Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal ([syndicated profile] smbc_comics_feed) wrote2026-04-22 11:20 am
Whatever ([syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed) wrote2026-04-22 02:33 pm

Still in Hollywood

Posted by John Scalzi

Although this picture is actually of the Pershing Square Metro Line escalator, nowhere near Hollywood in terms of actual Los Angeles geography — look, we’re going for the metaphor here, okay. What I’m saying is that I am still out here, on my third day of meetings, all of which seem to be going pretty well. It’s nice to keep busy.

Nevertheless I’ll finally be on my way home tonight after a week away, and I’m looking forward to seeing family and pets and being a massive introvert in my comfy office chair for several days. Los Angeles is wonderful. Home is even better.

— JS

mrissa: (Default)
mrissa ([personal profile] mrissa) wrote2026-04-22 09:49 am

Another first contact

 I hope you're not tired of first contact stories, because I've gone and written another one. Apparently this is what's on my mind lately? Anyway here's Waiting for Them in Nature Futures, go, read, enjoy!
settiai: (Celebi -- aniconisfinetoo)
Lynn | Settiai ([personal profile] settiai) wrote2026-04-22 10:50 am
Entry tags:

Pokémon Go

I've been playing Pokémon Go since it was first released back in 2016. The thing is, I've always been fairly off-and-on with my playing.

It's mostly been because I've never had any PokéStops or gyms that I could access from home/work. On the days when I'm out and about, I could walk around and visit them, but that's definitely not something I could do every day. Especially now that my job is hybrid. I only have so much capability to deal with people in a given week, so on days when I'm working remotely it's not unusual for me to avoid all human contact whatsoever.

And, well, the game intentionally punishes you for that. Outside of a brief period during the height of the pandemic where they extended the range of PokéStops and gyms, you miss out on things if you don't actually go outside and spin those regularly as that's where you get a lot of items that can be used in the game to do things like catch new Pokémon.

Anyway, I do have a point! There's a PokéStop that I can access from anywhere in my new apartment. I've been playing the game significantly more the past month or so because it's so much more rewarding when I can easily access new items (including Poké Balls).
disneydream06: (Disney Happy)
disneydream06 ([personal profile] disneydream06) wrote2026-04-22 09:38 am
smokingboot: (Rose)
smokingboot ([personal profile] smokingboot) wrote2026-04-22 02:27 pm

Gorgeous

This feels like Spring proper. The blooms are just beginning to show, and the air holds the here and now of it, fresh but not cold, warming but not still. The season has arrived. So I opened the kitchen door and left it that way; Dervish and her sister went out, enjoyed themselves, lifted their heads to the light and heat, jumped up walls, investigated the greenery. I remember last year when the vet made stern sounds about Biggie's future, and here she is still. So we do what we do and our girl will have her beautiful days. If it's the last Spring, we love every minute, if she makes it to Summer even better. And who knows? We only really have now. Turns out now is gorgeous.
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james_davis_nicoll ([personal profile] james_davis_nicoll) wrote2026-04-22 08:51 am

(no subject)



Can the salvation of the Literature Club be something as simple as blackmail?

O Maidens in Your Savage Season, volume 2 by Mari Okada & Nao Emoto
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summerstorm ([personal profile] summerstorm) wrote2026-04-22 02:37 pm

so I started yapping and this got long

Nightmares upon nightmares again, and earlier than usual. When I dragged myself out of sleep, it wasn't even 11 AM. Not crazy about this. I had some Monster before I showered -- I also made my mom shower before I showered -- and Gorgug did curl up under the sheets with me, briefly. Poor thing was extremely confused because yesterday I changed my sheets and folded up my winter blanket (left around just in case, I'm not that optimistic), and then slept with a smaller blanket and ended up kicking it off anyway.

My sister's been hogging the washing machine since Saturday and it seems like it may or may not rain this or that day over the next few days, so I probably need to steel myself for doing a quick load when she leaves later, so I'm sure to have clothes to wear (that I like and are comfortable... if you looked at my closet you'd be like, what the fuck, but unfortunately my cold/cool weather rota does not encompass even half of that, and it is still cool enough indoors for long sleeves) on Saturday. If I can, I'd also like to start individually washing that winter blanket, the charcoal gray blanket I'm currently using, my green winter coat, and my house shoes. Either pair. Though I may throw the one I haven't been wearing in the trash at this point, god knows how many times Ciri's peed on them by now.

Ciri was in heat last week and I was exhausted the whole time, to the point that I felt drunk when I went to the store Saturday morning. It was kind of funny because my mom had been hypocritically side-eying my picking up 5% abv cocktails in a can the day before, but also: not pleasant. I'm slowly recovering from that, but the nightmares aren't helping. Neither are the bouts of depression.

-

I've been experimenting with extremely low-grade alcohol for a couple of weeks -- and by low I mean "I don't think this counts as breaking sobriety," because the tipsiest I've felt has been 'unexpectedly happy,' twice -- to see how my body takes to it now it's been off it for three years, and also so I could try a drink I saw at Primaprix that looked right up my alley except for the 5% abv. It was delicious. They no longer stock it, of course. More chatter about this. )

-

Three episodes behind on The Pitt, caught up on 9-1-1 (Buck ;__;) and decided to finish 9-1-1 Lone Star for some reason. I have two episodes left and I assume they're gonna make me cry again so I've been putting it off a bit. This show is a telenovela. For all the NDEs in 9-1-1, at least you can kind of assume things will turn out okay, with one glaring exception. Season 4 of Lone Star was just melodramatic hit after hit, and Judd has been depressing in season 5. Carlos, too, to some extent. I do still really love Nancy and Marjan though. And TK and Carlos's relationship. And Paul. Ramble/rant, with spoilers. )

Anyway. I am trying to convince my brain mice to let me do things. I just wanna make maps and edit pictures and the mice are like, "what's that? We don't know how to open an editor suddenly." I'm halfway through Trespasser on Dragon Age: Inquisition, where I am missing most of the trophies for some reason? I'm pretty sure I did the DLC last time, but who knows. It was 2020. I accidentally locked myself out of a bunch of companion quests, but I'm just not putting myself through this game again. It would be so goddamn replayable if combat wasn't so tedious. I have it on easy! It should not take this long to defeat a bunch of bandits! At this point if they had an accessibility 'one-shot enemies' option I would take it. Goddamn. Let me shoot them in the head. Let me shoot them dead in the head, specifically. At least Veilguard let me aim.

I'm very pleased I made a guy and experienced the Dorian romance, though. He is just delightful.
christopher575: A model on The Price is Right showing that the contestant picked the right price, $575 (Default)
christopher575 ([personal profile] christopher575) wrote2026-04-22 05:25 am
Entry tags:

2026QOTD April 26-30

Full list of April questions here.

26. Do you still have a landline, or do you only use your mobile phone/cellphone?

Mobile only for about 22 years now. It would have been even longer, but the resident manager at one of my apartments was convinced the doorbell had to ring to a landline. The manager before had told me it just had to be a number with a 206 area code, but by the time I got my cell phone, their successor thought otherwise. That was a bummer, because I had to pay something like $35 just to use my doorbell.

Garrett might still have a phone on his desk but if so, it's VoIP rather than a traditional land line.

27. What sweets/candies do you remember from your childhood? When was the last time you ate some?

I just had a look at '80s candies for sale online and saw that lots of what I remember is still available. There are some I used to love but would never bother buying again, like Fun Dip. Sometimes Garrett's mom has some varieties that she grabs at Dollar Tree and I may or may not partake, like Circus Peanuts. I think I had a Circus Peanut a month or so ago, and probably won't again for quite some time.

One thing I'm a fan of is newer upgrades to candies that have been around a while. I'll probably never buy standard gummi bears again now that Albanese are available. And Spree is a decent candy, but Chewy Spree is so good, it's the only Spree for me. But it's been at least a couple of years since I had those. I mainly just make sure to have some Albanese and some high quality chocolate around.

28. In 2004, Shrek the sheep from Tarras, Central Otago, New Zealand, was finally shorn live on TV after 6 years of avoidance; the fleece weighed 27 kg (60 lb). Do you own, or have you made anything from sheep’s wool?

I don't. If I were to get anything like that I'd choose alpaca instead.

29. When was the last time you received a letter (not junk mail)?

Didn't we do this one? Same answer, I exchange letters with one of my oldest friends. A fun twist was that her last one included a postcard she wrote a very long time ago but hadn't gotten around to sending.

30. In 2018, Sweden's official Twitter account confirmed that Swedish meatballs actually originated in Turkey. Do you like Swedish meatballs? Ever had them in IKEA?

Yes to both! I wouldn't want to buy tons of stuff at IKEA but I sure wish there was one closer. Our nearest one is over 40 miles away in Renton and it's quite a slog to get to. We were supposed to get our state's second location just 1.5 miles from here, but the company suddenly backed out of the discussion. Then we were supposed to get a dine-and-drink style movie theater in the same place, but that plan fizzled out for some reason as well. The last update was that it would be a pickleball venue. I don't really understand why pickleball is such a huge deal in the US, and it's hard to imagine how someone could make much money since the courts take up a lot of space.
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pedanther ([personal profile] pedanther) wrote2026-04-22 08:28 pm
Entry tags:

Notes on a music collection, part 8

At last, a farewell to A )

Progress: 151 / 2542, 8:43 / 143:39
Chris's Wiki :: blog ([syndicated profile] cks_techblog_feed) wrote2026-04-22 03:26 am

Some general notes on network booting UEFI machines

Posted by cks

If you need to (re)install a large collection of servers or servers in inconvenient locations for physical access, booting them from the network in order to install them is something that you might be quite interested in. In the pre-UEFI PC 'BIOS' era of MBR booting, this was often called PXE booting, but UEFI changes things around.

UEFI firmware typically has built in support for networking, which is to say that there are UEFI protocols (function calls) for doing common things with the network (also, also). In practice this means that bootloaders and other things don't have to embed their own code to deal with the network (or their own network card drivers); provided that they don't exit from the UEFI preboot environment, they can just use UEFI services. In typical Linux environments, this will handle everything up until the kernel starts with its initial ramdisk (GRUB will load the kernel and initramfs over the network using UEFI services).

As covered in UEFI HTTP Boot, UEFI provides two ways to do network booting. Both ways start with the UEFI firmware doing DHCP to get an initial chunk of information, either by IPv4 or IPv6. In the standard and widely supported way, your DHCP server answers with (among other things) a next-server setting that points to a TFTP server and a 'filename' setting that is the initial EFI file to load and boot from that TFTP server. If you're using UEFI Secure Boot, this EFI file must be signed, so for x86 Linux with GRUB it's typically the (signed) shimx64.efi that you'd use locally (which will then boot 'grubx64.efi', which must really be the (signed) 'grubnetx64.efi'). My understanding is that this looks a lot like old fashioned PXE booting with minor differences in file names, configuration files, and so on.

The other, modern option is to skip using TFTP and load the EFI boot file over HTTP, hence UEFI HTTP Boot; this was apparently added in UEFI 2.5, from 2015. The UEFI firmware signals that it's doing a HTTP boot instead of a TFTP boot by setting special options in its DHCP request; it requests a special architecture and puts special things in its DHCP 'vendor class identifier'. If your DHCP server and your overall environment supports this boot option, you'll reply with a DHCP 'filename' option that is the URL of what to start booting from (often shimx64.efi again) and a special 'vendor class identifier' marker of your own to tell the UEFI firmware that this is a HTTP boot reply.

(See here, here, and the end of here for various DHCP server incantations using either the advertised client DHCP architecture or its vendor class identifier.)

Although the UEFI standard's description of UEFI HTTP Boot is somewhat unclear, it clearly envisions that HTTP boot can be used to 'boot' not just EFI programs but also disk images and even ISOs. These will be set up by UEFI firmware as a (UEFI) RAM disk. How your system installer accesses this ISO RAM image after the installer's kernel has started and UEFI firmware services aren't available any more is up to it.

UEFI HTTP booting has a variety of appealing features, like not using TFTP and supporting DNS (and everything that comes with that), and in modern UEFI firmware you apparently don't even need DHCP if you configure everything in the UEFI boot variables (cf, also). However, it has the potentially significant drawback of being modern, which means that older UEFI firmware (which you may have on systems you're now retaining) may either not support it at all or may have bugs and flaky behavior related to it. For that matter, even your modern UEFI firmware may not be entirely free of bugs, especially if you want to do more exotic things like directly boot an ISO image.

If you're already going to get as much as possible of the installer from your HTTP server, my view is that you might as well enable UEFI HTTP booting in your DHCP server. It probably won't hurt and it may enable somewhat better network booting, especially across subnet boundaries. Although ideally you won't be loading very much via TFTP anyway.