Nelson's Log

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/compare-versions > We recommend against working across operating systems with your files https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2019/06/01/wsl-access-to-linux-files-…

The problem is that so many sites have absolutely no shame about how many or what kind of ads they will jam into a page. LA Times is a great example - https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2017/03/25/la-times-and-ads/ If a site is willing to treat their consumers that badly then fuck them. I have no respect and will not feel bad about using an ad blocker there. On the flip side, a number of sites have started asking to turn off ad blockers (e.g. Wired), and if it's a site I visit frequently I'm willing to give it a try. If the page is filled with video ads or blinky shit, the ad blocker gets turned on again.

ChromeOS firmware has a bunch of this built in - it's super cool. https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2026/01/05/chromebooks-identify-usb-c… and https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/1pyojjd/comment/nwknhii… and https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform2/+/HEAD/typecd/R… is where I found out about it. A lot of the clever capabilities rely on the firmware that you have. Source - having spent a while a few weeks back getting Codex to poke at this topic on my machine https://github.com/nedrichards/whatcable-linux/blob/main/docs/framewor… since framework do reuse parts of the ChromeOS Embedded Controller in their firmware.

here's an old post of mine about it. this was a year ago, maybe it's improved but given they were willing to ship this I am not optimistic. https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2023/11/19/ubiquiti-routers-garbage-b…

9front has been adopted by WSL as the filesystem protocol, so there is that. https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2019/02/16/plan-9-rides-again-wsl-fil…

Yandex Image Search already uses facial recognition and is available to the public. See: https://yandex.com/images https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2020/01/07/facial-recognition-for-the… https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2019/12/26/guide-to-using…

I've been dealing with Apple for months trying to get them to fix Mail in OS X Mavericks 10.9.2, which crashes on me about every 30 minutes, or sometimes more frequently. Their answer, which they refuse to put in writing, is that engineering is "aware of the problem." Also, Mavericks broke Samba support completely. Apparently 10.9.3 doesn't fix it. http://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2014/01/15/mavericks-broke-smb/ I agree with the comments about this being the least stable Mac OS ever. I'd put it up there with Windows ME. Multiple times per day I have to interrupt what I'm doing to deal with Apple-related bugs.

i agree with you in principle, but i am not sure that this is simply a technical limitation. it feels to me more than just a preference. i can't explain it, but looking at the apple systems font example in this article: https://storck.io/posts/proportional-programming-code-fonts/ i find it much harder to parse (visually scanning the structure) than the monospace one below. perhaps it is simply what i am used to. but i feel like i am having a more violent reaction than i should have if mere preference and habit were the issue. perhaps the issue is the specific choice of fonts. the author in that article exclaims that if you allow proportional fonts then any font can be a programming font, while the author of the following post claims otherwise and set out to make their own proportional font that is suitable: https://timgord.com/2024-01/lisnoti-a-proportional-font-that-works-for… . there are other such projects like https://input.djr.com/info/ and https://go.dev/blog/go-fonts one issue is that of distinguishing similar characters, which the above projects try to address while some people claim it's not an issue at all: https://alexkutas.com/posts/non-monospace-font there is also the issue of alignment mentioned in the first article, that could possibly be addressed by limiting character widths to multiples of the smallest width. but there is still the issue of interacting with other programmers, mentioned in this article:…

For the uninitiated, Plan 9 lives on as the filesystem network interface that allows Windows and Windows Subsystem for Linux cross-platform access to your C drive. Via "https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2019/06/01/wsl-access-to-linux-files-… Plan 9’s filesystem is a very simple network filesystem protocol to share files between systems. They are specifically using 9P2000.L. They considered using Samba and SMB instead but can’t rely on Samba being installed and usable in the Linux guest OS and didn’t want to ship it because Samba is GPL licensed. They picked Plan 9 because it’s much simpler to implement. Also Microsoft already had Plan 9 server code for some other Linux container project they’d done. The \\wsl$\ path is handled in the Windows system by the MUP, an existing hook for network-like filesystems. They added a new one for Plan 9. The $ is in the name so that it can’t be confused with a computer whose hostname is wsl. The Plan 9 server in Linux communicates with the Windows Plan 9 client via a Unix socket. (Windows supports Unix sockets; who knew?) Windows can access your Linux files even if no Linux is instance is running. There’s a new Windows service called LXSManagerUser that mediates user identity and permissions.

I feel like all that's ever talked about here as bad about search is privacy. But what about good results? Google search results have an extremely heavy commercial bias. What would the internet look like without that? I would really like to have a say in how the ranking algorithm works. If I could, for example, exclude results from the Alexa Top 100k with a toggle, I bet I'd find interesting content a lot easier. Most "privacy-centric" search engines I've seen – especially DDG – do not approach this, probably since they use Bing results, which is just as inflexible and SEO-able as Google. Has anyone had a good experience with a search engine that implements a novel crawler and/or ranking algorithm? I've been trying Yandex for some searches lately, and it's results seem a little less commercially catered, but there are indeed some serious privacy concerns with it [0]. I have been holding a belief lately that a nonprofit search engine that scrapes & ranks in a way that is not commercially-driven is the single most important missing piece of digital infrastructure... anyone share this view? [0] https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2020/01/07/facial-recognition-for-the…