the year is 2025. to set up your new wifi router and enable wireless functionality you must take a photo of yourself with your face clearly visible while holding your government issued photo id in one hand and your most recent bank statement in the other and upload the photo to the international registry of wifi routers at which point your submission will be compared to data scraped from the sum total of data breaches during the 21st century to date and, if any discrepancies are found, you will be opted out of participation in the internet and your new router will self-destruct. otherwise, you can then craft an SSID for your network from one of the three choices offered by a dropdown selector. choose wisely.
if I had a centralized single-location non-computer business, my business would be safest if the software I needed to use had absolutely nothing to do with the internet. every time we push small businesses into the cloud we're setting them up for pain.
the cat still running his auto garage in eastern europe on a commodore 64 clone and a dot matrix printer will never ever succumb to ransomware or the whims of a cloud app.
offer free wifi. stream soma fm over the intercom system. have damn web browsing kiosks if you want.
but keep your business recordkeeping off the ding dang internet and it won't get ding dang ransomwared or virused or anything. you don't need to spend more money on subscriptions, you need to have something stable and secure that'll work for your record keeping needs for a decade or more.
I was doing a wiki rabbit hole about Tom Morello yesterday to make sure I hadn't missed any of his side projects.
I hadn't.
But I had missed the bit where his father was a participant in the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya and became Kenya's first delegate to the UN, and his uncle became the first democratically elected president of Kenya. And that's not to mention his mom's long history of activist work here in USia.
So yeah, that's how you make a Tom Morello, obviously.
the inverse of "make sure you have working backups of what's important" is "give yourself permission to delete digital detritus that no longer has any value to your life"
you do not need every email you've received for the last decade.
you do not need three copies of every photo you've ever taken with your phone.
you do not need the downloads folder for each of your previous twelve laptops.
@djsundog Here is a post I wrote for my day job a while back. I have done this on every Mac and Linux computer I have used for the last 8 years. It solves the problem of having a Downloads directory full of 10% mission critical can't lose stuff and 90% garbage that you are inexplicably saving.
I'd like to thank our younger cousins who are patient with us older cousins who are bitter gen x kids that took on high doses of premium-grade propaganda as we detox. A bunch of us are doing the work, and we're trying to get it to spread, but as y'all have already clued into, it's damn pervasive and entrenched. We'll keep going and we've got your back.
yesterday I crashed pretty hard energy-wise. I've been pushing, trying to get a lot done on multiple fronts, and my body finally called me on it and knocked me back into sleep mid-day to try and recharge a bit.
still tired even after my nap, I decided to listen and go easy on myself and my body.
ended up spending my evening doing something I rarely do anymore: binge watching a video series.
I used to watch a lot more video content, and it wasn't unusual for me to spend long stretches of time watching an entire tv series or what have you.
but my attention wanders a lot more easily these days, and I always feel the pressure to be doing something productive, and you know how it is. so, I don't end up watching a lot of video anymore. short pieces, disconnected, light.
The Hastening is one of the most well-researched and laid out looks at the USian empire and its long-term strategies and imperialism around the world and the effects thereof and the impact on our daily lives. It's a look at US history from an angle that US residents do not get in our public or private education systems, and I believe that it's a critical piece in self-educating towards a more humane and just society.
@djsundog Walt Disney had a lot of ideas but couldn't connect all the dots. The train, monorail and people mover should've been combined into one big ride at Disneyland
I would have uploaded this directly but the video came in at a half gig and by the time I got it small enough to appease mastodon it was even shittier than what the goog does with it, so here ya go:
a demonstration of the strength of a wisteria vine (and your chance to hear me narrate a silly short video if you've been curious as to what I sound like (this title has gotten long suddenly, yet nowhere near as long as a fiona apple album title probably, but whomst count))
for a more thorough yet less entertaining update about #StormageddonInSundogistan2024 I've put another half-day into limbing and analyzing and limbing some more and finally got to take the top ten meters off tree #2 (the hemlock directly in front of the garden shed, to the left of the one in the video) and most of the supporting branches removed as well, so once I get another ten meters off the top I'll revisit the supporting branches bc they're under hella pressure and I'm tryna finish this without being tree-bucheted (listen, it's funny, I'm gonna re-use it once in a while)
I've been questioning every best practice my fingers move toward typing during the initial dev process and stopping myself: "is this a best practice for the right reasons?" and then deciding on an implementation based on my pondering.
so yes, using solid password hashing with a salt and enough complexity to make it difficult to brute force user passwords.
but still no ORM, no enterprise-class database management server. just sqlite and php.