* Posts by Grunchy

653 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2015

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Meet the Proxinator: A hyperbox that puts SATA at the heart of VMware migrations

Grunchy Silver badge

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.)

Microsoft: Copyright law didn't stop the VCR and shouldn't stop the LLM

Grunchy Silver badge

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!

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

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First thing you check is the make & model of the PC. If it’s a (Dell) Alienware, buy something less garbagy!

HP print rental service seeks more users to become subscription addicts

Grunchy Silver badge

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/

Ahead of Super Tuesday, US elections face existential and homegrown threats

Grunchy Silver badge

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.

Air National Guardsman Teixeira to admit he was Pentagon files leaker

Grunchy Silver badge

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.

Dell promises 'every PC is going to be an AI PC' whether you like it or not

Grunchy Silver badge

I just blew $300 on upgrading my 3800x with 4TB M.2 ssd and 128GB of DDR4. I cannot imagine ever outgrowing this thing, for the rest of my life!

Grunchy Silver badge

Which robot or ship computer will it resemble?

Star Trek

2001 Space Odyssey

Dark Star

Red Dwarf

C3PO

Marvin the Paranoid Android

Knight Industries 2000

Megatron

Probably Aibo! Or Roomba :)

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

Grunchy Silver badge

How long has it been since Formula 1 had corrodible cars?

Ten years, at least !

Grunchy Silver badge

They once made a car that was impervious to rust, they called it “Chevy Corvette.” Then they were inspired to fabricate “Pontiac Fiero”!!

Microsoft adds more AI to Photos in Windows 10 and 11

Grunchy Silver badge

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.

Gelsinger splits Intel in two to advance foundry vision

Grunchy Silver badge

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

Someone had to say it: Scientists propose AI apocalypse kill switches

Grunchy Silver badge

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.

Damn Small Linux returns after a 12-year gap

Grunchy Silver badge

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.)

Crims found and exploited these two Microsoft bugs before Redmond fixed 'em

Grunchy Silver badge

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.

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

Grunchy Silver badge

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.)

Angry mob trashes and sets fire to Waymo self-driving car

Grunchy Silver badge

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.

Mozilla CEO quits, pushes pivot to data privacy champion... but what about Firefox?

Grunchy Silver badge

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 !

Europe's deepest mine to become Europe's deepest battery

Grunchy Silver badge

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.

Half of polled infosec pros say their degree was less than useful for real-world work

Grunchy Silver badge

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 11 24H2 is coming so we can all shut up about Windows 12 for another year

Grunchy Silver badge

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…

Mozilla slams Microsoft for using dark patterns to drive Windows users toward Edge

Grunchy Silver badge

Re: Yes...but

“The Edge” is a wrestler who is liable to swoon limply into the arms of Hulk Hogan, so as to become subject to a persuasive “slam.”

But you’re right about developing your PFC. How many times has “Macho Man” Randy Savage enjoined all of us to “snap into a slim jim” with him? You might cooperate with that suggestion… once, maybe.

After that, you’re likely to become a little apprehensive about those advertising suggestions… !

Grunchy Silver badge

Nobody “slammed” nobody

You guys exaggerate too much.

“Slam” refers to a wrestling move that Hulk Hogan might perform upon Jesse “The Body” Ventura.

(For the slam to work persuasively, “The Body” has to become somewhat limp, like a piece of week-old celery that isn’t as crunchy as it had once been.)

What you have here is a representative of one company expressing some vague criticism of some kind of communication from a second company.

Another usage: if you go to Denny’s restaurant, and order yourself a “slamwich.”

These are two of the most widely accepted uses of the word “slam.”

(Your editor deserves 30 days in the “slammer” for these egregious breaches!)

FBI confirms it issued remote kill command to blow out Volt Typhoon's botnet

Grunchy Silver badge

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.

Crunchbang++ versus Bunsen Labs: The pair turn it up to 12

Grunchy Silver badge

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).

Apple redecorates its iPhone prison to appease Europe

Grunchy Silver badge

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…)

Datacenters could account for a third of Ireland's electricity by 2026

Grunchy Silver badge

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.)

Zuckerberg wants to build artificial general intelligence with 350K Nvidia H100 GPUs

Grunchy Silver badge

Re: AI

“High speed rail boondoggle.”

That’s harmless tomfoolery, compared to the colossal murder contest Russia is earnestly pursuing with its gentle neighbour Ukraine.

Meanwhile as they spray each other with tungsten balls and high explosives and incendiaries, they both keep clonking their elbows into various massive nuclear facilities and weapons, including Chernobyl itself! Which blew up just because one asshole unexpectedly sneezed without a handkerchief!

(Though to be honest, from Russia’s perspective it’s still a relative bargain, compared to paying full retail for Ukraine. The best time to buy was like 30 years ago, which is when USSR fumbled Ukraine away in the first place!)

Grunchy Silver badge

Circle The Bandwagons

Shouldn’t he be focusing on blockchain or whatever. There ought to be a way to wedge a blockchain in there somehow.

Ask chat gpt!

Samsung’s Galaxy S24 pitch: The AI we baked in makes you more human

Grunchy Silver badge

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!

Be honest. Would you pay off a ransomware crew?

Grunchy Silver badge

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…

Apple sets new 16,000-foot iPhone drop test after 737 fuselage fail

Grunchy Silver badge

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!)

Microsoft pulls the plug on WordPad, the world's least favorite text editor

Grunchy Silver badge

Re: It's all crap

I use the “Ghost Spectre” edition of Win10 specifically because they streamlined most of the MS bloat out of there. But they never culled Wordpad.

(Besides Notepad++ there’s another really interesting freeware app, and that’s Notetab.)

I never liked Wordpad. Well it doesn’t open Word files and the “rich text” markup isn’t of any use.

These days I’m using Libre Office, or else Ubuntu Edit.

I don’t think I care about Microsoft anymore… they can do whatever they want in their abandoned mall. I’m not ever going back again!

Is it time for 6G already? Traffic analysis says yep

Grunchy Silver badge

I’m not buying any new phone

Here in Canada the 3G shutdown is postponed until Dec 2025.

Meanwhile, I found out I can easily just pay $40 and get a 4G wi-fi hotspot. This is perfect for me because I don’t pay for any cellular plan anyway: instead, I pay for a tablet data plan. Not only is it much cheaper, but I can get all the same utility with VOIP and SMS alternatives to “normal” cellphone functions.

Now I can skip the whole nonsense of providers trying to force my legacy equipment offline, by attacking my 3G radio.

Ok, suit yourself. Now I’ve got a 4G hotspot, and there’s nothing anybody can do to stop me!

Grunchy Silver badge

Re: it would be great

Why did anybody update? I still have iPhone SE 1st gen, circa 2014, because it has excellent 3G radio, good screen, good performance, 64 GB memory.

“Newer is always better,” yeah, for who though? For the guy trying to perpetuate his expensive, eternally improving handsets. I paid $100 for this thing back in 2015 and refused every single Apple “update” which is nothing but Apple sabotage. Jobs was an ass and his company sucks. I only have this thing because FLIR made a companion IR camera for it, which I got for $50 second-hand because people are in a rush to get swindled.

I use data for free from my unlimited wi-fi, I barely use any of my “tablet” 6GB plan. This mobile internet is handy, but in no way is it “crucially important” at all. My 500 kbps wi-fi is plenty good enough.

NO SALE on 6G.

Valve celebrates New Year by blowing off Steam support for Windows 7 and 8

Grunchy Silver badge

I actually tested this and so far Steam still seems to work on Win7. I know, I brag hard about running Windows completely sandboxed inside a VM isolated from the internet, but I just made a separate copy running only Steam. It has a snapshot anyway, so if hackers attack my image I’ll just recover it and move on.

The only hiccough was some kind of error involving a “sandboxed browser,” which doesn’t mean anything to me.

I played some more Portal challenge levels, got a couple more silver ratings on good ole Win7.

Who’s telling me I have to upgrade to Win11? Because I think rather not.

Windows 11 unable to escape the shadow of Windows 10

Grunchy Silver badge

I’m not “upgrading” to Windows 11, why would I? Windows 11 has no beneficial features (of any value to me, anyway).

The most beneficial feature has been to run Windows inside of Qemu/Virt-manager inside of Linux, because now my entire Windows environment is encapsulated inside a single qcow2 file, so backup has suddenly become utterly painless — after decades of being jerked around by Microsoft. Second feature is the snapshot function. Windows can suffer all the b/s of failed updates or whatever incompetence they are guilty of, and I can recover no matter what bungling Microsoft does to it. And now security updates are wholly irrelevant because I run Windows sandboxed from the internet: I use Linux to access the internet.

What does Windows 11 do? I really couldn’t care less, to be honest.

Microsoft is, frankly, just another vendor to avoid like the plague. Same as like Simpson Sears down at the mall, when Craftsman and Kenmore were no longer providing compelling value.

These companies have become obsolete, and I have moved on.

A tale of 2 casino ransomware attacks: One paid out, one did not

Grunchy Silver badge

Why does any customer data need to be net-accessible? You set up three servers. The first one faces the net, has no data, and can only talk to server 2 through a single low-speed connection and only using a particular messaging protocol. The second server has no internet connection and also no data. It can only talk to servers 1 & 3 via two separate low-speed connections and two different protocols. The third server can access the data, but only for confirming true or false if a particular query is correct; and can only speak to server 2.

And all 3 of these servers could run on the same physical hardware, as independent VMs!

I could write this in BASIC and it would still be utterly unhackable.

Here's who thinks AI chatbots will eventually be smart enough to be your coworker

Grunchy Silver badge

HAH

I worked with some ACTUAL intelligent assistants, and they were a complete disaster.

The circumstance was that we had a mountain of drawings to be updated per redline, but the majority of them were “simple” updates. So the boss had a great idea, let’s hire some intelligent assistants in India. The workflow goes: bundle up all the simple, busy, impossible to get wrong work (into a zip file), email that to India, and spend all the rest of your time doing the more specialized, challenging stuff. Then tomorrow morning, briefly check all the work from India, and release all the updates at once.

But what really happened: everything sent to India was mistaken, or poorly done, or introduced new mistakes. It’s as if you gave your information to hackers to mess it all up, and then they billed you for the privilege.

The amazing thing is that this persisted for months! Well it wasn’t hard to figure out. The boss got a raise for “solving” the problem, and he had a “closed ears” policy about the solution not working. Plus even better, he made it so that all the performance metrics were produced exclusively by the Indian vendor with no input from the on-site design and drafting department (as a matter of fact — we were deliberately gagged). Needless to say, our outsource colleagues published an unbeatable 100% on-time, 100% error-free performance record, justifying several rounds of bonuses: all fraudulent.

How did the whistle finally get blown? The dept VP finally came for an independent tour and asked to see the “success” with our online friends. Boy was he surprised to learn it actually took more time and effort to correct the “intelligent helper’s” edits than if we were to simply do the original job without help. Our actual workload ballooned from 100% to something more like 140%.

My prediction: AI helper bots prove to be a far greater hindrance than net useful benefit for all the foreseeable future.

Exactly like “full self driving.”

(Trust me: come test your chauffeur robot in a Calgary black-ice blizzard, to truly understand the meaning of “futile” !)

You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused

Grunchy Silver badge

Easy fix

Sometimes you can temporarily substitute a disrupted broadband link by sharing a cellular connection.

It depends how far out into the sticks you find yourself…

(This one time an out-of-control maniac wiped out a main trunk that provided connectivity for my entire neighborhood, including all the shops and gas stations and convenience stores, and interrupted all card transactions, whether debit or credit. You couldn’t even get a slurpee unless you had cash on the barrel! Even lotto lookup was offline, it was a complete disaster. THANKFULLY my iPhone SE still had wireless; I’d have had to read a book or something! It was an extended outage too, I heard the guy needed extrication via Jaws Of Life and everything.)

Bricking it: Do you actually own anything digital?

Grunchy Silver badge

Did something crazy

I bought a box with random 700 cds for $13.99 per hundred and I just rip em.

Hey it was funny people bought music libraries from iTunes and then passed away, and children tried to access the collection, only to find out Steve Jobs wanted all that for himself (and then died to spite em.)

Grunchy Silver badge

Cannot play Steam library on Win7 after Dec 31 2022

I don’t buy Steam games any more because they don’t want to support that era of OS anymore, even though every game I have runs fine on Win7.

I’ve moved on to GOG for DRM-free games only.

I can’t believe anybody pays a cent for Microsoft anything. Libre Office is finally a decent alternative.

As for music & books: I do my shopping on FM radio & free little libraries. You know where’s a good place to buy content? Thrift stores. Or borrow from library and rip at will.

(I’m not paying any money for computer hardware anymore either. I can get amazing deals on cast-off equipment at the recyclers. I have six high end HP & Lenovo servers downstairs with hundreds of GB of ram each and the whole lot cost less than $500!)

How thermal management is changing in the age of the kilowatt chip

Grunchy Silver badge

Frankenchip ?

Hey I thought if you packaged a CPU+GPU=APU (or possibly =SOC if you wanna go there), so what gives !

Windows 12: Savior of PC makers, or just an apology for Windows 11?

Grunchy Silver badge

Re: Windows 12 ?

Yes, well, Windows 10 IS the last version.

(As far as I care, anyway…)

Grunchy Silver badge

Done with Microsoft

I’m done with Apple, too.

I’ve moved on to Linux and run Proxmox server and virt-manager for other OS environments.

I’ve also reverted to Windows 7 for my legacy windows applications (minus the network connection, to avoid their security problems.)

Steam is dropping support for Win 7 so I’m dropping them first.

Data loss prevention isn't rocket science, but NASA hasn't made it work in Microsoft 365

Grunchy Silver badge

Re: Complex Things

I always thought of the Great Pyramid as like a really elaborate bathroom, equipped with nothing but 1 bathtub that’s really hard to get to (and no plumbing).

California approves lavatory-to-faucet water recycling

Grunchy Silver badge

I wonder if it’s possible to recycle data center water?

I’d rather drink Xeon water than toilet water, I guess.

AMD thinks it can solve the power/heat problem with chiplets and code

Grunchy Silver badge

Re: Long way to go?

“Moore’s Law is long gone,” “but we need to achieve 30x performance gain by 2025.”

Hey, isn’t it true that if you double performance every year, for 5 years from 2021-2025, that 2^5=32 times?

Huh, sounds almost identical to “long gone” Moore’s Law.

Google pencils in limited third-party cookie purge for January

Grunchy Silver badge

I got tricked

Somehow I got tricked into using “thorium” browser, and now I find out if has furry porn and circumcision images? I am trying to avoid google and microsoft spyware, and I got duped by “the individual” instead.

(If somebody ever tries to corner you into using their choice of pronouns, use “the individual” instead. Works practically everywhere.)

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