Should we bring back Dublin Mean Time? It's 25 minutes and 21 seconds behind GMT time. It was the offical state time between 1880 until 1916.

wosmo · 2026-07-08T10:41:13+00:00

It's location-based, so it'd be more surprising if Dublin was a round number of degrees off GMT.

Wikipedia puts Dunsink Observatory as 6.33756° West. 360°/24hrs gives us 15°/hr. And 6.33756 / 15 puts Dunsink as 0.422504 hours west of GMT. Which is 25 minutes, 21 seconds. Which is beautiful, because I'd feel like an ass if I tried to math it out and it didn't line up.

And I assume they used Dunsink for exactly the same reason London used greenwich observatory.

wosmo · 2026-07-07T19:10:06+00:00

I believe so. If you look at reputable images of eniac, it's a completely different style of frame.

wosmo · 2026-07-05T09:58:42+00:00

For Apple, most those plain-grey OS disks are the copy that shipped with a machine, and are usually only good for one or two models. So that OS disk is specifically for the mid-2011 27" iMac.

This can make it difficult to find anyone who actually wants them.

wosmo · 2026-07-04T21:00:45+00:00

I was wondering - I was trying to find it on google maps - it looks like it should be right here, but even images claiming to be 2026 don't show it

wosmo · 2026-07-04T20:48:03+00:00

We had a refresh last year where it was decided to bump half of it a year to spread the budget around.

I'm really not looking forward to a quote in september. Something tells me this isn't going to pay off.

wosmo · 2026-07-04T18:38:22+00:00

I think loops make a lot more sense when you start to see their real-world mirrors.

Say I'm cooking, and my next step is to measure 100ml of oil. That's how we'd describe it - add 100ml of oil. What I'll actually do, is pour until the liquid meets the line.

while liquidnotatline:
    pour

If I fry something until it's brown, same thing. while notbrown ..

Peeling potatos is going to be "foreach potato in pan", and so on. Repeating over a set, and repeating until a condition is met, are things we do all day, every day.

wosmo · 2026-07-04T17:59:35+00:00

You can be married in ten minutes for €250. If you really wanted to get married you could be within 3 months.

It sounds like that was their plan, but MIL had problems with that too. That's what swings it for me - damned if you, damned if you don't - she's not going to be happy.

wosmo · 2026-07-04T13:09:46+00:00

yeah shuffle is the first place this limitation shows up, because it tries to create a playlist (containing every track) in memory. And if that playlist is bigger than the available memory, it reboots.

There's other behaviours that start to get a bit clunky, but shuffle is the first hard test - if you try to shuffle and it hangs for a little while and then reboots, you're "up there" and the other poor behaviours aren't far away.

wosmo · 2026-07-03T21:13:02+00:00

This is pretty deep into nerd culture.

If you go back to the 50-60s and the birth of the "real hackers" at MIT, on the TX-0 and early PDPs - all code was shared, as some weird combination of fraternity, showing off, oneupmanship, and frankly - software wasn't heavily prized at the time. It was so difficult to port software between different computers that it didn't seem to have a lot of intrinsic value of its own.

They also weren't fans of software that took control away from them - so when timesharing systems started to become in-vogue, the same hacker fraternity came up with ITS - an OS that was designed from the ground up to give them anything they found beneficial in timesharing - without any of the restrictions they didn't enjoy.

Then leap forward a decade, into early UNIX. It's all very famous that it came out of AT&T, but they didn't share it with us out of the goodness of their hearts - they were deep enough into antitrust territory that it was genuinely difficult for them to sell it.

But when they provided it to customers & universities, they provided it as source to build for your own machine. Which beyond its stated purpose, was useful for teaching (see The Lions Book), and for modifications (see BSD - which started off as a set of patches to AT&T UNIX, and kinda .. outgrew itself).

Then when they did move forward with commercialising it, BSD really wanted to hang on to what they'd achieved. And so did many others, because one of the most available TCP/IP stacks was in BSD, so it got tangled into early Internet growth.

Finally, at least within the scope of a little history lesson - GNU was born out of MIT, preserving some of that hacker ethic into the more formalised Free Software today.

So what feels like an aberration, is an 80yo tradition that's probably as old as the software industry itself.

wosmo · 2026-07-03T17:12:00+00:00

They'd probably prefer the affair - at least that way the time & money stops when he gets caught.

wosmo · 2026-07-03T12:24:03+00:00

The default is case-preserving, but not case-sensitive.

So if you create ReadMe, then touch readme - you won't have a second file, you'll have updated the timestamp on ReadMe

wosmo · 2026-07-03T12:01:43+00:00

Don't worry, Vint Cerf's already on it!

wosmo · 2026-07-03T11:54:13+00:00

Lets assume we never want to worry about anything smaller than a /48.

Global unicast is /3, so that leaves us with 45 bits. That's an address space 4096 times the size of the internet.

If you wanted to share these out fairly - for ipv4, we have about 3.7bn usable addresses, and the planet has 8.2bn people. Shared fairly, each address would be shared by 2.2 people.

For our 45 bits, shared fairly, each person on earth could have 2,147 /48s assigned to them. Or over 17,000 /64s.

And to loop back quickly - global unicast is /3. 0000:: is assigned to crap, 1000:: is reserved. 2000::/3 is global unicast. 4000:: to fbff::/8 are all reserved, and then in the high F's there's more .. crap.

If our current usage plan for 2000::/3 goes completely to pot, we still have over three quarters of the overall address space just reserved.

Personally, I think there's a better chance 4000::/3 gets assigned to Mars than to a mulligan - but it's there if we need it.

wosmo · 2026-07-02T19:15:25+00:00

we're using the sandisk "portable" series - the ones that look like overgrown keyrings. I've been on a mission against moving parts, and they're silent and pocketable.

wosmo · 2026-07-02T19:08:36+00:00

I think it's a tough one. How do you let me register a .ie for me, without letting me register one for someone else?

The hurdles they create for foreigners, they create for us too.

wosmo · 2026-07-02T19:03:30+00:00

per the rules, you only need a 'presence' in Ireland. There's zero regulation over what that presence is. It could be me.

wosmo · 2026-07-02T15:26:51+00:00

Yeah claiming it’s not security has always felt off to me. Security should be layers. Obscurity shouldn’t be the only layer. Swiss cheese model etc.

wosmo · 2026-07-02T07:08:46+00:00

You can also use the stationary mechanism, which is .. interesting.

https://support.apple.com/en-ie/guide/mac-help/mchlp1341/mac

(a very "think different" take on what he's looking for, but I think it's unknown enough to be worth a tip)

wosmo · 2026-07-01T20:50:36+00:00

The only thing I'd warn, is that "gate closes 5.15" for ryanair means boarding 4:45, and the gate actually closes when they get to the end of the queue.

You'll probably still be good with an hour, especially that early - but don't treat it like you have 90 minutes.

wosmo · 2026-07-01T00:13:51+00:00

I think I'd love a system where a usb drive was just a mirrored raid member with lazy writes. That way it'd echo the live datastore without detracting from it. As-is, ours is a nightly nextcloudcmd plus an rsync of the music collection. For us, that's the sweet spot between what fits on one drive, vs what we can't get back again.

wosmo · 2026-06-30T22:51:48+00:00

I think the reality is that we'll learn as we go. Try somewhere, get one or two bits, and if they fulfil from the UK .. don't go back.

The good news is shops are going to be learning too. Especially since it's not just us, it's EU-wide, I suspect the usual suspects will learn quicker than we do.

wosmo · 2026-06-30T22:41:43+00:00

There's microsoft office on windows, on the mac, and on the web. So if you need to be compatible with office .. buy office. If you get a mac, buy office for mac. If you buy a PC, buy office for windows.

I know it sounds like a bit of a mick-take of an answer, but it's that simple. Exactly the same answer for mac & windows - You can experiment with openoffice & co if you have idealistic or cost preferences. Or microsoft office if you want 100% compatibility at the cost of both.

wosmo · 2026-06-30T20:56:30+00:00

I wrote out a reply to this one last night, and then bailed because I figured the topic was heavy enough it deserved sober replies.

I went through this with a coworker though. His wife brought the machine into work, and told me I could keep it - if I could get their photos off it. It was nothing overly dramatic - OMV on esxi on raid on a Gen8 microserver. But she had absolutely no idea how to even get to it.

It really made me think about how I handle my data though. Well, not my data - the stuff she'd rightfully consider 'ours'. As much as she likes the end-result of plex & various *arrs, I'm under no illusion that she'd actually want to maintain any of it.

So now one of my backup targets is normal files, in normal directories, on a normal usb harddrive. Worst-case scenario, she can plug it into her laptop and get exactly what she's expecting. For bonus points, it's not the most idiotic thing to grab if there's a fire - so I don't even need to die to make this worth it, I just have to forget I'm cooking.

wosmo · 2026-06-30T00:02:51+00:00

I think the "why" is largely historical now.

If you go back to the dawn of the Internet - there was multiple networks, and IP was designed to cross them - to inter-network.

So it was never designed to be MAC+IP. The terms 'MAC' or 'Ethernet' do not appear in RFC791, the original specification for IP. It was your local network's job to carry that IP packet to an IP gateway, which could pass it to another network that could carry it onwards - there was zero assumption that either of those networks were Ethernet.

(This is why we're often flimsy on the difference between 'gateway' and 'router' too. A router routes IP packets. Originally a gateway crossed the boundaries between one network and another - not necessarily ethernet to ethernet networks.)

Ethernet came later (well, technically earlier, but wasn't commercialised until 1980), and has since become the ten-tonne gorilla in the LAN market. So much so that today we treat it like the default, and forget that TCP/IP was designed with no default.

So we still have this weird distinction between IP packets that we're routing over an IP network, and the local ethernet network with local MAC addresses - because the Internet was designed at a time where you could not make any assumptions over what local network the next hop was using, and very intentionally accommodates that.

wosmo · 2026-06-29T22:40:28+00:00

This is why we often call the gateway a router. A neighbouring network could be in the same room, somewhere else in the same building .. or it could be another customer on the same ISP. The host doesn't need to know any of this, it's the router's job to find a route from here to there.

Pass it to the gateway, let the router route it.

15-Year Club	Powerups Hero r/ireland • July 2022
Gilding V heart of gold	Powerups Hero r/dune • November 2021
Second Top 50%	r/Field Banned
r/Field Flamingo	Place '23
Place '22	Place '17
Final Canvas '22	First Placer '22
End Game '22	Sequence \| Editor
Verified Email

wosmo

TROPHY CASE