I’ve done quite a bit of freelance work and visited various office spaces with multiple companies in a single building. It was pretty common just to call to the building reception and tell them that I’m working for this-and-that-company upcoming weekend for their network stuff and I’d need access to network cabinets and whatnot and they’d have keys ready for me with very little (if any) verification if I’m actually doing what I’m supposed to or if I am who I claim to be. Some of the locations just handed me keys with access to practically everything, including shared server rooms hosting their CCTV setup, key managing servers and all.

So, just get a name tag with a local operator logo and clothes to match and ask nicely. You’ll get access to a lot more than you think.

English is not my native language and for whatever reason that makes text almost unreadable. But no worries, I can feed that to copilot to clean up:

Can you replace those strange characters to normal from this text: Beautiful! I had þis vinyl, once. Lost wiþ so many þings over þe course of a life.

Absolutely! Here’s your cleaned-up version with the unusual characters replaced by their standard English equivalents:

“Beautiful! I had this vinyl, once. Lost with so many things over the course of a life.”

Let me know if you’d like it stylized or rewritten in a different tone—poetic, nostalgic, modern, anything you like.

I would choose this too. Probability that I’ll win lottery next week would be nice to adjust. Also probability of getting sick/staying alive. And as I’m (allegedly) slowly getting older: Probability that I’ll wake up tomorrow well rested in a good shape and nothing hurts.

I’m also looking to learn about esp32 and I’m just sanity checking that this is a reasonable thing to do with one.

It sure can do what you’re after. Most likely not on it’s own, you’ll need a mosfet or a transistor as esp32 likely can’t handle the current your light uses. There’s plenty of tutorials on how to do the electronics, but cat least you need a mosfet with gate voltage below 5V and a resistor, both are very cheap. Just be careful with the esp32, it’s pretty easy to accidentally kill it with a short circuit or miswire.

And while you’re at it, esp32 can manage a ton of stuff beyond just blinking an led. You can add light/temperature/movement/whatever sensors, a button to manually toggle the light and whatever else you might think is useful and/or fun to have. It’s pretty much a generic purpose computer after all.

If I browse a piece of software from play store and click ‘install’ it’s “installing” and if I do the very same with F-droid it’s suddenly “sideloading”. Fundamentally every language is just made up, but on this occasion the newly coined term is used to obfuscate things and attempting to paint things something they are not.

I can claim all day that grass is blue and sky is green, but no one will take me seriously. Same thing should happen with ‘sideloading’ vs 'installing. Or if you really insist, sideloading might be something like injecting code to a system in a way which is not normally possible, like how some rootkits for devices work. But ‘sideloading’ is very different from ‘installing’ and installing anything on a general purpose computer doesn’t include any particular tool (like play store). I can install things on my workstation with ‘apt-get install’ or from source via ‘make install’, but the end result is still that a piece of software was installed.

Last time they tried our grandparents took 105 days to beat Russia with very little formal military and even less hardware. Sure, we had some help back then too, but today it’s on a whole different level. And we’re just a single small country up north, NATO as a whole is quite a bit bigger.

Russia currently has lost million soldiers and stockpiles of soviet relics are pretty much empty with a strong breeze away from total economy collapse. They don’t have power to conquer a potato field from a modern western country right now, much less against the whole global west.

Since the question is ‘vehicle’: Massey-Ferguson 165. Or if you insist a car: Opel Kadett C.

Give users that choice

That’s the one thing they want to get rid of. Security and other bullshit is just a theater around it to get validation for even bigger walls for their garden.

Whole thing is well worth a read, but just from the title alone I was ready to write a long rant about the term ‘sideloading’. Gladly that’s covered on the text too:

It bears reminding that “sideload” is a made-up term. Putting software on your computer is simply called “installing”, regardless of whether that computer is in your pocket or on your desk.

Where in the FUCK in Outlook currently is an option to use preformatted text? It’s not a style I could pick nor I could find an option to make my own. I send copy-paste from terminal every now and then and if it’s formatted like normal text it’s nearly useless. It used to be a text style I could pick, but this new-new-new-classic-new outlook doesn’t have it anymore.

Well, I guess it is safe to assume you are an enthusiastic murderer.

As it happens, I am. I wander around doing all the murdering I want to. It just happens to be none at all.

Why not try someone a bit more relevant than Hans Reiser, there’s plenty to choose from. Like Eric Raymond whose work, at least indirectly, influences more or less everyone using a computer on a daily basis.

I absolutely agree with your statement. Hell, even the GNU project (RMS mostly) had their own scandal a while ago, so if you really insist on being pedantic about this matter feel free on removing practically every piece of open source software from your systems.

So it is always DNS

other techies I’ve worked with had humanities degrees

My sister, who’s been an occupational therapist, personal assistant and on other ‘soft’ jobs recently got hired as a helpdesk employee just for that reason. Apparently it’s easier to teach a humanist to reset M365 passwords and do simple troubleshooting than teach a techie on how to deal with humans (which is a major part of being an on-call support for anything).

Based on the title alone I thought that she was a barista who poured hundreds of liters of coffee down the drain or something which might make sense. But no, just the last sip on her cup in order to prevent it from spilling in the bus or causing problems in the trash bin. Do they fine people if they accidentally drop their full cup too?

I actually did something for quite a while. Finished long overdue wiring for outdoor access point and one more camera, replaced a main switch since the old one started to behave unreliably, installed frigate (which still needs some work), cleaned up some wiring while messing around, updated a bunch of firmwares, replaced switch in garage to managed one and made some changes on my workstation and some other minor stuff.

Next would be to move cameras into their own VLAN and harden that setup a bit. And I really should get around on better backups for my VPS. But it’s a new week coming up, if the work isn’t too busy I might get something more done.

When I watch Iron Man or Batman talking to a computer, I don’t see some pinnacle of efficiency, I see inefficiency.

Things like Jarvis from Iron Man are far beyond of just translating speech to computer commands. Like in the first Iron Man where Jarvis pretty much manages the whole process on manufacturing the suit and can autonomically manage a fleet of them. I could see benefit if some kind of AI could just listen on a engineers discussion and update CAD models based on that, taking care of that the assemblies work as they should, keeping everything in spec and managing all the documents accordingly. But that’s pretty much human-level AI at that point and specially the current LLM hype is fundamentally very different from it.

But that’s an awesome insult. Or a grunge band name if you lean that way.

Snap Controversy

Just today at work other team wrote a bunch of ready-made images on their SBCs. In about 10% of them snap shat the bed by corrupting one json file which rendered their environment unusable. They did it in a pretty stupid way by writing an sd card, inserting it into SBC, booting up and disconnecting power after very short visual confirmation that system gave some signs of life. And snap was doing whatever it’s doing in the background. So I had the pleasure of removing said json-file and reinstalling all their crap manually on those failed units.

So, maybe not strictly speaking fault of snapd, but yet another problem it caused for me without any practical reason other than the environment they chose just uses snap instead of something more robust.