Rob Landley

Rob does toybox and mkroot, writes linux docs, worked with j-core.org, long ago co-founded Penguicon and Linucon, wrote for Motley Fool, taught at ACC, etc. Trying to learn Japanese and make Android a self-hosting development environment.

He/him. Answers to "they/them" just fine.

Public Key

npub17qgpgv7anzj9katjrvwvszrwt48vvx09m5ncy255766g85as00asj8nwpl

NIP-05 Address

landley_at_mstdn.jp@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs0qyq5x0we3fzmw4epk8xgpph96nkxr8ja6fuz9220ddyr6wc8h7cf69d8f

Author Public Key

npub17qgpgv7anzj9katjrvwvszrwt48vvx09m5ncy255766g85as00asj8nwpl

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Last Notes

2024-09-05 03:47:47

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@npub1dts…6798 Life's a beach and then you dry.

2024-09-04 10:52:38

Youtube interrupts my video to warn of an upcoming "Apple Event", which I assume is like a "Cardiac Event" or "Ischemic Event". Good luck to those affected by it: I hope recovery is swift and long-term damage can be minimized.

2024-08-19 20:04:59

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@npub1dts…6798 of course the "cool original flavor" could include Mandrake root and plutonium.

2024-08-11 03:59:44

Oh I am so tired.
https://mastodon.social/@kaffando/110047953189331817
COVID isn't uniquely bad, it's uniquely _studied_. The madness of King George that led to the American revolution came after an illness. The Robin Williams movie "Awakenings" was about the aftermath of the encephalitis lethargica epidemic of 1919 to 1930. We didn't link HPV with cancer until recently.
Diseases have always caused damage, we just used to write off sudden disability as "a thing that happens". COVID isn't that _unusual_. Get your shots.

2024-08-08 15:05:48

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@npub1upk…tcwy 3) cat ./-name
4) cd "$PWD"

2024-07-14 06:03:40

Microsoft is apparently trying to reach "carbon negative" via integer overflow.
https://wetdry.world/@halva/112768408710903576

2024-06-11 10:34:24

Apparently the beans in standard american "baked beans" cans are _not_ "pinto beans". (Learn something new every day...)
I mean, they're _edible_ smothered in ketchup and molasses and onion powder and so on. But kind of large and chewy.
(That time Ford named a vehicle that explodes if rear ended after beans commonly used in mexican food was apparently NOT intentional, by the way.)

2024-06-06 14:34:47

Good leadership is boring.
https://youtu.be/DU06c7f9fzc
Drama and overcoming (self-inflicted) adversity are a great story. Confident, perpetually busy white men generate noise, action, conflict, pull through by the skin of their teeth in a nail-biter.
We don't celebrate preparation, research, and making it look easy. Nobody gets credit for _avoiding_ crisis.
This is Biden's problem vs Trump's endless self-aggrandizing tantrums. Good leadership that does the job without incident is invisible.

2024-04-29 15:51:24

@npub1hyk…3p33 Another good enshittification example:
https://youtu.be/FDvUSCa7Puw
1:40-5:00 after eMotorworks was acquired by Enel X, an OTA update removed functionality from their electric vehicle charging stations installed in people's homes.

2024-04-25 22:01:14

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@npub1kxp…lt8h I have re-followed you.

2024-04-25 15:52:54

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@npub1psd…9sr7 There's no _way_ amazon pays that well. Not through their "streaming" scam.

2024-04-25 15:46:57

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@npub1psd…9sr7 Can you write it off as a business expense?

2024-04-11 19:52:25

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@npub1psd…9sr7 A 737-800. All the major pieces of it appear to have arrived at the same time.

2024-04-11 17:14:28

Sitting in a Boeing contraption which is about to power up. Not entirely happy about this.

2024-04-08 12:45:35

Technology doesn't advance when patents are granted, it advances when patents expire.
The first cell phone call was made April 3, 1973. Cell phones took off 20 years later when the patents expired.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/03/tech/cell-phone-turns-50/index.html
Steve Sasson created the first self-contained digital camera in 1975:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130121194248/http://pluggedin.kodak.com/pluggedin/post/?id=687843
20 years later, the patents expired...

2024-04-03 09:24:03

If Netanyahu's defense is "we didn't see the World Central Kitchen logos, we just thought they were random civilians and thus fair game to shoot at"... how is that not genocide? You're saying you shoot at literally anything that moves. Continually, for 5 months now.
https://mstdn.social/@Bellingcat/112201813545928117

2024-04-02 03:16:45

Cloud is bad. Do not cloud.
https://chaos.social/@isotopp/112166979147346964

2024-03-30 22:08:22

Regarding the xz backdoor situation, here's what I wrote about in 2020 about coutering ken thompson's trusting trust attack by binary auditing from a small reproducible base:
http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2020-July/011898.html
This is not a one-time thing. We need auditable plumbing that can be cleaned regularly, like maid service. Binary re-auditing the common OS base from scratch should be a standard freshman project, and that base should be simple enough to allow that.
https://landley.net/toybox

2024-03-12 22:50:36

Back at @npub1kxp…lt8h's, preparing to cook dinner. Her freezer contains two bags of broccoli, which I'm afraid to touch in case they get raptured again.
We never did find that other bag...

2024-02-28 00:08:10

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@npub1nr8…rj65 How does that impact battery life?

2024-02-27 17:30:36

I can still build Linux without a bpf compiler. When I can't build Linux without a rust compiler, that's a "stay on the last old release until finding a new project" situation like GPLv2.
https://youtu.be/ZZJUhHlxaYs

2024-01-13 02:22:38

While preparing dinner, I have misplaced an unopened bag of frozen broccoli.
We've searched half an hour. It is not a large apartment.
I could not have hidden it this well if I'd tried. The broccoli is MISSING.

2023-11-22 17:56:50

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@npub1upk…tcwy @npub1psd…9sr7 Linus Torvalds is the person who created git. His talk is literally "why I did it that way", with reference to several other pre-existing source control systems, a bunch of use cases that motivated the design, and other projects like KDE that had different workflows.
Apparently I don't understand the question...

2023-11-22 17:28:06

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@npub1upk…tcwy @npub1psd…9sr7 I was there for all of it and could probably dig up references, but Linus gave multiple recorded talks about git back when it was new:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idLyobOhtO4

2023-10-22 10:12:40

$10,000 per day is $3.6 million/year. Billionaires should not exist.
If you had $1 billion in a bank account with a $10,000/day withdrawl limit on your card, you could not spend the money in your lifetime.
Your children couldn't either.
Even your grandchildren would have a hard time living long enough (273 years), and that's if the money never earned any interest.
This is why I lobby for guillotines, not taxes.

2023-09-25 17:59:33

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@npub1ysu…2jyl No protocol going across a digital connection ever changed after initial deployment, no upgrades have ever dropped support for older protocol versions, nobody has ever shifted a customer base into a new context where a captive audience can have the squeeze put on them later, it's always up front as bad as it will ever be on day one...
Why do people show up to defend capitalist market cornering? "I saw a press release with a good excuse, I assume you can't have seen it..."

2023-09-25 15:47:01

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An analog recorder doesn't know what's on the other end of the connection, so Boomers doing regulatory capture can't arrest you for owning one yet.
A digital recorder parses a protocol including permission information. If your digital recorder doesn't comply, it's a circumvention device according to the digital millennium copyright act and illegal to own.

2023-09-25 15:41:03

We all know the reason the analog jack got removed from so many phones is it has no DRM, right? You can plug a recorder into it and trivially copy songs and audiobooks and so on.
Every digital replacement from USB to Bluetooth has legally mandated DRM layers that can veto unapproved consumers of the data. Whether or not they're switched on now, they can be at any time in software once we give up the escape hatch.
Everything else is an excuse.

2023-08-04 17:45:04

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@npub1upk…tcwy You have of course seen the classic https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html

2023-07-05 13:24:21

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@npub1grx…uxfe Yeah, the Linux kernel has developed a similar problem recently.

2023-06-14 19:32:07

This is why I created https://landley.net/history/mirror with actual local copies (rsynced from my laptop, with its normal backup) instead of links to archive.org.
https://hachyderm.io/@hazelweakly/110538513402295174
I've never trusted archive.org to persist: it's a privately funded online service, when domains change hands a new robots.txt will _retroactively_ purge the history from archive.org, then during the pandemic they decided to play chicken with a freight train:
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/internet-archive-pandemic-library-provokes-broader-lending-fight
https://www.osnews.com/story/135949/the-internet-archive-has-lost-its-first-fight-to-scan-and-lend-e-books-like-a-library/

2023-05-04 02:35:49

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@npub19lt…qfjk Other than the movie "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs?"
In the USA the go-to example of runaway paperclip-maximizer production is Mickey Mouse enchanting broomsticks to carry water in "Fantasia".

2023-05-03 12:58:48

Tokyo is photogenic.
https://media.mstdn.jp/media_attachments/files/110/304/867/194/347/845/original/39c634a1fc3c229c.jpg