We have a long establishedapproach for configuring our Linux systems, and specifically ourUbuntu systems (since these days the only Linux we run is Ubuntu).Part of that has been that we use a standard /etc/resolv.conf thatpoints to our local DNS resolvers (which have our split horizon DNSsetup). However, as people may have noticed, Linux distributions thesedays are moving to systemd-resolved instead of a straight /etc/resolv.conf setup.

There are good reasons for this switch

If you look at it from the right angle, the existence of third partypackage systems that sit on top of Linux distributions is rather odd.After all, these distributions already have packaging systems, yethere people are, ignoring them and writing new ones. A while back onthe Fediverse, I said something on this general topic:

I have feelings and some of the feelings are that everyone screwedthis up, for actually natural reasons. I don't think any distrosolved the 'how do we let people

In a comment on my entry on universities, email, and the issues ofrunning things in house , Imentioned that our departmentalemail system has a non-trivial cost in both hardware and staff time. For the hardware costs I can easily count servers , but things are more fuzzy for the staff timeside of things so I'm not going to try to come up with a number(especially because our email system itself is somewhat complexbecause we have a number of unusual features, such as our simplemailing

I've been using my home desktop formany years now, with a variety of disk drives, and over those yearssome of those disks have failed (without data loss, because I usesoftware RAID mirrors). Some of the time, those failures havehappened when the HDD was still under warranty, but despite thatI've never bothered to try to return one for a warranty replacement.This is strikingly unlike work, where we routinely return faileddrives that are still under warranty.

Historically there have been

Back in 2022 I said that my Firefox addons hadn't changed in a while , and while that's still mostly truethere's been some minor changes that I want to write down. Addons arecentral to my Firefox experience, but I don't change them very oftenpartly because of that and partly because I'm much more conservativewith Firefox than I am with things like Emacs packages . I'm generally happy with myFirefox environment and most of what I do with it

So today I had a learning experience :

Firefox Nightly apparently has decided to not allowextensions/addons to run for file:/// URLs and I am sorry, thiscompletely breaks my environment (my startup page is a file:/// URL)and I find it infuriating. Maybe I can find some hidden toggle forthis somewhere.

This is relevant to me because my start page is a local HTML file and I'm a long time user of Foxy Gestures ( cf ), which I expect

When I wrote about the Emacs packages I use ,I mentioned that I had Embark installed but barely used it because I didn't understand much abouthow to really use it. One reason for that is that while there are abunch of articles on the web about things you can do with Embark, allof the ones I've tried to read started out with complicated stuffinvolving other third party packages I didn't use, which caused me totune out and stop reading. As sometimes happens, writing

One piece of technology news of the time interval is that Googleis no longer going to be providing Internet search, it's going tobe providing 'answers' .On the Fediverse, I had a reaction to that :

Given Google's apparent change to what Google Search will be, I'mwondering if I should even allow Googlebot to crawl my techblog. Ifthey're going to AI slop up anything they tell people after a search,I'd rather have my writing excluded entirely rather than

One of the problems I have when talking about 'vim' is that inpractice, there are several versions of 'vim'. I don't mean 'version'in the sense of release numbers (although Vim has lots of releasesand things change in them over time), but more in how people approachand use Vim. Even more than GNU Emacs, I feel that Vim has turnedinto an editor that has multiple faces, so the 'vim' that you usemay not be the 'vim