Dave.

Does it download the actual music tracks from youtube-music, or does YouTube helpfully provide the video version of the music?

I’ve used a few downloaders and it seems these days that every music video is a whole “production” with 30 seconds of dialogue and intro before the actual music starts, or there’s background noise over the first dozen bars (because the artist is in a cafe or car park or on the train in the clip) and all of that is just a bit tedious when listening to the audio only.

“ChatGPT, write a letter to the community that says I am looking after this issue with untrusted BLOBs and it is of high importance but do not be specific about anything.”

Something like a raspberry pi or equivalent, and use reverse SSH set up to connect to a server with a known address on your end.

This means that ports don’t need to be opened on their end.

Also if you go with a gateway host, shift SSH to a randomised port like 37465, and install fail2ban.

I want a music playing alarm app that’s permanently locked to Sonny and Cher’s , “I got you babe”.

I don’t think there’s anything commercially available that can do it.

However, as an experiment, you could:

• Get a group of photos from a burst shot
• Encode them as individual frames using a modern video codec using, eg VLC.
• See what kind of file size you get with the resulting video output.
• See what artifacts are introduced when you play with encoder settings.

You could probably/eventually script this kind of operation if you have software that can automatically identify and group images.

True. Hence my caveat of “most cards”. If it’s got LEDs on the port, it’s quite likely to signal which speed it is at with those LEDs.

I haven’t yet come across a gigabit card that won’t do 10Mbit (edit: switches are a different matter) but sometimes I’ve come across cards that fail to negotiate speeds correctly, eg trying for gigabit when they only actually have a 4 wire connection that can support 100Mbit. Forcing the card to the “correct” speed makes them work.

There was a series of books in the '80s where a systems programmer gets pulled through a portal into your typical magical world, good vs evil, etc.

They subsequently look at the magical spells in use and realise they can apply Good Systems Programming Practices™ to it. And thus, with their knowledge of subroutines and parallel processing, they become a Pretty Good Magician™ as all the rest of the magicians basically have to construct their spells to execute in a linear fashion, and they’re off spawning recursive spells and generally causing havoc.

It’s quite a good allegory for modern times, where a select few build all the magic and the rest just have useful artefacts they use on a day to day basis with no idea how they work

For later reference, the link light on most network cards is a different colour depending on link speed. Usually orange for 1G, green for 100M and off for 10M (with data light still blinking).

I have not cared about or terminated A-spec after network cards gained auto MDI/MDIX about 20 years ago.

Yeah , it’s really a little strange in OPs case, I can’t really recall changing a CMOS battery in ages, like decades of computer use.

1. Replace CMOS battery.
2. Get small UPS.
3. Discover that small UPS’s fail regularly, usually with cooked batteries.
4. Add maintenance routine for UPS battery.
5. Begin to wonder if this is really worth it when the rest of the house has no power during an outage.
6. Get small generator.
7. Discover that small generators also need maintenance and exercise.
8. Decide to get a whole house battery backup a-la Tesla Powerwall topped off by solar and a dedicated generator.
9. Spend 15 years paying this off while wondering if the payback was really worth it, because you can count on one hand the number of extended power outages in that time.
10. In the end times a roving band of thugs comes around and kills you and strips your house of valuable technology, leaving your homelab setup behind and - sadly - without power. Your dream of unlimited availability has all been for nought.

Conclusion: just replace the CMOS battery on a yearly basis during planned system downtime.

Directly from the nginx home page:

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, a mail proxy server, and a generic TCP/UDP proxy server, originally written by Igor Sysoev.

Webrings were themed though, so if your interest was cars, or cats, or ham radio, you could get on a webring for one of those topics and cycle through them.

And it wasn’t all random, you could move left or right on the ring , or jump randomly. So a good webring manager could group sites together as you went around the ring as well.

It was one of LinuxBabe’s guides - this one:

https://www.linuxbabe.com/mail-server/setup-basic-postfix-mail-sever-ubuntu

There is a more recent one that uses a shell script to install all the bits and pieces but I prefer to do it myself so I’ve got at least some idea of how all the pieces work.

My most recent ISP does CGNAT. They don’t hide it, it’s mentioned in their support pages. A quick email is all it takes to switch you over to an open address though.

Anyway I’ve got a $5/mo server with akami that looks after my email and it’s associated domain.

It took about three hours of following a guide to set up DMARC and etc etc and it works unobtrusively, and is about ten times faster than my old ISP IMAP account that I had for about twenty years.

Time is a cube, and always will be.

i like how the answers are the exact same generic unhelpful drivel you hear 20k times a month if you’re…

Searching for a solution to any problem on the internet.

There are a million ad- laden sites that, in answer to a technical question about your PC, suggest that you run antivirus, system file checker, oh and then just format and reinstall your operating system. That is also 90 percent of the answers coming from “Microsoft volunteer support engineers” on Microsoft’s own support forums as well, just please like and upvote their answer if it helps you.

There are a million Instagram and tiktok videos showing obvious trivial, shitty, solutions to everyday problems as if they are revealing the secrets of the universe while they’re glueing bottle tops and scraps of car tires together to make a television remote holder.

There are a trillion posts on Reddit from trolls and shitheads just doing it for teh lulz and Google is happily slurping this entire torrent of shit down and trying to regurgitate it as advice with no human oversight.

I reckon their search business has about two years left at this rate before the general public regards them as a joke.

I work in OT. The number of “best practice” IT mantras that companies mindlessly pick up and then slavishly follow to the detriment of their mainly-OT business is alarming.

Make your own damn best practice that suits your business best, don’t copy and paste something from a megacorp. Sure, include elements from megacorp’s best practice if they are applicable, but don’t be a slave to the entirety of it.

2004:

User: “I moved my PC to another desk and now my monitor is off. The hard drive is making noises though. All the power cables are in haha. I made sure the connections were all nice and tight it’s a bit strange.”

IT: “Okay I want you to follow the video cable from the monitor to the hard drive. It should have a BLUE connector at the end.Can you see the label where it is plugged in?”

User: “…yes it says ‘serial’, I think?”

IT: “Aha. I’ll drop around this afternoon with a spare monitor. That Trinitron monitor you’ve got will need to go away to be repaired.”

when you can help people live in discord.

That live support is super handy when you’re 8 timezones apart from the maintainers.

• Hey there, how do I get this thing to compile?

11 hours later

• Ok just need to make sure you have this list of prerequisites installed and then we can walk you through the compilation process.

6 hours later

• Nevermind, I built and installed another project.