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

  • 0 Posts
  • 126 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
cake
Cake day: September 27th, 2023

help-circle



  • The bug is the lack of documentation and that a simple unguarded command can erase all user’s data on the system.

    Also, the principle of least surprise would like a word.

    If I look at the command line arguments of a program called “systemd-tmpfiles” and one of them is called “purge” I will generally assume that option will purge temporary files.

    Now it turns out that someone decided that this program would be a simple way to do something with /home directories(*) so they included /home in the config file for the program, the file that the program reads by default when it is invoked.

    Who decided it would be a good idea for it to deal with /home?

    Wellllll…

    https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/tmpfiles.d/home.conf

    (*)I have no idea what this program is doing with /home in its config file. I will presume that there is a useful and mostly logical reason for it, and that this command line option was just an unfortunate footgun for those users who were not intimately familiar with systemd.




  • Assumption:

    Someone crams a 300 watt solar panel onto the roof of their EV and manages to integrate it into the charging system so that it’s pretty efficient to use that power.

    Numbers:

    One hour of good sunshine on the 300 watt panel = 300 watt-hours (Wh).

    Average EV energy usage : 200Wh per kilometre these days. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less, depends on how and where you’re driving.

    Result:

    One hour of perfect sunshine hitting the roof of your car equals 1.5 kilometres of extra range, or you can drive your car in a steady-state fashion at a 3-5 kilometres per hour because an EV is more efficient than the average usage at lower speeds.

    Conclusion:

    Probably better off increasing the storage capacity of the battery as a full day’s sunshine will get you about 10 kilometres of range.


  • I hate how bloated the kernel is. I’d like it to fit into main memory.

    Take a copy of lspci, lsusb. Use them to build a kernel from source with only the bits you need and then make the bits you might need modules. Include your filesystem driver into the kernel and you can skip the usual initramfs stage and jump straight to your root filesystem.

    Might take a few tries, but at least it doesn’t take 18 hours to compile the kernel anymore…


  • You need silicon.

    The earth’s crust is about 25 percent silicon. Sand made out of quartz like desert sand is about 50 percent silicon. Beach sand is usually mainly calcium carbonate from shells and it doesn’t contain much silicon at all. Volcanic beach sand is more likely the same as the earth’s crust so 25-50 percent.

    So as long as you refine your sand/gravel/rocks/lava so that you’re left with pretty much pure silicon, you’re good to go.





  • i like how the answers are the exact same generic unhelpful drivel you hear 20k times a month if you’re…

    Searching for a solution to any problem on the internet.

    There are a million ad- laden sites that, in answer to a technical question about your PC, suggest that you run antivirus, system file checker, oh and then just format and reinstall your operating system. That is also 90 percent of the answers coming from “Microsoft volunteer support engineers” on Microsoft’s own support forums as well, just please like and upvote their answer if it helps you.

    There are a million Instagram and tiktok videos showing obvious trivial, shitty, solutions to everyday problems as if they are revealing the secrets of the universe while they’re glueing bottle tops and scraps of car tires together to make a television remote holder.

    There are a trillion posts on Reddit from trolls and shitheads just doing it for teh lulz and Google is happily slurping this entire torrent of shit down and trying to regurgitate it as advice with no human oversight.

    I reckon their search business has about two years left at this rate before the general public regards them as a joke.

    Edit: and the shittification of the internet has all been Google’s doing. The need for sites to get higher up in Google’s PageRank™ or be forever invisible has absolutely ruined it. The torrent of garbage now needed to ensure that various algorithms favour your content has fucked it for everyone. Good job, Google.


  • I work in OT. The number of “best practice” IT mantras that companies mindlessly pick up and then slavishly follow to the detriment of their mainly-OT business is alarming.

    Make your own damn best practice that suits your business best, don’t copy and paste something from a megacorp. Sure, include elements from megacorp’s best practice if they are applicable, but don’t be a slave to the entirety of it.





  • LIVE BLACKBIRDS???

    Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye,

    Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.

    When the pie was opened the birds began to sing,

    Oh wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?

    The king was in his counting house counting out his money,

    The queen was in the parlour eating bread and honey

    The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes,

    When down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose!

    Moral of the story, don’t be a minor character in an 18th century nursery rhyme.



  • Yes, I shifted to my own domain after my default ISP of 20 years decided that email was just too hard, you know? They didn’t outright say it, they just started batch processing emails so that I’d get all my daily emails at around 2 am the next day. Super handy for time limited password reset emails!

    A few hours reading a guide and setting up a $5/mo linode email server with SPF and dmarc, a few more hours transferring 20 years of IMAP mail from my old account to a folder, and a month or so of changing a few site contact emails over each day when they emailed something to my old account, and now I’ve got an email server on my own domain that is 10 times faster at sending/receiving mail than my old ISP ever was.

    And now I can have amazon@mydomain.com and career@mydomain.com and random other disposable addresses so that when they are inevitably sold off for the $$$ I can just dump them and maintain a spam free inbox.