Gizmo
gizmo@fedi.weebyte.com
My interests vary by season, mood and trending hashtags but currently include #photography, #pkm (largely based around #obsidian) and #ssg web sites - #eleventy in particular. I use #mac and #android as my window on the internet and multiple instances of #linux for everything headless. On the road I can be found in an #EV or #Porsche, or on a #motorbike. #fedi22

once again:

DO NOT TRAVEL TO OR THROUGH THE UNITED STATES

if you are not a citizen, the rule of law has COMPLETELY collapsed. as one can infer from the DHS' contemptuous - and contemptible - official statement to the Guardian. if you have a visa, it is liable to be cancelled on the flimsiest of pretexts, or none at all. if you are visiting, or simply in transit, you could be seized, held for weeks, and then deported, just because an official doesn't like you, or has quota to make. the prisons are for-profit, so they have a motive to keep you there.

DO NOT TRAVEL TO OR THROUGH THE UNITED STATES

it's just. not. safe.

theguardian.com/us-news/2025/a

:boost_ok:

A misty temperate rainforest scene with tall, smooth-barked eucalyptus trees rising vertically among dense undergrowth. Shafts of early morning sunlight pierce through the canopy, illuminating a soft haze and highlighting vibrant green tree ferns in the foreground. The light creates a serene, ethereal atmosphere in the layered forest.

Dandenong Ranges National Park

More about me & prints
linktr.ee/steven.sandner

#pics

Trumpet of Parrots
This will be meaningless to anyone outside of Australia, and quite possibly anyone outside of Queensland, but I do love a snarky analysis of Australian fringe politics.

I occasionally revisit my Proxmox VM of FreeBSD to see if it can change my current opinion of it, which is that it is barely fit for purpose. But no, it reinforced my opinion today.

The VM has 14.1-RELEASE installed, reasonably recent you might say. So I attempt to run `freebsd-update fetch` and get as response "Fetching 2 metadata files... failed". I try this several times with the same result. Scanning the forums produces nothing useful, but on a whim I try modifying ServerName in `/etc/freebsd-update.conf` from `update.FreeBSD.org` to `update1.FreeBSD.org`.

No go, same result. OK, try `update2.FreeBSD.org`. It works and my system gets updated! This is a fundamental tool for maintaining a FreeBSD system and it cannot even work its way through the mirrors when it encounters one that fails.

I have had similar issues in the past, where an upgrade broke my BastilleBSD jails sufficiently to require a fresh install of the latest version of the OS. These issues never seem to plague me on Linux which is why I keep abandoning my experiments with BSD. It really does feel more like someone's hobby project than something "that just works".

I guess I will try again in a few releases' time... 

#freebsd

In Deep Water
map.png 241.41 KB

Thank you MapQuest
https://gulfof.mapquest.com

Is nuclear power really a viable option for Australia? This article seems to be a fair attempt at honestly weighing up the pros and cons but it's pretty damning of the nuclear path.

Those who DO learn from history are doomed to watch others repeat it anyway.

It's getting hard to keep up with all the ways we are spied on in this inter-net connected world. 

https://proton.me/blog/wifi-surveillance

#privacy #surveillance #bigtech

Gizmo shared a note by Em-squaredAug 14, 2024

The what? The Interwebs? See how often the presenter says "information super highway"...
1994 and the same year I also got to try the internet. #BBCArchive
youtube.com/watch?v=XpZ5STahhP

Slowly getting to grips with #darktable. Coming from other editors it sure is a steep learning curve.

Dead trees sprout from a Queensland reservoir on a sunny day