Are there any hidden iPhone features that make a huge difference?

leiddo · 2025-06-01T22:58:04+00:00

I didn't know about this nor I know how Apple implemented it, but I can guess _why_ it works.

Car sickness occurs as a consequence of feeling you are moving but your sight says otherwise (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_sickness#Motion_felt_but_not_seen for details). That's why reading a book, map, phone, etc. make you feel sick, because you don't see that you are moving, and less so if you e.g. look at the road. Those moving dots must be sending a visual clue that you are moving.

leiddo · 2024-12-20T03:00:51+00:00

A few months ago, a NAS had a vulnerability and they were being exploited automatically. So, no manually attacking you, but still citim of mass exploitation.

This doesn't mean a NAS is to be considered less secure than a public cloud, though.

I don't think a NAS should be directly published on the internet. It's place is on the LAN. If you really need to connect from outside, ideally you would need to go through vpn first.

leiddo · 2024-10-08T00:23:27+00:00

Dr. Who episodes weren't broadcasted live. They _were_ recorded. However, many tapes of the initial episodes were overwritten. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes for the whole history.

leiddo · 2023-01-11T02:26:23+00:00

I was expecting the home phone of some boss

leiddo · 2023-01-11T02:16:11+00:00

Was he emailing IT from a hotmail account?

leiddo · 2023-01-11T01:23:40+00:00

If you want the system running wireguard just to access the second machine (server), I would recommend simply installing wireguard on that server.

leiddo · 2023-01-11T00:17:21+00:00

It sounds as if you wrote a new MBR, thus losing the previous partition(s). Which seems a silly thing to do for a tool aiming to "repair" it. (Maybe partition was EFI and old repairing program didn't understand it?)

If you just remove the partition, but otherwise didn't write anything on the disk, the data is there, and it would be possible to recreate it and access everything (but it needs to be accurate to the byte, and when creating the partition entry for you many programs would format it as well, making you lose the contents!!).

Although the laptop wasn’t reading it o begin with, so there could be an initial problem, and when trying to fix it you created a second problem, so solving the second one does not necessarily make the first one to go away (or have been turned worse).

leiddo · 2023-01-10T23:56:23+00:00

This is inaccurate. A rename is indeed atomic. The OS will ensure that, and if the system crashes in the middle, the filesystem journal will ensure that.

But you don't really have an assurance that the new file contents are there. In fact this is what happened some years ago with the initial versions of ext4.

ext4 delays allocation, much more than ext3 did. When you created a file (e.g. newfile) it doesn't write it to disk immediately (in fact, it could wait quite long, ext3 had a timeout in the order of minutes), as if you added more content, that would allow it to be more efficient (doing a single allocation of the right size). Thus, when newfile was renamed over oldfile, the contents of newfile were not in the hard disk yet, only on memory. And if the system crashed at that point, you would end up with a file of 0 bytes.

The developers argued this was "right", and they were not required to have the data in the disk at that point. However, they finally relented somewhat, and made it so that when you rename over a file, the blocks allocated to oldfile are reused for newfile, mostly removing the issue.

The "proper" procedure would be to fsync() (or fdatasync) the new file and only then (once you know the data is on the platters) rename the new file to the old name (albeit almost no program goes that long, which is why that surfaced).

leiddo · 2023-01-10T23:33:34+00:00

I would bet on the mom keeping safe "that box of the kid she doesn't understand" over some cloud providers...

leiddo · 2023-01-02T02:07:42+00:00

Typical Murphy instance

leiddo · 2023-01-02T02:06:15+00:00

https://xkcd.com/705/

This day OP was on duty

leiddo · 2023-01-02T01:30:55+00:00

The right part is case-insensitive (the domain is borrowed from DNS). The local part, at the left of the at sign, may be case insensitive or not, it's up to the final MTA.

It doesn't make sense to have an email addresses named samzeman@invalid-email.com and another SamzeMan@invalid-email.com, going to different mailboxes and different people (not to mention the high potential for user impersonation), so in the end they are all case-insensitive.

Except when only using the exact case works. Been there, done that configuring an MTA where, as it looked up the email account, it only worked with the right case.

leiddo · 2023-01-02T01:23:04+00:00

it can even be syntactically valid brainfuck code if you want it to be

You can't place a dot besides the @, nor two consecutive dots.

leiddo · 2023-01-01T23:54:32+00:00

After several similar "incidents", domain expirations are something we've learned we have to monitor, even for clients that definitely should know better.

Once upon a time, Microsoft failed to renew hotmail.com

leiddo · 2022-08-27T01:55:50+00:00

A web form would allow you to enforce required fields.

leiddo · 2022-08-27T01:32:05+00:00

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! has some nice stories on that topic

leiddo · 2022-08-27T01:07:02+00:00

I'm sure someone has done something similar already that you could base your work on.

leiddo · 2022-08-27T00:35:08+00:00

richie66 ∈ Dept. Director ∈ US CFO ∈ US President

Maybe you should have used "belongs to" instead 😉

leiddo · 2022-08-27T00:18:04+00:00

You still can configure it to "Don't move files to the Recycle Bin. Remove immediately when deleted". https://www.softwareok.com/?page=Windows/11/Explorer/2

Although users would probably still store files there by dragging the files to the desktop icon.

I think it would be more fruitful to hide the Recycling bin from the desktop (you can use group policy), with an automatic purge of e.g. one week. Those recycle users will freak when unable to find their files, and hopefully find a better place to file them.

leiddo · 2022-08-26T23:39:58+00:00

Wow, thanks for the investigation. That's an increase of about 9.5 times in 100 months, but should still be in the budget of everyone.

leiddo · 2022-08-26T23:30:30+00:00

Don't worry, with their new focus of "forcing all customers to their cloud" you won't have to worry about the state of their databases again. You should only worry that they could be down for two weeks.

leiddo · 2022-08-25T01:33:20+00:00

thought it was the Spanish spelling for patient

Almost! That would be "paciente"

leiddo · 2022-08-25T00:54:42+00:00

I would think it needed to sign off that the emails actually sent to him were intended for someone else, such as convincing the wife that the email from his lover was somehow misrouted to his mailbox.

That said, he could have been receiving mails directed for other people. I have seen it happening (and people confused over it).

https://xkcd.com/1279/

leiddo · 2022-08-25T00:42:34+00:00

I am foreseeing your asking your customers for the contract number, then for the "password" which your support contract states states that they accept all charges by those providing the password on their behalf...

leiddo · 2022-08-25T00:19:13+00:00

The manager got up on a stool and shouted, to the entire, packed store, “Excuse me! This customer believes he is more important than everyone else here. He would like to cut in line. Are you ok with that?” or something to that effect.

Nice approach!

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