My friend told me this story from his antique radio club:

One club member is an audiphile and a former vibrations engineer for automotive companies. He disassembled his speakers and arranged custom housing for the drivers such that, based on his preferred listening spot, the peak of an average waveform from every driver would synchonize exactly at the spot where his ears should be. This, according to him, produces an unbeatable sound. We’re talking about opening a speaker and moving its tweeter, like, half a millimeter back.

No, I don’t understand how this is supposed to work, let alone consistently.

I use a PiKVM to manage my server at boot.

It streams video from the HDMI port so I can see what’s happening before boot, and plugs into a USB socket to emulate a remote keyboard.

Saved me the other week when I installed a new network card and the server lost its network connection. Since I could still reach the KVM, I logged in remotely and solved the issue.

Although some KVM devices can take power from the USB connection to the host, you should make sure your KVM has an independent power supply. Otherwise, when you shut down your server, the KVM will lose power and then you can’t remotely turn it back on again.

Played system shock 2 for the first time in January.

Joining with The Many didn’t sound like such a bad deal.

git commit --amend --author="Automated CI Action <no-reply@github.com>" --no-edit

I love movies with abstract imagery and themes. Usually I can piece things together and figure out what the film is trying to say, but not Megalopolis.

Like, what was Megalopolis (the in-film construction project) supposed to represent? It was one guy’s vision for a better future that he was going to build no-matter what. Fine! But then Adam Driver’s character makes a big speech at the ribbon ceremony about how we need to start a conversation about the future. What conversation? The guy never listened to anyone else during the film! Maybe his wife?

Why was everything wrapped up in the names and imagery of late Roman republic? To imply that American society is reaching an end of its current unsustainable phase. Ok, but then you name Adam Driver’s character after the guy who turned Rome into a militarist principate. So what better future should we be looking towards?

What was the whole deal with Carthage, the crumbling Soviet satellite which destroyed part of the city? The Megalopolis project only got underway when the destruction cleared out a chunk of New Rome, so are we to assume that our bold conversation about the futute can only happen when the once-forgotten ghost of Communism smashes America? But then the satellite’s crash has no impact on anything except some buildings. The mayor doesn’t face any problems as leader during or after this disaster, and the MAGA-coded villains don’t really change tactics either. Adam Driver’s plans are obviously helped by this, but he already had buy-in from the Mayor. It’s not like the disaster was some catalyst for change, but rather a convenience so we don’t have to watch Adam Driver finger-snap another building demolition.

Megalopolis threw a lot of ideas on the screen, but I kept waiting for a payoff that never arrived.

You can use devcontainers without vscode. At work, I use https://github.com/devcontainers/cli

I know it’s late advice, since you already switched from Bazzite, but I’ve never understood why people have an aversion to adding a layered package to the immutable system.

My attitude has always been: If an update breaks something, the whole point is that I can roll back. I’ve been running Fedora Silverblue with many layered packages for several years, and the worst thing that ever happened was when I had to delay a system update by a few hours because the latest build of a layered package hadn’t hit the repos yet.

Plus, for anything like development work that requires build dependencies, I spin up a toolbox to compile it. The nice thing about the default toolbox is that it’s a base Fedora install, so all the system libs are compatible with my host machine. I’ve found it’s often simple to compile a project in the toolbox and then launch the executable from my host system without adding any new layered packages to it.

I think it was August or September. Issue is documented in this forum thread:

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=19928

I lile my pinenote a lot. I mostly use it for reading.

As long as I’m reading or doing any touch-screen-y things (taking notes, viewing images, etc) it’s great! For anything that involves writing/copying/pasting text, it’s not very usable with just the on-screen keyboard, you really need an external bluetooth interface. I find web browsing very tedious if I have to type anything in the url bar without a physical keyboard.

Also, it’s still very much a WIP. The version of Debian it shipped with had a bug where I couldn’t install any software updates without deleting some random lib64 directory. Once I did that, everything was fine. The device has no security by default, so I created a new user with an encrypted HOME.

With import tariffs to the US, I ended up paying $500 for it, which really got me down. As a $400 open hardware machine, it would have been easier to look past the rougher edges. And I wish it had more RAM.

But overall it’s worth it to me because I’ve wanted a more libre e-reader for a long time. It’s gotten me back into reading books, which has been a lot of fun. Plus, because it’s an actual computer, I set it up as a tablet-like interface to my home automations.

Seems like this system relies on defending from well-defined entrypoints to the network. I’m not sure how a group of enthusiasts could use this unless they centralize their systems.

From the original 404 article:

And yet, this is of course an extreme example of the broader political project of AI chatbots and LLMs: They are top-down systems controlled by the richest people and richest companies on Earth, and their outputs can be changed to push the preferred narratives aligned with the interests of those people and companies. This is the same underlying AI that powers Grokipedia, which is the antithesis of Wikipedia and yet is being pitched by its creator as being somehow less biased than the collective, well-meaning efforts of human volunteers across the world.

You may already know this, but a lot of everyday people don’t. They still think that a computer can’t have bias, and if all these tech bros and business leaders are talking about AI then maybe it does make sense to replace our society with an impartial machine. This article is for them.

It’s quite insidious, and tbh there’s only so much you can do to control how you feel after work. Instead of hoping to feel good every day, I try and set myself up for success on random days where I do leave work with energy.

In my case this means I have 1 or 2 braindead-easy dinners waiting in the wings. Good leftovers I can reheat in the oven, or a meal that takes 2 steps to prepare. If I don’t have to worry about cooking dinner, then I have that much more time to dedicate to a hobby when the fancy strikes me.

I once got assigned a work project to add new functionality to the web service of a recently-acquired company.

The meat of their codebase was a single lua file to handle web requests, query value from Redis, and then progressively filter out items in a loop. Of course, because Lua has no continue statement, the file was a long series of if / else blocks. It was clear that the development style was to just keep adding new things to the loop. There were, of course, no tests.

I asked the former CTO of the acquired company (now in a sales) why they went with Lua. His reply was something about how if Lua is good enough for fintech, it should be great for web services. He must have been good in the sales role, because when I learned how much our company paid to acquire this crappy Lua script, my jaw dropped.

Anyway, that’s all to say that in my sample size of 1, Luarocks has been the least painful part of Lua.

Since this will be a facility owned by a public university, I think the city would see no property tax revenue from this project. So why should a city trade its health and/or morals for a nuclear weapons datacenter and not even get anything out of it?

What I’m getting at is that for people using FDE, any performance hit is worth it compared to worrying that you’ve covered every angle.

Suppose you’re in some hypothetical country where torrenting is illegal. The presence of /usr/bin/qbittorrent on your disk could be enough to face charges. Unencrypted /var/log? Maybe they can see you’ve been running a cryptocurrency miner. There could be plenty of data outside of $HOME on your computer which a cop might try to use against you.

In the most paranoid hypothetical scenario, someone could mount your unencrypted /usr/bin and replace openssl with a compromised version.

The Elon-oi.

I’d be OK if my descendents got to eat them.

I got a mixture called “Butcher block conditioner” for food-safe surfaces, and another called “Feed-n-wax” for surfaces that don’t touch food.

I’m sure the construction of towers is different from chimney stacks, but Fred Dibnah did it with a bunch of firewood and some shovels.

https://youtu.be/0L1WOnR2KBY

Hey, not everyone was born to be a king.