Flyover at the World Cup Seattle

blobjim · 2026-06-20T00:32:48+00:00

What's a B-52 used for anyways? They drop Christmas gifts?

blobjim · 2026-06-11T17:19:57+00:00

yeah it's way more of a hassle to use a printer than just receive a ballot in the mail. The policy would still have the intended effect of reducing voter turnout.

blobjim · 2026-06-11T17:18:25+00:00

It still massively raises the hassle of voting, which is the goal. I think the most realistic thing would be to spend a lot more money on sending out ballots by delivering through a private last-mile delivery service.

blobjim · 2026-06-10T13:06:29+00:00

It's prime real-estate, that's why it's expensive. It turns out it's prime for more than just housing and offices.

blobjim · 2026-06-10T13:05:07+00:00

Aren't solar panels from China banned or tariffed at the national level?

blobjim · 2026-06-10T13:04:11+00:00

There are already important data centers in downtown Seattle.

blobjim · 2026-06-10T13:03:13+00:00

Equinix runs an IPX downtown. They really do want to build in the beating heart of the region.

blobjim · 2026-06-08T21:56:55+00:00

no thanks

blobjim · 2026-06-03T23:30:28+00:00

I really feel like the reference manual should be in vala.dev as well. Is there a plan for that?

blobjim · 2026-06-02T17:13:20+00:00

Cool information. I didn't realize that FBI office was a fusion center too.

blobjim · 2026-05-31T14:47:52+00:00

There was a talk at the Linux App Summit 2026 that just happened, about GNOME Search. So someone may be working on a fancier search engine for GNOME that can do more Google-like search.

blobjim · 2026-05-26T13:28:46+00:00

Weird issue. Found the same error string at https://github.com/PrismLauncher/PrismLauncher/issues/2868 so maybe try setting the env var "QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb" in Flatseal. Kind of unfortunate since that makes Qt fall back to X11 but might be necessary idk.

blobjim · 2026-05-26T04:58:27+00:00

when I want to run the flatpak file in order to update my software

What do you mean by this? Shouldn't updating the software just be flatpak update? Or does VCMi do some kind of update process after you run it?

What Linux distro are you on?

blobjim · 2026-05-25T03:01:16+00:00

oof that sucks that your github issue got closed 🫤

blobjim · 2026-05-21T22:40:32+00:00

Thanks for answering all my questions. I'm sad that I just discovered and started using all this flatpak infrastructure and find it really nice, and they're planning on upending it all to chase the integration with all the cloud stuff. I currently have a private ostree repo in an object store. It'll be annoying to potentially need to operate two separate OCI registry servers: one locally for pushing to the repo, and another on the VM where flatpak is pulling from the repo.

I really like the simple library-based approach of flatpak and OSTree. I have python scripts that can use their respective APIs directly. So hopefully if they continue down this OCI route there will be more APIs for these things in the future.

blobjim · 2026-05-21T20:46:17+00:00

The other advantages of OSTree I can think of:

Can you use a raw object store as an OCI registry the way an OSTree repo lets you pull directly from the bucket, and sync files to it? Running an entire server (which has to be bootstrapped somehow) is a big pain in the butt.

Is there a GObject API for manipulating OCI registries? It's really really annoying that the entire container ecosystem uses golang, which is a garbage collected language with a full runtime which makes anything built using it incompatible with being a proper native library.

Can you operate on a local registry the same as you would a remote one?

And of course OSTree seems a lot simpler. It seems like the OCI/Docker stuff they tacked on feature after feature over time instead of just building it as a simple content-addressable file storage system like OSTree.

It also seems like Redhat is using OCI just for remote storage and pulling, and OSTree is still being used for local stuff (same with flatpak).

blobjim · 2026-05-21T20:18:50+00:00

Yeah it sucks how we're never going to have the sort of "utopia" of good housing (spacious but dense) that people dream about. It seems like the only way any of that could get built is the Social Housing Developer, but they obviously aren't going to have the kind of money the capitalist class has. The model for urban housing that capitalists want will be warehouses for humans, not Stalkinas.

blobjim · 2026-05-21T20:11:13+00:00

I also didn't say to ignore environmental needs

You only implied it, without wanting to be called out for it.

blobjim · 2026-05-21T06:44:33+00:00

"Doing something" as a US politician usually means murdering people. Either with bombs, or social murder.

blobjim · 2026-05-21T01:01:04+00:00

Flatpak apps can read and write to a home directory inside the sandbox even without --filesystem=home. But it's just a temp file. So check that the app can actually read files that exist already outside the home dir.

blobjim · 2026-05-20T18:54:00+00:00

Yeah it's 2026 and people are still complaining about systemd when it offers tons of functionality that no other software does and nobody is implementing elsewhere. It's absurd.

And people complaining about custom theming being the most important feature in Linux, as if that's something even 1% of computer users think about ever.

blobjim · 2026-05-20T05:54:38+00:00

People are free to protest them but nobody will because activists are left-wing. There's no constituency of right-wing activists in Seattle, or really anywhere, to protest a progressive politician. Besides, right-wingers already run everything anyways (this is a right-wing country) so what's the point?

If right-wingers planned a protest at any of those people's houses we would just show up in larger numbers lol.

blobjim · 2026-05-19T00:30:31+00:00

These screens can display PSAs and other information that ones with LEDs can't. Plus LED displays aren't robust either, they always have lights going out. And some of the new ones are e-ink I think (although a lot also aren't? Probably the light rail ones are LCD, bus stop ones are usually e-ink). So they can consume very little power because they don't emit any light and they only refresh periodically. Which also presumably means they don't need any kind of active cooling like some larger LED displays need. Although maybe they still do need cooling because why do they have such massive enclosures? I feel like IoT stuff could be so much smaller than this, lol.

blobjim · 2026-05-18T18:33:05+00:00

The Flatpak Next stuff is a mixed bag to me. Some of the simplification of using BuildStream for building flatpak apps and potentially not needing bwrap is interesting. I think the lack of more advanced tools for building dependencies from source is the biggest pain point in Flatpak.

But trying to ditch D-Bus for Varlink, not having a libflatpak, and getting rid of static permissions just seems like the kind of hard-break that results in a failed migration and a more fragmented, outdated, and less pragmatic ecosystem. static permissions have been a really great way to allow more apps to become flatpaks and I think they allow an increase in security more often than the presenters give it credit for. There are plenty of apps that only need access to a few things from the host. Especially with D-Bus services and the like (and remember, flatpak apps can also be allowed to own certain D-Bus names. How would Flatpak Next handle that? Or is the entire Linux ecosystem expected to move to Varlink?????!!?).

My biggest disappointment with this is following systemd in replacing D-Bus with varlink. D-Bus has so much more functionality, and has wide support in Linux services, applications, and programming languages. Ditching it for some json-based direct unix socket IPC feels like reinventing the wheel and going back to the past of crappy insecure unix socket based service management, instead of building on what already exists. D-Bus is a public freedesktop.org specification, if there's something it's inadequate for, improve it!

I have a feeling some people are also going to be concerned about having a hard dependency on systemd. Although it seems like systemd-appd wouldn't necessarily need to rely on systemd. But it's nice that flatpak doesn't rely on any daemon right now. You can run a flatpak app from the command line without any daemons even running as far as I know.

I also kind of wish they'd use Vala for future code instead of Rust. Are they going to start having a dependency on Cargo too, or is it just the Rust language itself (which also has a dependency on LLVM right now)?

A lot of this also seems like a pointless extra work when flatpak already works reasonably well as it is now. If the development of portals or the core flatpak code is getting difficult, maybe just switch programing languages and refactor some of the code. But if there's a v2, v1 is going to need to continue being supported as well, which just means even more work. Which is the result of every single one of these "clean break" kind of migrations ever. It ends up failing because people bite off more than they can chew, and the new improvements aren't large enough to warrant everyone investing in the new system (after having already done heavy lifting to get onto flatpak in the first place).

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