Viewing profile — soneil

I have a couple of devices that are 12V over usb-c. The devices themselves are fine, but the wallwarts the mffr provided are just that - 12v over usb-c. No PD. If a device is expec…

I'm curious if there's a reason this six-cell mechanism has become the defacto? It seems this should just be a single input field styled appropriately, but it feels like there must…

This feels like a good place to reel out my favourite anecdote; community college IT (or for the natives; BTEC), 1998; our programming tutor told us to "ignore the internet" becaus…

SNDMSG-over-ftp pre-dates UUCP by 5 years, so I think that one's pretty clear-cut. (Not that I'm claiming anything's original here, ftp & smtp are both in the nwg/ietf family tree,…

It used to be even more literally so - network mail started off as using FTP to SNDMSG onto a remote system instead of your own. In RFC475, FTP has MAIL and MLFL (mailfile) command…

I think what really stands out about this, is that having it installed as a pre-made brick is very cost-effective. But this cost-effective route isn't readily available to most peo…

It may amuse you to know they're both essentially the same thing. GBP is formally Pound Sterling, formerly 1 pound (tower pound / 20 troy ounces) of Sterling Silver. Which is why £…

2100 entries over 40 years is pretty much a show a week. Talk about artefacts of a life well lived.

Sigur Ros have a surprising number of shows on their ftp, which is delightfully retro.

I think it's interesting that traditionally Ireland used a different calendar for seasons - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_calendar So Winter is Nov, Dec, Jan - and Spring is …

The last one is so close to the point. Iran had Internet blackouts earlier this year, Russia has been experimenting with the same - options like shortwave are just as relevant as e…

I think "odious" really undersells it. A free press is an important part of a functioning democracy. What's the use in being able to vote against people doing wrong, if no-one's al…

> Now that you can't beat people to death with IBM hardware, what do you use instead? I believe IBM hardware is still applicable for this, the Thinkpad just isn't IBM hardware anym…

I have to admit - I still grind my teeth every time I see "dns propagation" used without a direct follow-up that it's a myth, you're looking at cascading cache expiry. Propagation …

Compelled speech is protected, fingerprints aren't. Imagine it's 1926 and none of this tech is an issue yet. The police can fingerprint and photograph you at intake, they can't com…

later, like 1956? The world's first commercial HDD was 5,000,000 characters.

> with the context mostly being HDD manufacturers who want to inflate their drive sizes This is a myth. The first IBM harddrive was 5,000,000 characters in 1956 - before bytes were…

It goes back way further than that. The first IBM harddrive was the IBM 350 for the IBM 305 RAMDAC. It was 5 million characters. Not bytes, bytes weren't "a thing" yet. 5,000,000 c…

They almost always mean power of 10, unless you're discussing RAM, RAM addressing, or RAM pages. (or flash, which has inherited most of the same for most of the same reasons)

This is the bit (sic) that drives me nuts. RAM had binary sizing for perfectly practical reasons. Nothing else did (until SSDs inherited RAM's architecture). We apply it to all the…

Pretty much anywhere you have networked storage? Gigabit is about on-par with pre-sata ATA133.

This was one of the "lessons learnt" from the XZ incident. One of the (many) steps they took to avoid scrutiny was modifications that existed in the real tarball but not the repo.

The sad thing is that's pretty accurate. I do value the inconvenience. When I put an album on, I put an album on. I don't hit next, random, go wandering off down rabbitholes. I put…

What you'll tend to notice with "willing participants" is that they're not looking for truth, they're looking for confirmation. No-one asks for proof when you tell them what they w…

In my family it's the other way around - it's the people that used to tell us not to talk to strangers on the internet, and not to believe everything we see on the internet, who ar…