I think “technical” is a bit of a stretch… But who doesn’t like a good cat meme?

Grifters are going to grift. Using the government to grift doesn’t surprise me.

What hurts the most is how many people are so desperate that they are going to buy into some snake oil and not actually get any help.

I got tired of windows updates breaking my dual boot. After some research I found that it’s possible to have two uefi partitions: one for windows and one for Linux. It’s not standard but there is nothing expressly written into the efi spec that prohibits it. And it just works. My bios doesn’t care, and works with them both just fine.

I only use Windows for that 1% of business stuff I can’t accomplish in a vm under windows. Invariably after I boot into widows once ever 3 months it installs so.e update and would kill my ability to boot into Linux. Since setting up 2 partitions I haven’t had this problem.

Ahh sorry. Again, I don’t use an iPhone.

I don’t have an iPhone but my daughter does.

For music I don’t sync anything to her phone. I run a navidrome server and set up an account so she can stream whatever she wants whenever. I think she uses isub as her streaming app. It does allow you to download and cache files from the server to play if you are offline

As for sms, I don’t know of any way to sync in Linux, but if you use Windows, the phone link app works, as several of my coworkers have set it up. I know it installs some piece of software on the iPhone you want to sync to, maybe you could do that and try running the phone link program with wine?

I also know kde connect has a link for iOS. It’s not perfect but it will do the sms linking thing.

I have a mikrotik at home and generally believe it to be a very solid product. A take aways from this hack:

1. mikrotik doesn’t bill themselves as “consumer grade”. It’s a huge learning curve to get started with them. There are graphical tools but it’s not much different then Cisco or juniper. You can put in bad or faulty configurations and the router will happily do the bad or faulty things you told it to.

2. It only effects routers that are severely misconfigured routers. You need specific services turned on, and have dns grossly misconfigured. Depending on your use case at home it is doubtful a hone user would do this. Also

3. the man thing I don’t like about my device is that the software isn’t open source. The hardware is quite well known tho and there are ports of *wrt and opensense that run on it , plus you probably could just run a Linux distro on it if you wanted. The bootloader isn’t locked down. It’s an arm64 computer with a lot of network ports.

That being said I really like the router itself. Performance is great, price is amazing. It does anything and everything I ask it to.

Good to know. I know a couple of people in the steam deck world who dual boot windows and steamos and have their games on a btrfs partition that use it so they don’t need games installed twice … I have no desire to do this so I have never tried.

Have you seen/tried https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs ?

I have heard it is decent but have never had a need to try it.

Fedora is systems, right? The easiest way to gain some (temporary) space is to clean out the journal and whatever logs you don’t need. It can grow quite big.

sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=100M

Will shrink it to something manageable. This will buy you some time to clean up until the journal grows again.

Also, clearing the apt cache will probably help free up some root partition space

sudo apt clean

Your root partition where packages are stored and all the logs and transactional databases might be full even if your home directory has tons of free space.

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The year: around 1994. I was 14 or 15 and using a borrowed account on a local collage network. A student there shared his modem pool login info with his friend who was also my friend and he shared it with me. My first taste of unix was a DEC minicomputer in some cs professors office. I learned a lot of the ins and outs of unix and the internet… 2400 baud for pirating software and porn mostly. Eventually random ftp sites and netnews got boring and redundant. I got introduced to irc and was amazed at the instant interaction with other computer people. My friend at the time hung out in a specific channel, #chitchat2, and I joined it as well because why not. It was a pretty tight knit group of regulars that hung out there and talked about whatever… Nothing in particular. At 15 I felt pretty accepted by people for the first time in my life.

Being the budding wanna be hacker and scriptkiddie I also hung out in all the warez channels, #exceed, #ego, #warez, etc, and picked up on irc scripts and whatnot. SrFrog and his seminal lice script was my favorite of the time. I learned about patching and compiling a customer version of the standard unix irc client, and ran lice. It was pretty fun to mess with people and being 15 and relatively immature I spent hours riding server splits and nick-colliding people for the hell of it. There were some dicks that hung out in #chitchat2 so I did what I could to make their life hell. Looking back I was probably as much of an asshole and they were insufferable IT twits.

I also met a girl there who was in college in another state. She remembers me as being a gigantic asshole and super immature. She hated me and would refuse to talk to me. Over the next 4 years I grew up, turned my script kiddie nature into an actual passion for computer security. As I grew she and i became sort-of friends.

Eventually, when I was around 19, my family moved across the country, and she graduated college and moved the other way across the country to be with her family. We started talking more and more on irc, private chats, late into the night. Out of the blue she called me on the phone which blew my mind. I had dated on and off but this is the first time I ever had a member of the opposite sex who I felt was actually interested in me. One call turned in to once a week, then to several times a week. I had to get a job so I could pay for 400 dollar a month long distance bills (this was the mid to late 90s and I never invested time in the phreaking skills I probably should have). One day she sent me a message “I bought a plane ticket and am coming to visit you in 2 weeks”.

My heart exploded on the spot. I spent the two weeks saving what cash I could, I found a hotel for her to stay at (my parents were cool but not cool enough to let her stay with us, she was some random anonymous person I met on the computer, as they put it… Stopping short of calling her an axe murderer).

The day arrived and I met her at the airport at the gate. You could do that then. It was then, at 19.5 that I knew I was in love for real, not just in lust or in dire need of companionship. Our next week together was a blur of every: passion, incredible sex, amazing conversations, and our souls connecting on a level so deep I didn’t know such a connection was possible. It went way too fast and seemed to last a life time all at the same time. We even spent some time on irc talking with all our combined friends in #chitchat2. By the end of our time together, we knew we had to be together. I brought her to the airport and walked her to the gate. We were both sobbing but she promised that her next step was getting her shit together and she was going to move to where I lived.

The next 6 weeks was arduous. It might as well have been 6 years. But in August of 1996, she packed her bags and flew across the country. She lived alone for a couple of years until I had issues with my family and I moved in with her. 4 years after moving to be near me we got married.

Tomorrow, April 28th will be our 24th year wedding anniversary. It hasn’t always been easy but I can’t imagine spending my life with anyone else.

As for the love of my life, tru64 lead to Solaris, led to slackware linux, Debian, ubuntu, Arch, etc. my lifelong love of unix and unix like operating systems started 30+ years ago with tru64 and I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Just kidding… It’s my wife that is the love of my life. We met “on that damn computer” as my mother likes to put it. Every year on our anniversary we go to where we had our first irl date. I sometimes pop back into efnet on irc to see if anyone has returned to #chitchat2 but so far haven’t found anyone. I’m still friends with, and grateful to the guy who gave me access to the colleges modem pool.

Can you plug the drive in directly and test it? You might also just have a dead drive. Either way if you were planning on using it as a backup medium I would tell you it’s probably not a good idea. If you are trying to recover data from it, good luck. Is it making any sound? You could try buying the same, old but good hard drive and swapping the control board on it. You may also have to swap the nvram chip on it to make sure you have the same sector mappings. Either way there is a lot of stuff you can try, but hopefully this is an educational experience for you (as in learning how to recover a dead drive, not as in learning about the need for proper backup methods) as opposed to a desperate attempt to recover data that is most likely unrecoverable.

You should be able to use smartctl on a USB drive. I’ve never had an issue anyway. You may need to specify the transport type tho. I had a drive that it couldn’t figure out on its own, but since it was an sata drive in an external enclosure, atapi is the transport protocol to use

sudo smartctl -a -d ata /dev/<devid>

Using the same switch you can run a long test. It’s sort of a pain as it will kill the test on finding a bad sector. But you can take that sector number and plug it into hdparm to rewrite the sector hoping it will remap it. You won’t be able to recover the data in a bad sector, But There are these extra sectors on the drive that firmware can replace the bad one with. It does this on a forced write command.Something along the lines of

hdparm --repair-sector --yes-i-know-what-i-am-doing </dev/<driveid> <sector number from smartctl>

Again, you have data loss, you can’t go back to no loss. All you can do is rescue anything important. You may (probably) need to run a long smartctl test again, and fix another sector. I have saved data off of drives with 100+ bad sectors this way… It’s tedious and eventually I scripted it but it does work.

Either way it’s a win-win for the virgins.

There are two major operating systems that are newish and ubiquitous: android and iOS. Android uses the Linux kernel but it is very different then a standard desktop installation of any other Linux based os. And both macos and iOS use the xnu kernel, but, again, iOS is very much a different os then macos.

Err kali isnt particularly privacy focused or piracy focused. It has its palace but it’s not really a daily driver imo