Linux nerd and consultant. Sci-fi, comedy, and podcast author. Former Katsucon president, former roller derby bouncer. http://punkwalrus.net/

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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • When I was in theater camp as a pre-teen, one of our actors was a very enthusiastic foot guy. I had heard of foot fetishes, but never understood them. But this guy was like an overexcited fan boy of feet. My curiosity triggered this guy into a huge brain dump, and one of the things he went on about about how feet were the “true expression of a person’s feelings.” Feet turned towards you? They like you. One foot pointed away? They don’t. He then showed me how girls’ feet would match their mood, so no matter what parts they were rehearsing, he could tell their underlying mood: anxiety, sadness, anger, happiness, etc… I have no idea if he was right, but that was my first exposure to another person’s fetish. I could only understand it abstractly, but I found it fascinating.






  • These are two types of cartoon sounds when a character snores.

    The “Inside you there are two wolves” is the name of a proverb which began being parodied towards the end of 2018 and through the beginning of 2019. In the original proverb, a grandfather says there are two wolves fighting inside him, an evil one and a good one. His grandson asks, “who will win?” The grandfather replies, “The one you feed.” In parodies, the story is often simplified to “There are two wolves inside you. One is X. The other is X. You are X.” The proverb’s actual origins are murky. It has been attributed to Christian pastor Billy Graham in 1978, as well as the Cherokee Native American tribe.



  • Basic setup for me is scripted on a new system. In regards to ssh, I make sure:

    • Root account is disabled, sudo only
    • ssh only by keys
    • sshd blocks all users but a few, via AllowUsers
    • All ‘default usernames’ are removed, like ec2-user or ubuntu for AWS ec2 systems
    • The default ssh port moved if ssh has to be exposed to the Internet. No, this doesn’t make it “more secure” but damn, it reduces the script denials in my system logs, fight me.
    • Services are only allowed connections by an allow list of IPs or subnets. Internal, when possible.

    My systems are not “unhackable” but not low-hanging fruit, either. I assume everything I have out there can be hacked by someone SUPER determined, and have a vector of protection to mitigate backwash in case they gain full access.


  • I also wonder what the trade value of gold might have been in that universe? For all we know, it might be an either/or situation. Like “Well, I could have my favorite takeout every Friday for a year, OR the newest smartphone.” Both are tempting but for different reasons. Like, “I could buy a lot of turnips, potatoes, and beer with one golden smurf and not have to worry every month if I have enough food, but then they taste REALLY good on their own.” Gargamel struck me as someone who didn’t have a lot of money, so having been poor myself, I understand this weird conundrum. Also, having a golden smurf to trade might bring unwanted attention from locals would who assume he has LOTS of them, and rob his home looking for them.



  • There’s also an “acceptable risk” that companies will take. Not sure about food service, but I have been in meetings where 5% of customers fucked over is considered acceptable, with the dollar figures that follow. They probably take into account the total number of lawsuits they get for poisoning people, and the cost of the impact to the bottom line via lawsuits and bad marketing versus actually fixing the issue.

    For example, if 10,000 people get food poisoning a year from iced tea, probably only a small percentage of those people will trace it back to McDonald’s iced tea WITH tangible proof. It might be easier to pay for those lawsuits than actually fixing the issue. They’ll pass some kind of memo out, showing they addressed the issue, and then blame the store management. Nothing really changes.


  • I have been using Kubuntu as a daily driver for almost 10 year now, and never regretted it. I had one Windows box for things like special cases (like dumb website forms that won’t let me use Linux), Pearson Vue exams, and edge cases related to work, but it’s on standby as a secondary system I RDP into. I am not a gamer, so I didn’t need it for that. I saved so much money not having to buy hardware in the last decade or so.

    Sadly, Windows 11 won’t work on anything I have (TPM issues, too old), so I recently got a cheap Windows 11 laptop before the tariffs hit and I pay more for dumb Windows-only reasons.

    Linux all the way, man. Gave me a career, a life, and my hardware back.


  • Punkie@lemmy.worldtoShowerthoughts@lemmy.worldqqqqqq
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    10 months ago

    One of my best friends lost her place of living when her boyfriend of 4 years said the relationship had actually ended in his head 2 years previously, but he needed the rent. But then he found a new girlfriend to grift from, “opened the relationship,” and they edged my friend out. I am still mad they did that to her; she was so heartbroken and damaged from that.



  • Cats can pant, I have seen it happen in times of extreme stress, and is often a bad sign. Like dogs, cats may pant if they are anxious or overheated. Strenuous exercise may be another reason, especially after a huge fight. Once your cat has had a chance to rest, calm down and cool down, this sort of painting should subside. However, even this type of panting is much more rarely seen in cats than in dogs. So, if you’re not 100% positive about why your cat is panting, it’s best to bring her to the vet.

    A side note, however, I misread this as “since cat’s don’t like pants like dogs,” and wanted to point out that dogs also do not like to wear pants, before my anti-dyslexia medicine kicked in.




  • Being poor. In college in the 90s, my lead sysadmin couldn’t afford Minix for this system we had, so we tried to compile Linux on it. Three days later, we still failed, and gave up, but this was kernel 0.93 or something, so it had a ways to go. But I learned so much from that experience without paying for a university course or something.

    Years later, I bought a copy of Red Hat 6 at a Costco. Windows 95/98 was big, I didn’t know how to pirate it, so I went back to Linux and it worked great on my “franken-puters” cobbled together from spare parts dumpster diving. Steep learning curve back then, though. Then I brought it to my workplace, went from UNIX admin to Linux admin, and soon I preferred it to Windows. Been my daily driver for decades, now.

    Am I an evangel? A little, but I find that “right tool for right job” is a better approach. Linux is great for everything, BUT a comprehensive system like MS Office AND Active Directory simply does not exist in FOSS space yet; everything is cobbled together and a kludge still trying to catch up.

    Obsessed? Kinda. I just assembled some ansible scripts to roll my own distro. Why? To see if I could.