• 4 Posts
  • 210 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: January 21st, 2021

help-circle




  • Vista sucked so bad. I got a nice new laptop and it was constant pain. One of the real breaking points was that it would refuse to let me modify or delete some files even as superuser. If I recall correctly they weren’t even system files, maybe a separate partition or something.

    I tried installing XP but there was some sort of driver issue with my CD drive. It would start installing fine, but then once it tried to reboot off of the HDD to finish the installation it couldn’t find the installation CD to finish copying things, so the install just crashed half-way done.

    I installed Ubuntu on a partition, dual booted for a while. After a few months I realized that I never even used the Windows partition anymore so I wiped it.


  • Likely what is happening is that the game is probing audio devices and triggering the mic on your headphones to get picked up. This switches them into the “headset” profile which has awful audio quality. I don’t know why the UI isn’t showing that, make sure you are checking while the game is running and the audio sounds bad.

    If you want your headphone mic to work there is not much choice. There isn’t a standard bluetooth profile with good audio and mic. If you never want to use your headphone mic you can probably configure some advanced settings in your audio manager (probably PulseAudio or PipeWire).




  • There are some password managers where you need to either manually look up passwords and copy+paste or autotype them or select the correct password from a dropdown. Some of these will come with an optional browser extension which mitigates this but some don’t really tract domain metadata in a concrete way to do this linking.

    Some examples would be Pass which doesn’t have any standard metadata for domain/URL info (although some informal schemes are used by various tools including browser-integration extensions) and KeePass which has the metadata but doesn’t come with a browser extension by default.




  • Tips for being secure online:

    1. Use your browser’s password manager to generate random passwords.
    2. In the rare case you need to manually enter your password into a site or app be very suspicious and very careful.
    3. Never give personal information to someone who calls or emails you. If necessary look up the contact info of who called you yourself and call them back before divulging and details. Keep in mind that Caller ID and the From address of emails can be faked.
    4. Update software regularly. Security problems are regularly fixed.

    That’s really all you need. You don’t even need 2FA, it is nice extra security but if you use random passwords and don’t enter your passwords into phishing sites it is largely unnecessary.


  • I’m not an expert on modern alarm systems but it seems that it is very common and fairly inexpensive to have cellular data backup. Not every system has it, but many do. In that case cutting the main connection will likely result in someone appearing on site fairly quickly.

    Many cameras also have some form of local buffering. So even if you are gone before someone does show up you still may find yourself recorded.

    But at the end of the day just put a bag over your head and you can be gone by the time anyone shows up without leaving a meaningful trace. Other than the very top-end system security systems just keep the honest people honest.





  • Prom is fun. You get to hang out with all of your classmates, ask someone out. A subset of people are always going to go overboard, but keep in mind that you don’t see the “normal” cases. Most people just walk up to someone and ask them out. They find a date from the school or go alone.

    I’m from Canada so I don’t know if the US is wildly different, but here it is a bit of a big deal, but I think part of that is what makes it fun, you sort of build a bit of hype around what would otherwise be just another school dance.




  • kevincox@lemmy.mlMtoOpen Source@lemmy.mlELI5: What is RISC-V?
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    25
    ·
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    For software to run on a computer it needs to speak the computer’s “language”. This is typically called “machine language” but differs across different hardware. For example most modern Intel and AMD processors speak x86_64. This language has ways to express different operations such as “add these two numbers” or “put this CPU core into a low power mode”. This is the fundamental way that software works, but running in this language.

    There are languages that are completely different, such as ARM which is very common on mobile devices and is the language used by Apple’s new M chips. These have basically nothing in common with x86_64.

    These languages also evolve over time. For example x86_64 is a significant extension to the older x86 language. For the most part this is fine, it is like the CPU now knows more words, if you use those new words the new CPU will understand them, but older CPUs won’t.

    RISC-V is a new machine language. What makes it interesting is that it is a free and open specification. This means that anyone can create a new RISC-V CPU, unlike x86_64 where you need to buy a license from Intel or ARM where you need to buy a license from the ARM corporation. Most people think that this openness has major benefits, for example now anyone can create a new processor which may be better, rather than having innovation being stifled by licensing costs (if you can even get a license) or needing to create their own machine language and require huge amounts of effort to migrate software to it.

    Note: It is important not to confuse “machine language” with “programming language”. When people write software they very rarely write code in machine language directly. Usually they use a programming language which is then converted into the machine language of the CPU it will run on.