* Posts by sin

24 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Aug 2023

Apple Intelligence summary botches a headline, causing jitters in BBC newsroom

sin

Re: Android guilty too

First thing I do on any phone I have to manage (read: family), first thing to get disabled is...

GOOGLE APP

Same warnings: your phone will die, "no no please don't", but only thing I have noticed is loger battery life.

Play Store - works

Maps - works

Gmail - works

Chome - disabled (Firefox rules)

Photos - disabled

Gdrive - disabled

everything else by Google - disabled/don't use

And yes, I have a ton of apps that I use, so do others in the family, but I get to chose and install them (or instruct younger ones what to do and what not to do).

Btw, my phone iis a Motorola/Lenovo Edge 20 Pro, much better hardware than 2/3 of the new phones on the market, but out of support/upgrades because it is "more than two years old model".

Which is good, because I am not receiving any more unwanted upgrades to Moto-tools (that are also disabled now).

Open source router firmware project OpenWrt ships its own entirely repairable hardware

sin

https :// vi.aliexpress.com/item/1005007438358228.html

https :// vi.aliexpress.com/item/1005005943823096.html

or just Search "2.5 gbps switch"

Not 3, but 8 ports, at this price I don't mind :)

'Best job at JPL': What it's like to be an engineer on the Voyager project

sin

Re: Go V'ger

Well, in a few hundred years they wouldn't actually be "machines" but "things" when their RTGs go flat.

But who cares :)

Here's what happens if you don't layer network security – or remove unused web shells

sin

As always, the only secure network device is one that is powered off and locked in basement, behind doors with sign "Beware of Tiger" :)

Windows 95 setup was three programs in a trench coat, Microsoft vet reveals

sin

Re: "the excitement of installing Windows 95 for the first time"

Even then there were free tools for kinda imaging Win9x, and you didn't even need anything but windows' "DOS mode":

FDISK - create partition on secondary drive, make it active and reboot

FORMAT D: - because you never want to format your C: :)

XCOPY /whatewer c:\win95image d:\ - copy "image"

SYS D: - make it bootable

FAT32, no FS securiy, no ACLs, just simple file copy.

Of course, I assume having a fleet of similar machines with hard disk easily removed to be connected to master machine... have been doing this since '95, a bit more automated, of course, I made a "special" boot disk that would destroy anything on secondary drive and overwrite it with whatever current DOS/Windows 3x/9x was. It was life-saver when we had to deliver a bunch of new PCs to customers...

Half the world's online via mobile, but growth is slowing

sin

Time to slow down and think...

I will never understand why the only important factor is "growth"? Once you reach certain level, stagnation is just fine. And NO, stagnation is not the same as recession, no matter what "experts" say.

Huawei's farewell to Android isn't a marketing move, it's chess

sin

Time to slow down and think...

So what's wrong with 7nm? My ~four year old(new?) Motorola is 7nm, and working beautifully (and my much older Huawei P10lite is also working fine, but the battery is holding less than 8 hours).

I don't know anybody who NEEDS the newest 3nm, 32GB/1TB (or whatever current specs might be) device. A few people I know WANT that, but only because they want to brag about it... they still use those devices mostly for making simple phone calls (not even video calls and god forbid any kind of messaging).

This "arms race" with performance has become stupid long time ago.

Your computer's not working? Sure, I can fix that problem – which I caused

sin

Not SOME money, but ALL the money, and with prices increased by some two digit percentage.

Japan to put a small red Swedish house on the Moon

sin

Wikipedia: Västerås (/ˌvɛstərˈoʊs/ VEST-ər-OHSS, US also /-ˈɔːs/ -⁠AWSS,[4][5][6][7] Swedish: [vɛstɛrˈoːs])

I am sick and tired of those letters and voices that don't exist in my language, but people are still insisting on putting them everywhere, expecting that everybody else will spend time searching the Internet for right pronunciation.

I prefer to have something close to how it would be pronounced, than to see it in original and don't know what to do with ä and å (assuming other letters are read like in my language)...

So "Vesteros" might be more accurate, so let's start the Games of Thrones :)

Btw, I also have letters specific to my language and alphabet in my name, but I don't force that on anybody...

Foot-thick wall workaround: Gigabit network links beamed through solid concrete

sin

So instead of shielded, point-to-point, solid 0.25mm2 (24AWG) or some optics, hidden in ceiling, walls, or at least in plastic ducts, using standard Ethernet protocols, consuming <3W for 10Gbps we have WIFI???? WTF!

Can they promise that no-one will be able to catch and decipher the wireless signal? Maybe not now, but in a year or two...

I'd always go for cable, no matter how much paperwork and drilling is needed.

I'm sure cable can be run everywhere, they already have cables in nuclear power plant cores and in labs working with live deadly viruses, right?

Then again, if you ask my wife: no drilling, no cables, god forbid anything hanging on the walls or ceiling, but I want my wifi to work everywhere and stable... What do you mean "can't be done"? You call yourself an IT guy, find a solution...

NIST finalizes trio of post-quantum encryption standards

sin

"...America's adversaries – including Russia and China... "

For us in the rest of the world: "America, Russia and China" because they are all the same from the outside.

I don't see America being any less keen on getting other people's secrets, especially it's allies, than the other two.

(English is not my first language, but you'll get the point).

Hello? Are you talking on a Cisco SPA300 or SPA500 IP phone? Now's the time to junk 'em

sin

Re: Any option for custom firmware

Maybe they will release all of the souce code once the phones become EoL, just like the MS did with DOS 4.0... in just about 30-40 years.

FTC grabs controller as Microsoft jacks up Game Pass price by 81%

sin

Forgive my ignorance, but is it so important to have the game on first day? I mean, from my experience, it will probably be full of bugs/problems/whatever and will take some time to become really finished, at least that was the case with all the games I used to play... So why not just wait a day, and get it on day 2? It will still have bugs, but you will pay less for them...

This is from one who's running latest Tumbleweed&Rawhide with absolutely bleeding edge rc kernel :)

Cybercriminals quickly exploit CrowdStrike chaos

sin

Re: "Criminals didn't waste any time"

That could be said for some other things that people are wasting resources on, like making weapons (to "defend" themself from someone on the other side of the globe)? Or building whole cities for rich people to enjoy (at $10.000 per night), while making poor people even more poor AND destroying the Earth in doing that? It is unfortunately true that people as species are only good at finding new ways to hurt other people...

Porting the Windows 95 Start Menu to NT

sin

OpenShell works just fine for me, thank you, on those unhappy times that I have to switch from my trusted Opensuse Tumbleweed.

How to escape VMware's pricey clutches with Virt-v2v

sin

Re: Disk2vhd from SysInternals

Sure :)

Fire up VM in any Linux rescue or live CD system (I use Opensuse), create partition layout per your needs, stop all services that could be modifying files on source machine, rsync everything to new VM, prepare boot loader, reboot... Yes, there is some manual work, but everything is customizable. Of course, you should really know what you are doing, so this is not for "average Joe"...

Resources: just google "rsync linux into vm" or something similar, but (as always) don't just copy-paste any of the answers, but be sure to understand what is going on in every step and modify it appropriately.

sin

Disk2vhd from SysInternals

... is what I am using if I need to (re)virtualize Windows, either from bare metal of from VMware/HyperV/some obscure cloud hosting, unless I have full access to old server, in which case "qemu-img convert ..." is enough.

And there is nothing better that good old rsync to move Linux to KVM. Yes, it requires some manual work, but you can actually make it better: change fs to XFS, partitions layout - make bigger or separate /home, etc.

Prof asks court to protect his Unfollow Everything 2.0 extension from Facebook's ire

sin

Last time I was addicted to a "social network" was in early 1990's with VAX NOTES at my university...

October 2025 will be a support massacre for a bunch of Microsoft products

sin

So why AWS?

Hetzner.com is available on both sides of Atlantic, and they let you run your server on any port, including 25.

Don't even mention the pricing.

And with a little education you can stop spammers just fine. Or pay someone to do that for you :)

Microsoft floats bringing a text editor back to the CLI

sin

Midnight Commnder and mcedit - I could not live without them... maybe because of years working with Norton Commander under DOS?

Boffins find asking ChatGPT to repeat key words can expose its training data

sin

They have mistaken ChatGPT for Deep Thought:

“Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of going up to a human being and saying "Blood...blood...blood...blood...”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

With version 117, Firefox finally speaks Chrome's translation language

sin

options, options....

I have been using FF Nightly builds since I learned about them about 10 years ago, had it crashing maybe 3-4 times (always fixed in a few days max). Otherwise rock solid, with 70+ tabs open at all times, sometimes double that.

Besides uBlock Origin, my favo(u)rite extension must be Paxmod*, which allows me to have my tabs in multiple rows, something that I cannot live without, because I want to see all the tabs and switch between them in just one click.

Back to the subject of translation, I don't like the popup about translation, so I have turned it off: browser.translations.automaticallyPopup -> false. I still get the translate icon in URL box. I'd like an option to have it always displayed, because from time to time I need my main language translated to something else - where I live, we use 5-6 languages of which I am fluent in only 2... I know I can go to hamburger menu -> Translate, but hey, options....

*https ://github.com/numirias/paxmod/ - not available in Firefox addons "store", works only in Beta, Dev and Nightly.

MIT boffins build battery alternative out of cement, carbon black, water

sin

So this might be ready in 10-20 years? Just about the time nuclear fusion reactors kick in... ever since 1980's when I first read about them, it's always "in 20 years".

Astronomers testing next-gen asteroid-hunting algorithm discover potentially hazardous object

sin
Mushroom

Just don't look up!