I forget where I originally found this and Google on my phone was unhelpful.

My favorite annoying trick is x -=- 1. It looks like it shouldn’t work because that’s not precisely a valid operator, but it functions as an increment equivalent to x += 1

It works because -= still functions are “subtract and assign”, but the second minus applies to the 1 making it -1.

Somewhat halfway between practical use and just messing around for fun.

Several years ago I built a GPS NTP clock out of an RPi3 and an Adafruit GPS hat. Once I had the PPS driver installed, it’s precision/drift got pretty good. According to its own self measurements, I got pretty dang close to NIST stratum 1 NTP servers, but those are hundreds of miles away so that measurement isn’t super precise. It’s still running today, clocking nearly 24/7 operation since (checks shopping history) 2017, though I replaced the breadboard and mini module with a full sized hat with the same chipset in 2021.

Recently I acquired a proper hardware GPS clock and I stacked the two against each other and found out my RPi did not half bad and can get between 0.5-10ms of the professionals (literally I’m pretty sure I’d need more precise measuring equipment to tell the difference between the two at this point than a regular computer). Now my homelab has fully redundant internet-disconneted stratum 1 time. Been half considering if I could write a GPSD driver for it as a joke, but I know upstream won’t accept it because it doesn’t offer SOOO many features they’d need.

As for what else - I just kind of keep an eye out for projects related to GPS and high precision time, like the open source atomic PCI card that was released a few years ago. Finding out what people are doing to get better and better time is just downright interesting.

Outside of the time world, it’s just fun to see what projects people come up with relating to maps and navigation. Stretch goal once I have enough server horsepower is to make a render-capable Open Street Map server with my home region loaded to start with, but eventually I’d like to get it to the point where I can load and process world.osm. That… Requires a LOT of CPU and SSD space.

Heyo, just wanted to say I appreciate the edit.

Some people see three extra clicks (which is what it took on mobile to get the real description out of GitHub) as a limiter. I actually clicked because I had guessed that with a name like “navidrome” it was something GNSS related, was surprised to see it was about music.

I’ve been self hosting for going on 7-8y, following various communities on reddit and Lemmy and I learn about new softwares every day. I’ll have to toss this one on my investigation queue.

I don’t think I’ve seen that movie, so that explains why I missed the joke

I’m still lost… I’ve been following the XZ thing since it broke, so I get the context, but I’m not sure how the meme at the bottom is connected?

Isn’t the point of PGP/GPG that there’s no central database?

Much easier to scroll through a HTML layout formatted to my phones font than clicking on several images in sequence

It being a laptop will almost undoubtedly make that endeavour more challenging. Off hand, I can’t think of a single non -proprietary internal connector from a major vendor that doesn’t already have a protocol established.

If there’s spare I/O, it’s most likely either not hooked up, was only used as a debug header, or fused off as a feature not available on that model. If it is indeed connected to something, you’d need to find documentation on that exact model of laptop since boards can sometimes vary even within the same series (such as whether a GPU is available). Chances are, whatever your find will need a specific vendor library that may or may not work on your version of the OS.

Unlike RPi and similar devices, you won’t find many consumer x86 devices that leave GPIO available and documented.

Off-hand, I think almost every LCD display I’ve encountered on x86 is plugged in to either a serial (for character displays) or higher-level protocol (for more complex displays)

Possibly important detail - what type of computer do you propose running this? Most methods that are common if you search the internet or ask here will likely apply to Raspberry Pi and it’s clones, but if you have something more esoteric it might not work.

Man this was a depressing post to read.

https://tenor.com/7cqP.gif

I get the statement you’re trying to make here - serving the name of a platform you dislike with the same reverence as he-who-must-not-be-named in Harry Potter (Voldemort) - but all you’ve done is obfuscate the search engine. Now if someone is skimming for information on the platform via search, you’ve hidden your comments and post from someone who might find your perspective useful. No one is going to try 15 ways of spelling a platform name (except maybe trying stackoverflow with and without spaces). Internet users are pretty lazy.

Why are you redacting platform names like it’s profanity? My brain keeps trying to read it as markdown…

I’ve only had issues with embedded serial consoles and things where you have to swap ctrl-h/? for backspace. But usually it’s solvable with key mapping.

Also you mention vi/m but insert is red? That’s the toggle switch between insert and replace mode (i vs shift-R)

I really only clicked on this to see if there were one you found interesting. Plenty of old interesting protocols and lots that probably can’t survive in a NAT/PAT environment like we have today, reducing us to a handful of IP protocol numbers that we actually use day to day. If you exclude routing equipment, that number is even less.

There’s just no prompt here. I for one love rabbit holes but where to even start here?

I’ve got one to add that should be used more often than it is.

Wouldn’t that require running the service as an admin?

This elicited a genuine laugh from me.

Excellent work, OP. I can feel the scope creep in my bones.

Which, now given the ability to inject arbitrary code, you could conceivably now write code to list every variable it had access to.

I tend towards always putting heavy cantilever stuff on 4-post rails even if they’re generic rails. Lighter 2-post stuff sags enough as it is.

So that’s the nifty thing about Unix is that stuff like this works- when you say “locked up”, I’m assuming you refer to logging in to a graphical environment, like Gnome, KDE, XFCE, etc. To an extent, this can even apply to some heavy server processes: just replace most of the references to graphical with application access.

Even lightweight graphical environments can take a decent amount of muscle to run, or else they lag. Plus even at a low level, they have to constantly redraw the cursor as you move it around the screen.

SSH and plain terminals (Ctrl-Alt-F#, what number is which varies by distro) take almost no resources to run: SSH/Getty (which are already running), a quick process call to the password system, then a shell like bash or zsh. A singular GUI application may take more standing RAM at idle than this entire stack. Also, if you’re out of disk space, the graphical stack may not be able to alive

So when you’re limited on resources, be it either by low spec system or a resource exhaustion issue, it takes almost no overhead to have an extra shell running. So it can squeeze into a tiny corner of what’s leftover on your resource-starved computer.

Additionally, from a user experience perspective, if you press a key and it takes a beat to show up, it doesn’t feel as bad as if it had taken the same beat for your cursor redraw to occur (which also burns extra CPU cycles you may not be able to spare)