[X] My Assistant

Wow they are selling an updated PS4 with SSD for more than the RRP of the PS5 because nobody can get PS5s...
Seems legit.

You'd think people would stop buying stuff at that point, but noooo. Gotta consoom.
[i.imgur.com] (IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/EsEc2nrl.png)

Yeah though, I don't know if I've actually physically seen a PS5 yet.

----
Thought: I have an Intersil/Conexant PRISM-2 802.11b PCMCIA (not cardbus) card here.
Supposedly, it should work with either the hostap_cs or the orinoco_cs drivers, but I cannot make the damn thing load the hostap_cs driver.

I need to load the hostap_cs driver in order to flash a new firmware to it. Linux will automatically upload a newer firmware into RAM, which is needed for WPA, but the BSD's driver won't do that and I have no working Windows installs to flash it from on machines with PCMCIA/CardBus slots.

Does anyone remember using these cards ~15 years ago who can help me figure out how to force it to use the hostap driver?

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 14 2021, 23:31

You'd think people would stop buying stuff at that point, but noooo. Gotta consoom.

I buy too much useless crap. Its still my goal to get rid of half of my current stuff. I still have wrapped PS3 games, so I didn't even bother with a PS4.

Yeah though, I don't know if I've actually physically seen a PS5 yet.

I had a friend who got one but wanted the Xbox, so he went on the official playstation and playstation community pages to troll by saying he was selling it for 5k. He ended up swapping with another friend for the xbox. He got loads of people that fell for the bait.

In my country they also messed up by sending out the wrong version of the PS5s to people. So loads of people got a free upgrade the disk version.

Does anyone remember using these cards ~15 years ago who can help me figure out how to force it to use the hostap driver?

I haven't used them in decades. They were problematic back then.

I choose 4 GB Ram +1 TB SSD rather than 8 GB Ram + 512 GB SSD

I choose 4 GB Ram +1 TB SSD rather than 8 GB Ram + 512 GB SSD

In what? A smart phone?

I haven't used them in decades. They were problematic back then.

Mine works great under linux with the other driver, even with WPA(WPA1, TKIP), because the linux driver will load a newer firmware into the card's onboard RAM (doesn't flash the nonvolatile storage). Works fine on OpenBSD as well, but with the caveat that it doesn't load a new firmware on the card and the firmware in flash on the card itself is too old to support WPA. So it's WEP or unsecured only - and it can see WPA networks but won't connect to them.
I don't really feel like diving into kernel programming at the moment to try to get the cards loading firmware to RAM under OpenBSD, even if the code is supposedly higher quality than the linux kernel stuff. I also know fuck-all about the card hardware.

I just need to find a way to flash the damn thing, I think. And also find the actual file to flash to it.

Normally, I'd use this newer Atheros 802.11n card I originally got for my powerbook, since this thinkpad "allegedly" supports Cardbus, but it has weird DMA errors all over the place when I try to use it so it dies after a few minutes (although at first it connects alright). That card also overheats in this 166MHz pentium laptop (while running at a reasonable temperature on a 1.33GHz PowerBook G4).

If I could figure out what stuff I need, I'd be happy to try flashing it from DOS as well.

In what? A smart phone?

4gb ram in a PC is fine.
It's not a lot, these days - but it's fine.

Currently waiting to see if OpenBSD will actually be able to relink its kernel on a Pentium MMX with 32MB of RAM; so far it's gone about 200MiB into swap.

That poor HDD.

Context: openbsd kernel updates get their various objects randomly shuffled on each build so that ideally no two people have kernels with identical address spaces.
I only figured out how to disable that once linking was already underway, so now I want to see if it will actually manage to do it.

Of course, compiling an almost 'hello world' size program in Clang on an MMX took fucking forever, so maybe it'll be done by next week.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 15 2021, 01:50

4gb ram in a PC is fine.
It's not a lot, these days - but it's fine.

Maybe, its quite low. Maybe for media PC. Prices have come down again.

Looking at a few PC stores, there are barely any 8gig kits for sale.

New egg has some 4gb kits but they are like DDR2 mostly.

Maybe, its quite low. Maybe for media PC. Prices have come down again.

In 2016 I was still using 2GB of RAM. I still run machines with 2GB RAM. I never really felt that limit.
It seems you're assuming everyone's just playing games on their computers. For modern games, yeah, 4GB is pretty tiny. But for everything else - except photoshop images with lots of layers - it's honestly more than needed (I do like having 8GB though).

I run out of ram at work on comps with 4gb of ram. 8gb seems okay.

Yeah, I lean towards 8GB being minimum, and 16GB being prudent for something used a lot for daily tasks. My two boxes are at 32GB and 64GB right now. I've never maxed out either, but used ~48GB for a game once before the game finally crashed.

I need to put a new screen protector on my phone, I see some cracks on the edge that are starting to spread.

I run out of ram at work on comps with 4gb of ram. 8gb seems okay.

If your work is using Win10, that's probably part of your problem.

I don't even exhaust 2GB of memory, usually.

New day, new thought.

I'm glad I discovered hwdb-based keyboard remapping. Makes it much simpler to get keyboards mapped the same in both TTY's and X.

It's too bad I can't find a way to make an hwdb entry that will apply to all generic USB keyboards, though.

/etc/udev/hwdb.d/97-unicomp.hwdb:

CODE

# Unicomp "Mini M" (tenkeyless) key remapping

# to reload without reboot:
# udevadm hwdb --update
# (or 'systemd-hwdb update' if you are lame)
# udevadm control --reload-rules
# udevadm trigger

# find match names (actually modaliases) with something like
# find /sys -name *modalias | xargs grep -i [vendor_id]
# ...where vendor_id is some device vendor ID; Unicomp's is 17f6.

# find key id's with 'evtest' (run as root).
# find names for possible keys to assign in
# include/linux/input-event-codes.h

# * Swap right alt and right super/meta key (windows key), since Unicomp
#     decided to mess it up again for the sake of saving some money.
#     note that on my board one of those key barrels is covered by a long
#     spacebar (old-style).
# * Map windows 'menu key' to compose key.
# * Map caps lock to left ctrl.
# * Map left super/meta (win) key to caps lock.

evdev:input:b0003v17F6p1862*
  KEYBOARD_KEY_700e6=rightmeta
  KEYBOARD_KEY_700e7=rightalt
  KEYBOARD_KEY_70065=compose
  KEYBOARD_KEY_70039=leftctrl
  KEYBOARD_KEY_700e3=capslock

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 17 2021, 11:26

New day, new thought.

I'm glad I discovered hwdb-based keyboard remapping. Makes it much simpler to get keyboards mapped the same in both TTY's and X.

It's too bad I can't find a way to make an hwdb entry that will apply to all generic USB keyboards, though.

since this uses the device directly, would it work with something that merges uinput devices(/dev/input/eventwhatever)? I wrote some horrible thing ages ago that does that and redirects all events to a single new device, to avoid x11 warez tripping over there being multiple keyboards in use

This post has been edited by cate_chan: Dec 17 2021, 20:38

New thought: The Roland MT-32 is a bitch to make music on, but it's also fun in a way.

since this uses the device directly, would it work with something that merges uinput devices(/dev/input/eventwhatever)? I wrote some horrible thing ages ago that does that and redirects all events to a single new device, to avoid x11 warez tripping over there being multiple keyboards in use

If it is perceived as an input device and it has a "modalias", I'd think so, yeah.

I should do something like that for programs that throw a fit if there are multiple joysticks attached to my computer.

--
So some genius just decided that 'which' wasn't an essential program:
[lwn.net] https://lwn.net/Articles/874049/
…As a result of this stupidity, I have just made some minor tweaks to [cvsweb.openbsd.org] OpenBSD which(1) so I can build and run it on my debian boxen.
which.c.patch:
[pastebin.com] https://pastebin.com/raw/ZA21sW9R
Makefile:

CODE

which: which.c
    $(CC) -o $@ $^ $(CFLAGS) $(LDFLAGS)

Make sure that second line is using a tab character, not sure how the forums will mangle it.

which(1) may not be a posix utility, but it's in literally everything (even AIX and HP-UX). It was also in System V release 4 (SYSVR4), which is the granddaddy of pretty much all commercial Unix systems. Bill Joy (the Sun Microsystems Bill Joy) originally wrote it for 3BSD, which was released in 1979. It's got over forty years of history.

The official response to "how does 'command -v' replicate the 'which -a' usecase?" from the maintainer seems to be "haha, it doesn't, fuck you; install programs that aren't in any official debian packages instead."
[bugs.debian.org] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=993700

Also not mentioned was how command -v fucking breaks on shell aliases, so actually using it to find a path to a program doesn't necessarily work:

CODE

fakeuser@fakehost:fakepath$ which nano
/usr/bin/nano
fakeuser@fakehost:fakepath$ command -v nano
alias nano='nano -w -T 2'

Also since I had tweaks to my /etc/X11/Xsession file, and they killed 'tempfile,' I would have broken X had I not manually merged the config file changes that were released as fallout from this stupidity.

BTW, mktemp(1) as a command isn't POSIX either, but he seems happy to ignore that. 'mktemp' only exists in POSIX as a C function.

And I forget if I said or not, but Jörg Schilling ("Schily"), the 'cdrtools' maintainer and maintainer of a very nice rigorously POSIX shell called 'pbosh', died in October. Damn.

I really liked his tools when I found them; he has his own 'make' implementation that looks to be based on the Solaris one, as well as a bunch of other nice utilities.
pbosh was beaten for speed only by ksh93, in my experience. Even dash couldn't beat it. It's a shame both of those have had their development falter (with Schily dead and David Korn apparently retired - laid off by AT&T Labs in 2013, retired from Google in 2018).

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 18 2021, 11:44

I laugh at everyone who uses log4j and has to deal with the security fallout now, mainly because I dislike Java but also because log4j has only ever annoyed me.

Another example of why Joerg Schilling was such a big deal:

[sourceforge.net] https://sourceforge.net/projects/schillix/files/

An opensolaris distro. Actually, the first opensolaris distro.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Dec 19 2021, 08:05

I laugh at everyone who uses log4j and has to deal with the security fallout now, mainly because I dislike Java but also because log4j has only ever annoyed me.

just got through most of it at work last week, I think the most annoying one is it in some of the dell 'supportassist' and other garbage that comes preinstalled on laptops, and now has to be taken off everyones machine. but also some cisco software, and parts of vmware.
luckily vmware tools is fine or it would've been far more annoying (majority of machines stuck in 'do not update or everything will break' levels of support)

my condolences to any fellow people that have IT as part of their responsability in less fortunate company setups

just got through most of it at work last week

I should clarify then, I mean that I laugh at developers that used log4j.

90s tech support jobs were the best.

Hooking up people's CRT monitors and installing basic software at work was considered technical.

Haven't seen token ring and star networks since though. It was funny when you talked about network topology and their eyes would glaze over and they would throw money at you.

90s tech support jobs were the best.

Hooking up people's CRT monitors and installing basic software at work was considered technical.

Haven't seen token ring and star networks since though. It was funny when you talked about network topology and their eyes would glaze over and they would throw money at you.

I have a token ring IBM card somewhere around here.

This took far too long to do.
(IMG:[i.postimg.cc] https://i.postimg.cc/QhJXNxSP/20211219-170353.jpg)

This took far too long to do.

You made it look pretty, though.

Are those XLR's or DIN's on the left?