Dave.

They should be able to put memtest on the boot partition and then break to an EFI shell on boot and Ioad it manually.

There will be a bit of swearing and googling required but it’s doable in a way that doesn’t mess with the current boot arrangement.

Did they give you a very funny reason for this requirement, or is it just some windows exclusive garbage that doesn’t work in wine?

Why do people always ask this kind of crap?

If you have a corporate laptop, it will likely have a suite of software centrally managed by your company’s IT department.

It will contain software that is also centrally licenced so that your boss doesn’t have to figure out how to pay for thousands of dollars of software, they can just tell IT to bill a licence for software X to your cost centre at $13.75 a month.

It will have a domain login that is your corporate identity which will usually require multi factor authentication.

It will have some corporate VPN solution which operates mostly transparently and requires zero setup on your part.

It will contain company sensitive data which will usually be encrypted by bitlocker, whose keys are stored with your domain account.

It will have the usual Teams/Outlook/SharePoint stuff with a centralised calendar and contacts for your company, and likely security classifications for all the communications you do through it, allowing you to join groups, accept invites to restricted groups, and limit access, all linked to your domain account.

It will have mapped drives to your corporate file storage , again, all linked to your domain account.

It will probably have OneDrive, synced to a corporate server, again, linked to your domain account.

It will have a printing solution that is linked to your domain account so that your printers follow you wherever you go and you can easily find and print to the secure print queue on some random printer you happen to walk past in one of your offices, so you can enter your PIN or swipe your access card and have that IMPORTANT_SECRET_RESEARCH.DOC file print while you’re standing in front of the printer.

And finally, your work laptop does not belong to you. Wiping it and installing Linux plus Wine and keeping company sensitive data on an unmanaged device will attract the ire of HR.

Your IT department won’t give a crap. But they also won’t help if anything doesn’t work, such as trying to join a domain to access allllll those domain-linked features with an unauthorised device.

They will simply re-image your laptop to bring it back to a known state that they can deal with, because they are dealing with thousands of devices. They need everything to be homogeneous simply because they don’t have the manpower to manage anything else or to audit a million different configurations for security issues or data leaks.

So no, suggesting Linux + Wine to run some “windows exclusive garbage” isn’t an answer here.

An electric Dash-8 equivalent with 20-40 seats would be a game changer on regional routes.

The engines are the highest maintenance and cost items in aircraft. Electric motors should* drastically reduce that. Regional/small use routes are often on razor thin margins, anything to improve those margins will be taken on board very quickly.

*Perhaps battery maintenance replaces that cost with a rough equivalent, I don’t know

I just would like to see the results of a recommendation algorithm that gives you something that it thinks you definitely won’t like, say, 20 percent of the time.

Because a lot of times in my endless scrolling I just end up with the same old drivel. Throw me something challenging occasionally, jeeeez.

Precisely.

A 1200 watt microwave is essentially like a 1200 watt bar heater if you’re outside the oven cavity. To a person, it will feel pretty warm at a distance of a few feet as the energy is basically unfocused as it exits through the open door.

But to a drone, it’s 1200 watts of RF noise near a receiving device that’s tuned to listen for signals that are typically around 0.00000001 watts. It would be like trying to hear a pin drop at a rock concert.

Do need to make sure you point it upwards though as it will cause havoc with microwave motion sensors and a bunch of other sensitive listening stuff. Also, good luck getting wifi within a hundred metres of it.

“I think there’s something wrong with the door switch on my old microwave oven. I’ve been testing it outside for safety, that’s why it’s out in the back yard pointing upwards with the door open.”

The bug is the lack of documentation and that a simple unguarded command can erase all user’s data on the system.

Also, the principle of least surprise would like a word.

If I look at the command line arguments of a program called “systemd-tmpfiles” and one of them is called “purge” I will generally assume that option will purge temporary files.

Now it turns out that someone decided that this program would be a simple way to do something with /home directories(*) so they included /home in the config file for the program, the file that the program reads by default when it is invoked.

Who decided it would be a good idea for it to deal with /home?

Wellllll…

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/tmpfiles.d/home.conf

(*)I have no idea what this program is doing with /home in its config file. I will presume that there is a useful and mostly logical reason for it, and that this command line option was just an unfortunate footgun for those users who were not intimately familiar with systemd.

Digg was Reddit, before Reddit came along. And then they tried to monetise it all and pushed out a site layout update that “enhanced” that monetisation aspect (sound familiar?)

Basically they fucked it up right there.

I left Digg in 2010 and never went back, and now the domain and it’s remnants are owned by some advertising company.

I would like to hear your opinion on crumbed, deep fried, pineapple rings. 🤔

For example : https://www.redrooster.com.au/menu/sides-kids-meals/pineapple-fritter/

Also, things not designed for food use or human consumption don’t have to follow strict rules regarding their composition, and they’re not monitored.

Nobody is checking PVA glue for heavy metals or melamine or pesticides or any other number of things that will give your insides a bad day.

Nobody is issuing a recall if your bottle of glue ends up with ground up glass in it.

Because it’s not food, and it doesn’t matter, until you put half a cup of it in your pizza because Google told you it was a good idea.

Mmm I’d take Common Sense Skeptic’s spaceX videos with about a ton of salt. They’ve got a real big bug up their ass about spaceX for some reason.

As an Australian, I’ve found the Fediverse to be nicer and much less repetitive when posts containing these words are blocked.

Of course, that’s my choice. Funny how meta doesn’t provide a generalised keyword post blocker… it’s almost like they’re worried you’d accidentally block too much or something.

And I do like the phrasing. “Here’s how to get control back!” Yes, yes, get back your control of an endless algorithmic feed designed to maximise engagement and profit, of course, it’s simple!

LIVE BLACKBIRDS???

Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye,

Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened the birds began to sing,

Oh wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?

The king was in his counting house counting out his money,

The queen was in the parlour eating bread and honey

The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes,

When down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose!

Moral of the story, don’t be a minor character in an 18th century nursery rhyme.

Win10 with Classic Shell is good enough for me… Until I have to dig into the control panel and dick around with any network settings harder than “hurrr durrr SSID and password goes here”. Luckily Simple IP Config does all the heavy lifting for me on that front.

But hey, having to use third party utilities to make my OS usable is just The Microsoft Way at this point.

Flash chip cells are basically tiny electron traps, they consist of a tiny stored charge surrounded on all sides by an insulator. When writing to the cell you fill it with some electrons via (much handwaving here) a method of quantum tunneling. You can then read the cell by sensing the internal charge without disturbing it.

When not in use eventually enough charge tunnels out of the cell via random quantum tunneling events for it to read nothing. This is worsened when things are hotter, so maybe keeping your flash chips in the freezer would help.

Consumer flash memory, I probably wouldn’t expect more than 20 or 30 years of offline storage out of it. The older chips would last longer, because their cells are bigger, and you’re not trying to read multiple charge levels per cell like the newer stuff.

Added edit:

Magnetic media probably has a higher chance of surviving longer. Floppies from the 80s can still be read, for example, but they are low density media. You’d want something that separates the drive system from the actual magnetic media to stop bearing or motor failure from being an issue , so tape would be a good idea.

The problem is, of course, that you could end up with media you can’t read as nobody makes the hardware for it. Tape drives have gone through a dozen revisions in the last 30 years as capacity has increased, but as long as you have the same physical tape cartridge you should be ok.

M-Disc is a blueray compatible media that doesn’t use dye and should have a life of hundreds of years. But who will have a blueray reader on hand in the 24th century? I’ve got a USB M-Disc compatible writer for my backups, but in 30 years will I be able to pull it out of a drawer and plug it into a USB Gen 15 port and have it work with whatever software I have then?

I think we’re going to have to do the manual duplication process for a while yet, until we finally settle on some universal petabyte storage crystals or something.

But but but it’s Designed In California™ , that makes it All American 🇺🇲🇺🇲🫡🫡

not only claim the right but also apparently claim ownership of any content you publish there, while providing no consideration (payment) in return.

That’s not entirely true.

The payment is hosting your content for free on their servers that provide reasonable uptime and unlimited retention. You can choose to carve out your own place on the internet and post your content on your own hosting if you want, but a lot of people choose Reddit, or Facebook, or Instagram, or Snapchat, because the tradeoff is agreeable.

Most controllers are universal for all countries so they can usually be configured for all sorts of things. Find the model number of your controller first.

Aside from wires that can be cut there could also be a sequence of steps you can do with the display buttons and thumb controller to allow thumb control only.

Aside from that, if you can get into the controller settings you can change the size of the wheels. Smaller wheels will make the walk assist faster but it will reduce the top governed speed of the bike and make the speedo read wrong, but it could be a quick fix.

But I guess that’s different.

Yes, because they’re talking about the mains supply cable which carries hazardous voltages, not the charging cable.

Nobody gives a crap if 5 volts is exposed. Many more craps are given once you get above a hundred volts.

Make laws that give consumers mandatory, irrevocable warranties that include fit-for-purpose clauses, and has phrasing such as “reasonable expected lifetime” for the goods. Make those laws apply to whoever sells you the goods, not the manufacturer.

Laws like that weed out a lot of crap. Shops won’t buy crap in because they have to deal with the warranty on said crap. Manufacturers won’t make (as much) crap because they have to deal with returns.

You won’t be able to buy a $4 air fryer any more, but the one you do buy will last a lot longer.

Edit: I’m Australian, and we have consumer rights over and above warranties offered by manufacturers. Those rights would be a good start.

They start about half way down this page:

https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/buying-products-and-services/consumer-rights-and-guarantees