• 3 Posts
  • 198 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 17th, 2023

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  • Back when I had an iPhone 6s it wasn’t uncommon for me to drop the phone when trying to unlock it with TouchID, and I came to the conclusion that the sensor was placed too far down on the phone.

    This made it unbalanced when trying to unlock it with out spreading your fingers out on the back of the phone to support it.

    Having the fingerprint reader at the top of the device would mean less contortion of your fingers as it is close to where your thumb naturally rests.

    It would be a similar motion to that of opening the iOS control center




  • Yep, LVM is basically a software raid 0, I used it when setting up Linux server VMs for years at my last job, as far as I know they are still running fine.

    The VM system backed up all VMs regularly, so I used LVMs as it made increasing the storage on a server easier for me.

    Since it is just a raid 0 that can span several disks and one disk failiure can bring it down I don’t want any irriplacable data on it, so games from Steam seems like an excellwnt idea.

    That also means that being able to just have a volume spanning several disks would be an easy and simple way to increase storage when space is running tight.

    I am an avid hobby photographer and I would never trust an LVM without some kind of added protection, I am looking to get a Synology NAS with minimum of four drives raided in raid 5.

    I have a very old Intel NAS with used drives that I used for many years, but I don’t trust it anymore, I keep it powered off as a cold backup.





  • It is soo easy to forget about just how much identifying metadata you leave on the internet just by reading stuff.

    You know the cookie banners you see? Those that claim to let you opt out from being tracked by advertisers?

    Yeah, those are just the overt tracking mechanism, tracking pixels are far far more insidious.

    Lets backtrack a bit, back when Facebook started getting big, companies started embedded Like buttons on their webpages, cool right? You could just click the Like button and it would help you post a link to your Facebook feed to the page you were visiting.

    Seems fine, right? What’s the issue?

    It would be fine if the image of the Like button was stored on the local web server hosting the rest of the site.

    But it isn’t.

    It is stored on Facebook’s servers, it is stored in a way that every single Like button has their own ID, so every time you load up your favourite website about abandoned radiation experiment sites it makes your browser send a request to Facebook’s servers as well and depending on how the request is sent they can at minimum log that your IP address loaded the Like button with the ID number X, the ID number X is tied to the specific webpage you visited.

    Then you go and do some research on impotense and how to cure it, the pages you read all have Like buttons as above, but with their own ID numbers, Facebook now knows at a minimum that you are a man who is interested in science, technology, society and modern history, you may also suffer from impotense.

    Well, you keep browsing the web and read local news, well the Like button is also there, and with the ID number Facebook can add an area of interest to your profile.

    It keeps going like this, but with one huge important change, people are starting getting warey of the Like buttons and Facebook in general, so they simply remove the button, while introducing the tracking pixel, a 1px*1px transparent picture, it works like how the Like button loads, and keeps generating data for Facebook.

    Facebook is not alone in this, I just used them as an example.

    You can read more here:

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

    This is also not even getting into browser fingerprinting.



  • IT tech here, yes, yes it can.

    Network infrastructure is both increadibly smart while also being dumb in other ways.

    To do an ELI5 answer:

    Imagine you have a container of pearls that you need to sort, red, green and blue pearls all need to be dropped into a red, green or blue hole.

    The container is being refilled, but slow enough that it only gets a new pearl once you have sorted the previous.

    The holes are connected to pipes going to separate buckets.

    Everything is fine, but then some adds a new hole that is muticolored and tells you that all pearls should go there.

    You tell your friends that you have a faster way to deal with the perls and to send you their pearls.

    The new hole also has a pipe, but that is connected to the container that recieves pearls, so every time you drop a pearl into the new hole, it appears in the container again.

    So now you have a situation where you not only get your normal ammount of pearls, but everyone else’s pearls and you also get every pearl you send back again.

    You are smart and quickly realize that something is wrong and call for your teacher for help, networking gear don’t have that capabillity to understand that it is wrong, it just looks at each pearl and not the big picture.

    If we go back to the real world, we have developed tools to deal with this situation, we have protocols line spanning tree which can have switches speak with eachother and figure out if there is a physical loop before sending traffic through it.

    There are other tools as well, but they all need to be configured and to be honest, it is easily forgotten or made a low priority since it happens rarely.

    It is something that is often implemented after a big outage.


  • That depends on your usecase.

    I have setup servers where I mounted extra drives on /srv/nfs

    When/If I switch to Linux I will probably mount my secondary drives to folders like

    /home/stoy/videos

    /home/stoy/music

    /home/stoy/photos

    /home/stoy/documents

    /home/stoy/games

    The ~/games will probably be an LVM since it contains little critical data and may absolutely need to be expanded to span several drives, though I would also be able to reduce the size of it and remove a drive from the LVM if needed.

    I’d make a simple conky config to keep track of the drive space used

    I’d just keep using the default automount spot for automounting drives.







  • As someone who has lived alone for eight years using only public transport in an area with excellent public transport, I can tell you that you are both right and wrong.

    You are right in that if there is just one bus line, then it would only serve a small subset of people in this photo.

    But if you only make one bus line then the public transport system is doomed to fail.

    A good public transport system will have multiple lines converging to the same interchange, and in the opposite direction it will have multiple lines departing the same interchange, following the same route and branching off when needed, this way you have added capacity and redundancy at the start of the line, and it gets reduced as the need is reduced.

    Then add lines that are circles in higher density areas, this means that no matter the direction all passengers can get on all departures, you csn also quickly add capacity by adding busses that goes in alternating directions.

    All of this means that travellers can define their own route along different bus, train, tram, metro and ferry lines.

    Public transport is not ment to be point to point, it builds a framework where people decide what parts the want to use.