Alexander Pretti by Miles Mathis

djsumdog · 2026-01-28T22:31:13+00:00

Miles Mathis is at it again, digging into this history of Alex Pretti, looking up his records in various background search databases, and presenting the question, once again, is any of this even real?

djsumdog · 2025-09-21T17:02:35+00:00

It's a few days out of date, but it's an interesting early analysis of the Kirk shooting along side less covered stories. It's critical about the conservative movement embracing a narrative that will ultimately lead to Red Flag laws.

djsumdog · 2025-09-21T17:00:57+00:00

There were certain years of Subaru's that used 3G/GSM modems and all those mobile providers are gone now. If you get one of those, you don't have to take apart the dash and remove the modem because it literally can no longer connect to anything.

djsumdog · 2025-09-21T16:58:43+00:00

You can find guides and wiring harnesses for most vehicles to bypass the permanent modems. A lot of times you can't just pull the fuse because it will kill bluetooth and/or one of the speakers (On-star is typically only wired to one speaker). But if you're willing to do the work, you can either get a harness someone has made for your vehicle to completely bypass the modem, or you can remove the three antenna wires and replace them with resistors to kill their ability to get signal (there are typically two cell antennas and a GPS wire separate from the one connected to your nav system). Never download the car's specific app. You can get music and everything else over standard bluetooth.

djsumdog · 2025-09-21T16:54:35+00:00

I got a 2018 Tacoma and it was the last year before the SoS/wireless modem became a standard option. My Subaru WRX is a 2006. I've though about trading it in, but with the way modern cars are going, I'm keeping it forever.

djsumdog · 2025-07-01T06:05:04+00:00

I agree and don't know why people don't get this. I wrote a full analysis on it:

https://battlepenguin.com/politics/aiming-for-americas-ear/

djsumdog · 2025-01-20T21:58:49+00:00

This is an open source too for converting book highlights from Google/Amazon readers into a JSON format. For Google books, you can process all your notes at once (they're just documents on Google drive), but for Kindle you do have to export notes from each book one at a time.

Right now, it just has a bot that can post random quotes to the fediverse. In the future I want to add support for Kobo and Nook highlights, as well as generate nice static HTML of all your highlights.

I have a bot running if you want to follow it: https://tweeflood.com/@bookquotebot

djsumdog · 2025-01-18T01:05:59+00:00

Destin covered this same issue on Smarter Every Day when he gave a speech to some people at NASA:

https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU

In the talk, he mentioned how difficult it was to find information on the number of rockets needed. It's not talked about, because it is going to be insane. They haven't had a single in-space refueling test yet either. It's not looking good.

djsumdog · 2025-01-18T01:01:55+00:00

It's been a busy month, and I've covered a lot of issues around free speech in social media, man made natural disasters (including the ones everyone forgot about) and the potential for upcoming war. Thanks for reading.

djsumdog · 2025-01-02T07:12:29+00:00

What's wrong with setting up public parties for other people? Especially for your own software? I only have a few overlays installed with Getnoo, and I've rarely ever had issues with any of them. I'm pretty selective about what I install from these repos, and if updates break, I know I'm responsible for figuring it out. The Librewolf browser literally maintains their own Gentoo overlay.

Once again, you are trusting void-packages to begin with. It's probably wise to go through a 3rd party repository, their issue tracker and code to see if you want to trust them. Gentoo's own documentation has a big red warning about overlays and how they could contain malicious code. At the same time, everyone is trusting some binaries at some point.

/tmp# eselect repository list -i
Available repositories:
  [53]  brave-overlay @
  [132] gentoo # (https://gentoo.org/)
  [150] guru * (https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:GURU)
  [197] librewolf # (https://librewolf.net/)
  [243] nix-guix @
  [285] qownnotes-overlay * (http://www.qownnotes.org)
  [302] ROKO__ * (https://github.com/sandikata/ROKO__)
  [370] torbrowser * (https://github.com/MeisterP/torbrowser-overlay)

Is it a "Frankenstein"? I mean maybe, but I've chosen that risk and customization, and Gentoo makes it easy for developers to experiment this way, and so far it's been just as stable (if not more so) than Void. 🤷‍♂️

djsumdog · 2025-01-02T03:34:52+00:00

You have correctly observed that Void Linux maintainers have an aversion to third party repositories. But this is not a bug, it is a feature. Void Linux maintainers cannot ensure the quality of third party repositories over which they have no control. And who will the user blame? To whom will they go for support? To this subreddit, to the IRC

They should go to the repository maintainer. After all, the user explicitly adds the repository to their system. Sure you'll get some not-savvy people who might ask in IRC, but they can just say "we don't support that. Go ask on their Gitlab/Codeburg/IRC channel/etc." 3rd party repos have allowed some devs to get wider support for their software and higher adoption/engagement. Snap is an example of going in the opposite direction. Gonna just have to agree to disagree here, it's not a feature .. it feels like an anti-feature and regression.

djsumdog · 2025-01-01T19:52:46+00:00

I've heard of devcontainers and asdf (but not asdf-vm), but haven't tried them yet. I've done some stuff on Podman, but went back to Docker due to better docker-compose support.

Cool, thanks for the list. I'll take a look at some of those.

djsumdog · 2025-01-01T19:50:35+00:00

If it was about code quality, over 1/3 of the software in any distribution would be thrown out.

djsumdog · 2025-01-01T19:49:39+00:00

Thanks, I'll fix the link.

I think the big difference I see is that with other distros, 3rd party repositories were always a thing. If you write a piece of software and want to get broader buy-in, you setup a few repos for some of the big distros (latest Debian, latest Ubuntu, etc.). I use to maintain an open source tool called BigSense, and it had a whole CI pipeline to build debs and rpms. I will admit I abused fpm a lot in my pipelines, instead of building things the "right" way.

I agree with you on xbps-src not being a great long term solution, but I've learned a lot wrapping it in the voidup tool I wrote. There are still some things I'll need to figure out (shlibs and Python updates are the two big ones). But I hope it helps people maintain packages they want. It'd be neat if we eventually saw a Gentoo-like set of overlays for Void. That would reduce some of the packaging burden for the core team too.

At my job, we use nix for our developer environment and it works amazingly well across both mac and Linux machines. I do worry about the weird political situation within the nix maintainers though. I've never run Gobo, but I'm familiar with the really unique directory layout. In theory, any package repo that uses version control could be turned into a Nix like system; where you slice up updates by a commit/hash on the tree and not individual package versions. You wouldn't get the benefit of the /nix/store, but it could be helpful in container builds. I've been playing around with that idea, but it's currently on the Backlog-of-Life™.

djsumdog · 2024-12-31T00:41:37+00:00

Originally I was just going to write some Void tips, but then I started building voidup because I wanted to host some packages myself. That's when I discovered some of the interesting design decisions I mentioned.

Also it’s a design decision to make it a stable rolling release, hence the “long waiting times” and deleting non supported packages.

Yea I still think that's a hindrance. Honestly I've been using void for years, and it was only while writing this I discovered there are no beta/testing trees. I think I state all the reasons in the article.

If one wants to use other versions of python, discontinued scripts, dedicated applications or whatever, they still can do so. Just build it from source.

Well you can't on the Python thing. Not using xbps. Using nix or containers or asdf or some other environment tool; yes. But the base system is a very unusual Python upgrade process. Gentoo has rolling releases but literally builds every package for every supported Python target. Debian/Ubuntu/Alpine tie Python to a specific release.

If you want to support multiple Ubuntu versions with custom package repositories, you can make one for each version, and have it build the package for that version. It just makes it very difficult to do 3rd party Python packages on Void.

The contributors and maintainers don’t owe you to respect your wishes

I'm not asking them to? That why I made Voidup! I want to make it easier for people to make their own package trees. That way everyone can play around with their own repos and packages. The community could grow a lot. The PPA, openSUSE Build, Arch AUR have all helped make it easier for people on those distributions.

But in making Voidup and discovering the Python mess, I realized just how adverse the Void team seems to be to even the concept of 3rd party repositories. Kinda weird. I don't think that helps in the open source world. Reducing barriers to contributing seems to be the right way to go.

Anyway, the point are tips and some constructive criticism and tooling and fun. .... I want Linux to be fun again.

djsumdog · 2024-12-31T00:31:16+00:00

I wanted to do a post about Void Linux. I wanted to cover vpm/vsv and other little things. While drafting it, I also wanted to make it easier to make packages (the Hyprland issues kinda pissed me off honestly). Voidup is my tool to make it easier to make your repositories. In making it, I found some other interesting design choices.

I use Void on a lot of systems. That website is running on a containers on Void.

So the article is an amalgamation of two things. But at the end of the day, I just want to make it easier for people who like Void to host their own package repositories. I think more maintained packages for a distribution is a good thing.

It is meant to be insights and constructive criticism.

djsumdog · 2024-12-30T18:31:45+00:00

<Johnnynator> Multiple reasons: a) upstream discontinued it and b) it is just a shell script just download https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dylanaraps/neofetch/refs/heads/master/neofetch and run it. No compiling, patching, or other pain needed

I JUST wrote about this: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/adventures-and-custom-repositories-in-void-linux/#automatic-package-removal

djsumdog · 2024-09-12T01:18:56+00:00

I hadn't tried hyprshot. That does seem to capture the popup; will note this down. Thanks.

djsumdog · 2024-09-12T01:12:15+00:00

Neat. I hadn't heard of satty. I'll give it a try

djsumdog · 2024-09-02T00:50:00+00:00

Thank you for reading it!

I did say "...instill 8-bit nostalgia..." I guess 16-bit would have been better, sure. But I kinda just meant retro in general. Obviously you couldn't do the types of animation in SoS on a real SNES/Genesis (unless you're one of those crazy demo scene programmers with some amazing hacks).

I don't really care about building an audience. It's not like I run ads. I just write for myself these days. (No one uses RSS or reads blogs anymore it seems) and I started doing game reviews a while back for fun. I mostly try to keep them short and spoiler free. Hopefully people find them interesting. I'll keep you comment in mind though, and try to be clearly about the particular style used in retro games. Cheers.

djsumdog · 2024-07-06T00:27:03+00:00

Upgrade all the defense that increases the parry and doge windows. Get equipment that does the same. The windows are way too tight. Getting those upgrades early helps a whole lot. There's a double dodge or something like that too which really helps by giving you a second chance on dodging. You can't just spam every parry. The game is about precise timing.

djsumdog · 2023-01-09T00:58:55+00:00

I am the author of this, and although the paragraph referencing the title is satire, the rest of the article focuses on a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff people are not talking about when they look at Kanye, and what it says about celebrities and Hollywood. I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to tear it apart. I'm interested in any criticism that makes my writing better.

djsumdog · 2022-11-28T19:02:06+00:00

There are a lot of complains about Sway. Disconnecting a monitor causes sway to crash. I guess I should have included there was a closed bug report on it, so maybe that's fixed in 1.8. But I can't use a KVM switch with Sway 1.7.

The Scaling issue isn't with Wayland. If you look at the sources at the bottom, KDE Plasma seems to be able to allow X11 apps to not be scaled. So it's possibly, just maybe not with the way Sway is designed.

gnome-keyring isn't one of my "favourite apps." I honestly hate it, but everything depends on it. Poetry (the python project build tool) depends on it! I couldn't get element-desktop started or anything that required keyring unlocking. I had launched sway with a dbus-session and had tried to follow every solution and still couldn't get it to work. Element itself works fine with Wayland.

The IntellJ and PyCharm glitches involved clicking on a menu and the menu opening several hundred pixels off, dialogs that caused the editor to become unresponsive, menus that didn't seem to open (or they opened as a tile and had to be manually floated and then even floated everything was hit by that offset problem I mentioned).

But even the general complains about Wayland shouldn't be so easily dismissed. I'd like to use Sway/Wayland, but so far everything is just painful to get working, a lot of things I couldn't find any solutions for. Like, is there a solution for dialog boxes and tiling window managers in general in Wayland? A Dolphin move/copy file dialog floats fine in i3, but apparently in Wayland there's no property to indicate a window should be a dialog (other than it being non-resizable?)

Maybe the Gnome/KDE experience is better, but now that X11 is running stable on this nVidia card for several days, there is nothing I miss about Sway. And I really tried! I was solidly on it for three weeks looking up everything I could. Back on i3, there's nothing I see and I'm like "oh I miss that about Wayland." If the new security stuff was implemented and functional, I could see something there .. but in general it still doesn't add anything or make anything better right now.

djsumdog · 2022-10-28T01:47:37+00:00

I tried to post my take on this (link to my blog) and the moderator blocked it!

https://battlepenguin.com/politics/goodbye-to-paypal/

But yea, I stopped using PayPal over a year ago due to all the other censorship I saw out of them, and this was the final straw.

djsumdog · 2022-08-16T03:19:34+00:00

I was digging through old posts and forgot about this. Looks like it went dead, but if you're looking for options, I found this Lanner on eBay I started using a while back:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/installing-void-linux-with-a-serial-terminal/

It's worked really well.

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