* Posts by Flightmode

216 publicly visible posts • joined 20 May 2019

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Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

Flightmode

Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ

Sorry to hear that you're going through this. Regardless of what the reason is for you mother's cognitive decline, it's not fun seeing someone you care about deeply deteriorate over time.

I would urge you (and anyone else reading this) to arrange for powers of attorney for your parents and other loved ones BEFORE you end up in a situation when they are no longer competent to fend for themselves or look out for their own interests. I don't know if this document has a particular name in English, but in my language there's a specific form of PoA that you can issue that allows named relatives, family members or other appointed guardians to step in and help a person make decisions if they are no longer able to take care of themselves. This will allow you to step in and help your mother when she can no longer make the appropriate decisions for herself.

To be brought up, discussed and executed with the tenderest care and understanding for your mother's wishes, of course.

Dave's not here, man. But this mind-blowingly huge server just, like, arrived

Flightmode

Re: Network?

Im sure there's a related aethernet joke in there somewhere too; I just can't find it.

Flightmode

Re: And there's me thinking...

"You accept payment in crypto-currencies, right? What if I told you I could get you the gear to mine your OWN crypto-currency?"

'Scandal-plagued' data broker tracked visits to '600 Planned Parenthood locations'

Flightmode

Re: That's why collecting and selling location information needs to be very illegal

And don't forget the risk of guilt by association.

My wife told me about an ex-colleague of hers, a local newspaper journalist who a number of years ago now found out he was being investigated by the police for his connections to a neo-Nazi organization. The colleague himself leaned quite far left on the political spectrum, so he was quite shocked about being brought in for questioning. The reason, it turned out, was that when he was on call or working weekends, he would park his private car in the newspaper's reserved spot in a public car park. That parking spot was apparently right next to a building that was used by the organization in question, and they'd just assumed that since he regularly parked there in evenings and weekends, he must be some kind of leader for the group.

And this was BEFORE Internet tracking.

Venus has a quasi-moon and it's just been named 'Zoozve' for a sweet reason

Flightmode

There's a pair of podcast episodes about it too:

https://radiolab.org/podcast/zoozve

https://radiolab.org/podcast/breaking-newsve-about-zoozve

(Disclaimer: I've not yet had a chance to listen to them myself, but Radiolab usually has really enjoyable contents. And of course, Latif Nasser who is the originator of the X thread linked above, is the co-host of the show, so this is straight from the horse's mouth.)

'Crash test dummy' smashed VIP demo by offering a helping hand

Flightmode
Stop

Re: Ouch

I cant help but to think that this is the kind of situation that LOTO (lock out, tag out) was invented for. The carriage shouldn't be physically able to move when someone is doing something to it; whether he's in the path of movement or doing something else that could be affected by the movement (such as holding a tethered-but-not-attached head-mounted display unit). LOTO would have prevented this. (But then again, aren't we all lazy and make assumptions?)

Singapore finally deletes its COVID-era contact tracing data

Flightmode
Terminator

Re: Exploitable Data

Quoting a news article I’m sure will be coming in about six to eight months:

“We have reached out to the (country) authorities and will update this story with their response. Meanwhile, the press representative at (hyped LLM provider) provided this statement: ‘After careful investigations it is our conclusion that portions of this data was included, in anonymized format, in a set of training data used to train our model BEFORE the data was set to be deleted. Current training sets do not include sensitive or personally identifiable information in any way, shape or form’. When closing the call, they added, off the record, ‘No doubt we’ll speak again in a couple of weeks.’.”

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

Flightmode

Re: Wrong defaults

When we were preparing to roll out IPv6 a number of years ago we had a consultant in to assist. She'd been doing some work at home over the weekend, and when she came into the office on Monday she continued checking how gracefully our equipment would handle NDP cache exhaustion in larger subnets but couldn't quite get anything to trigger the way she wanted to. After a couple of hours her husband called from home and complained about the Internet connection dropping out constantly. It was then it dawned on her that she hadn't changed the target IP subnet back from her home router on returning to the office, so she'd been DDoSing her husband for a few hours.

It took Taylor Swift deepfake nudes to focus Uncle Sam, Microsoft on AI safety

Flightmode

Now that megastar Taylor Swift has been pulled into this quagmire...

Giggity.

BOFH: Nice air conditioning system. Would be a shame if anything happened to it

Flightmode

My wife and I looked at buying a house a couple of years ago - it wasn't built yet, so it'd be brand new, and one of the things they touted as a huge benefit was an "app-controlled smart meter to keep track of and control your heating spend" which was marked as "(Free)*" in the prospect. Turns out, that little asterisk meant "for 12 months, thereafter the equivalent of EUR 25 per month; mandatory". One of the many reasons we didn't buy a property there.

Flightmode

This hits so close to home. Everything is a subscription these days, even if you still buy the hardware you'll need an annual license. Preferably pre-paid for five years and auto-renewing.

Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware

Flightmode

Two sides of a coin (aka Someone wanted a new printer)

A friend of mine many years ago told me a story of when he was called to replace a toner cartridge on an older-generation printer at a manager's office. The manager, who was generally well liked and somehow had never made any enemies in the helpdesk, asked if he couldn't get a new printer, as the one he currently had was very slow and noisy. My friend said that sorry, but he could only replace a printer that was actually broken. The manager asked if he couldn't make an exception, and my friend again said sorry, he could only replace broken printers. The manager now more or less pleaded, but my friend looked him sternly the eye and said sorry, he could only replace printers. that. were. actually. broken. As he said it, he nudged the printer about a foot to the left so that two of the rubber bumpers sat outside the desk surface. The manager brightened up and said that absolutely, good on you for not wasting company money.

When he came back from lunch about 45 minutes later, one of his helpdesk buddies was just discarding the packing materials from a new printer, as one upstairs had mysteriously crashed to the floor about ten minutes ago. The caller made a special note to say that they should keep the toner cartridge from the old one as it had recently been replaced.

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

Flightmode

Re: The RJ family...

Don't forget to include a constantly flickering blue LED with an intensity approaching the Trinity test. Preferrably on the back so that your whole room fills with strobe light bouncing of the wall.

Your password hygiene remains atrocious, says NordPass

Flightmode

Maybe I jumped to conclusions here, and for that I apologize. Wordings such as "NordPass customers in the US seem more likley[sic!] to use generic passwords..." from the article led me to believe that the data in the list (which apparently is an annual thing, coming from a company referred to in the same article as a "password manager vendor") came from their own customers. If the data is indeed collected from other sources then NordPass obviously have no blame here. I based my comment solely on the info in this article, I did not go the the source.

And my point was exactly what you're bringing up - if a password manager can even READ my password in clear text - either through non-encrypted backend storage or through a hidden master key, then they should definitely NOT be trusted. I have no experience with NordPass or any of the other Nord products, nor with any other online password managers. I rely on an offline password manager whose database I can maintain on my devices using a self-hosted sync service. That way, if something does go wrong, I can't blame anyone but myself.

Flightmode

So let's see, a password manager company that makes it their business to list their customers' most commonly used passwords every year? Broken down per service type, country and all? Definitely doesn't sound like a password manager I'd like to use, that's for sure.

Beta driver turned heads in the hospital

Flightmode

On my screen, a maximized default Excel spreadsheet at 100% shows columns A through BR (and about a third of BS*), so 70 1/3 columns. (58 2/3 lines visible with the expanded ribbon.)

*) Like most of what's presented in Excel, about 2/3 BS.

Flightmode

I used to do the two-slightly-different-monitors-side-by-side for many years; but recently my employer sprung for a 49" ultra-wide, curved monitor capable of 5120 x 1440 pixels for me. When writing, and especially editing, documentation I can fit up to six Word pages at 100% next to each other on a single screen; which is great! Also for other use cases, not having a thick bezel in the middle or the slight height offset is a boon. The only thing that was better with separate monitors is screen sharing in MS Teams - people complain about not being able to read things when I accidentally share my whole screen and they are on a 13" laptop...

Bids for ISS demolition rights are now open, NASA declares

Flightmode

Has anyone asked for the possibility to take it over and run it as a space hotel yet?

No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center

Flightmode
Pint

Re: Long MP3

Eeeeevil. I like it!

Flightmode

Re: Why stop with a music track?

1. Grab serially-absent colleague's phone from his desk.

2. Grab broom surreptitiously left in the corner.

3. Use said handle to lift a ceiling tile.

4. Shotput.

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

Flightmode
Pint

Re: Cleaning Printers that are full of dust

Nicely done.

Chap blew up critical equipment on his first day – but it wasn't his volt

Flightmode

Re: 220 vs 440

The first time I plugged in a seven-segment display on a breadboard to test it I accidentally left out the common-cathode resistor. I powered on my bench power supply and had the time to think "hey, this one is yellow, I ordered an orang..." before it popped and didn't have very much of a colour at all after that...

Polishing off a printer with a flourish revealed not to be best practice

Flightmode

Re: Stories from Grandad

Mind. Thoroughly. Blown.

Flightmode
Pint

Re: Stories from Grandad

I think it's more a statute of limitations thing...

Also;

> ...containing "20 odd women" though tragically he did not specify in his email exactly how odd they were.

Gorgeous twist!

Resilience is overrated when it's not advertised

Flightmode

Re: Failover backup redlining

AND not end up in a situation where users - because things are slower - keep pounding the servers by refreshing their requests again and again and again and...

Flightmode

Re: Dem girls, dem girls, yeah yeah yeah

> Dem girls, dem girls, dey all love me!

Welp, that weekend is ruined. Might as well make it full-blown.

Ziggyman and Zagamuffin are in the house in full effect!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bv_36P_f-w

Google offers to alert netizens when their personal info shows up in Search

Flightmode

Re: Everyone's evil but me

Yeah, this smells like Meta’s “Of course we can help you remove those (to quote TFA) saucy snaps you sent to your now-ex! Please upload a copy of the photos you want removed here!”.

BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!

Flightmode

Re: Cook's Tour...

Serves him right for giving them the idea...

Voyager 2 found! Deep Space Network hears it chattering in space

Flightmode

Re: Deep Space Network station

Though primarily focusing on Voyager 1 - Tom Scott visited the JPL a few years back - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLlzx6v8CcA - and the intro to that video still freaks my mind.

"The Voyager 1 space probe is the furthest man-made object from Earth, and the fastest. But right now, it is moving towards us. Relatively speaking."

NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

Flightmode

Re: What's 2 degrees away from Earth?

Yeah, but it's only needed until October 15th, so maybe you could rush it?

Flightmode

Re: Off topic

> everybody knew what it meant when "888" popped up in the corner of the screen as a programme began.

In Sweden we had 199 and 299 respectively for subtitles on the two public channels (meaning you could in theory watch a show on TV1 with the subtitles from TV2 superimposed to follow both programs); though I remember being very impressed with the 888 service in the UK when I moved there in 1988 - it was a lot more colourful (denoting different speakers and incidental sounds) - Sweden usually only had white-on-black subtitles, usually with the main character as yellow-on-black.

What we also had, that was pretty nifty, was a transparent page with just solid black bars where the regular broadcast subtitles would go on non-Swedish shows, so that you could cover them up in order to practice your foreign language skills.

'twas a simpler time.

Nobody would ever work on the live server, right? Not intentionally, anyway

Flightmode

Just checked Wikipedia now, and it seems that both Tri-X and T-MAX are actually still being manufactured by Kodak themselves (and sold by Kodak Alaris after the collapse of the Kodak empire). It’s been many years now since I shot on film, but I loved experimenting - and having a father who worked for Kodak in the 80s and 90s definitely helped feed the addiction…

The colours you could squeeze out of the Ektar 25, the definition of the T-MAX P3200 and - as you say - the Tri-X grain… Add a Cokin P057 Star 4 filter and I’m happy.

Flightmode

I too never used stop bath on film, only on prints. For (BW) film I'd do developer + agitation, rinse, fix, rinse thoroughly, squeegee.

My father, who is an avid photography enthusiast, told me when I got started that you can't go wrong with Tri-X film - the worst thing that can happen is that the emulsion itself cracks, and if it does it'll crack absolutely evenly and you'll get a cool graphical effect from it. Well, I proved him wrong when developing my first roll in the school lab one night. I did the last rinse in WAY too warm water, so when I went to dry it off, large swaths of the emulsion came off the substrate and stuck to the squeegee. It wasn't very even, but the resulting pictures were pretty ghostly and kind of cool anyway. So I guess half a point to dad for that one.

I can still remember the smell of Agfa's Rodinal developer combining with the 1:63 dilution of Kodak's Indicator Stop Bath. Fondly.

Flightmode

Like most people I got into the habit of shooting lots of pics in the hope I'd get a good one rather than thinking about, and setting up, the shot carefully as I used to do when shooting expensive slide film.

Aaron Johnson noted this phenomenon in his fantastic What The Duck comic strip (2006-2016). Forgive the links to the merch pages, but the comic archive search comes up with 0 hits.

- https://www.cafepress.com/mf/15360703/shoot-like-hell_mugs?productId=83198697

- https://www.cafepress.com/mf/36095082/2spray-and-pray-black_tshirt?productId=414186889

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

Flightmode

Re: ChromeOS is a fake linux

> - The kernel

Ah, this sent me straight back to Family Guy's Kentucky Fried Chicken cutaway from many, MANY years ago.

"What's wrong wit you? I say you he dead."

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Flightmode
Coffee/keyboard

Re: AltGr

I had a computer teacher in school in Sweden when I was, like 13-14 (late 80s) who insisted that it meant ”Alternativ Gravyr” - literally ”alternate engraving” - as it produced the symbol or letter that was engraved on the side of the key, not the top. He refused to accept any other possibilities, especially in English, because it was ”obviously a Swedish keyboard, or else it wouldn’t have Å, Ä and Ö, would it?”.

I just gave up then and there and didn’t bother pointing out Shift, Caps Lock, Enter, Home, End, PrtSc or, my personal favourite from that era, SysRq. Or <see icon>.

Flightmode

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

Cuneiform on a touch-screen.

Miscreants leak texts and info siphoned by Android stalkerware app LetMeSpy

Flightmode
Big Brother

Does anyone know if there's any trojan stalkerware out there?

Say Eve installs a spying app on Alice's phone and signs up to the web site to receive updates, but then gets a message that it's not supported or something. Instead ALICE gets notified about what Eve is trying to do AND gets the option to get info from HER phone instead? Because that would be the ultimate payback for this kind of behaviour.

Big Brother icon, because obvious.

Data cleanser did its job, but – oopsie! – also doubled customers' bills

Flightmode
Holmes

Ok, one last time. These are SMALL. But the ones out there are FAR AWAY.

A toast to being in the right place at the right time

Flightmode

Spoiler Alert

Over the past couple of weeks, I feel that the headlines and subheads for both the Who Me? and On-Call columns have become more or less full spoilers for the stories themselves. The combination of the words "toast", "mysterious network dropouts" and "popped up" doesn't leave much to the imagination.

I get that that's how headlines work for "normal" articles, but these stories should contain at least an element of surprise - otherwise, why would they end up in these columns at all? Please - take us along for the ride; don't just put us on the sidelines, laughing and pointing fingers. Please?

BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business

Flightmode

Of course this already exists:

https://github.com/markriedl/weirdai

Flightmode

Re: gigaspandrels

For some reason, this comment really makes me long for the new episodes of Futurama? Not too long now...!

Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget

Flightmode

We had a backup radio link between two nearby sites, with dish antennas on the roof of both buildings. After a couple of years, the link started acting flaky, but only during early morning through early afternoon, evenings, nights and most weekends were fine. Since it was the backup link we all basically thought that "I guess someone will have to look at that at some point". Eventually the link went hard down and didn't come back up, so after a couple of days someone started troubleshooting and eventually ventured up on the roof to see if something was up with the antenna - damage, birds nesting, cables chewed through by god-knows-what or something - only to came back down after a few minutes.

"Hey guys, you know that construction site across the street? They've put a hotel in our line-of-sight."

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Flightmode

Re: Hmmm

A local second-hand store has a big box full of wall warts of varying specs, polarities and connectors, priced at next to nothing. Whatever you need, you can probably find it there. (To be on the safe side, bring a multimeter to test that it works before you buy.)

Rigorous dev courageously lied about exec's NSFW printouts – and survived long enough to quit with dignity

Flightmode

> Until I discovered that I could make a lot more money doing the exact same thing...

I thought this sentence was going to end differently; mentioning things like blackmail, bitcoin and threats of public humiliation.

Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac

Flightmode

Re: Bridge technologies

Given that I left the company that used his services in 1997, he wouldn't have at the time at least...

Looking at official records, it seems the guy is actually still alive (25-year-old me would have classified him as "older" already back then), but the company was shuttered about a year ago. It looks like someone who would probably be his daughter had formally taken it over by that time. Maybe she had more nimble fingers, but the market for SCSI-cables isn't what it used to be?

Flightmode

Re: Bridge technologies

As if the talk about IrDa and Bluetooth further up on this page wasn't enough to give all of us nightmares for the whole weekend, you had to bring PCMCIA into it as well?!

Why not just say "Ultra Wide SCSI 3" (thunder rumbles) while you're at it?

(Fun side note - a company I worked for had a mom-and-pop-shop cable manufacturer who'd solder you a cable for anything. Small runs or even single cables weren't a problem and their workshop was just up the street, so you could usually call him and place and order, then walk over and pick it up half an hour later. He'd make cables for ANYTHING - I swear, if you dreamed up, I don't know, a cross-over null-modem cable with DB9-to-SCART plugs to connect, say, a traffic light to your washing machine, he'd make it for you, and it'd follow all the relevant EMF specs to boot. He wouldn't, however, touch SCSI 2 or higher for the eloquent reason of "the pins are so damn tiny that I keep burning my fingers, and I don't like doing that".)

Flightmode

Re: I can never ....

#insert joke about USB-A connectors always requiring a 360 degree turn to work here

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