Shdwdrgn

joined 2 years ago
[–] Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 4 points 5 days ago

I can understand why some programs only allow a single copy to be opened at once, something like email makes sense. However on Linux they got this right... if you try to open a program that is already running, it switches to the screen that program is on and restores the program window to the desktop. There's no guessing why the program "won't open", it just makes the logical choice that you want to see it.

Heh that reminds me of another detail from that call... the guy also wasn't willing to reboot his computer (which would have solved the problem as well), but berated me for not knowing what I was doing for making the suggestion. Dude, it's Windows, things break constantly and a reboot generally resolves the issue.

[–] Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 3 points 5 days ago

Oh I have no doubt he got angry that the IT guy made him look stupid. Everyone on the support desk already knew his reputation so it wasn't going to get any worse with us. I wish I had been around long enough to see what happened with his next demotion, because there was no possible way he was going to last even a year, I just can't figure out how he made it to such a high initial position in the first place (unless he fudged his resume and got hired into it).

[–] Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 43 points 5 days ago (5 children)

At one time I worked for IBM, supporting a nationwide company. There was a top guy who (like in the above story) thought he was hot shit. I think he was something like the CFO, but his ineptitude was recognized and he was pushed out. This company allowed people to move to a lower position, and he always thought he knew more about computers than everyone else, so he took the position of CTO.

One day I got a call from him, ranting that Outlook wouldn't open and these computers were hopelessly broken. The normal procedure was to remote connect into the caller's computer to directly fix any problems, but he decided he was smarter than the tech support people, and refused to allow me to access his machine. Fortunately I had direct contact with the on-site tech guy, who knew what he would be facing and went to the CTO's office.

When he got back a couple minutes later, I asked him what the issue was. "Outlook was already open, it was just minimized to the task bar."

[–] Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What kind of crops are you going to grow at 125°? That's still within OP's specification of triple digits and with temps getting hotter we're likely to see a lot more of this happening within our lifetime.

[–] Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah I think there's some good ideas that have been built up with the ABL devices over the years, and that mesh leveling seems great. However I also feel like more people should take the time to get their beds physically as flat as possible first, because otherwise your printer spends a lot of time micro-stepping the Z, and I've seen some mesh maps that looked absolutely horrible.

Playing around with arduino devices, I have some laser rangefinders that seem like they could work well for an ABL. That might also be a good way to map out the idea I mentioned about creating a thin full-bed shim to get a truly flat bed, and after that perhaps you would only need to do a fast four-corner calibration with the ABL to make sure nothing has changed.

[–] Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I've never had auto-leveling on my own printer, but the one at work has it and I wouldn't want it. It was great for the first couple years, then the sensors started suffering from corrosion and now it just doesn't work for crap.

So on my own printer (fully manual) I have always treated the paper test as nothing more than an initial step to make sure the nozzle doesn't plow your bed during the leveling process. It will get you close, but not close enough. To really dial in your bed, you need at least a 5-point 1st-layer print test so you can really get that initial layer adhering nicely at all points, and this of course performs the calibration with the bed at full heat so it matches conditions during actual prints.

The biggest problem I had was my aluminum bed was badly warped when I got it, but fortunately just bowl-shaped. I cut CD-sized discs of aluminum foil to build up the center -- 13 layers in total, then put a glass or G10 bed over that to really get a flat surface. I finished mine with a PEI sticker on top of the G10.

Another problem is that all beds will be completely unique from each other. I have one of the original Ender 3 Pro printers, and purchased a Creality glass bed with it. There was nothing that wouldn't stick to that bed, and I used a 10mm calicat (which has 4mm feet pads) as my tests for all new filament. Clean the surface occasionally with 91% ISO, and life was good... but after a few years the surface wore out and I was forced to get a new bed. Ordered directly from Creality again, and man, nothing at all would stick to that piece of glass, even for large prints. I tried everything down to brake cleaner to solve the problem and finally gave up on it. That's when I started working with the G10. The point of this is that you can tell someone a particular bed will solve all their problems, and you will be wrong. The reality is that sellers use different manufacturers to make their product and you never know what you'll get.

Your observations about the bed warping from the tightness of the screws is interesting, I never thought about that part before. I have heavy springs under my bed, and I have always suggested people get those springs as tight as possibly without being completely closed, then adjust the Z-switch to that point before you start your leveling process. Tight springs means the screws should never wander. It's been around 3 years since the last time I even touched my leveling screws, and I just fired up the printer and ran some new pieces last week without any issues. A good tool is one that you can ignore for a year, then use it without having to recalibrate. Anything else is just frustrating!

There are a lot of suggestions we can make to help newcomers get their bed leveling correct, and there are a lot of variables that we simply can't account for including manufacturer defects. One idea I had years ago but never got around to trying is to print a thin sheet of filament the size of the entire bed, ironed to create a top surface perfectly flat to the nozzle but taking up any imperfections in the aluminum plate. Then put a thin bed over the top of that, and you should have a perfect surface that lasts nearly the life of the printer. Seems like a good idea, but how do you figure out where to fill in those first layers until you have a final layer that covers the full bed?

[–] Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 1 points 2 weeks ago

Oh I have a pretty good idea about that... But I was actually referring to the fact that Trump's platform was the first thing attacked after he bombed the country. Yeah it would be great if we had a government that was focused on letting the various agencies do their jobs rather than dismantling everything that keeps us safe and healthy.

[–] Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 0 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

When they're talking about "poorly secured US networks", they're referring to Truth Social, right?

[–] Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 12 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Now if only Sony would get their shit together and start making a compact version of the Xperia line again.

[–] Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 4 points 1 month ago

Yes! One of my most favorite Johnny Depp roles.

[–] Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 1 points 1 month ago

That's a good point, although flashing does help to grab attention, but it can also be annoying when the person is driving with their foot on the brake pedal.

[–] Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 1 points 1 month ago

Wow that's got to be almost worthless. As you say, it just takes some idiot with a load obscuring the vehicle lights and suddenly nobody behind them knows what's going on. What's next, are we going to make tail lights optional?

 

I'm wondering if anyone has found (free) sources of data to use for live elections results, specifically the Presidential race? I've been building a map of poll results but would also like to put something together to watch the race tomorrow night.

 

I've spent the past day working on my newest Poweredge R620 acquisition, and trying to nail down what things I can do without checking. Google has shown me that everyone seems to be having similar issues regardless of brand or model. Gone are the days when a rack server could be fully booted in 90 seconds. A big part of my frustration has been when the USB memory sticks are inserted to get firmware updated before I put this machine in production, easily driving times up to 15-20 minutes just to get to the point where I find out if I have the right combination of BIOS/EUFI boot parameters for each individual drive image.

I currently have this machine down to 6:15 before it starts booting the OS, and a good deal of that time is spent sitting here watching it at the beginning, where it says it's testing memory but in fact hasn't actually started that process yet. It's a mystery what exactly it's even doing.

At this point I've turned off the lifecycle controller scanning for new hardware, no boot processes on the internal SATA or PCI ports, or from the NICs, memory testing disabled... and I've run out of leads. I don't really see anything else available to turn off sensors and such. I mean it's going to be a fixed server running a bunch of VMs so there's no need for additional cards although some day I may increase the RAM, so I don't really need it to scan for future changes at every boot.

Anyway, this all got me thinking... it might be fun to compare notes and see what others have done to improve their boot times, especially if you're also balancing your power usage (since I've read that allowing full CPU power during POST can have a small effect on the time). I'm sure different brands will have different specific techniques, but maybe there's some common areas we can all take advantage of? And sure, ideally our machines would never need to reboot, but many people run machines at home only while being used and deal with this issue daily, or want to get back online as quickly as possible after a power outage, so anything helps...

 

I have a self-hosted matrix-synapse server up and running on a Debian linux server, but before I open it up I want to at least get a captcha service in place to reduce spamming. The only module I've seen to handle this function appears to require setting up a Google recaptcha though, however I would prefer to keep all of this entirely self-contained for the privacy of my users. Can anyone recommend a module that allows for a local captcha option? For that matter, can anyone also recommend a captcha system that is pretty straightforward to set up (which is compatible with matrix-synapse) and uses basic preinstalled code bases like perl or python?

And while I'm here, I would also like to provide the option of registering with an email address, but I'm having trouble finding any clear how-to pages on this. Seems like that function might be built directly in to matrix-synapse but I'm just not finding anything helpful. Any suggestions?

I'm fairly new to matrix in general, but I have an initial setup running with the homeserver, Element web page, and an IRC bridge, so if I can just nail down the validation part of registrations I'll have what I think is a good starting point to launch from.

 

I was reading another article which discussed taking measurements of distance stars at 6-month intervals to create a 3D map of their relative positions and direction of movement. This got me to thinking... has anyone proposed 'dropping' stationary satellites outside of Earth's orbital path for continuous monitoring even when our planet is no longer in that spot? It seems like such an arrangement could provide constant monitoring of things that are happening on the far side of the sun, and they could each act as a relay to each other, bringing the signals back around where we could receive them.

It could be fascinating to be able to constantly monitor the path of know comets, or perhaps even to detect large meteors which are safely away from us now but might some day pose a threat. Studies like mapping star positions could rapidly expand with the availability of continuous data feeds, and I'm sure if such a tool were available scientists would come up with a host of new experiments to try.

A couple other things also come to mind. First off is radio telescopes, which can gather more sensitive data by having sensors further apart. Of course in this case they would only be able to peer in two directions unless you set up the array to rotate as a singular ring (which greatly increases the complexity). The other idea was that I know some phenomena are so large that it takes a huge array of telescopes or sensors to even detect them, and something this large could detect truly astounding low frequency events. Throw in some gravity detectors and watch as the waves propagate through our solar system.

I'm just thinking there's a lot of possibilities here and a lot more data could be collected if we could drop four or eight satellites along the way. I would assume the idea has been proposed before, I just didn't know if this is even feasible?

 

I run my own email server, and a friend received a compromised laptop from work which resulted in a spam attack from Russia yesterday. Turtle settings saved the days with thousands of emails still in the queue when I saw the problem, however it made me realize that everyone with accounts on my server are local, do not travel, and have no requirement to send emails from outside the country.

I found how to use the smtpd_discard_ehlo_keyword_address_maps setting in postfix to block a CIDR list of IPs, then found a maintained list of IPs by country codes on github. Cool so far, and a script to keep my local list updated was easy enough.

Now the question is, what countries should I be blocking? There are plenty of lists of the top hacking sources, but it's hard to block #2 (the US) when that's where I am located. But otherwise, does anyone have a list of countries they outright block from logging on to their servers? From the above google searches I have 17 countries blocked so far, and in the first 30 minutes already stopped login attempts from three of those countries, so it appears to be working.

Of course I could write a script to parse my logs to see who has already made attempts, but that's what services like fail2ban are for, and I'm just wondering if there are any countries in particular I should directly block? My list so far includes the following: ae bg br cn de hk id in ir iq il kp ng ru sa th vn

The question itself may not be that interesting, but I thought at the very least some folks might be interested in my experience and think about doing something similar themselves. I can post more details of what I did if there is any interest.

 

I have Openfire set up with the monitoring service plugin which we have been using with Pidgin on the desktop. One of the things I've noticed is that when I sign in to another computer on the same account, I do not get a history of recent messages (which I thought the monitoring plugin was supposed to provide).

The other thing that doesn't seem to be working right is when I am logged in to two computers simultaneously (using the same account). I expect to see chat messages showing up on BOTH devices so I can go between machines, which again is something I thought the monitoring plug was supposed to provide.

The settings I believe are related are under "Offline messages" which I have set to always store, and retain for up to 30 days. Should I bee looking for anything else?

I have been using Pidgin with XMPP on Google for years, so I know both the XMPP protocol and the Pidgin client are capable of handling this functionality. I've been digging around trying to find a solution, and see a lot of things claiming Pidgin is the culprit here, but those messages are a decade old. I can't seem to find any information on the subject for Openfire newer than about 2016.

I'm hoping there's a setting I need to change or another plugin I need to add to get both of these features working on my server? I really love the software otherwise but this seems like a really basic function that should just work, and I am hoping someone can point me to whatever I'm missing.

 

I just started noticing this happen today. For example I was reading posts in the mycology community and posts from comics started appearing at the top of the page. I'm assuming this is a bug but is there anything I can do about it from my end, or do I just have to wait for the next update? FYI I'm just on the desktop browser, not using any apps.

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