Today in Vancouver real estate adventures: last week I was complaining that nobody likes our dorky little poor people offers. My new complaint is we found a place we like and the sellers are super chill and I think they're going to accept our offer, but *why are we the only ones making an offer? What is wrong with it?!*

I can't believe anyone actually wants to buy a home more than once ever.

My 9 year old son has just vibe coded his first app. The free version of hangman he had showed too many ads, and had some stupid “lives” system that meant you couldn’t play again too quickly.

We sat down and spoke about what he wanted. He’s very particular in how he speaks so I didn’t need to reword it to be precise or less ambiguous.

We pasted that in to Claude Code and iterated a few times, within 15 minutes he had his game that he wants ready to go and installed on his iPhone and iPad.

It’s a crazy time to be coding.

#Claude
#VibeCoding

This entry was edited (1 week ago)

🕛Z #NowPlaying at the top of the hour, 2 hours of relaxing #NewAge, #ambient, and #meditationmusic on Northern Lights: The New Age Show, #live with Kelly Sapergia. More information is at ksapergia.net/northernlights/. Tune in either by visiting theglobalvoice.info and clicking on the Listen Live link, or go directly to theglobalvoice.info:8443/broad… #TGVRadio #audio #radio 📺🗣️📻🎶🎙️🌌🌈🫣🫰🩵🪬🫶

The Democracy Paradox podcast has restarted, featuring a series of three interviews (two already posted) with political scientists writing on democratic backsliding. democracyparadox.com #PoliticalScience

Mike Gorse reshared this.

ahaaha. github.com/nalexandru/api-ms-w… -: GitHub - Implementation of api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0.dll for Windows 7 based on Wine code. Good job, person who just helped me get Tweesecake running on Windows 7. So far, it's been fairly painless to get modern things going on it.
in reply to DJ Seedy!

ooh nice, for chromium? I couldn't find a good firefox one, r3dfox is definitely not accessible, Firefox 115 ESR is not the worst since it's 2023 but gosh darn it all the opensource instructions require you rebuild the Firefox source with Rust toolchains! Insanity. This kind of stuff made me a bit sad, just how quickly Windows 7 lost support once the ESU was gone, devs dropped it, and while some modern DLLs can be layered back in, my guess is once the app starts to drop support if they tie into system-level APIs and use newer ones, Windows 7 has very little fighting chance, sigh.
I wonder how long it'll take for Windows 10 to get there. I mean, not forever. Right now it shares enough in similar to Win11 that this matters very little, but in 5 years the code paths will diverge enough that it'll really be hitting end of life too.
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Tamas G

@cubic @serrebi I hear a lot more people talking about running enterprise versions of Windows 10 when compared to any previous Windows version, and I don't know the history of enterprise releases and their end-of-life dates, but I wonder if Windows 10 LTSC will make a difference to software support at all. So far I don't think I've seen any apps that specifically require Windows 11, but I know they're coming eventually.
in reply to Simon Jaeger

@simon @cubic @serrebi Oh yeah, the 10 Enterprise IoT LTSC (long-term servicing channel) is what I'm running now. There's a way to get the build to 19045 (from 19044, so to the 22H2 update) by extracting the .cab from the .msu package and installing it with dism, as it's just an enablement package, meaning the features are in the build just not running. So then, supposedly (although it's not confirmed, at least the package is easy enough to remove,) you get to keep Windows 10 LTSC support date (2031) with the slight improvements of the update, like performance tweaks and advanced threat protection enabled. I can say from my Winver dialog that it's a weird frankenstein of things: "Version 21H2 (OS Build 19045.6396)" - huh? But true. It didn't up it to "22H2", and the only way you would even know it's not treu 21H2 is by looking at the build number. Officially, my SKU still reports as the 21H2 LTSC branch, too. Huh huh. We'll see what happens in a month with this, I also have a back-up of that drive from before applying the update.
in reply to DJ Seedy!

yeah, their site is about the only place I've known you can get LTSC without it being the evaluation copy Microsoft gives for enterprise builds. LTSC is as clean as you'll get to Windows 7 but with Windows 10's Metro UWP bits still there. Removing those is difficult in any way because of just how much the shell and other settings bits rely on it now. I tried Explorer7, which lets you get Windows 7's Explorer on Win10, it's nice but then I'm reminded that control+windows +enter to run something as an admin wasn't added in Windows 7's explorer, joke's on me. xD
Oh yeah, and today marks 11 days until Win10 is out of mainstream support, ironic that it's 11 days to the end of 10.
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Tamas G

@cubic @serrebi Really liking all of the tinkering energy here. I have gotten win11 to cooperate but it seems like slimming down Windows 10 is easier, and there are hardware requirements even for the LTSC channel. I'm kinda wondering if I could get Windows 7 to run on my Compute Stick. It's the perfect shitty hardware to test out a much older, faster windows release. Wonder if I still have an old copy of Windows Loader. Eventually it turned into serious malware.
in reply to Simon Jaeger

OMG so you're telling me that's how I got ransomware in Windows 7 that one time? xD (this was back in 2020) Yeah, a lot of those keygens can really be crap. Not worth it when powershell scripts and things do exist which are a lot more safe and you can review the input so you know what it's doing exactly. Not that I advocate for these things, but LTSC I think also can only activate via volume licensing channels.
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Brandon

@serrebi @cubic For general use I think you will be far happier with Windows 10 IOT LTSC. I only wanted to try Windows 7 on this particular compute stick because it has an ancient and terrible Intel Atom chip. It looks like there aren't wi-fi and Bluetooth drivers readily available though, so that's probably a no from me.
After running Win11Debloat, changing some stuff in ExplorerPatcher, installing Classic Shell, and Winaero Tweaking a few things, I'm reasonably happy with how Windows 11 runs on even the slowest mini PCs available now. It positively flies on my Beelink SER8. I think we've figured out ways to mitigate the major irritations in Windows 11 by this point. It's even possible to put the system tray back to the way it was in win10 via ExplorerPatcher.
in reply to Simon Jaeger

@simon @serrebi @cubic aha yeah. I just tried the big red "install now" button just because, why not. guess what, no boot. Ahahahaa. I wasn't expecting any different. Problem is that GPT partitions were so new in 2009 and foreign, Windows just added support and to UEFI in general, so even if your partitions aren't right, Windows just will tank back then. No Recovery environment either to speak of for them.

MSNBC guest Ian Bremmer on Katy Tur suggests that European countries should ban #Israel from Eurovision, make it difficult for Israelis to travel to Europe, and engage in similar practices to isolate the #Jewish state. His idea is that doing so will turn voters against Netanyahu, thereby at last breaking the far-right stranglehold on government power.

I humbly suggest that Mr. Bremmer doesn't know shit about Israel or Israelis. If you want to push voters straight into the arms of the right wing, make them feel like the world is against them.

If you want those voters to abandon the Bibi and his ilk, stop rewarding Hamas for terrorism. Make it clear that Europe stands behind a two-state solution but only after Hamas capitulates and the #hostages have been freed, and only after Israel's government puts meaningful effort into building a foundation upon which a two-state solution could be implemented. Offer Pal recognition as an ex post reward for peace, not an ex ante capitulation to terror.

Never change, Europe. Never change. 😘🤌

"Around 15% of #Italians consider physical attacks on #Jewish people "entirely or fairly justifiable", according to a #survey published on Tuesday, as protests against #Israel's offensive in #Gaza continue across the country.

Some 18% of those interviewed also believe #antisemitic graffiti on walls and other public spaces is legitimate, according to the survey, conducted on September 24-26 by the pollster SWG among a national sample of 800 adults."

reuters.com/world/italy-poll-f…

ahaha. No I didn't switch back to Win7 but I did get it running on a VM during lunch. It was just my reaction to seeing how much lighter it is even compared to 10 (700 MB Ram at Boot VS 1.8 to 2.4 on Win10) , and how Metro and UWP apps have bloated the Windows ecosystem. I find it funny. On a lot of the Linux bashing boards, people will bash it for saying it's not a real operating system when you can't run something made for linux 5 or 10 years ago, unless they self-package deps. Well rude awakening to you Windows lovers out there, your OS (and Mac too, but not as badly) really has a lot of old code and copy of the same file 500 times because of that compatibility. What are you trading for it? More Ram usage? more storage space for the installed OS because it needs to now ship 50 copys of that library with it? Yeah? You can sleep in that bed, I'm getting very tired of doing so myself, my back is hurting, ouch.
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Tamas G

I am still running Windows 7 on hardware. The day is coming when I will need to be doing the same thing you did, not as an experiment, but as an actual system. If I may ask, what distro of linux and virtual machine software are you using to run it? Sorry to bother you with this, but my own research has either turned up command line only or completely inaccessible. I would really like to se a UI that I can use to launch VMs.
in reply to PhilSalkie

@PhilSalkie @techsinger yeah, I think commandline. My goal was to run it only under multiuser.target, not graphical.target. So that means, launching qemu with espeakup and the right VMDK, and then just using most things from within Windows. It's not a horrible option for transitioning to Linux, I figured if I want Linux more in my face, this might be more of the way than forgetting about it on a spare SSD as dual-boot. Comfort can bring ignorance too that way.
in reply to Tamas G

@PhilSalkie I don't know if this will work, but I thought maybe of launching the machine and then using NVDA remote to run it from another machine and Sonobus for audio output. That way, I wouldn't get annoying audio issues from the VM. Have you tried that? What I was also thinking about was to have a USB sound card and USB keyboard and run it through that. The thing I'm after is to avoid the hardware limitations of 7, there will come a day when hardware that supports it and supports everything else will be a serious pain to get. Finally, and this is still in the future for me, it would be nice to have a sort of containerized VM for everything I want, maybe 7 as a book reader, 7 as a mail machine, 10 as one browser, another 7 as a browser, and all on the same physical hardware. The switching might be a pain, I have yet to find a fast way to switch NVDA remote connections, but I can sort of see it as a nice to have.
in reply to PhilSalkie

@PhilSalkie @techsinger OK, if you do want to do VM stuff in a GUI, I think virt-manager is probably the best for it. Looks like it uses a GTK-based Window and launches Qemu and parameters on it for you too, so it's not bad at all. I used Debian 13. Could press S at the installer to get Speakup right at boot. Was very nice. Since then I've switched some packages to Backports and Forky, but it was super easy to get going with if you use Mate (can try Gnome, but Debian 13 ships an older ATSPI module for it and when I installed Gnome3 barely anything sppoke.) It's not the best distro for most-recent app versions, but for stability, sure. Archlinux is better at that but then you also can get new bugs to sneak in before upstream has had a chance to test it all. So in Linux Land you gotta pick I guess.
in reply to Tech Singer

well, no commandline-always for me. I just made a script that runs everything for me with the right audio and all. No stutters, no nothing like that. The basic HDAudio on Linux is far better than VMWare, it has almost zero lag for me.
```exec "$QEMU_BIN" \
-enable-kvm \
-machine q35,accel=kvm \
-cpu host -smp "$VCPUS" -m "$RAM_MB" \
-rtc base=localtime \
-display gtk \
"${AUDIO_ARGS[@]}" \
-netdev user,id=n0 -device e1000,netdev=n0 \
-device ich9-usb-ehci1,id=usb \
-device ich9-usb-uhci1,masterbus=usb.0,firstport=0,multifunction=on \
-device ich9-usb-uhci2,masterbus=usb.0,firstport=2 \
-device ich9-usb-uhci3,masterbus=usb.0,firstport=4 \
-drive if=none,id=d0,file="$DISK",format=vmdk \
-device ahci,id=ahci0 \
-device ide-hd,drive=d0,bus=ahci0.0,bootindex=0``` - it sets up things if you place it in as a script with your variables in the $ signs, like ram, drive, ETC. Virt-manager works too quite well, if you're not like me and don't have it mounted on an NTFS drive and on your own Linux file-system.
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Tamas G

Seriously, I can't thank you enough, this is amazingly simple and I appreciate it. The only bit I don't understand is the line "${AUDIO_ARGS[@]}" \ What arguments are supposed to be here? Again, thanks very much, I really appreciate it. And one more thing, if I may raise it. How do I pass USB stuff through like a braille display or BT adapter or even a sound card?
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Tech Singer

@techsinger @PhilSalkie ah yeah, in my script I set these between Pulse or Pipewire. I tried Alsa first, but should have thought better because Alsa is a one-program kind of beast, so since Orca was talking it failed to spin up the Audio within Qemu. For that section I list these as run commands:
"AUDIO_ARGS=()
case "$AUDIO_BACKEND" in
pa|pulse|pulseaudio)
AUDIO_ARGS+=( -audiodev pa,id=pa0 )
AUDIO_ARGS+=( -device ich9-intel-hda -device hda-duplex,audiodev=pa0 )
;;
pipewire)
AUDIO_ARGS+=( -audiodev pipewire,id=pw0 )
AUDIO_ARGS+=( -device ich9-intel-hda -device hda-duplex,audiodev=pw0 )
;;
*)
echo "AUDIO_BACKEND must be 'pa' or 'pipewire'"; exit 1;;
esac"
So it just changes that bit depending on how you pass it.
in reply to Tech Singer

so most Linux distros have switched to Pipewire by now, and After Pipewire 1.3 things did get a lot more stable on it, so now I have a lot less to hate Pipewire on for. There's the Pipewire-pulse.sh script Stormux wrote on his Github that adds a pulse socket for Pipewire as system, that way system apps can still talk to your own user's Pipewire, and that alone fixes 90% of issues I've seen with audio not passing on through to it.
Pipewire also usually installs a pipewire-pulse shim, which gives you commands like paplay and the other pulse-familiarities apps know.
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Tamas G

@PhilSalkie Lovely. Sorry to repeat myself, you can ignore this or answer as you wish, of course, I just wanted to be sure this question hadn't gotten lost. How do I pass USB devices to the VM, if that's possible? I see that the controlers are set up in the script, but let's say I had a braille display or even an ordinary USB sound card. How do I get the VM to see that rather than the physical machine seeing and using it?
in reply to Tech Singer

@techsinger @PhilSalkie yeah, it can. If you run it from within Mate Qemu does pop up a graphical window where you can press alt+M (when not key-locked with ctrl+G) to open the machine menu and connect it from there. The other option is to manually use lsusb to list and find its ID, ("Bus 001 Device 005: ID 1234:abcd VendorName DeviceName") and then you pass it in that super long command up-front. " -device usb-host,vendorid="${vv}",productid="${pp}" )" for each device you do, you can attach it that way.
in reply to Tech Singer

well well, I made the plunge and am running Linux as primary. Using Firefox and browsing from there whilst posting on Mastodon from Windows 7 and playing audio games, mostly only that. I must say, virt-manager is good but assigning your own "grab input" key is hard as heck - I had to do killall orca from the alt+f2 run dialog, then press the spacebar on the "OK button" within its preferences to get it to assign a key. Wow. It does allow for pass-through of USB, you can even set it so connecting one automatically transfers it to the guest, but the downside is grab key setting is hard. On Qemu-img it's alt+Control+G normally, but if you forget that it's grabbed, you can alt+f4 your entire VM out of existance in a flash too. Virt-manager remotely connects to it as a console so that can be detached separate of your VM running. Strange. They both have ups and downs.
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Tech Singer

@techsinger @PhilSalkie hmm. supposedly it's just control+alt keys together, but that didn't work for me at the time which is why I had reset it to begin with. There's a preferences not within the console for the virtual machine but within the edit menu at the point of locating the virtual machine in the list of machines, it's weird yes I know but a machine can run in the background whilst its window is not open so you don't accidentally close it with alt+f4 even if input isn't grabbed. With qemu it's just gone with alt+f4 and if you forgot where you were, that is if you've grabbed it or not and it was ungrabbed, poof goes your VM for good. Virt Manager doesn't suffer from this but still, neither solution is perfect or great, Virt Manager has its own demons to grapple with, sigh, such is the Linux world.

Last night, in response to the Israeli military attacking the Sumud flotilla attempting to deliver aid to starving people in besieged Gaza, 10,000 protesters marched through the streets of Rome.

Another solidarity flotilla is on the way to Gaza right now, defying the blockade.

A general strike will take place in Italy tomorrow in solidarity with the people of Gaza.

Stop the genocide. Abolish the fascist ethnostate that is perpetrating it. Free Palestine.

in reply to Winter blue tardis

@tardis oh yes filters! True true. Tuba has those, which is super nice to see. But then again it's getting built as a Mastodon client for everyone. So maybe I'll stick with it but might need to miss notifications for new things when they come in since it has no sound. I'm considering just running a second watcher that grabs just the stream to play a sound for it, which is the great thing about Linux, you can make your life as complicated or easy as you'd like to, ha.

New research from AWU/CWU/Techquity on AI data workers in North America. “[L]ow paid people who are not even treated as humans [are] out there making the 1 billion dollar, trillion dollar AI systems that are supposed to lead our entire society and civilization into the future,” says one.

cwa-union.org/ghost-workers-ai…

#AI #labor

#labor #AI

Nejzajímavější mi přijde inventura hlasování, protože je o reálných hlasováních, a ne o proklamacích do budoucna, které mohou, ale nemusí být naplněny. #volby2025

(Mimochodem je docela zajímavé, jak se celkové výsledky za stranu nemusí překrývat s výsledky za konkrétní poslance.)

volebnikalkulacka.cz

This entry was edited (1 week ago)

People ...

1. Do not use one of those Site Builders to build your site. They are Ala Carte and by the time you're done you're paying more than you would for my services (and I'm bloody expensive). Get a real web person (not me) to do your site, and an actual Internet Engineer to do your business infrastructure like DNS and EMail (that's me).

2. I'm specifically looking at Wix, I've been doing BIND for some 30+ years, this "DNS" is a pile of flaming dog shit.

3, Don't listen to "your friend".

in reply to cpm

@cpm Pifft, < I > can't do IPv6 math in my head.

We don't need to know Everything, just need to know where to look it up. And I have some of the important things bound in (*gasp*) Dead Tree if I really need it.

"I have been around long enough that I've memorized The Common FuckUps and Catastrophies and many of the more obscure." ... everything else is in the docs, StackExchange, or I actually have to work for a living amd figure it out myself.

@cpm