drblah

I have tried this multiple times on my 2014 MBA and it works mostly. Unfortunately, my model has some weird hardware(?) issue where the screen starts flickering when the intel i915 driver is loaded AND something communicates on the smbus. So if the cooling fan kicks in, or I use the function keys to change keyboard backlight brightness, my screen starts flickering.

Same thing happened when I tried dual booting Windows. I guess Apple has some workaround for this specific hardware model.

Now this Macbook is running Debian and is relegated to be a headless controller for my 3D printer with Klipper. It's pretty amazing for this, as it boots in like 5 seconds.

This, exactly. I work with similar modems daily. The first thing I do is to run the AT command for enabling adb. From there you can do whatever. The modems are quite beefy, 100s MB of RAM and multiple CPU cores. They even come pre-installed with a http server, ftp client, ALSA and much more.

Also, if you really want to get creative, I think you can just dump the firmware, which is just normal Linux. So just dump it, mount the filesystem and make whatever changes you want then re-flash.

The quality and security of the software in these things is absolutely bottom tier.

As someone who as also spent way more hours on LTE/5G modems than I want to, this post resonates with me. I also learned a few things, namely about the ECM. I will have to look into that. Thanks!

As for the firmware. It seems to just be how these companies do things, unfortunately. At work, we use modems from both Quectel and Simcom and the experience described in OP is very similar. For Simcom we have gotten access to a "secret-but-public" Onedrive share with documentation, drivers and firmware where they put up stuff sporadically. Sometimes the firmware updates even works!

I have a theory that Qualcomm who makes the chipsets used by Quectel and Simcom (at least for the 5G modems) imposes some kind of heavy NDA which prevents free distribution of firmware and documentation. Everything seems very "hush, hush" at least.

While I can't help answer your remaining questions, I can point to wiki I have found really helpful: http://trac.gateworks.com/wiki/wireless/modem

Huh, interesting. That "Hunting of a spider" clip almost follows part of the intro sections in Children of Time 1-to-1. Feels like someone took 'inspiration' in someone else's homework. I wonder if it was BBC or Adrian Tchaikovsky who came first.

Oh, well. It is a really cool clip nonetheless.

As "rescently" as 2014 I as involved with an old computer, controlling a pre-processing stage for a high volume composite casting factory. It turned out the computer had a modem and was connected with its own phone line. It also had Norton pcAnyware for remote operation.

The computer had been running since at least 1992. No one remembered ever getting remote support, so I left it disconnected just for good measure. If anyone had actually wanted, I think you could have done a decent amount of damage using that. Especially since no one knew how and what the software on the computer did anymore. :)

I have used Plant UML a lot and I love it. Anything that can help me draw less figures is a bonus and the markup language they use is pretty flexible and ergonomic.

However, I have one major gripe with Plant UML. About 3-4 years ago, my local install started showing memorial plaques for people who died in a terrorist attack in Paris [1]. While this attack was undoubtedly a horrible event, I still feel it is deeply unprofessional to include stuff like that in a program, and it makes me lose all trust in the developers. If they had just added a memorial section in the program, it would have been fine. However, for every error generating a diagram, Plant UML would show a popup window with a picture and a text in memory of that person.

This is similar to what the Notepad++ developer(s) did back in 2013-ish where they had a memorial build into a new release of the program. On startup, Notepad++ would write (literally type it out) some message into the default empty document [2].

It might be a bit harsh. But in my mind, if the developers of these programs can be so influenced as to push this onto their unsuspecting users, I feel they have misused my trust. It makes me think: "What are they going to put into it next? Malware? Perhaps watermark the output with a statement?"

Since these events, I have avoided Notepad++ entirely and been reluctant to use Plant UML, but used it out of necessity.

[1] https://github.com/plantuml/plantuml/issues/25 [2] https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/v6.7.4/

A few weeks ago, I tried doing this with the LADSPA version of RNNoise and ALSA, but couldn't get it to work reliably.

I have also experimented with NoiseTorch which routes the microphone through LADSPA using Pulseaudio but it didn't work reliably either. The biggest problem with this is that Pulseaudio will load one CPU thread 100% even when no audio input. This makes it a deal breaker for laptops.

I will definitely check this out. RNNoise is truly amazing tech, but it is not as accessible as I would like. The best use if it is in the Mumble client where it is an optional setting.

It is a shame Nvidia has taken over this space completely with RTX voice. RNNoise does a comparable job without the need for an Nvidia GPU. But I guess it is because RNNoise is just not as easy to setup.

One example is Freifunk in Germany. There is also a large network in Spain, but I forget what it is called.

There is also this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25412367 which was recently discussed on HN.

Sure! Almost anything would have been a better solution. However, no one knew how the system actually worked, and we were on a shoestring budget.

See, the situation was that IT management, who officially had the responsibility for the PC saw it as a risk because we in IT were unable to do anything if the system died. But the production line management, who had to pay for the upgrade, saw no reason to do it because it was "working fine!".

Sure it was working fine, and had been for almost 20 years. But WHEN it would inevitably give up the ghost they would be completely hosed.

I have a fun anecdote involving DOSBox.

Back in 2012 I worked at a large manufacturing company. They had an old IBM PC running IBM DOS which controlled a vital system at the beginning of their production line. This machine had been chucking along since 1992 and now someone high up had been made aware that it could be a potential risk if this machine stopped working. It was therefore decided that this PC should be replaced/upgrade if possible.

After investigating I learned it communicated with a PLC through the RS-232 interface and ran some special sauce software from a company that stopped existing in 1995. Previous upgrade attempts involved virtualization, but that did not work since the program ran too quickly on modern hardware.

My solution was to copy everything from the old HDD to a new computer, install DOSBox and configure the serial port. The first few attempts caused some sirens and alarms to go off in the building, which was "exiting", but after fiddling with the emulation speed I managed to get it to work.

To this day, unless something drastic has changed, a billion $ company is running DOSBox in production (and I literally mean production).

Also, a side note. The old PC was still connected to a modem with a dedicated phone line. At some point it had been remotely operated through some kind of Norton remote control software. I made sure to turn off the modem and did not bring it over to the new DOSBox setup. Imagine if someone had war dialed into the machine... They could have caused a major disturbance and potentially started a fire.

I find these kinds of projects very interesting. It is just too bad the site does not talk about the technology they use (or maybe I am just not seeing it?).

I am interested in this because I have recently been working on simulation studies of large Ad Hoc networks where we look at the B.A.T.M.A.N protocol. It was originally built for use in the Freifunk (https://freifunk.net/en/) network in Germany which is similar to Project Waves.

Its fascinating what a bunch of nerds with a mission can put together.

I have mainly used the built in RNNoise support in Mumble. But you can use https://github.com/werman/noise-suppression-for-voice/ and build the VST plugin (This is also what NoiseTorch uses i think). Then use any application that can load VST plugins to pipe your mic through. I have had reasonably good luck with it on Windows with Equalizer APO.

As far as I can see this uses RNNoise. If you haven't checked it out yet you should, because it is simply amazing. It is a super effective noise gate / noise removal tool that does not require any configuration whatsoever.

My study mates and I have been using it over the last four months when working from home. It removes the noise of keyboards, seaguls and vacuum cleaners.

It is essentially the same as Nvidia RTX voice except it is much lighter on the system and does not require an Nvidia GPU. In our testing RNNoise performs similarly.

This project looks super cool. It seems to make RNNoise much more accessible. Normally you would have to manually set up the pulseaudio plumbing for this to work.

Ah, of cause. It makes sense you don't loop in Python.

This all seems pretty interesting. I will give it a go.

I am currently doing an internship as part of my masters degree where I am analyzing ~30 GB of data. I'm using Postgres + Python and it is working quite well, even on my 2014 MacBook Air.

It would indeed be interesting to see how this approach with Vaex compares to Postgres. Though, I would be quite sad giving up SQL in favour of Pandas DataFrame indexing and Python looping :)

I really wish the danish numbers had been reformed. It is a drag to communicate numbers verbally and then write them down. It is very prone to errors since the verbal number sequence is so strange.

Exampel: 54. It is pronounced: fire-og-halv-treds (four-and-half-threes.) As you might notice, the spoken sequence is backwards compared to the written number. this gets even more confusing when saying a number above 100. 136 is et-hundrede-og-seks-og-treidve. (One-hundreds-and-six-and-threes).