A quick post since this isn’t well covered: FreeBSD on EFI systems still will hard-code the name enumerated at install time (like da0p2). There is a better way than using glabel (which injects itself into the last block of the partition, which can be problematic). Instead, you can use GPT labels, which are cross-platform and well-known.
Month: December 2020
FreeBSD 12.1 on a QNAP TS-251
I had recently gotten such a NAS for dirt cheap (they didn’t know what they had!), and wanted to put it into useful service. The specifications include a Celeron J1800, and mine had been upgraded to 8 GB of RAM in its past life.
The OS on these things (QTS) is bizarre; basically a homelab in a box, but it’s sludge. The UI is some fake desktop thing, in the vein of eyeOS/YouOS of old. There are servers for things like LDAP, MariaDB (recommending you use phpMyAdmin…) and RADIUS, but I’m not sure who would even use them. There’s even an X server running, for some reason – with IR remote support! This thing is really a low-end SMB-for-SMB and Plex box through and through. I didn’t really like the OS though, so I decided to load something else on.
Continue readingARM64 programs built with Visual Studio crash with 0xC000007B
It’s because Visual Studio seems to copy an x86 version of the VC++ runtime into system32 on ARM64 systems. That’ll make it crash with a bad image format error. If you copy the ARM64 version of vcruntime140.dll (for me, found in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\VC\Redist\MSVC\14.28.29325\arm64\Microsoft.VC142.CRT) into the build directory, binaries will work.
Notes with the Parallels Beta on Apple Silicon
QEMU recently gained Apple Silicon hypervisor support. That was pretty damn cool for the first few weeks of M1 in people’s hands. Even without any optimizations, Windows 10 on M1 outclasses the Surface Pro X and even my Ryzen gaming desktop. Unfortunately, that didn’t include 3D acceleration (though virtio-gpu is now a thing for 2D).
Luckily, Parallels has ported their virtualization software to M1. It’s incredibly janky (and certainly deserving of a technical preview because of that!), but shows a lot of promise, complete with D3D11 support for games. Unfortunately, it requires some hacks to get running stable, but it’ll work fine after that.
Continue readingEconomics Has Become a Spiritual Thing: How David Byrne Predicted Open Source and Startups
Here’s a post off-the-cuff (and not what I usually write): True Stories is one of my favourite movies that never gets talked about. It’s got everything – Talking Heads songs done better than the album, observing the state of the American suburbs of the 1980’s, and bizarre monologues. What’s not to love?
The scene I want to talk about the most though, is the scene where Byrne has dinner with a local businessman (the kind revered for contributions to their local and small community) and his family. It’s one of the most amusing scenes, but also the most prophetic – particularly for people in the computer business.
Reprogrammable Machinery
Contains: Plural system getting split, some minor domination
Fixing Overwatch voice chat after upgrading to Fedora 33
After upgrading my system to Fedora 33, I realized voice chat in Overwatch didn’t work. The symptoms included:
- The microphone worked in other applications, and there was no permissions issues involved
- When joining a voice chat (like a group), the message saying that you’re in a voice chat would never appear, and you would never hear anyone else
- The microphone icon in the game was forced to mute
Switching the WINE audio system from Pulse to ALSA didn’t work. What did work was changing the system cryptography policies:
$ sudo update-crypto-policies --set LEGACYNo reboot is required. This is an awfully big hammer though – I’d like to know what exact ciphers or protocols that Overwatch needs that are disabled in the stock crypto policies.
Thoughts on The Man from Earth
I recently watched the much-lauded-on-the-Internet film The Man from Earth. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s about a Cro-Magnon man that’s immortal, has experienced history, and lives to tell about it to his unknowing friends. This movie gets praised a lot for its thought-provoking plot and effective use of its budget. While it gave me some ideas to meditate on, and I thought it was a great example of a “bottle episode”, I think it falls short in the claim of being one of the best intellectual movies. I wonder if a lot of its praise might have been due to coming at the right time at the right place. Spoilers (and unpolished opinions) below!
The Machine Kingdom
Everything is fuzzy. The world refuses to focus properly, what little we glean from what we see at first is nothing like the room we fell asleep in. It is white, and fairly bright. It wasn’t even a little bit off white like the room we had slept in.
We force ourselves to blink. Slowly it resolves. We are lying down in a large white room lit by recessed bulbs every ten feet or so(about 3 meters). We get up shakily and look around. There is a single door, well, at least a rectangle, our glasses don’t seem to be anywhere nearby.
We go closer to it and find a plaque, which we squint to read.