Veiva

What laptop is only "[an] extra couple hundred dollars" and equivalent or better than my rather old desktop: i5-4670, Radeon RX 460, 16 GB RAM, 2 TB HDD 7200 RPM / 128 GB SSD? In total, it was about $1,000. It would need an excellent keyboard and a 1080p IPS (or equivalent) screen, mind. And it must support VT-d.

I have a laptop I use sparingly. It has an Intel Atom processor and came with Windows XP. I don't think there's much else to say.

Well that's because laptops themselves are terrible.

GPU pass through with bhyve doesn't work as intended. Something to do with PCI BAR registration and Intel's maximum addressable memory (39 bits, at least for my CPU). Whatever that means. Lurking the mailing list... Not sure what to do. Have a project in mind that requires a few operating systems, and rebooting doesn't seem nice. Will probably use some Linux distro with Xen that hasn't succumbed to "Microsoft-style Unix" (systemd et al) for this, but there's few choices.

I think citing "moral obligation" is a terrible thing to vote for a morally bankrupt candidate because she will be able to nominate a justice or two like the past dozens of presidents. The "up to four" is nonsense. The same logic applies to the last dozens of presidents once again, and there's rarely been a case of four justices being nominated over one presidency. Not to mention most everyone sacrifices hundreds of moral obligations every week--maybe every day--for expediency. It's funny, in a sad way, how true Thoreau's words are: Your vote means nothing, and there is no moral high-ground you can claim by voting.

That's why I find the notion that since Clinton has many claimed positions similar or identical Sanders that she is minimally different from Sanders to be so absurd. It's unlikely she sticks to most of these positions, since 1) she didn't hold them or act on them before and 2) given previous presidents of the same origin (establishment) even bother with critical campaign promises once elected. To be fair, I think Trump is the same to a large extent, but Trump has no record to go by.

But I actually like Godzilla.

In the superior Lua, both return '2'. String concatenation is done with a separate operator. I prefer dynamic typing for rapid things, like simple scripts or small programs, where I won't have to refactor. For anything else, types are simply too useful when writing clean, maintainable code.

Randomest, most pointless question, but why 2 sticks of 4 instead of just one stick of 8? Something to do with speed/utilization or maybe just cost? I already have two sticks, each 4 GB. I'd rather not mix RAM brands or sizes, so I'll just get another set.

Virtualization works amazingly well on FreeBSD! Been looking at graphics cards that support UEFI so I can use PCI pass-through for hardware accelerated graphics. I'm thinking about the Radeon R9 460... Will need two more sticks of RAM, as well, to go from 8 GB to 16 GB.

I installed FreeBSD 11.0 RC2 on another HDD. I use FreeBSD 10.3 on my main disk, but want to try some of the new things in FreeBSD 11 like the much improved hypervisor. Ran into some problems with the UEFI bootloader, but after some troubleshooting, got it working. Have the main stuff (/usr, /etc, /var, so on) on a thumb drive and the other stuff (/usr/local, /home) on an encrypted partition. Can't wait to try out the new features. Also, on a really old Atom-based netbook (an Acer Aspire One) I installed OpenBSD. Really like OpenBSD--works very nicely on the laptop. I had installed an OpenBSD 6.0 snapshot--for some reason I thought it had been released a week or two ago--but it was easy to upgrade to release.

I saw a school bus lose control and slide into three lanes. Someone braked for a redlight, but ended up 10+ feet into the intersection. Bunch of other smaller stuff. I decided my medication management appointment was not worth people who think some rain is dangerous, so I turned around and went home after the school bus did its thing. North Carolina: can't handle snow, can't handle ice, can't handle the wimpy outskirts of a hurricane. Incredible! What would they do during any of the dozen strongest dozen or so hurricanes I 'survived' while living in Florida? Probably look like some apocalyptic movie set... Unfortunately it seems Americans sink to subsistence about as readily as we rise to a challenge. It's kind of the same situation in my hometown when they get the first inch or two of snow...when were you in Florida anyway, must have been a while because they just had the first hurricane to make landfall there in 11 years. In other news I got my credit report in the mail and I really hate these agencies right now. I wanted the bank to raise my credit limit so I could improve my credit score, but they rejected it because some score they retrieved was too low. I was almost hoping there was some fraud on there so it could be improved...I guess I'll call them/the bank after the holiday and ask them to explain why it's so low... I was born in Florida, and moved to The Best Carolina 12 years ago January. So 1992 (six-months old during Andrew) to 2004.

I saw a school bus lose control and slide into three lanes. Someone braked for a redlight, but ended up 10+ feet into the intersection. Bunch of other smaller stuff. I decided my medication management appointment was not worth people who think some rain is dangerous, so I turned around and went home after the school bus did its thing. North Carolina: can't handle snow, can't handle ice, can't handle the wimpy outskirts of a hurricane. Incredible! What would they do during any of the dozen strongest dozen or so hurricanes I 'survived' while living in Florida? Probably look like some apocalyptic movie set...

Voting, or attending campaign talks, or anything else most anyone does is is really so minimally effective it might as well be disregarded. I went to ask her a question--how she differentiate herself from Senator Burr in regards to privacy and security--so as when I cast my meaningless votes this November, one choice is less uninformed. To be frank, most every person contributes nothing to whatever idea of progress they have. Voters go out and vote for candidates who most often protect the interests of the 0.1%. Or they attend campaign speeches in the tens of thousands, but then sit at home when it comes time to vote. Or they argue on the internet about their ideals--the same ideals they sacrifice to the point of worthlessness for expediency and comfort--as if they have some sanctity. We all are subject to incredible biases, from internal and external experiences, and yet we pretend we're special and our views our rational and sound and researched, while the opposing views are irrational and unsound and unfounded. You know, I learned recently to simply ignore 'the 99.9%'. It's those who call for a violent socialist revolution from their chairs manufactured in China and Taiwan and Indonesia on their computers designed by capitalist behemoths--like Apple or Microsoft, Intel or AMD, Dell or HP--posting their angsty opinions on data mining sites like Reddit or Facebook or Twitter. It's those who defend their second amendment rights while having never even read the Constitution in its entirety, demanding a small-big government, who think companies for some reason are better--including morally!--than their incompetent, authoritarian counterparts. It's those who think everything is okay and fine and the others--whatever less-than-moderate views they hold--are wrong, as wealth inequality divides the very richest from everyone else, less favorable government powers and services increase while more favorable government powers and services are eroded, ecosystems and communities are destroyed across the world, that everything is fine or getting better because crime has gone down and wars are less common. The only people who affect the world are those who act. Sadly, those who act are those with massive social, political, or financial capital who advance their selfish, oligarchical ideals or those who are zealots or destitute or brainwashed and end up doing terrible things. It's a shame.

I went to a campaign talk by the Democratic candidate, Deborah Ross, running against Senator Richard Burr (R-NC). You may remember him from such horrors as "Sponsor of the Cybersecurity Information Act" co-starring Dianne Feinstein in 2015, and other such things. Went well. Even asked her how she differentiates herself from Richard Burr on privacy and security, and her response was satisfactory enough. I mean, it would be hard to be as bad as Burr. Also I was most surely the youngest by maybe 10 years. Got asked if I'm with any news organizations, too, because of my clothes, which I took as a compliment.

I had an idea a few days ago: make easy-to-remember and easy-to-correct word-soup stories from high-entropy binary data (like encryption keys or small, highly compressed files). In essence, a verbal QR code. A carefully selected dictionary, well-designed phrase templates, and some techniques like alliteration should really help ensure efficient memorization and recollection. The process is rather simple: define various categories of nouns, verbs, and adjectives (word tables), where each word represents a unique bit-pattern; craft specific 'plot points' using these categories; and then fill in the blanks with matching words to encode a message. After two days of development and a day building a crude dictionary, it encoded a message: (First command generated random binary data, second command displayed it, third step encoded it). Named it 'Finn' because of Finnegan's Wake, the most famous word-soup of them all... The word tables are terrible, but the proof-of-concept works. The same data can be encoded to multiple messages. Any words not in the tables aren't used to encode/decode; they're filler. With a better selection, I could represent 64 bits with 8 words. Thinking of making nouns 9-bits, verbs 8-bits, and adjectives 6-bits; thus, I'd need 4 nouns, 2 verbs, and 2 adjectives. Going to use adverbs as checksum bits--they won't be necessary to decode the message, only help verify you remember the message correctly. The best part, I think, is going to be the password entry mechanism. You'd be able to delete mistakes in word-size chunks; it would display something like '***' for each distinct word. That's the primary motivation, because entering 80+ character passphrases a couple times a day can get annoying. I'd be fine with entering something a bit longer if I could fix mistakes quickly. Now I need to find an open source dictionary with the specific data I need to automate generating the 'word tables'... edit: God damn it I figured out something infinitely better, I think, when trying to go to bed. Something like a 4x4 grid with objects in the grid. You could have a 'large red elephant' at (1, 1) and a 'tiny blue toad' at (3, 2). That would be much easier to remember still, much easier to enter (say, some navigation and some typing), and much shorter. It would scale so much more nicely, as well... edit 2: On reflection, it wouldn't be better, and I do poorly with spatial memory anyway. Nice.

I got my home server working! I wanted to use FreeNAS, but the BIOS or motherboard are a bit wonky and bootable media attached to USB causes it to lock during POST, so I just installed FreeBSD directly. For the past couple weeks, I've been fiddling with getting a FreeBSD jail to access the internet only via a VPN. Well, I finally got that working. It'll download and store media, mostly. It'll also serve as a secondary and more accessible on-site backup for me and a primary backup solution for my brother. Going to get it set up to push compiling things off my primary computer, such as when there's updates to some software I modify and maybe personal projects in the future. There's a couple other things I'm going to use it for as well later. Will add a couple hard disks in the future, for redundancy and extra storage. Made the install process into several scripts, so if I ever have to do it over, it'll be very easy. The best part: I access it via hawkins.gov, and the primary account is called drbrenner. It's really cool to type "ssh [email protected]" or open a browser at "hawkins.gov" to access the web UI for Emby/Deluge/SickBeard/etc. Ooooh, so fancy...

Why so?

It's more like the same reason "Windows 9" would have caused problems: people make terrible assumptions about platforms when none are needed, resulting in broken software. Emscripten compiles fine if I work around the hard-coded platform check. I don't know why it wouldn't, since there's no reason it should depend on anything exclusive to Linux.

Why is it assumed if you're not using Windows you're using Linux or Mac OS X? Anything POSIX-compliant application should be compatible with any POSIX-compliant operating system with minimal modifications. Emscripten has a hard-coded check for Windows/Linux/OS X, yet by modifying the 'emsdk' script and making FreeBSD synonymous with 'Linux', it builds and works fine. Also, the 'emsdk' script is overwritten with the latest one, so rather than dig through and disable that behavior, I had to copy it and run the copy, so my changes weren't discarded.

20,0000 to go... And over 52,000 kills total: Averaged 196 KPH the last ~9 hours:

I feel bad for you, mate. My condolences... Definitely. Being outside the US? How terrible!

Over 200 kills in one hour. I'd never thought it was feasible--let alone the possibility I could do it--even just a few months ago. All I've got now is to max the killcount.

Use RuneScape Wikia and Reddit for more up-to-date information. The idea of dedicated fansites with up-to-date guides, databases, and other information don't really work anymore--just visit any other notable RuneScape fansite. The only reason you'd use Tip.it is for the forums, if you've been a member in the past. Obviously, that wasn't your case. Such a shame.

The first computer I built, the CPU and motherboard were DOA. That was terribly unlucky.