Posts by Screepy 89 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2018
+1 for Mint.
I'm by no means a Linux power user - I still get confused when people get angry about snap or systemd .. etc.
I went with Mint because Liam recommended it a couple of years back as a good option to make the hop across from Windows.
I really like it, and it stays out of my way so I can just get on with things.
I game on it a lot as well, all through Steam, and don't have any issues, but like others have said check protondb for your games of choice.
"it has a small internal combustion engine that powers the batteries. One tank of gas gives a range of up to 1,000 to 1,200 kilometers."
This is really nothing new at all.
Like a couple of you have pointed out, there are quite a few of non-chinese brand cars that do this.
All Honda hybrids are the same I believe, not just the Accord. The hybrid Jazz/Fit certainly uses the petrol engine as a generator to charge the battery.
Also quoting range of a vehicle without also quoting the efficiency is useless.
Sure it can go 1000km, but what is the actual mpg or km/l?
It reminds me of an advert several years ago when Toyota brought out a new Land cruiser Prado model.
It advertised a range of 1200km as standard, which was amazing for a big 4x4.
What the stats didn't show was it had a 180 litre fuel tank, so the mpg was just a rubbish as all the other big 4x4s but this one made your eyes water a bit more when you filled the tank and saw the total price on the pump.
I wonder why they have to destroy the craft at the end of the mission. I understand they don't want to contaminate Europa but we're ok with contaminating Ganymede?
Does anyone know why they can't just slingshot away from Jupiter and it's moons and send it off into the dark with it's sensors running sending NASA data until it runs out of power (a la Voyager)?
@Mikus , while I agree that Teams is less than ideal, I've been running it on Linux Mint for over a year and it's been fine.
I have no real issues with it at all.
The version I use is the first hit in software manager.
I suspect it is just the web version in some sort of wrapper but it works fine for me.
There are a few quirks; like it doesn't highlight which screen you are sharing in red, so you need to keep track of which one you've shared, and you can't pop out a video call into a separate window.
But overall I think it's workable - it means I can stay away from W11 and still continue to work for my curreny employer ;)
@James - are you saying that the big edu institute will pay for extended support for the W10 devices or just 'wing it' once official support ends?
The problem a lot of orgs have is that their cyber insurance won't cover them if they continue to use unsupported (and therefore unpatched) machines/OSes.
My org isn't massive (+-3000 users each with a W10 laptop) we can't afford extended MS support as it's incredibly expensive so we're forced to go W11 as otherwise our insurance won't cover us...
"The last terror is probably printing / scanning which had always been a bit of a nightmare in previous Linux experiments."
I had a similar experience to Boothy.
When I installed Mint last year, i chose default setup for printers and scanners during the install and my Xerox C235 has worked flawlessly right out the gate. I was most pleasantly surprised.
Interesting link, thanks.
If you click through that link to the site where they got the data from there are some other interesting bits in there.
RAM really not coming out looking very good - topping the charts in a lot of those results - more incidents (not accidents) than any other brand.
BMW has the most drivers caught driving under the influence of alcohol.
And, as you mentioned, Tesla, which are the most accident prone.
Also, a small point but important, your subject line says it's electric cars, but that study covers both EV and ICE - which makes it a much more interesting dataset.
"Do you you grow sustainable lettuce? No you grow it as big, watery and unsubstantial as you can, cut the head off, and sell it quick."
Not done much gardening in your life have you?
The individual lettuce isn't sustainable, you eat/sell that.
What needs to be sustainable is your ability to continue to produce lettuce of suitable quality for years and years.
So, instead of being greedy and harvesting all your lettuce at once, for a huge feast/profit, you need to let some lettuce run to seed, harvest that seed and then replant them for the next season. Rinse and repeat - sustainable.
So what that rather messy metaphor means is Broadcom are harvesting as much money as they can with no apparent thought of the future of VMware. Ie. Not planning for it to be a sustainable long-term..
On your point a)
The answer is, mostly everyone :(
There's hardly a country out there that hasn't connected critical infra. Main excuse is to allow remote troubleshooting/monitoring.
But also, air gapping won't always help (it certainly reduces the risk though)
Stuxnet ran riot on the Iranian centrifuges and that complex was air gapped. A suitably placed agent just needs a usb/network port or whatever and off they go.
When it comes to state-sponsored hacking, you can probably assume they will eventually find a way in. What you need is suitable mitigation for when/if they launch their bot/worm/malware/etc
I'm with you on this GraXXor, I loved Elite Dangerous.
The scale was mind boggling.
I went on both Distance Worlds expeditions and travelling with all the other commanders across the galaxy to beagle point has been one of the gaming highlights in my life.
In 2017 I went to FX17 in London to listen to some talks by the devs on how they designed and coded the game.
The astrophysicist who worked with the devs on creating the stellar forge have a brilliant talk on how the universe was generated in game.
There were certainly some disappointing decisions in the game, and some clunky multiplayer issues - trying to get hundreds of commanders in the same instance for a mass launch was always a lottery.
I eventually finished with about 1500 hours on ED.
Has been one of my favourite games.
This is true but I don't think the cybertruck is coming to the UK or Europe as far as I've read.
US licenses are a bit more relaxed on the weight limits.
I believe it changes from state to state but 10,000 lbs (4,545 kg) seems to be quite a common limit over there. So that would give users about 1,000kg to play with.
Hopefully one of our US readers can give us a better idea of the allowed weight limits on standard licenses..
@NickJP - thanks for those links.
I added them to my pihole, disabled my uBlock origin, and can confirm that I got no YouTube adverts within the video.
I hopped about across 8 or 9 different videos, no issues, none of them had adverts.
I did notice one or two ads appear alongside the comments section of the videos which I never usually see, so I assume uBlock has been sweeping those up for me in the past.
But thank you, please accept this -->
"PiHole works for Youtube, as long as you view via a browser. When you use the app, it serves ads directly from Youtube servers, making blocking them a game of whack-a-mole."
That's interesting. I've been running PiHole for years and I've never seen it block a YouTube advert (in browser or app). It blocks loads of ads but never ones embedded in the YouTube video.
I need to use uBlock Origin to get rid of the YouTube ones.
Are you doing any extra tweaks to your pihole config to get it to block YouTube ads?
" Linux Mint CInnamon is my main distro"
It is mine too.
Mainly thanks to Liam tbh.
I'm a MS sys admin, and have been for 20 years.
At home everything was MS, mainly as it was easy for me to fix due to familiarity.
Last year I read one of Liam's articles and it convinced me to try Linux Mint.
Has been my main OS for just over a year now. I'm still pretty crap at troubleshooting it when I have the occasional hiccup but overall I've been impressed.
There are bits and pieces that still annoy me (particularly around certificates. If we update our certs on our Citrix servers, the next time I try and connect from home I get all sorts of trust issues) but that's down to my skillset rather than anything wrong with Linux Mint.
Certainly won't be going back to MS for my home daily driver.
Thanks Liam -->
"I wasn't aware that the Concorde flew supersonic over land."
I don't think the OP was saying that it went supersonic over his area, just that the engine noise as it came over was really loud.
My grandmother's house was on the flight path and when we visited we all would stop talking and listen to the cups and saucers rattle on the shelves as it came over. It was really loud - I loved it.
A couple of years before Concorde was cancelled. BA took a load of RAF war vets up on a short circuit flight as a thank you for their services during ww2.
My grandad (rear gunner on Lancaster bomber) had already died by then but the widows were still invited.
My gran went on the flight.
When I asked her what it was like she just shrugged and said it was '.. a bit bumpy and quite chilly, but the air crew were gorgeous"
My dad pointed out that it was the only plane she'd ever flown on and consequently had nothing to compare it too :D
I wasn't a big octopus eater but growing up on the coast, I ate my fair share.
Watched My Octopus Teacher a few years back.
No chance I can eat another one.
I know it was heavily anthropomorphised but there's still no way I can eat one again. There is just a little bit too much 'intelligence' there for me.
"I've been onboarding new people for the last year or more, all entirely remotely. We don't have problems - then again we are not stuck in the management dark ages either."
Precisely this.
Onboarding remotely may be different but it's not necessarily more difficult or worse.
If your onboarding processes are still stuck on the ark with Noah then of course you'll struggle.
Pi-hut have Pi 4 8GB 'starter kits' available right now, £104 - hdmi cable, power supply, case, SD card, and pi4 8GB.
Not ideal as i know a lot of us would prefer just the board and then pick and choose what we want depending on our project of choice but at least it's something.
I nabbed one as I'm going to be setting up BirdNet-pi in the garden :)
https://github.com/mcguirepr89/BirdNET-Pi
What a totally shit OP.
"Why have one oldie at £90k when you can have 3 youngsters at £30k each?"
I'll tell you fuckin why!
It's because when I log in in the morning it will take me 30 minutes to fix the finance system issue that your 3x juniors spent all night on and are still no closer to fixing.
Sure, they answered the phone, and the customer got to speak to someone. What good did that do if that someone is still too inexperienced to know how to fix it?
I'm not sure this is the fault of the authentication type though.
That is just a time limit implemented by the admins when they set up the application, in your case Canvas/ Workday.
There is usually a setting in the config of the app for how long an auth session will last - controlled by the sys admins obviously.
At least that is how a number of our applications were set up with when we added 2FA - we could set timeouts from minutes to hours to days, or just x min of inactivity.
So either your orgs security policy has stipulated a time limit or the admins left it at default and/or their best guess at a suitable timeout.
We spent 2022 moving a big SQL data warehouse into Azure and onto some of their beefier VM options.
For the next 6 months we struggled with performance. Data cube analysis that would take us 5-6 hours on our previous on-prem servers was now taking double that.
MS had helped us spec the cloudy VMs - we provided our on-prem specs and they provisioned us with the VMs that would supposedly outperform our older system.
Not even close. Our SQL DBAs spent days/weeks trying to tune the system but we just couldn't get anywhere near our old system. We even bumped the cloud VMs up a couple more performance tiers (which completely wiped out the planned budget for the system) but still had issues.
Back and forth we went with MS support until they eventually said that the setup you was running as optimally as it ever would.
So, I had to rebuild the system on-prem again and we migrated back (what fun that was).
During the switch back we had a couple of days downtime.
DBAs and I took the opportunity to absolutely smoke both systems with some benchmarking tools. The on-prem kit was so much better it was a joke. And we're not talking high-end kit here. Midrange hybrid Nimbles as storage layer, with good, but not amazing Aruba switches and a well oiled but nothing special VMware layer running the VMs.
The main weakness that we spotted on the benchmarking for the cloud stuff was disk IO, it just couldn't get anywhere close to the on-prem Nimbles.
@Doctor Syntax
"Of course they'll all end up in land fill one way or another."
Sadly not just landfill, pop over you YouTube and search
'No Lost Shoes | A film by Max Romey'
Only 10 min, an interesting, if rather dispiriting video.
I'm an ultra runner (a very amatuer one!) and have been trying out NNormal shoes - they're trying to stop shoes ending up in landfill (or on distant shores) - after you've worn out your shoe you can send them back to NNormal and theyll break them down again and recycle it all (hopefully)
@Sampler - you haven't said whether your Xiaomi was bought in China or not.
The article is suggesting that the android phones made for the Chinese market are the ones of real concern. ie. they are slurping way more personal data than the same model of phone sold outside of China.
Basically, all phones are sucking up too much of our data, however it appears that if your phone is made for the Chinese market then it's sucking up even more.
MS is mentioned in the 2nd paragraph.
But agree with your other point. There do seem to be IT jobs out there at the mo.
We've got Sys Eng positions in our team but we've been unable to fill them as candidates have been counter-offering hard on salary which usually means they're not that desperate.
Good luck to all who find themselves in 'looking for work pool'
"The car I have
each time it goes in for a service, it gets a software update"
My motorcycle gets over-the-air updates now.
My eye always twitches slightly when I turn the key and it says,
"Hi, there is a new firmware update, would you like to install it now or postpone?"
If I postpone it installs during the maintenance window you have to stipulate when setting up the bike in the app.
To be fair it has never bricked the bike but on occasion I've ridden off in the morning looking at a dash that is completely different to the way it looked yesterday.
"If I was responsible for a business that used exclusively MS products, Patch Tuesday would become a Patch Tuesday from a month before at the earliest."
Sadly that's no longer an option for a lot of orgs.
We used to be 1 month behind for production (with Dev/Test getting patches a couple days after patch Tuesday which gave us a month to notice any issues), however our insurers now require us to have our entire environment patched within 10 days.
It's all rather stressful and since running with this new remit (June 2022) we've hit a number of bugs (particularly with on-prem exchange) where the latest patches bork something and degrade our production environment.
*Sigh
Since the ads are to be served through separate streams hopefully it means those clever people updating Pi-hole (or your alternative favourite ad blocker) will be able to block the ad content.
Although it may start to look a bit ugly in-game with big blank billboards/shirts/car bumpers etc where the ads were supposed to appear
Not quite on topic but since consent options have been mentioned...
A couple of months back Ghostery implemented their automatically 'opt out of all' functionality in their browser plugin.
It works surprisingly well I find.
Whenever I visit a new site, I see the consent pop-up window appear and then disappear as Ghostery automatically says no to all.
It makes me happy each time it happens - small victories :)
@iron
Curses!
You're right. I didn't think that through did I.
Now all I've done is flag the account is certainly active (I hadn't used it for months before changing pw today)
Rats.
I guess one good thing is my payment method is linked to PayPal which pings me with an MFA message before going through, other than that my phone number/address/last trips etc are probably all in the hands of the fiend.
It's the dunce hat for me.
I have used Uber quite a few times and have found it fairly handy.
Saw this article and nipped into the app to change password.
It didn't prompt me for MFA when I logged in.. odd.
Checked my account settings and MFA was disabled, also odd as I keep track of when I enable MFA on my accounts - with Uber i enabled it end of last year.
Not sure why it was disabled again, either something nefarious going on or an update to the app over the last few months reset some stuff including MFA but didn't let me know.
*sigh
password changed, MFA re-enabled.
I share that distinction, but am no where near the 100 year old mark.
Lived in Ghana as a teenager, bought my car license there - the whole system was rather corrupt.
Moved to South Africa for university. SA has an agreement with Ghana that the license is recognised as valid so got it converted to an SA one.
Moved to Germany in 2010ish, they recognise the SA drivers license, converted it to German license.
Moved back to blighty in 2012, DVLA is quite happy to convert German license to UK... and there you have it.
I have a valid UK drivers license but have never taken the test.
Postscript to that story - When I arrived in SA I happened to mention to mother that I hadn't actually passed a test in Ghana. She, quite rightly, gave me a clip round the head and promptly booked me for a full learners course. So I was trained, just never had to take the tests.
@tiggity
Although it does feel like a 'f the users' approach some orgs have no choice.
In my org (+-3000) employees we have to enable MFA otherwise a good chunk of insurers won't even quote to insure us - others will, but at far higher (unaffordable in our case) rates.
Moving across to MFA for us was pretty smooth. But it needed good clear communication to the user base and good clear training for the helpdesk who would answer the inevitable calls that would come through.
If some users didn't want to use their own mobiles we provided a work one - not ideal as they then had to carry two mobiles (but their choice)
We've been on MFA at our org for 4 years now, the user base is pretty comfortable with the concept by now and it hardly generates any noise on the helpdesk.
@ThatOne
You can set your mail client not too ask each time. So on setup you obviously need to follow the MFA request, but you get the option to 'trust this device' so it won't prompt again until you reinstall the app or do anything else that will reset the MFA settings.
If anyone else tries to log into your mail on another device they will obviously get a MFA prompt which will certainly make the baddie's lives more inconvenient.
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