The Art Of Not Asking Why

OK, trying zen browser take two…

The KeePass issue is definitely a Flatpak issue. I Installed Zen from tarball - no problem. Works as expected. What I’m not sure about now is if I need to download the browser each time when there’s an update.

Ah ok. KeePassXC doesn’t work with Waterfox or Zen Browser because these two come as Flatpak on Linux, and these are restricted in a way that prevents connection to KeePassXC. I do have FlatSeal… does anyone have any idea what permissions are needed?

If I were home now, I’d make myself a nice spicy vegetable soup. I don’t have many good vegan options here.

Finished watching: Better Call Saul S6E3, Rock and Hard Place 📺 Ouch. This one hurt. I liked this guy.

Well… a bit more and I’m done with this show. Good stuff.

I couldn’t finish Primitive War 🎥. The story is just too… cliche? Hard to believe? Don’t know. Wasn’t my thing.

Is it just me, or is Apple Workouts acting up? Since the update, it ends walks without prompting while I’m still walking home. During weight training, it aggressively asks if I want to finish after pausing of over a minute I think. I’m multitasking dude, chill!

Sometimes a short nap is all I need. A bit of a snooze and the battery is full after a short night sleep. And in this cold weather… Even more inviting.

Went a bit overboard with spending on gifts. I bought things for myself (the biggest one was the keyboard, without a doubt), but also for my partners and friends. There are also two birthdays around this time, and the look on one of my partners' faces when they saw what I’d gotten them was worth every penny, if you ask me.

All these people adding color to my life, which would otherwise be a constant grumpy gray and dark to navy blue (or, if I feel extra peep, royal blue). I was reminded where I was a decade ago… wow. What a difference.

Today I figured out how to play the very first part of Fur Elise without writing down the notes. It takes me forever, but I think something gets through my thick skull.

Manton mentions he likes to work from coffee shops. He doesn’t care about the coffee’s quality that much.

In my case, some places in the city are better than my homemade espresso, and others are worse. Those who fail this test don’t get a second visit from me. It’s about a 50/50 chance.

18 In New York City today, and this office is so hot (it’s an old building with steam heat), I had to turn on an AC, because it was going over 80 in here, and I’m layered like an onion… 😒

Tried HoptoDesk from Linux to my Mac. It works… until I close the lid to my Mac. With the new large desk I just got, I’m thinking maybe it’s not just so bad to slide over to the Mac and work on it as needed…

You know how “it’s always DNS?” In Linux, I think it should be “it’s always permissions”.

I tried to back up my new Kubuntu setup with the built-in backup program, which seems to be up to the task. It’s nice, clean and minimal (the actual name, by the way, is Kup, but they don’t tell you that; when you look for “KDE backup” or something similar, you get confused with Kbackup, which is a different program).

When I finished setting it up, using my external drive as a backup target, It just sat there telling me the backup program never ran. “OK, yes,” I told it, “I get that, so, start? where’s the button… how do I start you?” I burned some good coffee trying to figure this out.

Kup is configured to prompt the user automatically when everything is ready for the backup task. If something is wrong, well, it will not say anything; it will just wait for you to get things ready.

After a lot of back and forth, I realized that even though I asked my external hard drive to be accessible to all users, in practice, it wasn’t. Only root had access. The solution was to create a folder on the external and change its owner to my user (with good old chown). As soon as I did that, Kup (AKA “Backups) happily nagged me, “Hey, you want to back up your stuff?” And now it’s finally doing the thing. So yeah. Permissions.

Here’s a visual of why I love KDE Activities.

Below, Emacs with one theme playing some music:

And meanwhile, on my work instance, while listening to it:

Love it!

A few weeks back, I read a post griping about LEDs being everywhere. And honestly? It hit home—literally. My NYC apartment is the size of a respectable closet, so my bedroom doubles as my home office. That means my UPS hulks on the floor next to my desk, the modem lurks under it, and the Synology hums quietly in the corner—each one stubbornly blinking like tiny lighthouses in my personal sea of tech clutter.

The UPS pulses steadily, as if counting down to its inevitable retirement. The Synology flickers whenever it’s writing data—which, given it stores my Mac’s Time Machine backups, org-mode files, and certain encrypted personal archives, feels oddly intrusive for a machine that knows my digital secrets. And the router? It’s got more LEDs than a ’90s calculator, blinking in chaotic patterns that make me wonder: Who the hell is my network communicating with at 2 in the morning?

Now, before you ask: “Why not move this tech out of your bedroom?” - trust me, I’ve tried. But in a city where “closet-sized” is a luxury, my “office” is whatever space isn’t currently occupied by my existential dread. So let’s set aside my spatial tragedy for a moment. Do we really need LEDs on everything?

Take my wireless charger. It’s got a little blue light that glows like the Eye of Sauron, bright enough to navigate by. I have to angle it away from my pillow every night, lest it sear my retinas during my 03:00 insomnia. Couldn’t they just… add an off switch? Or maybe a dimmer? I’d settle for a polite chime instead of this relentless visual announcement that my phone is, indeed, charging. And the power adapters! Bless their tiny circuits, but why does my phone charger need to scream “I’M PLUGGED IN!” with a neon beacon? It’s in the wall. That’s the point.

Somewhere along the line, LEDs stopped being useful indicators and became tech’s participation trophies. Who decided this? Was it a well-meaning engineer in the ’90s who thought, “What if we lit up everything?” And why blue? It took a Nobel Prize to perfect blue LEDs—so if they’re that complicated to make, maybe we could’ve just… not? Red means “danger,” but a soft amber glow to say “all’s well, go back to sleep”? Too much to ask.

I’ve even pondered ripping these LEDs out myself. How hard could it be? Hmmm…?

Anyway, this has been your weekly installment of Old Man Yells at Cloud™. You’re welcome. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some duct tape to apply to my router’s most offensive LED.

Footnotes:

• Some of the humor here used AI. No, not the whole thing, the draft is written by a grumpy man in his 40s, as well end product, and many things in between. I just wanted some help with the humor, OK?

• I tried, but I can’t find this post. I assume it was somewhere in my RSS feeds but I can’t find it now. If you know of anything like that, please let me know.

Is This Anything? 22

Thanking items around your home? Maybe not such a bad idea. At the very least, and interesting post, no?