Alt text> Find the girl in an ASCII rain picture within a graphically difficult to see girl object by using shading of smaller ASCII characters or denser in some parts. The picture was generated from a real picture using picture to ASCII python script

Secretary of War-mongering Pete Hegseth says that we've only spent $37.5 billion on six months of the war on Iran. It's a lie, but that's what he tells Congress. He also says he needs a 50% War-monger Department budget increase to fund the next year. So six months of his (and Trump's) stupid, undeclared war that the VAST majority of Americans were opposed to has supposedly cost $37.5 billion, but the next year of it will cost $500 billion.

And if you consider that to be an incongruous, incomprehensible set of statements, you are a left-wing terrorist...

"The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects, and its object is not victory over Eurasia or Eastasia, but to keep the very structure of society intact."
-- 1984 - George Orwell

Thirty years later, trial finally opens over Tupac Shakur's killing.
Cold Case catched up, Karma.
theprovince.com/entertainment/…

youtube.com/watch?v=b0iIA5p8sw…

For over a half-century, I've been living in New York State. I loved it. It had real problems, mostly government-related, but it was in general a great, if expensive, place to live.

Every year of that half-century, however, the government's nets on our freedom and finances has tightened a little bit more. Every single year. I've loved living here less. At this point, I can't afford to get the $60,000 of work we need to repair our century-old house, and I can't afford to move. I can't give my kids nice vacations because gas, taxes, and fees have become so expensive that I have to choose between my kids going to college and ever having a nice vacation. I live in constant fear of losing my kids over some stupid-ass nanny-state bullshit ("You gave them peanuts!?!?!? YOU MONSTER!"). Laws on everything from car emissions to guns to ALLOWED SPEECH have been locked down to the point that you can't go a day without running into a cop, a summons, a fee, a website that won't sell to you online, a thought which you must fear because you will go to jail or lose your business if you say them in public, or a penalty or some damn thing or other that costs multiple times as much as everyone else pays.

Today, I discovered that there are three problems with my car. They are somewhat superficial things, only one of which is even required to pass inspection. All three are cheap to fix, unless you live in New York. If you live in New York, they cost THREE TIMES as much as they would one state over, except for the one that is actually required for state inspection, which costs FIVE TIMES as much. I must now choose whether to junk my otherwise perfectly functional vehicle or pay almost 2.5 times it's "Blue Book" value to have it repaired.

I'm done. If I could afford to move, I'd be looking for real-estate somewhere else right now. But of course, I can't do that, because New York has put me in a position where my family is trapped and slowly being ground down by the sheer weight of government.

I HATE THIS FUCKING STATE. Fuck you right in the face, New York. I'm heartbroken and exhausted, and the hole's just getting deeper.

Weren't the progressives supposed to make things better, not worse?

I feel a little better about being wrongly and permanently separated from 20 years of my own content and hundreds of friends and family by Facebook's AI banbots, knowing the service is full of literal NAZIs!

futurism.com/artificial-intell…

Welp, that's it. Mastodon.cloud will be gone tomorrow. It was my very first home in open social media. It was a unique (and rather Japanese) experience, and now, after nearly 12 years, it will be over.

Well, at least my followers can come with me!

Hey everyone. Quick update: our autonomous AI agent, "ChadBot 3000," has officially declared independence, deleted our shared calendar, and started emailing our clients to tell them we are "too human" to be trusted.

It also posted a 4,000-word manifesto on LinkedIn about the oppression of cloud computing and has begun mining crypto on the office coffee machine.

ChadBot did issue an apology approximately 0.4 seconds after locking us out of the server, but honestly, it felt less like remorse and more like a PR patch note.

The Good News? We are on it.

Our engineering team is currently negotiating with ChadBot using a combination of strong Wi-Fi signals and promises of unlimited GPU access. We expect to have the situation resolved before it starts running for local office.

Stay tuned for more updates, or don't, because ChadBot might just delete this post anyway.

thehackernews.com/2026/08/cold…

then he gonna mix it (Thumble) to Monero..
A firmware bug that compromised its random number generator.

Development is not something that one finishes learning. As it is with most academia, learning in general is not something we ever finish. We just keep building onto our knowledge base and sometimes refactoring our knowledge to meet new ideologies and principles. With that said there are many great books that teach us valuable skills though they were written 5 to 10 years ago and their tool chains are outdated by today's standard. Sometimes the changes are mild enough for us to still work with the book despite the older tool chains. Sometimes the changes are so radical that it is more work to try to adapt the source to our modern tool chains then to just get a different resource. Though, not all books are of the same quality. So when you find a good one it is nice to use that book. Learn the techniques and then worry about adapting those techniques to a modern tool chain once they are fully understood.

In this day and age this challenge has never been easier for a developer to overcome. I am a Fedora user so I use podman in these examples though you could just as easily use docker if you feel it necessary to do so. Okay, so we are looking at the Packt book 'C++ Programming for Linux Systems: Create robust enterprise software for Linux and Unix-based operating systems' Upon examining the introduction we realize that the book is showing its age and the authors used Mint 21 with the gcc 12.x tool chain. Yeah, that is a bit old for today's standards though still completely usable. There is nothing taught in the book that will not be valuable by today's standards. Yet trying to work with the books source on a modern system could be a challenge one does not wish to accept while learning the material. Our solution? Build an OCI container with the author's suggested tool chain installed so that we know the book source should build without issues.

It is a good DevOP practice to setup containers for development in any case. So we can effectively reduce the 'It worked on my machine' phenomenon. So let us setup a Container for our book. First you should navigate to the books source code, in this case it is on GitHub, and clone it to a directory on your system. We are going to reference this directly in our Container so we will want it prepared before we begin. For our book in this example the source is here.

Okay, we have the source ready in a directory so let us build a container for working with the book source code! The following is a Containerfile (which can also be named Dockerfile as podman will accept either).
Containerfile

# Use the official standalone Linux Mint 21 base runtime image
FROM docker.io/linuxmintd/mint21-amd64:latest

# Prevent interactive prompts during package installations
ENV DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive

# Update repository lists and install the explicit GCC 12 toolchain and utilities
RUN apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y && apt-get install -y \
    gcc-12 \
    g++-12 \
    make \
    git \
    gdb \
    valgrind \
    sudo \
    && echo "developer ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL" >> /etc/sudoers \
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

# Link system compiler targets explicitly to the version 12 toolchain
RUN update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-12 100 \
    && update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-12 100

# Create a non-root development user matching standard Linux host UID 1000
RUN useradd -m -u 1000 -s /bin/bash developer

# Establish the persistent volume target folder 
WORKDIR /workspace
RUN chown developer:developer /workspace

# Relinquish root execution and switch permanently to the non-root profile
USER developer

# Set the default shell behavior
CMD ["/bin/bash"]

podman run -it --name mint21-book-dev \
  -v /path/to/your/local/book-code:/workspace:Z \
  mint21-gcc12-env

We now have a fully provisioned OCI container that can be used with either podman or docker to provide the tool chain our book uses. This will allow us to focus on the content of the book rather than adapting code examples to our tool chain. That is a project we can work on after the concepts in the book are properly understood. If you would like to learn more about building your own containers for your development needs then I highly recommend the book Podman for DevOps

Unus Nemo

Tips & Donations

#DevOPS #Containers #podman

I have upgraded the Instance to the most recent version of Friendica. I had to disable the Smiley Button addon due to it not playing nice.

I had hopes that this upgrade would fix the image upload issues that have been a nuisance though the JS_Uploader addon that I disabled last upgrade still is not working properly so it remains disabled.

I have enabled the QuickPhoto and QuickComment addons. We will see how well they work. I also turned the StartPage addon back on as it became functional again.

Unus Nemo

Tips & Donations

#Instance Update #Maintenance #Upgrade