Wife and kiddo are gone this week visiting extended family, so I’m holding up the fort on my own.
… and apparently that means watching movies that make me weepy. Why am I the way that I am.
Remote
Shannon Quinn 
@magsol@quinnwitz.house
mastodon 4.7.3I'm just the guy who does the thing.
Honor is dead. But I’ll see what I can do.
🐝 Lifelong Yellow Jacket
🏛️ Recovering academic
🎓 Former tenured professor
🧬 Learning of the machines in biotech
👨🔬 #OpenScience, #Bioimaging, #MachineLearning, #ComputerVision, #SpatialBiology, #DrugDiscovery
👨💻 Working dad
🏃♂️er
👾er
🍩-eater
Profile picture by @andycarolan@social.lol
229 Followers
242 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 30, 2022
Boosted by @octothorpe@mastodon.online
RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@Paul_Taylor/116393432979937863
I’ve been seriously starting to research what would be required to self host my own email service, and hands down this is the single biggest hurdle: not a technical one, but a political one.
Quoting
I have been using email for 40 years. It used to work.
As an (independent) academic researcher, I need to contact new people, primarily in universities, to ask questions.
I refuse to use Google, Microsoft or the other American IT giants.
But they are increasingly preventing refuseniks from sending email at all.
I know what RFC, DNS, MX, SPF and DMARC mean. My email goes through small British companies with intelligent, friendly and helpful staff.
mxtoolbox.com says that I must have DMARC to send email to M$. So I set it up. I now get a dozen copies of the same report from G or M$ for each email that I send out.
They show that my email gets to G and M$ sites, but then it is marked as spam.
The stupid senior management of numerous universities has surrendered their staff email to M$.
Web searches and AIs preach about spam. I don't send spam - I want to contact my colleagues.
Rumour has it that previously unknown senders are treated with suspicion and their emails are sent to spam. In other words, it is impossible to **initiate** communication with someone.
Let's be blunt about this. They are a mafia that is enforcing an **oligopoly**. It's got nothing to do with reducing spam --- I have no doubt that they let through emails from "trusted partners", ie companies that bribe them enough to send their spam.
The result of this is that it will only be possible to send emails by paying M$ to do it, and then it will only be allowed to express "approved" opinions.
What can we do about this?
At the very least, those of you with senior positions in universities can tell your management to revert to competent standards-based email systems hosted on Linux systems.
Seriously though: not only does Legolas never ever miss, but literally every arrow is a one-shot.
Except, of course, for one—ok, two really—notable exceptions. What’s up with that?
Replying to
Initial feedback from 5yo with tonight’s first test drive:
OVERWHELMING JOY 😍
She just kept giggling while drawing. Also quoted parts of the “Faceytalk” episode while telling me precisely what to draw (“A COWBOY HAT!” 🤠)
Still some kinks to work out—need to remember to lock the iPad orientation before I hand it over, and could also stand to add a black color pen, and maybe even an eraser?—but it worked *remarkably* well for being a pile of Javascript running on my laptop.
WebRTC ftw! #Bluey
PSA for all the non-runners out there (and, apparently, some runners too):
If you’re driving in your car and see a friend of yours running on the sidewalk, please 🛑 DO NOT HONK 🛑 at them, UNLESS they are actively in danger or doing something dangerous.
Car honks hit our nervous systems HARD—for good reason!—but if you’re only trying to say “hi” to us, we’re gonna be *pissed off*.
Shoot them a text later saying you saw them and they looked strong. We love that 💙
So I unplugged the Ethernet cable for our TV a few days ago because I needed to plug in a raspberry Pi and the switch had all 5 slots filled.
Today I’m seeing network traffic from our TV.
I am… confused.
I’ve never heard of this before. Would’ve been insanely useful my freshman year of college when we were building x86 assembly compilers in C.
@serge@babka.social Hey--did you ever finish that unofficial Forgejo CLI tool? I'm making another GitOps overhaul push in my homelab and am realizing more and more how useful a Forgejo CLI would be.
Just once, I'd like to have a Release Day™️ that DOESN'T entail something breaking during the live demo.
JUST ONCE.
Timeline cleanse: spotted this fellow hiding out in a shaded spot of our neighbor’s backyard where our kids were playing. Didn’t want to make a fuss since it was clearly hiding but managed to snap a few photos.
iNaturalist pegs this as a Fowler’s Toad (Anaxyrus fowleri) 💚
Boosted by @heidilifeldman@mastodon.social
RE: https://mastodon.social/@heidilifeldman/116834182389439325
I have one of the worst, most persistent, most painful post-travel headaches I’ve had in years and this line
‘We like to place ourselves right in the middle of the road so it’s easy for others to run us over. That’s called “comity.”’
made me suddenly BURST out laughing
Quoting
Read this. Spot on satire. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/06/28/centrist-democrat-mamdani-progressive-socialist/90681634007/
“I am a centrist Democrat and I am terrified of success”
Open quoted postReplying to
@imalcolm @NanoRaptor Our sweetheart dwarf bun died in Sept 2024 and we likewise haven’t been able to bring ourselves to get another. Sending love ❤️🩹
Replying to
@lproven I can literally never remember “ip addr”, but “ifconfig” is about as baked into my muscle memory as breathing
Replying to
@crazy4pi314@mathstodon.xyz That’s so freaking cool! Come for the Python, stay for the MtG 😊
Replying to
@keith@social.starkeith.net Also it’s just fun 😊 But yes, for the reasons you said too! ✊
Replying to
@czarbucks@vmst.io We sure aren’t. In fact we seem hellbent on intentionally doing the wrong thing.
People caring for each other simply because it’s the right thing to do is what moves and inspires me these days 💙
Replying to
@andycarolan@social.lol Really good question lol. It feels kinda lame but the first thought that comes to mind is badges for the various FOSS licenses (e.g., MIT, Apache, GPL, etc)? I could also see some of the acronyms on this list being eminently badge-able https://github.com/d-edge/foss-acronyms (AFK, MR, DevOps, TBD).
Replying to
@hl I figure I’ll post it somewhere when it’s in halfway decent shape, in case you’re interested.
Replying to
@amcasari I’m kind of jazzed not only by how well it came out (and frankly how straightforward it [mostly] was!), but especially by how THRILLED 5yo was by it 😍 Definite motivation to try and fill out a few more things from the episode (custom backgrounds, memoji faces)
Replying to
@hl @MichaelTBacon I’m currently calling it “FaceyDraw” just because I don’t think I can do justice to the OG
Students whose classes and programs of study are more diverse literally earn more money: a study.
Politics is how we put our values into action. Yes, it means everything is political. “Not getting into politics” is a political decision that reflects your values.
"install" vs "cp":
- former sets permissions explicitly; latter inherits them
- former removes any destination files and writes a new version; latter overwrites in place (could result in corruption if interrupted mid-overwrite)
- neither preserve source mtime, so I guess they're equivalent there
So in effect:
sudo install -m 0755 script.sh /dest/binary
is functionally equivalent to
sudo cp script.sh /dest/binary && sudo chmod +x /dest/binary
TIL!
I just posted a write-up of what I've been working on for the past couple of months: creating an internal monitoring loop for our home solar installation!
#homelab #diy #solar #monitoring
https://magsol.github.io/posts/2026-04-08-fully-offline-solar-monitoring/
Replying to
@adx@infosec.exchange @geerlingguy@mastodon.social I don’t know why, but Adafruit still lists the 16GB model as $219 (they’ve had it listed at that price for awhile—again, I’ve been checking 🫠), so where this was bizarre that it was $20 pricier than elsewhere, now it’s $80 *cheaper* than most others.
At least for now.
https://www.adafruit.com/product/6125
Replying to
@enting@wandering.shop I don’t know how excited or not you’d be to put your PhD to use but my employer (Valo Health) just inked a big partnership with a company that studies Parkinson’s and so we’re hiring compbio folks in that area: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/valohealth/jobs/8443273002
Replying to
@eamon I’ve recently written like four different docker containers for random edge device homelab stuff and I’ve no doubt they are -awful- 🤣
Replying to
@eamon My uninformed, all-vibes opinion is “both” software is getting worse AND there’s more of it.
Sincerely, a software dev who has more CI/CD infra than actual prod code to be tested.
Replying to
@eamon Totally agree, though I'll admit my own preference mostly came about when I started running, and the convention among runners had already seemed to be well-established in that one's "running week" was Monday through Sunday (i.e., it was easier to adopt than to resist).
Replying to
@b0rk@social.jvns.ca A bit tangential, but that’s disappointing to hear that kagi hasn’t been a great experience. That was one of the top Google alternatives I was considering.
Replying to
@geerlingguy@mastodon.social I don’t know if it says anything other than luck-of-the-draw that this doesn’t seem to have happened to any of the channels I follow… yet 😬
“The Ents are going to war. It is likely we go to our doom: the last march of the Ents.”
Replying to
@MichaelTBacon I’ve said the same thing to my wife before, with the added caveat: “…because Muffin isn’t MY child” 😆
Replying to
@write2run@quinnwitz.house Hahaha yeah, classic. It’s classic because they explained the joke. That’s what makes it classic. So classic 🤣
Replying to
@cazabon I like to work with 5V, 0.12A cooling fans. Or RJ45 cables. Highest voltage item I’ve worked directly on is a 20A GFCI outlet and I checked about a dozen times that I’d correctly shut off the associated breaker (including testing with a non-contact voltage pen) before touching it.
Someone asked about how to use Tailscale to access their home services when they’re away from home, and somehow I got pulled into a back-and-forth with a Top Commenter™️ on whether it’s better to go with an approach that works but is “wrong” or the one that satisfies all the bullshit purity tests.
I love me a “right way” approach—or as Claude would say, “belt-and-suspenders” (??????)—but everything in moderation, y’all. Including moderation.