tokamak-teapot

Just wait until you notice how much humans do this day to day

If you read the source of ‘cat’ and ‘more’ you’ll see that if they are reading /etc/passwd they replace the passwords of system users with ‘*’, unless you are uid 0.

When ‘less’ was created, there was a bug where when you scrolled upwards the passwords would be revealed, so it was decided that the passwords should be replaced with actual asterisks and stored in individual files per-user.

For security, these files were given access rights only for the owning user, and immediately deleted, with an encoded copy of their inode number being stored in /etc/shadow.

Fun fact: forced password changes were initially introduced when disks were getting full and deleted inodes of user password files were due to be overwritten. “For security reasons” was correct but misinterpreted.

Safari? I don’t know what counts as ‘this bloatware crap’ but if you haven’t looked into it perhaps it could meet your definition.

Might the battery charge a capacitor?

It was discovered that it was something that can be created.

I feel like they are close to the right shape but haven’t quite got a handle on it.

It really is. I often have to go and modify some (tail-call-optimised-away) code just to get it to turn up in a stack trace so that I can continue with what I’m debugging.

The suggestions as to what Apple could do to help are all great, but it does look (from here) like there could be ways to tweak application development process to better shield against breakage.

It might seem like I’m stating the obvious, but I really do think it could be worth spending time with the preview releases.

I assume the reason this isn’t done is as pointed to in the article - a lack of correlation between what goes into a preview release and what ends up in a real release, but is it really the case that none of the three issues raised could have been avoided if they had been spotted slightly earlier?

The first looks like it was a case of over reliance on what was communicated by Apple. “Trust but have a backup plan” would seem like a useful approach here, if it is reasonable to consider the option of enlisting or creating a compatible replacement for using the Javascript zip library.

The second issue - reliance on a bug - just seems like something that is easy to fall foul of, but in retrospect would it have been possible to have noticed that there was an assumption being made, or that there might be a test missing to catch a future change in behaviour?

The third sounds like an assumption in the application code (that a value would not be null) which may have been a perfectly fine thing to do, if it was going to be obvious what the issue was as soon as it broke, but…

… the description of the pain of having to put out an ‘emergency’ release gives the impression that there is scope for making this process easier. I understand, of course, that automated testing of anything that runs in a browser is still hard, so it may be that it’s this part of the release process that causes friction and the returns from improving this have already diminished as it’s been refined.

It’s such a great product and I hope there can be less friction in keeping up with Safari as it’s fantastic to see cross platform web applications continuing to thrive.

The problem for the vendor is that their customers are encouraged to avoid using their product.

I saw advice here a while back about using Screen Time to block PIN and Account updates. This gives you a separate PIN to protect those, so theoretically if someone shoulder surfs your phone PIN they can’t take over your iCloud account.

The point was about the rise in prices across the spectrum of available products vs those that would be expected given inflation figures. But thanks for the tube tip!

Yes, which would seem around in line with inflation. I was replying to a comment talking about seeing toothpaste for £5, which gives the impression that perhaps the price of toothpaste has rocketed past that of inflation, which doesn’t appear to be the case.

Two of the most well-known toothpaste brands in the UK are still selling their most 'basic' toothpastes for 100ml for £1, which I don't think is much of a rise on what it's been for the last few years (I think I used to get 125ml for that price).

People on modest salaries either don't spot the cheaper, just-as-good toothpaste that's not as prominent, they think that it's not as good as the ones with lists of all the great things they're supposed to do, or they aren't feeling the squeeze enough to seek it out.

If you drop into an independent chemist you might notice that sometimes the only toothpaste they stock is the 'basic' one, because their customers are price-sensitive, so that's all they'll buy.

Going rate for pizza is around 60p/100g, with a larger than average Aldi 'Meat Feast' pizza coming in at £2.19, which is 39p/100g.

Again, if you're on a 'modest salary', you pick the cheaper products or pick the supermarkets which only really sell the cheaper products.

I'm not saying that prices aren't going up, just that closer to the 'survival' line, there is much less room to increase prices, because people aren't at the point of choosing based on preference, so you can't rely on them switching to a slightly cheaper option from your artificially differentiated product line (yes, you, Colgate-Palmolive). They'll just be forced to stop buying your products altogether.

Old cheap Mac Mini with USB drive attached. Put Photos library on it. Set it to keep all photos locally. Back up that drive elsewhere.

Any chance of a peek at the demo code and/or transcript please? Sounds fun!

I feel like I’ve got my money’s worth for most games on the Switch, too. Mostly a lot more than my money’s worth.

Speaking of Super Mario Odyssey, two of us have played it from beginning to end, so we definitely got a lot of fun game time out of the cost!

Yes, I always put my address on the back of parcels (who sends letters?).

I also always use the short form: house number and post code.

Is this a good method? No idea. Decades of sending parcels. None failed to arrive, so no attempts to return to sender.

M1 Air user here too.

I am convinced there must be some kind of ‘spatial’ processing going on, even though I’m as certain as I can be that I’m listening to a plain stereo source, Spotify web version on Firefox.

Why does it sound like a particular instrument is up in the air to my right? I’ve found myself getting up and looking for the source of a sound before realising it was in the music.

Apple seem to believe what you’re talking about is supported via Home Sharing [1]. I have attempted to get this to work with a little success but I wonder if it was too little too late for you?

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT202190

Ironically I believe I remember that LastPass had such a feature, though it didn’t work for more than about 2% of my passwords when I used it a long time ago.

You can export your keychain and import into other password managers, if you have access to a Mac. I doubt this can be automated, though, and passkeys will need another solution.

Do you know what makes them asymmetric? Is it just traffic shaping at the ISP, or is it some hardware limitation?

A really, really good coffee machine for home. Price: about $1k. You can spend more but the coffee doesn’t get better - you just get more automation.

Thanks for this, this is the info I was looking for. I'm thinking of using fly.io for some bigger projects and was considering the possibility of having data on AWS, so this is great to hear.

Is there an alternative? I’ve used Pinboard forever but it’s frustratingly clunky and I’m about ready to jump elsewhere.

Or controls one of the many apps. Every time I install the Firefox extension I wonder if I’m really able to be sure that I haven’t been directed to a compromised version or lookalike.

I like it. It's easy to read.

Have you used Mercurial? I found it a lot more user friendly, especially with TortoiseHg for Windows. Not sure if that’s still around as I don’t use Windows any more but even though there are many similarities, git always feels like it’s designed to solve problems I don’t want to use source control to solve.

Why would latency be a problem with video? Or is the audio separate and not latency compensated?

It was received knowledge thet SQL Server (at least) would have problems if you had a massive index on randomly generated UUIDs.

By the time I compared UUIDs to sorted UUIDs (in the special pattern that was supposed to work for SQL Server) and ints, however, I didn’t find any difference in performance.

Perhaps by the time I tested it had been fixed, or perhaps it was only an issue in certain circumstances, but never an issue with a few million rows for me.