John Goerzen @jgoerzen@floss.social

I'm old enough to remember when software that sent records of everything you did and websites you visited was called "spyware".

How times have changed.

And I don't mean that spyware has gone away.

The problem with all these queue and job schedulers is that they are terribly complex. Also they rely on online, synchronous communication and most can handle multi-GB binary inputs to a task.

I'm writing a simpler one. That uses files as a primitive, and preserves ordering. Use a command to generate a task file - could be 10 bytes, could be 50GB - and get it to a directory on the destination somehow. #Syncthing, #Dropbox, #NNCP, whatever. Then process it, with locking. Easy, eh?

For quite a few years now, I've sung with a large (often 300-person) men's choir that raises money for charity. This year my 12-yr-old son also sang, so we had our first concert where I got to sing next to him last night.

Anyone know about #golang's #power consumption when idle? Tracking an issue where #Yggdrasil uses 1% CPU even when idle, representing 10% of total #battery consumption on the box during that time. I was told "that is the typical power profile of a #go program with a decent number of go routines". Is that correct? strace shows a lot of stuff in futexes and apparent busy-sleeps. How to address? Does GOMAXPROCS=1 help? The program is otherwise idle during these times.

Using #systemd to un-suspend a system at a particular time and run tasks only if it's plugged in to AC power. I'm going to be adapting these techniques to schedule backups to run only if the system is on AC power. From @joeyh - https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/a_programmable_alarm_clock_using_systemd/

TFW you just installed #Debian on a new box but forgot to make a separate /boot, so GRUB hangs because / is encrypted and it can't load the rest of itself.... 😦

3/ Then there's Windows being creepy. Turn on the machine and Cortana starts sounding all excited. No, go away. I search for Firefox in Edge and it pops up a thing saying "But you don't need to install another browser" like a whiny 2-yr-old.

Then I manage to figure out how to set up the machine without a Microsoft account.... only to discover that I can't leave S mode -- the one that restricts you to Windows Store -- without a Microsoft account. ugh.

/end

2/ My wife got a #Windows laptop at work, and they use Office 365. She was set up with #Outlook for the first time in... ever? I think. She said to me, "How can I make the email addresses of senders show up?" I could NOT FIGURE IT OUT. She contacted their IT support... also couldn't figure it out. Searching the Internet revealed n complicated solutions, none of which worked.

Suddenly I understand why #phishing is so easy. Yikes. 2/

Every time I use #Windows I am reminded anew how terrible it is. I don't understand why people put up with it.

Today's reminder: I bought a #Surface Go 2 which I will shortly put #Debian on. I thought I would update Windows and shrink its partition first. So updates take... hours? And the OS reserves 8GB of space just to make updates possible. Somehow Debian, Ubuntu, ChromeOS, Android, and iOS all manage to update in a few seconds to a few minutes and don't need to dedicate 8GB to it. 1/

Mozilla will now only accept crypto donations from energy-friendly cryptocurrencies. A very positive move! https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/reporting-back-on-mozillas-cryptocurrency-donation-policy/