Posts by firstnamebunchofnumbers

UK government lays out plan to divert people's broken gizmos from landfill

Re: "The issue being addressed is what to do with that cord that has one failed light"

> Needless to say after 15+ years of service those old lights will probably be replaced next year. Fortunately our recycling centre is a short drive away and has a bin for generic electrical stuff but the cost of trawling through that and getting anything usable out of most of the stuff chucked in there must be enormous.

Thought about this a bit more. The environmental cost of the old lights (and human cost, as I expect most of this electronic waste is exported to poor countries to be picked over for less than $1 per day) is probably much more than the financial cost to me of a string of new lights (£10). Since I am fortunate enough to not have to worry necessarily about the financial cost of the 35W of power these old lights draw for the ~12 hours per day over the ~30 day festive period, it probably makes more environmental sense for me to continue to subsidise these old lights, keeping them out of waste at least until they are genuinely kaput.

Re: "The issue being addressed is what to do with that cord that has one failed light"

Being a complete tragic person this year I hooked up our Christmas lights (living room and kitchen-diner) to some power monitoring (Shelly Plus Plugs, for control of the lighting via Home Assistant). The 15+ year-old string of incandescent lights uses about 35W and the 4 year-old string of LEDs 3W.

Needless to say after 15+ years of service those old lights will probably be replaced next year. Fortunately our recycling centre is a short drive away and has a bin for generic electrical stuff but the cost of trawling through that and getting anything usable out of most of the stuff chucked in there must be enormous.

Red Hat bins Bugzilla for RHEL issue tracking, jumps on Jira

Shame

The Red Hat bugzilla has been a valuable resource for all Linux admins and devs for 15-20 years.

It's hard to ever imagine a public JIRA instance reaching such levels of SEO and accessibility... although we all know the plan for this will be for it to be a very private resource instead.

/me goes to "Edit Comment" in JIRA and laughs heartily at the incompetence that allows me to be presented with a 200x100px text box.

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Re: Expensive

That would also leave more Pi stock available for people who actually need them.

The most appealing Pi form-factor for me in recent years is probably the Pi Zero 2W actually, ideal for small home automation applications.

> Will it velcro to the back of your TV to provide silent streaming from the interwebs?

My cheap £35 refurb Lenovo ThinkCenter Tiny thing is attached via a VESA bracket. Works well enough.

Expensive

The shortage of stock over the last few years made me re-consider using rPis in a couple of home situations. If you need a headless/fanless board for a very specific function, then the price-per-watt might still be worth it. It's not even that small in footprint when you factor in the cables sprouting out of every direction

However on my home "management server" I tried attaching an SSD via USB-SATA enclosure to my 4GB Pi 4 to make updates/installations slightly less IO-bound vs MicroSD or USB-3 stick. Despite recommended/compatible USB 3 chipset, I had no end of problems with the power envelope of the Pi. With a powered USB hub as well the thing ended up taking out 2 plug sockets and wires everywhere... not a family-approved application.

I eventually just bought a Lenovo ThinkCentre M93 Tiny with Intel i3 "T" CPU (office refurb on ebay, £35). When comparing the power usage, the full x86 box with more RAM and expandability idled at 9-12W and my Pi 4 idled at 4W. For some applications such as ARM development, GPIO/electronics tinkering, or a truly fanless requirement then it might be worth paying the Pi premium. But IMO if you need cheap but still vaguely efficient home compute for some headless home server/NAS tinkering, then for most people a cheap refurb x86 thin client is probably more flexible and cost-effective.

Downloading the Webb Scope's data starts with a 6-month scheduling scramble

DSN Now

Thanks for sharing this amazing link https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html I'm basically addicted to it already!

OpenZFS 2.2 is nearly here, and ZFSBootMenu 2.2 already is

ZFS... pls explain

I have been using ZFS on-and-off for a number of years, mostly off in the last 2-3 to be fair.

The thing I never quite got my head around is the concept of dropping a drive for a graceful replacement. With LVM I add a new PV to the VG then do a `pvmove` command to move the extents from the drive I'd like to replace to the new (possibly larger) drive. Then I can safely remove the old PV from the VG. Repeat that with all PVs then resize2fs.

Could anyone describe a similar workflow with ZFS? I remember getting confused and concerned when adding the new drive to the zpool and the zpool size instantly grew to include it, rather than preparing to then remove an older drive. IIRC I ended up copying all the data off to another physical device then rebuilding the zvol/zpool or whatever and copying back to ZFS. I was probably just "holding it wrong" and need to RTFM but if anyone can point me to the way of doing this with ZFS?

HashiCorp's new license is still open source-ish, just with less free lunch

Shareware

Have always considered HashiCorp's stuff as shareware, in that its existence as true FOSS was completely dependent on HashiCorp's share price or financial priorities.

Decent software (albeit dreadful QA) that solves unique problems. There's a path to monetisation but post-IPO that was always going to involve gradual retraction of licensing and community engagement.

Since when did my SSD need water cooling?

Progress

My favourite feature of M2 drives is how much surface area they take up on a motherboard. Especially, on a recent Asus board, that to replace an M2 drive I had to remove three expansion cards and associated cabling, undo 4 screws to remove some plastic decorative cover to then get access to the disk.

Why sit them flat on the motherboard and not vertically like RAM? Or just use the fact that they take out PCI lanes and have them on expansion cards by default.

Microsoft has made Azure Linux generally available. Repeat, Azure Linux

Azure

The thing is there is no way MS are creating their hosted/PaaS offerings such as O365, Exchange online, Azure Domain Controllers with their fundamental in-house core technologies.

Exchange online and Azure AD managed by a global topology of JetDB instances and Domain Controllers? Nah, probably just postfix, Exim, postgres, OpenLDAP, BIND (etc and/or whatever) *heavily* optimised and bent into shape. Which is no mean feat and no slight on MS engineering meant by that at all, just let's be real here, Microsoft's primary revenue streams in the present day would not exist if it weren't for Linux and the open-source platform.

Perseverance rover shows up Curiosity with discovery of Martian water park

powerful stream in the area

> proof of water that flowed faster and at greater depths than previous evidence indicated

...

> little doubt there was a powerful stream in the area,

I see lots of this sort of wording that once upon a time there was *water* on moon/planet whatever, based on effectively "look, a flowing substance carved shapes in rock over billions of years".

As a space numpty but achieving minor adequacy in science A levels and some sort of BSc, I never seem to see anyone questioning whether it was anything other than *liquid* H₂O. IMO over a billion-year geological solar-system time-scales, in space(!) etc, all bets are off! Planetary topology caused exclusively by liquid H₂O actually seems to be the most unlikely thing out of anything to me.

As recession looms, Workday warns that legacy HR systems need updating

Workday warning people to not use Workday?

I was at a place that had outsourced their people processing to workday and using it felt like the very definition of legacy! You could practically hear the JBoss apps clunking away as each HTML 4 table loaded in various iframes... felt like using a web app from 1998.

Zorin OS 16.2: Shapeshifting desktop to help the Linux-wary feel more at home

XFCE

XFCE... Been doing the job and staying out of my way for years!

Tend to use Fedora in the last few years (after many years of Mint or Xubuntu). Fedora rolls at a nice cadence but with any gnarly bits having been tested by many others before it reaches me.