vk6flab
@vk6flab@lemmy.radio
Anything and everything Amateur Radio and beyond. Heavily into Open Source and SDR, working on a multi band monitor and transmitter.
#geek #nerd #hamradio VK6FLAB #podcaster #australia #ITProfessional #voiceover #opentowork
- Comment on [deleted] 1 day ago:
Is it for Clickbait purposes?
- Comment on Sweet pic 1 week ago:
Further down the article it talks about why it’s that colour.
- Comment on Sweet pic 1 week ago:
What’s even more remarkable is that someone actually did that, in January 1998.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
About that.
Just because I’ve done it this way and haven’t had issues, doesn’t mean it’s the best or only way.
You dared to ask a question and the tools to explore answers are readily available.
This is how we as a society make progress.
Please don’t feel like my experience is the final answer to your question … my experience tells me that this is rarely … if ever … the case.
So … please … explore!
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
If you genuinely attempting to quantify this, you can create a swap file of any size right there on your drive. You could iterate and test every setting for every scenario. You could even change settings dynamically if you wanted to.
That said, I leave it to the kernel to figure out and over the past 25 or so years that’s been fine.
- Comment on With bots hammering websites it might make companies make there websites smaller in in size to reduce bandwidth costs 1 week ago:
Or you just block them.
I will note that in my experience the bot army from META is by far the most aggressive and destructive. At one point, traffic from their systems was tenfold all the others combined.
- Comment on Would you rather have a pet dinosaur or a pet dragon? 1 week ago:
Hmm … I confess that I really appreciate and enjoy the company of the neighbours all around me … although there is one … let me work on that …
- Comment on Would you rather have a pet dinosaur or a pet dragon? 1 week ago:
Very cute … I don’t even have space for the little rodent, let alone a distant cousin ten times its size.
- Comment on Would you rather have a pet dinosaur or a pet dragon? 1 week ago:
I’m guessing that you’d need a big backyard for either … so I’m out.
- Comment on Fediverse Corporate Sabotage 1 week ago:
I’m guessing in the same way as Bit Torrent and others before it … with big flaming headlines, politicians foaming at the mouth, lawyers rubbing their hands with glee and the world for the general public becoming a little bit more shit whilst the actual miscreants carry on with impunity on some other platform or get funded by venture capitalists who make everything legal but no less palatable.
Source: I’ve been here for a while.
- Comment on What are some of the impacts of a power outage that isn't that obvious / isn't talked about a lot? And What happens to restaurant bills? Do Buses still work? (since card payments wouldn't work) 2 weeks ago:
I’m not familiar with how many telephones in Spain are landlines, but looking at Australia, where I am, the majority of connections don’t have an SLA battery, made even more power dependent because we have been rolling out fibre optic cable everywhere and the copper wire in the ground has been disconnected, preventing telephone exchanges from powering much of anything anymore.
The idea that generators will keep the essentials running is incomplete if not outright incorrect. Most of these systems have never been actually tested with an actual outage, look at Heathrow airport for a recent example.
At best a generator will run for up to 12 hours, and only if you have multiple generators and the fuel to run them will you have much in the way of energy security.
Of course if you’re already running on a generator then the picture is different, but even then, in the case of a country wide power outage, getting fuel for longer periods of time is going to be a challenge.
- Comment on Does humanism lead to tolerance paradox? 2 weeks ago:
Do you mean this: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
The paradox of tolerance is a philosophical concept suggesting that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance; thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance.
- Comment on What are some of the impacts of a power outage that isn't that obvious / isn't talked about a lot? And What happens to restaurant bills? Do Buses still work? (since card payments wouldn't work) 2 weeks ago:
Off the top of my head in no particular order:
- sewerage pumps
- fresh water pumps
- telecommunications systems
- refrigeration equipment in homes, restaurants, hotels, factories
- transport infrastructure like street lights, traffic lights, railway crossing lights
- trains, consider for example control of signalling and switching, let alone electric trains
- fuel distribution like petrol pumps
- hospitals
- broadcasting like TV and radio
Essentially society as we know it stops, at least for a while. Generators are used, but are often of limited use, since getting fuel to them is non-trivial and many are scaled for short outages.
Without knowing what happened in Spain, I can say that events like this can and do happen around the world. It’s likely that this will increase.
Given how interconnected the electricity grid is, I’m surprised that this didn’t cascade across Europe.
- Comment on What would this list look like for your generation? 2 weeks ago:
I get the sense that this list is constantly growing and acts as an incentive to invent new words that end up on the list.
By that measure, Emma is a rockstar and Darius is being bullied by their classmates and the teacher.
- Comment on Squint your eyes 👀 2 weeks ago:
So, what prompted this?
- Comment on A Fair Delicacy! 3 weeks ago:
Three fiddy a pair … we’ll throw in extra fries.
- Comment on A Fair Delicacy! 3 weeks ago:
You should put them in contact with the customer service team at Uber.
An Uber drove away with her kid. Then Uber wouldn’t connect her or police with the driver Toronto police found 5-year-old, with the unwitting driver, without company’s help
- Comment on BK's new promotion is frozen water 3 weeks ago:
In Australia most petrol stations and liquor stores sell ice in 5 kg bags. I’m not sure if you can even buy it here at Hungry Jack’s (the name of the Burger King franchise in Australia).
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Why do you care about votes?
What makes you think that a defederated instance votes are still captured?
Why do you care about what happens on another instance?
- Comment on Online trolls take over Hope Florida virtual board meeting with slurs, hate symbols, and adult images 3 weeks ago:
Obviously not everyone learnt from the pandemic…
- Comment on What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good? 3 weeks ago:
You’re welcome.
I understand that being able to write software and be deliberate about accounting gives you a closer relationship with your financial situation.
For me the issue is that there are no guardrails around the plaintext accounting model, which means that you have the freedom to shoot yourself in the foot.
My current accounting software as rubbish as it is, stops me from making stupid mistakes, credits instead of debits for example. Plaintext accounting won’t.
So either you need to never make a mistake, or have a way to figure it out.
All that kind of safety net doesn’t exist. You can still make the books balance, but at some point you’re going to find a hole and spend weeks fixing it, or the taxman will and you’ll be paying a fine.
I exported the line items from my current software into plaintext accounting, even made it balance and match my actual accounts.
Then I needed to write an invoice and had to make my own, from scratch and manually enter the data twice, once into the invoice, another into plaintext accounting, giving me the chance to make an error twice, perhaps even a different one on either process. And that’s just one invoice.
I have considered writing my own accounting software from scratch, or forking something, but that’s not going to pay for food, so I kept looking instead.
It’s not a great place to be, either from a business perspective, or a mental one, but that’s where I’m at.
- Comment on What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good? 3 weeks ago:
Plain text accounting (and all the variants) sounds great, right until you need to use it to generate invoices, or depreciate assets, or do a monthly Business Activity Statement, or convert a currency, track repayments, etc.
All of those things require that you write software to achieve that, which means that now instead of solving problems and writing software for my clients, I’m burning hours writing software so I can run my business.
Even if I did that, I’d have no way to validate the processes, short of becoming an accountant.
GNUcash, held up as an example by anyone you ask has no documentation for importing data, has no sample company datasets, has no Business Activity Statement, continues to prefer using an XML file as a database and is unreadable on a 4k monitor.
Kmymoney is fine for home users, but specifically not for business.
Odoo, Adiempere, ERPnext and the six or so other ERP tools have poor or non existent documentation, same issues as GNUcash in relation to data and import, and have a poor track record in solving basic issues that are completely unacceptable in a business setting. For example ERPnext didn’t do currency fractions properly (ERPnext uses Centavo instead of Cent for the USD fraction: github.com/frappe/frappe/issues/13445, took 13 months to fix).
Last week I evaluated Apache OFbiz. It looks like a product from 1995, and trying to find anything is impossible. For shits and giggles, try setting the global date format to yyyy-mm-dd. There are three different repositories and the Docker installation instructions don’t even bother to include which one to clone in which order. It starts at: “run the docker build command”. Not to mention that it uses a database called Derby. I’ve been writing software for over 40 years and until last week I’d never heard of it. That’s not something you want in business software.
I could go on, I’ve tested dozens. This is just from memory.
Why did I test all these?
Because I’m still running a 25 year old accounting package that doesn’t run on current hardware, isn’t supported, doesn’t run under Linux and has all my data hostage.
- Comment on What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good? 3 weeks ago:
Business Accounting software under FOSS is abysmal. Poor quality, poor documentation, poor functionality, limited locale support and limited local support.
CAM software under FOSS is limited to three axis at best, but most is two and a half axis.
Office functionality is covered with LibreOffice. Your assertion that it’s 20 years behind is in my experience not based in fact.
Source: I’ve been using FOSS for over a quarter of a century.
- Comment on Tesla speeds up odometers to avoid warranty repairs, U.S. lawsuit claims: Reuters 3 weeks ago:
With Google maps on many phones you should be able to get a good idea if this true or not.
- Comment on YouTube Music wants me to verify my age. 3 weeks ago:
Listening to the Wiggles over and over again will do that … 😁
- Comment on CVE Board members launch the CVE Foundation, a dedicated, non-profit to continue identifying vulnerabilities, after the US ended its contract with Mitre 4 weeks ago:
I came across this just now.
The CVE Program is invaluable to cyber community and a priority of CISA. Last night, CISA executed the option period on the contract to ensure there will be no lapse in critical CVE services. We appreciate our partners’ and stakeholders’ patience.
- Comment on A reminder that the majority of anti-Reddit *hardliners* went back crawling to Reddit like the bitches they are 4 weeks ago:
So how is this “I told you so!” posting by you a shitpost, or are you just bragging or lost?
- Comment on The real questions 4 weeks ago:
Because the only thing coming out of them is shit?
- Comment on 4chan hacked and taken offline. Hacker reopens /qa/ and leaks all admins emails. 4 weeks ago:
What’s the point? 4chan seems like such a low value target.
- Comment on A whistleblower's disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data 4 weeks ago:
It’s “possible” … really, that’s the word you’re going for?
How about “likely”, “obvious”, “certain”, “duh”.