• 4 Posts
  • 160 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle





  • limelight79@lemm.eetomemes@lemmy.worldOverflow
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    9 days ago

    I just ignore questions that I’m not interested in answering.

    The other day, someone asked in the Linux community here on Lemmy why people don’t like Ubuntu. It seems someone asks this question every few months. I thought, “I’ve answered several times, I’m done answering it, let someone else take care of it.” Last I saw it had over 100 comments, so I feel the issue is resolved.






  • My wife brought a 37" Vizio into the relationship she got in 2008. It still works great. It’s now hanging on the wall in the bedroom (and requires a special bracket because it doesn’t have the VESA specified mount). We have a FireTV that allows us to stream television to it. It has survived two moves, plus being relocated in the house a few times.

    So I’m with the guy in the comic - waiting for it to break could take forever.

    Our living room TV and Blu Ray player are from that very short time period where you could get a 3D TV setup that uses passive polarized glasses, not active shutter glasses. (We’ve only ever watched one movie in 3D on it.) So even that is at least 9-10 years old at this point.

    Obviously I’m not big on getting the latest and greatest TV, but if you wait until it’s broken, it could be a while, in my experience. I’m generally with the wife on upgrading things, ie after they break, but for some things, that might not be a viable plan (or, the reward is worth it).


  • I agree with the concern you’re raising, but most of the time I ran into it, I was using bluetooth to a radio that had its own volume control. The phone was just reacting to the volume setting, not listening and knowing it was too loud.

    I haven’t seen that happen in a long time, though. I saw elsewhere in the thread there was a way to disable it, so I might have done that, but I don’t recall seeing it at all on the newer Samsung S24 I got early this year.


  • To me, I don’t understand why someone would proofread their resume but not their cover letter.

    Yeah, I hear that…but you’d be surprised at how often I see perfectly-rendered resumes, and then multiple obvious issues in a cover letter.

    The cover letter helps you get the interview - after I make the decision (offer or not), I pretty much forget about the cover letter.


  • I may have posted this before, but…late last year I realized my Debian server with circa 2009 hardware, with 4 gb of RAM and Core 2 Quad processor, was no longer up to the tasks I wanted it to perform; in particular, running a Home Assistant server. Back in 2018 or so, I added a software Linux RAID5 array with 5 active 3 TB drives and one hot spare, along with a “cold spare” that I’ve never actually used.

    So, early this year, I bought hardware to upgrade my desktop machine, which was still plenty fast for me, and move the guts to my server. This is how my server usually gets upgraded. Upgrade the desktop machine, give it a few days or weeks to make sure it’s stable, and then upgrade the server.

    I installed the hardware without a problem, booted it up, and everything seemed okay, except that I …couldn’t access the RAID. At first it was like, well, I’m sure it’s nothing serious, but then when mdadm could even FIND it, I started to get extremely worried. Fear set in.

    Long story short: When I built the RAID, I followed directions that used the entire discs as the RAID, instead of making a partition on the disc and using that partition. The old motherboard didn’t care, but the new one saw the bare discs and was like, “Hey, those are messed up, I’ll fix the partition table for you!” Turns out, building Linux RAIDs by using the full discs like that is a VERY BAD IDEA for exactly this reason - but there are still guides out there showing that method and not mentioning the risks.

    I was panicking. I spent days trying to figure out what to do and nothing was working. I was asking for help on the Linux-RAID list (and most of them were as helpful as they could be). Unfortunately my backups were NOT up to par (something I should have checked before starting), and I was at the point where I was like, well, I’ve lost x, y, and z.

    I had basically given up and was just recreating the RAID using the “create command” then trying to see if I could mount the drive read-only. With 6 drives, there are quite a few possible combinations that could be the right one. If I remember correctly, I was able to figure out which drive was the spare, so I could limit my searches to the other 5, and knowing all 5 were in use, it was a matter of trying different orders. I think I got close one time and ext4 gave me weird read error, so after that I swapped two drives, and hit the right order.

    Eventually … I found it. I found the right combination and could reload it! Everything was there, untouched! As quickly as I could, I copied everything to a 10 TB drive I bought and installed into the desktop system. I saved the command, rebooted, and the same thing happened again - so it was definitely a motherboard problem - but this time I knew how to recreate it, and did so.

    Since I now had a backup, I partitioned each drive and rebuilt the array using partitions…and I saved every piece of data I could think of about building the array, outputs of mdadm, outputs of /proc/mdstat, partition IDs, etc. Naturally, having that info likely means I’ll never need it.

    I was so relieved when I saw that mount command work without error. I spent close to a week worrying about it, and in that moment it was a huge rush.

    New setup handles HA and other duties with aplomb and is very reliable, so in the end it was very worth it.

    This is less “silly” and more “horrifying”. Sorry.


  • Interesting. I’m a hiring manager, and I’ve seen many cover letters that actually hurt the candidate because they have typographical errors, poor grammar, or are addressed to a different organization entirely. Probably 85% of cover letters I see do no harm; most of the rest hurt the candidate. The way you’re describing a cover letter sounds like it would be beneficial, but I don’t see ones like that very often. I definitely would appreciate that you took the time to tailor it to us.

    My advice for everyone is, if you’re going to write a cover letter, proofread it just like the resume. If you’re short on time, focus on the resume and skip the cover letter (if you can - they might be required for some applications). I definitely notice a sloppy cover letter, so not having a cover letter will hurt far, far less than a sloppy one.

    I wouldn’t toss someone’s application just because their cover letter had a typographical error in it, especially if the candidate is otherwise well qualified. But, if I’m borderline on whether I want to interview someone, and the cover letter is sloppy, I’m probably going to pass. We’re pretty detail-oriented, and a sloppy cover letter makes me worry about the details.


  • I need to do this with my gaming computer yet. I run Linux on my other machines (and have for many years), but this one is Windows. I bought the computer in 2021, but it doesn’t have the trusted computing module, so I can’t upgrade it to Windows 11 even if I wanted to.

    Last night I tried to add an SSD that I had from a laptop that died, figuring I’ll put a fresh install of Linux on the second SSD and not touch the original drive. Unfortunately, the computer didn’t want to boot off the original drive any more - even when I changed the boot priority to the original drive, I still got grub from the new drive. I had to disconnect the new SSD to get the computer to boot Windows on the original drive (I wasn’t ready to do the Linux install and might need Windows in the mean time).

    I know it’s a temporary issue at worst, as the installer will likely pick up that Windows installation and make it an option in grub. But it was a setback I wasn’t expecting. I figured I’d put in the drive and have it just idling there until I had time to run the Linux installation.


  • I think my wife was mildly amused by it at first (I was playing with X10 automation long before she came into the picture), but quickly started to like it because it meant that we always came home to the lights on, stuff like that.

    And there’s one button to shut off the outside lights and “evening” lights in the house when we’re going to bed.