Tux in Brussels @tux@mastodon.multimob.be

Today (Oct. 11):
1 EUR = 1.15722 USD

If you live in the Eurozone and buy something in dollars with#PayPal, this is how you will be charged:
1 EUR = 1.11340 USD

This is how PayPal makes money, while providing a service that looks like it’s free of charge.

According to a study by Kaspersky, more people would accept being involved in a (minor) car accident than losing their smartphone.
https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/stay-tuned-report/

It reminds me of Jerry Seinfeld explaining that the fear of public speaking was stronger than the fear of dying, i.e. at a funeral the average people would prefer to be in the casket than being the one doing the eulogy. 😂

Postfix’s "transport" rules look like an interesting option here, though it looks like they only work with a static table of known domains to reject. But maybe I’m missing something here.

One of my users wants to avoid writing to users whose email is hosted by Google. This excludes not only gmail.com but also thousands of other domains.
Are there desktop email clients that do a "host -t MX" check? Any idea, anyone?
#deleteGoogle

I always create aliases on my machines to include the "-i" option for cp, mv and rm. A real life-saver.
There is an additional benefit: sometimes, it’s faster to type "rm *" and answer "n" to the files you want to preserve, than writing a complicated regexp.
But here’s the drawback: if you are on another machine without this alias, it hurts!

Let's treat our users well! 💞

The last days, I have seen lots of times this in my web server logs:
GET //libs/js/iframe.js
I suspect that the script-kiddies looking after a vulnerability here are focusing on very old bugs that were fixed years ago, weren’t they?

I ordered a laptop at ubuntushop.be. Here is my experience:
(post 3/3: negative points)
(➖) Website looks unprofessional: bad English, no search function, most of the site is about why Linux is better than Windows
(➖) Too much emphasis on distributions: are "Ubuntu laptops" totally different from "Mint laptops"?
(➖) "Pre-2005" UX: as soon as they see your order, you will not hear from them for 8 days before they start shipping; you don’t even see a message when your payment has been accepted.

I ordered a laptop at ubuntushop.be. Here is my experience:
(post 2/3: neutral points)
(0️⃣) I cannot comment on how they configure the OS, I asked for a blank drive to do it myself.

I ordered a laptop at ubuntushop.be. Here is my experience:
(post 1/3: positive points)
(➕) It works: you can see the product, you order, they deliver.
(➕) The machine is okay, it is robust and looks fine
(➕) You can even save €50 if you ask that no OS comes pre-installed (so far only for the so-called "Ubuntu laptops")

I ordered a laptop at ubuntushop.be. My motivations:
(1) I don’t want to pay for Windows licences, or to boost their sales and statistics
(2) Supporting a local business (small company in West-Flanders)
(3) No need for bleeding-edge features
(4) They still sell machines with large HDD devices (whereas most vendors impose SSD drives and expect you to use their cloud).

There have been ups and down. This is explained in my next posts.

Mobs of villagers in India have killed innocent passers-by because of misinformation spread through WhatsApp.

What worries me is that people ask for more social responsability from software makers, and those respond by imposing artificial restrictions (e.g. number of forwards). If Mastodon had been the #1 media, would we have accepted this? Let’s educate people not to believe rumours instead; for centuries, urban legends have thriven on ignorance.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-destroyed-village-lynchings-rainpada-india

This fallacy has been around for too long. A VPN improves your *privacy* but does not make you *anonymous* nor permit illegal activities. It just hides your IP to servers you talk to (websites, email servers, your ISP), and traffic is encrypted by default. But if a government wants to trace you back and if they can force VPN providers to reveal your identity they will find you.
#VPN #privacy

Helping a friend to buy a new computer: she wanted the same ports she has now. Okay, let’s see:
VGA ✔️
HDMI Type A ✔️
USB ✔️
Broken USB ❌
Oops!

This message is not reassuring.
Especially because CAcert.org is a certificate authority, right?
#cacert

#ArchLinux is great… BUT I made a fatal mistake recently: hibernating the machine while failing to notice that pacman was still running and was in the middle of regenerating the #kernel hooks.
ArchLinux is great anyway because it’s easy to fix: boot through USB, use arch-chroot, then pacman -S linux linux-headers 👍

A friend hated #PeerTube because of horrible performance on her old tablet—it was constantly lagging—but we found a simple way to solve this: upon starting the video, pause it for 30 seconds or more, then start watching. Problem gone. User happy again.

@admin Mastodon 2.5.0 is out, do you plan to migrate soon?

Message to my users:
If it is a software problem, slamming your computer won’t do any good.
And if it is a hardware problem, it won’t either.

In the last few weeks my activities to repair people’s electronic devices were mostly focused on cleaning internals. Yesterday I used a toothpick to remove a ball of dust inside the jack connector of a smartphone. (Crappy sound is gone.) Looks like I am starting some kind of a new job. 😃