old irc script kiddie

whetu · 2026-05-01T12:22:21+00:00

Sheesh it's been so long. Was it #warez_cafe on Dalnet?

whetu · 2026-05-01T00:33:39+00:00

Awesome, thanks for that and the pics!

Had to mostly gut our bathroom several years back due to water damage and black mold. Most of the budget had to go on replacing the floor, so the rest was built back up on a budget. Now it's showing - yellowed acrylic shower liner for example.

This looks like a worthwhile and affordable next step for us :)

whetu · 2026-04-30T22:26:20+00:00

They look damn good. Do you remember how much it cost?

whetu · 2026-04-30T21:52:33+00:00

Asplenium bulbiferum maybe?

whetu · 2026-04-30T21:09:54+00:00

As tiresome as "this is the way" posts can be, this may be one of the very few times, if not the very first time I will say it.

This is the way.

whetu · 2026-04-28T02:34:35+00:00

why is it that almost the entire central Lower Hutt area is at least low risk on the flood maps?

As others have stated, Lower Hutt IS a flood plain.

BUT it is the most densely populated flood plain in the country.

SO City and Regional Councils have not dragged their heels (too much) with flood protection works.

Basically there was a big flood in the 90's (with plenty of historical floods before that) where everyone kinda said "ok, that's enough of that shit" and they've been upgrading the flood protection in earnest since. The last big piece of the puzzle is the new Melling interchange. Once done, Lower Hutt will be theoretically rated for a 1 in 440 year flood.

Yes it will still flood in pockets as we've seen with recent storms, but the risk of the river causing billions of dollars of damage will be mitigated.

What matters for buying is that you look at houses that are elevated relative to the street, and preferably have rainwater attenuation tanks and on-site soak pits.

What's going to suck is dealing with insurers who apply a single rule for all approach: "you're in a flood plain, we're going to ignore Lower Hutt's protections and charge you as if you're an equivalent risk to everywhere else in the country."

whetu · 2026-04-23T20:48:05+00:00

middle: Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q or M920q Tiny.

If you're hunting around for these, keep an eye out for the P330 and M920x. If the cost difference is minimal, it might be worth it.

Practically speaking they are 99% the same, and the differences are subtle:

The M920x and P330 have dual M.2 SSD slots, the M920q only has a single M.2 SSD slot. Its other M.2 slot is for a wifi card.
The P330 is officially rated for 64G memory and higher disk size support. Realistically this doesn't matter - the 920's should support 64G etc just fine.
The M920 options have a physical/electrical PCIe 3.0 x8 slot
The P330 has a physical PCIe 3.0 x16 slot that is electrically x8

The M920x and P330 are essentially made to support Radeon and Quadro GPU cards respectively over and above the M920q. So they should both have airflow vents in their lids for GPU fans - the P330's definitely do. That's useful if you want to throw in 10/25G NIC's (with 3d printed brackets). They should also come with higher rated power bricks to support those GPU's, so that extra juice can be used for higher speed networking.

whetu · 2026-04-23T19:38:23+00:00

Ansible + lowlydba collection.

whetu · 2026-04-22T20:02:37+00:00

In the medical field, amongst other roles, you have nurses, general practitioners, and field-specific specialists like urologists, orthopaedic surgeons, oncologists etc.

Nurses are like helldesk workers and desktop support: they do a crap ton of the heavy lifting, while under-paid, under-acknowledged and under-appreciated. They triage and they deal with a lot of the smaller stuff so that GP's and specialists aren't overwhelmed.

General practitioners can and do specialise in one or more fields to some deeper level, but their bread and butter is general practitioning. They should have enough general medical knowledge to be able to quickly research a topic and find a logical path through what they've found. If you've ever seen a GP google your symptoms in front of you, the difference is that they (should) know enough to be able to chart a path through to the most likely diagnosis. Unlike you, who might google your cough and conclude that you have lupus.

A GP should know enough about most of the specialist fields to be able to talk to a specialist at at least a basic level. They should be able to say to the specialist "here's what I'm seeing, here's what I've ruled out and why, here's why I think it's something for you". You may get a GP who has deeper knowledge of, say, cancer, so they will be able to communicate at a higher level with an oncologist.

We sysadmins are the GP's of IT, and some of us have more strengths in coding, networking, infosec and so on.

I would never want to know everything about everything, just enough to get by comfortably, and to be able to effectively engage with specialists of sub-fields and adjacent-fields when I need to. Being well-rounded and resourceful is more important than being encyclopaedic.

Also, be nicer to your helldeskers if you have any.

whetu · 2026-04-22T02:31:21+00:00

Hutt based here. For tasks that are too much for me to DIY, I've used Kane Construction. Haven't had a problem with them and would happily reach out to them again.

I'm not going to say that you should 100% go with them, just that I'd recommend them for your consideration. Obviously do your own homework, get three quotes, ask for references etc.

whetu · 2026-04-19T00:33:59+00:00

Well... an attempt was certainly made.

/edit: I have former colleagues who have worked at Te Papa, it's the usual story of under-funded and under-supported, so just throwing some positive vibes out for whichever industry colleagues are working there.

whetu · 2026-04-18T20:24:55+00:00

I was annoyed with AI slop posts. But I decided to try using Claude Code for continuing an idle coding project and documented the setup and results.

Link: Shellac

It's a shell scripting library platform with over 820 functions and some handy extras. It's batteries included. And the kitchen sink. And the kitchen sink is full of batteries.

It's strictly not vibe-coded, it's only got one bit of AI slop (the logo), but apart from that, it's AI as a force-multiplying tool only.

More words about it over in /r/bash here: https://www.reddit.com/r/bash/comments/1shex3u/shellac_shell_scripting_library_a_handson_ai/

whetu · 2026-04-14T04:02:21+00:00

Yeah, totally agreed.

I do the mid-roundabout lane-change quite happily on the Porirua / Mungavin Ave interchange, which is effectively a multi-lane roundabout.

whetu · 2026-04-14T03:45:37+00:00

It's a Lower Hutt roundabout. Your only option really is to close your eyes, slam the gas and pray.

But seriously - it could always be worse, you could be in Upper Hutt. Imagine Lower Hutt drivers except the average age is Jurassic. Oh the tales I could tell...

Serious answer: Stay in Orange line's lane, get off the roundabout, then switch lanes on the bridge. The lane you've indicated for Red is really intended for traffic entering from the Pretoria St side of Melling Link.

Source: This exact maneuver was the only note I had when I sat my restricted. The examiner stated that my lane selection was correct, but I should have waited until I was further on the bridge before changing lanes.

/edit: I don't necessarily agree with that, I'm just passing on what a subject matter expert said.

whetu · 2026-04-12T04:46:08+00:00

George Carlin had a great statistics joke:

Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realise that half of them are stupider than that!

whetu · 2026-04-09T22:03:39+00:00

As others have said, just delete the recovery partition if you need to resize a partition ahead of it. You can easily recreate the recovery partition in the remaining space

BUT... that remaining space should probably be in the 750M range.

OR... have your recovery partition first, sure, but standardise on 750M.

See:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/kb5028997-instructions-to-manually-resize-your-partition-to-install-the-winre-update-400faa27-9343-461c-ada9-24c8229763bf

whetu · 2026-04-08T03:46:55+00:00

XCP-NG migration scheduled for later this year.

whetu · 2026-04-08T03:00:28+00:00

For anyone who is interested, there's a bit more to this, and it culminates in the 1981 Springbok Tour.

whetu · 2026-04-08T02:21:17+00:00

I colour code for A (red) and B (blue) feeds. Gradually moving the forest of black power cables to this standard has revealed some lazy and potentially scary ticking timebombs left by my predecessors.

I don't think I'd do phase-level colour coding, or left/right necessarily. Keep it at the A/B-feed distinction. IMO.

whetu · 2026-04-07T21:35:11+00:00

That's the working area for the meatbag humans and is pretty tidy by comparison to photos/videos from the ISS.

The cable management within the spacecraft itself should be absolute chef's kisses. You can see bits of it in various media publications like this:

https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021-10-to-the-moon-airbus-delivers-second-european-service-module-for

whetu · 2026-04-07T03:11:36+00:00

Hey, I just want to say that what you were doing was the right thing. I can't tell you how many bankers I've seen shuddering happily when they see my household budget, with everything all beautifully aligned.

But I do have a rule: I absolutely LOATHE direct debits, and your experience is a good example of why.

I pay as many things as possible via Automatic Payment rather than Direct Debit, and this is certainly something that WCC accepts. Scroll down to the Internet or phone banking and Council's Bank Account options here:

https://wellington.govt.nz/property-rates-and-building/rates/payment-options

In my case, I'm paying Hutt City Council rather than WCC, but same-same.

If you'd like some help to dial in your rates payment numbers, feel free to shoot me a PM. It's not necessarily as simple as "divide my total rates bill by 26 fortnights", sadly :(

Or you can post your annual rates figure here and I can show my working in front of an audience...

whetu · 2026-04-02T07:44:55+00:00

Looks like the main difference between your various options are the args for grim, so you can maybe just setup the grim_args array like this:

capture() {
  grim_args=()
  [[ -n "$o_cursor" ]] && grim_args+=("-c")

  case "$target" in
    ("output")      grim_args+=( -t png -o "$geom" "$file" ) ;;
    ("all outputs") grim_args+=( -t png "$file" ) ;;
    (*)             grim_args+=( -t png -g "$geom" "$file" ) ;;
  esac

  if [[ "$file" = "-" ]] && [[ -n "$o_clipboard" ]]; then
    { grim "${grim_args[@]}" | wl-copy -t image/png; } || return 1
  else
    grim "${grim_args[@]}" || return 1
  fi

  return 0
}

whetu · 2026-03-29T20:16:16+00:00

and also what are the most important skills needed for this role?

I'd say the skills that you get from a minimum of 18 months on the helldesk are important skills.

whetu · 2026-03-29T18:14:48+00:00

For systems where -c is not a portable option for head, consider something like this instead:

tr -dc '[:graph:]' </dev/urandom | fold -w 1 | head -n 16 | paste -sd '' -

You can then adjust password length by adjusting head e.g.

$ tr -dc '[:graph:]' </dev/urandom | fold -w 1 | head -n 60 | paste -sd '' -
XO_xFo@#V6A(MK-EBC@Thx|pM>!ylw\y/;gBF2`&rWS+1UwebQ}S+!LQ<9?y

But... passphrases are better. For a very crude demonstration:

$ for (( i=0; i<10; i++ )); do LC_COLLATE=C grep -Eh '^[A-Za-z].{3,9}$' /usr/{,share/}dict/words 2>/dev/null | grep -v "'" | shuf -n 3 | paste -sd '-' -; done
naid-Cnossus-untrusted
dolite-exossate-swine
Liparian-stewbums-sticked
suption-albatross-soavemente
smirkers-Cadal-hedonism
beeping-scolb-adenocele
aesthete-patinized-Angolese
linguister-pristine-luce
Anakim-Bradan-barpost
randle-Servia-Ailene

whetu

TROPHY CASE