vvv

@vvv@programming.dev
2 Post – 112 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Updoots for The 4400. Might be my favorite show of all time. The theme song is still playing in my head.

Do /not/ make the mistake of watching the cw's 4400 (without a The). I would rather watch Tommy Wiseau's The Neighbors over it.

Add Tucker and Dale vs Evil to that category.

it's awful and I hate it. I generally prefer not to have a shared identity across communities, and there's no way to create a usable discord identity without a phone number.

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just to add a little more explanation to what the other posters are suggesting.... a hard drive, from the perspective of your OS is very very simple. it's a series of bytes. for the sake of this example, let's say there are 1000 of them. they are just a series of numbers.

how do you tell apart which numbers belong to which partitions? well there's a convention: you decide that the first 10 of those numbers can be a label to indicate where partions start. e.g. your efi starts at #11 and ends at #61. root at starts at #61 and ends at #800. the label doesn't say anything about the bytes after that.

how do you know which bytes in the partions make up files? similar sort of game with a file system within the bounds of that partion - you use some of the data as a label to find the file data. maybe bytes 71-78 indicate that you can find ~/.bash_histor at bytes 732-790.

what happened when you shrunk that root partions, is you changed that label at the beginning. your root partion, it says, now starts at byte #61 and goes to #300. any bytes after that, are fair game for a new partion and filesystem to overwrite.

the point of all this, is that so far all you've done is changed some labels. the bytes that make up your files are still on the disk, but perhaps not findable. however - because every process that writes to the disk will trust those labels, any operation you do to the disk, including mounting it has a chance to overwrite the data that makes up your files.

this means:

  • most of your files are probably recoverable
  • do not boot the operating system on that drive, or any other that will attempt to mount it, because you risk overwring data
  • before you start using any data recovery tools, make a copy of the raw bytes of the disk to a different disk, so that if the tools mess up you have an option to try again

ONLY after that is done, the first thing I'd try is setting that partion label back to what it used to say, 100gb.. if you're lucky, everything will just work. if you aren't, tools like 'photorec' can crawl the raw bytes of the disk and try and output whatever files they find.

good luck!

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.... but cd is a built-in

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grep -r exists and is even more faster and doesn't require passing around file names.

grep -r --include='*.txt' 'somename' .

(obligatory I'm not a network surgeon this is likely not perfectly correct)

The article mentions network interfaces, DHCP and gateways so real quick: a network interface usually represents a physical connection to a network, like an Ethernet port or a WiFi card. DHCP is a protocol that auto configured network routes and addresses once a physical connection is established, like when you jack in via an ethernet cable, it tells you the IP address you should go by, the range of IP address on the network you've connected to, where you can resolve domain names to IP addresses. It also tells you the address of a default gateway to route traffic to, if you're trying to reach something outside of this network.

You can have more than one set of this configuration. Your wired network might tell you that your an address is 10.0.0.34, anything that starts with 10.0.0. is local, and to talk to 10.0.0.254 if you're trying to get to anything else. If at the same time you also connect to a wireless network, that might tell you that your address is 192.168.0.69, 192.168.0.* is your local network, and 192.168.0.254 is your gateway out. Now your computer wants to talk to 4.2.2.2. Should it use the wireless interface and go via 192.168.0.254? or the wired one and use 10.0.0.254? Your os has a routing table that includes both of those routes, and based on the precedence of the entries in it, it'll pick one.

VPN software usually works by creating a network interface on your computer, similar to an interface to a WiFi card, but virtual. It then asks the OS to route all network traffic, through the new interface it created. Except of course traffic from the VPN software, because that still needs to get out to the VPN provider (let's say, at 1.3.3.7) via real Internet.

So if you're following along at home, your routing table at this point might look like this:

  • traffic to 1.3.3.7 should go to 10.0.0.254 via the wired interface
  • all traffic should go to the VPN interface
  • traffic to 10.0.0.* should go to the wired interface
  • all traffic should go to 10.0.0.254 via the wired interface
  • traffic to 192.168.0.* should go to the wireless interface
  • all traffic should go to 192.168.0.254 via the wireless interface

whenever your os wants to send network packets, it'll go down this list of rules until one applies. With that VPN turned on, most of the time, only those two first rules will ever apply.

If I'm reading the article correctly, what this attack does, is run a DHCP server, that when handing out routing rules, will send one with a flag that causes, for example, the last two rules to be placed at the top of the list instead of the bottom. Your VPN will still be on, the configuration it's requested the OS to make would still be in place, and yet all your traffic will be routed out to this insecure wireless network that's somehow set itself as the priority route over anything else.

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something to consider here... Firefox lazy-loads out of focus tabs when you start it, so if you're a tab hoarder, it's nice for just the one active tab per window to load when you start the browser.

I'm not sure that you can get it to do the same with "out of focus" windows. or maybe I have a tab hoarding problem.

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Another way of writing '10'

... but there is a way, and it has been proven.

One of the more memorable physics classes I've had went into the history of discoveries that led to our understanding of relativity. The relevant story here, starts with how sound travels though air.

Let's say you're standing at the bottom of a building shouting to your friend peeking out a window on the 5th floor. On a calm day, that friend will hear you at pretty much the same time as someone standing the same distance away, but on the street. However, if it's windy, the wind pushes around the air through which the sound of your voice is traveling, the friend up in the window will have a slight delay in receiving that sound. This can of course be verified with more scientific rigor, like a sound sent in two perpendicular directions activating a light.

Scientist at the time thought that light, like sound, must travel though some medium, and they called this theoretical medium the Aether. Since this medium is not locked to Earth, they figured they must be capable of detecting movement of this medium, an Aether wind, if you will. If somehow the movement of this medium caused the speed of light in one direction to be faster than another due to the movement of this medium, measuring the speed in two directions perpendicular to each other would reveal that difference. After a series of experiments of increasing distances and measurement sensitivities (think mirrors on mountain tops to measure the time for a laser beam to reflect), no change in the speed of light based on direction was found.

Please enjoy this wikipedia hole: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment , and please consider a bit of caution before you refer to things as facts in the future!

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Be careful, if you get a .pizza, you are only legally allowed to spend the donations on pizza.

The value proposition of old or used android phones as SBCs is insane! You've probably got some in your drawers, or can at worst buy some carrier locked ones for 30$. You get a device with better compute than a raspberry pi, with a screen, cameras, speakers, flashlight and battery attached!

Personally, I use them to run and monitor my 3d printers.

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it feels to me, like they're less looking for new people to start doing this "work", but more to connect with people who already happen to be enthusiastically going to events and showing off their laptops.

just to give you the term to search for, these types of applications are called snippet managers. for example, https://snibox.github.io/

there's a ton of them around. I don't have a particular one that I recommend, since it's not something I use in my workflow.

like this?

I really think that's the secret end game behind all the AI stuff in both Windows and MacOS. MS account required to use it. (anyone know if you need to be signed in to apple ID for apple ai?) "on device" inference that sometimes will reach out to the cloud. when it feels like it. maybe sometimes the cloud will reach out to you and ask your cpu to help out with training.

that, and better local content analysis. "no we aren't sending everything the microphone picks up to our servers, of course not. just the transcript that your local stt model made of it, you won't even notice the bandwidth!)"

firefox sync has worked pretty great for me, across all devices. I don't self host it, but seems like once again, they've gotten it to the point where you can.

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John Oliver take on it https://youtu.be/gYwqpx6lp_s

A JavaScript VM in the kernel is inevitable.

I use Firefox on all my devices and couldn't be happier with it. I especially love how sync works: there's options to both pull tabs from other devices, and push to them. Quite frequently I'd be just browsing on my phone and send a tab over to my laptop to deal with/read/act on when I'm sitting down at a bigger screen.

Further, in terms of safety, having a large display built into your dash showing you navigation is much better than a small device you jerryrig onto a vent or something. It's easier to see via your peripheral vision, and won't put you in a situation where you need to go find it off of the floor when it falls off.

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Geocaching is free and usually lots of fun in cities. It's like a big database of dead drops - people hide small containers with pieces of paper to sign, and post their GPS coordinates online. Frequently they're hidden near points if interest, as well so you might find some cool shops or bars as a side effect.

I'll take it over QuickTime

Everything else wrong with Gmail and Google aside, those are the least reasonable complaints? You can use labels as folders. You can also disable conversation grouping, but I doubt you go more than a week before turning it back on.

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More than that, your editor doesn't run with root permissions, which reduces the risk of accidentally overwriting something you didn't mean to.

That's the other one. The Rabbit thing is $200, which, not that I would buy one, is not too unreasonable for an AI tamagotchi

I've been very happy with roku tvs at home and a roku stick "to-go". Very simple interface with minimal ads that you can block.

I don't get it, who in their right mind hosts development stuff on a Windows clunker?

Same question, but Subversion. Switch to git. Import your repos with git-svn.

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I have a stupid little script for this:

#!/bin/sh

setres() {
  output=$1
  width=$2
  height=$3

  xrandr --output $output --brightness 0 --auto
  xrandr --delmode $output better
  xrandr --rmmode better

  xrandr --newmode better $(cvt $width $height | tail -n1 | cut -d'"' -f3)
  xrandr --addmode $output better
  xrandr --output $output --brightness 1 --mode better 
}

setres "$@"

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I personally disabled the feature on my phone when it popped up as available. I don't have much of an interest in contributing to a weird surveillance network.

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Likely relevant John Oliver about these types of scams: https://youtu.be/pLPpl2ISKTg?si=WYsqiiQ4f3U6ZoIe

yep. they're still here. they got smaller, and we call them "tracking pixels" now.

it's just an image, which, server side, you can count the number of times it got loaded. easy to embed and no js required.

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Very important distinction. When the apple vr battery dies, or the software fails, you're suddenly blind.

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Hi! Although your post is full of reasonable advice on maintaining privacy online I want to challenge you on the statement that the threat model matters. The contrapositive of the statement "I don't need privacy if I have nothing to hide" is "I have something to hide, if I need privacy". This puts those marginalized groups you mentioned in a position where simply by using a privacy tool or technique, they draw suspicion to themselves. It might immediately raise subconscious alarms in internet communities like facebook, where the expectation is that you use your real name.

The only way privacy measures work for anyone, is if they're implemented for everyone.

Further, I'd like to challenge the concept that a cis white tech bro has nothing to hide. There's a big invisible "for now" at the end of that statement. The internet, mostly, never forgets. We've had waves of comedians get "cancelled" over tweets they made years ago. Times change, people grow, laws regress. Posting statements about abortions is as of this year, suddenly unsafe. Maybe posting about neurodivergence comes next. Who knows with the way the world is going, maybe 5 years from now you'll regret having posts on /c/atheism associated with you.

I think a good way to be considerate of privacy is to think in terms of identities, what those identities are for, and what links those identities. Does your identity on github need make comments about your political leanings? Should your resume have a link to your github? Does your identity on etsy need to have a link to your onlyfans? Does your dating profile need a link to your reddit account? Your "2nd" reddit account? Not all of these are clear yes or no answers, they're just things to consider and make decisions about. Also, consider what class identities you only have one of, and what class of identities are for the most part unchangeable, e.g. attaching your phone number to two separate identities functionally links them.

It might be an attention thing. With an emoji in a post your eyes are drawn towards the cute colorful picture before you l've read the content of the post. Emoticons on the other hand don't stand out as much, but serve a similar purpose: punctuate a thought with an emotion (=

dd if=image.img of=/dev/disk/flashdrive is usually all you need

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I can see it happening if it becomes an "appliance", similar market to what the home assistant green doodad is going for. "put this shiny blue cube full of hard drives into your kitchen, and join the identiverse! it also comes in purple!"

The password to my password manager: a few randomly chosen words that will definitely just sound like nonsense dementia-talk probably.

I highly recommend installing fzf, and its shell integration. Makes your Ctrl + r magnitudes more pleasant to use!