A random thread for small computing things that don't really warrant a thread of their own

[woollypigs]

Rather cool https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/159176/cracking-of-sky-ecc-encrypted-messaging-service-brings-down-organised-crime-lords/

And the police cracked the secure phone, arrested people, send bill to phone company

[Beardy]

Rather cool https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/159176/cracking-of-sky-ecc-encrypted-messaging-service-brings-down-organised-crime-lords/

And the police cracked the secure phone, arrested people, send bill to phone company

which just reenforces the fact that one time encryption pads are the only really secure protocol for message encryption. If a machine encrypts it, then in all likelihood a machine can be used to decrypt it. Eventually.

[grams]

Until they make a machine that can reverse a pseudo RNG.

And then a machine that can reverse a real RNG.

[Morat]

My new PFY was rummaging in his desk drawer for a USB Drive and found the ancient Kingston Datatraveller 4000 encrypted drive that had been "Put in a safe place" by his predecessor in about 2017.
Luckily my Keepass had the password and it "Fired right up!" on it I found a copy of our customer database from 2016 (now deleted, of course).
Sometimes, things DO just work.

[Kim]

Kingston Datatraveller
[...]
Sometimes, things DO just work.

...but not usually those.

[Bledlow]

I like to think someone at Amazon is currently struggling to heft a 750 GB RAM pack into the back of a server.

I remember rooms with cupboards full of 25 MB disk packs & people being paid to load them into drives that looked a bit like top loading washing machines - & were about the same size - when the data on them was needed. Heavy buggers.

I'd like to see a 750 GB one. 

[ian]

I like to think someone at Amazon is currently struggling to heft a 750 GB RAM pack into the back of a server.

I remember rooms with cupboards full of 25 MB disk packs & people being paid to load them into drives that looked a bit like top loading washing machines - & were about the same size - when the data on them was needed. Heavy buggers.

I'd like to see a 750 GB one. 

It was 1.5 TB RAM in the end and it didn't work anyway. I'm glad that's not on my budget.

[Bledlow]

Hmmm.  My W10 laptop has caught the (reportedly unfixable) bug whereby the Excel file association appears to have been lost permanently ...

My WIn 8.1 work laptop did something similar. Clicking on an Excel file would load Excel but give some weird error saying it couldn't load the file. leaving Excel open then clicking the file again would load it perfectly. Spent hours trying to fix this, registry hacks, resetting file association etc no joy and I ended up just living with it. A couple of weeks ago it just fixed itself after a Microsoft update. Not sure which one did the job.

Mrs B's laptop had that last year. Buggered if I can remember what I did, but it fixed it. I think there's a little txt file on the laptop with the destructions . . .

Given the date, I expect you've fixed it, but if not please let me know & I'll look for the fix.

[TheLurker]

I remember rooms with cupboards full of 25 MB disk packs & people being paid to load them into drives that looked a bit like top loading washing machines

The RL02s (10MB?) we used for one or two of the PDP 11-44s were fairly light but the RA60s & RA80s for the 11-84s & (IIRC*) VAXEN were heavy.  At least the RA60s & 80s were slightly more shockproof than the RL02s. 



*I may not, it's a frighteningly long time ago.

[Mr Larrington]

IIRC RA-80s weren’t removable.  In my first job as a VAXherd we used an RA-80 (121 Mb) as the system disk and an RA-81 (a massive 456 Mb) for everything else.  Can’t remember what the PDP had.

[Clare]

Your Incident : IN00809172 :  Student records runtime error : has recently been completed with the following details:

No resolution

If you feel that the solution provided has not resolved your issue, please contact us and we will reopen this request.

Well, that's cleared things up.

[tiermat]

Just checked my monitoring and noticed one of my VPS is unreachable.

That'll be why then:
http://travaux.ovh.net/?do=details&id=49484

At 00:47 on Wednesday, March 10, 2021, a fire broke out in a room in one of our 4 datacenters in Strasbourg, SBG2. Please note that the site is not classified as a Seveso site.
Firefighters immediately intervened to protect our teams and prevent the spread of the fire. At 2:54 am they isolated the site and closed off its perimeter.
By 4:09 am, the fire had destroyed SBG2 and continued to present risks to the nearby datacenters until the fire brigade brought the fire under control.
From 5:30 am, the site has been unavailable to our teams for obvious security reasons, under the direction of the prefecture. The fire is now contained.

It is in SBG1 so I may wait to see how smoke damaged it is.

Was that the same place that Rust kept their systems?

[philip]

Scottish power have just sent me a text message to confirm a callout date, and the three apostrophies in the message were replaced by ¿, an upside down question mark. A search suggests this is caused by copy/paste from some Windows rich text environment. Why would Scottish Power have that as part of the process for sending text messages?

[ian]

Welcome to the giddy world of encoding.

[TheLurker]

IIRC RA-80s weren’t removable. 

Aye, my memory isn't up to snuff, but I did say it was a frighteningly long time ago.   Ummm, 30 years as near as makes no difference since the last time I got roped into a backup that involved multi-platter disk packs.

[Jurek]

This morning, somewhat oddly, my iPhone bonged to alert me to to a meeting arranged for 08:00 on March 23rd, with my sister, for breakfast.
Only I made no such arrangement, or entry in the calendar.
There's only one person I meet with for breakfast, and it's not my sister.
I've checked the calendar in my iMac, and there's no meetings arranged for that day. Which, given that the two are synced every couple of days, makes it even weirder.

[Mr Larrington]

You've recently had the Coronalurgi vaccination, no?  It's Bill Gates' way of telling you not to buy from the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia, via the 5G chip now embedded in your arm.

[Jurek]

Also, the entry in the calendar on the phone is high lit in yellow.
Yet yellow isn't one of the colour options available for high lighting.
Yes, yes, yes, I've thought of the 5G / Covid jab association.
Where's my roll of Alcan?

[Mr Larrington]

Note to self: if leaving the Babbage-Engine idle for three hours while you watch the news/nom dinner/drink tea it is wise to make sure it actually is idle and not still running the introductory bit of $GAME, which canes the GPU at 95% even when it ent doing anything.  No, I don’t know why.

(Melts)

[Chris S]

Must be a thing. If I leave my PS4 on the main menu page of Elite: Dangerous - the gpu fans sound like a 777 spooling up. It's literally just a menu. Oh, and a picture.

[woollypigs]

I forgot about Elite and I just looked it up, a new "season" to come out this spring. I must not get it, do not install ....

I lost many an hour back in 84-86 playing this game and I learned that gaming is my addiction and that I had to step away before something went wrong. Therefore I have never build a pc that is powerful enough to play anything other than Pong. Or tried out X-box. PSwhatevernumberitisnow as will become addicted.

What I just saw on the trailers for Dangerous and the new Odyssey. Months if not years will just go puff up into nothing if I get my hands on this.

[Ashaman42]

One of us. One of us.

[DaveReading]

I recently dusted off my 12-year-old photo printer, then after spending most of a day trying and failing to get it to work I remembered why I'd stopped using it.

I'd always been pleased with the results while it had been working, so I was delighted to find an example of the same model on eBay described as "opened but never used", so I duly bought it at a bargain price.

It was indeed in pristine condition, but the output was a bit iffy, which I put down to the cartridges bundled with it being well past their best by date. With replacements ordered, I decided I had nothing to lose by trying to unclog the old ones in the meantime - there's an interesting range of techniques on the Net involving cotton buds, vacuum cleaners, soaking in various solvents, etc.

Happily, they worked (printing photos minus any of the primary ink colours isn't recommended), so I'm looking forward to printing some nice 10x8s of the grandkids and discovering the delights of cartridge refill kits.

[TimO]

I was looking at which of the AVR Tiny microcontrollers was best to experiment with, and thought that the ATtiny3217 looked promising. It's not the simplest or cheapest, but the 24-pin VQFN it's packaged in is only 4mm across, so is physically smaller than the 8-pin SOIC of some of the other Tiny devices, and allows a lot more to be done. You can buy them for less than £1 each fairly easily, and about 65p if you're willing to buy more (500!)

Admittedly, a part that small is going to be a pain to hand solder, but I can probably do it carefully, and can possibly also get it assembled commercially for not a lot of money, when having a PCB made.

I searched for a way to easily experiment with it, and looking for development boards originally found the Dily 3217, but that doesn't seem to be sold by anyone. Luckily, after a little more hunting I found the ATtiny3217 Nano Curiosity board on Microchip's website, for only £11 each!

Like a lot of DIL boards, such as the Teensys and Arduino Nanos, it's meant to be plugged into a breadboard, but also has support for some development options such as controlling the regulator voltage and programming the board over the USB connector.

Reading the datasheet for the ATtiny3217, it's actually a remarkably powerful AVR device. There are a lot of cheap Cortex-M0+ devices on the market now, but this AVR one is likely to be less power-hungry. I think you can use every one of the 22 non-power pins for IO, it can run using its internal 20MHz (or 16MHz) oscillator, has 32kBytes of Flash, 2kBytes of RAM and 256 bytes of EEPROM, a USART, SPI and I2C interfaces, an ADC, DAC and PWM, not to mention some of the really complicated stuff!

Experimenting with it should be fun, yes I know I'm weird.

[Afasoas]

Just checked my monitoring and noticed one of my VPS is unreachable.

That'll be why then:
http://travaux.ovh.net/?do=details&id=49484

At 00:47 on Wednesday, March 10, 2021, a fire broke out in a room in one of our 4 datacenters in Strasbourg, SBG2. Please note that the site is not classified as a Seveso site.
Firefighters immediately intervened to protect our teams and prevent the spread of the fire. At 2:54 am they isolated the site and closed off its perimeter.
By 4:09 am, the fire had destroyed SBG2 and continued to present risks to the nearby datacenters until the fire brigade brought the fire under control.
From 5:30 am, the site has been unavailable to our teams for obvious security reasons, under the direction of the prefecture. The fire is now contained.

It is in SBG1 so I may wait to see how smoke damaged it is.

Was that the same place that Rust kept their systems?

Yes I think so.
I've spent far too many hours putting the DNS server configuration into ansible so the next time there is a fire, I'm covered. I thought this would take me a day, but so far it has taken three. The DNS side of it is actually quite straight forward. But, add dynamic DNS, letsencrypt (dehydrated.io), fail2ban, NTP, monitoring, logarchival, backups, email alerts on successful SSH auth and it turns out to be far less trivial. That said, having the configuration version controlled is a real boon.