Ben Werdmuller posted a quick blurb about entirely disabling website notifications in your browser of choice, and I’m right there with him in not ever granting permission for a website to send me notifications. And while he covered Chromium- and Gecko-based browsers, he omitted Safari and Webkit-based browsers.

Fortunately Apple doesn’t hide this in hidden advanced settings panels. It’s in Safari Preferences → Websites (tab) → Notifications. Delete any entries you may have previously granted (or don’t) and uncheck the checkbox at the bottom.

Hi, [coworker],

I hope this email finds you well.
Wait, no that’s not quite true;
I hope this email never finds you.
I hope you sleep the deepest sleep of your life,
A sleep earned through labor and fresh air. That you smile in the slight fog as you rise to dew
on the increasingly-reclaimed markers of our once-great society.
Once-“great” society.

I hope you look back on the things we built
And find them quaint in how they misjudged what was important,
And entirely misguided in how they defined “value”.
I hope you feel the Earth and the plants in your lungs,
that you see your breath in the springtime sun.

I hope you can reflect and reject the techno-industrial, the educational-industrial,
the capital-industrial complex to which we dedicated so many years,
And I hope you see smiles and dirt on the faces of your children.
Hope you smile too, knowing our mistakes won’t be theirs.

I hope you find satisfaction in the routine,
reaching into stores to make breakfast for you and yours.
Tending to others, to plants, to animals. I hope you take less than you give
And that you teach others do the same.
I hope you know your worth, our worth
Is not defined in EBITDA or MAU.
It’s defined in what we instill, how we inspire, and how we reflect the things we claim to hold dear.
I think you said that to me.

I hope that between when I hit send and when this gets delivered to you.
We, the greater we, face a redefining event.
That we are forced to reckon with our past prioritization.
But, I guess, if all that doesn’t happen.
Maybe, if you could get me the latest quarterly summary?
We’re supposed to update it with the new KPIs that the Leadership team defined last week.
Yeah, no the new new KPIs. I know. I told them.

But, really, I hope this email never finds you.

I wrote this a little over a year ago, thinking of a friend who I was frustrated on behalf of. It’s been a while, I need to check in on him.

I kept running across a problem with my Mastodon instance where I was seemingly unable to follow other accounts. Reviewing Sidekiq logs revealed HTTP 401s for nearly every account I tried to follow.

After some poking and help from some very kind folks on a Mastodon admin Discord (@[email protected], specifically), as well as my host, I think I’ve resolved the issue. It seems to have been because I boched my webfinger redirect.

For some context, Mastodon relies webfinger as a method for clearly identifying users on remote servers. Since I have my Mastodon instance on a subdomain of alvani.me, but want my usernames to be in the @[email protected] format, I have to create a redirect for requests to

https://alvani.me/.well-known/webfinger
to be redirected to
https://mastodon.alvani.me/.well-known/webfinger.

I used a CloudFlare redirect rule to accomplish this, as per the screenshot below.

Ran into a problem updating packages on my Ubuntu-based NAS and Plex host; zfs-zed and zfsutils-linux were unconfigured due to some logic failures that occurred in certain configurations. This resulted in apt failures. In my case, there was an empty zpool configured in a subdir of another pool which resulted in the zfsutils-linux configuration script failing when it was run.

dpkg: error processing package zfsutils-linux (--configure):
 installed zfsutils-linux package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of zfs-zed:
 zfs-zed depends on zfsutils-linux (>= 0.8.3-1ubuntu12.14); however:
  Package zfsutils-linux is not configured yet.

dpkg: error processing package zfs-zed (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
No apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup error from a previous failure.
																										  
 Errors were encountered while processing:
     zfsutils-linux
	 zfs-zed
  E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

To resolve, I stopped all the services that might write to the zpool(s) - NFS and a Plex container, then

• zfs unmount [root pool name] (replace [root pool name] with -a to unmount all pools if needed)
• zfs list to list pools
• zfs destroy [root pool name]/[sub pool] - Be really careful you’re destroying the right pool. Going back isn’t impossible, but it’s not easy.
• zfs list to confirm the pool isn’t listed
• zfs mount -a to mount all pools
• dpkg --configure -a to complete the configuration of unconfigured packages
• Restart stopped services

Nice little throwback. My teams are being proactive and gathering information now for projects they might like to take on in the future. In some cases, I want to make notes to include these in future budget planning sessions. Sometimes it’d be useful to link to some specific details, and often that detail is in a specific email message.

The Message-ID header is made exactly for this, and you can view the Message-ID header in Mail.app using these instructions. There’s even an old DF post with an AppleScript snippet to make it easy to extract the Message-ID. I didn’t try that, but I suspect it’ll still work just fine.

Elsewhere on your computer, you can use a message:// prefix followed by the message-ID to link to the specific message and macOS still manages to handle it apporpriately, fifteen years later.

Nice when the simple & useful stuff still works.