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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I’m hoping for MacroSD. About the size of a 3.5" floppy so you won’t lose it easily.

    Seriously, it’s interesting that now that we have the tech to make a useful-capacity storage device the size of a credit card, we don’t. Not like those crappy giveaway flash drives printed with a card design, where they had a captive USB head and were 4x as thick as a card, but something with just contacts like a chip card, so you might need to use an external reader but it really preserves the wallet-size concept.

    I’d love to have a cheap 16GB card in my wallet with all my health records and a cryptographically signed copy of my will as a one-stop, no cloud required, emergency kit.




  • Runit works well enough for me; I’ve only added one nonstandard service (launch a custom tool to drive an external stats display) and it works fine. My ,xsession has to load some polkit and pulseaudio stuff but that could be because I’m not using a full desktop like KDE/GNOME/XFCE that do those things for you.‘’

    I don’t really try to do custom package recipes because I tend to ./configure;make;make install stuff I want at random.

    EFI boot is no problem. I think my root is btrfs, but the /boot/efi is vfat. Refind is pretty first-class, but sometimes it has stupid conditions where it tries to default to the wrong kernel version if you have multiples installed (I think it sorts by timestamps or filenames in a way that sometimes work counterintuitively; discarding old kernels largely fixes it)

    Haven’t really had too many showstopper problems with xbps. I probably sledgehammer it a bit-- occasionally when it says a repo certificate is out of date, I usually end up doing a full update rather than selectively upgrading packages.




  • Well, the example I gave above-- in the early Socket 754/939 days, ASRock sold a bunch of boards with an extra slot that would take a daughterboard that contained a Socket AM2 and DDR2 slots which would theoretically allow a significant upgrade on the “same” mainboard. Not sure anyone ever bought it, since it cost as much as a new mainboard.

    The most famous example of this style of weirdness was the ECS PF88, which could be equipped with a Socket 939, LGA775, or a Pentium M depending on daughtercard choices.

    But there was also some novel features-- motherboards with tube amplifiers on board (AOpen AX4B-533), a few generations of “instant boot mini-Linux environments”, and some more sophisticated debug tools (I recall some firms trying small LCD displays and voice prompts to replace 7-segment POST code displays-- considering a 128x32 all-points-addressable OLED costs like $1 in quantity of 1, why are those not standard when the motherboard costs $300+?!)



  • Yeah, he was one of a long string of lunatic leaders, which evidently “democracy” has done little to temper. The thing I recall about him was a bit in a reference book to coins and currency: at one point in the 1950s, the central bank issued a 500-hwan note that had a large central portrait of him (the overall design looked like a cheap riff on US currency of the time), and rapidly replaced it because he concluded people folding it in half across his face (as people do with banknotes) was some symbol of defiance to him personally.

    They don’t teach that style of crazy in dictator school.

    As for the “Korea is a puppet and exists only as long as the US props it up”, duh, but I figure there’s perhaps some chance to exploit some “we’ve been under the yoke so long we no longer notice it” and “we’re a big strong country that thinks it can actually engage internationally” mentalities to loosen the fixation with copyright and chasing those imagined license revenues that will never materialize.