Before I begin, I’ll make a note that I actually do like and use ThinkPads. However, I hate how technologists (well, the ThinkPad enthusiast community, often seen on thinkpads.com, /g/, or /r/thinkpad) have constantly misunderstood them, be it celebrating workarounds for clumsy flaws, or are completely ignorant of their history. Nowadays, I’ve switched to a MacBook Air (since I want a compact laptop that was lightweight and got good battery life… and I am a sucker for an actually good RISC CPU), but I often buy ThinkPads as a “known quantity” for whatever age of machine I need. That is, I know exactly what I’m getting into, and they’re widely compatible with whatever you throw at them. However, I often recommend other lines of machine, be it something radically different like a MacBook or Surface, or something that’s actually more like what a ThinkPad enthusiast’s platonic ideal of a ThinkPad is, like a Latitude or Let’s Note. This post sums up my opinions why.
Continue readingAuthor: cb
Redirecting privileged ports to unprivileged ports on the same system with pf on FreeBSD
I needed to set up a daemon for a service that’s in the low 1024 ports reserved for root on FreeBSD. However, I didn’t want to run the service as root. Instead, I set up pf (the firewall in BSDs) to simply redirect the port.
Continue readingFixing VisualEditor not being able to contact RESTBase server
If you set up a new wiki with MediaWiki 1.35 (since it adds the PHP-based Parsoid server), and you get this error trying to load VisualEditor:
Error contacting the Parsoid/RESTBase server: (curl error: 28) Timeout was reachedIt’s because the server is trying to contact itself with the server name (hostname/IP). If it’s a DNS name, then make sure the name it uses resolves to itself; a quick fix was to add it to the hosts file.
Embeding application manifests into Windows executables as a resource
If your Win32 application needs to declare that is supports something before it even executes, this is where a manifest file comes in. While you can ship one with your application (in the form of appname.exe.manifest), it’s more fool-proof to just embed it into your application. You can do so with
RISC-V isn’t as interesting as you think
I had wrote this before the Unleashed was revealed, so some of the bits on economics have changed. As of writing this, I still stand by my other beliefs. One of the most hyped things in hardware design is RISC-V, the open ISA available without license fees. Many organizations including Western Digital have pledged support for RISC-V, and the open source community has a lot of faith in it, and with Nvidia’s recent purchase of Arm, people are concerned. However, I feel these hopes are somewhat misleading, as RISC-V’s openness is less at the benefit of the user and more for CPU vendors.
Brief thoughts on Princess Mononoke
Princess Mononoke has been talked about a lot elsewhere – why wouldn’t it be? It’s a great movie that everyone should watch. What I want to talk about briefly is the motivation for characters, and how they put many “prestige TV” dramas to shame in terms of complexity. Spoilers below the fold!
Continue readingUsing EFI labels on FreeBSD
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.
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.
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