There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

dgriffith

@[email protected]

I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

dgriffith ,

That’s easy. Just fly somewhere and bring it in your carry-on, airport security will let you know.

dgriffith , (edited )

What I’m asking is how tf did text messages and whatever in the walkie talkies ignite a spark strong enough to ignite the PETN?

Pager with firmware that activates an output on date/time X/Y and triggers an ignition signal. That signal is sent o an actual detonator in the device, which sets off the explosive.

Radio with DTMF receiver that activates an output when, for example, touchtone 4 is received over the air, or alternatively if the radio has GPS, another date/time activation via firmware.

Both of these things are relatively trivial for a nation-state to pull off.

So yes, in both cases it’s possible that faulty devices are still around. However, if all the rest of your group has had exploding pagers and radios, most people in the same group would have dropped their still-working pager or radio into a bucket of water by now. There’s probably a few, and they’re probably being carefully taken apart right now to see how it was done.

Afaik such an idea was nonsense previously.

It’s not nonsense, it just takes planning and resources. And now that people know it is possible, buying and using any sort of equipment for your group without having the nagging concern there might be a bomb in it is impossible. And that’s a pretty powerful limiter.

dgriffith ,

There’s a lot to be said for “yourISP.com/~username” being available 24/7 at no particular effort to you.

dgriffith , (edited )

As if the software was as permanent as the hardware lol

There’s no guarantee that the software will ever be updated to something that the user finds usable though.

Google could just one day go “meh, we don’t think folding displays are where we want to be right now”, and - ta-da! - you’re left with a folding doorstop and Google’s got yet another entry on the “killed by Google” list.

dgriffith ,

Blu-Ray USB drive and M-Discs is about the best you can get at present. Keep the drive unplugged when not in use, it’ll probably last 10-20 years in storage.

Seeing as there hasn’t been much advance past Blu-ray, keep an eye out for something useful to replace it in the future, or at least get another drive when you notice them becoming scarce.

dgriffith , (edited )

As another poster has mentioned, M-Discs are written using a Blu-ray writer and are good for a few hundred years, in theory.

dgriffith , (edited )

90% of users when they are presented with the UAC popup when they do something:

“Yes yes whateverrr” <click>

dgriffith ,

Never understood why smartphones are so super bright by default.

Because they have to compete with 50k lux outside and then scale to 600 lux indoors, then down to just to a few lux in a darkened room.

Perhaps the brightness slider needs to be more logarithmic so you can slide from 0.001 percent to 100 percent more easily.

Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying (arstechnica.com)

My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk...

dgriffith ,

when they’re powered down.

There’s no periodic cell refresh in flash memory like there is in DRAM. When USB sticks are plugged in, all you are doing is powering up the flash chip and interface ICs.

You’d have to read a block then write it back to actually refresh the stored charges in the cells.

dgriffith ,

I’ve got photos in Flickr dating from 1999 onwards. Ten thousand or so of them, and a couple of the early ones are now corrupted.

But they are my “other backup” for Google photos so I don’t mind too much. I also have a USB Blu-ray drive at home that I use to periodically burn M-Discs that I hand out to a few relatives.

That’s about as good as I can conveniently do for backup, and it’s probably better than the single-point-of-failure box of negatives that my parents have in their cupboard.

dgriffith ,

Dammit now I have to reduce the block size of my discord-based cold storage filesystem.

dgriffith ,

They need to learn how to use their tools better. Winscp does all that transparently for you if you press F4 on a file on a remote system. Or maybe they did and you just didn’t see it…

It’s quite a handy function when you’re diving through endless layers of directories on a remote box looking for one config file amongst many.

Chat GPT appears to hallucinate or outright lie about everything

As an analytics engineer, I’ve used basically every major variation of web-based AI there is. Claude, Gemini, Microsoft copilot, Chat GPT. Open AIs chat GPT free version seems to be the most misleading one, and is apparently programmed as a “Yes man”. When you ask it questions, it’ll provide you a generic answer, and if...

dgriffith ,

Most times what I get when asking it coding questions is a half-baked response that has a logic error or five in it.

Once I query it about one of those errors it replies with, “You’re right, X should be Y because of (technical reason Z). Here’s the updated code that fixes it”.

It will then give me some code that does actually work, but does dumb things, like recalculating complex but static values inside a loop. When I ask if there’s any performance improvements it can do, suddenly it’s full of helpful ways to improve the code that can make it run 10 to 100 times faster and fix those issues. Apparently if I want performant code, I have to explicitly ask for it.

For some things it will offer solutions that don’t solve the issue that I raise, no matter how many different ways I phrase the issue and try and coax it towards a solution. At that point, it basically can’t, and it gets bogged down to minor alterations that don’t really achieve anything.

Sometimes when it hits that point I can say “start again, and use (this methodology)” and it will suddenly hit upon a solution that’s workable.

So basically, right now it’s good for regurgitating some statistically plausible information that can be further refined with a couple of good questions from your side.

Of course, for that to work you have to know the domain you’re working in fairly well already otherwise you’re shit out of luck.

Debian Orphans Bcachefs-Tools: "Impossible To Maintain In Debian Stable" (www.phoronix.com)

Even before the Bcachefs file-system driver was accepted into the mainline kernel, Debian for the past five years has offered a “bcachefs-tools” package to provide the user-space programs to this copy-on-write file-system. It was simple at first when it was simple C code but since the Bcachefs tools transitioned to Rust,...

dgriffith , (edited )

If library devs do versioning correctly, and you pin to major versions like “1.” instead of just the “anything goes” of “”, this should not happen.

Your unit tests should catch regressions, if you have enough unit tests. And of course you do, because we’re all operating in the dream world of, “I am great and everyone else is shit”.

dgriffith ,

They also came from a time when hard drives could draw several amps while in use and much more on spin-up. There was a good reason why SCSI drive arrays used to spin each disk up one-by-one.

Molex connectors are good for 10 amps or so, SATA connectors couldn’t have handled that amount of current.

dgriffith ,

Excuse me, “UXers” is not the preferred term any more. You should be using “HXers”, as per the article.

In my opinion, replacing “users” with “humans” feels wrong in much the same way as when incels replace “women” with “females”.

They are reducing the accuracy of the description. All users of computers can generally be assumed to be human. All humans cannot generally be assumed to also be users.

dgriffith ,

Letting it ring has no impact. They have autodiallers that call, and when someone picks up, only then is that call assigned to someone in the call centre.

You can often tell this because there is a marked delay in the response to your initial “Hello?”. Long enough that you can reliably just hang up if you don’t hear a response in two seconds.

If it’s a real person who actually wants to call you and they you call again straight away, you can just shrug off your hang-up as a network issue.

dgriffith ,

how the IT team tries to justify being locked into Microsoft, and then telling me I could potentially become a point of vulnerability

Because they can manage and control all the windows PCs , pushing updates automatically, restricting what users can do locally and on the network, they have monitoring tools and whatever antivirus and antimalware tools they have, and are able to easily manage and deploy/remove software and associated group licensing and so on and so forth.

Meanwhile you’re a single user of unknown (to them) capabilities that they now have to trust with the rest of their system, basically.

The first rule of corporate IT is, “control what’s on your network”. Your PC is their concern still, but they have no effective control over it. That’s why they’re being a bit of a pain in the ass about it.

dgriffith ,

They could have hooked the phone up to a windscreen wiper motor (a high torque motor with a crank arm) and left it to run for a few hours, that would have given them about 10,000 open/close cycles. But no, it’s “let’s hang a 5kg weight off it and use the phone as a bit of a hammer”.

Police raid Andrew Tate's home in Romania as new allegations emerge involving minors (apnews.com)

Masked police officers in Romania carried out fresh raids early Wednesday at the home of divisive internet influencer Andrew Tate, who is awaiting trial on charges of human trafficking, rape and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women....

dgriffith ,

“Hey Pizza Shop, it’s The Law here. Did you have any orders for an ‘A. Tate’ recently? You did? Where did you deliver them to? Ok, thanks.”

Stupider things have happened and if I was a detective you’d be damn sure I’d at least give this a try.

dgriffith , (edited )

There was a series of books in the '80s where a systems programmer gets pulled through a portal into your typical magical world, good vs evil, etc.

They subsequently look at the magical spells in use and realise they can apply Good Systems Programming Practices™ to them. And thus, with their knowledge of subroutines and parallel processing, they amplify their tiny innate magical abilities up to become a Pretty Good Magician™. So while all the rest of the magicians basically have to construct their spells to execute in a linear fashion, they’re making magical subroutines and utility functions and spawning recursive spells without halting checks and generally causing havoc.

It’s quite a good allegory for modern times, where a select few build all the magic and the rest just have useful artefacts they use on a day to day basis with no idea how they work

dgriffith ,

Me: “This binary file is merely an approximate mathematical and statistical transform of the complainant’s “Deadpool 3”, your honour. If you care to glance through a few A4 pages of the binary representation of both items, you can clearly see that there is no direct copying involved, thus, no copyright claim can be upheld.”

Result: $250k fine, two years community service in anti piracy groups.

NVIDIA: “Each copyrighted work was ingested and a statistical model was generated that leverages that information for our own profit. We have no intention of compensating copyright owners for their information.”

Result: Oh you! Get out of here, you scamp! Ruffles hair

dgriffith ,

I hate the camera bumps. Just make the entire phone the same thickness and - hey! Maybe then you could then add a bit more structural integrity and put a bigger battery and a SD card slot and a headphone jack in there as well.

dgriffith ,

Someone with only a tenuous grip on their sanity, I’d imagine.

dgriffith ,

As I understand it, it’s the quantum part of quantum mechanics.

Electrons can only have fixed energy states, they can only radiate or accept fixed sized packets of energy - a “quantum” of energy. So an electron that is hit with the correct sized quantum of energy can be excited up to the next orbital, and it will emit the same sized packet of energy when it returns to its ground state. So they can’t gradually emit radiation and fall into the nucleus.

Eventually electrons should spontaneously decay but that’s predicted to be in 10 to the power of 40 years or something like that.

dgriffith ,

I looked it up, after 6.6 x 10e28 years or so they are theorised to decay into neutrinos and photons.

dgriffith ,

Presumably there is a transformation of charge to energy which is then carried away by the photon, but all of this is beyond my understanding of the theories involved.

dgriffith ,

Energy efficiency can be offset by extra computational ability though.

Eg Linux has a plethora of CPU and IO schedulers and allows you to tune the system to maximise performance for your particular workload. Getting more performance than with the generic CPU and IO schedulers provided in other OS’s generally means more power consumption, unless you do some sort of “performance per watt” calculation to take that into account.

I spent ~$35 on new cables and my LAN speed increased 6x

After seeing that my wireless speeds were much faster than the speeds I was getting over Ethernet, I decided to invest in some new cables. I didn’t know it before, but I saw while I was changing them out that my current cables were Cat 5e. While putting my network together, I had just been grabbing whatever cables I could find...

dgriffith ,

I have not cared about or terminated A-spec after network cards gained auto MDI/MDIX about 20 years ago.

dgriffith ,

For later reference, the link light on most network cards is a different colour depending on link speed. Usually orange for 1G, green for 100M and off for 10M (with data light still blinking).

dgriffith ,

True. Hence my caveat of “most cards”. If it’s got LEDs on the port, it’s quite likely to signal which speed it is at with those LEDs.

I haven’t yet come across a gigabit card that won’t do 10Mbit (edit: switches are a different matter) but sometimes I’ve come across cards that fail to negotiate speeds correctly, eg trying for gigabit when they only actually have a 4 wire connection that can support 100Mbit. Forcing the card to the “correct” speed makes them work.

dgriffith ,

Immediately switches to google play to turn off auto update for Nova Launcher

dgriffith ,

Google play reports an update with a few fixes a couple of months ago.

dgriffith , (edited )

shrugs

The current state of Nova Launcher will take my four year old phone with Android 13 to the end of its life.

dgriffith ,

This is the hard part. Modern techniques can detect just about anything in anything, down to parts per billion or less.

So we all have measurable quantities of PFAS , radioactive materials, arsenic, plastics, endocrine disrupters and so on and so forth, but there are very few actual hard numbers as to what levels are distinctly harmful and what levels are just “something else will kill you long before this does”.

My homelab had the stupidest outage ever (blog.thefossrant.com)

This morning I woke up to my phone using mobile data and my home assistant automations not working. Initially I thought it the power was out, but I could turn on the lights just fine. I checked my UniFi app and saw that the server was not connected to the network at all. This meant that the cable got unplugged, the switch...

dgriffith , (edited )
  1. Replace CMOS battery.
  2. Get small UPS.
  3. Discover that small UPS’s fail regularly, usually with cooked batteries.
  4. Add maintenance routine for UPS battery.
  5. Begin to wonder if this is really worth it when the rest of the house has no power during an outage.
  6. Get small generator.
  7. Discover that small generators also need maintenance and exercise.
  8. Decide to get a whole house battery backup a-la Tesla Powerwall topped off by solar and a dedicated generator.
  9. Spend 15 years paying this off while wondering if the payback was really worth it, because you can count on one hand the number of extended power outages in that time.
  10. In the end times a roving band of thugs comes around and kills you and strips your house of valuable technology, leaving your homelab setup behind and - sadly - without power. Your dream of unlimited availability has all been for nought.

Conclusion: just replace the CMOS battery on a yearly basis during planned system downtime.

dgriffith ,

Yeah , it’s really a little strange in OPs case, I can’t really recall changing a CMOS battery in ages, like decades of computer use.

dgriffith , (edited )

I had a full run of vaccinations and got COVID about 6 months later. Nothing serious, in bed for a few days, cold and flu tablets kept everything under control, a perfect case of the effectiveness of the vaccines in taking the edge off.

But for about two weeks after “recovery” I was constantly forgetting keys, or my wallet. Drove halfway to the airport for a week away for work one morning and went, “oh shit, where’s my wallet?” and I’d placed it on a bench behind my car when I put my suitcase in the back and didn’t pick it up again. I’m 50 years old, I can count on one hand the number of times I’d forgotten my wallet before that.

That brain fog eased off after that but I wonder sometimes if there are still long term effects that I’m not aware of.

dgriffith ,

Fucking hell, imagine the requirement of a couple of megawatt substation for fast charging, urban power planners must be shitting themselves.

dgriffith ,

Yeah, just the random added load equivalent to 80-100 houses per car, any time between 5am and 9pm would be enough to send local suburban grids into a spin, especially in summer evenings when there’s peak loading already underway. A lot of infrastructure would need to be beefed up to make it reliable.

dgriffith ,

Yeah if you’ve got home charging it’s not a real issue. We use 240v here in Aus so you can pull quite a bit out of domestic outlets before having to get serious and generally overnight charging to top up the day’s commute would be fine.

So it wouldn’t be a fast charger on every street, and you could always enforce limits by time of use pricing to put a dampener on peak loads.

I just wonder if utility planners might get caught with their pants down on this one. Like, could you say 5 years ago chargers might run to 800kW?

dgriffith ,

It was a mouse driver in a windows XP VM. Really saves on development costs that way.

dgriffith ,

There’s plenty of custom ROMs for cars from all major manufacturers, you just don’t know where to look.Google “ECU remap” or “dpf delete” for an idea. ECU remapping has been done by bold individuals ever since there were programmable ECUs, around 1985.

Apart from engine/drive line tinkering, there are also plenty of third party software that can tinker with body computers for “lifestyle” adjustments.

Is it easy and accessible? No. Because of environmental laws - and vendor lock in - you can’t generally and easily dick around with the control software in your car. But it does exist.

dgriffith ,

Jobs also believed that 3.5" was the perfect touchscreen size for the human hand, neglecting the fact that (a) the human hand size varies drastically and (b) people are willing to trade ergonomic perfection for more screen estate because it’s more usable that way.

dgriffith ,

What you have linked to is a high level overview of what happens, regardless of what OS or network stack you are using.

If you ask me to describe what Linux would do at that kind of level, well, exactly that.

dgriffith , (edited )

Have a look here at the ICMP source code in the Linux kernel at line 400. That is the ICMP reply code.

At lines 433/434 you can see the collection of the source and destination MAC addresses from the incoming packet. The source is just lifted directly from the packet, the destination is done with a helper function that presumably looks at which interface it arrived on and returns the MAC address of that interface.

Lines 441 onwards construct the reply packet and push it to the generic ICMP transmit function (which is a bit higher up in the source code), which then pushes it on to the network stack.

Hope that gives you an idea of how it works internally! It’s really only a slightly more detailed version of the actual standard, there are a few checks to make sure that we are not exceeding network rate limits in the stack and etc, but it’s a quite simple bit of code.

Added edit: it’s “simple” at this point because a lot of the work has already been done. The packet has arrived via the network stack, it has been determined to be an ICMP packet, and it was sent here to this function. There are already functions that send packets out via the network stack, so this chunk of code just builds an appropriate packet and hands it on to be sent.

dgriffith ,

Let me know if I can explain it more clearly.

Multi-part MIME containing inline images is actually what you’re looking for and it’s fairly easy to implement.

Here’s an example. They handwave over the html section that actually refers to the inline images that they embed, but that’s the basic layout you need.

…microsoft.com/…/7a08211a-760a-41af-8cab-0acf462c…

dgriffith ,

In the phone world, the jump in capacity that modern phones have from my 4370mAh battery in my A71 is negligible. They haven’t increased power density much because that way leads to fires and lawsuits when users bend or otherwise damage their ridiculously fragile phones

My point was, if modern phones had the physical space that my phone + case has, they could have a bigger battery, and that bigger battery would then power all the hungry, hungry electronics.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •