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minimaul

1,659 karma · joined May 16, 2018

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minimaul··on How iTunes Is Changing on PC
I can’t do the most basic of tasks on Apple Music on my Windows PC - I literally can’t play music!

I’ve tried:

- redownloading the app

- deleting all local state in the Music folder

- logging out of my account, and logging back in

- deauthorising my PC, then reauthorising it

It just never starts playback, no matter what I do!

Cider works fine. The Music apps on my phone and Mac work fine. Very weird.

edit: plus, they have a lot of problems with music artists getting mixed together - if an artist has a common name, say “Ray”, you’ll see music from other artists with the same name mixed in. Apple’s support totally disclaim responsibility and said I should contact the record label to get them to correct it. This is absolutely ridiculous, and the record label predictably doesn’t care. It ruins recommendations :/

minimaul··on WTF Ubiquiti
TP Link Omada works surprisingly well too.
minimaul··on Nintendo Switch Emulator: Progress Report December 2023
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/17/high-court-q...

Prosecutions are basically unheard of, but it’s not legal nonetheless.

minimaul··on Nintendo Switch Emulator: Progress Report December 2023
And not true - for example, format shifting in the UK is illegal. You can't legally rip a CD, DVD or Bluray here, let alone a console game.
minimaul··on Inside the Steam Deck's APU
And in contrast, I find Intel support to be very buggy, certainly on Linux.
minimaul··on British Post Office Scandal
Sadly not available in the UK - I'd quite happily take that as an option :/
minimaul··on British Post Office Scandal
I wish Ian Hislop would drop his opposition to doing a sensible online version - I'd happily subscribe for access to the same content posted online, but when I get it posted through my door I find I don't read it.
minimaul··on Subject-First Commit Messages
I like a style like:

codebase section: short summary

longer description if necessary

eg: cocoaui: fix images being incorrectly aligned on high dpi displays

We were calculating the position of the image in logical pixels, but not converting that to actual display pixels for rendering.

I think it's a really nice style that makes commit messages really easy to scan in a short log, and lets you ignore commits easily that don't touch the area you're interested in

minimaul··on Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
Laptops have advantages though - for a remote team, they're often a lot more convenient. A lot of people don't have space for a full permanent desk setup for a work desktop on top of their personal use - UK houses aren't huge!

Desktops work if you have an office, but our dev team is entirely remote. But you can't take a desktop into a meeting, or take a desktop on the train to our office for in-person meetings/events.

minimaul··on Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
These are fair points, and definitely a rough spot.

Eg at work we use M1/M2 macs and dev on those using docker - so that’s a Linux VM essentially with some nice tooling wrapped around it.

We certainly see differences - mostly around permissions (as docker for Mac doesn’t really enforce any access checks on files on the host), but we also mostly deploy to ARM Linux on AWS.

We went Mac only from a mix of Linux, Windows and Mac as we found the least overall friction there for our developers - Windows, even with WSL, had lots of problems, including performance issues. Linux we had issues finding nice laptops, and more support issues (developers are often not *nix experts!). Mac was a nice middle ground in the end.

minimaul··on Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
Being Mac only can be an advantage - I’ve been on both sides of trying to maintain & use non-trivial dev environments and the more OSes you bring in for people to work on, the harder it gets.

Bringing in Windows or Linux has a set up cost and a maintenance cost that may exclude it from even being considered.

Edit: plus, Macs are ARM, other options are inevitably x86. So it’s also two CPU architectures to maintain support for, on top of OS specific quirks - and even if you use eg Docker, you still have a lot of OS specific quirks in play :/

minimaul··on 2024 could be the year the PC dumps x86 for Arm, thanks to Windows 12
https://www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-secr... Is very interesting reading on the x86 port of Mac OS.
minimaul··on 2024 could be the year the PC dumps x86 for Arm, thanks to Windows 12
I have a 35W AMD 5750GE (zen 3, 8c16t), along with M1, M1 Max and M2 Pro devices - the AMD processor and M1/M2 chips trade blows depending on workload.

It’s absolutely possible to get x86_64 to the same power/performance envelope as apple’s M series chips :)

minimaul··on Advent of Code 2023 is nigh
Yeah - this is what happened to me too.

I deleted my Reddit account because I don't want to support Reddit any longer, so I lose access to anything I used "Sign in with Reddit" for - it's subtle lock in that tends to only hit issues months later.

It's why I never use social media logins for anything that gives me the choice not to.

minimaul··on Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs
This!

Adobe used to bundle Chrome by default with Acrobat Reader for instance. - this was how a LOT of people got Chrome the first time.

minimaul··on What has changed in CPU cores in M3 chips?
I remember getting this jump accidentally - I bought a M1 Mac Mini for porting stuff too and for testing, and building on it was twice as fast as my 2018 15" i7. And it was silent doing it. Pity it was only the 8GB base spec, because it would have made an amazing main machine!
minimaul··on Last Post, Please Read
Thanks for this reminder, it’s a feature I didn’t know about!
minimaul··on The Apple Network Server's all-too-secret weapon (featuring PPC Toolbox)
The huge list of projects from that era of Apple really shows how aimless they were.

I remember at the time how more and more irrelevant they seemed compared to the Wintel behemoth, and that really didn’t start to turn around until the G3 iMac, and later the iPod.

minimaul··on Apple has a memory problem and we're all paying for it
At work, the m1/m2 airs are exactly what we buy for most employees. The base spec is absolutely fine for most of our staff, and they’ll get 3+ years out of them.

Edit: devs get 32G pros though, and we loathe the extra RAM pricing on those. Cheap compared to the cost of a developer, though!

minimaul··on What the QWAC? An EV Certificate all over again
This sounds a lot like CAA records! https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6844
minimaul··on I Know What You Download on BitTorrent
My UK based ISP provides static IPs by default (v4 & v6!). There's a few aiming at smaller niches that do.

We're relatively unique compared to a lot of countries though, where we have an infrastructure provider that serves basically the whole country with very good to tolerable internet (mostly) - Openreach.

Any ISP can sign up to use Openreach's network & a backhaul provider for providing services, and they usually get handover from their backhaul provider in London. Means we have a lot more small/niche ISPs that can still cover the entire country, and provide unique features - like static IPs or even blocks of static IPs.

There are alternative providers too (lots of 'alt-nets', and virgin media) - they're mostly not so open, though.

minimaul··on I Know What You Download on BitTorrent
Only 5 entries this time, so I favour poisoned data, personally.

edit: it always shows random stuff every time this one comes up!

minimaul··on I Know What You Download on BitTorrent
No, I have my own /32, /28, and /29 of IPv4, along with a /48 of IPv6 :)

Definitely dedicated just to me.

minimaul··on I Know What You Download on BitTorrent
I'm the only user on this internet connection, I am pretty restrictive with what I run, my Unifi controller shows no unexpected devices in the last month (and that covers the time window the site claims), and my librenms graphs of my router's interfaces don't show any traffic spikes at the times the site claims that a torrent client was last seen.

edit: and I've been the only user of this static IP for a decade at this point.

I'd say that's pretty conclusive?

minimaul··on I Know What You Download on BitTorrent
This site is actually pretty useless imo - I have a static IP, I've had it for years, and I'm the only user of the IP.

It shows me as recently torrenting a ton of content that I've never even heard of, and definitely haven't done.

Either someone's poisoning the data at trackers (TPB used to do this?), or they're just making stuff up...

minimaul··on Post Mortem on Cloudflare Control Plane and Analytics Outage
> Our team was all-hands-on-deck and had worked all day on the emergency, so I made the call that most of us should get some rest and start the move back to PDX-04 in the morning. That decision delayed our full recovery, but I believe made it less likely that we’d compound this situation with additional mistakes.

I liked this - the human element is underemphasised often in these kinds of reports, and trying to fix a major outage while overly tired is only going to add avoidable mistakes.

I don’t know how it would work for an org of Cloudflare’s size, but I know we have plans for a significant outage for staff to work/sleep in shifts, to try to avoid that problem as well.

Issue there is that you need a way to hand over the current state of the outage to new staff as they wake up/come online.

minimaul··on Setting up a MikroTik 10 Gbps Switch the first time
I’ve always had a big preference for RouterOS over SwOS - I think it’s a lot more flexible.

I do like the Mikrotik switches though (and their kit in general) - affordable, decent feature set, reasonable performance.

edit: they’re not flawless, but as far as prosumer or small/medium business kit goes… very reasonable.

minimaul··on Why you should probably be using SQLite
I did handwave it a bit, yes :)

What concerns me more than anything with a process like LiteFS is the 'unknown unknowns' perspective of what can go wrong - whereas I think MySQL and Postgres have generally more understood failure modes.

I also think that a lot of people in middle sized projects where they're not big enough to have a dedicated database team, etc will end up using some kind of managed database solution - something like Amazon Aurora, or RDS, or even someone like DigitalOcean's managed database product? Those generally take care of sensible configuration, backup, and failover at least.

edit: FWIW, I've done both ways - self-managed MySQL & Postgres clusters and managed services. You're right - getting MySQL in particular set up to be crash-safe etc requires careful documentation reading, and it's very frustrating that default installs of MySQL don't come already configured like this. In my eyes, safe-but-slow is a much better default than fast-but-risky :/

minimaul··on FPGA N64
Their shipping/fulfilment is utterly terrible. Their shipping is exceptionally expensive for the size & weight they’re shipping, and allows for no selection of courier.

Niche audio companies (eg Schiit) do this infinitely better!

minimaul··on Intel Launches Intel Core 14th Gen Desktop Processors for Enthusiasts
You're right, this is much harder to find reputable numbers for :/

https://www.guru3d.com/review/intel-core-i7-13700k-review/pa... is the closest I can find, and it's whole PC power draw - and it has them all fairly even. I suspect it's dominated by other components like GPU, though?

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