Thanks for the heads up. The point release for Ubuntu LTS is next week so I've been upgrading things.

To be fair, Letsencrypt wildcard renewing over DNS is kinda annoying.

Thanks. The favicon code needed to be rewritten anyway. Should be working better now.

As for The Intercept feed, the code currently has a one-to-one relationship of articles to feeds. This means that if you add the feed for "All" and the feed for "English" then articles will show up in one or the other, but not both. This is unfortunate, since quite a few sites have overlapping feeds like this. Just add the main feed for now...

Heh, I had actually pre-ordered Diablo 4 a good while back. But now that the game is finally out, I can't seem to bring myself to play it. If I want to play a game I just start another play-through of Oxygen Not Included.

The Slashdot, Engadget, Gizmodo, SoylentNews, and other feeds should now work again. ExtremeTech is still broken because it downloads using IPv6 by default but their server only likes IPv4. I think...

That's a known bug that I've been meaning to look at. It's not just the slashdot feed but several others as well and it's quite annoying to me too. I'm using a third party library called SimplePie that is supposed to parse the RSS / atom text into usable data, but the library often bombs out instead of returning anything. It's a pain because the fatal error in that library causes the whole feed process to completely stop until cron restarts it again. This causes not only the offending feed to not get data but all other feeds afterwards to halt. Feed parsers are complicated because a lot of sites return malformed data with stray tags all over the place. In an ideal world you could just parse an article with a strict xml parser and everything work! But far too many sites forget to close their html tags or use some invalid unicode strings that cause the parse to fail.

There is no such setting at the moment, but I'll keep it in mind and may show the IDs again in the future.

Ya, just tried on gmail and it marked the email as spam. But as soon as I moved that first message out of the spam folder, all further messages went to the inbox.

I submitted a story in the pipe: SoylentNews Shutdown
They contacted me briefly, but I'm not sure what their plans are going forward.

You guys are welcome to come over here if you want. I'm not going anywhere.

Just some ongoing issues due to using an over-complicated database cluster setup. It'll be back soon, though likely with a few records missing.

test

Ya, I have a few bugs that cause the feed pages to act improperly at times.

The first is that I'm using a strict XML library to parse the feed. If the RSS/Atom page has any syntax error (for example: a stray tag or quote) the page wont parse correctly and will return blanks for everything. Pipedot's feed page uses the "title" tag returned from the RSS page as the name of the feed. This is why you sometimes see the header bar of a feed become blank. This is also why some feeds (like ExtremeTech) have weird names: because that's how their source title tag of their RSS page is set!

Another bug happens when adding dual protocol feeds. When I wrote the feed logic, I made each feed be unique based off the RSS URL. This lets a site have multiple feeds, as long as the RSS links have different URLs. The bug happens when you create two feeds to the same location, one using "http" and one using "https". A human knows that "http://xkcd.com/atom.xml" and "https://xkcd.com/atom.xml" are the same, but the site see's them as two unique URLs! (current xkcd feed link is using the atom version over http)

P.S. I also recently upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 that was released last week. (may have some lingering issues)

Welcome.

A misbehaving set of feeds (raw weather data) was taking too much time and caused some of the other feeds to miss their updates. When I coded the feeds, I never really considered raw weather data would be used as an RSS stream. Every time the feed updates, the system would generate a new permanent article with the current temperature. Some of the weather feeds racked up millions of ephemeral and rather worthless articles. For now, I've deleted a big chunk of these and unclogged the updates.

In the future, I will probably need to come up with a more elegant solution to showing weather information. With some of the other sites (like iGoogle), you could add a "weather widget" that showed a better summary of current conditions than an RSS feed.

Before I left for vacation last week, I turned off a few of my computers. Seems I turned off too many and accidentally turned off the backup computer that moves the database backups off the live site. After a few days, the untransfered backups exceeded the storage capacity of the live site and started to cause problems. Woops! Sorry for any inconvenience as the site was down on Friday-Saturday while I was traveling.

I'm looking at a few changes to the backup process that should prevent these types of problems in the future.

Agreed. A great deal of effort is required to mangle many of the user submissions we've received into something that is high enough quality and worthy of being published. Of course, the hundreds of stories already published by evilviper/zafiro17/etc set a rather high bar of quality. :)

Over 5 years ago, a growing rift in the green site set in motion a movement for a "better" news for nerds site. The result was not only a split into the new red and blue sites, but also reforms in the original site as well. The feared "beta" was shelved and calmer heads prevailed throughout. Although some rumors have suggested that Pipedot is dead, and I can hardly blame them, there simply doesn't need to be so many forks of the same thing. As for product differentiation, we still have plenty of technical features the others do not (editable comments!) but other features that we pioneered (colorized new vs old comments) have even made it into the others. Rest assured, if the other sites decide to self-destruct again, we will be waiting; this time with an easier turnaround. As an abandoned user of iGoggle and Reader, I'm still a huge fan of the RSS features of Pipedot and still use it daily. Others have suggested that other site features, like the internal mail system, could be expanded to include full web-email abilities - which may still be explored in the future. Suggestions for improvements are welcome!

As always, if an enterprising individual wants to step up and help as an additional editor or help in other ways, send me a message.

With the red site doing well, and even the green site getting bought out by a new benevolent dictator, the need for another alternative has diminished considerably. If the other two sites self destruct or start a new "beta" fiasco, I'm sure we'll get some some renewed interest - but for now, yes, we are sleeping. I still use the site quite a bit every day to read RSS feeds so the site is definitely not dead. I also have a pretty big backlog of code changes to push up (probably around the release of the next Ubuntu LTS in April.)

Of course, I would not be opposed to a new editor volunteering and posting some fresh stories. Send me a message if interested!

Did they still run TV commercials non-stop on nearly every public channel like they did 20 years ago? Not much of a TV watcher, so I'm unsure. Maybe Progressive Insurance has one-upped them in advertising quantity.

I had hopes that Rackspace would open a neat datacenter in my hometown of San Antonio when they bought a large shopping mall to serve as their main point of presence. Sounds cool, right? Take down the JCPenny/Mervins/Sears signs and install rows and rows of computers, etc... However, years later, the site is still largely empty. Sure, they renovated a few areas to serve as a large cubicle farm for phone support personnel, but they don't actually host anything or run any servers in the building. They continue to use a few third party datacenters with remote-hands in Dallas for their server needs. As far as I know, they don't even have the transit from the network providers to host anything in San Antonio, even if they wanted to.

Plus, their main business has turned into selling you a really expensive full service experience. No build your own server or collocation options, you just tell them you want a webpage and they do everything for you. Kinda boring.

We used to host our local Linux group meetings there, but support from Rackspace rapidly waned, and lack of interest to continue to push for room every month means we stopped meeting altogether. If we ever continue, we will probably go back to meeting at the local community college and skip the Rackspace option - which is kind of sad for company that claims that it is "Linux friendly" and even originated the whole OpenStack thing.

No hacking required?

https://xkcd.com/1559/

Here's hoping we solve our problems and everything turns out OK in the end. Then, in our utopia, we can build star ships and seek out our neighbors.

Tried to watch some of the gymnastics this weekend. The station spent over 80% of the time watching the athletes walk around, show their backstory, wait for their turn, view their reactions to the score, etc... Everything but showing the actual competitive event. Often, so much time would pass of showing nothing, that 2-3 commercial breaks would happen before seeing the next gymnastic routine.

Plus, you pretty much only get to see the U.S. team and almost never see any of the other countries competitors.

something that may be awkward to do in a moving vehicle

Hopefully, one doesn't try to unlock their phone via iris scanner while driving... Sounds even worse than trying to text while driving.

As for thermostat settings, I prefer the simplest option: a single fixed temperature that the system maintains +/- a degree or two.

The house itself should be efficient and have enough thermal mass to prevent large temperature fluctuations throughout the day anyway. If you feel the need to "adjust" the heat/cooling at different times of the day, perhaps you should invest in more insulation or higher efficiency windows instead of a fancy internet connected thermostat.

The Anandtech article #1MSRJ claims that the new 10TB drives are based off of helium.

I remember having a knockoff iPod back when mp3 players were still a thing. The device, produced by notorious cloner Meizu, actually worked better than a real iPod in that it was able to play Ogg Vorbis and other audio codecs that the real iPod couldn't.

Kinda late noticing this comment, but your username is probably just "kurt" and not your external email address.

Plus you don't have to worry about the rail cars evaporating.

Even for household applications, compact fluorescent bulbs often have a higher efficiency rating (in terms of Lumens per Watt) than LEDs. However, LED bulbs are pretty close, especially when compared to incandescent, and are still improving. Add in the instant startup, the more focused output, and the whole no-mercury thing, and it's no wonder why the new LED technology is quickly becoming the new "green" favorite.

The new iPhone SE, with the old 4 inch form factor, makes my iPhone 5 look new again. :)

This would finally make all those smart watches useful though, right? Being able to hear a private call with the actual watch instead of relying on a speakerphone or a Bluetooth earbud.

Presidential candidates and their stances on encryption.

A friends feed of what? Articles they like? Comments?

In the stream feature of the site, you can see a single individual's stream (here's mine) of articles that they have modded up, but combining the streams of all your friends could be a neat addition that I'll look into.

As for the IRC home, a #pipedot channel on freenode was very briefly occupied two years ago, but was abandoned once soylentnews started their own IRC presence and became much more popular.

Amazon wants to drive their customers to Prime - the service with a monthly fee even if you don't use it for anything for the month.

Many times, the "Live CD" is actually a flash drive. Ubuntu and the like can even create a separate partition on a live CD flash drive for a persistent /home storage area.

Volunteers are always welcome. :)

More Information at their homepage and on Wikipedia.

I remember seeing some articles a few months ago about delaying until 2016 because the modular components would break apart when dropped.

I like how super glue is in 2nd place. :)

The movies are great and all, but a TV series is better in every way.

The current SSL cert system is a corrupt money grab (although, I suppose we can thank them for indirectly funding Ubuntu.) There is just no reason why they need to charge hundreds of dollars a year to sign a certificate.

The site still gets an "A" from the SSL Labs testing page. A year ago, when I made the certificate, Google still accepted SHA1 signatures. Their new warning (in Chrome based browsers) is just a warning (and, in my opinion, a bit premature.). That being said, the next time I renew the cert, I'll make sure that I switch to a provider with SHA2 certs down the entire chain, as well as one that allows a working SSL stapling setup.

The end result should be VW pays massive fines...

Or, even better, convince VW and others to take plug in electrics more seriously and introduce their own models. Can't fail an emission test if you have zero emissions.

For many years, AMD kept Intel honest and largely pushed the performance to what it is today. With AMD, you would typically get faster clocks, more cores, larger dies, and a cheaper cost. Intel was forced to compete.

Remember Intel Itanium? AMD responded with a more sane alternative that even Intel eventually adopted a few years later. SATA 6GB? USB3? AMD's chipsets had them almost immediately, while Intel dragged their feet for years afterwards.

Although Moore's Law is still technically alive, they've essentially been "cheating" for the past 5+ years. All those new transistors are being added to the graphics and memory caches; performance of the cores have been relatively stagnant for some time now. For example, compare a 5 year old sandy bridge (i5-2500K) with a brand new skylake (i5-6600K) CPU. See how 5 years has added hardly any additional performance? Granted, the new chips are far more efficient energy wise, and you can now play some low end games on the integrated graphics, but still...

Since they are probably already installed at the front entrance, why not just put automatic sliding doors on the bathrooms?

Granted, you'll probably want either an opaque or frosted glass version. Also, an automatic door (times two for both genders) will surely be more expensive than a standard door.

With all the smartphone screens these days, you would think they would be able to nab a much higher resolution screen (and likely cheaper) part from a phone maker's spare parts bin. With some new phones getting 4K screens today, something with only 480 vertical lines sounds a bit dated.

Either way, it was about time. Holding up copyright expiration (1976 and 1998) on recent works is bad enough. Somehow claiming they have an exclusive hold on a tune from 1893 is appalling.