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Chris Siebenmann

@cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy

28 followers 4 following 1K posts

That cks. Overcommitted sysadmin, photographer, bicyclist, and other multitudes. I write a lot of words for a programmer. he/him/they/them 🇨🇦 🌉 bridged from ⁂ mastodon.social/@cks, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

Posts Replies Media

Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 36m

Current status: being tempted to write a techblog entry called simply "Light mode is not optional". (I mean, it's 'optional' in the sense that you can not provide it. It does mean I'm not going to be using your software or reading your website, because increasingly I literally can't with white […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

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Reposted by Chris Siebenmann

Sean Coates @sean.scoat.es.ap.brid.gy · 05/10/2026

It appears that this #NeXT Cube I'm working on (at @foulab ) was last set up to connect to `IPBROADCAST=132.206.3.255`, which is a #McGill IP block. Anyone in #Montreal got a greybeard IT connection at McGill that could tell me more about the cube? I'm afraid at least some of the lore has been […]

Original post on scoat.es

Reposted by Chris Siebenmann

Neville Park @nev.status.nevillepark.ca.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026

His name is Sidney "Buster" Crosby and he has no respect for boundaries #DailyCatPic #CatsOfMastodon #cats

A large black cat lying on the keyboard drawer of my computer desk, turned away from me, half on top of a small Bluetooth keyboard. There is a beetle-pattern mug on the desk and a multi-column fedi web client open on the monitor.

A large glossy black cat with golden eyes lying on my computer chair in a relaxed attitude as if he owns the place.

A black cat sprawled out on top of a row of kitchen cupboards, very high up, seen from below. His tail and a back paw are dangling over the edge.

A black cat standing on a wooden table, paws on top of a box fan in a window to reach a shelf of potted plants above it. He is gnawing on a spider plant leaf. His ears are flat back.

Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026

Ah yes. After grinding the morning coffee beans, it helps if you remove the ground coffee from the grinder and put it in the Aeropress. Fortunately this is an easy mistake to observe and recover from. Current status: coffee (now).

Reposted by Chris Siebenmann

🎃I'll be Frankenstein with you 🧌🇨🇦 @syncros.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Looking for Lunch in Biidaasige Park 🐟 #TOphoto #toronto #x100vi

a Great Egret hunts for fish on the shores of Biidaasige Park with the bridges in the background. I'm a good distance back shooting with a zoom lens.

Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

Sadly it looks like my Wahoo Elemnt bike GPS computer (vintage 2016) has failed, not from the faltering battery that I expected (it's been less good at that for some time and I was dreading this winter) but from something that keeps it going through power/reboot cycles most of the time. This […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

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Reposted by Chris Siebenmann

Robert Zaichkowski @rzaichkowski.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Hey #BikeTO! MPP Mary-Margaret McMahon is hosting "Bike The Night" on Friday, October 9. Starts 6:30 PM at East Lynn Park. Please spread the word! #TOpoli #ONpoli #VisionZero www.eventbrite.ca/e/bike-the-n...?

Bike The Night!

Join Triple M for a rally and group bike ride through the east end of Toronto to show Ford that the bike lanes must stay!

Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026

The latest Mastodon web UI has stopped accepting ESC to cancel a pop-out picture display and this is breaking my reading reflexes so, so much. I hope this change is either an accident or gets reverted really soon.

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Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026

This is my face about how absurdly difficult it is to set up a light theme in <name your favorite modern terminal program>. No, I do not want to play hunt the wumpus to find all of your colour settings, I want a "I want black text on white background" option. Your dark theme default is searing […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

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Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026

It has been '0' days since I had to play the "construction noise or part of this ambient music track" game. Answer: partly construction noise this time, but not all of it, this ambient track is just like that. (Yes I do like Lustmord and things like it. And noise music, sometimes, but this […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026

TIL of an annoying difference in X terminal programs. In xterm, if you print or enter a line longer than the screen width (so it overflows to a new physical line), you can backspace a character at a time and wipe out the entire logical line; your backspace will move to the previous physical line […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/09/2026

Today's bike club group ride¹ had great weather and a small, fast group; we started in Etienne Brule, went up to Eglinton and Matheson, then out to Streetsville, down Mississauga Road, and back along the Waterfront. It's one of our simpler routes but a longer one, and this year it was quite fast […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

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Prof. Sam Lawler @sundogplanets.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/09/2026

Well, *someone* needs to post about this on Mastodon www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-colu…

Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/09/2026

I'm crossing my fingers for a giant, noisy, attention-getting Toronto Critical Mass tonight. I won't be there because I've once again wound up Too Tired and sleepy at the end of my workday and I don't feel up to the crowds and the time and the everything of a CM. But good luck out there to all […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

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Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

The programmability of GNU Emacs is tempting me into a probably-huge project. What I want is a command that generates a buffer containing one instance of every "misspelled" word in my current buffer, then ideally lets me edit them, occur-like, to change (correct) all occurrences […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Reposted by Chris Siebenmann

Robert Zaichkowski @rzaichkowski.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Just for a friendly reminder, the September #CriticalMass ride is happening THIS FRIDAY! Meet 6 PM at High Park north entrance (Bloor & Colborne Lodge) for 6:30 PM departure. #BikeTO #TOpoli #ONpoli #VisionZero

Critical Mass
High Park 6pm
Ride 630

Background image is from the August 2026 Critical Mass ride at Yonge & Bloor

Reposted by Chris Siebenmann

Ben Zanin @gnomon.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026

Hey #Toronto nerds with home servers on a UPS: do you have your UPS connected to a monitoring program? Does it log events, e.g. to /var/log/apcupsd.events ? Would you be willing to share that log of events and your _approximate_ neighbourhood info (e.g. nearest power substation) with my sister? […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/09/2026

Today's group bike ride¹ took us from High Park to the Beltline, along it (mostly, parts were too washed out for us) to Mt Pleasant Cemetery, down to the Brickworks and its busy farmer's market, and then down the recently reopened Don River South trail (as far as it currently goes) and back […]

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Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

Can I recommend GNU Emacs to people? No, not really, but that's because I can't recommend any editor to people¹. All serious editors are A Project to actually use (because of all the learning). If you've got one that works, stick with it. Otherwise, who knows what will click or be appealing or […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

It feels like I should get a replacement for gnome-terminal. Potential candidate programs must fully support Unicode, full terminal colours, and all of that stuff, and run on X (including remote X, ideally). A standalone process would be ideal. There's nothing wrong with gnome-terminal, it's an […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

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Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026

Ah. That's why some people reported feed problems with my techblog, especially through third parties. The host it's on hasn't answered on port 80 (HTTP) since an OS upgrade in like March-ish, and some people's feed URLs were that old. (I've been giving permanent HTTP to HTTPS redirects for more […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

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Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2026

Current status: not on the bike club's annual metric century ride¹, because I'm a responsible adult. Not entirely feeling fine + important medical appointment tomorrow == it would be bad to bike 100+km and take myself out for tomorrow. I might have gotten away with it, but. ¹ this year it's […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/09/2026

Phishing problem: people have MFA. Creative phishing solution: (phishing) forms with "enter some of your backup codes here". University MFA problem: there are login-required websites that are used during exams, where phones are prohibited, and the university is now requiring MFA from on-network […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

Yes, GNU Emacs, "Wrong type argument: integer-or-marker-p, nil", that sure is a problem. Unfortunately it's a problem in a large function (goto-address-fontify) and I would like your debugger to tell me WHICH BIT OF THE FUNCTION is throwing this error so perhaps I can figure out which bit is […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

It's Toronto election season so my least-favorite¹ local political email spammer has crawled out from under his rock and is spamming me again. Congratulations on spamming so many people that your new host promptly got listed by Spamhaus, that's a good accomplishment for a small-time local […]

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Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/09/2026

The drawback of being on the bleeding edge is that sometimes you bleed, even if your leading edge is "the leading edge of the Emacs 31 branch" instead of Emacs' main development branch. At least it wasn't much bleeding and it got fixed promptly. (No, I will not be tempted by main, especially […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

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Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/09/2026

It certainly is a choice for Linux's Polkit to decide that there is no way to say "this login does not have administrative access period, no matter what". (Your only choice is to force people to try to authenticate using the 'password' of a locked account, which will always fail.)

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Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/09/2026

I went for my first weekend bike club group ride since August 16th and I'm glad I did even if it may not have been an entirely wise decision. The past two weekends were rained out, and yesterday I was feeling fairly cruddy. Today I was only semi-cruddy so I motivated myself to give it a try […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

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Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2026

Just what I want to see during a dnf distro-sync upgrade from Fedora 43 to 44, specifically during the posttrans actions: Transaction failed: Rpm transaction failed. Why? Who knows, dnf/RPM doesn't say. How do you recover? Who knows. What does 'failed' mean here when everything was installed […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/09/2026

TIL that my home UPS has recently become a home power bar or maybe a home line conditioner, despite claiming that its battery is fine. Well, it’s six years old, but on the other hand it worked in June. (Do I try replacing the battery or get a whole new one, which would avoid any internal issues […]

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Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/09/2026

Current me is very glad past me already worked out how to do this thing with PAM that we now suddenly want to do for work, and then wrote a techblog entry about it to capture that knowledge. Go past me! (Current me found this out not by remembering the entry but by doing an Internet search and […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

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Reposted by Chris Siebenmann

Neville Park @nev.status.nevillepark.ca.ap.brid.gy · 01/09/2026

LOOK AT THE FOG #dlws

The shoreline of west Toronto and Mimico as seen from Sunnyside beach. The normally clear skyline is swathed in low-lying fog.

Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026

I don't normally delete apps from my phone for neurotic reasons¹, and I have no idea if apps get notified about uninstalls, but I just deleted Google Maps from my phone. You can yeet yourself right into the sun as far as this Canadian is concerned. And yes, Mexicans, I'm embarrassingly late to […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/08/2026

GNU Emacs people who write Python using venvs, what's the state of the art for getting linters, LSP servers, and so on started with the right paths/etc set up for a particular project's venv? Is it (still) direnv + the envrc package, or something else (.dir-locals.el with a exec-path setting […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/08/2026

GNU Emacs transient-mark-mode is quite nice and the modern standard, but I still have old Emacs reflexes from before it existed, where eg deep reflexes expect M-> then C-w to delete from where I was through the end of the buffer. Being reminded of C-x C-x recently has been very useful in making […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

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Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026

I want to write a blog entry at some point about what I think is a good Emacs setup today for Python, but one 'problem' is that Flycheck keeps improving so anything I write risks being obsolete in N weeks. Presumably Flycheck will at some point run out of new good features to add, or at least […]

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Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/08/2026

Today I belatedly finally noticed that my commuter bike's rear brake had become advisory instead of mandatory¹. I definitely need to pay more attention to brake fade over time, next time. Oh well, this is why I have a local bike shop². ¹ the rear brake no longer locks the wheel even from a […]

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Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/08/2026

This is my face that if a Linux user has a special shell that just prints a message and then exits, and the user logs in via SSH, systemd will still start up a session and auto-start any user .service units set up for this, which will stay running and etc. Now I really want some way in […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

It has been '0' days since I discovered that I shot myself in the foot in Python 3 with a bytes/Unicode confusion issue, although this one was an unusually creative and subtle way to get things wrong (ie, it had no exceptions, it generated corrupted text).

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Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

[US/Canada relations] In theory the Canadian International Air Show¹ (the CNE airshow, coming up Labour Day weekend) will have a USAF F-16 appearance. If that doesn't get cancelled on the US side, under the circumstances I think it would be nice if CIAS withdrew the invitation. Really I don't […]

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Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2026

For no particularly good reason I'm currently thinking about how I'd define "terminal", "command line", and "shell" in a Unix context¹ (I think you can draw a difference between the last two, although maybe people don't in practice). It's slightly tricky but I've already covered some of the […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/08/2026

It's vaguely tempting to hack hostname completion into my shell¹ (drawn from $HOME/.ssh/known_hosts), or maybe I should hack in support for general completion generation functions. But it would be a bunch of work. (Yes, I know, I could switch to a shell with better general completion support […]

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Original post on mastodon.social

Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/08/2026

Advice-add in GNU Emacs is such a useful tool for doing little low-effort, low-impact hacks to things (under the right circumstances). (advice-add 'mh-page-msg :after (lambda (&optional _lines) (setq mh-page-to-next-msg-flag nil))) I'm so glad @gnomon told me about advice-add (checks notes) […]

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Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2026

Oh look, when you set up something to nerf people's shell sessions on a server, your shell sessions get nerfed. This is my "I should have seen that coming" face, since I was just worrying about why various commands seemed really slow on this machine (in addition to systemd session startup, which […]

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Ross A. Baker @rossabaker.com · 17/08/2026

@cks Does this sequence help? The first to reactivate the region (if you haven't moved), and the second to turn it back into a rectangle: C-x C-x ;; exchange-point-and-mark C-x SPC ;; rectangle-mark-mode

Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2026

In GNU Emacs, is there any way to 'undo' the loss of a selection region, especially a rectangle selection? I am forever going through the dance of C-x SPC, select a rectangle region, do something that fumbles the action I wanted to do, rectangle region disappears, I grind my teeth, and I would […]

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Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2026

Today's bike club group ride¹ took us from Kipling TTC up to Eldorado Park (just barely) in Brampton, crossing the path of the Credit River several times in the process. In the process we went past the airport on part of the Etobicoke Trail that's open, and then through a bunch of industrial […]

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Chris Siebenmann @cks.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/08/2026

I don't want to excuse the systemd-journald people for their IO volume, but people who have never looked at traditional syslog behavior may have a excessively nice view of what it does to your disks too. Syslog normally fsync()s every log write and it often writes a log record to multiple files […]

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Original post on mastodon.social