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losttourist

@ losttourist @kbin.social

Posts
2
Comments
53
Joined
3 yr. ago

Modern tech, retro tech, 80s/90s music & nostalgia. I live in northern England so most things I post about have a UK slant.

Elsewhere on Fedi:

  • Has anyone else given up on daytime Radio 2?

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  • I enjoy Sara Cox's evening drivetime show. I sometimes wish I didn't, but when you're doing yet another 4-hour slog up the M1/M6 in evening rush hour traffic it's perfect company.

    And Zoe Ball can be OK in the mornings, although I'll often tune into something with a bit less chatter unless I'm feeling particularly enthusiastic. Other than those two shows, R2 doesn't really do it for me. And yes, Jeremy Vine is utterly off-putting.

  • Good mini PC for around 100€

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  • It's a little more than 100€

    It's half as much again! If your budget is that flexible you really should have mentioned it in the original post so that people could give you a wider range of options.

    Translate it up by a couple of orders of magnitude and you get "I want to buy a car, I have €10,000 to spend" ... "I found one for €15,000, it's a little bit more but ..."

  • TfL's AI Tube Station experiment is amazing and slightly terrifying: Mind the Orwellian Surveillance Apparatus

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  • Which would be what, exactly?

    Literally the next line on the image tells you what:

    "This includes: disability, pregnancy/maternity for the purposes of the mobility assistance use case."

  • Mastodon security update: every version prior to today's is vulnerable to remote user impersonation and takeover

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  • Without a published POC there's a slightly longer window before clueless script kiddies start having a go at exploiting the vulnerability, though.

  • Recommend me a programming language

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  • It's a very flexible language so can find a niche almost anywhere. I know of fintech companies that use it extensively for their back end data processing systems, and I've seen some really interesting stuff done with Clojure and Apache Kafka. They're a good fit for each other - Clojure, as a lisp, is optimised for processing infinite lists of things and Kafka topics can be easily conceptualised as an infinite stream of data.

    Also, when combined with Clojurescript, it provides a single language that can be used full-stack, so could drop in anywhere that you might otherwise use Node.

    But I think one of the best things about it is the way it forces you to re-evaluate your approach to development. It's a completely functional language so you have to throw away any preconceptions about OO and finding new ways to resolve old problems is one of the things that should be a joy for most developers, even if it has no practical application.

  • Recommend me a programming language

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  • Give Clojure a go.

    It's a modern variant of lisp that runs on the JVM and has deep interoperability with Java, so you can leverage your existing knowledge of Java libraries.

    But as it's a lisp, it will have you thinking about problems in a very different way.

  • Issues filling forms in PDFs

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  • Not really a viable solution for many scenarios though. What if your PDF has half a dozen pages, your answer becomes really tedious. And in a lot of cases a PDF with forms is expected to be sent back to the person or company that created it once the fields have been filled in. They're not likely to want to receive a bunch of JPEG screenshots instead.

  • Locked

    Where can a Boomer catch up on current computer/software technology?

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  • You don't need a desktop for CAD anymore.

    Not for the raw processing power, but anyone doing serious CAD work is going to want at least a 21" monitor, relying on just the laptop screen is going to be difficult especially (and I speak as someone aged over 50 myself) as your eyes become less able to focus on fine details as you get older.

    So OP needs to decide if they're going to want to use the machine for other things as well, in which case a laptop + external monitor might be fine, or if it's a dedicated work/hobby CAD machine in which case why not get the desktop + monitor.

  • Anyone else unreasonably hyped for new Gladiators?

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  • Ha, I enjoyed that. Trashy TV of the most enjoyable kind but good clean fun as well. Although I have to agree with whoever it was on Mastodon said that it looked like every round was designed to cater to a very specific kink or fetish!

  • What sci-fi-esque inventions are the most plausible and could happen soonest?

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  • With flying cars we'd have the opportunity to take the human factor out of the equation, which is the cause of the vast majority of car crashes.

    Imagine we had never invented cars and trucks and highways and were just doing it now. Do you think we'd take these two ton death machines and say "let's put them under control of an individual person, with all the distractions and fallibility and other problems we know we suffer from"? Or would be instead design a system where every single vehicle has a computer that is constantly in communication with all the other vehicles around it, and can react far quicker to any issue than a person could.

    The problem with self-driving cars is that they have to operate in a world where there are also human-driven cars, and cyclists, and pedestrians, etc. If the only things on the road were computer-controlled, it's a completely different scenario. And that's what we'd have with flying cars. At least I hope so!

  • Last few days are the least functional kbin has been for me since the July exodus. Just me?

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  • It seems a lot more stable right now. I expect @ernest has been occupied with, y'know, actually having a life. Seeing as it's Christmas and all that.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • You might enjoy Peter F Hamilton's books Pandora's Star and its sequel, Judas Unchained. It's somewhere between space opera and hard sci-fi but there are significant plots and sub-plots involving alien creatures ranging from the vaguely comprehensible (to humans) through to creatures that are almost beyond our ability to understand.

  • can my image be recorded at British airports by tv crews even if I don't consent?

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  • If an officer at a British airport asks you if he can search your luggage and you say no and you ask him if you are under arrest, what happens then?

    The police (and Border Force staff when you're in a place under their jurisdiction) have the legal right to search you and your belongings, as long as they can justify the reason for that request. If you refuse to allow them to do that you will most likely be arrested and you will have your belongings confiscated and searched anyway.

  • can my image be recorded at British airports by tv crews even if I don't consent?

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  • They can’t broadcast your image without consent.

    They absolutely can. The principle has been tested multiple times in court and the case law is very clear - anyone who is in a public place can have no reasonable expectation of privacy. If a photo is taken and published, or video is recorded and shown then anyone in the crowd is basically fair game.

    For under-18s there is a code of ethics that means any responsible photographer will blur out the faces of anyone who appears to be a child, but even that's (probably) not enforceable by law.

  • How to update the BIOS on a Dell laptop running Linux

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  • That all seems ... incredibly complicated.

    Why not use fwupd? (link is the Arch wiki but should be relevant for any distro). I've been using fwupd to keep my Dell XPS15 BIOS updated for the last few years, with no problems at all.

  • I'm starting to see some serious downsides to being able to see who downvotes you.

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  • No. The whole point of Federated software is that things happen on one server, and by the very design of the system those things get shared out to other servers. "Things" could be anything from posts to comments to up/down votes.

    The only way to have anonymous voting would be to make the up/down votes strictly local to a particular server, which kind of defeats the purpose of a federated system.

  • Am I wrong to assume that docker is perfect for single board computers that relies on low life expectancy drives (microsd)?

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  • I'm still struggling to understand what advantage Docker brings to the set-up.

    Maybe the application doesn't need to write anything to disk at all (which seems unlikely) but if so, then you're not saving any disk-write cycles by using docker.

    Or maybe you want it only to write to filesystems mounted from longer-life storage e.g. magnetic disk and mark the SD card filesystems as --read-only. In which case you could mount those filesystems directly in the host OS (indeed you have to do this to make them visible to docker) and configure the app to use those directly, no need for docker.

    Docker has many great features, but at the end of the day it's just software - it can't magic away some of the foundational limitiations of system architecture.

  • Am I wrong to assume that docker is perfect for single board computers that relies on low life expectancy drives (microsd)?

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  • I'm not sure why Docker would be a particularly good (or particularly bad) fit for the scenario you're referring to.

    If you're suggesting that Docker could make it easy to transfer a system onto a new SD card if one fails, then yes that's true ... to a degree. You'd still need to have taken a backup of the system BEFORE the card failed, and if you're making regular backups then to be honest it will make little difference if you've containerised the system or not, you'll still need to restore it onto a new SD card / clean OS. That might be a simpler process with a Docker app but it very much depends on which app and how it's been set up.

  • Could someone explain the networking behind transparent proxies and MiTM snooping using certificates to me?

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  • Yes, I think that 'masquerading' is the key bit to grasp. The MITM Proxy isn't just intercepting the traffic, it alters the traffic as it passes through.

  • Any free beginer resources?

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  • DigitalOcean's guides in general are pretty good for all sorts of things, whether it's a generic discussion of a concept like the ones you've posted, or a step-by-step guide for installing and configuring specific systems or software. Even if you're not using DO as a host, much of what they suggest is still very useful.

  • Reddit Migration @kbin.social
    losttourist @kbin.social

    I was wondering when they'd get round to the smaller subreddits

  • Reddit Migration @kbin.social
    losttourist @kbin.social

    /r/LegalAdviceUK is forced back open, vows to move the entire community off Reddit

    www.reddit.com /r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/14cr5zc/were_back_and_heres_whats_happening/