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elFarto

229 karma · joined March 17, 2015

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elFarto··on Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen
The tax for electric cars is normally £200 after the first year or £20 for electric cars older than 2017.
elFarto··on Tell HN: Azure outage
We saw all incoming traffic to our app drop to zero at about 15:45. I wonder how long this one will take to fix.
elFarto··on A New ASN.1 API for Python
I was using the asn1bean Java library yesterday funnily enough. I'm sure it's fine for X.509 stuff, however lucky me got to use it with the more obscure parts of X.400. It's lacking support for COMPONENTS OF, and a bunch of other things that were likely deprecated from the ASN.1 spec a few decades ago.
elFarto··on A 15 pound computer to inspire young programmers (2011)
It wasn't the first computer they've made, or at least had their name on[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro

elFarto··on Japan’s love affair with the fax machine (2021)
Actually Unicode has something for character creation: 'IDS', or Ideographic Description Sequence. For example, the Chinese character for the word Biang[1] can be describe with:

⿺辶⿳穴⿲月⿱⿲幺言幺⿲長馬長刂心

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#Chinese_cha...

elFarto··on Godot 4.1
> What's now really missing is from sourceware binutils: fine grained control of the versions of the symbols to use while creating binaries.

I did actually prototype an idea for attempting to fix this. The tool would take a list of symbols from a text file and produce a (non-functioning) .so file that ld can link against. The newly created .so file can be injected in via an environment variable (LIBRARY_PATH iirc).

Since the list of symbols is just text, it's easily modified to contain only the one's that you want to target.

It's not a complicated tool to write, but there are some issues like how to reliably get ld to pick the correct .so file when you're overriding an existing on, LIBRARY_PATH is not 100% reliable. The other issue was if it's nessassary to recreate all the symbol types (like weak, etc..) exactly, I'm not sure exactly what's required for ld.

elFarto··on Microsoft denies data breach, theft of 30M customer accounts
I did receive a notification from Microsoft of a suspicous login about a week ago. The password for that account was a relatively strong one (upper/lower case, numbers and some symbols I think). It was an actual login, not just an attempt. I also don't use my Microsoft account for anything (no Windows/Xbox).

So I'm inclined to say that they have had a breach.

elFarto··on Finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in H.264 decoders [pdf]
> Those other processes with the tightest sandbox possible...

I guess I should get really around to getting the nvidia-vaapi-driver to work inside the decode sandbox, rather than requiring it to be disabled.

elFarto··on The Mod Archive
Funny coincidence, I was just watching a video on the history of trackers yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw
elFarto··on Vogtle Unit 3 starts nuclear fuel load
The B1M Youtube channel did a video[1] featuring this plant the other day which goes into some of the delays they had.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyQMNVSxbNo

elFarto··on Pine64 Announcing Pinebuds and Pinepods
Most kettles in the UK are 3kW, which is right at the limit of how much you can draw from a regular socket with a 13A fuse.
elFarto··on Ask HN: Looking for a Backup Email Relay
I found SMTP2GO has a pretty good free tier, at 1000/month. https://www.smtp2go.com
elFarto··on Music Tuned to 440 Hz versus 432 Hz and the Health Effects
Two videos infact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghUs-84NAAU
elFarto··on Unusual login activity was due to bug
I'm using Enpass, which mostly works fine. However, they've recently moved to a subscription model which is unfortunate, where-as I bought the Android version a while ago which gave me a 'Premium license'.
elFarto··on Fedora 36 Planning to Run Wayland by Default with Nvidia's Proprietary Driver
Regarding the video decode support in Firefox, I've got a working solution to that (a VA-API implementation backed by NVDEC). Just waiting for some Firefox patches to land to release it.

No sure it works on wayland though, not tested it there.

elFarto··on Mkinitcpio v31 and UEFI Stubs
I actually wrote a UEFI boot loader a few weeks ago that loads the kernel, initramfs and command line directly from a file on the root fs. It uses the efifs project to let it load directly off of an ext4 file system.

It's nice to use compared with grub, just edit a file and reboot. I've struggled to understand exactly how the fedora boot system is configured, and which command I need to run or file to edit to get it reconfigured.

elFarto··on Typed Pipes in Every Shell
Interesting. I've always wondered why there wasn't an addition in/out fd pair for communicating with the previous/next program in a chain of pipe, e.g:

  foo     |  bar
  STDOUT --> STDIN
  ALTIN  <-- ALTOUT
You could detected it by looking for specially number fd's open on program launch, or maybe an environment variable.
elFarto··on Ever Given Container Ship Fan Fiction
I'm really hoping they rename the ship, Ever Grounded.
elFarto··on A better Kubernetes from the ground up
There's Bridget[1], a non-overlay network for k8s that can use/create a VLAN over a network adapter (or just use the network adapter directly).

[1] https://github.com/kvaps/bridget

elFarto··on Emojis paved the way for UTF-8 everywhere
I'm not sure HN will even allow emojis:

Burrito: Taco:

edit No, it stripped those :'(.

elFarto··on The Heart of RISC-V Development Is Unmatched
The CPU only has 8 lanes of PCIe. It's using a PCIe switch to get the rest of the lanes. USB is also connected via the PCIe switch. The ethernet adapter is connected directly to the CPU though.
elFarto··on SiFive Announces HiFive Unmatched RISC-V PC for $665
Well, they've finally got the right form factor, but that price is...expensive, esp. considering it's not got much more than a Raspberry PI 4 Compute Module + I/O board which is about £110/$150. And the PI has a GPU built-in.

Likely that PCIe switch IC they've got in there is a fair chunk of that price.

elFarto··on Trying to Get an Nvidia GPU to Work with Raspberry Pi CM4
I doubt it's a limit of the CPU. It might be a limit of the method used to connect the PCIe component to the CPU (the SCB bus on the PI IIRC).

The device tree file does contain the range of memory to use for the PCI BAR, could it be as simple as increasing that number (the last value of the 'ranges' item I think) and rebuilding it? Seems unlikely, but might be worth a go. I'm uncertain how much the device tree file is describing the actual setup of hardware, and how much is used to actually configure the hardware.

The larger issue might be the complete lack of I/O space. Again this could be added in the device tree file, but who knows if the underlying device even supports it.

elFarto··on Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 on sale now from $25
I was thinking you could use a PCIe Non-Transparent Bridge IC to connect all the PI's together. However those sort of chips aren't cheap, and it would only be a ~5x speed increase over the Gigabit ethernet.
elFarto··on Cory Doctorow is fighting back against Amazon's Audible
The DRM on the Audible downloads is so easy to remove, then you can have it in whatever format you want:

   ffmpeg -activation_bytes <your magic bytes> -i inputfile.aax -vn -c:a copy output.m4a
You'll need to search around for how to find out your magic bytes, but it's not difficult.
elFarto··on Checked exceptions: Java’s biggest mistake (2014)
There's also this magic function:

  private static <T extends Throwable> T sneakyThrow(Throwable ex) throws T {
     throw (T) ex;
  }
Due to generic type erasure, the entire throw clause gets erased so it looks like this method doesn't throw anything.
elFarto··on Handmade HDMI capture card for Raspberry Pi and software
I came across a video of someone soldering a WLCSP package IC, with a soldering iron tip about as big as the chip itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edERx4x5eY0

elFarto··on Major Proposed Changes to Linux From Scratch
The 'ip' command only operates on runtime state (it doesn't save anything to disk).

NetworkManager used to be configured to save it's config to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts on Fedora, for backwards compatibility (see /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf).

/etc/network/interfaces is the Debian alternative to network-scripts. I don't use Debian based distros much so I don't know too much about that.

There's also systemd's networkd, which has it's own config in /etc/systemd/network.

Honestly I'm surprised you've got a Fedora machine with networkd. Usually NetworkManager has been the goto choice (and is what my Fedora 32 install has, although this install has been upgraded from Fedora 23 so take that for what it's worth).

Most of this mess comes from ifconfig (which again, only operated on runtime state), which people then wrote scripts around to automate the setup of the networks. Then ip came along to access networking features that ifconfig couldn't.

You best off sticking to NetworkManager (in my opinion) for desktop usage. It has a far better GUI integration than networkd (which is fine for server/embedded use).

elFarto··on UASP makes Raspberry Pi 4 disk IO 50% faster
I have a USB 3.0 Orico enclosure with a Pi4 and I had to pass '-d sat' to smartctl for it to work:

smartctl -a -d sat /dev/sda

Newer versions of smartmontools shouldn't need it, only the older one that Raspberry PI OS has.

elFarto··on Firefox 80 to Support VA-API Acceleration on X11
Unfortunately this won't be supported by the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. It requires them supporting DMA-BUF, which they can't due to those symbols being marked as GPL. Even then, they don't support VA-API.

There is a library that maps VA-API to VDPAU (their other video acceleration library), but that doesn't support DMA-BUF either.

I wouldn't hold your breath that this would ever be supported. It'll probably be easier to modify Firefox to use NVDEC directly, given that FFMpeg already supports that. But I don't think that'll be easy given their reliance on DMA-BUF for composition.

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