today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 08, 2024

• Dedoimedo ☛ Thunderbird & no email associated error - Another fix

  Greetings readers! Roughly 2.5 years ago, I wrote an article with the exact same title as above. It was a short guide on how to solve a rather annoying and cryptic error in the Thunderbird mail client: that there is no email program associated to perform the requested action. 'Twas an error that suddenly happened with the 91.x upgrade. In that article, I showed you several methods on how to fix this annoying little issue, so you wouldn't need to click and dismiss a harmless yet pointless popup on every Thunderbird launch.

  Well, since, I received a handful of emails from my readers, and they all had new, different suggestions. They all revolve around the same basic concept - support for certain protocols. Well, in this article, I'd like to present another possible solution. Take a look, and if you're plagued by this wee annoyance, perhaps the new method outlined here may help. Provided the other ones didn't, of course.

• Education

  • Olimex ☛ FOSDEM 2024 – the conference is totally recovered after the Covid hard years | olimex

    This year, people were back, and things were even crazier than usual. With hundreds of tracks and thousands of attendees, the rooms were available for only one day instead of two, and they were consistently full!

  • Fred Herbert ☛ A Distributed Systems Reading List

    This document contains various resources and quick definition of a lot of background information behind distributed systems. It is not complete, even though it is kinda sorta detailed. I had written it some time in 2019 when coworkers at the time had asked for a list of references, and I put together what I thought was a decent overview of the basics of distributed systems literature and concepts.

    Since I was asked for resources again recently, I decided to pop this text into my blog. I have verified the links again and replaced those that broke with archive links or other ones, but have not sought alternative sources when the old links worked, nor taken the time to add any extra content for new material that may have been published since then.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Kevin Wammer ☛ On Arc Search

    All these AI tools that summarise websites steal traffic from the source. Sure, Arc Search credits where it got its content from, but let‘s be honest: who clicks through when they got all the information in a summary?

    This will lead to the enshittification of the [Internet].

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ A rant on ARC Search – Manu

    The second issue is one of trust. Should I just trust ARC Search? Who can guarantee that the sources used by ARC are not just companies that have paid ARC to be used as such? But Manu, ARC Search doesn’t just provide the answer to your query, it also provides links to the sources. Well then congratulations, you just recreated an AI-nerfed SERP with fewer links and more extra layers.

• BSD

  • TuMFatig ☛ Using OpenBSD with a Dell U2723QE monitor

    Not so long ago, I bought a Dell U2723QE 4K monitor. I was not sure OpenBSD would support using it with only a USB-C connection. Spoiler alert, it does.