@grawity@social.treehouse.systems

grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 06, 2026

there was apparently a FidoNet node *ASTERISK* [1] in Lithuania, which I only discovered by going through a nodelist trying to figure out the authors of a single-issue "Hacker's Newspaper" from 1995 [2] which had only emails and fidonet point addresses [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20141122230218/http://www.tdd.lt/slnews/asterisk/ [2] https://archive.org/download/Lauztuvas

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Jul 30, 2026

a bit disappointed that @mikrotik@mikrotik.social developers now started replying to support tickets with wholesale LLM generated messages... but at least it seems the dev (and/or the LLM) finally understood the root of the issue, so there's that, I guess?

-

(thinking about it, I guess it's all the more jarring when the LLM output is still signed by the same dev's name as their own earlier messages. Like if I were to get a reply from "ClaudeGPT", then I would just set my expectations accordingly. But now the reply is from the same $PERSON_NAME as the 3 earlier messages, yet the text is *clearly* not written by them, and that's just bleh.)

mikrotik.social

MikroTik (@mikrotik@mikrotik.social) - mikrotik.social

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Jul 29, 2026

packet loss

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Jul 29, 2026

Also I was learning about the "DHCP Option 82" support in the less-cheap switches in order to track down a device that apparently wakes up every morning at 07:00, grabs a DHCP lease, then disappears for the rest of the day. By the time I'm awake it's already expired out of the MAC tables and everything.

so yesterday I went around enabling circuit-id support on various switch ports and I *think* now I know which of the (empty during summer) offices to check

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Jul 29, 2026

TP-Link's "Easy Smart" aka "Unmanaged Pro" series of cheap Ethernet switches (TL-SG108E, etc) technically has VLAN support, you can configure up to 32 VIDs as tagged/untagged.

But if you do so, the switch occasionally blasts its own DHCP discovers across *every single VLAN it knows about.*¹ Configured a port to have a tagged WiFi VLAN? Great, now the switch is going to pick up its management IP address from the guest subnet every couple of days.

I don't know who thought this would be a good feature.

¹ (Or maybe it chooses at random? Or maybe it's just not initializing the buffer and using whichever VID it saw in the most recent packet? Or maybe it's only doing that in the non-VLAN mode, the opposite of what I was assuming? Fuck knows.)

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Jul 28, 2026

nullfs/failfs patches in vfs.git are interesting, apparently a process can now fchroot(FD_FAILFS_ROOT) and become filesystem-less, without needing a preexisting /var/run/empty or anything. like it doesn't even have a "/" anymore

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Jul 28, 2026

Feels kinda wrong to run an RDP client through X11-over-LAN, but hey, it works. Performance of FreeRDP being displayed over Wi-Fi to VcxSrv on WinXP is surprisingly good

(that is, much better than Firefox for example)

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Jul 28, 2026

Came across this lovely collection of old-timey network mapping software screenshots while looking for WhatsUp alternatives

https://www.gambitcomm.com/site/large_nets.php

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Jul 27, 2026

a d'oh moment: In one building at work, there's this switch port that *sometimes* is up, but most of the time is down, well past the MAC table expiry, and I didn't really know where the cable goes or what it connects to, except that it's something in this floor or the floor below. today I was doing some maintenance at an office there, sat down at a "shared" PC and checked the switch... the unknown port was up. huh. Nobody else in the building at this time of year, computers asleep or off, but somehow port 12 happens to be up at just the right time when I'm poking at the switch so I dump the MAC table of the switch, it *finally* has one entry for port 12. I search for the MAC address in the DHCP server, etc... ...the mystery port turns out to be connected to literally the PC that I was sitting at. [it's a "shared" workstation and a very sporadically used one at that, so most of the time it is powered off...]

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Jul 26, 2026

RE: @famfo@frogs.lgbt

my favourite network is SUNET because in 2026 they still have good old L3 routing at every single hop and you can actually see the packet going through Sweden (e.g. to tungsten.libera.chat or umea.mirror.pkgbuild.com)

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Jul 24, 2026

accidentally misread a forum question as "How do I use ffmpeg to transcode a German audio stream to English"

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Jul 23, 2026

Replying to @grawity@social.treehouse.systems

Sixteen Win11 computers in a single room, all freshly installed from the same USB stick, with exactly the same regional settings and everything, are showing at least 5 different weathers in three or four different languages, *none* of which is Lithuanian. How do you fuck it up this bad o7 (and if you click to expand the widgets pane, it doesn't actually have a weather widget to change the city in. Literally it's not there and it's not an option for adding a widget either) anyway, just turned it off via GPO

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Jul 21, 2026

Replying to @grawity@social.treehouse.systems

Sorry it's not always Danish Sometimes it's Finnish (also this is a freshly installed system and in theory the AD GPO should have turned it off, or at least turned off the whole "open on hover" mess)

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Jul 21, 2026

The OS language pack is English, the region is set to Lithuania, the keyboard layouts are EN and LT, the timezone is LT, the external IP address geolocates to LT. So of course the Windows weather widget defaults to Danish.

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Jul 15, 2026

this is why you don't zip tie cables to the wall I guess this specific AP hasn't been in use for a while now, I just took the photo while we were replacing similar "quality" cabling for other APs that are in active use; at least two other cables also had big holes in their insulation, not from zip ties but purely from spending a few years on the roof of a 9-floor building while *not* being outdoors-rated at all, I'm pretty sure. (and/or birds I guess? idk)

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Jul 05, 2026

"this meshcore thing looks kinda interesting" *opens the map* nearest nodes: 44 km away 50 km away 55 km away *closes tab*

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · May 09, 2026

@cks@mastodon.social for what it's worth, Feedly has not been able to receive any new posts since ~end of March, so now I have a cron job to update a local copy of cks.atom on my webserver and pointed Feedly to that instead

mastodon.social

Chris Siebenmann (@cks@mastodon.social) - Mastodon

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · May 07, 2026

alright, time for rdo -S "sysctl kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=0; rm -v $(modinfo -n rxrpc)"

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · May 06, 2026

Replying to @andrewg@mastodon.ie

@andrewg@mastodon.ie well, if they request e.g. a 16-bit prefix, they can't realistically bruteforce the remaining 144 bits (for every single of the retrieved keys) to determine valid fingerprints... they can hold on to the data, but it is useless until the fingerprint is published elsewhere (at which point it's just as easy to fetch the individual certificate by fingerprint) (I'd expect the server to refuse prefixes past some maximum length, like 20 or 32 bits, where it would stop being "privacy preserving" due to matching too few keys... but imo even with long prefixes of e.g. (x-64) bits it would be cheaper to find some other way of enumerating fingerprints (or really, scraping emails))

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · May 06, 2026

well okay I guess

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · May 06, 2026

Replying to @eloy@hsnl.social

@eloy@hsnl.social Germany is a country I wouldn't be surprised to see migrating to X.500 Directory Services and X.400 MHS

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · May 06, 2026

this morning, on a day off, I get a syslog notification that my backup 4G modem isn't connecting. (it's at my little personal "lab" I have colocated at work.) I ssh to my syslog server to check what was happening, etc. It comes back up a minute later but I figured I'd scroll through logs anyway.

Literally *the next minute* after the 4G connection has come back up – while I'm still typing a grep command – the workplace's main fiber ISP goes down and 4G becomes my only remaining connection ;_;

I mean it's probably a coincidence, but.

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · May 05, 2026

Replying to @domi@donotsta.re

@domi before I forget completely 1) how do you arrange planned downtime when other users are logged in; like reboots-for-kernel-upgrades stuff? do you just wall <<< "reboot incoming, hold on to your tmuxes" or do you have a monthly schedule? (like you have some disdain for single-user selfhosting but one reason that keeps me from actively going out and Offering Services on my own systems is that I'd have no place to tinker with things anymore and get into situations where something breaks until reboot, or a security fix needs a reboot, etc. (another reason being that all my machines are kinda /old/ lol)) 2) already forgot what else I was going to ask I think it was about putting literally everything on one server vs multiple lower spec servers

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Apr 24, 2026

Replying to @grawity@social.treehouse.systems

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Apr 24, 2026

RE: @grawity@social.treehouse.systems

this reminded me of how someone once packaged the Atom editor on AUR, and since it had all of the dependencies vendored, they made it have a version number of 1.11.1.a1.8.6.ap1.12.7.d0.8.9.e1.4.3.f1.7.19.g3.0.7.gp5.17.1.gt1.5.3.l3.4.4.m0.158.7.o1.2.1.s3.10.1.sc0.68.3.sv0.243.0.t0.209.3-1

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Apr 22, 2026

Replying to @domi@donotsta.re

@domi@donotsta.re it's interesting how typing e.g. sqrt(warranty) is a syntax error but still gives you a license message

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Apr 18, 2026

Replying to @CursedSilicon@social.restless.systems

@CursedSilicon I'd probably have gone with InnoSetup + InnoScriptStudio, I remember playing around with it a lot on XP and it's a little less arcane than InstallShield

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Apr 17, 2026

Replying to @Nine@chitter.xyz

@Nine it's an external Internet-Draft that someone submitted to IETF the day before this one (literally anyone can submit drafts to IETF as independent track), its main premise being that IPv6 is too different and incompatible to be adopted and therefore starting from scratch with "IPv4 with longer addresses" (and new routing mechanics) is the way to go not the first such proposal of its kind, and it's fun thinking about alternative ways IPng could've gone, but this particular one seems to have been both LLM-generated itself and very quickly picked up by LLM-generated tech news sites as a big thing

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Apr 17, 2026

Replying to @Nine@chitter.xyz

@Nine I think you may be missing the context

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Apr 17, 2026

Replying to @ahhhhhhoniichan@snug.moe

@ahhhhhhoniichan another IETF draft that was published just the day before https://frogs.lgbt/@famfo/116414769827941648

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Apr 17, 2026

Replying to @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems

@ariadne do you have an opinion on SCION by the way like the whole OAuth thing in IPv8 reminds me a little bit of SCION having the strict core/non-core AS hierarchy, in the way that it's also pushing more top-down control

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Apr 17, 2026

I can only assume that https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-meow-mrrp-00.html exists to counterbalance the IPv8 thing.

www.ietf.org

Meow

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Apr 15, 2026

Replying to @moses_izumi@fe.disroot.org

@moses_izumi@fe.disroot.org @domi@donotsta.re our largest ISP used to have their own FTP with pirated movies, back in the early ADSL days... tbh Real 8 is from 2000, digital video wasn't *that* new already in 2000

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Apr 15, 2026

Replying to @moses_izumi@fe.disroot.org

@moses_izumi@fe.disroot.org @domi@donotsta.re it's just deciseconds, I think. (the video is encoded at 30 fps, RealProducer's defaults are 15 fps and 30 fps depending on profile) tbh I have never used RealPlayer for *actual* streaming video (which seems to have been its main focus); by the time I encountered a few standalone .rm's it was already more common to have K-Lite as a RealPlayer replacement. still, I just like its very Win95/98 UI. would be neat to have some of those "channels" still working.

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Apr 14, 2026

Replying to @domi@donotsta.re

@domi got distracted

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Apr 07, 2026

it seems that Neovim 0.12 "fixed" guicursor= so that trying to disable the feature as documented only enables it harder (always forcing the cursor to block shape)

as workaround I guess I no longer disable guicursor and let Nvim control it, but made the bash prompt reset it properly to "terminal default" afterwards (ESC [ 0 space q).

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Apr 07, 2026

"A keyserver MUST NOT support indexing or downloading certificates by prefix." [draft-gallagher-openpgp-hkp-09]

hmm what if a keyserver *did* support downloading PGP certificates by fingerprint prefix, but returned each item encrypted with its own fingerprint, so the client could only decrypt updates for the certs which it already has

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Apr 07, 2026

Replying to @grawity@social.treehouse.systems

my completely normal workflow:

trying to pick a good wallpaper for my WinXP laptop, as one does
browsing my homedir SMB share in XnView
'hmm, many of them still have XMP/IPTC/EXIF data', but XnView only shows EXIF, not XMP
double-click the .bat file on my desktop that rsh's to my home server and starts Xterm through the network
exiftool in the xterm shows a lot more details
:o
hit Ctrl-Shift-P to have SnagIt screenshot the xterm to the SMB share
Syncthing on home server picks up the screenshot in ~/Dropbox and syncs to the Microserver at work
too lazy to pacaur -y toot, so ssh to the server at work because I already have toot installed there
run chafa to display the screenshot via SIXEL to make sure it's the right one
toot post -m snag0012.png -d "alt text goes here" <<< "witty text goes here"
Ctrl-x ctrl-e the bash command to fix a typo before sending

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Apr 07, 2026

Replying to @grawity@social.treehouse.systems

Like this single .jpg file contains around 1700 history entries with ~1000 unique file names stored within. The photoshop 16:9/9:16 crop template got reused a lot.

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Apr 07, 2026

By the way, did you know that some of the Windows Spotlight lockscreen images (which get cached in your ~\AppData\Local) have an *extensive* history of where the PSD template has been exported.

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Apr 07, 2026

Looks like it's snowing

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Apr 07, 2026

they should invent smartcards which just speak the ssh-agent protocol over USB

(I like my X.509 though, but it still seems like a cool idea)

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Apr 07, 2026

I discovered https://ijmacd.github.io/rfc3339-iso8601/

ijmacd.github.io

RFC 3339 vs ISO 8601

Comparison between RFC 3339 and ISO 8601 date formats

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Apr 07, 2026

RE: @liberachat@fosstodon.org

reminds me of how the Bitcoin software in the early days used to find peers through joining a channel on [old] freenode...

fosstodon.org

Libera Chat: "Please boost. Tell your OpenClaw (and forks) usin…" - Fosstodon

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Mar 26, 2026

"oh shit, the door is locked, how am I going to get my stuff now", I thought, while literally holding the door key in my hand and being the one who locked the door in the first place

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Mar 25, 2026

Discord keeps dying mid-raid so we're trying out the built-in voice chat in WoW and it feels like we're dusting off a feature nobody has used in decades

I mean it works quite well (aside from the UI being five kinds of glitchy) but kinda has the vibe of going back to Win98 NetMeeting

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Mar 25, 2026

Replying to @famfo@frogs.lgbt

@famfo sometimes I catch myself being defensively verbose (when posting on SO/StackExch. in particular), like "this is an important thing I want to drive home and if you just skim the post and miss the first time it was mentioned maybe the second time will work" (I don't like overusing bold or like a bunch of others tend to)

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Mar 25, 2026

I'm curious how communication happens between grid operators during a blackout. I guess cell phone towers (and the associated datacenters) keep running for a few hours? Not days?

(I've heard they run fiber along/inside of the transmission lines but not what exactly they use it for)

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grawity @grawity@social.treehouse.systems · Mar 25, 2026

I'm readingskimming through the final report on the last year's Spain grid collapse and huh that's a *lot* of graphs and math, and I didn't know they keep "oscilloscopic records" at like 400 Hz of Every Single Thing

https://www.entsoe.eu/publications/blackout/28-april-2025-iberian-blackout/#Publications_&_Documents