Monthly Archives: October 2022

Adobe replacing old Pantone spot colors with black when you load files using them

Posted on 2022-10-28 by pappp

Source: Boing Boing

Article note: Layers of horseshit. Asserting property rights on a color horseshit. Software as a Service horseshit.

Welcome to intellectual property hell, designers! This one's great because you never saw it coming: Adobe removing certain Pantone spot colors should you try to open PSD files containing them. Now you can see nothing at all, because it replaces them with black. — Read the rest

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Linux 6.1 on NanoPi R4S – On fixing SD-card support, Heisenbugs and Rabbit Holes

Posted on 2022-10-28 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It's an excellent tale of a bug hunt. I spent some time staring into device trees and specifically weird SD/MMC behavior at the U-Boot to Linux hand-off a few months ago on some Zynq boards... this totally tracks, though I haven't cracked the behavior I was seeing. In my case, the boards in question have sequenced regulators for 3v3, 1v9, 1v8, and 1v5 and some examples have other issues with the power sequence, so it's a great angle to look at. I should see if the behaviors are related.
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The Beautiful Machine (2020)

Posted on 2022-10-28 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I remember when this went around shortly after being posted, but man. That is a beautiful machine, and exactly in the vein of the aspirational designs of the 80s - it looks like something FrogDesign would have pitched before being rejected or drastically cheapened/practical-ized before it hit the market. It's of course expensive ($275 + 136 for the bespoke PSU + 33 for the GPU cooler = ~$450 case and cooler) - but not as obscene as I expected at first glance. The owner's gorgeous split ergo keyboard (ErgoDox?) setup is pretty majestic and cyberpunk too.
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Brave New Trusted Boot World

Posted on 2022-10-26 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Ugh, this looks nightmarish. Single-provider from the trust root through all the software components. The UKI blob of "all your boot stuff" isn't the worst idea, though if I'm reading correctly, it more or less means you _have_ to bundle all your modules and device tree and such in the image stored on the EFI partition, which causes it's own collection of problems related to size and inflexibility... and the whole blob has to be built and signed upstream unless you do the hostile blood-ritual to enroll your own keys and possibly brick your machine.
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Lash#Cat9: A radical new Linux UI for keyboard warriors

Posted on 2022-10-25 by pappp

Source: The Register

Article note: Björn Ståhl's stack (Arcan/Durden/and now this Lash#Cat9 project) is such an interesting "alternate universe" system. Lot of good out-of-the-mainstream ideas in there.

Arcan sub-project reinvents command lines and GUIs at once

Lash#Cat9 is a new type of typing-driven UI, which moves beyond terminal emulators. Cat9's power comes from its close interaction with its display server, Arcan. This picks up some of the ideas from X11 and Wayland then goes much further.…

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Lawsuit filed against rent-setting software RealPage

Posted on 2022-10-24 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Product whose sole feature is allowing rent-seekers to collude through a intermediary sued for enabling collusion. Medical billing and HR departments seen sweating. This is what "Data Driven laissez faire capitalism" actually means, technocrat fuckwits.
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I help seniors with technology issues. A regular came in with a Lenovo laptop

Posted on 2022-10-24 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: That kind of intrusive crapware is the norm on smartphones - which are the dominant species of consumer computer - and has been trying to take root in general-purpose computers that still resemble personal computers since the 90s. I remember in the 2000s the standard advice of "Do a fresh install on any new computer, because trying to safely remove the crapware is more difficult." It's still shocking that we tolerate it as a soceity to such a degree.
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Wolfgang Denk, creator of the U-Boot bootloader, has died

Posted on 2022-10-23 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: U-Boot is one of those pieces of tooling that sits mostly-invisibly underneath a huge fraction of devices, and has done so going back decades. Respect.
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It was all downhill after the Cuecat

Posted on 2022-10-20 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It's a pretty good take, though my favorite two bits are attributed to others;"There’s no longer anything being promised to us by tech companies that we actually need or asked for. Just more monitoring, more nudging, more draining of our data, our time, our joy." (Shannon Vallor) and the turn of phrase "Felony Contempt of Business Model" (Jay Freeman).
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IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

Posted on 2022-10-18 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: A company so famous for their obnoxious licensing practices and inflated prices that cracking it using it is a routine joke, who have sprung significant competition in the last few years (at least Ghidra and the whole radare family on the FOSS side, Hopper and Binary Ninja on the commercial side). I'm not sure what an investment company hopes to get from it, it seems likely maybe the last of the original team is just cashing in on their way out.
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