Tom @teek_eh@aus.social

I'm glad I don't have to manage any on-prem Exchange any more. Gotta admit it was fun using a GUI to do things that otherwise would have had me combing man pages and config files.

A bit of an escalation in the emails from MS this morning. It's the first time they've put "please read" in the subject.

> We are contacting you to alert you to Microsoft’s release of patches for multiple different on-premises Microsoft Exchange Server zero-day vulnerabilities that are being exploited by a nation-state affiliated group.

I ask myself the same thing every day, friend. Never have worked it out.

It's a good thing I don't need to buy any new PC hardware for a while. I mean, if I had to get something today the Ryzen 5xxx are reviewing very nicely but I'd be grumpy if a direct M1 competitor came out later this year and just mopped the floor with everything.

Yo aus.social, welcome my mate @leofebey! He's an electronics hacker and developer who does cool projects.

Custom GitHub Actions always give me the heebie-jeebies. Scripts popped up on git, ready to ingest your passwords and tokens, promising to do stuff in return. Surely MS could task some devs to write some trusted utilities like "send an email" or "message people on slack" so we don't have to choose between DIY and YOLO?

I’ve achieved some sort of inversion where I make calls from my landline and people a generation older are surprised when I don’t get their reply SMS

Google 2021: We made a speech codec called Lyra that works down to 3 kbps: https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/02/lyra-new-very-low-bitrate-codec-for.html?m=1

David Rowe (VK5DGR) releasing a 700-3200 bps codec under LGPL 6 years ago: https://www.rowetel.com/?page_id=452

I've been trying repeatedly to give up streaming services like Spotify since I know it's bad for artists. These large catalogues have this weird duality where I _could_ listen to most things but my real attraction to the service is that it comfortingly feeds me the same stuff over and over. Kudos to those who get their value out of the anything-ness but I can't seem to do it. Plus it annoys me supremely when licensing issues notch out tracks from my favourite albums.

Got some blank CD-Rs today to turn some of my bandcamp stash into car-playable tunes

Does anyone know if the “log in with Google” overlay (containing your email address and picture) is still accessible to the random sites that embed it, like Medium? I found this post saying leakage was possible and Google wasn’t going to do anything about it, but it’s from 2018. https://blog.innerht.ml/google-yolo/

Got the news today that the US patent office has deemed me a co-"inventor" of something. It's a bit underwhelming futzing around with computer networks, I always pictured the process as more like Belle's old man in Beauty and the Beast.

Does anyone know why it is that macOS's Activity Monitor itself uses so much CPU? I realise querying hundreds of processes per second is non-trivial but 30+% of a core? Yeesh.

There is a Take going around that non-profit orgs should be held accountable for environmental destruction because they accept bitcoin donations. As if that will achieve literally anything other than limiting funding for good causes and helping certain people feel superior. Some folks just gotta kick down.

It's probably mostly nostalgia but for me personal computing peaked around XP SP2. Firefox was new, you had winamp, gaim, MSN, 3D games were getting good. Your data was on your computer instead of the cloud. 1:1 was the default social communication. "AFK" meant something - you were uncontactable.

With G-Suite, I like how the gmail tab periodically signs me out “for security” and then Chrome uses my Google Account to autofill its own password, a little pantomime that plays out once a month or so.

Bridging Sync/Async Code in #Rust
https://octet-stream.net/2021/02/21/bridging-sync-async-code-in-rust/
New website, new focus.