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

[Mr Larrington]

Q: When copying a folder tree containing many many very very small files to an old and slow NAS, is it quicker to cram them all into a heavily-compressed archive, copy the archive file to the NAS and unpack it in situ?

A: Why, no!  No, it is not!

Unpack started at quarter to five yesterday evening.  It's still going.  This is why the temperature in the Estate Office is ~ seven Celsius higher than is normal for this time of year.

[Feanor]

I've just discovered that there's an IRC client in Thunderbollocks, and it's about as good as the one that used to be built into Mozilla, which is to say 'not very'.  (Credit where it's due for giving the option of displaying messages line-by-line as well as supporting the stupid space-consuming speech-bubble user interface that all IRC-like things have to have these days.)

This TIL sponsored by a "WTF is Matrix?" rabbit-hole.

I've just discovered that too!
I'd forgotten you mentioned this.

Have been Migrating Stuffs Around on AAISP, to ditch the copper pair: IRC chat is handy.

[Kim]

Does anyone know the story behind the official gov.uk bunting API?

https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays.json

I need to build something silly that uses this data...

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

Transparent processor found in vintage HP computer – exotic silicon-on-sapphire chip discovered on a humble floppy drive PCB

A mysterious transparent chip has been found in an HP computer, dating back to 1977. Investigations have concluded that the custom chip was formed on a sapphire substrate, making it a silicon-on-sapphire IC. What was it for? Its function was far more mundane than you might expect: It was a support component on a floppy disk controller.

Silicon-on-sapphire may sound somewhat futuristic, but Shirriff’s blog highlights that ICs made this way have been around since 1963 or earlier. A notable example of a silicon-on-sapphire IC is the RCA 1802 processor used on the Galileo space probe that studied Jupiter and its moons.

[ian]

I suspect they're often used in high radiation situations like outer space since it's hard for a high-energy photon to knock electrons loose from a rigid crystal like sapphire.


Can't explain why they used for a floppy disk though, the contents must have been some exotic kind of extra spicy ASCII p0rn.

[rafletcher]

I’m finding that the Google app on this iPad (7th generation running iPad IOS 17.2) is playing up. Sometimes the loading progress bar just stalls, other times it appears to load the page but as I scroll down it just cuts off and shows no more data. Using Google search on Chrome I have no issues. Irritating. I’ve cleared the cache, for all the good it did. I’ll try a delete and reinstall.

ETA Appears to have resolved it.

[Wowbagger]

I have a Raspberry pi, cordially fielding all the weather station’s data and writing a web page with it.

It has been doing this uncomplainingly for 103 days from the time of writing. Is there anything to be said for rebooting the Raspberry pi periodically, or is it better to leave well alone?

[delthebike]

I have a Raspberry pi, cordially fielding all the weather station’s data and writing a web page with it.

It has been doing this uncomplainingly for 103 days from the time of writing. Is there anything to be said for rebooting the Raspberry pi periodically, or is it better to leave well alone?

Leave well alone, except for security updates that may require reboots.
Double check that the potential updates will not interfere with the weatherish software and stop them from working properly or at all.

[Mr Larrington]

Off-by-one errors, how do I hate thee?  Let me count the ways.

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

Berlin researchers hacked Tesla autopilot to unlock “Elon mode”

Three IT security researchers from Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin) glitched Tesla’s driving assistant into activating a powerful “Elon mode” and were able to access the company’s secrets, Spiegel reported. Allegedly, all Tesla models are vulnerable to this attack.
..

They assume all Tesla vehicles are vulnerable to such an attack as they probably all use the same circuit board, even if the owner did not buy the driving assistance system. Researchers themselves were surprised that it was easy to get into Tesla’s secrets.
“What we showed today is that with the voltage fault injection attack, Tesla's intellectual property could be threatened.”
However, the hack requires physical access to the circuit board, removing and reinstalling it without damage, and soldering skills. Therefore, such an attack would not be very practical outside the laboratory.

[TheLurker]

https://cybernews.com/tech/berlin-researchers-hacked-tesla-autopilot

...the hack requires physical access to the circuit board, removing and reinstalling it without damage, and soldering skills. Therefore, such an attack would not be very practical outside the laboratory a reasonably well set up garage or lock-up

[rogerzilla]

Having seen small operators doing fiddly repairs to things like Audi dashboards, the soldering skills required here would be trivial by comparison.

[Kim]

Just discovered that if barakta plugs her phone into her laptop dock, not only does it do power delivery charging, but the keyboard and mice Just Work.

[Cudzoziemiec]

What's the difference between "power delivery charging" and "charging"?

[Kim]

It negotiates a higher voltage than the basic USB 5V, which means you can draw more power down the same wire (needed to usefully power a laptop over USB-C).  Power Delivery and Quick Charge are two standards for doing this, with PD seeming to be winning the standards war.

Lots of phone manufacturers have their own pointless names for them, because marketing.  "Turbo Charge" being Motorolaese for QC, for example.

As in all things USB, it's a confusing mess.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Oh. I've not encountered USB charging for (as opposed to from) laptops. I have a vague idea mine is from 2012, so I suppose it's like a rim-braked 9-speeed.

[Kim]

In classic modern-life-is-rubbish style, I have a laptop here with a USB-C port that it can't charge from.  (The SEEKRIT is what little symbols appear next to the socket.)  If you plug it into barakta's laptop dock, it sprouts monitors and USB ports and Ethernet and audio as you'd hope, but will happily sit there draining its battery, unless you also connect its power supply to the stupid little^[1] DC barrel jack.

Barakta's $ork and $ork-1 laptops are a bit newer and at least have the decency to charge from USB-C.  This is a tremendous standards win, as it means that the power supplies for them are effectively interchangeable.  (And can indeed also be used to charge a phone^[2].)


_{[1] It's like 3mm external diameter, and is undoubtedly going to get broken at some point.
[2] Phone chargers won't generally be able to supply enough voles to power a laptop, but that's okay because at least the magic smoke doesn't escape from anything if you try.}

[Mr Larrington]

One second power glitch.  Some stuff went off, like this PC, the router and the printer.  Some didn't, like the Great Hall PC and the notwork drives.

Confuzzled...

[Kim]

One second power glitch.  Some stuff went off, like this PC, the router and the printer.  Some didn't, like the Great Hall PC and the notwork drives.

Confuzzled...

V=V₀-I_t/C or something.

Some devices might be storing more voles.  Other devices might be more vole-hungry.  And of course the quality of the Chinesium in the reservoir capacitors may vary, along with how much they've been over-specified to ensure that droid rot doesn't set in until at least 5 minutes after the warranty period expires.

In practice, I find that immunity to brief power drop-outs is proportional to the annoyance of an unplanned restart.  So cooker clocks, burglar alarms in unoccupied houses and anything that needs to run fsck will trip out in under 20ms, but tellingbones, Fridges Of Silly Oak™ and anything responsible for keeping hospital patients awake with incessant beeping won't even blink.

[MattH]

It's probably 20 years ago now when I started investing in UPSes for "critical" stuff in the house. Admittedly at the time our village was fed by overhead power cables so we got regular outages, and I was doing stuff from home that meant I had some small servers running for my business from there. So UPSes to keep the computing stuff, and the ISDN and ADSL routers alive.

Nowadays it's a bit easier because most of our computing is done on laptops, so they don't care about short-ish blips. I still have UPSes running my home server, all the networking kit, the DECT phones, and the entertainment stuff in the living room. That means a short blip won't turn off the TV, lose any programmes that are being recorded at that moment, or drop the amp out. That stuff won't run very long (20 minutes or so), but it gives time to ride out short outages or do an orderly shutdown to allow critical stuff to run much longer. I can manage several hours of no incoming mains without losing the ability to talk rubbish on the internet.

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

Hackers discover way to access Google accounts without a password

‘Exploit enables continuous access to Google services, even after a user’s password is reset,’ researcher warns



“We routinely upgrade our defences against such techniques and to secure users who fall victim to malware. In this instance, Google has taken action to secure any compromised accounts detected,” Google said in a statement.

“Users should continually take steps to remove any malware from their computer, and we recommend turning on Enhanced Safe Browsing in Chrome to protect against phishing and malware downloads.”

[alfapete]

Is there a word for the joy you get after getting your (inevitably) HP printer working again after 36 hours being offline?

[Wowbagger]

I think that this morning Jan has successfully cancelled an account with a broadband provider, in this case Three. The 2-year contract is up on 27th Jan, and the 24th direct debit is due to leave our account on 22nd. Three (aka Hutchins Telecom) failed to give us the statutory OFCOM 30 days notice that the end of the account was approaching.

It's only £14 a month but I'm very wary of these bastards since our run-in with Virgin two years ago.

[JonBuoy]

It looks like there is a mass outage for Plusnet broadband.  That'll do for today's excuse for not thrashing myself round some imaginary world in the spare room.  I might have to have a beer to cheer myself up 

[TheLurker]

It looks like there is a mass outage for Plusnet broadband. 

Sorry to be a wet blanket, but it's back.