TCB13

TCB13, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

“if you can’t parse tabs as whitespace, you should not be parsing the kernel Kconfig files.” ~ Linus Torvalds

This is what we got after people sent him into PC training. The OG Linus would say something like “if you’re a piece of s* that can’t get over your a** to parse tabs as whitespace you should be ashamed to walk on this planet let alone parsing the kernel Kconfig files. What a f* waste of space.”

TCB13, 4 months ago

Yes: annas-archive.org/search?q=Coloring

TCB13, 12 days ago

And rEFInd, GParted Live… SystemRescueCd.

TCB13, 12 days ago

Yes, that’s true but I’m no longer doing that. Everything sync to the NAS using Syncthing that in turn is set with file versioning and weekly snapshots.

TCB13, 11 days ago

I’ll have to test it. Better to have one less extension.

TCB13, 11 days ago

Interesting… I wasn’t aware of ClearURLs for uBo. How good is that? Does it really filer all tracking elements like clear URLs does?

TCB13, 11 days ago

Innovation and privacy go hand in hand here at Mozilla

As well as profits and corporate interests.

People speak very good thing about Firefox but they like to hide and avoid the shady stuff. Let me give you the un-cesored version of what Firefox really is. Firefox is better than most, no double there, but at the same time they do have some shady finances and they also do stuff like adding unique IDs to each installation.

Firefox does is a LOT of calling home. Just fire Wireshark alongside it and see how much calling home and even calling 3rd parties it does. From basic ocsp requests to calling Firefox servers and a 3rd party company that does analytics they do it all, even after disabling most stuff in Settings and config like the OP did.

I know other browsers do it as well, except for Ungoogled and because of that I’m sticking with it. I would like to avoid programs that need no snitch whenever I open them. ungoogled-chromium + ublock origin + decentraleyes + clearurls and a few others.

Now you’re free to go ahead and downvote this post as much as you would like. I’m sorry for the trouble and mental break down I may have caused by the sudden realization that Firefox isn’t as good and private after all.

TCB13, 11 days ago

Let me correct you: this is another sign that Europe was dragged into a war because the US needed to jack up their economy with a manufactured war that, besides Ukraine, hurts Europe the most.

TCB13, 11 days ago

How delusion one must be to think that the US isn’t profiting from this war? C’mon, the US just loves to sell all kinds of militar equipment. Russia has been a problem since ever but a bigger problem is the US that poke around the entire globe for wars and don’t really care about the impact because for them it’s all profits. Unfortunately for me, this time, they decided to poke around Ukraine and Russia.

TCB13, 11 days ago

Of course I place blame, and a lot, on Russia. After all they were the ones to react. But frankly Ukraine has a ton of as well.

TCB13, 11 days ago

Clearly you don’t live in Europe, you aren’t paying the electrical, gas and whatnot bill that this war caused. Get over yourself, your American lifestyle is only possible because a large chunk of your economy is only possible due to wars somewhere else.

TCB13, 11 days ago

Okay great, so you’re in denial about what’s going on around you. There’s a bigger picture than what you’re painting, I’m not saying Russia acted correctly nor that we shouldn’t blame it but Ukraine and the US aren’t saints either and profits are being made.

TCB13, 2 months ago

So much for free markets, democracy and freedom of speech. Yes, they blocked it because of copyright infringement but let’s face it, piracy should be viewed as a market option for people to get their content, providers need to step up their game and make their content easier to get to from official / payed sources instead of attacking piracy this way. If they can’t do it, well, their loss, eventually someone who can will be on the market.

TCB13, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Linux in corporation fails in multiple ways, the most prevalent is that people need to collaborate with others that use proprietary software such as MS Office that isn’t available for Linux and the alternatives such as LibreOffice aren’t just good enough. It all comes down to ROI, the cost of Windows/Office for a company is cheaper than the cost of dealing with the inconsistencies in format conversions, people who don’t know how to use the alternative X etc etc. This issue is so common that companies usually also avoid Apple due to the same reason, while on macOS you’ve a LOT more professional software it is still very painful to deal with the small inconsistencies and whatnot.

Linux desktop is great, I love it, but it gets it even worse than Apple, here some use cases that aren’t easy to deal in Linux:

• People who need the real MS Office because once you have to collaborate with others Open/Libre/OnlyOffice won’t cut it;
• Designers who use Adobe apps that won’t run properly without having a dedicated GPU, passthrough and a some hacky way to get the image back into your main system that will cause noticeable delays. Who wants to deploy GPU passthroughs for others? Makes no sense;
• People that run old software / games because not even those will run properly on Wine;
• Electrical engineers: Circuit Design Suite (Multisim and Ultiboard) are primarily designed for Windows. Alternatives such as KiCad and EasyEDA may work in some cases but they aren’t great if you’ve to collaborate with others who use Circuit Design Suite;
• Labs that require data acquisition from specialized hardware because companies making that hardware won’t make drivers and software for Linux;
• Architects: AutoCAD isn’t available (not even the limited web version works) and Libre/FreeCAD don’t cut it if you’ve to collaborate with AutoCAD users;
• Developers and sysadmins, because not everyone is using Docker and Github actions to deploy applications to some proprietary cloud solution. Finding a properly working FTP/SFTP/FTPS desktop client (similar WinSCP or Cyberduck) is an impossible task as the ones that exist fail even at basic tasks like dragging and dropping a file.

If one lives in a bubble and doesn’t to collaborate with others then native Linux apps might work and might even deliver a decent workflow. Once collaboration with Windows/Mac users is required then it’s game over – the “alternatives” aren’t just up to it.

Windows licenses are cheap and things work out of the box. Software runs fine, all vendors support whatever you’re trying to do and you’re productive from day zero. Sure, there are annoyances from time to time, but they’re way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you’ve to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive Linux desktop experience. It all comes down to a question of how much time (days? months?) you want to spend fixing things on Linux that simply work out of the box under Windows for a minimal fee. Buy a Windows license and spend the time you would’ve spent dealing with Linux issues doing your actual job and you’ll, most likely, get a better ROI.

From a more market / macro perspective here are some extra reasons:

• Companies like blame someone when things go wrong, if they chose open-source there’s isn’t someone to sue then;
• Buying proprietary stuff means you’re outsourcing the risks of such product;
• Corruption pushes for proprietary: they might be buying software that is made by someone that is close to the CTO, CEO or other decision marker in the company, an old friend, family or straight under the table corruption;
• Most non-tech companies use services from consulting companies in order to get their software developed / running. Consulting companies often fall under the last point that besides that they have have large incentives from companies like Microsoft to push their proprietary services. For eg. Microsoft will easily provide all of a consulting companies employees with free Azure services, Office and other discounts if they enter in an exclusivity agreement to sell their tech stack. To make things worse consulting companies live of cheap developers (like interns) and Microsoft and their platform makes things easier for anyone to code and deploy;
• Microsoft provider a cohesive ecosystem of products that integrate really well with each other and usually don’t require much effort to get things going - open-source however, usually requires custom development and a ton of work to work out the “sharp angles” between multiple solutions that aren’t related and might not be easily compatible with each other;
• Open-source requires a level of expertise that more than half of the developers and IT professionals simply don’t have. This aspect reinforces the last point even more. Senior open-source experts are more expensive than simply buying proprietary solutions;
• If we consider the price of a senior open-source expert + software costs (usually free) the cost of open-source is considerable lower than the cost of cheap developers + proprietary solutions, however consider we are talking about companies. Companies will always prefer to hire more less expensive and less proficient people because that means they’re easier to replace and you’ll pay less taxes;
• Companies will prefer to hire services from other companies instead of employees thus making proprietary vendors more compelling. This happens because from an accounting / investors perspective employees are bad and subscriptions are cool (less taxes, no responsibilities etc);
• The companies who build proprietary solutions work really hard to get vendors to sell their software, they provide commissions, support and the promises that if anything goes wrong they’ll be there. This increases the number of proprietary-only vendors which reinforces everything above. If you’re starting to sell software or networking services there’s little incentive for you to go pure “open-source”. With less companies, less visibility, less professionals (and more expensive), less margins and less positive market image, less customers and lesser profits.

Unfortunately things are really poised and rigged against open-source solutions and anyone who tries to push for them. The “experts” who work in consulting companies are part of this as they usually don’t even know how to do things without the property solutions. Let me give you an example, once I had to work with E&Y, one of those big consulting companies, and I realized some awkward things while having conversations with both low level employees and partners / middle management, they weren’t aware that there are alternatives most of the time. A manager of a digital transformation and cloud solutions team that started his career E&Y, wasn’t aware that there was open-source alternatives to Google Workplace and Microsoft 365 for e-mail. I probed a TON around that and the guy, a software engineer with an university degree, didn’t even know that was Postfix was and the history of email.

TCB13, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

In true EFF fashion. Their second server / backup MX is hosted at some other smaller company so things could be worse, at least their MX as a non Microsoft alternative.

Either way I can get this, they most likely have hundreds of people using Microsoft products, like Office 365, and Outlook’s compatibility with IMAP is a joke. They most likely also don’t want to run a serious in-house email infraestruture capable of handling that load. All reasons might have driven them to Microsoft / O365.

This is usually what happens, when your company is big you can’t make it with open-source without tons of extra costs and complexities. Sad but true.

TCB13, 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

Well, nothing is reliable over USB type A. If you don’t want to DIY you can get a USB JBOD with type-c like this one or that one or this cheaper one. They’ll get the job done for a price. :)

However, there are easy ways to get reliable SATA ports from m2 slots that your framework has. NVME to 6 SATA ports: www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004263885851.html

To power the disks you can use ANY standard ATX power supply (get something brand-gold second hand for 20$). To make sure the PSU stays ON, just plug a wire between the green and any black wire.

Another option for power is to get a cheap 12V power supply and a step down DC/DC to provide 5V. If you don’t have it a SATA cable like this is helpful. Simply cut the white plug and attach the red cable (5v) to the output of the DC/DC and the yellow one (12V) directly to the power supply.

There’s also these dual output power supplies that you can regulate to 12v+5v but frankly I would just go for the option above as it will be safer.

Make sure you check every voltage and polarity before plugging anything into your power supply!!

TCB13, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Build it yourself, avoid proprietary solutions. If you’re after power efficiency go with some ARM board with PCI/M2 slot to use as SATA ports, if you want more performance and want to run a few services on it, get a second hand computer like an HP mini or even a full desktop.

I what would recommend is instead a Mini-PC like the HP EliteDesk 800 G2 DM or the Dell OptiPlex 3050 Micro.

If you plan to create a small NAS for storage and self-host a few services even an old laptop will do it, however there are advantages to picking a mini PC. Those machines are quiet, don’t require much power and some can even fit a 2.5" hard drive so you won’t need external hard drive enclosures.

Mini-PCs are also cheap second hand, you might be able to get an 8th Gen Intel CPU for 100-200€. Sometimes you’ll find really old models (i3 CPU + 4 GB of RAM) selling for 50€ and while those aren’t usable anymore as a Windows desktop they’re are still more than enough to run your NAS/Cloud solution. I would pick something 6th gen or more recent.

For eg. for 100€ you can find an HP Mini with an i5 8th gen + 16GB of ram + 256GB NVME that obviously has a case, a LOT of I/O, PCIe (m2) comes with a power adapter and outperforms a RPi5 in all possible ways. Note that the RPi5 8GB of ram will cost you 80€ + case + power adapter + cable + bullshit adapter + SD card + whatever else money grab - the Pi isn’t just a good option. Aside from the big brands like HP and Dell there are other alternatives such as the trendy MINISFORUM however their BIOS comes out of the factory with weird bugs and the hardware isn’t as reliable - missing ESD protection on USB in some models and whatnot.

A very important thing for you to consider is the storage / hard drive interface. On a Pi you’re usually constrained to USB for your hard drives, however on a Mini PCs you’ve the following options:

• USB Storage - is slower and USB isn’t very robust, not recommended, the only advantage here is that you don’t have to DIY anything;
• Some of those machines come with a SATA port and space for a 2.5" hard drive, either use it a single drive if you don’t need much storage or get a 5 SATA port card to expand it;
• Recent models come with a NVME M.2. slot (PCIe) and that can be turned into 6 SATA ports with a cheap adapter like this.

In both SATA cases you just have to throw NAS hard drives and a cheap power supply at it and you’ll be done. SATA is faster and way more reliable than USB for storage, it won’t randomly disconnect and you will be able to take full advantage of the disks, no speed limitations like in a typical USB connections. Personally I would pick model that has both the SATA connector and the NVME slot and then use the SATA connector for a small 2.5" SSD (boot drive) and the NVME with the adapter above for the NAS hard drives - this option will give you the best performance.

Software: run barebones Debian and install everything from scratch OR use something already made like TrueNAS Scale or OpenMediaVault.

TCB13, 11 days ago

Okay that’s fair, even if remove that and assume they hold zero influence / there are no cleaver backdoors Signal is still not good when it comes to performance and reliability.

TCB13, 11 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

Yes, yet telegram isn’t a piece of shit of an app that runs slowly on every device, can’t sync messages because “something went wrong” and doesn’t depend on electron to run. Also, not funded by the CIA.

TCB13, 12 days ago

Window XP, is that you?

TCB13, 3 months ago

Your logic is all fun and games until you find out that your MRI machine doesn’t have software for anything but Windows. Or that the software required to read and EKG is Windows only. Most of those devices tend to be isolated computer that don’t even touch the internet and run some older version of Windows. Some of them have years of uptime on Windows XP Embedded or Windows 10 LTSC and it isn’t now they’ll suddenly fail.