AndrewDavis

Reminds me of the story of the French politician with a forward slash in their name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emeline_K%2FBidi?wprov=sfla1

I can't find a reference anywhere, but I remember reading that when their child was born they couldn't process a birth certificate with the name containing a slash, so it was changed to a dash for the kid.

I've been contemplating buying a new car. BYD are a popular brand for electric cars in Australia. A single titbit in a review turned me off[1].

> To start with, the Dolphin falls victim to a speed limit warning system with no tolerance and a chiding beep that will quickly drive you insane.

The car has cameras to read speed signs and if it detects you are speeding beep at you. Sounds like a great feature! What's the problem if you aren't speeding?

> To make matters worse, the Dolphin is equipped with equally flawed traffic sign recognition technology that takes all speed limit signs at face value, ignoring the time stipulations common in school zones and busy shopping hubs.

Oh ... we have some speed signs that have time qualifiers, eg lower speeds around schools near start and end of school, or busy shops etc.

> It’s one thing to have a car bother you for breaking the speed limit, but another altogether for a car to unnecessarily distract you during safe, lawful driving. Rant over… for now.

> You can switch the system off, just not permanently. Settings revert to their default state every time you switch the car off, so setting up ADAS becomes a time-consuming daily ritual.

Absence of a feature is often far superior to a broken one.

[1] https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-reviews/2025-byd-dolphin-re...

My university had a model train set, hooked up to some ancient 386 machines (and we're talking late 2010s here) and it was used for a real time programming course which was taught in Ada.

Unfortunately the lecturer that ran the unit retired the year I started my degree and by the time I had the prereqs required to do the course the faculty had run the course once without the original lecturer and it was apparently a disaster so they canned the unit until it could be rewritten from scratch, sans train set ... and in Java.

I still think about missing out on programming a train set. Years later

Their downloaders for classic games still have the options to enable peer to peer. Though it failed to initialise, but I'm not sure if that's because their tracker is down or because it demands upnp. I recently did this with Diablo 2 and it's expansion.

> Navidrome can work with your folder layout, too.

Is that recent? When I was looking to replace libresonic I looked at Navidrome and it couldn't do that, and the developer indicated they didnt have plans to add that feature.

I also settled on Gonic. Mostly for this reason.

Even though I have a CRT and NES, I bought one of the NES minis when they released.

I played some Mario Bros 3 and... I kept dying. Jumping too late led to running into holes and enemies. It was so bizarre, I couldn't believe how bad I'd gotten. Tried the next day, same deal.

Then I had a thought re delays. Pulled out my NES and hooked it up to the CRT and all that stopped

There was sufficient delay in the NES mini and modern TV it made a huge difference.

I'm sure I could retrain myself, but it was honestly stunned at how much of a difference it made

We didn’t replace all servers at once, it was progressive, therefore due to availability the models we used changed over time.

Our first batch of all nvme machines had SSDPE2KX080T8, they became harder to source and we moved to SSDPF2KX076T1.

With Intel no longer in the ssd business I believe we have some Micron MTFDKCC7T6TGH and MTFDKCC30T7TGR. And as mentioned in the blog post we've recently purchased some Solidigm D5-P5336 which are 61TB monsters.

Here's a fun related story. Our supplier had so much trouble finding SSDPE2KX080T8 that when we had exhausted our spares, I had to sync everything off a machine, tear it down and pull its drives for spares and rebuild it with the smaller SSDPF2KX076T1. Then we had lots of spares

A few more than one, but it has been a lot less than when we were dealing with spinner. I think I requested about one or two replacements a year, a far cry from the one a week I was doing before.

It's not uncommon in configuration management. Ansible has ansible-vault which encrypts secrets you then commit. When you need to use them you decrypt them and run your ansible commands.

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/cli/ansible-vault.ht...

It suffers the same problem as any other secrets management in git. If the decryption key leaks, even if your repo hasn't, you have to rotate every secret in case the repo is ever leaked in the future.

Modern AEDs have voice guidance telling the person what to do. So you can follow the instructions as you do it.

Also, you should call the emergency number in your region and (at least in Australia) they'll transfer you to someone who can coach you through using the defib and performing CPR until professional help arrives.

Don't let that stop anyone from getting their CPR up to date though. The more experience you have the better equipped you'll be if you need to use it

> Now we just need Oracle to decide not to want to maintain the Virtualbox kernel modules

If I remember correctly you can already select KVM as the backend in Virtualbox. And in Windows you can use HyperV as your backend. Not sure about MacOS land.

So this is great, if you're just looking to deduplicate read only files. Less so if you intend to write to them. Write to one and they're both updated.

Anyway. Offline/lazy dedup (not in the zfs dedup sense) is something that could be done in userspace, at the file level on any filesystem that supports reflinks. When a tool like rdfind finds a duplicate, instead of replacing with a hardlink, create a copy of the file with `copy_file_range(2)` and let the filesystem create a reflink to it. Now you've got space savings and they're two separate files so if one is written to the other remains the same.

The linked blog post covers this, and the improvements made to make the new dedup better.

I'm substantially more productive at home. Not for any single reason, but as a result of small things coming together, for example.

More sleep. I can set my alarm 15 minutes before I start work instead of an hour and a half. So I'm more refreshed.

Commuting is mentally draining.

I get sick less. Less often as a sardine in a tin can. More sleep probably helps too.

Less distractions. There's just me in my home office room, at work there are 3 other people right next to me and a dozen within ear shot.

I get home stuff done during work breaks. When I step away from my desk at work I do so because I need a break from what I'm doing, not a break from everything. But there's nothing else to do at work so I sit and do nothing. At home i: - unload the dishwasher - walk to the shops to buy items for dinner - sit in the park

And I find doing those things more refreshing than sitting in the break room staring into space, or walking through the city in the noise of cars everywhere.

So when I step back to my desk, at home I'm more refreshed ready to get back into it.

This also means when I finish work for the day, in office it's another hour or so to get home and then do chores. Vs at home I finish work and I can go for a walk in the park because I've done my chores already.

So I'm happier and less stressed. Which leads to less fatigue and burn out. So I'm ready to go again the next day.

> as it's how HAProxy runs all of their containers

Could you elaborate on this? I'm curious about using s6 as a container runner.

Absolutely, if you can't use a filesystem with checksums (zfs, btrfs, bcachefs) then rsync is a great idea.

I think filesystem checksums have one big advantage vs rsync. With rsync if there's a difference it isn't clear which one is wrong.

I had a significant data loss years ago.

I was young and only had a deskop, so all my data was there.

So I purchased a 300GB external usb drive to use for periodic backup. It was all manual copy/paste files across with no real schedule, but it was fine for the time and life was good.

Over time my data grew and the 300GB drive wasn't large enough to store it all. For a while some of it wasnt backed up (I was young with much less disposable income).

Eventually I purchased a 500GB drive.

But what I didn't know is my desktop drive was dying. Bits were flipping, a lot of them.

So when I did my first backup with the new drive I copied all my data off my desktop along with the corruption.

It was months before I realised a huge amount of my files were corrupted. By that point I'd wiped the old backup drive to give to my Mum to do her own backups. My data was long gone.

Once I discovered ZFS I jumped on it. It was the exact thing that would have prevented this because I could have detected the corruption when I purchased the new backup drive and did the initial backup to it.

(I made up the drive sizes because I can't remember, but the ratios will be about right).

> But lithium ion battery costs will keep falling

I question whether increased demand for grid scale batteries will create so much demand that lithium won't drop significantly any time soon.

I certainly hope i'm wrong.

My favourite are queries "why are you rejecting my email?"

Ehh... Because your dmarc policy told us to?

Possible. That's not uncommon for podcasts.

Subscribe to an RSS feed and when you download the file the server based on some heuristic (I'm guessing most geo ip) sends you a file with ads targeted for you.

> Some time later I saw a Pacific Bell truck and crew trenching the street. (We had underground utilities.) I excitedly asked them, "Are you running fiber?" "No, just more copper."

During the Australian NBN^^ rollout. Where I used to live was on the border of a FTTC and a coax/DOCSIS one. My street had no pre-existing cable TV cable so you'd think no brainer to lay fibre. Nope, brand new coax. And because the street had no coax that meant no homes had an existing cable so they had to trench every driveway to connect it to the street. It would have been an absolute no brainer to run fibre then use the existing phone lines up driveways to their homes. Cheaper, and an easy upgrade path to full fibre. This was 2019.

^^Australia built a national broadband network. It was originally designed to be all fibre (except for remote places over satellite etc), but politics happened and it was changed to a multi technology mix which included DOCSIS, fibre to the node then vdsl for the last km or whatever, or fibre to the curb and vdsl up your driveway. And the government entity building it NBN was buying up old copper phone lines and coax.

I think it's a bunch of reasons but agree it's probably 50/50. I can certainly relate to having no where to put stuff when my grandparents passed away, so I took one item I could fit into my bedroom.

Another reason is, the craftspeople to maintain this furniture is much rarer. I have a dressing table that was my great grandmothers. It's a beautiful piece and solid as a rock but it's showing wear and tear of daily use every day of my life (and who knows when it was previously restored). Finding someone capable of restoring it is hard, and it's a long manual process which would cost substantially more than buying a new piece. I'll never part with the thing but I doubt I'll ever get it restored either.

My mother has an old settee that was her aunts. It's falling apart needing new springs and upholstery. She's been on a waiting list to get it repaired for years, and the upholsterer isn't taking more clients as he's past retirement age and now does it just a few days a week with a backlog of years.

I remember discovering his Youtube channel, it was either during my first year of University and i'd watch them as much for entertainment as education. Every so often i'd find myself following along.

Between semesters I watched some of his search algorithm videos, including his two part A* videos, and recreated it. When semester started I took a classical AI course and the first assignment was search algorithms. And my goodness was it helpful.

> zfs was baked in

How baked in? I think Alpine is one of the few distros to ship a binary zfs kernel module. So it's just a quick apk command away from getting it. There's some pretty decent documentation to install zfs on root on the alpine wiki too https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Root_on_ZFS_with_native_en...

I carry those old games from old windows installs. They won't run "natively" on modern windows, however someone ported a subset of WINE, winevdm, to windows called otvdm.

I was playing Chips Challenge yesterday!

https://github.com/otya128/winevdm

I used ME for a while. I must say it was extremely performant, shaved off about 15-20 seconds of boot time (compared to 98 SE) off my Athlon XP 2000+ machine. A cold boot in about 25 seconds. Which was a real time saver because it crashed every 2-3 hours.

This has been my solution too. I have a vpn into my home on all my devices, so even away from home I can typically rely on it.

As a side note, for Android I've been using (and can't praise enough) Material Files [1]. It's the best simple file manager I've used that has built in samba support.

[1] https://f-droid.org/packages/me.zhanghai.android.files/

Ahh interesting. Didn't realise there were such significant differences in storage. Thanks!

That's interesting. In Victoria Australia (Melbourne to me more specific). LPG (liquid petroleum gas) cars were more very successful. Throughout the 80s and 90s almost every taxi was LPG, basically every petrol station also had (and many still do) have LPG. And it was super common if you bought a Ford Falcon or Holden Commodore, two of the most popular cars of the 90s and 00s here that you would convert them to LPG. Typically by installing an additional smaller tank in the boot (trunk as Americans call it) and have a switch in the cabin to switch between the fuels. Maybe the smaller tank might only get a couple hundred kilometres but it was quick, cheap and easy to fill up, simple to swap back to petrol if you needed the range etc. It was so common, I know Ford (and possibly Holden) were offering the factory ready for LPG without a petrol tank.

Even appliances that aren't internet connected are going down this terrible UX path.

My old washing machine had nobs (dials) you turn. You put the clothes and soap in, close the door and press the button. My preference of type of wash and water temperature were all "saved" by the nob position.

My current washing machine, nob is type of wash, capacitive touch buttons for everything else. Keeping the nob "on" keeps the digital display on and consuming power. And the wash options like temperature, extra rinse etc are all controlled digitally with no memory. Want 60 degrees water? Press the water temperature button 8 times, each with a delay of about 3/4 of a second for it to register before a press works again. It's utterly terrible.