I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • Blu-Ray USB drive and M-Discs is about the best you can get at present. Keep the drive unplugged when not in use, it’ll probably last 10-20 years in storage.

    Seeing as there hasn’t been much advance past Blu-ray, keep an eye out for something useful to replace it in the future, or at least get another drive when you notice them becoming scarce.


  • I don’t think there’s anything commercially available that can do it.

    However, as an experiment, you could:

    • Get a group of photos from a burst shot
    • Encode them as individual frames using a modern video codec using, eg VLC.
    • See what kind of file size you get with the resulting video output.
    • See what artifacts are introduced when you play with encoder settings.

    You could probably/eventually script this kind of operation if you have software that can automatically identify and group images.




  • Dave.@aussie.zonetoLinux@lemmy.mlCompanies that use desktop Linux
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    24 days ago

    how the IT team tries to justify being locked into Microsoft, and then telling me I could potentially become a point of vulnerability

    Because they can manage and control all the windows PCs , pushing updates automatically, restricting what users can do locally and on the network, they have monitoring tools and whatever antivirus and antimalware tools they have, and are able to easily manage and deploy/remove software and associated group licensing and so on and so forth.

    Meanwhile you’re a single user of unknown (to them) capabilities that they now have to trust with the rest of their system, basically.

    The first rule of corporate IT is, “control what’s on your network”. Your PC is their concern still, but they have no effective control over it. That’s why they’re being a bit of a pain in the ass about it.


  • True. Hence my caveat of “most cards”. If it’s got LEDs on the port, it’s quite likely to signal which speed it is at with those LEDs.

    I haven’t yet come across a gigabit card that won’t do 10Mbit (edit: switches are a different matter) but sometimes I’ve come across cards that fail to negotiate speeds correctly, eg trying for gigabit when they only actually have a 4 wire connection that can support 100Mbit. Forcing the card to the “correct” speed makes them work.


  • Dave.@aussie.zonetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlStop
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    1 month ago

    There was a series of books in the '80s where a systems programmer gets pulled through a portal into your typical magical world, good vs evil, etc.

    They subsequently look at the magical spells in use and realise they can apply Good Systems Programming Practices™ to it. And thus, with their knowledge of subroutines and parallel processing, they amplify their tiny innate magical abilities up to become a Pretty Good Magician™. So while all the rest of the magicians basically have to construct their spells to execute in a linear fashion, they’re making magical subroutines and utility functions and spawning recursive spells without halting checks and generally causing havoc.

    It’s quite a good allegory for modern times, where a select few build all the magic and the rest just have useful artefacts they use on a day to day basis with no idea how they work






  • Dave.@aussie.zonetoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldMy homelab had the stupidest outage ever
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    2 months ago
    1. Replace CMOS battery.
    2. Get small UPS.
    3. Discover that small UPS’s fail regularly, usually with cooked batteries.
    4. Add maintenance routine for UPS battery.
    5. Begin to wonder if this is really worth it when the rest of the house has no power during an outage.
    6. Get small generator.
    7. Discover that small generators also need maintenance and exercise.
    8. Decide to get a whole house battery backup a-la Tesla Powerwall topped off by solar and a dedicated generator.
    9. Spend 15 years paying this off while wondering if the payback was really worth it, because you can count on one hand the number of extended power outages in that time.
    10. In the end times a roving band of thugs comes around and kills you and strips your house of valuable technology, leaving your homelab setup behind and - sadly - without power. Your dream of unlimited availability has all been for nought.

    Conclusion: just replace the CMOS battery on a yearly basis during planned system downtime.


  • Have a look here at the ICMP source code in the Linux kernel at line 400. That is the ICMP reply code.

    At lines 433/434 you can see the collection of the source and destination MAC addresses from the incoming packet. The source is just lifted directly from the packet, the destination is done with a helper function that presumably looks at which interface it arrived on and returns the MAC address of that interface.

    Lines 441 onwards construct the reply packet and push it to the generic ICMP transmit function (which is a bit higher up in the source code), which then pushes it on to the network stack.

    Hope that gives you an idea of how it works internally! It’s really only a slightly more detailed version of the actual standard, there are a few checks to make sure that we are not exceeding network rate limits in the stack and etc, but it’s a quite simple bit of code.

    Added edit: it’s “simple” at this point because a lot of the work has already been done. The packet has arrived via the network stack, it has been determined to be an ICMP packet, and it was sent here to this function. There are already functions that send packets out via the network stack, so this chunk of code just builds an appropriate packet and hands it on to be sent.





  • What if I want to buy a cheese sandwich today with BTC?

    A cheese sandwich can remain the same fixed price in dollars for years, with only the relatively slow change in actual value due to inflation.

    I’ve seen BTC swing 10% in 24 hours. Does the cheese-sandwich-maker have to look up the rate this instant and calculate a spot price for me?

    Will they have more or less dollars at the end of the day, when they need to pay their bills and buy more cheese from their suppliers?

    “Just buy cheese from someone who takes BTC”, doesn’t help, it just kicks the can further down the road.

    “Just add a bit of a buffer in the price to take fluctuations into account”, means that I go buy a cheese sandwich with dollars from next door because it’s 50 cents cheaper for the same thing.

    As an investment vehicle, BTC is doing hot laps of the track (with occasional accidents), but until its volatility issues are sorted and it becomes “boring”, it’s not going anywhere as an actual currency.



  • I end up having to play twenty questions with chatgpt. For example, I’ve been asking it for code examples for ffmpeg mpeg4 encoding with C++.

    It will happily spit out completely non-working code, where the core part - feeding image frames to the encoder - works, but it doesn’t initialise or tidy up the encoding afterwards.

    Until I say, “hey this code doesn’t seem to work and creates corrupted files”, and then it’s like, “oh yeah you also need to do a bunch of other stuff, just like this”. Repeat as it slowly adds more and more pieces until finally you end up with something that actually works.

    Or it will happily dream up function names or mix python and C functions, or will refer to older APIs even when I’ve specifically said “use API version x.y” and so on and so forth.

    If I didn’t know enough about the subject already, I’d never be able to tease out the answer. So in a sense it’s a mostly useful reference, but it can’t be relied on to actually and consistently provide a result because it’s all statistics and fuzzy text generation behind the scenes, not actual knowledge.