Colin Matthias @colin@mastodon.technology

Does anyone else think it's a bad idea to make a wallet that attaches with magnets to the back of your phone? Like... a wallet... where credit cards go? Next to a ring of magnets? 🤔

Got some money? Want to donate in such a way that maximizes the chance that we vote the assholes out? Check out this extremely well-written article on the topic! https://idlewords.com/2020/09/effective_political_giving.htm

Hmm... just discovered that both of my 2015 15" retina MBPs will accept a Thunderbolt 2 cable rotated the wrong way (meaning, upside down). I thought the shape was supposed to prevent that. I was really confused and thought my dock had died 😱

@gudenau These types of machines are readily available, and for cheap, if you're just talking about running a quick test. You can get an AWS x1.16xlarge (976GiB) for ~$5/hour or an x1.32xlarge (1952GiB) for ~$10/hour. Those prices drop to $2/hour or $4/hour respectively, if you're willing to figure out Spot pricing.

@yakkoj I agree somewhat in that Facebook is bad, but I think for somewhat different reasons. Facebook feels more "group oriented" In that everything isn't public by default. For this reason it doesn't lend itself as well to being the primary source of quotes from idiot politicians/celebrities/etc ripe for the taking by lazy journalists.

Hot take: Twitter and its for-profit, eyeball-driven nature is the worst thing to happen to government, journalism, the free exchange of ideas, mental health, and countless other factors that contribute to a functioning society, in at least a generation. Change my mind.

@ianbetteridge @thomasfuchs Yes, that's all true. I guess it depends on whom you want to trust -- I trust that UBo and Firefox (and to a lesser extent, Chromium with the google bits ripped out) are not going to gather my data, since it's all open source. In exchange, I get a much more feature-rich and robust blocking tool. But in general, everything sucks and you have to compromise somewhere :)

Me: Alexa, when is Thanksgiving?

Amazon Echo, a "smart device": Thanksgiving is Thursday, November 28th. People also asked, "Who is Barack Obama?" Would you like to know the answer?

Me:

@ianbetteridge @thomasfuchs

To be clear, I have no experience with Better, I'm sure it's a fine blocker, and it's better than nothing, but you are fooling yourself if you think it (or any other ad blocker on Safari) is protecting your privacy as well as uBO would on Firefox or Chromium.

@ianbetteridge @thomasfuchs

No. uBO and Privacy Badger are not available on Safari because it's not possible to implement them. Safari has a drastically watered-down "content blocker" implementation that, among other things, limits the number of domains that can be blocked at one time (I think it's 50K, but not sure). Using any content blockers in Safari is strictly inferior to blocking in other browsers that use WebRequest, full stop.

@thomasfuchs If your goal is overall privacy on the web (and not only liberation from Google), then I strongly disagree with the Safari suggestion, due to Ad/tracker blocking functionality for extensions being very limited compared to Chrome or Firefox.

There are approximately 42 billion companies out there trying to track your every move on the web, and a robust blocker like Privacy Badger or (better) uBlock Origin is the best way to stop that. Both not available for Safari.

(finally) continuing my series on becoming a private-label Amazon seller: https://www.colinmatthias.com/blog/fba-how-to-part-2-selecting-a-product/

This video is a fantastic intro to the basic math behind 3D graphics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih20l3pJoeU

Heading into the city today for the first time in a while!

@gudenau Yeah, I definitely found lots of references to it going back a while. Not really sure who is to blame; could see arguments for blaming either or both sides. UFW wants to provide a nice simple interface to iptables, and Docker wants networking to just work when you create a container. 🤷‍♂️

Posted a quick writeup about an issue I had with ufw and Docker: https://www.colinmatthias.com/blog/ufw-docker-fixing-security-issue/