MCS-51
MCS-51, as in the Intel Microcontroller? I’m trying to find some link between that chip and the VHS standard, but I’m not immediately coming up with anything. From my reading, I see that some variants of the MCS-51 incorporate DSP functionality, which would make for a good analogue media device, but I’m not seeing any VHS VCRs that use one.
I’m far sadder to see the various MIPS machines starting to lose support than I am for Itanic.
I REGRET buying an nvidia adapter when I had the opportunity to buy an AMD/Radeon adapter.
During the pandemic, I purchased an GeForce GTX 1650. It’s an older, Turing hardware-based card, so you’d think the driver support would be pretty mature, right? It has been NOTHING but problems.
On nouveau, it’s stable, but 3d acceleration just doesn’t work right. Under the nvidia open source driver, it corrupts the screen after boot and locks up entirely second later. Under the proprietary driver, it freezes on boot a good amount of the time.
Now, once I get it booted, it’s solid as a rock. I’ve gotta crank the engine over five or six times every time I DO boot, though. If I had it to do over again, I’d definitely have stuck with AMD.
“Brave Hero from Finland, you’ve been struck by a bus and are going to reincarnate into–”
“No I wasn’t. That bus CHASED ME DOWN two alleys, over a fire hydrant, into, and out of a Starbucks. It did NOT hit me. You just summoned me here.”
“Err… anyway, this world needs a hero to–”
“Write hardware drivers? A kernel module? Some inline assembly?”
"Err… the demon lord… er… "
“DID YOU EVEN MAIL THE LIST? Hah… Okay. Does this world have logic gates of any kind? I need to get this knocked out as soon as possible. I’ve got the entirety of the bcachefs patchset to review before 6.7 is in release.”
Yeah, that was close to the end of that job. I didn’t want to be there, and that particular manager was really upset that they couldn’t just eliminate those servers. He wanted his folks trained on them, but then refused to actually let them spend any time training on them. I was a scapegoat and took the severance deal ASAP.
“I’ll Become the Strongest Adventurer in the Other World with My Maximum Level Open Source Operating System Development Skills.”
You’re using it well. Nothing wrong at all.
This. Too many partitions for a home system can get pretty stupid pretty quick. But OP has just the right amount of separation between system and data. I’ve known people that were uncomfortable without breaking /var (or /var/log) off into its own partition, but that’s really overkill for a stable, personal system, IMO.
computer isn’t a dino that can’t handle it.
I feel personally called out by this statement!
Seriously, the big one for me, is that I like having drive encryption. It protects my computer and data should it fall into the hands of, say, burglers. I also like turning it up to the elevens simply because I’m a bit TOO paranoid. You really need more than 1GB of ram to do argon2id key derivation, which is what fde is all moving to for unlocking purposes, and BIOS just can’t do that. My main workstation is using a powerful, but older mobo with gigabyte’s old, horrid faux EFI support.
Another good one for the security-conscientious person is Secure Boot, meaning that you control what kernels and bootloading code is allowed to boot on your computer, preventing Evil Maid-type attacks: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot
That’s pretty far fetched, but maybe not too out of the question if you, say, work for a bank or accountant.
Of course none of that matters if you don’t practice good operational security.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor is a thing that any GOOD project or IT department considers. How many of your staff can you afford to lose if they all happen to be travelling in the same bus, on their way to eat at the same place for lunch when an asteroid inevitably punches through said bus and/or diner.
‘Hit by an asteroid’ is a little unrealistic. Sentenced to prison for 15 to Life has happened in the Open Source community at least once before. The project I linked to had a Bus Factor of about one. It’s now ‘old code using outdated APIs’ and is considered obsolete.
I’ve personally seen legal and criminal issues for a single individual cripple IT departments before, meaning their bus factor was also way too low. I’ve been on trips that have been rudely interrupted by screaming executives when I came down out of the mountains into cell range because I was the only bus factor left on certain systems. Natural disaster, such as hurricanes, wildfires, and floods are very serious existential threats to even the largest of organizations.
Since Linux seems to be a good project, I can’t imagine that the discussion hasn’t been had, in public or in private. Millions of individuals and dozens upon dozens of big corporations depend on Linux, Open source and otherwise. If the bus comes for core maintainers or project leaders we have at least SOME backup.
“Here’s something I made for my school work. It occurs that it might be useful to others in my line of study.”
WTG! You just EXEMPLIFIED the open source ethic!
My favorites:
Mono:
https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka
Period. Full stop. A line of nothing but exclamation points. The Iosevka family blows every other mono-width font out of the water with at LEAST one, if not more, of its extremely customizable variations.
F/W:
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Comfortaa
This almost seems like a good idea… if unicode weren’t already shaky enough.
UTF-8 is, honestly, pretty amazing. It lets you do things like compose latin-character text, and then interpose words like 𰻞.
That’s ‘biáng’, which is, to my understanding, a kind of Chinese noodle dish. It’s apparently the most complex Chinese character, comprising more than 50 strokes. (https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+30EDE).
In hex it’s encoded as: 0xF0 0xB0 0xBB 0x9E
So, yeah, only 8 bytes to describe a character that looks like white noise to me unless I zoom WAY in on it! (My vision’s getting pretty bad, tbh. I need it to be about the size it shows up on compart.com to make out the individual radical characters.)
If you were to count strokes on ‘biáng’, you end up with 5 bytes to encode 11 pen strokes or 2.2 strokes per byte. At 8 bytes to 57 pen strokes, the information density goes up to 7.125 strokes per byte.
So in Latin characters provided by UTF-8, you end up with very similar storage requirements. To encode the much more complex character, you get more than 3 times the information density.
I will never not be impressed with people who get themselves off drugs and have endless respect for that.
Luthis, you’re doing God’s work here. You are learning by experimentation and then, importantly, documenting and sharing what you’ve learned. There is absolutely zero wrong and only good to be had in either of those and in combining them, you’re doing service to our entire community.