UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down while on a business trip in Manhattan on Wednesday, December 4th. Almost immediately, security camera footage was released of what appears to be a targeted assassination. All over the Internet, jokes and memes were made praising the shooter for what appears to look like an act of vigilantism by a citizen upset by American’s broken health insurance system. A narrative was built by the media almost immediately. The whole story, and the reaction to it, has really brought out the absolute worst in people and generally lowered my hope for humanity.
The Internet Archive was allegedly hacked, and their crawler stopped updating conveniently prior to the election. Although the Wayback Machine was partially restored, most of the archive’s services were down for a considerable amount of time. The Internet Archive has recently gone through a substantial amount of legal trouble, and some of their content has disappeared after they restored all their services. For an organization that has preserved so much of the old Internet, the recent events are quite troubling. They bring into question the entire integrity of the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine.
In 2016, I had returned to America after several years outside the country. I did an amazing job of avoiding most, but not all the election season. I didn’t see any meaningful difference between either candidate. Hillary Clinton was evil and corrupt, and her name is associated with a “two to the back of the head” suicide. I joked with a friend that I hoped Trump won, just so that people on the left would finally get angry about endless wars again. I don’t think I was quite prepared for the absolute media fueled-hatred of those who opposed the Orange Man, nor was I prepared for those who saw Trump as America’s only hope. In the years since that election, I found myself on a journey, both across America and through an insane political landscape.
The Network Neighborhood icon, appearing in Windows 95 and NT4, allowed people to share files between computers connected on a home network. At universities and LAN parties, people used to make copies of the videos they watched, long before the growth of large video sharing websites. YouTube did so well during the video hosting wars that it was purchased by Google. Being a massive monolith of a video sharing website, it’s also rife with censorship. I archive videos that I find interesting, which are also at high risk of disappearing. I wrote a program called Youboot to scan my collection of downloaded videos, and tell me which ones are no longer available and the reason they were removed. The best offense, in the war against thought-crime, is to watch the videos the powerful want to burn.
This year, I updated the headlights and fog lights on my 2006 Subaru WRX. These were quality of life updates, as the old light enclosures were yellowed and dulled. I had planned to do wheel updates as well, but the rims I purchased were on backorder. The wheels were more essential as the previous rims have taken a beating over the seven years I’ve owned this vehicle. Searching for aftermarket rims was an involved process. In this article, I’ll cover the replacements and how they turned out, but also the process I went through and the tools I’ve found that helped narrow down the right size and fitment for my vehicle.
Every once in a while, I’ll give Wayland another try. I’ve been using the i3 window manager for years, so my last attempt was another crack at using Sway as my Wayland Composer. I had put weeks of effort into getting Sway working for my general development workflow, but it was eventually frustrating and broken enough that I went back to using i3/X11. This year, I’ve decided to try Hyprland. With its pretty animations and visuals, I heard good things about this tiling window composer. A few months in and there are still some Wayland things that frustrate me, but Hyprland is far beyond my Sway experience. I’ve had to, once again, try to reconstruct my workflows and default applications, but overall I’ve made a lot more headway this time. Hyprland is usable enough that I want to try to continue using it for the foreseeable future.
Sea of Stars is an amazing role-playing adventure, with retro graphics and music that will instill 8-bit nostalgia. It’s very modern in its game design, and filled with really incredible artwork and characters. The gameplay pulled me in from the very start. I enjoyed this game, but parts of it do drag on. It’s a little long in the tooth, and the dialog is a mix of emotional and mediocre. It’s a game that held my attention strongly, but the story is somewhat lacking, and the gameplay does get a bit repetitive.
When going from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, I favored installing things from scratch rather than trying to upgrade things in place. In my university days, it wasn’t uncommon for many of the other students I knew to reformat and re-install their machines regularly. Windows has become more stable long term, although copying a Windows install to a new device sometimes requires 3rd party tools. In the Linux world, it’s much easier to simply copy an entire existing installation to a brand-new system using tools that are often part of the base system in any distribution or USB installation media. The following post is a reference document I often use when imaging new machines.
I bought my 2006 Subaru WRX in the fall of 2017. I’ve traveled over half the country with Nicole (that’s her name). Last year, I started looking at newer Imprezas, but I was concerned with the tracking that’s now being built into all vehicles. General Motors was found selling detailed driver information to third-party data brokers, allowing insurance companies to increase rates and deny coverage based on data car owners didn’t know was being reported. I take my data privacy seriously, going as far as removing Google services from my phone and deleting my mainstream social media. There are guides for bypassing or disabling the permanent cell modem on modern Subaru vehicles, but I decided not to go down that route. I know I’m still being tracked in other ways, but I like to lower my footprint whenever possible.
So I decided I wasn’t going to replace Nicole. After all, she is a Subaru WRX. She’s well maintained, and her interior is in excellent condition. Although not the most high-end sports car for her era, she is fun, fast and occupies a special place in the hearts of many car enthusiasts. So I decided to do some repairs and updates to keep her on the road for years to come.
I had been using a Dell Inspiron 16” with an Intel i7-1260P as my work laptop for a year and 11 months. One Sunday evening, I went to look up information I needed for a Monday meeting and found the laptop had shutdown. I was unable to turn it back on. I tried multiple chargers and high-powered USB-C cables. The power light simply turned amber for a few seconds whenever I pressed the power button. With the laptop completely dead, I pulled the storage (an M.2 NVMe solid state drive) and moved it to a Lenovo. After setting up the GRUB bootloader, I was back up and ready for work on a horribly slow laptop. With the Dell out of warranty (only one year from the factory), I decided to replace it with a Framework Laptop. Even though Framework is slightly more expensive than most major brands, everything on it is user-serviceable. All the options from major brands had RAM soldered onto the motherboard that could not be upgraded. That growing trend was the breaking point that turned me away from the big brands in the laptop market.
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