Subj : What to do with a gia To : Ky Moffet From : Barry Martin Date : Fri Oct 16 2020 12:34:00 Hi Ky! > Don't recall that but probably did it accidentally: any > machine I had a Windows on was going to be one that was refurbished, > so probably an older version, maybe updated. Ubuntu would be the > latest LTS version, so automatically older to newer. KM> So no worries! Seems so! > Yes, I've done a lot of 'learn from others'. ...Someone's probably > going to gripe about your password being 'password' but doesn't > matter KM> Doesn't matter since no one else is going to stick their grimy KM> fingers on my keyboard, and if some network attack is as far as KM> needing password input, it's already too late. With recent KM> installs I disable it entirely, if I can. (Some distros won't let KM> you.) Here I also don't get too concerned about LAN machine passwords either. Out into the real world am more cautious, but a lot of times what I consider a simple/easy password the password integrity bots indicate are rather secure. > as have to be in range. Someone made the joke here that if I > started seeing a bunch of cars parked outside the house I'd better > change the WiFi password! KM> When your street looks like a parking lot, you're really in KM> trouble... now that every new car has wifi, it's amusing to turn KM> on the unloved cellphone's wifi and watch the endless parade of KM> unsecured wireless going by on the highway. (Also amazing that it KM> has enough range to see them at all.) Well that's one way of being entertained! Haven't thought of that, plus generally drive so don't want to be looking at that cell phone app when should be paying attention to the road. ...There is someone around here (the neighbourhood) with an odd SSID: "I can haz internet toos". Yup, spaces and all! ...Not on currently so can't find their signal strength. > KM> Oh yeah, have had that sort of thing too.. which of several KM> icons? Which drive was it on again?? KM> And sometimes I don't realize I'm using the one on the wrong KM> drive until one day I need to twiddle something on disk and... KM> what do you mean, I'm running the copy in D:\storage instead of KM> the one in C:\Utility ?? Or worse... what do you mean, you're KM> running the copy from over on \\Bullet\F:\Utility?? Yup: BTDT. Have made a work directory and for trying to make it easy have simply copied so the work directories and file names are the same as the original. ...Oops! How'd I get to working in the original area when I should be in the work area?! Backups are a good thing to have!! KM> Especially with Win7 and Aero active -- it lets you move stuff KM> around on disk and Aero keeps track. (If you disable Aero, this KM> does not work.) Pretty soon you don't know where any of your KM> shortcuts point, even tho they still point at the right program!! I got to where I wanted to go! I have no idea how I got there, but I'm there! KM> It's the one feature that endeared Aero to me (otherwise I can't KM> stand it, because I can't get eye-restful colors) because it KM> tolerated my dragging stuff around without troubling to KM> reinstall, AND without editing the wandering program's shortcut. Probably creates some sort of a virtual drive and when you want to use a programme the programme is working on its original home, you just think you're working elsewehere. Being relly virtual! > BTDT!! I've put a file called "WhatIsThis" is some subdirs so I > could find what it did or why it was created. Usually used the > extension '.BJM' for a further indicator I created that file. > Windows (at least the old ones when I used it) needed to be told .BJM > was a text file; KM> Oh yeah, now I have textfiles in the root of every drive, so I KM> can see where I am even if it's non-obvious (or I'm oblivious). KM> No content, just need the filename to tell me where I am. Eg. KM> Silver_C_WD500.txt Yup. 0 bytes is fine as long as it tells me where I am. For a while I was running three MythTV Backends. All three (or maybe just the first two) Desktops were the same (because running the same Ubuntu version), so that didn't help. Could have changed the picture but a lot of times whatever I was doing was covering most of the Desktop so that wouldn't have helped. Finally created a Desktop icon; didn't go anywhere but did show whare I was. To semi-further complicate things I use one monitor off an HDMI switch. Had different keyboards amd mice and those were identified -- how come my mouse isn't working? Oh - wrong video input! > Linux just knows. KM> I'd like to know how it just knows! The Shadow Knows!! >> Possible incomplete/incorrect programming. > KM> Bingo. This is the hazard of having unfinished features, which > KM> was like as not the root of the problem. > I C:/ KM> Time to upgrade your compiler. Time to upgrade my brain so I understand the complier! > Yes, have run into a few of those. And have sometimes seen where > there's an exchange between a user and the author where the author > states he's just not interested enough in that feature/option to do > it, or admits it's beyond his capabilities. KM> Too bad more of these don't get picked up by better/more KM> interested programmers. They're creating their own! KM> That's actually why all the sudden improvements in ReactOS -- KM> lately got the attention of a bunch of programmers with time on KM> their hands, and they fixed/improved more stuff in the past year KM> than the one-man-band-and-occasional-help managed in the previous KM> two decades. Those of us who've been keeping an eye on it are KM> suitably grateful. > I've got a notebook computer which seems to have that issue. It is > set to dual boot between Windows-something (10? - it did that sneaky > upgrade people were in an uproar over maybe three years back) and > Ubuntu 18.04. Haven't tested with Windows but with Ubuntu it needs to > be connected to The Internet to complete booting, otherwise the > screen gets to a certain point and the sceen semi-randomly blinks and > the HDD LED indicates constant access. Plug in an Ethernet cable - > boots fine. KM> That's nasty; I'll consider myself warned!! My old laptop doesn't have that issue (fortunately!!). Back to the notebook, not sure if the problem is something with the built-in WiFi as even after booting it will randomly disconnect (which is why I got the dongle in the first place). > The internal WiFi on this unit is intermittent so has a dongle > added. Apparently the boot issues occurs before the driver is > loaded. (Guess I mentioned that already!) KM> So far I haven't run into goofy onboard wifi, but have had a KM> couple NICs croak... you might check if the wifi card is loose, KM> or its antenna is loose. Usually you can get to 'em easily as KM> it's typically a card in a slot (meaning it's also easily KM> replaced, relatively speaking) with its own door, since the slot KM> can also accommodate those micro SSD drives. I'll have to eventually check that. Initially I was thinking of replacing the WiFi module with one that will do both bands but then was reminded the antenna would probably be wrong as designed for the 2.4 GHz band only. Seems like there was another problem. Anyway, plugging in the dual-band dongle was the safer option, though I did forget about the driver having to be loaded for it to work. (Driver loads and works fine, just need to load the kernel first and the kernel needs to connect....) > KM> And I'm like... no way in hell. KM> At the aforementioned launch were some 1000 IT pros. During the KM> presentation, they all developed identical angry frowns. (I was KM> off to one side near the front and had a fine view of the KM> > audience.) > It's kind of funny when everyone comes up with the same conclusion! KM> Oh yeah. But seems so obvious if you have the first clue about KM> business vs its necessary reliability. Someone in the same era KM> figured out that downtime for big business could cost as much as KM> $8 million per MINUTE... so building in even brief cloud-caused KM> downtimes was out of the question. And considering how much sheer KM> waiting around one did on that era's broadbland (typo, I swear!) KM> it would have been a very costly switch even with zero downtime. Some things are very easy doodled on paper and get very difficult with attempting the actual implementation. I've seen posts in StackOverflow where the desired result seems fairly simple: should be able to add a grep here and a &2> there to get the desired output. Thirty lines of code later.... KM> Which was flamingly obvious to everyone in the room, except for KM> the hapless Microsoft presenter. (Who was a nice guy, but a true KM> believer in The Future Is Cloud. Sadly, he may have been right, KM> if premature.) > There are good and bad things about The Cloud. Might make things a > lot easier with 'everyone on the same page': utilities up-to-date and > so compatible (assuming the machine can use -- 64-bit utility on a > 32-bit machine...). Well, that might be processed 'in the Sky' and > just the end result sent out (seeing some problems with that too!). KM> Yep. And it's becoming forced, first by Adobe and Autodesk with KM> their subscription-only models, and soon enough by Windows. My KM> sister's architectural firm is already all cloud-based, because KM> by way of their necessary software, going cloud is now state of KM> the art, and if you're not up to date on everything, you can and KM> will be sued into a culvert the first time anything goes majorly KM> wrong and some shyster can claim you weren't using "supported, KM> industry standard" everything. (They don't even keep older KM> company cars, same reason.) Yup: sometimes one is forced to 'go with the flow' even though it's wrong. You and I might be able to get by using old/antiquated software but companies can't, partially/mostly because of support. Probably a good example is when they don't "keep up": pretty soon they're left behind, forced to use a 286 because their software won't run on anything newer. KM> Which is how I came to have a stack of 5 year old PCs, and the KM> titular giant server. Out of support means too much liability KM> (especially when your projects are budgeted in multiple millions KM> of dollars), so out the door they go. Yup. So sometimes good news for us individuals: cheap refurbished computers! Bad news is it costs to get the new ones and those costs are passed on to us as consumers. > KM> If only thinking could instantly install the OS of our KM> choice, with all the desired features... I know! I'll call it KM> Telepathy. > Let's float that idea to the flagpole and see who salutes! Insert 'saaaaalute!' from the old Hee-Haw show. :) KM> Wait, why is DOS up on the flagpole?? It rose above the others? > I have a bad habit of sometimes playing 'Stack'..... KM> Mine are more like "randomly piled". What I usually wanted was on the bottom and I was getting tired (pronounced 'annoyed') with taking off the ones on top to get to the one I wanted. KM> Not even that, but that should it change its mind about KM> resolution while I'm doing something, I could wind up with KM> unfortunate clicks. This is why I turn off ALL the sliding and KM> fading everything on linux, because it can and DOES capture the KM> wrong click (Windows tends to have a more definite time boundary KM> for click vs menu, but I've still seen the problem there). I tend to not like the 'fancy stuff' so the pretty graphic effects are turned off fairly quickly. OK, I will admit they are interesting for a little while, just because it's new. After that, let's get to work! > Possibly why the BIOS for this motherboard has switches to control > the various cores. Initially I'm thinking why would someone want to > shut off a core (it's an 8-core CPU)? Probably more the other way: > allow an overclocker to turn on a core and maybe use a quad-core as a > quint-core. KM> If it's actually a 6-core (never heard of 5-core!) then you might KM> be able to enable 'em (I gather there are BIOS hacks to do this KM> for some CPUs). I don't know why you'd want to disable one, tho. No longer working properly? IOW failed. Sort of like using a battery adapter to make an AAA fit because out of AA's. https://www.amazon.com/LAMPVPATH-Battery-Adapter-Converter-adapter/dp/B0 7D6RDQ3S/ref=sr_1_3?crid=2XR1QOBHNAC8M&dchild=1&keywords=battery+adapter &qid=1602866461&sprefix=Battery+adapter%2Caps%2C199&sr=8-3 Basically a tube the size of the larger battery the smaller battery fits in to. KM> But hyperthreading is still not cores. Paladin's old single-core KM> P4 gets displayed by Windows as 2 cores, but it's not -- it's KM> just got hyperthreading. Right: essentially make one do the work of two. > KM> One of the Dells has an oversized recovery partition, and I > wound KM> up putting all sorts of junk in there as storage... > Sneaky hiding place for private data too! KM> Especially if the partition is hidden Even better! > I was semi-playing around with 'split' systems. In the past have > used two hard drives: one for the boot and the OS, the other for > data. This time figure to try the boot/OS drive as one of those > solid state critters, potentially some problems so left the data on > the 'rust drive' as you call it. Was also thinking along your lines: > not necessarily hide stuff but use the 'excess' space for > don't-need-too-often storage. Never did (or at least not so far) use > the extra space on the SSD but did find I was running a little low on > the space I allocated for the OS. Multiple backups to what I already > have - just in case! -- and delete one of the 'sneaky' partitions on > the SSD and expand the OS partation in to it. Worked without problem > (whew!!). KM> Oh yeah... for some reason I've forgotten (except that at the KM> time I was still doing a DOS boot partition), Bullet has 3 small KM> FAT32 partitions before it gets to the larger XP64/NTFS KM> partition. Good thing I haven't run out of space on the NTFS KM> partition... tho I sure have found a lot of junk to put on D: and KM> E: !! Lots of storage space is good! KM> Also, I like to have the swapfile on its own partition, along KM> with any browser cache or other wastes of space, to confine KM> fragmentation. I was trying to find where my swap file is. System Monitor says it's 32 GiB but I didn't see anything around that size. ...Ah! I put it on the hard drive (I was looking at the the SSD): the old rule was not to have something that constantly changed on a solid state drive so I put it on the rusted one. > KM> I make images of small drives and store them on a big drive. > And then an image of the big drive on an even bigger drive! I don't KM> YES! And then -- even bigger?! > play around with operating systems like you do so no real need to do > the imaging. For you it makes sense. KM> Oh, this is not so much for the OS as for the complex tangle of KM> software that eventually inhabits the OS. Egads!! I get confused enough with this one OS! > ) The half-baked build-your-own NSA project here is considering > use of several old/small hard drives for storage. Some might be > clobbered together under JBOD, though if one fails they all > effectively fail. KM> EEEP!!! Yeah, it sounded good at first. > Might be better to use as individual drives and/or store > non-critical KM> I spent six months rebuilding 14,000 image files for a friend KM> who'd had his data on a RAID system (some species of linux), KM> since the best that professional data recovery could do was still KM> a mess. Me, I ain't NEVER doing any kind of striped, KM> cobbled-together, or other fragmented-among-the-hardware file KM> storage. I am not a busy commercial server that needs the KM> performance boost, and for me it is not worth the risk. I have made DVD and external hard drive backups of portions of the NAS. > data. As far as the power draw, was a semi-consideration -- inital > project was sort of thinking the unit in a computer case, so use a > ATX PSU. The use of an RPi put a bit of a twist on the PSU aspect -- > would definitely need an external supply, which could be that 5v/12v > one I have -- if able to supply the necessary start-up current. KM> My brain hurts. What would such a creature do for a living? Blow fuses? Actually part of the considertion is just to use what I have on hand to create the backup storage unit. >> KM> I dunno VNC... but now I know who to ask. Wikipedia?! > KM> Some bloke on a BBS. > :) ...So did I provide a usuable introductory explanation in an > earlier message? KM> Uh, somewhere... kinda cross between remote desktop and Mouse KM> Without Borders... or so I gather... BTW, VNC will not support audio, or at least the 'VNC Server' I'm using here has that 'error' message. Not really an error message as the icon of the speaker has a line through it and when hover that message comes up. Maybe there is a higher level version that includes audio. >> KM> Dig up from the grave as the case was with this one... was KM> >> supposedly dead. Not dead, just slow boot like a server. Happy KM> >> birthday to me. It is rather fun when something that doesn't >> work can be fixed easily! > KM> Such as by turning it on! > Some times they just need the rest! KM> That was the old method for fixing CDROM drives -- power 'em down KM> overnight and sometimes they'd get unconfused and work again. Wonder if the 'unconfusion' was simply a discharge of capacitors? ¯ BarryMartin3@ ® ¯ @MyMetronet.NET ® .... 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