I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • Are you doing chmod with the recursive option? You could list a few subfolders with “ls -la” and see who owns them and what permissions they have.

    It’s also possible that your distribution mounts that drive with fixed permissions that override whatever you’re trying to set. Checking with “mount” and seeing what it spits out for the mount options for that device might give a clue.




  • There is a FreeRTOS option for Arduino which is pretty much the next step when you want to do multitasking.

    Basically, you create tasks in your setup routine by pointing to various self contained functions - each function becomes a task - and your “loop” becomes the task that runs when everything else is idle.

    Your functions have their own loops so they never exit, and then when you kick-start the tasks the task scheduler in FreeRTOS does all the heavy lifting of timeslicing the various functions so that they all appear to be running at once.

    If you share resources, like an I2C bus, you can add locking around it so that tasks that need the resource wait until other tasks are finished with it so you don’t get tasks treading on each other’s toes.

    FreeRTOS is in the Arduino libraries so you can just add it to a blank project and then have a play running two tasks at once.



  • measuring the ram usage on a blank desktop isn’t really a “benchmark” and doesn’t say anything about the OS itself

    Benchmark: noun

    1. a standard or point of reference against which things may be compared.

    And frankly, whatever memory the OS hogs is less memory for applications to hog.

    My laptop is 14 years old with a lightweight modern Linux distro. The “OS” - kernel, desktop environment , and system tray apps, a few widgets - uses 800MB of ram when it’s parked at the desktop after startup. Which means the other 15.2GB is available to my applications, and it makes my wheezy old laptop perfectly functional for most things.



  • There was a point, about 10-12 years ago now, where The Algorithm™ took over social media entirely.

    If you were around before that, you would have noticed the shift. Your friend’s comments and posts started to get intermixed with “other stuff” , and eventually you could scroll endlessly and not see anything from your direct friends, or friends of friends. Forever.

    What decided what you could see? Why, The Algorithm™ , of course. So, at that point right there, that’s when a direct and consistently biased feed of someone else’s opinion about what you wanted to see got pumped into people’s brains. And you can bet it’s going to be designed to be handing out the most engaging things that it can find for you, to keep you scrolling away on their platform. But it doesn’t matter a fuck if what its handing out i’s mentally harmful to you personally, as long as you’re engaged.

    And just like schoolkids in the USA reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, reinforcement of whatever The Algorithm™ wants (simply: more engagement) becomes pretty trivial when it’s crammed into your head consistently from a young age. Lacking any other reference points, children are the ones with the least amount of defenses against all of that shite.

    These kinds of laws worldwide are trying to stop that kind of thing from happening, because they can’t stop the source directly. Social media companies hold too much sway over the population and the economy now, it would be political suicide to try and go toe to toe with them.

    In my opinion, The Algorithm™ as it stands now is a cancer that needs to be cut out of social media by any means possible. Whether there’s anything left remaining after that is debatable.



  • but are normal plebs going to be arrested for having Signal on their phone or with a Meshtastic/Meshiliscious device?

    Are you deliberately trying to be obtuse?

    The “criminal encrypted communications device” - whatever the hell that actually is 1 - is the very small cherry on top of the firearms and whatever other investigative legwork needed to identify, locate, and then arrest these people.

    So no, unless you’re also often nipping off in a taxi with a few guns to do a job for another crime group, I think you’ll be relatively safe fooling around with meshtastic.

    1Maybe it’s one of those CrimPhones™ that had their security protections quietly broken in the last few years.




  • the pursuit of fancy graphics just doesn’t make sense anymore

    Their assertion is that fancy graphics doesn’t necessarily equal good gameplay, and the major industry players are focused on ever-increasing frame rates instead of game quality.

    Nobody cares if your game is fully immersive and rendered down to the atomic scale if it is boring or the game mechanics are shite. Sure you can wander around and look at stuff and gasp at the physics, but unless the game is titled “Look around and enjoy it” , that’s not the point.


  • Ditto on the QuietComfort headphones. I’ve had a pair of QC35’s for 10 years now with heavy use on weekly flights.

    Runs off a AAA battery which is good for like 18 hours or so. Works as regular headphones when the battery goes flat. 3.5mm cable with media controls and a mic in it.

    Still in its original hard case, have replaced the ear pads a couple of times, decent pads are cheap enough on eBay and etc.

    I also bought a Bluetooth insert for it for ~AUD75, it plugs in where the cable goes and has it’s own rechargeable battery with only about 6 hours life which is a bit of a nuisance.

    Edit: regarding audio quality, I can say that if you’re using headphones in any sort of urban environment, noise cancelling absolutely trumps audio quality. But the QC35’s aren’t too bad in the quality stakes, especially if you’re using them on the move.

    Small edit: The major thing that stops portable electronics from lasting 5+ years is the little rechargeable battery inside that dies. Removable batteries like the AAA battery in the QC 35 solves that, and as a bonus it’s “instant charge” when it goes flat, as long as you keep a tiny packet of AAAs in your bag. 4 x AAAs lasts me about 3 months.


  • As the earth rotates, the oceans follow the moon’s gravitational pull (and the sun’s, to a lesser extent). From an outsider’s perspective it is a lump of water always bulging towards the moon, and the earth rotates underneath this lump.

    By placing a resistance to the free movement of the tides you are siphoning a very small amount of energy from the rotation of the earth as you are restricting the passage of the earth through that lump of water.

    So it doesn’t matter if your generators spin both ways on the rising and falling tides, you are still restricting movement.




  • 32 bit computers can handle 64 bit timestamps, it’s just a matter of defining time_t to be 32 or 64 bits at compile time. The compiler will deal with all the mess of splitting the 64 bit value up to calculate on the smaller registers in 32 bit architectures, just like any other variable defined as int_64.

    Linux kernels have had support for 64 bit time on 32 bit systems since version 5.something, so generally speaking there’ll still be retro 32 bit hardware running past 2038 just fine.