Dave.

Microsoft is shit. Windows, is shit. Windows 11 is a privacy goddamn nightmare.

But in the end of the day, it just fucking works, those damn bastards ensure that. And even when something doesn’t work, it seems, for some unknown reason, most of the online solutions do fix the issue.

Hahahahahahahahahahaha

(Pause for breath)

Hahahahahahahahahahaha

Only if you count “most of the online solutions” as “run SFC /SCANNOW and if that doesn’t work, just reinstall your OS”.

I want a music playing alarm app that’s permanently locked to Sonny and Cher’s , “I got you babe”.

That’s easy. Just fly somewhere and bring it in your carry-on, airport security will let you know.

I don’t think there’s anything commercially available that can do it.

However, as an experiment, you could:

• Get a group of photos from a burst shot
• Encode them as individual frames using a modern video codec using, eg VLC.
• See what kind of file size you get with the resulting video output.
• See what artifacts are introduced when you play with encoder settings.

You could probably/eventually script this kind of operation if you have software that can automatically identify and group images.

True. Hence my caveat of “most cards”. If it’s got LEDs on the port, it’s quite likely to signal which speed it is at with those LEDs.

I haven’t yet come across a gigabit card that won’t do 10Mbit (edit: switches are a different matter) but sometimes I’ve come across cards that fail to negotiate speeds correctly, eg trying for gigabit when they only actually have a 4 wire connection that can support 100Mbit. Forcing the card to the “correct” speed makes them work.

I’m guessing something like:

Robots.txt: Do not index this particular area.

Main page: invisible link to particular area at top of page, with alt text of “don’t follow this, it’s just a bot trap” for screen readers and such.

Result: any access to said particular area equals insta-ban for that IP. Maybe just for 24 hours so nosy humans can get back to enjoying your site.

There was a series of books in the '80s where a systems programmer gets pulled through a portal into your typical magical world, good vs evil, etc.

They subsequently look at the magical spells in use and realise they can apply Good Systems Programming Practices™ to them. And thus, with their knowledge of subroutines and parallel processing, they amplify their tiny innate magical abilities up to become a Pretty Good Magician™. So while all the rest of the magicians basically have to construct their spells to execute in a linear fashion, they’re making magical subroutines and utility functions and spawning recursive spells without halting checks and generally causing havoc.

It’s quite a good allegory for modern times, where a select few build all the magic and the rest just have useful artefacts they use on a day to day basis with no idea how they work

in which case I will go one level down, to the calculateExtraCommissions() method.

In which case you will discover that the calculateExtraCommissions() function also has the same nested functions and you eventually find six subfunctions that each calculate some fraction of the extra commission, all of which could have been condensed into three lines of code in the parent function.

Following the author’s idea of clean code to the letter results in a thick and incomprehensible function soup.

For later reference, the link light on most network cards is a different colour depending on link speed. Usually orange for 1G, green for 100M and off for 10M (with data light still blinking).

I have not cared about or terminated A-spec after network cards gained auto MDI/MDIX about 20 years ago.

Yeah , it’s really a little strange in OPs case, I can’t really recall changing a CMOS battery in ages, like decades of computer use.

1. Replace CMOS battery.
2. Get small UPS.
3. Discover that small UPS’s fail regularly, usually with cooked batteries.
4. Add maintenance routine for UPS battery.
5. Begin to wonder if this is really worth it when the rest of the house has no power during an outage.
6. Get small generator.
7. Discover that small generators also need maintenance and exercise.
8. Decide to get a whole house battery backup a-la Tesla Powerwall topped off by solar and a dedicated generator.
9. Spend 15 years paying this off while wondering if the payback was really worth it, because you can count on one hand the number of extended power outages in that time.
10. In the end times a roving band of thugs comes around and kills you and strips your house of valuable technology, leaving your homelab setup behind and - sadly - without power. Your dream of unlimited availability has all been for nought.

Conclusion: just replace the CMOS battery on a yearly basis during planned system downtime.

*Inspects saucepan*

It does? Wow this technology stuff is more insidious than I thought.

I have to wonder if there is a way for clients to glom together duplicate posts across your subscribed communities into one, and if you reply to a thread in that post it passes it back to the correct discussion.

I mean, you’d still see repetitive stuff in the post’s comments from your point of view, but everything would be in one place from your perspective and it would be semi-transparent, at least for the communities you subscribe to.

All the information is there, it should be doable…

Let me know if I can explain it more clearly.

Multi-part MIME containing inline images is actually what you’re looking for and it’s fairly easy to implement.

Here’s an example. They handwave over the html section that actually refers to the inline images that they embed, but that’s the basic layout you need.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/exchange_server_protocols/ms-oxcmail/7a08211a-760a-41af-8cab-0acf462c4094

Directly from the nginx home page:

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, a mail proxy server, and a generic TCP/UDP proxy server, originally written by Igor Sysoev.

Australian here, in Finland. Holy shit it seems everyone smokes like chimneys here.

Never really thought about how much smoking has declined in Aus over the last 20-40 years, but yeah coming over here has been an eye opener.

You’re right, I try to use {insert cryptocurrency that I’m heavily financially invested in} for my every day transactions as much as possible, you should too, and you can get amazing returns as well! It’s win-win nobody loses ❤️

What if I want to buy a cheese sandwich today with BTC?

A cheese sandwich can remain the same fixed price in dollars for years, with only the relatively slow change in actual value due to inflation.

I’ve seen BTC swing 10% in 24 hours. Does the cheese-sandwich-maker have to look up the rate this instant and calculate a spot price for me?

Will they have more or less dollars at the end of the day, when they need to pay their bills and buy more cheese from their suppliers?

“Just buy cheese from someone who takes BTC”, doesn’t help, it just kicks the can further down the road.

“Just add a bit of a buffer in the price to take fluctuations into account”, means that I go buy a cheese sandwich with dollars from next door because it’s 50 cents cheaper for the same thing.

As an investment vehicle, BTC is doing hot laps of the track (with occasional accidents), but until its volatility issues are sorted and it becomes “boring”, it’s not going anywhere as an actual currency.

Webrings were themed though, so if your interest was cars, or cats, or ham radio, you could get on a webring for one of those topics and cycle through them.

And it wasn’t all random, you could move left or right on the ring , or jump randomly. So a good webring manager could group sites together as you went around the ring as well.