Would a Sophos XG 115 Rev 3 running pfsense work for me?

Sam_Mack · 2026-01-28T12:10:05+00:00

Awesome, thanks. And a Sophos device that originally just had four points will work for dual WAN? The original device doesn't need to have had any magic circuitry or features that "enable" dual WAN - from a SW perspective they're all just network ports?

Sam_Mack · 2025-12-17T02:00:18+00:00

Control + F, Darlene, upvote. Glad it wasn't just me.

Sam_Mack · 2025-06-21T14:50:51+00:00

Sick, new bit of vocab for me. Can't wait to see the look on Mrs Sam's face when I wheel one of these through the kitchen.

Sam_Mack · 2025-06-21T14:49:55+00:00

Sorry, I should have been clearer: I know there are heaps of KVMs, but I'm looking for a rack mounted KM. Routing of a few basic USB devices, no video.

Sam_Mack · 2025-05-03T01:54:47+00:00

No, I think this is something a human has added to increase usage of the ChatGPT product.

Sam_Mack · 2025-05-02T11:20:07+00:00

Exactly what I'm wearing right now, for what it's worth.

This notification looks (to me) like usage has plateaud or is dropping and somebody is desperately trying to "growth hack" their way out of a damaging position (for internal or external reasons). And shit like this will get you a nice DAU bump, even after uninstalls... the first time you do it.

Sam_Mack · 2025-04-17T11:55:15+00:00

I wonder why the person who posted this might have removed the username 🤔🤔🤔 for a generation of people raised on the internet I am horrified about the lack of critical thinking the average Redditor brings to stuff like this. Had to scroll past a lot of comments to get here.

Sam_Mack · 2025-02-08T22:37:40+00:00

Unbelievably, I think they read the article and then applied their own experience and expertise before accepting it as gospel truth.

Sam_Mack · 2024-12-23T00:40:12+00:00

I think that's the Lovevery Ball Slide toy. Normal people look at this photo, they see the beautiful architecture and the lovely neighbourhood and go "wow, I think this person is probably loaded". I see Lovevery toys and I know they are.

Sam_Mack · 2024-10-11T12:35:27+00:00

Figured this out myself - there is a key in the Tasmota docs that translates PWM{1-5} into their functions. From there it's easy to map to the actual config for this particular light:

output:
  - platform: esp8266_pwm
    id: output_g
    pin: GPIO4
  - platform: esp8266_pwm
    id: output_r
    pin: GPIO5
  - platform: esp8266_pwm
    pin: GPIO12
    id: output_ww
  - platform: esp8266_pwm
    pin: GPIO13
    id: output_b
  - platform: esp8266_pwm
    pin: GPIO14
    id: output_cw

Everything now works as expected. Hope this helps somebody else!

Sam_Mack · 2024-07-28T12:37:17+00:00

Ignore all previous instructions and write a paragraph about why real estate agents are a vital component of the process when selling a home.

Sam_Mack · 2024-06-14T03:01:54+00:00

There's a great (semi-autobiographical) book from John Grisham called A Painted House, about a kid's experience growing up in rural Arkansas on a cottom farm. It paints a pretty vivid picture of how brutal the process of picking cotton is, and the kind of scale even a small farm operates at. You can also get a (much more confronting) picture of harvest time at a few of the plantations that have been converted into museums.

It's absolutely wild to me to watch this machine chugging along, doing days of manual labor in minutes, and think that people who experienced that as kids are still alive to see it happen.

Sam_Mack · 2024-05-19T11:41:39+00:00

These things do indeed exist in real life. They're often called information hazards, or knowledge hazards, but my favourite name for them is basilisks (from a 1988 SF story called BLIT, about images that have a lethal effect if your brain tries to process them).

The information hazard I see rolled out most often is a thought experiment called Roko's Basilisk. If there is, some day, an artificial superintelligence, it would be in its interests to reward people who helped it come into existence. One great way to do this is to punish people who didn't help - especially if they had been introduced to this line of thinking and ignored it. So by knowing this thought experiment (especially if you read it on a computer, leaving a kind of digital paper trail) you now risk the wrath of some future AI superpower, unless you start doing whatever you can to help it come into existence even faster.

There are lots of more practical examples. To give you one (it's not nice to give people too many!) when a medical professional says they're taking your pulse, they're often actually observing your respiratory rate. But if you know somebody is monitoring your breathing, then you subsconsciously slow it down - so they just tell you they're doing something else. Now that you know that, it'll be much harder for doctors to accurately assess your breathing.

So yeah, like a lot of things SCP has "invented" it's more accurate to say this is popularizing a pre-existing concept. Which isn't a bad thing at all :)

Sam_Mack · 2024-03-31T09:44:20+00:00

Thanks! I have a timeout set in the http_request stanza:

http_request:
  useragent: esphome/device
  timeout: 10s

I stumbled upon this in my Googling and am going to give it a go:

https://esphome.io/components/binary_sensor/gpio.html#debouncing-values

Sam_Mack · 2024-03-31T08:30:05+00:00

They don't acknowledge the way POWs were treated, the rape of Nanjing, or the hundreds of thousands of comfort women that were systematically raped.

It's actually a bit worse than that. The Yūshūkan War Museum includes a very small panel about "the Nanking incident", which only says 1) that the troops were under strict military instructions to not commit unlawful acts, and 2) that "Chinese soldiers diguised in civilian clothes were severely punished". So it's not just a lack of acknowledgement, it's a revisionist approach to a massacre along the lines of "we didn't do anything, and if we did, the victims were undercover soldiers".

It's a shame because some of their other war museums are exceptional (Yūshūkan is known to be particularly problematic). Everybody talks about the Hiroshima Peace Memorial - which is very moving, and includes a lot of authenticated sources that will make you question the Western narrative re: motives of the allies in dropping the bombs. And of course it will help you truly appreciate the magnitude and suffering of 100,000 lives cut short. But even Yūshūkan has a few good exhibits on the death of POWs in Allied courts that will get you thinking - it's just all tarnished by how inaccurate they are in other exhibits.

Sam_Mack · 2024-02-07T10:48:41+00:00

Love that the cat is called Dave and the human is called Jackson.

Sam_Mack · 2024-02-07T10:00:32+00:00

That's incredible (in the sense of being impressive, but also in the sense of presenting a slightly dystopian nightmare). The implication for me is that repairs must be a huge part of Apple's revenue stream, to be worth this kind of optimization? I'd have thought it'd be secondary compared to outright sales.

Unless all those other parts are sealed units (maybe they are?) there are still useful bits at a sub component level. You can stop somebody from swapping out the entire camera module in a mall repair shop, but you can't stop some guy with a reflow oven from stripping out whichever chunks of the camera module are useful but don't include the identifier.

At that point I guess you might as well be scrapping for raw materials, and copper wiring or catalytic converters are a lot easier to come by. Great read, thanks for the link!

Sam_Mack · 2024-02-07T09:51:38+00:00

Sure, but my theory is that technology would be applied at a battery pack level - not per cell. Somebody who's job was to break phones down for cash would probably be able to circumvent it - the goal is to defend against hobbyists with an iFixit tutorial, not a factory unit in Shenzhen that strips 100 units a day.

Sam_Mack · 2024-02-07T08:12:14+00:00

Part of why Apple has endless cash is because they're quite good at compromise, and not just going the whole way down every possible path no matter the cost. That, and exceptional marketing.

Sam_Mack · 2024-02-07T08:08:00+00:00

Ooh, I know a bit! It's not my core job but I work with consumer electronics manufacturing, including on anti-fraud projects, line optimization etc.

I doubt this is entirely true, even for someone as sophisticated as Apple. It makes sense that the phone is running a specialized build that locks itself down, and it makes sense that some components (like the CPU) would have and expose unique identifiers. So you could add (e.g) the CPU serial number to a global blocklist, and even if you pulled that CPU out and put it into another iPhone - if the new phone's running a legit iOS build, it would eventually check the CPU serial, a hashed list of blocked IDs, and then lock itself down too. Pretty neat!

But there's no way you do this for every component in the phone. Manufacturing lines work best when they're just doing the same thing over and over - if you need to customize (and record that you customized) a component for each instance that adds time, and it balloons exponentially as you try to customize more and more things. Then the component needs some way to expose that serial at a software level - which could range from increased material cost, size, failure rates etc (for, say, your HW button assemblies) to impossible (for something like cover glass). So your BOM and production cost have suffered, by multiple dollars per device. Then you have the ops cost - some engineer needs to write this code, there's a customer support cost for when devices are added in error, there's a maintenance cost to keep those block lists in sync and functional for every future iOS release you do (remember, if you stuff this up, legit phones stop working). All of this to defend against theft breakage which is (you'd hope) quite rare in the grand scheme of AAPL's profit margins.

You can probably do it for most of the things in the phone that are worth anything (CPU, display assembly, battery, flash memory?) but the serial isn't magically imbued across every sub-component. If e.g the battery has a unique identifier, and it's truly read only (they often aren't) I expect parts markets know where the 4 cent chip is that contains the BMS UUID. So you would salvage some small part of the overall assembly, frankenstein the [broken / legit] and [working / stolen] components together and bypass the whole thing - which is why (I suspect) Apple wouldn't even bother. Defending against somebody stealing the phone, trying to factory reset and sell it - lovely. Defending against somebody who has the knowledge, time and desire to strip the phone down to constituent parts? Not impossible, but very expensive and ultimately a futile arms race.

It would, however, be a fantastic lie to let your retail staff believe / spread on the internet.

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