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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Universities have been running Linux since the very early versions. Slackware was pretty common back in the 90s and 2000s and universities had labs full of them not least because there weren’t really laptops so they had to have enough machines for all the students. Universities have been heavily involved in the development of unix from its inception and a lot of the tools were initially written by university professors.



  • Grian’s early videos on his channel were all about how to make better looking buildings. The fundamental strategy is to start with a more interesting asymmetric shape as the base and vary the height in various places as well to produce a more interesting shape. For example the entrance could be a short corridor with well defined doorways and its only as high as the corridor needs to be breaking up the cube both on the bottom layer and vertically.

    The second part of his steps I recall were depth. So take the corners and put structure and framing on the outside, do this across the entire build to give it that sense of being held up with columns.

    The next is all about colour and details where small extra little pieces are added such as frames around the windows and stair cases used to fill corners of framing to make them gradient in.

    I highly recommend those early Grian tutorial videos on youtube because they teach some fundamentals that can make any build look a lot better even when you start out with a grey cube,







  • It really depends on the project. Some of them take breaking changes seriously and don’t do them and auto migrate and others will throw them out on “minor” number releases and there might be a lot of breaking changes but you only run into one that impacts you occasionally. I typically don’t want containers that are going to be a lot of work to keep up to date so I jettison projects that have unreliable releases for whatever reason and if they put out a breaking change its a good time to re evaluate whether I want that container at all and look at alternatives.

    So no its not safe, but depending on the project it actually can be.


  • This is having big real world consequences. In Long Covid research there has been a tonne of near duplication of work and its apparent none of the work is really building on prior work as the sheer volume of papers is impossible to keep up with. Most of its unremarkable in the sense it hasn’t moved further than findings on ME/CFS from decades prior, so much of the work is too shallow to be of use.

    Then the other side of this is the psychology side of things which has been publishing some grade A nonsense and none of the findings hold up to any scrutiny once a replication is attempted.

    There there is all the widespread fraud where medical images have been fabricated in various ways, the data often shows clear signs of fabrication as well.

    Its a real mess and its harming real people who need this research to inform proper treatments.




  • Over the years I have used OSMC for my TV. I have never used it for streaming however always internal across the network streaming of my own content. It worked reasonably well for the most part although I have had issues with Samba in recent versions and have stopped using it. I can’t say much about its streaming, mostly for that you need a supported android or similar device rather than an open source one.


  • I have done this a few times, so long as the drive isn’t mounted it works fine.

    One advantage of this approach compared to clonezilla is you can pipe it through netcat or similar and move it to another machine. You can also first pipe it through gzip as well to save on the transfer bytes a bit as well and then on the other end just store the compressed image or unzip it. Combine a few tools together and you have quite a lot of capability for complete image backups but its usually best done for the boot drives from a live USB.


  • Ideally for your router you want something that runs an open source firmware (OpenWRT, DD-WRT, OPNSense, FreshTomato). Its better because you get a completely unlocked everything you need system with security patches for the hardware’s true lifetime. Every router company stops with the security updates after a few years and then at some point it becomes part of a bot net or one of this mass hack events. Its best not to play in that game and instead run some open source firmware from the outset.

    The best way to start is to look at the website for openwrt.org and use their filtering to find a device that supports your needs (at least 5 LAN ethernet ports I guess and some wifi but AC sounds like it will do). The other option is a more typical 4 LAN port router which will give you a lot more options and then add a switch to that, doesn’t sound like you care too much about it being managed or >1gbps so they are also dirt cheap.




  • I don’t think modern Raspberry pi’s make much sense unless you are using GPIOs or really need the low power consumption. The 3 and the 4 were OK price wise but the pi 5 is quite close to all these N100 mini computers and they are a lot more performance and expansion compared to a raspberry pi 5 and still quite low power.

    Either a Topton or similar N100 based machine or a mini PC second hand is the way to go at the ~$100 mark. The mini PC will be faster and probably more expandable and cheaper but also more power consumption.



  • These early days of processors I was constantly upgrading between the companies. A Pentium to K6 to a PIII celeron to a Duron and then an Athlon XP and then a Pentium HT before finally the stable era arrived with the Core 2 duo and all the subsequent CPUs largely being small incremental upgrades at more or less the same clockspeed peak and lots of the performance coming from more cores. There was a lot of back and forth in price/performance and absolute performance as various innovations and pipline length increases and clockspeed were release. Things changed drastically in the 8 years we went from 100Mhz Pentiums through to the Core 2 Duos where both companies lead and trailed and you needed to upgrade your machine most years to keep up with modern games.