Shdwdrgn

@Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Does your state not require good lights on the trailers? I just built a new trailer last year, I was required to have full working brake and turn signals along with running lights, but I went the extra step and included more brake/turn lights on the front and rear of the fenders, along with reverse lights plus four marker lights along each side. Trailers are hard enough to see, I didn’t want to make it harder for anyone by just sticking with the bare minimum.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I suspect a lot of that has to do with the entitled way people are driving these days. If you leave a car length gap, some kid will wrecklessly attempt to cram their way in because your lane momentarily moved slightly faster.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I suspect because there’s no consistency in the brightness of vehicle lights. But that’s one of the reasons why I think an incremental light bar would be better, there’s no variation between vehicles. You could even make it more informative by flashing the whole bar when you first brake, so someone behind you can more easily see how much of the bar is being lit up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That could probably be implemented in most existing vehicles, and at least it would provide more information.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I still think rear signaling could be improved dramatically by using a wide third-brake light to show the intensity of braking.

  For example – I have seen some aftermarket turn signals which are bars the width of the vehicle, and show a “moving” signal starting in the center and then progressing towards the outer edge of the vehicle.

  So now take that idea for brake. When you barely have your foot on the brake pedal, it would light a couple lights in the center of your brake signal. Press a little harder and now it’s lighting up 1/4 of the lights from the center towards the outside edge of the vehicle. And when you’re pressing the brake pedal to the floor, all of the lights are lit up from the center to the outside edges of the vehicle. The harder you press on the pedal, the more lights are illuminated.

  Now you have an immediate indication of just how hard the person in front of you is braking. With the normal on/off brake signals, you don’t know what’s happening until moments later as you determine how fast you are approaching that car. They could be casually slowing, or they could be locking up their wheels for an accident in front of them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  And never forget about the I-D ten T error.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the minimum or recommended requirements for a personal home server?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You might check if a simple CPU upgrade would get you there. I previously ran some 2005 Poweredge servers that came with a Pentium D processor, and it cost me something like $8 from ebay to upgrade to a Xeon and start running KVM.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the minimum or recommended requirements for a personal home server?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Keep an eye out for people trashing perfectly good desktop machines because Windows 10 is being retired.

  If you want a server that “does it all” then you would need to get the most decked-out top of the line server available… Obviously that is unrealistic, so as others have mentioned, knowing WHAT you want to run is required to even begin to make a guess at what you will need.

  Meanwhile here’s what I suggest – Grab any desktop machine you can find to get yourself started. Load up an OS, and start adding services. Maybe you want to run a personal web server, a file server, or something more extensive like Nextcloud? Get those things installed, and see how it runs. At some point you will start seeing performance issues, and this tells you when it’s time to upgrade to something with more capability. You may simply need more memory or a better CPU, in which case you can get the parts, or you may need to really step up to something with dual-CPU or internal RAID. You might also consider splitting services between multiple desktop machines, for instance having one dedicated NAS and another running Nextcloud. Your personal setup will dictate what works best for you, but the best way to learn these things is to just dive in with whatever hardware you can get ahold of (especially when it’s free), and use that as your baseline for any upgrades.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Airlines Are Selling Your Data to ICE⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Someone trusts flying in these conditions? That’s insane.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After an Arizona man was shot, an AI video of him addresses his killer in court⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This was played before sentencing. It doesn’t say it here, but the article I read earlier today stated that because of this video, the judge issued a sentence greater than the maximum recommended by the State. If true, then it really calls into question the sentence itself and how impartial the judge was.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Assume you meant 3 1/2" floppies? Seems like you’re confusing these with the 5 1/4" size.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨commodore C64 (extended) font⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Why only “most” of the original block characters? There were only 128 characters to begin with, so why did the creator stop?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FCC head Brendan Carr tells Europe to get on board with Starlink⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Didn’t you see the Tesla ad on the Whitehouse front lawn?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a good point… if you can’t read messages and discussions without a login, then it’s not really facilitating public notification.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… a social media post is NOT an official government communication. I don’t mind it being used in addition to public channels to help spread the word further, but if you are going to use one platform then you should be required to use all of them to ensure all affected people receiving the same information… and I don’t see them posting on Bluesky or Mastodon or even Reddit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to easily add a backup internet connection to your home office - and why you should, A failover internet connection is a good idea if you work from home - and it's not complicated to set up.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So ldirectord is kind of a front-end for ipvsadm. The tools allow you to set up load-balancing between internal servers. I run each service in a VM, and I have at least two copies of each (on separate physical servers). Ldirectord lets me configure how frequently to verify each machine is up, a list of primary servers, and an optional backup when the others go down. Overall it works pretty smooth.

  Shorewall is similarly a front end for iptables, allowing a more structured set of configuration files. I’ve been trying to start using Webmin for the first time because it has some nice management of shorewall, maybe I’ll be able to clean up some of my config, but I’d also like to get traffic shaping configured.

  I have a dedicated firewall (just moved to a poweredge R620 last night), a NAS, and two VM systems to run services on… all run from home. I enjoy setting things up to play with, so this has all been built up starting from old desktop machines and expanded over time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to easily add a backup internet connection to your home office - and why you should, A failover internet connection is a good idea if you work from home - and it's not complicated to set up.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I tried playing around with opensense awhile back. Wasn’t impressed and kept running into things I couldn’t get it to do for me, so I stuck with my existing setup. I use ldirectord for load balancing between servers and shorewall lets me generally balance the traffic between WAN connections. It works pretty well but there’s a lot of moving parts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to easily add a backup internet connection to your home office - and why you should, A failover internet connection is a good idea if you work from home - and it's not complicated to set up.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Does anyone else use a Linux firewall to manage dual connections? I run Shorewall here, but I haven’t really had much luck with traffic shaping to keep the majority of traffic on my primary connection while allowing low-speed info like email to split up between connections.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I fit a network card with a physical x4 slot into an x1 slot?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If your card has an x4 pinout, then it probably needs the additional bandwidth. Plugging it into an x1 slot (if it was possible) would slow down the network traffic. Get a better motherboard with an x4 slot on it so you can use the hardware you want. or find something else that will fit your computer.

  Honestly even the 1Gb quad port card I have requires an x4 slot, although I saw some dual-port 2.5Gb x1 cards on ebay. Maybe you could just use two of those?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨openscad is pretty great⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Even the older versions work pretty well, depending on the features you need. I use it for all my 3D modeling, I could never get the hang of other CAD software but this one just “makes sense” to me. I even used it last year to create a model of a trailer I wanted to build, worked out the finer details of how everything would fit together and some options like adding ramps, and once we got to the point of building the trailer it was just a matter of copying the dimensions and cutting out all the steel.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Return of Digg, a Star of Web 2.0 (Gift Article)⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I see they’ve deleted old user accounts. Oh well, I was briefly curious but that’s gone now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Decentralized Search Engine⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But is it decentralized? Do the results from multiple spiders get added to give everyone the same quality searches or do I need to scan the whole internet myself?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why can't we go back to small phones?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Right? I mean I’m still lamenting the loss of slider keyboards, typing on a screen is so damn unreliable that I was forced to turn on the auto-correction, which itself is highly unreliable and constantly changing real words while failing to fix the words where I hit a number instead of a letter (the word “9f” gets typed a LOT!). I use my phone for phone calls and sending texts, with a secondary usage as a GPS in my truck. If it can’t perform one of three basic tasks then what good is it?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Decentralized Search Engine⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I just did a quick dive into this and have some concerns. SearX appears to no longer be maintained and was last updated three years ago. SearXNG was forked to use more recent libraries but there were concerns that those are not always stable or fully vetted. There were also concerns that SearXNG did not follow the same concerns for user privacy. It’s a shame that SearX shut down, that one actually sounds like a project I would have jumped on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why can't we go back to small phones?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I upgraded to a Sony Xperia XZ2 compact last year. It has a 5" screen and decent capabilities, the only down side is it doesn’t support 5G. For a phone that’s over 5 years old, it’s probably the most recent usable phone available which actually fits in my pocket.

  Seriously, don’t show me a damn tablet computer and try to sell it to me as a mobile phone. If you can’t make a compact phone then you’re not really advancing the technology, are you?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenEvidence Sounds Promising, but is it Reliable?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It could be “3D” 2.0 as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just Finished Lower Decks⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Man what are the odds??? I just finished the last episode today too! I’ve been dragging along on this last season because, ya know, last season and all, but it did certainly end with quite a bang.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Miniature Hard Drives⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Haha yeah storage capacity just keeps going up fast. Now that you mention it, I do recall the performance on these drives was supposed to be just absolute crap, but it was a massive innovation before chip storage came out. And some day the next big thing will be released and we’ll wonder how we put up with SSD drives.