Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

RE: https://muffin.industries/@wayback_exe/116172758890535509

We used to have Web search engines, instead of SEO sales & ad engines.

After a dozen years of happily perusing the Web using browsers with decent ad blockers installed, just 15 _minutes_ of trying to find stuff with Google Chrome feels like a dystopian television nightmare. Like, any second now, Google will save me from the sea of animated overlay ads by happily letting some random malvertizer show me a full-screen error message telling me to call Windows Support at 1-800-FLEECE-ME urgently.

And it happened again, same descent, but starting with multimedia/ffmpeg4, a dependency of emulators/vice. This being the third time in as many days portmaster has burned me, #FreeBSD Handbook section 4.5.4.2 is set to permanent distrust.

I need to either find a large enough block of time to shave the poudriere yak, use a ports management tool stupider than portmaster, or babysit a sequence of long-running make commands, to get my software back to last Saturday.

#FreeBSD While I slept, portmaster descended thousands of levels deep into a circular dependencies loop: deskutils/zim > devel/xdg-utils > textproc/xmlto > www/w3m > graphics/imlib2 > graphics/libheif > multimedia/ffmpeg > graphics/libcaca > graphics/imlib2 > graphics/libheif > multimedia/ffmpeg.

Make-installing zim and restarting portmaster without zim somehow broke the circular dependency loop, despite nothing being functionally different.

I'm weighing options for a Chromebook browser that's generally decent and doesn't actively sabotage good ad blocking like Google does.

So help me, one of the options I'm considering is Microslop Edge.

Good news: It's possible to install Firefox in the ChromeOS Linux development environment using the regular Debian apt commands now, not just with Flatpak.

Bad news: It's a straightforward yet daunting task straight out of a '90s Linux hacking guide. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/run-firefox-chromeos

Other news: No matter which way it's installed, Firefox 148 on ChromeOS 144 is so unstable that it crashes unpredictably within a few seconds to a few minutes.

#FreeBSD Ahah. The first `pkg` in my path is /usr/sbin/pkg from base, while the first `pkg-static` is /usr/local/sbin/pkg-static from ports-mgmt/pkg, the two sources got out of sync (ports a higher version number than base), ports-mgmt/portmaster explicitly uses pkg-static, and I never noticed which `pkg` and `pkg-static` I was using outside of that. Yep, that would do it.

That's a first, and if my futile searches are any indicator, a first ever for anyone.

Everything I use in #FreeBSD is installed from ports, not pkg, yet I somehow managed to bork my pkg database so badly that pkg-static keeps randomly removing vital packages like www/firefox and x11/xorg-server while upgrading (and later reinstalling) completely unrelated ports.

It's taking me a month of Sundays, but I'm slow-cooking my code into something I like.

Do not move fast and break things.

Move purposefully and fix things.

Microslaw Cole: Pile-It

@earthshine I agree. Blasting a tracking number loud enough for an Australian road train's computer to pick up the last trailer axle is certainly next-quarter cheaper, but not a real solution.

@earthshine A contactless alternative is a set of fixed NFC antennas near the hub and a rotating NFC antenna on the sensor that stays just close enough to talk to at least one of the fixed antennas.

@earthshine Those are the problems I would focus on engineering a workable solution to, instead of trying to retrofit the need for decent wifi security, removal of functional identity at a distance, and with no need for dealer, mechanic, or user configuration.