Posts by Shane Sturrock

CentOS 7 container or VM

Not sure if this will work but for all the stuff I had running on CentOS 7 I built a container with the same set of dependencies and that lets me run everything I built on CentOS 7 just fine on the new Rocky 8 hosts we moved to. RedHat lost all our respect with what they did and Rocky is working well for us. If a container doesn't work due to your driver needing a kernel stick CentOS 7 in a VM and work that way. Rocky 8 with KVM using the Cockpit Virtual Machines interface works really nicely too. Pass the hardware through to the VM, mount storage via NFS and you're off to the races.

Re: For the record...

Happy to reply to you because you’re being nice about it.

Yes, I have two keycards and carry one with me in my wallet but rarely use it. It is useful to have a card I can give to someone if they need to do work on my car such as when someone dented the door.

The phone itself opens the car up via Bluetooth. You don’t even have to open the app and this method wasn’t affected by the server outage because the phone is the key. I always have my phone with me so it’s by far the best way to open the car up. There’s also no on switch in the car. My LEAF has a fob but you still have to press the button on the door to unlock it and when you get in you have another button to ‘start’ the car. The Tesla doesn’t do this, you just walk up and the door is already unlocked. You get in and there’s no ‘on’ switch, it is already on. If you want to drive it there is an optional PIN that the owner can set which prevents someone driving off if they do get in with your phone or keycard as an added security measure.

The phone app has a lot of great features such as setting climate control, setting charge rate and turning charging on and off as well as summon where you can call the car out of a tight parking space. Had a few times where someone parked a big old car too close to mine so I couldn’t get in the door so I just summon the car out of the space and go on my way. With advanced summon I can even tell the car to come to me which I have done when it is raining heavily and I just call the car which pulls out of the space and drives up to where I am. The app is great but it relies on the Tesla API and that’s what failed.

The nice thing about the API (and I don’t get all the hate of a technology driven vehicle that runs Linux here on The Register but the media seems to have done a great job of pushing an awful lot of bull) is that you can access the car from other software. I have a Raspberry Pi hooked up to my wall connector which monitors solar production, Powerwall state of charge and house use and when there’s solar excess it puts that into the car rather than selling it to the grid. It can dial the amps up and down to soak up the excess and no more and when there’s no longer enough excess it can stop charging, then start again later when there is an excess again. I leave my car plugged in all the time so it is always ready to take this excess power and it covers most of my daily driving just from ‘free’ solar power. The API issue meant this stopped working and I couldn’t access the car via the app. Irritating but not the end of the world.

Re: Hmm

I have an IT supplied Windows laptop and my daily use workstation is a Mac. One of these things keeps getting stuffed up by IT pushing out updates requiring reboots at the most inconvenient times, plus forcing expiring passwords (which is just bad practice but do you think these IT gurus will listen?) versus the ssh keys I use for my Linux and Apple boxes. IT loves Windows because they can mess with it, I won’t let them near my Mac and it is fully updated and maintained plus an Apple machine is by far the best tool for working with Linux servers in a corporate environment because it has all that Office stuff Linux lacks. No, LibreOffice is good but won’t do everything so I’m stuck with Office365 and the web version of that is terrible so native apps that are better than the Windows versions (where are my menus Microsoft??? Oh, there they are on my Mac, phew) plus Apple hasn’t stolen CTRL-C for copy which clashes with every Linux/Unix system out there so working with Linux from a Mac is joyous and Windows isn’t.

VMs make BootCamp largely obsolete

For the majority of use cases, a Windows or Linux VM does all that is needed with having to reboot into it natively. Even a fair bit of GPU stuff runs pretty well in VMWare these days so unless you're gaming there's little reason to use BootCamp. I did back in the early days but once Parallels and VMWare got their act together it didn't make sense to do so any more. More to the point, I use the VMs less and less now too as there's so little software I need now that isn't native to the Mac anyway. I keep the VMs around for testing mostly just in case one of my clients has a specific problem on Windows or Linux. Nice to be able to boot up whatever OS version they're on the reproduce the problem and even OS X runs in VMWare happily on a Mac so I can have a single machine cover all my development and testing needs.

Re: IPhone only

Coconut Battery on a Mac will read the battery state of a connected iOS device. That's how I found out my 6+ battery is fine (98% capacity) and my wife's 6 wasn't (67% capacity and slow as hell so I replaced the battery.) When I plug in my old iPad mini 1st gen it shows 76% capacity. Generally I've been impressed with the batteries in my Apple gear although my rMacBook battery failed early and Apple replaced it out of warranty for free because it should have held 80% capacity after 1000 cycles and it was down to 70% after less than 300.

Re: I hope...

Why would Apple (a hardware company) let other hardware companies install the software they develop to sell their own hardware? Seriously, this comes up many times. Apple is not a software company. They sell integrated solutions with hardware and software designed to work together. Microsoft is trying to get into this game but the two companies come from very different backgrounds with Microsoft originally being all about software and Apple originally being all about hardware. Apple sells very little of their software, they just bundle it with their hardware so they're simply not going to be motivated to sell macOS to run on competing hardware. They tried it back in the 90's and it nearly killed them because there was the usual race to make cheaper and cheaper macOS compatibles. If you want a Mac, buy a Mac. Otherwise there's Windows or if you prefer to OS to be unrestricted Linux is very good these days.

Re: Statistically....

The name is fine as it is being used in the same way as it is with aircraft. A limited tool that can allow the pilot to pay attention to other things while the aircraft maintains altitude and airspeed. Autopilot on a Tesla maintains position in lane and speed while adding adaptive cruise control where it slows down in response to other traffic. It isn't self-driving and the term autopilot is simply being misunderstood by people to think it does mean self-driving. When Tesla can do self-driving, they'll call it autonomous driving or similar. That said, I don't care if they drop the name because I care about the feature as I drive long distances regularly and even something as simple as adaptive cruise control and lane control is a huge step up, but is also far more limited in scope compared with what the next generation includes which really will be self-driving capable.

Re: Interesting - Just hope the dates match up.

The LEAF is not slow by any stretch (take it from an ex-Alfa driver) but if you have the car in Eco mode (or potato mode as we call it because it feels like there's a potato under the throttle pedal stopping you from getting the full power of the car) then it will be sluggish. This mode is intended for wafting around gently in traffic and saves a fair bit of power, but take it out of Eco mode and the throttle response is instant compared with any petrol car I've ever driven and while 0-60 in 9ish seconds doesn't sound that quick, it is the fact that it does it without any gear changes that make the thing feel swift and it can easily surprise the usual go boys away from the lights. Not the fastest EV on the block but certainly not slow. Range is an issue for some but for us it is plenty for our use as we don't do cross country drives very often and the charging network is getting better all the time. I like to stop regularly for a top up of coffee and give the car a fast charge anyway.

That all said, yes, I put a deposit down for a model 3. I'll probably never buy it because I doubt I'll be able to afford it but I wanted to at least have the option when they do become available.

Re: Good point - but not really the point

Non-admins can install software on a Mac and that software will only get the rights of the user who installed it. This is due to how the packages are bundled because everything the application needs is in the app bundle and can be removed as easily as deleting that bundle once installed. Compared to the setup.exe and remove programs way on Windows, the Mac is light years ahead. Enforce signed packages and you're unlikely to get all that additional crap that the installers for Windows packages love to bundle by default. There are some packages (MacKeeper for instance) which I would define as malware and which are horrendously difficult by design to remove because it insists on having admin rights to install and then uses those rights to spread itself around the system like a hydra and when you try and remove it, it reinstalls the parts you removed. Getting that off my father-in-law's machine required booting the Mac into single user mode and then going through all the directories that it was spread through and removing them but it isn't common to have something as nasty as this and as I said, normal users are able to install packages without admin rights and use them just fine (each user has their own Applications folder) and those packages can't go making changes to the system. Unfortunately, implementing anything like this on Windows would result in the breaking of many older packages and MS lives and dies by backwards compatibility. My solution is to run Windows in a VM (snapshotted so I can roll back in case it screws up) and I can do whatever I need to and then close it back down. I don't run security software on it outside the basic MS supplied stuff because I don't use it much and I don't install much. Windows is the new classic environment, simply there for compatibility but never used for serious stuff.

Re: It's a sad end

DSNZ are in receivership too and are not honouring gift cards for instance. The whole show is coming to an end. As others have said, JB Hifi is a better bet for consumer goods and if I need bits of wire etc I can go to Jaycar which has all the stuff I used to get at DS.

Re: They aren't popular

I've seen a few Surface Pro tablets in the wild but they always had their keyboard attached and some executive was carefully typing while the thing teetered on their lap. Personally, I'll stick with my MacBook/iPad mini combo which gives me a real laptop which is incredibly small and light and a tablet that actually has apps. MS is stuck between two worlds with the surface and it really doesn't work well in either. It isn't a good laptop and as a tablet the lack of apps makes it pretty useless unless you want to poke at desktop apps with your finger. Frankly, with Splashtop Remote installed on my desktop PC I can access Windows apps pretty well from my iPad even when I'm on the road not that there's a great deal of software on Windows I ever have to use these days and since work it switching to Office 360 there's even less reason (I would have preferred Google Docs but some users couldn't get to grips with it unfortunately)

Re: What PC death spiral?

How many people bought a PC just to get on the internet and do some e-mail? Those people are usually perfectly well served by a tablet or even a phone. Better even because those devices are far cheaper and don't require the level of maintenance that a PC has and that's the attraction. Those of us who make our living programming for instance will still need a desktop but what about those people who just work in Office docs? This is why MS is pushing so hard in the cloud space with 365 and put Office on platforms other than Windows/Mac including iOS and Android. They need people to keep creating and editing documents in Office formats otherwise they really will become irrelevant. The fact that they're making phones which can be a desktop too just reinforces this but my personal opinion is I don't like the one device/OS fits all approach and have a phone, tablet, laptop and desktop and they're all for different needs despite there being significant crossover.

The money in the market is being divided beyond microsoft's grasp where they used to be the only game in town and the PC the only tool. Neither of those are the case now and that's why the PC is a shrinking market with lower turnover rates. There's still plenty of money to be made but MS doesn't control the software world any more. Windows isn't the only platform choice and that's better for everyone.

The Settings panel for instance, it takes up almost all of my screen and has huge amounts of white space. This is pretty much par for the course on Windows 10 where even a large monitor just gets abused with windows which look like they would be fine on a tablet or phone but on a large monitor they're horrible.

Complexity is the enemy of reliability. Having the ability to detach a large portion of your computer from the display so it can function as a tablet is asking for trouble. I have travelled all over and abused my machines a lot and I've never once had a Mac fail. Before I switched to Macs I would buy a new PC laptop every year just because they were trashed. Now, MS is charging real money for this so I would expect it to be better made than a run of the mill Toshiba Satellite Pro or something but even so the complication of the detachable section bothers me and I prefer my devices to be more focussed so I have a laptop and a tablet. One fails, I'm still able to use the other. Sticking everything into a single piece of kit is asking for trouble.

Re: Well that's just grand!

My 6 Plus uses about 20% battery a day and can go a full work week without a recharge. Sure, my old 4 would be lucky to have 20% left at the end of the day but the 6 Plus has excellent battery life and if the 6S can do the same with less then all the better.

Personally, I'm not going to upgrade because the 6S isn't much different from my current phone and worse, the price went up by $350 here not that I replace my phone each year anyway - I buy outright and run for four years.

Re: Beg to differ

The cost of entry into Mac OS X may be higher in the short term but it pays off in the longer term. I used to run nothing but Linux and every year I would trot down to PC World and hand over another chunk of cash to replace the smashed laptop from the previous year. Gradually I bumped the money up hoping to get a longer life, first starting with a Samsung for £600, then a Compaq at £1000 and finally a Toshiba for £1500. Like the previous machines that Toshiba was dead after 12 months of lugging it around the world. The keys would fly off when I typed, the case had a large crack down the back of the screen and the backlight was intermittent so I would have to bang it to get it on some times, and the corner of the body broke off early in the life. Plus it looked like hell because the silver finish on the palm rest rubbed off leaving two black hand prints. £1500. Think about that for a moment, and then look at the G4 iBook I replaced it with for £1000 in 2003 which still works to this day having served as my primary machine for three years and then another three with my wife and then until just a couple of years back as my iTunes server. I replaced it with a MacBook Pro in 2006 which I ran for 6 years. I fell off my motorcycle with that in my backpack and it got dented but still works.

When I look at the money I spent on regular PC laptops versus the Macs I've had over the years the cost of a Mac looks like a very good investment. I don't think Apple's pricing is disagreeable at all when I need a machine which can take a beating and still come back kicking. Sure, there are PCs that can take the same treatment but they also cost a lot and I don't get a fully supported UNIX like I do with a Mac. Where I work they stopped buying PCs and get everyone Macs now because they last longer. People can choose whatever OS they want but everyone gets a Mac. It just makes financial sense and we had the numbers to prove it which won the finance guy over.

Doesn't have to be 100%

It just needs to be better than the other guy. In the case of Android, there's a lot of potential targets due to the large number of old and vulnerable versions out there. Apple has been much better at supporting their OS, and the biggest danger comes from jailbreaking your phone. Don't do that and it is very difficult for malware to do very much of anything and as another poster pointed out, these anti-virus apps can't do anything inside iOS outside their own sandbox. That said, sure, there can be documents or e-mail on your phone which can have virus infected attachments but frankly, that stuff should be screened at the server end rather than wasting my phone's cycles doing it just to protect another platform. If your device or computer is vulnerable, you deal with protecting it.

Re: Looks f-ing awful

The dock in 10.10 looks very like the one in Tiger (10.4) and earlier, losing the stupid perspective glass layer that just made no sense. The Yosemite dock is one of the best features. I've tried the last build of Windows 10 and by comparison, even the comparatively flat Yosemite has lots of subtle graphical niceness and depths that MS appears determined to eradicate from their OS. The icons on the latest Mac OS destroy these horrible efforts on Win 10.

Re: Good hardware... but

I stopped buying all Samsung gear after they dropped support for my almost new Blu ray player just because they had released a new version. The last firmware update they put out for mine knocked the audio out of sync and after months of waiting for a fix which never came, I returned the player (it was 6 months old at this point) to the store for a Panasonic - the consumer guarantees act in NZ gives you the right to reject a device as unfit for purpose if the manufacturer has failed to rectify the issue and I had returned my original one which was replaced and as soon as I tried to play a new Blu ray it needed the update and bam, the audio was out of sync again.

Samsung may make good hardware, but their software is appalling and I won't be caught dead with their kit again.

Re: I remember

I remember when schools taught computing rather than just IT and office. Of course, that was back in the 80's when the BBC micro was king. My son just expressed an interest in learning to program so I pulled out the Sinclair Spectrum and let him get on with it. Sir Clive would be proud, but I'm saving the BEEB for once he's more familiar with the language. Single keyword entry was such a nice feature.

Anyway, he is happily unaware of IT and just wants to know how computers work and how to program them. Microsoft getting such a stranglehold on schools has been a terrible detriment to those kids who were really interested. Thank goodness for Linux.

Re: The truth hurts

The desktop is slipping down the charts for how people access the internet. When most people use phones and tablets to access their e-mail, websites and so on, where does that leave poor microsoft? King of an ever shrinking sphere with limited influence.

Re: Regrets

Wipe it and set it up as a new iPad. I did that with my iPad mini 1 (basically an iPad 2) because it was constantly stalling doing anything. After a fresh setup it is all smooth and a pleasure to use again. I've since wiped and re-setup all my other iOS devices right back to my iPad 1 which with a fresh install of 5.1.1 is like new, and even my old iPhone 4 appreciated a fresh install of iOS 7.1.2 and is responsive unlike after the upgrades.

Upgrading an iOS device works OK for a generation or two, but it is good to wipe and start fresh if only to get rid of all the crap apps you've installed over the years.