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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • While it sounds a bit hacky, I think this is an underrated solution. It’s actually quite a clever way to bypass the whole problem. Physics is your enemy here, not economics.

    This is kind of like trying to find an electric motor with the highest efficiency and torque at 1 RPM. While it’s not theoretically impossible, it’s not just a matter of price or design, it’s a matter of asking the equipment to do something it’s simply not good at, while you want to do it really well. It can’t, certainly not affordably or without significant compromises in other areas. In the case of a motor, you’d be better off letting the motor spin at its much higher optimal RPM and gear it down, even though there will be a little loss in the geartrain it’s still a much better solution overall and that’s why essentially every low speed motor is designed this way.

    In the case of an ammeter, it seems totally reasonable to bring it up to a more ideal operating range by adding a constant artificial load. In fact the high precision/low range multimeters and oscilloscopes are usually internally doing almost exactly the same thing with their probes, just in a somewhat more complex way behind the scenes.


  • The end result is exactly the same.

    The difference is that you can install an iso on a computer without an internet connection. The normal iso contains copies of most or all relevant packages. Although maybe not all of the latest and most up to date ones, the bulk are enough to get you started. The net install, like the name suggests, requires an internet connection to download packages for anything except the most minimal, bare-bones configuration. The connection would hopefully be nearly as fast if not faster than the iso and be guaranteed to have the latest updates available which the iso may not. While such a fast connection is usually taken for granted nowadays, it is not always available in some situations and locations, it is not always convenient, and some hardware may have difficulty with the network stack that may be difficult to resolve before a full system is installed or may require specialized tools to configure or diagnose that are only available as packages.

    In almost all cases, the netinst works great and is a more efficient and sensible way to install. However, if it doesn’t work well in your particular situation, the iso will be more reliable, with some downsides and redundancy that wastes disk space and time.

    Things like windows updates and some large and complex software programs and systems often come with similar “web” and “offline” installers that make the same distinctions for the same reasons. The tradeoff is the same, as both options have valid use cases.


  • To be fair, in the case of something like a Linux ISO, you are only a tiny fraction of the target or you may not even need to be the target at all to become collateral damage. You only need to be worth $1 to the attacker if there’s 99,999 other people downloading it too, or if there’s one other guy who is worth $99,999 and you don’t need to be worth anything if the guy/organization they’re targeting is worth $10 million. Obviously there are other challenges that would be involved in attacking the torrent swarm like the fact that you’re not likely to have a sole seeder with corrupted checksums, and a naive implementation will almost certainly end up with a corrupted file instead of a working attack, but to someone with the resources and motivation to plan something like this it could get dangerous pretty quickly.

    Supply chain attacks are increasingly becoming a serious risk, and we do need to start looking at upgrading security on things like the checksums we’re using to harden them against attackers, who are realizing that this can be a very effective and relatively cheap way to widely distribute malware.


  • I still use Nextcloud for syncing documents and other basic stuff that is relatively simple. But I started getting glacial sync times consuming large amounts of CPU and running into lots of conflicts as more and more got added. For higher performance, more demanding sync tasks involving huge numbers of files, large file sizes, and rapid changes, I’ve started using Syncthing and am much, much happier with it. Nextcloud sync seems to be sort of a jack of all trades, master of none, kind of thing. Whereas Syncthing is a one trick pony that does that trick very, very well.


  • The setting you described sounds like a motherboard manufacturer issue. There’s no reason for it not to default to “auto” unless that somehow limits something else they wanted to have on by default. They choose the defaults, and they chose that one, even if it’s stupid. Either that, or you set it somehow previously and didn’t realize or forgot you did.


  • I feel like you are the one who is confusing a “NAS device” or “NAS appliance” as in a device that is specifically designed and primarily intended to provide NAS services (ie, its main attribute is large disks, with little design weight given to processing, RAM or other components except to the extent needed to provide NAS service), and a NAS service itself, which can be provided by any generic device simultaneously capable of both storage and networking, although often quite poorly.

    You are asserting the term “NAS” in this thread refers exclusively to the former device/appliance, everyone else is assuming the latter. In fact, both are correct and context suggests the latter, although I’m sure given your behavior in this thread you will promptly reply that only your interpretation is correct and everyone else is wrong. If you want to assert that, go right ahead and make yourself look foolish.



  • It is mostly a myth (and scare tactic invented by copyright trolls and encouraged by overzealous virus scanners) that pirated games are always riddled with viruses. They certainly can be, if you download them from untrustworthy sources, but if you’re familiar with the actual piracy scene, you have to understand that trust is and always will be a huge part of it, ways to build trust are built into the community, that’s why trust and reputation are valued higher than even the software itself. Those names embedded into the torrent names, the people and the release groups they come from, the sources where they’re distributed, have meaning to the community, and this is why. Nobody’s going to blow 20 years of reputation to try to sneak a virus into their keygen. All the virus scans that say “Virus detected! ALARM! ALARM!” on every keygen you download? If you look at the actual detection information about what it actually detected, and you dig deep enough through their obfuscated scary-severity-risks-wall-of-text, you’ll find that in almost all cases, it’s actually just a generic, non-specific detection of “tools associated with piracy or hacking” or something along those lines. They all have their own ways of spinning it, but in every case it’s literally detecting the fact that it’s a keygen, and saying “that’s scary! you won’t want pirated illegal software on your computer right?! Don’t worry, I, your noble antivirus program will helpfully delete it for you!”

    It’s not as scary as you think, they just want you to think it is, because it helps drive people back to paying for their software. It’s classic FUD tactics and they’re all part of it. Antivirus companies are part of the same racket, they want you paying for their software too.






  • I would need to factory reset the whole server for that, which would be … highly inconvenient for me. It took me quite a long time to get everything working, and I don’t wanna loose my configuration.

    This is your actual problem you need to solve. Reinstalling your server should be as convenient as installing a basic OS and running a configuration script. It needs to be reproducible and documented, not some mystery black box of subtle configurations you’ve forgotten about ages ago. A nice, idempotent configuration script is both convenient and a self-documenting system for tracking all the changes you’ve ever implemented on your server.

    Once you can do that, adding whatever encryption you want is just a matter of finding the right sequence of commands, testing it (in another docker perhaps) and then running your configuration script to migrate your server into the desired state.



  • I can’t live without my Nextcloud + Email server. Having all my personal files, contacts, email, calendar, and other personal information immediately accessible synced and backed up with a single app on any device or platform I want to use, is a dream come true, and I get to do it without any Big Tech, avoiding their lock-in and privacy invasion and without any fees or limits beyond my own hardware.

    OpenVPN is how I can access it from anywhere in the world, so that gets an honorable mention too.



  • Experience is the best teacher. Practice makes perfect. Get in a creative world and build redstone machines. Copying other people’s machines is absolutely fine and is a great way to learn all sorts of tricks. You learn not just by building it, but also by observing the one you’ve coipied, seeing it work, looking at what its parts are doing. You can tinker with the parts, change something and see if it does something different. If there’s a machine you don’t understand how it works, don’t be intimidated by it, break it down until you understand how it does work. And that’s where the next question comes in.

    Things like “quasiconnectivity” honestly reflect things I would call more of a bug that has been turned into a feature. There’s no way to make it intuitive because it’s non-intuitive by design, it makes no sense that certain blocks don’t work in certain cases or if the power comes in from one location and not another, or they need a block update to happen before they work, or that a block update makes them work when it doesn’t seem like it should, and while you will certainly run into them by accident sometimes (and it’s annoying!) you can also use these unexpected things to your advantage create really elaborate and bizarre effects (or more often just really compact ones). But unless you have a specific need for that compact/unexpected process or layout you probably don’t need to worry about it. It’s something you learn with experience when you’re trying to figure out why the thing you’re making isn’t working the way you expect it to be working.

    The other thing you’re asking about, T Flip Flops are a kind of digital logic circuits that are actually from the real world. In many ways (at least when it’s not dealing with buggy quasiconnectivity effects), redstone signals actually behave like a perfect digital circuit would. Electrical engineers and computer designers typically design their logic using all kinds of digital “building blocks”, some of the most basic and well known are gates (AND/OR/NOR/XOR/etc) and flip flops. Flip flops are special because they can form permanent digital storage. That is true in minecraft also, and once you learn both what these do and how they can be used, you can also learn how to implement each one in Minecraft. The best way to learn more about these is to study digital logic. With enough patience Minecraft is effectively turing-complete, and can build redstone computers of unlimited size and capacity.