iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dustin L. Howett @dhowett.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2026

Hey @sajatype, you’re coming up in the strangest of places…

A photo of a dog toy for dale on a rack at a store. It says “harvest collection, dusty the turkey, dog plush toy.” What is notable is that some of the text is in the Cascadia font family, one of the font families of all time.

Dustin L. Howett @dhowett.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 01/08/2026

We’ll we’ll we’ll (Gods, I hate this so much. In the previous message it corrected We’ll to well _and_ well to we’ll. Double whammy!)

iOS offering to correct “we’ll keep you updated” to “well keep you updated”. It is infuriating.

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Dustin L. Howett @dhowett.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 04/03/2026

Hey all 👋 I know I stick to talking about tech, so this post will be a bit different. I've been a long-time supporter of API Chaya, a Seattle-based non-profit serving survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking. API Chaya is looking for […] [Original post on mas.to]

A brochure for API Chaya's Executive Director search. It says (abbreviated):

Location: Seattle, WA.
Salary range: $165k - $195k
Application deadline: March 20th

API Chaya seeks a heart-centered, strategically-minded leader to guide our organization into its next transformative chapter. For over three decades, we've been a powerful force in supporting survivors of gender-based violence and human trafficking while building deep-rooted community organizing and advocacy. We're looking for an Executive Director who understands that the most effective solutions come from centering the voices of those with lived experience. We seek someone who can blend bold vision with grounded, relational leadership to amplify our impact across Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian, Asian, and South Asian communities throughout the Greater Puget Sound region.

As Executive Director, you'll lead strategic direction and fundraising efforts, cultivate a culture of collective leadership and staff wellbeing, and strengthen our role as a movement leader in the anti-violence ecosystem.

If you're ready to lead an organization where trauma-informed practice meets systems change, where ensuring culturally relevant support drives every decision, and where your leadership can create lasting impact for generations of survivors and their families, we invite you to join us in building a future rooted in justice, healing, and collective liberation.

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Dustin L. Howett @dhowett.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 03/03/2026

Ah, yes, the reputable and highly-reviewed Settings App For Phone.

A screenshot of the iOS 26 Search interface. The query is “settings”. Three salient and equally important results have been excerpted: the settings app (good!), a suggestion that I search using Firefox, and then an App Store result called “Settings App for Phone”. It has 1,000 reviews and 4.5 stars (out of 5.) A small badge informs me that it has in-app purchases.

An album of some sort seems to be playing, indicated by the thumbnail at the top of the screen.

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Dustin L. Howett @dhowett.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 22/02/2026

Behold! Windows’ Terminal, on Linux. With its original settings UI and everything.

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Dustin L. Howett @dhowett.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 16/02/2026

Well, you all did suggest that Windows Terminal should run on Linux. Be careful what you wish for!

A screenshot of a desktop displaying KDE's "Dolphin" file manager behind a terminal emulator with, unexpectedly, Windows-style decorations on it. It purports to be the Windows Console Host (conhost), from Windows.

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Dustin L. Howett @dhowett.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 26/11/2025

Every year, I get the opportunity to be upset about my employer's proxy voting form. The board universally and unanimously recommends voting "against" new reports and oversight committees, and every single one of the "More Details" links drops you on a 900-page PDF […] [Original post on mas.to]

A screenshot displaying a list of things the Microsoft board recommends voting "against" in their annual shareholder meeting, such as "Report on AI Data Usage Oversight" and "Report on Human Rights Due Diligence". Every one of them says "Board Recommendation: Against".

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Dustin L. Howett @dhowett.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 16/11/2025

I’m actually really upset about this for some reason. A piece of future trash with obsolescence built into it, sold as a consumer benefit. “Look, you never have to change a battery! It saves you $40 over the next ten years!” How much is another one of these going to […] [Original post on mas.to]

A photo of a Carbon Monoxide detector, which offers that it is “10-year Worry Free”. It comes with a built in battery. “Never change a battery. No more late night battery chirps. $40 savings over the life of the alarm.”

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Dustin L. Howett @dhowett.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2025

"up to a few minutes"? Was "few" not sufficiently vague?

A tightly-cropped screenshot of a website. It says "HTTP 502: Waiting for GitLab to boot. It can take up to a few minutes for GitLab to boot completely."

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Dustin L. Howett @dhowett.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 27/08/2025

Gmail now offers a proud, brightly-colored "Unsubscribe" button that just takes you to the sender's website. Fuck that. If that's all you offer on your e-mails, you get the same treatment as all other spam.

A dialog box, titled "Report spam or unsubscribe?"
It buries the lede: "Go to the sender's website to unsubscribe."
I clicked "Report spam" anyway.

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Dustin L. Howett @dhowett.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 09/08/2025

@bagder hey, wcurl made it into the Debian “trixie” release manual! @debian

Section 2.2.8 of the Debian 13 (codename “trixie”) release manual, stating that curl has support for HTTP/3 and comes with a new tool called “wcurl”.

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Dustin L. Howett @dhowett.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 09/07/2025

@bagder my favorite part is that they are just calling the callback themselves after freeing the context. It isn’t even being called “back” by anything! “Function call with freed SSL context uses freed SSL context” 🙃

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Dustin L. Howett @dhowett.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 25/05/2025

You know, I should have expected this. /cc @ivory

My mastodon client displaying the same thing the previous post complained about.

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Dustin L. Howett @dhowett.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 25/05/2025

Hot take: "1 other" is never a useful thing to display. In the space it took you to display it, you could have displayed another name.

A flyout displaying "Pushpin reacted by DHowett, nikcha, Unnatural Twilight, and 1 other".

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Dustin L. Howett @dhowett.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 23/05/2025

@eclectech I would like for our eyeless wonder to participate in the summer hatting! My partner and I said farewell to him only a couple weeks ago. As a bonus, I do already have a conventional photo of him wearing a somewhat less silly hat which shows off his keen sense of style.

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Dustin L. Howett @dhowett.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 26/04/2025

I could once say in full honesty that I had never seen a binding arbitration clickwrap EULA on a food product. And yet here we are! (Found in the wild by @etryn)

The top of the same “Vital Proteins” collagen container, with a peel-away wrapper. The wrapper is printed in faint text saying “by opening and using this product you agree to be bound by our terms and conditions.” The conditions are said to include a mandatory arbitration agreement.

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Dustin L. Howett @dhowett.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 02/04/2025

@awakecoding.com You may have gotten this reply on bsky (sorry, can't see them here on fedi), but it looks like the service object returned by Get-Service contains a path with the group in the format you're already parsing.

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Dustin L. Howett @dhowett.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 29/03/2025

cloud-init purports to perform declarative setup of your new virtual machine (or cloud instance) As far as I can tell, the capabilities most cloud-init systems expose are adding user accounts and adding SSH keys: user accounts you will invariably log into and do […] [Original post on mas.to]

A screenshot of the cloud-init website, saying "Use cloud-init to configure: setting a default locale, setting the hostname, generating and setting up SSH private keys, setting up ephemeral mount points."

These are not the things I need declarative help with.

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Dustin L. Howett @dhowett.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 14/02/2025

@awakecoding.com Oh it absolutely isn't a Windows-only thing! It supports Linux, BSD, Android, iOS, and macOS! The bootstrap script is... well, it's something. :D

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Dustin L. Howett @dhowett.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 19/12/2024

It does take a while to attach all those loopback devices, so sparsemapper sports a lovely progress bar!

The same tool from the previous post, but now it is displaying a long progress bar. It has 23,000 devices to process. The estimated time of completion is seven minutes away (but we know from experience that it will take twelve or so.)

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Dustin L. Howett @dhowett.mas.to.ap.brid.gy · 19/12/2024

Merry Cursedmas! I've been using `sparsebundlefs` (github.com/torarnv/sparsebundlefs) to expose sparse bundles (usually used for networked time machine backups) as a single image to mount as a loopback device. Then I wondered: can device-mapper do it? Yes. And all […] [Original post on mas.to]

A terminal emulator displaying four split panes.

In the top left, the user ran a command named "sparsemapper" and provided a path to a file ending in "sparsebundle". The tool replied by saying it was "ready".

In the top right, the output from "dmsetup table aether" - ten lines indicating a linear device-mapper table.

In the bottom left, the output of dmesg showing that at least 2,000 loopback devices have been created.

In the bottom right, the output of blkid ("block device identify") used on the new device named in the top left. It is reporting that one of the volumes inside it is labelled "Time Machine Backups".

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