leisesprecher

joined 3 months ago
 

I'm trying to get an old Windows game running for a friend.

It seems to be a 16bit macromedia app and I kind of got it running in a Win 98 VM using Virtualbox. DOSBox seems to get confused by it being a Windows app.

Thing is, the friend is very much not good with tech and I want to set everything up for him to "just work". Installing VBox might be a bit too much.

Apparently, you can install Windows inside DOSBox, but is that really stable and usable for layman? Are there any other approaches?

[–] [email protected] 50 points 3 days ago

I use Karch, btw.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago (4 children)

We could start by not requiring new chips every few years.

For 90% of the users, there hasn't been any actual gain within the last 5-10 years. Older computers work perfectly fine, but artificial slow downs and bad software cause laptops to feel sluggish for most users.

Phones haven't really advanced either. But apps and OSes are too bloated, hardware impossible to repair, so a new phone it is.

Every device nowadays needs wifi and AI for some reason, so of course a new dishwasher has more computing power than an early Cray, even though nothing of that is ever used.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

Usually ~/devel/

On my work laptop I have separate subdirs for each project and basically try to mirror the Gitlab group/project structure because some fucktards like to split every project into 20 repos.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 days ago

I'm 90% sure these deals are a way to funnel money into defense contractors without having a suspicious paper trail.

Overcharge a bit here and there, and by sheer volume you get a nice shadow budget to build and operate things that aren't even supposed to exist.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Ansible is actually pretty nice, if you get the hang of it. Not perfect, but better than triple tunnel ssh.

You could simply automate step by step, each time you change something, you add that to the playbook and over time you should end up with a good setup.

Flakey dev setups are productivity killers.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (3 children)

The real question is why you're torturing yourself by manually fixing that stuff? Don't you terraform your Ansibles?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

These schemes never work forever. But the big investors usually know when to jump ship.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Not for the shareholders. And that's exactly the problem.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Admittedly, I only ever entered an operating room under anesthesia, but could you just, you know, put the displays somewhere else?

This seems like one of those informercial "problems".

 

I have a small homelab running a few services, some written by myself for small tasks - so the load is basically just me a few times a day.

Now, I'm a Java developer during the day, so I'm relatively productive with it and used some of these apps as learning opportunities (balls to my own wall overengineering to try out a new framework or something).

Problem is, each app uses something like 200mb of memory while doing next to nothing. That seems excessive. Native images dropped that to ~70mb, but that needs a bunch of resources to build.

So my question is, what is you go-to for such cases?

My current candidates are Python/FastAPI, Rust and Elixir, but I'm open for anything at this point - even if it's just for learning new languages.

 

I asked a while ago, how to build an automatic light switch and finally got around to actually building it.

My board is an ESP8266 mini D, and ignoring all the sensor parts, my problem right now is powering the actual light.

It's just a small LED array and I connected it directly to the 5V and GND pins (controlled via a transistor).

Measuring from the wall (so including the PSU), this whole setup pulls about 3W (so far expected), however, one small component close to the USB connector gets uncomfortably warm, and I'm not sure, whether that's ok.

The hot component is one of the two small thingies circled in the picture. I thought the 5V get pulled directly from the USB plug, so I'm not sure, why there is any circuitry involved.

 

I'm trying to build a very simple, stupid light switch for my grow light. Essentially, I want to turn on the light, if it gets too dark outside, so that my plants can survive the northern winter.

Since I'm a software guy, my first thought was an ESP32, but that seems excessive.

My current approach would be something like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/313561010352 In conjunction with a relay, both powered by a USB-PSU.

If the light level is low enough, the logic DO pin should send a signal and that should be enough to trigger a small relay, so that the relay then closes the circuit to switch on the lights.

Is that idea completely stupid? With electronics, I'm usually missing something very obvious.

The lights themselves are already just usb powered and only draw 5W, so that shouldn't be problem.

What I'm concerned with is the actual switching. Is the logic signal "strong" enough to activate a relay? Would simple transistor maybe sufficient?

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