Onno (VK6FLAB)

Anything and everything Amateur Radio and beyond. Heavily into Open Source and SDR, working on a multi band monitor and transmitter.

#geek #nerd #hamradio VK6FLAB #podcaster #australia #ITProfessional #voiceover #opentowork

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • As a fully functional adult, I’ve been eyeing off light up shoes for years. So far, all I’ve seen is gimmick shoes you wouldn’t wear for more than an hour, so I make do with fluorescent shoelaces instead.

    This seems like fun, though I’m not sure if I’d be game to walk up a set of stairs on them, perhaps I’m not keen on breaking something when I’d invariably trip and fall.








  • The commands man and apropos are your friends to get you started.

    Learning how to use specific tools like grep, sed and awk is a case of getting started by using them. Most of the subsequent learning process will focus around how to create regular expressions (regex), for which there’s also a manpage.

    The “typical example” for a dd command is like saying, “here’s a great way to shoot yourself in the foot”. A better way is to understand that most of these tools follow the UNIX philosophy:

    1. Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new “features”.
    2. Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don’t clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don’t insist on interactive input.
    3. Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don’t hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.
    4. Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you’ve finished using them.

    Once you “grok” that, you’ll be in a much better place.








  • It essentially depends on what level of support you require.

    End Of Life is a concept, not generally a fixed point in time … even though the likes of Microsoft are attempting to rewrite history and making everyone move off Windows 10 by a specific date.

    And just like in that situation, you have options.

    You can consider your relationship with Microsoft at an end and install a different OS, or you can continue the relationship and buy new hardware even though there’s absolutely nothing wrong with what you currently have.

    The same is true for a router.

    The decision around EOL is about what happens next.

    Do you want to yell at the supplier if it breaks, or will you realise that yelling only happens if you spend money on lawyers, and in the meantime you can move on with your life and decide on an alternative path.

    My car is worth $700 or so, even though I bought it new 15 years ago. Is it at the end of its life? It’s still getting me from here to there and back.



  • From a security perspective I’d be surprised if number of mentions as a metric has any bearing whatsoever on the impact or urgency of a CVE.

    If you’re using mentions as a proxy for affected user base, I’d hazard an opinion that there are better ways of determining the impact footprint of a CVE.

    Finally, a vulnerability rating or priority is determined and published with each CVE, so I’d expect that this would take into account some of those considerations.

    That said, a vendor ranking seems like something that I’ve not seen before, mind you, the notion that Microsoft didn’t make it into the list is gobsmacking considering that patch Tuesday addressed 81 flaws and 2 zero-days in September.

    In my opinion, he idea seems useful, but the execution needs some work.