litchralee

joined 2 years ago
[–] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 3 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

I too have issues with silicone earbuds, and also with them falling out. Which is why I was over the moon when I discovered wireless clip-on earbuds. They meet my criteria of being convenient (because wireless) while also not falling off (because clip-on). The specific ones I bought (Anker Soundcore c30i) are not noise-cancelling, but I found that I can adjust their position up or down my ears to meet conditions. For example, I wear them high up when out in public, to hear wayward automobiles that might run me down.

[–] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Fair, though I personally don't let my ISP indirectly dictate what I do with my LAN. If I didn't already have a v6-enabled WAN, I would still manage my LAN using IPv6 private range addresses. There are too many benefits to me, like having VMs and containers be first-class citizens on my LAN, rather than sitting behind yet another layer of NAT. That lets me avoid port forwarding at the border of my home Kubernetes cluster (or formerly, my Docker Swarm), and it means my DNS names correctly resolve to a valid IP address that's usable anywhere on my network (because no NAT when inside the LAN).

I will admit that NAT64 is kinda a drag to access v4-only resources like GitHub, but that's only necessary because they've not lit up support for v6 (despite other parts of their site supporting v6).

This is my idea of being future-ready: when the future comes, I'm already there.

[–] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

The approach isn't invalid, but seeing as you already have the framework set up to deny all and log for IPv4, the same could be done with IPv6.

That is to say, your router advertises an IPv6 gateway to the global internet, but you then reject it because your VPN doesn't support v6 (sadly). I specifically say reject, rather than drop, because you want that ICMP Unreachable (administratively prohibited) message to get returned to any app trying to use v6. That way, Happy Eyeballs will gracefully and quickly fall back to v6. Unless your containers have some exceptionally weird routing rules, v6 connections will only be attempted once, and will always use the route advertised. So if your router denies this attempt, your containers won't try again in a way that could leak. v6 leaks are more likely when there isn't even a route advertised.

This makes your apps able to use v6, for that day when your VPN supports it, and so it's just a question of when the network itself can be upgraded. IMO, apps should always try for v6 first and the network (if it can't support it) will affirmatively reply that it can't, and then apps will gracefully fall back.

This also benefits you by logging all attempted v6 traffic, to know how much of your stuff is actually v6-capable. And more data is always nice to have.

[–] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm so confused on what the point of such a hash would be. If the time that an email was sent was so important, would existing DKIM timestamps also work? Is this basically the digital equivalent of including today's newspaper in a ransom note?

Not to say that DKIM as-used is perfect.

[–] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago

For an example of where constant current sources are used -- and IMO, deeply necessary -- we can look to the humble LED driver circuit. LEDs are fickle devices, on account of their very sharp voltage-current curve, which also changes with operating temperature and is not always consistent from the factory. As a practical matter, the current through an LED is what predominantly controls the brightness, so constant current sources will provide very steady illumination. If instead an LED were driven with a constant voltage source, it would need to be exceedingly stable, since even a few tens of millivolts off can destroy some LEDs through over-current and/or over-heating.

For cheap appliances, some designs will use a simple resistor circuit to set the LED current, and this may be acceptable provided that the current is nowhere near overdriving the LED. Thing of small indicator LEDs that aren't that bright anyway. Whereas for expensive industrial LED projectors, it would be foolish to not have an appropriately designed current source, among other protective features.

[–] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago

In a nutshell, voltage incompatibility is generally more damaging than current mismatch, typically in a frightening or energetic manner. Many Americans tourists find this out when they bring their 120v AC hairdryers to an overseas hotel with 230v AC power. If there is only room for one number to be emblazoned on an outlet or plug, it should be the rated voltage, first and foremost.

For current protection, we've had thermal fuses since the 1890s, and thermo-magnetic circuit breakers since the 1940s. There are even more fancy transistor-based current protections available for industrial equipment that can shut off extremely fast. In a sense, protection against over-current has basically been solved, in the scenarios where there's enough of a risk of humans or property.

Whereas voltage mix-ups still happen, although consumer electronics are now moving to automatic voltage detection (eg an 18v electric drill battery charger refuses to charge a 12v battery) and through actively negotiated power parameters (eg USB PD). And even without human error, under- and over voltage transients still happen in residential and commercial environments, leading to either instant damage or long-term product degradation (eg domestic refrigerator motor drive circuits).

It should be noted that a current starvation scenario, such as when an ebike is current-limited per regulations, does not generally cause a spike in voltage. Whereas in a voltage starvation situation, resistive loads will indeed try to draw more current in order to compensate. Hence why current protection is almost always built-in and not left to chance.

[–] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 21 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Firstly, I wish you the best of luck in your community's journey away from Discord. This may be a good time to assess what your community needs from a new platform, since Discord targeted various use-cases that no single replacement platform can hope to replace in full. Instead, by identifying exactly what your group needs and doesn't need, that will steer you in the right direction.

As for Element, bear in mind that their community and paid versions do not exactly target a hobbyist self-hosting clientele. Instead, Element is apparently geared more for enterprise on-premises deployment (like Slack, Atlassian JIRA, Asterisk PBX) and that's probably why the community version is also based on Kubernetes. This doesn't mean you can't use it, but their assumptions about deployments are that you have an on-premises cloud.

Fortunately, there are other Matrix homeservers available, including one written in Rust that has both bare metal and Docker deployment instructions. Note that I'm not endorsing this implementation, but only know of it through this FOSDEM talk describing how they dealt with malicious actors.

As an aside, I have briefly considered Matrix before as a group communications platform, but was put off by their poor E2EE decisions, for both the main client implementation and in the protocol itself. Odd as it sounds, poor encryption is worse than no encryption, because of the false assurance it gives. If I did use Matrix, I would not enable E2EE because it doesn't offer me many privacy guarantees, compared to say, Signal.

[–] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 30 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Approximately 90% of people are right-handed. In European writing systems that use quills and pens, reading and writing left-to-right makes more sense so that you can hold the pen in your right hand and drag it rightward, not into the ink you just laid down.

In East Asia, before writing on paper was a thing, they wrote using inscribed bone, but then eventually moved to vertical wood boards, bound together by string. Each character on the board would be ready from top-to-bottom, and then move to the next board. The most logical choice for a right handed person is to stack the wood pile on their left, and use their right hand to draw the next board to meet their gaze, then set it down on their right. Later, this bundle of wood boards would become paper scrolls, but would still be pulled from left-to-right by a right-handed scholar.

For this reason, the historical writing system common to China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam for centuries was read right-to-left (because instead of scrolls, we have pages, which can be moved easily). But the native Korean script is left-to-right, as is the modern Vietnamese script. And Chinese and Japanese in the 20th Century switched to left-to-right. And yet, Japanese books are still ordered "backwards" so that the title page is what Westerners would say is the back of the book, and manga panels are read from the right side toward the left.

So far as I'm aware, this means some Japanese signs can be rendered left-to-right (modern), right-to-left (historical standard), and top-to-bottom (traditional). The only orientation that's disallowed is bottom-to-top (although vertical news tickers will do this, so that readers see the text from top-to-bottom).

It all boils down to right handedness, but it depends on whether your hand is moving, or the text is moving.

[–] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Are ham radio operators in the EU able to use LoRa radios and be exempt from duty cycle limitations?

[–] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Admittedly, I haven't finished reflashing my formerly-Meshtastic LoRA radios with MeshCore yet, so I haven't been able to play around with it yet. Although both mesh technologies are decent sized near me, I was swayed to MeshCore because I started looking into how the mesh algorithm works for both. No extra license, since MeshCore supports roughly the same hardware as Meshtastic.

And what I learned -- esp from following the #meshtastic and #meshcore hashtags on Mastodon -- is that Meshtastic has some awful flooding behavior to send messages. Having worked in computer networks, this is a recipe for limiting the max size and performance of the mesh. Whereas MeshCore has a more sensible routing protocol for passing messages along.

My opinion is that mesh networking's most important use-case should be reliability, since when everything else (eg fibre, cellular, landlines) stops working, people should be able to self organize and build a working communications system. This includes scenarios where people are sparsely spaced (eg hurricane disaster with people on rooftops awaiting rescue) but also extremely dense scenarios (eg a protest where the authorities intentionally shut off phone towers, or a Taylor Swift concert where data networks are completely congested). Meshtastic's flooding would struggle in the latter scenario, to send a distress message away from the immediate vicinity. Whereas MeshCore would at least try to intelligently route through nodes that didn't already receive the initial message.

[–] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 19 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (6 children)

Very interesting! Im no longer pursuing Meshtastic -- I'm changing over my hardware to run MeshCore now -- but this is quite a neat thing you've done here.

As an aside, if you later want to have full networking connectivity (Layer 2) using the same style of encoding the data as messages, PPP is what could do that. If transported over Meshtastic, PPP could give you a standard IP network, and on top of that, you could use SSH to securely access your remote machine.

It would probably be very slow, but PPP was also used for dial-up so it's very accommodating. The limiting factor would be whether the Meshtastic local mesh would be jammed up from so many messages.

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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by litchralee@sh.itjust.works to c/newpipe@lemmy.ml
 

(fairly recent NewPipe user; ver 0.27.6)

Is there a way to hide particular live streams from showing up on the "What's New" tab? I found the option in Settings->Content->Fetch Channel Tabs which will prevent all live streams from showing in the tab. But I'm looking for an option to selective hide only certain live streams from the tab.

Some of my YouTube channels have 24/7 live streams (eg Arising Empire), which will always show at the top of the page. But I don't want to hide all live streams from all channels, since I do want to see if new live streams appear, usually ones that aren't 24/7.

Ideally, there'd be an option to long-press on a live stream in the tab, one which says "Hide From Feed", which would then prevent that particular stream ID from appearing in the feed for subsequent fetches.

From an implementation perspective, I imagine there would be some UI complexity in how to un-hide a stream, and to list out all hidden streams. If this isn't possible yet, I can try to draft a feature proposal later.

 

I'm trying to remind myself of a sort-of back-to-back chaise longue or sofa, probably from a scene on American TV or film -- possibly of the mid-century or modern style -- where I think two characters are having an informal business meeting. But the chaise longue itself is a single piece of furniture with two sides, such that each characters can stretch their legs while still being able to face each other for the meeting, with a short wall separating them.

That is to say, they are laying anti-parallel along the chaise longue, if that makes any sense. The picture here is the closest thing I could find on Google Images.

So my questions are: 1) what might this piece of furniture be called? A sofa, chaise longue, settee, something else? And 2) does anyone know of comparable pieces of furniture from TV or film? Additional photos might help me narrow my search, as I'm somewhat interested in trying to buy such a thing. Thanks!

EDIT 1: it looks like "tete a tete chair" is the best keyword so far for this piece of furniture

EDIT 2: the term "conversation chair" also yields a number of results, including a particular Second Empire style known as the "indiscreet", having room for three people!

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