Yet another rant about crappy electronic designs.

Just now I was cleaning my desk and stumbled upon some old hard drive in a caddy that I still had laying around.. I figured, let's plug it in and see whether the drive still works. And to some extent, it does! Except that every few minutes it craps out on me. And after disassembling the caddy, I think that I know why.

Just as background information, hard drives work at 12V and generally require about 10W to spin their motor. Meanwhile USB operates at 5V. So a boost converter needs to be present in the controller to step up the voltage and power the drive.

Now what's a boost converter? It's an inductor, a capacitor, a transistor and a diode in a specific arrangement (if you're interested in the design, check out https://youtube.com/watch/...), along with feedback circuitry to stabilize output voltage. Now that transistor is important.. it switches at very high frequency, and its rise and fall times create heat. In the particular transistor used in that controller, it apparently causes the transistor to operate at 65-68°C. That's quite toasty IMO, and overheating may be why the controller is so unstable. But the Chinese manufacturers thought that it's just fine and okay to be sold without heatsink or some research into transistors with better rise and fall times.

So the hard drive craps out on me and yet again it's because of certified shitdesigns. MOTHERFUCKTURERS!!!!

Learning about logic gates and how memory works, had to make a "D-latch" which is a flip-flop where the leds can never be on simultaneously.

Pretty cool stuff imo
https://imgur.com/a/MlfLy

(gif too big, sorry for the external source)

Let's talk a bit about CA-based SSH and TOFU, because this is really why I hate the guts out of how SSH works by default (TOFU) and why I'm amazed that so few people even know about certificate-based SSH.

So for a while now I've been ogling CA-based SSH to solve the issues with key distribution and replacement. Because SSH does 2-way verification, this is relevant to both the host key (which changes on e.g. reinstallation) and user keys (ever replaced one? Yeah that's the problem).

So in my own network I've signed all my devices' host keys a few days ago (user keys will come later). And it works great! Except... Because I wanted to "do it right straight away" I signed only the ED25519 keys on each host, because IMO that's what all the keys should be using. My user keys use it, and among others the host keys use it too. But not by default, which brings me back to this error message.

If you look closely you'd find that the host key did not actually change. That host hasn't been replaced. What has been replaced however is the key this client got initially (i.e. TOFU at work) and the key it's being presented now. The key it's comparing against is ECDSA, which is one of the host key types you'd find in /etc/ssh. But RSA is the default for user keys so God knows why that one is being served... Anyway, the SSH servers apparently prefer signed keys, so what is being served now is an ED25519 key. And TOFU breaks and generates this atrocity of a warning.

This is peak TOFU at its worst really, and with the CA now replacing it I can't help but think that this is TOFU's last scream into the void, a climax of how terrible it is. Use CA's everyone, it's so much better than this default dumpster fire doing its thing.

PS: yes I know how to solve it. Remove .ssh/known_hosts and put the CA as a known host there instead. This is just to illustrate a point.

Also if you're interested in learning about CA-based SSH, check out https://ibug.io/blog/2019/... and https://dmuth.org/ssh-at-scale-cas-... - these really helped me out when I started deploying the CA-based authentication model.

To those able to join us in the Netherlands:

So you want some devrant goodies? We are having a (IMO) cool event soon.

"Collab - Digital Agency meets Cloud Provider"

We will go into various topics regarding; automation, CI, cloud, experiences and maybe a few things about clusters / kubernetes.

Everyone is happy to join us for 2 talks, beers (and maybe pizza!).

Last but not least we are able to give a way various goodies including stuff from DevRant ;)

You can order the free tickets at https://eventbrite.co.uk/e/...

I hope to see some devrant people there and make sure to hit me up if you will attend!

ps. if you have question, just ask away!

https://alldaydevops.com/register/

WHAT THE FUCK???? UX level: 9000

I do like dark themes in many places. But IMO this is just too much

And the font..? Is this registration for witch-hunt or satanists' party?

## Building my own router

Damn it! I've got to read more before making decisions :) I already do that, but I need yet *MORE* reading.

So I bought a miniPC which I'm planning to turn into a router. I wanted to install AX200 (wifi6) card in it but it could only see the bluetooth part of it (using btusb kernel module).

What I did NOT know about wifi cards and mPCIe slots

M2 is only a form-factor. It defines what the connector looks like. Over that connector multiple different protocols could be used. m2 (NGFF) WIFI cards are usually using PCIe proto. And USB.
https://delock.com/infothek/M.2/...

My so-desired AX200 uses both PCIe and USB protocols: USB for BT and PCIe for the actual wifi.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/.... The same spec applies to both: m2 and mPCIe card versions.

Now my mini PC has a mPCIe slot but the label on the board says "USB wifi". Which suggests that it only accepts the USB-related pins of mPCIe (as wiki says about mPCIe: "The host device supports both PCI Express and USB 2.0 connectivity, and each card may use either standard.").

So I guess that means I'm stuck with a useless mPCIe port :D shit..

Now my best bet is to wait for USB dongles supporting wifi6 and use usb AC adapters until then. Well... It's not an optimal outcome. But still IMO a better solution than an embedded router from the shelf!

(No, I'm not giving up and buying another used/new PC :) )

At last I can calm down and stop searching for magical pcie-to-usb adapters :) Phew... That's a relief!

!rant
Here's a peek at the current state of the service that I'm developing as a side project(plenty of time meanwhile searching for job).

It's a renting service, more automated and with more(and better, imo) search criterias. By automated I mean that I don't have to scroll through search results half backed with poor filters. You create a search, the search will iterate as soon as there is process power in the queue of the searches, and when it's done it will notify you(in different ways(communication channels) and different times, all setup by the user)

.NET Core 2 is the reference framework for the backend; HTML5,Razor, SCSS,JS for front-end.

What do you think about?
(https://thepra.github.io/previewRen... for more pictures)

!rant

For all of youse that ever wanted to try out Common Lisp and do not know where to start (but are interested in getting some knowledge of Common Lisp) I recommend two things:

As an introductory tutorial:
https://lisperati.com/casting.html/

And as your dev environment:
https://portacle.github.io/

Notice that the dev environment in question is Emacs, regardless of how you might feel about it as a text editor, i can recommend just going through the portacle help that gives you some basic starting points regarding editing. Learn about splitting buffers, evaluating the code you are typing in order for it to appear in the Common Lisp REPL (this one comes with an environment known as SLIME which is very popular in the Lisp world) as well as saving and editing your files.

Portacle is self contained inside of one single directory, so if you by any chance already have an Emacs environment then do not worry, Portacle will not touch any of that. I will admit that as far as I am concerned, Emacs will probably be the biggest hurdle for most people not used to it.
Can I use VS Code? Yes, yes you can, but I am not familiar with setting up a VSCode dev environment for Emacs, or any other environment hat comes close to the live environment that emacs provides for this?

Why the fuck should I try Common Lisp or any Lisp for that matter? You do not have to, I happen to like it a lot and have built applications at work with a different dialect of Lisp known as Clojure which runs in the JVM, do I recommend it? Yeah I do, I love functional programming, Clojure is pretty pure on that (not haskell level imo though, but I am not using Haskell for anything other than academic purposes) and with clojure you get the entire repertoire of Java libraries at your disposal. Moving to Clojure was cake coming from Common Lisp.

Why Common Lisp then if you used Clojure in prod? Mostly historical reasons, I want to just let people know that ANSI Common Lisp has a lot of good things going for it, I selected Clojure since I already knew what I needed from the JVM, and parallelism and concurrency are baked into Clojure, which was a priority. While I could have done the same thing in Common Lisp, I wanted to turn in a deliverable as quickly as possible rather than building the entire thing by myself which would have taken longer (had one week)

Am I getting something out of learning Common Lisp? Depends on you, I am not bringing about the whole "it opens your mind" deal with Lisp dialects as most other people do inside of the community, although I did experience new perspectives as to what programming and a programming language could do, and had fun doing it, maybe you will as well.

Does Lisp stands for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses or Los in stupid parentheses? Yes, also for Lost of Insidious Silly Parentheses and Lisp is Perfect, use paredit (comes with Portacle) also, Lisp stands for Lisp Is Perfect. None of that List Processing bs, any other definition will do.

Are there any other books? Yes, the famous online text Practical Common Lisp can be easily read online for free, I would recommend the Lisperati tutorial first to get a feel for it since PCL demands more tedious study. There is also Common Lisp a gentle introduction. If you want to go the Clojure route try Clojure for the brave and true.

What about Scheme and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? Too academic for my taste, and if in Common Lisp you have to do a lot of things on your own, Scheme is a whole other beast. Simple and beautiful really, but I go for practical in terms of Lisp, thus I prefer Common Lisp.

how did you start with Lisp?
I was stupid and thought I should start with it after a failed attempt at learning C++, then Java, and then Javascript when I started programming years ago. I was overwhelmed, but I continued. Then I moved to other things. But always kept Common Lisp close to heart. I am also heavy into A.I, Lisp has a history there and it is used in a lot of new and sort of unknown projects dealing with Knowledge Reasoning and representation. It is also Alien tech that contains many things that just seem super interesting to me such as treating code as data and data as code (back-quoting, macros etc)

I need some inspiration man......show me something? Sure, look for a game called Kandria in youtube, the creator, Shimera (Nicolas Hafner) is an absolute genius in the world of Lisp and a true inspiration. He coded the game in Common Lisp, he is also the person behind portacle. If that were not enough, he might very well also be Shirakumo, another prominent member of the Common Lisp Community.

Ok, you got me, what is the first thing in common lisp that I should try after I install the portacle environment? go to the repl and evaluate this:

(+ 0.1 0.2)

Watch in awe at what you get.

In the truest and original sense of the phrase (MIT based) "happy hacking!"

What are folks thoughts on this?

https://gitcoin.co/contributor/...

It’s basically an mturk model that pays out etherium to python coders.

Im skeptical about

1. Cryptocurrency payment for work, I don’t know enough about crypto to trust it’s use as payment?

2. Payment for open-source work: on one hand, i support workers getting paid for their work, BUT (imo) the coolest part of open source is that it’s one of the few environments where people work for the works sake, not for $$.

I had a bigger list but it left my brain as I was typing, so what do y’all think?

can you guys look at the design of my app?

https://play.google.com/apps/...

kinda ugly imo.

also please fuck around and find bugs.

thanks!

ps it's my first flutter app

This is for people looking to switch to Linux but on the fence due to game support.

If you have a steam account, you can go to http://steam.bravehost.com and our in your public profile ID, and it'll tell you all the games in your library that support Linux.

For games you want to buy in the future, check http://www.steamdb.info/linux. I know the steam store lists by Linux too, but IMO it is too slow and visually noisy to see what you want.

Deus Ex Mankind Divided surprisingly works on Linux from what I see and so do other games I actually play, so I will likely take the plunge sooner than I thought!