The cardinals are getting brave enough to use the feeder we put on the front porch.
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Marcus Adams
@gerowen@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06• Privacy, open source software, cybersecurity, self-hosting/homelab and tech enthusiast
• Father, husband, occasional gamer
858 Followers
455 Following
50 Posts
Joined January 09, 2020
If you use #Linux and are using a #Debian or #Ubuntu based distro, one thing I would recommend for installing .deb files (ones you download from outside your repos), is to install "gdebi" and use that to open and install your .deb packages instead of your "Software Center". Reason being, "gdebi", before it actually installs anything, lets you browse the contents of the package, read the contents of control files like postinst, etc. to make sure it isn't doing anything shady.
#CalyxOS is officially back. You can read the announcement here.
Link: https://calyxos.org/news/2026/07/01/calyxos-official-release-is-back/
#Android
Got my #Steam controller in the mail and I gotta say, it's really rather nice. The fact it can make audible sounds using the haptic motors is cool, it's a lot more comfortable than I thought it would be, the screw holes have been beveled so they don't have sharp edges, and it automatically picked up my custom Steam Input profiles that I've created on Steam Deck and adapted them to the Steam controller with no manual intervention from me. Frickin' sweet, :-D
Laying the smack down on an ogre in #DragonAgeOrigins.
It's official, they're moving forward.
Title: Sony gives update on all-digital PlayStation plan, and it's not good news for disc fans
Subtitle: After being oddly quiet for almost a month. #Sony has finally addressed the issue of disc-based gaming on #PlayStation.
RE: @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social
This shit is wild. The reason they got the key was because database queries were being executed as .NET code in a sandbox, a sandbox which they were then able to escape, granting them code execution on the Azure backend, including access to that "master key" which they could use to unlock every database on the service.
Replying to
@GossiTheDog I'm on mastodon\.social and I couldn't post comments or anything, but the app was still giving me notifications from folks like you that I follow who are on other instances, so that's cool.
There's a new #Fallout game called "Fallout California". It's a mod for New Vegas.
My unboxing and first impressions of the #Steam controller.
#PalWorld sales have officially surpassed every #pokemon game. According to Bulbapedia the best selling Pokemon game, so far, is Red/Green/Blue with roughly 32 million.
Link: https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/1623730/announcements/detail/686383649529010195
RE: @codemonkeymike@fosstodon.org
I've had to give this same bad news to more than one person who bought a used Apple computer. Somebody will sell their Mac or iPad or whatever to a pawn shop or something without doing a reset and there you go. My brother managed to unlock one he got used from Rent-A-Center, but had to spend over an hour on the phone with Apple customer support to do it. I have a feeling if he'd gotten it from Facebook marketplace or a pawn shop or something he'd have been out of luck.
Replying to
LG is 100% at fault here, but I would argue #Microslop ( formerly known as #Microsoft ) is also partly at fault here. Who in the world thought it should be ok to automatically install "apps" in the background when you plug a device in? Basic device drivers, such as the .inf file, for the device to function? Sure. But apps?! Hell no.
Replying to
@soatok My dream was to marry my high school girlfriend and just gain personal independence and be left the heck alone. I grew up in a house with parents that weren't abusive, but were overbearing, and no other kids around.
Now I've spent some time in college, some time in the Army, been married to that girl for 20 years, bought a house, got two kids, etc. It feels nice to not be dependent on people who might use it against you. I need another dream though because mission 1 accomplished, 😛
#SNES emulation is about to get a huge shot in the arm. #ZSNES is back after a 17 year hiatus.
Title: Super ZSNES - GPU Powered SNES emulation is here!
Since switching from #CalyxOS back to stock #Android a few days ago, my battery life has gone to hell. I could go all day on a charge with my Pixel 6a. Now if I use my phone for any period of time I'm lucky if I make it to lunch.
Kinda hoping the folks at Calyx are getting close to finalizing all the changes they've been making for future releases.
Replying to
@Gargron@mastodon.social YouTube has been auto-dubbing a lot of folks's videos to languages other than the one it was recorded in, so you might be able to find a useful guide in English or something else and then just switch it to Spanish in the player settings.
Replying to
@gardiner_bryant@mastodon.online I really hope they allow pre-orders with this because the release of the Steam controller was an absolute shit show. I set an alarm for the release time and when I tried to buy it I got an error "initializing payment" even though I pre-loaded my Steam account with the money specifically for that purpose. After half a dozen tries I waited an hour for things to die down. I tried again, got no error, just a page refresh 3-4 times, then it said it was out of stock. Scalpers...
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@tokenizer@fosstodon.org I just meant for externally downloaded ones that aren't in your repositories, since the distro maintainers and packagers are hopefully trustworthy since you're using their OS. But if you're curious and would like to download the .deb for something that is in your repos, "apt download package" should do it.
Replying to
@s4mdf0o1@piaille.fr It's one of my novice level personal side/hobby projects. It's just a very basic frontend for yt-dlp.
It's on gitlab at: https://gitlab.com/gerowen/youtube-dl-pytk
RE: @nateb@mastodon.thenewoil.org
Sadly, my mom is absolutely addicted to #Facebook. It's an alien concept to her that I deleted my account and have no desire to make a new one. I see it as hypocritical to complain about things Facebook / #Meta does or contributes to, but to then turn around and use the platform anyway. There are a lot of folks around here that just can't wrap their head around that stance.
Headline: FTC: Americans lost over $2.1 billion to social media scams in 2025
Replying to
@schlink@hachyderm.io It seems pretty cool. Their recent update added the option to generate PQ key pairs. It doesn't do digital signatures though; it's one of those tools that just does one thing and does it well, though it suffers from not being well integrated into the desktop in the same way GPG/PGP can be. That said, as a purpose built utility, it seems simple, modern and efficient. I did a write-up of some benchmarking I did a while back if you're interested:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-193653722
I've had a thought. With the current state of computer and #gaming graphics as good as they are, at this point, I think good voice acting and soundtrack is more important than pushing the boundaries of graphical fidelity. Games have looked "good enough" to reliably suspend belief a long time now, and we're really getting into the territory of diminishing returns when it comes to visuals. But voice acting, good voice acting and music can really sell an experience.
Apparently the Fallingstar beast in #EldenRing can have its charge interrupted if you hit it in the head with certain spells or abilities. Pots apparently work. Didn't discover this until NG+.
I'm not saying Element is compromised or anything, but I always hate seeing stuff like this on websites for #Linux versions of software, for two reasons. 1, it conditions people into the bad habit of copying and pasting terminal commands from a website. 2, native system packages have postinst scripts that run as root as part of the install, so if their website or app gets compromised, who knows what could be put there. More third parties need to officially embrace Flatpak.
Replying to
@grimmy@mastodon.social I added some filters to my Apache config to block certain user agent strings, and added a Fail2Ban jail/filter to block the IP if it has a certain user agent string. This isn't perfect though as the user agents can change, or they can just lie, so I also installed Anubis as an additional reverse proxy in front of my web services.
https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis
In the absence of updates from CalyxOS for the past several months, and my ban from that other popular ROM, I've decided to restore stock #Android to my phone for the sake of #security. Apparently the Play Store now shows ads ranked higher than search results. I damn near installed this random email app instead of FairEmail, which I use to get alerts from my home server. I'm half tempted to disable Play and install Aurora on stock Pixel Android.
@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social On this note, I saw some footage earlier on Reddit where the OpenMW team is working on expanding the project to support other games. They currently have Fallout New Vegas running, though it's not in a production ready state yet. Would be pretty cool to be able to drop that engine into those games and get quality of life upgrades like you can with Morrowind.
Replying to
@gary_alderson@infosec.exchange Working pretty darn good. Went with Debian stable with backports kernel and mesa drivers, and KDE desktop since it has the most mature HDR implementation. Left the CPU power profile in the UEFI at "balanced".
Title: Is the new Super Mario Galaxy movie really that bad?
Link: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/apr/14/is-super-mario-galaxy-movie-really-that-bad
Replying to
@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social I always assumed anything that could unlock an encrypted drive with no password or other authentication from the user could be bypassed. I figured if you don't have to enter a password, you have to assume that neither does anybody else.
Replying to
Also, it turns out, that the value of "Host" in that config file can be anything you want, and your local SSH client will treat it as a DNS name. So I could define "Host" as "momdesktop" instead of her IP address, and then just use "ssh momdesktop" and it would automatically use the SSH proxy defined in the config file for the host "momdesktop" to connect to her desktop PC at her house.
Pretty cool stuff.
Holy shit, I just got a #GMKtec mini PC in the mail and I was checking for BIOS updates before nuking the default OS to install Debian, and all their drivers, including the Windows 11 Pro image that comes on it, are just hosted on Google Drive...
Link: https://www.gmktec.com/pages/drivers-and-software
I really like the #LifeIsStrange games, but man there's a part of me that gets overwhelmed by choice paralysis, lol. And you can't really "save scum" in this game beyond one previous checkpoint, you just have to live with your choices.
Screenshot link: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3714482206
Title: #PlayStation Network has been down for hours, affecting all online services
Subtitle: After hours of complaints and confusion, Sony has now officially acknowledged the issues facing its PlayStation online services.
Headline: #Firefox Has Quietly Integrated #Brave's Adblock Engine
Source: https://itsfoss.com/news/firefox-ships-brave-adblock-engine/
Even though #AGE beat #GPG in my recent benchmarks, it came close once I disabled the compression that's on by default both via the terminal, and if you just right click a file and click "Encrypt". Kinda makes me think that the "nautilus-seahorse" extension for Gnome/Nautilus should provide a checkbox in the dialog to enable/disable compression. Right now all it asks is whether you want to use a password or PGP recipient, and whether you want to digitally sign the output file.
Replying to
@gardiner_bryant@mastodon.online For most people you're absolutely right. For those of us in rural areas with little infrastructure, we'll always need cars. I would like to see more public transportation infrastructure though. Right now the east mountain parkway here in Kentucky is being expanded and moved. I would have preferred a high speed rail. It would have been so nice to be able to walk or drive to a train stop and catch a ride to Lexington or Louisville, which is normally a 2-3 hour drive each way.
#HaloCampaignEvolved just dropped on Steam and apparently not only does it support split screen 2 player local co-op, but up to 4 player cross platform online co-op, so you can play with your friends regardless of whether they're on Steam, XBox or PlayStation.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2806050/Halo_Campaign_Evolved/
Replying to
@Kurt The big alternative that everybody talks about all the time has too much drama surrounding it for my liking. Louis Rossmann had issues with them, they attacked me on here and went ballistic because I mentioned CalyxOS in a comment on one of their posts, etc. Just doesn't inspire confidence in their maturity and level headedness.
I've looked into /e and used Lineage very briefly, but there were features missing I liked in Calyx, so I figured I'd just deal with stock for a little bit.
Boosted by @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social
Replying to
@xssfox@cloudisland.nz @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social might know somebody.
To be fair, if he has a history of negotiating with racists, they picked the right guy.
Don't ask #CoPilot for "work safe VPNs".
Headline: Microsoft is allowing IT admins to monitor your AI prompts and responses in plaintext
Subtitle: #Microsoft will now let IT admins read employees' risky #AI prompts and responses in plaintext, even if users are pseudonymized.
What the actual fuck!? #MassEffect is one of the greatest stories ever told, #gaming or otherwise, and they're fucking with it to broaden appeal? I'm officially terrified.
Headline: #Amazon Mass Effect Show Undergoes Script Rewrite for 2026 Production
Source: https://www.ingamenews.com/2026/04/amazon-mass-effect-show-undergoes.html