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Cake day: August 24th, 2024

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  • The interesting thing is the people who will care the most about this are professional users, who actually did require a machine with real expandability, to stuff full of the likes of SDI video IO cards (eg https://www.aja.com/products/kona-5).

    If you ask those people, they’ll undoubtedly gladly tell you how much it sucked dealing with Thunderbolt-to-PCIe expansion cages during the “Trashcan” era in order to use their machine for their work.

    While Thunderbolt’s throughput has certainly improved a bunch since then (80Gbps symmetrical or 120/40Gbps asymmetrical for TB5, vs 20Gbps for TB2 back in that era), latency and stability still frankly leave a lot to be desired versus a real PCIe slot.

    For people who already perceive Apple devices as overpriced toy computers, their further alienating what was at one point their primary target audience - high-end professional users - will certainly seem like an odd choice.


  • I said this to someone once and they accused me of being “elitist”. The simple fact is when I learned how to do this stuff, there was no such thing as a GUI for any of it. You did it on the CLI, or not at all.

    (Almost the exact same experience with git, funnily enough)

    I 100% agree though; the bones of the setup of my NAS (admittedly mine is Ubuntu, just because everything else I run is too) was done once 18 months ago, and most has never been touched again. Just software updates every now and then and ignore it the rest of the time.

    I don’t feel like I’ve lost any functionality doing things this way, either. I discovered when a disk died that it even uses SES to light the error LED and turn on the annoying beeping noise on the JBOD, and I didn’t have to do anything to set that up. I call that a win.




  • You wrote this all a lot better than I could have, but to expand on 2) I have no desire whatsoever to have a “conversation” (nay, argument) with a machine to try and convince/coerce/deceive/brow-beat (delete as appropriate) it into maybe doing what I wanted.

    I don’t want to deal with this grotesque “tee hee, oopsie” personality that every company seems to have bestowed on these awful things when things go awry, I don’t want its “suggestions”. I code, computer does. End of transaction.

    People can call me a luddite at this point and I’ll wear that badge with pride. I’ll still be here, understanding my data and processes and writing code to work with them, long after (as you say) you’ve been priced out of these tools.


  • Not that I know of, which means I can only assume it’ll be a timing-based attack.

    With strategic use of sleep statements in the script you should stand a pretty good chance of detecting the HTTP download blocking while the script execution is paused.

    If you were already shipping the kind of script that unpacks a binary payload from the tail end of the file and executes it, it’s well within the realm of possibility to swap it for a different one.








  • But also at regular checkouts.

    You’ve just stood there motionless for the last 4 minutes, while someone else (potentially two people) scanned and bagged your purchases for you.

    How is it that JUST NOW is the time you’ve decided is right to rummage through your bag for your wallet/purse, or check your banking app on your phone to see if the account actually has money in it? What were you doing for the rest of the time that was so vitally important?

    I swear you can just about hear the birds flying around in their head sometimes.






  • At work we use the NexDock for that purpose (for anything that doesn’t have proper Ethernet remote management, at least). It’s relatively convenient that it’s self-powered and self-contained, basically a laptop minus the computer part.

    (Conveniently, I see this is also a new model that replaces the awkward mini-HDMI port with a proper full-size one)

    If you need VGA, you will have to buy an active VGA-to-HDMI dongle. They’re cheap (down to about $10-15 these days) and seem to work just fine.

    Should the preference be to use a laptop you already own, you’ve got a few options. Either an IP KVM like the JetKVM, GL.iNet Comet, NanoKVM, etc, or a USB one such as the Openterface.

    (Note that a couple of those links are pre-orders or otherwise not immediately available, make sure you do your research)

    All of these things are fairly comprehensively reviewed by tech-focused Youtube channels, just gotta pick your favourite form factor.