@ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 1w ago

Replying to

@tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org the cases are *very* pretty, and reasonably usable for something else. I still kind of regret giving my (second hand) one away to a friend to use for a PC case mod. (I had Irix running on it, which was interesting ~20 years ago and probably less so now.) If the power supply and motherboard work, then the SCSI disks are fairly easily replaced by modern alternatives now. IIRC the RAM was fairly standard DIMMs for the time too, so probably could be maxed out.

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 1mo ago

Replying to

@daveyk00@aus.social @Unixbigot@aus.social love is irrational, that’s how you know it’s real

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange *sigh* Thanks for the heads up! Times like this I’m grateful for past me having put up with that incremental frustration of immediately downloading each thing I’ve purchased on Bandcamp. (It’s a non-trivial amount, best downloaded over time.) TBH I’m surprised things stayed as stable as they did after the most recent acquisition. I guess that part is over 😢

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@aurynn@cloudisland.nz also someone is making an old school tracker for iOS / Android, called Billie Tracker. Currently in beta test (with a TestFlight link). Supposedly similar to LSDJ to use. Apparently will be free, with some paid expansions for extra features. Seems like a bit of a passion project for an experienced mobile developer. (There may also be a desktop version coming later — developer mentioned it, but AFAICT wants to get the mobile version out first.) https://audio.billie.coop/tracker/links

audio.billie.coop

billie audio — audio plugins from a worker-owned co-op

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@pearofdoom@cloudisland.nz that seemed to be the rough estimate, I think based on property value bands. In my case adding the new rates estimate (without water services) and the water services, the overall total was up around 10%. Which was less bad than I’d feared. Hopefully they actually fix things with all the money being brought in….

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@PetraOleum@cloudisland.nz @pearofdoom@cloudisland.nz at a quick glance it feels like the water services were previously about 1/4 to 1/3rd of the total rates. (Now they’re split out, and up some amount, hopefully to pay for fixing infrastructure.)

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@azonenberg@ioc.exchange I like how you write “DNS zone file” in the singular… 😃 (I have forward and reverse zones per VLAN, each with their own subdomain. For voting purposes I counted the largest one by itself, but off the top of my head the total list concatenation of forward entries would also fall into the same size bucket.)

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

From a systems perspective the (Airbus A320) Lufthansa 1829 flight situation asks the question what happens when the majority of the sensors are wrong. Well worth the ~47 minutes to watch if you have any interest in systems thinking. (Mentour Pilot video released today. As a minor spoiler, the plane landed safely. The how and why is the interesting part.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpJM0_4PQaM

The Higher They Went The WORSE It Got!! | The Strange Story Of Lufthansa Flight 1829

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 1mo ago

Replying to

@kbob@chaos.social @lkundrak@metalhead.club if you don’t find a better solution, maybe you could design in a recess for the rubber feet? So the gap between the visible edge and the surface it resets on is lower. (Not in the USA, so don’t have good suggestions of specific items. The other product category that came to mind is the drawer liner non-slip material. But typically that’s not glued down, so not exactly what you want.)

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@xssfox@cloudisland.nz sorry you missed the tiny print: un(known )limited 😉😭 (But yeah, N GB/TB at full speed, then rate limited to some fraction of full speed until it resets after T hours/days, is way more honest, and predictable.)

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@pjf@cloudisland.nz “after an hour Paul unlocked the secret extra level to the game, adding many new tools to his knapsack” 😂

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 1mo ago

Replying to

@errbufferoverfl@genericsocialmediapage.com yeah even if you were to slack off to one a week from now on you’d still make it 😉

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@kbob@chaos.social having used both HomeBrew and MacPorts, at this point I’d use HomeBrew on Apple Silicon and MacPorts on x86. MacPorts is way better at supporting older macOS and older architectures. But generally has fewer things packaged. I’ve never used Nix (anywhere), and all I’ve seen online makes it look like a very “buy the whole ecosystem” choice. Homebrew / MacPorts are both considerable convenience improvements over hand installing everything.

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org Airplane mode for ages likely triggers “no known location” :-/ The fastest way out is probably to set the time “fairly close” from some other source (eg pocket watch, or even solar noon with longitude correction). And then hopefully cold start will have a reasonable idea which satellites to expect. (As Nick notes it’s possible phones expect decent RTC and won’t do full “know nothing” cold start of old devices.)

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@jeffzugale@mastodon.art @aurynn@cloudisland.nz no, FL Studio and Reason are also DAWs. Music Trackers are basically sequencers of (typically) note length samples, with effects. It was a whole scene in the mid to late 1990s. There’s still a bit of a scene in hardware devices (eg M8 Tracker) and the demo scene. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker

en.wikipedia.org

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@jeffzugale@mastodon.art @aurynn@cloudisland.nz for context, Multitrack DAW is NZ$10, with IAP (in app purchases) of NZ$20 and NZ$10 to add more tracks (16 more and 8 more respectively). But it doesn’t look like what I’d expect a (1990s style) tracker to look like. It seems like a more general DAW with audio recording and AUv3 plugins.

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@pearofdoom@cloudisland.nz @PetraOleum@cloudisland.nz rating valuations only really matter to rates total if your property goes down a bunch more (or up a bunch more) than other properties in the city change. Otherwise it’s basically just new city budget divided by similar *ratios* as before. My impression is the city valuations as a whole all went down from the previous one (which was done near the top of the property bubble from memory).

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@xssfox@cloudisland.nz if you add a positive budget vector and an equal and opposite budget vector together the result is zero. This is why your delivery is free ;-)

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

Definitions bill

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

Definitions bill

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@fanf@mendeddrum.org I’ve used “Toot!” for the last 6 years as pretty much my exclusive way to access Mastodon. Generally works well for me, but very occasionally loses its place in the timeline (and seems to reset to an earlier position checkpoint). Having tried Ivory for a bit, I found I liked Toot! a lot more. (For context I add filters occasionally via the Mastodon web interface. I don’t think Toot! has a built in UI for managing filters, but it does respect them.)

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@wdormann@infosec.exchange @nyanbinary@infosec.exchange Google starting getting picky about matching forward/reverse DNS, SPF, DMARC and DKIM above certain mail volumes, etc. It’s non-trivial to successfully deliver to GMail these days. Which is not to excuse the vendor apparently not even trying. Just pointing out that “can deliver email to GMail successfully” is a sign one is doing quite a lot right. (IIRC some large open source dev mailing lists also basically gave up on trying to deliver to GMail.)

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to on ephemera.vital.org.nz

@stephen@ephemera.vital.org.nz for temperature monitoring many of them are Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). Either as generic beacons or with some query protocol. Home Assistant will in theory support a bunch of variants, although in some cases it needs a special association process. For Smart Plugs I think people who want locally only end up having to reflash them. But that’s fairly well supported for some models (eg up thread).

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@stephen@ephemera.vital.org.nz I have the Minew S1 (temp / humidity sensors) and Minew G1 (BLE to Ethernet gateway), which can run locally. Not sure I’d necessarily recommend it (I mostly have it as an “open hardware” crowd funding eventually turned into that). But it does work and the gateway will output to MQTT (an IoT style network message bus) or HTTP, to a destination of your choice.

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@kbob@chaos.social the one other thing I’d note about HomeBrew (which I also don’t like) is they aggressively deprecate older OS / architectures (eg x86-64 likely has only a few months support left). It’s also basically (unreproducible) binary only as far as what’s supported (you *can* build from source yourself but it’s both strongly discouraged and officially unsupported). So at this point I’d only install HomeBrew onto macOS / Apple silicon. https://docs.brew.sh/Support-Tiers

Homebrew Documentation

Support Tiers

Documentation for the package manager for everywhere.

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@wdormann@infosec.exchange so “the usual way” then :-) When I last had to remake my internal CAs I ended up setting the new expiry date to “the heat death of the universe” aka 2038. It’s nearly the same number of years away now (~11.5), and chances are at least some of the client systems will have issues demanding something gets replaced by then anyway.

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@kbob@chaos.social yes, yes, no. (Ie Mac user, HomeBrew user, not kept awake by that.) It’s… not my favourite design choice. But on a “basically single user” system, with lots of other user-writable areas usable as hooks for malware (eg excessive modern reliance on putting things in ${HOME}), in the end I concluded it didn’t make a particularly meaningful security difference. Everything that really matters is already read/write by my user ID anyway.

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@wdormann@infosec.exchange yeah it’s super non-obvious if you’ve not encountered it before. I’ve missed calls I tried to answer for someone else (on their phone) because I couldn’t figure it out in time 😢 I can *maybe* understand why some people might want swipe-to-answer, but the UI is missing obvious clues you’re supposed to do that, in a time critical context 😕 (And I’m not convinced it should be the default setting either.)

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org GPS is timing correlation of transmissions from N of M satellites. If you know your location fairly accurately you can get time from that. If you know the time fairly accurately you can get location from that. If you know neither you’re in coldstart, which is very slow, because you have to guess at which satellites you might see, on which frequencies, when. And do successive approximation of time and location.

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@kbob@chaos.social ~20 years ago there wasn’t an “apt” command line tool, just “apt-get” and a promise that an “apt” tool would come “eventually”. I too learned to type “apt-get” and do that to this day. The (~10 year old) “apt” tool is a reimplementation and does have some better dependency resolution algorithms, so is probably best for tracking unstable or doing major version upgrades. But for day to day usage on “stable”, with few package changes, “apt-get” and “apt” are workalike tools.

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@kbob@chaos.social yeah, I spent several years with OS/2 on the Desktop while friends were running Linux ;-) (Actual Unix usage — BSDi, SunOS 1.x — goes back further, but I didn’t have to admin that.)

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@rmi@cloudisland.nz apparently no longer available but this is the sort of thing I’d be looking for: 900MHz ISM band, standard USB, external receiver unit, intended for auditoriums. On a whim adding “100 feet” to my RF wireless keyboard brought up a couple like this for AV usage. Both seem to be “try to find as used” at best 😢 https://www.fentek-ind.com/kbrf100aesmu.htm

fentek-ind.com

Long Range Encrypted Wireless Keyboard with AES

Long Range Encrypted Wireless Computer Keyboards with AES Secure Technology and a working range up to 30 feet.

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@rmi@cloudisland.nz in case you didn’t find it, there’s a ~2021 era list of 2.4GHz “RF Wireless” keyboards, with make / model and links. Unfortunately they don’t list range. “2.4GHz RF Wireless” is a reasonable search term to find keyboards with USB dongles (ie not just Bluetooth). But the ones that do specify range that I’ve found are still 10m or less. https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/pkyx1w/my_comprehensive_almost_24ghz_rf_wifi_mechanical/

My Comprehensive (almost) 2.4ghz / rf / wifi Mechanical Keyboard List

tour__de__franzia

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@azonenberg@ioc.exchange at the lower end it’s gone USB serial (plug in USB cable) only. At the higher end typically they provide both USB serial (via USB cable) *and* Cisco style 8p8c UART. But it fees like even Cisco style 8p8c UART is gradually becoming retrocomputing 😃

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 4w ago

Replying to

@aurynn@cloudisland.nz macOS 27 release is next week (Monday 2026-09-14, presumably US/Pacific — so our Tuesday). And typically macOS versions are supported (at least with security patches) for 3 years. Which for macOS 15 — last “all x86-64 machines” release would be one more year, ending sometime in September 2027. That said, people are already rushing to abandon building for macOS Intel. Including HomeBrew who stopped last month (August 2026, slightly ahead of schedule as their Intel CI machine broke) :-/

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@azonenberg@ioc.exchange a bunch of network equipment will do xmodem over serial as a last ditch recovery mechanism. I’ve not seen anyone do HDLC. For modern embedded devices the most common pattern seems to be a bootloader with USB2, that will do both CDC (ie serial over USB), typically at 1Mbps, *and* USB Mass Storage for firmware upload (eg .uf2). Having hard wired UART serial is increasingly uncommon on devices. Even networking equipment typically encourages USB serial these days.

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@rmi@cloudisland.nz my strong assumption would be that Bluetooth probably displaced any pre-Bluetooth wireless keyboards from the market decades ago. The Bluetooth protocol is pretty deliberately designed to be “personal area” (~10m) by radio power, timeouts, and RF frequency. USB has some very strict timeouts on certain steps, so I suspect a naive “wireless extender” for USB wouldn’t meet those timeouts.

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@aurynn@cloudisland.nz someone is even trying to reimplement Protracker 2, for Windows/Linux/macOS, aiming to make it sound like the Amiga original. If you want the really old school look ;-) https://github.com/8bitbubsy/pt2-clone

GitHub

GitHub - 8bitbubsy/pt2-clone: ProTracker 2 clone for Windows/macOS/Linux

ProTracker 2 clone for Windows/macOS/Linux. Contribute to 8bitbubsy/pt2-clone development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@stuartyeates@cloudisland.nz ingesting dishes with large amounts of garlic? 🤔

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@kwf@social.afront.org does it need a web front end? Eg could it just be some Ansible steps that did the forwarding config? 🤔

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@hal_pomeranz@infosec.exchange the first idea that came to mind was to mount each “version set” inside a separate VM, and then for convenience share those mounts (read only, no squash) back out to the host with NFS. Since the NFS “network” is virtio, I’d guess the performance would be similar to native disk bandwidth. (One could use cloud init or similar to automate the mount-and-NFS-share steps, from boot arguments, to make this relatively low setup overhead.)

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@karora@mastodon.nz I’m very unlikely to travel to Everything Open in Brisbane (especially given the oil wars uncertainty on top of everything else). But I’ve given Simon Lyall a heads up on the date/location and it’s possible he might be interested in a specialist track. Good that the dates / location are announced now!

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@rmi@cloudisland.nz OTOH there are different times for civil, nautical, and astronomical, twilight and dawn / dusk. Because the definitions differ on how far from the horizon the sun needs to be for it to count. The differences are each about 6 degrees of rotation, which is a non-trivial amount of extra time (~24 minutes based on some quick maths). https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/different-types-twilight.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight

timeanddate.com

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@irix@cloudisland.nz QT is another thread about this, which links to a BlueSky thread about it. So far Daniel Spector (existing councillor) and Bianca Grizhar (ran last year too) are on my “vote for” list. And there’s a couple more to strongly consider suggested in those threads. (The BlueSky thread has an avoid list too, with three people on it — likely the three you found.) https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@futuresprog/116972416781036105 https://bsky.app/profile/jpdanner.com/post/3mr2kuaeycs2v

mastodon.nzoss.nz

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@gloriouscow@oldbytes.space early access is a common default. Often a few days. One Patreon I supported dedicated commits to Patreons at a specific level (“this commit sponsored by…”). I think they had a pre/post-editor script that automated that. A “thanks” page for a specific tier is also common. # (I’d suggest avoiding physical rewards like stickers — postage adds up, and not everyone will want to give a physical address anyway.)

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@rmi@cloudisland.nz So you’d need a USB dongle to a custom radio protocol to a battery powered keyboard. (Think old school wireless mouse with dongle.) My guess is maybe ~20 years ago such a thing was findable, but likely not now. Best option these days is probably an embedded device as USB HID device with a custom radio link to an embedded USB (or Bluetooth) host that understands HID. But I’d expect that to need to be 100% DIY, at both ends. (Or very retro USB 1 keyboard dongle and radio keyboard.)

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@aurynn@cloudisland.nz DefleMask (above) is both of those. Schism Tracker is an open source implementation of Impulse Tracker (a famous tracker back in the day), on a bunch of platforms (including macOS, but not iPad). Renoise is a paid sampler / tracker, with a free demo. I’ve not used it, but supposedly a fairly advanced tracker. Also macOS but not iPad. https://schismtracker.org https://renoise.com

schismtracker.org

Schism Tracker

An old-school sample-based music composition tool.

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@azonenberg@ioc.exchange yes, I understand the context. I’m just pointing out even there manufacturers seem to have decided they might as well put the USB serial chip inside the hardware, rather than in the cable 😉 Traditions die hard, but I wouldn’t be surprised if even high end network gear is USB only for OOB serial by about 2030. (I have USB-A/C to 8p8c cables too. Definitely handy for older network gear!)

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange most people’s ability to estimate how long something will take is… rather inaccurate. So encouraging on time makes sense. Also having an on time bonus feels way way nicer than having a “late penalty”. But presumably the economic effect is calculated to be identical 😃

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Ewen McNeill @ewenmcneill@cloudisland.nz

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@aurynn@cloudisland.nz do you want macOS or iPad / iPhone? DefleMask is a cross platform chiptune tracker. I’ve got the iPad version installed, but haven’t used it much. Seems to be aimed at 16-bit era chiptunes, with a tracker interface. https://www.deflemask.com https://apps.apple.com/nz/app/deflemask-mobile/id1390797126

deflemask.com

DefleMask – The best chiptune tracker

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