• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I have three ideas: First, you could switch the desktop environment to one of the ones that has a GUI settings tool to set passwordless automatic sign in. I think Gnome 3 on Ubuntu, and Mate Desktop on Linux Mint have that feature. There are probably others.

    Second, you could switch your display manager to “nodm”. The display manager is the thing that runs the X server or Wayland, and it starts the greeter (the greeter is the program that shows the login screen). nodm is a special display manager that doesn’t use a greeter or ask for a password. It immediately starts the session using the username and desktop environment specified in its configuration file.

    I use nodm for my HTPC and it works very well. The only downside is that you have to edit its configuration file, /etc/default/nodm , using a text editor. I’m not aware of any GUI configuration tool for it. However, it’s pretty easy to configure.

    Third, you could abandon all display managers, and start the session manually, either from a shell script, or over SSH. This is a little more complex. You will probably want to get comfortable with SSH before trying this (SSH is the command-line analog of remote desktop).






  • I cannot recommend any USB-connected drive for long-term use. (Only for portable devices that get plugged in for a little while at a time.) In the long term, any USB drive will randomly reset during periods of heavy use – including heavy writes, meaning some data will get lost.

    USB enclosures tend to just crap out completely after a year or two, if used continuously on a server. I know because I twice used 1TB external drives with OpenWRT (home router) devices. The data will be safe on the drive, but you’ll have to replace the enclosure.

    1. My first recommendation would be to look very carefully at the chassis and see if there’s any way at all to fit another SSD inside it. 2.5" SSD’s are usually thinner than 2.5" hard drives, so it may be possible, and most motherboards have more SATA ports than they need.

    Is there possibly an NVMe slot on the motherboard? Or an open PCIe slot where you could put an NVMe adapter?

    1. My second recommendation would be using a 2.5" hard drive. Newegg has a 5TB one for $135, but unfortunately that’s as large as they seem to go. It will be a bit slower than an SSD, but still probably around 150MB/s for sequential access.

    2. My third recommendation, if money is really tight, would be an additional server, with a large 3.5" hard drive. This will be a lot cheaper than an 8TB SSD, but adds complexity, electricity use, space use, and possibly fan noise.




  • What do you expect them to say? That they’re proud of this guy? Even though he’s clearly a madman?

    I know IRL gun nuts, and none of them would identify with this person. Also, none of them subscribe to the fallacy/straw-man of a “good guy with a gun”. The ones who carry concealed would remind you that they are carrying for themselves, not for you. If you find an active shooter in a mall, you can count on them… to run away.

    Skillful gun nuts know that shooting defensively is never worth the legal hassle unless it saves your life (or a family member’s life).

    The shooter in this article is nothing like any of the gun nuts I’ve ever met. This shooter is another Kyle Rittenhouse, someone anxious for a chance to kill a person and get away with it under the excuse of defense.






  • I believe it is:

    spoiler

    e^W(W(ln(2))

    spoiler
    x=W(x)*e^(W(x))
    
    x^(x*x^x)=2
    x*x^x*ln(x)=ln(2)
    x*e^(ln(x)*x)*ln(x)=ln(2)
    u=x*ln(x)
    u*e^u=ln(2)
    u=W(ln(2))
    x*ln(x)=W(ln(2))
    e^(ln(x)*x)=e^W(ln(2))
    x^x=e^W(ln(2))
    x = square-super-root(e^W(ln(2)))
    wikipedia says this is equivalent to:
    x=e^W(ln(e^W(ln(2))))
    but I don't know how they arrive at that.
    x=e^W(W(ln(2))
    
    working backwards to verify:
    x=e^W(W(ln(2))
    ln(x)=W(W(ln(2))
    ln(x)*x=W(ln(2))
    ln(x)*x*e^(ln(x)*x)=ln(2)
    ln(x)*x*x^x=ln(2)
    e^(ln(x)*x*x^x)=2
    x^(x*x^x)=2
    

  • The text of this post appears wrong on old.lemmy.world. It says “Solve x for x^x*x^x^ = 2” with no superscripts. It appears correctly on lemmy.world.

    I assume we’re meant to find an expression of W() and square roots and stuff, which expresses an exact answer. Since finding a decimal approximation somewhere between 1 and 2 using a binary search would be too easy.



  • Remember that voltage is measured across a pair of wires, so you can’t power the chime with only a single wire. That’s part of what makes this difficult – these doorbell systems only have the bare minimum of wiring in them. Powering the camera and the chime in series with each other is quite difficult. I think a lot of these things just accept the short circuit, and use a battery to power the camera while the button is being held.

    Here is what I was proposing, and I think what ch00f was also proposing. Replace “5VDC power supply” in this diagram with “a full bridge rectifier and a bunch of caps” in their description, and also note that your camera probably requires a well regulated 5VDC supply.


  • The easy way: take your existing wiring. Put an 18VAC to 5VDC power supply in parallel with the pushbutton. Then, the output of that power supply goes to the 5V USB input of your camera setup.

    The downside is that it will reboot the camera every time someone rings the doorbell, because you are shorting across the camera’s power supply.

    You can put a resistor in series with the button to fix this. You will need to find a resistance that’s low enough to still cause the chime to ring, but high enough not to disrupt the camera’s power supply. Maybe start around 20 ohms. If you can’t find a working resistor value, you can change the transformer to a 24V or 36V transformer, but make sure to keep that resistor high enough not to burn out the chime, and make sure your 5VDC power supply can handle the increase in input voltage.


  • This is false. X is not less secure than Wayland. It does have a different security model, which can become insecure if you misuse it. I don’t think people really care about situations where multiple user accounts access the same display.

    In my opinion, the benefits of xdotool far outweigh any benefits gained by Wayland’s security model. It’s impossible to make xdotool in Wayland, because of its security model.