Posts

kindrobot

Debian 12 on MacBookPro9,2

Quick notes on setting up Debian 12 on a MacBookPro9,2 download debian 12 dvd installer iso write ISO to usb device sudo cp debian.iso /dev/sdX plug into mac hook mac up to ethernet (le sigh) boot holding alt boot into none graphical installer–touchpad doesn’t work work well in graphical installer install ignoring missing firmware notices I unselected Gnome and selected xcfe reboot into new system edit /etc/apt/sources.list remove cdrom add “contrib” at the end of each deb and deb-src line su apt update apt install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics firmware-b43-installer restart pray connect to wifi network smudge ~ Tom
kindrobot

MANAGER.md

Hello there! If you’re reading this, then I might be your manager! I am currently cosplaying as a manager at the Wikimedia Foundation. Different people have different ways of wanting to know how to work (deal) with their manager. My preferred method is synchronous conversation, but many people’s preferred style is reading and async conversations. This document is to help facilitate that conversation and answer some questions you might have.
kindrobot

STAB photo album (cw: needles, nudity)

Digital photography album of an estrogen injection. model: Stef Dunlap (kindrobot) photographer: maxine location: Toronto, ON date: 2024-08-30 00:55:33 EDT camera: Samsung Galaxy Fold 5 Discuss (mastodon) 00 mise en place 01 elle sourit 02 elle s' assoit 03 elle ouvre 04 elle désinfecte 05 elle ESS uie le vil 06 elle perce le vil 07 elle injecte de l' air dans le vil 08 elle tire la pisse de cheval du vile dans la seringue
kindrobot

SYSTEM.md

Updated 2024-10-15. Hello, and welcome. If you’ve been handed this README, then you’re someone I trust. You’re someone with whom I want to share the whole “me,” or rather should I say, “the whole ‘us’”. You see, I (we) am (are) plural, a system, a collection of multiple persons in the same body, three sloths in a trench coat. (That last one’s a joke.) AI generated tl;dr: we are a system of three alters: Rebecca, Stephanie (Anie), and Tom.
kindrobot

HYPOMANIA.md

Hello, and welcome. If you’ve been handed this README, then you’re likely interacting with me while I’m experiencing a hypomanic episode. I’ve written this README on some ways you can help (if you’re so inclined) and some best practices for interacting with me. About (my) hypo-mania I have been diagnosed with bipolar II with a generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) component. I’m under the care of doctors and counsellors who are aware of the diagnosis and prescribe appropriate medicines and therapies.
kindrobot

Android SFTP Clients Review

I’ve done a quick survey of SFTP clients for Android. Here are my findings. Recommendation My top pick is Owlfiles (+) supports a lot of protocols alongside SFTP (e.g. WebDav and S3) (+) shows previews of remote files (+) supports private keys (+) is aesthetically pleasing (~) It’s free(mium), but not very pushy to upgrade (-) closed source Other contenders Termux (+) open source (~) first and foremost a terminal emulator (~) scp is included (-) not particularly friendly for quickly uploading a file FTPClient on F-Droid (+) open source (+) decent UI (-) some features are broken (e.
kindrobot

NixOS with AwesomeWM on a Framework laptop

Framework is a company that makes laptops that are easily repairable. AwesomeWM is a modular tiling window manager. NixOS is a Linux distribution that is configured using a declarative, idempotent language. This is a blog post about how to install and configure NixOS using AwesomeWM with no display manager (i.e. using startx) on a Framework laptop. I was inspired to write this after receiving help from elly’s post about installing Alpine on a Framework laptop.
kindrobot

DEPRESSION.md

Hello, and welcome. If you’ve been handed this README, then you’re likely interacting with me while I’m experiencing a depressive episode. I’ve written this README on some ways you can help (if you’re so inclined) and some best practices for interacting with me. About (my) depression I have been diagnosed with bipolar II with a generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) component. I’m under the care of doctors and counsellors who are aware of the diagnosis and prescribe appropriate medicines and therapies.
kindrobot

An AI Writes Some Holiday Cards

You probably have heard about ChatGPT, a Generative Pre-trained Transformer (a specific type of artificial intelligence). If you haven’t, the short of it is that ChatGPT is a chat bot that can generate content (prose, poetry, code, etc) from an open-ended prompt. The social internet has been having a field day with ChatGPT responses. I think this is partly due to the uncanny reflection of humanity. Because it’s been trained on human writing (often to other humans), it’s picked up on many of the filler phrases we say that don’t mean anything.
kindrobot

mintwise

So imagine this scenario: you move in with your partner and you want to start splitting rent, utilities, groceries, dining out, vacation expenses, home goods expenses, etc. “Don’t worry,” you say, “there’s an app for that, Splitwise!” Great! Now all you have to do is comb through all of your credit card expenses at the end of the month and put them in Splitwise… and put the right date… and the right category…
kindrobot

Hexaflexago: the friendly hexaflexagon template generator

I was originally turned on to hexaflexagons while watching a video by vihart. I’ve since become a tad obsessed. My partner, Jane Meredith, and I created Hexaflexago, a hexaflexagon template generator. Features Generates a printable trihexaflexagon template Upload up the three images; Hexaflexago splices them into the template for you Technical Notes Written with: React.js using create-react-app the vanilla SVG standard What’s Next? There are some improvements I’d like to make to Hexaflexago eventually.
kindrobot

🦆.to

Though ICANN has disallowed emojis in domain names1, some ccTLD (country code top-level domain) registrars have gone rouge and permit (and even encourage) the purchase of emoji domains. One of the first ccTLDs to do this was .ws which is the TLD for Samoa. Normally when a new ccTLD announces that they are selling emoji domains, the single emoji domains sell out fast. When I found that .to was selling emoji domains, almost every single emoji domain was gone when I got there.
kindrobot

Idea for Part-time Agile Development Shop

Agile software development is awesome, but there’s more to life than writing code, developing software, and becoming the next successful start-up. People might like to work part-time so that they can devote the rest of their time to other things like school, research, theirs kids, or what-have-you in a sustainable way. Unfortunately part-timer employees at full-time Agile shops can create friction. Web search “agile part time employee” and you’ll see a wash of people trying to hammer out the problem of how to coordinate fragmented, part-time, and/or remote teams in an agile work place. The problem, I think, is that it’s not possible, or at least it’s very hard. Think: trying to jam a large rectangular prism through a small circular hole. You might make it work, but you’re probably not going to like it.

But that’s only thinking about the problem with the 8 hour work week as a constant. Read on to see a proposed way to work agile, part-time.

kindrobot

Connecting to University of Cincinnati's Securewireless with netctl

If you’ve set-up an Arch Linux installation, and you’ve used wifi-menu then you’ve used netctl before and didn’t even know it. netctl is

… a CLI-based tool used to configure and manage network connections via profiles. It is a native Arch Linux project for network configuration.

I used to think that the wifi-menu dialouge was a cute little installer helper program, but I learned later, that it can be used to automatically generate profiles in /etc/netctl that you can subsequently use to reconnect to network later with

# netctl start INTERFACE-SSID

… where INTERFACE is the name of your wireless interface device (see below) and SSID is the “name” of the network.

I was a little disappointed (but not too shocked) when wifi-menu failed to connect to the University of Cincinnati’s Securewireless network. This short guide will discuss the steps needed to connect to Securewireless using netctl, and discuss why these extra steps are needed.

kindrobot

Getting Candle Wax Off an LCD Monitor

First you might ask, “How does one get wax on their monitor?” A valid question. In my case, I had a taper candle on my desk, and I blew it out right before bed. When I awoke, I found a splatter of wax from the candle in the bottom left corner of my LCD. This post will talk about the steps I took to safely remove the wax from the monitor without damaging the surface or liquid crystals of the display.

Note that this guide is intended for soft-surface LCD monitors (the kind that are not glass/plastic covered and make distorted colors when you press on the screen.)

kindrobot

Arch on a Lenovo ThinkPad x140e

Recently at work I had been virtualizing Arch Linux on a MacBook Pro using VirtualBox. While there were many perks (easy backups, no hardware issues), when I left that assignment (and had to give back the Mac), I couldn’t justify spending a grand on a Mac which would spend most of its time running Linux in a virtual machine, so I set out to find a cheap, modern, Linux compatible laptop. Ultimately, I landed on the Lenovo Thinkpad x140e which was certified by Canonical to run Ubuntu. Unfortunately, for Arch Linux, much of the hardware did not work out of the box. This post covers the modifications I performed to get all of the hardware working including:

  • graphics
  • network adapters (wired and wireless)
  • input devices (trackpad and trackpoint)
  • sound
  • Fn keys for volume and brightness