Stonehenge, the naturist symbol, and the Druid Awen sign

Paul (336)

Philosophy

Poor start. The talk initially was about an Australian philosopher who apparently thought humans were the pinnacle of evolution. Until her canoe was attacked by a crocodile and she realised that the crocodile considered her no more than food. Her initial thought, so it was said, was: "This can't be. I'm an elevated human. I can't be animal food." Of course this came out after she'd been rescued. That shocked me, because how far do…

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Off is fine

Customer: "Can we just not complete the power cycle?" IT Helpdesk: "Okay, I'm going to need you to turn it off." Customer: "...and on again?" IT: "No, off is fine." This speaks to my heart. This is something I want to tell so many clients... (but I'm not allowed to).

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Joplin

Janis Joplin If the first you did when reading "Joplin" was thinking of this singer, I already like you. Janis Joplin was amazing. Alas, this post is not about her, but about the program called Joplin. It's what Evernote does, just a bit different. Joplin is open source, which is my preference. Joplin allows for synchronisation through various means, like NextCloud and AWS S3, and also their own Joplin Cloud. Great for use on many…

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Password and MFA/2FA

Looking into options besides Bitwarden, in the Buy European craze, I went out to find stuff. Backups of your data are supported on the phone through Settings/Tools. Data are saved in CSV or an encrypted container. You're prompted to protect the export with a password and then you can store it to your device or any connected cloud service. One thing: TOTP (One time password, MFA) isn't working (perhaps due to the free account) and…

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Linux and boring elephants

Linux is a wonderful operating system. But let's face it, even wonderful operating systems can sometimes lock up or freeze. Have you ever experienced that? I have. So what to do when nothing responds any more? Most logical option: press power until the machine switches off. Unfortunately you risk corruption on the disks. Usually nothing bad, and fsck will be able to correct that, but it's not funny. There is a better way, using boring…

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Why I left facebook. And twitter.

"You can post anything you like, because we are all for free speech. Here is a list of things you're allowed to like." More and more right-wing, previously banned bad people were allowed back there, like Alex Jones and Donald Trump. * Note that 'bad people' here is used from my perspective. If you love such people, you're reading the wrong blog. Twitter was renamed to the now well known 1-letter places. The x is…

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The christian god is a poor architect

(And other gods are as well.) Why do I make this claim? Then he got to work on the earth, putting plants, animals and people and stuff down here. This whole thing took 6 days, and he had a nap after that. Now, almost all of us accept that the universe is billions of years old, and the earth at least many, many millions of years, but let's assume the idea supported by some folks…

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Harmony Glen. On Harp.

Getting around tech issues is simple if you know the way. I spent a lot of time putting one of my favourite tunes from a band called Harmony Glen to sheet music. After that, I reworked the (1 finger) chords for a while, so the tune is easier to play. First: this is the original by Harmony Glen. If you want to get the sheet music, this link will get you the PDF sheet music,…

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Save the data - degoogling.

Continuing a bit with the degoogling of my phone. See the first part here if you missed that. It's about setting up CalyxOS. Here is part two, about Google MFA. Don't miss it. What I did to prevent typing in all 400+ contacts again: First: export your google contacts. I used this page for reference. It comes down to: After this: I have a Nextcloud subscription. I went into the dashboard and imported the file…

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Mastodon - Diaspora