fivesixzero's comments

Before Kali, in the mid-late 90’s, we had had a 4-node dial-in BBS in my area code (813) called The Arena that ran an app called SerIPX - basically IPX over serial - to allow 4 players to play Doom. It was an incredible experience at the time, especially when paired with Dwango5.wad and other 4-player centric maps. Worked great on a 28.8k modem, direct, with no TCP/IP.

So many memories, but I wish I remembered more from that era. Crazy to think it was a quarter of a century ago.

I spent some time last week tinkering with a SOQuartz board and ended up getting it working with a Pine-focused distro called Plebian[1].

Took awhile to land on it though. Before that I tried all of the other distros on Pine64's "SOQuartz Software Releases"[2] page without any luck. The only one on that page that booted was the linked "Armbian Ubuntu Jammy with kernel 5.19.7" but it failed to boot again after an apt upgrade.

So there's at least one working OS, as of last week. But its definitely quite finicky and would probably need some work to build a proper device tree for any carrier board that's not the RPi CM4 Carrier Board.

[1] https://github.com/Plebian-Linux/quartz64-images

[2] https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/SOQuartz_Software_Releases

This looks like a shift away from their old “editorialized” blog-style updates to a data-sharing-centric approach. I’m guessing that this takes less time for them and it allows various commentators and communities to create their own opinions based on the data.

I liked the tone and approach of their old blog posts but this is pretty cool too. It’s just good to see them continuing to share their data since it’s arguably relevant to a wide range of audiences.

I had to get an active DAC cable (S+AO0005) for the RB-4011 because of the quirk you mentioned. Works great with the active cable, which was about $50 I think. I was glad I read the manual beforehand. :)

Thanks for the update on the WiFi side of things. Seems likely that I’ll be looking to another vendor for APs, but that’s fine.

For awhile I was actually using a UniFi NanoHD for my AP. Performance and stability were great but running a Docker container for a Ubiquti Controller (for a single AP) was annoying enough for me to bail on it. My old Asus router with OpenWRT has been fine for now and doesn’t require me to run a container. :)

I’m still looking for a proper WiFi 6 replacement that can hook up to my 10G core, ideally via 2.5/5/10G copper or preferably SFP+ DAC. Nothing’s jumped out at me yet though.

Sadly RouterOS isn’t open source. They’ve received a bit of flak for their “available on request” stance on getting GPL sources too. The fact that their GPL patches aren’t readily available is pretty uncool.

WireGuard isn’t supported on RouterOS 6, which is the current stable version, afaik. RouterOS 7 (currently available in beta) did support for WG in August though, as part of 7.1beta2 [1].

[1] https://mikrotik.com/download/changelogs/development-release...

I’ve become a big fan of MikroTik routers and 10G/SFP+ router/switch hardware in the last few years. Their web UI and SSH console are a bit quirky but the performance is pretty great for the price.

My primary use case for their gear at home was to have a router that can handle a LACP WAN bond for my fancy cable modem as well as connecting to a 10G Ethernet switch via copper or direct-attached SFP+ to a CRS-305 10G switch. Their RB-4011 was a perfect fit, without any of the Ubiquiti SSO/controller stuff to worry about.

I haven’t explored their WiFi products yet (still using an old router as an AP) but their product range is pretty broad. Might look into it this year though.

Current job (Java dev, mid sized SaaS, 2019-now): Local specialist recruiter via random inbound LinkedIn message. Worked out really well, despite the horror stories I had heard.

Previous job (Tier 1-3 support to Java dev, startup SaaS, 2013-2018): Asked a friend how they liked it there, took a tour, met some people, was in for an interview the next week. First non-freelance or self-employed gig in many years but it turned out to be a great match.

Before Times: Post-college-dropout drift for a decade or so. Helped run a massive LAN party (dates it a bit, heh), did some PHP/Java work for friends’ small consultancies, worked retail, repaired computers, freelance music writing and photojournalism, random open source project contributions here and there.

I love seeing other “non-traditional path” stories on here. Not everyone ends up in dev work, or their current job, the same way. :)

The main argument in the article (and other places I’ve seen WG discussed) is the relative ease of auditing the core code as well as auditing implementations. In that context it’s less of an augment that it’s “more secure” and more of an argument that it’s “more cost/time effective to assure that it (the core code or Any implementation) is secure”.

That argument can be strong when considering that effective security in most projects comes down to whether assurance of security can be discerned effectively within a limited time window. Often very limited.

Increasingly it seems like heavily opinionated foundational tools and frameworks are overtaking more highly configurable alternatives, at least in terms of breadth of usage or popularity.

Could this be a positive change? Does this represent a healthy response cognitive fatigue in a world with configuration options at every possible layer?

Or does this shift to less readily configurable tools represent an overall negative? Are we losing diversity in favor of a more vulnerable monoculture crop?

Or both?

Asking for real, not sarcastically. As a developer I’m a huge proponent of simpler, more opinionated frameworks for most projects but I’m also aware my perspective is more limited than many HN commenters.

Whether the issue is with the CPU hardware, the mainboard design (VRM, etc), mainboard BIOS, kernel, or the Prime95 app itself still appears to be an open question.

Based on oscilloscope analysis of the VRM output in a linked thread elsewhere in the comments it looks like the board’s VRM design, or its configuration by the board’s BIOS, may be the most likely suspect.

But there are less-researched reports of similar issues on other boards as well, which makes things a bit more murky.

Given the uncertainties there it may put some people off from buying into the TR/sTRX40 platform in general. But to offer a blanket recommendation to avoid is a bit premature.

I’m curious if this behavior defined by something in hardware, microcode, boot-time BIOS flags, or higher level kernel/hypervisor/application code.

Thanks for the recommendations! I have a DSLabs DScope (100 MHz, 2-channel FPGA scope) and while it’s handy I’d prefer to have a proper hardware scope someday. Rigol’s scopes look like they nicely fit in between the basic DSO/FPGA stuff and the “proper” 4-5 digit priced test bench gear.

Any recommendations for learning resources that could help with understanding DC power supply analysis for non-EE types? While refurbishing laptops and working with microcontrollers I’ve run into some odd things where ruling out transient power supply issues would probably be helpful.

I still have a pair of G5 mice that I use at home and work. It’s good to see Logitech bringing back that design! Other than the MX Master 2S I carry around for mobile use, I’ve never had a mouse fit my grubby paws do perfectly.

Other than a cable replacement and a switch cleaning, both of those original G5’s are still perfectly operational after over a decade of regular use.

Haven’t reached any degree of publishing quality yet, but it’s something I’m aiming to do if time allows.

Ideally I’d prefer to Yep people run their own testing and monitoring. This stuff isn’t rocket science, just requires a bit of knowledge, inexpensive tools, and a bit of logical framing. :)

I recently put my Telegraf configs/scripts for monitoring RPi thermals and throttling into a git repo. These might be helpful for anyone doing their own comparative testing of cooling soliutions and/or power sources.

https://github.com/fivesixzero/telegraf-pi-bash

RPi power consumption and power supply is a bit more complicated than it seems on the surface.

A large problem is that even “3A rated" supplies suffer large voltage droop under load. This can be seen pretty easily using a cheap USB DC load [0]. As load goes up, voltage tends to drop slowly at first, then heavily at a certain point.

Several I’ve bought drop as low as 4.1V at just 2A load which will almost definitely make any Pi very unhappy. I haven’t found an authoritative source but generally the Pi’s power management system starts complaining (flipping the “undervolt since boot” bitflag [1] in “vcgencmd get_throttled”) around 4.6-4.7V [2]

To monitor the throttled bitflags, which also report thermal throttling, I wrote a basic shell script that just converts the hex to bin then returns a Grok-ready string with the flags as booleans. I've already got Telegraf on the RPis sending basic host metrics to an InfluxDB instance so that script just gets called by an exec input to generate and persist the data for monitoring or analysis.

Eventually I'd love to write (or contribute to) a proper Golang Telegraf plug-in that just reads from the VC mailbox directly but that's still on the back burner.

As far as actual power consumption during use, I’ve recently started running tests using a decent USB power meter (WITRN/Qway U2 [3] and X models, in particular) to monitor load over time while running various workloads on a Pi Zero W, a Pi 3B+ and a 4GB Pi 4.

Power usage at idle is usually low but even that's unpredictable. Daemons are gonna daemon regardless of the user load. Generally though the load goes up substantially when powering peripherals - Ethernet, USB, BCM VideoCore enc/dec/CSI/SSI, SD card R/W, HDMI, fans, HATs, GPIO peripherals, etc. CPU load definitely factors in heavily, of course, but it’s only part of the picture.

For reducing power usage, some surprisingly simple things can help. As a very minor example, shutting off the activity LED [4] can save a few dozen mA. :)

[0] https://www.droking.com/Intelligent-USB-Adjustable-Constant-...

[1] https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/48329/underv...

[2] https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=1477...

[3] https://usbchargingblog.wordpress.com/2018/08/11/web-u2-usb-...

[4] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/controlling...

Wired, before the boom/bust, was a massive inspiration for me. Growing up in Central Florida in a “BBS rustbelt” area code it was one of the only places I could find quality writing on a broad spectrum of tech. Or any writing on tech, for that matter.

During and after the boom it seemed to lose its focus on quality writing and countercultural verve, particularly when it got flooded by blurbs and articles about $10,000 wristwatches and stock picks.

There were still some gems though, here and there. But I don’t think much of the writing ever approached this in terms of timeliness and caliber.

As someone that grew up on bash the concepts that underlie PowerShell’s syntax are unnecessary reinventions at their best and utterly bizarre at their worst.

That’s the primary reason my hierarchy of Windows shells usually starts with bash (via WSL, MinGW, or Cygwin) for file management, ssh, compile/build/deploy, and text parsing work and ends at CMD and eventually PowerShell for the Windows services management and other Windows internals that require it.

Also, bash’s (and other similar shells’) high degree of customization is both easily portable and massively extensible. With some minor customization it’s possible to match, or even exceed, PowerShell’s tab completion capabilities.

This is related to the underlying console/terminal system in Windows 10, which should be shell agnostic. The same infrastructure is used by PowerShell, the Windows command prompt, and WSL for instance - all are just different shells that use their own implementations of the console subsystem.