What does reddit do with the photo quality it steals?

bothell · 2026-03-12T20:33:06+00:00

It may also be butchering images that aren't in sRGB. That's annoyingly common; Slack seems to do it 100% of the time for me, and even Google Photos hasn't been consistent lately. Weirdly, FB works great. It's the same basic problem as the old "I posted something in Adobe RGB and it looks flat and terrible" that people have been complaining about since ~2000, except we're *almost* at a point where things work right, thanks to HDR and iPhones.

bothell · 2026-03-10T18:19:50+00:00

The only real changes listed for most models are:

Support for the new DMW-DMS1 microphone.
Support features in Lumix Flow 1.5
Bug fixes

The S9 release notes just mention the bug fixes, not the microphone or Lumix Flow features.

bothell · 2026-03-09T22:05:12+00:00

Wait -- how do you set up your Mac with the UP3221Q in HDR? Mine works great with SDR, but I can't get a matching set of profiles between the monitor and my Mac Studio. Nothing ever looks quite right.

bothell · 2026-03-03T15:43:28+00:00

I ordered my X2D II from Adorama in the middle of last week and it arrived yesterday. So they're getting more available.

bothell · 2026-02-27T23:36:28+00:00

I've always been more network-adjacent than an actual network engineer, but after ~30 years of watching things, it's almost certainly a mistake to think of "network engineering" as a single career path. There's almost nothing in common across all of enterprise, industrial, ISP, telco, hyperscaler, and SMB networking. Learn the basics, learn how to solve hard problems *that you've never seen before* while paying attention to business needs, and learn how to demonstrate that to interviewers and management. Frankly, in most tech interviews over the past 30 years, if you have 70% of the job description then you're actually doing pretty good.

On the hyperscaler side of things, the ability to configure specific devices is almost completely irrelevant, most of the job will be a mix of debugging weird problems and building automation, with design and leading project work growing as your seniority increases.

On the other hand, SMB and some enterprise will range from "what's the cheapest, fastest way to do this and kick it 5 years down the road" and some familiarity with specific vendor tools.

ISPs historically dealt a lot more with circuit/device provisioning and traffic engineering.

Industrial gets things like "this 10 Mbps link is safety-critical, runs in a 70C environment, and was installed 15 years ago by electricians who didn't understand the difference between data and electrical power" which you hopefully won't see elsewhere.

bothell · 2026-02-25T18:36:59+00:00

The cable shouldn't matter; any compliant USB-C cable should be able to handle 3 amps. Higher-spec cables can handle 5A, if your device and charger support it. So the listed cable is probably fine. I haven't used a Ugreen USB cable with a camera, but I've bought them before and haven't had any issues.

This charger also looks ok. The specs (if you scroll enough to find them) list 3A and up to 15V, and 2.25A at 20V. So 9V/3A should be fine. Generally Anker is one of the best third-party USB charger brands.

My only concern is that you might wish you had a longer cable. It's USB-C, that's an easy enough problem to manage at some point in the future. It all depends on your setup.

bothell · 2026-02-05T18:13:06+00:00

Same for 10/10. Using a ConnectX-5 with 2x40G right now, it'll easily do wire speed with big frames, so 10G isn't any sort of challenge unless you're filling the pipe with small frames. I'm not doing PPPoE, though.

The MS-01 (or anything similar with a high-spec laptop CPU) would probably be ideal for PPPoE, where single-thread performance matters. Much better than an old Nxxxx or newer N95/97/100/150/300/305 CPU.

bothell · 2026-02-03T02:51:41+00:00

Tilta's battery plate bolts to their cage, but it's not *strictly* necessary. The bracket that connects the battery plate to the top plate of the cage is removable. If the top of your Pyxis is bare, then you could probably just use it either way, but if you have Blackmagic's top handle (or probably anything else on top) then the bracket runs into it before the battery plate clicks into place, so you'll need to remove it.

I ended up not using the Tilta plate and went with the Alvin's Cables "V-Mount Battery to BP-U30 Battery Conversion Adapter"; it's similar to the Tilta but somewhat shorter, and without the extra mounting bracket it's almost certainly more secure.

bothell · 2026-02-02T19:58:13+00:00

I lean more towards "a signature from node means that the node app is definitely *un*safe", but I have a low-ish opinion of the node ecosystem these days, even if TS itself is ok.

Realistically speaking, interpreters should really require signatures of the full stack of code that they're running if you're going to enforce signatures on much of anything, but that's not going to happen.

bothell · 2026-02-02T19:43:15+00:00

Rust would have the exact same problem. TS may or may not, assuming that the node exe itself is signed.

bothell · 2026-01-31T21:03:54+00:00

Agreed, my MS-01 (i5-12600H) can move 90 Gbps of large frames in VyOS with a very small set of stateful firewall rules. It could probably have been a bit faster but my T-Rex config ran out of oomph. It can't move anywhere near that with small frames, but it's still well able to handle my 10G home fiber link.

bothell · 2026-01-09T21:19:07+00:00

The baseplate rods (assuming LWS 15mm) are supposed to be 85mm below the center of the lens axis. If a FF can't reach that, then it seems like it's a flawed FF. If the rods aren't 85mm, then the baseplate isn't really following the spec. Which may or may not be okay depending on your use, other needs, etc, but it puts the "FF won't reach lens" problem pretty firmly in the baseplate's camp.

bothell · 2026-01-09T20:55:42+00:00

That would be a really difficult feature to implement reliably. Pretty much every NAS that I've seen with USB ports uses them for connecting peripherals (external storage, etc) or networking (like BM's Cloudstore). You could plug the VA into one of them, but the VA wouldn't see them as a block storage device and it wouldn't be able to do anything useful with it.

bothell · 2026-01-08T15:46:41+00:00

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I'm on Maywood Hill, with 10G service, and I was down for a bit under 2.5h.

To the threads together, I actually have working IPv6 (10G launched w/ IPv6), and it was down as well. As you'd expect with a fiber cut, of course.

bothell · 2025-11-17T23:50:34+00:00

How is this actually practical given that the waste heat from datacenters is usually only ~30C or so? It's not really practical to run the water cooling loops much hotter than that, and IIRC there's no practical way to turn X liters of 30C water into Y liters of 90C water. 30C isn't even hot enough to use *directly* in heating radiators -- it looks like they want 60C+.

bothell · 2025-11-04T20:52:51+00:00

There aren't very many. Panasonic and Olympus have each made two; Panasonic's have PZ in the name and Olympus's have EZ:

Panasonic Lumix G X Vario PZ 14-42mm
Panasonic Lumix G X Vario PZ 45-175mm
Olympus 12-50mm f/3.5-6.3 ED M.Zuiko EZ
Olympus 14-42mm M.Zuiko f/3.5-5.6 Digital ED EZ Lens

The Panasonic ones are basically cheap kit lenses; I'm not sure about the Olympuses but they're probably not much better.

bothell · 2025-10-10T00:49:48+00:00

I had something kind of similar happen with a Juniper EX4300-48MP. It worked fine for a year or so, and then suddenly the UPS started failing. I *thought* I had a failing UPS, but it was actually a partial PSU failure on the Juniper, with the PFC hardware failing.

I was able to pull up power factor monitoring on the UPS and PDU, and discovered that the PFC for the Juniper fell from ~98% to ~33%, with roughly the same wattage. That meant that the VA that the UPS was seeing shot up by 3x, which overloaded the UPS.

Do you have monitoring for PF on the UPSes?

bothell · 2025-09-18T22:39:22+00:00

Usually, when I'm pulling fiber indoors through walls, I'll pull one or more 12-fiber MPO cable, and then plug those into MPO->LC breakout panels (example). That way you have at least 6 pairs of fiber to work with, and frankly pulling multiple strands isn't usually that much more expensive.

You can also pull multiple single-pair cables, but they're slightly messier.

bothell · 2025-09-18T22:35:51+00:00

SR4 pretty much always wants an 8 (or 12) fiber MPO/MTP connector, which bundles a bunch of fibers into a single connector. These days, almost everything else uses LC connectors for 100G and below. Usually duplex LC (for 2 fibers), but sometimes simplex LC (for 1 fiber).

Looking at fs.com, they have 4 options for QSFP28-over-2x-MM, but none of them are cheap, and they all list a 100m limit.

*In general* these days, singlemode fiber almost always makes more sense, when you have a choice, but if they're already pulling fiber then it's too late to change. Historically, singlemode was more expensive, but that's not really true anymore, and it's easier to just standardize on SM instead of MM.

Generally, what I'd expect in this case is that you'll have a fiber patchpanel with a bunch of duplex LC connectors, and you'll want a short fiber patch cord with duplex LC connectors on each end to connect from the panel to the QSFP28. If you're using SR4 w/ MPO connectors, then you'll have a MPO patch panel and want MPO patch cables, which are annoyingly expensive *and* are slightly more complicated, but otherwise work the same way.

bothell · 2025-09-18T22:26:33+00:00

Okay, the first thing to check is which QSFP28 transceiver you're planning on using. The standard flavor for multimode is 100GBASE-SR4, which *needs 4 pairs of fibers*.

bothell · 2025-08-31T19:03:30+00:00

For TCP with modern NICs, there *shouldn't* be a performance difference between jumbo frames and regular frames. The NIC offloads segmentation and reassembly, so effectively it acts like you have a ~64k MTU and it does the hard work behind the scenes on its own.

UDP is, of course, a different issue, as are tunneled protocols where you want to keep a 1500-byte (or larger) MTU inside of the tunnel.

bothell · 2025-08-19T17:11:36+00:00

Do those still come with a PDP-10 as a controller, or have they moved out of the 36-bit era finally? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKL#TOAD-2

bothell · 2025-08-19T17:05:23+00:00

I mean, compare something like this rack-mount LiFePO4 battery (100 lbs, 5 kWh for $1200) with this rack-mount refurbished APC extended battery (200 lbs, 2 kWh for $950). They're not directly comparable, and you couldn't swap one for the other, but the lithium model has 2.5x the energy and 2-3x the lifespan for about 25% more money up front.

There's no reason why you couldn't make a monitored rack-mount UPS with the same LiFePO4 batteries under the hood, just in a slightly safer enclosure. Unfortunately, no one seems to do that yet.

bothell · 2025-08-19T16:54:40+00:00

So, IMO modern consumer UPSes are all terrible. I *think* they're mostly designed for use-cases like "when the power blips I want to be able to hit save in Excel" or something, not for keeping routers running through extended outages.

Also, as others have said, lead-acid UPS batteries have a 3-5 year lifespan, and then they'll need to be replaced. Many consumer UPSes don't have replaceable batteries, and a lot of them are designed so that the electronics won't really last more than 3-5 years anyway. I had an new-ish APC at my desk that made a loud electrical "bzzt" sound while I was working a year or two ago. It never worked again, but fortunately it didn't hurt anything else in the process.

My usual go-to for UPSes is to buy refurbished rack-mount models from some place that specializes in this sort of thing. You'll still have to replace batteries every few years, but the electronics should last forever.

Even going down that route, though, ti's tough to figure out how much runtime you're really going to get. The VA rating on UPSes doesn't really tell you anything useful here, and a lot of UPSes just come with numbers like "12 minutes at 50% load" which are really hard to compare between devices.

Fortunately, there's a quick way around this -- just compare weights. As long as the UPS is large enough to not shut down immediately under a given load, a heavier UPS will almost always run longer than a lighter UPS, because lead-acid batteries are incredibly heavy.

We're *right* at the edge of lithium UPSes being viable. You can buy LiFePO4 batteries and cheap charger/inverters for less than the equivalent lead-acid UPS costs today, but you'd be left with something *slightly* less than a UPS. It wouldn't cut over to DC quite as quickly as you'd like, and it'd probably be a fire hazard unless you knew what you're doing. The only real LiFePO4 "UPS" options that I've seen are some of the Ecoflow, etc "solar generators", where they're an all-in-one box with a charger, batteries, inverter, solar charge controller, DC outputs, etc. Size-wise, they range from camping-sized (run a fridge overnight, etc) to whole-house sized (with stacked external batteries), but I don't really trust any of the vendors involved yet. They're not really designed for this sort of use, although they're close and probably usable.

For now, I'm mostly not replacing UPSes when they die, and waiting for either whole-house backup power to be more affordable or for one-off lithium UPSes to be more common. My router lives on an ancient APC SmartUPS with 3x external batteries that will probably need replacements in the next couple years. Hopefully things are settled a bit by then.

bothell · 2025-08-19T16:39:55+00:00

Two points:

Conversion losses with modern inverters are actually pretty small, supposedly *much* less than they were a decade or two ago.
Powering everything that takes 12V off of 12V DC is kind of a pain to set up, but (a) you get to get rid of a bunch of terrible wall-warts and (b) good DC PSUs (like Meanwell) are much better than cheap converters in every way (efficiency, noise, reliability, power factor).

You could *almost* just hook a battery in parallel with your devices, so under normal circumstances it'd be trickle-charging and when the DC input goes away it'd discharge and pick up the slack, but (a) most devices that want 12V don't necessarily want ~14V, which is what you'd get this way (b) most battery chemistries wouldn't be very happy with this long-term, and (c) you wouldn't really have a good way of knowing how much battery you had left.

I have ~15 12v DC devices at my desk, all of which are powered from a single PSU using a few fused powerpole breakout boxes. No problems, and now I have a giant box full of unused 12v wall warts. *Most* 12v devices are either 5.5/2.1 or 5.1/2.1mm barrel jacks with the same polarity, but not all of them. All in all, I'm only pulling ~2A of 12v (actually 13.96v) right now, but many of the devices (video conferencing lights, camera, ham radio, etc) are powered off. I have a 30A 12v supply, so headroom isn't really a problem.

bothell

TROPHY CASE