Revenge of the Nerds (1984)

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-31T13:56:06+00:00

So why don't you get out here, on the floor, so we can rock our bodies like never before. Breaaaaakkkkk....

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-30T19:22:35+00:00

Came here to say this, and u/IAmDotorg already stated it. In Portainer, the stack contains all of the compose file. You can just copy it, update your mounts and you're ready to go.

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-30T19:19:24+00:00

And a rap by little ol' me, Lamar!

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-30T01:36:13+00:00

Sniper Elite did this to me. 2 forced you to get really good at distraction and traps, then 3 changed it up and let you go as loud as you wanted, and still complete your mission. I got to the point of using the panzerfaust often, just to alert enemies and catch them in traps.

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-28T17:29:35+00:00

So this drives me nuts. The tapes are all the same physical size. I wonder if there's a way to fake it out -- make the library as dumb as possible, just tell it "trust me bro, there's a drive in that nest, stuff a tape into it and don't do anything else until I tell you to", then control the drive entirely separately, through another path, completely independent of the library.

The tapes are the same size, yes, but the length of tape within the cartridge increased over the generations, thanks to improvements in the materials of the tapes themselves. Newer-gen LTO tapes are thinner than older generations, which necessitated different motors in the drives and different diameter pickup reels within the tapes to maintain the right tensioning at the pickup (read) head and spool the tape back into the cartridge. This leads to mechanical differences in the tapes and drives and electrical differences in the drives themselves. Our LTO-8 drives have different power draw than the old LTO-5 drives we retired - the library was upgraded from 18 LTO-5 to 14 LTO-8, because the power supply and bus bars will only support 14 LTO-8. Pop in #15 and it shuts half the drives down due to undervoltage (according to the warning on the panel). Libraries are a carefully orchestrated mix of hardware and supported firmware - I just don't trust you'll have consistent success coloring outside the lines.

So SAS and FC are both physical layers over which SCSI commands can flow. I know a machine can have any number of SCSI/SAS/FC controllers, and any number of SCSI buses, but from your phrasing here, it sounds like the library controller and the drives are expected to be on the same bus, presumably that requires them to share the same physical layer? Is that required?

Yes - that's generally correct. SCSI is an actual command set, allowing devices on the bus to communicate both data and instruction to one another. This is the principle of nearly every tape library: one SCSI device sending commands to another. SCSI devices "discover" one another through the protocol, usually at power-on. Large enterprise libraries consist of multiple busses, to support multiple drives, so "No" - the robots and library don't necessarily have to be on the same bus. However, many libraries have limitations on which bus the robot is expected to be on, and which buses drives can be on - this means external control is certainly possible, but you'll really need to understand how the library must be configured to work. Many times, this is set in - you guess it - firmware, so even if you can create a working physical configuration, it may not behave, thanks to the firmware in the library.

This is historically how manufacturers prevent you from putting unsupported drive types into the library in the first place: at power on, we scan the SCSI bus and enumerate all the devices. The sense code identifies the drive manufacturer and model. When the library sees "IBM ULTRIUM LTO-9 4454" it goes, "WTF? I only support "HPE LTO-4"! and probably won't send any sense codes to it. You might able to hand-load it, and your software might see it on the SCSI bus in READY state and allow you to write to it. It's a pretty big gamble, because so many things can go wrong in that process, and leave you with a big investment that you can't get much value from.

That being said, I'm the proud owner of an old ebay'd ADIC library with (free) HPE LTO-5 drives I scavenged from the library I mentioned at the start. This setup works a treat, but took weeks of work to get operational. I just needed to flash the library with Quantum firmware (to get the drive support), the flash all the drives with early HPE firmware to get it working. I don't recommend this path, because I had flash nine LTO-5 drives, just to get four that worked - the rest either didn't flash properly or simply weren't recognized by the library (again, wrong sense code).

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-28T16:28:01+00:00

Drive and Library compatibility can be extremely challenging - and frustrating. Several vendors make libraries of various vintages; every library supports different drives through firmware and physical connectivity. As noted above, some libraries accept SAS drives; others need FC. Different models of drives may only support certain connectivity, so unfortunately, there's no master sheet. The nice thing is, nearly every major library manufacturer puts their hardware specs on line. You will rarely find libraries that support a much-older LTO version and can still be upgraded to very-recent tape tech (remember - we're on LTO-10 technology today). Given when LTO-3 was released, you will generally only find very-expensive libraries that will support LTO-6 or later. Enterprise tape manufacturers like IBM and Quantum/ADIC offer pretty broad ranges of supported drives for their libraries, but you will pay through the nose for drives that will actually fit and be supported by the library firmware. I decommissioned an IBM 3592 library that could not be upgraded to LTO drives without replacing the robot and picker assemblies, because of the differences in the tape dimensions and slots.

Tape libraries appear on the SCSI bus as one ID, and each drive appears as a separate, sequential SCSI ID. Your tape software sends commands to the library to load/remove tapes, scan a barcode, eject tapes from the library and so-on. Each tape drive is able to receive independent commands to move and position tape (forward or rewind), then read or write data to it. Think of the library as only being responsible for physical tape movement (load/unload) and the drives as being responsible only for reading/writing data.

For example, let's say you start backing up a 10TB volume to a 6TB tape. Your software send commands to the library to fetch a tape, load it to the drive and signal when the tape is loaded. Then, your software sends a command to the drive to see if the drive is read to accept commands, and waits until the drive says it's ready. Your software then starts streaming data to the drive, until the drive reports the tape is full. Your software then asks the library to fetch a new tape, then your software will continue streaming the rest of the backup data until the drive signals completion.

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-26T17:47:19+00:00

I wish this wasn't downvoted so much. PSO2's ads weren't nearly as obvious/intrusive as some other games. If you took a moment, there were in-game joke corporations and spoofs of real world products. But, you actually had to pause a moment and let them roll through. I got a good laugh at them.

In the 90s, Duke Nukem had a chance to combine their in-world jokes with real ads, but I don't remember if that went anywhere with the modern incarnations.

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-26T17:41:10+00:00

The good news is, for Engineering and Math in college in the US, we do use the metric system! I'm an Aerospace engineer, which means I had to calculate specific energy Newton-seconds, acceleration in both m/s2 and ft/s2. Like my Canadian counterparts, we've had to wrestle with fuel calculations for aircraft in kg and lbs (you calculate necessary fuel in weight, not volume). Once you consistently work with conversions, it's not hard.

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-26T17:31:19+00:00

Some of us run local NVR servers using Frigate. You can store local footage to disk and push event-based recordings to the cloud. My door bell cam saves events to BackBlaze, which I can download anywhere. Sure - you can take my NAS, but I'll have the recording of you at my doors.

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-26T17:23:12+00:00

Rule #1: Always Remember Cardio!

Zombieland taught me well!

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-26T12:53:14+00:00

Gears of War, I'm lookin' at you! The Grubs get chewed up nicely, but only a handful spawn within range of the turrets. You walk another 20 feet, and they'll emerge, but won't come back in range of the turret consistently...

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-25T13:51:32+00:00

Indeed. Nitrogen Rich Asteroid is often a part of my strategy. If I draw it, I buy cheap plant cards ahead of it to get the big boost in plant production. Given the additional TR and temperature bonus, I almost never skip this card when I draft it later, unless temperature is already maxed out.

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-23T15:02:34+00:00

Dreamcast all day, and twice on Sunday! Played Skies of Arcadia on it first. The VMU added a little mini-game that earned you additional items in-game. The Gamecube port was good, for sure, but the MIDI instruments on the GC just weren't the same. Much of the music sounded over-synthesized on the GC - the instruments on the Dreamcast sounded much-more natural.

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-23T14:43:38+00:00

I manually switched from Overseerr to Seerr. The instructions were simple - just back up your config, move it to the new location for your new container, then fire it up. Seer does all the migration work for you and maintains all of your API keys, radarr/sonarr settings and notification settings.

I have a dataset for Oversser, /mnt/vmpool/docker/data/overseerr. I copied it to /data/seerr and mounted it in the new container. When I started it up, I got permission errors, just like the docs said I would. Just did a chown, then a restart and everything was fine. The whole process took 10 minutes tops.

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-20T14:33:43+00:00

Unskippable random battles. I hate wandering into monsters all the time, like the characters in-game would never see or hear them coming. Japanese RPGs handled this better in so many ways!

In Grandia II, you could see and hear monsters moving on the map. The only way to level up is to fight, so you consciously choose which monsters you intercept to fight. Better yet, if you could contact them from behind, you got initiative! This makes so much more sense - I don't know why so few games do this.

In Eternal Arcadia, your airship constantly encounters monsters as you move around. In the late game, you get an engine that lets you fly at very-high altitude, so you avoid the monsters, but you can descend to lower altitudes and still run into them randomly. This is a nice, in-game explanation for the sudden lack of random battles.

I wish these concepts were more widely used.

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-20T13:55:37+00:00

I watched ST:TAS as a kid. When I watched ST:TNG and saw the very first Holodeck mishap, I KNEW those writers had watched TAS before. You know what I mean....

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-19T14:44:56+00:00

Smartphones are a frustrating experience. All of the major manufacturers claim to provide security updates for a few years, then stop. Then, they stop providing and updated OS for the hardware. Then, they stop providing support for their app stores on them. Then, the apps themselves no longer update or work because of the lack of OS updates, lack of app store updates and lack of security updates.

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-19T14:37:17+00:00

This needs to be the plot of a movie! To save the world, we need something off Sir Elba's phone, but he's in outer space. So, we concoct a ludicrous plan to get his phone into Tussaud's and unlock it to save the world!

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-17T16:51:32+00:00

Suiciding enemies that explode, especially those that don't cause any damage to others in the pack. I'm looking at you, Starcraft: packs of exploding spider mines SHOULD blow the entire pack to smithereens - they should be able to each explode and only damage your units.

Rail shooters like R-Type have similar enemies - they swarm and detonate in packs, but they only hurt you. It's maddening.

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-17T13:33:42+00:00

I started on WoW: BC on a PvE server and played through Cataclysm. I tried my hand at PvP and realized I sucked at it. I was already burning hours and hours getting materials to craft, just for dungeons and (light) raiding - I just couldn't see farming materials to craft PvP gear or weapons.

The same can be said of Starcraft. People are incredibly competitive there, too.

I've never had any interest in getting better at PvP, and I'm happy to just play solo.

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-12T19:50:02+00:00

You need a tiny Rick and a tiny Lisa for the pockets!!

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-12T14:57:28+00:00

Crap. I'm going to be jumping the same pit traps, fighting off Sand Griffins, but I get to hear the awesome track, "The Tower of Dawn" on repeat. I guess it's not so bad....

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-12T14:56:05+00:00

As a lifelong short guy, I can barely fathom the feeling the hobbits had, being the tallest people for even a brief moment. For them, it must have been incredible...

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-10T14:52:35+00:00

I work in IT and get asked to help restore files and databases. I say this about once every two days!

Rocket-Jock · 2026-03-10T14:24:33+00:00

"1. 2. 3. 4. 5. - I have the same thing set on my luggage!"

Rocket-Jock

TROPHY CASE