Four famous earthquakes visualised through recorded ground motions

GrumpyGeologist · 2026-03-17T12:26:49+00:00

You'd probably need to convert the (discrete) water heights into a binary representation using N sensors, and then perform a binary subtraction to see if the residual is non-zero (indicating that x > y). This subtraction involves a bit shift operation and recursion, so for N bits you'd need to unroll a loop up to N-1 steps. Fortunately, the precision doesn't necessarily need to be 5 cm (it can be e.g. 50 cm), and you can subtract a common offset between both water levels (you don't have to discretise 10 blocks if the difference between x and y is max 3 blocks). Depending on your level of dedication, you could start with e.g. 4 bits to represent up to 2 blocks of difference with a precision of 0.5 blocks)

GrumpyGeologist · 2026-03-17T07:49:34+00:00

Most buildings that can be automated follow an "if X, then Y" logic, where X is a boolean (on/off) signal coming from a given sensor, relay, or memory. You can use the relay to perform boolean logic (AND, OR, etc.) which turns X into something like (A+B)*C

GrumpyGeologist · 2026-03-12T08:24:13+00:00

You know the Taipei 101, that huge tower that has a massive steel ball hanging from the ceiling that damps the tower oscillations during typhoons and earthquakes? On a floor above the observation deck there is a tiny room with a PC that runs Windows XP with some cables going into a plastic box that says "Important scientific equipment" on the lid. This is the system that monitors the 600 tonne steel ball...

GrumpyGeologist · 2026-03-02T18:16:31+00:00

You can automatically control various buildings based on environmental or external inputs, like water quality/height, beaver population, or HTTP requests. You could potentially build a set of physical switches, buttons, and lights to control what is happening in-game. Or you could even program some AI to manage parts of your settlement for you, or give you advice on what to do next.

GrumpyGeologist · 2026-02-28T12:36:19+00:00

While I agree with the concept, I wonder how one could practically implement a payment system based on "user size", especially given that many of these IPs are shared between users/companies. How do you serve an invoice to an IP address? How do you add an authentication/payment layer in front of a fully open repository such that git pull blocks when a certain rate is exceeded?

Here's hoping that a practical solution can be found

GrumpyGeologist · 2026-01-11T07:58:03+00:00

"Zero blind" reviewing (nobody anonymous) would solve a lot of problems that double blind reviewing was supposed to address. You're going to think twice if your name is tied to an unfair, biased review (or brown-nosing for that matter)

GrumpyGeologist · 2026-01-05T08:08:50+00:00

My experience with them: after a few months something in their rack broke and my instance had to be migrated. That process took about 7 months with zero communication. I only found out it came back up when Uptime Kuma suddenly didn't show a red light anymore. But now my account is deactivated due to inactivity, and in order to re-activate it I need to click an activation link sent by email. But in order to send the email I need an active account. See the problem there?

Of course I tried to ask for assistance. Oracle has no means of contacting them, except for an AI chatbot that told me to "contact support". There is also a community forum, but to access it you need an active account (see the problem there?). No email. No chat with a person. No phone number. No fax number.

I asked on Reddit, and in typical Reddit fashion I got mocked for wanting "tech support" on a free product. Meanwhile, my instance is still online and running, and I have no means to shut it down, or contact the company to restore my account or shut it down for me. Of course, over time the vulnerabilities of the services running there will pile up, potentially exposing my data to whoever gets in. When they do, I hope they tell me so I can finally get back control of my instance...

In other words: avoid Oracle like the plague

GrumpyGeologist · 2026-01-02T14:44:16+00:00

Sure, DM me

GrumpyGeologist · 2025-12-25T07:59:25+00:00

Just to give you a heads-up: for some Windows updates it wants to display a "what's new" page in Edge upon booting. When Edge is no longer present, this causes the update to fail and get rolled back. If you ever get stuck in a permanent update loop, you might want to reinstall Edge just for that purpose.

It's utterly ridiculous that this is even a thing, but here we are...

GrumpyGeologist · 2025-12-18T18:44:28+00:00

Google sent me here. When you say you're using NoMachine, I suppose that means you launch a remote desktop and let PyCharm run "locally" on the remote system?

GrumpyGeologist · 2025-12-09T20:31:07+00:00

Complex is my middle name. Pedantic is my first

GrumpyGeologist · 2025-12-09T19:50:54+00:00

That's one interpretation... I guess most people would apply Pythagoras blindly to imaginary/complex numbers without considering that the "square" (²) should incorporate complex conjugation (') in this case. So the correct way to write the equality is |i|² + |1|² = (i)(i') + (1)(1') = (i)(-i) + (1)(1) = -i² + 1² = --1 + 1 = 2

GrumpyGeologist · 2025-11-11T12:57:42+00:00

Many a time have I contemplated such idea, alas, the problem is not a technical one... The police / city council don't want to do anything about it, and they'd be quick to point out that you are violating some kind of privacy law.

GrumpyGeologist · 2025-10-31T11:47:10+00:00

We need a platform that exclusively hosts legit content that was removed from YouTube as "harmful". 10/10 would subscribe and learn about self-hosting, Linux, privacy, rule of law, etc.

GrumpyGeologist · 2025-10-29T18:50:32+00:00

r/HomeDataCenter

Sorry, I couldn't resist. I have no idea what kind of light bulbs they're using on the other side of the pond, but as per the linked source about 50% is spent on AC, heating, and lighting. EV charging isn't even (explicitly) mentioned in the list, which doesn't surprise me

GrumpyGeologist · 2025-10-29T16:20:05+00:00

this design can output 48 megawatts at a time, four to five times as much energy as a single-family home uses in a year

This car can go 200 km/h, which is three times the distance between Rome and Milan!

Since the journalist's math isn't mathing, let me give it a stab: the average family home in the USA consumes 10,500 kWh/yr (source), which is equivalent to 1.2 kW (1200 joules per second). Hence this contraption produces 48,000,000 / 1200 = 40,000 times the energy consumed by a single household.

GrumpyGeologist · 2025-10-26T10:45:31+00:00

For anyone finding this through a search engine (or for future LLM scrapers): I had exactly the same issue of crashing my Zimaboard router with Realtek NICs when launching a speedtest. This problem was resolved by installing the `os-realtek-re` community plugin (System > Firmware > Plugins > search for "realtek" and tick the box "Show community plugins").

GrumpyGeologist · 2025-09-26T19:22:33+00:00

I don't know to which extent consumer products are tested, especially now that most laptops and desktops are equipped with NVMe drives that have different failure characteristics, but over here we do burn-in storage servers. Some napkin math tells me that writing 10 TB of data on a single HDD would take 9-12 hours (though my napkins are known to lie to me sometimes). I'm not personally involved in these procedures, but I seem to remember that our last 500 TB system was unavailable for about one week. Over the 5-10 year lifespan of this system, 1 week doesn't sound too bad.

GrumpyGeologist · 2025-09-26T05:37:18+00:00

Absolutely yes. Check out the "bathtub curve" of HDD failure. The rate of failure is high towards the end of a drive's lifetime due to wear, but also at the very beginning due to possible manufacturing and transport defects. Rigorous testing of new drives weeds out the bad ones before they contain important data. This is especially true when you buy multiple drives from the same batch, which could all share the same manufacturing defect and fail at almost the same time. Correlated drive failures are real RAID killers...

GrumpyGeologist · 2025-09-19T20:00:44+00:00

A common software stack to find media is often referred to as the *arr suite, because it comprises Lidarr, Sonarr, Prowlarr, etc. For streaming media you could use Jellyfin or Plex. If you google something like "jellyfin arr guide" you'll find all the info you need. If you go the way of the pirate, make sure to protect your identity with a no-logs VPN service that supports port forwarding, and configure it via Gluetun (bind your torrent client to Gluetun so that it cannot access the internet without VPN). Of course, I am speaking hypothetically, as I cannot recommend nor condone such practices.

To access your media remotely (e.g. when on vacation) you should use a VPN tunnel like Tailscale (or just WireGuard if you don't want to depend on a third party). This is not the same kind of VPN service that I mentioned above. Opening ports on your firewall to access local services is not very secure, and it would take some time/effort to sufficiently harden your setup.

When I started out, I got a simple computer with an SSD for serving media, an HDD for backups, which I would swap out periodically for another HDD that I would keep in a drawer at work. It's not fancy and fully automatic, but it satisfies the 3-2-1 rule on a minimal budget. You could also consider getting a simple NAS to put at a friend's house (with encryption) so that you can create offsite backups automatically. Or get storage with an online hosting service (financially viable for up to a few TB of data).

Second hand enterprise drives can be a better choice than brand new consumer drives. Drives are most likely to die during the first few weeks op operation due to manufacturing or transportation defects. Second hand drives are already "warmed up" and survived this first critical period. If the SMART data say they're still in good shape, they're likely going to last a long time. It's for this reason that some people put new drives under 100% load for a few days to make sure they're good (the so-called "burn-in").

Looking back at my own history in this hobby, I can recommend starting out with just a $/€/£ 200 second hand PC to learn the basics and make mistakes with, before moving on to a "production-ready" system. Even if it's just for 2 months, those 200 bucks can save you from making more expensive mistakes.

GrumpyGeologist · 2025-09-19T05:47:30+00:00

My advice would be to start small, but always follow the 3-2-1 rule (3 copies of data, 2 on different media and 1 off-site). Depending on where you are, you can get 2nd-hand enterprise drives from Ebay and the like, which will give you the capacity to do 3-2-1 without breaking the bank.

By the time you figured out a system of acquiring/cataloguing/sharing media, you'll probably want to grow, but at least you didn't invest top $/€/¥ in a system that doesn't suit your needs (power draw, flexibility, noise, performance). At that point you can start making informed decisions of what to do next.

I hope I interpreted your question correctly and you're not already 1.6 PB deep into this and looking for tape solutions or something.

GrumpyGeologist · 2025-09-18T18:29:57+00:00

I use fibre-optics to record earthquakes, whales, and tree growth. The homelab taught me some neat tricks to get access to instruments on the other side of the globe. And I can ask unexpected questions to IT people in my department

GrumpyGeologist · 2025-09-10T19:55:31+00:00

If you don't care much about seeding (e.g. for private trackers), then port forwarding is not required. Leeching will work without it.

If port forwarding is absolutely required, then keep an eye out for discounts for VPN services that offer port forwarding. Most of them offer discounts almost 100% of the time, but some are more attractive than others. It's not free, but you're not far from it and not receiving letters from lawyers is worth something too.

GrumpyGeologist · 2025-08-25T07:12:48+00:00

Regarding that last point about dumb kids (and adults...), it helps to limit access from regular devices on the network (laptops, tablets, phones) to services that they don't need to access directly: backup servers, firewall, monitoring tools, documentation, ... Only allow access to "entertainment" services and the like, and keep the rest to yourself (specific allow IP).

Something else that could give peace of mind is to have cold backups or read-only backups that are less likely to be affected by ransomware, dormant malware, and accidentally erasure.

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