playing around with 😀
Oh wow. I’m following @bobmarshall.co.uk for quite some time now but this one beats it all. “Wolf At The Door” is an interpretation of the siege of Stirling Castle in 1304.
There’s also a production video beside the rendered images and a lot of background information on the siege itself. Fiddling with Blender myself I’ve quite some understanding about the process involved so I can’t stress enough how freakin awesome this work is:
Dieser Tage dem Housekeeping zum Opfer gefallen: Die Parteizugehörigkeit zur #piratenpartei
Mit dem Wegfall meiner 4-stelligen Mitgliedsnummer 34** erinnere ich mich gerne an die Anfangszeit. Die für mich so wichtigen Kern-Themen sind inzwischen in der Gesellschaft angekommen, womit sich meine Gründe für mein damaliges Engagement erledigt haben. Ich bin davon überzeugt dass vieles deutlich schlimmer hätte kommen können.
Inzwischen ist immerhin ein gewisses Bewusstsein für Datenschutz und Privatsphäre entstanden, was sich in Gesetzen wie dem #GDPR (DSGVO) niedergeschlagen hat.
Wer sich nicht mehr erinnert, wie die Netz-Politik damals in Deutschland aussah, kann das Gedächtnis zum Beispiel im Archiv des AK-Zensur.de auffrischen.
Übrigens: Ich bin sogar weiterhin mit dem Parteiprogramm ganz einverstanden. Trotzdem fühle ich mich nicht mehr zugehörig und habe den Anschluss verloren. Damit ist das alles wieder bei Theater angekommen – und hier findet man den höchsten Unterhaltungswert gerade anderweitig *zwinkersmiley.
Most Linux users know some systemd by now. There is systemd stop $someservice and systemd disable $someservice. If you think that’s all one has to know about systemd you’re missing out on a lof of features. That’s not the story for today tho.
Some services tend to come back even when disabled and stopped. Socket services come to mind. This is e.g. the case for rpcbind starting a portmapper service on tcp/111 that can be used for a DDoS reflection attack. There are various ways to deal with this from uninstall to firewalling or to mask this service. Since everbody on Linux gets to pick their own poision I decided to use mask to make sure this can simply no longer start without having to break dependencies by removing it or fiddle with the firewall:
Visited Berlin / Germany for the #IndieWebCamp to learn more about the #IndieWeb. We changed plans last minute and went by train to the camp when we found out about the new and kinda cheap #FlixTrain from Stuttgart to Berlin.
Tram station in Berlin
The #IWC itself has been a blast. The location was the office grounds of Mozilla Berlin and we were even offered a tour to take a good look at it (and it’s coffee machines).
The group was a very mixed bunch from various places. Some even took planes over the ocean to visit the camp on the continent. It’s nice to put faces on people I only knew from reading so far and I’m grateful for this chance.
Tantek Çelik speaking
The first day was all about getting to know the people. Organizer Tantek Çelik invited everyone to speak up and introduce themselves and their websites so we got a lot of examples of itches already scratched with #IndieWebprinciples.
We also learned about the OptOutTools project from the keynote speaker Teresa Ingram with the bold claim to work on AI capable of detecting misogyny online. It’s browser extention is designed like an ad-blocker or personal firewall where the user can decide how much of offending text may be displayed (or even none at all). Undetected phrases can be added to the filter to train it even more as well.
This resulted in a lof of discussion about intented and unintended side effects and how and in what ways speech will change and how people will try to break it. Detecing e.g. hate speech by AI is a goal even FB was (officially) not able to tackle so far. I’m very curious if and how this succeeds so I’ll keep an eye on their GIT repositories.
Learning about RFC 6920
Parallel other talks were held in various rooms. This way I learned about the proposed RFC 6920 on Naming Things with Hashes or a quick introduction to #microformats held by David Shanske. There were also some less technical discussions. Two teenagers attented to the camp as well so we had a talk about what’s in for them on the #IndieWeb and we learned about TikTok dances. Some did their very first TikTok dance this day. So perhaps we’ll soon see a #POSSE or #PESOS provider for #TikTok.
The evening was all about finding food for a group of ~15 people. That wasn’t an easy task. Berlin is an ever changing city and all restaurants were packed or gone for good. The online informations are sparse on this and way to often badly out of date. We were about to give up on this when we found a really small store that switches to some sort sort of food place in the evenings usually only visited by the local neighbourhood. They threw a bunch of tables together for us and somehow we all squeezed into it. Such a cozy and friendly place. I loved it and that night became a really short one for us.
The next day was about getting things done – a hard task beeing sleep deprived from the travels and short nights before.
While some just offered assistance others had more pratical goals in mind. This ranged from setting up a new #IndieWeb enabled blog to hacking on gallery systems, location visualisation or in my own case on my #POSSE provider for Okuna.io.
It’s really nice to see how other people work and get their projects done. Everybody has some very personal workflow here and I enjoy peeking over people’s sholders and catch a glimse of this.
In the end everybody got a chance to show what was achieved or learned. I got my prototype for backfeeding reactions going and used the chance to show this to the audience off the record without the cameras going. Okuna is still in closed beta so I’m sensitive on this topic. As mentioned I always have some invites to give away. I’d love to see more IndieWeb users on Okuna as well. I’ll need lab rats testers for my bridge soon anyway 😀
That was a great weekend and we met some awesome people at the camp. Of course we also snatched a bunch of new stickers and we ate as much candy from the stashes @MozillaBerlin as we could. Always fun to let the inner Geek run wild on such events 😉
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