Dave. @ dgriffith @aussie.zone

I'm a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

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2 yr. ago

and due to the nature of the protocol, companies hosting Usenet services didn't want to have to store all of that shit.

You can opt not to carry certain newsgroups, eg skipping alt.binaries.* would reduce your storage requirements drastically.

The fact of the matter is that people wanted something more "instant and accessible" than newsgroups that were synced overnight, and modern social media sprang from that desire.

The World Copyright Office then?

Oh wait, three seconds of googling suggests my posts are most likely covered when I post via my home instance in Australia.

"You don't need to register for copyright in Australia. The moment an idea or creative concept is documented on paper or electronically it is automatically protected by copyright in Australia. Copyright protection is free and automatic under the Copyright Act 1968."

I have a very nice set of Bose corded noise cancelling headphones and use them when I fly for work and at home sometimes when I want to chill out.

The advantage they have over Bluetooth is that the base functionality still works when the single AAA battery that powers them goes flat. Unlike Bluetooth headsets they also don't switch to low power/BLE mode when they're supposed to be "off", so they don't go flat when they're in my travel bag for a week or two. They also plug straight into in-flight entertainment systems so I don't need to use the $3 headphones the airline provides.

The AAA powers the noise cancelling for about 15-20 hours straight and the case has a spot for a spare so the whole setup is pretty good.

As mentioned below, have a look at Linuxbabe's guide and see what you think. It was basically set up and forget (so far).

The server I get through linode has a relatively small amount of storage. So I repartitioned the available storage of the default install and created a separate ZFS filesystem with compression enabled to hold the mailboxes. It's compressing at about 65% of original size and even with 20 years of IMAP mail in there there's heaps of room left.

And holy shit it is so much faster than Internode's server. I've enabled forwarding on their server so everything gets dumped to my new account, and just opening and browsing the folders/mail is so much faster now, both on my phone with the Gmail app and using thunderbird on the desktop.

I used postfix and dovecot as well.

Basically walked through Linuxbabe's excellent guide and was done in about 1.5 hours with SPF/DKIM/DMARC.

https://www.linuxbabe.com/mail-server/build-email-server-from-scratch-debian-postfix-smtp

I have my own domain and a static IP with one of Linode's nanode sizes servers for USD5 a month, works pretty good.

Also it looks like they're nuking their email service if you're using that

Their mail service has been garbage for 6 months or more now. I have a large IMAP account with them and mail is usually delayed anywhere from one to ten hours. I typically get batch delivery of the previous day's worth of email around midnight to 2am.

So that's super fun for all those password reset and account signup emails that expire in 60 minutes.....

Finally got fed up with it at the end of November. I built my own mail server with my own domain and for the next few months I'll be slowly migrating my 20 years of signups using my internode email to my new account.

I got dragged over from Google Play Music, and never use YouTube video.

My subscription is going from AUD 9.99 to AUD 16.99 a month in April, for features I couldn't give a crap about.

I just want to listen to music, fuck this noise. I've got a reminder in my calendar in March to cancel my subscription and I might switch to Spotify which is $5 a month cheaper here.

I've had an Oki mono laser printer for so long, I gave it to my kids. It was a "cheap" printer in the scheme of things, but it was a compact duplex printer and I only ever needed a new $50 toner for it over the years.

It also didn't come with a 650MB printer driver package with a shitty tray application or a subscription.

I have a Philips Hue wireless switch that has no batteries. The click action when you press the button is enough to drive the transmitter. The button moves in about 4-5mm when pressed and that is all that's needed to drive the transmitter.

What's really mind-blowing is that such trivial amounts of energy runs a transmitter that sends a specially coded pulse (not even just an on off pulse of RF) thirty feet to the receiver.

The voltage range depends a lot on cell construction, temperature, load or charge rate, and chemical mix.

For example "lead acid" batteries with lead and sulphuric acid have a cell chemistry voltage of 2.05 volts but their nominal range is 1.8 to 2.4 volts per cell. Translating that to a 6 cell "12 volt" car battery gives you a range of 10.8 to 14.8 volts.

Battery chemistry produces fixed voltages depending on what you use. It depends on where the active components sit on the electronegativity table.

The typical ones are:

Zinc-carbon and alkaline - 1.5 volts per cell.

Lead acid - 2 volts

Nickel Cadmium - 1.2 volts

Nickel Metal Hydride - 1.4 ish.

All the Lithium ion combos - 3.4 to 3.7 volts.

git commit -m "So long, and thanks for all the fish."

you’ll see that he doesn’t like functions to be very long. I think his rule is no more than 4 lines.

Four line functions? Sounds like a codebase adhering to that rule would end up as a nice thick function soup. It feels like..... I dunno, those database programmers that like normalising databases to the Nth degree.

If you put your loops into functions then you can just use return instead of break.

And that just sounds like abusing the concept of functions to replace standard flow control that your language provides.

I mean, sure, if I find repetitive chunks of code popping up I'll break them out into functions, but - generally speaking - I do functions that translate into discrete real-world or UI tasks. I'm opening and parsing a text file into internal structures, I'm doing the reverse to go back to a data file, I'm cycling through the data to update UI components, etc etc.

But hey, I use C and on the rare occasion I sneak a goto in there, so I'm not qualified to pass too much judgement.

Don't worry too much about it going to waste.

What usually happens next is that your "lifetime licence" turns into an "ohhhh that's a licence for the OLD system. We've introduced Plex Ultimate 2000! It's got all these great new features, and it's only $3.95 a month. Don't worry, we won't forget our greatest supporters, whoever has a lifetime licence for the worn out, old system, their first year's subscription will be 25 percent off, yaay!"

Awesome, now you get only subconscious messages flashed in your eyes.

Blipverts. If I recall correctly, they had some bad side effects on sensitive people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert

It's was definitely one of those "seemed like a good idea at the time" kinda things, but now they've realised they've created a monster.

That's like saying Windows does... I.e. it's not true. Maybe if you go back to the Win9x and DOS days.

I don't think you've seen the number of power user articles these days that give you two options :

• Wade through 27 levels of keys and subkeys in regedit, create this dword, then stop and start this inscrutably-named service, or
• Run this one line command in PowerShell.

I remember helping a teacher at school who had installed a CopyIIPc card on one of our computers. They used it to make everyday copies of the master disks of the copy protected educational software we used in our room full of Sperry IBM compatible PCs.

The card went in between the floppy controller and the drive and could do a pretty good job at duplicating all the physical copy protection tricks of the time.

They copied a lot of stuff, not for pirating reasons but simply because they were literally 5 1/4" floppy disks back then and school kids were not kind to them. Either it was simply jamming them into the drives, or touching the exposed disc surface, or chucking them around the room, those disks didn't last long.

I have learned over the years that reasoned discussion is impossible at this point. You are firmly fixed on your opinions, and I am moderately fixed with mine, and the gulf in between is large.

So I will simply bid you good day.

No.

Because I'm not under the self-important delusion that everything is part of a grand conspiracy out to get me.