That is some definite bullshit. I am both a software developer and a controls engineer. That stuff irritates me to no end, but I also understand how these systems can fail. They will always protect themselves over the user/customer, so thus we suffer. Hell, I used to do Amazon projects on the controls/industrial side. Amazon had their own software systems that they built/stole running things overall, so thankfully I didn’t have to deal with trying to make them happy on the software side too. I much prefer programming the machinery.

Wtf. They must have screwed something up with a software update. Worst case you charge back, but that might get your account banned…

I always take it to my UPS store down the road instead of boxing it up and sending it out. You don’t package the item up at all. They scan the barcode on my phone and take the item. Done, return processed. If they steal it afterwards, not my problem since the code was scanned and you get a notification/receipt. They have a lot of strange locations you can take it to, including random big box stores.

No idea about which specific type of business it is, but keeping that history long term can have some benefits, especially to outside people. Some government agencies require companies to keep records for a certain number of years. It could also help out in legal investigations many years in the future and show any auditors you keep good records. From a historical perspective, it can be matched to census, birth, and death certificates. A lot of generational history gets lost.

Companies also just hoard data. Never know what will be useful later. shrug

Me too! I have used it for a couple other non-rpi devices in the past as well. It is super simple and works on my Mac. I haven’t even looked at other utilities in years.

Everything runs 24/7, but now I am thinking about theoretical power saving modes. Besides any built in power saving whatever (a little clueless), you could always throttle the CPU more. Not sure if it would be worth it without testing with a power meter.

Sorry, didn’t make it home until today and not sure if you get notifications on edits. You will need a monitor and keyboard hooked up to your server as you will not have ssh access until the network config is “fixed”. I would do the below with the GPU removed, so you know 100% that your networking config is correct before mucking about further.

Step 1 - Create 99-default.link file

Add a /etc/systemd/network/99-default.link with the below contents.

# SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT-0
 #
 # This config file is installed as part of systemd.
 # It may be freely copied and edited (following the MIT No Attribution license).
 #
 # To make local modifications, one of the following methods may be used:
 # 1. add a drop-in file that extends this file by creating the
 #    /etc/systemd/network/99-default.link.d/ directory and creating a
 #    new .conf file there.
 # 2. copy this file into /etc/systemd/network or one of the other paths checked
 #    by systemd-udevd and edit it there.
 # This file should not be edited in place, because it'll be overwritten on upgrades.

 [Match]
 OriginalName=*

 [Link]
 NamePolicy=mac
 MACAddressPolicy=persistent

Step 2 - Reboot and find new name of NIC that will be based on MAC

I forget if you have to reboot, but I am going to assume so. At this point, you can get the new name of your nic card and fix your network config.

1. ip link should list all of your nic devices, both real and virtual. Here is how mine looks like for reference, with the MAC obfuscated:

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
2: enxAABBCCDDEEFF: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq master vmbr0 state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
3: vmbr0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

Step 3 - Fix your network config and restart network manager

You will need to edit your /etc/network/interfaces file so the correct card is used.

1. Make a copy of /etc/network/interfaces, just in case you mess something up.
2. sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces (or whatever text editor makes you happy) It will need to look something like below. I have to have DHCP turned on for mine, so your config likely uses static. Really all you need to do is change wherever it says enp yada yada to the enxAABBCCDDEEFF you identified above.

 source /etc/network/interfaces.d/*

 auto lo
 iface lo inet loopback

 iface enxAABBCCDDEEFF inet manual

 auto vmbr0
 iface vmbr0 inet dhcp
 #iface vmbr0 inet static
 #address 192.168.5.100/20
 #gateway 192.168.0.1
     bridge-ports enxAABBCCDDEEFF
     bridge-stp off
     bridge-fd 0

3. Restart your networking service. You shouldn’t need to reboot. sudo systemctl restart networking.service

Step 4 - Profit?

Hopefully at this point you have nework access again. Check the below, do some ping tests, and if it doesn’t work, double check that you edited the interfaces file correctly.

1. sudo systemctl status networking.service will show you if anything went wrong and hopefully show that everything is working correctly
2. ip -br addr show should show that the interface is up now.

lo               UNKNOWN        127.0.0.1/8 ::1/128
enxAABBCCDDEEFF  UP
vmbr0            UP             192.168.5.100/20 

At this point, if all is well, I would reboot anyways, just to make sure. If you add any GPUs, sata drives, other PCI device, disable/enable wifi/bt in the BIOS, or anything else that changes the PCI numbering, you don’t have to worry about your NIC changing.

I am not at home, but what I did was change the 99-default.link file. I found this from the two pages below. https://wiki.debian.org/NetworkInterfaceNames#CUSTOM_SCHEMES_USING_.LINK_FILES https://wiki.debian.org/NetworkInterfaceNames

Basically, by doing this, your nic cards will be forcibly named using the mac address:

#/etc/systemd/network/99-default.link
 [Match]
 OriginalName=*

 [Link]
 NamePolicy=mac
 MACAddressPolicy=persistent

Afterwards, you will need to reboot and then update your network config file to use the correct names. I don’t ever change the network config with the GUI in proxmox as it has wrecked it too many times. I will update this reply again later with some more information on what to do.

I changed my settings to name nic cards by mac address instead of the enumeration as I got sick of the name changing when I would add/remove pci devices.

In a similar train of thought, have you tried having (good) orange juice with Mexican food? I used to love having it once in a while when we brought home Rosa’s. Never did at a restaurant. Not a complete heathen. 😁

Like other posts, Factorio. You will lose sleep. Set timers…

Proton and Vulkan make most things easy-ish if you are using Steam. Note that there is a little properties button on the game page that you probably need to use to force it to use Proton so it will install. Proton DB is your friend. Lutris + Wine is pretty good too. Proton is just Wine with enhancements.

You may find Helldivers a lot of fun too, especially if you can play with friends. It is suitably ridiculous in the best way and is sort of human vs aliens/robots. All of the humans (us) play on co-op teams to bring Democracy to the universe. There is a game master from the company that makes it that is leading the war against us. Like I said, suitably ridiculous. Most of my friends are playing it nightly and it will be a big part of our LAN party this weekend.

I usually look at their GitHub or what have you to see if there are packages or instructions there. I have been able to solve most issues this way. Otherwise I see how much of a bitch it will be to compile from source. Depending what it is, I also check to see if there is a docker image instead.

I am so jealous. Those assholes will not run it to my apartment. Landlord tried. The entire neighborhood behind and next to us has it. I am just done and fed up with Spectrum. Maybe I should call and bitch.

The whole thing is fucked all to hell and we have a whole bunch of people afraid of the other gender perpetuating this nightmare of violence, abuse, unhinged reality, and inequality. These violent delights, have violent ends.

However, we can choose to see the beauty in the world. We can love each other, laugh, teach, revel in the mysteries, and hold each other in comfort. There is so much we have achieved as a species, but we are also so good at holding ourselves back. Sometimes, we just need to crash in to each other. To get some kind of connection, even if it is the wrong one.

There is so much more to say, but painting the universe takes time. Go. Be beautiful my friend, and good night.

I am getting flashbacks on dealing with SAP “inspired” software that looked worse than that bottom image. I am glad my new company does not use that garbage. It was especially depressing to see how SAP entirely ruined Concur.

The only way I learned how to type growing up was from instant messaging my friends. All of those ridiculous typing programs didn’t help. One random thing that might help is a different keyboard, or, different profile keycaps!

I love me some mechanical keyboards and I like the tactile feedback from “brown” switches. The last one I built I found out about the wonderful world of keycaps, specifically keycap profiles. I fell in love with MT3s as they are a little “cupped”. My fingers sort of fall into the scoops and get enough tactile feedback to stay on the key and they just feel nice. I haven’t looked at cheaper membrane keyboards in years, but I remember you could pull off the keycaps and put different ones on those, but I have no idea how they are now.

If you are interested in mechanical keyboards, you can usually buy a sample kit that has all of the different switches and you may be able to find something similar for keycaps.

I guess what I am trying to say is a different keyboard, or even keycaps, may help her learn. Though I do realize that this stuff is expensive too. As someone who is on a keyboard everyday, it became a tool to invest in.

https://drop.com/buy/drop-mito-mt3-cyber-custom-keycap-set

This. Ignition isn’t that expensive and is cross platform. You can even run it in docker. I understand wanting free, but when it comes to industry, sometimes paying a few bucks for less hell later down the line is worth it.

I gave Manjaro a shot recently and Bluetooth was 90% unusable for anything but my mouse. Keyboard? Nope. Headset? Nope. Other headset? Nope. Bluetooth speaker? Nope. Unfortunately, it is a brand new Intel motherboard, so I can’t even get WiFi as athk12 or whatever isn’t really done. I was shocked I could get bluetooth to work at all. Sound wasn’t that great through a USB headset either, but then I could at least hear people. For me, I can really only use trackballs now and the USB port on the mouse is for charging only. Bluetooth compatibility is very very important to me and it still being shitty on any system in 2024 blows my damn mind.

Only other potential issue would be something with how Proxmox is doing passthrough, but I had just as much trouble pairing with Debian underneath through the terminal as I did with the Manjaro VM. On another note, the GPU passthrough is amazing and I had a good time playing games for the first time on Linux. This machine was never intended for gaming, but I thought it would be fun to take a server to a LAN party. Sliger case for the win! Just a 3U.

I don’t know what everyone else’s case is, but my work provides a laptop. None of my home machines have Windows, but the work laptop does.

Image transcription. Pasted from source, Reddit Post

Despite having just 5.8% sales, over 38% of bug reports come from the Linux community

Article

38% of my bug reports come from the Linux community My game - ΔV: Rings of Saturn (shameless plug) - is out in Early Access for two years now, and as you can expect, there are bugs. But I did find that a disproportionally big amount of these bugs was reported by players using Linux to play. I started to investigate, and my findings did surprise me.

Let’s talk numbers. Percentages are easy to talk about, but when I read just them, I always wonder - what is the sample size? Is it small enough for the percentage to be just noise? As of today, I sold a little over 12,000 units of ΔV in total. 700 of these units were bought by Linux players. That’s 5.8%. I got 1040 bug reports in total, out of which roughly 400 are made by Linux players. That’s one report per 11.5 users on average, and one report per 1.75 Linux players. That’s right, an average Linux player will get you 650% more bug reports.

A lot of extra work for just 5.8% of extra units, right?

Wrong. Bugs exist whenever you know about them, or not. Do you know how many of these 400 bug reports were actually platform-specific? 3. Literally only 3 things were problems that came out just on Linux. The rest of them were affecting everyone - the thing is, the Linux community is exceptionally well trained in reporting bugs. That is just the open-source way. This 5.8% of players found 38% of all the bugs that affected everyone. Just like having your own 700-person strong QA team. That was not 38% extra work for me, that was just free QA!

But that’s not all. The report quality is stellar. I mean we have all seen bug reports like: “it crashes for me after a few hours”. Do you know what a developer can do with such a report? Feel sorry at best. You can’t really fix any bug unless you can replicate it, see it with your own eyes, peek inside and finally see that it’s fixed.

And with bug reports from Linux players is just something else. You get all the software/os versions, all the logs, you get core dumps and you get replication steps. Sometimes I got with the player over discord and we quickly iterated a few versions with progressive fixes to isolate the problem. You just don’t get that kind of engagement from anyone else.

Worth it? Oh, yes - at least for me. Not for the extra sales - although it’s nice. It’s worth it to get the massive feedback boost and free, hundred-people strong QA team on your side. An invaluable asset for an independent game studio.