R.M. @[email protected]

If you're new to Mastodon and not seeing much, be sure to check out the 'Local' view to see other people on the same instance and the 'Federated' view to see what people on other instances are talking about!

Occasionally I torture myself by looking at real estate in areas that are much cheaper than Boston (where I live). Sometimes this means I get to see hilarity in staging.

Anyone who knows American Sign Language (or can fingerspell) should check out the sculpture in the background of this picture.

Spoiler: it says "LOV💩"

Dear makers of voice automation systems: PLEASE STOP INVENTING YOUR OWN PHONETIC ALPHABET SYSTEMS WHEN NATO PHONETCIS ALREADY EXIST.

Sincerely,

R-as-in-wrong M-as-in-motion

AWS managed service for Grafana and Prometheus announced today! Very excited to see these tools made easier to access for AWS users!

Basically this makes an X or Wayland system into a multi-seat terminal server surprisingly easily. After having done this once, I think I could scale it out to a ton of seats really quickly.

Why anyone felt the need to *build* this after, say, 1985 or so is beyond me. But it is cool regardless!

[email protected]:~$ loginctl seat-status seat1
seat1
Sessions: *c2
Devices:
├─/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.0/0000:04:00.0/drm/card1
│ [MASTER] drm:card1
├─/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.0/0000:04:00.0/drm/renderD128
│ drm:renderD128
└─/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.0/0000:04:00.1/sound/card0
sound:card0 "NVidia_1"
[...]

[email protected]:~$ loginctl list-seats
SEAT
seat0
seat1
seat23 seats listed.

[email protected]:~$ loginctl list-sessions
SESSION UID USER SEAT TTY
11 1000 fader pts/2
4 1000 fader pts/0
5 1000 fader pts/1
c1 124 lightdm seat0
c2 1000 fader seat1
c3 1001 xayide seat2 6 sessions listed.

Today I learned about `loginctl` which, as expected, controls Linux logins. It's not quite as well documented as I'd like, but after tinkering with it for a while I've done some very cool stuff.

I put two NVidia cards into a 2U server and used `loginctl` to associate each one with an automatic login session in lightdm (plus one non-autologin session with the built-in VGA hardware). So without creating an xorg.conf at all, this system runs an X session for each card plus Steam to stream games!

My coworker: "I feel so bad for you when I look at your calendar! You never even have time to eat lunch!"

Same coworker: *books last remaining 30 minute slot in my day between 0800 and 1800*

Early voting in the past: show up, walk right in, vote, leave.

Early voting today: line out the door of city hall, down the street, and around the block.

And early voting has been running for a week already.

It took me way longer to get this working than expected but it's alive! 2.11BSD on a PDP/11-70 (emulated) logged in via a TeleVideo serial terminal.

Ready to go conquer the Great Underground Empire!

The Golang tutorial never ceases to make me feel stupid. The difficulty curve just feels way off for me, like

• Lesson 1 - What is a keyboard
• Lesson 2 - Saving a file in your editor
• Lesson 3 - Running "hello, world"
• Lesson 4 - Massively parallelized asymmetrical quantum computing across 17 star systems

Good news: @adafruit has resumed shipping the #adabox after being shut down for COVID-19!

Better news: the latest one has the most adorable single board microcontroller platform I've ever seen. I intentionally didn't look at the docs before powering it up, as Adafruit always ships with fun demo apps.

I actually laughed out loud a couple of times while playing with it! I handed it to my partner and at one point she shrieked in delight.

This thing is fantastic!

https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-clue

TIL: NPR produced radio plays of the original Star Wars trilogy in the 80s. https://archive.org/details/StarWarsRadio

(Background: https://www.npr.org/2019/12/19/789279631/star-wars-the-trilogy-that-npr-turned-into-radio-drama)