NotAnArdvark

joined 2 years ago
[–] NotAnArdvark 6 points 5 days ago

My dog was getting dental work done and my vet was worried about her leg. She said while my dog was sedated she'd throw her up under the x-ray to take a look at the joint. "Well that's super nice!" I thought.

I leave my dog at the vet and get a call an hour or so later. It's the vet, she says she's really sorry but not only can she not do that x-ray for free, but I'll have to pay a consult fee too if they're going to look at anything not related to the teeth. She was very apologetic.

When I go to get my dog we're going over discharge notes and at the end this poor vet says "I now need to recommend this particular water supplement. I don't use it with my dogs. Some people think it's expensive and ineffective. If you think you might be interested I can also tell you about other options that may be more effective."

This poor woman who was all happy and concerned about my dog turned into someone who seemed supremely uncomfortable. I can only imagine it was VCA that was forcing this vet to go contrary to what she felt was best.

[–] NotAnArdvark 1 points 1 week ago

I'm surprised how many people turn their computers off. My desktop uptime is 4 day, but, I do put it to sleep at night (which I think counts towards its uptime).

I will look into hibernating. The reason I don't shut down is because I usually end up with carefully placed windows and lots of ongoing projects all over. Restarting would mean I'd have to start all that up again - assuming I remember what I was doing.

[–] NotAnArdvark 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

For whatever it's worth - I have a laptop with 4GB of RAM and a 4GB ZRAM device, and it can't use all the ZRAM before everything grinds to a halt. I think the way ZRAM works best is if it can "swap out" (compress) anonymous pages that aren't actually needed again right away, freeing up the fast memory for disk caching and other memory needs.

In my case, I think I can reach a point where the amount of memory Linux needs simultaneously active goes beyond the 4GB of RAM, so it's just compressing/uncompressing forever and getting nowhere.

So, I think I'd argue that maybe you can't go too big? I think only anonymous pages can get compressed, and there's probably only so many gigabytes of those in memory at any given time.

[–] NotAnArdvark 30 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I was watching CBC coverage of some press conference Poilievre was doing, going on and on about the need for an "axe the tax election" (??). Someone asked Poilievre what he was doing to fight against Trump's proposed tariffs and Poilievre says he's not the prime minister, but if Canadians give him a mandate, he'll fight for their interests, etc.

Then the CBC commentator cuts in and says "It should be noted that there are many people who aren't the prime minister who have decided to adopt a "team Canada" attitude and are doing what they can to make the case against tariffs."

The bluntness and absurdity I just found hilarious.

[–] NotAnArdvark 6 points 1 month ago (4 children)

YouTube premium is one of the subscriptions I most often feel thankful for having. I watch enough YouTube videos that avoiding all those ads is really worthwhile, I hope that my view is worth more to the channels I watch, and YouTube music let me cancel Spotify.

I understand being pissed at YouTube and Google, but at the end of the day, of all the things I have to rage at, YouTube isn't worth it. I like it, there are creators that use it that I like, and I understand that it costs real money to run the platform.

[–] NotAnArdvark 2 points 1 month ago

I switched to Tumbleweed from Ubuntu but was wary of the rolling release idea. I went in thinking "Well yeah, they need a file system like BTRFS to back out of bad updates." And this was the case for me when Zoom stopped working after an update during a month when I really needed Zoom to be working. But, somehow, BTRFS has turned into a personal requirement for me everywhere. Things went wrong on Ubuntu too, wouldn't it have been nice to be able to easily roll back the change that did it?

So, I still find it irritating how often little things change with Tumbleweed, but I love having BTRFS in the background making sure I can back out of any major issues.

[–] NotAnArdvark 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Does Lemmy life feel any different using your private instance now?

 

Here's the situation: I use the Obsidian Flatpak with Plasma on openSUSE Tumbleweed. For a long time the Obsidian file picker was the Plasma version, and life was good. After an update of openSUSE and my Obsidian Flatpak, I'm now getting the Gnome file picker. Life now makes less sense.

I've confirmed that other Flatpaks are still using the Plasma file picker. I've also been investigating my xdg-desktop-portal configuration based off of what I've been reading here, but it all looks correct to me.

I can't decide whether this change was because of Obsidian, the Flatpak packaging of Obsidian, or an openSUSE change. Does anyone have tips on tracking this down?

[–] NotAnArdvark 49 points 3 months ago (11 children)

I don't see what would be wrong with a world where businesses just satisfied themselves with providing employees with a reasonable living, contributed to the communities they were in, and provided a good or service that was needed. Sitting under a tree and reading a book sounds better than watching the world burn in your name-brand clothes and 5 bedroom 2.5 bath house.

[–] NotAnArdvark 5 points 3 months ago

Adding my "Me too" to Vorta/Borg. I use it with Borgbase, which I like because it's legitimately cheap and they support Borg development. As well, you can set Borg backups with Borgbase to "append only," which prevents ransomware or other unexpected "whoopsies" from wiping out your backup history.

I backup most of my computer every hour, but have pruning rules that make sure things don't get too out of hand. I have a second backup that backs everything up to my NAS (using Vorta, again). This is helpful for things like my downloads folder, virtual machines, or STEAM library - things I wouldn't want to backup over the network, but on occasion I do find myself going "whoops, I wanted that."

I also have Vorta working on my Mom's Macbook, then have Borgbase send me an email when there isn't any activity for longer than a couple of days. Once I got automatic pruning working right I never had to touch this again.

[–] NotAnArdvark 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I want a GPU to do silly AI stuff, but my hesitation with Intel is I'm not convinced they're in the GPU market for the long haul. The irony, of course, is that if there are lots of people like me, Intel may actually abort their GPU efforts because no one is buying.

I suppose that they're working on their 3rd generation already is a good sign.

[–] NotAnArdvark 2 points 3 months ago

I moved from Kubuntu to Tumbleweed and really like it. For some reason I really don't like RPMs and that caused some hesitancy when I thought of switching, but really I never deal with RPMs directly. Zypper is ok and I've made peace with Flatpak. I update the whole distro every weekend and I've tested out reverting using Snapper.

In the year and a half of using it I can think of two problems I had from updating - one is fixed by removing the GPUCache directory of an Electron app when Mesa gets updated, the other is with Zoom which I mostly fixed by moving to the Flatpak version.

 

The following command works even though I really don't think I should have permission to the key file:
$ openssl aes-256-cbc -d -pbkdf2 -in etc_backup.tar.xz.enc -out etc_backup.tar.xz -k /etc/ssl/private/etcBackup.key

I'm unable to even ascertain the existence of the key file under my normal user. I'm a member of only two groups, my own group and vboxusers.

The permissions leading up to that file:

drwxr-xr-x   1 root root 4010 Jul 31 08:01 etc
...
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root      206 Jul 14 23:52 ssl
...
drwx------ 1 root root    26 Jul 31 14:07 private
...
-rw------- 1 root root 256 Jul 31 14:07 etcBackup.key

OpenSSL isn't setuid:

> ls -la $(which openssl)
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1004768 Jul 14 23:52 /usr/bin/openssl

There don't appear to be any ACLs related to that key file:

> sudo getfacl /etc/ssl/private/etcBackup.key
[sudo] password for root: 
getfacl: Removing leading '/' from absolute path names
# file: etc/ssl/private/etcBackup.key
# owner: root
# group: root
user::rw-
group::---
other::---

> sudo lsattr  /etc/ssl/private/etcBackup.key
---------------------- /etc/ssl/private/etcBackup.key

Finally, it's not just the case that the original file was encrypted with an empty file:

> openssl aes-256-cbc -d -pbkdf2 -in etc_backup.tar.xz.enc -out etc_backup.tar.xz -k /etc/ssl/private/abc.key
bad decrypt
4047F634B67F0000:error:1C800064:Provider routines:ossl_cipher_unpadblock:bad decrypt:providers/implementations/ciphers/ciphercommon_block.c:124

Does anyone know what I've missed here?

 

Zoom is vital to my job this month and prior to an update last week I had the openSUSE version of Zoom's RPM installed and working fine.

I updated my Tumbleweed installation to openSUSE-20240704-0 last week, after which Zoom started crashing when sharing a screen. There was a message in the logs about the library libqt5qml.so and I thought I could fix this by backing out either the update for the libQtQuick5 package in particular, or just booting from the pre-update snapshot.

To make a long story short, I ultimately installed the Zoom Flatpak and resolved to get back to this when I had a bit more time.

My question - Can people suggest the right way in openSUSE Tumbleweed to handle the situation where an update breaks something on the system?

Assuming libQtQuick5 was the updated package that was at fault here, is there a way I could have downgraded just that package? Would booting from the pre-update snapshot and then just carrying on with my week have been a reasonable way to proceed?

To be clear - I'm not so much concerned about Zoom, I'm more curious about how to use the openSUSE Tumbleweed tools to recover from updates that cause problems.

Thank you!

 

I'll be emailing the site admin... or some contact at the site, but, is there anything else that can be done to try to put pressure on these websites that tell me "you're not getting the best experience... download Chrome."?

I know Firefox has a "Report a broken site" feature, but, the site isn't technically broken. They're just telling me to switch browsers.

 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/14107888

I have a very specific questions about Linux Traffic control and u32 filters in particular. However, I don't know where the right place is to ask such a question as it's fairly niche.

The Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control site says it has a mailing list for questions, but the last post was from 2019. There is also the incredibly busy 'linux-netdev' mailing list, but, the traffic there looks like strictly source changes.

Any ideas?

The question I'm trying to find an answer to is: The u32 tc filter seems to support negative byte offsets which allows you to examine the Ethernet frame header (I don't think I even found documentation on this, this is thanks to ChatGPT). However, when using u32 values to examine 8 bytes I can only use offsets in increments of 4 - like "at -8" or "at -12", with any other increment giving me the error Illegal "match".

This seems like only a curiosity, but, I've been struggling to get my bit-matching to match the way I expect, and I'm wondering if this suggests that matching doesn't function the way I think.

 

I have a very specific questions about Linux Traffic control and u32 filters in particular. However, I don't know where the right place is to ask such a question as it's fairly niche.

The Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control site says it has a mailing list for questions, but the last post was from 2019. There is also the incredibly busy 'linux-netdev' mailing list, but, the traffic there looks like strictly source changes.

Any ideas?

The question I'm trying to find an answer to is: The u32 tc filter seems to support negative byte offsets which allows you to examine the Ethernet frame header (I don't think I even found documentation on this, this is thanks to ChatGPT). However, when using u32 values to examine 8 bytes I can only use offsets in increments of 4 - like "at -8" or "at -12", with any other increment giving me the error Illegal "match".

This seems like only a curiosity, but, I've been struggling to get my bit-matching to match the way I expect, and I'm wondering if this suggests that matching doesn't function the way I think.

 

With the cold weather I was hoping to hear of some experiences people have had with their heat pumps.

What kind of backup heat do you have? Are you using it? Is there some temperature where you just stop using the heat pump, or are you even consciously thinking about it?

Thanks!

 

I really had no idea where on Lemmy to ask this, so apologies if this seems like a bit of a strange place to post.

I'm a computer guy, but "fixing computers" isn't usually my thing. However, I offered to migrate my veterinarian's accounting laptop to a new laptop she had bought. This involved getting an old version of Quickbooks running on Windows 11, a bit of back-and-forth with login details for various accounts. Generally though, it was straight forward.

This took me about 4 hours (more, really). The only other time I did contractor work like this I picked my rate based on what my mechanic was charging - $95/hour.

So my invoice, for my tiny-town vet, is going to be $380. Can I get input from anyone on whether that's high? The laptop itself probably only cost $500. Something that makes me feel a bit better about the number is that I've helped her out lots over the last couple of years and never billed her for it, despite her saying I should.

Thanks!

19
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by NotAnArdvark to c/[email protected]
 

My hood fan vents into the top of this metal box, which then has a vent to the outside about halfway down the metal box. The box itself it maybe two half-height shoe boxes in size. I looked pretty hard, and the closest I could find was that it might be related to collecting condensation.

Does anyone know what this is for?

Thanks

I should say! The picture that comes up for this album is clearly the outside vent and is not what I'm talking about. Click on it to see all the pictures!

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