Posts by Grunchy

Sorry Pat, but it's looking like Arm PCs are inevitable

I might upgrade one day

I’ve been upgrading my 2017 “budget build” went from Ryzen 1800x to 3800x, still pleased with my SX8200 1TB “pro”. Main slot has the Vega56, secondary has the GTX1050-Ti. Just yesterday splurged $300 Cdn on 4x 32GB DDR4-3600 modules.

The *big* upgrade, however, was from Win10 to Ubuntu22. Now I run Virt-manager with Qemu, and pass-through the Vega56 to my compartmentalized instances of Win7, Win10, and Mac-OS (which no longer run any form of anti-virus, since they are unfit to be exposed to the internet. Nothing but legacy offline apps.)

Even though my rig is already 6 years old, I doubt I’ll be upgrading anything else before 2030, if ever.

No more Mr Nice DoJ: Tesla gets subpoenas over self-driving software claims

Elon Musk was hanging around the Mercedes garage in Austin yesterday, which attracted attention of scrutineers, BAM Lewis Hamilton instantly disqualified.

Coincidence?

There are no coincidence.

'Influencer' gets 7 months in prison for plot to interfere with 2016 US election

That was a pretty good trick though

But it’s really true, in 2024 you can text “Krusty” to 59925 to vote for the clown (or whichever other clown you intend to support.)

You don’t even need to be American! You can even vote King Charles if that’s Your Fancy.

The problem with Jon Stewart is that Apple appears to have cancelled his show

Who’s Jon Stewart

I never heard of the guy.

On a related note, who’s Apple computers.

I have never bought anything from whoever those guys are.

Shrug!

Take Windows 11... please. Leaks confirm low numbers for Microsoft's latest OS

Re: There's nothing particularly wrong with it except for its hardware requirements.

“It all has to do with monetizing the user after the sale. Create a Microsoft account just to install, now they know who you are. Send you a text to your cell for MFA, now they have hooked in your mobile device as well.”

Seems that Microsoft has become a peddler of “shitware.”

Re: Maybe it's the installer

I haven’t tried KVM, but I am using QEMU with successful passthrough. I also set up a Hackintosh (despite there being zero use for that) but also a creaky old Solaris installation.

I’m having way more fun just monkeying around with abandonware. I don’t care what Microsoft does anymore, they are irrelevant now.

Back to Windows 7

Since I’m running Ubuntu now and I can run any Windows I want as a virtual machine, I’ve ditched Windows 10. I’m back on Windows 7. (By the way: with full GPU passthrough. I solved the puzzle!)

Virus protection is irrelevant since Windows isn’t used for internet anymore. Just for legacy software, which is also prohibited from any more “update” meddling. Everything works good enough the way it is!

Ransomware attacks register record speeds thanks to success of infosec industry

My system could be encrypted and locked in 60 seconds

I run Windows VM in only a 40GB sandbox qcow virtual drive which could be completely destroyed in seconds. On the other hand, I could recover my last “snapshot” even faster than that, so who cares?

Good luck getting to it since it runs 100% disconnected from the network.

Good luck getting to my NAS backup device, which is literally powered off every second it isn’t tasked with backups. “Off,” as in unplugged from the wall power outlet.

Nice try, hackerz! But think again.

From chaos to cadence: Celebrating two decades of Microsoft's Patch Tuesday

I don’t get any Microsoft patches anymore!

I finally, Finally! upgraded my Windows PC to a certain Debian distribution, and using virt-manager configured a Windows VM running Ghost Spectre with all updates halted until the year 2077. It is running sandboxed and isolated and is used for nothing but legacy apps that are also prohibited from all future updates. I set up another Monterey Hackintosh VM in the same manner.

The meddlers are totally locked out.

Meanwhile, I have embarked (emborked?) on a separate “voyage of discovery” into the vast sea of Debian. So far, clear weather…

(I am just so tickled at the power of snapshot! The proprietary OS’s will angrily sabotage themselves in response to some new liberty I am exploring, and each time it’s like the ultimate “undo”. Refreshing! Microsoft and Apple are literally powerless now. FREEDOM!!)

AI girlfriend encouraged man to attempt crossbow assassination of Queen

This is the best story ever!

Imagine if Steinbeck or Hemingway had ever dreamed up such a scheme, what a magnificent tale they could have spun. Spectacular! Bravo!

(Or maybe, you know, Kipling. Or Dickens!)

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

“Google,” who dat?

YouTube is dead, my friend. The only worthwhile way to access their upload library is with NewPipe. Google is rapidly becoming irrelevant… Microsoft may as well not even exist anymore, as far as I’m concerned. As for Apple, I haven’t bought any Apple equipment since the 1990s.

I like Firefox

Wow, 3% market share? But what difference does it make: nobody pays any money for a browser, they’re not making anything from sales. I like Firefox because it is NOT constantly upheaving everything all over the place. It’s an information appliance and that’s good enough for me. As for the “app” store, I bought exactly one app ever and that was Star Chart on the iPhone: a very clever “augmented reality” view of the sky. I have never found reason to pay $5 for any other app. I got my Firefox web browser, Thunderbird email, voip, sms, instant banking, gps mapping. Good enough!

(I used to do web browsing with Emacs on the Vax terminal at Uni, Mozilla still seems like the “new thing” in comparison. Shrug.)

If the Linux Foundation was a software company, it'd be the biggest in the world

Ideal for cheapskates

Since computers are so cheap and software solutions have become so mature, companies are resorting to subscriptions and obsolescence schemes to churn software and maintain revenue. PCs used to cost big money for much less horsepower than you can get in a $60 Raspberry Pi 5 today, and not all that long ago. People like me pay pittances for cast-off hardware from recyclers and run abandonware for $nothing. I remember being offended how outrageous expensive PS3 was, now people scrap them as junk and the entire game library is freely downloadable. Being a natural scrounge & cheapskate, I don’t pay ‘nuthin for anything !

Google killing Basic HTML version of Gmail In January 2024

Still getting bills for $0 a month from Telus after firing them 10 years ago

They finally called me up to switch me to fibre optic since they are spending megabucks to convert the entire city of Calgary. So I asked the lady “why” I am getting monthly bills for $0 owing for the last decade. She says that’s cause I still have access to my Telus.net email address (even though no service!) because they ditched that server way long time ago and it’s been operated by google mail ever since then, which retains your data for at least 99 years after your demise, whether they caused it or not. So I’m all, “ok how do I access that defunct account then,” and she’s all, “well are you buying fibre optic service or not.” Check Mate.

No joke: Cloudflare takes aim at Google Fonts with ROFL

It’s about time !

If you had 10,000 customers and they each saved 150 ms, you know what that’s like uh, 25 minutes saved. That’s worth nearly $9 at my rate of pay! Practically a full qtr pounder meal deal.

The iPhone 15 has a Goldilocks issue: Too big or too small. Maybe a case will make it just right

I find it interesting anybody goes to malls anymore

I bought my iPhone SE (first gen) 2nd hand back in 2016 for $100. Had to replace the battery and screen once or twice, but it’s still going strong. It’s one of the last ones that were still ‘phone’ size and not ‘clown’ size. It has 64 gb space, good enough I reckon. Plays video non-stuttering. Apple has several no doubt critical updates necessary to improve and modernize their surveillance capabilities (and sabotage its video playback), but I have it configured to ignore everything they say and do.

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

People still buy games?

The entire PS1,PS2,PS3 catalog is utterly hacked. So too NES, SNES, C64, Wii, XBox, XBox 360,N64, Atari 2600, Vectrex, countless arcade consoles. I still haven’t conquered colossal caves yet, it’s the damn little dwarf keeps coming out of nowhere and nailing me with Ax.

UK judge rates ChatGPT as 'jolly useful' after using it to help write a decision

AI takes the pith

I guess it would be unethical to get an artificially intelligent parser to write pithy remarks for me.

US-Canada water org confirms 'cybersecurity incident' after ransomware crew threatens leak

“Water Rights” info

This is something probably nobody cares about. It’s like, some guy hacks the FBI website. So? I honest to God never clicked on the FBI website. I could not care less.

What I’d really like to know about is the knob who’s gonna sift through 80 GB of stolen water rights data in search of the tiniest interesting thing. Who is that guy. Why is he such a looser.

Meet Honda's latest electric vehicle: A rideable suitcase

It’s the shabazz

I’ve got an Airwheel, it’s exactly like BC’s Quest For Tires. Including hopping over potholes and ducking beneath branches.

The kids ‘round here seem to prefer motorized skateboards, talk about little hard wheels! I can only imagine what befalls when you go past where the geese congregate by the river, I guess it’s a long green streaky skid to calamity. The Honda Suitcase ought to be packed full of 1st aid supplies…

Long-lost 1977 Star Wars X-Wing prop discovered – lock s-foils in bid position

X-wing is cool

Mostly because of the orange racing stripes that matched Luke’s “blu-blocker” tinted visor. But there’s a reason they don’t make biplanes any more: too much drag. Plus, I mean come on, where’s the control surfaces? Not even a propeller?

The only “model” I remember seeing in Close Encounters was made out of a big tub of mashed potatoes by a slightly manic Dreyfuss. No way anybody hung onto that.

Apple races to patch the latest zero-day iPhone exploit

What?

Guys, get real: the insecurity is the iMessage service itself !

Any information you send via Apple or Google or Microsoft is definitely getting read by artificially intelligent daemons trying to figure out how to steal your money or your vote or your stock tips or whatever else they can steal.

antiX 23: Anarchic for sure, but 'design by committee' isn't always the best for Linux

Somehow if you’re going to host your own web page, now you have to install certbot because http is illegal for whatever reason (because unless you register with Let’s Encrypt and the Electronic Freedom Foundation, your site is automatically boycotted by all the latest browsers). But certbot instructions only walk you through their snapd installation. So if you’re running Ubuntu server in a Proxmox container, you can’t install snapd containers because your Linux os is already in a container.

And it’s like, what’s with all this farging bollshet??

(There’s another sneakier installation procedure involving a Python script which I believe is disparaged because it doesn’t necessarily program your computer to generate daily system reports to certbot HQ as part of its continuous “update” scheme.)

Right to repair advocates have a new opponent: Scientologists

Re: Expose

Hint: The bible is free

The Koran is free

The Torah is free

Mark Twain described a circumstance in which Tom Sawyer had to do a LOT of horse-trading to muster up enough Sunday School credits to be awarded his “free” bible ! !

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

Multics and Pine and Emacs

I got in hot water with Sysadmin at Uni for wasting minutes on Pine and IRC (funny thing: I had just returned from my internship at Alberta Research Council which in 1993 provided internet access to ALL of Alberta — including UCalgary and UEdmonton, and ULethbridge — and which I participated in the setup of). So in response I required Sysadmin to delete the /usr/games folder “in case somebody wastes minutes of their Multics session.”

The jerks actually deleted /usr/games!!

What a bunch of maroons.

seeing other graduate students in the 90's trying to figure out what to do when their uni address would evaporate after they graduated…

For awhile, anyway, University of Calgary let you set up a free lifetime “alumni.ucalgary.ca” email forwarding account (got mine). It’s great, actually. It’s surprising how many software packages recognize that address as good enough to qualify for the lower cost “educational” version.

Linus Torvalds couldn't find an excuse to hold back Linux 6.5, so here it is

Cheerfully behind

I still have my beloved old rusty Dodge with bench seat, column shift, no ABS, window cranks, manual door locks. But I did upgrade from the 2-barrel carb to a Fitech throttle body injector, even though I had to mount an O2 sensor in the exhaust header, because it simply runs better (and “tunes” itself).

(I’m still on kernel 5.15 because the newer stuff still isn’t properly implemented on my 4+ years old hardware, which already works well enough for my needs. But by all means, keep innovating, who knows when it might come in useful...)

Microsoft still prohibits Google or Alibaba from running O365 Windows Apps

Humbug

I quit Microsoft office long before 365 scam.

(I got sucked in to their VBA scheme before they obsoleted everything that was done up to XP. Seems to me they had done something similar with OLE 1.0 vs 2.0)

Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

Word Perfect 5.1

Along with DOS one of the most pirated programs was good old WP51. It’s main secret weapon was the ability to reveal all the secret control codes inline with the text.

Because the editor was unpredictable. You might select some text, and underline it, then change the text and remove underlining, add bold, add italics. I found it highly typical to receive someone’s document, then reveal the control characters and find 7 “underline begin” tags in a row, before a tangled mess of on/off tags sprinkled throughout the document.

To this day I still rely on Microsoft Notepad. Why?

Because I can select any text from any document, copy it to clipboard (ctrl-c, which used to mean ‘break’), then open up a notepad window and issue command ctrl-vax, that is ctrl-v, ctrl-a, and ctrl-x. What does that do? It automagically removes every single control tag from the clipboard and leaves me with clean, unencumbered ASCII.

Canada's Telus to shed 6K workers as profits plunge 61%

Alberta Government Telephone

I haven’t had a telephone line for more than a decade, not even cellular. Though I had taken advantage of Fongo’s freeware VOIP solutions including “freephoneline.ca”.

I’ve got about 10 years of “demand invoices” from Telus (formerly A.G.T.), and receiving one or two more each month, all informing me of my unresolved account balance of $0.00 still owing. One day I might go drop them off back to Telus global HQ in downtown Calgary (about 5km bike ride).

The real reason Telus is struggling is because they are retrofitting each and every structure in Calgary with the Fibre Optic connection. They come around and hydrovac a small tunnel from your front yard to the service portal (being that most of Calgary is serviced by underground utilities, including electrical, water, sewage, natural gas, plus one each of telephone + coaxial cable TV).

I used to “make do” with my bottom-of-barrel, 5-million baud (5 Mbps) cable internet, but now they’ve upgraded me & fellow laggards to 250 Mbps minimum speed. Funny thing, it’s still a DOCSIS 3.0 modem, of which all devices lower than DOCSIS 3.1 are still threatened to be obsoleted by next year.

(The way Telus roving gangs operate is they come to your door and apologize that the only way they can get that fibre optic connection strung is to tie it to the coax and pull it into the structure that way, which unfortunately destroys the cable service, but that’s ok because there hasn’t been cable TV in about as long as people stopped paying for landline telephone, or newspapers. You know, they don’t even charge for the library card anymore either? As a matter of fact they don’t even charge late fees anymore too! In fact… when’s the last time I even went to the library? And yet I still have hundreds of books kicking around the place, peculiar.)

Middleweight champ MX Linux 23 delivers knockout punch

Obsolete

No offense intended, but this doesn’t offer “me” anything worthwhile.

My computer doesn’t run an operating system anymore, now it runs a Proxmox hypervisor that hosts a whole bunch of VMs. It’s each individual VM that boots into the resource-sucking OS, and as far as I am concerned those OS’s are there strictly to provide function libraries that enable the various applications to run.

(Because the point of the computer is to run the applications.)

I’m tired of operating systems, they keep getting changed around which is disturbing the orderly operation of the purposeful applications. My hardware dates back as far as 2013 and serves ALL of my purposes already.

Same as my kitchen table that I also bought back in 2013. I’m not letting some furniture enthusiast come into my home and start making changes I don’t want or need. I use my kitchen table each and every day. The thing already works the way it is. Done.

XenServer teases free VMware migration package

Proxmox VE

I stuck to PVE 7.4 and was able to get nVidia Grid vGPU shared amongst Ubuntu + Win 10 + Win 7 VMs. The trick to including Win7 was to install older Host driver V11.13 that could interface with much older Guest driver V10.4 (the last one still compatible with Win 7). Video card shared is the venerable 8GB Tesla P4.

… but the real reason to use Proxmox is the ZFS, with its built-in snapshotting, various redundant RAID schemes, backups, templates, containers. I’ve installed Sunshine 0.20 into all VMs running vGPU, when using H.265 encoding the VNC gigabit network streaming is excellent. Even over wi-fi!

… and I maintain complete control over all these vast resources using nothing but a decrepit 2015 Steam Link (running latest Moonlight) and Logitech K200 “media center” keyboard.

Florida man accused of hoarding America's secrets faces fresh charges

Uh… the IT director said “I don’t have permission to delete the server.”

This is a common source of frustration for anybody lacking su credentials…

All of these court cases are gonna get pushed back to next summer, if not further.

Meanwhile it’s entertaining to watch all the goofy Americans twist themselves into knots over this nonsense.

There’s a fantastic collection of Torrents (up to chapter 29 by now I think), “donald trump and the downfall of the republican party.” It consists of all the donald trump books people have been churning out the last several years.

Again: entertaining to collect all these free copies, but you certainly wouldn’t waste your time and effort to actually read any of them…

Google's browser security plan slammed as dangerous, terrible, DRM for websites

Aw man

Just the other day I finally loaded up “Brave” browser, and eliminated Chrome - no matter how cool it looks on Lando “Calrissian’s” McLaren.

Then I loaded up Noxplayer so I can run Newpipe on my workstation and escape all that crappy Google advertising.

I’d already switched to DuckDuckGo for internet search.

What’s next to go, probably gmail…

FCC boss says 25Mbps isn't cutting it, Americans deserve 100Mbps now, gigabit later

I only have 5 Mbps

Baud (“modulation rate,” or pulses-per-second) is approximately equal to bits-per-second, but there’s quite a lot of signal theory involved to work out the exact relationship.

My rule of thumb was always about 10 pulses per byte, so 300 baud would deliver about 30 bytes per second; similarly, my 5 Mbps delivers about 500 kB per second.

In my opinion, my 5 million baud connection is pretty darn fast!

I can watch 1 hi-def stream with that, or download pretty much any software update, eventually.

(I remember copying C64 diskettes with 4 minute “fast hack’em”, which could copy a complete 180 kB diskette with only 3 passes. That means the entire copier program fit inside 4kB in order for it to duplicate 60kB per pass.)

Frankly: not only is slower internet service cheaper, it’s also more secure. A hacker attacking my network could only steal one 30MB photo from my network per minute! Actually not: upload speed is only a fraction of download speed, for whatever reason.)

Musk's X tries to win advertisers back with discounts

I had already quit the twitter

Now nobody’s on the twitter.

Trendsetter, moi?

C'est arrivé!

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

"We're cutting the Twitter logo off the building with blowtorches,"

some jackass don't know what a blowtorch is.

Want to live dangerously? Try running Windows XP in 2023

Not so dangerous, if you properly sandbox it first. As a matter of fact I'm going to sandbox my entire workstation the same as I did my servers downstairs: within Proxmox. With vGPU and everything.

"...a lot of readers are keen on running ancient operating systems, and possibly worse still, ancient proprietary operating systems...", well, yeah. I'm trying to figure out how to fire up a Proxmox VM with 1990s era Solaris, and the reason is I'd like to explore some old applications I used to run on Sun workstations. I can do it with QEMU, sure, but Proxmox developers figured people would only run x86/x64 operating systems. I swear they go to more effort to de-feature QEMU than if they had simply left well-enough alone.

Meta can call Llama 2 open source as much as it likes, but that doesn't mean it is

Ehhh, so what.

Whether it’s “free software,” or “open source,” or even “free open source software,” I wasn’t gonna pay any which way.

Personally I’d just pirate it and move on.

That’s the way the computer industry works anyway!

(Bill Gates is famously known to have made sure that every copy of MS-DOS was easily reproduced by its own Xcopy command. To make sure the user base grew as fast as possible…)

RHEL drama, ChromeOS and more ... Our vultures speak freely about the latest in Linux

Somehow…

And just like that, I blow $4 USD on a dodgy “Windows 7 Ultimate” “perpetual“ license via “Wholsalekeys” of Covent Garden, London.

For my virtual machine operating within Proxmox.

Alas, for my Mahjong dependency…

Social media is too much for most of us to handle

I got an iPhone 4

Minding my own business, I was perusing the “technology discard” bin at Staples when I espied a discard iPhone 4. Yoink! (Despite that being disallowed: like the dump, the discard bin was supposed to be “deposit only.”)

The ‘phone was account locked, however. Rats. Then I looked up the emergency contact info, and was presented with a Twitter handle. Well then! 60 seconds later, now I’m a Twit, too.

Later on began what could only be described as a “harassment campaign.” I did indeed contact that former owner, explained who I was and what I was after, and after about a week was able to coach them into logging into their Apple account and de-registering the offending iPhone 4. You see, I was creating a spectacle around their personal Twit account, and embarrassing them in front of their peers.

Once I had the ‘phone unlocked, I proceeded to delete each and every tweet and photo I had uploaded onto the service. Which permanently eliminated my intrusion into these hapless individuals’ lives. Then I deleted my Twit account, and installed AirPlay server onto my new device, which to this day still serves as my media server for the hi-fi downstairs.

I genuinely have no idea what everybody else is doing on social media. If you’re not getting at least an iPhone 4 out of it, it’s a complete waste of time, I reckon.

Opportunity NUCs for Asus to continue Intel's mini PC line

Nuc-Nuc

Who there.

Asus!

Asus who?

Isuzu keep on truckin, nothing save Intel Nuc from sad fate of overpriced product!

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

I run Proxmox

If I run Windows inside Proxmox, itself inside Debian Linux, what would that count as?

As far as I’m concerned this is all happening inside Firefox which is the true operating environment. A close second is Parsec high-bandwidth VNC client…

India takes second punt at soft lunar landing with launch of Chandrayaan-3 mission

$74.5 million is a good deal

Until you remeber Google only valued a lunar landing + 500m joyride as worthy of $20 million x-prize (later $30 million when they realized how preposterous their original valuation was).

I guess going to the moon is its own reward, you know, to visit a barren airless hellscape a million miles from home...

Broadcom asserts VMware's strategy isn't working and it basically needs rescuing

Proxmox it

I’m going to reformat my workstation and run Windows as a VM in Proxmox, and never run a non-virtualized OS ever again. Well, I’ve had it with garbage Windows “restore points” that never ever worked right. The Z-pool storage in Proxmox + successful implementation of templates, snapshots, and foolproof backups has me convinced. That and other freeware “cloud” technologies such as Parsec VNC has me excited to dive deep into this.

Although I am somewhat miffed they deleted Solaris emulation from their implementation of Qemu, come on, guys. What are you actually saving by deleting Solaris! Practically nothing.

“VMWare,” what… are they still around? I was not aware!

Virtualbox, if you absolutely cannot figure out Proxmox for whatever reason.

Qemu, if you need Solaris (and who “needs” Solaris, it’s strictly for old-time sentiment.)

Producers allegedly sought rights to replicate extras using AI, forever, for just $200

I get the impression that you could just set up a discreet scanner somewhere busy and capture anonymous likenesses all day long, for nothing.

Why not?

Indian developer fired 90 percent of tech support team, outsourced the job to AI

So What

I fired all sorts of stuff because of Hyper Text: newspapers, TV guides, Television, I fired all my local radio stations and tune into exotic African, Japanese, and South American stations on radio garden.

I'm surprised there even is a "tech support" business anymore, any sort of problem I usually "google" it (on duck duck go) and find answers faster and more specific anyway.

Also, half the time "tech support" is merely a person following an "expert system" diagnostic tree, if there even is a tech support channel in the first place...

Ex-Twitter employees owed half a billion in severance, says lawsuit

Stupid name

I never got into Twitter because it has a stupid name, so I don't care what they're doing or not doing or what the problem is.

You're too dumb to use click-to-cancel, Big Biz says with straight face

Gyms are the same way

I went to the same kickboxing gym for years, and then one day I lost my job and wasn't going to that location anymore. Cancelled membership. And that's the day I learned that the original agreement stipulated that whereas customers were indeed allowed to cancel their membership, they were unfortunately obligated to pay for one more month at full price for the gym's benefit.

(It was easier to just cancel the credit card and let them figure it out...)