An interesting article on Brain Rot forwarded on by a friend after I complained about how annoying educational software is. I was referring to the setup hassles but now I’m starting to look at the actual educational value of the software themselves.

A nice quote:

Technology’s greatest contribution is to permit people to be incompetent at a larger and larger range of things.

Posted by bruce as (un)happy consumer, computing, kids at 6:16 PM UTC

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Sweet Maria’s has the best description with big pictures of the roasting scale.
A Rough Pictorial Guide to the Coffee Roasting Process

Posted by bruce as coffee at 2:09 PM UTC

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This morning I tried my first shot of Connoisseur Coffee‘s Woodside blend which Terry at CC recommended. He said it’s a blend of sumatra and brazilian which sounds promising to my palate. It was quite agreeable — lots of body and smooth with a great finish. In fact, I’d say it’s my favorite from them so far.

 With that nice taste lingering in my mouth, the last thing I wanted to do when depositing a couple checks at Patelco was lick the envelope! A couple weeks ago, with some Blue Bottle lingering, I innocently licked the envelope only to have my taste buds smacked in the head by an offensive adhesive! Like puking on a Picasso — a real tragedy. Today, using my noggin, I spit on my finger then wiped that on the envelope. Worked like a charm. Yeah, and it probably charmed the woman behind me in line, too.

Posted by bruce as coffee at 11:32 AM UTC

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I tried several months ago to get SMTP Auth working with Postfix-tls on my Debian server but kept getting "SASL authentication failure" errors. After a couple of hours searching and experimenting it was still failing. I found this page and it worked right away with a slight mod!

Since I wanted to auth to the shadow file instead of an IMAP server, the only change I needed to make was to have the following in /etc/default/saslauthd:

MECHANISMS=shadow

Now Mom and Dad can roam the country and still send email.

Update on Mar. 12: It mysteriously stopped working and browsing the page again, someone else noted that /var/run gets cleaned up on reboot which has happened to me (due to power outages). So this page gets extra credit for the solution to the follow-on problem I didn’t know I had!

Posted by bruce as computing at 1:24 AM UTC

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