jonah-archive

Hey -- I don't see another way to get in touch with you, so advance apologies for the comment spam. In a past comment you mentioned that you used to run the Ricochet modem wikispace and have a bunch of documentation/etc -- perhaps I can host them on the Internet Archive? Particularly interested in the Garage Gateway stuff, I've never seen the code and I have an otherwise working Ethernet Radio & pair of poletops I'd love to get properly running. Email's in my profile if you'd like to get in touch.

A favorite HN comment of mine from a few years back (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21590482):

> Outside of fundamentally better workflow improvements, most professional fields don't randomly change their tools. If you gave a professional artist a new pencil that had to be gripped differently for no reason, they'd throw it in the trash.

>

> But in software, we tolerate buggy tools that change all the time for no discernible reason. We tolerate software that simultaneously targets professionals and casual users, serving both segments poorly. We tolerate software that can't be customized or adapted for specific workflows. It's tough to put into words, but if you watch a musician or a painter interact with their tools, there's a very clear difference that emerges, and over time you start to realize how much better all of their stuff is.

>

> In most professional artistic settings, workflow changes only happen because they have a clear benefit -- drawing from your shoulder instead of your wrist, changing your embouchure if you play an instrument. And even in those fields, it's generally accepted that over time people will end up with very specialized setups that are very consistent and refined and that remain constant for years and years.

>

> Only in the software industry would someone tell me that my professional tools should change because change is inherently good. Only in commercial software would an elegant, consistent interface like Markdown that allowed me to build up decades of muscle memory until my computer was an extension of my fingers and I didn't need to think about the way I typed -- only in software would that be considered a bad thing.

"He told me that in 1886 he had invented an original system of numbering and that in a very few days he had gone beyond the twenty-four-thousand mark. He had not written it down, since anything he thought of once would never be lost to him. His first stimulus was, I think, his discomfort at the fact that the famous thirty-three gauchos of Uruguayan history should require two signs and two words, in place of a single word and a single sign. He then applied this absurd principle to the other numbers. In place of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Maximo Perez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Railroad; other numbers were Luis Melian Lafinur, Olimar, sulphur, the reins, the whale, the gas, the caldron, Napoleon, Agustin de Vedia. In place of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a kind of mark; the last in the series were very complicated ... I tried to explain to him that this rhapsody of incoherent terms was precisely the opposite of a system of numbers."

(Borges, Funes the Memorious: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Borges_FunesT... )

Sorry folks! One of our datacenters lost power for a couple hours. We're fairly redundant across sites but in the case of an ephemeral event, it can make more sense for us to wait it out than to fully fail over/etc. As we like to say, the data is safe, the library is just temporarily closed.

I totally agree with this. One of the strengths of the original Dune series is how willing Frank Herbert is to leave things unsaid -- it's a complex universe that has lost a lot of knowledge, just like ours! It covers timespans that admit archaeology! The idea that there's an accessible succinct narrative arc that ties the story up in a neat little bow is antithetical to the strengths of the original series, in my opinion.

IMHO the Dune Encyclopedia (written in collaboration with Frank Herbert) does a much better job elucidating aspects of the Dune Universe in an interesting way than Brian's books do -- there's a narrative thread that weaves through the last three of Frank's books that is really, really present and which Brian's books set aside for an alternative -- and to my view, much less satisfying -- interpretation of late-stage events in the series.

re the advice in that post -- I completely agree but I would say that if you enjoy God Emperor (I do, deeply), between that and Heretics go read _The Dune Encyclopedia_, which is a hard-to-find paperback but an easy-to-find PDF written as an in-universe encyclopedia set after God Emperor. Yes, some things in it are contradicted by the remaining two books, but it adds such a powerful structure to the extant universe in a remarkably satisfying way.

!! I need to check this out. A friend gave me an old Lytro Illum with a bad test firmware awhile back that I never got around to doing anything with, maybe there's some possibility here.

We're having a contest to remix public domain material that will be judged at our in-person Public Domain Day party on January 20th! Check it out: http://blog.archive.org/2022/11/30/public-domain-day-2023-re...

Dave Arnold tried this and was not impressed: https://cookingissues.com/2009/06/11/maillard-pipe-potatoes/

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As you can see from the photo, the potato turns a dark mahogany all the way through (cause it is 355° all the way through). Even the water turns mahogany.

This experiment taught me that not all Maillard reactions produce good flavors. The Maillard pipe potato tastes awful and smells acrid. Damn it’s bad—but it’s instructive.

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ah, found it! Page 88 of this PDF: https://www.ardent-tool.com/NIC/3c5x9b_Technical_Reference.p...

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It is the user’s responsibility (with help from the configuration program) to avoid configuring the boot PROM on the adapter in such a way that the system is not able to boot. If this does occur, you can manually jump the Test Via using a #2 pencil. The Test Via forces the adapter into test mode, which disables the boot PROM so that the adapter configuration program can be run. You must cover the designated area thoroughly with the pencil mark.

Test mode forces the adapter not to perform the Automatic Initialization sequence, which means the EEPROM is not read and the adapter is left in the following configuration:

■ Address Configuration register = 0000h

■ Resource Configuration register = 0000h

■ Product ID register = 0000h

Test mode also shortens the ID sequence to 8 bytes (first is still FFh and last is 69h) and forces it to the active state (that is, the adapter is active and will respond to I/O cycles at base address 0200h even without going through the ID sequence).

After you are done, thoroughly erase the pencil mark.

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Pretty much -- IIRC connecting the pad bypasses the internal EEPROM and loads a default configuration, and from there you can read/write the EEPROM as well.

I had something like this happen once -- a company I was at had these old RAID arrays that we kept limping along while we waited for budget to buy ones from a company that hadn't ceased to exist, and at some point a disk failed in some way that caused the RAID system to lose its internal partition table information (to my recollection... it's been awhile).

I could still access the block devices, but couldn't instantiate the logical volumes, and dumping dd chunks showed that there was data there... so I wrote some code to scan the disk for ext2 magic numbers, and once I found them did some math on paper to find the partition boundaries and very... carefully... recreate them. I have a photo of the piece of paper here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jedwards/4494268626/

That phenomenon is the source of one of my all-time favorite man page entries: https://web.archive.org/web/20210421224904/https://nixdoc.ne...

     ep0: 3c509 in test mode. Erase pencil mark!  This means that someone has
     scribbled with pencil in the test area on the card.  Erase the pencil
     mark and reboot.  (This is not a joke).

It's the E1 pad between the barcode and the empty BIOS socket: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Com_3c509#/media/File:3Com_3C...

Canonical link is at https://archive.org/details/jonah-edwards-presentation -- I'm also always happy to answer any questions folks might have about it if I see them.

etymologically, the term Schmoo or Shmoo (typically based on the characteristic shape) originates with the cartoon character popularized by Al Capp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmoo

A favorite example is the shape of a budding haploid yeast cell, known in the literature as a shmoo (though as that wikipedia page will indicate, there are a lot of other delightful schmoo/shmoo eponyms): https://web.archive.org/web/20071111122821/http://discoverma...

A slightly hyperbolic but technically accurate description of knitting I once received that blew my mind a little was "tie this string into a knot in the shape of a sock".

Many (many) years ago I worked for the Earth & Space Sciences department at the University of Washington (setting up some of the first GPU farms! If only I'd known) and the lab where Minze Stuiver calibrated the Carbon-14 (and O18 and St90) timelines was in the sub-sub-sub-basement -- a single room with a descending spiral staircase in a storage room next to where they kept the ice cores. The facility was a kiln built from lead bricks made from the keel of a boat sunk before the modern atomic era.

A photo of the apparatus with the lead to the right: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jedwards/2281494063/

and a close-up of the kiln: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jedwards/2282285754/

IIRC a year or two after I left, they filled the whole space with concrete to build the foundation for a new neighboring building. They found someone who wanted the lead and bucket-brigaded them out of there, which must have been quite a day (the bricks are about 25lb each, and the size of a normal brick)

I guess a more direct analog to the original link would be https://archive.org/download/FDNYforcibleEntryReferenceGuide... , which will take you directly to the PDF and provides the load-balanced benefits.

I linked to the item's main page, which has other download options for different e-readers, metadata, etc, in addition to the bookreader interface (which provides additional options like Read Aloud and Search Inside (and it's open source! https://github.com/internetarchive/bookreader ).

It looks like this is a link directly to the PDF on one of our servers. You can link to e.g. https://archive.org/details/FDNYforcibleEntryReferenceGuide and it will serve from one of the servers that can source the item even if this particular server is offline, and will be valid in the future if the item is ever moved off of this server.

For the curious, here's the satellite view: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.0334984,-115.4461277,1423m/d...

True, though I'm not always passing through something that will give me a shell (often enough that this generally works, though)

Not quite -- I want something that will show me a hostname or instantiating command from the SSH escape sequence subsystem (e.g. if I'm N SSH sessions deep and hit ~~~., where will the kill land).

This seems like the right place to ask: does anyone know of a hack or modification that will e.g. dump hostname on a ~? -- so many times I'm in a few layers deep and likely to miscount.

So, roughly speaking, many of these problems arise because Linux is a weak end system in an RFC1122 sense (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1122.html). This is by design, not a bug, etc -- the "meaning" is roughly that to Linux, IP addresses belong to the kernel, not the interfaces themselves. This is the right way to think about the problem.

There are a number of features available to Make It Work The Way You Want but they're often nonobvious. As a sibling comment notes, you can set the arp_announce and arp_ignore (and arp_filter) sysctls to instruct the kernel to answer or not answer for arp requests based on interface specifics (the other arp_ sysctls are related to gratuitous arp sending and receipt).

As in this post, you can use the rp_filter sysctl to change the reverse path filtering (as in RFC3704).

Additionally, you can use iproute2 rules and route tables to enforce outbound paths if you want a node to have multiple interfaces on the same subnet without arp confusion.

I would recommend that everyone go check out Sian Bahram’s 2016 talk on computing while blind. At around 6:30 he specifically addresses how inaccessible HN is to a visually impaired user: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1r55efei5c

Generally speaking, BGP route propagation does not include a TTL cache invalidation mechanism (i.e. routes are never invalidated and rechecked -- the BGP session's ongoing existence validates already learned routes and conducts the addition or deletion in-band -- if heard, "TTL" in the context of BGP means that routes should not be propagated onward, like TTL for IP packets).

Another of Terry Bisson's short stories, "Bears Discover Fire", is an absolute gem, and free to read online: https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fi...

One of my all-time favorite examples of an alternate communication channel is when, their URL banned from in-game chat, gold sellers spelled it out in corpses on a hillside: https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/2y2vb3/back_in_wrath_g...

Our numbers as of the end of 2021: https://archive.org/web/petabox.php

    4 data centers, 745 nodes, 28,000 spinning disks
    Wayback Machine: 57 PetaBytes
    Books/Music/Video Collections: 42 PetaBytes
    Unique data: 99 PetaBytes
    Total used storage: 212 PetaBytes