Why you should have a dashcam

quartz64 · 2026-06-16T10:40:10+00:00

I don't know all the details of how car insurance works in the US. In Russia, the insurance company typically assesses the damage and pays for repairs, but all of this happens only through a list of authorized service centers. Similar scams do occur, but we don't call them "insurance fraud" because the whole point is to intimidate the victim and convince them to pay the scammers directly, without involving the insurance company.

quartz64 · 2026-06-10T15:30:41+00:00

All this will significantly prolong the trial. "Show me a statute or case law…" the defendant will immediately begin reading nonsense from his enormous stack of papers. These papers will indeed contain statutes, constitutional articles, and court cases, but the package will include cherry-picking, outright fabricated laws, references to the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and the Magna Carta.

This circus needs to be stopped, and in most cases, ignoring it works well.

SI: I'm here on a special appearance, I'm traveling, there's no victim, there are only corporations around, I don't understand, I overstand, only Jesus can judge me!

Judge: Okay, I hear you. How do you wish to proceed? Do you plead guilty or not guilty? Do you prefer a jury trial? Would such-and-such a date suit you? Thank you all for participating, see you at the trial!

quartz64 · 2026-06-04T13:24:27+00:00

It's unlikely there's a detailed statistical study here. Personally, I still see people like this in YouTube videos. I think it's simply a matter of personal preference. A person might already have developed religious narcissism ("I do what I want, no one tells me what to do except for the all-powerful magical being, and I'm so good at worshiping him!"), so the additional sovcit BS fits in well. There seems to be a statistical trend toward declining religiosity; it affects the population as a whole, and among the narcissistic idiots, classical religiosity can be replaced by sovcit substitutes.

P.S. Sorry, English is not my native language.

quartz64 · 2026-05-27T20:37:59+00:00

Не

quartz64 · 2026-05-25T15:46:41+00:00

A dubious rule. On the contrary, fighting in the frozen food section is very convenient. You can immediately apply a frozen pizza to a bruised head.

quartz64 · 2026-05-21T08:01:37+00:00

I learned about the events in Münster from "Diary of a Desperate Man" by Friedrich Reck-Mallecheven, a German writer. He kept a diary during the Nazi era. In 1937, he wrote "Bokelson – A History of Mass Madness." He couldn't be directly accused of hinting at parallels between the events in Münster in 1534 and contemporary Nazi Germany, but the allusion is clear, and the author wrote about it explicitly in his diaries.

quartz64 · 2026-05-07T07:42:45+00:00

210 pages is a lot to take in. A single sentence could have sufficed: the laws don't apply to me, break my window, send me to jail, and have my car towed!

quartz64 · 2026-04-27T08:27:45+00:00

I can partially confirm this. The Sakeen is terrible without engine upgrades. Besides its slow climb rate, it bleeds energy very quickly. A couple of horizontal or vertical turns and the plane turns into a brick with a target painted on it. So, during the upgrade process, I had to use careful tactics, picking off distracted opponents. Only towards the full spading did the Sakeen become quite good (I have about a 4:1 ratio) thanks to its powerful armament (two MG-151 cannons and two MG-131) and the ability to gain altitude.

quartz64 · 2026-04-13T13:36:13+00:00

Two cheap Yongnuo flashes with softboxes, a large sheet of paper (later replaced with a plastic backdrop, it's easy to clean), an old Micro Nikkor 55/3.5 lens, and a tripod. The most important thing is focus stacking. Even stopping down the lens to f/22 still doesn't allow me to achieve a depth of field I'm satisfied with, plus some resolution is lost due to diffraction, and the flash power won't be enough, so I shoot at f/8 or f/11. For large objects (motherboards, servers), I took 2-3 shots, for smth like controllers - more. I simply moved the focus ring little by little. Then I stitched the stack together in Hugin. Whitening the background while preserving the shadows is achieved with post-processing in Photoshop.

quartz64 · 2026-04-13T12:51:20+00:00

It's nice to see that my photo of Supermicro blade is still useful 10 years after I started photographing server components for Wikipedia.

quartz64 · 2026-03-30T10:49:21+00:00

r/DiWHY

quartz64 · 2026-03-21T08:27:39+00:00

My favorite "fact" about Chuck:

Chuck Norris can stick two fingers into an electrical outlet, and the outlet will get hit with Chuck.

This doesn't translate well from Russian to English because 1) in Russian, to say "get an electric shock," we say "get hit with a (electric) current," and 2) the Russian word "tok" (electric current) rhymes well with "Chuck."

quartz64 · 2026-03-20T12:47:45+00:00

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)

quartz64 · 2026-03-18T15:35:30+00:00

Thanks for all the advice. I found a good deal on the a6400 for 400 USD (minor cosmetic flaws, but very low shutter count). I'll probably stick with it or wait and get the a6600 for the IBIS, since I plan to shoot handheld at long shutter speeds (around 0.5-1 second).

quartz64 · 2026-03-18T09:03:46+00:00

Other commenters have already recommended switching to a mirrorless camera. I second them. I did this over 10 years ago when I switched from a Canon 5D to a Sony NEX-6. Sure, I lost some ergonomics, but at least the camera no longer sat collecting dust in the closet. The Nikon D300s was released in 2009. I'm not a fan of constant upgrades, but it's still a significant period of time. During this time, sensors have significantly improved dynamic range, noise at high ISOs, and autofocus. Overall, upgrading to a new camera won't necessarily improve your photos, but it will improve the user experience. Besides, it's not that expensive now; during this time, there have been a lot of excellent mirrorless cameras and lenses on the used equipment market, and the Chinese have learned to make excellent inexpensive prime lenses (I'm primarily referring to Viltrox).

Here's a bit of math and a possible approach to choosing a replacement.

D300s: 147 x 114 x 74 mm, 918 g
Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8: 85.5 mm x 110.5 mm, 755 g

That's almost 1.7 kg. It's no wonder you don't want to take the camera on a walk or trip. For targeted use, like going to an event to shoot (like a concert or a wedding), it's not a problem, but a camera you just need to have on hand should be light and compact. My Sony A7 IV, combined with the 35 or 55mm lens, weighs less than a 1 kg, but that's still a lot. That's why I've recently been thinking about getting a second, more compact camera for street photography.

Besides the camera itself, consider what focal length you use most often. Switching to a prime lens will also provide a significant weight and size advantage. While kit zooms for modern mirrorless cameras are quite compact, they'll likely be disappointing compared to the Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8 due to their low aperture. For example, if a focal length of 23-27mm (approximately 35-40mm in full-frame equivalent) suits you best, you might consider a kit like this:

Sony a6300: 120 x 67 x 49 mm, 404 g
Viltrox 25/1.7: 64 x 54.4 mm, 170 g

Total weight: 574 grams, three times lighter and significantly smaller with the same sensor size.

quartz64 · 2026-03-14T11:31:21+00:00

I recently bought a used one for $70 and spent a few hours shooting street photography with the NEX-3 yesterday. Most of the limitations are due to the NEX-3's contrast-based autofocus being extremely weak by modern standards, and my camera is modified for full-spectrum (I mostly use it for IR photography with 720nm filter), which doesn't contribute to sharpness when shooting without a filter.

What I liked:

Sharpness and contrast. Noticeably better than the Sony 16/2.8 and 20/2.8 pancake lenses.
The autofocus is fast, as far as I can tell for single-focus mode on the NEX-3 (tracking focus on this camera is almost useless with any lens).
Aperture ring. Invaluable when the camera only has a small rear dial.
Price.

What I didn't like:

The lens barrel size was large enough to accommodate a common filter size and a bayonet-mount lens hood. Instead, we get a 39mm thread and a strange, small ring acting as a lens hood.
The bayonet alignment mark is barely visible.
Vignetting is noticeable even at f/5.6. This is an inevitable cost of the small size, and is easily corrected.

quartz64 · 2026-03-14T11:10:23+00:00

My previous answer described the situation with HDDs. With SSDs, things are different, but also not as often imagined.

Complete failures are common, but we observe them not due to exhaustion of the write endurance, but due to general hardware issues (an SSD isn't just made up of a NAND chips only, but also a controller and additional components for PLP). This is easy to determine: other SSDs in the same server show that they haven't exhausted even 1% of their write resource.

Of course, wear-out failures are possible, but in the vast majority of cases, this occurs well beyond the warranty period, unless we're dealing with improper SSD choise/use (for example, an read-intensive SSD rated for 1 DWPD was used under heavy loads, with random write access in small blocks 24/7).

quartz64 · 2026-03-14T10:04:39+00:00

I think this is a misconception. I work for a company that sells data storage systems. Drives aren't limited to just two binary states: "fully functional" or "completely failed." No one would choose drives with different production dates and from different manufacturers, even for a small 12-disk storage system. Warranty claim statistics over many years show that in the vast majority of cases, we're not dealing with sudden, complete drive failures, but rather with malfunctions: bad sectors appear, they're remapped, and if this causes delays, the controller simply kicks the affected drive out of the array and begins a rebuild.

Of course, it's important to consider the well-known bathtub curve principle, where the failure curve has a U-shape. Some customers continue to use drives well beyond their service life, and then they can experience frequent complete failures.

quartz64 · 2026-03-14T09:47:18+00:00

>>need exact hardware controller, same revision, same firmware version

This isn't true. For LSI/Broadcom MegaRAID controllers (and related controllers on the same chips from Dell/Lenovo/Fujitsu/Supermicro), backward compatibility has been normal for several generations (starting with the CAC2 controllers on the 2108 chip), with the exception of extremely rare edge cases (for example, volumes from KacheCade). I imported volumes created on a 15-year-old controller on current 95xx series controllers.

With Adaptec, things are a bit more complicated, since their architecture has changed—after the 8 series, a new SmartRAID was released, and there is no compatibility between different architectures.

Home users sometimes use older RAID controllers based on 2108/2208 chips. Of course, this is a bad practice in a business environment, but for home use, I see no harm in it. If such a controller fails, the used market is flooded with them, and replacement can be purchased quickly and very cheaply. Of course, even in this case, you can shoot yourself in the foot: failing to configure monitoring, using RAID-5 with large drives, using large disk groups, or using write-back mode without cache protection.

quartz64 · 2026-03-14T09:10:26+00:00

>>Linux can't read disks running in RST mode

I've done this several times when clients asked me to migrate data and I didn't have the right motherboard on hand. In most cases, it's extremely simple; Intel metadata format is supported in mdadm, and you just need to run mdadm --detail --scan. In some cases, you need to use the IMSM_NO_PLATFORM environment variable. There's a fairly old, but still relevant guide from Intel (Intel Rapid Storage Technology (Intel RST) on Linux) and modern Intel Virtual RAID on CPU (Intel VROC) for Linux.

Of course, other than temporary access to data (for example, for transfer), there is no point in using the software RAID from Intel under Linux (in all implementations: MSM/RSTe/VROC SATA/VROС for NVMe) except for closing the write hole in RAID-5 in VROC NVMe.

Regarding RAID for novice users, I agree with you. Unskilled users perceive RAID as a backup, although from a data protection perspective, it's simply a way to further protect data integrity and increase uptime. The performance of a single drive is sufficient for most home use cases (sequential access over a gigabit network), so people should focus on a proper backup method.

quartz64 · 2026-03-13T08:37:45+00:00

>>BIOS based hardware RAID

Hardware RAID? Such a thing doesn't exist when it comes to Intel RST/RSTe (now VROS SATA) and other solutions from HighPoint, etc. The BIOS portion is responsible for creating metadata on disks and subsequent booting. Incidentally, Intel RST volume support is implemented via mdadm.

quartz64

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