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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • The router provided with our internet contract doesn’t allow you to run your own firmware, so we don’t have anything so flexible as what OpenWRT would provide.

    Short answer; in order to Pi-hole all of the advertising servers that we’d be connecting to otherwise. Our mobile phones don’t normally allow us to choose a DNS server, but they will use the network-provided one, so it sorts things out for the whole house in one go.

    Long, UK answer: because our internet is being messed with by the government at the moment, and I’d prefer to be confident that the DNS look-ups we receive haven’t been altered. That doesn’t fix everything - it’s a VPN job - but little steps.

    The DHCP server provided with the router is so very slow in comparison to running our own locally, as well. Websites we use often are cached, but connecting to something new takes several seconds. Nothing as infuriating as slow internet.


  • Big shout out to Windows 11 and their TPM bullshit.

    Was thinking that my wee “Raspberry PI home server” was starting to feel the load a bit too much, and wanted a bit of an upgrade. Local business was throwing out some cute little mini PCs since they couldn’t run Win11. Slap in a spare 16 GB memory module and a much better SSD that I had lying about, and it runs Arch (btw) like an absolute beast. Runs Forgejo, Postgres, DHCP, torrent and file server, active mobile phone backup etc. while sipping 4W of power. Perfect; much better fit than an old desktop keeping the house warm.

    Have to think that if you’ve been given a work desktop machine with a ten-year old laptop CPU and 4GB of RAM to run Win10 on, then you’re probably not the most valued person at the company. Ran Ubuntu / GNOME just fine when I checked it at its original specs, tho. Shocking, the amount of e-waste that Microsoft is creating.





  • I’m in this photo and I don’t like it.

    More specifically, my programming background is in industrial automation and I’d like to add some more ‘robust and flexible’ algorithms to CoolerControl so I can control my system fans / temperature better, but it’s written in a mix of TypeScript and Rust.

    I’ve spent 20 years programming hard real-time z80 assembly and know quite a few higher-level languages. (Although I prefer the lower-level ones.) Not those ones, however, so it’s not just a couple of hours work to raise a PR against that project. Going to need to crack some books.



  • The industrial design has improved enormously since then, as well. The days of using the same connector for different voltages, or connectors which can be rotated are gone. Everything has a keyed connector or similar pokayoke that means it only fits to the correct place, and only one way around. CPUs don’t suicide if you forget to attach their system cooler, they just throttle. Much better, and obvious in retrospect that it should always have been that way.

    Apart from the front panel connectors on a motherboard, of course. Those fiddly little bastards can get straight to hell.





  • Well, an increase from (60 to 70) fps to (85 to 87) fps is nothing to complain about. It was obviously completely playable when it was managing “a bit over 30” since it was designed that way, but I’ve no problem with more.

    Apparently they have fixed the “vertex explosion” bug as well, where your face would occasionally turn into a mass of spikes that obscured what you were doing so much it was unplayable - needed a quit out and restart, and was the major interruption to the game.