deadlyllama

Please accept this revision:

  I got my first real Pentium
  Bought it at the local shop
  Played Quake till my fingers ached
  Was the summer of '99

  Me and some guys from school
  Had a LAN and we played real hard
  Jonny lost, the network failed
  Should've upgraded our thinnet

  Oh, when I look back now
  Ninety-eight was more fun than XP
  And if I had the choice
  My kids wouldn't be stuck with chromebooks
  I really miss my old PC

...

Whatever it is, it's not that. A ping to a unicast IPv4 address in the local subnet won't be transmitted at the Ethernet layer until the IP has been resolved to an Ethernet MAC address via ARP. The troublesome host must have been responding to the broadcast ARP requests with ARP responses, too. Promiscuous mode makes no difference here as those ARP requests are broadcasts and you'll receive them with or without promiscuous mode.

Before I read the linked page I assumed this was a rant about using MS Office with files on your local filesystem. Although that would be titled "How Hard is it to Save a File?"

EC2 is pricey if it's all you're getting from AWS. If you have wierd requirements, colo may be a good option. Otherwise, just get a VPS or 3 and be done with it. You'll get a virtual KVM that lets you boot it off an ISO and set it up the way you want.

Vultr, DigitalOcean, Linode, ... are long established VPS players.

I'm cheap and buy VPSes off deals on lowendtalk.com. e.g. my backups are on a VPS with 3TB disk, 2GB RAM, 1 vCPU, USD7/mo. I suspect your USD80/mo budget would stretch to something amazing, by comparison.

Sharing filesystems is hard when you make users do it in advance.

I was thinking of the server end of an ffmpeg-over-ip system bringing up a FUSE filesystem backed by something similar to your VFS-served-by-the-client. Combine that either with argument rewriting, or chrooting into the FUSE filesystem.

As another commenter said, where's plan 9 when you need it? If you go the FUSE route there are existing 9P implementations for both server and FUSE client you can use.

I've been meaning to build exactly this for a while, and my waiting has been rewarded by someone else doing it!

Had you thought about using FUSE on the server side, rather than patching ffmpeg? Like a reverse sshfs? That avoids patching the ffmpeg binary, which allows usage of wierd and wonderful ffmpeg binaries with other people's patches.

I'd be interested in seeing how well it works with SBC GPUs - many have hardware decoding and encoding, and their vendors love to fork ffmpeg.

As a New Zealander, I can say: it's not bad.

I went back to self hosting when Google were going to kill free Gmail for your domain. I have no problems with deliberability. And I have tiny mail volumes.

Pre Gmail I was on Exim. Now I'm on Postfix. I used the 123qwe.com tutorial as a starting point.

The real problems are (1) family members just want Gmail and (2) I have to maintain an email system.

My high school got email access for students in 1997 (New Zealand). We had to pay per megabyte for web browsing. There were services you could email URLs to, that would email you back a text rendering of the page. So I used that.

They had a fairly smart UI for following links. They would appear as footnotes and IIRC you could just hit reply, type the footnote number, and then send.

How similar is this to the sipeed NanoKVM? (RISC-V based, software source https://github.com/sipeed/NanoKVM ) From the outside it looks very very alike.

I remember when Java was exciting. There were several attempts at open source Java OSes like JOS (https://jos.sourceforge.net/). A Java applet runtime for the PalmPilot. My thesis on dynamic aliasing protection was based on a dynamic Java-esque runtime. But... Java got a reputation for being heavyweight.

And yes, as others have said, instead we got the modern web, with (for example) web based word processors requiring orders of magnitude more compute power than a desktop of the early Java era.

Does it play the single player mode cutscenes though? My PC was underpowered when I was playing Red Alert. Full screen, full motion video still seemed pretty amazing back then. "Hitler is.. out of ze way"

As long as it's better than the i740 I used to have!

How prevalent is ladder logic for new industrial systems?

Over two decades ago I was programming a Foxboro PLC in their SALL language, which was compiled down to C. Variables and control structures! And you could hack the C if you wanted your state transitions to go faster.

Would this work:

* put a warning wrap on your sandwich - danger - this sandwich may have laxatives added

* if your sandwiches continue to go missing, label them AND add laxatives

DIY (instead of the cloud) is the answer. If you're pushing terabytes+ from day 1 on a shoestring, you're going to want your own CDN. If you can manage a queueing system and the occasional wait, run your own (or rented physical) hardware for transcoding at as high a utilisation as you can.

Build vs buy pushes you to "build" early on when your margins are slim and your volume is huge.

At last we can uninstall Bing & Edge!

... in the EEA.

"Windows uses the region chosen by the customer during device setup to identify if the PC is in the EEA."

Imagine the tourist ads if it was just device location: "Hate Edge? Uninstall it and see the Eiffel tower at the same time!"

Yes, you are being too paranoid. Once booted into Openwrt the router will only be running Openwrt code. I guess there's the tiny possibility of a backdoored bootloader but that would have to be a pretty sophisticated backdoor!

When I looked at buying an EV last year, BYD was a serious option. In the end I decided on a second hand Nissan Leaf. In New Zealand, we're right hand drive and have no local auto makers. We import lots of second hand cars from Japan as a result. Like most New Zealanders, I've never owned a new car. Cheap Chinese EVs are somewhat cost competitive with second hand Japanese EVs which is crazy. Still not going to buy one. I'm happy that geopolitical tensions aren't going to stop spare parts being available.

If enough people didn't buy tickets, then the airlines would have to reduce capacity on the routes, and that would reduce emissions.

I've been using NestJS this year and (mostly) found it great for the use cases I've had.

I'd rather describe the HTTP to method call mapping of my controller with decorators than a bunch of "add endpoint" calls. I like that the HTTP to code binding is located right beside the code itself.

I like that I can separate my app up into modules and couple them as loosely or tightly as I need.

You can architecture astronaut with NestJS, but you don't have to! I wrote a queue module (to interface with a legacy queue system), using decorators to specify the consumer. Docs on doing this are essentially nonexistent. The NestJS based library I cribbed from spread the "find the object & method to call" logic across multiple classes. I distilled it down to a screenful.

As with all tools, you get some choice in how you use it. Want to go wild with dependency injecting a zillion classes with one method each? If you really want to, I guess you can. Want to be sensible, for your definition of sensible? You can do that too.

AirBnB used to be a cheap stay. Now it's often not. Many hosts charge the equivalent of an extra night as a "service fee," pushing up the total price for the stay and making it harder to compare places on price.

We're booking a trip at the moment and finding in many locations we're better off booking a hotel - they're often cheaper, closer to public transport, we can leave bags at reception etc.

I'm very happy with my Glove80. I started with a prototype 3D printed model last year: the creators are friends of mine, and I wrote the LED status display code for them. I also dropped the prototype down a flight of concrete stairs (sorry! It still works though).

I now have a production model with the white clicky keyswitches. Ultra happy with it. I've been using Kinesis Advantage2s for a shade over two decades - the same model DanielDK used for a long time. The Glove80 is simply better. I prefer the clicky keyswitches. Ergonomics are great. It's really repairable - everything is held together with screws (spare parts for my Advantage2s are not available, and the function keys are not repairable). Open firmware so you can make it do wacky stuff if the need arises. Small and light enough for travel - I should get a proper case but it's survived a fair few trips stuffed into my backpack.

Yeah, adaptation to new keyboard layouts is hard. I used a layout that mimicked my old Advantage2 - so I'd paid the cost to learn columnar already. I found the default Glove80 layout was better, but switching meant a month of confusing Ctrl and Shift. All better now!

Ha ha ha onboard anything

PCs of a sufficient vintage had so little logic on the HDD that you could swap out the MFM controller card in your PC for an RLL one and get 50% more storage. The modulation of the signal written to the disk was the job of the controller card, not the board on the HDD. Turn your 20MB HDD into a 30MB with a controller change and reformat? Mighty tempting.

Build yourself a Windows install USB stick with Rufus using its automatic ISO download system. When you write the image it has an option to make the installer create a local account and turn all the stupid prompts off.

You could retrofit a more modern computer in there. Probably even reverse engineer the radio system and replace it.

This would have been done by an enthusiastic high school student with both programming, electronics, maybe some RF knowledge too. Radio amateur? I find these stories kind of sad. Clever system built by someone talented, at a low cost -- replacement with a modern system costed in the millions. Those talented people still exist but they wouldn't get a look in with most RFPs.

Tailscale gets pretty good performance using Wireguard in userspace, with some very clever use of the tun/tap device like supporting TCP segmentation offload. Does (or could) tinc use the same tricks?

I made the mistake of buying one of the early ARM chromebooks (Samsung 13"). Great little machine. Hardware still OK.

But - Google themselves don't support Chrome that old. Google docs doesn't function correctly. Performance wise, it's fine, but the I bar showing the cursor location is in the wrong place.

It's ARM, and old ARM, so the only distro producing images is Postmarket OS. And those images can't drive the internal display properly.

Once bitten, back to x86 for future laptops. I'd consider something like the Pinebook that had Linux support from the beginning, but not something that didn't support normal Linux out of the box.

This was gold back in the DOS days. Software interrupts were used as a system call interface, both to DOS but also to various drivers. Getting documentation was tricky; the Interrupt List brought it all together.

My Kinesis Advantage collection is useless as the function keys die and they won't sell you spare parts any more. I got a MoErgo Glove80 (https://www.moergo.com/) which is designed by friends of mine.

It's great. Two independent halves so you could just put a track pad between them. Really low to the ground, the old Kinesii were always quite high off the desk. And THE FUNCTION KEYS ARE PROPER KEYS SO WON'T DIE AFTER 5-7 YEARS!!!!!

Also it's a great keyboard. I recommend the white (clicky) keyswitches.