Working analog clock minute hands after the first minute.

Software Patent Attorney

It’s really hard to time it just right but the theme to Jeopardy 👍

Get it wrong and it’ll really surprise you!

God’s keyboard

Astronomers: The Sun is a recent development

Correct 👍

You had corruption with btrfs? Was this with a spinning disk or an SSD?

I’ve been using btrfs for over a decade on several filesystems/machines and I’ve had my share of problems (mostly due to ignorance) but I’ve never encountered corruption. Mostly I just run out of disk space because I forgot to balance or the disk itself had an issue and I lost whatever it was that was stored in those blocks.

I’ve had to repair a btrfs partition before due to who-knows-what back when it was new but it’s been over a decade since I’ve had an issue like that. I remember btrfs check --repair being totally useless back then haha. My memory on that event is fuzzy but I think I fixed whatever it was bitching about by remounting the filesystem with an extra option that forced it to recreate a cache of some sort. It ran for many years after that until the disk spun itself into oblivion.

I wouldn’t say, “repairing XFS is much easier.” Yeah, fsck -y with XFS is really all you have to do 99% of the time but also you’re much more likely to get corrupted stuff when you’re in that situation compared to say, btrfs which supports snapshotting and redundancy.

Another problem with XFS is its lack of flexibility. By that I don’t mean, “you can configure it across any number of partitions on-the-fly in any number of (extreme) ways” (like you can with btrfs and zfs). I mean it doesn’t have very many options as to how it should deal with things like inodes (e.g. tail allocation). You can increase the total amount of space allowed for inode allocation but only when you create the filesystem and even then it has a (kind of absurdly) limited number that would surprise most folks here.

As an example, with an XFS filesystem, in order to store 2 billion symlimks (each one takes an inode) you would need 1TiB of storage just for the inodes. Contrast that with something like btrfs with max_inline set to 2048 (the default) and 2 billion symlimks will take up a little less than 1GB (assuming a simplistic setup on at least a 50GB single partition).

Learn more about btrfs inlining: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Inline-files.html

One point: ext4 has a maximum file size of 16TiB. To a regular user that is stupidly huge and of no concern but it’s exactly the type of thing you overlook if you “just use ext4” on anything and everything then end up with your database broken at work because of said bad advice.

Use the filesystem that makes the most sense for your use case. Consider it every single time you format a disk. Don’t become complacent! Also fuck around with the new shit from time to time! I decided to format my Linux desktop partitions with btrfs over a decade ago and as a result I’m an excellent user of that filesystem but you know what? I’m thinking I’ll try bcachefs soon and fiddle around more with my zfs partition on my HTPC.

BTW: If you’re thinking about trying out btrfs I would encourage you to learn about it’s non-trivial maintenance tasks. btrfs needs you to fuck with it from time to time or you’ll run out of disk space “for no reason”. You can schedule cron jobs to take care of everything (as I have done) but you still need to learn how it all works. It’s not a “set it and forget it” FS like ext4.

Ooh this is a good idea! Because when you extract a file you just downloaded the original creation/modification dates are preserved. So when you extract some tarball the directory my be from several years ago so you can’t rely on file modification times to see when you downloaded any given thing.

I think I’m going to start doing the date directory thing! I’ll start by writing a bash script that runs in a systemd timer that automatically creates a directory whenever the month changes 👍

My favorite podcasts are super geeky:

• The Hackaday podcast: https://hackaday.com/category/podcasts/
• The Pick, Place podcast: https://www.pickplacepodcast.com/

(They’re both available on just about every podcast platform)

Hackaday is catered to a much more general audience than The Pick, Place podcast which is all about the PCB manufacturing/assembly industry. So if you’re a geeky sort you’ll love Hackaday because just about everything they talk about is super interesting (to geeks) and it’s never boring (unlike a lot of other geeky podcasts where the hosts can ramble on for too long about topics that are only mildly interesting).

About the Pick, Place podcast: Never in a million years would did I think I could enjoy such a podcast. They go over the steps and equipment used to make the circuit boards that live inside all the electronics we use every day and it’s way more interesting than you’d think! Like, did you know that most professionally-made circuit boards go through the equivalent of a dishwasher? As in, they’re washed… With (denatured/deionized) water! Furthermore, these washing machines only need their water changed out like once a month (or sometimes after several months) then they take the little bits of metal it collects over time and they sell them to companies that deal with precious metals (because they’ll have multiple pounds of tiny balls of tin, silver, gold, etc).

Oh man I learned so much interesting obscure shit from that podcast! I love it 👍

Zero sugar “energy drink”? Does that even exist?

I’m thinking, “pasta water”. Like, save the water you cook pasta in (which tastes like… liquefied plain pasta aka not much of anything haha), add some zero-sugar flavoring (e.g. some of that Kool-Aid grape stuff you’re supposed to dump in bottles of water), and voila! Zero sugar energy drink that tastes like grape pasta but actually gives you long-term energy from all those starches/complex carbohydrates 👍

I used to use “top 24h” but these days I just sort by “hot” because it actually seems to work pretty well now: I don’t see the total garbage that gets down voted immediately like you get with “new” but I see pretty much everything else (which is what I like; I especially like finding interesting posts in obscure communities!).

I also regularly block foreign language communities for no other reason than I can’t read them so there’s no point in them taking up space in my feed. Like, I’m sure that German meme about Elon Musk is hilarious but since I don’t know German it’s just noise 🤷

As someone who’s caught a leaker in the past (well, someone that was exfiltrating company secrets to a competitor) catching leakers is actually pretty easy if you have any modicum of control over the tools they use and the places they work. Barring that, no. Just no. It’s not going to happen.

If a leaker is gullible and stupid some trickery is possible but I wouldn’t get my hopes up, Warner Music. Seems like a job that’s doomed to fail from the start. I wouldn’t even bother unless they know it’s just a job on paper and are actually just looking to give someone’s kid a legit-sounding job to pad their resume 🤷

Not only that but if I were in charge of hiring I’d be extremely skeptical of any and all applicants. Anyone smart enough to do the job will know it’s impossible and will just become a master of stalling and picking low hanging fruit (aka useless) and everyone else is just a fraud.

Bought an automatic door opener (the type for handicapped people in wheelchairs) so the dogs can come and go as they please to/from the back yard. I setup infrared sensors inside and outside near the dogs level (off to the side outside) and they quickly figured out how to open the door on their own.

Was like $600 but man was it worth it! Never have to worry about them being locked in or pestering me to go out. My big dog also gets a huge kick out of sneaking up on the pool guy and barking at him (just once!) when he’s not looking 🤣

If something is “older than dirt” that means it’s at least 18,000 years old but can be millions of years old depending on where you live:

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14qna.html

Also, they didn’t mention it but you can always just do this (the easy way, thanks to GNU): chmod a+x somefile to give it execute bits. It works intuitively like that for w and r permissions too.

It’s just quicker to type out chmod 775 than it is to do it the other way 🤷

There’s not much to learn in Windows land! Learn how to set file permissions, how the registry works (and some important settings that use it), and how Active Directory works (it’s LDAP) and you’ll be fine.

If you’re used to using Linux nothing will frustrate you more than being forced to use a Windows desktop. The stuff you use every day just isn’t there. You can add on lots of 3rd party tools to make it better but it’ll never measure up.

When you have to go out on the Internet to download endless amounts of 3rd party tools the security alarms in your head might start going off. Windows users have just learned over time to ignore them 🤣

I interview developers and information security people all the time. I always ask lots of questions about Linux. As far as I’m concerned:

• If you’re claiming to be an infosec professional and don’t know Linux you’re a fraud.
• If you’re a developer and you don’t know how to deploy to Linux servers you’re useless.

So yeah: Get good with Linux. Especially permissions! Holy shit the amount of people I interview that don’t know basic Linux permissions (or even about file permissions in general) is unreal.

Like, dude: Have you just been chmod 777 everything all this time? WTF! Immediate red flag this guy cannot be trusted with anything.

If you’re working in the attic, under the house, around dirt/dust/debris wear a mask/respirator. It’s so nice to be able to take deep breaths without coughing later in life (and outclass your peers in the stamina department) 👍

Pro tip: Even though they’re bigger and bulkier respirators are much more comfy than masks.