September 2024 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

War story: Hardware bloat
by Evan Leibovitch 13 Sep '24

13 Sep '24

Hi all. Slightly related to Linux because this ... or rather was ... about an Android tablet. Not a knockoff Alibaba tablet with no vowels in the brand name, an Acer Iconia One bought from Amazon in 2015. It served me well for quite a few years but, as always happens, support for updates ran out and it was replaced for daily use by an Amazon Fire 10 for which I paid almost the same amount (on Prime Day) as for the Acer a decade ago. This raised the issue of what to do with the old tablet, that was not only out of updates but also running much slower than the new stuff. I investigated the many "what can you do with an old tablet" articles and settled into turning the Iconia into a weather station that one could check at any time to see what was coming for the next six hours. It had been doing that task for about two years now, and was stationary and always plugged in. I was looking at it the other day, almost by accident, and noticed the back was much thicker than I recall. Everything was functional, and the tablet had barely been touched since given this role. I suspected something to do with the Lithium battery and immediately became wary. Was this going to be one of those times when the device caught fire or exploded? Some checking online led me to immediately turn off and unplug the device, and put it in the garage. Today I took it to the hazardous waste disposal depot on Ingram Drive (Lawrence/Keele area). Things were deteriorating fast. It had swollen so much that the screen had cracked. I drove to the dump gingerly as if I had a bomb in the car. After informing the depot staff of the nature of the tablet's battery, they were unfazed and had me just put it in the designated "electronic waste" portable dumpster, into which people had tossed their old printers, screens, faxes and a few desktop CPUs. At least it's a thick metal dumpster and any ... incident ... would certainly be well contained. Still, the disinterested response was a little surprising. I've also disconnected my Google account from the tablet, in case anyone has the bright idea to try restarting it. Lessons learned? 1. Routinely inspect any devices you have that contain lithium batteries, even if they're off. 2. Be especially careful with devices that are rarely unplugged such as old devices being repurposed as photo frames, clocks or weather stations. Overcharging is a common cause of such battery failure. 3. This doesn't just happen to Chinese mystery brands, it can happen to household names too. 4. Don't scavenge from electronic waste bins, you never know what's there. Hacklab swap events (the next one is sept 22 <https://hacklab.to/archives/junk-independence-day-5/>) are much more useful for this kind of thing. -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56

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Re: [GTALUG] OT: Shots fired - heads up
by Evan Leibovitch 13 Sep '24

13 Sep '24

On Tue, Sep 10, 2024 at 4:56 AM ac via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> wrote: > I read in a thread here recently that email is dead, That would be me. Or something close to what I said. I never said email was dead, but rather it's evolved in a way that makes it ever less useful ... just like postal mail. Email, like postal mail, is mainly these days for - Flyers and advertising - government, business and legal communications None of these uses is really interactive, at most they're occasionally transactional (ie, providing stimulus for me to do something that often itself does not require mail in response). The one benefit of postal mail that is not shared by its electronic counterpart is the ability to send and receive parcels; the consequences of my doing e-commerce in a way that has zero to do with mail of any kind. And the one unique benefit of email is that its addresses provide a unique identifier that can be used to create (and optionally authenticate) unrelated online accounts. I have been hearing that same thing for 30? years now and always for > different reasons. But volumes of actual transactional email has seen > exponential growth, year on year, with not even a hint of any decline in > the growth itself. For most email these days, "transactional" is an aspiration. Most have response rates of single digits at best. Sure, my spam filter is busier than ever ... but the signal-to-noise ratio has plummeted. Same with postal mail. If it wasn't for flyer mail Canada Post would be in even more of a financial hole than it now is. Email marketing does not suffer quite the same financial fate as postal mail because costs are shared between sender and receiver. In a previous life I was on the other side of this. I was involved in choosing a bulk-mailing vendor and launching numerous bulk email campaigns, for newsletters and announcements. (FWIW, the vendor we ended up using was Moosend, based in London and India -- email doesn't care about domestic versus international rates.) It was cheap, but we never expected more than low-single-digit percentage of recipients even opening what we sent, let alone responding by (say) going to the org's website. Providing strategy to circumvent RBLs and spam filters has become a cottage industry of its own. What interactive functions of email still exist -- mainly the social ones, like personal mail and forums such as this -- are mostly the artifacts of the generation that grew up on it. Just like I still receive birthday cards in the post, but only from relatives older than me. These services may very well never die. But both email and non-parcel post are destined to continue their ever-further descent into pure nuisance. - Evan

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Opinions on container management for self-hosting
by Mark Prosser 12 Sep '24

12 Sep '24

Hi GTALUG group, Currently, I'm using docker-compose to deploy my self-hosted apps. I'm considering upgrading this to something easier to maintain. What is everyone using? - Docker/Podman & diligence? - Pulumi / Ansible Terraform / OpenTofu to automate things? - Docker Swarm? - Watchtower for updates? - Rancher? - Kubernetes for a local install? The main issue I'm having is keeping on top of updating my containers, along with keeping track of how my deployments stitch together (aside from my Caddy reverse proxy). I think this is very easy to fix; however, I'm wondering if the community has some feedback on how they made their container management turn-key... without taking on too much technical debt. Warm regards, -- Mark Prosser // E: mark(a)zealnetworks.ca // W: https://zealnetworks.ca

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Weird Keyboard Issue
by Jim Ruxton 12 Sep '24

12 Sep '24

I am having a strange keyboard issue and wondering if it could be a weird setting that got changed somehow. If I hold down my left shift key then press a letter while holding down the shift key, the first character typed is lowercase but all subsequent letters come out uppercase as expected. I can't figure out why the first character typed when holding down that shift key comes out lowercase. My right shift key works as expected., always producing uppercase while held down. I'm on Ubuntu 22.04. My keyboard hasn't always been like this. I can't figure out why this is happening and what has changed. Any thoughts? Thanks Jim

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Re: [GTALUG] OT: Shots fired - heads up
by o1bigtenor 11 Sep '24

11 Sep '24

On Wed, Sep 11, 2024 at 1:57 AM ac via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> wrote: > On Tue, 10 Sep 2024 13:40:23 -0400 > Evan Leibovitch via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> wrote: > <snip> > > I see nothing in email (whether in Google Groups, groups.io or a > > conventional list like GTALUG's) that isn't functionally done better on > > Reddit (which allows people to "upvote" the most useful contributions) or > > Discord (which includes streaming and virtual ad-hoc meetings) or > WhatsApp > > (which is super simple and most people have it anyway). All three of > these > > are free of cost to join or start a group of as many people as you can > > gather. Discord also supports Markdown formatting which is easier to do > > than the HTML in most emails. > > > > You're right, it is about the audience. > > I am over 40 and I use discord and read reddit each and every day... > > > BUT, in the groups, specially the larger one's it is not easy to > read/scan each and every post, more so, when, like in email, the thread > devolves from Google being listed for abuse TO where do I think Glug chat > should migrate to... I usually avoid even reading threads with many > replies as > I have no clue who would post anything useful, where in each reply (what I > would find useful, not the 'crowd' - I read upvoted drivel many times each > day > and every times this happens I am sure I lose a braincell and seriously > consider leaving whatever platform. > > In fact, if I had no interest in spam/abuse and email and only scanned the > first post in this thread, I would not be even reading any of this on other > platforms. > > I have also had this same discussion, in a few formats and it always ends > the > same way... (with everyone doing whatever they want to do :) ) > > > > As I said, this is a generational issue. > > hmm, maybe you are right, but maybe not for the reasons you think? > I recall my first 'smartphone' a Nokia brick, but I could ssh into my > servers (the Nokia had a shell) I could do IRC and so many things mobile. > I also recall using my own first self written App, 2008? (three years > after > selling the Linux distro I made) App's were so cool, and surely now > email would become useless. Point I am trying to make is that I > used to be one of the charge leaders on 'email is now finally dead' :) > > > Email works great for people over 40, because it's comfortable and they > > grew up with it. > > Maybe you are right. maybe email is also now comfortable for me. I did not > grow up with it though. I used IRC way before using email. Email always > seemed to 'clunky' and just too much :) > > > > For younger people who grew up with smartphones and apps it's a very > > different story. > > > maybe. but it does not mean that technically one should promote mobile > tech. > > we only now know that small kids should not have smartphones. we only now > know > about myopia and so many many other harmful effects of where tech has taken > humanity. We will also still be paying that Invoice. > > I could also argue that maybe younger people, Gen A for example, is not > even > going to use discord or reddit. They struggle to focus and/or read anything > over 120 characters. (In stating this, I am looking at actual eye tracking > data and analytic data) - When comparing data Gen X and Millenials have > the > longest attention spans. imo, discord users are, on average, younger than > reddit users. Much more still needs to be known, but the foundations > expose a trend. > > You should think about what this means? > > also, to add : The 'upvote' idea, the 'like' idea and the 'herd' has > advantages, > but as it turns out, has more disadvantages. > > this email has no "like' 'subscribe' 'upvote' 'downvote' and you have to > truly think about who the person is writing whatever and, if you have the > attention span, you have to really focus to understand what is being said > :) > > sure, hindsight is perfect. but even in knowing something, like planetary > change is going to extinct us faster, this does not change anything. > > maybe we are evolving ourselves into extinction as we are truly disgusted > at > our very nature and the herd is just the herd. > > and, btw, as there are useful things in the bottom post, I have left it > intact, for the record, email allows me to reply inline, snip stuff and > allsorts of other things which, depending on the platform, is either > impossible, or just too much of an effort and just to hard to do... > > Hmmmmmmmm - - - been following the thread - - - - I'm thinking that its not that email is dead or dying, its not that attention span has been decreasing (although not training ourselves to think and learn really is increasing the level of helplessness in our society) I think the real problem is that we have or are most definitely forgotten how to communicate - - - because we really don't!!! The idea with writing is that one can communicate - - - have worked with those that can read anything unless it is printed (wow - - - huge handicap!). Now one gets notifications for most everything - - - why - - - because it makes one feel good - - - is that what communication is all about - - - feeling good?!!? So - - - can we change the direction of the thundering herd? (I think that that is the crucial question - - in point of fact!) Regards

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Windows eats Fedora installation sticks
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 10 Sep '24

10 Sep '24

Old news, I know. But I've been burned again. A Fedora installation USB stick, prepared by dd-ing the .iso file onto the raw stick works fine. But if you have that stick in the computer, and Windows sees it, it will drop a few bytes on it. The result is that the stick cannot be used to boot Fedora (until you rewrite it). Sheesh. Why did it happen to me, when I know of the problem? To run the stick, during power on, I have to hit a key to get into the choose-a-device-to-boot-from menu. It's a race, and sometimes I lose.

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Tom's Hardware: "AMD announces unified UDNA GPU architecture — bringing RDNA and CDNA together to take on Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem"
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 10 Sep '24

10 Sep '24

<https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amd-announces-unified-udna-…> This seems important to me. I lost a lot of interest in playing with AMD GPU Computing when consumer cards were no longer supported by AMD's computing stack. Unfortunately, it is clear that this unification will take years because there are GPUs in the product pipeline that haven't got the memo. I found one particular paragraph disappointing: The company also remains focused on ROCm despite the emergence of the UXL Foundation, an open software ecosystem for accelerators that is getting broad support from other players in the industry, like Qualcomm, Samsung, Arm, and Intel. ROCm seems to be to be an imperfect emulation of CUDA. How is that going to be a winner?

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OT: Shots fired - heads up
by ac 10 Sep '24

10 Sep '24

Usually when google or microsoft does really weird stuff the large RBL do not penalise them the same as everyone else. But, it seems the tide may be shifting... Just today, Microsoft has been sending out these "we have videos of you doing weird sexual stuff and pay money" and Google cloud has been sending out UBE to literally purchased/stolen/trojan data (and maybe doing other stuff that I do not knwo of or do not have data for - for the two mentioned things I do have my own hard data...) So microsoft has picked up some serious listings today but what is interesting is that SpamCop has now started listing @google servers I know that many on this list trust & use @google, but heads up: Me for one, drop (silently) on spamcop listing... (so some things from some @google places will not be read and may just disapear into /dev/null) example: https://multirbl.valli.org/lookup/209.85.166.74.html Hopefully both huge players will step up and take actual action against their (sometimes large corporate) abusers, but probably not. Notably the past few weeks many interesting things have been happening in the Interent abuse field, I see that many services are publishing data, downgrading and treating large esp's like everyone else... I read in a thread here recently that email is dead, I have been hearing that same thing for 30? years now and always for different reasons. But volumes of actual transactional email has seen exponential growth, year on year, with not even a hint of any decline in the growth itself. What has declined in email is some application stuff, like mailing list usage. In many areas use has grown, notably 2f, id and business use has risen, (among some uses) anyway ymmv.

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Re: [GTALUG] Windows eats Fedora installation sticks
by Howard Gibson 09 Sep '24

09 Sep '24

BODY { font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12px; }Hugh, Some sticks out there have a read-only switch. Maybe you need one of those! -- Howard Gibson hgibson(a)eol.ca http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson On Wed 04/09/24 11:43 AM , "D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk" talk(a)gtalug.org sent: Old news, I know. But I've been burned again. A Fedora installation USB stick, prepared by dd-ing the .iso file onto the raw stick works fine. But if you have that stick in the computer, and Windows sees it, it will drop a few bytes on it. The result is that the stick cannot be used to boot Fedora (until you rewrite it). Sheesh. Why did it happen to me, when I know of the problem? To run the stick, during power on, I have to hit a key to get into the choose-a-device-to-boot-from menu. It's a race, and sometimes I lose. --- Post to this mailing list talk(a)gtalug.org [1] Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk Links: ------ [1] mailto:talk@gtalug.org

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Junk Independence Day, Sept. 22
by Scott Sullivan 09 Sep '24

09 Sep '24

Just a heads up, Hacklab is having it's next JID event later this month. Junk Independence Day Sunday September 22 2PM – 6PM https://hacklab.to/archives/junk-independence-day-5/ -- Scott Sullivan

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