dgriffith
@dgriffith@aussie.zone
- Comment on 'I signed up to be a b****, not a criminal': Australia's 'most-hated' TV villain speaks 1 week ago:
This didn’t occur thirty years ago when “reality tv” was in its infancy. The actual reality is well known and abundantly clear now.
This was well understood 20 years ago.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chart_Throb
Reality television has always been manipulated for the most draaaama otherwise it’s just hours of people sitting around.
For a bit of an experiment, try watching it with the sound off and just subtitles. The music and staging absolutely are used to control the narrative to paint whoever they want as Public Enemy #1.
I guess in that sense reality television accurately portrays modern media.
- Comment on Let's chat about these SEVEN nuclear power plants the LNP want to build ... 1 week ago:
Link the east and west coast grids to let afternoon solar on the west coast flatten the evening east coast peaks, pick a big old chunk of desert in South Australia for wind and solar, throw in a few gigabatteries and tart up some hydro systems, done.
Probably only be $10-15 billion or so.
- Comment on Does mini 12V DC diaphram water pumps like this get really hot after running for 5 min? 1 month ago:
It was probably deliberately overdriven to make it look good for the currently-missing data sheet.
Put it on a variable voltage power supply, run it at 6v to 12v in one volt steps, and measure its output volume at each step.
You might find that you still have adequate flow for your situation at a lower, cooler, voltage.
- Comment on Can we all agree that whatever version of predictive text we have nowadays is crap, and has been for a long time? 1 month ago:
I don’t know about you, but I just swiped my way through the first sentence off this reply with Google’s keyboard and all I had to do was select swiped instead of the suggested settled.
They do remember common words that you use, so if you have accidentally “approved” a few misspellings they’ll be suggested/given to you more often so a drastic solution to that is to clear your personalised data from the keyboard.
- Comment on How come TurboVPN can have double the amount of downloads compared to NordVPN and ExpresVPN? ++ 2 months ago:
I can’t speak for the popularity of TurboVPN, but note the “+” on the end of each number.
NordVPN could have 99,999,995 million downloads, TurboVPN can have 100,000,002 downloads.
- Comment on space 2 months ago:
I prefer the H.G. Wells style, where you affect the flow of time instead of a discontinuous jump.
You’re still attached to your current location, things just happen faster (in forwards or reverse). It also means that time travel takes time, which can be a handy plot tool.
- Comment on Judge rules YouTube, Facebook and Reddit must face lawsuits claiming they helped radicalize a mass shooter | CNN Business 3 months ago:
This appears to be more the angle of the person being fed an endless stream of hate on social media and thus becoming radicalised.
What causes them to be fed an endless stream of hate? Algorithms. Who provides those algorithms? Social media companies. Why do they do this? To maintain engagement with their sites so they can make money via advertising.
And so here we are, with sites that see you viewed 65 percent of a stream showing an angry mob, therefore you would like to see more angry mobs in your feed. Is it any wonder that shit like this happens?
- Comment on Your 4G phone could be impacted by 3G shutdowns this year. Here's what to know 3 months ago:
Satellite cellular coverage will probably swoop in and make an absolute shitload for one of the telcos.
See Vodafone’s plan for NZ, it’ll probably end up being the same here. Even just getting country-wide data and SMS would be a hell of an improvement over what’s available now.
- Comment on Hobart endures hottest night in 112 years as severe heatwave hits south-eastern Australia 3 months ago:
You might need to recalibrate your mental chronometer because Hobart began to have electricity in 1898, 126 years ago, and they had gas lighting before that starting in 1857 ish, some 160-plus years ago.
Whiskey drinking, most definitely though.
- Comment on A 62-Year-Old German Man Got 217 Covid Shots—and Was Totally Fine 3 months ago:
It’s a similar data point to those people who accidentally got a single 10x or 100x dose. We know from those people that very large doses don’t seem to have any major negative effects, we now also know that a long term “continuous” dose doesn’t have much of a negative effect.
- Comment on Any free jmap email service? 4 months ago:
For the user mostly it’s just slow. It can literally take ten seconds just to check if there’s any mail and that’s if there are no new messages. When there are messages it takes much longer.
I have my own IMAP server (Dovecot)with 20 years of messages on it. It’s on a linode instance in Hong Kong, I’m in Australia.
When I open my Thunderbird on my laptop, it takes less than a second to authenticate and grab a dozen headers. If I pop open the Gmail app on my phone and select that account, again, it connects and refreshes in the same amount of time. Manually doing the drag-down-to-refresh motion gives me one spin of the spinner at the top of the page, possibly 1.5 seconds.
So my question to you is, what’s wrong with your IMAP server?
- Comment on US regulators crack down on AI playing doctor in healthcare 4 months ago:
They are point to point communication devices with no intermediate storage along the way.
So from a point of view of “don’t store copies of this data except at the sender’s and receiver’s locations, which are already set up to handle sensitive data”, they meet requirements in a simple to implement manner.
- Comment on Barnaby Joyce captured on video lying next to planter box 4 months ago:
Out therrrrre There’s a world outside of Tamworth Way out there beyond this hick town, Barnaby There’s a slick town, Barnabyyyyyy! Out there Full of shine and full of sparkle Close your eyes and see it glisten, Barnaby Listen, Barnabyyyyyy!
Put on your Sunday clothes, there’s lots of world out therrrrre Get out the brillantine and dime cigars We’re gonna find adventure in the evening airrrrrr Girls in white In a perfumed night Where the lights are bright as the stars! Put on your Sunday clothes, we’re gonna ride through town In one of those new horsedrawn open cars
We’ll see the shows At Delmonico’s And we’ll close the town in a whirrrrrl! And we won’t come home until we’ve kissed a girrrrrrrrl!
- Comment on A report into price gouging is expected to cause trouble for Australia's most powerful companies 4 months ago:
My prediction:
A few board members will fall in their swords and be jettisoned, conveniently carrying all the responsibility for all those abhorrent actions.
Once free of that moral burden and with the slate wiped clean, the companies will then appoint the necessary replacements, who will stand up in front of the media and say that they are “moving in new directions”, with “significant change to the status quo”.
Then a few months of not much in particular will pass before they can get back to the dirty business of making the most amount of money with the least amount of service.
- Comment on Is Intel gatekeeping WiFi 7? A very quick look at the Intel BE200. 4 months ago:
Honestly, I don’t know how the BE200 works
My guess after skimming this thread:
Bare bones radio interface with all the smarts being done by CPU extensions and coprocessors in your existing chipset. If you don’t have the extensions/coprocessors, no deal.
Very similar to Intel’s video decoding enhancements where they stack a bunch of special instructions and hardware in the CPU to take the load off software video decoding.
- Comment on Starlink's Laser System is Beaming 42 Petabytes of Data Per Day 4 months ago:
It’s less impressive when you convert back to petabytes. When you do that starlink is “only” about 20 times slower than that single trans-atlantic cable.
Interestingly, it’s possible that starlink routed ping times could be less, as propagation speed on fiber is only around 2/3rds the speed of light. So if the end to end path length is roughly equivalent between the two (and LEO radius is a relatively small addition to the radius of the earth) it could be faster.
Certain companies would pay a lot of money to be a few milliseconds faster than their competitors if they need to react quickly to foreign stock market fluctuations.
- Comment on It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription 4 months ago:
Speaking from my experience in Australia, Prime is quite good for ad-hoc ordering.
For AUD6.99 a month I can order something that will usually turn up tomorrow morning, meaning that if I need a light bulb or a dishcloth or weed killer it’s just a 30 second search with the app on my phone and I can get on with my day.
Compare that to:
eBay - free shipping, a week or so, “express” , 3 days and AUD12-18 per purchase.
Small online retailers - generally no free shipping, usually an Australia Post option at AUD12 or so that takes about 4-5 days, “express” via various couriers that takes that to 2-3 days for AUD18-30.
Large retailers - a week or more for delivery, AUD10-40 depending on size.
Say what you want about their treatment of workers, from a consumer point of view Amazon’s warehousing and delivery logistics are pretty effective.
- Comment on Does the way you say 'France' rhyme with 'pants' or 'aunts'? How the Australian accent is changing 5 months ago:
For me it’s “AHnt” for Aunt, “frANce” for France, and “pANts” for pants.
- Comment on Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice 5 months ago:
It’s a perfectly cromulent word that describes the enshittification process that happens across nearly all consumer corporate endeavours, online included.
- Comment on Hacker spins up 1 million virtual servers to illegally mine crypto 5 months ago:
Everything is so intertwined, and that’s the way they like it. Do I trust some random support bot/person in Google to unhook and delete my compute account from my google identity and not accidentally trash the rest of my 15 year identity with Google/Gmail? Hell no. So my compute account still sits there idle.
I guess it bolsters their metrics, that’s nice for them I suppose.
- Comment on Proton Mail says that the new Outlook app for Windows is Microsoft's new data collection service 5 months ago:
I thought Thunderbird was getting increasingly shitty and slower/clunky, until I realised it was actually my ISP’s mail server getting increasingly shit. This became immediately obvious the day that emails started taking 12-18 hours to land in my inbox. Reallllll handy for those time limited account reset emails.
Transferred my IMAP inbox to my own domain, everything is now awesome again.
- Comment on Hacker spins up 1 million virtual servers to illegally mine crypto 5 months ago:
I’m always a bit paranoid about my google compute account. Opened it many years ago, ran a few instances for a few dollars for a few months, had enough, oh look there’s no easy “delete just my google compute account” button.
Unhooked all the payment methods, shut everything off, turned out the lights, but it seems I can’t leave the building.
- Comment on Linux devices are under attack by a never-before-seen worm 5 months ago:
To add to this, install fail2ban (most distros have it in their package system) and activate it for the various things that use username/passwords in your system.
Basically it monitors access logs and blocks the IPs that repeatedly fail logins.l for a certain amount of time.
This drastically reduces the effectiveness of brute force attempts - as long as your password isn’t, “password” and guessable in one go.
- Comment on The rise and fall of Usenet: How the original social media platform came to be 6 months ago:
and due to the nature of the protocol, companies hosting Usenet services didn’t want to have to store all of that shit.
You can opt not to carry certain newsgroups, eg skipping alt.binaries.* would reduce your storage requirements drastically.
The fact of the matter is that people wanted something more “instant and accessible” than newsgroups that were synced overnight, and modern social media sprang from that desire.
- Comment on Do we own our posts? 6 months ago:
How about you read the very first sentence of my little snippet again.
The very first sentence.
The sentence that says, “You don’t need to register for copyright in Australia.”
You know, the sentence that effectively describes what needs to happen if you’re thinking about registering copyright in Australia.
Perhaps in your country you have to register works for copyright so that the courts will recognise your claims of infringement. Other countries, maybe not so much.
- Comment on Do we own our posts? 6 months ago:
The World Copyright Office then?
Oh wait, three seconds of googling suggests my posts are most likely covered when I post via my home instance in Australia.
“You don’t need to register for copyright in Australia. The moment an idea or creative concept is documented on paper or electronically it is automatically protected by copyright in Australia. Copyright protection is free and automatic under the Copyright Act 1968.”
- Comment on How many of you actually use the headphone jack on your phone? 6 months ago:
Yeah the issue we’re slowly running into is that there’s no more 3.5mm sockets in newer phones.
When my current phone dies it’ll be a toss-up between trying to find a decent phone with a headphone socket or trying a USB C audio adaptor and see how that goes.
- Comment on How many of you actually use the headphone jack on your phone? 6 months ago:
I have a very nice set of Bose corded noise cancelling headphones and use them when I fly for work and at home sometimes when I want to chill out.
The advantage they have over Bluetooth is that the base functionality still works when the single AAA battery that powers them goes flat, and they don’t go flat in low power/BLE mode when they’re in my travel bag for a week or two, and they also plug straight into in-flight entertainment systems.
The AAA powers the noise cancelling for about 15-20 hours straight and the case has a spot for a spare so the whole setup is pretty good.
- Comment on Internode and Westnet shutdown: TPG moves customers to iiNet 6 months ago:
As mentioned below, have a look at Linuxbabe’s guide and see what you think. It was basically set up and forget (so far).
The server I get through linode has a relatively small amount of storage. So I repartitioned the available storage of the default install and created a separate ZFS filesystem with compression enabled to hold the mailboxes. It’s running at about 65% of original size and even with 20 years of IMAP mail in there there’s heaps of room left.
And holy shit it is so much faster than Internode’s server. I’ve enabled forwarding on their server so everything gets dumped to my new account, and just opening and browsing the folders/mail is so much faster now, both on my phone with the Gmail app and using thunderbird on the desktop.
- Comment on Internode and Westnet shutdown: TPG moves customers to iiNet 6 months ago:
I used postfix and dovecot as well.
Basically walked through Linuxbabe’s excellent guide and was done in about 1.5 hours with SPF/DKIM/DMARC.
linuxbabe.com/…/build-email-server-from-scratch-d…
I have my own domain and a static IP with one of Linode’s nanode sizes servers for USD5 a month, works pretty good.