Linux or Windows, Tablets to Slimbooks, APU's to GPU's. All tech talk goes here.
destraht
8 hours ago Tech Talk
Framework laptop.
World Exclusive: Upgrading my Laptop to AMD

destraht
about a day ago Tech Talk
@MentORPHEUS You're thinking high watts because you're a mechanic. There are tons of devices out there which just need to remove a few watts of excess heat, and can't afford to bulk out with a very inefficient bladed fan (because they don't work well at low power). They've already solved these applications using filters and the fact that the pressure is so much higher that debris can't easily settle into it. Inside is basically a mini jet engine. So only larger particle filters need to be blocked, and anything that is larger with a deformable characteristic is going to be sucked through at massive pressure.
This project is already living inside of many other products, but it's just not something that you would be buying yet because it's not in boomer consumer devices.
I wouldn't be surprised if these things end up replacing passive heat sinks on parts of motherboards with lots of hot chipsets. They could be replaced yearly for maximum performance like what people already do with CPU heat paste.
It's going to be a while before it's servicing a 100W device, but those devices are already so large that they're not mobile anyways. They're only mobile in the sense that they're luggable.
These handheld (game) emulator devices would be a good target. In that case getting arid of an easy 2-3W of excess burst heat for a fraction of that is very ideal.
Read MoreMentORPHEUS
about a day ago Tech Talk
@destraht Interesting concept, but I'm not optimistic the company will ever pay their boastful staff of "More PhDs than a doctor's office" by selling a shipping product.
It's basically a tiny bladeless fan, perhaps useful in miniaturized applications but won't scale up to the performance of a conventional heat sink and fan. They have yet to achieve 10W of heat dissipation. Dust and water are kryptonite to the device. What can this do that a Peltier Junction array couldn't do better and more robustly?
If I was a professional tech investor, I'd give this company a hard pass.
destraht
about a day ago Tech Talk
Solid state cooling is going to change a lot of things.
WTF is solid state active cooling? We’ve just seen it working on a mini PC

destraht
about a day ago Tech Talk
Red Hat To Stop Shipping LibreOffice In Future RHEL, Limiting Fedora LO Involvement
Basically everything is going to flatpak cross(-Linux)-platform package format. It already provides Android-like app permissions, and so that is a pretty big benefit. It's also the most secure way to run Windows programs via WINE because it can be locked down so that it is not capable of accessing outside of it's virtual "C" drive. That means that a WINE flatpack cannot reach outside to install exe files. You have to manually drop the exe inside of the "C" to be able to install it. That is annoying, but also much more secure.
I'll probably give the sort-of Lutris competitor Bottles another try in some months. It's definitely going to be better at some point, and it might already be, but I'll still give it some more time since Lutris is fine. It will be better for me due to the tighter Gnome integration and because I don't need all of the app store support like Epic, etc which Lutris offers.
Read Moredestraht
about a week ago Tech Talk
@redpillschool @MentORPHEUS Actually fuck that. This looks waaay better. I can pick it up for $150 off of Joom. Aliexpress stopped shipping here sometime during the war thingy. It's just far better than the old Linksys. The only issue is that the OpenWRT build is still on snapshot.
There is also a AC (Wifi 5) version that has a mainline OpenWRT build.

destraht
about a week ago Tech Talk
@redpillschool Linksys WRT3200ACM
You asked a long time ago about routers. This is what I would get now. The Wifi 5 on this is good enough. Then later say when Wifi 7 comes out then simply disable the signal on this and just use it as a router. Then you can put your Wifi 7 access points where ever you want.
The reason that this router is the best is that it was made by design to be loadable with custom firmware, hence the WRT in its name. The processor and memory on this are very good.
I check it out and there is an nginx package on this that also works with the admin portal (it has to switch to using another web server). So that means that you can put a reverse proxy vhost config right into the router so that via SNI (server name identification) headers that you can host multiple standard-port webservers on your network without needing a separate proxy box.
This router should be fast enough to last say 10 years or so (after you turn off the wifi antennas).
This is one of those rare situations in which it's better for you to be in faggot-ass America sitting there like a bitch with your Amazon marketplace. I'm going to have to struggle to get one of these. You suck. Fucking JQuery-level kinds of...
So I'll get one of these for the main DHCP router and then the others will be just access points providing 802.11r fast roaming with the 802.11v and 802.11k supplements to make it actually good. Then I'll just pop on Wifi 6 and 7 cheap nodes as they come up.
That brings me to my next point. The CPU on these things needs to be decent in order to have all of the thrills. So you need a somewhat modern ARM CPU to be able to use Wireguard VPN without it taking up to a 90% speed hit. There are MANY cheap MIPS CPU routers out there which are perfectly fine for being access points, but fall far short of being a general purpose router and application server (as the Linksys WRT3200ACM is).
So I'll get this and put it on 5Ghz only for the center of the house. Then the outside ones will be 2.4Ghz (and possibly 5Ghz).
The big benefit of Wifi 7 though will be that the wifi can simultaneously transmit on 2.4 and 5 so that the receiving can choose which data stream that it accepts. This will be really a huge improvement. It's not worth waiting for though, and I learned that 802.11r fast roaming allows Wifi versions to be mixed, while 802.11s possibly does not (I can't find the answer to this). However, for sure it's at completely necessary to run the same kernel versions for any mesh node. So that really isn't compatible with a chaotic mixing of various devices that might not work on specific kernel versions, etc (like WINE for example). It's more so for a larger scale coordinated projects where you roll out everything at once with like 500+ nodes.
Read Moredestraht
about a week ago Tech Talk
My research has shown that I don't need a 802.11s mesh. What I need is a 802.11r fast roaming network with 802.11v and 802.11k to make it jump connections properly (so that it doesn't get stuck on a bad connection).
Furthermore I can combined wifi 5 and wifi 6 (ac and ax) devices without any issue. So that really frees everything up, big time. The problem is that before I understood this it was looking like that I'd be married to whatever I bought for a long time. Now that I'm free to mix and match then I can get whatever is the best value for the task.
The problem with 802.11s is that it uses batman protocol behind the scenes as an implementation detail, and this requires all devices to be using the same kernel. So that somewhat meant to me that all devices needed to be the same.
I'm thinking that I'd make the wifi in my house to be 5Ghz Wifi 6 only. Then the outside ones would use Wifi 5 or 6 (depending on the need) on 2.4Ghz (which is a lot slower). I'm never going to need crazy fast Internet outside. That is just a work thing.
I've made a list of Wifi 6 devices that can be purchased locally for OpenWRT router firmware. I'm now trying to figure out if it makes sense to get a router wit a very powerful CPU, memory and storage so that I could run my Golang webserver with Video4Linux2 webcams right off of that, saving stupid mini computers. But it's hard to get benchmarks on these processors to know if any of it is in the realm of usability. I have no idea if it's ridiculously overpowered or stupidly too weak.
I think that I'll need to get webcams that are delivering some degree of compressed video already, even if it's just a fast pass one. Basically becomes doing video encoding on a router probably isn't a great idea.
Damn though, I might be up on this a lot faster than I thought.
Read Moredestraht
about a week ago Tech Talk
The explanation answered the question of what was causing routers to crash, but it raised a new one: Why were routers affected even when they had been configured to not automatically update and no manual update had been performed? Asus has yet to address this, but the likely answer is that the definitions file for ASD, which resides in memory and scans devices for security threats, gets updated whether or not automatic updates are enabled.
It took 48 hours, but the mystery of the mass Asus router outage is solved
