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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • That still doesn’t look like a very heavy workload. My older box was older then your 6700k and was fine running such stuff.

    Perhaps your limit isn’t the CPU. What storage and ram setup do you have, did you look at that?

    I’ll be honest and say that when I replaced my old crap with 7900x I did feel improvements on occasion, mostly when I really burden the pc. Plus I think having 64 gigs of ram helps there, at my old system I hit the limits sometimes. Not often, but sometimes. Now my new box just laughs at anything I try to do to it.






  • XDG specifies the capital names, but to be nitpickingly technically precise, linux systems don’t do this. It mostly is done by the distribution maintainers, and the XDG specs. A base system does not usually have a notion of anything beyond your $HOME.

    Try adding a user: sudo adduser basicuser. If you ls -al ~basicuser you will see it’s almost empty, just the .bashrc (or in my fedora, there’s some .mozilla crap in /etc/skel that also gets bootstrapped).



  • For bash, this is enough:

    # Bash TAB-completition enhancements
    # Case-insensitive
    bind "set completion-ignore-case on"
    # Treat - and _ as equivalent in tab-compl
    bind "set completion-map-case on"
    # Expand options on the _first_ TAB press.
    bind "set show-all-if-ambiguous on"
    

    If you also add e.g.CDPATH=~/Documents, it will also always autocomplete from your Documents no matter which directory you’re on.


  • Sure -> I’m not smart enough to explain it like you’re five, but maybe 12 or so would work?


    The problem

    The problem here is that you’re not adding 1 + 2, or 0.1 + 0.2. You’re converting those to binary (because computers talk binary), then you’re adding binary numbers, and converting the result back. And the error happens at this conversion step. Let’s take it slow, one thing at a time.


    decimal vs binary

    See, if you are looking at decimal numbers, it’s kinda like this:

    357 => 7 * 1 + 5 * 10 + 3 * 100. That sequence, from right to left, would be 1, 10, 100, … as you go from right to left, you keep multiplying that by 10.

    Binary is similar, except it’s not 1, 10, 100, 1000 but rather 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 -> multiply by 2 instead of 10. So for example:

    00101101 => right to left => 1 * 1 + 0 * 2 + 1 * 4 + 1 * 8 + 0 * 16 + 1 * 32 + 0 * 64 + 0 * 128 => 45

    The numbers 0, 1, 2, 3…9 we call digits (since we can represent each of them with one digit). And the binary “numbers” 0 and 1 we call bits.

    You can look up more at simple wikipedia links above probably.


    bits and bytes

    We usually “align” these so that we fill with zeroes on the left until some sane width, which we don’t do in decimal.

    132 is 132, right? But what if someone told you to write number 132 with 5 digits? We can just add zeroes. So call, “padding”.

    00132 - > it’s the same as 132.

    In computers, we often “align” things to 8 bits - or 8 places. Let’s say you have 5 - > 1001 in binary. To align it to 8 bits, we would add zeroes on the left, and write:

    00001001 -> 1001 -> decimal 5.

    Instead of, say, 100110, you would padd it to 8 bits, you can add two zeroes to left: 00100110.

    Think of it as a thousands separator - we would not write down a million dollars like this: $1000000. We would more frequently write it down like this: $1,000,000, right? (Europe and America do things differently with thousands- and fractions- separators, so 1,000.00 vs 1.000,00. Don’t ask me why.)

    So we group groups of three numbers usually, to have it easier to read large numbers.

    E.g. 8487173209478 is hard to read, but 8 487 173 209 478 is simpler to see, it’s eight and a half trillion, right?

    With binary, we group things into 8 bits - we call that “byte”. So we would often write this:

    01000101010001001010101010001101

    like this:

    01000101 01000100 10101010 10001101

    I will try to be using either 4 or 8 bits from now on, for binary.


    which system are we in?

    As a tangential side note, we sometimes add “b” or “d” in front of numbers, that way we know if it’s decimal or binary. E.g. is 100 binary or decimal?

    b100 vs d100 makes it easier. Although, we almost never use the d, but we do mark other systems that we use: b for binary, o for octal (system with 8 digits), h for hexadecimal (16 digits).

    Anyway.


    Conversion

    To convert numbers to binary, we’d take chunks out of it, write down the bit. Example:

    13 -> ?

    What we want to do is take chunks out of that 13 that we can write down in binary until nothing’s left.

    We go from the biggest binary value and substract it, then go to next and next until we get that 13 down to zero. Binary values are 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, … (and we write them down as b0001, b0010, b0100, b1000, … with more zeroes on the left.)

    • the biggest of those that fit into 13 seems to be 8, or 1000. So let’s start there. Our binary numbers so far: 1000 And we have 13 - 8 = 5 left to deal with.

    • The biggest binary to fit into 5 is 4 (b0100). Our binary so far: b1000 + b0100 And our decimal leftover: 5 - 4 = 1.

    • The biggest binary to fit into 1 is 1 (b0001). So binary: b1000 + b0100 + b0001 And decimal: 1 - 1 = 0.

    So in the endl, we have to add these binary numbers:

    ` 1000 0100 +0001

    b1101 `

    So decimal 13 we write as 1101 in binary.


    Fractions

    So far, so good, right? Let’s go to fractions now. It’s very similar, but we split parts before and after the dot.

    E.g. 43.976 =>

    • the part before the dot (whole numbers part) -> 1 * 3 + 10 * 4 = > 13
    • the part after it (fractional part) -> 0.1 * 9 + 0.01 * 7 + 0.001 * 6
      Or, we could write it as: 9 / 10 + 7 / 100 + 6 / 1000.

    Just note that we started already with 10 on the fractional part, not with 1 (so it’s 1/10, 1/100, 1/1000…)

    The decimal part is similar, except instead of multiplying by 10, you divide by 10. It would be similar with binary: 1/2, 1/4, 1/8. Let’s try something:

    b0101.0110 ->

    • whole number part: 1 * 1 + 2 * 0 + 4 * 1 + 8 * 0 (5)
    • fractional part -> 0 / 2 + 1 / 4 + 1 / 8 + 0 / 16 -> 0.375.

    So b0101.0110 (in binary) would be 5.375 in decimal.


    Converting with fractions

    Now, let’s convert 2.5 into binary, shall we?

    First we take the whole part: 2. The biggest binary that fits is 2 (b0010). Now the fractional part, 0.5. What’s the biggest fraction we can write down? What are all of them?

    If you remember, it’s 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16… or in other words, 0.5, 0.25, 0.125, 0.0625…

    So 0.5 would be binary 1/2, or b0.1000

    And finally, 2.5 in decimal => b0010.1000

    Let’s try another one:

    13.625

    • Whole number part is 13 -> we already have it above, it’s b1101.
    • Fractional part: 0.625. The bigest fraction that fits is 0.5, or 1/2, or b0.1. We have then 0.625 - 0.5 = 0.125 left. The next fraction that fits is 1/8 (0.125), written as b0.0010.

    Together with b0.1000 above, it’s b0.1010 So the final number is:

    b1101.1010

    Get it? Try a few more:

    4.125, 9.0625, 13.75.

    Now, all these conversions so far, align very nicely. But what when they do not?


    Finaly, our problem.

    1 + 2 = 3. In binary, let’s padd it to 4 bits: 1 -> the biggest binary that fits is b0010. 2 -> the biggest thing that fits is b0010.

    b0001 + b0010 = b0011.

    If we convert the result back: b0011 -> to decimal, we get 3.

    Okay? Good.


    Now let’s try 0.1 + 0.2.

    • decimal 0.1 => 1 / 10.

    How do we get it in binary? Let’s find the biggest fraction that fits: 1/16, or 0.0625, or b0.0001 What’s left is 0.1 - 0.0625 = 0.0375. Next binary that fits: 1/32 or 0.03125 or b0.00001. We’re left with 0.00625. Next binary that fits is 1/256
    … etc etc until we get to:

    decimal 0.1 = b0.0001100110

    We can do the same with 0.2 -> b0.0011001100.

    Now, let’s add those two:

    ` b0.0001 1001 10 +b0.0011 0011 00

    b0.0100 1100 10 `

    Right? So far so good. Now, if we go back to decimal, it should come out to 0.3.

    So let’s try it: 0/2+1/4+0/8+0/16+1/32+1/64+0/128+0/256+1/512+0/1024 => 0.298828125

    WHAAAT?



  • I plan to try the OpenMediaVault first. For my use - a lot less for services and dynamic changes and a lot more for sitting in the closet quietly - it’s good enough. And I can still dig into the internals if I wanted to.

    And with OMV I can also teach my non-techy wife and kids how to add themselves more disk space :)


  • Yep, that was my intention. First, it’s low power, so it can be always-on with only a small impact on the power bill. Second, it’s only gonna serve a few things - my photography hobby and media library, and maybe a service or two will come with time. If I need other services, I put them on a Hetzner box and they’re much better taken care of.

    I’ve done my share of sysadmin work and even a bit of server-room maintenance, I don’t want a full-time, or even a part time job. This is mostly gonna sit in the corner, and be quiet. If the prices matched, I would have probably just gone with QNap or Synology, but this way I get the NAS and the disks for the same price.






  • I wanted to suggest something like this. Code-freeze wise, you can have a “minor” and “major” problems, major problems block the feature, minor ones let it go (but you now have a tech debt, and make sure that THIS process to fixing up found issues is higher-prio then new features). Of course, you decide what is minor and what major. E.g. maybe a typo in the UI is acceptable, maybe not.

    As for throwing features over the wall - I would actually suggest just changing the perspective - make QA involved earlier. The feature is not ready and not frozen unless it’s been looked at by QA. Then when a thing is frozen, it’s really ready. (Of course you’ll still have regressions etc but that’s another topic.)