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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.websitetoScience Memes@mander.xyzi need sleep
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    2 days ago

    High frequency is generally bad for transmission line losses, so getting power from A to B is better at lower frequency — DC is a great option here.

    If we switched to DC, many things would still flicker though as they would presumably use switching power supplies, but those could be relatively high frequency like you said.

    Interestingly, airplanes use 400Hz, as transmission over distance doesn’t matter, and transformers can be made much smaller/lighter.




  • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.websitetoScience Memes@mander.xyzOn Venus.
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    29 days ago

    Not a historian, but folks on The Internet have characterized the Soviet program as a series of milestones, with the US program a series of stepping stones in support of a single goal.

    This makes sense with the cartoon, where the Soviets were first in basically everything except walking on the moon.

    Not sure how much merit it has, but it’s kinda interesting.




  • nc is useful. For example: if you have a disk image downloaded on computer A but want to write it to an SD card on computer B, you can run something like

    user@B: nc -l 1234 | pv > /dev/$sdcard

    And

    user@A: nc B.local 1234 < /path/to/image.img

    (I may have syntax messed up–also don’t transfer sensitive information this way!)

    Similarly, no need to store a compressed file if you’re going to uncompress it as soon as you download it—just pipe wget or curl to tar or xz or whatever.

    I once burnt a CD of a Linux ISO by wgeting directly to cdrecord. It was actually kinda useful because it was on a laptop that was running out of HD space. Luckily the University Internet was fast and the CD was successfully burnt :)



  • Maybe not a service in the typical sense, but setting up your router+server to route your home network traffic through a VPN is a fun project.

    My router (MikroTik) supports WireGuard, so I can use it with Mullvad for the whole house—but wg is demanding and it’s a slow router, so while it can NAT at ~1Gbps, it can’t do WireGuard at more than ~90Mbps. So, I set up WireGuard/Mullvad on a little SBC with a fast processor, and have my router use that instead. Using policy based routing and/or mangling, I can have different VLANs/subnets/individual hosts selectively routed through the VPN.

    It’s a fun exercise, not sure I implemented it in a smart way, but it works :)





  • xscreensaver of course! Note that this is not an option on Windows—jwz hates Microsoft, and any xscreensaver port to Windows is against his wishes.

    I use yabai and sketchybar for a tiling WM feel. It’s nowhere as nice as my preferred i3, but it’s ok. Unfortunately it often breaks with major OS updates, so I’m sure to hold back updating my system until yabai is working.

    IIRC sshfs will work on macOS but it’s more work to install. Worth it if allowed by your IT policies and your work can benefit from it.

    Vim, tmux, and the usual *NIX stuff you might want.

    The coreutils are not the GNU coreutils you typically find on a Linux system, so you may find a few differences. I believe sed is slightly different, and the flags for ls must be before the filename arguments, but I’ve found it’s mostly silly stuff like that (I used zsh before using macOS, so no problem there).