randy

@randy@lemmy.ca

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randy,

Typst is Markdown-ish with the possibilities of LaTeX.

randy,

K-9 mail… isn’t supported or being developed any more.

That’s not true. They make frequent-enough releases, they post monthly progress reports, and they are actually going to become Thunderbird’s Android version.

Having said that, I almost switched to FairEmail because K-9 lacked support for some sort of authentication measure (which I no longer need), but that wasn’t because K-9 stopped development.

randy,

According to Wikipedia, John Riccitiello was CEO from 2014 to 2023. So I think your facts are off, unless Unity was planning layoffs and fee changes nine years in advance.

Instead, note that Unity went public in 2020. I expect Riccitiello was pushed by the board to improve profitability, then left with a golden parachute for being the scapegoat.

randy,

If you want a preview of an uncaring and anti-consumer Valve, look no further than the company’s efforts on Mac.

Valve never updated any of its earlier games to run in 64-bit mode… Apple dropped support for 32-bit applications in 2019

Funny enough, the only platform with a 64-bit Steam client is Mac.

I don’t disagree with concerns about monopoly, but the author’s key example is Macs. And from the example, it sounds to me like Apple disregards backwards compatibility (dropping 32-bit support, moving to ARM chips) and Valve isn’t investing to keep up. Meanwhile, Windows has a heavy backwards-compatibility focus, and Linux isn’t too bad either, so no wonder they still get Valve’s attention. So who is being “anti-consumer” in this example, Valve or Apple?

randy,

The Atlantic had a good article on this a couple weeks ago (no paywall). It sure feels like a move in the wrong direction, but the authors note Oregon’s overdose deaths grew way faster than the rest of the country after decriminalization. Their take is that Oregon already had pretty good laws place, and that a little bit of a legal threat can help to encourage addicts to seek treatment (and that the treatment system needs to be better funded).

Whom Should You Vote For? Don't be just a 'political hobbyist' (billhulet.substack.com)

“My experience is that most of the people who get really upset about the current leadership of our nations tend to be folks who haven’t spent much time either as an activist or as someone working for a candidate. What happens instead is they immerse themselves in on-line news and commentary.”

randy,

<span style="color:#323232;">As I said to him, “in the US you don’t get to vote and get someone better than Joe Biden
</span>

Actually, write-ins are a thing, so you literally can vote for anyone else than him and Trump.

I think you misunderstood the author. You can literally vote for anyone, but the winner of the next US presidential election is only going to be Biden or Trump (barring a crazy twist, e.g. death or criminal conviction). I think the author’s point is that, in any given election, you should probably vote strategically, but getting better options takes a lot of work for a long time to make it happen, so get working if you can.

randy,

Basically they don’t want NATO right on their doorstep.

NATO is not the anti-Russia club. They’re a defensive pact. Why would you be concerned about your neighbours agreeing to defend each other? Like a neighbourhood watch, perhaps. Maybe you’d be upset if you’re planning to do the thing they’re defending against. Which is all the more reason for those neighbours to band together.

randy,

That’s how Putin claims to perceive it, but that’s also what he would claim if his actual goal was to control his neighbours by force. And don’t forget Finland and Sweden responded to the invasion of Ukraine by joining NATO. If Russia perceived NATO as a threat, then Finland joining would make them more likely to be attacked. Clearly Finland feels NATO is making them safer or they wouldn’t have joined. And since then, Russia has moved tons of their military away from NATO borders and into Ukraine.

In other words, I trust the actions of Finland and Russia more than I trust the words of Russia.

randy,

You know, you have a point. But I’ll note both instances had the UN request NATO intervention. Russia could have blocked either with their veto in the UN Security Council, but they didn’t.

randy,

Forcing people to give up their language and culture can be considered cultural genocide. Cultural genocide is not included in the UN Genocide Convention, so the definition of cultural genocide is not universally agreed upon. But the UN Genocide Convention does include “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” in its definition of genocide, and Russia is not shy about their relocation and adoption programs, so we can pretty definitively say that Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine.

randy,

Also worth noting this article is nearly five years old. Rust’s first stable release was nearly nine years ago, so its (stable) age has more than doubled since then. I expect Rust would look a lot more mature if the article was written today.

randy,

Aaron Wherry, the author of the article, does that a lot. In my opinion, he regularly does a good job of covering all the facets of difficult issues.

Protecting HDDs from (external) train vibrations

I am worried that externally caused vibrations might damage my HDDs (NAS in the planning). The subway / metro runs under my building, and every time the train passes, this causes slight but measurable vibrations in the 50-100 Hz frequency range. It is more like a rumbling noise than the usual vibration of a passing train....

randy,

I work in railway noise and vibration mitigation, and @scrion has given you a great starting point. When we build rails and want to mitigate ground-borne noise and vibration (typically up to ~200 Hz), we generally mount the rails on soft pads and add extra mass to isolate the rails from the surroundings. The exact same approach will work at your computer. We don’t typically use tuned mass dampers for ground-borne vibration, so I think that will be overkill for you, but you can try if you like.

I wanted to suggest that, in addition to the feet/foam/plywood, you can also add a big chunk of something heavy to help with isolation. Like put a heavy rock on top of the foam, and your computer on the rock. The trick is this: if k is the stiffness of your foam, and m is the mass of everything on top of the foam, then your isolating frequency is at √(2k/m). All frequencies above the isolating frequency will by mitigated (the further above, the more they’re mitigated), while all frequencies below will be amplified.

(Quick aside if you actually want to calculate frequency with √(2k/m): check that your units for k and m are compatible, you should end up with a result in units of 1/s, which is actually radians per second, then multiply by 2π radians per cycle to convert to Hertz).

When it comes to measuring results, since your problem is in low frequencies, you can probably use your phone’s accelerometer assuming it reads fast enough (the sample rate must be at least double the highest frequency you care about). Mount it as rigidly as you can to your computer, since if the connection is soft, the phone will be in its own isolating system. The quickest way to test your isolator would be to hit close to the base with a hammer; impacts excite a wide range of frequencies equally, so in the frequency domain you should see vibration amplitudes following a shape https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amplitudenfrequenzgang.tif.

But as @scrion notes below, you don’t really care about your isolator’s response, you care about what trains are doing to your computer. However, he said one thing I disagree with: it’s not the amplitude of the acceleration that you care about, it’s the amplitude of energy, and therefore velocity. This article gives a good introduction to ways you could analyze that. But now we’re getting way in to the weeds on what should be a simple project!

One last aside: if the vibrations in your building are bad enough, you could raise it as an issue with the metro operator. The US Federal Transit Administration sets standards that are commonly followed even outside of the US (see Table 8-1 in their Noise and Vibration Manual); if your measurements show vibration exceeding those limits then they might pay me to fix it :D.

randy,

Wow, I hadn’t heard of phyphox before (hadn’t even noticed @khorak mentioned it in the OP). That’s very cool and I’ve installed it now.

randy,

None of the included experiments look to be exactly what you need. For characterizing your isolator, the included Acceleration Spectrum is close, though it records continuously, making it difficult to use to record impact response. For evaluating actual train vibrations, the user-defined Integrated Acceleration might be a start, but it doesn’t include the filtering needed to get good information. You could define your own experiments, but that’s probably even harder than analyzing the CSV data on your computer. At least on your computer you can change your analysis freely and immediately see results, rather than re-running the experiment every time.

randy,

Thanks for the update and graphs. That is an amazing improvement. In the “after” plot, it looks like any acceleration from the train is well below the noise level of your accelerometer. So, within the limits of your measuring equipment, you’ve effectively eliminated all train vibration. If I were in your place, I would declare success and move on with life! Don’t even bother with foam and rubber feet, because this configuration is working great.

But you could analyze further if you really want; there could be some train signal hiding in all that noise. Since there’s periodic noise in the Z axis, you could take a reading during a still time (computer off, no trains) and see where your spikes are in the frequency domain. Then you could apply a filter (or filters) to cut out that periodic noise.

But unless you’re really into learning about signal analysis, I’d say you could skip it.

randy, (edited )

At a glance, it looks like Aegis generates standard TOTP tokens, which means there’s a lot of software that can do the same thing, so you don’t need to emulate Aegis. I use pass-otp (an extension to pass), but that’s command-line-only, and a lot to deal with if you’re not already using pass. From a quick search, it looks like Keysmith and OTPClient are decent graphical alternatives. From another quick search, OTPClient is available in Ubuntu 23.10.

Edit: Re-reading your post, your issue is that you don’t like logging in on your phone, right? But Aegis just provides the code, you should be able to use the code from your phone to log in on your computer. TOTP codes are only affected by the secret values and the current time, so the code generated on your phone can be used on any device.

I'm locked out of my 6 year old Chipotle account because they now say my email address is invalid when I login. Here is me asking for their help: (lemmy.world)

I also reached out to them on Twitter but they directed me to this form. I followed up with them on Twitter with what happened in this screenshot but they are now ignoring me.

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