vili's recent activity
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Comment on Is there a documentary from a reputable source that documents the relationship between the Jews and Israel/Palestine? in ~misc
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Comment on From its start, Gmail conditioned us to trade privacy for free services in ~tech
vili Link ParentI think Hotmail launched with 2 MB of free space in 1996 [source]. They upped it to 250 MB at the time of Gmail's launch. The other major player in the 90s, RocketMail, I think had something...I don't recall what something like Hotmail had at the time, but it was definitely substantially less.
I think Hotmail launched with 2 MB of free space in 1996 [source]. They upped it to 250 MB at the time of Gmail's launch.
The other major player in the 90s, RocketMail, I think had something similar, but I can't find the exact figure. When Gmail launched, it was upped to 100mb, although by then it had also become Yahoo! Mail.
So yes, I also remember Gmail's 1 GB being an insane offer. It felt like you could never reach that limit. But then again, 2 MB also felt perfectly adequate back in 1996. And now I'm using something like 15 GB on my work Gmail account.
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Comment on Hey, monthly mystery commenters, what's up with the hit-and-runs? in ~tildes
vili LinkMost of the comments that I write, I don't post. I look at what I have written and don't see that I'm really adding any value to the conversation, or can't formulate my thoughts properly, and so I...Most of the comments that I write, I don't post. I look at what I have written and don't see that I'm really adding any value to the conversation, or can't formulate my thoughts properly, and so I delete what I have I written. In these cases, the only trace of me appreciating another person's comment is the anonymous vote that I may give it.
This comment actually is one of those that I would normally delete, as I don't think I'm quite able to make a coherent and original point here, especially given the amount of space that it's taking, but I decided to keep it, in the spirit of the topic.
There is also one situation which is pretty much from the other extreme: when I ask advice, I think I tend to write too many "thanks, this is helpful" type comments, which just don't add any value to the conversation. But when I have asked for information or advice and receive it, it also feels too anonymous to only give a vote to the comment. And using an "exemplary" label wouldn't be proper form, either.
In fact, I feel it would be helpful to have something like a "thanks" label. Something that would work a little like "exemplary", but would only be shown to the person that you are thanking. As with "exemplary", you could add a small message, including your name, if you so wish. It would give me the possibility of telling the commenter that I've really appreciated their comment, but I don't have anything meaningful or constructive to add to the conversation. So, basically, information that is important to me and the other person, but total noise for everyone else. Something that in a face-to-face conversation would be conveyed with a nod or a smile or a similar gesture. I guess I could use a private message for something like that, but that again feels quite out of place, as it is the opening of another communication channel, when the whole point is that I want to close the old one.
Also, like others, I do tend to disappear and come back, sometimes not visiting for half a year or so. Recently, I've been following Tildes more consistently as I discovered that I can get new posts through an RSS feed. But that of course doesn't promote comment activity from me, since I rarely visit the front page and therefore don't re-visit threads where interesting conversation may be happening. And I also only notice that someone has replied to a comment of mine when I visit the website, which only happens when I see something interesting in my feed. This is certainly a problem very much of my own doing, and the solution would be to just visit the website more often, but at the same time, I just don't really have the mental bandwidth to explicitly visit websites to check if something interesting is happening. That's what my RSS reader, email account and my mobile phone's notifications are for.
With users like me, getting more activity out of us would probably require some sort of a notification system (RSS, email, something), which would tell me about replies to my posts and comments, and perhaps more importantly, would somehow promote to me threads that contain interesting discussion. Could there for instance be an RSS feed that promotes particularly active threads (without notifying about every single new comment)?
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Comment on Favorite hobby / subculture YouTube channels? in ~hobbies
vili Link ParentA cheap popcorn machine. That's pretty much it! I think I paid 20 euros for it. I do use my phone as a timer, a sieve to cool the coffee beans down quickly, and I do the roasting under the...What's your home roasting setup?
A cheap popcorn machine.
That's pretty much it! I think I paid 20 euros for it. I do use my phone as a timer, a sieve to cool the coffee beans down quickly, and I do the roasting under the ventilation of a kitchen hood, while wearing a mask.
Naturally, the results are not perfect. But they are surprisingly good. The challenge is that with a cheap popcorn machine, the heat is applied very quickly, so the time it takes for the roast to go from "light roast" to "burnt beans" is fairly short, about a minute or so. The roasts are also slightly different from one batch to another, as the method is fairly inconsistent, and I can only roast about 70-80 grams of beans at a time.
But it's fun. The biggest issue I suspect is the short time frame, as it seems to result in somewhat thinner flavour profiles than if the roasting process was able to run for longer. Now, there definitely are plenty of aromas in the coffee that I roast, and they drink fine black, in fact much better than anything I can buy in a supermarket, but there isn't the kind of depth to the flavour that you can get from the best artisan roasters with proper equipment. It's especially noticeable with lattes and cappuccinos, as the flavours of my home roasted beans get more lost when milk is introduced to the coffee.
And because it's such a short time window for the roast, and because of the inconsistencies introduced by the popcorn machine, it's difficult to target any specific level of acidity or bitterness, and especially sweetness, with this setup. Since both acidity and bitterness are basically a function of time, acidity decreasing the longer you roast while bitterness increases, I can still ballpark those two, but sweetness is trickier to manage, as it peaks somewhere in the middle of the roasting process, and I have no way of really knowing when that is. So, it's always a little bit of a surprise what comes out. But in a way, that's part of the fun.
I haven't stopped ordering roasted beans from local speciality shops, but roasting my own is a fun and relatively inexpensive hobby.
What do you do in the industry?
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Comment on Favorite hobby / subculture YouTube channels? in ~hobbies
vili LinkSome of my current absolute favourites: Food: Internet Shaquille - Perhaps my favourite channel on YouTube. I wish all videos were like this: he goes straight to the point, doesn't add filler...- Exemplary
Some of my current absolute favourites:
Food:
- Internet Shaquille - Perhaps my favourite channel on YouTube. I wish all videos were like this: he goes straight to the point, doesn't add filler content, keeps things informative, and makes foods that are actually easy to make at home, while also being witty. Chef's kiss.
- Alvin Zhou - In a way, the very opposite of Internet Shaquille: this one makes food very, very slowly, and doesn't share much information. His latest project was a ramen that took him 200 hours to put together. The videos are calming, beautiful, and funny.
- Tasting History - Max digs up an interesting old recipe (like, from ancient Rome or something), makes it, tells a bit of history around that dish, and then tastes what comes out and tells you whether to make it or to avoid it. I've made several of the foods that he's covered, and some have been genuinely wonderful. I can particularly highly recommend the Parthian Chicken.
- James Hoffmann - Coffee videos, done by someone who not only knows his stuff, but also seems like a genuinely lovely person. Before I stumbled into his channel, I never liked coffee, and never in my 40 years of life made myself a cup of coffee. Because, yuck. Fast forward about two years, and I'm now roasting my own coffee beans at home. My introduction to him was actually on the Tom Scott Plus channel, where he made Tom Scott like coffee.
- Hames Joffmann - If you follow James Hoffmann, and have the sense of humour of a six-year-old, you also need to follow his döppelgänger, Hames.
Retro computing:
- Retro Recipes - Just a wonderful person, who in addition to retro computer stuff also does some other retro projects, most recently converting a Tesla into a KITTesla, i.e. trying to make it function like the car from the 80s TV show Knight Rider. I love just about everything about this channel.
- The 8-Bit Guy - I guess you already know this if you are into retro computing at all. But if you don't, you definitely should check him out.
- Iftkryo - Makes music with Commodore 64s. And I mean that literally: his most recent project is the C=TAR, a guitar-like instrument built on top of a C64. Still, my favourite of his is The Commodordion, an accordion-like instrument built from two C64s, and old diskettes.
Science & Tech & Space & Stuff:
- Dr Geoff Lindsey - My favourite linguist on YouTube. Excellent videos on speech, mainly focusing on English phonetics and phonology. And I'm someone whose interest in linguistics is generally far more in the fields of syntax and morphology.
- Sabine Hossenfelder - She has recently started to put out videos almost daily, making her channel a bit more hit-or-miss than it used to be before, and taking her away from her core strengths and into more of a general science channel. But it's still good. She's also fairly opinionated, which can be both good and bad. I love her humour.
- Technology Connections - A channel that looks at all sorts of everyday technology that we live with. I have learnt so much about household appliances from this one.
- Technology Connextras - More Technology Connections. Which is a good thing.
- Everyday Astronaut - Pitches himself as making rocket science accessible to everyday people. I think it's not quite true, as some of his videos can be quite challenging to follow, but they are generally well made. His live coverage of launches is also my default way to watch the bigger events. Incidentally, the last launch of the Delta IV Heavy rocket will happen today, and the channel will live stream it.
- Scott Manley - Scott is, I feel, THE authority on space related things on YouTube. While Everyday Astronaut is constantly upping his own game with 8K videos and highly produced content, Scott mainly just turns on the camera and talks, and what he says is almost always very interesting.
- Nutrition Made Simple - I tend to shy away from recommending nutrition information sources because it seems to me that what and how you eat has basically replaced religious fanaticism in many parts of the world. But I will still recommend this one. They are not the sleekest produced videos out there, but I like the kind of information that he shares and how he does it.
Music (sort of):
- Bill McClintock - The best mashups I have ever heard. I mean, just check out this Donna Summer + Ozzy Osbourne track.
- There I Ruined It - This channel ruins perfectly good (or bad) music. The latest video was Simon & Garfunkel singing "Baby Got Back". That's all you need to know. Either you like the humour or you don't. I do. Just check out this Pulp Fiction musical.
Puzzles:
- Cracking the Cryptic - Videos where a guy solves a sudoku, or a cryptic crossword. Although I like puzzles, I would never ever in my life have thought that I would find this interesting. But I do. I particularly love the longer (2+ hour) solves, and make a point to watch every single one of their weekly cryptic crossword videos. Their patreon also has quite a bit of extra content, if you get hooked.
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Comment on Let's talk about Eurovision Song Contest 2024 in ~music
vili Link ParentI could pretty much have written everything that you wrote above. I have largely the same history with the competition, the same insistence of not listening to songs beforehand, and the same habit...I could pretty much have written everything that you wrote above. I have largely the same history with the competition, the same insistence of not listening to songs beforehand, and the same habit of checking some music videos afterwards.
Correct me if I remember things wrong, but I think still back in the 90s, it was explicitly forbidden to release a competing song in any form before the competition, including radio play. Does anyone remember if this was actually true, or have I made it up? Of course, nowadays, with the internet and the national competitions that are used to select the songs, this would be impossible.
I love being surprised and hearing the songs for the first time in the semi-finals. It's also really interesting how a song that I didn't really care about in a semi-final suddenly sounds much better in the final, or the other way around. You learn new things about yourself. Eurovision can be educational.
Also, for some reason, Thursday's semi-final almost always sounds much better than Tuesday's. I'm not sure if it's the song selection, or does watching Tuesday's semi-final calibrate my brain to accept Thursday's songs easier? It's been a bit of a mystery to me over the years.
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Comment on Album of the Week #25: D'Angelo - Voodoo in ~music
vili Link ParentAbsolutely, the Voodoo sound very much stands on its own. It is such a meticulously crafted album. I suppose my difficulty of hearing the Prince influence on the album could be because of this. I...Absolutely, the Voodoo sound very much stands on its own. It is such a meticulously crafted album. I suppose my difficulty of hearing the Prince influence on the album could be because of this. I get so drawn in by the D'Angelo sound that I don't catch the references. He may incorporate all sorts of influences, but as with "Feel Like Makin' Love", he totally makes them his own.
I love "The Charade". That guitar sound definitely sounds very much like Prince!
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Comment on Album of the Week #25: D'Angelo - Voodoo in ~music
vili Link ParentSpeaking of Adoring things, "Adore" is actually the one Prince track that I could perhaps be convinced might in some distant way sound a bit like something on Voodoo. That and maybe "Insatiable"....Speaking of Adoring things, "Adore" is actually the one Prince track that I could perhaps be convinced might in some distant way sound a bit like something on Voodoo. That and maybe "Insatiable". But both are far cleaner, clearer, more playful and melodic to me than the dirtier, murkier sound that runs through Voodoo. Even on headphones, much of that album sounds like it's playing somewhere in a club on the other side of the street. Which is quite wonderful, but quite far from Prince.
The contrast between "Feel Like Makin' Love" on Voodoo and the original Roberta Flack recording is such a great example of this. D'Angelo sounds like he is in a tin box, wrapped in a blanket and not quite singing into the microphone. There is absolutely no space, no echo, no reverb, and no life present. Sonically, everything comes across as very dry and emotionless, which frames the lyrics in a very interesting manner. As a performance, it's a million miles away from the airiness, brightness and beauty of Roberta Flack's version. She's not in a tin box in some dark corner somewhere. No, she's clearly in that park in the spring, and the sun is very much shining, whatever the lyrics say about the time of the day.
Also, now that I played Voodoo through once again, I must admit that the drums on "Africa" sound like they were lifted from Prince's "I Wonder U". Maybe I'm starting to finally hear the connections.
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Comment on Album of the Week #25: D'Angelo - Voodoo in ~music
vili Link ParentI think you are right that D'Angelo was just a massive Prince fan. I couldn't find the article where he talked about wanting to work with Prince and bring him back into fold (and perhaps I...I think you are right that D'Angelo was just a massive Prince fan. I couldn't find the article where he talked about wanting to work with Prince and bring him back into fold (and perhaps I remember it wrong), but he did certainly say in an interview in 2000 that what Prince was doing at that point wasn't "pure Prince", insisting that Prince should go back to his earlier sound, "back to the ABCs", and even suggesting that Prince's earlier success may have been due to the talented people around him giving him a push. I can imagine Prince wouldn't have been too happy to read any of that. But that doesn't make D'Angelo any less of a Prince fan in my view. In fact, it was pretty much what most Prince fans were saying at the time.
That is, until Prince sort of shut everyone up by switching back to using his birth name, putting out The Rainbow Children, and especially with the One Nite Alone Tour that followed. But just before that, the late 90s and the turn of the millennium was certainly a little weird time for a Prince fan.
I don't know why, but no matter how much I try, I just can't hear "Feel Like Makin' Love" as a Sign O The Times track. It sounds to me more like mid-90s R&B, making me think of TLC's "Rainbows" or Fugees or something like that. Which I suppose is funny as I remember "Rainbows" also being talked about as a Prince-like track at the time, and... I just can't hear the connection there, either. Maybe I just lack some sort of musical imagination, or something.
But what I lack in imagination, I can perhaps substitute with useless pedantry. "Chicken Grease" was actually not a reference to Prince's guitar, but a call that Prince used in concerts to instruct his guitarists to play a certain kind of funky guitar strum pattern. I'm sure it has a technical name, but as we have already established, I lack musical imagination, so I don't know what it is.
Now, I may certainly have this wrong, but I think the phrase appears exactly twice on Prince's album tracks. You can hear it in It's Gonna Be A Beautiful Night (this one's actually not the album version but close enough), and you can also hear the guitar pattern going on in the background. And the other time he mentions the phrase is, naturally, in the 2001 version of "Undisputed", i.e. the track that I mentioned earlier is dissing D'Angelo and Questlove. Here, Prince asks his guitarist to "show them the real chicken grease". Ouch.
I'm glad all this didn't seem to sour D'Angelo's enthusiasm for Prince. And we of course don't know what really went on between these people, or how playful all this was meant to be. What we do know however is that D'Angelo's "Pop Life" cover is absolutely lovely, and I remember how he performed "Sometimes It Snows In April" on Jimmy Fallon after Prince's passing. It made me cry when I saw it.
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Comment on Album of the Week #25: D'Angelo - Voodoo in ~music
vili LinkApologies for the lack of brevity. I consider myself a big Prince fan, but for some reason I have never really been able to hear Voodoo's alleged Prince influences. Apart from some background...Apologies for the lack of brevity.
I consider myself a big Prince fan, but for some reason I have never really been able to hear Voodoo's alleged Prince influences. Apart from some background touches here and there, as on "Untitled", the album doesn't sound either rhythmically or melodically anything like Prince to me. (But maybe you guys can point me to the Prince bits!) I think this is largely why I dismissed the album when it came out, as I was so focused on trying to compare it to Prince, and I just ended up baffled and confused. It was only later, after I first got into Parliament-Funkadelic in the late 2000s, and through that into 1990s g-funk (yes, I was quite late to the party, having pretty much dismissed all rap music in the 90s), that I began to appreciate Voodoo. And I still feel that that those are the album's more natural musical connections, rather than the Minneapolis scene.
I wonder if I was also influenced by Prince's apparent dissing of D'Angelo at the time. I didn't remember any of this, but I now notice that while he name dropped D'Angelo and Questlove on his 1999 track "Undisputed" (on Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic), he pretty much turned that around in his 2001 version of the song (on Rave In2 the Joy Fantastic). I believe he wasn't too happy about some comments that D'Angelo made, practically saying that if given the chance, he could get Prince back on track. Or maybe it was the press saying that D'Angelo's songs were the best Prince songs in over a decade. And I probably wasn't wild about any of those comments either, because I for one really liked Prince's 90s output.
Anyway, I almost feel that the D'Angelo-Prince connection ended up working the other way around. Some of Prince's music from the mid-to-late-2000s reminds me a little of D'Angelo.
But even more than the Prince thing, it may have rubbed me the wrong way that D'Angelo was so praised for his unconventional approach to soul music, the organic quality of the album's songs and his masterful sonic tapestries, while I thought all of that would have described Maxwell's near-contemporary album Embrya equally well. Yet, that one had been widely and quite loudly criticised for being pretentious and lacking in direction. And while I don't typically mind what people say about my favourite albums, I to date lament the reception that Maxwell's album received, as he has never ventured into similarly experimental territory since.
And while I probably couldn't have known Maxwell's career trajectory at the time, I had already seen how unkind reviews had affected another of my musical heroes. A full decade before Maxwell and D'Angelo used their follow-ups to successful debut albums to release experimental takes on progressive soul, Terence Trent D'Arby did exactly the same with his own second album, 1989's Neither Fish Nor Flesh: A Soundtrack of Love, Faith, Hope & Destruction. While it may have stumbled in places, and TTD's public persona certainly made it a bit too easy for the press to ridicule his work, I feel it was a much better and certainly a much more interesting album than reviewers gave it credit for. But whatever I thought, the response was enough to make TTD practically disappear from the top of the charts, even if his 90s albums were, I think, some of the best music that anyone put out that decade. At least he didn't play it quite as safe as Maxwell ended up doing in his subsequent albums (I do love Maxwell's music, but I long for another Embrya), even if it also meant that TTD, in following his muse, also ultimately sort of gradually drifted into a musical dimension that I just haven't been able to follow him into.
But I digress. And then again, maybe I don't. All this illustrates that for various reasons, Voodoo came to me with lots of baggage, which I wasn't able to put aside at the time. And I feel that a part of that baggage, the Prince references in particular, was intentional, generated by marketing. It felt like a very strongly, very methodically, and in many ways very cleverly marketed album. It succeeded in building hype and creating that aura of "genius" around the release, but it felt a little much at times to me.
So, whenever I think about Voodoo, I tend to think about all these things, rather than the music. Which is a pity. Because these days, I can see the album's brilliance, even if I still can't claim that it's one of my favourites. In fact, it's not even my favourite D'Angelo album. But that's just because I really like his other two releases. They feel a little fuller, rounder, more melodic to me. Voodoo so easily fades into the background for me. Unless I put it on the headphones and really concentrate on it. It's one of those albums that requires you to work with it.
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Comment on New Music Fridays: Ariana Grande, Kamasi Washington, MIKE and more in ~music
vili LinkI heard Nikka Costa's new song Dirty Disco today. It's a fun track and made me happy. Nikka hasn't released a new album of original music in something like 15 years. This song has very strong...I heard Nikka Costa's new song Dirty Disco today. It's a fun track and made me happy.
Nikka hasn't released a new album of original music in something like 15 years. This song has very strong Prince vibes, specifically the early 80s era Prince. The new album also apparently drops on June 7. That day would have Prince's 66th birthday.
I'm quite excited to hear what Nikka has put together. I first came across her music with the 2001 album Everybody Got Their Something and have followed her career since. She's worked with everyone from Mark Ronson and Questlove to Lenny Kravitz and the already mentioned purple yoda. It has always been something of a mystery to me why Nikka isn't a bigger star.
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Comment on Humble Choice - March 2024 in ~games
vili LinkI remember Citizen Sleeper with fondness, having played it a couple of years ago. It's fairly well written and the dice mechanics are quite well put together. Not particularly long, but doesn't...I remember Citizen Sleeper with fondness, having played it a couple of years ago. It's fairly well written and the dice mechanics are quite well put together. Not particularly long, but doesn't overstay its welcome. In fact, it left me wanting for more. In terms of mechanics, it's something like a single player digital board game with some light resource management, story-driven role playing, and plenty of text to read.
It's not a particularly challenging game but I enjoyed the world that it depicted and felt like I was making meaningful decisions for my character. That said, a friend of mine who is much more of a completionist/competent gamer than me found the game to be so easy for him that there were no meaningful decisions, as he just managed to do everything.
If you are looking for a story driven scifi game, and enjoy board game mechanics, definitely give this one a try.
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Comment on Humble Choice - March 2024 in ~games
vili LinkIf you enjoy co-op games and if you have an interest in soulslikes, I can highly recommend Nioh 2. I have been playing it with a friend for the past half a year and have enjoyed it much more than...If you enjoy co-op games and if you have an interest in soulslikes, I can highly recommend Nioh 2. I have been playing it with a friend for the past half a year and have enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. It's challenging but rewarding, and I have fallen in love with its many, many systems. It has actually become one of my favourite games ever.
You can of course play it solo as well, which I guess is how it was originally intended to be played. But the co-op works really well. I'm hopeless with soulslikes, but I like to be hopeless in them together with a friend.
It is a long game though. We have put in about 90 hours so far and still have one DLC's worth of content to play from the complete edition. And some consider finishing the first playthrough as only finishing the tutorial. The game has constantly been adding new mechanisms, and in a sense the real game only starts in new game plus. As I understand it, once you play through the main game five times, with each new game increasing difficulty and changing how enemies behave, you unlock a completely new mode, with something like 150 extra levels. It remains to be seen whether we have the stamina or skills to get that far.
It's not a perfect game, of course. The game recycles levels for its optional missions, and the number of enemy types is quite small, so you end up seeing the same enemies over and over again, although in different contexts. There is so much loot that it becomes a little exhausting to manage, and the game has so many systems on top of systems that it can be a little too much sometimes. Although it does also allow for a lot of experimentation with different character builds and approaches to the game. The game is ruthless in combat, but very forgiving when it comes to allowing you to try out different setups. This allows you to eventually find a game style that works for you personally.
If you don't know Japanese history and folklore, the story can also be fairly opaque. Just about every character is a historical figure, and I think all enemy types, the so-called yōkai, are taken from Japanese folklore. They pretty much just get dropped into the story without much explanation, expecting you to automatically get the references. Fortunately for a non-Japanese player, the game does include a fairly exhaustive reference archive, where you can read about all of these people and yōkai that you meet, as well as the wider historical context that serves as the backdrop. The game has actually inspired me to start reading some books on yōkai and Japanese folklore.
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Comment on RSS users - how do you use, organize and maximize your enjoyment of RSS? in ~tech
vili LinkI try to keep the signal to noise ratio as high as possible. I stay away from generic, high volume feeds, and filter feeds if necessary. I use services like Reddit as curators, as they allow me to...I try to keep the signal to noise ratio as high as possible. I stay away from generic, high volume feeds, and filter feeds if necessary. I use services like Reddit as curators, as they allow me to filter feeds by vote counts.
I don't follow breaking news through RSS. I just visit a handful of news websites daily for the bigger developing news. I do subscribe to news digests however, to get summaries of what has been going on in the world.
With something like Ars Technica which you mentioned, I don't subscribe to their main feed, or necessarily even their main categories. Instead, I subscribe to their individual journalists who I know produce high quality content on a topic that I am interested in.
I divide feeds into thematic categories as it makes it easier for me to process articles quicker and more accurately when I have that context as a reader. For instance, if I come across a headline about AI in my culture category, I instantly know that the article is likely very different than a similarly sounding article would be in my tech category, or in my LLM category.
I sort articles within categories by publication date, oldest first. This again helps with context, as sometimes things build on top of earlier things.
Most of my categories are intended to be read through like news feeds, but there are some which function a little differently. My music recommendations category, for instance, gathers album recommendations from a handful of sources. I only touch that category when I want to listen to something new, basically just picking whatever the next unread article recommends. As I work from home, I can and do listen to music throughout the day, but typically that category is never fully "read" as it always has unread articles (unchecked recommendations).
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Comment on Any tips for games for two or more players? in ~games.tabletop
vili Link ParentIf you like Jaipur, give Jambo a try! It's also a card driven trading game. My wife and I love Jaipur, and Jambo is probably our favourite two player game. The expansions are excellent as well.If you like Jaipur, give Jambo a try! It's also a card driven trading game. My wife and I love Jaipur, and Jambo is probably our favourite two player game. The expansions are excellent as well.
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Comment on Any tips for games for two or more players? in ~games.tabletop
vili LinkIf you like narrative games, co-operative games and puzzles, one of my favourites is the good old Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective series. Best enjoyed with a pot of English tea and some...If you like narrative games, co-operative games and puzzles, one of my favourites is the good old Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective series. Best enjoyed with a pot of English tea and some cookies. And lots of voice acting by the reader!
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Comment on Tips for Docker security on a NAS? in ~tech
vili Link ParentThis helpful reminder made me question whether I actually understand what I am doing. When I spin up a container with a docker compose file, I use PUID and PGID variables in the environment...This helpful reminder made me question whether I actually understand what I am doing. When I spin up a container with a docker compose file, I use PUID and PGID variables in the environment section, with PUID pointing to a special docker user that I have created, and PGID to its user group. This user has very limited access to the file system, among other things.
But now that I read into it more, I see that not all containers support PUID and PGID. I had thought that it is a Docker standard, but it isn't? Additionally, I have no idea how to confirm what user a given container is actually running under. How can I do that?
If I run "id" on the container itself, or if I run "docker exec mycontainer id" from the host machine, the response always notes root as the user. But, if I understand this correctly (and this may be a big if), this makes sense, as that just lists the container's internal user, which tends to be root, and is not the same as (but is mapped to?) the user that runs the container on the host machine?
Are we even talking about the same thing when you say not to use root users?
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Comment on Tips for Docker security on a NAS? in ~tech
vili Link ParentI generally do that when installing a new container, but I must confess that I don't really see myself doing that when updating containers. I have done some Node.js development in recent years and...If you don't have the ability to validate the code, you can at least go to the git repo, check the issues board, and look at the number of downloads there too.
I generally do that when installing a new container, but I must confess that I don't really see myself doing that when updating containers. I have done some Node.js development in recent years and while the npm package manager is far from perfect, I have found its way to notify me about vulnerabilities in my installed packages helpful. I'll try to look for something like that for my Docker containers.
PiHole
This could indeed be helpful, and I have been considering setting it up for other (understandable) reasons anyway. Thanks for pointing out how it could help me with Docker monitoring as well. I've also seen Wireshark mentioned here and there, I think I'll need to take a closer look at that as well.
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Comment on Tips for Docker security on a NAS? in ~tech
vili Link ParentSynology's Container Manager contains an image registry and handles the downloads. Basically, it's a slightly broken GUI for Docker Hub. I'll look into firewalls, thanks for the suggestion.Where are you getting containers?
Synology's Container Manager contains an image registry and handles the downloads. Basically, it's a slightly broken GUI for Docker Hub.
I'll look into firewalls, thanks for the suggestion.
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Comment on Tips for Docker security on a NAS? in ~tech
vili Link ParentThanks! What about a container that needs Internet access and secretly contains code that contributes to a bot network or something similar? Would there be any way for me to detect that?Thanks! What about a container that needs Internet access and secretly contains code that contributes to a bot network or something similar? Would there be any way for me to detect that?
I did a bit of reading following the attacks in October, trying to wrap my head around the history of the conflict, like I have done when tensions have risen. I can't say I came out with any sort of a better understanding of what ways out of the cycle of violence there could be, but I can recommend The Routledge Handbook on the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict as a fairly good, level-headed and pretty kaleidoscopic look at the history and potential futures of the conflict.
Other books that I found interesting, although always fairly biased towards or against one side, were Alain Dieckhoff's The Invention of a Nation, Maryanne A. Rhett's The Global History of the Balfour Declaration, and Jean-Pierre Filiu's Gaza. I must stress though, that each of those books presents a fairly one-sided view of the situation. What I liked about the Routledge Handbook, which I read after these (and others), was its more academically neutral overall approach, although individual authors do lean towards one side more than the other there as well.