@dan@upvote.au avatar

dan

@dan@upvote.au

Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
d.sb
Mastodon: @dan

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

This is why I like Docker. It’s basically “works on my machine” as a service.

Similarly, I’m starting to really like dev containers. They’re Docker containers with all the required dev tools already installed inside, and a config so that VS Code knows how to spin up a new container when you want to do dev work on the project. They use VS Code remoting - a VS Code server runs in the container and the regular VS Code desktop app connects to it.

I was recently dealing with a project that has some Ruby dev tools and it was 100x easier to deal with since they were using dev containers.

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

It’s way worse. At least Excel lets you do database-like stuff. Discord is unusable for long-form posts or any info you want to keep long term.

dan, (edited )
@dan@upvote.au avatar

I can’t wait until Discord have to start charging for features that are currently free (since they have to be profitable eventually), projects using it freak out about it, and end up switching to a different closed-source hosted system that’ll do the same thing years later. It already happened with OSS projects using Slack that migrated to Discord. People just don’t learn from the past.

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Any of the modern forum systems (Discourse, Flarum, NodeBB) is fine as long as it works. Previous-gen forum systems (SMF, phpBB, MyBB, Vanilla, etc) are fine too.

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

A lot of Linux drivers are like this - just one or two people maintaining them. They usually eventually mainline the driver rather than having a separate Git repo though.

dan, (edited )
@dan@upvote.au avatar

The thing with drivers is that the hardware they’re written for doesn’t really change. A particular network card is always going to behave the same way. Once the driver works well, it’s pretty much complete, and the only changes that are needed are bug fixes, updates to handle new firmware, or adjustments if the kernel changes some implementation detail of how drivers are used. There could be months or years between updates to the driver.

Some manufacturers have great first-party Linux support. Intel is a good example - they contribute a lot of code to the kernel, and their drivers are maintained by employees.

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Realtek NICs are junk (even the buggy Intel I225-v chip is better) so I try to avoid them, but I honestly haven’t ever checked which sound chip my motherboard uses. I’ll have to check if it’s a Realtek one. Realtek is generally the lower-end manufacturer for cheaper products.

dan, (edited )
@dan@upvote.au avatar

I’ve got a “ASUS ROG Strix B550-F” which wasn’t exactly a high-end motherboard when I got it (I got it because it was cheap), but it’s got an Intel chip rather than a Realtek one. The lower-end motherboards have Realtek NICs but I usually don’t get the cheapest of anything since there’s usually a pretty big difference in quality if you spend just a little bit more.

The Intel I226-V chip on that motherboard is only $2.87 each (for quantities of 1000, even cheaper for large bulk orders) and the manufacturer can likely use the same PHY chip and timing components, so it doesn’t really increase the price a lot to use a non-Realtek chip.

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Ubuntu on the other hand features much more modern versions of libraries because they want to be more hip and modern

You can use the “testing” release of Debian if you want newer stuff. It’s still more stable than rolling distros. Packages have to be in the “unstable” release for 10 days with no major bugs to get promoted to testing.

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

now I got to work and hopping takes too much time and effort to set everything up again.

This is the same reason I haven’t switched to Linux again even though I want to. Limited free time.

I also switched to playing games on a console for the same reason. I don’t have to worry about system specs or driver issues or anything like that… I can just launch the game and play it.

ajayiyer, to linux
@ajayiyer@mastodon.social avatar

Gentle reminder to everyone that support for ends in about 90 weeks. Many computers can't upgrade to Win 11 so here are your options:

  1. Continue on Win 10 but with higher security risks.
  2. Buy new and expensive hardware that supports Win11.
  3. Try a beginner friendly distro like . It only takes about two months to acclimate.

@nixCraft @linux @windowscentralbot

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Any decent motherboard built in the last 10 years should have a TPM chip onboard.

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

There’s still around two more years of support for Windows 10. By that time, it shouldn’t be too expensive to upgrade some components to some second-hand ones that perform better than your current ones.

dan, (edited )
@dan@upvote.au avatar

This happens every year anyways, when IT departments need to spend their remaining budget. A lot of people set up home servers on ex-office small form factor PCs like HP ProDesk/EliteDesk, Lenovo Tiny, etc. Companies are always throwing them out when they upgrade, and as a result there’s always good deals for them on ebay. A lot of companies have a 2-3 year upgrade cycle.

dan, (edited )
@dan@upvote.au avatar

How long do you think is reasonable for a vendor to support their old software version once they release a new one? If they drop support in 2025, Windows 10 will have had 10 years of support. It was released back when Linux kernel 4.0 was the latest version. Would you expect distros today to support a 4.x kernel? (yes, I know RHEL still does)

You can still get longer-term support if you pay.

dan, (edited )
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Not a lawyer; would this likely stand up in court?

I’m not a lawyer either, but I don’t think so.

The developer of this Home Assistant integration is German. European law allows people to reverse engineer apps for the purpose of interoperability (Article 6 of the EU software directive), so observation of the app’s behaviour or even disassembling it to create a Home Assistant integration is not illegal.

In general, writing your own code by observing the inputs to and outputs from an existing system is not illegal, which is for example how video game emulators are legal (just talking about the emulator code itself, not the content you use with it).

If it’s a Terms of Service violation, it’d be the users that are violating the ToS, not the developer. In theory, the Home Assistant integration could have been developed without ever running the app or agreeing to Haier’s Terms of Service, for example if the app is decompiled and the API client code is viewed (which again is allowed by the EU software directive if the sole purpose is for interoperability).

The code in this repo is likely original Python code that was written without using any of Haier’s code and without bypassing any sort of copy protection, so it’s not a DMCA infringement either.

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Be sure to wear a hoodie in a dark room so that you can hack faster.

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Good advice? In a meme thread? It’s more likely than you think.

Pi-Hole or something else for network ad blocking?

I’ve been aware of pi-hole for a while now, but never bothered with it because I do most web browsing on a laptop where browser extensions like uBlock origin are good enough. However, with multiple streaming services starting to insert adds into my paid subscriptions, I’m looking to upgrade to a network blocker that will...

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

PiHole and similar services just use DNS blocking, which only works if the ads are served via a third-party ad server. Sites with their own ad inventory (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc) can’t be blocked this way since they can just serve the ads from the same domain as their regular content.

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Plus it’s easy to run multiple AdGuard Home servers and keep them in sync using github.com/bakito/adguardhome-sync

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

It works well! I have one AdGuardHome instance running on my home server and one running on a Raspberry Pi, both using Docker. Having two prevents the internet from breaking in case I have to shut down one of them for some reason.

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Wow this is such a good comment. Very helpful. I wish Lemmy had a “super upvote” where I could upvote it several times.

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Isn’t this actually more likely to happen if it’s closed-source, since the code isn’t visible to third-parties like security researchers? That’s why zero days are a thing.

Lighter weight replacements for Sentry bug logging

I love Sentry, but it’s very heavy. It runs close to 50 Docker containers, some of which use more than 1GB RAM each. I’m running it on a VPS with 10GB RAM and it barely fits on there. They used to say 8GB RAM is required but bumped it to 16GB RAM after I started using it....

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Nice to see you on here! I understand the lack of time - I’ve got some projects I’ve had on hold for years because of time constraints. I’m definitely going to try Glitchtip.

If I get some free time, I’ll see if I can write some docs about using source maps for JS apps. Sounds like it works in the same way as Sentry’s does.

It was a great idea for GlitchTip to reuse the Sentry SDKs and CLI, because their SDKs are solid. They’ve got the best .NET SDK out of all of the error logging systems I evaluated two years ago which is why I was using Sentry. Unfortunately, Sentry has become significantly heavier over those two years.

dan, (edited )
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Sure, but that’s extra manual setup, and the point of running something like PiHole is to have a nice UI to manage things.

AdGuard Home uses DNS-over-HTTPS by default, so it’s immediately more privacy-focused than PiHole. I’m really surprised that PiHole hasn’t done this.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • localhost
  • All magazines
  • Loading…
    Loading the web debug toolbar…
    Attempt #