#yakshaving — Public Fediverse posts

Let‘s #print a #label so we can post this package.

#YakShaving

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5mmISldi060

Well that's a first. (Firmware update on the X1 Carbon)

/boot/efi does not have sufficient space, required 61.3 MB, need additional 80.1 kB

Time to dig around for old kernel images I guess.

#linux #yakshaving #ubuntu

Today, I introduced one of my colleagues to the concept of "yak shaving", a time-honored IT tradition (and a term I think I learned from @mackensen)

As I transition into my new role, I'm spending a lot of time resisting the call of the yak.

Sometimes, I even succeed.

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/yak-shaving-defined-ill-get-that-done-as-soon-as-i-shave-this-yak

#YakShaving #Jargon #GTD

But yak shaving is fun

https://parksb.github.io/en/article/32.html

#HackerNews #yakshaving #fun #coding #humor #productivity #technology

🆕 blog! “Did Frank Sinatra really think "Something" was a Lennon/McCartney song?”

Read enough articles about The Beatles and you'll repeatedly hit the claim that Frank Sinatra frequently introduced his cover of George Harrison's "Something" as his "favourite Lennon & McCartney number."

Much like the misquote about Ringo not being the best…

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/06/did-frank-sinatra-really-think-something-was-a-lennon-mccartney-song/
⸻
#quote #yakshaving

Did Frank Sinatra really think "Something" was a Lennon/McCartney song?

Read enough articles about The Beatles and you'll repeatedly hit the claim that Frank Sinatra frequently introduced his cover of George Harrison's "Something" as his "favourite Lennon & McCartney number."

Much like the misquote about Ringo not being the best drummer in The Beatles, I think this might be one of those semi-apocryphal lines which has taken on a life of its own.

Here's what Paul McCartney has to say in The Beatles Anthology, Episode 4.

That was broadcast in 1995 - so we need to look for sources from before that.

There's not much Internet before the mid-1990s. Google's mismanagement of the USENET archives is a cultural obscenity. Nevertheless, we can find a few references which predate McCartney's broadcast.

1994-12-26

Frankie used to introduce "Something" as his "tribute to Mr. Lennon and Mr. McCartney" ;^)

1990-03-05

In fact, a friend of mine (a supposed Beatle fan; turns out she's really just a L/M fan), were having a discussion about this very subject, she, just like Frank Sinatra, didn't know that George wrote "Something." Duh.

So it was certainly a proto-meme back then.

Of the thousands of Beatles books, I can't find any from before the mid-1990s which mention Sinatra's misattribution.

For example, 1994's The Complete Guide to the Music of the Beatles simply says:

Similarly, there are plenty of books and articles about Sinatra - lots of them talk about Something, but never this supposed misrepresentation. In 1980's New York Magazine, Sinatra is interviewed and says:

There are many videos of Sinatra singing Something on YouTube - none of them have him introducing the song as a Lennon/McCartney number.

Indeed, here's one where he introduces it as being by George Harrison.

I think that's 1982's The Concert for the Americas - in the Dominican Republic.

Here's a 1985 concert where he introduces it as being by George Harrison of The Beatles.

Way back in 1978 at Sinatra's Caesar’s Palace Concert, he introduces it with "George Harrison wrote it" and finishes with "by George Harrison".

Even back in 1975, during a concert in Jerusalem he was crediting Harrison, saying:

Every one of The Beatles was a very talented young man individually. And here's an example of George Harrison with a great love song."

I've now listened to dozens of recordings of Sinatra singing Something live and in none of them does he so much as mention John Lennon or Paul McCartney.

So is the quote apocryphal? Possibly not!

Less than a year after John Lennon was murdered, Sinatra treated Carnegie Hall0 to a series of 11 concerts.

On 10th September 1981, John Rockwell published Pop: Sinatra at Carnegie - a review of the opening night of Sinatra's concert series at New York City's Carnegie Hall:

Also on the 10th, a clutch of US papers reproduced a story by the inimitable Mary Campbell of the Associated Press.

Most of the syndicated versions leave out the parenthetical remarks.

On the 11th, Patricia O'Haire published a somewhat snide review of the September 9th concert in The New York Daily News

On 14th September 1981, a British newspaper re-reported the comment:

That's the Daily Express by Rob Benson, their Los Angeles correspondent1.

By the 29th of September 1981, the story had made it to Australian Financial Times' The Bulletin.

It's unclear how many of those journalists were actually at the concert. I assume John Rockwell, Mary Campbell, and Patricia O'Haire were as they published fairly detailed reviews.

Tracking down a set-list for that long-gone concert is tricky. Carnegie Hall themselves get the dates wrong in their archive and say the first performance was on the 8th, and their set-list is sourced from Setlist.fm rather than their own records. The Sinatraphiles mailing list has a set-list for the 9th which does include "Something".

There's a purported recording of the September 10th concert with a set-list on the reverse:

There's no "Lennon" song - the only Beatles number is "Something". Let's take a listen to the introduction from that bootleg recording.

💾 Download this audio file.

"A beautiful song by George Harrison. Maybe one of the best love songs ever written."2

So, that's a handful of contemporary sources who mention that Frank Sinatra once introduced "Something" as being composed by someone other than Harrison.

The only recording is of the concert the next day - and it doesn't includes that "blooper".

There's no other mentions I can find which directly cite a specific concert or performance.

Did Sinatra ever say it was his "favourite Lennon and McCartney song"? He sang in thousands of shows3, not all of which were recorded I also checked all of the other collectors lists I have, and they do not have it either, I do however have reference to its existence via a notecard that…" role="doc-noteref">4, so it is entirely possible he mentioned it. But you'd expect more than a few reporters would write about it, wouldn't you?

The origin of the "quote", as far as I can tell, is from an interview Paul McCartney gave to David Hinckley in the New York Daily News on 21st October 1984.

That's the first time that I can see "Something" mentioned as Sinatra's "favorite Lennon-McCartney song".

I went rummaging through some reviews of Frank's concert performance which included "Something" in the set list.

His concert at the Palladium:

And Frank sings 'Something'. It's OK. The Vanilla Fudge were more adept at Beatle rewrites however.

Chris Salewicz. "Frank Sinatra: Palladium, London". New Musical Express (1975).

His concert at the Royal Albert Hall:

Superb renditions of Jim Webb's 'Didn't We?' and Harrison's 'Something' were recreated with a totally unique empathy. "Real Songs, beautiful songs", he said fervently, no trace of show-biz cant.

Max Bell. "Frank Sinatra: Royal Albert Hall, London". New Musical Express (1975).

And another report of the same gig:

Jimmy Webb's 'Didn't We' and the classic 'Nice And Easy', were exceptionally good, standing out easily among lacklustre renditions of 'Something', 'Strangers In The Night' and a David Gates song. In between, Sinatra delivered various controversial raps designed to instigate audience loyalties but proved that Sinatra should open his mouth only when singing.

Barbara Charone. "Frank Sinatra: Royal Albert Hall, London". Sounds (1975).

I've read dozens of gig reviews of old Sinatra concerts and they all contain various levels of snark about his performance, song choice, and politics - so you'd expect British reporters would have picked up on the misattribution, wouldn't you?

Instead, there's two slightly contradictory reports of one single concert and no suggestion that Sinatra himself said it was his "favorite Lennon-McCartney song". Given that he repeatedly credited George Harrison in the decade leading up to that concert, I think it is fair to say the "quote" has taken on a significance far beyond its actual importance.

If you have a recording of Sinatra introducing "Something" as a Lennon/McCartney number - or any other contemporary reports of that - please drop a comment in the box.

1. After all, Sinatra had a lot of practice! ↩︎

2. It is odd that the reporter describes Sinatra as "now" singing Something when it had been in his repertoire for over a decade. About the right level of journalistic rigour expected of the Express. ↩︎

3. Later on, in the introduction to "Luck Be A Lady Tonight", he sarcastically describes Marlon Brando as "America's great baritone!". There are quite a few jokey moments in the performance - so it is entirely possible his Lennon & McCartney remark was a quip. ↩︎

4. Incidentally, as far as I can tell, Sinatra first sang "Something" in December 1970 on The Dean Martin Show - about a year after its release on Abbey Road. Sinatra's performance doesn't contain him saying anything about the song. ↩︎

5. I spoke to one collector who said:

   I also checked all of the other collectors lists I have, and they do not have it either, I do however have reference to its existence via a notecard that represents a massive collection. What this means is that the concert could exist, but more than likely has never been digitized. Many Sinatra concerts are still stuck on reel to reels from the 70s and 80s and have never been transferred to the digital realm and shared on the internet.

   ↩︎

40 hours give or take, but I finally have #gnuradio talking directly to my ft857d using #soapyaudio and #hamlib - RX only at the moment, but I'm going to be working on TX.

After calming down from all the excitement, I'll document the parameters and commit a proof of concept.

#yakshaving #BaldYak

My #Emacs config file now contains only use-package declarations. Took some doing, but now startup is significantly faster, and managing the thing is significantly easier.

#gnu #yakshaving

Habe heute aus Versehen drei Stunden damit verbracht, mein Terminal-Prompt zu konfigurieren, statt die Aufgabe zu erledigen, für die ich das Terminal überhaupt geöffnet hatte.

Klassischer Fall von „yak shaving“. Aber hey, jetzt zeigt es mir Git-Branch, Akku-Stand und die aktuelle Mondphase an. 🌙

Wer kennt's? Welches Tool hat euch zuletzt in so ein Kaninchenloch gezogen?

#Linux #FreieSoftware #Terminal #Yakshaving

I removed all my #Raspberrypi from my network and #NixOS configuration.

Main reason was that I needed to reduce my side projects a bit.
The raspi's were a nice experiment but I just needed to reduce my workload a bit and their hardware and architecture don't help to make things easier.

In addition I set up #Wireguard (when you remove some projects you can start new ones right?) with the plan to have it enabled all the time.
The initial idea was to have a mesh but I have now so few devices that a star made more sense.

#selfhosted #yakshaving

Of course, I can't be trusted to take notes properly, so I haven't properly documented progress on this thread 😅

But here is what happened since last time...

I moved all that to a module that I intend to publish. This led me into investigating how to set default computed values for the module inputs. For instance, I want to be able to specify IPV4 and IPV6 subnets, but if no subnet is specified, I want to pick a random one.

I also added a bunch of documentation.

And then I tested everything using a Proxmox token instead of SSH access, and ... of course it broke, because I was importing a disk image (downloading a raw disk image from the Talos image factory) and that requires SSH access. Because the Proxmox API is annoying like that.

(I didn't think that'd be an issue because that particular feature wasn't listed in the bpg provider under "stuff that requires SSH access".)

So I'm now refactoring everything to install from an ISO image instead (since that doesn't require SSH access), but of course, yak shaving happened: when installing from a Talos image, when the VM reboots, instead of using the static IP address passed by Proxmox in the "nocloud" payload, it's now obtaining an address from DHCP. Which means that cluster bootstrap doesn't work anymore.

I'm now pondering options:

- switching back to raw disk provisioning (and requiring SSH access for my module to work)

- passing IP addresses in the Talos MachineConfig (that should definitely work, right?)

- finding out if there is a way to tell Talos to use the nocloud payload even when rebooting (actually kexec-ing) the disk install

#proxmox #talos #yakshaving

Vom Wochenend- und Flohmarkt-Ausflug nach Hause kommen.
Tasche ausräumen - oh, ich könnte die neuen Sachen gleich ausräumen.
Beim Auspacken - oh, ich könnte die DVD gleich in die DVD-DB eintragen.
Beim Eintragen (sprich Scannen des Barcodes) - oh, meine Anwendung geht nicht mehr.
Beim Debuggen der Anwendung - oh, die Webanwendung hat die API geändert.
2h später ist noch nix aufgeräumt, aber die Anwendung gefixt 🤪 #yakShaving

und das war der einfache teil #yakshaving

Mein Weg zum #Balkonsolar hat so'n bisschen was von #YakShaving:
Da ich keinen Balkon habe brauche ich für die Montage der Panels an der Fassade ein Gerüst. Wenn ich eh ein Gerüst aufbauen lasse, kann ich gleich die Dämmung an der Südseite ersetzen oder aufrüsten lassen.
Den ersten Schritt hab' ich heute erledigt: Ich hab' einen Stukkateur :D

🆕 blog! “What's the source of Einstein's "citizen of the world" quip?”

I like digging through old archives and tracing my way through quotes. Here's a particularly good one from Albert Einstein which is often peppered around the Internet without any sources.

If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and…

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/03/whats-the-source-of-einsteins-citizen-of-the-world-quip/
⸻
#politics #quote #yakshaving

What's the source of Einstein's "citizen of the world" quip?

I like digging through old archives and tracing my way through quotes. Here's a particularly good one from Albert Einstein which is often peppered around the Internet without any sources.

If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.

Let's see if we can find it!

1929-12-04

The earliest I can find is in the archives of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency who published this snippet:

Is this likely to be true? What other evidence is there that Einstein was there and made those remarks?

1929-11-12

Flicking back a few weeks in the JTA archives is this evidence - "Sorbonne bestows degree on Einstein."

1929-11-09

There are also contemporary photos of the ceremony which are included in various press clippings.

Is there anything previous to 1929?

1922??

Alice Calaprice's Quotable Einstein has the quote but attributes it differently:

From an address to the French Philosophical Society at the Sorbonne, April 6, 1922. See also French press clipping, April 7, 1922, Einstein Archive 36-378; and Berliner Tageblatt, April 8, 1922, Einstein Archive 79-535

I wasn't able to find the French press clipping - but the German paper is available.

My German is rusty and that font is hard but I don't think it says anything similar to the above quote. I think the 1922 date is merely the confusion between two different visits to the Sorbonne - which is the same conclusion as Wikiquote editors came to

Contemporary reports

OK, so what other sources are there for the quote? The JTA says:

The local papers feature a summary of the brief address made by Prof. Albert Einstein […]

So I suppose they were just re-reporting what others had said. Let's take a look in some of those newspapers via Bibliothèque nationale de France who have an excellent archive of newspapers.

There's a rather detailed report from L'Œuvre - but that makes no mention of the anecdote.

Similarly, there are other interviews and contemporary commentary - but this remark goes unnoticed by all of them.

I read through several dozen French papers from November 1929 until early December. I couldn't find anything resembling the remark in any of them.

OK, what about the German press?

Again it is possible to search German newspapers for those specific dates - and there are plenty of contemporary reports.

Nothing about him being a Weltbürger that I could see.

Similarly, British newspapers don't make reference to the joke despite their endless coverage of him.

Google's shitty AI hallucinates the quote as appearing in The Saturday Evening Post.

While that issue does have an extensive interview with Einstein, there's nothing even vaguely similar to the sentiment about being a citizen of the world. Never trust an AI!

Is it likely?

Einstein is endlessly quotable - and had a good ear for a pithy turn of phrase. However, he was accompanied on this trip by the German Ambassador. Would it have been prudent for him to make such a politically charged joke in front of that audience?

Minced Oaths

Perhaps this is a mangled quotation? Einstein said something similar several years before the purported 1929 quote.

In Herman Bernstein's 1924 book "Celebrities of Our Time Interviews", there's the following quote:

That's much less pithy, but carries largely the same sentiment.

The original can be seen in the British Newspaper Archive of 1919

Dr. Einstein's Theory.

We publish to-day a translation of an article written for our readers by ALBERT EINSTEIN

[…] He adds that the different descriptions of him in England and Germany form an amusing example of relativity to the sentiments of the two countries. He is famous just now, and was described in our columns as a Swiss Jew, whereas in Germany he is called a German man of science. He suggests that were he suddenly to become a bête noire, the descriptions would be reversed, and he would be stigmatized here as a German man of science and in Germany as a Swiss Jew. We concede him his little jest.

However, do note that this is described as a translation. In his letter to Paul Ehrenfest on the 4th of December 1919, he says:

By the way, I myself participated in the cackling by writing a short article in the Times, in which I thanked our English colleagues, said a few things to characterize the theory, and at the end produced the following witticism: A simple application of the theory of relativity: today German newspapers are calling me a German man of science, the English, a Swiss Jew. If I come to be represented as a bete noire to the readerships, I should be a Swiss Jew for German newspapers and a German man of science for the English.'

See The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 9 The Berlin Years. I cannot find the original letter, but I assume Princeton's transcribers and translators are accurate.

Either way, that's two reputable sources which have Einstein expressing something similar. Perhaps the joke was repeated and refined by him as the years wore on? Perhaps an eager journalist took a half-remembered quote and gave it new life? Perhaps.

Where next?

Well, dear reader, that's where you come in! I've exhausted all my research prowess. If you can find a transcript of his remarks, or a report older than the JTA's of the 4th of December 1929 where Einstein talks about being a "citizen of the world", please drop a comment in the box!

Zjistil jsem, že Copilot s nejnovějším Codex modelem mi umožňuje na junior.guru webu bez velkého uvažování změnit prakticky cokoliv během pár minut, v ucházející nebo úplně ok kvalitě. Což je super!

Akorát že jsem dnešní den jel jak na matech, tahal jsem pořád za páčku a koukal, co vyleze. A protože je to „levné“, zalezl jsem do každé rabbit hole, kterou jsem potkal. Už dlouho jsem neměl tak silný pocit, že celý můj den byl jeden velký yak shaving. Udělal jsem asi 50 různých věcí, každá s (nejspíš?) mizivým dopadem na úspěch projektu 😆

Tak hlavně, že jsme o tom měli teď přednášku v klubu, že vygenerovat tisíc řádků kódu je k ničemu, když je to tisíckrát nesmysl. Ale třeba to jenom zveličuju a budou to užitečné věci…

#juniorguru #productivity #llm #copilot #ai #yakshaving

A lovely day here. 72 degrees F, 25% humidity, and zero clouds.
#ThreeGoodThings

1. Listened to the reborn community radio station this morning. DJ Roy Kasten hosted another diverse 3 hours of music on CRSTL.FM. Playlist here. https://spinitron.com/CRSTL/pl/21998062/Feel-Like-Going-Home. First time I heard The Weakerthans 'Sun in an Empty Room'. Might need to buy some.

2. Had lunch out back. Peanut butter on this mornings bread followed by a bit of coffee from the Moka pot.

3. A bit of yak shaving. Been wanting to come up with some type of cover for my spare cordless tool batteries. Put some used bike tube to work. Safety condoms.

#BelleVegas #CRSTL.FM #RoyKasten #YakShaving

#DearDiary, today I diagnosed an issue, fixed it, and submitted a PR for somebody else's #code for a #vscode extension, because I wanted to use that extension to work on my own project but couldn't without the #bugfix. Now the extension works (on my machine) and I can get back to shaving this yak.

#tech #technology #devops #development #developer #devjournal #git #yakshaving

I needed feedback on some conference proposals. But I didn't want to paste markdown into Google Docs (it never comes back out right).

So naturally, instead of just emailing the drafts, I spent the weekend customizing a Hedgedoc v1 instance on a tiny VM.

It runs on SQLite, supports anonymous edits, and I even patched the CSS for better high-contrast colors and comments.

The yak is fully shaved.

https://www.bexelbie.com/2026/02/12/yak-shaving

#Hedgedoc #YakShaving #OpenSource

Upstream provides docker ecosystem , with docker bake instructions, even regular build fails on podman, I try on a fresh Ubuntu , requires buildx , #yakshaving so no .. docker does NOT solve the packaging problem. Never did ..

Mal eben den RAM beim NUC upgraden…

Die Chromebox3, die andauernd neu startet hat RAM, die ein NUC gut gebrauchen kann.
Der Plan: NUC drainen, System-Updates einspielen, herunterfahren, RAM einbauen, hochfahren, fertig.

Realität:
NUC drainen, System-Updates einspielen, herunterfahren, RAM einbauen, feststellen: och, die NVME-SSD ist ja viel kleiner als die der Chromebox3 …

Also auch die SSD umbauen und das System „mal eben“ neu installieren.
— dann sagte das BIOS: CMOS Error. —> Die Batterie ist leer

Dafür hat man ja passende CR2032 zu Hause. Dumm nur, dass hier die Batterie per Molex-Stecker auf dem Mainboard sitzt.
An einer Batterie wollte ich auch nicht rumlöten.

Also sitzt der NUC jetzt im Wohnzimmer, wg. LAN und Monitor und spielt dort so lange bis die Austauschbatterien da sind.

Die Neuinstallation habe ich trotzdem gemacht und dann kam es zum "Waiting for other members to finish joining etcd cluster: etcdserver: unhealthy cluster“.

Also erst einmal den etcd vom k3s angeschaut... und da gab es einen (laufenden Node 2x) …

Was für eine Freude. Okay, es läuft nun alles wieder.

Die Lektion aus der Geschichte:
- seltener verwendete Kommandos wie „irgendwas mit etcdctl“ dokumentieren
- ab und zu einmal Geräte vom Strom trennen um defekte Batterien zu finden

#homelab #yakshaving #nuc #k3s

Yesterday, I wanted to quickly post something on my blog when I realized that my blog generating process was broken after upgrading to Debian 13.

So I had to analyze the situation, got lost in my complex shell script hell and decided to merge it into one single script without lots of dated stuff.

Next I realized that one of my own libs has a minor issue with Python 3 strings: had to migrate to raw strings to get rid of very valid warnings.

Well, I could not publish that lib any more so I had to migrate that project to "uv" to do so. Finding out how to do that ...

Lib was working. Next, I rewrote my blog generation script which took me four hours or so with heavy help of Claude AI.

Also moved this to uv.

Some unit tests were failing. Partly because of the pandoc upgrade, partly because of classic bugs.

Debugging one by one and FINALLY, after maybe six hours, I could actually publish that article.

A classic #yakshaving Saturday. 😜
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving

#publicvoit #PIM #rant

The current levels of #yakshaving:

* I want SDL2
* SDL2 configure needs a gsort that has the -V option
* Coreutils 9 needs a newer gmake
* gmake-4.4.1 doesn't seem to want to build on 2.95.3

#retrocomputing