mcovey

I figured Aleppo, Syria

Any advice on how to get rid of feral honeybees? I had hundreds of them last year, attracted to my hummingbird feeders. I took those away and the bees stuck around waiting for them to reappear. They're completely docile, but also non-native, and the huge number of them makes them a pest.

They've even been around a bit this winter taking pieces of cracked corn that I put out for wild turkeys.

My neighbor cut down and chipped a large area of mostly dead trees. Maybe his original intent was to clear the area and expand his back yard but it's been 2 years and it's still just a bunch of ugly stumps and brush. I have a lot of woodpeckers around and it makes me sad that they lost a bunch of homes - woodpeckers primarily nest in dead/dying trees.

It's not a very big thing nor related to technology, but ravens are making a comeback here in New England. Very interesting birds. I have a couple with 2 young that still beg for food and at this point they are reluctant to feed them and instead peck them in the face and throw food at them - they clearly want them to start being independent. I leave them cut up pieces of suet and they stop by promptly about 45 minutes after daybreak, often all 4 of them together.

I had never seen (noticed) a raven before until this pair showed up in late 2021.

It's still going to be accelerating and decelerating frequently so there's a lot you couldn't do, or would just be unpleasant to do while it's moving. I'm imagining taking a shower and it comes to a sudden stop for a train crossing. Better have a grab bar so you don't fall out!

One suggestion, set the overflow to "scroll" so the scrollbar is always visible. When I open a section it appears, adding like 10px on the right and all the content moves left.

Mainly for the negative ones, to see if there are many similar complaints indicating something is wrong with the product.

I've left bad reviews on manufacturer websites and often times they just never publish them so I don't really trust reviews anywhere more or less than Amazon reviews.

today: the Amazon shopping experience is so filled with bullshit that it’s actually easier to buy from the producer’s website and pay shipping

This is where I'm at. I only order products from Amazon that are sold by Amazon. Pretty much any legit third party seller will have their own website I can order from.

I still read reviews on Amazon before ordering elsewhere, although they've banned me from leaving reviews and wiped all my past ones for no discernible reason. I guess I left a review on some product that had a lot of fake reviews and I got caught in the crossfire.

I almost always filter for items shipped from and sold by Amazon. The only times I buy from third-party sellers are when the seller is clearly the manufacturer or a large distributor.

I had one go off this morning. Second battery for my vacuum cleaner. Hooray.

Opera (with the Presto engine) used to do this really well.

I think it's already too late. Removal of unpopular / non-mainstream opinions from large social media sites is now the norm and is celebrated (by those who didn't get silenced).

About 10 years here and hundreds of different addresses given out. I get surprisingly little spam. Most spam I get comes to addresses that were leaked in data breaches, or email to my old gmail address which is forwarded. I'd say maybe 5 of them have ever started getting spammed.

Huh, I haven't had any problems using tractorsupply@mydomain.com

I've had a few people ask "That's your email?" and just briefly explained that I own the domain and get all email sent to it.

I have been using hxselect from the html-xml-utils package to do this for many, many years.

It doesn't handle malformed HTML that well but can be coaxed into working about 90% of the time, with the help of the other included package hxclean or something like html-tidy.

There is "checkinstall" that creates an apt package by watching changes during a "make install" step. So you can install many programs that don't provide .deb packages or only provide source code that way.

https://wiki.debian.org/CheckInstall

Check out Neat URL - it's more basic, uses a comma-separated list of rules, and comes with some hard-coded presets you can override. I maintain my list in a text file and just update that and copy/paste in when I want to create one.

Of the defaults, I only override "cid, mbid" as blocking those on every site has ended up breaking some.

https://github.com/Smile4ever/Neat-URL

There are some userspace scripts that will dry-run updates and email you the results. Generally it's just new config files that differ from your current versions, usually it's just whitespace differences or settings that have changed manually.

https://github.com/tavinus/opkg-upgrade is one.

As it notes, the reasons you don't want updates on auto-pilot are those config differences, and limited space available on routers.

I de-googled several years ago, when they dropped Google Reader. It wasn't about privacy, or the threat of my account being locked. It was just because they killed off a product I loved and depended on. I thought Gmail could be killed off soon too.

I still have my Google account, but when I do a "takeout" there is almost nothing there.

I think they could, and it would be a good idea too. Browsers could also possibly ignore server-sent cache directives for scripts with SRI hashes, or at least consider them immutable by default, since there is virtually no possibility of any script with the same hash referring to a different file.

Linux packaging certainly is a mess.

I have 50+ "update-foo" scripts for programs that want me to use yet another package manager. Everything that doesn't use apt is in there, so many of them just run "pip install foo" or "npm install foo", at least this way I don't have to remember which program uses which package manager.

I used to be very adamant that if something did not have an apt repository then I wouldn't use it, but that's become hard to do. Even the piece of software I use the most, my browser, is not managed by apt. Firefox (developer edition) lives in ~/.local/lib and updates itself.

This is not a new problem. You should see my home folder. I hardly ever look at it, I moved into ~/Downloads since at least I can keep that tidy myself.

The more employers willing to hire remote workers, the less this argument works.

Still, I already make 1/2 as much as I could make living in Boston, living 90 miles north of it. That is "local market" salary though for a job that is ostensibly on-site (partial remote / now fully remote due to COVID).

Comment sections always have some garbage in them. At least there's a report button that does something.

I visit a number of conservative and libertarian discussion forums and the "blame the jews" conspiracy has completely lost its steam. Don't get me wrong I can see how it's offensive and unwelcoming to jewish people but I just don't see the same level of commitment to the idea that some secret cabal of jews run the world or run America as I used to, just random remarks.

On the other hand it could be these are the same people who were previously writing theses on the matter and they've actually been effectively silenced and only drop hints at the idea anymore.

I love(d) the idea of Keybase but I always had in the back of my mind that it was too good to be true. I'm guessing this will be the end as they announce in a few months that Keybase is being retired as it's "best security features" have been integrated into Zoom. Seems to happen to just about every good product that isn't fervently open-source.

For anyone running OpenWRT, you can install the adblock package to accomplish roughly the same thing as Pi-hole does. I don't believe it supports some advanced features like DoH/DoT or DNS resolution (e.g. a1b2c3.example.com -> ad-server-that-should-be-blocked.com), but it does the basics - custom host file sources, additional blacklist rules, whitelisting, and quick enable/disable for troubleshooting.

It also has an option to force all DNS traffic (port 53, so again it won't catch DoH/DoT) to go through the router. Occasionally I forget I've done this and tried `dig foo.bar @1.1.1.1` and gotten confused until I remember that my router is forcing that DNS lookup to go through it first, and then through the router's configured DNS resolver.

As a regular linux user, no, don't worry about whether you're using wayland or xorg, just use whatever comes with your distro. Let the maintainers worry about those things and just be a user.

I suspect you're right, that's a shame, I've used Credit Karma tax 2 years now, it's been very easy because they haven't over-complicated the UI, it's mostly just a simpler, gently guided interface to enter the values you see on your tax forms.

I'm sure there will continue to be plenty of free ways to file my taxes - I usually owe a little bit every year so I'm not very keen on paying even more to file - but the sites I used before Credit Karma were all just more complicated and took longer to file.

One thing that's usually hard to find is the form to enter my mortgage credit certificate. Since it's not the most common thing (a program for first-time homebuyers / buyers in targeted areas administered on a state level) I've usually had to go through some wizard and answer the questions just right (e.g. lie and say I bought a house within the past year) to get it to offer me that form, rather than just picking it from a long list of options.

There are only a few niche phones on the market in the US right now that can be used with one hand. I know because I insist upon it and haven't been able to buy a new phone (I also insist upon being able to run a fully de-googled LineageOS or similar ROM). So I use a Motorola Moto E 2015 model and will continue to indefinitely, until there is a phone that fits my required specifications.

There are a few small phones available, but most of them are too small like the Palm phone or Unihertz Atom. There's nothing that's just normal with a 4" - 4.5" screen.

I noticed lately google is starting to understand symbols in certain contexts. Searching "php =>" actually does provide relevant results.