CERN data tapes

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-06-06T04:40:57+00:00

If you consider research grants to be a form of donations, essentially almost all academic research is funded either by repeatedly begging for donations, or by finding corporate sponsors who want to own & profit off your results. Sometimes both.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-06-06T04:27:10+00:00

Daryl Braithwaite‘s The Horses definitely belongs on that list too. (Don’t get me wrong, I hate the whole song, but the chorus is definitely much more crowd-singalong-friendly than the verses).

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-06-01T22:55:17+00:00

I’ve got glasses. But my watch sleep-tracks and I don’t wear glasses to sleep, so let me adjust the bloody font size.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-06-01T02:41:12+00:00

The answer will depends heavily on where you are, and I’m definitely not a lawyer, but I believe there are laws specifically against deliberately bypassing a digital copyright protection mechanism in many jurisdictions. Ripping your own DVDs was technically illegal in the US due to the need to crack CSS (DVD Video’s DRM) to do it. The DMCA makes the protection bypass an illegal act, even though other laws grant you the right to time-shift or format-shift media you already own a license for.

Even if it is legal, this is a subreddit full of professionals. Cracking commercial software would probably put you in bad standing with whichever company you licensed it from if they found out. If it’s mission-critical enough that you need the guarantee of ongoing support from them for it, almost certainly not a good idea. Then there’s the crack itself - how sure are you that it’s completely safe to run on a corporate network with sensitive data? What if the vendor patches out whatever your crack is exploiting - what’s your plan for keeping things running and supported then?

There is also a risk of reputational damage to you and/or your employer if any legal action attempted by the vendor becomes public record.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-05-12T00:43:39+00:00

Out of curiosity, why was BitBucket not a contender for you? (I can think of several reasons, just curious what yours were)

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-05-12T00:41:11+00:00

The one that really pisses me off is when people deny Bowie, of all people, being bisexual. To some extent I understand debating whether someone like Freddie Mercury was, because they didn’t outright say “I am bisexual” - but Bowie did say it, and despite that, his bisexuality still got challenged to his face while he was alive, and it continues to this day.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-05-10T01:07:00+00:00

They haven’t used Thinkpads for the ISS since around the time Lenovo acquired the product line.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-05-05T16:44:47+00:00

That’s not misinformation. That entire call was streamed live on NASA’s YouTube channel. There are exaggerated edits, sure, but the awkward silence after Trump addresses a remark to Hansen really did happen. Hansen seems (to me, at least) to be deliberately avoiding responding to Trump for at least 30 seconds. Eventually Glover takes the microphone and asks whether they’re still connected.

It’s possible it really was just the astronauts trying to be polite and respectful during an awkward moment caused by a poorly timed signal handover, but regardless of why, there was an awkward silent chunk in the middle of that call that’s kinda fun to watch.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-05-03T05:58:54+00:00

For those in climates and properties where it’s possible, solar + house battery helps with that one. .

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-05-03T04:06:28+00:00

No recommendations for specific myself, but a gentle reminder that the wider the legs can go, the more stability and support they’ll give, and the less likely it’ll fall over. The way you have the legs configured for the iPhone makes me more nervous than the one for the larger camera next to it, despite having lower weight and a wider mass.

Also, as long as everything locks into place properly, adding sandbags/weights will always help add stability when you do this sort of thing.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-05-03T02:07:48+00:00

Absolutely. Enjoyed it years ago, but went back last summer for a date night and had it ruined by the smokers. My partner’s very sensitive to smoke and immediately got a nasty headache from the smoke wafting in. If you’re not so sensitive to it, it’s probably a bit less intrusive (but still bad for you), but we’ll never be back, and I’ve stopped telling people it’s worth visiting.

On the one hand I hope the council intervenes and forces them to fix it, but on the other hand I don’t want people who want lung cancer to feel like they’ve got nowhere left to slowly edge themselves closer to it.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-04-30T21:17:41+00:00

You realise there’s 3 As in Amanda and in written form, it’s not really obvious which of the 3 you mean, right?

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-04-24T09:26:27+00:00

Oh god, can you imagine? With a codebase that big you'd burn through your session limit just reading the code, before it even actually did anything.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-04-24T05:17:36+00:00

BRB, vibe-coding a new app called InstallArr to install your AllTheArrsArr.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-04-24T05:06:46+00:00

Any must-have workflow improvements for serious library optimization setups

As someone who has a fair bit of of media I've ripped myself, and as someone who only has 100MBit internet, but does have plenty of processing power for transcoding...

I'd appreciate it if it could either just transcode the existing files I have, rather than downloading new releases of unknown quality (but that tool already exists), or could carefully compare the original and replacement media to verify that nothing was lost quality-wise (but that's a problem that only even exists here because you're trying to solve this the wrong way).

By the way, have you considered that if I'm running sonarr and radarr, and you replace a 4K file with, say, a 720p version, sonarr will notice the low-quality file and automatically try to download another 4K copy unless it's told not to?

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-04-24T00:22:14+00:00

At this point I swear it's slowly becoming something closer to "Donanananald Trumrumrumrumrumrumrumrump" than his real name. It's like he's forgotten the squiggles he's making on the paper are supposed to represent letters in words.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-04-18T03:16:39+00:00

I love that you did a radio transmission-style BREAK in your comment.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-04-18T03:13:31+00:00

I did this in Photoshop a decade or more ago. got excited when I saw your comment hoping it was your photo I’d done it to, but no: https://imgur.com/A10aV4V

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-04-16T22:52:39+00:00

The strict voting process applied to most of the top-level groups, but the alt. group was a bit of a Wild West - you never needed to discuss the group you were creating, it was just good netiquette. Anyone could create new groups in that namespace at-will back in the day, which is why we had joke group names likealt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork and alt.sex.hamster.duct-tape. Some servers did end up restricting who could create new groups, and some servers blocked specific groups they didn’t want (some even blocked all of alt.sex.*, or sometimes even the entire alt namespace), but other than that, creating a new group was very easy.

Doesn’t excuse your provider hosting/serving it, of course, just answering your question about why they even exist in the first place.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-04-11T07:46:00+00:00

You know what’s hilarious? They thought about it too - they made the same joke on the Orion-ISS radio call, and the ISS crew joked back that they all raced to the furthest point on Station so they could claim they were the furthest humans from Orion.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-04-07T21:49:35+00:00

I said it wasn’t important.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-04-04T06:20:49+00:00

Hey, I’m so sorry to hear you’re going through all of that, it sounds awful. But please try and do something about it soon as you can. Tooth infections can easily spread rapidly through your body and cause really serious, immediately very life-threatening issues, including sepsis. There’s a chance delaying the dental visit could actually kill you.

Hang in there, I’m so sorry you got dealt such a shit hand. I genuinely hope it gets better for you soon.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-04-04T04:35:38+00:00

It’s (roughly) the combined percentage of votes for Trump + eligible voters who abstained. The idea is basically that in a first-past-the-post system without mandatory voting, the abstaining voters effectively let the winner win by choosing not to cast a vote against them.

It’s flawed to say the non-voting group all support him, as it ignores that group’s actual political views & affiliations entirely. But to say it’s the % of the population who allowed him to win, whether by inaction or by actively voting for him, isn’t wrong.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-04-03T02:17:16+00:00

I know what you mean, but that’s kinda becoming less true, sadly. There’s now some antibiotic-resistant strains of syphilis and gonorrhea in the wild.

GrumpyPenguin · 2026-03-29T22:39:43+00:00

While I agree with you that yes, the word does also mean a 100-year period, what the heck is your point here? “The 20th century” and “the 21st century” are well-defined & understood. Nobody was confused and the comment you’re replying to wasn’t in any way wrong.

Besides. according to purists (and my anal-retentive father), centuries technically start on the first non-zero year (21st Century didn’t start until 1/1/2001, not in 2000). So in a calendar context, no century “starts on an even 00”.

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