There's a song by Bad Religion called I Love My Computer, whose interpretation I will not attempt to make, but the lyrics speak of an obsession with a computer, as if it were a rather masoginestic sexual relationship with a powerless woman with the man dictating all, and in full control.
I haven't gotten all philisophical about it, but I enjoy it for its surface-level lyrics, in the computer sense of the words, not the sexual parts, and simply because not many even try to sing about anything to do with computers, couched in metaphor or not.
So its a unique niche genre topic, amongst the ranks of Its All About The Pentiums by Weird Al, and not really too many others.

So with all that preample out of the way, part of the lyrics of the above discussed song, 64 characters of them, to be exact, became my very first WiFi password, using the WEP encryption scheme. For individual end users, this was the best on offer at the time. You either had an open network, or you had a WEP encrypted network with a textual password with a hard limit of 64 characters. The password from the lyrics of that song, and my very first WiFi password was:
ILovemycomputeryoumakemefeelallrighteverywakinghourandeverylone
Of course, I became quickly aware that RC4 had been broken, and WEP was essentially at best an annoyance, quickly overcome, by anyone really wanting to listen to your network, so after I reprogrammed my mind for the acronym WEP standing for Wired Equivalent Privacy to Wire-exposed Privacy, I moved to WPA enterprise and set up a RADIUS server, and had MAC authentication going there for a while.
But with the prolipheration of devices, rapid upgrades and swaps, that became untennable. So I went back to WPA2 Personal and now WPA 3 Personal. I may investigate the enterprise modes a bit further, but authenticating devices is simply unwieldy, most especially with MAC randomization, its just impossible now.
But I'm really not all that worried about my network being hacked. Not to say it can't or won't ever happen, but its not something that keeps me up at night anymore. I just rock the latest protocols and schemes, latest firmware, and roll with it.
So that's a bit of a story on my first use of WiFi encryption and what locked it down. Until it didn't. LOL.

in reply to Adam MacLeod

I am still (unfortunately) using WPA2/WPA3 mixed mode, which is probably no better than just WPA2 by itself, because of a couple of stupid devices that don't support WPA3. There are workarounds, such as putting said devices on their own VLAN/SSID, smashing them with hammers, or just not using them, but all those options have different sets of pros and cons.

I did briefly mess with WPA3 Enterprise, and, yes, getting keys on devices is annoying. That being said, if it were just me and no one else in the house, I'd probably do it anyway.

Also, if it were just me in the house, there'd be a lot less WiFi. Most of my stuff doesn't use it as-is.

This entry was edited (4 weeks ago)
in reply to Baldur Bjarnason

More and more, generative models are looking like productivity tobacco. Promoted by biased research, it’s addictive, harmful, and the little benefit it has (nicotine is a somewhat effective ADHD drug, for example) cannot outweigh the fact that it’s hurting us all, directly and indirectly.

This shit is already turning out to be one of the most harmful tech innovations of the 21st century. It needs to be regulated at least as much as tobacco, if not banned outright from most economic spheres

The Australian government has announced on November 3 that, beginning next year in much of the country and spreading to the rest by 2027, all residents will get three free hours of electricity every afternoon.

That’s right: 3 hours of free electricity. This possible because Australia has built enough solar power that in the middle of the day the sun is generating so much electricity that wholesale electric prices often go negative few those few hours. So, they’re giving it away. electrek.co/2025/11/04/austral…

How’s that for a political platform plank? “Vote for us and we’ll build out so much solar power generation that we’ll give electricity away for free in the middle of the day.”

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in reply to Jeff Spencer

Bill McKibben offers the bottom line: “Australia has enough solar power, and that solar power is so cheap, that now people who live there will get to have it for free. They will be, every afternoon, energy-rich. With just a little bit of care, they’ll be able to get done most of what needs doing for free.”

Meanwhile, Bill writes, “Trump and the corrupt fossil fuel cronies that surround him have done everything they can to make sure Americans will never get to share in this kind of bounty.”

You can read all of Bill’s comments at billmckibben.substack.com/p/fr…

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This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to HOAXILLA®

Für die zweite OP alles gute! Und kurioserweise ist mir im Oktober dasselbe passiert: Mitte Oktober gegen Influenca und CoVid impfen lassen, eine Woche später ein RSV- oder sonstiger Erkältungsvirus, der sich bei mir breit machte, und wo der Husten erst jetzt richtig abgeklungen ist.

Zum Thema lesen: Ihr kennt das meiste aus den letzten Jahren vermutlich schon, aber ihr könnt euch auf viele Arten Texte auch vorlesen lassen, wenn die Augen nicht mehr können. Bei Fragen gern DM.

The #dragons may have all been adopted, but, in the true spirit of #FLOSS, we give you the instructions on how to make your own!

Grab the instructions as a PDF document from the "thank you" page you see after donating:

kde.org/fundraisers/yearend202…

or directly download them from here:

kde.org/fundraisers/yearend202…

And get knitting!

#fundraiser #freeSoftware #amigurumi

"Controversy erupts at the plagiarism machine conference when it turned out people were using the plagiarism machine to do plagiarism."

This is genuine comedy.

nature.com/articles/d41586-025…

We've released V21.2, as our 'traditional' end-of-year release.

There are some minor changes relative to the beta, most notably the addition of a warning if you are moving a way that has a majority of its nodes off screen, the minimum number of nodes for the check to be active can be set and the default is 5.

vespucci.io/help/en/21.2.0%20R…

#OpenStreetMap

in reply to Bubu ☎️: 3016

This was the trickiest part (that admittedly was broken long before moving) of the repair: part of the hip didn't print correctly initially (and as this was a ~20 hour print job when I printing this originally, I didn't particularly feel like reprinting the whole thing). The broken off part also got lost at some point.
This entry was edited (4 weeks ago)
in reply to Bubu ☎️: 3016

There was no completely straight seam where the part broke off and it also was very hard to judge where exactly to cut the model for reprinting it. So as expected the (two component) glue had to do a lot of work creating a very visible (and very ugly brown) seam. Painted over it with minitiature paint we had lying around.

It's not quite perfect yet, but good enough, I think. The idea specifically was to mend the existing model, not to just reprint it.

This entry was edited (4 weeks ago)

the window for participation in the #osgeo devroom at #fosdem2026 is open for a few more days; if you're able to share in a fossy geo space but are unsure, I can assist - it's easy and fun to get involved. #fosdem #foss4g #geo #brussels #foss pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2026…
This entry was edited (1 month ago)

I have been on vacation so I didn't get to post this until today, but if you haven't seen my bits and bops demo video yet, you really should. This is a super fun game, and the level of screen reader accessibility is very impressive. youtu.be/MdaGu4FSgfI

reshared this

RE: coywolf.com/news/social-media/…

„The features matter a lot less than the people who are using the platform. […]

It can sometimes be a bit misleading when you get a lot of ideas and feature requests in a community, and the conversations become, ‘We definitely need feature X to grow because that’s what’s stopping people from using the platform.‘ While that’s true in some cases, the sad reality is that any flaw can be overlooked as long as the people you want to reach are there.“

This feels true for #Conversations_im as well.

in reply to Daniel Gultsch

I feel that a platform needs to have an absence of annoying bugs first and foremost. Additional fancy features (as in OP) might *initially* attract new users, but it's an absence of such embarrassing bugs which keeps them there longer term. And people giving up on a failed attempt at a new platform is very costly to one's social capital, to ever recommend any new platform ever again, and be taken seriously.

Finally hit publish on a blog post I've been writing for a while.

It's common to hear the term "fully accessible" used to describe products which have passed WCAG 2.2 level AA. But, are they really?

In this post, I explore 5 examples which highlight why WCAG, as awesome as it is, is not a measure of great usability or performance.

craigabbott.co.uk/blog/2025/5-…

#accessibility #a11y #wcag

reshared this

I knew it. KDE is goin to make their own login manager. If they can't integrate that piece with the plasma desktop you can't have a coherent OS experience and a ton of functionality is just missing.

So the year of the desktop Linux is a few more away, but it's getting closer I guess

blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog…

Oh a good HN comment. Also didn't know that SDDM was a potential root cause:

I love Wayland. I just absolutely love hard-rebooting my computer twice a day. Oh, need to walk away from the desk? Better switch into a TTY before unplugging the dock so I can force restart SDDM when it crashes. Oh no! Walked out of WiFi range? Your DE is hard frozen and the only operable button is the power button.
Wayland truly saves me so much time at work. It's forced me to re-up my ctrl+s reflex. Now I never lose work when it randomly crashes!

We've also been playing a fun new game. Every morning when I walk into the office my giant 5Kx1K monitor might be reset to literally any imaginable resolution and I have to figure out how to navigate to the display configuration menu to manually reset it because of course replugging the screen doesn't work.

I love Wayland. It's so easy to use and reliable. But MOST IMPORTANT it's newer than X11. Thank god I don't have to use gross old software written in uncool languages. God for-fucking-bid we have to run old software that works instead of new software that-- while not as good as the old software-- is still new

What's that? Wayland is almost 20 years old and still not to feature parity with any other OS? Well, it's newer than X11!

Pauline Hanson Condemns Use of Term ‘Black Friday’, Saying ‘All Fridays Matter’

theshovel.com.au/2022/11/25/pa…