Hackaday Prize 2021 Finalist ThunderScope is doing exactly that. [Aleska] is building a modular open source PC-connected oscilloscope aiming at four channels and a cool 100 MHz bandwidth with a low budget. The detailed project logs, showing how he is learning about ‘scope technology on-the-fly is a fascinating look into the mind of an engineer as he navigates the ups and downs of a reasonably complicated build.
We like how [Aleska] has realised early on, that keeping the project private and only releasing it when “I’m done” actually impedes progress, when you could open source from the beginning, log progress and get great feedback right from the start. All those obvious mistakes and poor design choices get caught and fixed before committing to hardware. Just think of all the time saved. Now this is an attitude to cultivate!
Biden didn’t only prove himself to be a fool on the matter just a few weeks later but reiterated during his speech that he had “no regrets” on his withdrawal plan. This is perhaps the most egregious thing said by Biden during the whole presser. //
Biden’s speech was everything you could have expected from Biden: The speech was filled with various finger-pointing at Trump, at the military, at the Afghan people, despite it ending ironically with a Truman-Esque “the buck stops here.” But yet, the symbolism that truly showed through at that presser was when Biden had to then turn his back on the cameras and walk away. Worse than that, he then walked outside to Marine One to head back on vacation.
He didn’t take any questions. He didn’t act like a person who is in charge. He acted like he was checking a box. “Well, I addressed the country. Can I go back on vacation now?” In fact, Biden created more questions than answered them. Remember, just a few weeks ago, Biden said Afghanistan was not going to become a new Vietnam, and any withdrawal would not lead to Taliban control on the country. //
We already know what they plan to do to the country that we have spent 20 years, 2 trillion dollars, and thousands of American lives to create and Joe Biden was willing to throw all that out. Worse yet, even with the benefit of hindsight, he has no regret.
Yet, despite these huge errors in judgment, Mr. “The Buck Stops Here” didn’t stick around after his presser to accept questions. //
He turned his back on the military. He turned his back on the Embassy officials still on the ground. He turned his back on our allies who are still in the country. He turned his back on the Afghan people. He turned his back on the Gold Star Families, wounded veterans, and others who were lucky enough to return home. He turned his back on the local interpreters who saved countless American lives. It isn’t like the President doesn’t see the same images we see or isn’t terrified by the same video we are seeing. In fact, he probably has access to even more footage and data. Not so much as a plan, a promise, or a guarantee. Despite all these horrible results of his failure to plan, he has no regrets. //
DarthCY
7 hours ago
Why do people assume Biden has a conscience? He knew this would happen and just didn't care. Quit trying to measure him by standards of decent human beings. Nothing in his history shows he has morals or decency.
Tom Cotton
@SenTomCotton
If you’re an American stranded in Afghanistan, or know one who is, please contact my office immediately:
(501) 223-9081 or
evac@cotton.senate.gov
The situation is dire, but we’ll do everything in our power to help keep you informed and to help get you out.
4:06 PM · Aug 15, 2021
Angelo Carusone
@GoAngelo
Imagine being trapped in Afghanistan in this moment..and thinking best person to call is Tom Cotton of all people.
Honestly, if someone’s in that situation where Tom Cotton is the only number they can call, they’d be better off just calling NYC’s 311. I mean really. Tom Cotton.
Maggie Haberman
@maggieNYT
Cotton spokesman says that their office has heard from multiple US citizens in Kabul trapped behind Taliban checkpoints, who can’t safely reach the US perimeter and have no clear option for what to do. https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/s //
Nick Pappas
@NickAPappas
Have you considered the possibility this was so botched that they didn’t have anything besides a phone number on Tom Cotton’s Twitter account?
9:33 PM · Aug 15, 2021
Christina Pushaw
@ChristinaPushaw
Yeah, why would you call a Senator who served in Afghanistan when you could have called Biden?
Oh wait, Biden was on the phone to the Broward superintendent praising the forced masking of kindergarteners. Then he went on vacation.
8:02 AM · Aug 16, 2021
Glenn Greenwald
@ggreenwald
Scummiest tweet of the week comes, unsurprisingly, from the head of Media Matters: condemning a US Senator for using his office to try to help Americans get out of Afghanistan safely rather than just tweeting empty, performative "demands" -- all because he's a Republican.
Elander’s Voice
@Elanders_Voice
AUSTRALIA- 24,000 children will be vaccinated in a stadium next week. No parents will be allowed access.
Er… //
The police? Somehow it doesn’t seem any more comforting that a law enforcement agent will be the one “escorting” your child to a forced medical procedure.
Imagine for one second the American military knocking on your door and escorting your children out to receive a treatment you may not feel confident about and they may not want at all.
It blows the mind that such a proud people like the Australians would so willingly submit to outright totalitarianism. To say it is disappointing is an understatement.
It makes one wonder if the current state of the American spirit is prepared to withstand any similar incursions from our own government. //
Liberty Lockdown w/ Clint Russell
@LibertyLockPod
Australia began as a penal colony
And ended as one
This is already a disaster in Afghanistan. But may get even worse.
There are thousands of Americans still trapped in Afghanistan. According to the Biden team, 5,000-10,000 are still trapped near Kabul, but John Kirby said they didn’t have a real count, showing more ignorance. //
Sara Cook
@saraecook
Replying to @saraecook
The below note went out this afternoon to American citizens requesting to be evacuated from Afghanistan, @alanacbs reports. It instructs people to come to Hamid Karzai Intl Airport in Kabul, but says the US govt cannot guarantee their safety as they make the trip. @CBSNews //
Richard Grenell
@RichardGrenell
American citizens are told they are on their own in Afghanistan.
Joe Biden has failed us.
The Afghan government started disintegrating a month or more ago. The intelligence community has been forecasting that the Taliban would emerge victorious within 90 days. And yet, nothing has been done to evacuate Americans or process eligible Afghans for refugee visas.
Apparently, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley had successfully sold President Trump on keeping a residual force in Kabul and believed he could sweet-talk Biden into doing the same. But, at the same time, the Pentagon did nothing to plan or prepare for the withdrawal to try to forestall the event. //
Eric Brakey
@SenatorBrakey
I am hearing the U.S. was unprepared in Afghanistan because the Pentagon slow-walked Trump’s withdrawal order—hoping they could pressure @JoeBiden to cancel the peace deal completely.
9:55 PM · Aug 15, 2021 //
Having worked directly for one of the three-stars on the Army Staff, I can tell you this resonates with me. The standard Pentagon response, at least on the Army side, to any task you don’t want to do is to nod vigorously while doing absolutely nothing. //
To me, this all sounds like the military leadership (can we start putting Lloyd Austin’s face on milk cartons yet, because he hasn’t been seen for a week) convinced itself that it had persuaded Biden to slow down the withdrawal and adhere to their recommendations. They might have convinced themselves that they had convinced Biden to cancel the Afghan withdrawal completely just as he had with most of President Trump’s initiatives. Then, unexpectedly, Biden decided that he was plowing ahead, and yes, his callous disregard for human life played into that decision and pulled the trigger on the withdrawal. The military and State were left flat-footed because they’d refused to take any preliminary steps needed to evacuate noncombatants and friendly Afghans.
Breaking911
@Breaking911
New Zealand is on nationwide lockdown due to 1 single case of COVID-19
“Don’t talk to your neighbors. Please, keep to your bubbles,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern tells the public.
One of the iconic social media images of President (so-called) Biden, other than him doing a faceplant on the stairs of Air Force One, is him with an ice cream cone. //
It seems as though the Taliban have seen the images.
Abdulhaq Omeri
@AbdulhaqOmeri
#Taliban eat ice-cream #Kabul #Afghanistan .
It is hard to credit the idea that you could get four hardened fighters to pose with ice cream cones in Afghanistan today unless they were trying to send a message: that Joe Biden is a joke, and they are laughing at him.
That was pretty horrible to read — that indeed he was looking at Vietnam actions as a model of what he could get away with.
But that isn’t all. He blamed Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. But that wasn’t who was responsible. Guess who was involved in 1975, too? You guessed it — Joseph R. Biden and the Congressional Democrats.
Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸
@JackPosobiec
During the 1975 Fall of Saigon, Joe Biden had already been a Senator for 2 years
8:04 AM · Aug 15, 2021 //
In the spring of 1975, as North Vietnamese divisions approached Saigon, hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese with connections to the U.S.—soldiers, officials, spies, interpreters, drivers, bar girls, cooks—begged their American friends and colleagues to help them find a way out. But the embassy in Saigon and the Ford administration in Washington were slow to face the gravity of the situation and reluctant to prepare an evacuation for fear of panicking the population into chaos. In mid-April, President Gerald Ford finally realized that the government of South Vietnam might fall, and he asked Congress for $300 million in emergency aid, including money to evacuate the remaining 2,500 Americans and their dependents along with up to 175,000 South Vietnamese.
But Congress, led by Senate Democrats, had no interest in throwing away more money on a lost war that Americans wanted to forget. The prospect of sending U.S. troops to help evacuate Vietnamese along with Americans was a nonstarter. Some of the most strenuous objections came from the 32-year-old first-term senator from Delaware, Joseph R. Biden.
“I feel put upon in being presented an all-or-nothing number,” Biden said at a rare White House meeting between the president and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 14. “I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out.”
Ford countered: “We opened our door to the Hungarians. I am not saying the situation is identical, but our tradition is to welcome the oppressed. I don’t think these people should be treated any differently from any other people—the Hungarians, Cubans, Jews from the Soviet Union.”
Biden and other Democrats were unmoved. In a Senate speech on April 23, Biden argued that the president lacked the authority to rescue any Vietnamese. “I do not believe the United States has an obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals” other than diplomats of third countries, Biden said. “The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese.” The U.S. should leave the task of protecting them to “the organizations that are available” and “diplomatic channels,” he added. A week later, North Vietnamese tanks entered the grounds of the presidential palace in Saigon just hours after the last helicopter carried the last Americans out of Vietnam. //
Here he is at the funeral of Sen. George McGovern in 2012, saying that he was right about Vietnam.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/we-cant-abandon-afghans-who-helped-us/618416/
....
Here he is at the funeral of Sen. George McGovern in 2012, saying that he was right about Vietnam.
Howard Mortman
@HowardMortman
.@AnnieLinskey : "2 weeks before Saigon fell in April 1975, Joe Biden was among senators summoned to WH for top-secret briefing on crisis Vietnam" https://washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-vietnam-afghanistan/2021/08/15/fd155518-fdd5-11eb-ba7e-2cf966e88e93_story.html
Biden told that story 10/25/2012 McGovern funeral:
"5 weeks later helicopters taking off roof...I was right"
7:00 AM · Aug 16, 2021
So, not only was Joe Biden involved in this debacle in Afghanistan, he was involved in the Saigon debacle as well. He didn’t have any moral compass then and he doesn’t have any moral compass on it now. All those folks who helped us are just to be tossed aside. All he had taken away from it by 2012 was that “he was right” when he was so manifestly wrong.
But someone apparently decided enough was enough — that he wanted to make his feelings known about Joe Biden on a Wilmington digital billboard. He clearly had a sense of humor, as well, as he trolled Biden.
To remain protected online, you should check whether your initial line of defense is secure. First, check your password to see if it’s compromised. There are a number of security programs that will let you do this. And make sure you’re using a well-crafted password.
We also recommend you limit the use of SMS as a 2FA method if you can. You can instead use app-based one-time codes, such as through Google Authenticator. In this case, the code is generated within the Google Authenticator app on your device itself, rather than being sent to you.
However, this approach can also be compromised by hackers using some sophisticated malware. A better alternative would be to use dedicated hardware devices such as YubiKey.
These are small USB (or near-field communication-enabled) devices that provide a streamlined way to enable 2FA across different services.
Such physical devices need to be plugged into or brought into close proximity of a login device as a part of 2FA, therefore mitigating the risks associated with visible one-time codes, such as codes sent by SMS.
One of my most popular blog articles is this article about the "Hidden Cost of using ZFS for your home NAS". To summarise the key argument of this article:
Expanding ZFS-based storge can be relatively expensive / inefficient.
For example, if you run a ZFS pool based on a single 3-disk RAIDZ vdev (RAID5 equivalent2), the only way to expand a pool is to add another 3-disk RAIDZ vdev1.
You can't just add a single disk to the existing 3-disk RAIDZ vdev to create a 4-disk RAIDZ vdev because vdevs can't be expanded.
The impact of this limitation is that you have to buy all storage upfront even if you don't need the space for years to come.
Otherwise, by expanding with additional vdevs you lose capacity to parity you may not really want/need, which also limits the maximum usable capacity of your NAS.
RAIDZ vdev expansion
Fortunately, this limitation of ZFS is being addressed!
ZFS founder Matthew Ahrens created a pull request around June 11, 2021 detailing a new ZFS feature that would allow for RAIDZ vdev expansion.
Finally, ZFS users will be able to expand their storage by adding just one single drive at a time. This feature will make it possible to expand storage as-you-go, which is especially of interest to budget conscious home users3.
Jim Salter has written a good article about this on Ars Technica.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/raidz-expansion-code-lands-in-openzfs-master/
There is still a caveat
Existing data will be redistributed or rebalanced over all drives, including the freshly added drive. However, the data that was already stored on the vdev will not be restriped after the vdev is expanded. This means that this data is stored with the older, less efficient parity-to-data ratio.
I think Matthew Ahrends explains it best in his own words:
After the expansion completes, old blocks remain with their old data-to-parity ratio (e.g. 5-wide RAIDZ2, has 3 data to 2 parity), but distributed among the larger set of disks. New blocks will be written with the new data-to-parity ratio (e.g. a 5-wide RAIDZ2 which has been expanded once to 6-wide, has 4 data to 2 parity). However, the RAIDZ vdev's "assumed parity ratio" does not change, so slightly less space than is expected may be reported for newly-written blocks, according to zfs list, df, ls -s, and similar tools.
So, if you add a new drive to a RAIDZ vdev, you'll notice that after expansion, you will have less capacity available than you would theoretically expect. //
The overhead or 'lost capacity' can be recovered by rewriting existing data after the vdev has been expanded, because the data will then be written with the more efficient parity-to-data ratio of the larger vdev.
Rewriting all data may take quite some time and you may opt to postpone this step until the vdev has been expanded a couple of times so the parity-to-data ratio is now 'good enough' that significant storage gains can be had by rewriting the data. //
Release timeline
According to the Ars Technica article by Jim Salter, this feature will probably become available in August 2022, so we need to have some patience.
RAID type - Supported RAID levels are:
- Mirror (two-way mirror - RAID1 / RAID10 equivalent);
- RAID-Z1 (single parity with variable stripe width);
- RAID-Z2 (double parity with variable stripe width);
- RAID-Z3 (triple parity with variable stripe width).
Drive capacity - we expect this number to be in gigabytes (powers of 10), in-line with the way disk capacity is marked by the manufacturers. This number will be converted to tebibytes (powers of 2). The results will be presented in both tebibytes (TiB) and terabytes (TB). Note: 1 TB = 1000 GB = 1000000000000 B and 1 TiB = 1024 GiB = 1099511627776 B
Single drive cost - monetary cost/price of a single drive; used to calculate the Total cost and the Cost per TiB. The parameter is optional and has no impact on capacity calculations.
Number of RAID groups - the number of top-level vdevs in the pool.
Number of drives per RAID group - the number of drives per vdev.
Slop space allocation - 1/32 of the capacity of the pool or at least 128 MiB, but never more than half the pool size. [1,2]
% free space limit - recommended free pool space required to ensure best performance. Usually around 20%. [4]
Outputs:
Total raw storage capacity - the sum of physical size of all drives in the pool.
Zpool storage capacity - calculated as the difference between the total raw storage capacity and the loss for drive partitioning and metaslab allocation, but without taking into account parity and padding. This number should be reasonably close to the SIZE value reported by the zpool list command.
Reservation for parity and padding - calculated as described by Matthew Ahrens in [3]. (Not applicable to Mirror vdevs.)
Zpool usable storage capacity - calculated as the difference between the zpool storage capacity and the reservation for parity and padding.
Slop space allocation - see the Inputs section above for description.
ZFS usable storage capacity - calculated as the difference between the zpool usable storage capacity and the slop space allocation value. This number should be reasonably close to the sum of the USED and AVAIL values reported by the zfs list command.
Simply put, a PCIe x4 card CAN fit in a PCIe x16 slot. The main reason this is possible lies within the fact that PCIe standard is cross-compatible as well as backward compatible.
Meaning, PCIe devices can work in different slots as long as they are provided the required PCIe lanes. They can also work across different generation provided that they get enough bandwidth.
So Can PCIe x4 Card Fit in x16 slot? Yes, it can. However, whether this is a good idea or not is something we explore further in this article.
The key point to note here is that the PCIe device and slot work at the speeds of the slowest component. So putting the x4 device in an x16 slot will not result in any performance boost.
But what did it look like on the inside of one of the C-17s taking off? Normally, it might take 150 fully geared-up members of the U.S. military. But today it may have set a record, according to Defense One. Many more vetted panicked Afghans piled onto the plane than the military had thought they would be taking, but they didn’t want to turn anyone away, given what was going on, so they just took as many as they could.
In Jeff's world, it's not 'you snooze, you lose', it's 'you lose, you sues'
Perl is a high-level programming language that’s easier to learn when compared with Python. Python is more robust, scalable, and stable when compared to Perl. While Perl code can be messy, featuring many paths to accomplish the same goal, Python is clean and streamlined. //
Ask someone who’s worked with both Perl and Python what the most noticeable difference between the two is, and they will most likely reply “readability.” Perl, although designed for beginners to master, is consistently reported to look unreadable, especially compared to the sleek interface brought by Python. Editing code can be difficult enough. Having to decipher the code you’re trying to edit at the same time? That may be pushing it.
When creating a pool, use disks with the same blocksize. A correlation between zfs "blocksize" and the disk blocksize is the ashift parameter (which cannot be modified after the pool creation). Either the value is set to "0" for auto blocksize recognition, or manually set to either ashift=12 for 4k blocksize disks or ashift=9 for 512b blocksize disks. Mixing disks with different blocksizes in the same pool can lead to caveats like performance leaks or inefficient space utilization.
You can interact more effectively with ZFS using the zdb tool. To check the vdev ashift used for the zpool, check the ZFS MOS configuration:
zdb -C <pool_name>
or
zdb -e <pool_name>
This memo documents the fundamental truths of networking for the Internet community. This memo does not specify a standard, except in the sense that all standards must implicitly follow the fundamental truths. //
- The Fundamental Truths
(1) It Has To Work.
(2) No matter how hard you push and no matter what the priority, you can't increase the speed of light.
(2a) (corollary). No matter how hard you try, you can't make a baby in much less than 9 months. Trying to speed this up might make it slower, but it won't make it happen any quicker.
(3) With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead.
(4) Some things in life can never be fully appreciated nor understood unless experienced firsthand. Some things in networking can never be fully understood by someone who neither builds commercial networking equipment nor runs an operational network.
(5) It is always possible to aglutenate multiple separate problems into a single complex interdependent solution. In most cases this is a bad idea.
(6) It is easier to move a problem around (for example, by moving the problem to a different part of the overall network architecture) than it is to solve it.
(6a) (corollary). It is always possible to add another level of indirection.
(7) It is always something
(7a) (corollary). Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two (you can't have all three).
(8) It is more complicated than you think.
(9) For all resources, whatever it is, you need more.
(9a) (corollary) Every networking problem always takes longer to solve than it seems like it should.
(10) One size never fits all.
(11) Every old idea will be proposed again with a different name and a different presentation, regardless of whether it works.
(11a) (corollary). See rule 6a.
(12) In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
1.1 MPlayer EDL
Classic MPlayer EDL files are supported. Kodi also supports an extended version of this file format that allows extra functionality as outlined below. The name of the file must be the same as the video file but with a file extension of .edl.
The file contains the start and end times of the edits along with the type of action associated with each edit. The file format is:
[start time] [end time] [action]
Start and end times can be defined as seconds, HH:MM:SS.sss, or frames. To specify frames precede the frame number with the # symbol. The original MPlayer EDL files only support seconds for start and end times.
The actions supported by this file format have also been extended by Kodi to include Scene Marker and Commercial Break actions since the original format only supports Cut and Mute. Supported actions are:
- 0 - Cut
- 1 - Mute
- 2 - Scene Marker (if start and end times are specified, the end time is used)
- 3 - Commercial Break