nbailey

nbailey , 6 days ago

If it’s cheap, sure.

nbailey , 6 days ago

Cardiff, Wales. One of the few places in the world that felt like a Real City while also having its own distinct culture and feel. Every other city I’ve been to feels like the same sort of dull corpo-district monoculture.

Old Montreal also has a bit of this, but only the central city areas, the outside periphery quickly devolves back into the “this could be anywhere in North America (version francaise)”

nbailey , 9 days ago

Not sure I’d want to take risk management advice from the mortgage-backed securities ghouls who crashed the economy 15 years ago, but okay I guess.

nbailey , 1 month ago

Servers are 100% efficient at heating, but heat pumps are 300% efficient. Get the most energy efficient devices you can, and heat your house with a proper heat pump.

nbailey , 1 month ago

I wouldn’t put a lot of trust in Telegram. Not only is their cryptography off by default, it’s a bespoke hand-rolled non-standard algorithm that might not work as well as they say. Oh, and it’s been potentially backdoored by the FSB (Russia’s CIA) for six years.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/telegram-reportedly-ordered-to-share-encryption-keys-with-fsb/

nbailey , 1 month ago

A huge majority of politicians are landlords. They’re more represented than mining, tech, forestry, oil, agriculture, or any other big industry lobby group.

Rents will rise, but it’s by design.

nbailey , 1 month ago

So basically the “conventional” generation methods use a Big Thing spinning at a specific speed to generate AC power. Solar and wind spit out DC which has to be converted to AC and also synchronize to the rest of the grid.

Hydroelectric, nuclear, coal, methane, all use a big-ass turbine at exactly 60.00 Hz to supply the grid. This is fairly easy to sync, since a change to load or supply will slightly change the physical rotation of the generators. If the load increases, it will draw down the speed of the turbines as it pulls on it harder. When the load is more than the generators can supply, or changes too quickly, it can cause a breaker to flip to prevent damage to the equipment.

With DC generators, the inverter connected to the grid works differently. It has to sense the frequency changes and react based on “external” factors. Right now there aren’t really widespread protocols to signal this type of grid conditions to solar/wind farms, so they have to be a bit more careful and preemptively disconnect to prevent damaging the inverters.

So it’s an entirely solvable problem. It just requires the industry (and ERCOT) to be proactive…

nbailey , 1 month ago

A decent solution is to install shairport-sync on the Pi and advertise the service over multicast dns (Apple bonjour protocol). This effectively creates an AirPlay device on the network that’s usable from any iDevice. This had a very high “wife approval factor” when I did something similar at home.

https://docbot.onetwoseven.one/linux/airplay/

nbailey , 2 months ago

Pearson was always a garbage airport, but it’s gotten so much worse since 2020. I hope the workers get all they demand and more.

nbailey , 2 months ago

Going to go against the grain a little here and say, why bother? If you already have a background in Linux, that will get you further in your career much faster. My education was 100% windows/cisco, but I haven’t touched either in the better part of a decade since I’ve been working with mostly “web stuff” where Linux dominates.

Invest the time you would spend slogging through learning Active Directory and grinding MCSE into something useful like Docker, ansible, bash, infra-as-code, etc. It’s more fun, and it’ll make you way more money!!

nbailey , 2 months ago

I guess this is the next chapter in the endless middle-east war. The British & French got exactly what they wanted when they drew up those borders. It’s truly tragic how many people are going to die in the next decade because of religious and nationalistic despots and their egos.

nbailey , 2 months ago

Index funds, yes of course. Individual stocks, absolutely not. They have way too much power and control and too little oversight to not abuse their positions of authority.

nbailey , 2 months ago

It was called Conrail. And it was beautiful.

nbailey , 2 months ago

I’ve been using Thunderbird with the OWL and TBSync plugins for exchange for years with good results. Obviously some things won’t work (teams integration, provisioned signatures, mail merge, etc) but it’s good enough that I only need proper outlook/OWA less than once a month.

Another option is “installing” the webapp as a PWA. I tried that for a bit but found notifications to be unreliable.

nbailey , 2 months ago

It’s fine. RAID is not a backup. I’ve been running simple mirrors for many years and never lost data because I have multiple backups. Focus on offsite and resilient backups, not how many drives can fail in your primary storage device.

nbailey , 3 months ago

The very first run of the CN (Canadian) turbo train nailed a meat truck at top speed… with a full load of journalists on board. Talk about bad PR.

https://thewalrus.ca/off-the-rails/

I don’t want to entirely blame the sorry state of rail travel in my country in that one meat truck, but it’s not blameless…

nbailey , 3 months ago

It needs some tweaks to be snappy. The defaults are really bad.

• change database from SQLite to a proper database like MySQL or Postgres, and configure the database server to use your memory fully
• increase the PHP memory limit from the default (128M on many distros) to >1G, the more the better
• install APCu in-memory cache for PHP
• add Redis as additional cache
• turn off the antivirus extension, if installed (ClamAV is useless)
• use http/2 on Apache/nginx to increase performance with multiple connections

https://docbot.onetwoseven.one/services/nextcloud/

nbailey , 3 months ago

Not sure how to do that in docker, I’ve run mine as a plain old PHP-FPM site for years and years. It might be something that can be tweaked using config files or environment variables, or might require building a custom image.

ClamAV is slow and doesn’t catch the nastiest of malware. Its entire approach is stuck in 2008. It’s better than nothing for screening emails, but for a private file store it won’t help much considering that you’ll already have the files on your system somewhere. And most importantly, it slows down file uploads 10x and increases CPU load substantially. The only good reason to use ClamAV for nextcloud is if you will be sued if you don’t!

nbailey , 3 months ago

Gonna paint this on my roof to break some spy satellites

nbailey , 4 months ago

Americans will do anything but build townhouses

nbailey , 4 months ago

IPtables on Debian because I like my life to be boring and unchanging.

nbailey , 4 months ago

Yep. Firewall, routing, dhcp, dns, everything you’d expect from a gateway device. Plain Debian (or really any distro) can do it all. With a 1gbps bi-directional connection fully saturated it will run at about 10% cpu on my very crappy low power Celeron CPU.

Plus, there’s no web UI full of janky and insecure CGI scripts to exploit, and software updates are forever (well, until x64 is deprecated, so basically forever).

nbailey , 4 months ago

I just got my first Chucky Buck this weekend, we can’t switch to a new currency this quickly! Our economy is in shambles!

nbailey , 4 months ago

Sadly the Canadian mint takes a loss on every coin and bill. Every $50 note they create actually costs about $65 (with the tip).

nbailey , 4 months ago

Yeah, this will actively discourage the most experienced baristas. It takes ~15 seconds to pour some drip coffee out of a carafe, but it takes ~90s for a good quality latte or cappuccino. If your least experienced employee is “6x more productive” then your most senior, that creates a hilariously bad incentive to fire people who know what they’re doing.

Not to mention that this disincentives cleaning.

nbailey , 5 months ago

Not an arch user, but it’s possible they moved dbus to a user scoped unit now. Might be possible to start it like this (or something similar)

systemctl —user start dbus.service

nbailey , 6 months ago

Nextcloud - slick web UI and good desktop app. Bit of work to install and maintain the server software but worth it imo.

Syncthing - barebones cross device peer to peer file sync. Simple but works great.

Most unixey option - just use rsync to do incremental backups of your homedir to your server with a crontab. Easy and simple.

nbailey , 10 months ago

Could always whitebox it with Debian, nftables, dnsmasq, hostapd, etc. on an old mini PC if it has two NICs…

nbailey , 10 months ago

If you have a car get a dashcam. It’s more valuable than any insurance because it will definitively prove what happened when something goes wrong. Bonus: you can post videos of bad drivers doing stupid things on the internet for imaginary points.