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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I have a tube-based distribution system from the second-floor window that I started using during COVID to keep my distance from those plague incubators that came calling, and just never stopped using it.

    I live in a moderately cold climate, and Halloween evening nearly always drops to around -5℃ to 5℃. So it’s much nicer to just sit in a cushy armchair by the window with a warm blanket over my legs and drop candy through the tube. A surprising amount of adults, teens, and tweens are tickled pink by that system, although a lot of little kids need a surprising amount of direction to get their candy.

    And yes, I always drop either two pieces or - for those in dark hoods and carrying scythes - full-sized snickers.





  • 16 characters was the minimum length a password should be due to how easy it was to crack… something like a decade ago.

    Now it’s something like 20 to 24 characters.

    Seriously, if your company is defining maximum password length and demanding specific content, it is failing at the security game. Have the storage location accept a hashed UTF-8 string of at least 4096 bytes - or nvarchar(max) if it’s a database field - and do a bitwise complexity calculation on the raw password as your only “minimum value” requirement.

    Look at how KeePass calculates password complexity, and replicate that for whatever interface you are using. Ensure that it is reasonable, such as 150-200bit complexity, and let users choose whatever they want to achieve that complexity.




  • His router is tri-band though meaning it has 2 5ghz transceivers.

    Unfortunately, for many models - like the Linksys WRT 3200ACM - that second antenna (technically the third one if you include the 2.4Ghz one) doesn’t function at all without the manufacturer’s firmware. It’s a dead stick with any third-party firmware, and is 100% software-enabled.

    I have found this fact to be reliable whether it is DD-WRT or OpenWRT, and across several different manufacturers including Asus and D-Link.


  • The hardware to read the tapes are calibrated to the maximum size they are configured to accept. So when you hit up eBay, you will need to know the maximum amount of data you will need, and either the size of the largest tape drive to hold all that - if you are not getting a machine with an auto-loader - or the maximum number of drives that the machine’s autoloader can take, so you can size the tapes properly for the data.

    Say you need to back up 25Tb. You are unlikely to ever need more backup than that. So you either look for a machine that takes 25Tb tapes, or you get a machine that can take max. 5Tb tapes, but has an autoloader that can hold at least 4 additional tapes (in addition to the one in the drive) such that all five will automagically cycle through the backup process. That way, all 25Tb will be backed up in either case without your direct and immediate involvement, all you have to do is rotate the tapes off-site after the backups are done, and slot the next ones in for the next backup run.

    Obviously, incremental backups are a no-go, as backups are stored off-site. So it’s an all-or-nothing process. And as such, this is usually done both on your entire primary data set (for fast total-disaster restores) once in a while, with a different set of tapes focusing on your local/on-site warm backups and backing up only the atomic/incremental locally-stored backups for the day/week/month.


  • If you want longevity and shelf stability, tape drives are the way to go. You can get them in very large capacities, even into the hundreds of TB.

    Their benefit is that they have no internal motorized components, they are a lot like VHS videocassettes - two spools with tape. This makes them very shelf-stable, unlike hard drives which can have their spindles seize up over time.

    They also have absolutely epic data densities. You could store on one tape the contents of dozens of the largest hard drives currently available.

    Their downside is that you need highly specialized hardware to read and record them. And this makes the hardware quite expensive.

    So why don’t we use tape drives to store data? Because they store said data linearly - great for writing once, terrible for finding or updating said data - and because they are slow. You want to get to a file 20Tb in? Enjoy scrolling past every single byte up until that point.

    But for cold backups, there ain’t nothing better.



  • Our civilization demands that I be profitable to a parasite who leeches a majority of my labour’s value in order to accumulate obscene levels of wealth.

    Without exorbitant amounts of time spent maintaining that profitability, I will end up poor, homeless, and eventually dead from exposure. This leaves vanishingly little time to spend on open source work, regardless of how intellectually and ethically attractive it may be.



  • when it wasn’t actively sexually harrassing T’pol

    I never understood that need. T’pol was already fiercely exotic, what with her flawless face and remote Vulcan disdain. They could have put her into a spacesuit for the entire series and she would have still been attractive AF purely due to her personality and strength of character. About the only improvement I would have liked to see is more of her character arc being in conflict with her Vulcan upbringing, particularly in trying to deal with those infuriatingly irrational humans, and her emotional entanglement with Trip.


  • If you are looking for Bar, it is highly likely that you are already looking specifically for a particular functionality - say, the action - for Bar. As such, it is irrelevant which method you use, both will get you to the function you need.

    Conversely, while it is likely you will want to look up all items that implement a particular functionality, it is much less likely you are going to ever need a complete listing of all functionality that an item employs; you will be targeting only one functionality for that item and will have that one functionality as the primary and concrete focus. Ergo, functionality comes first, followed by what item has that functionality.





  • Fail2ban bans after 1 attempt for a year.

    Fail2ban yes; one year, however, is IMO a bit excessive.

    Most ISP IP assignments do tend to linger - even with DHCP the same IP will be re-assigned to the same gateway router for quite a number of sequential times - but most IPs do eventually change within a few months. I personally use 3 months as a happy medium for any blacklist I run. Most dynamic IPs don’t last this long, almost all attackers will rotate through IPs pretty quickly anyhow, and if you run a public service (website, etc.), blocking for an entire year may inadvertently catch legitimate visitors.

    Plus, you also have to consider the load such a large blocklist will have on your system, if most entries no longer represent legitimate threat actors, you’ll only bog down your system by keeping them in there.

    Fail2ban can be configured to allow initial issues to cycle back out quicker, while blocking known repeat offenders for a much longer time period. This is useful in keeping block lists shorter and less resource-intensive to parse.