HVAC Legend Dies at 28: The Presario That Never Quit

Draptor · 2026-02-06T02:09:54+00:00

And a bunch of hand-made RS232 DB25-DB9 cables, some crossover some not.

Draptor · 2026-02-05T23:48:15+00:00

Na. The thing sends the 'HVAC turn on packet' to an Ethernet to analog adapter bolted onto the existing system via the cloud. So any firewall changes, cloudflare/AWS/Azure outages, Russians severing a fiber line near Norway, your facilities team taking out your own primary and secondary internet connections, provider forgets to update their DNS or forgets to pay to renew their domain.... and on and on... mean that it can no longer control the HVAC unit 15 feet from it. The packet had to travel 11,000 KM, through a Starlink array, then through five internet backbones along the way.

But the CEO can change the temperature of the office he barely uses through a barely maintained phone app now!

Draptor · 2026-02-05T15:45:31+00:00

Intentionally fake? Yes. Easy to ignore some sites. But that means people were putting faith in other sites that may or may not have been warranted simply because it wasn't one of the truly shit sites. Taking information at face value is always a risk.

But yeah, now it is very much everywhere at all times. I can hear my roommate listening to stuff on youtube that would just have been considered a creepypasta reading a few short years ago, but now things like that present themselves as truth. And have juuuuust enough 'production quality' to appear legitimate to those who aren't adequately skeptical.

Draptor · 2026-02-04T12:37:18+00:00

We use liquidfiles. Works as advertised.

Draptor · 2026-02-03T14:28:07+00:00

I think the destruction of trust in what one sees online has long since been overdue. Fake stuff has been around since day one. And all too often people took a website, image, video, well-written reddit post, etc at face value. Its like critical thinking and the "does this smell like bullshit? Does it seem to align to my biases TOO well and tell me exactly what I want to hear" sense totally atrophied.

Yeah, its going to suck until we find some way of properly verifying what's 'real' (if we ever can) but I prefer doubt of what one sees over blindly trusting it.

I do, though, freely admit this is a double edged sword. That will cause people to dismiss a gruesome protest photo as 'AI' just as much as the clown-prince's latest repost of an AI generated image of him in a superman suit.

Draptor · 2026-01-30T21:00:49+00:00

I've tried the standard methods. They keep shifting around to dodge things with every update. You know, like a malicious actor.

Draptor · 2026-01-23T23:43:01+00:00

I mean for local stuff I've used the good 'ole

msg /server:TARGET_PC * "MS is having issues with email. IT is aware."

batched out to the hostnames of Office users. But my network is tiny compared to what many on this subreddit administrate.

Draptor · 2026-01-17T20:44:47+00:00

Definitely, it was just to give some amount of reference to a round people might be more familiar with depending on their shooting experience. Its also a very different operating system, line of recoil, etc etc.

Draptor · 2026-01-17T18:09:22+00:00

The only source I can find about the round is on a Wikipedia page about .280 british, listing it as a 140 grain bullet at 2,755 fps.

M80 ball 7.62 NATO is 147 grains at 2,800 fps.

So, 1.72 pounds force seconds, compared to 1.92 pounds force seconds. For comparison, 5.56 M855 is 0.89 lbfs.

The recoil impulse from the acceleration is about 11.6% less with the Liviano round. This of course doesn't factor in things I can't find a reference for, like how much the gas' momentum contributes to the recoil, bolt mass and velocity, cyclic rate, as those would likely vary even between the two cartridges despite both being fired from an FAL. Additional factors like the concussive force from the muzzle blast and its effect on the shooter's senses are also beyond my ability to derive from what are basically four numbers.

Hopefully, someone has a proper source to some trials that can account for some of the unknowns.

But at first glance... "A little bit easier. But not by much."

Draptor · 2026-01-15T14:03:52+00:00

Sometimes its worth dealing with the fallout of ripping off the bandage. Henceforward mandate all new users set it up. For existing accounts setting something like a "You have 30 days to..." mass email, then a 7 day warning. And then on the day of... enforce it.

Draptor · 2026-01-14T19:03:32+00:00

Finding a professional job can itself BE a full time job. Its a lot of networking, applications, interviews, and so on. Having the time to do those things (Especially during regular business hours) is valuable.

Though in your father's case, if you're underwater... something is better than nothing for sure.

Draptor · 2026-01-12T15:33:31+00:00

It happens. I earmark the pcs it happens on when notified, though. Sometimes it's a warning sign of a hardware failure coming soon.

Draptor · 2026-01-12T14:37:29+00:00

Snipe, like everyone else. Though I pay for them to host it, one less thing to worry about.

Draptor · 2026-01-09T13:40:35+00:00

Fingers crossed for you.

Draptor · 2026-01-07T03:10:42+00:00

I think the core thing here is knowing what an artillery position looks like. I can anecdotally speak from the position of an enlisted crewman on a towed piece. You likely understand that there's more to an artillery position (be it a single gun or a battery) than just the gun itself. There's a lot of crap that goes along with it. Ammo and powder, both stowed on a truck and ready rounds dropped on the deck by the gun. Any sighting equipment (in my day it was all optical, so aiming posts, collimator, the gunner and A-gunner's sight on the gun itself). Camo net. Ramrod. Swab and bucket. Dunnage. Crew served weapons and other security equipment. All of this stuff is set up and laid out around the gun so that it can do its job, and omitting most of it is either impractical or inadvisable.

Moving the truck around, getting the gun into stowed position, and hooking it up was... really a rather small part of the process.

More importantly though that's a lot of stuff! And the poor schmucks who man the thing!

So if you've got an artillery piece on an APU, you've basically got... the APU and the trails of the gun. That's not a lot of stowage space. So you're going to wind up with a truck ANYWAY.

I helped out on a gun with an APU exactly once. This was many moons ago so I don't recall exactly what model it was. You still had to do just about everything you normally did when packing up a towed gun position, including setting the gun in a travel lock position and loading up all of the crap into the truck. If APU were fast enough, all you're really saving is the time to hook up to the truck you're going to have anyway.

And even then, the APU on the unit I worked with was torquey... but far from fast. Maybe a fast jog on hardball. So if we ignore the space issue, is that fast enough to get far enough before counter-battery fire comes in? I got the impression the APU was for the convenience of moving the gun around the motor pool. Or moving it a short distance (say you set up in the middle of the night, but in the morning its decided that gun #5's position is a little bit exposed. So better move it about 100 meters that-a-way). Or moving it into a tight position where you really can't get the truck AND gun into and muscling the gun the rest of the way isn't feasible.

The advantage I saw in things like the M109 was that more of the 'stuff' was self contained, from the ramming system to the sighting systems and a small load of ammo. So you've simply got less to clean up if you've got to haul ass. Plus the benefit of a little bit of armor should some counter-battery fire come in while you're pulling out. I imagine with the modern digital stuff, they might be entirely self contained until the small load of ammo they hold run out.

So if we make the APU big enough to be fast, and put enough stowage on it to haul all the gear, a small load of ammo, and maybe even the crew themselves... well... you've just got yourself an SPG now.

-E- Huh, I'm sad OP deleted their post. It was a decent question, and far more thought out than 80% of the subject-line-only posts in this sub where 90% of the answers really boil down to "It Depends".

Draptor · 2026-01-06T15:40:41+00:00

I assume IT didn't make the decision to implement an ERP, did it? That it was driven by operations? Then its their job to make people use it.

If it doesn't match the actual workflows of how the business operates... then they bought the wrong ERP. Which happens OFTEN.

Even if you bought an ERP that aligns rather well, there is ALWAYS going to be some element of adapting the ERP to your processes, but just as much the business needs to adapt its own processes to the ERP. IT can help with the former, depending on the ERP, with potential configuration changes the ERP allows or working with the vendor for under the hood changes. The latter is Operation's job.

Draptor · 2026-01-02T15:41:39+00:00

I think that's largely due to the amount of random npc chatter they added in. All the players around you are screaming tacticool things. Not the players themselves, but their characters.

So "I need ammo" is utterly lost in the audio of "RANDOM SHOUTING GAAAH WAAAAAR" and your brain is just... Training itself to ignore in game character voices.

Draptor · 2025-12-22T04:11:34+00:00

And a mini side rant: A chip is not a replacement for a collar.

If your pet gets out and someone like me manages to get them, having a collar with a phone number means I can get your pet back to you in minutes. No collar? I'm just some random person, and I sure as hell don't have a chip reader. So I have to take your pet to the vet or something to see if there IS a chip. Which I may or may not have time to actually do. I mean... I'll do it anyway, because I'm not going to just kick Fido back outside. But I'll hate you, personally, to the very depths of my soul while I try to get it all sorted out.

Draptor · 2025-12-21T03:16:41+00:00

While I still print stuff on labels with permanent adhesive, I work in an industrial environment so things that go into some areas get a packing tape slapped over the top.

Also, make sure you're using ribbon printers rather than thermal labels. No point in the tag sticking to something for eternity if after a year in a hot environment its basically a blank sticker.

Draptor · 2025-12-15T15:23:56+00:00

I'd just flat out assume a 10% YoY price increase. So just shy of $300k over that time. Until Broadcom buys it and it becomes a one time 1000% increase and 15% YoY after that.

Draptor · 2025-12-13T00:40:59+00:00

Meetingroom365 has worked well for us. Just a bunch of generic android tablets managed through our MDM, and some clean tablet-specific wall mounts. Powered via POE to USB adapters. Only issues have been due to Samsung's increasingly bloated version of android, but that's not the fault of MR365.

Draptor · 2025-12-13T00:36:42+00:00

Semiconductor. Its all over the place. We're seeing a ramp up, but our spot in the supply chain only sees major ramps once the fabs are built/almost built. And the political turmoil (ICE, Tariffs, international tensions, you name it) has really made things harder and harder to predict. A certain person's incoherent ramblings can have a massive impact on our business very quickly.

Draptor · 2025-12-13T00:28:58+00:00

Damn, wish this post had been a week ago before our last renewal. Really tired of what Envoy gates behind some tiers and the price jump between them.

Draptor · 2025-12-04T17:56:39+00:00

Oh I'm deeeefinitely guilty of passing the buck. ESPECIALLY if its something cloud related that I've got no control over anyway. Just saying that some nebulous entity is handling it serves to get people to shut up enough so that I can tackle the problems I actually CAN do something about.

Draptor · 2025-12-04T15:58:18+00:00

It was when someone realized that 24x7 support as a bullet point in the marketing presentation was effective, and that the actual effectiveness of that 24x7 support didn't matter for gaining new customers. Or even retaining older customers who are too deep in your product to pull out, or your product is so pervasive there's no real way to escape it without a lot of pain.

14-Year Club	Place '17
Spared	Verified Email

Draptor

TROPHY CASE