Posts by Grunchy

I remember one time hearing about an electronic fly swatter, that according to rumor used Reagan “star war” technology to zap flies from mid-air using a low power laser. And then for awhile you could buy a green laser from “deal extreme” that had enough power to zap a fly.

Commodity Equipment

“The cloud” isn’t exactly a scam, but it’s definitely no foundation to build a business upon. The cloud host has too much power to restrict or remove service at any second.

What I like about Linux and Proxmox is that once the system is working, I don’t have to let anybody make any changes anymore: I don’t have to respond to Microsoft Apple Google Amazon whims. I can lock down my solution and let it earn money without some “landlord” coming to demand more and more. What they are really after is to spy on my business, steal all my trade secrets, then run me out of business and steal all my customers and trade relations. And pay them for the privilege!!

Instead I switched to Proxmox and Virt-Manager and run “obsolete” systems and solutions. I will never do any business with Microsoft Apple Google Amazon ever again. Nothing against M.A.G.A., I just don’t trust those people, and thank goodness there are alternatives…

Wikileaks

I heard that the only “journalism” that assange did was to trick 20-something year old transgender individual Chelsea Manning into stealing secret info from the U.S. government, some of which may or may not have been privately sold to international “concerned parties” and which inexplicably enriched assange by multi-millions, perhaps in “untraceable” crypto-assets to be cashed in at a later date.

What’s interesting is that manning served less than 7 years before obama commuted that sentence, whereas assange has been on the run for nearly double that long (my guess is that when you know you’re absolutely guilty of all charges you’ll run away for as long as you possibly can, whereas somebody who is actually “innocent” might stand trial in order to clear their name, though it might cost you some portion of your untraceable crypto-fortune).

My DNS-323 still runs Alt-F

I’m sure it doesn’t have any security vulnerabilities but it does have one bulletproof security feature: the damn thing is so slow (and same as my internet bandwidth) that you’ll never live long enough to steal all my data !

Garbage malware

There is a “sort-of” battle going on to finally kill Firefox browser by Microsoft and Google “Donald Trumping” the ecosystem by throwing up fake incompatibilities and “this don’t work on Seamonkey” baloney error messages. Seamonkey works just fine… it’s your corporation that’s defective. And dying.

I don’t use any of these garbage malware instant message “apps,” I share messages online exclusively on email, or some other FOSS technology, perhaps Jitsi, and what the hell is wrong with IRC?? Instead of wasting time playing Microsoft Apple Google B/S war battle, I BOYCOTT everything they do and are involved in. Those mega corps are 100% irrelevant to me, and have been for a couple years now.

I got GTA5 for free from Epic game store, oh must have been more than 1 year ago? Still never bothered to install it or try it out. I saw the GTA6 trailer, but it doesn’t interest me at all. The last game that interested me enough to actually spend full price on it? Flight Sim 2020.

(I have no interest in PS5 or Xbox, but I find myself tempted by Gamestation Pro…)

People should be compelled to surrender their votes to the authorities so that they don’t get tricked into voting for the wrong politicians any more.

What about Assange

He fights tooth and nail, obviously, because everybody in the entire world knows he’s DEFINITELY guilty as charged.

What he really wants is guaranteed assurance that he will be extradited ONLY if it is agreed he will be found innocent at trial.

The ultimate irony: he cries and begs and whimpers, but gets sent back anyway, and the jury sentences him to 3 months because he’s such a complete milktoast, anything more and it’s punishing the jail system worse than him.

And then it dawns on him: he wasted, what, 15 years? avoiding practically nothing.

Poetic Justice!

YAWN !

Ransomeware is a stupid problem to have. I’m immune, because I run Windows in a virtual instance. That works wonders because I can backup my entire Windows environment by copying a single qcow2 file to some sort of off-line storage. You’d literally have to break into my house and figure out my various and sundry backup devices before you could cause damage to my data in any meaningful way.

Plus, my data is inherently worthless which makes infection even more difficult. Yes, I scorn, but it’s because the remedy is so disgustingly simple.

DELIBERATE

Apple CEO pleased that all M1,M2,M3 chips are instantly obsolete now.

Spring season will be an excellent opportunity to upgrade ALL that old junk!

Easy phishing opportunity here. Simply create a sloppy LinkedIn profile of a fake individual with security clearances & see who steals the credentials.

The old double-cross!

My car dates to 1987

My Toshiba Satellite 2400 dates to 2002 or so, it has the dvd/cd-rw drive, got the 1.44 MB floppy drive, even a SD card slot and 3x USB poking out the back. 1600 MHz Pentium 4M including full SSE2 support. Also ethernet, a wi-fi radio, and even a fax modem. This baby has been upsized to a 150GB hard drive which can boot amongst Win3.11-95-98-XP-Lubuntu 16.04, and you just know it has a 2GB partition set aside strictly for Kolibri OS!

Obviously I surf this thing on the internet, are you crazy? If you can hack my 150GB of obsolete operating systems, my hat is off to you!

(That’s a ‘87 Dodge Diplomat with headers, cam, FITech throttle body, and noisy glass-packs.)

I configured my own for under $200

It’s because there are all these cast-off servers being scrapped, I picked up 3x DL380P G8s and another 3x X3550 M4s. Every chassis is rigged with AT LEAST! 128GB ram per socket, and that’s 12 sockets. 8x 2.5” drives per chassis, the same recycler blew out a whole box of 256-to-512 GB SSDs, also practically give-away. I also got 3x Tesla P4s off eBay and did the virtualization trick (nVidia hounds me ever since to start paying them licensing fees, but I’m sorry guys, the virtualization trick worked!)

I genuinely have no idea what I can do with this cluster. I stacked it all up in the spare bedroom in the basement, but just one of the DL380Ps howls more than I can tolerate. I also need at least 1 breaker for each pair of servers, but let’s see, all the basement bedrooms run off 1 breaker?

So I blew another $30 and picked up an old Datto Alto 3 L3A2 (with single 3TB drive) which I configured as a single Proxmox node, running a single copy of Ubuntu Server. I set up iGPU forwarding of the 4205U Celeron for iSpy Agent, it monitors four IP security cameras with HEVC and about 35% CPU utilization. But also my NGINX web servers, a bulletin board, and a couple other things I forgot about. Oh right, that nVidia virtualization server, for one, plus NFS + Samba, etc.

Well anyway, I think this crusty old Datto runs well under 15 Watts.

I’m surprised anybody needs to pay anything to put together a Proxmox cluster, well, meanwhile the local recycler warehouse is positively bursting with castoff servers.

(My local guys are at era.ca but e-waste repurposing is blowing up all over the world.)

Copyright = right to make copies

There’s a tricky issue when someone programs an artificial brain to emulate a particular, identifiable style, but in a “non-infringing” way.

But “copyright” is a well-understood legal concept (as are Deceit and Fraud).

I’m confident this all gets worked out, eventually!

Oh Brother!

I’m gonna convert my Brother AX-250 into a teletype terminal. I’ve still got quite a lot of fanfold paper from the 80s, so…

https://hackaday.com/2022/08/04/converting-an-80s-typewriter-into-a-linux-terminal/

Skinhead culture

I saw this entertaining history from a guy who kinda looks like a skinhead.

https://youtu.be/5SmRWeDU6DA

What’s interesting is for how long agitators and malcontents have been indulging in violence and racism and just itching to break bones. He traces the phenomenon back to the 1960s with mods + Jamaican rude boys = skinheads (who have gone through a couple generational iterations since then).

Misinformation? Oh, people know the truth, don’t worry about that. They gleefully consume any manure-like substance as long as they get to join a riot and indulge in fisticuffs. It really doesn’t matter what nonsense is being peddled just so long as it leads to Physical Confrontation.

Say, where did Assange go?

Whatever happened to multimillionaire hacker Assange? Say, how do you do nothing worthwhile your whole life, then “eureka!” start stealing worthless American military secrets, of no interest or value to anybody on Earth; and next thing you know you release a little bit publicly a little bit privately, and inexplicably you’re a multimillionaire and some asshole from USA is trying to extradite you there to be assassinated, jailed for life, and executed, all on fake Trump Up charges that any fool sees is phoney baloney x infinity.

I’ve waved farewell to Microsoft and to Apple. Oh sure, I still use them frequently inside Virt-Manager on my Ubuntu workstation: but strictly for legacy apps, and permanently disconnected from the internet.

I’ve discovered much greater reward in pursuing power-sipping devices running simple server tasks that doesn’t make sense in Microsoft or Apple ecosystems. Proxmox, Ubuntu Server, NAS functions, web servers, IoT servers, all sorts of interesting stuff.

I’ve become a real champion of Kolibri OS too, it’s like an open source Windows 95 where everything is in Machine Language and the entire OS can boot from one 1.44 Megabyte floppy disk. The more I try things in it, the better I like it!

I have never seen a Win11 environment yet and seriously doubt I’ll ever waste my time on it. It’s just a bunch of Razamataz.

OMG sounds like something Sanders did with AMD, like 15 years ago.

Well it’s just common sense, we’ve had limited robot work envelopes and “lock-out tag-out” work procedures for decades now. We also have emergency kill switches, redundant control schemes, remote access, and plenty of other contingency measures.

Another good idea was recognizing that allowing unproven robotic cars with deliberately limited sensors to roam freely out in the general public was a wildly stupid move.

Meanwhile, the Kolibri OS fits on a single 1.44MB diskette, and the entire system can be downloaded as a 40MB iso CD image.

(Sneer if you want, but I am super impressed! It is technologically similar to Win95 yet works just fine on my 3800x Ryzen.)

Not me

I’m done with Microsoft “updates.” I only run Windows in an instance of virt-manager and no access to the internet, period.

If my Microsoft work needs data from/to the internet, I’ll port it from my Ubuntu host OS. I actually don’t care if Microsoft goes broke, they have nothing to offer me anymore.

Kolibri

The more I check it out, the more I like the Kolibri project. Well, the entire operating system fits on a single 1.44MB diskette. Not really a lot of bloat there.

Undoubtedly it suffers security oversights but they’re not likely to be exploited, from the main issue: nobody uses it!

(I like machine language operating systems, you know Commodore machines worked from machine language operating systems.)

In Theroux’s “O-Zone” the story starts with some rube visiting the city, from the countryside, in his gasoline-powered car, and the gridlocked Tesla-driving crowd start imagining they are being poisoned with carbon monoxide, and in Rodney King style they drag this hapless rube out of his jalopy and beat him to death and torch the car.

We visited downtown Vancouver back in 2019 and the place was a hellhole, though not precisely a Tesla hellhole, more of a fentanyl/marijuana hellhole. You really don’t wanna be outside anywhere when the sun ain’t shining.

I tried out chrome many years ago, it grabbed all the resources and slowed my pc to a crawl (back to Mozilla).

Firefox should go back to calling itself Mosaic. What is “Mozilla,” a portmanteau between Mosaic and Godzilla? If it’s a joke, guess what, I maybe only just figured it out right now.

Dumb joke, guys!

Also, “Firefox” is a fictional Mig 31 that you control with Neuralink… and then only if you think in Russian !

BAH

Put an exercise bike into every household. Equip it with an inverter. Plug every one into a wall socket. BOOM, everybody is responsible for putting 1 kWhr into the wall, per person, per day.

If that doesn’t shut them up, any belly-achers get to do 1.5 kWhr per person per day.

Shoulda gone to vocational college

Listen, if you want occupational training, go to dummy school. Many are the gifted mechanics charging $100/hr + for practical solutions.

If you want to invent something new to the world, go to undergrad school and study and master the basics. If you can pay attention, you might see “a better way”, somehow. Maybe you can even commercialize it, who knows.

“All” theoretical knowledge is worthless… or to the right mind, priceless.

(There’s plenty of demand for HVAC mechanics, if you want “useful” training, go to janitor school. It’s decent, and honorable.)

Windows is dead

Microsoft is irrelevant, it makes no difference what they do any more.

(Speaking just for myself, of course.)

I do have some legacy programs that only work properly inside a Windows VM, and that’s where they exist (speaking only for myself, of course.)

I’ll see myself out…

So I bought 2nd hand Netgear Aircard 763S "LTE" wi-fi hotspot device, for $3, because at least the premise is cool.

However, the router is in a reboot loop which is not unheard of for these devices. In fact I got two, and they both do it.

Somebody, way back when, posted about how somebody figured out the router had become Infected With Virus and that's causing the issue.

I read about this "virus" yesterday, and thought it sounded ridiculous, and now I read about this today, and I wonder..?

How can I find out if I have infected routers? Maybe there's a way to figure it out.

I’ve grown accustomed to Ubuntu Debian, it works with every part of my setup, including the networked laser printer.

But I’ve set up another slot in virt-manager to play around with Kolibri OS, which I find absolutely Kick Ass. The bare OS fits inside 1.44 MB, but if you can spare 40MB you get the complete package including file managers, text editors, plenty of games (including Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, Lode Runner, “Super” Star Trek, and my current favorites Flood-It and Laser Tank), two web browsers, graphics editors including a really good icon editor. Hex editors, IDEs, it’s got DosBOX in there, TinyBasic, numerous calculators, an interesting CNC editor (in Russian though).

Do people buy apps on the AppStore anymore? I wasn’t aware of that.

(Android and iPhone are approximately equal, I bought a 2nd hand 2016 iPhone SE only because I could get a 2nd hand FLIR one infrared camera for it extremely cheap. I’d switch to a FOSS Linux phone in a heartbeat, except, well, I have a FLIR one in my pocket. That value proposition sort of demolishes every other cellular phone on the market…)

I got a discarded Datto L3A2 with the Celeron 4205u, has TDP=15 watts. It runs my entire home lab, monitors several security cameras, serves 3 web pages, and I forget all the other stuff I burdened it with. Runs at about 14% cpu utilization, according to the proxmox hypervisor.

(Cost me $30 though.)

You could get married with AI

On Barney Miller, Inspector Luger got Barney to write him letters to mail order Filipino ladies, and he wound up getting married.

Now the show was fictional, but it is a fact that it’s cancelled for many years, and Barney isn’t gonna write your love letters for you. It’s gonna have to be Samsung, or you, or else forget it?

Hawkeye and BJ did another Mash script read-through last year, and chat gpt had to write it for them. Writer’s strike!

I backed up all my VMs to a SD card, which I blew $30 on at Boxing Day extravaganza. It is offline and sitting in a secure location (*I* don’t even know where the hell it is, at the moment.)

By all means, burn down my system: see if I care. I’ve got the guts for at least 6 rebuilds kicking around here. I might be able to manage…

Bread and butter

Bread usually falls butter-side down because the extra mass of the butter makes it a little more stable oriented that way.

And so the screen side might be a little heavier, in part to ensure more work for Apple screen replacers.

(Cats tend to land rubber-side down because they can use their tail as a rudder. A high proportion of cats would survive 16,000 ft free fall, you know how come? Because of eating birds, I reckon!)