fratermus

between 2AM and 6AM internet would start dropping packets like crazy

about 20 years ago I was remotely troubleshooting a microwave connectivity problem that occurred at a clients workplace about 10pm each night. Lasted about an hour. There was no one at work then but data transfers between their server and the mothership would fail.

One night the client went to the site at night to check an alarm and noticed there was a bobtail truck parked next to the building. The aero deflector attachment on its roof blocked line-of-sight with the tower, causing the problem. He asked the driver to nap at some other location in the parking lot and the problem went away.

I feel crazy for thinking it is correlated to do bad weather, as if that should somehow affect my indoor WiFi quality…

well, if it’s raining more people might stay indoors on their wifi, exacerbating any channel interference problems

ARM is perfect for this, but does Linux play nice with it?

to paraphrase the saying, “Millions of Raspberry Pi can’t be wrong”

When you do aliased commands, can they take arguments? Like to download a playlist with yt-dlp, could i do download-playlist [URL]?

They don’t take arguments in the sense that functions do but in bash at least they are passed on as part of the expanded string. Pasted from bash:

alias argtest='echo arg is'  
argtest foo  
arg is foo  

So yes you could alias your yt-dlp commands and invoke the alias with the URL.

If you have been using Linux for +10 years, what are you using now?

I distro-hopped every few years until about 2015. Since then I’ve been trending toward Debian for everything.

That’s the one I use, too. Works fine.

I’m honestly regularly shocked at how many people use Chrome on Linux.

I generally prefer to run firefox (ESR) on my debian machines. But I regularly open a couple dozen tabs during a research session and sometimes FF eats eat all my RAM (16GB), then swap, then locks up the machine. If I catch the degradation before lockup sometimes I can kill enough tabs to recover. I had a few of those lockups last month before I got tired of it.

So for now I’ve swapped back to chromium to get around that problem. Same behavior on my part, ~same extensions, but chromium’s RAM usage stays sane.

for the first time someone has contributed to the code. This may seem trivial, but it is important to me

I’d definitely feel good about that!

I just don’t make a habit of visiting any particular website to read it. That’s what the threadiverse is for.

Alternatively: that’s what RSS is for.

I’m a noob and I prefer… Debian?

The beauty of linux is you get to run whatever you prefer. Have fun and be productive in the way you like. :-)

In the past I’ve mainly used XFCE or openbox because of my old hardware. A couple years ago I picked a Debian+MATE image to install on a fresh box and have been using it by default since then.

None of that “touchscreen UI uber alles” BS.

No matter what plugin you find that supposedly will do the job, in my experience it is always a PITA that ends up involving a lot of programming.

I had a good experience with jekyll’s wordpress->jekyll import tool. But see below.

I would go for a database-less static site generator like Hugo

Graybeard here, so it’s probably just braindamage specific to me, but I’ve found ruby dependency setup and troubleshooting to be extremely frustrating. Hard for me to wrap my head around.

When jekyll is actually dead (right now it is “only mostly dead”) I’ll change to something that does not require ruby (eleventy?) or just go back to the nineties and do something barebones with gtml or whatever. Already playing with the latter.

If the ads for a feed are in a predictable position (like first two minutes, last minute, whatever) one can use sox or similar to trim the file at that point to effectively remove the ads.

But like some of the other commenters here, when the podcast is available by patreon I use that feed and avoid the whole problem.

I own and use a Microsoft Zune HD

Seems like a good enough reason to me!

I updated both my desktop and a headless server without issue.