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cbull

21 karma · joined April 17, 2014

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cbull··on Upgrade your desktop: Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS is now available
Nope, if you tried the do-release-upgrade before this morning it just told you there's nothing new available.
cbull··on The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe
It's no longer $120 a year. It went up to $15.99/month a few months ago (in the middle of my annual billing cycle).

As a hobbyist photographer who sometimes does a lot with photography and sometimes very little I despise subscriptions, I'm putting the effort into learning Darktable and look forward to canceling my Adobe subscription.

cbull··on Glasses Got Worse on Purpose
"only" a few hundred bucks for just frames? That seems ridiculous for what you are getting.
cbull··on Usenet Archives
I found a few of my posts from 1997, am glad none of them were too cringe.
cbull··on Usenet Archives
I found a few of my old posts from 1997
cbull··on Men in their 50s may be aging faster due to toxic 'forever chemicals'
Yeah, the airplane armrests had those little metal ashtrays with the door you could fidget with...
cbull··on Men in their 50s may be aging faster due to toxic 'forever chemicals'
I went to bingo years ago and there was a glass partition between the smoking and non, but it didn't go to the ceiling. So you'd sit in the non and just watch a wave of cigarette smoke roll over the top of the glass into your area... I only went once because of that.
cbull··on Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements
I think that depends on what sites you are using/things you are doing with it. The only time the fans turn on for me is one specific dashboard in Home Assistant. Nothing else I connect to even moves the needle on temperature/CPU use
cbull··on Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal
Do you have a link to the app? There's way too many hits searching for honeydew online...
cbull··on Ask HN: What tech purchase did you regret even though reviews were great?
I use mine so I own my own data. Almost nothing I use talks to the internet but I still have a smart house (that runs just fine when my internet is out).

And while it took some tinkering to setup (back in the "edit all the yaml" days), I barely touch it anymore, I have it set how I like it and that's that.

cbull··on Ask HN: What tech purchase did you regret even though reviews were great?
You must have some funky electricity at your place, I have two smart bulbs (a TP-Link wifi and a generic Zwave) that get daily use and have been running fine for 7 years now.
cbull··on AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D sells for more than 9800X3D, enthusiasts flock to AM4 DDR4
Same, 5800X in my X470 AORUS mobo and it's been fantastic, no desire to upgrade (already had the 64gb ram, so the CPU swap was simple, I think I got $50 from my old 2700 cpu)
cbull··on Btop: A better modern alternative of htop with a gamified interface
There was that version of `kill` that you interfaced with by playing Doom...
cbull··on Photos: New Phoenix Microcenter is a 'tech-heaven' for geeks
There's loads of things at Microcenter you CAN hold in your hand though, plenty of keyboards, mice, game controllers out on display you can handle and see what you think. Their 3d printer section usually has all the printers running and printing something so you can see the speed and judge how noisy it is. Same with their computer cases, out on display so you get a feel for how big it is or how easy it is to get to the drive cages for example.

There's a lot of products there you can inspect in a way that online just doesn't do.

cbull··on I Bought an N100 Mini PC, Then Another
I have an N100 miniPC that I'm using as an OPNSense firewall, claims to be fanless but it killed an NVME drive.

Now I just have a small usb-powered fan aimed at it and it runs fine. Fortunately for me it's in the basement so I don't have to see or hear it, but the fanless versions run super hot in my experience.

cbull··on Have I Been Pwned 2.0
Agree completely. I got ownership of my domain before he started charging, but looking now there's only a summary and it lists 45 email addresses in breaches, which means I need to pay a substantial amount to get a report, and I'm the only user of the domain for email.

I wish there was a "I'm just one person, or a small family" tier for this.

cbull··on A kernel developer plays with Home Assistant
The "Hub" device can be as simple as a USB stick that's attached to the machine running Home Assistant. That's what I have been running for years, a Z-Wave USB stick that passes through to a ZwaveJS docker container (which also communicates with HA).

So it's not like you need a big stand alone device that has to have it's own Wifi or ethernet or anything like that, it's just a USB stick.

cbull··on A kernel developer plays with Home Assistant
Your house is wired with an alternative and you can't imagine people who DON'T have that infrastructure are looking for a way of doing smart automations?

I have been using HA for years and I love it, it does what I need it to do while operating quietly in the background. I don't have any devices that are "cloud based" so I don't care if the vendor goes out of business or not.

My stuff is a mix of wifi, z-wave, and my cameras are ethernet cabled but can be integrated with onvif.

My house was also built in 1958, there's no chance I'm running KNX cabling anywhere, much less all the places I have devices.

cbull··on My quest to make motorcycle riding that tad bit safer
I have one of the Brake Free lights and it uses an accelerometer, it's NOT just a basic tilt switch. Nor does it rattle when riding, it's a very solid unit.

I've had friends following me (both in cars and motorcycles) who comment later they can't believe how much more visible it makes me.

It does attach to a helmet and require that you periodically recharge the battery but I'm very happy with the purchase (as opposed to just flashing the brake lights on the bike when slowing)

cbull··on TMSU: Command-line tool for applying tags and viewing virtual tagged filesystem
I've used exif-database for something similar but it doesn't build the folder, it just lets you query the sqlite database to find what you are looking for.

https://github.com/perk11/exif-database

cbull··on DHL pioneered the sharing economy (2016)
I used to work for a small business called The Air Courier Association. They didn't do any of the actual travel arraignments, they were a membership "club" that gave you all the information on the actual shipping companies and how you can get the cheap/free airfare in return for giving up your baggage allowance on your flights. This was at the end of the 1990s...
cbull··on Ask HN: Should you reply STOP to unwanted texts?
Earlier this year I think? I have a Twilio number that I setup just so my Home Assistant system could message me about things like water leaks. They stopped delivering any of those messages (while still charging me to send them!) and I have to register as a business and provide proof I have an opt-out, etc, etc.

The only phone number I ever texted was my real cell number, it's no longer worth having a Twilio number for a hobby project.

cbull··on SurrealEngine: Open-source reimplementation of Unreal Engine with playable UT99
If you have a copy of the game there's still playable servers using Openspy ( http://beta.openspy.net/en/server-list/ut2004 ).

I play regularly and the couple of servers I play on get full to the point nobody else can join...

cbull··on The Case Against Gmail (2020)
Why do you say people would "likely lose the domain"?

I've had my own domain and been running my own email for almost 30 years (from back in the day you had to pay Network Solutions more than $100/year just for a domain). My current domain provider lets me renew for multiple years, I get plenty of notifications about it expiring, etc.

I can see a case where if something medical happens to me for a long term at the wrong time I could potentially lose it but I don't see why that would apply to most people, that's a very specific instance.

cbull··on Postfix 25 years old today
I use sendmail on a couple of servers. Started them in the late 90s with FreeBSD and it was easier to just keep moving the sendmail configs as I upgraded the servers. What I have works and works well for what I'm doing, though I have an idea someday I'll move over to Postfix...
cbull··on Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes
It will do Security+ 2.0 with an add-on module (or that was the case several years ago when I got mine).

The device has been fantastic, I got mine about 4 years ago and I just never think about it, it's never failed to work (even after power outages).

Mine isn't a motion sensor, it's a distance measuring device, it's how it can tell if a car is in the bay or the garage door itself is open (you set the distances in the device)

cbull··on The New Linode Cloud: SSDs, Double RAM and much more
Dallas data center, not upgraded, faster than London, slower than upgrade. ;)

  $> dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync
  1024+0 records in
  1024+0 records out
  1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 2.19598 s, 489 MB/s

  $> hdparm -tT /dev/xvda
  /dev/xvda:
  Timing cached reads:   12446 MB in  1.98 seconds = 6273.29 MB/sec
  Timing buffered disk reads: 1768 MB in  3.00 seconds = 589.00 MB/sec