Notices by MattChippytea (wifiwits@infosec.exchange)

@dalias @carnage4life there’s something interesting to me about your account. It comes across to me almost like a bot account. Limited interaction and high posting rate, quite declaratory. That you’re posting the same content across platforms probably explains this.

@carnage4life @dalias that’s completely understandable. Engagement is a strange thing, and it makes sense you would focus where you get the most.

If your daily life involves personally burning fossil fuel to function, know that these price shocks we’ve seen are likely to keep coming. Anything you can do to reduce the need to burn stuff is beneficial in the long and possibly short term.

I have to get up too early tomorrow for a flight to that London for work porpoises. I’m not happy about it.

It seems the corporate IT cyber chiefs have decreed no more USB drives… they’re also removing local admin so we can’t install software. I absolutely cannot use my own computer to do any work for my employer… at which point it will be impossible for me to do my job.
I feel some #maliciouscompliance coming on.

I wish I understood the met office. Often there’s a weather warning and we barely notice. Today the sea wall has partially collapsed, roads closed, house shaking with the wind… no warning.

Trying to reach the ILO on an old lab server a colleague has given me. Trouble is this is a DL360 gen 6, around 16 years old. Unsurprisingly there's no new firmware for the ILO. Think I'll be giving up on this. Only trouble is I don't know where I have a VGA monitor.....

Furthermore it turns out I can’t actually install Ubuntu on this machine. Spent all day on it and no joy. Didn’t even consider that it might not run Ubuntu… everything runs Ubuntu doesn’t it? Not my 16 year old proliant it turns out.

Which gets me thinking... anyone in Northern Ireland got an old server, newer than this, kicking around I could get out of your way?

I’m concerned the railings on Deep Space Nine don’t conform with health and safety regulations

Lisa from Behringer… you foul temptress

Today’s fun with Zorin OS is a real lesson in why mass adoption of Linux on the desktop is still going to struggle. For all that I’m really enjoying using this, today I tried installing an ‘editor recommended’ thing from the software app - Whalebird from the snap store - which completely broke everything such that it was no longer possible to get to the desktop. Apparently snap packages can be problematic in Zorin OS. Why is something problematic that can completely bork the desktop even available let alone ‘recommended’?

A little while ago the B&Q (large dot hardware store in the UK) website became useless as they decided to open it up to third party sellers. The result is searching the website for a product you expect to be able to buy from the local store is now impossible. It seems Tesco has decided to do the same and their website now has a marketplace full of useless listings for products that you certainly can’t get from Tesco, or maybe you can, how would you know?
Why is this? Do they want to be Amazon? I mean that’s where I’d go if I wanted to look at endless useless listings from people incapable of getting something to me.

A general question to the multitude: what might be causing a short burst of RF interference such that it’s picked up by an audio amplifier that occurs every 56 seconds? It isn’t happening all the time but the gap of 56 seconds seems consistent when it does. I live near the sea, next to a golf course and on a flight path on approach to an airport.
My best guess at the moment is it’s aircraft related but that’s not based on anything more than a hunch.

Had a delve into the auction purchase vintage music centre. It has mostly been working well, other than intermittent disappearing audio on both channels, mostly the right.

What I’m hoping the problem is: dulled contacts in the speaker protection relay through lack of use.
What I fear the problem could be: failure of the Sanken amplifier module

For now I’ve rudely pulled the top off this relay and given the contacts a clean. 🤞

Squeezed to the heat sink here is a Sanken SI-1125HD. One of a number of hybrid amplifier modules very popular with manufacturers of the era. It contains most of a stereo 25W amplifier packaged up very nicely. These have not been manufactured for many years and are unobtanium. So, if this has died I’ll replace the entire board with something new and likely class D. Fortunately it looks like that would be easy to do.

I have to say, despite the parts challenge vintage audio stuff like this is a joy for an electronics idiot like me. Lots of space, discrete boards that have a nice clear purpose. Easy soldering. I can almost feign competence.

This seems to be a poorly considered idea

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0mxwg70gkeo