danielquinn

At my first-ever tech job back in 2000, I was given a little Celeron desktop computer to do my work: mostly writing some ColdFusion and cutting up images in Photoshop. For the most part, the machine worked fine, except whenever I scrolled down on a webpage in Netscape, the box’s PC speaker would start screaming. I tried to ignore it, but I was in a small room with two other nerds and it was getting really annoying.

One day, my frustrated colleague decided it was time to investigate. As part of the process, he noticed that there was very little air coming out of the power supply fan port. “Must be a busted fan and that’s causing an overheating alarm” he declared. We unplugged the box, popped it onto my desk, and opened it up. The internals were pristine. No dust, nothing. The computer was practically brand new after all.

We were just about to crack open the power supply (not recommended, but we were getting desperate) when my colleague noticed that something was wedged inside the fan… it was the biggest (dead, thankfully) cockroach I have ever seen, at least 10cm long. For context, this was in Vancouver, Canada. Those just don’t exist there.

My colleague jammed his screwdriver in there to grind up the cockroach carcass, then plugged the box back in. After a shittone of dessicated cockroach guts spewed out the back, my little computer was operating normally.

As best we could guess, the monster crawled into the fan in Malaysia when as was assembled and somehow got pinned in there, died of starvation, and then stowed away to Canada.

There’s a nifty project on Mastodon where someone is running an instance entirely on solar (and I think a battery?). They’ve been tinkering with some of the code to do things like optimise images for reduced weight of CPU cost.

The project is called @solaradmin@solarcene.community and the account for the person running it is on a separate instance, presumably so petiole can message them about problems: @smallsolar@techhub.social.

The right time to look elsewhere was when Microsoft bought it.

The next best time was when viable alternatives like GitLab and later, Codeberg appeared.

The next best time was when it became clear that they were stealing your code to feed into their sparkly autocomplete and were going to sell it back to you.

The next best time was when they dumped a bunch of vibecoded garbage into the codebase and killed the uptime.

The next best time is now.

You don’t even have to migrate all your stuff. Just start all your new projects on Codeberg, or GitLab, or something self-hosted. Once you get used to the new place, you can migrate your old stuff when you’re ready.

What do you use for voice synthesis?

OMG I love this. Thank you for sharing!

I really liked VOY: “One Small Step” (s06e08) wherein the crew work to salvage the wreckage of an ancient Earth probe from a dark matter asteroid

It’s a nice acknowledgement of the reality that space is fucking dangerous, and of the bravery of the men and women who shot themselves into it with little more than a few layers of metal and their wits to protect themselves. All this in the name of advancing science and exploration.

It closes with seven reading a eulogy for the centuries-dead astronaut who died diverting all power to the sensors so that knowledge would be preserved.

Repentance is s07e12.

That’s an excellent tutorial, but the bit about blocking legitimate web crawlers should be a little higher up in the article. I read all the way down and was ready to try it out when I encountered that deal-breaker.

Please no.

I’ve seen (and read) The Expanse, and you’re right, it’s fantastic. One of the authors has also repeated gone on record as doing his best to fight the patriarchy.

I agree that this is valid criticism. The Star Trek writers have clearly gotten lazier over the years, opting for hamfisted, blatant, “see? we’re being woke in this scene” rather than allowing you to think for yourself.

However, the complaint here is laziness and not the nature of the message. I’d even go so far to say that due to the complex storytelling of earlier series, there’s a large continent of the fanbase that didn’t realise their progressive nature, and are objecting to how it’s woke now.

So basically I think there’s two complaints here: a valid one that you’re making: “lazy writing is terrible and arguably less effective”, and another one coming from, shall we say, those unburdened by an overabundance of schooling that are objecting to progressive ideas that were always there, but they only notice it now with the lazy writing.

I whole-heartedly agree.

I’ve had a really hard time figuring out how to get cloud native pg working 'cause I couldn’t get longhorn working for disk space.

So instead I went with a separate Raspberry Pi that isn’t part of the cluster to host a single Postgres instance.

It’s inelegant, but has worked for years. Still, I’d rather host a separate pg instance for each project… I just have to figure the above out first.

#Solarpunk!

Each Pi 4 has 8GB of RAM. With six devices, that’s 48GB to play with. More than enough for my needs.

Actually, as a web guy, I find the ARM architecture to be more than sufficient. Most of the stuff I build is memory heavy and CPU light, so the Pi is great for this stuff.

They’re fanless and low-power, which was the primary draw to going this route. I run a Kubernetes cluster on them, including a few personal websites (Nginx+Python+Django), PostgreSQL, Sonarr, Calibre, SSH (occasionally) and every once in a while, an OpenArena server :-)

Seven Raspberry Pi 4’s and one Pi Zero, mounted on some tile “shelves” inside some IKEA furniture.

Image

Ho ho ho