keithzg

https://fediverse.keithzg.ca/users/keithzg

My first home on the Fediverse was [@[email protected]](https://mastodon.club/users/keithzg ), and I'm the admin here on [fediverse.keithzg.ca](http://fediverse.keithzg.ca ) originally out of necessity and now just out of cozy laziness.

Public Key

npub1xzjxz86yga5j8j55mujy5kkr9rf8dfz3d944fau75zruqv2l3d9q7gft66

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsrpfrprazyw6fre22d7fz2ttpj35nk53gkj6657702pp7qx90ckjsprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuumwdae8gtnnda3kjctvqy28wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hszrthwden5te0dehhxtnvdakqlqwl7a

Publishing to

relay.snort.social

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1xzjxz86yga5j8j55mujy5kkr9rf8dfz3d944fau75zruqv2l3d9q7gft66

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Last Notes

2026-06-14 18:55:53 UTC

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Not really a thing in Canada anymore, at least that is to say I don't know if there's functional improvements to avoid that insecure fallback angle (I'd pessimistically guess no) but rather I have not had both the NFC tap and the EMV contact chip fail at a reader in at least a *decade*. I couldn't honestly tell you if my magnetic stripes worked still or not!
(I did scramble them back in the day as a fun exercise in probably unnecessary personal security, but haven't thought to do that for years, since at this point the only way it's getting swiped is if someone literally steals it from me, in which case they have other ways to use it like simply going online with the number and CVV written on the card.)

2026-06-13 19:36:53 UTC

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IIRC they did, but even if they didn't it's still an order of magnitude more secure than the ol' stripe, which any reader immediately has all the info needed to clone! But yeah up here in Canada it has been chip+pin since inception since that, uhh, obviously improves security a tonne with minimal overhead. But we had also already gone over to swipe+pin late during our long lag where we were still lacking chips due to using American equipment, whereas I hear down south of the border people were loathe to give up swipe+sign . . .

2026-06-13 18:57:57 UTC

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It is *much* harder to clone a chip than a magstripe at least (since the chips don't just expose their entire set of data with every read, there's actual cryptographic communication), but of course that's a moot point for a zone where magstripes continue to be widely used...

2026-06-13 17:59:17 UTC

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It's wild (and says a lot) that France got payment chips in the 1980s and the USA struggles to deploy them still in the 2020s.

2026-04-27 18:44:52 UTC

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Anyways, my ranting aside, there's plenty of aches and pains today but compared to the pain of dislocation itself they feel pretty trivial, and honestly I've sometimes felt worse from sleeping wrong! I'll be sticking with button-up shirts rather than pullovers for the near future though, and digging out the exercises I got last time…

2026-04-27 18:44:34 UTC

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I've always been of the mind that we should just let our city be a winter wonderland! I'd personally even prefer no scraping, but we could run 100% scraper trucks instead of 98% dirt-gravellers if people really can't figure out how to drive around with our natural weather conditions.
Frankly even when driving, which I rarely do these days but used to a decent amount, I've found unblemished snow less troublesome than some of the mixtures resulting from our brown spoiling mixing with said snow in our wildly variable temperatures. Admittedly I never was piloting a rear-wheel drive or such, but I don't think it's too much to ask that drivers purchase and maintain their vehicles with our climate in mind. (Of course, I know in practice if I was King Of Edmonton enacting such a policy there would be a contingent of entitled drivers throwing fits.)

2026-04-27 01:43:25 UTC

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Slipped on all the sand on the side of 109th Street! Went down hard, and my left arm took the brunt of it and popped out of the socket. I'd always hated the way we dirtied up the city for some meager benefit to drivers at the expense of everyone and everything else, but in the years since I have harboured a personal grudge atop that :D

2026-04-27 00:24:40 UTC

Every time I redislocate my shoulder, I get even more radicalized against the road sanding that made me dislocate it the first time. Anyone who thinks #YEG or any other city should sand roads for winter, I'll fight them with my one good arm!
https://fediverse.keithzg.ca/media/d9151278de8f6b6bab707b0efd7cc9b5561924efc0df95ba29b9a6e9683a46dd.null

2026-03-12 13:53:28 UTC

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Even just having put LineageOS on my old but still functioning fine Pixel (4aXL) made not only Google Wallet refuse to let me use my TD credit card for tap-to-pay, but it also silently disabled RCS! Actually getting security updates is Bad, because the most important thing is that the software be corporate-published, nothing else matters.
Carney may regret the visa-free Chinese travel deal, since it could give us Canadians experience with a technologically-functional society . . .

2025-09-02 11:47:54 UTC

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Well the good news is, the air quality here in at least my portion of #yeg has legitimately seemed much better tonight, with my personal impressions bolstered by data from my own station and some reporting I see from some random person's stations in McKernan.
But annoyingly, the IQAir "AirVisual" service has detected my outdoor sensor used for https://wx.parkallen.club as being "not well correlated with the surrounding stations" (perhaps this former lakebed is getting quite different local conditions due to the perculiarities here?) and in temporarily delisting it that also removes reporting via the API, which I was actually relying on—there's no actual direct LAN access to that data without monkeying with the firmware.
Will this prompt me to finally monkey with said firmware, or set up the outright weather station I have still boxed up, or order an AirGradient kit to get a unit that actually runs open software? Probably not, for now I've just sent this corporation an "I'm not mad, just disappointed", I've closed my windows back up now that the heat has cleared and turned my indoor filtering back on, and I'm gonna try to sleep before the world gets too noisy!
#yegaq #yegwx

2025-08-28 20:44:24 UTC

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One thing I've noticed about the Blue No Matter Who folks are y'all love to fire off sweeping generalizations and conclusions even in the face of directly contradictory evidence. Like, *literally my most recent post on the Fediverse before the one you're reply to* is me saying bad things about Trump!
> These sexist gripes show how Trump is pure id of the petite-bourgoisie . . . the small business owners who think they should rule the world but find their slices of pie decreasing as capitalism inexorably centralizes are forever incensed, blaming and demeaning all the people that rightwing propaganda tells the rubes to hate (women, racial minorities, queers, the disabled, unions…)
https://fediverse.keithzg.ca/notice/Axbyca01UrlSjNDk9o

2025-08-28 20:32:21 UTC

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I'll chime in here too and say that I voted with my conscience and as the best use of my otherwise superfluous vote, rather than for a candidate who for example as AG decided my voting county's DA and Sherrif colluding to listen in on inmate conversations with lawyers was A-OK and not for her office to do anything about.
The idea that my vote ever imperiled Harris's ability to win California, or that objecting to kneejerk defense of flagrantly unconstitutional actions of law enforcement puts me on the same side as Trump, is not only ridiculous but also wildly undemocratic; what formal mechanism of voicing, much less change, is available to a citizen if even a pointed protest vote in the safest Democratic state in the entire country isn't allowable?
And my vote wasn't counted anyways, thanks to arriving ridiculously too late, arguably due to Biden's refusal to undo Trump's damage and leadership change of the USPS! Which also naturally does nothing to convince me I should have voted for him or his VP.

2025-07-23 05:19:01 UTC

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To be fair, I have been out and about in Montréal and have not read up on the AUS specifics!

2025-07-23 02:32:47 UTC

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The flipside I foresee is individual investment doesn't have the clout of a single aggregate mass, so will be more likely to be taken advantage of without nearly as much recourse as a gigantic unified pool of money can leverage out, eh?

2025-07-22 22:27:00 UTC

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I have some reservations about so closely involving private institutions in such ways, but I would certainly prefer it to my provincial government choosing the investments made!

2025-07-22 22:08:17 UTC

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Well, my current provincial government wants to grab all of our CPP money for an Albertan equivalent of the Québec approach, it seems unlikely the current parliament would let them but not inconceivable a future one would. It's also not inconceivable that a cutoff could be set, where current pensioners get theirs and a buffer cohort does too but the youths have to go on some riskier plan which will invest in politically motivated and unsound investments (this is certainly what the Alberta government has done with the existing provincially-managed pensions, though the house of cards there hasn't entirely collapsed *yet*).

2025-07-22 21:01:37 UTC

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Cynic that I am, I have been presuming for basically my entire life that a government will loot the CPP before I get the chance to retire and that I won't see a cent . . .

2025-07-22 19:07:24 UTC

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Funny enough, as the youngest of the three of us in this thread, I would have voted against raising the retirement age in such a referendum!
I have a host of reasons, but a key one is that I know many retired folks, and all of them who at all possibly could work have either (a) kept working instead of retiring, or even more commonly (b) spend their time now instead on volunteering. Their pensions give them the leeway to contribute back to society in ways that may not directly create "value" in immediate market economy terms but seem at times quite invaluable to society and culture.

2025-07-21 06:32:34 UTC

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I think a *lot* of people are in the Team Sport Fan category, as gets often shown by the discrepancy between how people poll on issues or even party platforms versus how they poll on parties. It's a silly way to think, but it clearly aligns with how many people prefer to engage with the world (or naturally fall into).

2025-05-18 05:28:42 UTC

After spending approximately forever never getting around to it, I finally made a webpage for publishing the data from the air quality station I have attached to the non-working car door of my garage:
https://wx.keithzg.ca/
Yeah, in theory that's published by the service run by the company who made the unit I'm using, but they really just publish the AQI and the PM2.5 count (on which the AQI is based), none of the rest of the values, so that wasn't that helpful for neighbors wanting to know the temperature, humidity, pressure, etc. Well, now that's possible!
Sometime between tomorrow and months from now I'll get it styled up and displaying historical data too, maybe include some forecasting from Environment Canada's HRDPS West modeling and put it all up at wx.parkallen.club instead (because I now own parkallen.club, but DNS caches are long, heh).
#yegwx

2025-03-18 14:28:42 UTC

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That's fine, they can just tell people to strategically vote for the NDP ;)

2025-03-18 13:42:42 UTC

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I've never been able to quite understand how to use Inkscape, personally.
Krita, though! There's one I find routinely useful, and more immediately apparent how to use than Certain Other Programs ;)

2025-01-12 23:51:06 UTC

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Man I *wish* I could get fibre, I've been increasingly hosting stuff again myself but on my cable connection it gets iffy at times.
[damn you Trudeau and killing the fibre resale rules that were ready to go already by the end of the Harper admin! Like hell I'm gonna get internet from Telus or Rogers...]

2024-08-11 02:57:43 UTC

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Damn this makes even more acute my dilemma I came to this week, where I suddenly felt a hankering for an Escape Velocity-alike and then stalled out unable to choose between any or any of the originals

2024-08-09 03:18:35 UTC

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The new guy at my work lives within a 5min walk of a pretty good medium-size grocery store, and a 10min walk of a big-box grocery store, and has complained to me that the light passenger train going by the main entrance/exit to his neighborhood makes it hard to get groceries 🤦 I was like "why don't you just walk?" and he was shocked in a way that seemed to indicate it literally never even occurred to him! For so many bits of peoples' lives here in North America, as long as they own cars they will just default to using them even when they're wildly overkill for the task at hand, and won't even consider other options.