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RulerOf

728 karma · joined March 1, 2017

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/abobulsky; my proof: https://keybase.io/abobulsky/sigs/MDr1xwtuCy29DhScWU2OYzuJmGXN8tANQjc826ycwGA ]
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RulerOf··on Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini
> People often forget how "good enough" the PS2 graphics were, and how big of a deal that was.

I remember going to an electronics store with my friend. I couldn't figure out why they had a broadcast football game playing on a 15 inch LCD display up front. I assumed it was a game but then watched it for a few cuts and was so certain it was live footage...

It was a madden game on PS2 in demo mode.

RulerOf··on The Amazon tax
App Store search is so bad that I won't use their search at all anymore. I search the web and grab the link from the app maker's website.
RulerOf··on Someone is running mass vulnerability scans, spoofing AI bots like ClaudeBot
I do the same, but I switched from cert-per-subdomain a couple of years ago.

They're either using Passive DNS logs or a historical dataset.

RulerOf··on Just Pay the Subscription
> Keep track of which apps had been opened every month, only pay the subscriptions for the ones I’ve opened, and allow me to set monthly limits.

That turns app icons into land-mines though.

Idk what the happy medium is, but there's gotta be something between "buy this kids game once" and "pay $13 a month until he gets sick of it," and I don't think we've quite found one that's equitable for all parties yet.

RulerOf··on How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
36 bays and only 24T of storage?

Can't you get that in a single disk that costs less than a kilodollar?

RulerOf··on Tiny data centre used to heat public swimming pool
I have a pool heater and an air conditioner, and I'm running both at the same time. They're fifty feet apart, but this thought crosses my mind constantly.
RulerOf··on Librepods: AirPods liberated
What do you mean?

I ask because I find Apple's wired EarPods to be less... selective than AirPods are—by that I mean they'll pick up more background noise whereas AirPods seem to only transmit my voice—but EarPods' clarity exceeds AirPods if you grab the mic and hold it next to your mouth, which you obviously can't do with AirPods.

RulerOf··on Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
I was looking at roughly the same, m5 max, 128G with 4T. It was ~$6000 out the door.

The same config on their site is now $8000 before taxes and AppleCare.

A couple weeks' notice would've been nice.

RulerOf··on Don't verify email addresses by sending spam to them
I get that, but I don't care.

I want the PDF (or CSV) emailed to me as an attachment because that's the workflow that doesn't suck.

Everything else sucks in one way or another, and much of it is security theater.

RulerOf··on Don't verify email addresses by sending spam to them
That'd be nice, but I'd even settle for the plain pdf attached to the email.
RulerOf··on Introduction to UEFI HTTP(s) Boot with QEMU/OVMF
> Why can’t I set up Windows or MacOS like that? I know the answer I just find the answer annoying.

I wish I still cared about this. I had intended to build an iPXE boot menu via a small web service that would act as a windows install XML template editor/selector, but I never got around to doing it after learning enough web dev to pull it off.

I built a few similar things that worked inside of WinPE, but the slowness of waiting for it to boot was always what drove me to do as much config as possible in the PXE boot menu—you can get into that in seconds versus minutes for the PE.

I used to install Windows a lot, and found a lot of tech around it to be a little too opinionated. SMS/WDS were just too legacy-leaning and Microsoft Enterprise-flavored. FOG was a little too heavy-handed (though very good). Glazier excited me but I never actually used it to determine if it has the flexibility I wanted...

But I digress. OS installs should be a lot easier and faster to accept your configuration preferences and get to work when the goal is "erase this machine and reinstall" than they are even today.

RulerOf··on Introduction to UEFI HTTP(s) Boot with QEMU/OVMF
That was the point as I read it. Payload signature verification is a good and sometimes desirable alternative to transport encryption when the payload itself isn't secret.

Highly-cacheable resources like game and OS updates are often intentionally delivered over http as signed payloads to facilitate middlebox caching.

RulerOf··on We're testing new ad formats in Search and expanding our Direct Offers pilot
I saw a helpful ad once.

The organic search results didn't offer what I needed at all, but the ad took me straight to an e-commerce site that sold what I wanted. I had it in my hands at a reasonable price about 5 days.

It was for a Nintendo Wii component video cable, back in 2007.

RulerOf··on I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
> Finally, AWS isn't a silver bullet. For anyone in us-east-1, you know [0].

I probably should have commented on the original article here, but I pulled all of my company's production infra out of that AZ back in 2019 because AWS dragged its feet for too long deploying 5th gen hardware there.

I assumed the racks were full or something. I still don't know if they ever did get newer hardware in that AZ—I just avoid it like the plague.

I had a light chuckle this week when I discovered the work I did out of sheer frustration saved us from a partial outage seven years later.

RulerOf··on Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE
> Another alternative is Mellanox with RDMA. You need CX4+ for optimal performance over TCP/IP, while the cheap CX3 is excellent with IPoIB.

Do these benefit the iSCSI target end of the equation too, or just the initiator? And do they work like an HBA, where you configure the card in a firmware setup menu, or does it just transparently accelerate the software initiator on Windows/Linux?

RulerOf··on Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat messages from iPhones
That is absolutely fascinating. I'm gonna have to pay attention the next time I open an iPhone box. I'd bet they're sitting on their faces in the box.

I really wonder how the wireless data transfer works.

RulerOf··on Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat messages from iPhones
They did?
RulerOf··on Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing
I thought it really excelled at displaying the timeline—it was quite novel to see a timeline for a video I was watching that didn't occlude any part of the screen—but quite annoyingly it would go black due to inactivity.

And of course the virtual function keys were awful.

RulerOf··on Build your own Dial-up ISP with a Raspberry Pi
I've wondered for a while if it would be possible to do that with a USB FXS adapter[1], and something like a Pi, but you'd basically need a soft modem of some kind to make it work and the only module for Asterisk isn't up to the challenge (last I checked five years ago).

However, to be frank, it'd make more sense to do PPP over null modem with a straight serial connection.

[1]: https://www.amfeltec.com/usb-fxs-adapter/

RulerOf··on IPv6 address, as a sentence you can remember
I don't remember my ipv4 addresses either, but I recognize them as mine when I see them.

I've never recognized an IPv6 address or prefix used in my networks.

RulerOf··on Cherri – programming language that compiles to an Apple Shortuct
I'm sure the UX would suck, but you could use hcl2json[0] and then transform that to YAML.

[0]: https://github.com/tmccombs/hcl2json

RulerOf··on Cherri – programming language that compiles to an Apple Shortuct
There needs to be a happy medium. I don't like reduce motion because it amputates many of the spatial arrangement metaphors inherent in the iOS UI.

My biggest problem with authoring shortcuts is that the editor goes out of its way to obliterate context while you're working. Full-screen editors to change a setting lay on top everything else you're working on. Placeholders for variables, which themselves have no actual names. It's a mess.

RulerOf··on Building a Mostly IPv6 Only Home Network
Man... I typed that reply on my phone and dropped the ball formatting it lol.

> My understanding is v6 has two different autoconf schemes, DHCPv6 and a more "native" solution. Do these both always result in interfaces having multiple (routable) addresses?

The answer to that is "yes," but only insofar as DHCP is _not_ the norm for IPv6 networks. If you're planning to use DHCP to assign network addresses in an IPv6 range, you would run it in addition to using automatic configuration, and DHCPv6 would be responsible only for the "permanent" IPv6 address. Automatically-configured addresses (via RA with SLAAC or whatever) would still create the temporary address that you'd use for outbound internet connectivity, and the DHCP address hangs around for your use in DNS and for hosting "permanent" services like a webserver or whatever.

You've hit on one of the subtler problems of IPv6 being that it requires more things being let through the edge firewall[0], but given a stateful IPv6 firewall on the client side, the onus is on the hosting service's admin to ensure that works correctly (AFAIK).

[0]: http://shouldiblockicmp.com/

RulerOf··on Building a Mostly IPv6 Only Home Network
> using a static v6 block, not only would this address never change, each device in my LAN would have an extra identifier attached to it.

This is not true.

IPv6 stack allocates at least 3 addresses:

- Link-local - "Permanent" Address derived from the subnet and MAC - Temporary address that changes several times per day

The default address for new connections is always the temporary address. So IP-based tracking from outside your network will be no better than it was before from one day to the next—the /64 will be the only constant here, just as your router's WAN IPv4 is for v4 connections.

RulerOf··on AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip
You can get close with a VM, but there's overhead in device emulation that slows things down.

Consider a VM where that kind of stuff has been removed, like the firecracker hypervisor used for AWS Lambda. You're talking milliseconds.

RulerOf··on Telnyx package compromised on PyPI
A number of years ago I wanted to drop a webhook when a call came in on VoIP.ms but couldn't find any way to do it natively.

Ended up sticking a twilio endpoint in the ring group with a "press 1 to accept this call" message so it wouldn't eat the call, then was able to fire an http request with the call details.

It worked well, although I admit I was a little annoyed I couldn't do it directly with VoIP.ms.

RulerOf··on Apple discontinues the Mac Pro
That device was explicitly made with "not enough" memory, because if it had enough, it'd cannibalize a significant portion of their higher-margin products' sales.

I'd argue that if memory and storage were still customer-expendable, they wouldn't have even considered making this product.

RulerOf··on My astrophotography in the movie Project Hail Mary
I watched the movie and then read the book.

I tend to prefer movies as a storytelling medium, and enjoyed watching the story unfold that way. I ended up just wanting to know more about things that were implied in the movie but not explained, and the book filled in those gaps well.

So if you want to do both, and want to get something new when you do each, then, having done it that way, I would recommend it.

Edit: reviewing my app history, it took me somewhere between 10-11 hours to read the book, and I do not read fiction especially fast.

RulerOf··on Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps
I've seen a few apps that run locally on Android and hook into the ADB connection over loopback networking to do certain things.

This just adds the step of "download Cool ABD Installer from the play store" to the set of directions I would think.

RulerOf··on Meta acquires Moltbook
You're absolutely.... that's a tired joke at this point. Sorry.

Just brainstorming, but I suppose that account/karma farming is still useful for the people that do that sort of thing.

Engaging in a heavily on-topic way in larger niche subreddits is probably a really good way to get that done. There's always a motive and it's always money and it always idiotic.

I remember having a clear vision of how this tech was going to ruin communities on the internet. I really hate that it has mostly come to pass and there's no good way to fight it.

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