Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

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.

@earthshine I wouldn't. I'd pass the signal from wires in the spinning sensor through rings on the rotor or rim to wires fixed to the frame in order to reach the main computer.

Overwide pride flag stripes with words on them feel like the words should be scrolling side to side with '80s cracktro tunes blasting out the speaker.

Some random trivia living rent-free in my head:

The Fisher Price Laugh & Learn Game & Learn Controller knows the Konami code.