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mm0lqf

17 karma · joined November 3, 2022

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mm0lqf··on Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
theres the well known inherent problem with the graphite at UK AGR reactors which could be very bad (can crack or misshape in such a way that the control rods or fuel rods cant be moved), not to mention the boiler cracking at the weldseams, they only mitigated this at some sites because they all are slightly different in design, they basically ignored it in the ones which didnt yet have it for decades ,the regulator ended up finding exactly that lessons learnt on older reactors were not being applied to newer ones which had the same problems inherent to them
mm0lqf··on MacBook Neo and how the iPad should be
this. it took me 2 years to notice my T14s even had a touchscreen

its useless

flexes too much to actually use it

mm0lqf··on You Want to Visit the UK? You Better Have a Google Play or App Store Account
EU and US do the same to the UK
mm0lqf··on New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
doesn't really mean anything, Mac randomly autocorrects dashes to em-dashes (caused me a world of pain once when it did that in a GUID in a config file)
mm0lqf··on The Falkirk Wheel
> My understanding is A roads in the UK are much like USA interstates.

Not in Scotland, some of them aren't dualled (just a single carriageway in each direction), narrow, windey, full of terrible potholes and animals you can hit etc... its a 5-6 hour drive in reality

source: Live in Edinburgh

mm0lqf··on DIY NAS: 2026 Edition
Tape drives are generally SAS so you will need a controller card

I've got a HP StorageWorks Ultrium 3000 drive (It's LTO-5 format) connected to one (LSI SAS SAS9300-4i), in my NAS/file server (HP Z420 workstation chassis). Don't go lower than LTO-5 as you will want LTFS support.

About £150 all in for the card and drive (including SFF-8643 to SFF-8482 cables etc..) on EBay

Tapes are 1.5TB uncompressed, and about £10/each on Ebay, you'll also want to pick up a cleaning cartridge.

I use this and RDX (1TB cartridges are 2-4 times the price, but drives are a lot cheaper, and SATA/USB3, and you can use them like a disk) for offline backup of stuff at home.

mm0lqf··on GNU Screen 5.0 Released
when I worked in the embedded software industry long ago, I spent lots and lots of time connecting over serial ports to dev boards, using software like Minicom. Being able to do that in screen itself would be neat. Tmux does it.
mm0lqf··on Puget Systems' Perspective on Intel CPU Instability Issues
Was common with AMD CPUs in the past, the Ryzen 1000 range had a widespread problem where many made in 2017 would randomly segfault from time to time under Linux, it was a whole drama, and you had to RMA them until you got lucky.
mm0lqf··on Psion 5mx Emulator
Probably lots, my first Palm was a TX in 2006, and I remember it was ~£300. I used it with a IBM T60 which was was I recall £1200+

I had an IBM R30 before that in ~2000 and recall it being ~£1500 as well.

Laptops weren't cheap!

mm0lqf··on Morse code is designed so that you can decode it with a binary tree
In real morse messages, you aren't always sending full words, most of the time you are sending prosigns (abbreviations) - Think like early SMS chat. "DE" means this is, you hand over with a "K", "SK" means you are going offline, "HIHI" is like LOL, "XYL" means significant other, etc...

Things like Q get used a lot in Morse for example (look up Q-Codes) compared to real English.

So, traditional letter frequencies are not applicable (Also because the code itself is language-agnostic)

Using a tree like this to decodee also sucks from a speed perspective. You need to learn the sounds /not/ count the dits/dahs if you want to get a good word per minute.

source: radio ham who knows morse and can do 20+ wpm.

A lot of weird stuff in morse and things also comes from older comms methods like Semaphore - The reason we have M in Scottish callsigns for ham radio is because M is the saltire (Scottish flag) symbol in Sempahore, for example.