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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Society has apparently forgotten the good old ‘call me when you get there’-thing. My wife travels by car with our kids now and then for 300-400km at a time and it’s nice to get messages/calls like “we’re at X, stopped for coffee” or “we got here”. That’s all I need and it’s also a part of relationship and communication. There’s no value on following a dot on the map. They even had a small accident one time and I heard about it soon enough. Even if I had their live location it would mean absolutely nothing as they were over an hour away, it was way more important to get proper help there before notifying me instead of getting distracted by my calls/messages at that time.


  • Valve is basically a small business one bad Monday from going bankrupt compares to payment processors.

    Few quick searches around the internet says that (measured by revenue) Mastercard alone is roughly 3 times bigger than Valve. So even if Valve is pretty big player it’s not even close on major payment processors. And they’re not playing on the same rules either, any payment processor can vanish payments for anyone with just ‘fuck you, that’s why’ -reasoning buried in their contracts. There’s almost no one who could afford to fight with them even in theory and much less in practise.


  • If you are willing to deal with potential galvanic corrosion, condensation, leaks, replacing fluid every now and then and so on I suppose you could use red or yellow radiator coolant from your local car service shop. It has all the properties you’ll want from a coolant liquid, but as others have already mentioned, it’s not really worth the hassle. Atleast if you’re not running something really power hungry, like GPU farm. And even with liquid you have the very same problems than air, you need the heat to go somewhere. So either have very long pipes (and pumps to match them) so you can have the radiator on a different room/outside or big fans to move the hot air away from radiator.


  • And setting permissions on directories get’s them inherited by newly created/added files in there, right?

    No. They’re created based on ‘umask’ and changing directory permissions doesn’t automatically change permissions on underlying files (unless you set privileges recursively) nor new files in the directory.

    So how can i remove the ability from my homedir to execute current and new files but keep the traverse permission?

    For new files set your umask on what you want. By default it’s usually either 0002 or 0022. For existing files you can use find: find ~ -type f -exec echo chmod a-x {} \; (remove echo once you’ve confirmed that it does what you want).



  • big begginer distros

    I wouldn’t say that Mint is a ‘beginner’ distro. Sure, it’s beginner friendly, but it’s equally friendly for everyone. I’ve been a linux user for “a while” and currently I prefer Mint on my workstations. It offers me everything I need from a distro in a neat package and as I’ve been a Debian user since Potato it’s a familiar environment.

    But if OP want’s somehting “more linux-y” then good old Debian should do the trick. Basically anything with decently long history besides Ubuntu (in it’s current state) will do just fine.


  • Obviously we’re talking about hobbyist level stuff and with that there’s always something what can go wrong and it’s not always obvious what it is. So if the ‘remote end’ doesn’t have someone who can do at least very basic troubleshooting it can be nearly impossible to fix the setup over the phone unless you just replace the whole thing and ship whole units back and forth.

    But in this particular case the remote end has someone who knows their stuff so it’s taken care of, with or without a KVM. I’ve been thinking a similar setup with my relatives and on my case the distance isn’t an issue but it’s still something I’d need to bother family members with and, for me, it was simpler to get a storage box from hetzner and run backups to that instead of getting more hardware.

    Maintenance is anyways something you need to consider and viable options for that vary on a case-by-case basis, so there’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution.



  • I would consider also the case where something goes wrong. Maybe the whole thing crashes, maybe you misconfigure something, maybe there’s a power outage or something else happens and you lose the connectivity. Is there someone on site who can do anything to your hardware as you can’t easily just go and figure it out by yourself?

    If the answer is ‘no’ then I would strongy reconsider the whole approach. On a worst case scenario the system goes down before you’re even back home from the trip and then your hardware is just gathering dust.



  • I think what just_another_person means that Lenovo, specially at the beginning when they got the Think-brand from IBM years ago, tried to ride the brand and released sub-par laptops under ThinkPad -brand. At least some of the L-series were closer to what you could get from your local supermarket than actual work machines.

    The brand-riding is now greatly less and the crappy ones generally aren’t the models you can find refurbished from 3rd party retailer. I’m currently using T495 and it was ~300€ from a sale couple years ago, now you apparently can get L13 for less than that. And of course, when you buy used units do your homework and only make deal with a reputable seller, there’s always an option that previous owner didn’t treat the thing nicely.



  • The best mechanics can track down an issue by reasoning about what could be causing it

    Same principle works with IT. I do and have done sysadmin stuff for quite a while and there’s always some random software or whatever I’ve never heard of and someone comes and asks me to fix it. Then you start to ask questions, “what exactly doesn’t work”, “can you show me what you’re doing”, “what should happen when you press that button”, “can you show settings on that thing” and so on. Then you can start to dig down, does the server they’re using respond to ping, does DNS resolve (it’s always DNS after all), does that thing work on the next workstation, when did the problem appear and was there some other maintenance or changes going on at that time and so on.

    Same principle, just start to reason the whole thing from bottom up, check everything you come across untill you find something which doesn’t work and then do what’s needed to fix that, rinse and repeat until the problem goes away and make sure that what you’re doing won’t cause new problems. Just the tools are different, the mindset is more or less the same.


  • Does a senior mechanic need to understand the physics of piston design to be a great mechanic

    I would argue that if senior mechanic doesn’t understand the physics of piston design at least on some degree he’s not a great mechanic. Obviously mechanic doesn’t need understanding on metallurgy, CAD models and a ton of other deeper level stuff just like an IT engineer doesn’t need to know on a deep level how circuit boards are designed or how CPU die manufacturing process works. But both benefit greatly when they understand why something is built the way it is.

    I’m also an systems engineer of sorts and have worked with software engineers. And I’ve had requests like “Can’t you just set 'bind-address = 0.0.0.0 on mysql-server and disable firewall” on a directly internet-facing machine and then received complaints when I’m “making things more difficult” from “senior software” -titles. Sure, I can’t write the code they’re doing, or at least it would take me a crapload of more time to do that but on the other hand there’s guys who have so very narrow understanding on anything they work with that it makes me wonder how they can do their work at all in the first place.

    Of course no one can master everything in any field but I find it concerning that a lot of guys just press the buttons more or less randomly until their thing works without any clue on what they actually did and how it might affect on different parts of the house of cards they’re building.




  • “But don’t forget the situation we are in. Now is the time of military censorship, unprecedented for our country. After all, the war is going on in the information space too,” Peskov is quoted as saying by the magazine.

    So it is a war after all? And that front goes both ways, you can see even here on Lemmy comments which could be paid actors on behalf of Russia. Most likely not all of them get paid, but I’m pretty sure at least some do (obviously not focusing just on Lemmy).


  • As long as there’s no military need for them against an invasion there will be zero mines in the ground. No one will hurt themselves with them, unless some storage worker happens to drop a box on their toes.

    As of why now, you can’t pull out of agreement and start to build up manufacturing and logistics if there’s active invasion going on. I hope not a single one of them is ever dug on our Finnish soil, but I’m glad that our military is prepared to use any viable option if they need to.


  • I somewhat agree on your comment about documentation and UI (altough once you get used to it, it’s manageable) but just to add with my experience on these things: for me they’ve been rock solid. I’ve used them both at home and professionally (mostly on small-ish networks) for at least 10 years and they just seem to run just fine.

    Currently my home router is RB4011iGS+ and there’s been absolutely no problems with it in the 4-5 years it’s been on my network. I’m not saying all their models are as reliable and there’s not that many models I’ve had my hands on, but my experience with them has so far been pretty good.


  • You’ll get used to it eventually

    I’ve been earning my living mostly with connecting to remote systems via ssh (and other means) for quite a few years and I still occasionally mess up and enter commands on a wrong terminal. Less now than I used to, but it still happens. The trick is to learn youself to pause for a second and confirm the target for any potentially destructive or otherwise harmful command, no matter if it’s locally or to some server other side of the world.