• 0 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle
rss


  • What do you expect them to say? That they’re proud of this guy? Even though he’s clearly a madman?

    I know IRL gun nuts, and none of them would identify with this person. Also, none of them subscribe to the fallacy/straw-man of a “good guy with a gun”. The ones who carry concealed would remind you that they are carrying for themselves, not for you. If you find an active shooter in a mall, you can count on them… to run away.

    Skillful gun nuts know that shooting defensively is never worth the legal hassle unless it saves your life (or a family member’s life).

    The shooter in this article is nothing like any of the gun nuts I’ve ever met. This shooter is another Kyle Rittenhouse, someone anxious for a chance to kill a person and get away with it under the excuse of defense.



  • The good news is: the error shown there was a PCIe bus error, which means the error is somewhere between the NVME controller and your processor’s PCIe interface. Also good news: the errors you experienced were fully corrected, so you probably lost no data.

    So the flash memory in the drive isn’t failing. That’s good because if the flash memory starts failing, it’s probably only going to fail more. In this case, your errors may be correctable: by replacing the motherboard, by replacing the processor, by reseating the NVME drive in its slot, by verifying that your power supply is reliable…

    However, if your NVME controller actually does fail, it will be little consolation to tell you that your data is all still there on the flash chips, but with no way to get it. So now might be a good time to make a backup. Any time is a good time to make a backup, but now is an especially good time.

    If you keep getting these errors at the same rate, then you probably don’t need to do anything, since the errors are being corrected. If you’re worried, you could use BTRFS and enable checksumming of data.





  • Headlines like this are problematic. I think we can all agree that Trump has done a lot of damage to democracy in the US, but are rural Trump supporters really more dangerous than urban Trump supporters? That claim is suspect, and the article provides no evidence to support it (it provides evidence that most Trump supporters are rural, which is a totally different claim.)

    And saying that white rural Trump supporters are worse than non-white rural Trump supporters is an even more serious claim. It’s racially discriminatory, and seems totally baseless in this article.

    The article has no evidence of these claims, and seems to indicate that the book doesn’t even make the claims of the headline.

    (I’m not objecting to the claims that Trump supporters are mostly rural and mostly white. That is common knowledge.)


  • Using a VPN (like Tailscale or Netbird) will make setup very easy, but probably a bit slower, because they probably connect through the VPN service’s infrastructure.

    My recommended approach would be to use a directly connected VPN, like OpenVPN, that just has two nodes on it – your VPS, and your home server. This will bypass the potentially slow infrastructure of a commercial VPN service. Then, use iptables rules to have the VPS forward the relevant connections (TCP port 80/443 for the web apps, TCP/UDP port 25565 for Minecraft, etc.) to the home server’s OpenVPN IP address.

    My second recommended approach would be to use a program like openbsd-inetd on your VPS to forward all relevant connections to your real IP address. Then, open those ports on your home connection, but only for the VPS’s IP address. If some random person tries to portscan you, they will see closed ports.


  • You know that stuff that appears on the screen before the operating system? That is the computer’s firmware. Sometimes it shows a brief memory check, sometimes it has a silly error message like “No keyboard detected. Press F1 to continue.” Sometimes it’s just a big image of the motherboard’s manufacturer’s logo. That firmware exists independently of the operating system, and will run even if you don’t have any operating system installed.

    Most people refer to the firmware as the “BIOS”, but technically, BIOS refers to an API between the firmware and the operating system. About a decade ago, some people decided that “BIOS” was going to be replaced by “UEFI”, and operating systems would start having a new way to boot. What ended up happening is: the firmware on all recent computers supports both UEFI and BIOS interfaces (and everyone still calls it “BIOS”). Recent Windows versions seem to only boot in UEFI mode, but most Linux distros can boot in either UEFI or BIOS mode. The GRUB bootloader can also start itself up in either UEFI or BIOS mode.

    USB live operating systems are limited in size and may have less functionality than other operating systems, so maybe they are only able to boot in one method or another. Try looking around in the firmware (or “BIOS” if you prefer) to see if you can change the boot method to allow both UEFI and BIOS operating systems.

    It may help if you can take a picture of some of the firmware’s boot configuration menus.





  • It’s Apple, which is a dealbreaker for me. Everything Apple is proprietary. All the OS, all the apps, everything is locked down. Last I used it, you can’t even compile your own software for Apple platforms without paying a massive fee.

    I will wait to buy the open source AR goggles, even if it makes me 10 years late to the bandwagon.



    You are correct that the Desktop Environment and Package Manager are the most important part of any distro. Of those, the Desktop Environment is the most important. Switching between Ubuntu with KDE Plasma and Arch with KDE Plasma is less visible of a change than switching from KDE Plasma to Gnome in any distro.

    Most distros include all the major Desktop Environments: Mate, Gnome, KDE Plasma, and probably several more.

    The biggest missing feature between Mint/Ubuntu/Debian is Container-based package management. This is an additional installation method, for “application”-like programs, usually proprietary. Debian has the infrastructure to run these, but you have to find or make the containers yourself. Mint has more support, in the form of a graphical package manager installed by default.

    There’s really not much difference in the feature set of distros. Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint have a lot more in common than they have differences.

    Desktop environments usually include a full set of these. I just use whichever comes with it.

    Linux usually has the drivers already set up right away on first boot. You shouldn’t need to install any drivers. There’s very little bloat. Any superfluous packages are likely consuming no CPU time, just drive space. Every default installation comes with a media player and file archiver, but you can install VLC or RAR if you like them better.

    They probably had a bad experience with one or more qt-based programs, or got a negative response when they filed a bug report to a qt program or library. Or, they were using some weird mix of old and new software, and ended up in a weird dependency loop that blocked a large set of packages on their system.

    Probably. The most common distros will have the most community support.

    Spend most of your effort choosing a Desktop Environment. Fortunately, this can be changed after installation.


  • The Catholics are going to be in a difficult place as gayness becomes more normal. It’s quickly becoming self-evident that homosexual relationships are not immoral at all. That’s probably going to accelerate over the next few decades.

    So the church should probably do more than just this to accept gay people, but they can’t. Catholic rulings set by ecumenical councils or by the pope (in such a way as to invoke papal infallibility) can’t be changed. It’s like if the US constitution could only be amended if the amendments didn’t contradict or repeal any existing text.

    So if the church says “no homo, and that’s final,” then they can’t go back and change it to “just a little homo, as a treat.” It’s hard to find an exact citation, but I’m pretty sure they’ve already said “no homo” enough to make it official, so there’s no going back from that. Unless they also retract infallibility.