One of the things that MIME parts in email have (or can have) is a content disposition , whichtheoretically tells your mail client whether the MIME part shouldbe displayed as part of the message (a content disposition of inline ) or it should be not displayed by the client and you'd beoffered the option to save it, view it with something, and so on(a content disposition of attachment ).

(HTTP reuses this idea in the Content-Disposition header, which tells the browser if it

Modern versions of the Linux kernel have a set of metrics that areintended to give you a better high-level indicator of where (orwhy) your system is 'loaded' than the venerable load average, inthe form of Pressure Stall Information ( also ). The toplevel version of this is exposed as three files in /proc/pressure ,called cpu , memory , and io . If your distribution uses cgroup2,each cgroup also has its own version of these that's specific to thecgroup

I recently read Text Encoding Menu in 2021 ( via ), on Firefox'smenu (or menus) for controlling what text encoding a web page orother resource is interpreted in. The menu that Henri Sivonen described puzzled me, because itwasn't the text encoding menu that I'm familiar with and the textlisted didn't initially match mine.

Firefox's 'Text Encoding' menu (or menus) lets you select or insome cases alter the text encoding of documents that

In theory, disk drive SMART attributes should give us valuable information on how our diskdrives are doing, how many problems they've already experienced,and how likely they are to fail (or how close they are to failure).In practice, there has always been a significant view among sysadmins(and other people) that consumer drives understate SMART attributesor flat out lie, and their failure data is often not trustworthy(although sometimes it's actually useful ).

(More neutral and informational SMART attributes like

I recently read Terence Eden's That’s not how 2FA works ( via ). Init, there's an insight I hadn't realized about what passwordmanagers do for you:

A password manager stores your passwords. But it also stores the webaddress of site’s login page. If you visit githu d , the passwordmanager won’t prompt you to use the login details for githu b .

Let's rephrase this: password managers automate checking thewebsite's URL .

In theory, disk drive SMART attributes should give us valuable information on how our diskdrives are doing and how likely they are to fail (or how close theyare to total failure). Whether or not this happens in practice isa somewhat open question, although in 2016 Backblaze describedthe SMART attributes they found useful for hard drives .Whether SMART means anything much for consumer SSDs is an even moreunclear thing; we have seen both SMART errors mean effectivelynothing and SSDs fail abruptly withno notice .

WireGuard is usually described as aVPN, but it's really a secure IP tunnel system with VPNs as themost common use; I've been using WireGuard on Linux for a while . One of the settings you configure forWireGuard peers is AllowedIPs , which back in 2017 I described vaguely as that it '[...] controls which traffic isallowed to flow inside the secure tunnel'. Recently I had anopportunity to discover that my understanding of AllowedIPs wasincomplete ,so here is

Go modules are soon going to be our only option for building Goprograms , which means that it's useful tounderstand what we can and can't build with Go in 'module mode',and how to do certain customary things as part of this. There area lot of articles on using Go modules as a developer, but my majoruse of ' go get ' and friends is to build and consume other people'sprograms, so that's what I'm focusing on here.

In theory any modern version of Python 2 (or Python 3) is bundledwith pip , although it may be an out of date version that you couldupdate (with something like ' python2 -m pip install --user --upgradepip '). In practice, some Linux distributions split pip off intoits own package and have stopped providing this separate packagefor their version of Python 2. This is definitely the case forFedora 32, and may soon be the case for other distributions. If