Firefox: play videos on Rocky Linux / Red Hat 9

Red Hat / Rocky Linux doesn't include patent-encumbered video codecs out of the box, so sudo dnf install \ "https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/el/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E '%rhel').noarch.rpm" \ "https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/el/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E '%rhel').noarch.rpm" \ && \ sudo dnf install ffmpeg I didn't even need to restart Firefox afterwards; it just all seemed to start working immediately

Rocky Linux 9 & HP Elitebook 8470p

Annoyingly, the Rocky 9 installer ISO didn't come with the Wi-Fi drivers for my HP Elitebook 8470p. The laptop seems to have a “Intel Corporation Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 (rev 3e)” PCIe Wi-Fi adapter, which worked fine out-of-the-box on Ubuntu and every other distro I tried on it, but not this one. I diagnosed this via dmesg: [ 108.888963] Intel(R) Wireless WiFi driver for Linux [ 108.889046] iwlwifi 0000:25:00.0: enabling …

Attempt to recover Amazon Seller account linked to old phone number

tl;dr: actual human seller support is NOT available over email or phone; it's ONLY available through a portal that you can access if you're already logged in. If you can't access your account, you're just *screwed*. I'm posting this not to help anyone per se, but more as a scream into the void about Amazon's worthless Seller Support representatives. 8 months and 14 days after the day my account …

[DRAFT] Transcript: Babylon Bee congress testimony March 28 2023

(Personally, I think TBB is dead wrong here, and their opinion is actually dangerous. I’m unconvinced that UGC-centric websites should or even CAN be regulated like a utility. Dillon’s redactive quoting of §230 in the closing remark belies bad faith. I’m leaving this post tagged as “draft” because I haven't properly expressed my thoughts here, but I am archiving Dillon’s statement in full because I had a seriously hard …

Edgar Allan Poe Proves Stockfish Can't Exist

A summary of Edgar Allan Poe’s Maelzel’s Chess-Player. §1–§4, §6–10, §11–14, and §15–18 describe the physical appearance, (public) operation, and cultural/historical context of the chess robot; §5 and §19 actually present the argument that the robot can't be a “genuine” (or “pure machine”) mechanical chess player — that it must have a human operator. §5 sketches the outline of the argument: Abridged Original Verbiage It’s inconceivable that any physical …

Weird issues trying to transfer a domain (XYZ's EPP infrastructure broken?)

tldr: XYZ infrastructure is literally collapsing, they couldn't transfer in one of their own domains without a staff override. Initial transfer attempt Namecheap e-mails me the “transfer Authorization Code” Gen.xyz web interface claims “Invalid EPP Code” I contact Gen.xyz support Gen.xyz staff tells me“Please request a new EPP code from Namecheap” I contact Namecheap support via web chat “I need a new EPP for my domain, ishygddt.xyz; XYZ support …

EC point serialization formats

I looked into this when trying to make a piece of toy software to serialize and de-serialize *all* OpenSSH-supported public key formats. While OpenSSH uses standardized formats for private keys, the ssh-* AAAA/3NzaC0… format you're used to pasting into remote servers is actually a "proprietary" (though with freely-licensed spec and implementation) encoding—it's not JSON, and not any standardized BER/DER codec; instead, it's mostly a Length-Value encoding (think TLV without the T) …

IA5string definition

From ITU-T Rec. X.680 (02/21): C.5.7 IA5String [is] mapped into UniversalString by mapping each character into the UniversalString character that has the identical (32-bit) value in the BER encoding of UniversalString as the (8-bit) value of the BER encoding of IA5String[.] 41.6 The characters which can appear in the UniversalString type are any of the characters allowed by ISO/IEC 10646 [aka Unicode]. 43.8 For IA5String, [the] entire character set …

[DRAFT] Transcript: Lance Owens MD, “Jung, Tolkien, and the Hermeneutics of Vision”, 2015

“Jung, Tolkien and the Hermeneutics of Vision” Dr. Lance S. Owens 23 October 2015 California Institute of Integral Studies The Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness Forum Transcribed from youtube.com/video/GxVaxOco7kg and adapted for the web [PUNCTUATION, GRAMMAR, AND QUALITY PASSES STILL WIP] by James Edington in 2023 Opening Remarks (A shout out to my introduction speaker tonight, Becca; the stuff she has done on Jung, The Red Book, and Tolkien is …