rotopenguin

rotopenguin, 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

If you’re RDPing from a malicious client, how do you know what you’re seeing is real? How do you know that your viewer didn’t show the same screen for just a little too long while the host popped up a cmd, curl, run, close, continue in the background? How do you know that closing your session isn’t “forwarding it to someone else for a bit, but they’ll close it when they’re done”? One time you start a session, verify it with your phone, waiting waiting waiting, an error occurred try again. Did it fail, or did it go to someone else?

https://infosec.pub/pictrs/image/afc72808-7f6a-4590-9007-399a7cc651af.jpeg

rotopenguin, 3 days ago

Tim Cook reads every single LOC submitted to his OS.

rotopenguin, 6 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

I believe h.265 has particular handling for “film grain”. And it has hardware decoding on just about every chip out there. And you probably already have a hardware encoder, so you can do something like QSV in a reasonable time frame.

300MB for a half-hour is a pretty reasonable bitrate, for one and a half hours it is quite dire.

rotopenguin, 5 days ago

pv. It’s just cat, with a progress meter.

rotopenguin, 6 days ago

sl is the single best utility, hands down

rotopenguin, 4 days ago

Use Trixie instead of Sid. With Sid you’re getting new packages right as they come out of the oven. If Sid users don’t get burned too badly, the packages go into Trixie two weeks later.

rotopenguin, 8 days ago

The fix is to make it a Ctrl key.

rotopenguin, 11 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

First, it never hurts to reboot. There could be some dumb state going on in your display server. Or kernel DRM. Or in some little bs microcontroller in the video card.

Next, read the arch wiki on hardware video acceleration. Contemplate the note(2) at the very bottom of the page and boggle at all the PPANAPAPPI acronyms bouncing around in there.

VLC has two major sides to its video settings, the (Video)output method and the (Input/Codecs)hardware-acceleration. You are on the VDPAU acceleration API, so give VAAPI a try for a bit. Remember you have to restart VLC before any change takes. VLC should be smart about choosing a good Automatic option, but it can’t do much about “looks like an API’s there, but it’s broke”.

Try mpv. Try VLC, but from Flatpak (which brings its own version of a lot of the acceleration libraries).

rotopenguin, 12 days ago

Btrfs. Just format as one big partition (besides that little EFI partition of course) and don’t worry about splitting up your disk into root and home. Put home on its own subvolume so that root can be rolled back separately from it. You can have automatic snapshots, low-overhead compression, deduplication, incremental backups. Any filesystem can fsck its own metadata, but btrfs is one of the few that also cares if your data is also intact.

rotopenguin, 12 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

There should be exactly one game allowed to keep its “fuck your accessibility, git gud nüb” difficulty, and its name is Zadette.

rotopenguin, 14 days ago

I’m quite sure that all gigabit+ ethernet auto-negotiates. There is no shared ether, there are no dedicated tx/rx pairs anymore. It’s all point-to point and constantly negotiating to make the most of every wire it’s got.

rotopenguin, 14 days ago

I think that the Deck is able to connect as a device (MTP or CDC?), but there has been trouble with that so the current OS disables it.

rotopenguin, 14 days ago

And if you want to get really funky, Intel also does their JTAG over USB. They are quite secretive about it, your bios should have turned it off, but it is there.

rotopenguin, 14 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

Professional accreditation is such a racket lol. I’ve seen plenty of tax courses with “the last tax year that so-and-so was relevant was 1988, NEVERTHELESS this will be on the test.” Zero effort goes into updating the material, just keep on reselling the same crap to a captive audience forever.

rotopenguin, 14 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

The reason you can’t is “because Intel deliberately designed it that way”. Back when USB was just a notion, PDAs were a really cool thing. There was apparently concern at Intel that someday these little things might be all that someone might own. You might connect your PDA directly to the printer, rather than syncing it to your Intel Desktop and printing from there. You might connect your PDA to the modem and collect electronic mailographs directly, instead of syncing with a PC. If you could do enough without the PC middleman, you might even skip on buying an Intel computer altogether.

So, Intel baked into the protocol anything they could think of to make peer-to-peer communications impossible in USB, make life easy for the singular PC communications master, and put a timing onus on devices that forced them to be dumbed-down state machines instead of computers in their own right.

rotopenguin, 15 days ago

I would like to install a distro on a USB stick, without it doing something stupid to my internal drive’s EFI.

rotopenguin, 15 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

A dumb little stick is fine for the occasional “fix something up” or “take a snapshot of a Windows drive because dd is objectively better than anything that Windows itself could do”. A live iso distro precludes me from adding a handful of other useful tools.

Late breaking edit : What I ended up doing was formatting a stick as small EFI / 5GB btrfs / rest exfat. Chattr +c the btrfs, and debootstrap in there. Put rEFInd on the efi and tell its conf file about the stick (or maybe it’ll detect). Put non-free-firmware & stable-security into apt’s sources.list. In a chroot shell, apt get live-task-non-free-firmware-pc gdm3 systemd-timesyncd linux-image-amd64 locales gnome-terminal. Add other tools to suit taste. Fix up the fstab, make /tmp tmpfs, make the exfat mount nofail. With btrfs compression, I can have a gnome environment inside of 2.5GB. It would be even more smol if I could figure out booting directly into Weston.

rotopenguin, 16 days ago (edited 12 days ago)

I can kinda see “shot an old horse or two” as being a positive thing, okay you got over the squeamishness of it and did a sick animal a mercy.

Winging a goat and gosh I gotta go get more ammo to finish this one off, well that’s starting to get a little peculiar.

LIKING IT SO MUCH THAT YOU WENT OUT AND GOT A NEW PUPPY SO YOU COULD DO IT AGAIN, well hoooly fuck we are getting into something entirely else now aren’t we?

rotopenguin, 17 days ago

The magic missile knows where it is at all times, because it knows where it isn’t.

rotopenguin, 20 days ago

Snappy Snake features -

Everything is now a snap. Your kernel and initrd? They’re snaps now (requires an updated grub with snap mounter. An /efi partition of less than 20GB is no longer supported). Apt is now a symlink to snap. Procfs and device nodes are all snaps. Instead of “perusing the legacy web2.0 internet with an html browser”, the new Canonical Snapium snaps you into modern digital snap-eriences powered by the Snapchain. The Linux CLI has been replaced with Gnome’s “Drag-n-snap Editor”.

rotopenguin, 23 days ago

You can’t “just patch it” to make snap work with another store. Instead what you’ve done is invented an entirely different store, which you’re now going to have to maintain. It is never going to be upstreamed to Canonical. You are going to be in a perpetual tug-of-war with Canonical driving snap development towards their own needs and not your own.

rotopenguin, 25 days ago

It’s not like it’s terribly uncommon for some Earth species or other to go from sexual reproduction, to giving asexual reproduction another try. What invariably happens is that the daughters only sub-species does well for a few generations, and then gets completely wiped out by some disease. We’re not having sex for fun, we’re having it because “applying combinatorics to our genetics (particularly the immune system genes)” is the best tool we have to try to stay ahead of microbes.

https://infosec.pub/pictrs/image/60f66ac7-9093-41e7-b981-1855f6aa9e99.jpeg

rotopenguin, 25 days ago

Tell the drive to do a secure erase. If there are still bad blocks after that, it is absolutely garbage

Frankly you should never see bad blocks, but sometimes minor bad things happen and the drive has to tell you that this data is gone forever. If you write over those bad blocks at some point, the drive is supposed to remap them to spare blocks and carry on as if everything is okay. If it has run out of spare blocks, then the bad blocks stay forever. A secure erase might give the drive more wiggle room to re-allocate around a larger bad spot, IDK.

rotopenguin, 25 days ago

Valve was using Debian way-back-when, but the pace of getting new stuff into debian proper is too glacial for Valve. Valve is putting a lot of work into “making the linux graphics stack rather good for games”, and having those improvements integrated upstream quicker means that Valve can get to work on the next set of improvements.

Valve is still using Debian as the basis for their runtime environments for games (pressure vessel). Debian’s slowness is great for providing a stable ABI for the parts that come into contact with (seldom maintained) game code. There is some amount of magic that goes into gluing the stable runtimes with rapidly changing stuff like Mesa.

rotopenguin, 28 days ago

Aha, thank you! That’s just a weird enough concept to “attach to” a local QEMU user session (where virt-manager will be the guy spinning it off anyway) that I would never have seen it.

Every newbie article about virt-manager starts with a filled list of connections, so I was down to figuring that it’s cleverly detecting a missing dependency or permission and silently eliminating list entries for me.