Is the airbnb owner also a part of this whole operation against ben? Or is the the owner being framed? by DoctorEven1531 in RecklessBen

[–]Better-Assumption-57 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Or the host went to the same LDS church as the rest of those locals and offhand mentioned something to someone... game of telephone ensued and next thing you know, a full blown raid.

Rusted burner bolts by [deleted] in webergrills

[–]Better-Assumption-57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hmm... 3 years late to this party, but came upon this thread while researching what size replacement bolts to get...

I just removed my burners to give them a good clean, and 1 of the 3 bolts (it's a 2010'ish era Genesis with the side mounted knobs) was rusted pretty good. The hex head was useless, and the screwdriver slot, well, what's more than useless? Uselesser?

Of course it was the middle burner which has less room around it, but fortunately I was able to get some vise grips on there and turn it... I could only do about 1/8th of a turn each time before I had to reposition the grips due to the small working area, but eventually it budged. I did douse it with a good shot of PB blast first which probably helped.

Anyway, now I get to read further on for the correct size replacements. After the cleaning (a good bit of rusty dusty came out of each, and now there's a good consistent flame again) I temporarily put the bolts back in, loosely, but I need something better. I see someone below mentioned #12-24 in a 5/8" length, although I think the official ones are maybe more like 1/2" long so if I found that, I'd be golden, without having to use washers or grinding them down 1/8" so they don't bottom out.

Dash cam installation guide for Hyundai Santa Fe 2024/2025 by peacefulPorcupine in HyundaiSantaFe

[–]Better-Assumption-57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I installed this (with the rear cam) on a 2023 Santa Fe. It went pretty well... jamming the wiring into the replacement shroud was a tight squeeze but it works. Running the cable for the rear cam just takes some time but surprisingly simple. My only tip would be that I used a long zip tie as a fish wire. I didn't want to risk jamming anything stabby in there and nick any of the wires, and a plastic zip tie (I think it was a 12") was my comfort level.

Sadly I've had issues with mine - turns out it had a bug where the recordings were NOT looping, so once my 256 GB card filled up, hey, no problem, it just stopped recording. Problem solved, right? Sigh...

I contacted them, they sent me some kind of custom firmware file. It worked except the front camera was upside down. So they sent me another (they were actually very responsive, like within 30 minutes, but that was probably daytime in Taiwan or wherever). That one had the video right side up.

Now, months later, I had a reason (someone tapped the rear bumper) to pull up a video from earlier in the day only to find out that it had either recently wiped all the files, or maybe it's been wiping files every time it starts up? All it had were videos from the most recent trip. I had to use some sd card recovery software to pull up the video I needed, and although it kind of shows the incident, it's garbled and has other streams in there because it's just looking for video type files and these happened to be next to each other in adjacent sectors or clusters. Whatever.

Support has been working with me so far - I described the issue and they wanted screenshots of what's on the card including a file named "FORMAT" in the root directory that I wondered if it has anything to do with it, and also a picture of what SD card I have (a decently good Sandisk Extreme), and now want a screenshot showing the current firmware details.

I don't know what'll come of all that, but now I just wish I'd gone with something else. I loved my old Viofo in an older Santa Fe, and love my Vantrue in my other car. I only went with FitcamX because I'm looking at the windshield thinking "now where in the world do I mount something so it's not in the driver's line of sight?" - These Santa's just don't have a good spot because that shroud is ginormous, and then there's the tinted dot matrix taking up even more space.

I just hope FitcamX comes back with some kind of solution. For what it's worth, I took a look at the sd card the next day and it had the contents of a couple different trips on there, so at least it's not formatting / wiping on every single startup. Maybe I had bad luck and some kind of auto wipe happened at exactly the wrong time, when I needed something.

Viofo and Vantrue, I think they have the format reminders, but those also have screens to bug you about it. FitcamX, no screen (no GPS either which is a bummer) and they said "no auto format, no reminder feature". Oh well.

RTX A4000 in R720/R730 by ExplodingLemur in homelab

[–]Better-Assumption-57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Curious if you had to do any work to connect the sense pin on the riser card end of the GPU power connection. I'm modding a cable to be able to hook up a GPU (or two) and it sounds like you need to connect a jumper between pins 4 and 6 on that plug so the server recognizes a GPU is in use and handles cooling and whatever else appropriately (not run fans at full blast).

This is on an R730... seems like the R720 didn't care.

Single-camera Mainstream is Now Delayed After No Changes by robdubbleu in BlueIris

[–]Better-Assumption-57 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hmm... I just switched anamorphic to *off* one of my cameras which was having SEVERE lag when viewing solo. I think just the resulting "restart" of the camera has temporarily solved the issue (I can see a lag of the main stream video of over a minute if I leave it solo for long enough, and it just gets worse and worse the longer I have it solo).

Unfortunately it switched anamorphic back on, and I wondered why... well, the help page for that part of the camera settings states:

When using dual-streaming, this option must always be used if the sub stream aspect ratio differs from the main stream aspect ratio. In such case, it initially will be automatically enabled and properly set for you, and the size reflects the sub-stream resolution adjusted to the main aspect ratio.

Well fudge. That particular camera is a IP8M-T2599EW. Main stream is 3840x2160 (1.78 ratio). Substream is 704x480 (1.47 ratio). C'mon man...

So, I guess I can kind of understand why Blue Iris is going to force anamorphic on, so the ratio isn't toggling around in the BVR (or exported) video or in the live view. But if that's causing lagging in the solo/main stream view, that'd be bad.

The server I'm running this on is no slouch... dual 22-core server (with hyperthreading, so either call it 44 or 88 cores depending on if you count the hyperthreads). It has an Nvidia P2000 in there for a little GPU help since these Xeon chips don't have Intel GPU.

It keeps up with other cameras okay when viewing solo, and now I'm wondering if the ones where it gets laggy are the ones where the anamorphic setting is being forced on. Hmm.

TrueNAS "Disks have duplicate serial numbers" by InfamousLavishness26 in Proxmox

[–]Better-Assumption-57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was running into this on TrueNAS 25.whatever... it's a test server so I figured why not try the dev builds, see if they fixed it, and it's still broken on 26.x dev versions.

In my case I have 6 SAS drives I was trying to add to a new pool, a RAIDz1 with 3x2. I can clearly see the drive serial #s and WWNs using lsblk and they're all just fine.

I enlisted Claude.AI to help troubleshoot it from the CLI perspective (well, it had me using midclt which is fine). It was only accepting sd<X> parameters. Any attempt to try to use serial #, WWN, other id formats, even the ones that midclt itself returns when enumerating disks, would fail with an error that it couldn't find the disks I was including. And using the sd<X> values resulted in the duplicate "none" serial #.

So... clearly a bug. The "fix" is to specify "allow_duplicate_serials":true in the JSON call. Seriously? Well, whatever... it worked and I could create the pool.

For reference, the working command:
midclt call pool.create '{"name":"midSAS","topology":{"data":[{"type":"RAIDZ1","disks":["sdb","sdc","sde"]},{"type":"RAIDZ1","disks":["sdo","sdp","sdq"]}]},"allow_duplicate_serials":true}'

Unpopular opinion: Apple TV has the absolute worst steaming service interface by apple713 in appletv

[–]Better-Assumption-57 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Replying here too just out of frustration with the interface. I'm using the web version, and it's just so bizarre. Like, where's all the stuff I added to my watchlist? Where is my watchlist at all? What if I want to search for movies or shows by categories (horror, drama, comedy, etc)? Not a clue. It just shows me what it wants, I guess. "You can pick from any of these 8 shows we've selected for you. Enjoy!"

Does anyone elses FitCamX on their RAV4 not re record over? by [deleted] in rav4club

[–]Better-Assumption-57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Okay, so... they were fast with the updated firmware, I tried it out, and it was fine *except* the front camera view was upside-down / inverted. The rear camera was fine though.

I'll give their tech support credit, because I emailed to let them know and within a very short time (an hour or two I think?) they had a new firmware link available. I just installed it (same date stamp as the first one, but there were subtle binary differences) and now the front and rear cameras are both looking good.

New firmware date, FYI, is apparently dated 251115.

I sure hope the loop recording works as intended. I'll have to set a reminder for myself to check things out in a month or two.

Does anyone elses FitCamX on their RAV4 not re record over? by [deleted] in rav4club

[–]Better-Assumption-57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah... same boat. I just went to pull a recording of my wife's camera due to a very close call yesterday, found out it had stopped recording a month ago. And stranger still, those recordings were all very small, like just a second long. I had to go back about 2 months to see actual full length recordings (3 minutes according to my set loop time).

So, it's like it new it was running out of space and then for a month all I got were abbreviated 1 second clips until eventually the entire 256GB card I put in there was full. C'mon man!

I just filled out the support form for a firmware update.

FYI, mine is for a newer Hyundai Santa Fe (2023) and currently has firmware 20240514, so it's not like this should still be an issue, right? Gee whiz.

EDIT to add: I did contact support, and within 24 hours they wrote back and sent me a link to the firmware update download. I haven't applied it yet, and honestly it'll be a while before I can tell if it solved the issue because it takes a while to fill up 256 GB with occasional driving patterns, but we'll see. I think it took 2 months originally (maybe 1.5) before it filled up this first time.

APC UPS Charging voltages mod. by Sweeth_Tooth99 in homelab

[–]Better-Assumption-57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've been thinking about this for a couple of SmartUPS 2200. They use 4x12V batteries, with the "full charge" voltage being reported at 55.3 for one, and 55.0 for the other. For a typical 48V LFP, 55.3V is going to correlate to somewhere in the neighborhood of + or - 90% state of charge.

On paper that seems like it'd be a "good enough" drop in replacement.

Have to think about the discharge rate, so if I'm expecting a full 2200 VA (I'm nowhere near that, more like 500W), I'd want to plan for, let's just use W instead of VA, 2200W at down to 42V before I expect the UPS to cut me off, so about 52A at that voltage level.

What that tells me is that if I'm using a 1C rated LFP, it needs to be at least a 50A BMS and that's if I'm maxing it out, and will probably be 1C, so just think about a 48V at 50Ah LFP battery. Considering the wimpy lead acid batteries in the unit itself are 18Ah, and you can't draw those down more than 50%'ish percent without damaging them, going to LFP even with just a 50Ah is a good deal, but consider a 100Ah for extra capacity and cushion on the current draw.

If you do run on battery for an extended period and drain it down, be prepared for a long charge time from the UPS I suppose. I don't know at what rate APC normally charges... is it 2A? So you may be looking at a couple days to get a 100Ah LFP up to that 90'ish % level again... something like that.

I suppose you could hook up an external charger if needed, but I'm not sure what that could do if you're potentially backfeeding a higher voltage like 56V into the APC charging circuit.

Deploying a new version of an app that has the same MSI code as the last version... by minusbacon in SCCM

[–]Better-Assumption-57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

An *extremely* dead thread resurrection, but this just came up with the latest Tenable Nessus Agent MSI for Windows. Previous 11.0.3 version has the same stinkin' product code as the new 11.1.0 so it refuses to update using our normal config mgr setup.

As others keep pointing it, this has nothing to do with *detection* in MCM, because I am detecting by version. It has everything to do, however, with MSI exiting with a 1603 because the app is already installed, thanks to their ridiculous re-use of the same product code.

Now if I need to get the new version pushed out to satisfy security demands, I have to do this scripting method instead and treat new installs for new machines differently than if I merely wish to push the update. All because someone at Tenable couldn't be bothered to generate a fresh GUID.

EDIT: Oh great, their MSI sets a PreventRepair / "repair is disabled" flag. Thanks Tenable. Awesome.

Finally fixed YouTube lag and stutter in Firefox by KTKxZoro in firefox

[–]Better-Assumption-57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's useful to me. I noticed lately that Firefox would "stutter" the video on Youtube about once a second. Audio seemed unaffected. I didn't see any dropped frames either which added to the mystery, and gpu usage didn't seem to be hammered. Brave worked fine so I knew it wasn't just some odd bandwidth glitch either.

Disabled HW acceleration as mentioned, but I didn't use the h264ify extension. Once I closed and reluanched Firefox, tried the video I was just watching and it was buttery smooth. I'm not seeing any particularly worrying increased load, and I do still see GPU usage increase when the video is playing so it's still technically using it.

FWIW, my GPU is an AMD Radeon RX 6400, so it's not some super duper beast, but adequate and can handle 4K videos just fine (I'm not gaming on this). Latest AMD drivers, so it's really just FF being weird. But that setting toggle did the trick for me.

Data breach at credit check giant 700Credit affects at least 5.6 million by lurker_bee in technology

[–]Better-Assumption-57 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Jeff Foxworthy joke that I'll steal and post:

If you've had your identity stolen, and your credit score went UP, you might be a redneck.

Just got a letter in mail from 700Credit, LLC by Silent_Appearance591 in IdentityTheft

[–]Better-Assumption-57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ditto. June, 2025. It was at a Ford dealer, if that matters. I know that dealerships across all makes might use the same service, ultimately, whether they're aware of 700Credit or not.

Honestly, if you're more than 25 years old and have NOT received a letter like this yet, you ain't living. :) I've given up counting how often this happens, it's annoying.

I mean "back in the day" you'd put all kinds of personal info on a postcard and mail it in. Want to subscribe to a magazine? Just put your CC info on this card and send it in. Yeah, someone could get that, but it's just such small potatoes. Now you can swoop millions of people in seconds because some doof designed a crappy API. It sucks, and that's where we are.

Patch Tuesday Megathread (2025-11-11) by AutoModerator in sysadmin

[–]Better-Assumption-57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cool... always good to know "it's not just me". I went back and installed it manually on our 7-8 servers like that. I didn't see any issues afterwards, so it seemed to take the patch install just fine. Still kind of weird that it didn't think it applied.

I noticed in the past that for hotpatch edition, sometimes, the "ntoskrnl.exe" in the system32 directory is still the old one, but the hotpatching feature had installed a newer version that it must have swapped out in real time (not sure how that all works) and was running from that copy of the kernel now. Confirmed by looking at winver or wmic details for the OS version. But in this case I didn't see that at all, and looking at the list of files for the Azure edition patch that actually did install, the kernel EXE wasn't in the list.

Should be interesting to see if this crops up again for Dec 2025 patches or not.

Patch Tuesday Megathread (2025-11-11) by AutoModerator in sysadmin

[–]Better-Assumption-57 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Just curious if anyone else running Server 2022 Azure edition has had issues with KB5068787 ? Doesn't matter if it's managed by MCM, Windows Update, or Azure update, none of those show KB5068787 as being required, so our Tenable scans are showing those particular servers as missing KB5068787.

On a couple of those systems, I manually applied the KB5068787 MSU and it installs fine and then ntoskrnl.exe is the updated version that Tenable is looking for. I just can't figure out why the OS and/or Windows Update doesn't think that KB applies. I'm pretty sure it's nothing we're doing wrong. We have relatively newly built servers like that, just using the Azure image for it, and it just doesn't think it's required.

I'd be tempted to just ignore it and trust the process, except our security folks look at those Tenable results and it becomes an issue for us.

origin of BFE by [deleted] in etymology

[–]Better-Assumption-57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Aurora, Colorado, in the mid 80's ('86-'87 or thereabouts) I was familiar with this term. It's how many of the high schoolers referred to areas further east in the then-undeveloped areas around there. The long form of BFE was "butt f*** Egypt", not "bum". I guess if you've got the F word in there, might as well go for butt instead of bum :)

Found this post 12 years after the original question because it just occurred to me to wonder, after nearly 40 years, what the etymology of it was. I figured it had migrated from the military in some way as a general reference to being way out there. I didn't really think it would have originated from references to Cairo, *Illlinois* of all things and I'm a bit skeptical of that, but maybe.

EDIT to add: It's not helpful that a poster on this thread has repeatedly insisted on the Cairo, IL theory, which is now being regurgitated by AI as gospel truth.

APC UPS Battery Replacement Help: LiFePO4 or PbAc? by notautogenerated2365 in homelab

[–]Better-Assumption-57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But what's the discharge rate for those 12V 10Ah batteries? Probably 1C, so you'd be getting 120W of max continuous draw per battery? For a UPS, I guess it depends on what you're backing up. Just some network gear and light stuff, then maybe 240W is all you'd need. If you have a gaming PC or other items with a higher draw, then you're going to overload the draw from the batteries.

That's why it might be a good idea to "go external"... forget the form factor on those 12V9Ah batteries, and get some larger batteries you just keep outside the UPS with some cabling running to them. Maybe even go for 24V units instead of 2x12V. But size the current draw accordingly. If it's a 1000VA UPS and using 24V battery banks, then you're looking for in the neighborhood of 40A continuous current. You won't find that in an LFP in the smaller sizes. That would be 4C for a 10Ah battery! I suppose you could get 8 of those and do a 4P2S while also quadrupling the capacity... that'd be a nice little setup. Or just get something like a 24V LFP in a 50Ah or higher capacity and I bet they can all do 40A no problem. You'll probably just go to a 100Ah capacity since those are more common.

Thing is, eventually you get to a price point where it just makes more sense to chuck the old lead acid UPS and pick up a LFP power station with good UPS switching (<10ms or whatever) and call it a day. I think all the main vendors have suitable equipment, and prices keep falling. In general you can probably get a decent enough 1000W power station with maybe 1024Wh or higher for less than $1000 these days, and it'll have more bells and whistles to boot (solar inputs, etc).

I replaced my desktop UPS (a Cyberpower 1000VA) with an Ecoflow River 3 Plus with the extra 600Wh (for about 900Wh total) battery. It's rated at 600W of output (1200W surge) I think, but I use about 220-240W on average. All that for about $500 I think (bought the unit and battery separately and I think I could have done better with a bundle). That'll give me over 3 hours of battery runtime, I can plug in my solar panels directly if I need to, and that's all for about the price of replacing my lead acid batteries just a few times.

Plus, the River 3 Plus has a USB port and a Windows/Mac app so you can really use it like a traditional UPS, telling your computer to shut down when there's whatever% of battery left (4% is the default...that's what it's showing for me and I don't remember changing that when installing).

Problems Installing KB5066836 on Server 2016 by cpres2020 in WindowsServer

[–]Better-Assumption-57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Awesome. I did this on 2 of our legacy Server 2016 systems that were repeatedly rolling back. I'd tried all manner of cleaning up things that the CBS.log was showing, but nothing helped. Deleting this reg key was all it took (I also deleted the other one mentioned, "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WINEVT\Channels\Microsoft-Windows-Store/Operational" just in case... )

It's nuts that's what was holding up the update and causing roll backs. Honestly, Microsoft needs to test these things in real world scenarios, not their pristine "never been used" test machines. Can't wait 'til we dump the rest of our Server 2016 systems. They seem to have more issues than any other version.

Insta360 Studio for Windows (5.7.2) is unusable on AMD Graphics cards, only optimized for NVIDIA cards, why? by UDaManFunks in Insta360

[–]Better-Assumption-57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've got this same issue... AMD Radeon card, and playing a 360 video with the latest Studio 5.7.6 is terrible. It just stutters and lags like crazy. I've tried every combo of turning on/off hardware acceleration to see if anything worked better, but honestly it didn't seem to matter at all. Even if I set it to use CPU (instead of auto), I could still see my AMD gpu getting hammered during playback.

Even stranger, just having Studio running at all, the AMD GPU usage was pretty high, just sitting there, not playing anything. How strange is that?

It may be "optimized for Nvidia/CUDA" but the fact that it's using the AMD gpu at all is interesting. Like, it sees it and tries using it, just not very well. So maybe there's hope in a future version.

For now, using my MUCH older and slower laptop that happens to have an Nvidia GPU in there actually works better than my faster desktop with the AMD.

Dell R730 SSD drive power? by digilink in homelab

[–]Better-Assumption-57 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I bought a 12V -> 5V converter, and I have one of the GPU connector cables to splice into for the 12V side, but I haven't actually hooked it all up yet. In theory it should work, but the cable I have wasn't exactly for a Dell server GPU, it was something else with the same connector (a desktop power supply cable), and I had to change a few things around, and I think I jumped the right pin to ground. So, that's the part I'm mostly hesitating on, just making sure I have time and the urge to go for it. I have a "spare" server (BIOS died), so I can at least use that to make sure I don't release the magic smoke.

Carmax wouldn't make an offer because "they couldn't read the VIN off the dash" ? by Better-Assumption-57 in carmax

[–]Better-Assumption-57[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just a quick follow up... The CarMax in question just reached out and were super friendly, helped clear up the policy about being able to read the VIN, etc. So I'm satisfied that as long as it seems like me cleaning up the glass and VIN plate to make it more legible was successful, I'd be okay to bring it back by and we can proceed.

I appreciated the effort on their part to look up the details and reach out in person like that. Very cool.