Chris Siebenmann
@cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
That cks. Overcommitted sysadmin, photographer, bicyclist, and other multitudes. I write a lot of words for a programmer. he/him/they/them 🇨🇦
🌉 bridged from ⁂ https://mastodon.social/@cks, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact
🌉 bridged from ⁂ https://mastodon.social/@cks, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact
Pinned
A PS about my Fediverse account: I don't normally do this much of it, but the picture boosting will continue until morale improves.
It's perpetually funny to me (in a bleak way) that almost everyone in Microsoft Teams "meetings" that I wind up attending has their video off, their mic muted, and talks purely through the chat window (me included). It's far easier. And faster, we've had entire conversations in text before the […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
January 13, 2026 at 10:13 PM
It's perpetually funny to me (in a bleak way) that almost everyone in Microsoft Teams "meetings" that I wind up attending has their video off, their mic muted, and talks purely through the chat window (me included). It's far easier. And faster, we've had entire conversations in text before the […]
That certainly was a yak-shaving adventure into actually reading the documentation instead of just copying working examples from it. I wound up reading the Exim source code because the documentation did not appear to match reality.
(It's always possible that I'm mis-reading the documentation […]
(It's always possible that I'm mis-reading the documentation […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
January 13, 2026 at 3:32 PM
That certainly was a yak-shaving adventure into actually reading the documentation instead of just copying working examples from it. I wound up reading the Exim source code because the documentation did not appear to match reality.
(It's always possible that I'm mis-reading the documentation […]
(It's always possible that I'm mis-reading the documentation […]
Reposted by Chris Siebenmann
For anyone who's looking for some good reading material in ebook form, the latest Humble Bundle of fantasy & science fiction (& some horror) is just astonishingly good value - an incredible selection.
It's a collection of 65 books by women authors, and there are an almost unbelievable number of […]
It's a collection of 65 books by women authors, and there are an almost unbelievable number of […]
Original post on wandering.shop
wandering.shop
January 12, 2026 at 11:19 PM
For anyone who's looking for some good reading material in ebook form, the latest Humble Bundle of fantasy & science fiction (& some horror) is just astonishingly good value - an incredible selection.
It's a collection of 65 books by women authors, and there are an almost unbelievable number of […]
It's a collection of 65 books by women authors, and there are an almost unbelievable number of […]
While I like this general description of "Ptolemaic code"¹ and understand the appeal, I can't read it without immediately flashing to the excellent series "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown", which covers how the shift from heliocentrism to geocentrism was nowhere near as neat and simple as the […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
January 13, 2026 at 12:31 AM
While I like this general description of "Ptolemaic code"¹ and understand the appeal, I can't read it without immediately flashing to the excellent series "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown", which covers how the shift from heliocentrism to geocentrism was nowhere near as neat and simple as the […]
Now this is what you could call 'hecking windy': https://masto.bike/@nabili/115876417418588123
(See also the first photo in https://masto.bike/@nabili/115876402559304217 where someone is literally leaning into the wind.)
(See also the first photo in https://masto.bike/@nabili/115876402559304217 where someone is literally leaning into the wind.)
Nabil (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 video On sort voir le coucher de soleil, avec un vent qui souffle particulièrement fort #argentine #rafales
masto.bike
January 12, 2026 at 4:10 PM
Now this is what you could call 'hecking windy': https://masto.bike/@nabili/115876417418588123
(See also the first photo in https://masto.bike/@nabili/115876402559304217 where someone is literally leaning into the wind.)
(See also the first photo in https://masto.bike/@nabili/115876402559304217 where someone is literally leaning into the wind.)
Reposted by Chris Siebenmann
January 11, 2026 at 12:53 PM
Reposted by Chris Siebenmann
#forestfriday is here! So, one of my favourites (even included it in my calendar) - Fledgling, named due to the cute size of this mossy stump that appears to be protected by the large Vine Maple.
What a gift to have stunning places like this to explore […]
[Original post on mastodon.social]
What a gift to have stunning places like this to explore […]
[Original post on mastodon.social]
January 9, 2026 at 9:49 PM
#forestfriday is here! So, one of my favourites (even included it in my calendar) - Fledgling, named due to the cute size of this mossy stump that appears to be protected by the large Vine Maple.
What a gift to have stunning places like this to explore […]
[Original post on mastodon.social]
What a gift to have stunning places like this to explore […]
[Original post on mastodon.social]
Today was the first bike commute of the year, a leisurely one on a grey day (where by 'leisurely' I mean that I mostly stayed under 20 km/h). I almost made it the first bike commute of the year in sandals, but I decided to save that for tomorrow, when it will be up to 10C instead of this […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
January 8, 2026 at 4:32 PM
Today was the first bike commute of the year, a leisurely one on a grey day (where by 'leisurely' I mean that I mostly stayed under 20 km/h). I almost made it the first bike commute of the year in sandals, but I decided to save that for tomorrow, when it will be up to 10C instead of this […]
Wow, people do some extremely slow downloads from work's main web server. We roll logs at midnight and Apache wrote the last log record to the old file at 03:58 (for a request that had started at 23:27).
(For our sins we've become a load-bearing source of ML image training data, for the "CIFAR" […]
(For our sins we've become a load-bearing source of ML image training data, for the "CIFAR" […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
January 7, 2026 at 4:15 AM
Wow, people do some extremely slow downloads from work's main web server. We roll logs at midnight and Apache wrote the last log record to the old file at 03:58 (for a request that had started at 23:27).
(For our sins we've become a load-bearing source of ML image training data, for the "CIFAR" […]
(For our sins we've become a load-bearing source of ML image training data, for the "CIFAR" […]
Would I like to try a split (mechanical) keyboard? Sure, absolutely, everyone says they can be very nice, it would be interesting to find out for myself. Am I interested enough in the idea of split keyboards to actually buy one, sight unseen? Ha ha lol no. My current keyboard isn't perfect but […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
January 6, 2026 at 11:31 PM
Would I like to try a split (mechanical) keyboard? Sure, absolutely, everyone says they can be very nice, it would be interesting to find out for myself. Am I interested enough in the idea of split keyboards to actually buy one, sight unseen? Ha ha lol no. My current keyboard isn't perfect but […]
RE: https://fosstodon.org/@LibreQoS/115848718757642436
Current status: doing extremely "I don't know what I'm really doing, I'm copying from a website¹" things with Linux tc to see if I can improve my home Internet latency under load without doing too much damage to bandwidth or breaking my […]
Current status: doing extremely "I don't know what I'm really doing, I'm copying from a website¹" things with Linux tc to see if I can improve my home Internet latency under load without doing too much damage to bandwidth or breaking my […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
January 6, 2026 at 11:06 PM
RE: https://fosstodon.org/@LibreQoS/115848718757642436
Current status: doing extremely "I don't know what I'm really doing, I'm copying from a website¹" things with Linux tc to see if I can improve my home Internet latency under load without doing too much damage to bandwidth or breaking my […]
Current status: doing extremely "I don't know what I'm really doing, I'm copying from a website¹" things with Linux tc to see if I can improve my home Internet latency under load without doing too much damage to bandwidth or breaking my […]
On the one hand, digital music has been great for the variety of genres and artists that are readily available and making music. On the other hand, digital music enables artist names like "░▒▓█𝔸𝕊𝕍𝕄ℝ█▓▒░"¹. I feel conflicted (and also sad for anyone tracking albums with a limited database schema […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
January 6, 2026 at 2:12 AM
On the one hand, digital music has been great for the variety of genres and artists that are readily available and making music. On the other hand, digital music enables artist names like "░▒▓█𝔸𝕊𝕍𝕄ℝ█▓▒░"¹. I feel conflicted (and also sad for anyone tracking albums with a limited database schema […]
Obvious realization is obvious: since we universally use Let's Encrypt with certbot and follow standard naming, I can just look in /etc/letsencrypt/live to find all live TLS certificates and (a) host name for them, for cross-checking against our monitoring.
January 5, 2026 at 9:47 PM
Obvious realization is obvious: since we universally use Let's Encrypt with certbot and follow standard naming, I can just look in /etc/letsencrypt/live to find all live TLS certificates and (a) host name for them, for cross-checking against our monitoring.
It's a tiny petty thing but I finally looked up how to get Git to check out any branch (including 'main') as of some commit, instead of the current latest commit. git checkout -B <branch> <commit/tag/etc>
Unlike a detached HEAD checkout, this still lets you do 'git pull' or equivalents to later […]
Unlike a detached HEAD checkout, this still lets you do 'git pull' or equivalents to later […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
January 5, 2026 at 7:03 PM
It's a tiny petty thing but I finally looked up how to get Git to check out any branch (including 'main') as of some commit, instead of the current latest commit. git checkout -B <branch> <commit/tag/etc>
Unlike a detached HEAD checkout, this still lets you do 'git pull' or equivalents to later […]
Unlike a detached HEAD checkout, this still lets you do 'git pull' or equivalents to later […]
Reposted by Chris Siebenmann
January 2, 2026 at 5:07 PM
On the positive side, Toronto seems to have escaped freezing rain doom this time around. On the negative side, this snowy blizzard-ish thing. Honestly it feels like we're in late January, not the tail end of December.
December 30, 2025 at 12:58 AM
On the positive side, Toronto seems to have escaped freezing rain doom this time around. On the negative side, this snowy blizzard-ish thing. Honestly it feels like we're in late January, not the tail end of December.
Work is on break right now and I thought I was keeping decent track of what day of the week it was, but then I reached 9pm in my Fediverse timeline and had the puzzled reaction of "why are people doing Monsterdon? Is this a special thing because of NY/holiday timing? It's not ... oh."
December 29, 2025 at 5:29 AM
Work is on break right now and I thought I was keeping decent track of what day of the week it was, but then I reached 9pm in my Fediverse timeline and had the puzzled reaction of "why are people doing Monsterdon? Is this a special thing because of NY/holiday timing? It's not ... oh."
Reposted by Chris Siebenmann
Hi everyone, I wanna tell you about a really cool #trans person I’ve learned about recently - Wendy Carlos. (Thread: 1/3)
Carlos was born in 1939 and is currently 86 years old. She helped develop the first ever commercial #synthesizer, Moog, in 1964. She […]
[Original post on hachyderm.io]
Carlos was born in 1939 and is currently 86 years old. She helped develop the first ever commercial #synthesizer, Moog, in 1964. She […]
[Original post on hachyderm.io]
December 28, 2025 at 5:32 PM
Hi everyone, I wanna tell you about a really cool #trans person I’ve learned about recently - Wendy Carlos. (Thread: 1/3)
Carlos was born in 1939 and is currently 86 years old. She helped develop the first ever commercial #synthesizer, Moog, in 1964. She […]
[Original post on hachyderm.io]
Carlos was born in 1939 and is currently 86 years old. She helped develop the first ever commercial #synthesizer, Moog, in 1964. She […]
[Original post on hachyderm.io]
It's sort of fun to detect the unmistakable fingerprint of a crawler operating through residential IPs. In this case I could detect it because I gave its first request a HTTP bounce-for-validation redirect and it requested the (distinctive) target from a completely different second IP a couple […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
December 29, 2025 at 12:25 AM
It's sort of fun to detect the unmistakable fingerprint of a crawler operating through residential IPs. In this case I could detect it because I gave its first request a HTTP bounce-for-validation redirect and it requested the (distinctive) target from a completely different second IP a couple […]
Reposted by Chris Siebenmann
December 28, 2025 at 5:40 AM
Today's random thought: Your phone, like mine, probably has a "Level" app, which is most naturally used with the phone on its side for better accuracy, including resting on top of (or below) things. Your phone (also like mine) probably has buttons on the sides that make its sides not 100% […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
December 28, 2025 at 11:46 PM
Today's random thought: Your phone, like mine, probably has a "Level" app, which is most naturally used with the phone on its side for better accuracy, including resting on top of (or below) things. Your phone (also like mine) probably has buttons on the sides that make its sides not 100% […]
In a "that figures" thing, my home Linux desktop spontaneously rebooted today (not due to a power outage as far as I can tell). It's been up since November 11th so it was overdue for a kernel update and other things, but still.
But if it's going to spontaneously reboot, doing so on a day when […]
But if it's going to spontaneously reboot, doing so on a day when […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
December 28, 2025 at 8:22 PM
In a "that figures" thing, my home Linux desktop spontaneously rebooted today (not due to a power outage as far as I can tell). It's been up since November 11th so it was overdue for a kernel update and other things, but still.
But if it's going to spontaneously reboot, doing so on a day when […]
But if it's going to spontaneously reboot, doing so on a day when […]
My new phone has FaceID, and this mostly works. But sometimes it's laggy in a really irritating way:
* FaceID doesn't recognize me, so the passcode screen comes up
* I start entering my passcode
* FaceID decides 'oh it's you after all' and unlocks, with the passcode pad disappearing.
* I'm still […]
* FaceID doesn't recognize me, so the passcode screen comes up
* I start entering my passcode
* FaceID decides 'oh it's you after all' and unlocks, with the passcode pad disappearing.
* I'm still […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
December 26, 2025 at 9:31 PM
My new phone has FaceID, and this mostly works. But sometimes it's laggy in a really irritating way:
* FaceID doesn't recognize me, so the passcode screen comes up
* I start entering my passcode
* FaceID decides 'oh it's you after all' and unlocks, with the passcode pad disappearing.
* I'm still […]
* FaceID doesn't recognize me, so the passcode screen comes up
* I start entering my passcode
* FaceID decides 'oh it's you after all' and unlocks, with the passcode pad disappearing.
* I'm still […]
I like programming but I wish it wasn't for this reason status: I added loading my techblog's configuration from a pre-compiled¹ file rather than parsing it from scratch, which significantly speeds up configuration loading because these days I have a ton of CIDR netblocks in it for various […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
December 25, 2025 at 9:27 PM
I like programming but I wish it wasn't for this reason status: I added loading my techblog's configuration from a pre-compiled¹ file rather than parsing it from scratch, which significantly speeds up configuration loading because these days I have a ton of CIDR netblocks in it for various […]
This is my angry face that GNU Emacs appears to have re-indented my entire Python file to a different standard without me noticing and I didn't catch it in time. And also it appears impossible in GNU Emacs to FIX this. I do not want four space no tabs, this is historical code that all files […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
December 24, 2025 at 3:27 AM
This is my angry face that GNU Emacs appears to have re-indented my entire Python file to a different standard without me noticing and I didn't catch it in time. And also it appears impossible in GNU Emacs to FIX this. I do not want four space no tabs, this is historical code that all files […]