At the time of the Adria Richards affair, I had sympathy for her. I thought she was in the right, though I observed that if talking about anything sexual at all in front of women — in the workplace or anywhere else — is verboten, then that actually harms women (as humans are and always will be sexual creatures, unavoidably so).

It turns out that she had made sexual jokes on her own Twitter feed, and is a pretty large hypocrite in other respects. Thus I’m not surprised she got canned from her own company (good employees tend not to get fired at the very first sign of trouble, especially in tech workplaces).

I don’t know a single person in the IT world — male or female — who has not made a dongle joke at some point in their IT career.

When two scumbags collide, everyone loses.

I’ve never been a watcher of awards shows, but for the Oscars this year I don’t think I’ve ever been less interested in the Best Picture nominees. Similar for most other categories.

Even at the best of times mainly I like to look at the pretty and absurd dresses from awards shows. But for the Oscars, I usually at least care about some of the movies.

Too many old white guys deciding what’s “good,” not enough actual good.

SSL-intercepting code found in many more places.

According to Ars, “More than a dozen software applications other than Superfish use Komodia code. Besides Trojan.Nurjax, the programs named included:

• CartCrunch Israel LTD
• WiredTools LTD
• Say Media Group LTD
• Over the Rainbow Tech
• System Alerts
• ArcadeGiant
• Objectify Media Inc
• Catalytix Web Services
• OptimizerMonitor”

If you think this sort of thing is not a threat to you, well, you’re simply wrong and the perfect candidate for the apps economy.

This is a very simple Mac application I made called SleepyDisplay.

Click here to download it.

I made it because there is nothing that does exactly this. On the iMac, there is no easy one-click way to turn off the display but still have the computer running — and not have it locked (as the Retina iMac at least doesn’t have an eject button, and I don’t use the Mac keyboard).

So this application does that. I have only tested it on Yosemite and only on my setups — a Retina 5K iMac and late 2013 Retina MacBook Pro — so it might not work on your machine.

I do not offer any tech support and if you destroy your machine in the process of using this, it’s on you.

But for me it does exactly what I want it to.

Or as a Gnome or systemd developer would say, “Screw you if this is not the exact application for all your turning off your monitor needs. And if you don’t need it, you are mentally deficient obvs.”

BTW, the Superfish debacle by Lenovo is not just some “innocent” corporate mistake. Nope, it’s a result of corporate/state espionage attempts.

The company’s founder is a former Israeli security agent, and the company has big government contracts with both American and Israel military. It’s also likely on a lot more than just Lenovo machines – Lenovo just did them a favor.

Thought there might be a little more to that story since it was such a powerfully malicious program.

And yep, there is.

This is way more fun than writing about Gnome 3 or the idiots who run that project.

Never seen anyone playing a cello standing up like that. But it works.

Good god, Gnome 3 is a dung heap.

Messed with it again for a few minutes today. People use this? On purpose? It makes Mac OS look positively a paragon of customization and options.

Gnome 3. When you absolutely positively don’t need to get a fucking thing done.

My blog is all jacked up again. Not because of that blogging software I tried — it has been that way a while. Not sure if its my host or WordPress but the blogging software just exposed a problem that has been there a while.

But anyway, I found a command finally to put my iMac screen to sleep while leaving the compy running.

It’s pmset displaysleepnow at the terminal.

For all you true Mac believers afraid of typing commands, the “terminal” is the scary box — mine is black with green text hearkening back to my youth but by default it’s white these days — where you type long fearsome phrases. 😉

God, I fucking hate apps.

Apps are what you get when there are too many dumb people. Apps are dumb people paradise.

Too stupid to use a computer?

There’s an app for that!

Also, Netflix is now useless as they once had everything I could want to watch. Now they have almost nothing.

So it’s a pirate’s life for me.

In this case, I disagree with the prescription here for dealing with anti-vaxxers.

We can’t make people vaccinate themselves and their children. But we can make that a more expensive proposition for them, and a less dangerous proposition for the rest of us, by speaking out and making unnecessary anti-vax choices less societally acceptable.

Though I usually disagree with the use of the carceral system as a deterrent — or even the idea thereof — this is one of the rare cases where using it as a disincentive would be effective.

Because it is almost all upper-middle-class people who don’t vaccinate. And nothing would deter them more than seeing a few percent of their fellow yuppie peers in the slammer for a good long stretch.

This would actually work in this case. Throw a few thousand anti-vaxxers in federal prison, the rest will be screaming, but they will be vaccinating.

At least most of them, because for most religion is only a pretext, an excuse, not a true belief foundational to their anti-vaxxing madness.