Completely Off Topic Chat

johnraff · 2022-01-20 02:37:06

I wasn't going to join this discussion for fear of making it worse, but I've learned a thing about Djokovic - his charitable works - which altered my very negative opinion of him a bit. OTOH I've learned more about his Magical Thinking beliefs in imaginary things, which brought him down again.

Regardless of that, FWIW I think:

1) Djokovic should be free to have whatever weird opinions he wants.

2) Countries sometimes have to impose restrictions on personal freedom in the public interest. Where the balance is drawn between individual rights and the public good is for each society to consider. There are countries I'd never want to live in because they have drawn that balance point way too far to one side or the other. Examples of both are easily found in the world around us.

3) Australia is entitled to impose whatever restrictions they want on who is allowed or not to enter their country.

johnraff · 2022-01-21 00:38:21

misko_2083 wrote:

For me it's a very difficult task to pick someone to dislike because of his beliefs.

No problem. You do yours and I'll do mine.

Sun For Miles · 2022-01-21 09:01:28

misko_2083 wrote:

The politicians that were lobbying for Rio-Tinto lithium mining project in Serbia which Novak has openly voiced against on social media.
Has anyone thought of conflict of interests? Nope.

Rio Tinto projects halted in Serbia imho is a lot more significant than Novak being banned from entering Australia for 3 years (possibly other western coutries without vaccination now due to omicron panic). I think that is a great trade from our end.

hhh · 2022-01-21 09:13:07

misko_2083 wrote:

Some people did belive that hhh's presence on the forum MAY fuel some misogynist sentiment.

What in the... ? Whatever dude.

After that, the minister has canceled his visa, and detained him again.

No, his case went to the Supreme Court and the judges flat our decided that his influence as a celebrity was a health risk and therefore he was not entitled to "procedural fairness". In other words, they wanted him out of there. Specifically for the reason that you are so clearly representing... "And the minister was concerned by reports that anti-vaccination groups "had portrayed Mr Djokovic as a hero and an icon of freedom of choice"...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-60066404

Nice chat, thanks! I'm done with this subject.

hhh · 2022-01-22 18:27:02

mariannemarlow wrote:

I think I preferred the cheese talk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SRY0_ovbLo
Hope it gives you a chuckle.

Bearded_Blunder · 2022-01-23 03:14:16

I'll clarify if it's "WD Red and 6TB or less." it's SMR (unless it's years old) if it's "WD Red Plus/Pro" it's CMR in all sizes. Lots of people with DAS/NAS devices caught out by that, my own is incompatible with SMR. There you are, no clearer. My own is one, fortunately I wasn't caught out, pure luck but I bought 10TB.

You bought 12TB & thus are safe from that little scam.

It sometimes takes days, but I always run a full sweep with badblocks with -w over a new spinning drive before putting it into service -p 1 if i'm in a hurry the default 4 passes if there's no urgency. Makes a good (if slow) drive wipe program too.

Sometimes you can't encrypt, often 4 & 5 bay NAS / DAS units simply won't support it. As for the overwriting, with modern drives a single pass is enough unless the ones trying to get data are a 3 letter agency, & it's probably enough even then unless you're subject of a really big investigation. Just for overkill I use the default badblocks write test for wiping if there's no urgency.

Sector11 · 2022-01-23 15:08:03

This is just an inconvenience for me --- remember not to trust your new drives without properly exercising them first. I had all the data I've written to it still available on other media.

I hope the drive is still under warrantee.

I have never encrypted a drive in my life. Never even checked on how to.
It's just used for my wife and myself

I have 5 or 6 old ones here that I need to smash up. Not exactly the easiest things to open up. The only thing I would have problems with are online banking and 'some' emails'

I'd have to encrypt the 1T drive I have and the two external drives (250GB and 1TB)

Sector11 · 2022-01-23 15:11:33

OK a curious question: How does one wipe a drive that went "OOPS!" and will not boot or mount?

Mu guess is a hammer, spikes and chisel.

deleted0 · 2022-01-23 15:49:03

^ A non warranty drive - open it up; grab the cool magnets.
No one who can recover info after that is interested in you.

8bit

jeffreyC · 2022-01-23 17:41:15

Sector11 wrote:

OK a curious question: How does one wipe a drive that went "OOPS!" and will not boot or mount?
Mu guess is a hammer, spikes and chisel.

A charcoal fire will work and be less likely to get you on a govt. watch list.
Heat it to red heat and magnets randomize.

Martin · 2022-01-23 18:17:04

Sector11 wrote:

OK a curious question: How does one wipe a drive that went "OOPS!" and will not boot or mount?
Mu guess is a hammer, spikes and chisel.

Sounds like too much fun to be legal :-)

/Martin

trilobite · 2022-01-26 19:49:01

misko_2083 wrote:

The fact is Novak Djoković had covid in December.
Whoever had covid develops natural antibodies which are far stronger than any vaccine reproduces.
You can ask any immunologist about that.

This is false. I consult in public health in Canada. A Covid-19 infection is about the same as getting one vaccination. Additional vaccinations will boost immune response. There is not enough data to tell us if 2 infections of Covid-19 are about the same as 2 vaccinations. The understanding is probably it isn't because of the way vaccines affect immune system function versus being sick with Covid-19.

Only one quote from https://www.cmaj.ca/content/193/47/E1820. There is much more info that this about what happens to immunity from infection versus the vaccination series of 2+1.

Two doses of an mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccine provide better protection against infection than natural immunity from previous infection with the virus, according to a report by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Unvaccinated Americans who previously had COVID-19 were 5.49 times more likely to test positive again than people who were fully vaccinated and had never been infected.

(Not being allowed to a stay in Australia and play is another issue entirely beyond vaccination versus infection.)

Last edited by trilobite (2022-01-26 19:51:35)

Bearded_Blunder · 2022-01-31 04:55:50

Well --- that was a "fun" experience, my Esxi host just crashed & purple screened.. you don't expect that from a dedicated hypervisor.
Judging by the fact the usb3 add in card has dropped off the edge of the world.. no longer there when I lsusb guess it's time to order a replacement.

deleted0 · 2022-02-11 16:46:06

Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Series photos.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/20 … first-look

8bit

hhh · 2022-02-12 03:11:21

^ OMG, black main characters! /s

Sun For Miles · 2022-02-12 05:09:48

Does that imply something terrible happened to all back characters after this prequel timeline considering the movie casts?

hhh · 2022-02-13 21:19:19

In the original films all the black characters were Orcs. The Goblins were sickly green and Gollum was grey.

ree!

hhh · 2022-02-13 21:55:50

Fly, you fools!

https://media.vanityfair.com/photos/620 … gs-004.jpg

Should have said character, kind of lonely, isn't she?

johnraff · 2022-02-16 08:31:08

tl:dr check the takeaways below.

The other day I was playing with OCR for the first time. Had a couple of book pages scanned in that I wanted to print out nicely. Going from the xsane scanner software, there's an OCR menu item that seemed to be tied to something called gocr. Installed and tried it, but it left quite a lot of post-conversion cleaning up to do. Then found tesseract looked better, but how to use it from xsane? The options in the preferences seem aimed specifically at gocr. Eventually discovered that xsane comes with a little bash script that's supposed to improve communication with tesseract: /usr/share/xsane/ocr-scripts/xsane2tess3.sh Looks promising - let's run it with '--help' and see what the options are...

Very weird terminal output but no help message. Discover that it needs to be run with no arguments to see them. Finally set up xsane to use it, but processing a single page takes forever, and the result isn't that great anyway. Much better, it turned out, was the GUI tesseract frontend gimagereader. You have to save the scanned image first as a file then process it, but it's easy to leave out things like embedded images in the text, remove line breaks and generally clean things up before saving the text file. I quite liked it.

The story's not over. A bit later I noticed that my terminal no longer had its coloured prompt, even after closing and re-opening. Odd... something changed in .bashrc? Uh oh - there is no .bashrc. No dotfiles at all!! Not cool.

It was that xsane2tess3.sh script. The last line but one is:

rm $FILE_OUT.*

If you run the script with an argument of '--help' as I did the first time, then FILE_OUT is unset and that line resolves to

rm .*

ie remove all the dotfiles in the current directory (which was my HOME). Not cool at all.

Luckily I did have a backup to hand made the previous evening so got the missing files back from there. Except for .bash_history which had looked OK but turned out only to be ~500B instead of its usual 500KB. By the time I noticed that my evening backup had already been overwritten with the latest version... Again, luckily, a hard disk backup was to hand to fill in the history which I sort of rely on to save having to remember commands.

Sigh... panic over.

Some takeaways:

1) Just because a script has been shipped with a Debian package doesn't mean you can trust it. I had a close look at xsane2tess3.sh later and it's not too impressive.
2) Backups are for more than recovering from a disk failure. If you make a daily mirror of your files you'll soon lose the OK stuff you just nuked. Something a bit more sophisticated is needed. (Task for me.)
3) Don't rely on .bash_history - make a note of useful commands somewhere else.
4) I'm sure there was more...

jeffreyC · 2022-02-23 16:39:17

misko_2083 wrote:

Someone made a Android TV x86 that should turn an old PC into a TV but I could not find the download link.
https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/andr … s.4182205/
Requires at least 1.2 GHz dual-core 64-bit capable processor with a typical Intel/NVIDIA/AMD GPU having 64MB of video memory.

Newer, with links:

https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/andr … v.4227253/

Last edited by jeffreyC (2022-02-23 16:39:43)

#3581 2022-01-20 02:37:06

Re: Completely Off Topic Chat

#3582 2022-01-21 00:38:21

Re: Completely Off Topic Chat

#3583 2022-01-21 09:01:28

Re: Completely Off Topic Chat

#3584 2022-01-21 09:13:07

Re: Completely Off Topic Chat

#3585 2022-01-22 18:27:02

Re: Completely Off Topic Chat

#3586 2022-01-23 03:14:16

Re: Completely Off Topic Chat

#3587 2022-01-23 15:08:03

Re: Completely Off Topic Chat

#3588 2022-01-23 15:11:33

Re: Completely Off Topic Chat

#3589 2022-01-23 15:49:03

Re: Completely Off Topic Chat

#3590 2022-01-23 17:41:15

Re: Completely Off Topic Chat

#3591 2022-01-23 18:17:04

Re: Completely Off Topic Chat

#3592 2022-01-26 19:49:01

Re: Completely Off Topic Chat

#3593 2022-01-31 04:55:50

Re: Completely Off Topic Chat

#3594 2022-02-11 16:46:06

Re: Completely Off Topic Chat

#3595 2022-02-12 03:11:21

Re: Completely Off Topic Chat

#3596 2022-02-12 05:09:48

Re: Completely Off Topic Chat

#3597 2022-02-13 21:19:19

Re: Completely Off Topic Chat

#3598 2022-02-13 21:55:50

Re: Completely Off Topic Chat

#3599 2022-02-16 08:31:08

Re: Completely Off Topic Chat

#3600 2022-02-23 16:39:17

Re: Completely Off Topic Chat

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