Royal Kludge may not be the fanciest, best, or most Linux-compatible brand of keyboard, but I feel like something with "Kludge" in the name is totally on brand for me.

RE: https://mas.to/@OrionKidder/116706187007919449

The only solution to this #enshittified #wifi was to log in using vanilla #Firefox. Neither #Waterfox nor #ZenBrowser are insecure enough to allow me onto this #HotelWifi.

This does not speak well about Firefox.

#computers #hack #workaround #kludge #Linux

RE: https://mas.to/@OrionKidder/116706193743600090

Public service announcement: THIS DOES NOT WORK!

My computer was drawing on the cellular data plan. Somehow, the enshittified wifi refused the hotspot tether.

#wifi #HotelWifi #computers #iphone #hack #workaround #kludge #Linux

So I'm a hotel with #enshittified wifi. My Linux laptop can't connect to it bc my browsers are like, "Hell no, we're not touching that corporate surveillance crap." So...

#Linux #phone #wifi #hack #workaround #computers #kludge

#systemd #linux #kludge
I have no one else who will find this interesting so might as well yell it out into the ether.

You can create a hacky mutex in systemd to prevent units from starting if there is an extant unit that "holds" the mutex.

Why would you do this? Well, I needed to run a process in a very specific network namespace and running it via a container within that context was a royal pain.

I got a python service running which would receive request via websocket or HTTP and spawn a systemd transient unit which would survive the python service dying or being restarted. Awesome!

Then a few months later, I get the idea of a web UI and realize that dbus is slow if you are trying to poke it for properties for every unit in the `foo@*.service` glob-space.

I really only needed a start timestamp from systemd and the python service could remain gloriously stateless. Lets say that at this point, it was less about what's good and more about getting it to work as I wanted it. I wanted to be able to just list all the systemd units and derive the frontend from that.

So I ended up configuring the systemd transient unit to be named `foo@$id-$startTime.service` and I set two properties, `Type=exec` and `BusName=$id`.

Now systemd supports notification via dbus as an exec type, it also can grab the dbus bus interface name for a service and hold it so no one else can grab it. But if you just use `BusName=` then systemd will wait for the unit until it actually notifies dbus. Which cool, but I'm running ffmpeg!

Then I just tried `Type=exec` and `BusName=$id` and it worked! I could stick both $id and $startTime into the unit name *and* have any subsequent units fail to launch because they couldn't grab the dbus bus interface name (because the first one grabbed it).

What's super nice is that since the units transient, when it finishes or fails, it'll be GC'd and the BusName will be freed.

Thank you for coming to my talk. 😅

Oh how loudly we elevate the virtues of elegance and simplicity
in deafening tomes and curricula of art and architecture!
Nature skipped those lessons,
fudged all designs,
from your million base pairs of apparently unused DNA
to your messy, sludgy internals -
we are kludges, hacks, permanently on evolution’s drawing board..

Maybe this is exactly why humanity
desires simplicity
so much?

#kludge #MastoPrompt