Amazing that a music group formed in 2003 already had an album in 1982, no?

Having trouble with your network? The Ubiquiti Cloud Key can reduce casting costs.

The machines are learning. But what?

Long story short, printing on a chromebook is still fucked, and now the incompetent dickheads who write drivers for HP have made things worse. With time and effort, however, one can still repair the damage. Writing this up in case somebody finds it useful, and because I have little doubt I’ll be referring to it again in the near future.

First, the problem: printing from a chromebook to a local network printer no longer works. There is an extension that used to make this possible. If one reads the reviews, one will quickly notice the many, many one star reviews saying that it doesn’t work. In particular, it used to work, but after the March 20 update it completely unhelpfully and uselessly does nothing but say “Printing unsuccessful”. That was more than a month ago. The rockstar talent at HP is apparently on tour and too busy to fix this.

Here’s the insane workaround. First we need the old version of the extension. Obviously Google will never let us have it, but there’s an archive site. Here’s the previous print extension. Download that. Rename the file to zip. Create a new folder and extract the contents of the zip file. Rename the _metadata folder to not_metadata. Open the chrome extensions panel. Delete the old HP Print extension. Flip into developer mode. Add an unpacked extension. Add back the printer IP address and rejoice.

For bonus fun, talk your mom through this procedure over the phone.

Updated to chrome and noticed I couldn’t login to my own site.

www.tedunangst.com normally uses encryption to protect your information. When Google Chrome tried to connect to www.tedunangst.com this time, the website sent back unusual and incorrect credentials.

That’s mostly not wrong, although the “this time” is. The cert has never been fully trusted by chrome, but I click through because I’m a bad person. This time, however, there was no option to do so.

You cannot visit www.tedunangst.com right now because the website uses HSTS.

I mean, yes, I set the HSTS header, but that was with the same cert that chrome is now insisting can’t be trusted. Why in the world would you permanently store “must have trusted cert” on the basis of an untrusted cert?

I suppose this warning is too late to save anyone, but you can clear HSTS sites if necessary via chrome://net-internals/#hsts.

Yes, actually harmful.

The file utility can be useful. Don’t know what program to open a file with? Run file and it will tell you. Of course, sometimes file will be wrong and misidentify the file type. This may be inconvenient, but at least as a user you still have the option of trying to run another program.

Except when you don’t. What happens when file (or its programmatic buddy, libmagic) is not a hint, but a gatekeeper? What happens when some application determines its behavior based on the output of file?

What happens is you can’t print on Tuesday.

Or you can’t print particular documents that contain inappropriate phrases.

Or you can’t launch a browser and consequently prevent Firefox from providing ASLR enabled builds.

Something tells me these won’t be the last three bugs.

A program that helps users is useful. A program that restricts users is harmful. Run file on your computer all you want, but don’t use file to limit what I can do.

How hard is it to preload a PC with the software it needs to work? Really fucking hard.

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Skip the middleman to save time and money by simply telling your customers exactly what you would have told your customer service team. Simple direct communications mean nothing gets lost in translation. Not even funtioning.

Best of all, if they screw up, it’s their own fault.

Everybody knows the best sandwiches in town are made by your local neighborhood deli.

Or, apparently, Delhi. Good work Apple.

WTF is this? No, this is not a git mirror. Not here, not there, not anywhere.

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I was watching some Netflix (Joss Whedon Astonishing X-Men) on my iPad. I take a break and I’m catching up on some reading in Safari, when suddenly the next episode starts playing in the background. Not a short while later, but probably about 30 minutes later. It was weird and quite unexpected.

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End of the year bug? Or always bug? Dunno. Seen at Starbucks.

Also, “try not to lose this page“? For serious?