Posts by Ribfeast

Ahhh that caption, as an 80's kid that made me laugh!

Ahhh that caption, as an 80's kid that made me laugh!

In rural Australia here, we had some floods and bushfires that took out power to the local cellphone towers. They flipped across to UPS power, and then generator power. Ran great for 12 hours, and then the generator ran out of fuel because nobody could get to the tower. The tower has point-to-point wireless connectivity to adjacent towers (too hard to run cable up the side of a mountain), so no fibre to dig up at least.

There was also the recent Optus outage that took out banking and comms for half the country a few weeks ago due to a BGP routing bungle.

Still boggles the mind that your retirement fund and health insurance are linked to your employer. Much prefer the Australian system of superannuation, where 10 or 11% of your wage is automatically put into your retirement fund and invested immediately. And if you put in more on top of that percentage, the gov matches it. And most jobs are advertised as wage Plus super.

And health insurance is optional (although you get taxed for NOT having it). The medicare system is at least free, although the waiting lists can suck for some operations.

I got in just before they kicked off Demand charges here in Australia on some tariffs. I pay 36c per kwh for power used any time, and I get 12c per kwh for solar I export from my 19.6kW system (17.5kw of inverters). Maths doesn't work for battery storage yet. Some people are stuck on Time Of Use plans which are closer to 60c per kwh in the evenings, but marginally cheaper than my rate in the early morning.

Demand charges are worse again. If you consume say 10kW consistently for a 30 minute period, then you will be charged 10x 15-20c PER DAY for the rest of the billing month. So staggering high-use appliances becomes a must. I've had the EV charging, oven on, ducted AC on, and induction cooktop running, exceeding 20kW draw in the evenings sometimes, if I was subject to a demand charge, it would be brutal.

Here in Australia we have the CCS, and I like that people can't just randomly walk up and unplug my car while it is charging. I don't find the connector too bulky, but I guess in other countries where you need to use an adaptor to get CCS to plug into NACS it might be an issue.

Still have two Amiga 500s here, but I think their floppy drives were damaged by one of the old floppies I had (was working fine for multiple disks, then none). Also have a large ADF collection. Would love a solution where I can have a CF/SD card full of ADF files and play them on the native hardware, would the PiStorm do that? Which Amiga OS would I need then, 3.1?

My fridge and washing machine are LG, but they don't do anything useful except tell me that the load of washing is done, or the fridge door is open. I can't adjust the fridge temperature, I can see the set temperature but not the actual temperature inside the fridge. I can't start washing jobs remotely either, so kinda pointless.

Our Lifx light globe still seems to be supported after many years, but only gets switched on once in a blue moon for lighting effects out on the deck.

We have an Intel NUC as a HTPC connected to the projector, smart TVs aren't great after a period of time.

The BlackBean is used to send infrared signals to our split system aircon on the wall, to simulate the remote.

The main smart devices we use regularly are power switches, we have them for fans in the stables, barley boiler, electric farm kart charger timer, and the electric fence energizer, so I can turn the fence off remotely if I'm out in a paddock and need to fix the electric fence. It would be a bummer if these devices stopped working. On the to-do list is to set up a separate wifi SSID and segregated VLAN for these devices in case of compromise.

Had a few over the years.

One tightass client had their server rack set up inside a shower cubicle, with tiles, plumbing etc still in place. They had installed a splitty AC up on the wall to keep things cool. Problem was, the server rack was mounted sideways, so unracking servers was impossible once the rack was slid into place.

It all worked, but was sooo dodgy. No UPS, around 3 switches between one room and another etc.

Another site had a splitty up on the wall with racks directly below it, Condensation drain outside blocked up, so it dripped all over the racks and took a $500mil org offline for a day or two until replacement kit could be sourced.

Another site had the chillers fail/trip off for their server room, it hit around 60-65C on the door handle to the room, according to the fireys who fired an infrared thermometer at the handle. Big red switch was pushed. PDUs have since had temperature monitors installed, and high temp cutouts enabled. AC is still woeful though, with AC coming from the ducts in the ceiling, and no way for the hot air to get out, other than rising to some return vents.

Maybe they could just put in a geofence around theme parks so that the fall detection doesn't false alert?

Don't you need a bunch of nitrogen to make it breathable too?

Impressive achievement!

Those audits always bothered me. I worked for an MSP, and it would cost the customer a fortune for us to come in and go through everything for them to satisfy an audit. And I doubt they could bill the vendor wanting the audit for that time.

Maybe use the helicopter to blow the dust off the lander? Risky though :)

I'm guessing if it simply replaces the fans, and mounts onto the CPU itself, wouldn't everything else in the case still overheat? RAID controllers, RAM, drives etc.

Plus wouldn't the system throw up faults as it is seeing 0 RPM from the fans?

I remember working for a water/sewer provider, and their SCADA network was fully separated from the main corporate network. With only a few ports open between the networks for status traffic to get through from the collector probe in the SCADA network across to the central NOC in the main network. Everything was locked down tight.

If they have to work from home, then they can claim their home office expenses on tax as a deduction, at least in Australia. Here you can also claim per-hour based on some formula, or do it the hard way and work out power, % of your residence, internet, etc etc.

The savings in fuel and time for me are immense, I love working from home. Save 2 hours in the car, and a 130km round trip, car needs servicing less often, less fuel, etc.

Dunno why they are chasing Amazon, just claim it on tax.

With the FluBot malware running rife through the Android ecosystem (I get dozens of texts from it a week), in some ways I appreciate the walled garden of IOS somewhat. If there was a way to sideload without losing that security it would be good though...

I could just imagine a directive from higher-ups in China to Nio to remotely disable all their vehicles in a certain country, as a precursor or in the middle of hostilities etc. I'm sure Tesla could do similar if they wanted.

I thought it was "A hand on the bird is not as good as two in the bush" ;)

Reminds me of the time a previous employer in the early 2000's sent an all staff message from one of the bosses or CEO, with a large attachment. Think it was a TIFF file or something that should have been a JPG or more optimal format. Was a multi-site company with hundreds of staff, and the WAN link at the head office where the mail server lived was only 4 megabit or similar. Took a long time for everyone to download that message.

Strap an engine to it, and turn the ISS into a space ship instead. Or even pop it in orbit around the moon or mars or something. Could even just fill it with supplies, or fuel, for easy access to them while building a moon base etc.

I'm guessing radiation shielding and serviceability then start to become issues if it remains inhabited away from the earth's magnetic field.

Isn't this what XRP (Ripple) was for?

Pop the files as attachments in a draft e-mail, but don't send it.

Go home/somewhere else and log into webmail.

Download the attachments from the draft e-mail to your disk/USB/NAS/whatever

Delete the draft

Doubt it would show up on logs as the e-mail was never sent.

Where I work, anything cloudy is blocked, even if I take my work laptop home. USB sticks are also read only. OneDrive, Dropbox, iCloud etc all blocked. Surprisingly Office 365 webmail still works, but not the admin portal.

No admin rights to install dropbox etc on workstations either. Would be pretty trivial to set up the same at Tesla surely?

Surely you can just tell them to piss off? Do they actually have any right to enter your premises and perform an audit? Or take away valuable staff time to handhold vendors through the audit? Surely you can just say "too busy, go away", or some other excuse?

I used to work for an MSP, and customers would get audited occasionally and ask us to help, and it could take hours/days/weeks of stuffing around to track down licenses, work out staff counts etc, which the customer paid us for, and I doubt the vendor compensated them for.

Surely the network that is used to develop these things is air gapped? I guess not...

All good unless you have a network switch, SAN, or other device that has ceased vendor firmware support, and requires flash in order to manage the damn thing...

Had to fix this for someone last night. Moved hpdm.framework to the trash, and the OS reinstalled the driver. I then deleted and re-added the printer and all fixed.

Makes me wonder if black holes and neutron stars are also superconductors, and if that would induce any interesting properties or fields etc...

We have a couple of Efergy EGO smart wifi switches. Can turn them on and off remotely, and they also meter power, can see live power stats in the app, can set timers etc.

We use one for the stable lights, so they come off and on at a certain time. More reliable than the mechanical timer switches, as they don't have the time go out of whack when there is a power outage.

The other is hooked up to our electric fence energizer, so when I'm out in a paddock I can turn the fence off remotely and fix sections.

Back at MIT (not the good one, the other one in NZ) in late 90's I remember the PCs in the various labs has LS120 "superdrives" which took a standard floppy as well as 120MB disks. A bit like a zip drive.

Games were banned, but they obviously overlooked the fact that an install of Quake fit rather nicely on the LS120 disks.

Had many hours of fun playing against other students.

Whenever a lecturer or admin peeped into the room, many PCs would mysteriously reboot. They suspected it, but never caught us.

One time we heard them bounding down the hall towards the room in advance, in a vain attempt to try and catch us :)