Reminder: Safari is not an evergreen browser

In many ways, the lives of web developers have been getting easier these past few years. There are powerful tools that abstract away browser differences, allowing developers to use the latest technologies without worrying about older platforms. But the web has always been, and will continue to be, a messy place, and there is no way to abstract away the mess completely.

Which brings us to Safari. I am nowhere near the first person to say that Safari is the new IE, but consider this: Out of all of the major browsers (Firefox, Chrome, and let’s include Edge here for old time’s sake), Safari is the only one that is not an evergreen browser.

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Localized Lightning for Thunderbird 60 on Linux

Non-English Linux users of Lightning, the calendar extension for the Mozilla Thunderbird email and news client, must be having a hard time these days.

Both Thunderbird and Lightning are available from the major Linux distributions’ software repositories. However, with the exception of Debian, the Lightning extension from these repos are available in English only.

Most non-English users at this point would look to Lightning from the Thunderbird add-ons site. Versions available here are only compatible with Thunderbird 52 or older though and stop working in Thunderbird 60.

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Lower- or mixed-case Samba server names in Ubuntu 17.10 / 18.04 LTS

Say you have brand new Ubuntu server with a few Samba shares (and Avahi for auto-discovery). Or perhaps you have upgraded your existing server to 17.10 or 18.04 LTS.

Uppercase server name in Finder sidebar

Welcome back to the heyday of Windows for Workgroups.

You open up Nautilus or Finder (or if you are unlucky, File Explorer) to test your Samba shares, and what do you see? Your meticulously chosen server name is in now in ALL CAPS. (Note that I haven’t confirmed this in File Explorer.)

This aggression will not stand (man).

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Hello World

After almost 10 years of existence, I finally decided to turn this site into a blog.

My Declaration of Principles

  1. I will provide the people of this interwebz with a sporadic blog that will tell some of the news somewhat honestly.
  2. I will also provide them with a loving and lethargic champion of their rights as citizens and as human beings.
  3. I will also provide lolcats.

Signed,
Jeffery Foster To