myself248

On the plus side, I was able to cancel my subscription without a notarized letter!

But Jean (English name, like Jeannie) and Jean (French form of John) are entirely different names, with different pronunciations, that happen to share the same spelling.

When you monitor a power line, you don't get a tcpdump showing who's producing and who's consuming the power. You can't just jump straight to the culprit.

It's just bulk flows, so when a weird flow shows up, you've got to move up or down the line, past a few producers or consumers, and see if the flow changes. For a subtle effect, that might not even be so clear.

Worse, for an effect that's most visible at the medium-voltage transmission level, simply placing a monitor might take weeks. These are planned installations with incredible safety considerations -- you don't just plug in.

Finally they found a research campus with a bunch of battery storage systems, AND the ability to install a bunch of monitors, and persuaded them to install dozens of monitoring points. Finally a high-resolution view of the effect allowed them to confirm the behavior.

He mentions that he's running it in an air-conditioned studio, so presumably if the unit's datasheet lists an environmental range warmer than that, it has plenty of cooling headroom in this environment.

The last rubidium oscillator I played with, had to heat the vapor cell within the physics package, but then prevent that from overheating the rest of the unit, so it specified mounting to a heatsink. There was no heatsink recommendation given, just a certain package temperature as reported by sensor value X in the diagnostic data page. Get below that and you're golden. Get too much below that and you're wasting extra energy in the heater. Which is harmless, it just drives power consumption up.

So depending on how the unit's thermals work out, a slightly less aggressive fan may end up being mildly beneficial.

I converted from residential-class to business-class cable a few years ago. In both cases, I had routable IPv4 addresses.

I was just looking at flipping back, but now it seems the default for new resi accounts is CGNAT. They say they'll give me a real IP upon request at no additional charge, but it's anyone's guess how long that holds out.

They don't do IPv6 at all.

Michigan USA.

Yeah, that's probably part of it. Some do have explosion vents in the top of the container.

It'd just be impressive to see a giant wall of battery. A bunch of little batteries camping in a field doesn't play the same visually. Ah well.

One reason they report in MW instead of MWh, is that grid operators primarily spec systems by their continuous MW, and only secondarily mention their cumulative MWh. So that's the way they talk about them, and reporters just mimic that. Both are important, but the top-line number is MW, for sure.

One reason for this is that for a lot of grid-support functions, instantaneous or short-term power is vastly more important than long-term energy capacity. The other reason is that traditional generation is only sized by MW; you just keep pouring fuel into it forever, so the notion of MWh doesn't even enter the picture. They're not even thinking in those terms.

You and I, as battery natives, think about it the other way around. But we're not grid operators.

I've always wondered why they don't stack them in deployment -- the containers are obviously fine with it! -- but I guess land is cheap enough not to bother.

Horizontally they need plenty of room for airflow, as each container has some HVAC-or-whatever module on the side. But vertically...

For years, I've said that if there's a "call for quote" where I expect an "add to cart", I'm gone, instantly. I will buy somewhere else.

Now there's a login before I can even figure out if it's a quote or a cart.

Byeeee.

It's like every smartphone is an iPhone, in the parlance of headlines. It's fewer letters.

Oh yeah. I toss the sheets in the washer the moment I get up on the day I'm leaving, and transfer them to the dryer (or clothesline) on my way out the door. So there's no chance of the cleaning crew "cleaning" the bed by just making it. As a favor to the next renter.

When I walk into a bar, I always ask the bartender for negative zero beers, just to check the place out, before placing my actual order.

I have not yet been accused of arson, but it's only a matter of time.

"Gig" implies paid. Nah. Just for laughs. Because hackerspace.

Some years back, I helped build a Twinkie cannon, which was mounted in the front of a Twinkie-decorated car, built on a dune buggy chassis. We had to remove the roll cage to fit the fluffy cake body (made of airbrushed yellow fiberglass insulation), so we made sure to drive it quite slowly, but it was a beast underneath if you wanted it to be. (I once drag-raced a pizza driver, and only afterward noticed the cop on the next streetcorner. Luckily it's hard to write a ticket while doubled-over laughing.)

The CO2-powered cannon was capable of way more power than cellophane-wrapped Twinkies can handle. Dial the regulator up past halfway, and they'd just shred on exiting the barrel, splattering anyone near the front of the car with sticky creamy filling and cake crumbs. That was both messy, and disappointing to folks down-range who'd been hoping to catch a snack. (And it immediately summoned a cleanup crew of seagulls, who then wanted more...)

So we learned to keep it modest, and developed a decent sense of pressure vs range. The car geometry allowed only limited variation of the barrel angle, so it wasn't a full-on GORILLA.BAS experience, but it was pretty close.

Culinary ballistics keeps you young. I highly encourage it.

Exactly. "Responding to pings" is not the same as "letting me get work done".

If I had a nickel for every solid-green status page I shook my fist at while the actual site faceplanted on every request...

Is Broadcom not obligated to issue a CVE for a legitimate vulnerability?

Since they wouldn't share the contents of their notification to their customers, we don't know how clearly those customers (router makers) were notified. But having a CVE and detection signatures would get this vuln into all the usual scanning and reporting channels, which is another route the customers might (should!) be paying attention to.

Also, I don't know how laws over there work, but there might be legal requirements to patch things once they're known, where "known" is probably defined by "has a CVE issued". So by refusing to issue one, Broadcom is blocking that process.

How is that blameless?

The article estimates the number of these routers in the author's home country (Belgium), but the vulnerability would exist in units sold worldwide, no? Seems to me that their estimates of affected units are a couple orders of magnitude low.

The magic/more magic switch?

Solar time never cared about seconds, and leap-seconds were always stupid.

Long overdue. Sad they didn't realize this in 1972 and avoid all the silliness in between.

This article's byline features one of the most magnificent cases of nominative determinism I've ever seen. I wonder if it's a nom de plume.

Checksum offload, recalculating a bad checksum after corrupting the data, is really insidious.

Shows that trust in TCP can be badly misplaced -- in this case the trouble was cache coherency, but lack of ECC RAM or other electrical gremlins could easily corrupt packets too (and NIC buffer RAM is never ECC afaik), and blindly trusting TCP checksums would eat your data every time.

(Side note, doesn't 'zfs send' blindly trust TCP checksums?)

Props to Rsync and SSH and Wireguard and everything else that went beyond the call of duty to keep your data safe, with varying levels of alertness.

> only lets the original writer delete a shard.

That makes sense on the very surface, but eventually someone's going to lose their config, and all their orphaned storage is just occupied forever in the rest of the group.

I'm pondering an "anti-challenge" primitive, whereby storing nodes can ask the original writer to confirm that it still has the stub file. (Because if that's lost, the data can't be decrypted anyway, there's no point to still saving it.) And if that fails for X months in a row, sorry, time to go. Or maybe raise it for manual review so the node operator can check in with the others before pushing the "reclaim storage" button.

Unrelated to the flux images used for floppy disk archiving? Sigh.

A few years ago, I helped repair a broken USB port, on a USB-floppy emulator...

...which was so the operators could sneakernet their NC tape files into an IBM PC 5150 that thought it was talking to a floppy drive, of course...

...which hosted an ISA card that emulated the punch-tape reader that the NC lathe had originally been designed with.

The NC lathe hadn't missed a beat in 50+ years, why mess with what works?

An unsung benefit of core memory's non-volatility is that, decades later, forgotten core stacks discovered in storage might still retain whatever data they held when they were powered off.

You just only get one chance to read it.

I'm not aware of any good writeups of such discoveries, though.

This is precisely what makerspaces are for.

There are many operating models. Some are attached to another organization (a library, a university), some are commercial (RIP Techshop), some are completely DIY and member-run. Any given city might have a handful of different ones, but you'll have to dig around and visit a few to see what you vibe with.

Caveat, it's very easy to get focused on the ooh-shiny tools, and forget to pay attention to the community energy and expectations. Some of the more professional spaces, you just pay for what you want, and staff takes care of the rest. At the other end of the scale, the fully-DIY places are very much a case of "you get out of it what you put into it", and may offer cheaper memberships but expect a lot more involvement.

Visit as many as you can.

Exactly. The sane ones just ask you what year it is at startup, and use that to determine the initial epoch. Then they handle rollover automatically since then.

It's been widely opined that 1024 weeks (~20 years) is the worst possible interval. Either rollovers should've happened VERY frequently (say, 128 weeks) so receivers would be FORCED to deal with it, or extremely infrequently (16384 weeks?), so it's simply never an issue.

The unhappy medium is long enough that developers feel justified in saying "naaaah, our receiver won't still be in use then, we can ignore that!", but in practice it's very likely to happen.

I've heard the advice to use a passport card for this. It has your age, it has your name, but it does not have your address.

Of course passports are expensive and not everyone has them, but if you do, next time you renew, opt for the book+card option.

A twenty-foot ridge in Florida would be the tallest thing in the county and qualify for names like "Matterhorn".

> in german there is a word for this

I am not surprised.

> competence table tennis

Magnificent!