@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

TimeSquirrel

@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

TimeSquirrel , (edited )
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

That'd make it highly file system dependent with no way of updating the firmware. All these drives stopped working after the FAT32->ExFAT switch.

TimeSquirrel , (edited )
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

What makes you think there’s no way of updating the firmware?

I don't know, but the amount of USB drives I've seen with a readily identifiable serial or jtag port and API documentation is exactly zero. 😉

I think most of them were one-and-done, as in, code/hardware was designed once, and never iterated on again, at least not for devices already in the field.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

Sorry. Wife's Christmas present. She wanted to surprise me. Gotta make do.

TimeSquirrel , (edited )
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

Circuit City

Warning: trigger activated, loading and playing long lost childhood memory:

🎵 "WELCOME TO CIRCUIT CITY, WHERE SERVICE IS STATE OF THE ART" 🎵

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPWRWg83Zvs

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

Do any of you people actually use your OS, or do you just distro-hop and tweak things all day?

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

You know jokes and sarcasm are a thing, right?

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

Sorry for the confusion. I should probably start using emojis to convey playfulness in nonserious comments.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

Thank god macros and functions are different colors in my IDE.

TimeSquirrel , (edited )
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

We used to do that a lot, in the 90s and early 2000s. We determined that that's not a good idea. People even ran DEs under root.

I don't know anything about Linux and the idea of installing it frightens me. Where do I start?

I bought a laptop yesterday, it came pre-installed with Windows 11. I hate win 11 so I switched it down to Windows 10, but then started considering using Linux for total control over the laptop, but here's the thing: I keep seeing memes about how complicated or fucky wucky Linux is to install and run. I love the idea of open...

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

Ubuntu is basically dead

It's dead for hardcore nerds that care about such things as snaps and such. But in the corporate world, it's very much alive. I literally just got done installing an Ubuntu-based NVR from Wisenet for a store's CCTV system.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

Isn't that still in system RAM at this stage in the boot process?

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

Neofetch is only dead if y'all let it die. Same as Hexchat.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

Libraries and APIs are a moving target. Eventually it won't run on modern systems anymore without modification.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

Server consoles. Admins need some tunes in the data room while they're migrating DBs.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

My question is, how can you look at whitespace in a filename and not have your eyelid twitch?

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

being autistic

Easy there, a lot of people on the spectrum built everything you're using to talk to me right now.

TimeSquirrel , (edited )
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

By "a lot of people", I meant "a great many of them" compared to neurotypicals. Not all.

It often takes a special kind of person to be able to absorb reams of dry technical knowledge in a narrow field and spit it out like it's a second language.

It's easy to recognize in people like RMS, Steve Wozniak, and Torvalds if you are afflicted with it too (although technically none have been officially diagnosed). Even Elon Musk exhibits traits of it (as much as I don't want to be associated with him) I can still recognize the complete social ineptitude and obsessive behaviors that are often associated with it.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

Did it for shits and giggles once back in 2006. I think everyone serious about learning Linux at a "pro" level should go through the process at least once, even if the system gets wiped afterward in favor of a more usable distro. Teaches you what the standardized core components are and what they do, and gives you a clear understanding of how Linux is structured. That knowledge will carry on over to other distros and will make it much, much easier to troubleshoot issues with your system if you know how the parts of that system work.

For those unaware or who never used it, it has a huge setup guide with copy/pastable commands to guide you through each step. Theres even an automated script from what I remember. They don't just give you a pile of source code and tell you "good luck".

TimeSquirrel , (edited )
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

Ethernet had this figured out almost 30 years ago with auto-negotiation. Last crossover cable I ever used was in 2004 for a customer's old hub they didn't want to replace. Yes, "hub", not "switch".

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

"Forks of the project are welcomed. Nobody can stop the code from living on."

That's a tear jerking quote right there. o7

TimeSquirrel , (edited )
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

In that case, you implement the old API or other interfaces so older things will continue working, while having the new one alongside it, and then phase the old one out when nobody is using it anymore. It's not that hard to emulate an older API with a newer subsystem. Just a shitload of function wrappers and things so that the things your program used to call now transparently use the new system while the program is unaware anything changed from its perspective.

That's what happens with the Linux kernel. Linus would go apeshit if one of the devs straight up broke a ton of user programs with a change. He's already demonstrated his commitment to not doing that in one of his mailing list rants. Because unlike GNOME, the kernel is running some pretty critical things all around the world.

GNOME seems to be treating their DE like their own little pet project that they're tinkering with alone in the basement without caring that millions are relying on it every day. Breaking a large portion of programs on a regular basis is what I do in the evenings. Not professionals.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

dont use parental controls

That's how you get your kid to encounter MLP porn. Or worse, discover Gab and 4chan.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

If your kids are motivated enough, they will find a way around it.

Reminds me of my local public library in 1997. They had these public computers for people that didn't yet have Internet access, and the browsers were locked down and stripped with just "back", "forward", "refresh" buttons and a URL address bar.

However, there was a tiny question mark icon in the corner that when clicked, brought up the Windows help system (that browser thing that can navigate help topics). There was a link in there to open IE and go to a support page, and when clicked would launch the full Internet Explorer with a complete menu over top of the kiosk interface, and this browser instance was not restricted in what it could access like the kiosk browser was (I believe it may have been a custom version of Mosaic).

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

Who said I'd never talk to them about it? I'd just like to do it in a controlled manner at an appropriate age and prepare them without them seeing the most depraved shit right off the bat. Is that unreasonable?

Don't assume the intentions of other people.

TimeSquirrel , (edited )
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

I use a combo of Pihole + OpenDNS with filters. And my kid's user account does not have privileges to change network settings. Yet. Things will be enabled one by one in due time until he's in 100% control of his own computer.

And if he actually knows what a DNS server is and is digging around for the setting, and trying to hack my shit, then I'd say he's ready for the "adult" computing world.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

You know what's nice? Being able to sit down at any Linux distro and being able to set up and configure services without Googling how to use that particular distro's init system.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

It was awesome back when during the install you could just select "LAMP", and a full stack web server suite would be automatically set up and configured correctly out of the box. But those days are long gone.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

Yeah now they do. Back in the early 2000s, I only remember Ubuntu having just a single option to install everything needed to be up and running on first boot. Everything else needed some tweaking of configs and quite a bit of domain knowledge to get started at the time. It's what jumpstarted me into PHP development.

TimeSquirrel , (edited )
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

"./configure"

"error: libblahblah1.0.0-2 not found"

downloads tarball

"tar –xvzf libblahblah1.0.0-2.tar.gz"

"./configure"

"error: libblahblah1.0.0-2 depends on libgofuckyourself.2.0.0"

downloads tarball

"tar -xvzf libgofuckyourself.2.0.0.tar.gz"

"./configure"

"error: libblahblah1.0.0-2 not found"

🤯😡🤬

Can you imagine we did this shit over dialup too? I was there. In the dark times.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

I heard a good comparison on here a while ago: Github is to Git as Pornhub is to porn.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

I dunno, Stallman, it's been 30 years, you got something for us?

Are there any discrepancies between the resources an OS uses when running in a virtual machine vs being ran directly?

I recently found out about a Linux Distro named Q4OS and I wanted to test out their claim that it only requires 256 MB of ram when using the trinity desktop environment. However, when I used the live cd in virt-manager with 256 MB or ram, it just kernel panicked at boot. So I then tried it with 512 MB of ram. In addition to some...

TimeSquirrel , (edited )
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

A container is just an environment where it appears to any program running within it that it has full access to the computer, while in reality it's "jailed" and isolated from the rest of the system. The OS resources are shared with the container, instead of the hardware resources as in a virtual machine. There's no hardware being emulated. It's a beefed up version of a chroot.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

I'm in my 40s, and finally decided to give C/C++ a serious go and try to learn them at a competent level after decades of putting it off, and now everybody wants to move to Rust.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

I'm at the level of finally understanding pointers, templates, and operator/function overloads and using them pretty effortlessly now. I looked at some Rust code. I'm not sure I have the brain plasticity to take that on at my age now without massive struggling.

TimeSquirrel , (edited )
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

This is why I enjoy programming libraries only I will ever use. "Do I need to account for user ignorance and run a bunch of early exit conditions at the beginning of this function to avoid throwing an exception? Naww, fuck it, I know what I'm doing."

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

I have 12 cores and 64 GB RAM. I am not worried about "bloat". The people trying to keep 20 year old Thinkpads running are.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

Sounds like a web based spreadsheet. Being able to insert and edit data using friendly web forms but not needing to know SQL commands.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

Human readable code:

// do stuff 100 times
for (int x = 0; x < 100; x++) {
do.stuff();
}

After compiling might look like:

1011 1100 1011 1011 and so on and so forth, which corresponds directly to cells in a memory chip and transistors in the CPU being switched on or off, which are the instructions that get fed to your CPU to do everything your program does in the machine.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

Its whole body is a programming sock. It doesn't need them.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

But most of those were extremely shitty or niche and got abandoned. Except Mandrake. That one was pretty good but I think I remember they were constantly having funding issues.

Mandrake was to Redhat as Ubuntu is to Debian now.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

A huge amount of security camera NVRs run Linux, so that's something.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

I'm actually using it because it's easier. I do hobby programming, and I like having every utility I would ever need related to that just one command away. Need a hex editor? It's in the repository. Need a calculator that can convert binary to decimal? Also in the repository. IDEs/plugins/compilers? Repository.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

I started my embedded engineering journey by blinking an LED on a PIC microcontroller back in 2007. Maybe you can toss them an Arduino development board. Programming by itself could be boring and tedious, but seeing your program actually do things in the real world could be exciting, at least it was for me. There's so much to branch to from there, everything from industrial automation to vehicle navigation to robotics.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

Is this the equivalent of a PC maker in 2024 going "yeah, I don't think we are going to put a floppy drive in anymore..."?

Help with HDD

I have a 4TB HDD that I use to store music, films, images, and text files. I have a 250GB SDD that I use to install my OS and video games. So far I didn't have any problem with this setup, obviously it's a bit slower when it reads the HDD but nothing too serious, but lately it's gotten way worse, where it just lags too much when...

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

We’ve been making them for many years and have gotten very good at it.

This can't be overstated enough. Modern mechanical hard drives are a hundred times more impressive than Swiss watches.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

a valuable and required skill for any future job - basic Windows and Office usage.

Not everybody is a data-entry drone. I have no use for it, and I have a technical career.

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.social avatar

There's nothing that anyone can do in 2024 in the MS Office suite of applications specifically that I can't find a third party or cloud equivalent of to do the exact same thing.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • random
  • All magazines