Onno (VK6FLAB)

Anything and everything Amateur Radio and beyond. Heavily into Open Source and SDR, working on a multi band monitor and transmitter.

#geek #nerd #hamradio VK6FLAB #podcaster #australia #ITProfessional #voiceover #opentowork

  • 16 Posts
  • 449 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: March 4th, 2024

help-circle







  • Between the clickbait, YouTube “enhancements”, exploding AI slop videos and the atrocious search facility, the platform is rapidly becoming completely unusable for finding relevant information when you’re looking for answers.

    As an entertainment platform it’s forcing creators to make long form content and making viewers sit through more and more low quality content.

    It’s evolving, but I’m pretty sure it’s heading towards extinction, rather than greatness.



  • As a fully functional adult, I’ve been eyeing off light up shoes for years. So far, all I’ve seen is gimmick shoes you wouldn’t wear for more than an hour, so I make do with fluorescent shoelaces instead.

    This seems like fun, though I’m not sure if I’d be game to walk up a set of stairs on them, perhaps I’m not keen on breaking something when I’d invariably trip and fall.



  • The commands man and apropos are your friends to get you started.

    Learning how to use specific tools like grep, sed and awk is a case of getting started by using them. Most of the subsequent learning process will focus around how to create regular expressions (regex), for which there’s also a manpage.

    The “typical example” for a dd command is like saying, “here’s a great way to shoot yourself in the foot”. A better way is to understand that most of these tools follow the UNIX philosophy:

    1. Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new “features”.
    2. Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don’t clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don’t insist on interactive input.
    3. Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don’t hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.
    4. Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you’ve finished using them.

    Once you “grok” that, you’ll be in a much better place.


  • How would you suggest I respond in the future?

    We have a person, claiming that CUPS doesn’t work and they now uninstall it on every installation.

    There is no context, no data, no information that suggests what the issue is, what they tried, when this occurred, on which platform, under which conditions.

    In other words, the user was essentially saying “CUPS sux”.

    Having used Linux as my main system for over 25 years, that sentiment did not match my own experience, does not help anyone, not me, not the user and not the OP who was trying to solve a problem, let alone anyone else reading along.

    I responded accordingly.









  • There’s a common but persistent misconception that Docker is like running a virtual machine. This is understandable but incorrect.

    A better way to think of it is as a security wrapper around an untrusted process.

    If you look at your running processes whilst a container is running, you’ll see the processes inside the container running on your “host” machine - remember, it’s not a host - guest situation.

    There is no relationship between the user inside the container, unless you start mapping the UID and GID.

    The only exception to this is the root user which shares the UID/GID with the actual root user.

    See: https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/why-processes-in-docker-containers-shouldnt-run-as-root/

    Edit: I suspect, but don’t know for sure, that the root user inside the container is actually the same user as the one running the Docker process, which is typically the root user on the “host”.