“Want to close wage gap? Step one: Change your major from feminist dance therapy to electrical engineering.”

— Christina Sommers

​...and that's why I switched to The Spice House


Right after the 2016 election, the owner of Penzey’s went Full Batshit in his newsletter, going so far as to say he didn’t want the business of anyone who didn’t demand that Trump be removed from office. So I stopped being his customer and switched to a company that sells spices rather than hate, The Spice House.

Three years later, the deranged dipshit’s still at it, buying ads demanding impeachment.

As the Bee put it:

Survey Finds More People Would Support Impeachment If They Knew What Crime Trump Was Supposed To Have Committed

Teach them to click 'Ok'...


Gosh, what’s the downside to constantly popping up “do you really want to do this?” boxes?

Tyler Hall explains:

Unicode Is A Hate Crime 2!


This is so trivial and stupid that I’d usually call it a nano-aggression or pico-aggression, but given the subject is combining characters in typography, I’m going to have to label it a pica-aggression.

Worst part is the replies take this bullshit seriously.

I can’t wait to see the Unicode folks cave to this nonsense and create a combinatorial explosion of directly-mapped emoji including all possible jendyr/raes/idenchy, to be immediately followed by complaints that the hex code for transbrown questioning dragonkin herm is proof of bigotry because it’s numerically higher than cishetyelloman.

Pixiv: serious, formidable, bouyant


And by that I mean Serious Sirius and Formidable from Azur Lane, equipped with rather remarkable flotation devices. Like most warships, they often find themselves exposed, even with allies to wash, er, watch their backs.

Formidable’s standard outfit made it a bit challenging to find pics that didn’t need to go behind the NSFW tag, even after relaxing my usual rules a bit. Not that Sirius was easy.

more...

The Ghostess With The Mostest


I missed Yuuna And The Haunted Hot Springs when it aired. An assortment of screenshots and short video clips convinced me to give it a shot, and I found it a perfectly delightful harem comedy. Sadly, there’s no US Bluray release, and Crunchyroll has the steam-and-lightbar-censored broadcast version, and they don’t have the 3 uncensored OVA episodes, so off to the torrents we go!

(NSFW after the jump)

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Meme endgame


Well, I suppose there are worse ways for this story to end…

Dear Amazon,


The two packages I expected today arrived as scheduled. The third, unexpected, quite heavy package contained items I didn’t order, wouldn’t order, and according to your web site, are not associated with my account at all, despite having an Amazon-generated shipping label with my name on it.

All three came from the same fulfillment center in North Las Vegas. Is this an off-by-one error, where you’re printing an extra label that then gets slapped onto the next package in line?

In any case, somebody out there is probably wondering where their Fancy Feast cat food and Body Armor sports drinks are…

Configuring a static IP in %pre


When building out a new kickstart server for CentOS 7.x/8, I vigorously ignored the cruft that had built up in the old one and started over. One useful improvement is handling the basic network configuration properly:

%pre --log=/tmp/pre.log --interpreter=/usr/bin/bash
DNS=10.201.0.2,10.201.0.3
IFACE=$(ip -4 -o a | awk '/scope global/{print $2}')
IPADDR=$(ip -4 -o a | awk '/scope global/{print $4}')
declare $(ipcalc $IPADDR -h -m -n)
cat << EOF > /tmp/network.cfg
network --onboot yes --device $IFACE --bootproto static --noipv6 --onboot=on --activate --nameserver=$DNS --hostname=$HOSTNAME --ip=${IPADDR%%/*} --netmask=$NETMASK --gateway=${NETWORK%%.0}.1
EOF
%end

%include /tmp/network.cfg

We use TXT records in DNS to automagically set static DHCP leases and PXE config files, so that all we need for an unattended install of a new server is the MAC address of the first NIC. This little snippet tells Anaconda to hardcode that IP config so the server doesn’t depend on DHCP after the install is done. This has saved our bacon many times after power outages, because if your DHCP server doesn’t come back quickly (or at all), dhclient eventually gives up, and then you have to touch everything by hand to get them back online.

To get the base install down to something simple, quick, and easy to secure (~380 RPMs, minimal network services), I dusted off the Perl script I wrote back in 2009 that does dependency analysis based on the repodata files comps.xml and primary.sqlite. Still works pretty well, actually.

I deeply regret that we had to bite the bullet and start using a systemd-based release. CentOS 6.x was just getting too long in the tooth for functionality, and then one day we suddenly needed to ship a new DNS/DHCP/NTP/mail server to a new office, and the only available hardware was a NUC too new to run 6.10. My feelings about systemd can be summed up with this Ace Ventura clip.

“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”