Posts by Grunchy 1095 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2015
I only buy 2nd hand. Well, because the depreciation is ungodly severe! I still use the 64GB iPhone SE that I bought used for $100 in 2017.
(New phones still don’t have FLIR. My $100 iPhone has FLIR. New phones don’t do anything new or different, or even as good as my old phone. Sorry, just stating the facts of the matter!)
I run “Virsh” (Qemu) on Linux, onto which I installed “Ghost Spectre” edition of Win7, with all antivirus and updates permanently disabled. Then, I created “snapshots” after all my apps were installed. I have no data stored inside the Win7 virtual machine, all my data is safely stored in Linux. I created a Samba share folder in Linux, and that’s the data transfer folder. If ever an occasion arises I think I need Windows (very rarely, now) I copy the data to the Samba folder, boot up Windows, do whatever is needed, then put the data back to Linux. It doesn’t matter if anybody hacks or corrupts Windows: I just restore the last snapshot.
Honestly, this completely eliminates the risk and all the Microsoft hassles. If they try to do an update, I just roll it back!
By eliminating Microsoft meddling, finally, Windows is tolerable!
We’ve got this travelling go kart show to fund, and Oracle pays Big Money to get some stickers put on some of the go karts. I think part of those funds gets “kicked back” in party tickets that Oracle marketing gets to share around with unsophisticated customers. Any ERP system could be replicated with a database programmed in Microsoft Access (anybody who gets caught using Microsoft Access for anything in business gets fired and whatever project they had put together gets shitcanned). Thus it always has been…
Tech support doesn’t know anything anyway. You have to go to online forums to find out anything. My biggest problem with HP and nVidia was how to defeat their proprietary software locks, and after that, how to defeat their endless email spam trying to force me to buy their useless, worthless services.
I upgraded to a Supermicro.
(Then I put all my server tasks on a Datto NAS, which does everything within TDP=15 watts!! Woot!)
“HP, who? What, aren’t they out of business by now?”
I’ve got two HP Z800s and three DL380Ps (G8) and I think I paid a grand total of $200 for all of it, including at least 2TB of ram sticks.
I blew another $100 apiece for some Tesla P4s and consequently have some hugely capable iron downstairs.
I fire up one of the DL380Ps “occasionally” to run the deepseek, but I really don’t have use for all this junk. If I care to I might run some CFD simulations, or something.
What do you do with HP equipment? I have just as much but for IBM-branded equipment. I betcha I’ve got 30+ Intel Xeons kicking around, not even counting the loose ones…
Someone tries to copy A to B without checking if A fits or not?
Computer languages are merely collections of programs called “commands,” if one command isn’t working right, just revise it!
(Barely anybody programs Fortran ‘77 anymore, it’s possible to revise and to move on.)
Someone is paying billions of dollars for all this machine training, and “some other guys” are charging billions of dollars to perform the machine training. I reckon nVidia gets some of that, and the power company gets some. But who else, and for what?
For example: who is “Anna,” creator-operator-mastermind behind Annas-Archive, the outlaw library that is suddenly intent on collecting every single book ever written and make them available from bittorrent?
What would be the motivation for such an enterprise?
I got the local instance of Deepseek running on the server downstairs. I guess it’s ok? It’s sort of a version of Watson, the IBM program that beat Jennings on Jeopardy.
Jennings “skill” is no more than the trick played on “Just Glen”.
https://youtu.be/l1-69AnA_To
Here’s what I think of Alex Trebek!
https://youtu.be/GwZBnUR6P-A
This should be straightforward, but no chance it WILL EVER WORK!
sudo mount --bind /home/grunchy/libvirt\ images /var/lib/libvirt/images
This works fine! But it won’t work in /etc/fstab:
#work, damn you!
/home/grunchy/libvirt\040images /var/lib/libvirt/images none bind
Why?! Who the hell knows? Incidentally, the clue is that / is 200GB non-encrypted and /home is 3.3TB encrypted. <-- this makes sense to do!
sudo mount -a
Yep that works, but NEVER on boot up.
crontab -e
@reboot * /opt/scripts/stupid.sh
Not a chance!
/etc/systemd/system/stupid.service
Not a chance!
This is on Mint, btw.
/etc/rc.local
No Go.
There’s a hundred ways to skin the cat and they ALL FAIL.
My suspicion is that the /home hasn’t decrypted and mounted yet causing the other mount to flop, so you would think sleep 10 might give it a chance, or dmesg might throw a clue, and NO, nothing works!
Gave up and reconfigured virt-manager json config thingy to just point to /home by default.
(I could never remember where the heck /var/lib/libvirt/images had put all my Qcows anyways.)
</flame>
Actually, I happen to own several Raspberry Pis.
I mean, no, I don’t ever do anything with any of them.. the Pi400 is set up with the Amiga emulator. I let it sit on my desktop, it ain’t hurting much.
(I tried several times to dummy-out the RetroPi thingy, but the dang thing never worked right. Yes, yes, operator error, OBVIOUSLY. Sheesh!)
Granny got her M2 Mac Mini that I have to go figure out every once in awhile (I still have no idea what the big deal is about, really I don’t.)
Well, so much for that.
My trusty old Sid “noise generator” works via “linear feedback shift register,” fully described here:
https://youtu.be/aASlxcOsYUg
If you slow the noise generator down slow enough, and capture each sample, you can very quickly predict the sequence: even in BASIC!
(I always thought the noise was akin to radio noise, but nope, it never was.)
I plonked my old Win10 SSD back onto the bus of my trusty old “pc mate” and logged into Microsoft for the first time in 1 coon’s age, lo and behold, they had Chucked a Copilot at me !!!
%*!#?^!
Dubbed off my old MS data onto my new Mint installation.
I feel like I’m DONE with Microsoft. Apple too, for that matter.
If I ever feel the need for a “copilot” (skepticism) I’m already running sandboxed Deepseek down in the basement.
Nobody will ever be able to spy on my A.I.!
I’m turned off already, but then the $550 price tag: blah!
I’m still sticking with my 2016 Gen1 iPhone SE. Well, it only cost me $50 2nd hand for the 64GB storage back in, what, 2018 or so (who can remember?)
The reason “why” my iPhone kicks ass is because it fits my pocket, plus I “blew” another $100 for the FLIR 1 camera for it, and it’s so old Apple gave up screwing around with it, which means “update hell” is over, finally. This Furi Fone does nothing different or better than my old 2016 phone. The old iPhone is good enough, the Safari built in can log into my Proxmox environments, I’ve got the eBay and the Kijiji. It syncs to the gmail good enough. Accelerometer and compass and GPS? Sure, they all still work (xlnt for geocaching). If I cared to waste another $30 I guess I could get a lightning-hdmi dock adapter thingy (but why).
THE BIGGEST disadvantage to iOS is they don’t let you run Newpipe. Oh well, I blew $50 on an Android set-top box for that functionality, INCLUDING remote control.
I am slightly tempted by recent iPhones for their 3D scanner capability, but no, they don’t have FLIR. My crap iPhone has FLIR, included with a big battery expansion! So, shrug, another year goes by with “nothing new” available (of any value, that is).
I made a LXC on my PVE (Linux container on Proxmox) and fired up a 70GB DeepSeek, I guess it’s ok. I still never got my cheap nVidia P4s virtualized so I ran it purely on CPUs.
Computerphile made a good video about DeepSeek which inspired me to get it running.
https://youtu.be/gY4Z-9QlZ64
What good is it? It’s an interesting spectacle (actually, it’s damn neat!)
The output is definitely recognizable as pure AI, so it’s not all that compelling. It’s the technology that’s fascinating; the product itself is disposable.
The American government has three co-equal branches, that’s the President, the Congress, and the Senate.
Trump helped them win the election but that’s all done now. I’m pretty sure if things get real nuts the plan is to impeach the moron and promote President Vance, who can be more easily controlled.
Nobody would blame them, either.
I cast about and I’ve got at least 5 laptops kicking around. Sure, they’re all “obsolete” but they all run Win10 just fine, which means they’ll run Mint even better.
I checked out the tech dumpster at work and harvested two more Dell laptops, both Win11 class. 1 had a dead battery ($40), the other needed a new screen ($100).
Shit, now I’ve got SEVEN laptops kicking around ! !
“These tariffs are not all about money – it’s about forcing countries to sort out borders, people smuggling, drug trafficking. Trump is saying enough is enough, stop abusing us or we’ll fight back.”
I don’t mind the higher border security. We need WAY better drone technology anyway, you should see how they’re fighting modern war in Ukraine. I can see China put together 10e6 drones with explosive caps and send them off to “clear out” Vancouver, for instance. If you’ve ever seen one of those drone swarm shows at night, just imagine if each one had a firework rocket, except instead of a firework it’s a grenade, and they use one of those human ID algorithms, except they tell the drone to fly briskly toward the faces they find.
So, sure, time to upgrade our drone technology.
“ If a microSD card is 1/378 the size of a page of A4 and stores 32 million pages of A4 text (assuming 4000 characters per page at 8bits per character), my rough calculation suggests that a humble 128GB microSD card beats his challenge by a factor of about 0.5 million.”
8 bits per character? Depending on the zip algorithm, you might be able to compress text by a factor of 10x.
(If I was gonna archive a million books or so, why not exploit lossless compression?)
I remember when the USA deficit exceeded $350 billion: that’s when you borrow $1 billion each and every day just to keep the lights on in this joint!
Of course the deficit then quickly exceeded $1 trillion, that’s where we have to borrow $1 billion every 8 hrs.
Or, $2 trillion, where we gotta borrow $1 billion every 4 hrs.
(If it costs $6 billion a day to keep the wheels on this bus, how long can you do that before you just declare bankruptcy? Or maybe it doesn’t matter since everyone else in the world is bankrupt?? Shrug?)
https://youtu.be/6UldI1xIb0E?t=1569
"Agency heads shall ensure that DOGE Team Leads coordinate their work with USDS and advise their respective Agency Heads on implementing the President's DOGE Agenda. Sec. 4. Modernizing Federal Technology and Software to Maximize Efficiency and Productivity. (a) the USDS Administrator shall commence a Software Modernization Initiative to improve the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, network infrastructure, and information technology (IT) systems. Among other things, the USDS Administrator shall work with Agency Heads to promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization."
Seems like Musk gets to be IT administrator for the whole US government and work on synergies and what-all.
I think all he has to do is text "resign" to the number provided and he can go away on Monday and still be paid out a full salary until Sept. 2025 without finding even a single synergy.
Good deal for Musk!
Yeah, inside Virt-Manager on my Ubuntu installation. Sure, I've got Win7 and Win10 in there, all set to run old legacy software if/when the need arises (less and less as the days go by).
I just took an "image" of my old system, then I reformatted with Ubuntu and got that all working hunky-dunky then installed Virt-Manager and then resurrected my old Win environment.
I have a motherboard that can run two GPUs so I got the nVidia one for Linux (weird eh?) and the AMD Vega one for the virtual machines. So that way, they can have their own GPU for their own full graphic acceleration, just like a real computer.
EXCEPT... NOT a real computer. No sir. This time, I have Backups and Snapshots and I installed the defeatured Ghost Spectre "light" version, and there's no virus detection (pfft who cares, if it gets infected I'll just roll back a Snapshot).
What I did was I installed a Samba share of one of my Linux folders, and I use that to transfer data to/from the Windows and the macOS and the Solaris VMs. So the actually valuable "data" all resides within Linux, and Windows/macOS are merely software applications that run inside Linux in order to facilitate old legacy software that I'm seeing less and less use of, to be frank. Oh, what the H the SSD space is pretty cheap nowadays, "why not" keep the old OS environments for old-times sake. It's not like they take up any physical room.
For $60 billion I wonder if you could invent “movie goggles,” no seriously, hear me out.
It’s a pair of glasses! But no ordinary glasses. Instead of corrective lenses, they instead feature miniature TV screens!
Why, the effect is so powerful, it’s like a gigantic movie screen… but they’re built into your spectacles!
With SIXTY BILLION we could perfect this revolutionary technology in no time flat.
I fired up ChatGPT just yesterday! Well sure. You see, I discovered my original 1979 copy of “Manual of Possibilities” (https://annas-archive.org/md5/994d1d4b39f0a8057800e272e35b3167) and read this little morsel:
“Similarly, programming can replace painting technique, at least of the nonrepresentational kind. A computer will never create a Degas dancer or a Rembrandt portrait, but computers can be the canvas of much of the nonobjective art we see today.”
Eh, what? Can’t create a Rembrandt portrait?
So I uploaded a snap of me muggins and asked ChatGPT for the “portrait in the style of Rembrandt” version, but change dirty old winter to a pastoral springtime scene.
It rendered me with 1-week facial growth!!
AI wins against the humans, again. Egad.
Yup, I got fed up with buggy Ubuntu “snaps”, plus I’m never running Microsoft or Apple again: too much AI, zero actual innovation. Let’s put it this way, my Office 2007 “pro” license is still approximately 100% compatible with current day Office 365, at least for the functions I use. What have they done in 18 years, other than nothing? Yeah they put in advertising and spyware.
I guess I’m giving up on Ubuntu too, since they are now a corporate property and will soon become filled with zero innovation except for advertising and spyware.
Just about done with Google, too.
Funny thing, Space X launched their actual moon mission 3 days ago (Jan 15/2025). Another 6 weeks until we find out whether it makes it or not.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/14/science/nasa-launch-firefly-ispace-moon-landing/index.html
This bogus "starship" project, which already spent the entire budget of two complete moon trips, would have definitely failed in bankruptcy except Trump inexplicably got elected.
So probably more money is going to get funneled to Space X to continue this farce.
(Musk is a gigantic Ponzi scam so you never know just precisely when he'll be arrested. Could be any day now, could be delayed until 2028 or beyond...)
Well, because I got the FLIR one infrared camera accessory that puts a 64-pixel sensor on it.
Got it cheap because iPhone SE is WAY out of date, nevertheless the phone and the infrared both work perfectly well.
(Also the FLIR adapter makes a decent enough bump cover).
I need two new technologies to "upgrade" from the iPhone and that's infrared and 3d scanning.
This HMD device doesn't offer that. Also, I'm not accustomed to paying "retail" for any kind of tech. In fact, I usually pay scrap prices, if that much. No deal.
I dunno how many billions of dollars was stolen based on Y2K consulting but if this all comes from one incident of one lady who was 103 years old trying to get a driving license, and being denied because nobody could figure out she wasn't 3 years old, and NOBODY HAS ANY CONFIRMATION OF THAT TALL TALE, then I guess we all learned a very valuable lesson back in year 2000.
"He has a terrible fast food based diet," that's your typical hacker! You just described me, if not most of us here.
"and has been in pretty obvious mental decline over the past few years," ahem.
I'm astounded how many people think they're the only one who hates Donald Trump: Everybody hates Donald Trump! Including Donald Trump.
He's playing up the "Heel" character in wrestling.
"It is good that there is competition between Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance, Arianespace and SpaceX" for what customers? These are not consumer services they're selling. Also, I don't see much difference between New Glenn and the old 1970s-era Saturn. Eventually, this all has to accomplish something; what?
https://archive.org/details/omnibookofcomput0000unse
"It's 2025 and they've closed down the museums. The works of the masters lie in the darkness of subterranean storage vaults. People don't need to see them anymore. Why should they? In the privacy of their homes, they can view the entire collections of the Louvre on 3-D entertainment modules or visit Michelangelo's Florence via electronic brain stimulation. No more hassles with crowds of tourists or with pompous tour guides.
"Home computer systems craft 400-page novels in hours, suited to the owner's personal taste, or duplicate the Mona Lisa from recyclable materials so that only a chemist could distinguish the copy from the original.
"In a robotic society we won't work. The robots will do most of the jobs more efficiently than we could do them. Such robots can usher in an age of super-abundant, very inexpensive goods. But there's a catch. If humans don't work, do they deserve to be paid? Where can they get the money to buy all the wonderful and inexpensive products the robots will produce?
"We can't have a society of unemployed people who can't afford the products made for them by the robots that took away their jobs. That's absurd. We must devise a scheme that will shift the manner in which we receive income without endangering either our standard of living or our self-respect.
"Robotics is the challenge of the future. The government could move us to accept it by forming a quasi-public agency to sell Victory Bonds for the Future. The money-gathering agency that issues the bonds might be called the National Mutual Fund (NMF). Here is how it might work.
"With the money it receives from public investors, along with money appropriated by Congress or gathered from other government sources, the NMF would build a significant supply of cash. The NMF can use this cash to finance companies that want to adopt robot technologies...
"Now let's look at the other side of robot economics: As the new technology expands, workers will be pushed out of jobs. We must plan to ease their discomfort and make up for their financial losses.
"One way would be to allow the workers to own the robots that replace them. As owners, they could lease the robots back to their former employers for use at their old jobs. The plan is highly speculative, of course...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
