I recently built a new PC for the first time in a decade. I'm struggling with a number of surprising and distasteful changes to computing practices on both the hardware and the software sides. This is my list of modern computing annoyances and the partial mitigations so far.

1. Stock coolers sold with $200 CPU are no longer capable of cooling those processors and aftermarket cooling is required. My Ryzen 3600 went to 95C and throttled within 20 seconds with stock cooling. Conversely the stock cooler with an Intel 3570k from a decade ago not only kept everything below 80C but it did it even with a massive overclock. Buying a $45 aftermarket cooler fixed this.

2. It's easy to forget that even if you build a fancy new computer if you use an *old* BIOS video card you *CAN NOT BOOT IN EFI MODE*. And while I like BIOS-mode more than EFI mode at some point in the future I want to actually buy a modern video card. It may be when I get a modern card I'll have to resize my partitions to make an EFI boot one, somehow switch my OS boot process to EFI while still using the old videocard (impossible to confirm success because it won't display on EFI boot) and then put in the modern EFI video card. Additionally, with being forced into csm/BIOS mode for my boot that means I now have a GPT formatted and partitioned drive with a MBR master boot record that's actually what is being used for booting. I wasn't even aware that was possible before doing it.

3. All desktop environments have suffered from "convergence" with mobile design styles and slowly bitrot. Gtk3 File Open dialogs no longer have text entry forms for filename and paths by default. This prevents pasting into a just opened open dialog until you press ctrl-l. And the gsettings switch for this no longer functions. Gtk devs confirmed this is as intended and gtk3filechooserwidget will stay this way. My attempts to create a patch so far are feeble at best and only restore the filename-entry location mode for the first File->Open operation of each application load.

I've been poking at gtkfilechooserwidget.c and .ui for about 2 weeks now. Of course the first thing I tried was just changing the initialization function settings for location mode. But it turned out operation mode had to be changed too (thanks Random!). But that only fixes for the first file->open operation. In order to permanently fix it I think the best path forward is to artificially send the GtkFileChooserWidget::location-popup: signal on initialization of pretty much any function that looks like it works on location mode or operation mode. I've tried doing this using location_popup_handler (impl, NULL); but I haven't fixed it yet.

Index: gtk+-3.24.5/gtk/gtkfilechooserwidget.c
===================================================================
--- gtk+-3.24.5.orig/gtk/gtkfilechooserwidget.c
+++ gtk+-3.24.5/gtk/gtkfilechooserwidget.c
@@ -8607,8 +8607,8 @@ gtk_file_chooser_widget_init (GtkFileCho
   priv->load_state = LOAD_EMPTY;
   priv->reload_state = RELOAD_EMPTY;
   priv->pending_select_files = NULL;
-  priv->location_mode = LOCATION_MODE_PATH_BAR;
-  priv->operation_mode = OPERATION_MODE_BROWSE;
+  priv->location_mode = LOCATION_MODE_FILENAME_ENTRY;
+  priv->operation_mode = OPERATION_MODE_ENTER_LOCATION;
   priv->sort_column = MODEL_COL_NAME;
   priv->sort_order = GTK_SORT_ASCENDING;
   priv->recent_manager = gtk_recent_manager_get_default ();

4. Just because systemd Debian 10 has cron/crontab and syslog don't expect them to actually work. syslog won't update it's time when the time is changed and so cron won't either. Additionally, crontab -e no longer updates cron immediately. Instead all changes are updated at the start of the next minute. This means if you try to test a crontab -e entry you need to set it for at least *2* minutes into the future, not just one.

root      2997  0.0  0.0   8504  2872 ?        Ss   Apr03   0:00 /usr/sbin/cron -f

Apr  4 10:32:11 janus crontab[5608]: (superkuh) BEGIN EDIT (superkuh)
Apr  4 10:32:15 janus crontab[5608]: (superkuh) REPLACE (superkuh)
Apr  4 10:32:15 janus crontab[5608]: (superkuh) END EDIT (superkuh)
Apr  4 10:33:01 janus cron[2997]: (superkuh) RELOAD (crontabs/superkuh)

Some claim old computers should be replaced with modern computers because modern processors have far lower idle wattages. A mid-range Intel Core2Duo 6400 from the 2008 era idles at 22w. Compare that to modern processors like my mid-range Ryzen 3600 at 21w.

A better argument for replacing older PCs is the last decade of lowering prices for 80% gold and higher efficiency power supplies that can actually delivery this efficiency at idle loads.

But any efficient modern power supply should be able to power an older computer too so this doesn't change much.

Everything is being written or re-written in Rust these days. It has genuinely nice features and it's hip. Unfortunately it is the least stable compiler/language in existence. Rust's "stable" versions don't even last a year. Something written in Rust 1.50 can't be compiled and run on even Debian 11, a distro *not even released yet*, with Rust 1.48 from 2020-11-19. Rust versions don't even last 5 months.

For all it's safety and beauty as a compiler it fails spectacularly at being able to compile. This is why every single Rust tutorial you see demands you not install rustc from your system repos (no matter how new) and instead use their proprietary and shady rust-up binary that pulls down whatever it wants from their online sources. The idea of a compiler that you cannot get from your repos is absurd and that needs to be recognized.

Rust is cool, yeah, but it isn't a real language yet. It's just a plaything for coders right now. It is not a tool for making applications that can be run by other people. Eventually as a different demographic of devs begins using Rust they'll stop using the fancy newest backwards incompatible extensions and only target "stable" versions. And at that point Rust will slowly become a real language. But that day is not today.

Sometime between last night and this morning my Cree 4-Flow style LED bulb had the phosphor coating pop off one of it's LED emitters. It is now shining a bright violet light along with the warm white of the others. I don't think there's any danger from this but it isn't very nice asthetically.

I decided to take the opportunity to get in a little guerilla gardening on the now dry empty lake bed. The city plans to start seeding of fast growing grasses to reduce erosion later this year. But there'll be a brief 1-2 year window before any actual landscaping with native plants is done. I figure I can get a single season of growth in without too much disturbance. And if any of the trees I try seeding (oak, maple, birch, thornless honey locust, walnut) get going maybe the city will keep them.

This is what the lake used to look like.

For the last 15 years or so I've made sure to put all my websites on both the clear web and tor. I liked tor because I believed that I owned my domain name on tor. This is unlike the clear web with DNS and registrars merely leasing you a domain name. But it turns out that even on tor you don't own your domain name.

https://blog.torproject.org/v2-deprecation-timeline

Today I learned that the Tor project is killing off *all* tor v2 domains in October 2021, a handful of months from now. All of the tor web, the links between sites, the search engine indices, the rankings and reputations for onion domains, they will all disappear in a puff of smoke. I never really owned my tor domain. I owned my keys but The Tor Project owns the domains. And the Tor Project has decided to take my domain away from me.

Yes, I understand why tor v2 is depreciated. The hash of the keys is short enough that brute forcing a prefix to imitiate some v2 address is nearly possible. But v2 has worked alongside v3 just fine for a couple years now. The idea that they have to completely remove it is false.

And the consequences of doing so are dramatic. The very heart of the tor web will be destroyed. All the links, the search indices and rankings, the domain reputations and bookmarks will all disapear. Some of the domains may create a new website using tor v3 but it will have no link back to the v2 version. The web of tor sites will simply disappear. Decades of community building gone in an instant.

I thought tor was useful for owning my domain but I was wrong. I no longer see any reason to run tor onion services and I will not be creating a v3 service like I'd been planning to. I guess nows the time to try i2p.