Notices by Kenneth Finnegan (kwf@social.afront.org)

When someone asks for information about something, never, under any circumstances, regardless of how great of a paid subscription service you have access to, is it ok to respond with "try asking the AI"

New Blog Post!

I now know more about Nvidia ConnectX firmware packages than I ever expected.... https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2024/12/connectx-4121c-firmware.html

the tl;dr is that you can't compile custom firmware packages anymore because Nvidia doesn't release the MLX files for the ASICs.

Reading people on Reddit lamenting that their GTX 3070 is running all their games fine, so they just don't know if they should be replacing it with a 40xx or wait for the 50xx is just fucking infuriating.

If your rig works, stop fucking producing more e-waste and play your videos games!

Living in a rural adjacent town pays off once again.

We needed some eggs for Christmas breakfast, and literally every grocery store in town has zero eggs. Completely wiped out, entire shelf.

So I tried the self-service dairy on the other side of the freeway that usually has eggs in their refrigerator next to the milk. Bam; they had a whole stack of eggs. $10/dozen, but that's better than just... none.

My final backup plan was to ask one of the three neighbors on my block who have chickens.

The lone green light towards the bottom of the tree is the float switch sensor in the water basin for the live tree. Literally just a 555 timer held in reset by the float switch. When this starts blinking green/blue, it means I need to pour more water in.

Absolutely fantastic not needing to remove the tree skirt and see what I'm doing; just move the skirt enough to blindly pour water in until the light stops blinking.

Festive spirit; engage!

@InstantArcade nope. It just... indictor light, right there, in the tree.

I've worked on the Internet enough to know it was a mistake.

The tree has been lit. 285W of white lights.

Me: "Hey, we're seeing a lot of download traffic for LibreOffice. Can we interest you in hosting it on a dozen of our additional mirrors across four continents?"

The Document Foundation: "Nah"

Imagine you're working on a product with an RS-232 user interface.

Try and come up with as many different ways to render a backspace as possible. Go.

It's a reproduction, but still absolutely my kind of decor energy. Thanks kind gifter of gift! 😍

Useless fun fact about Arista switches: The fan trays use the same mechanical connector as SFP optical transceivers.

The pinout is obviously completely different, since it has 12V on it and only needs tachometer, speed control, and a few direction identification solder jumpers, but why not reuse the same blind mate connector?

I've been working in Arista TAC for more than 4 years, so I've seen a lot of customer network configs, and you know, exactly once have I looked at a customer's QoS config and thought "yes, these people understand the concept of QoS and this configuration makes even a tiny bit of sense with respect to improving their quality of service without opening them up to a plethora of other, more painful, issues"

Just buy more bandwidth.

Friendly reminder that if you download software updates for Fedora or AlmaLinux from London, there's good odds that your software updates are coming from an HP thin client sitting in a road box in Surrey.

This is perfectly fine, and how free software / the Internet actually works.

#MicroMirror #Fedora #AlmaLinux #Linux #FOSS

Phrases uttered this morning: "Thankfully, it looks like BOTH CloudFlare and ISC played fast and loose with that RFC"

@MLE_online Gotta juice up those engagement interaction numbers somehow, and we're not getting people to just send more emails

When my parents bought their house, they took Boysenberry cuttings from my grandparents house to start berries all along the back of their house. Growing up I've always enjoyed the jams and pies resulting from those berries.

As a house warming gift, my mom gave me several cuttings of their berry vibes to propagate to my new house. And now I'm about to get my first berries from it. 🥰

Funny how CCing in the company owner solves so many support issues so rapidly.

Everyone losing their minds over #Threads implementing an open standard is just so delicious.

It's a single domain name folks. The block domain button is right there.

Customer: "How unusual is it that we experienced an outage because of our turning the BGP timers down to something lower than the default?"

Me: "Well... let me put it this way; we have a sign in the TAC for "It Has Been ____ Days Since A Customer Shot Themselves In The Foot With BGP Timers"

Customer: "Ah, ok, yeah, then we probably shouldn't have done that."