Tvorsk

Tvorsk, 2 months ago

@NanoRaptor Knowing the various other power-input crimes done by electronic musical instrument makers, I'm sure they're already taking notes of your post and sending change requests to manufacturing...

Tvorsk, 2 months ago

@volpeon Kinda seems to be sitting on the foxcat fence? ^^;
(which sounds pretty fittin' for a dragon temporarily shapeshiftin' into a more inconspicuous form...)

Tvorsk, 2 months ago

@volpeon AgrEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEd...

Tvorsk, 2 months ago

@volpeon ... may the fleas of a thousand camels invade the change-requester and his houshold.

Tvorsk, 2 months ago

@volpeon

Sorry if I said that already some weeks ago - my brain's pretty fried - but the problem with all these services is the "people want to use this as a rich-content replacement for SMS" mindset.

Some of the early big winners (WhatsApp, etc) were like that and it somehow rooted as the fundamental truth in all those other serivices of the kind.

I'm nearly totally convinced that even the "sweet sweet juicy analytics" bit came later, while the "SMS 3.0" doctrine already embedded in their brains.

iMessage influence (and the whole deliberate bull*** about "green vs blue bubbles") is also partially responsible for sure, it's nearly exclusively an USA thing but then of course that's where most of these software projects start from.

"So of course, everyone wants to use their phone number, the single phone number, and share it in the same way with any contact, right? Right?!" -- every single mobile chat platform ever. :(

Tvorsk, 3 months ago

@KayOhtie @Rusty @odoben

Well the real joke is that /usr is indeed "user", and it was the original place of users' personal directories.

Just as the root user is called root because their home directory was originally "/" itself.

If you look around for archived filesystems from early unix systems, you'll see the /etc/passwd file list homedirs as /usr/xxx (and root's as /).

And yes, there might occasionally be found login "bin" with homedir /usr/bin.

Basically / was where the system boot disk was mapped, and /usr was when the secondary disk was mapped - I didn't do anywhere near enough digging to tell you if this was hard-coded in those early versions but I wouldn't be surprised if yes.

So at some point the /usr/bin thing happened as a way to offload big, resource-heavy, but not system-boot-critical programs to the secondary disk.

And some time later with lots of software and stuff "used to" /usr/bin, /usr/src, /usr/lib and so on existing, I guess someone decided moving actual users to /home would be easier than to moving all this other stuff from /usr.

That must have hapened in late 70s, early 80s at max.

I'm pretty sure the Minix3 book was still describing a version of the OS which was putting user accounts under /usr and talking about logging in as "bin" to manage compiled programs that should be made public to all users. But I haven't read that one since, like, fifteen years.

From a quick skim of the webpage, the latest release (3.3 of 2014) is using /home instead.

Tvorsk, 3 months ago

@kiwa with the VNC server projecting a "Look Mom, I'm on the bot!" graphic?

Tvorsk, 3 months ago

@volpeon ... So cute. So fluffy. So pattable... :vlpn_pat_melt:

Tvorsk, 3 months ago

@KayOhtie Lemme guess, the API in question is "proprietary" and they refuse due to extremist levels of FOSS puritanism?

Tvorsk, 3 months ago

@Sominemo @KayOhtie ... This is one messed up timeline we exist in.

Tvorsk, 3 months ago

@kiwa @kiwa

You know, anytime you post like this, I hear it in the voice of the angry German (or Austrian?) lady who provides voice alerts in many Siemens locomotives.

Specifically the way she reminds you to press the the dead-man's switch with "SIFA!"

(So... is this a good time to ask for a quick guide how your name is pronounced properly?
Kye or Kee, soft W or hard V? ^^;)

Tvorsk, 3 months ago

@DeltaWye Do you think she'd love the British and/or Australian sockets with power switches, or would she not trust those either and unplug anyway?

You may be amused by the amount of layers and protections and redirections I've been paranoia-ing about the VPN connections between my phones, my cloud stuff, and home.

For a while I was considering home network making an outbound VPN tunnel to a small cloud VPS serving as a relay, phone doing another one to the same (so I don't need to open an inbound port on home firewall).

... And then have another layer of authenticated phone-to-home VPN tunnel inside the aforementioned two tunnels so the cloud relay is "untrusted" and can't read the data flowing through.

And all this just to sync my joplin notes and browser bookmarks... Yeah maybe a bit of an overkill.

In a big part it's a psychological thing for sure, with home being the only place with a drop of privacy and not wanting to endanger that.

And trusting hardware I own much more (though not fully, in these days) over cloud shit someone else can take control of at whim.

Tvorsk, 3 months ago

@DeltaWye Dropping the "Radar Range" branding was a mistake. :p

Tvorsk, 3 months ago

@DeltaWye @philpem av-spec?

Tvorsk, 3 months ago

@philpem @DeltaWye Ouch. Hopefully it'll show up.

Tvorsk, 3 months ago

@philpem Because a DX4 would be too extravagant?

Tvorsk, 3 months ago

@volpeon I live somewhere where additional SIMs are cheap and easy, so I had a dual SIM phone for a while.

Then I've learned the hard way (via one of the "hey, your mutual finally joined $App!" popups) that one of the popular apps still successfully sucked-in my contact list some years earlier and kept it in cloud cache, despite having access removed and "sync off" nowadays.

Since then I'm carrying two separate (and dual-sim) phones with zero saved phonebook contacts on the furry one.

Not bragging here, no. Despairing. :neofox_sob:​

Tvorsk, 3 months ago

@peter It's an accessibility option available at the very beginning, in the GRUB bootmenu of the installer ISO.

Accidental stuck arrow key or maybe END key?

(Did you use Ctrl-Alt-End to reboot into the installer, maybe?)

And well, I guess it makes sense that if you run installer in this mode it'll automatically add the voice components to the system being installed too.

Tvorsk, 4 months ago

@volpeon :drgn_pat_flat:

Tvorsk, 4 months ago

@volpeon ... Dang. Volp kicks all of the design ass again. :neofox_love:
If common popular platforms would look quarter this good, they'd still be so much better than they are...

Tvorsk, 4 months ago

@kiwa

Well, any "generic" drive noise emulator would be kinda off considering how the different mechanisms sounded so differently from each other.

The powerup/calibration drumroll of small Quantum drives will be burned into my brain forever.

But even in last decade's products, there's just so much difference in pitch and melody...

Tvorsk, 4 months ago

@kiwa Ahh, you want more than just the noisemaker part. Sorry for misunderstanding. ^^;
Cool, and I agree about some kind of speed throttle for the feel of times when DMA/33 was the turbo new hot thing.

However I think SD card will still get "spot damage" by writes to the same HDD sectors, so some kind of (s)low end SSD with internal balancing controller would still be less of a pain to build upon. :)

Tvorsk, 4 months ago

@kiwa If you don't care about the data loss/corruption, then the "it's so cheap" approach makes sense, sure.

I'm on the opposite end of scale for this, hate dealing with non-raid failed storage, so I'm netbooting my raspis in hope of keeping SD write cycles near zero. :p

(You still need the SD for broadcom firmware blobs and config.txt, but from there on all linux parts can be netbooted. It's a pita to setup, though.)

Tvorsk, 4 months ago

@philpem hmm with the barely visible letter widths "data" at the end is basically certain but the beginning seems to have a thin vertical stroke where "Cable" would have the fat B. Did Interdata ever do anything in this business? That would seem a bit more fitting.