Archives

Categories

Links May 2025

Christopher Biggs gave an informative Evrything Open lecture about voice recognition [1]. We need this on Debian phones.

Guido wrote an informative blog post about booting a custom Android kernel on a Pixel 3a [2]. Good work in writing this up, but a pity that Google made the process so difficult.

Interesting to read about […]

Service Setup Difficulties

Marco wrote a blog post opposing hyperscale systems which included “We want to use an hyperscaler cloud because our developers do not want to operate a scalable and redundant database just means that you need to hire competent developers and/or system administrators.” [1].

I previously wrote a blog post Why Clusters Usually Don’t Work [2] […]

Machine Learning Security

I just read an interesting blog post about ML security recommended by Bruce Schneier [1].

This approach of having 2 AI systems where one processes user input and the second performs actions on quarantined data is good and solves some real problems. But I think the bigger issue is the need to do this. Why […]

Leaf ZE1

I’ve just got a second hand Nissan LEAF. It’s not nearly as luxurious as the Genesis EV that I test drove [1]. It’s also just over 5 years old so it’s not as slick as the MG4 I test drove [2]. But the going rate for a LEAF of that age is $17,000 vs $35,000 […]

Digital Sovereignty and Email

Running Your Own Email Srever

I run my own mail server. I have run it since about 1995, initially on a 28k8 modem connection but the connection improved as technology became cheaper and now I’m running it on a VM on a Hetzner server which is also running domains for some small businesses. I make […]

DDR4 RAM Size

I’ve been looking at computer hardware on AliExpress a lot recently and I saw an advert for a motherboard which can take 256G DDR4 RDIMMs (presumably LRDIMMs). Most web pages about DDR4 state that 128G is the largest possible. The Wikipedia page for DDR4 doesn’t state that 128G is the maximum but does have 128G […]

Silly Job Titles

Many years ago I was on a programming project porting code from OS/2 1.x to NT. When I was there they suddenly decided to make a database of all people and get job titles for everyone – apparently the position description used when advertising the jobs wasn’t sufficient. When I got given a clipboard with […]

Links April 2025

Asianometry has an interesting YouTube video about elecrolytic capacitors degrading and how they affect computers [1]. Keep your computers cool people!

Biella Coleman (famous for studying the Anthropology of Debian) and Eric Reinhart wrote an interesting article about MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) and how it ended up doing exactly the opposite of what was […]

Last Post About the Yoga Gen3

Just over a year ago I bought myself a Thinkpad Yoga Gen 3 [1]. That is a nice machine and I really enjoyed using it. But a few months ago it started crashing and would often play some music on boot. The music is a diagnostic code that can be interpreted by the Lenovo Android […]

What Desktop PCs Need

It seems to me that we haven’t had much change in the overall design of desktop PCs since floppy drives were removed, and modern PCs still have bays the size of 5.25″ floppy drives despite having nothing modern that can fit in such spaces other than DVD drives (which aren’t really modern) and carriers for […]