I cut my Linux teeth on SuSE Linux, coming from twelve years as a Novell NetWare administrator. YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) under SuSE was great. I particularly liked finding and installing new Perl modules using YaST – it took care of dependencies and everything. Just wonderful.1
Unfortunately, the OpenSuSE project doesn’t like YaST and is working to get rid of it. This is one of the reasons I’ve abandoned OpenSuSE.
I’m currently back on Debian. It is fine, but it is frustrating to add Perl modules. First, I have to find the name of the Perl module I want, because apt wants to know exactly the name of the file to install.
APTUI (a Text User Interface for APT) is everything I liked about yast sw-single
If I type DateTime into APTUI, it shows me all the Perl modules that I might want to use. Although I know it as DateTime::Format::ICal, apt wants to know that the file is named libdatetime-format-ical-perl. aptui simply lets me select the module (with a mouse or keyboard) and hit the i key to launch the install. This is great.
So thank you to the guys over at the Untitled Linux Show. This was a great command-line tip of the week. And gesundheit. 😉
I suppose much of that is Zypper and RPMs, and not so much YaST, but the experience is what I liked. ↩︎
The problem I am trying to solve is that when I am in-person at work, there is a ton of talking going on around me, and I’d like to blot that out with music. But I’m usually wanting a genre of music. Also, I’d like to choose the option for the player to randomly pick which song to play and then work through the entire list.
I have my own Nextcloud server on the public Internet, and I can log in on my cell phone and go to the Music app page (or now the Audio Player app page) and play the music via Bluetooth to my headphones. This lets me not bother anyone, I’m blotting out the stuff I don’t care about, like baseball, how drunk my cubicle neighbor got with his friends over the weekend, etc.
I’d previously used Kid3 to change genres on files, but that was mostly a manual process. Purchasing MP3 files from Amazon is still something I do, but I don’t really want to have to then manually mess with every file. So I looked at MusicBrainz Picard. Actually, I’d heard about it from the Untitled Linux Show over on the TWiT.tv network.
At first, it did exactly what I wanted: replace all the tagging I’d done with whatever was in their database. That was fine. I went from probably 15 to 20 genres to 123, but that was to be expected. FWIW:
exiftool -p '$genre' -q . | sort -u | wc -l
One of the things that looks good in Picard is the plugin or scripting features. This looks promising. So I tried that, but… ooof.
Part of the problem is definitely my own fault: I’d like to have a song show up in multiple categories, and I’d like to use the genres tag, and I’d like to use the Nextcloud web page for playing. So this is my fault for wanting too much.
It appears that the multiple genre tags are not something the Nextcloud Music app can handle. Perplexity suggested I try the Nextcloud Audio Player app, but it didn’t appear to be any better. It appears that the Nextcloud apps don’t know how to do multiple genres, but I didn’t know that going in.
Back to MusicBrainz Picard: I had successfully gotten the genre tag of each file set to their Internet database default. Now to recategorize things. For example, the B-52’s Love Shack shows up as Alternative Rock, and I’d like to have it show up under both Rock and Fun.
On the one hand, it appears that Picard was able to mess with the genre tag and perhaps be able to add multiples. I couldn’t tell, though, because the Nextcloud apps did not play nice with that file after I’d touched it with Picard. It is entirely likely that I did something wrong with scripting.
But what was the real problem? Resetting back to normal. Thankfully, I’d only touched the one file. Wow, Picard was not willing to undo the tag update I’d told it to do.
I tried all the things I’d done during the first run, to reset the tags to only what the MusicBrainz database out on the Internet has. Picard would not let go. Ultimately, I had to exit Picard, crank up Kid3, delete the genre tag entirely, then crank up Picard and refresh from the Internet. Thank goodness I’d only messed with the one file.
Ultimately, I’ll go back to creating playlist files, either .3mu or .m3u8 files. These are a pain in the ass to deal with in Nextcloud, however. Every time I reset the music collection and rescan my files, it deletes the playlists from its database. Loading them from disk is a single-playlist-file-at-a-time operation. This may be heresy to say, but for this, I am more capable on Windows than on Linux, because I have WinBatch available: I’d be able to script driving the mouse and keystrokes to load the files each time.
I do already have my playlists down to about eight categories, which isn’t too bad. But loading the .m3u8 files into Nextcloud is a poor experience: it wants the name of the playlist before I can import the file, and then if I want to save the changes, it may create a new, different file name on export. I’m much happier with MPD (Music Player Demon) simply reading .m3u files. My whole-house audio is great. But that doesn’t help me with needing Nextcloud when I’m in-person in the office at work.
I’d signed up for the service, paying $20 per month. I understand that running this stuff costs money, so sure, I’ll buy a subscription. And some of the Perl programming I was doing, when I asked Perplexity.ai to help, it was excellent.
But recently, the stuff I want, they are putting behind a new tier called “Computer” for $200 per month.
I feel betrayed.
Yes, I would like “Ready-to-paste Picard script for true multi-genre tags – tested on mixed genre tracks”. But I don’t have $200 per month, and never will.
I asked Perplexity.ai if I could turn off the prompting to use “Computer” and of course the answer is no.
It is still useful, of course. What these programs can do, using statistics of word association, is spectacular. But, there’s no Intelligence in Large Language Models (LLMs) yet. If I were going to whine about work, I’d tell how MS Copilot literally wasted 6 hours of my 8-hour day yesterday. It is amazingly bad at generating PowerShell (and if any company should have PowerShell expertise, it should be Microsoft). After getting past all the syntax errors, the script finally worked, except it searched a mailbox and matched nothing. Turns out Copilot hallucinated a function for matching Sent Items. Gah! I am so ready to be retired from this hell.
Anyway, back to Perplexity.ai – the bait-and-switch of getting me to sign up and then putting the good stuff behind a bigger paywall is… well, it doesn’t feel good, man.
Today would be a good day to do a quarterly inventory.
How is your personal life going?
How is your work life going?
How is your Volunteer Service life going?
Future Me
Personal Life
The search for the best Linux desktop continues, and KDE and Fedora 43 continue to disappoint. In theory, the meta key plus the PageDown key will minimize all windows on all screens. Nope, only on the current screen. Also, where to configure that has gone completely missing in KDE Plasma 6.5.5 (KDE Frameworks 6.22.0). AI is worthless here, referring to menu items that don’t exist because they have been removed. This is on top of the elimination of KSysguard – I’m still salty about a favorite tool being removed because some developer didn’t want to be bothered with porting it to KDE 6. And of course, I still don’t like KDE for being bigots.
Signed up for Medicare
I had another birthday, and then promptly signed up for Medicare, because if I hadn’t, then I’d be fined for the rest of my life with higher premiums for signing up late.
I sold and bought some stock.
Back in July of 2022, I bought shares in Micron Technology, a manufacturer of memory chips. Unfortunately, I only had $250 in my stock trading account at the time, so I was only able to buy 4 shares. But I bought them at $60 per share. So recently I sold 1 share at $370, making the rest of the shares essentially free. 🙂
Similarly, I had bought 4 shares of Costco at $473 per share ($1,892 outlay). I recently sold 2 of them for $975 each, bringing in $1,950. The two shares I have left are essentially free.
Currently, I’d like to buy Corning (symbol GLW), Fastenal (symbol FAST), and Medline (symbol MDLN). Valmont Industries looks good too (symbol VMI).
A friend of mine who is in the trucking business hauling equipment to construction sites points out that 100 new cell phone towers were built in 2025 nearby. Cell phone towers and gear were still a growth industry in 2025, although the main cell tower company is forecasting a poor 2026.
Mom went into the hospital
The Kaweah Delta Emergency Room (ER) still has quality problems with their employees. Once a person gets to the rest of the hospital, their quality is quite good. I suspect that the ER staff burn out very quickly. She got back home maybe three weeks later.
Rumble video losing independent journalists
Two of the journalists that I subscribe to, to help pay for them to be able to do their journalism, have announced that they are no longer going to do shows on Rumble. I’ve been a fan of Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn for a while now. But Glenn has found the daily grind of a television show to truly be a grind. I can understand that. Matt and Walter disagreed on Matt’s choice to bring in more people to Racket News, so now the America This Week show is no more.
I’m bummed because these shows on Rumble were mostly the only “television” that I watched. I was also watching Scott Adams before he died.
It’s not that I would dedicate time to watching their shows, but rather that when it was time to fold my laundry, that gave me a good hour or two to catch up on the news.
I still like Russell Brand, so it is nice that he is still on Rumble.
Work Life
Goodbye, Proofpoint
This quarter, I have been made the lead on a project to eliminate Proofpoint and go 100% Microsoft: Exchange Online Protection (EOP) and Microsoft Defender for Office (MDO). I’m not a project manager; I’m an engineer. Stressed out and intensely disliking my work life is an apt description of January and February.
I am SO happy that I’m four months away from retirement.
Proofpoint was a great company in the early days. Then the owner sold out1, and the investors started milking the customers for money. Technical support got slow (but the premium prices remained). This last year, however, it seemed that the Proofpoint management pulled their heads out of their asses and support was getting better.
Alas, it is too late for my employer. They’ve spent a ridiculous amount of money “going Microsoft” and the upper management Microsoft fanboys wanted to show a little savings for the massive increase in cost. As I’m writing this, I don’t know how bad Microsoft will be compared to what we had when we had Proofpoint. I know that some loss of functionality is guaranteed. But I don’t know the size of the impact, yet.
The actual migration was a little painful, but not terribly so. If we’d had a real project manager and started the project two months prior, it most likely would have been flawless. We didn’t have the time needed for proper testing and careful examination of what we were doing, however.
We did get on an anti-spam blacklist for a week. One user spammed almost 400 people, and the email did not have an unsubscribe link. Also, our DKIM records were fouled up, and the consultant didn’t remind us to check that. We wouldn’t have been in this trouble if we’d been able to restrict the number of outbound recipients. Pouring salt into the wound: Exchange used to have a setting where the maximum quantity of recipients could be limited. They’ve moved it to a per-mailbox setting, which is a little painful when there are more than 7,000 mailboxes and 20 to 100 changes per day.
Work From Home
Oof. The management at my employer has (in my opinion) earned the nickname Dimmer Switch. “A metaphor for a manager who walks into a bright, productive room and metaphorically “dims the lights” until everyone is working in a state of apathetic gloom.”
Yeah, said management is demanding a stop to our work-from-home plan that we’ve been on since 2021.
I want to specifically point out that the manager I directly report to is a great guy, and in no way a Dimmer Switch. If I were to start my own company, and my business grew enough to need management help, I’d hire him away in a minute if I could.
But above him is a whole middle management class of Dimmer Switches. And they want their employees in the office where they can micromanage watch them. The amount of CYA actions that my coworkers are invoking has spiked.
I’ll have to put up with about a month of in-office-only work before I retire.
Renewal cost
My manager happened to be the person to authorize the license renewal with Microsoft: more than $3 million per year. When we were with Novell, it was one-tenth of that. Yes, Novell provided only 90% of what Microsoft does.
But hey, at least the director of my department doesn’t have to go to an IT director’s conference and get made fun of for not having moved to Microsoft. Your and my tax dollars at work, man.2
Volunteer Service Life
It was mildly amusing to me that eleven days into the new year, I received an email to Future Me from three years prior:
Dear FutureMe,
Last night Alberto was in the web site and he hit the Update button. I’d messed with file permissions so I could batch-upload the new format meeting schedules, so his update kind of failed because it couldn’t write to the file system. I got it fixed by 12:20 AM. Thankfully, today was … Meeting Minutes day, so I was off work, and staying up past midnight wasn’t really a problem.
If last night was the worst night I have all year, I’ll be a blessed guy.
I went back through my quarterly inventories for 2023, and indeed, it was the worst night I’d have all year. 😊
The Events Calendar (TEC) continues to vex
A problem is that the problem takes a while to develop. One symptom is that any of my users go to the calendar on the website, hit a button to scroll to some other month, but instead of displaying the new calendar, the throbber just hangs. Using debug mode on the browser (F12) I can see that something in the server is creating a 401 Not Authorized response when TEC goes to retrieve the next entries for next month. I don’t know what is doing that.
The other symptom is that any of my users go to the calendar on the website, hit a button to scroll to some other month, and the calendar reports that there are no events to display.
Immediately after troubleshooting (which involves disabling and reenabling WordPress plugins), the calendar will behave fine. Between one day to two weeks later, problems return.
A problem with all WordPress support is that they don’t do true support, where they set up a remote control session and you can see (and control) what they do. They only ask for the admin password to the website, do some black magic, and when it is done, you’re fixed but clueless. I find this appalling.
One of my favorite Ronald Reagan quotes is “Government is like a baby: an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.” ↩︎
One nice thing with Factorio: Space Age is that all belts can immediately have a circuit connection: Read belt contents: Hold (all belts). This makes sushi belts way easier. Hence, my current favorite science lab setup is this:
It is simply a sushi belt with (up to) eight labs. As I research a new science, I hook it up to the sushi belt with an inserter on an enable/disable circuit based on the count of packs on the belt.
I still like Tileable Science – Early/Mid Game v0.17 by Christoffer Ramqvist. So far, I haven’t created a base so large that I need to tile these production facilities. With that, I will reverse the output belt so the layout has inputs on one edge and output on the opposite edge. And then I can drop the parts that exist only to extend tiling.
I really like the layout of this mall. I like the design. I like that it does not have interleaved belts. 3,000 hours in, it is my favorite mall.
However, it was created 7 years ago, and no longer fits with the changes in Factorio: Space Age. Specifically, three of the power transmission recipes now use copper cable instead of copper plate. This is a recipe change that makes sense to me; previously we were pretending that inside the power pole factory was a small copper plate-to-copper cable factory. Externalizing it is fine. A factory and a belt getting the copper cable output sets up a whole production line. Copper cable and iron bars should share a belt and feed medium electric poles and big electric poles.
But yeah, Kitch’s blueprint doesn’t (easily) have room for one more factory and one more belt. Sigh.
I’ve already got twenty small projects on my plate. Looks like I’m going to be adding another one. At least this one will be fun. 🙂
It has been four years since we abandoned GroupWise, and I still get people who say to me, “Man, I miss GroupWise.” They know that I was the GroupWise guy for twenty years, so it is the obvious topic when I pass them in a hallway.
But still… they have a point.
I know that what they hate about Outlook is that search sucks. Randomly, there was even a meme on a website two days ago:
Outlook search is glaringly bad. You know the email that came in only a few days ago. You know a word in the subject line. You go into search, put in that word, and … there are countless results but not the email you’re looking for.
You try a different keyword, and the search still fails it. You try searching by who you think sent the message, and finally you find it WITH THE KEYWORD RIGHT THERE IN THE SUBJECT LINE!
(insert particularly profane profanity directed at its founders, its management, its programmers, and the horses they rode in on here)
GroupWise never had this problem. I know because I got to maintain the indexer. I had nightly jobs that kept the index up to date. The GroupWise search function was great. Once in a while, if someone’s mailbox had a problem finding things, I’d reindex the whole mailbox.
Fundamentally, Microsoft Exchange has a poorer design, which does make it tougher for Microsoft. Well, okay, if your product is crappier, it should be cheaper too, no? It is not.
And you, dear reader, who is being played for a chump by Microsoft, can fix this problem by just throwing a few more dollars per month at Micro$oft:
Copilot
Yes, if you pay for a Copilot license, it can ingest your mailbox. Then you use Copilot to find your email for you. It does so with ease.
Which goes back to the point: sure, what you paying for is shit, but why would Microsoft fix Outlook search when you’re going to be thrilled with the results after paying more for Outlook + Copilot?
I am certain this is what is behind the newly announced E7, G7, K7 license plans. Microsoft knows how to dangle the carrot in front of the hungry, and the hungry keep ignoring that it was Microsoft shorting them their rations in the first place.
I did my usual volunteer service at the World Ag Expo. One thing that was noticeable was that we had far fewer airplanes and jets fly into the airport adjacent to the show.
The guys in charge had also said that fewer people had rented booths for the show.
I did get to talk to a farmer about his business, and he was super impressed with the new robotic sprayers. In previous years, he’d have to hire a spraying job out. That could cost him $26,000. They’d bring out four sprayers and five people and get the job done in a day. One person would refill the sprayers, and the other four would drive the sprayers. However, this farmer is looking at buying robotic sprayers instead of hiring the service. He could be the refiller, and his wife could drive the robots from her iPad. Sure, the initial investment would be high, but at $26 grand a pop, it won’t take too many sprays for a return on the investment. And if he has neighbors growing different crops, he could spray theirs too, and help his own ROI while providing less expensive service for his neighbor.
I missed getting to look at the robotic platform that can lift a ton and haul 5,000 lbs.
I did think this weed suppression technology is super neat. It is a film that keeps weeds from growing, but it only lasts long enough to keep them from germinating. Then it biodegrades into food for microbes. I asked, and they don’t sell to retail yet, though.
At work, someone else on my team is responsible for pushing out desktop software, and the decision has been to remove Adobe Acrobat and use Microsoft Edge instead. That’s fine; I agree with simplifying the environment and only installing Adobe stuff if one has a license because one’s job is creating or editing PDF files. The fuckup is that Edge notified me this morning of a new feature in Edge: “We’re picking up where you left off. If you don’t want this feature, you can turn it off in Settings”
Liars.
The settings button is right there – the icon looks like a gear – but clicking it brings up only “Pin toolbar”, “Hide all annotations”, and “View document properties”.
No, the document properties don’t control anything.
Even Microsoft Copilot doesn’t know where this new setting is. It says it should be found behind the three dots menu … and inside that, the gear icon for Settings, and inside that, the Cookies menu, but that is fruitless.
Mostly, I’m complaining about two things:
Someone on the Edge team created a new gear icon for their random three settings, and QA didn’t reject it with “We already have a Settings section – put your stuff there!” No, they let the stupid design ship into production.
By making the new option default to “on”, Microsoft is reinforcing what is wrong with them: “it’s not your computer, we will do whatever the hell we want because it is our computer.”
Perhaps the fuckup is that upper management at Microsoft has so emasculated their QA department that they don’t have the ability to prevent stupid from shipping into production.
And as always, someone at Microsoft did not conceive that their new idea might be half-baked. “We’ve created a new feature! Of course everyone should be inflicted with it!”
Grrr.
Once per week, our help desk system runs a report I created, and it sends out a file attachment with the exact same file name. This is a report and does not need to stored long term – it is a snapshot of what happened during the last week. There is zero reason to add a date to the file name and end up with 52 new files per year. The idea that a new file with the old file name is a different file apparently didn’t occur to whomever was pushing the new feature.
What I don’t want, is to start reading this document on page 17. This week is a new file, even though the file name is the same. Last week, I got to page 17 because that is where the summary finished and the detail began. This week, I want to start on page 1, because that’s where the summary starts.
I would like the ability to disable this pick up where you left off feature1, but that option appears missing in all the settings menus I could find.
So not only did Microsoft ship into production a duplicate gear icon with lame options, but they didn’t get the new option into the real settings. I cannot turn this new feature off.
I am so looking forward to retirement, when I won’t have to put up with Microsoft’s dysfunction.
Microsoft, famously as I remember it, was the inventor of the phrase “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature” a.k.a. “It is working as (poorly) designed. Pray that I don’t design it further.” ↩︎
Today would be a good day to do a quarterly inventory.
How is your personal life going?
How is your work life going?
How is your Volunteer Service life going?
Future Me
Personal Life
This quarter gave me the opportunity to attend two weekend conferences out of town, and I enjoyed both of them.
I’m a little depressed because cold-and-overcast season is here again. I can see why people like living in the desert. I have relatives who live in the Pacific Northwest, on the coast, and man, that would be depressing nine months out of twelve.
A walk to remember
Mildly amusing, I needed to get some car work done, so I took it to the dealer I bought the car from. This is probably not the best idea because they don’t treat me as well as I would like. No matter, I dropped off the car first thing in the morning, went to a little cafe and got breakfast, and then texted a retired friend in town that I’m in town, and would he mind if I dropped by for a visit? He said, Sure, did I want a ride? No thank you, I’ll walk – I need the exercise; it will only be a 25 minute walk from downtown to his house.
I was about five minutes into the walk when the gastric distress kicked in.
I successfully did not poop my pants. Let’s get that said right up front. But man, it was an excruciating walk: go some number of feet, stop, pause, clamp down, and wait for the spasm to pass. Nowhere along the walk was a public park with a public restroom. I wasn’t going to walk up to a random house (if anyone is even home) and request to destroy their bathroom. Anyway, the mildly amusing part was that at some point, I paused, crossed the street, and paused again right behind a small pickup truck sitting in front of a house. I look up, and on the back of the pickup truck was a sticker that was essentially this:
(click the + sign to reveal the spoiler)
Thank you, God, for reminding me You have a sense of humor. 😉
Public sector Uber / Lyft
Another thing that happened is that I became miffed with the City of Visalia for using my tax dollars to play the big shot. Visalia Connect
You see, I have friends who supplement their income by driving for Uber and/or Lyft. I’m 100% in favor of people who want a side hustle getting out there and doing the work – in the private sector. I despise when the public sector tries to undermine them, because they are doing so with your and my tax dollars. If the city wants to spend tax dollars on police and fire, I’m 100% in favor of that. If the city wants to spend tax dollars on a bus system with fixed routes, okay, that’s not the worst spend of tax dollars. It’s not a great spend of tax dollars, but sure, when someone gets so elderly that they cannot drive anymore, that there is a bus system they can use is a public good. Walking would probably be better exercise for them, but sure, it’s not the worst spend of tax dollars.
But Uber and Lyft? Why the hell should the city be trying to compete with that?
WORSE – the City of Visalia contracted with a French company to provide the service.
You can barely make it out on the photograph, but the side of the van says “Operated by RATp Dev USA”. RATP Dev USA is the North American subsidiary of RATP Dev, the international arm of the Paris-based RATP Group that operates public transportation systems worldwide.
My USA tax dollars are enriching a French company to undermine local taxpayers trying to improve their lives with a side hustle.
What the hell‽
Microtransit is a luxury, not a necessity. Let the people who want to bask in luxury pay their own way at private sector prices. Let local people make some money. Let Uber and Lyft, both based in California, make some money. Don’t be taking money away from our local police and sending it off to Paris, France.
Cynical me thinks that really, some corrupt official at the City of Visalia pushed through the idea to get kickbacks. I have no proof of it, but it wouldn’t surprise me. We’ve had lots of corruption in other areas. But yeah, I wouldn’t mind seeing the officials and bureaucrats behind this tarred and feathered.
Amazon shopping this Christmas (not)
I did just about zero Christmas shopping with Amazon this year. Their “Black Friday” prices are not better value than the rest of the year. I did buy a large Christmas gift from Costco.
Personal mail server
For about nineteen months now, my personal mail server has been rebooting. I just replaced it with a different installation here the third week of December. I expect that it will be rock-solid now.
Way back when, I built it as a combination WordPress (this blog), Dovecot/Postfix, and Nextcloud server. On Ubuntu. Well, the machine I was renting was too small, so I started splitting things off. Nextcloud I moved in-house onto bare metal. WordPress I moved to a different machine, but on Debian. I left Dovecot and Postfix on the Ubuntu box, because it was probably going to be the most painful to move.
When I built my personal mail server before, I used the excellent guide by Christoph Haas (workaround.org) to build it. Back then, I’d struggled a little bit with the difference that Christoph’s instructions were for Debian, and I was installing on Ubuntu, but I made it work okay. Let’s Encrypt certbot was a little tough because I wanted a wildcard certificate for multiple domain names.
But then the server started running out of memory. I built a script that checked for an out-of-memory condition, and if so, I rebooted the box automatically.
That was twenty-seven months ago. Initially, it would go three or four days without rebooting. Nineteen months ago, it was rebooting one to three times per day. Last month, it was rebooting at least three times per day and up to six times per day. I knew I wanted to work on it, but I also expected it to be a big job. Being ruled by a hundred forms of fear, I made it into a larger problem than it was – go figure.
I’d scheduled some vacation time for Christmas and even took off the Friday before Christmas week. Then my mom called me and changed my plans on when we were going (to later). Suddenly I have four days off before I need to be on the road, and that should be plenty of time – no matter how hard the migration went. It actually took about a day.
One thing Christoph doesn’t go into is fail2ban for the webmail. I did have that on the original Ubuntu box, although it was more for WordPress than anything. But for all I know, that was the source of the memory leak. I had also done a sort of funky disk layout, so I was running Restic for local backups. Maybe Restic was the source of the memory leak? I don’t know. But the new box has the email-on-reboot script in place, so I’ll see if it doesn’t reboot on its own any time soon.1
Since I re-enabled comments on this blog with the spam protection coming from hCaptcha, I thought I’d try it with my webmail client. It is working great.
KDE Donation
I’ve donated to the EFF and Internet Archive for close to a decade now – I’m happy to support projects I think are worthwhile. I started donating to the Thunderbird project two years ago in November.
This quarter the KDE project did a request for donations, and I have really liked KDE, so I signed up for a small, $5 monthly contribution. Not very long later, over on the KDE mailing list, their community manager called everyone on X/Twitter Nazis. Maybe I’m the one off-kilter here, but I thought a community manager was supposed to grow their community. The exclusionary stance ends up alienating normal people and stunting the growth of the community instead. Later, the KDE community said they supported their community manager being a bigot.
Yeah, I’m out.
If these people are so infected with TDS that they don’t see the damage they are causing, I’m certainly not going to be an enabler and continue donating to their project. It is sad because I was first exposed to KDE back in 2006, and I like the desktop environment. But perverse behavior should not be rewarded. I’ve cancelled my donation going forward. If a different desktop environment shows up that is as good or better, I’ll switch.
Work Life
Well, I found out I’d miscalculated my retirement date; the pay period ends one week later than I’d thought.
It is mildly amusing to me that February 2026 has perfect alignment, with the first Sunday being on the 1st and the last Saturday being on the 28th. On the calendar, February takes the space of exactly four weeks. May and August 2026 have the worst alignment, spanning six weeks. I did a post this quarter about programming in RPG II under the heading Helping Sales make promises they could keep. May and August were the sorts of configurations that RPG II was not naturally a good fit for.
I got (probably my last ever) Performance Appraisal and my boss was kind. I’ve been feeling guilty about how much work I’m not doing, but my boss said this is a good thing. Proper succession planning means I must train everyone else what to do when I’m not here, and the best way to test my training is to let them do the work.
Volunteer Service Life
The Events Calendar Pro (TEC)
Well, I added TEC to the website for the fellowship, but it has bugs. I’m having to watch for errant behavior and then run a MySQL statement on the server:
DELETE FROM wp_options WHERE option_name LIKE '_transient_tribe_views_v2_cache_%';
DELETE FROM wp_options WHERE option_name LIKE '_site_transient_feed__%';
Still, TEC is remarkably better than Sugar Calendar, so overall it is a win. We might try out ticket sales next.
Flyers for events
One thing where AI has been a blessing and a danger is in adding events from outside sources. I uploaded a flyer for an event to an AI and asked it to convert the flyer into WordPress-compatible HTML. In one minute it did the job that would have taken me an hour or two. So that was great.
Then for another event, I pointed the AI at a series of pages the organizing committee had put up. That went great.
Then for a third event, I did the same, but the information was wildly off. I went to the web page, copied the URL, and prompted the AI to read that web page and create HTML from it suitable for pasting into WordPress. It looked okay, but… the event is at a Sheraton hotel, and this says Hilton… and the Hilton is 25 miles away! Oof. I asked where the information it gave me came from, and it said the web page, “This is what it says”. I put into the AI prompt “No it doesn’t” – and of course, then it apologized and actually read the website and created correct content. Apparently, it had pulled information from ten years ago and had simply run with that. AI is not intelligent (yet).
Contact Form 7 and Captcha
Our office manager is a part of a community of other office managers. One of them did a demo of their website, and that office had an email contact form. My office manager requested we do the same. I’d tried Contact Form 7 back in 2018, but the spam was immediate and incessant – I quickly deleted it.
So now I need to add it back in, but not subject my office manager to the onslaught of porn, supplements, and cheap junk email. The nature of the fellowship is not a great fit for ratting out people to Google as members of this fellowship. Well, if reCAPTCHA is off the table, how about hCaptcha?
I implemented hCaptcha for the contact forms on the website, and it has worked great. I was happy enough with it that I signed up for a personal account and added it to this blog’s login form for user comments. Later I used the same account to protect webmail on my rebuilt personal mail server.
The only thing I’d like better is if there were a pricing plan between Free and Pro. I do believe in paying my own way.2 But for the month of December, I’ve used it twenty times (their dashboard tells me this). I cannot justify the Pro membership at $99 per month ($1,200 per year). The fellowship also believes in paying its own way, but also, we cannot afford $1,200 per year. $60 per year would be ideal – and I don’t actually want any additional features. I know that serving up their images and comparing the results takes CPU cycles. I just don’t want to be a freeloader.
2026-01-13 addendum: it did finally run out of memory and need to be rebooted after 17 days. ↩︎
Unless you’re going to be an asshole and call me a Nazi for my choice in social networks (duh!) ↩︎
