Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

I got another scam spam today where the scammer revealed one of my passwords in the subject, threatening to disclose it if I don't send bitcoin.

The scammer wants me to believe they hacked my PC to steal it, but it's much more likely they bought a list of compromised passwords.

Apparently, "this week" means "just a few hours shy of 'this time [i]next[/i] week.'"

@evie iLamps! :D I still need parts to get mine working again.

Also, the scammers who called me directed me to a remote desktop software site offering downloads for a wide variety of OSes, not just Windows: MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS, FreeBSD, Raspbian, & ChromeOS. Don't do what I did without carefully thinking through every click & every word.

Remember that Microsoft will never call you about "sending us errors." If anyone calls claiming to be from "Windows" or Microsoft, just hang up, don't do what I did.

Read more on Microsoft's support site: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4013405/windows-protect-from-tech-support-scams

Don't uninstall VLC because the news told you to panic, not just yet. The conclusion driving panicky news stories are CERT-Bund & NVD assessments, but the bug it relates to had been open for a whole month before the first "uninstall it now!" story appeared.

Lifehacker: https://lifehacker.com/you-should-wait-before-banning-vlc-from-your-computer-1836645438

NIST NVD: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-13615

Huzzah! I just got cold-called by a "Windows tech support" scammer outfit and successfully wasted 34 minutes of their time before they figured out I'm not running Windows!

@QuestForTori I wish the name "three-slot toaster menu" caught on, because they're often in the same valley between useful and useless as a real 3ST.

This is my home desktop, where I just finished making a much simpler signpost-like desktop icon theme, and I'm going to start my write-up with this.

@NovaSquirrel Sabrina's a good choice. :3

Have I mentioned I like L-shaped furries recently? Anyway, this is my work desktop, and I'm finally, *finally*, going to start writing up how I made the fancy group of desktop icons and framing, and how I maintain it, this week.

It took literal days of searching, poring over hundreds, maybe thousands, of results, but I did finally manage to find what I was looking for: Programs that compute sun and moon data (one in Perl, another in Ruby), then print them in a form shellscripts love.

It's amazing and appalling just how many questions for "how to get <computable almanac data> in bash" wind up being "just use curl on <website> and parse that data" answers.

Just-use-curl folks, I know it's shocking, but...

I have a computer.
It's pretty good at computing.

I don't want to depend on someone else's computer, that might get turned off at any time, and that's only reachable by an often crappy 'Net connection.

@lynnesbian lesbunny?

One of our 50 is missing again... https://www.newmexico.org/nmmagazine/heart-of-nm/one-of-our-50-is-missing/