I was fiddling about with a script I need to run from time to time but need escalated privileges to run. Editing /etc/sudoers isn’t an option, so I took to the Reddit. I found this:

Scripting with sudo on Mac – BrettTerpstra.com:

The gist is this: when you need to script a tool that requires administrator privileges, you want to make the process as automated as possible without creating glaring security problems (like including a password in plain text). …

Fortunately, macOS has tools built in to make this work. We’ll use a combination of macOS’s Keychain Access and the security command to make running superuser tasks both convenient and secure.

Yay! I already use Keychain for managing my SSH and GPG keys, so this definitely falls in with that.

Here’s the pertinent article bits, but read the whole thing for screenshots and how this is used in Brett’s excellent Batch app.

The first step is to create a Keychain entry for the password you want to use. In our case, this will be your system password.
Open Keychain Access in /Applications/Utilities. Unlock your login keychain if needed, then click the “Create new” button in the toolbar. Give the item a unique name, any account name you want, and then enter the password and click “Add.” …

Now this password entry can be accessed using the command line tool security, which we can use in a script. If the keychain is unlocked, the password will be retrieved without interaction. If it’s locked, you’ll get a dialog asking for your keychain password when the script runs.
In our script, we’ll call security and give it the name assigned to the keychain item (-l), and the account name (-a). The -w flag tells it to return only the password (otherwise there’s a lot of data it spits out). …

To incorporate this into a shell script, we’ll just use tr to trim the newline off it and save it to a variable, and then pipe it to sudo. Using sudo -S tells sudo to read the password from STDIN (the result of the pipe). …

The first time security is used from a script, you’ll get a prompt to allow access. Be sure to click “Always Allow” to avoid getting the same prompt every time.

I watched 2 films Sunday for my film studies class: Taxi Driver (1976) and Django Unchained (2012). I will probably watch There Will Be Blood (2007) tonight and pick which 2 of the 3 to do for my unit 1 analysis, and which of those 2 I will write about for my unit essay.

Taxi Driver

It’s been at least 20 years, probably 30, since I last viewed this film. I remembered going in how uncomfortable the movie is to watch. Robert De Niro is perfect in the role, bringing a staccato integration with other characters while his voice-overs give an internal monologue that vacillates between assured and unhinged in equal measure.

Cybil Sheppard’s Betty lights up the screen in almost every scene she is in.

A young Jodie Foster delivers Iris with a delicate veneer ineffectively hiding her fear.

Peter Boyle portrays maybe the most interesting character in the movie. When Travis Bickel (De Niro) goes to get the taxi job at the start we can see Boyle’s Wizard in a heated discussion through the window over the dispatcher’s shoulder. I would love a story about Wizard that takes place simultaneously with Taxi Driver.

Random thoughts:

• Albert Brooks and Harvey Keitel are wasted in this movie
• That said, they both inform Bickel’s interactions with Betty and Iris, respectively
• I forgot about the scene with Martin Scorsese as the guy in the back of Bickel’s cab talking about how he will kill his wife
• Windows, mirrors, and eyes are recurring elements
• I forget how New York used to look & be
• I forgot how the movie ends
• I had to stop the movie twice and watch 30 Rock episodes
• This is a movie that would be hard to remake today in the modern age
• It is about 20 minutes too long
• The political posters end up in interesting spaces
• The music was spot on – the xylophone pieces really bothered me. Bernard Hermann, well done

Django Unchained

This was my first ever viewing. I was not looking forward to it, because:

• I’ve grown disenamored of Tarantino’s homages
• I do not like Jamie Foxx or Leonardo DiCaprio as actors
• It’s dark and heavy

I ended up enjoying it more than I thought. Christoph Waltz was great as King Shultz, Samuel L. Jackson played Steven superbly, and the bounty hunter section of the film was as good a bit of the Western genre as you’d find in this century.

I am impressed by the second dinner scene where Leo cuts his hand. I read that it actually happened and he stayed in character and pushed through. He received a standing ovation from the cast and crew for this, and the scene was clearly his best.

Random thoughts:

• Few women are in it, and the ones that are and have screen time are mostly wasted, which is out of step for Tarantino movies
• Walton Goggins was also wasted
• The scene with the Australian mine employees was a missed opportunity
• This was Tarantino’s super hero movie
• A lot of seeing things through slats/gun sights/gaps in things, and like Taxi Driver eyes in general are key elements
• Tarantino in this movie was as disturbing as Scorsese in his but for different reasons — Tarantino is awful in acting and accent
• Where in the hell did Candie get all those gun hands?
• Hi, Chattanooga! (The first outfitting scene for Django)
• Reading articles about the movie I think there was a lot that was cut that should have been left in to make the movie hold together better than a super hero movie
• I could do without the cameos — give up-and-comers with ability the roles
• That said, the woman with the covered face in Candie’s crew was another wasted opportunity
• This should have been 2+ movies — bounty hunter & vigilante in Django Unchained and then rescue husband in Django Unleashed — or else been 30 minutes shorter. A third movie could have been about him and Brumhilda trying to settle somewhere.
• No one wised up to Hilde and Django having the same ‘R’ burned into their right cheek. It took Stephen to somehow decode that they knew each other

Biggest Criticisms

The music in this movie is a mess. The pieces that were homage to spaghetti westerns and more modern stuff done in a country-and-western vein were great. However, Tarantino kept taking me out of the movie with more modern pieces that reminded me that this is a movie and they were thematically out-of-place.

The super hero elements I alluded to also took me out of the suspended disbelief this kind of movie deserved: blood & other body matter spatter was comical; the clown car that spewed gun-toting plantation hands was ridiculous; Django shooting a rider off his horse the first time he fires a rifle is absurd; that he turns out to be a shooting savant is even more absurd; and his interaction with the Australian miners had me thinking “it can’t be this easy”, until it was.

The Sportswashing Edition:

“Everyone needs money. That’s why they call it money.”

– David Mamet, Heist

Jeff here. About a year ago, news began to circulate among the golf media that the Saudis—through their Public Investment Fund, and with the fiercely unlikeable Greg Norman as their frontman—were preparing to throw an unholy amount of money at some of the current greats of the game in an attempt to launch a rival league to the PGA Tour. The news was met with a mixture of moral outrage (the word “bonesaw” often featuring prominently) and a sort of glib flippancy (“who would ever leave the PGA Tour and its AMAZING pension plan?”)

These professional athletes are employees of the Saudi Arabian government regardless of how they spin their funding.

My big take away from this nonsense, since I’m soured on pro sports of every kind, is that I have been in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia several times and it is a miserable place to be. It’s the ancestral homestead of the House of Saud, which is why it’s the capital.

It’s not safe for foreigners, especially non-Muslims. All of the locals I know advised me about where not to go ever and when to not go everywhere. Had I gone back again I would have set up a spreadsheet to keep it all clear.

That these professional sports people think it’s ok that they not only take the Saudi’s money but also launder the Saudi’s reputation is reprehensible, I was never going to watch these Saudi employees anyway.

JPMorgan still has confidence in the cryptos:

Crypto, the most perfectly designed way to separate a person from real wealth,

I love that sentence fragment, but I would insert “so far” as there are at least as many scammers as there are suckers in any market, and I would spell out “cryptocurrency”.

is still high on JPMorgan’s list of things to gamble on. They feel bitcoin is massively undervalued and the entire crypto shellacking that has gone on in 2022 is “capitulation.”

In fact, they are swapping out investments in real estate for digital assets. In the words of Han Solo, “I have a bad feeling about this.”

/me checks portfolio

This is to what I paid attention:

Dazy are an indie-rock band based out of Richmond Virginia. I’ve got their Rollercoaster Ride b/w Peel and The Crowded Mind on rotation.

I’m re-reading Ender’s Game so that Ender in Exile, the installment author Orson Scott Card later inserted before Speaker for the Dead, will click. I’m 51% through Ender’s Game and it holds up.

Before that I read The Empress of Salt and Fortune. I was tired and emotional at the end … in a good way.

I watched Annika, a PBS Masterpiece series, about a marine police unit in Glasgow, Scotland headed up by the eponymous DI Stranded, played by the always engaging Nicola Walker.

Massimo @Rainmaker1973:

For the 2 hours between 10:00 and 11:59UTC each day, 3 different dates are observed at the same time in different places on Earth. At 10:15 UTC Thursday, it is 23:15 Wednesday in American Samoa, Thursday in most of the world, and 00:15 Friday in Kiritimati http://bit.ly/2CCgeZ0

The last thing you’d expect when you bring your car to a shop to get an oil change is to be served with a lawsuit. But that’s what happened to a car owner who dropped his car off at the Rochester Hills Chrysler Jeep Dodge dealership in Michigan. An 18-year-old mechanic got in the car and drove over his 42-year-old boss, Jeffrey Hawkins, killing him. 

Very sad, but here’s where the story gets weird. Hawkins’ family is suing the owner of the car for damages. The attorney for the family explained that it is not possible for them to sue the dealership, so they are going after the car owner instead, even though the owner had nothing to do with Hawkins’ death.

(Via boing boing)

A sibling bought a car from this dealership. This story tracks with that experience. YMMV

Pluralistic: What the fediverse (does/n’t) solve (23 Dec 2022)🙁permalink)

No matter how benevolent a dictatorship is, it’s still a dictatorship, and subject to the dictator’s whims. We must demand that the owners and leaders of tech platforms be fair and good – but we must also be prepared for them to fail at this, sometimes catastrophically.

That is, even if you trust Tim Cook to decide what apps you are and aren’t allowed to install – including whether you are allowed to install apps that block Apple’s own extensive, nonconsensual, continuous commercial surveillance of its customers – you should also be prepared for Cook to get hit by a bus and replaced by some alt-right dingleberry.

In case you think Cory sides with Elon Musk, a wealthy, selfish, often cruel, weirdo who has marketed himself as a man who is so smart that he can say or do whatever he wants, he doesn’t.

But, it takes Cory a long time to get to the fediverse:

The Fediverse’s foundation is a standard called ActivityPub, which was designed by weirdos who wanted to make a durably open, interoperable substrate that could support nearly any application. This was something that large corporations were both uninterested in building and which they arrogantly dismissed as a pipe dream. This means that Activitypub is actually as good as its architects could make it, free from boobytraps laid by scheming monopolists.

BTW, the use of terms like “weirdo” is, I think, meant in the best way – people outside of the accepted normal or willing to look outside of same.

Cory continues:

The perils of running your own Mastodon server have also become a hot topic of debate. To hear the critics warn of it, anyone who runs a server that’s open to the public is painting a huge target on their back and will shortly be buried under civil litigation and angry phone-calls from the FBI.

This is: Just. Not. True. The US actually has pretty good laws limiting intermediary liability (that is, the responsibility you bear for what your users do). You know all that stuff about how CDA230 is “a giveaway to Big Tech?” That’s only true if the internet consists solely of Big Tech companies. However, if you decide to spend $5/month hosting a Mastodon instance for you and your community, that same law protects you.

Indeed, while running a server that’s open to the public does involve some risk, most of that risk can be contained by engaging in a relatively small, relatively easy set of legal compliance practices, which EFF’s Corynne McSherry lays out in this very easy-to-grasp explainer:

www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-gene…

Finally, there’s the ongoing debate over whether Mastodon can (and should) replace Twitter. This week on the Canadaland Short Cuts podcast, Jesse Brown neatly summarized (and supported, alas) the incorrect idea that using Mastodon was no different from using Gab or Parler or Post.

www.canadaland.com/podcast/843-god-save…

This is very, very wrong. The thing is, even if you like and trust the people who run Gab or Parler or Post, you face exactly the same risk you face with Twitter or Facebook: that the leadership will change, or have a change of heart, and begin to enshittify your community there. When they do, your only remedy will be the one that Valente describes, to scatter to the winds and try and reform your community somewhere else.

But that’s not true of the Fediverse. On Mastodon, you can export all your followers, and all the people who follow you, with two clicks. Then you can create an account on another server and again, with just two clicks, you can import those follows and followers and be back up and running, your community intact, without being under the thumb of the server manager who decided to sell your community down the river (you can also export the posts you made).

codingitwrong.com/2022/10/10/migrating-…

For me, and I kind of thank Elon Musk, a wealthy, selfish, often cruel, weirdo who has marketed himself as a man who is so smart that he can say or do whatever he wants, for this realization, is:

They’re not that smart. By “they” I mean Space Karen and Thiel and Jobs and the Oracle guy and Gates and whomever. They and those like them did something, maybe, that made a difference. Some, like Space Karen, marketed themselves instead. They all ended up where they are because they convinced people that what they were selling was the best.

Remember: the audio player and smart phone existed before Jobs moved Apple there; Space Karen bought into and then took over Tesla and SpaceX, and so on.