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dan

@dan@upvote.au

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

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Corporate astroturfing is the norm

Went to Google Play to complain about Hulu. I noticed Google advertising that over 300 reviews had the verbatim quote "watch and movies that you love". It's always confusing that buggy corporate apps have >95% 5 star reviews until you see that the majority are just completely fake, and no one cares or is doing anything about it.

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If you want true honesty, read some of the 3 star reviews and below.

There are a lot of one star reviews that are astroturfing too (e.g. companies paying for negative reviews of competitors).

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adding "reddit" to the end of google search

As if there's no astroturfing on Reddit :) there's plenty of companies in the comments there, posts promoting particular brands or products that get to the front page, etc.

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English is the most spoken language in the world.

I assume you mean languages that are either spoken as a first or second language, because if you just look at native speakers, more people speak Mandarin than English.

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The uxtheme thing was great because it was pretty powerful, and since it was just the standard theming system built-in to Windows, it was more reliable than theming systems that required third-party apps (WindowBlinds being the most common one).

Apparently uxtheme patching still works on Windows 11, but I haven't tried it.

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In my opinion, it peaked in Windows XP. XP's themes were way more customizable than 98's. You could patch the uxtheme DLL (disable the signature check) to allow third-party themes.

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I love netboot.xyz. I use it all the time when setting up VPS systems. A lot of KVM-based VPSes have iPXE as a boot option so you can chainload directly into netboot without having to use an ISO.

I prefer installing the OS myself over using any images provided by the provider, so that I know exactly how it was set up.

Netboot.xyz has tools to build your own custom version of it too, with your own options. Useful if you want to host it on an internal server. It's essentially just a set of iPXE scripts.

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The FCC seems to have grown a spine given they've reinstated net neutrality and rolled out the Broadband Labels that require ISPs to be upfront about all fees, so maybe they'll tackle this eventually.

In Australia, ISPs have to advertise the "typical" or average speed during peak times. See the plans here for example: https://www.tpg.com.au/nbn. It's still not a guaranteed speed, but listing an average speed during the most congested time (evenings, since everyone is streaming movies and TV shows) is significantly better than listing a maximum speed.

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VS Code wasn't based on Atom. It was written from scratch. The system architecture is very different.

VS Code uses Electron, but all the heavy stuff is running in separate threads or processes, which is why it feels faster than some other Electron apps.

Unfortunately, many Electron apps break the #1 rule of desktop app development: Never do any heavy processing on the UI thread. Any Electron app that does heavy-ish processing really needs to use node:worker_threads or something similar, plus a UI library like React that can prioritise handling of user actions over rendering other parts of the UI.

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The thing that doesn't make sense to me is when vendors have their own domain and site but they use a freemail account (Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, etc). If you really want to run your business using a free service, at least use an email forwarder at your domain.

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"what is your password?"
"uh, it's just the letter A"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRGljemfwUE. A classic.

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The Microsoft 365 admins at my workplace were doing something like this. It's got some sort of built-in phishing simulation functionality (I think it's this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-office-365/attack-simulation-training-simulations). The idea is that the recipient clicks a button in Outlook to report it as suspicious, and get a "congrats you did the right thing" notice.

However, it seems like IT security were unaware of the test, because they started blocking the emails and blackholed the domain the emails linked to (meaning it doesn't resolve on our network any more). They also reported the domain as phishing to some safe browsing vendor we use, which propagated into the blocklist Chrome uses. It was a shared domain Microsoft use for this training (it was one of the domains on this list: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-office-365/attack-simulation-training-get-started?view=o365-worldwide) so Microsoft probably had to deal with un-blocking it...

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setuid binaries are scary, so I could see myself getting behind this.

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literally the universal operating system

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And sudo apt full-upgrade when a new OS version is available.

full-upgrade is the same as upgrade except it'll remove old packages if required. (e.g. programs that don't support the new version and hold back the upgrade due to old dependencies). When upgrading Debian to a new release, I usually first run upgrade, then run full-upgrade and read the output very carefully before continuing.

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is a .deb downloaded from a webpage

deb-get is useful for these.

I hate directly installing Debian packages because I forget to update them (since apt won't update them). I usually either use deb-get or create my own repo for the app using Aptly.

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What type of data are you looking for? Does http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/network_usage_view.html suit your use case? There's similar data somewhere in the modern settings app too.

There's also performance counters for real time data (bytes sent and received): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/networking/technologies/network-subsystem/net-sub-performance-counters. You can use these in any tool that supports performance counters. There's an app that comes with Windows called Performance Monitor that can read these counters.

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Did you try the first app I linked to? I can't try it since I'm away from my computer for a few days.

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I hadn't heard of Atlas... Looks like it's a debloating tool? Does it work well?

Debian FTW

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Is it actually malicious, though? Ads by themselves aren't malicious.

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I solved this by getting an Xbox. I start a game, and it works (as long as there's no mandatory updates...). No worrying about system specs, graphics drivers, or anything like that.

I was all about PC gaming in my teens and 20s. These days, I work all day and have much less free time, and want a gaming system that just works with minimal effort. Consoles handle that nicely.

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What do people use Alpine for? Embedded systems?

I sometimes see it used for Docker containers, but usually a distroless or "chiseled" container is a better fit and can be even lighter weight.

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Interesting - I didn't know it was complete enough to run on a laptop as I've only seen it on servers. Good to know!

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How did you build this list? This is likely to break other things. Azureedge isn't just for ads, and msftconnecttest is literally only used to detect if your internet connection is working.

dan , (edited )
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what they did to LXD

I still don't understand what LXD does that LXC doesn't do. LXC is significantly more popular. All the major control panels (like Proxmox, SolusVM, Virtualizor, etc) support OpenVZ or LXC but not LXD.

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I'm not trying to argue? I legitimately don't know what advantages LXD has since I don't see it used widely in the industry, whereas LXC is everywhere.

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I pre-ordered a Framework 16 laptop and will probably try Linux Mint Debian Edition on it when it arrives.

Debian Edition because I prefer Debian over Ubuntu.

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I like Sweet Home 3D. I'm slowly building my house's floor plan and laying out furniture using it. Just using it sporadically once every few weeks. It'll be done eventually.

I'm hoping to use it in Home Assistant with ha-floorplan (https://experiencelovelace.github.io/ha-floorplan/) so that I can have a floor plan with things overlaid on it (lights, temperature, etc) that you can tap to toggle.

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Would you consider Candy Crush an ad? It was preinstalled. Was the pinball game that used to come with Windows an ad for Maxis Full Tilt Pinball? Was the U2 album that Apple gave away for free an ad for U2? (that was even worse since it was very difficult to remove the album from iTunes).

To be clear, I don't like that Microsoft bundled Candy Crush. I even saw it on my work PC running the enterprise version of Windows! I'm just not sure I'd consider it an ad.

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I've been using Debian on servers for over 20 years. Rock solid. I like it. I like that it doesn't have any corporate influence, and that the main repo consists only of free software. Changes are only made if there's a good reason, unlike Canonical which seem to change things in Ubuntu just because they can.

The last time I used Linux as a desktop OS was around 2007 so I'm excited to get back into it.

dan , (edited )
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Other points about the Australian system:

  • The cost of the university course is subsidised by the government. The government pays the majority of the cost, usually around 70-80%. For example, a Bachelor of Computer Science degree at the university I went to (Swinburne) is currently AU$9k/year (~US$5.8k) subsidised vs AU$39k/year (~US$25.4k) full price.
  • The loans for the amount you have to pay are through the government and are interest free. They're indexed for inflation once per year, but this is a much lower increase compared to interest from a bank loan.
  • You only have to pay it off once you earn over $51k/year, like you said. Repayments start at 1% of income and are paid as part of your income tax return.
  • They used to have a program where if you paid $500 or more of the loan upfront, you'd get a 10% discount (so e.g. if you paid $500, it'd reduce your loan balance by $550).

Note that this system only applies to citizens and permanent residents. International students still have to pay the full price. Having said that, Australian universities frequently advertise at college fairs in the USA, as even at the full price plus flights plus accomodation, studying in Australia can still end up cheaper than the USA, and Americans love Australia 🙂

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Discord? For Linux communities? Linux communities usually like to stick to non-proprietary solutions.

dan , (edited )
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Vista did a bunch of great things... It added BitLocker drive encryption. It added the Snipping Tool for screenshots. It added a newer driver model that end up making drivers far more reliable than on Windows 9x and XP. It required drivers to be signed, which helps a lot with security. It added UAC, which was initially painful but also really helped improve security (no more running every single process with admin permissions). It moved C:\Documents and Settings\ to C:\Users so we didn't have to type that long path any more. And probably a bunch of others I'm forgetting

It was kinda half-baked at the time, but these are all major defining features of Windows. It just took a while for them to become stable.

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If the USA didn't have such a complicated tax system, with companies like Intuit lobbying to keep it that way so they still make money, this wouldn't be an issue.

A lot of countries automatically fill out your entire income tax return for you, and send it to you to verify it. If it's all good, you just need to accept it. Less than five minutes work.

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Not sure about business since I've never had to deal with business tax returns.

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And that organization - the IRS - won’t tell you the information they have. They want you to guess and tell them what you have, so they can tell you if you got it right or not.

This really needs to be fixed.

In Australia, the stuff the government knows about you gets prefilled in the tax return form. Not as good as other countries where the entire thing is completed for you, but better than the USA. The form is significantly shorter than the US one.

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One of my favourite naming schemes is MikroTik's. CRS312-4C+8XG-RM looks like a mess initially, but it's very logical. The features of the product are literally in its name:

  • CRS Cloud Router Switch (product name)
  • 3rd generation
  • 12 ports total
  • 4C+ = 4x combo (RJ45 and SFP+) 10Gbps ports
  • 8XG = 8x 10Gbps RJ45 ports (XG = multi gigabit)
  • RM = rack mountable
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I've got three monitors at work: Two Dell monitors arranged horizontally, and a Samsung that's vertical.

The Dells are U3219Q. U for UltraSharp (product name), 32 for 32 inch, and a little bit extra to differentiate it from other UltraSharp 32 inch models. Nice. (edit: apparently 19 means the model year, i.e. 2019 for this one)

The Samsung is a LF32TU874VNXGO. Just... what? Samsung why do you do this to us?

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I don't see it a lot with consumer electronics. Most other network switches I've dealt with don't have as useful names as MikroTik's.

TP-Link have a switch called the TL-SX3016F. Sure, you can guess that the 16 means 16 ports, but there's no discernable info other than that. Netgear have names like XS716T which are also meaningless other than the 16. D-link have DGS-1510-20 which is similar (20 ports).

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The “other little bit” is the year - 19 means model year 2019.

Wow - This is very useful to know. Thanks! I've got a U4021QW at home, and a friend just bought a newer version of it (U4025QW).

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Honestly I'm just using mine as a basic switch at the moment. It was the cheapest 12-port 10GBase-T switch I could find at the time I bought it, but all the extra features in their OS are a nice bonus.

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My wife used Mint Mobile from 2018 until 2022 and really liked it. We moved in 2022 and unfortunately our new place had very poor T-Mobile coverage so we had to switch, otherwise we'd still be using them. She switched to US Mobile which give you a choice of using T-Mobile or Verizon.

They're QCI 7 rather than QCI 6 though, which basically means they're considered lower priority on the T-Mobile network. If there's congestion (not enough network bandwidth for everyone that wants to use it), customers on QCI 6 are given priority. Every MVNO except for Google Fi is QCI 7, while Google Fi and most plans directly through T-Mobile are QCI 6.

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I miss when custom ROMs were easier. Practically every phone with Windows Mobile supported custom ROMs. I tried a lot of custom Windows Mobile 5.0, 6.0 and 6.5 ROMs back in the day. It was pretty straightforward on older Android, too.

These days, it seems like so many phones are locked down, for example with a locked bootloader. It's so dumb. If I paid for my phone, I should be able to do whatever I want with it. Why even some tech-savvy people are comfortable with being limited in terms of what they can do with their expensive devices, I'll never know.

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HKEY means "handle to registry key"... Not that that helps anything.

When code opens a file, device, etc, it's given a "handle" to it, which is an internal reference so that Windows knows which file you're reading or writing, and it keeps track of where you are in the document. Similarly, HKEY_CURRENT_USER is the handle that gives you the current user part of the registry.

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there is no difference between a program and an app

Yeah the naming is confusing. The reason is what you said - machine vs app.

Back on Windows 9x, some apps would store files directly in the C:\Program Files directory. This was 'fine' at the time since every app ran with full permissions. Users were at C:\Windows\Users, but users were optional so not every install used it.

Windows XP had a better NT-based permission model (not nearly as improved as Vista, but better than 9x) and allowing regular users to write to the Program Files and Windows folders wasn't really a good idea. It added two directories for settings:

  • C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data for user-specific data
  • C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data for non-user-specific data

Vista kept the former but moved the latter to C:\ProgramData. I can't remember why.

Windows 7 moved the user stuff to C:\Users.

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It's HKEY (handle to key), not HOTKEY. That's what I was trying to say in my comment. There's no "HOTKEY".

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Yeah both runit and sysvinit are supported, but packages are no longer required to include sysvinit scripts, so there's no guarantee that all software will work. Most have kept their sysvinit script though.

The main issue will be that systemd does a lot of stuff, so you'd have to install replacements for everything else it does - like a syslog daemon for logging, ntp client for clock syncing, DNS resolver, etc.

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I see them!

Here's a screenshot:
https://upvote.au/pictrs/image/8ef19fa3-7aca-49b1-bd4b-58988e4e3ed5.jpeg

dan ,
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My screenshot is from the "Boost" mobile app on Android :) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rubenmayayo.lemmy

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