TiffyBelle

TiffyBelle, 4 months ago

I had so much faith in Vicario at the start of the season after hearing such glowing things about him in Serie A. I’m so glad he’s showing his potential.

A good result, but we have a bit of a discipline problem. We gotta stop making rash, all-in challenges and getting players sent off. Need to calm some players down a little as this can and has cost us this season both in the games themselves and the ensuing suspensions.

Will be a tough little game against Everton coming up, who appear quite buoyed and defiant after their points deduction and are in good form.

Can’t wait until we get VdV/Maddison back.

TiffyBelle, 5 months ago

The number seems low, so I looked for some information about how common CO poisoning is in non-Airbnb hotels and motels and found this:

This study was conducted to determine the significance of the problem of carbon monoxide poisoning occurring in US hotels, motels and resorts. […] From January 1, 2005 to December 31, 2018, 905 guests were poisoned in 115 identified incidents, including 22 fatalities. […] Most poisonings were caused by natural gas fueled appliances and could likely have been prevented by an in-room carbon monoxide alarm. To reduce morbidity and mortality from unintentional CO poisoning in lodging facilities, government should mandate installation of in-room CO alarms, similar to the current requirement for smoke alarms.

This problem doesn’t appear to occur any higher in Airbnb establishments than any other hotel, motel, or resort, at least according to what this research suggests. It is worth noting, however, that the frequency of poisonings is a lot higher when you consider those that didn’t lead to fatalities.

With that said, CO monitors are fairly cheap and as the research states, a lot of these incidents could probably have been prevented by using them. In many countries in Europe at least, this is already a legal requirement. I don’t see why it shouldn’t be in the US too.

TiffyBelle, 6 months ago

Absolutely gutted at the loss.

I knew we were going to struggle with squad depth this year, and the early signs of that were the loss against Fulham in the Carabao Cup when we tried to rotate the squad a little. I was hopeful we’d be able to get it done against Wolves though and we almost scraped through but it wasn’t to be.

For long periods, I thought our defense were going to hold up. This was aided by a Wolves team who were struggling to find any kind of quality in the final third for most of the game. The game never felt comfortable though and it felt like we were on the back foot for long periods. We were certainly not manufacturing many chances ourselves and looked creatively lost for long spells. Kulusevski looked solid for the first 15-20 minutes, but quickly became less and less impactful as the game went on. Son was a little anonymous for large portions of the game, which was in part due to our inability to get much of any type of service going at the top half of the pitch.

This is a worrying period for Tottenham. We’re going to be down Maddison and Micky van der Ven, who have been so instrumental in our success soo far, probably until the new year and our next fixtures are Villa, City, West Ham and Newcastle. There’s never a good time to lose players like that, but this is probably one of the worst. We have no momentum and back-to-back losses to Chelsea and Wolves are going to sting.

I hope Postecoglou can motivate and inspire the players out of this mini-slump. This will be the true test of his management skills and I hope he’s up to the task.

I always try to remain positive, but its easy to feel deflated at this moment. Just like that, any title aspirations seem to be in the rear-view mirror already and I’m now starting to think we’ll be lucky for a top four finish. I know this is a bit of a doomer outlook, but our current situation feels bleak.

TiffyBelle, 6 months ago

Fully agree. I started using OnlyOffice about 6 months ago but wouldn’t go back to LibreOffice at this point. I feel the interface is way more intuitive and helps with productivity.

I’m a fan of the LibreOffice project too, but they need to invest some time in improving the interface. The Word 97 look isn’t cutting it for me anymore and even with “ribbon mode” enabled it’s vastly inferior to OnlyOffice’s UI.

TiffyBelle, 6 months ago

Seems it was going to be quackhouse.uk?

If so, I’m glad we’re retaining feddit.uk personally.

TiffyBelle, 6 months ago

I moved to KBin for a time when Lemmy had various issues such as auto-updating timelines that were hard to deal with and hugely broken algorithms for “Hot” posts, etc.

Somewhere around release 0.18.3 a lot of these issues were fixed and I ditched KBin. I figured in the long term, it was likely that Lemmy would have more development attention. It also used more straightforward terms like “communities” instead what KBin terms them (“magazines”), which just seemed to be unnecessary and confusing terminology for the sake of being different rather than because it made sense.

The KBin interface looks polished, but it hides a lot of fundamental issues with the software under the hood. I hope the project receives more dev attention and thrives in the long-term, however. It’s good for the Fediverse that choices exist.

TiffyBelle, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

That’s a really nice alternative interface for desktop! I wonder if other instances implement it other than lemmy.world? It’s cool that that that instance admin has, though. It looks superb.

Its default purple theme matches my overall browser theme completely by accident, lol.

https://feddit.uk/pictrs/image/b8c7a59c-da2b-4d48-aaad-72b1fde6eeb1.png

TiffyBelle, 6 months ago

Awesome. Thanks so much for the tips! ❤️

TiffyBelle, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

It’s really unfortunate it has come to this, but I’m glad people are putting in the effort to ensure the continuity of a UK-focused instance.

Will be unfortunate to lose the “feddit.uk” domain name, as I found it pretty neat and there are several other localized instances with a similar domain. Hope the new one’s decent also.

TiffyBelle, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Obsidian is really good. Very feature-rich and customizable.

I personally prefer Joplin for a couple of reasons. It’s fully open source and while it has less features and customizability, I also feel it keeps out of my way more to allow me to focus purely on taking notes and not messing around with other features. Obsidian encourages me to play with its extra features more, which for my case usually just reduces the productivity of my note-taking.

Probably just a me-thing. I tend to gravitate to more straightforward and minimalist solutions generally.

TiffyBelle, 7 months ago

Good question! There’s a few reasons, I guess:

• There’s a large element of “because I can” to this, just to explore how stupid the scope of systemd is as a suite.
• There’s a small practical element. GRUB itself is quite a hefty tool to accommodate all kinds of boot setups, and it works well. If you have a simple boot setup though you could probably shave a couple of seconds off of the boot time just by using the simplified sd-boot and loading the kernel via its EFIStub.
• A learning exercise in self-signing EFI binaries, enrolling a MOK (if I use Shim), and setting up scripts to handle updates.

All boils down to my enjoyment of doing weird nerdy things though, ultimately. =)

TiffyBelle, 7 months ago

Booting the kernel directly via EFIStub from the firmware is certainly an interesting idea, although it sounds like a potential pain to manage updates. Will definitely take a look down that rabbit hole though. =)

TiffyBelle, 7 months ago

Microsoft doesn’t own the standard. It’s actually an open standard maintained and contributed to by a whole host of technology companies. This is contrary to the old BIOS method which was originally proprietary to IBM.

The fact they have such wide authority in signing is a product of how wide-reaching their market share it. They essentially mandate that OEMs include their signing keys in the signature database if their systems are to ship with Windows, thus making them a de facto authority on what gets signed. This was a point that made a lot of people in the FOSS community uncomfortable and still does to this day, although if one wants they can actually take full control of the Secure Boot process by replacing the Platform Key (PK) with their own. This gives ultimate control to the owner of the machine as they can then replace the Key Exchange Keys to allow them to replace Microsoft’s keys within the signature database (db). This completely removes reliance on any third party signatures and enables ditching the first-stage Shim bootloader from the boot flow entirely, since the owner could just sign whichever bootloader they wanted to use directly with their own key in the database. As it would require manually signing everything from the bootloader to the kernel and its modules though, including re-signing them after updates, this is definitely a much more involved way of doing things although arguably even more secure as the system would be entirely locked down to only binaries signed by its owner at that point.

As to why they don’t sign GRUB, it’s about licensing. Since GRUB is GPLv3, there are provisions in the license that Microsoft interprets as potentially mandating them to disclose their private key to facilitate users installing modified versions of it. Ubuntu came to the same conclusion when contemplating how to deal with Secure Boot back in the day, where they wanted to provide an alternative to the Microsoft keys by having Canonical’s keys also shipped with firmware, although proliferation of their keys is a lot less widespread and in some peoples’ eyes not all that much different than just using VeriSign’s service for the Microsoft keys anyway.

TiffyBelle, 7 months ago

I prefer the KeePassXC fork as it’s written in C++ and not C# so it has better native integration with OSes like Linux, but yeah these are really good solutions with no subscription requirements or necessity to upload to any cloud service.

TiffyBelle, 6 months ago

This thread is about KeePass and my comments relate to that. If you pull KeePass2 from the repos in Debian, for example, it’s going to pull the Mono runtime to execute it as well because it’s been built, like most C# apps, for JIT compilation. I doubt it’s even possible to compile KeePass2 using AOT compilation.

This is what the C# KeePass application looks like using the Mono runtime in Debian:

https://feddit.uk/pictrs/image/20570e86-6c0b-4325-b7f4-2df32c5d9731.png

This is KeePassXC:

https://feddit.uk/pictrs/image/590ced27-0b20-4b96-8e04-87af5aff1986.png

You can see which has better native integration into the desktop out of the box.

TiffyBelle, 7 months ago

All well and good, but sadly this relies on the hosts managing DNS to include specific entries in their DNS configuration for keys to use during the encryption process. Unfortunately the vast majority of hosts probably won’t be bothered to do this, similar to DNSSEC.

TiffyBelle, 7 months ago

You’re right, but HTTPS implementation added real, tangible benefits that everyone could understand. I think ECH is a little more abstract for the average user, which is why I compared it to DNSSEC which has notoriously poor buy-in.

Obviously I hope ECH becomes a well-implemented standard. I’m just rather cynical that it’ll be the case.

TiffyBelle, 7 months ago

Turned out, this model was hard coded to only allow a boot entry named “Windows Boot Manager” to be loaded by default.

Holy moly that’s absolutely shocking. Yeah I didn’t quite realize how scuffed various UEFI implementations were until I encountered this issue and started looking around. Wild.

TiffyBelle, 7 months ago

The lack of proper search has been a defining barrier between Mastodon and similar services. I’m glad it has finally been added. A great improvement alone.

TiffyBelle, 7 months ago

Unless you’re using the TOR Browser or Mullvad Browser, you’re already fingerprintable with a high degree of accuracy for those determined enough. If you’re that worried about fingerprinting, you should probably be using one of those.

There’s no magic number of extensions that would be considered “safest” from a fingerprinting perspective. Any you add will likely adjust your fingerprint in its own way. But as I said, since you’re probably uniquely identifiable anyway you can’t really get “more unique.”

With that said, it’s best to keep your extensions to a minimum for other reasons too. Each extension represents an increased attack surface and you have to trust more developers to not be implementing exploitable code directly into your browser. Generally, I find UBlock Origin to be enough and maybe an extension for your password manager or a few other things. I don’t generally run more than 5.

TiffyBelle, 8 months ago

Supporting the Chromium monopoly is a valid point, but there’s also a reason why a lot of browser companies, even those who market their browser at more privacy-conscious individuals such as Vivaldi and Brave, choose to fork Chromium over Firefox/Gecko. A good portion of that reason is Chromium’s superior security architecture that is a lot more battle tested and mature; the rest of the reason often comes down to compatibility and mobile-readiness.

A lot of people are wary of any browser engine attaining a monopoly since IE achieved this back in the day. It’s not exactly a like-for-like comparison though, since Chromium is actually open source and IE/Trident was not. For that reason, anything problematic can be stripped out by those who fork it which is exactly why we have browsers like Brave, Vivaldi, Ungoogled Chromium, and others who remove anything that feeds data to Google from their releases. The option also theoretically exists to hard fork the project entirely and take it in a different direction which was never a possibility in the IE days, although that would be a monumental effort.

I get it if people want to support Firefox/Gecko for philosophical reasons. In an ideal world there would be several projects of equal maturity to the browser engines we have today. Realistically though, for all intents and purposes, the vast majority of the world is already using Chromium in some flavor or another and it’s a project that has a lot of the world’s best browser engine developers contributing to it. As a user, I care most about using a secure, privacy-respecting browser that I find innovative which caters to my needs through its features rather than fighting a philosophical battle that’s already been lost. Naturally if you find Firefox does cater to all your needs though, more power to you.