I just ran my routine update script. For the fourth time today. And I’m hit with 2029 updated packages.

I mean, that’s kinda what you sign up for if you’re using a rolling release Linux distro, and I’m assuming, given the name, that tumbleweed is a rolling release?

searches

Yes:

https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Tumbleweed

The Tumbleweed distribution is a pure rolling release version of openSUSE containing the latest “stable” versions of all software instead of relying on rigid periodic release cycles. The project does this for users who want the newest stable software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSUSE

openSUSE[5] ( /ˌoʊpənˈsuːzə/) is a free and open-source Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE Project. It is offered in two main variations: Tumbleweed, an upstream rolling release distribution, and Leap, a stable release distribution which is sourced from SUSE Linux Enterprise.[6]

I mean, sounds like they’ve got a non-rolling-release distro too, and that won’t hit you with all the updates.

EDIT:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_release

Rolling release, also known as rolling update or continuous delivery, is a concept in software development of frequently delivering updates to applications.[1][2][3] This is in contrast to a standard or point release development model which uses software versions which replace the previous version.

A rolling release model is different from a staged or “staggered” rollout, in which an update is gradually made available to an increasing percentage of users for testing or bandwidth reasons.[4][5]

An example of a rolling release would be Arch Linux, where new packages and updates roll in constantly, and significant changes to the distribution may occur at any time by the developers. This is in contrast to Ubuntu Linux, which has biannual releases, with the only major changes after a release being security updates or significant bug fixes.

It might be that the pict-rs instance on lemmy.ml has size restrictions that disallows uploading a full-resolution screenshot or something.

Musk sued Altman and OpenAI in 2024, claiming the artificial intelligence company that he helped start almost a decade earlier “assiduously manipulated” and “deceived” him into donating $38 million, based on promises that the entity would remain a nonprofi

Musk’s attorneys previously said, in a January filing, that their client should receive up to $134 billion in damages

That seems a little disproportionate.

I’m still not using one. The problem is that you’ve got two classes of devices that haven’t quite converged to what I want.

UPS

Traditionally, the purpose of UPSes isn’t to keep systems running (other than through very short outages). It’s to do one of the following:

• Provide a small amount of buffer until a backup power system, like a generator, has time to come online.

• Give the systems time to shut down cleanly. If the user is right there, they have time to save their work. This was particularly an issue before journaled filesystems became the norm, since an unclean shutdown in the era when Windows was using FAT, Linux was using ext2, and MacOS was using HFS had at least the possibility to corrupt your filesystem. They have the ability to report their charge level to an attached computer so that it knows when the battery level is critical and then software on it can start it shutting down. On Linux, the most-common software package to do this is Network UPS Tools, or NUT.

These things don’t need a lot of capacity. They rarely get drained, so they usually use lead-acid batteries, which are heavy and don’t have many full charge-discharge cycles in them (but are pretty happy staying fully charged all the time). You can still get these. The lead-acid batteries are replaceable, though, so an old UPS can keep going for a very long time.

Powerstation

These are designed to keep attached devices running for a longer period of time. Unfortunately, they have a couple of important limitations for powering computer systems.

• They do not normally have the ability to report their charge level. Irritatingly, they do nearly always have a voltmeter rigged up to some software to map voltage to charge remaining to drive a ‘charge remaining’ display on the device, and there are USB HID device classes for reporting charge levels to a host OS, but for some reason, powerstation manufacturers don’t seem to have an interest in making a powerstation that has the latter functionality. NUT does have a USB HID backend, which means that it can monitor and shut down a system if they’d expose it. I’d really prefer the ability to treat one of these as a laptop-style battery, as Linux (as well as other OSes) have the ability to hibernate on low battery. On Linux, these show up as /sys/class/power_supply/BAT*, and there’s lots of software to display charge information and act based on low levels…but AFAICT from looking around the kernel, there is no way to get the kernel to deal with a USB HID device reporting remaining charge like this as a BAT device.

• Computer power supplies can only smooth out so much of an interruption in their power. Computers rely on something on the order of a 10 millisecond transfer time after AC goes out until the UPS needs to be running full-tilt. searches ATX PSUs apparently are only required to operate for 16 milliseconds without power. Other hardware attached may or may not actually deal well with interruptions, but obviously the shorter the transfer time, the better. It looks like line-interactive UPSes tend to do something like 3-6 milliseconds. The problem is that a lot of powerstations have a transfer time in excess of this.

There are some LFP UPSes now, but these have their own disadvantages. They tend to be fairly pricey, and the batteries are often not replaceable, which means that unlike the old lead-acid UPSes, when the battery dies (which will take longer than with a lead-acid battery), the whole device is also going to the landfill.

And lastly, you have the problem that while lead-acid batteries are pretty mature and prices are pretty stable, LFP battery prices are coming down (and sodium-ion might start competing with them for fixed batteries). If batteries are cheaper in the future, waiting means a better deal.

I don’t currently run a UPS on my systems (though I have in the past). I kind of decided that if I’m going to run a UPS, I’m probably going to just bite the bullet and use the combination of a traditional lead-acid UPS and an LFP powerstation, with the UPS plugged into the powerstation. In that configuration, the powerstation provides provides the longer-running power, and the UPS deals with short transfer time and warning computer systems that power is about to go out. This isn’t perfect, because (a) your computing devices can’t see the remaining charge on the powerstation in an outage (b) at some point, one still has to toss the LFP powerstation, and (c) there’s a little extra hardware involved. However, it also has a number of benefits:

• Lead-acid UPSes pretty much always have replaceable batteries. One can keep the UPS around, though the batteries will have to be periodically replaced.

• The UPS will provide time for the system to shut down.

• UPSes are designed specifically for this, and have short transfer times. You don’t need to worry the way one might about a powerstation having marginal transfer time.

• You can get a lot of AC-related functionality in UPSes, like online capability (which will clean up the power, if you want), which isn’t generally available in powerstations.

• You can upgrade the “powerstation”, even (if you want) doing a build-your-own thing with separate cells and an inverter and charge controller (which is generally more cost-effective for larger systems) down the line. These discrete-component systems are also a lot easier to provide human monitoring of remaining charge, since you can pick the components (and worst case, all you need to do is connect a voltage sensor that can talk to a computer to it), though they don’t integrate as nicely off-the-shelf with something like NUT as do traditional UPSes.

I’m not saying that this UPS+separate-battery-system is the only route to take, but I spent some time banging my head on it, and wanted to share if anyone else is similarly thinking about the same thing – that there may be a good argument to have a traditional UPS and some kind of separate battery system.

I remember looking at Sysracks racks a while back when I was trying to find sound-absorbent enclosed racks (which they do make, though I didn’t get one; wasn’t willing to pay for it, as they come at a very large premium). They were one of the very few companies making them. I don’t think that those particular ones are the sound-absorbent models, but their name stuck in my head.

Old system 76 machine from a while back. Its what is running a majority of my services for self hosting. Only one screw keeps the case together, since I get into the insides quite often.

If you get bored and adventurous:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_case_screws

Computer case screws are the hardware used to secure parts of a PC to the case. Although there are numerous manufacturers of computer cases, they have generally used three thread sizes.

The #6-32 UNC screws are often found on 3.5" hard disk drives and the case’s body to secure the covers. The M3 threaded holes are often found on 5.25" optical disc drives, 3.5" floppy drives, and 2.5" drives. Motherboards and other circuit boards often use a #6-32 UNC standoff. #4-40 UNC thumb screws are often found on the ends of DVI, VGA, serial and parallel connectors.

You might be able to get a box of thumbscrews in the appropriate diameter and go toolless. I’ve had a number of computer cases that ship with those (my current desktop case just uses magnets, doesn’t even have the thumbscrews). I have had a lot of less-than-ideal toolless things in the past, including poorly-designed toolless hard drive mounting stuff that wound up being a lot more work than the traditional tool-requiring stuff, but for the screws that keep the case closed, going toolless has always been a big win for me.

Re: the cabling up top there, there’s some Reddit subreddit devoted solely to people showing off their spiffy cable-routing.

searches

Might be:

https://old.reddit.com/r/CableManagement/top/?sort=top&t=all

Though that looks like in-PC-case cabling. I thought that it dealt more with network cables.

searches more

Ah. I think this:

https://old.reddit.com/r/cableporn/top/?sort=top&t=all

It looks like we do have a [email protected], but basically nobody is posting.

beverages

That desk is about a million times cleaner than mine.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

You want a double-backslash in Markdown.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

yields

¯_(ツ)_/¯

Whereas:

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

yields

¯\(ツ)/¯

Those HP Elitedesks are all over Amazon as refurbished machines. I was actually considering getting one earlier today for a server.

Related Stories

• Man in Japan breaks through his own apartment floor to attack woman’s TV
• Osaka man finds stranger eating in his kitchen at night, stranger dies shortly after
• Man in Japan arrested after sneaking into woman’s apartment and washing her lingerie
• Osaka man arrested after sharing futon with dead girlfriend’s body for five nights
• Japanese man arrested for shouting that he studies English (weird) before grabbing woman’s butt (illegal)

I probably wouldn’t use something specialized to home maintenance. Just any todo/task management system that lets you have a recurring task to tick off. There are tons of those out there.

Personally, I use repeated tasks in org-agenda in emacs for most of this, but I wouldn’t recommend picking up emacs simply to use org-agenda. But if you are an emacs user, then it might be a good option.

I haven’t used Taskwarrior myself, but I’ve seen a few people recommend it for Linux use, and if I weren’t using an emacs-oriented system, I’d probably look into it. It supports recurring tasks.

Looks in approval at use of antimicrobal bronze handles.

Every time I get an Android update, my first reaction is “what workflows that had been working am I going to need to relearn?”

I’ve had some similar comments about Windows in the past. Like, a lot of the lock-in value that Microsoft enjoys isn’t anything special that they’ve done — it’s because people are expert in using their platform. If you make them change their workflow, you throw that out. And people profoundly dislike changing their workflow, once they’ve put the effort in to become accustomed to one.

I don’t know if I know all that much about it, but National Geographic did an article on the growing elver smuggling issue in the US a while back, and that inspired me to read some more material about it.

This is also a big deal for commercial and environmental reasons.

Eels are extremely popular as food. China has aquafarms to grow them, but the problem is getting ahold of young eel to grow, because we can’t get them to breed in captivity. They catch wild ones, then raise them in farms. At first, the Japanese eel got clobbered.

Then what had been happening is that people would catch young wild European eels (“elvers”) then export them illegally to be raised in Chinese aquafarms:

Moreover, the effort is increasingly urgent due to the dramatic decline in European eel populations since the 1980s, marked by a staggering drop of over 95% in the number of glass eels arriving at European coasts. The species is now highly endangered, facing multiple threats that complicate conservation efforts.

https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/law-enforcement-casts-net-over-256-eel-smugglers

Law enforcement casts net over 256 eel smugglers

Europol-led operation finds 25 tonnes of trafficked eels worth EUR 13 million destined for Asia

Then after European eels got depleted, baby eel smuggling started happening in North America.

https://apnews.com/article/business-europe-china-smuggling-nyc-state-wire-baab790064d148b72dc5b1752fab7d39

Baby eels are among the most lucrative fish species in the seafood world. The U.S. fishery for American eels is based almost entirely in Maine. The baby eels are often worth more than $2,000 per pound at the docks.

https://vifreepress.com/2024/03/boaters-caught-trying-to-smuggle-over-110000-live-eels-out-of-puerto-rico-feds-say/

SAN JUAN — Two people are facing charges after the United States Coast Guard found them trying to take over 110,000 eels out of Puerto Rico without proper paperwork, prosecutors said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials noticed a “suspicious” boat about 40 miles off the northern coast of Puerto Rico on the morning of February 21, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico said in a March 1 news release.

The boat was described as “flagless and outfitted for smuggling.” The U.S. Coast Guard approached the boat and, when it refused to stop, had to “neutralize” it, prosecutors said.

Once onboard, officials found two people with 22 bags of live American eels, prosecutors said. Each bag held “over 5,000 eels”, officials said, totaling at least 110,000 eels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freshwater_eel_poaching_and_smuggling

Freshwater eel poaching and smuggling have emerged in recent years as a direct response to the sustained popularity of eels as food combined with the eels’ low population, endangered status, and subsequent protections. Freshwater eel are elongated fish in the Anguillidae family of ray-finned fish. The three most commonly consumed eel species are the Japanese eel (A. japonica), European eel (A. anguilla), and American eel ( A. rostrata).

The life cycle for eels has not been closed in captivity on a sustainable level, and any eel farms rely entirely on wild-caught elvers (juvenile eels). These elvers are caught from their native ranges in North America and Europe and are smuggled into East Asian eel farms, where they are often relabeled as the native Japanese eel to subvert legislation. The eels are smuggled disguised as other cargo, such as luggage[1] or other meat products.[2]

If we could figure out how to get eels to breed in captivity, which we currently don’t know how to do, it could resolve the eel shortage. That probably involves a better understanding of their sexual habits.

I think that if you aspire to regulate the political positions that AIs should recommend, you…okay, I think that that’s probably not a great idea, but setting that aside, it seems pretty odd that you’d want to do that, but not regulate the political positions of webpages that search engines return or the political positions that news media may take, which would be what I’d consider alternate information sources.

Oh, come on. It’s late at night, you’re really craving some mouthwatering chicken-fried steak and syrup-drenched waffle. You find yourself falling deeper and deeper into the mental image, and then suddenly you feel the world twisting around you and a sharp dropping sensation and, bam, there you are, in a booth at Waffle House. We’ve all been there, at one point or another.