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[#] Wed Apr 19 2023 16:26:12 UTC from Nurb432

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i have been tempted to do this several times.  Right now my crap is just on a shelf out there.  Fiber modem, battery backup, router. 4 servers ( those mini lenovos, so not much space ), unplugged litecoin miner, and one of those coax/Ethernet things hanging from the ceiling. ( literally.. was short on cable and it didnt reach the shelf )

When switched from a tank heater to that tankless a couple of years ago, i did extend the support framework i added to the wall so i could..   one step closer :) 

Wed Apr 19 2023 12:00:21 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar
Actually it's a piece of plywood that someone put up on the wall back when it was a rental property. 

 



[#] Wed Apr 19 2023 19:45:53 UTC from darknetuser

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2023-04-19 12:00 from IGnatius T Foobar
Mine is a literal closet. Its where my water heater also is.

Mine is a wall. A big, beautiful wall. :)


I have an actual network rack with racked switches and routers, and an UPS.


Most IT pros consider it just a job. I live this shit.

[#] Wed Apr 19 2023 21:13:07 UTC from Nurb432

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Most of us get burnt out after a couple of decades. 

Wed Apr 19 2023 03:45:53 PM EDT from darknetuser
Most IT pros consider it just a job. I live this shit.

 



[#] Thu Apr 20 2023 19:32:40 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

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Everyone handles it differently. I've posted before about the moment it happened to me, one late evening in 2011. I was fighting some random problem at home, and I just got sick of it all and ripped it all out.

I got sick of being a system administrator *at home*. I still like my job and I still like building software as a hobby. Since then my strategy for home has been "simple, but high quality". There is no home automation, no telephone system, no server rack. I have access to a large and expensive lab at work so I don't really need a home lab. All of the wiring in finished areas of the house are hidden inside walls and ceilings.

The practical result of all this, is that if you see me behind a keyboard at home, I am either working my day job, or hacking what I want to hack on, rather than trying to fix technology in the house.

[#] Thu Apr 20 2023 21:21:25 UTC from Nurb432

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While true i have a server farm at home, on a shelf, I made sure to use pretty much 'it takes care of itself' software.  I dont have to futz with it at all.

Each VM has a legit use, not just for play.  And i dont have lots.

And i fight 'smart home' as well. Wont do it. Nope.  F-that.   Its bad enough things like my thermostat is not mechanical.  

 



[#] Fri Apr 21 2023 09:57:02 UTC from darknetuser

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2023-04-20 15:32 from IGnatius T Foobar
Everyone handles it differently. I've posted before about the moment

it happened to me, one late evening in 2011. I was fighting some

random problem at home, and I just got sick of it all and ripped it all

out.

I got sick of being a system administrator *at home*. I still like my

job and I still like building software as a hobby. Since then my

strategy for home has been "simple, but high quality". There is no

home automation, no telephone system, no server rack. I have access to

a large and expensive lab at work so I don't really need a home lab.

All of the wiring in finished areas of the house are hidden inside

walls and ceilings.

The practical result of all this, is that if you see me behind a

keyboard
at home, I am either working my day job, or hacking what I
want to hack on, rather than trying to fix technology in the house.




For me, it is the other way around. I gravitate torwards quick solutions that get the job done with minimal effort at $job because nobody appreciates any extra effort in the field - they appreciate that things work with no issues but they would not appreciate deployment correctness.

At home I have lotta services with network segmentation (via VLANs and firewalling) and my own DNS with deep caches (since DNS service from outsie is sometimes flimsy). My home networks have MITMs everywhere to ensure every device uses my DNS, NTP and proxy services in order to save bandwidth. It is glorious.


Both $job and $home work in autopilot these days. The only actual struggles I get nowadays is porting Linux stuff to obsd.

[#] Fri Apr 21 2023 11:03:27 UTC from Nurb432

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I think that is everyone, in every industry. 

Fri Apr 21 2023 05:57:02 AM EDT from darknetuser
 - they appreciate that things work with no issues but they would not appreciate deployment correctness.

 



[#] Fri Apr 21 2023 15:18:15 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

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And i fight 'smart home' as well. Wont do it. Nope.  F-that.   Its
bad enough things like my thermostat is not mechanical.  

Ooooh, I'm gonna disagree with you there. My house has an electric baseboard heater in each room, so there's a thermostat in each room. I have 11 of the Honeywell "LineVolt Pro" themostats. They are electronic, but NOT "smart".
I very much appreciate the accuracy of an electronic thermostat. It keeps the heat set evenly across the house. When we first moved in there were mechanical thermostats everywhere and they were so inaccurate that we always had heat bouncing around the house, some rooms were too cold and others too warm. Replacing them all with electronic thermostats immediately corrected the problem (and reduced the energy bills a bit too).

But I agree in principle that "smart" thermostats can be a bear to deal with, especially if they are "smart home integrated".

(Side note: to make people do a double take, I sometimes describe it as "We don't have central heat" which makes it sound like our house is a primitive dump, or "We have 11 zone heat" which makes it sound like a huge mansion.)

[#] Fri Apr 21 2023 16:06:55 UTC from Nurb432

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Im ok with electronics when it makes sense. but so often its 'we can computerize this, so lets do it'. So now a 20 cent 100% reliable mechanical part is now a 200 dollar flaky IoT device linked to the inter-brain.

 

( like when Chrysler went from a simple fuse box to some electronic thing.. 300 bucks to replace, and you had to several times as they were crap.. replaced a simple time-tested molded plastic frame with some metal connectors that lasted longer than the car would.

And dont get me started about replacing carbs....

Fri Apr 21 2023 11:18:15 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar
And i fight 'smart home' as well. Wont do it. Nope.  F-that.   Its
bad enough things like my thermostat is not mechanical.  

 



[#] Fri Apr 21 2023 17:54:56 UTC from Nurb432

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No, wait, it was 600+ to replace their fancy digital fuse box..  

Went out 2x. Thankfully, the 2nd time it was still under warranty.    Mother ditched the car soon after.



[#] Sat Apr 22 2023 14:07:11 UTC from darknetuser

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> I think that is everyone, in every industry.

It is specially bad in IT.

In most other fields the customers demand a minimum of quality in the product, so management likes it when the product is designed to specs. Consumers of IT are happy running crap and therefore management is happy deploying crap.


IT is the field in which it is acceptable to spend lots of kilobucks in infrastructure and hardware to then run lame software in it that wastes 95% of its horsepower. It is like designing a car with a 200 horsepower rating and then installing a transmission so lame that the thing will break if running at 20 mph.

Every industry gravitates towards providing services for minimum effort (at least the ones I am familiar with do) but IT is the redhaired stepchild.

[#] Sat Apr 22 2023 14:39:00 UTC from Nurb432

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Automotive and Manufacturing are about the same. Was IT in both of those markets for a couple of decades, dont see much of a difference ( in this aspect ).

 

Government, where i am at now.. dont even get me started its built on that concept of 'its good enough, now give me more money" :) 

 

Sat Apr 22 2023 10:07:11 AM EDT from darknetuser
> I think that is everyone, in every industry.

It is specially bad in IT.

In most other fields the customers demand a minimum of quality in the product, so management likes it when the product is designed to specs. Consumers of IT are happy running crap and therefore management is happy deploying crap.


IT is the field in which it is acceptable to spend lots of kilobucks in infrastructure and hardware to then run lame software in it that wastes 95% of its horsepower. It is like designing a car with a 200 horsepower rating and then installing a transmission so lame that the thing will break if running at 20 mph.

Every industry gravitates towards providing services for minimum effort (at least the ones I am familiar with do) but IT is the redhaired stepchild.

 



[#] Sat Apr 22 2023 16:39:48 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

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Im ok with electronics when it makes sense. but so often its 'we can
computerize this, so lets do it'. So now a 20 cent 100% reliable
mechanical part is now a 200 dollar flaky IoT device linked to the
inter-brain.

Since this is the broadband room, let's tie it back --

Every product or service that is sold must have a value proposition that makes it attractive enough to buy. Despite all of the benefits that we get from universal always-on Internet connectivity, it also makes possible some business models that consumers often don't appreciate.

One of those is that manufacturers can move large parts of the value chain into "teh cloud" instead of providing it to the customer as part of every sale. This drives prices down, makes the sale more "sticky", and both parties believe they got some value. And perhaps they did. But as people have discovered, the value diminishes with time. With some types of products and services, it is no longer possible to "buy something once" and own it for decades.

[#] Sat Apr 22 2023 16:58:02 UTC from Nurb432

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And with cloud you can change your pricing, and the customers are sort of f-ed as they have nothing on-prem to use..  Its far easier to move TO cloud, than FROM it..  Especially when the vendor ends up canging the platform that it runs on to be 'cloud tenant friendly'. 

Its IBM mainframe all over again, the entire reason we went to PCs and local servers in the first place. And what SUN tried to do for home people, a return to the 'remote data center', but few had that level of bandwidth yet so it fell apart. And i suspect part of their eventual demise as too many eggs in that basket. They were right about it being the future, but further down the road than planned.



[#] Sun Apr 23 2023 18:12:14 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

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Timesharing has always been a thing, and I wish they still called it timesharing because "cloud" is stupid. Sun had the right idea but they depended too much on building everything in Java.

Cloud fail of the day -- and I thought of the discussion we're having here the moment it happened. I have an app on my phone that acts as a remote control and remote monitor for my Pit Boss pellet smoker. You have to pair it with the smoker using bluetooth, during which process you also give the smoker your wifi info so that the app works even when you are out of wifi range.

Yep, you guessed it -- in wifi mode, the app talks to the grill THROUGH A F****NG CLOUD SERVICE. I turned off the wifi on my phone and it still just kept chugging away, updating with the temperature inside the smoker and the temperature of the food probes as if nothing ever happened. The new version of the app doesn't let you even *see* the smoker until you've created an account on their server.
What the ACTUAL mesquite-smoked f**k were they thinking?

If I ever have excess free time I might just have to create an open-hardware controller for pellet smokers that just does the obvious thing: let the app find the smoker by broadcasting onto the local network to find it.

In the mean time I did register for the cloud account with the name "(firstname) I shouldn't have to create an account (lastname)just to use my smoker." So if they ever sell their mailing list I'm gonna get some really weird stuff.

[#] Sun Apr 23 2023 18:16:14 UTC from Nurb432

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Get this + some temp sensors and a metal box so you dont melt it. Perhaps even a couple of thermometric units to power it from the heat of your smoker....  -> https://mangopi.org/mangopi_mqpro

( just ran across it today. I dont need it, but nice to see more RISC options stepping on RPI )



[#] Mon Apr 24 2023 13:13:41 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

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Heh. I saw the Mango Pi in a video on Explaining Computers and figured you'd be all over that :)

I've replaced the controller once already, for a factory recall. There's not much involved in swapping it out, just a single integrated module with both the front panel controls and the rest of the module all-in-one, with pin connectors for the power input, outputs for the auger, ignitor, and fan, and a temperature sensor. It snaps in to the side of the unit that has the fuel box, so it's away from the heat.

If I built my own, I think the hardest part would be figuring out the correct doses of fuel, air, and ignition to maintain the correct temperature while giving off the correct amount of smoke.

[#] Mon Apr 24 2023 16:35:10 UTC from Nurb432

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Honestly for small IoT stuff i'm more fond of the ESP32 series.  Smaller, less power and does the job. And they are migrating to RISC-v. away from extensa for that side of things.  My thought was that having a tiny RISCv platform running Debian means one can use something like Circuit/Micro Python and not have to do things the hard(er) way.

I have a couple of tiny RISCv IoT like devices. One does run Debian/Armbian but none of those are 'hobby maker friendly' as the mango seems to be, and mine are more targeted for professionals developing products, not using them 'as the product'.  Plus the Mango's form factor of it mimicking a PI zero means you have tons of commercial packaging options.

Ran across the mango a bit ago. but i did notice that video you were talking about ( didnt watch since it wasn't news, but saw )

Mon Apr 24 2023 09:13:41 AM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar
Heh. I saw the Mango Pi in a video on Explaining Computers and figured you'd be all over that :)


 



[#] Mon Jun 05 2023 22:37:24 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

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THROUGH A F****NG CLOUD SERVICE. I turned off the wifi on my phone and

it still just kept chugging away, updating with the temperature inside


I have to say that the new software is much more reliable, even if it does communicate with the smoker over a cloud service. I just wish it would simply send a local broadcast to find the grill and use that. Doesn't everyone know how to use zeroconf (or as apple calls it, bonjour) by now?

I found out that my *bed* does the same thing. I was showing a friend the app for my Sleep Number bed last weekend, and how the settings and sensors are all reachable from the app. To my surprise, when I pushed some buttons to make some adjustments, it actually made the bed move back at home. This is so, so, so stupid.

They're probably all using the same damn library that builds a cloud connection whether you need it or not.

[#] Mon Jun 05 2023 22:45:39 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

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Meanwhile, back at the hall of justice...

The cable company (Optimun), which has been stuffing solicitations in my mailbox 3-4 times a week for the last nine years, is now rolling out "fiber" service. I did see them around town putting new fiber on the poles, and splice packs, etc. I don't know if it's ready yet, but they sure are advertising the hell out of it. The number of pieces of snail mail I get from them now exceeds all other junk mail combined. (That might be an exaggeration but it sure feels like it.)

I'm glad everyone is "seeing the light" (heh) on fiber, but now I really wish they'd work hard to just migrate all subscribers and take down the ugly fiber, like they did in New York City in 2011 when that one vault flooded.

They're offering 2.5 Gbps service, which presumably is delivered on 2.5 Gbps ethernet. Somehow I doubt they can fill that pipe because their network is crap.

-- and on the television front ... --

News in the cord-cutting world is that a number of smaller cable companies are discontinuing their multichannel service entirely, encouraging subscribers to sign up for streaming networks, or even reselling streaming services from DirecTV or YouTube. I think DirecTV ought to build a "set top box" for Grandma that looks exactly like her old cable box but attaches to ethernet or wifi.
That will probably be needed to finish off what's left of CATV.

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