Yesterday I wrote about my abomination of an Xocóatl-inspired coffee. Today I added in cinnamon and then topped it all off with canned whipped cream. Remember to floss and brush your teeth afterward! **A Silly Spiced Autumn Americano** * Prep Time: 1 minute * Cook Time: 5 minutes * Yields: 1 serving * Tools: * a drip coffee maker * a coffee grinder * a stirring utensil (a spoon) * a mortar & pestle ### Ingredients * 12-14g coffee, ground (enough for “two cups” of coffee) * distilled or filtered water (enough to fill to the “two cup” line in the coffee maker) * 1 packet hot chocolate * 1 dusting of cinnamon * 1 dusting of cayenne pepper (flakes or ground) * some whipped cream ### Instructions 1. Prepare the coffee maker for making coffee using the ground beans and water in their respective containers. Start brewing. 2. Empty the hot chocolate packet into your Americano sized coffee mug. 3. Sprinkle some cinnamon into the mug. 4. Start grinding 1 dried cayenne pepper. You do not need to apply much pressure to the mortar with the pestle as you move it in a circular motion around and around. Grind until the coffee maker finishes brewing, about 5 minutes. 5. Gather a minute/sprinkle/dusting of cayenne pepper from the mortar and put it into the mug. 6. Pour the brewed coffee into the mug. 7. Stir the concoction with a spoon. 8. Add some whipped cream on top because you’re special and you deserve it.

Emails from GitLab, like most software project planning software, are annoyingly generic and do not have a robust and granular notification system, which makes it difficult to figure out the importance of the notification. It is very annoying that software require configuring email filters for controlling their spam, and if you have to use more than one system, the burden increases. And yes, we all probably have to use GitLab, GitHub, Codeberg, Azure DevOps, Jira, and of course all the other software that sends useless emails disguised as important emails. I have two GitLab email filters: 1. **GitLab spam** —Emails from GitLab for which the notification ding(s) will cause me stress and anxiety over nothing because these emails are unimportant. 2. **GitLab notification** —Emails from GitLab for which the notification ding(s) will cause me stress and anxiety, but it is probably important for me to read the email. So my current filter setup is the following ### GitLab spam ANY of the following: * Self-Defined Header (`X-GitLab-Pipeline-Status`) Exists * Body Contains “removed as an assignee” Delete message ### GitLab notification I am hoping that `X-GitLab-Discussion-ID` will help isolate actual user content rather than label, status, and assignee spam, but maybe `X-Origin-Message-Id` containing “<note_” would work too. ANY of the following: * Self-Defined Header (`X-GitLab-NotificationReason`) Is “mentioned” * Self-Defined Header (`X-GitLab-Discussion-ID`) Exists Flag this message as Flagged

I was there and witnessed her grow up for the first few years, but I have not had a chance to visit in a long time. I am really sad. Red pandas are the best and cutest animals. I am going to trauma dump a bunch of photos and videos. Mastodon will probably only display a couple of these so you will need to click through. Quoting Meta/FB post from Columbus Zoo & Aquarium, > There are some animals whose personalities are simply too big to fit into a few words. Santi was one of them. Born in June 2020 at the Columbus Zoo, this beloved red panda brought joy to her Animal Care team and to so many guests who had the opportunity to meet her. She was smart, curious, and determined to be involved in absolutely everything happening around her. > > Give Santi a cardboard box, and she was happy. A paper bag, cardboard tube, puzzle feeder, backpack, or even an OSU cooler? She was going in. Anything new was worth investigating. That curiosity extended to just about everything happening in her world. When maintenance teams worked in her yard, Santi appointed herself supervisor. New people, unfamiliar equipment, and even the sound of a drill didn’t deter her. She wanted to inspect the work and be part of the action. And then there were the grapes. Santi adored them. When she was young, she would chitter with excitement when she knew grapes were coming. When she was ready for another, she would gently reach toward her keeper’s hand. > > Her intelligence and trust in her care team showed in countless ways. She learned to high five in a single training session and would enter her crate when given the cue. One of her sweetest behaviors, though, sometimes happened without being asked. If a keeper held out a hand, Santi would gently place her paw in it. > > We are heartbroken to share that Santi passed away on August 25, 2026 following a sudden medical emergency. That morning, her Animal Care team noticed she was lethargic and slow to respond and immediately brought her to the Zoo’s veterinary hospital. An examination revealed a distended abdomen and systemic shock, and she was diagnosed with gastric torsion. Our veterinary team worked to stabilize Santi and prepare her for emergency surgery, but sadly, she passed away before the torsion could be corrected. > > For the people who knew her best, there are six years of memories to hold onto. There was Santi building her nest before the birth of her cubs, carrying an impressive amount of bamboo into her box. There was the red panda who crawled into anything she could find, who trusted her keepers enough to curl up in their laps, who eagerly anticipated enrichment and tours, and who could turn an outstretched hand into an invitation to gently offer her paw. > > One member of Santi’s Animal Care team perhaps said it best: “We were so lucky to love her and be loved BY her.” Our hearts are with the Asia Quest team as they say goodbye to Santi. Wait, > There was Santi building her nest before the birth of her cubs, carrying an impressive amount of bamboo into her box. I guess I am renewing my membership this year.

You know how it goes... You go to configure your Media type view display to make use of a new feature and your site WSODs. This happened on... A local instance of **this site**. And then you spend the next couple of hours hunting down the root cause analysis, creating a bug report, creating a test for a merge request. This is not any different from a proprietary/internal work flow _except_ for going through the contribution process. If you find this and you’re working for a client or other site you manage, you still need to do root cause analysis (set a breakpoint), find any relevant issues, and create a test for it. And if you’re going to workaround it anyway, you should go ahead and create the bug report as a good Open Source citizen. Anyway if anyone is looking for a nice Major bug request that might have some Novice tasks associated with it, File video formatter summary can pass NULL placeholder values to StringTranslation. I think coming up with a community consensus on whether to have either Size or Width/Height in the summary, whether "auto" is okay to use as a placeholder value since it won’t be translated, and fixing the issue based on that consensus could be Novice tasks. Probably not a good-first-issue, but definitely a good-next-issue. This all stems from a recent change in not accepting `NULL` values in `Drupal\Component\Utility\Html::escape` due to argument typing. Oh, hey, there’s an issue about that also ;-). I find this happens most-often in `\Drupal\Component\Render\FormattableMarkup::placeholderFormat`. A quick hack to workaround that, which _I do not recommend_ because it would add technical debt to your Drupal installations would be to do the following: case '@':$args[$key] = static::placeholderEscape($value ?? '');break;case ':':$args[$key] = Html::escape($value ?? '');break;case '%':$args[$key] = '<em class="placeholder">' . static::placeholderEscape($value ?? '') . '</em>';break; But if you’re trying to just configure your site, that’ll help.

I haven’t posted solar generation and consumption since my first full month in May. June was good. July was good, but A/C. August was poor because it rained half the month. ### June These stats are not accurate because the Enphase system was not reporting data for at least 1 day, which was a clear/sunny day. * 493.8 kWh generated * 379.1 kWh consumed * 320.1 kWh exported * 125.6 kWh imported * 131.3 kWh net exported ### July I used much more air conditioning (A/C) in July so it came close to evening out generation and consumption. This was the highest month of generation yet. * 535.7 kWh generated * 568.2 kWh consumed * 257.4 kWh exported * 292.7 kWh imported * (35.3) kWh net imported ### August It rained like half the month here in August so generation was the lowest yet and it was still hot, but not as hot as July. But still almost as much as May’s production. The billing cycle ending before those nice peak days in August hurt my electricity bill as I paid $24 USD. August 11th was a particularly dark and stormy day, and yes, that’s only 4.5 kWh generated. * 470.0 kWh generated * 471.4 kWh consumed * 254.7 kWh exported * 258.6 kWh imported * (3.9) kWh net imported Hopefully the heat wave this week dissipates and it only rains at night in September.

Yats is a cajun/creole chain based out of Indianapolis that many _Hoosiers_ are familiar with. They offer a variety of étoufées, gumbo, red beans and rice, and jambalaya (although not as good as The Jambalaya Shoppe). Oh, and did I mention you get two pieces of French bread slathered in butter and herbs to go along with this deliciousness? “Oh, the bread”, they say. I like to call it _my_ cajun/creole comfort food although I doubt any true ~~Scotsman~~ New Orleans folk would say that. In the Summer of 2014, a storefront opened in Grandview Heights, Ohio for which this post is about. I remember going up Grandview Avenue one day, and I noticed a new sign on the side. What the heck is a “Yats!”, I thought. During that time I was always looking for alternatives to eat lunch when I did not bring it in while I worked in the Highlights for Children offices nearby, and so I stopped in probably within 2 weeks of the place opening. I think I first went to try to re-capture my jambalaya experience at Jambalaya Shoppe. **What started as an experiment quickly became a tradition**. I started patronizing Yats once every week, but soon that became a weekly tradition. People who I worked with knew that if it was Thursday, I would be going to Yats for lunch around when they opened at 11-11:30. I think I have probably dined there 500 times. Yeah, I guess you could say I was a regular. It has been a significant, though small, part of my life these past 12 years. In the before times, Yats Grandview opened for lunch and dinner planning on having a full service bar. They eventually got their liquor license a year or so after opening if I recall correctly. Occasionally if I was in the area on the weekend, I would swing by for an Abita Purple Haze and an étoufée. At the start of the pandemic, Yats became an online ordering takeaway establishment. Working from my side of town made things difficult. And when I finally was able to secure a mask it would be one of the few times I would leave the house. In the later pandemic, the clientele has changed to expect takeaway with the storefront mainly empty except for the delivery drivers picking up for the privileged. And in these last few years, being down there made it a good excuse to stop by the bald eagle nest on the Scioto River. **But all things must come to an end**. Obviously during the early pandemic, the bar was the first to go. Without a steady stream of non-takeaway customers, and now even the storefront costs too much to continue. Yats Grandview is suceeded however by a food truck that operates mainly around the Ohio State campus and soon outside of Endeavour Brewing & Spirits on the Saturdays starting the 29th of August 2026, if you're still interested. Unfortunately this is probably the end for me. Ohio State campus is a no fun zone because of CampusParc unless I wanted to take a 45 minute bus ride one-way. There are plenty of amazing restaurants more convenient to me that I already patronize or should probably patronize like the Haitian cuisine place down the road. I like to think that the franchise owner chose the last day for me, but probably not as the place was packed by 11:30. So on this last day of the store, the 2026.08.29, I went back to my standard staple of a Chili Cheese Étoufée with Crawfish to enjoy one last time. So it’s been great, Yats. I’ve enjoyed everything you’ve had to offer in the last 12 years from étoufées to king cakes to Abita on tap. Thanks for calling me by my name every time I came in. Cheers.

I was reading a console message while booting into run level 4 for a while now > `daemon: fatal: failed to create directory /var/lib/greeter/.run: No such file or directory` ### The failure of modern search engines I was thinking that there was some configuration I had forgotten about that I did not need, and I have been ignoring it. But I decided to look into it today. Years of conditioning have led me to search for things first. But as more proof of the death of search engines due to invalid results, there were no search results on Duck Duck Go. That’s right. **None**. **Zero**. **Nil**. **Nada**. I try not to use Google, but in this case I did. Google had no search results either, and whatever I was doing to prevent Gemini had failed, and it spit out a hallucination rather than not being there at all. :( ### Linux stuff The next best thing is to experiment (or look at code). Just create the damn directory and see what it does. I did have `/var/lib/greetd`, which was empty and owned by a `greeter` user. Hmm... That’s suspect. Anyway, experiment started, I logged out and no longer got the error messages (obviously), and went inspecting the directory contents. drwx------ 3 greeter greeter 4.0K Aug 11 08:24 .cachedrwx------ 3 greeter greeter 4.0K Aug 11 08:24 .dbusdrwx------ 3 greeter greeter 4.0K Aug 11 08:24 .localdrwx------ 3 greeter greeter 4.0K Aug 11 08:24 .run Oh, it’s the `greeter` **user** configured with its home directory `/var/lib/greeter`. That’s in the SBO greetd package. Okay, I can live with that. I should probably set a quota on that user in case those directories fill up with nonsense. ### The problem is motivating myself to actually do things It is amazing how much I live with things without doing them. People often say it is easy to break a habit and hard to form one, but when it comes to some things, I find the opposite is true. I settle into a routine (a habit), and just live with it. I mean I _finally_ patched two holes in my ceiling the other day. I kept giving myself excuses about trying to come up with the best way to do it because these were narrow cuts made by a plumber, and I was not exactly sure how I was going to fit the drywall patches in there. The solution that I had come up with to attach a 2x4 and slot the drywall into the hole failed miserably. In any case, the other day I was at the “mudding” step, which is a pain in the ass to do when gravity is working against me. I keep telling myself I need to do things like paint the pseudo-shutters and paint the header (?) above front side of the house. And several summers have passed, and then I tell myself “next year, you HAVE to do this.” But when I do find the motivation, I get things done. Such is the life of a Slacker.

Welcome to your weekly curation of the essential news in the Open Media Network and open social development communities with a focus on devastating big tech via Techno Anarchism.

If you maintain a Drupal module and are reviewing your “Automated Drupal 12 compatibility fixes” merge requests, remember to trigger the “composer (next major)” step manually so you can actually test the changes on Drupal 12. If you are also thinking about keeping Drupal 10 support, trigger that “composer (previous major)” job too. However, from my experience, I have not been able to maintain compatibility between all three (or more) versions when trying to go without deprecated messages. This is probably because I rely heavily on tests using the `dataProvider` annotation (now `DataProvider` attribute). A few things that I have run into, some of which are no longer relevant as of this week thanks to the improvements from Björn (bbrala) and feedback provided by the amazing maintainers. * Bump my initial dependencies to the latest Drupal 10 and 11 minor: `^10.6 || ^11.3`. * I don’t normally opt-in to the “composer (next minor)” job so I have been postponing issues where the changes will be introduced in 11.4.0. This has happened to me for a couple of projects, and so I need to create a new branch to drop Drupal 10 support completely: `^11.4 || ^12`. * Fix `phpstan.neon.dist` because phpstan had a breaking changed to `excludePaths` that now requires directories to be specified with a trailing `/*`. * Update PHPUnit deprecations: * ~~Annotations to Attributes~~ * Removal of `$this->any()` and `$this->expects()`, which were just boilerplate before. * Since I am usually removing Drupal 10 support, I get rid of `LegacyHook` attribute and remove the `DeprecationHelper::backwardsCompatibleCall` calls, which usually break 12 quality and unit tests anyway. And of course updating any existing core annotations to attributes. Then at this point, I can finally focus on any _real_ test failures, which still may be occurring. If you don’t have the picture shiny cool button to trigger the “composer (next major)” job, think about adding a or modifying the .gitlab-ci.yml file in your repository.