I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

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  • 272 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • Precisely.

    A 1200 watt microwave is essentially like a 1200 watt bar heater if you’re outside the oven cavity. To a person, it will feel pretty warm at a distance of a few feet as the energy is basically unfocused as it exits through the open door.

    But to a drone, it’s 1200 watts of RF noise near a receiving device that’s tuned to listen for signals that are typically around 0.00000001 watts. It would be like trying to hear a pin drop at a rock concert.

    Do need to make sure you point it upwards though as it will cause havoc with microwave motion sensors and a bunch of other sensitive listening stuff. Also, good luck getting wifi within a hundred metres of it.



  • The bug is the lack of documentation and that a simple unguarded command can erase all user’s data on the system.

    Also, the principle of least surprise would like a word.

    If I look at the command line arguments of a program called “systemd-tmpfiles” and one of them is called “purge” I will generally assume that option will purge temporary files.

    Now it turns out that someone decided that this program would be a simple way to do something with /home directories(*) so they included /home in the config file for the program, the file that the program reads by default when it is invoked.

    Who decided it would be a good idea for it to deal with /home?

    Wellllll…

    https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/tmpfiles.d/home.conf

    (*)I have no idea what this program is doing with /home in its config file. I will presume that there is a useful and mostly logical reason for it, and that this command line option was just an unfortunate footgun for those users who were not intimately familiar with systemd.





  • And how if you share a file in Teams and then six months later you want to share a file with the same name to ANYONE else via teams, well that’s a big no-can-do. Teams just went ahead and uploaded that file to your “stuff to share” folder in OneDrive and didn’t put it in a subfolder unique to the chat, or add a unique prefix or suffix or anything because hey, you’ll only ever share a file with a particular name once in your life, right?

    And nobody would ever want to share a file with the same name, but different data, right? So Teams can just give the end user the choice between replacing the current file with the new one, or sharing the same one again to these new guys, because there’s no possible use case for actually having two files named the same with different information in the file, right?

    Nobody would want to share a README.TXT, or Photo001.jpg, or contact.ics, or a zip file of a folder they just downloaded from Teams’ SharePoint interface, the file that’s automatically called “OneDrive.zip” without the option to change it before saving, more than once, right? Right??

    Fuck teams. And fuck Teams(New) too, just for the shitty name.


  • Generally I bash together the one-off programs in Python and if I discover that my “one off” program is actually being run 4 times a week, that’s when I look at switching to a compiled language.

    Case in point: I threw together a python program that followed a trajectory in a point cloud and erased a box around the trajectory. Found a python point cloud library, swore at my code (and the library code) for a few hours, tidied up a few point clouds with it, job done.

    And then other people in my company also needed to do the same thing and after a few months of occasional use, I rewrote it using C++ and Open3D. A few days of swearing this time (mainly because my C++ is a bit rusty, and Open3D’s C++ interface is a sparsely-documented back end to their main python front end).

    End result though is that point clouds that took 3 minutes to process before in python now take 10 seconds, and now there’s a visualisation widget that shows the effects of the processing so you don’t have to open the cloud in another viewer to see that it was ok.

    But anyway, like you said, python is good for prototyping, and when you hash out your approach and things are fairly nailed down and now you’d like some speed, jump to a compiled language and reap the benefits.



  • Assumption:

    Someone crams a 300 watt solar panel onto the roof of their EV and manages to integrate it into the charging system so that it’s pretty efficient to use that power.

    Numbers:

    One hour of good sunshine on the 300 watt panel = 300 watt-hours (Wh).

    Average EV energy usage : 200Wh per kilometre these days. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less, depends on how and where you’re driving.

    Result:

    One hour of perfect sunshine hitting the roof of your car equals 1.5 kilometres of extra range, or you can drive your car in a steady-state fashion at a 3-5 kilometres per hour because an EV is more efficient than the average usage at lower speeds.

    Conclusion:

    Probably better off increasing the storage capacity of the battery as a full day’s sunshine will get you about 10 kilometres of range.



  • I hate how bloated the kernel is. I’d like it to fit into main memory.

    Take a copy of lspci, lsusb. Use them to build a kernel from source with only the bits you need and then make the bits you might need modules. Include your filesystem driver into the kernel and you can skip the usual initramfs stage and jump straight to your root filesystem.

    Might take a few tries, but at least it doesn’t take 18 hours to compile the kernel anymore…


  • You need silicon.

    The earth’s crust is about 25 percent silicon. Sand made out of quartz like desert sand is about 50 percent silicon. Beach sand is usually mainly calcium carbonate from shells and it doesn’t contain much silicon at all. Volcanic beach sand is more likely the same as the earth’s crust so 25-50 percent.

    So as long as you refine your sand/gravel/rocks/lava so that you’re left with pretty much pure silicon, you’re good to go.





  • i like how the answers are the exact same generic unhelpful drivel you hear 20k times a month if you’re…

    Searching for a solution to any problem on the internet.

    There are a million ad- laden sites that, in answer to a technical question about your PC, suggest that you run antivirus, system file checker, oh and then just format and reinstall your operating system. That is also 90 percent of the answers coming from “Microsoft volunteer support engineers” on Microsoft’s own support forums as well, just please like and upvote their answer if it helps you.

    There are a million Instagram and tiktok videos showing obvious trivial, shitty, solutions to everyday problems as if they are revealing the secrets of the universe while they’re glueing bottle tops and scraps of car tires together to make a television remote holder.

    There are a trillion posts on Reddit from trolls and shitheads just doing it for teh lulz and Google is happily slurping this entire torrent of shit down and trying to regurgitate it as advice with no human oversight.

    I reckon their search business has about two years left at this rate before the general public regards them as a joke.

    Edit: and the shittification of the internet has all been Google’s doing. The need for sites to get higher up in Google’s PageRank™ or be forever invisible has absolutely ruined it. The torrent of garbage now needed to ensure that various algorithms favour your content has fucked it for everyone. Good job, Google.