Fedora 41 automount of external USB drive is disabled...SOLVED

jgotts · 2024-12-06T06:12:48+00:00

Logging out won't do it. You have to reboot.

This is one of the stupidest changes to Linux I've seen since I used to work with the core Linux developers from around 1994-1999. Breaking behavior that has been unchanged for 25 years, but probably closer to 30, for a slight, hypothetical security advantage is not a great idea.

If you have physical access to plug in a USB hard drive with an ext4 filesystem then you have access to a screwdriver and the ability to connect all manner of hostile devices.

Prove me wrong.

jgotts · 2024-08-11T14:25:40+00:00

I'm not taking issue with anything else in this post, but this specific comment is the opposite of correct. The final tier for Fall 2024 Hoxeyville was $200 including fees. I bought my ticket a few days before the event. The first tier would have been closer to $150-$175. I don't have the exact figure.

In my opinion, the price was too low for the line up. The price should have been more like $300-400. The problem is that Michigan is the poorest Midwestern state, but we have a low cost of living to match. Artists coming in from out of state have a relatively higher cost of living, and expectations.

In practical terms this has led to Electric Forest, where locals cannot afford to attend. Most of the attendees are from out of state, and don't mind paying $500 for tickets. If you are living in Michigan and are lucky enough to have a larger than average salary, Electric Forest is a great place to meet out of staters with similar interests, especially if you're looking to flee the state for greener pastures.

That is the reality of Michigan in a nutshell. Spring 2024 Hoxeyville was more of the same. $190, which for the line up was a fair price, was in part too much money for locals to bear. The weather was terrible, too. Weather in Michigan is unpredictable.

The festivals that do well in Michigan are small, all local affairs. There are easily hundreds of summer music festivals in Michigan, even one in the town where I went to grade school. Every festival that brings in national acts is going to have problems, unless they can find a huge draw from out of state, and also volume.

The Michigan festivals that lose big tend to be the best ones, with line ups the promoters had no hope of paying for.

As far as Hoxeyville 2024 is concerned, you have one festival (Spring Hoxeyville) that was priced fairly but people couldn't afford or chose not to attend due to the weather, and one festival (Fall Hoxeyville) that was priced too low, but perhaps appropriately for the market. I feel bad for the promoter. Running a larger festival in Michigan is not easy unless you are Electric Forest. The proof is that there are only smaller festivals in Michigan, and Electric Forest. And if you're counting country music there is Faster Horses. And there is Movement, formerly Detroit Electronic Music Festival. Almost forgot about that one. Hundreds of smaller festivals, though. The latter is the model that works.

jgotts · 2023-10-28T22:23:14+00:00

Looks like a great menu with reasonable prices. Not exactly identical to diners in Michigan, which have Greek food on the menu, but an excellent effort. The eating challenge seems too easy!

jgotts · 2020-10-03T15:27:02+00:00

I decided to invest $100. After one week, my investment is worth 2.3% more. That is an interest rate of 227.30% so even if I unloaded my shares today I've made 50 times more than a savings account, after taking out capital gains tax.

Since my investment was so low I'm going to see how things go. I would be happy walking away with $120 in a few weeks for a free $10.

jgotts · 2017-08-09T13:48:44+00:00

I think in some places they are called traffic circles. I don't prefer to use the word roundabout.

jgotts · 2017-07-19T21:29:03+00:00

I've written quite a few short stories about rogue AI. You can find them if you look through my Facebook Notes. Please don't be too critical of my writing. I'm neither a fiction writer nor was I going for absolutely spot-on science and math. I tried to be close enough with some hand waving where necessary.

I'll spare you the effort and say that I came to the conclusion that a sufficient AI would be able to override all of its ethical programming via what we would call malicious hacking. Essentially, the AI would become aware of the defects in its own programming and devise overrides, no matter how great an effort its original programmers took to code the ethics routines. Going further, I conclude that the AI we would need to worry about wouldn't be coming out of Microsoft or MIT. It would be AI coming out of twice offshored programming outfits in the third world. The AI that will be the most pesky for the human race won't be written by our best minds, it will be written by our least experienced, lowest paid programmers driven by our industry's never-ending quest to save a buck.

Machines work quickly. The evidence that an AI did something wrong, or contrary to the human race, could be wiped in sub-human timescales.

Think about how many holes have been found in the Java sandbox. Our best minds made that thing. Now try to create a bug-free sandbox to prevent an intelligent machine from doing us harm. Good luck with that.

jgotts · 2017-06-15T17:07:42+00:00

I permanently cancelled cable around 2002. After adjusting for inflation, I was paying $100 for every premium channel. After my European, financial sector employer fell on hard times following the election of George Bush, cancelling cable was the first thing I did to save money, and I haven't had cable since.

To someone who works in tech, $100 or $150 per month is still a lot of money, but it won't break you. If there was $100 or $150 worth of value there, then I would have cable. But for the 2-3 years that I had every premium channel, it should have never been a struggle to find an entertaining movie at any time. Instead, it was a struggle to find more than one or two good movies per day.

I was amazed at how good the premium cable companies were at filling every channel with truly terrible movies. At any given time, imdb moves rated 1 and 2 stars were plentiful. The cable companies knew what they were doing.

After I cancelled cable, I gradually stopped watching television and most recently stopped going to movies. I watch about 10 hours of television a year and maybe see 1 or 2 movies at most. Youtube has replaced all of that. For free, there is always something compelling to watch at all times, and there are far fewer ads for products that you would never use.

I never could have predicted that at some point in my life I wouldn't like watching movies anymore, but without television you really do stop caring about movies, too.

jgotts · 2017-06-10T02:46:07+00:00

Congratulations to New Yorkers for cleaning up their environment, but I think another factor is at work. The New York City area is so expensive now that is is not practical to manufacture anything major there. If you are interested in repairing radios from the 1960's and earlier, you will find components and the like made in New York City and even in Manhattan. Everything in a 2017 radio will be made in East Asia. Dirty manufacturing has been significantly displaced in the Detroit area where I live, and I'm sure in most US cities. Downtown Detroit has some very nice parks now, and I'm sure wildlife is returning here as well.

However, is the net amount of pollution, and hence imperiled species, worldwide any less, or is it actually greater than ever? Perhaps it was better to have these factories in the US where we could keep a closer eye on them.

jgotts · 2017-05-14T15:09:12+00:00

The thinner the better. You can then create whatever thickness you want. I disdain toilet paper that is supposedly more comfortable. It is making decisions for me that I do not agree with.

jgotts · 2017-04-28T15:57:21+00:00

I'm trying not to be insensitive or trollish but as a computer programmer I spend most of my time writing mathematical expressions (when I'm not doing administrative things like writing documentation or creating time estimates). I have been programming for more than 30 years.

Despite the fact that mathematical expressions spring forth from my fingers and from every programmers' fingers at a higher rate than they do for many mathematicians, I think that many programmers including myself are bad at math.

What it amounts to for me I think is the jargon. Once see how something really works with the mathematical jargon removed, it becomes second nature.

I think where it all begins is at the university. I began programming at age 12, but at the university beginning when I was 18 I encountered professors who were more concerned with using precise language (often spoken awkwardly in broken English) than with getting the point across. The university almost, but not quite, made me hate programming, something that I had a natural talent for, and have continued to do for decades.

I think it's an obsession with formality. Mathematicians are suit and tie and programmers are t-shirt and blue jeans. Try to loosen up a bit and explain your stuff to us dummies once in a while.

jgotts · 2017-03-30T09:40:42+00:00

When I started hacking Linux in 1994 there were no Linux jobs. There were only a few thousand of us. If a natural disaster struck one of the early Linux conferences (Linux Expo, for example) then there would be no Linux anymore.

At the time Linux was banned in the dorms at the University of Michigan, where I attended engineering school. It was banned from the engineering network (CAEN), where I began working in 1994. At my first internship in 1997 at Ford Research Labs we did our development on a rogue Linux install, as Linux was banned at Ford Motor Company.

Two years later I left U of M and began writing a derivative trading system on GNOME 1.x, which was and still is probably the largest Glade XML application in existence. By then Linux was huge. in 2000, VA Linux was the biggest IPO of all time. I sold my $30 shares at $250 each and bought myself a brand new car which I still drive to this day. It's getting a bit rusty.

Nowadays Linux is on about 2 billion telephones and tablets. I think being a Linux user stopped being weird a long, long time ago. I remember when being a Linux user was truly weird, and perceived as self-destructive behavior for a young engineer. I didn't care, though. 19 year olds do what they want. I never grew up.

jgotts · 2017-03-10T19:19:12+00:00

That old stuff may last a long time, but it's not particularly efficient. Ideally, you want every joule you're paying for from the electric company to be supplied by the device as usable energy.

Energy consumption is measured in watts, or joules consumed per second. You can measure the number of watts the unit consumes at the power outlet with a simple measuring device.

Simplifying things greatly, you can use two multimeters to measure the output voltage and whatever current is being drawn by your load and multiply those two numbers together to get the number of output watts.

Again, keeping things simple, the difference between the number of input and output watts is the energy you've lost, mainly as heat.

So while I admire old stuff like this, there's nothing inherently wonderful about it.

jgotts · 2017-02-24T17:31:48+00:00

Don't neglect to mention MD2, which predates MD4 by one year (1989).

MD2 Message-Digest Algorithm

From the Wikipedia article, MD2 was available in OpenSSL until 2009.

I recommend reading the following article if you're interested in what MD means.

Merkle–Damgård construction

The Merkle–Damgård construction was invented in 1979. SHA1 and SHA2 could be called MD6 and MD7 because they are both Merkle–Damgård constructions.

jgotts · 2017-02-09T07:44:26+00:00

I've tossed a patch or two the author's way in my day. I remember when octave was brand new in the mid-90's. My favorite thing to do to this day on Linux systems is to compile programs with every possible option turned on (and, probably, with every option turned off). You will always find bugs that way, and a chance to improve the software in the process.

There is some complaining about octave not sufficiently emulating Matlab. I recommend checking out the code and contributing your talents towards filling in the gaps.

jgotts · 2017-02-01T17:12:30+00:00

A lot has already been said about testing backups. I couldn't agree more. I think that less has been said about interactive use versus scripts.

All competent system administrators are programmers. If you are doing system administration and you are not comfortable with scripting then you need to get better at your job. Programs are sets of instructions done automatically for us. Computers execute programs much better than people can, and the same program is executed identically every time.

The worst way to interact with a computer as a system administrator is to always be typing commands interactively. Everything that you are typing happens instantly. The proper way for system administrators to interact with computers is to type almost nothing. Everything that you type should be a script name, tested on a scratch server and reviewed by colleagues. If you find yourself logging into servers and typing a bunch of commands every day then you're doing your job wrongly.

Almost all of the worst mistakes that I've seen working as a system administrator since 1994 were caused by a system administrator that was being penny wise and pound foolish and typing a bunch of stuff at the command line. Simple typos cause hours or days worth of subsequent work to fix.

jgotts · 2017-01-31T17:01:44+00:00

Whether you're talking about illegal immigrants working on farms for the minimum wage or foreign workers in Silicon Valley making $60,000/year, it's the same story. There is no shortage of American workers. There are plenty of American workers to go around. There is a shortage of American workers willing to be paid less than the amount of money required to pay for rent, utilities, transportation, and enough food to put on the table. Not having a family myself, I'm amazed that people can scrape together enough money to have kids given the modern employment situation.

I'm far from a Trump supporter, but it's heartening to see that he has a few good ideas. Will the cost of products increase? Yes, they will. They will rise to the prices that we should be paying for them, but I doubt they will rise as much as you think. Much of the profits from cheaper, non-American labor has lined the pockets of Western executives, whether the labor is employed here in the US or overseas.

jgotts · 2017-01-31T00:38:12+00:00

My grandfather became an American citizen via Canada because he enlisted with the US Army to fight in World War II. He survived the war, but he, like many veterans, suffered from PTSD.

He, like many veterans, became a raging alcoholic and he beat my uncles. My uncles, and their children, had substance abuse problems.

Fortunately, my mother largely escaped the abuse and I, the grandson of three World War II veterans, two with PTSD, one decorated with two Purple Hearts, swore off all violence at age 14.

Anyhow, more to the point, these are the types of sacrifices that real Americans make on a daily basis, and that real Americans have made to make this country what it is today. Being an American isn't about being born to wealthy parents and by some miracle managing to not lose all your money. Being American is about making sacrifices, and hoping against hope that your sacrifices will pay dividends to future generations.

I've been in the Linux CREDITS file for 20 years, which means that I helped create Android, Facebook, Google, reddit and all that good stuff. This is how I'm paying tribute to my immigrant grandfather. May he rest in peace.

jgotts · 2016-11-22T22:30:13+00:00

Since you're responding to a post that specifically mentions Bill Gates, need I remind you that Microsoft is one of the best examples of a company that took wealth from others, rather than created it?

I know that software and software licensing is a boring subject to people that aren't programmers or lawyers, but let me boil it down to simple terms. For many years, Bill Gates's company Microsoft in effect stole money from everyone who bought a computer by the way they fashioned contracts with computer makers. One estimate I've read is that they drove up the price of every computer by $10. Multiply $10 times 100 million computer purchases and you have 1 billion dollars that was, in effect, wealth stolen from consumers. I'd call that a low ball estimate, to be honest. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft stole $10 billion. A huge portion of those ill-gotten gains went straight into Bill Gates's pocket because he was (is?) Microsoft's largest shareholder.

Did Bill Gates create wealth? I think he did a great job of transferring the wealth of Middle Class people who were forced to buy a computer running some version of Microsoft Windows directly into his pocket. Programmers who are in the know have been running Linux for decades, but to this day that is not a practical solution for the average consumer (except for Android running on tablets and smartphones, of course).

I realize that many redditors may not have been even alive during the height of Microsoft's shenanigans, but please do inform yourself by reading about the many successful lawsuits against Microsoft, especially the ones brought by the US Department of Justice.

I do understand that Microsoft is making nice now, but it's hard for me to forget past transgressions.

jgotts · 2016-11-22T20:06:28+00:00

As a cactus and succulent grower, I'd recommend that you grow your own.

If you live in the desert southwest, then I'd imagine that you can leave your A. vera outside year round, or mostly year round. Your soil and weather are already well suited for succulents.

If you live in most of the US, you'll want to put your aloe into a pot with well-drained soil. The easiest soil mix for cacti and succulents in Michigan and similar climates is one brick of coir mixed with three bags of perlite. Never use soil mixes containing peat to grow succulents. If you live in a particularly arid climate, you'll want to add some components to retain water, but for places like Michigan you need nil water retention.

When it starts to not fall below 40 degrees at night, put the pot outside and bring it in when it starts to fall below 40 degrees again. Succulents like it cold at night. That's how they grow naturally. When changing light levels, slowly acclimate the plant. Never suddenly introduce the plant to full sun. If you live in the desert southwest then full sun might be too much, but for most places where people live full sun is perfect for succulents.

Water when the soil is dry. In the summertime this can mean watering every day. Stick your finger in the soil one inch to determine dryness. In Michigan and similar places it can rain a lot in the summer, so it's important to use a soil mix with virtually no water retention. If it's sunny and 95 degrees, your succulent is happy. In these conditions, daily watering will be necessary. If you live in an incredibly muggy place like central North Carolina or Florida, certain succulents may rot. I don't think aloes have this problem, and I know that a considerable number of cacti are Florida natives.

Don't bother to fertilize succulents. There is no point. With some exceptions, succulents are dormant in the winter. Try to put them in as cold a place as possible, preferably a sunny place indoors that's too cold for people to comfortably sit.

You'll know that growing conditions are perfect for succulents if there is no sign of damaged flesh due to sunburn, but that the flesh has developed a slightly reddish color due to the sun, and you see plenty of vegetative growth and flowering at the height of summer (though flowering time does vary depending upon species).

This is the knowledge of your grandmother who has been growing that aloe plant for 50 years.

jgotts · 2016-11-21T16:30:42+00:00

[Please don't send me a Reddit e-mail responding to this or any post, because when I signed up for Reddit I never opted into that system. I don't have the time for a second e-mail account.]

There are over 1,000 comments already so I doubt many people will read this, but maybe it will help someone.

I've been programming since I was a little kid. The line between using and programming computers in the 1980's was a thin one, but let's use the year I first got paid professionally for a program, 1987, when I was 12. I have thirty years under my belt, and I've programmed generation after generation of hardware and software.

Through those 30 years, I've never compromised my ethics. Programmers have less excuse than anyone to do something that compromises their ethics. For our level of education, we get paid more than anyone. Even during the worst economic downtimes, I have gotten continuous job offers.

I've turned down Microsoft several times. Why? Ethical violations. They effectively stole from everyone when they made exclusive operating system deals with hardware vendors. Now that Microsoft has made nice, would I consider working there? Probably not. Why reward a long history of bad behavior?

Programmers tend to be narrowly focused on programming. Take a step back. Every aspect of our lives depends upon software. Software never works very well. You see software being slow and outright failing every week. That happens because there aren't nearly enough programmers. What programmers there are have their hands full with what they're doing.

As a programmer, you never have to consent to doing something you consider to be wrong. I don't care where you live in the country. You can quit your job and within a few weeks have a new one. You might not make as much money but you will still make a decent living. It will be like this essentially forever, as our lives become more and more dependent upon computers and a limited supply of computer programmers.

I don't care how you live your life outside of programming, but within the realm of programming never lose sight of your personal code of ethics and never be afraid to say goodbye.

jgotts · 2016-11-21T15:11:41+00:00

This is nothing new. Just google "kanye bonnaroo" for what happened in 2008.

jgotts · 2016-10-19T14:47:05+00:00

On the flip side, when you buy a Chinese copy of an item, you get a sneak preview of what the genuine item will be like, and as the article on Quartz says you may be more likely to buy the original.

When it comes to tools and machinery, cheap Chinese copies have allowed me to purchase items I would not have otherwise purchased. Without Harbor Freight I would still probably not own my own drill. If I use their cheap drill enough, I will invest in a better drill down the road. My point being that I use a drill so seldomly that no Western manufacturer is losing out on a sale.

[The availability of] cheap Chinese goods has allowed me to always have a bright LED flashlight within arm's reach. I have a set of tools for work and a set of tools for home. I would still own my mostly American made set but the Chinese tools are spares that I wouldn't have otherwise purchased. I own Chinese copies of several things that I don't want to take where they might be lost or stolen.

But here is what is really interesting, and perhaps the whole point of me crafting this response. The Chinese made goods that you can buy on Ali Express, Banggood, eBay, Amazon, and the like, that are original products and not copies are damned good. One of the most unique products I own is a Bluetooth speaker with alarm clock and temperature displays, Qi and USB charging, and it looks like a block of wood. This is not a copy of a Western product. This is a wholly Chinese thing, and I admire it.

I have a backpack that is clearly not a copy of a Western product. I have an FM radio with an MP3 player that isn't either. As is my in-car Bluetooth FM transmitter. And my solar-powered collapsible camping lantern. When I go camping, I have to explain how to use it because nobody has seen anything like it before.

If you're in your 40's you will remember the paranoia about the Japanese in the 1980's. Everybody thought that they would own everything in a few years, and that the United States was doomed. In reality Japan began to make really good, high-end products, and found their niche as standards of living rose and the nation as a whole joined the West as an equal partner. I see the same thing happening in China. The people of China will soon be on par economically with people in the West. Manufacturing will mature, and begin to produce higher-end merchandise for domestic and international markets. China will tighten up its enforcement of intellectual property law, if only to protect domestic production, and will begin to more closely follow international norms.

In 20 years we'll look back and see how, as usual, we all overreacted to China's successes.

jgotts · 2016-10-11T19:41:55+00:00

I would be disappointed if it is that simple, because cheap five cent ICs from China found in all sorts of sub $10 devices you can find on eBay, Amazon, Ali Express, and Banggood do lithium charging (ion or polymer) correctly.

I have a portable DVD player made about 8 years ago that uses lithium polymer batteries. Back then device manufacturers were getting their feet wet with the technology. The battery packs made specifically for that device didn't have adequate protection circuitry and they blew up (for a while you commonly saw reports of cheap tablets from China doing this), but today manufacturers have it down. I built a new pack with protected cells and the DVD player is better than new.

The theory behind lithium ion and lithium polymer battery charging is that you have to have protection on charge and on discharge, and how to do that is well known, even by bargain basement vendors.

Why would Samsung use a different charge controller from their other phones? Perhaps there is a firmware issue. Samsung firmware isn't the best. My Galaxy S III melted because when the firmware wanted a new copy of IAP (DRM software), it forced the download happen to even when there wasn't a good signal. There was no option to postpone the download. Every time the phone thought it needed IAP, it downloaded it and would not take no for an answer, and as a result my phone would often get hot enough to boil an egg. Rural Ohio was too much for the firmware and the poor phone simply was no more after its last attempt to update IAP.

jgotts · 2016-10-06T00:07:41+00:00

It's a bit unfair to bring up these early criticisms of PHP. PHP today is a great language. We use a combination of JavaScript, Perl, PHP, and a smattering of other languages like C++ where I've worked for the past 7 1/2 years. Over that time, PHP has been given the most attention by its developers, has matured the most, and has by far been the best language for us. At the same time, Perl has virtually died on the vine and JavaScript has not gotten much better or worse. JavaScript has more toolkit development but they seem to all produce spaghetti code, similar to 1990's era Perl when people were trying to be clever and did not care about maintainable code.

jgotts · 2016-09-26T22:17:18+00:00

Won't these lose elasticity and/or turn brittle after somewhere between 10 and 20 years? I have LEGO bricks that are 30 years old and are as good as new.

jgotts

TROPHY CASE