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Links June 2020

Bruce Schneier wrote an informative post about Zoom security problems [1]. He recommends Jitsi which has a Debian package of their software and it’s free software.

Axel Beckert wrote an interesting post about keyboards with small numbers of keys, as few as 28 [2]. It’s not something I’d ever want to use, but interesting to […]

How Will the Pandemic Change Things?

The Bulwark has an interesting article on why they can’t “Reopen America” [1]. I wonder how many changes will be long term. According to the Wikipedia List of Epidemics [2] Covid-19 so far hasn’t had a high death toll when compared to other pandemics of the last 100 years. People’s reactions to this vary from […]

Squirrelmail vs Roundcube

For some years I’ve had SquirrelMail running on one of my servers for the people who like such things. It seems that the upstream support for SquirrelMail has ended (according to the SquirrelMail Wikipedia page there will be no new releases just Subversion updates to fix bugs). One problem with SquirrelMail that seems unlikely to […]

Storage Trends

In considering storage trends for the consumer side I’m looking at the current prices from MSY (where I usually buy computer parts). I know that other stores will have slightly different prices but they should be very similar as they all have low margins and wholesale prices are the main factor.

Small Hard Drives Aren’t […]

Comparing Compression

I just did a quick test of different compression options in Debian. The source file is a 1.1G MySQL dump file. The time is user CPU time on a i7-930 running under KVM, the compression programs may have different levels of optimisation for other CPU families.

Facebook people designed the zstd compression system (here’s a […]

Cruises and Covid19

Problems With Cruises

GQ has an insightful and detailed article about Covid19 and the Diamond Princess [1], I recommend reading it.

FastCompany has a brief article about bookings for cruises in August [2]. There have been many negative comments about this online.

The first thing to note is that the cancellation policies on those cruises […]

A Good Time to Upgrade PCs

PC hardware just keeps getting cheaper and faster. Now that so many people have been working from home the deficiencies of home PCs are becoming apparent. I’ll give Australian prices and URLs in this post, but I think that similar prices will be available everywhere that people read my blog.

From MSY (parts list PDF […]

IT Asset Management

In my last full-time position I managed the asset tracking database for my employer. It was one of those things that “someone” needed to do, and it seemed that only way that “someone” wouldn’t equate to “no-one” was for me to do it – which was ok. We used Snipe IT [1] to track the […]

About Reopening Businesses

Currently there is political debate about when businesses should be reopened after the Covid19 quarantine.

Small Businesses

One argument for reopening things is for the benefit of small businesses. The first thing to note is that the protests in the US say “I need a haircut” not “I need to cut people’s hair”. Small businesses […]

Links March 2020

Rolling Stone has an insightful article about why the Christian Right supports Trump and won’t stop supporting him no matter what he does [1].

Interesting article about Data Oriented Architecture [2].

Quarantine Will normalise WFH and Recession will Denormalise Jobs [3]. I guess we can always hope that after a disaster we can learn to […]