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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • For most utilities (water, electricity), there’s a relatively linear relationship between the tangible value provided (energy used, water dispensed) and the cost to provide it (coal burned, water sourced/treated). Even for wind- or hydro-powered electricity, the amount that everybody uses has a proportional amount of wear on the system and consequent required maintenance.

    But not so much for ISPs. Instead, you’re basically paying for a “fictional” amount (speed) of a non-tangible product. Granted, there is a linear relationship to the amount of electricity the ISP uses to provide each bit, but it’s negligible.

    Instead, what you’re paying for with internet is essentially to recoup the fixed costs of the provider’s equipment. They do need to upgrade every so often to accommodate more capacity and faster speeds, but this is proportional to speeds provided and not data volume used.



  • The --hold feature was introduced with snapd v2.58 which was released as recently as Dec 1, so less than 9 months ago. So I would consider this a relatively new feature.

    Furthermore, as best as I can tell from the documentation, there isn’t even a way to configurably hold updates in general or for a specific package like can be done with apt-preferences; refresh.hold only allows 90 days out.

    I think it is a perfectly valid criticism that the snap developers didn’t implement this feature at all until well into the life of the product and then, even then, done begrudgingly at best evidenced by the minimal implementation.

    Now, I feel like I did my research, but feel free to let me know if there’s something I can do better or if you have any other general life advice for me.



  • Try putting it in the freezer for a few minutes before trying to read the data. Or heat it up slightly.

    This is an old trick I’ve used to recover data from a hard drive or two. I suppose it could help if the problem with the SD is some kind of microscopic fractures.

    It should be emphasized that this is just a temporary workaround at best.


  • The console is the virtual terminal (VT) seen initially at boot before the desktop login starts up, or where you land if there is no desktop, and where the kernel spits its raw output. It could even be configured to be a physical serial port.

    I’m using the term in a similar manner to describe the virtual terminals spawned at boot (typically 7 of them) and occupied either by a login prompt (getty) or the desktop session, and switchable with Alt-Left/Right or using the chvt command. These are analogous to the real terminals of old such as VT100 or even typewriters.

    This is in contrast to what we normally call a terminal like xterm or Konsole which runs in the GUI where it is resizable, zoomable, etc. The console, and virtual terminals, are pretty limited in the interactivity they have. For instance, there’s no mouse interaction or copy-paste functionality, at least not without some exotic setup.


  • My C.H.I.P is still rocking in a special project sitting on my desk.

    For those that don’t know, it is like a RPi but smaller, cheaper (originally $9), more I/O, and had WiFi & Bluetooth (whereas the RPi2 of the time didn’t). DIPs (aka hats) were available giving HDMI, VGA, and other capabilities including the PocketCHIP which turned it into a handheld computer by providing a display, button-keyboard, and battery.

    While the project is now defunct, kept alive only by the community, there was an attempt to resurrect it in concept and form-factor as the Popcorn Computer on Kickstarter. But that one didn’t fund so, alas, it is now an endangered species.

    “There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.” -HST


  • I did daily drive it for a couple of years sometime around then.

    It was so beautiful, yet still performant on basic hardware because it was written relatively low-level iirc. It was like having the flashy UI that they used in movies (anybody remember the 3D filesystem browsers?), but for real and actually usable. And the aesthetics were in contrast to the other major DE of the time which were all kind of drab tbh.

    But that was the main use case imo: nice UI for low-end hardware. Once other DE started looking nicer, partly due to leveraging GPUs, the niche nature of Enlightenment became more of a hindrance.

    I haven’t looked at it in quite a while and don’t know what their current philosophy or design is but, if it’s still the same, I think it might still be an interesting alternative to XFCE or LXDE for somebody with older hardware that wants to experience a unique UI from a passionate team.


  • I suspect what they meant was copy and paste from the console and not a terminal.

    I don’t know how else somebody could do copy and paste at the console. And I don’t necessarily know that tmux can do this (I still haven’t graduated from ‘screen’), but this interpretation makes the most sense.

    If it can do this, presumably with just the keyboard, that’s a pretty decent feature.




  • Why do you say “drive(s)”? Is this or similar happening with more than one drive?

    If the other drives are working fine, then you might already have your answer. If they’re not, it sounds like the enclosure.

    If you think it’s drive, try putting it in the freezer for an hour to see if anything changes. It wouldn’t be a permanent fix but, if the problem temporarily goes away, it’ll make clear that the problem is the drive, possibly due to add solder joints.


  • I am partial to a LVM storage pool.

    If there is nothing particularly distinct about any of your drives, then just lump them together into a volume group and add that as a storage pool to libvirt. Then you can divvy them out in whatever capacities you want.

    This is assuming you don’t need core access to them from the host (other than the obvious samba share).

    Disclaimer: I don’t have any experience with ZFS, but I suspect it probably serves a similar role and might possibly be just as well or better suited.