plenipotentprotogod

joined 2 years ago
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Subscribe now for your life saving warnings! in c/politicalmemes
[–] plenipotentprotogod 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

FYI: The American Red Cross has a pretty nice (and completely free) app that'll send you push notifications for all kinds of different emergencies.

You can set up multiple locations to monitor (in addition to your live location) and select which types of emergency events you want to hear about for each one.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cube.arc.hzd

Give permission. Don't give permission. They know where you are anyway in c/technology
[–] plenipotentprotogod 36 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

The sample data shared in the article includes

"c": "ES", // Country code,

ES is usually used for Spain, so it looks like these tests were run from within the EU.

Soldering/De-soldering USB flash-drive Plugs in c/[email protected]
[–] plenipotentprotogod 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

This is a fun thought experiment. If I'm understanding correctly, you're writing a story where the character has a flash drive with important information. They have to remove the end to prevent the bad guys from getting access to it, then later replace the end to access the information themselves. Here's my pitch (disclaimer: don't actually try to do this. It would probably work, but if you have actual important files on a flash drive, this isn't by any means how you should be trying to get at them)

For removing the end, soldering would be safe if they have access to a soldering iron. If it's an emergency scenario, then I'd say just snap the plug off. It's a bit risky depending on how the drive is made, but if it's done deliberately by someone who knows what they're doing, then I would say they could plausibly take off the USB connector without permanently damaging any of the guts.

For connecting the drive later, find a spare usb cable and cut it in half. It shouldn't be hard to find one in an office. Even cutting the plug off a wired mouse or keyboard would work. Use a pocket knife or pair of scisors to strip the outer insulation off the cut end. This exposes four small wires. Strip the ends of those as well. Now, you just need a way of attaching each wire to the correct spot on the circuit board in the flash drive. Soldering would be best, but in a pinch, I'd look around the office for some of that sticky clay stuff they use to hang up posters. Pre-chewed gum might also work. Lay the stripped end of each wire over the correct spot on the board, then put a blob of the sticky stuff on top to hold it in place. Plug the other end into a computer, and you should be good to go.

The Pebble smartwatch is making a comeback. Google has open-sourced the Pebble software, which means anyone — including Pebble’s founder — can make one. in c/[email protected]
[–] plenipotentprotogod 23 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm aware that pine64 sells a smart watch that they encourage flashing your own OS onto. I wonder how hard it'd be to just port the pebble code onto that hardware (a lot harder than I just made it sound, no doubt.) It could be a good way to get a pebble-like experience for people who prefer not to support this guys new company.

I can abide by most of Captain Jellico's decisions... most in c/tenforward
[–] plenipotentprotogod 20 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Theres actually a similar story with the fish. From Memory Alpha:

According to Ronny Cox, Patrick Stewart hated Livingston's presence in the ready room, and constantly petitioned the producers to remove the fish. Stewart, a strong animal rights advocate who opposes many forms of pet ownership, felt that using a captive animal in an ornamental display was "immoral" and inconsistent with TNG's core theme of exploring the inherent dignity of different species across the galaxy. Cox, who called Stewart's point "well taken", stated that Livingston's temporary removal in "Chain of Command" was thus a "sort of a bone they threw to Patrick".

I Ditched the Algorithm for RSS - and You Should Too in c/technology
[–] plenipotentprotogod 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Man, I feel you on the affiliate link fluff. I actually ended up unsubscribing from the Popular Mechanics and Popular Science feeds because the signal to noise ratio was so bad.

The creator of Nunti provided a very good primer on the algorithm design here. Basically, you indicate to the app whether you like or dislike an article and then it does some keyword extraction in the background and tries to show you similar articles in the future. I suppose you might be able to dislike a bunch of the fluff and hope the filter picks up on it, but it isn't really designed to support the kind of rules that would completely purge a certain type of content from your feed.

I Ditched the Algorithm for RSS - and You Should Too in c/technology
[–] plenipotentprotogod 27 points 1 month ago

Most of the feeds I subscribe to came to me in one of two ways:

  1. I enjoyed reading an article posted somewhere else (Lemmy, etc.) so I sought out the feed of that publisher.
  2. Sometimes news outlets enter into agreements to republish each others articles. When they do this, the re-publisher will usually include a little blurb at the end giving credit to the original publisher. If a feed I'm already subscribed to has an article re-published from elsewhere then I click through and check out the original source to see if I want to follow them as well.
I Ditched the Algorithm for RSS - and You Should Too in c/technology
[–] plenipotentprotogod 12 points 1 month ago (6 children)

It can be as simple as just putting an app on your phone. I use feeder which is fine. Pretty bare bones, but in that way it's easy to learn and use.

I've also been meaning to try out an app called Nunti, which I heard about a while ago from this Lemmy post. It claims to be an RSS reader with the added benefit of an (open source and fully local) algorithm to provide some light curation of your feed. It looks interesting, but I haven't actually tried it out yet because I'm still deciding whether I want any algorithm curating my feed, even one as transparent as Nunti's. It's also only available through F-Droid right now, which is a bit of a barrier to entry.

Anon buys a TV without researching in c/[email protected]
[–] plenipotentprotogod 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I've been trying to solve this problem for a while. I've not yet found a really good solution, but I can summarize what I've learned, partly for your information but mostly in the hope that Cunningham's law will finally put me out of my misery. Here are suggestions I've seen, organized roughly along some axis of easiest/most popular to hardest/least popular:

  1. Get an NVIDIA Shield TV. This isn't really what you asked for. It's just a commercial smart TV box, but it's generally considered the least annoying and highest quality of the lot. The unfortunate fact is that when dealing with DRM controlled media, having a big company like NVIDIA behind the product goes a long towards simplifying things.
  2. Install Kodi. Kodi (formerly XBMC) is the elder statesman of the FOSS smart TV world. You can run it on just about any hardware, including a SBC like a Raspberry Pi. You can even get it pre-bundled with a Linux OS like LibreELEC. It's got a clean interface and good community support, BUT it's primarily oriented towards viewing media from your own collection. If you're a person who consumes content via streaming services then you're gonna have a rough time. Apps (mostly unofficial / community made) do exist for many popular services, but installing them can be a pain, and you may have trouble streaming in high quality (DRM issues).
  3. KDE Plasma Bigscreen. Great concept, not maintained any more. See my comment here for all the gory details.
  4. Clean build of Android TV. I'm not aware of any major independent android distributions (Lineage, Graphene) providing official builds of the android TV operating system, but this site seems to provide relatively consistent lineage OS based releases. You can run them on a Raspberry Pi. I haven't done this yet, but it will probably be the next thing I try.
  5. EarlGrey TV. This one is a deep cut. EarlGrey TV mad a very small splash in the FOSS news cycle a couple of months ago. The concept is simple: install your favorite Linux distro and configure it to boot directly into a browser displaying a static webpage with links to your favorite streaming services and/or local media folders. The implementation is extremely basic, but the upside is that it's easy to tinker with if you're so-inclined.

As for remotes, there are some decent options on Amazon that connect via bluetooth or a USB dongle and basically act like a mouse and/or keyboard packaged in a remote control form factor. I bought this one a while ago and it's been fine. Nothing special, but fine. The play/pause/volume buttons on the front read on the receiving end like the media buttons on a keyboard. The air-mouse functionality isn't for everyone, but this model is one of the few with a little track pad on the back if you prefer using that. Honestly just get anything with a full keyboard. So much easier than using the arrow keys to click-click-click your way through an onscreen keyboard.

Do I have to build my own touchscreen thermostat? in c/[email protected]
Riot’s $250 Million ‘Arcane’ TV Series Was a Netflix Hit, Financial Miss in c/[email protected]
[–] plenipotentprotogod 19 points 2 months ago (4 children)

It seems that Netflix paid a flat rate of $3 million per episode for rights to stream the show. I wonder how much their internal accountants estimate that they made off of it. I wouldn't be surprised if it's a lot more than that.

For reference, Stranger Things season 1 was estimated to cost $6 million per episode, with season 4 ballooning to an estimated $30 million per episode. I'm not suggesting that Arcane was worth that much to them. Adult oriented animation based on a video game is a pretty niche genre. But, I think it's safe to say that netflix came out way ahead on this deal.

Also, regarding the claim in the lede: can confirm. Despite thoroughly enjoying both seasons of Arcane, I was never even a little bit tempted to start playing LOL. That game has a well-earned reputation, and no amount of good television is going to change it.

We just don’t understand the stakes. in c/insanepeoplefacebook
[–] plenipotentprotogod 32 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I'm reminded of a quote from an old Tom Scott video. He's visiting a modern reconstruction of a Neolithic long barrow. Tom points out that the sun lines up with the entrance on the summer solstice, then it cuts to the owner who says

I think a lot of people would assume that getting the alignments of a monument like this... would involve complex calculations, a sharp pencil, and computing power. But in fact, you can do it just as easily by getting up at the right time with some sticks.

-51
Today I learned that the Brave Search engine has a tool that allows end users a high degree of freedom to customize the search results they're shown. (self.technology)
 

I know there's some controversy surrounding Brave as a company, and I'm not a fan of everything they do, but the goggles feature in their search engine is a really interesting attempt to give users more control over their search results.

The tool allows you to re-rank your search results according to custom rule sets. Each rule contains a regex style string to check against webpage URLs, and an instruction for what to do when a match is found. There are four basic types of instruction:

  1. Exclude matching URLs from your search results.
  2. Boost matching URLs so they appear higher in your search results than they otherwise would
  3. Downrank matches, causing them to appear lower in the results than they otherwise would.
  4. Highlight matches so they stand out in the list of results.

Brave has provided some premade rule sets (called goggles) that you can use right away, such as one that automatically removes all pinterest links, or another that boosts posts from tech related blogs. It's also relatively straightforward to create your own goggles, which you can either keep private or make public for others to find and use as well.

If you want to try it out for yourself you can go to search.brave.com and do a normal search for whatever you want. Then, on the results page, click the little "goggles" button just below the search bar. You'll be presented with a variety of premade filters along with a "discover more" button which sends you to a page with more information and filter options.

47
Has anyone here built a Beowulf Cluster? (spinoff.nasa.gov)
 

A university near me must be going through a hardware refresh, because they've recently been auctioning off a bunch of ~5 year old desktops at extremely low prices. The only problem is that you can't buy just one or two. All the auction lots are batches of 10-30 units.

It got me wondering if I could buy a bunch of machines and set them up as a distributed computing cluster, sort of a poor man's version of the way modern supercomputers are built. A little research revealed that this is far from a new idea. The first ever really successful distributed computing cluster (called Beowulf) was built by a team at NASA in 1994 using off the shelf PCs instead of the expensive custom hardware being used by other super computing projects at the time. It was also a watershed moment for Linux, then only a few yeas old, which was used to run Beowulf.

Unfortunately, a cluster like this seems less practical for a homelab than I had hoped. I initially imagined that there would be some kind of abstraction layer allowing any application to run across all computers on the cluster in the same way that it might scale to consume as many threads and cores as are available on a CPU. After some more research I've concluded that this is not the case. The only programs that can really take advantage of distributed computing seem to be ones specifically designed for it. Most of these fall broadly into two categories: expensive enterprise software licensed to large companies, and bespoke programs written by academics for their own research.

So I'm curious what everyone else thinks about this. Have any of you built or admind a Beowulf cluster? Are there any useful applications that would make it worth building for the average user?

167
Pi-Hole or something else for network ad blocking? (self.selfhosted)
 

I've been aware of pi-hole for a while now, but never bothered with it because I do most web browsing on a laptop where browser extensions like uBlock origin are good enough. However, with multiple streaming services starting to insert adds into my paid subscriptions, I'm looking to upgrade to a network blocker that will also cover the apps on my smart TV.

I run most of my self hosted services on a proxmox server, so I'd like something that'll run as an LXC container or a VM. I'm also vaguely aware that various competing applications have come out since pi-hole first gained popularity. Is pi-hole still the best thing going, or are there better options?

156
These cheap scissors are held together with a screw (instead of a rivet), which means they can be tightened when they get loose and sharpened when they get dull. (www.scotchbrand.com)
 

I'm aware that the plastic handles probably disqualify these from being true "buy it for life", but the exciting thing for me is that they are relatively cheap and can be found on the shelf in most stores with an office supply section. It's an unfortunate reality that the vast majority of BIFL items are special order and cost several times more than their mainstream equivalent, so I wanted to shout out Scotch brand for maintaining such good serviceability on an item you can literally pick up at Walmart.

I just pulled apart a pair of these which was cutting horribly, gave each blade a couple passes on an oil stone, then reassembled and tightened them up with a drop of oil in the joint. They cut as well as the day they were bought, and the handles are still in good shape so I could see doing this several more times before I even have to consider replacing them.

69
Give Your Yard Back To Nature (www.popularmechanics.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by plenipotentprotogod to c/[email protected]
2 comments fedilink
 

A garden that’s planted purely by aesthetic decisions is like a car with no engine. It may look beautiful, the stereo works great, but you’re going to have to push it up the hill.

This is a really informative article by Popular Mechanics describing how to effectively landscape with native plants, as well as the long term benefits you will see as a result.

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