linker3000

A few weeks ago I needed a computer to be a Debian server for some at-home simple Web dev / learning stuff. I bought an HP Prodesk 400 G3 SFF PC with i5-6500, 8GB RAM and a 256GB off a popular auction site for £44. It'll do. I might upgrade to 16GB. An additional 8GB stick costs £19.

leads to real outages.

Um, no.

I daresay you could find the odd example, as for any grid in a stressed situation, but it's not like we turn to each other every week in the dark and say "Oh, it must be half time at the Manchester United match".

I would just like to bring my Bluetooth headset into teams reliably.

I used to support DTP, and graphics for the systems house at which I worked. I travelled round the UK installing PageMaker and A4 paper-white CRT displays - boy were they heavy!

My endearing memory is calling the company in Edinburgh for technical support, to be greeted on the phone by a lady with a lovely, cheery Scottish accent announcing "Aldus UK".

Fun fact: I was first person in the UK to print in colour on an HP ink jet printer at the trade show where they were first demonstrated. The HP folks hadn't got the official colour driver ready for the show, so the HP guys were printing in mono, but I'd had an advanced model to try and hacked some other print driver to work with it.

The Motorola phones are generally good performers and value for money. My only gripe is that they cannot have their batteries replaced easily - even by phone repair shops.

I understand that this is because you have to disassemble / un-glue the phones through the front and remove the display. For this reason, the repair shops I have asked have said they don't 'do' Motorola phones because there's too much risk in breaking the display.

This effectively means that the life of the phone is determined by the ageing of the battery.

I learned how to do lacing during an electronics engineering apprenticeship in the 1980s.

After the fact, when I moved more in to systems and networking, I found that flat, nylon, waxed lacing cord, with a small nut tied to the end, was lightweight and perfect for throwing through ducting and ceiling spaces very long distances, so you could backhaul cables through the void. It was a real time saver.

LinkedIn - it takes you to the allow/deny page but doesn't automate things. It used to be that the LinkedIn login would get stuck in a cycle around this, but now it just dumps you on to the consent page.

I worked in IT support and engineering for a UK Olivetti dealer / distributor in the 1980s/90s. As such I had access to all sorts of Olivetti kit in various states of functionality. At one time, my home PC was an Olivetti M280 case with an M380 (386DX) motherboard and EGA display adapter. It had a colour monitor and the ANK 27-102 keyboard - it was a 'top end' hybrid for its time that I'd put together from several non-working machines..

I also had a 'faulty' Olivetti inkjet printer that was written off under warranty with a mysterious fault. I eventually managed to fix it by bending the metal paper detector arm so that it slotted properly into the optical sensor - it was a little out of whack and the sensor sometimes couldn't work out whether there was paper in the tray.

I tried this with Node-RED for a Meshtastic project (MeshBop), but experienced occasional timeouts even when only making a handful of calls per hour. In the end I moved to Met Norway's API for UK/EU weather.

I ran with Centreon for a while because you got Nagios + integrated dashboarding out of the box and a Community option.

I'm out of that game now though so don't have the challenge.

https://www.centreon.com/

I don't really keep up with the hifi market and seeing the headline was an eye opener.

I used to work in a building next to a B&W place where they either made speakers or at least the drive units. The day was punctuated regularly by rather loud audio frequency sweeps!

Will the products please stop complaining.

My calculator says that's 4.5 days at warp 9.

Here's one possibility.

With AI we need fewer programmers, and the juniors will possibly be the first to go, but they might me retrained for other careers (which might eventually get cancelled too because of AI), or out of work.

The software they produced did something - it might have been a CRM or a game, but out of work people might have to cut back on their gaming spend. As for the CRM app business, the customers and potential software customers are also cutting back in staff, and the CRM apps will be able to conduct direct B2B negotiations with client CRMs, so there's no job opportunities there, and so more people are out of work. Perhaps the businesses that used the AI-based B2B and B2C CRM and ERP systems won't be needed any more, or not have a viable customer base, too.

Other industries are replacing folks with 'AI', so the unemployment pool is getting larger. This means the luxury and non-vital goods manufacturers will have less revenue and they are laying off staff so there's some compensation there, but eventually not enough for survival - which is 'fine' because AI is replacing all this stuff.

This snowballs into other industries, leaving just those jobs that can be done more easily by a human, but those jobs will also reduce as AI and surrounding robotics etc improve, so what do all these unemployed people do all day. Some will embrace leisure activities that don't break the bank. Some may volunteer for community work or projects to improve the World, but they still need to eat and pay bills - who's going to help with that?

One solution might be a 'Star Trek' economy not based on work for reward, but that's a big cultural shift that people and governments will struggle massively to get their heads around conceptually.

There will also be powerful resistance to such a radical rebasing of the planet-wide financial model, especially by those people and organisations that have amassed wealth and don't want to give it up. They'll even fight back with lobbying and arguments against change while they're getting replaced with AI.

Or...?

As far as I remember Digg didn’t have followers or any major original content or influencers.

Yep, some personalities on Digg had their groupies and if they posted something, all their followers would vote it up the listing, in effect the post was influenced.

That's when I bailed because genuinely interesting stuff not posted by the 'right' people had no chance of exposure.

Might be OK if you had to take a driving proficiency test and only had the extra HP enabled if you proved you can handle it.

And then your insurance is voided due to an unauthorized engine modification..

Official dealers won't service it or will keep resetting it...

Well, I still own the ancestor - a BBC B.

As a schoolboy I was one of a handful who were in the computer club. We had a CBM (PET) 3016, a few Acorn System Ones and a UK101 that was built by our physics teacher.

One day this big grey prototyping keyboard case turned up. There was a microcassette unit fitted for loading and saving programs, and the whole thing was connected to a colour TV via an umbilical cord that looked like a vacuum cleaner hose.

We were given task sheets with projects to complete on this unit, and we could control the TV from the keyboard, read Teletext pages AND download programs.

It was a fun piece of kit that stayed with us for a couple of months.

In hindsight, I realised that the unit was a pre-production BBC Micro and we'd been part of a pre-launch test programme thanks to that same physics teacher.

At least one of my local, out of town, supermarkets doesn't have a warehouse any more.

It's all Just in Time, with a residual amount above the main shelves. If you can't find what you want, they don't have it 'out back', because apart from an unloading area, there's no 'out back'.

That's how I do it. I have a smart plug on the washer dryer and the power consumption gets sent via MQTT to Node-RED where some simple monitoring and trigger conditions update a dashboard and send an email to myself when the washing machine starts and when it stops. That's good enough for our needs.

The machine does have an app and Bluetooth, but I can't see the point of spending the time reverse engineering the protocol, and the app is never going to be activated on my phone because it wants access to camera, sound, phone and my contacts list.

Edit: It seems some integration work has been done for HA: https://github.com/home-assistant-HomeWhiz/home-assistant-Ho...

Context: We're from the UK.

My wife and I left a meeting in a business park in Phoenix and decided to walk the 5 mins to the local shopping mall, have a look around and then get a taxi back to the apartment in which we were staying (We'd taken a taxi to the meeting).

We were about 2 minutes into our walk when a car pulled up and it was one of the people from the meeting. People in the office had spotted us walking and assumed there was some kind of emergency or our car had broken down.

We had to be very politely insistent that we didn't need a lift to the mall and were perfectly fine.

See also in West Sussex:

https://www.amberleymuseum.co.uk/explore/explore-communicati...

https://www.amberleymuseum.co.uk/explore/explore-communicati...

This is an important point but often it's existing docs and files that cause the most grief, with subtle issues like differences in font rendering or line spacing.

For example, I wanted to make a simple change to a Word doc in Libre Office that included a side bar/column of text in a fixed size table on multiple pages. In Word the layout looked great.

Unfortunately due to font subtleties, in Libre Office the side texts overflowed the tables and the last sentences were cropped. It took some fiddling to make things fit and look as good as the original, but in the process I had to make the font smaller which lost some clarity. I did play with line spacing but that got fiddly.

In summary, a 5 second edit of an existing document laid out 'just so' perhaps 5 yr ago ended up becoming 20 minutes of hassle.

New docs could be laid out better and differently to make future edits easy, but that ignores the large legacy of existing stuff that many will have.

I didn't know there was a competition.

Would you buy a car that's been thrown together by a immature production and testing system with demonstrable and significant flaws, and just keep bringing it back to the dealership for refinements and the fixing of defects when you discover them? Assuming it doesn't kill you first?

These tools should be locked away in an R&D environment until sufficiently perfected.

MVP means 'ship with solid, tested basic features', not 'Ship with bugs and fix in production'.

I tried HA back in the day and got YAML-bound trying to get various sensors and controllers to integrate and work reliably. I revisited HA a couple of times over the years, but by then had become cosy with Node-RED and saw no strong reason to change. I understand HA's now more configurable through the front-end GUI, which is nice.

I've just integrated an office UPS with the Node-RED stock dashboard to log status, mains voltage and battery charge state - it took all of 5 mins, including the time to install the UPS NUT plugin for Node-RED via the GUI.

I love the ease of the visual, block-based configuration, and the ability to add codable function blocks to process and modify data.

The only things that are not so great in Node-RED are the dashboard look and feel, and the dashboard setup tools.

Edited.

No, Jeff just changed his mind and decided that sending a card abroad was problematic.

Found it: https://meta.superuser.com/questions/3720/three-free-video-c...

I used to be a major contributor on Superuser then one day the SO team had a competition to ship a reasonably decent spare graphics card to the most worthy requestor, based on a community vote.

I won in behalf of my young son, whose graphics card had just expired, but when the SO folks noticed I was in the UK, they decided shipping the card to me was too much effort and didn't send it.

That's when I decided my knowledge and free input would be better appreciated elsewhere and I quit. That was perhaps 12-ish years ago and I think I've been back a handful of times just out of curiosity.

Yep, I was learning C++ and could not understand an example in one of Stroustrup's books, so I posted a query asking for help, giving my thoughts and confusion.

I was roundly berated for not reading carefully enough, until one lonely soul piped up and said that actually there was a typo in the book's example code.

I'm only a hobby programmer and the experience wasn't encouraging.

A few people have implemented file transfers over Meshtastic. I believe there's a repo out there with Zmodem over Meshtastic.