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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The Turris Omnia is an open, powerful router that comes with OpenWRT.

    Turris adds an additional UI and features beyond that, but the OpenWRT UI is still available and the stock firmware can be completely replaced with OpenWRT if so desired.

    It’s a bit pricey but has great specs (1.6 GHz dual core, 2GB RAM, 8GB eMMC) and is an excellent device for tinkerers with headers exposing UART, JTAG, GPIO, and more. It has three internal mPCIe ports as well.

    I am not affiliated with Turris but just happened to stumble upon a new one at a garage sale a couple of days ago. Lucky find and I’m excited.














  • For most utilities (water, electricity), there’s a relatively linear relationship between the tangible value provided (energy used, water dispensed) and the cost to provide it (coal burned, water sourced/treated). Even for wind- or hydro-powered electricity, the amount that everybody uses has a proportional amount of wear on the system and consequent required maintenance.

    But not so much for ISPs. Instead, you’re basically paying for a “fictional” amount (speed) of a non-tangible product. Granted, there is a linear relationship to the amount of electricity the ISP uses to provide each bit, but it’s negligible.

    Instead, what you’re paying for with internet is essentially to recoup the fixed costs of the provider’s equipment. They do need to upgrade every so often to accommodate more capacity and faster speeds, but this is proportional to speeds provided and not data volume used.



  • The --hold feature was introduced with snapd v2.58 which was released as recently as Dec 1, so less than 9 months ago. So I would consider this a relatively new feature.

    Furthermore, as best as I can tell from the documentation, there isn’t even a way to configurably hold updates in general or for a specific package like can be done with apt-preferences; refresh.hold only allows 90 days out.

    I think it is a perfectly valid criticism that the snap developers didn’t implement this feature at all until well into the life of the product and then, even then, done begrudgingly at best evidenced by the minimal implementation.

    Now, I feel like I did my research, but feel free to let me know if there’s something I can do better or if you have any other general life advice for me.


  • For starters, you can replace the equivalent of the battery: fuel

    Don’t get me wrong; my next car will be an EV. But it is disingenuous to hand wave the reality that EV batteries are expensive and difficult to replace, somewhat negating the economical and environmental benefits.

    I do all of my work on my own cars in my home shop, including things like dropping transmissions. This is why I’m able to keep cars for over 20 years. But there’s no way I would be able to even start to replace an EV battery pack simply due to the weight.

    But, for me anyway, that’s not a compelling excuse not to get an EV. It’s the way of the future and, by the sheer nature of getting one, I’m promoting their adoption, encouraging their innovation, and driving down the cost overall. So I look forward to it, even if there are some inconvenient truths.



  • Try putting it in the freezer for a few minutes before trying to read the data. Or heat it up slightly.

    This is an old trick I’ve used to recover data from a hard drive or two. I suppose it could help if the problem with the SD is some kind of microscopic fractures.

    It should be emphasized that this is just a temporary workaround at best.


  • My C.H.I.P is still rocking in a special project sitting on my desk.

    For those that don’t know, it is like a RPi but smaller, cheaper (originally $9), more I/O, and had WiFi & Bluetooth (whereas the RPi2 of the time didn’t). DIPs (aka hats) were available giving HDMI, VGA, and other capabilities including the PocketCHIP which turned it into a handheld computer by providing a display, button-keyboard, and battery.

    While the project is now defunct, kept alive only by the community, there was an attempt to resurrect it in concept and form-factor as the Popcorn Computer on Kickstarter. But that one didn’t fund so, alas, it is now an endangered species.

    “There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.” -HST