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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • I worked for an MSP that merged with a copier company. Copiers got more and more capable, and so of course people wanted to use their “advanced” features, hence the merger with an IT company.

    When they sold a copier, they would sell limited IT engagements. Things like handing information and help to customer IT, or if they lacked IT, limited help like placing it on the network, installing the drivers to use it as a printer, setting up scanning to network. This was done remotely by a level one technician, Joe this time.

    Well, install day came, and after Joe helped out the customer claimed that some computers could print, some couldn’t. And some computers couldn’t access anything else on the network. They hired a local IT guy that threw Joe under the bus, and the customer yelled at my boss. As one of the level 2 techs, I was told to “fix what Joe fucked up” right in front of Joe. Shit boss, different story.

    I travel out there, look at their problem, but was told I couldn’t touch anything until their IT guy showed up. So I used the time to ask questions, and tour around since I had a hunch.

    Local IT guy strides in 15 minutes late, smug as hell. I talk and lead him to the basement, following the signal strength of a weirdly named wifi signal, and get a solid full strength connection in front of a locked closet. I ask them to unlock it, and ask about the router I see on the shelf, and point out that I believe it’s their issue.

    Local IT guy installed a router as an access point, and did it so wrong that it was acting as a 2nd DHCP server on their network, handing out different addresses. In layman’s, their computers had 2 bosses with differing orders. Therefore local IT guy broke it, and blamed Joe cause he didn’t understand what he did.

    I praised Joe from that day for being the first technician I knew capable of physically installing gear remotely. He was an excellent tech, and a good colleague.






  • As you said, friction would introduce more wear and maintenance. This gentleman’s idea is to attach a windmill to drive the rotary induction wheel, which would essentially be “free” heat energy, and an interesting hobby contraption. Entertainment and a sense of accomplishment is probably his main goal.

    Its not a brand new idea, just a different application of the principle. Induction generators already exist, and they can indeed be used with windmills, but to generate AC current versus heat energy.

    More power to this fun and crazy inventor. Maybe he can find practical and reproducible use for this effect. If not, he’s gonna have the most unique water heater ever invented. With this he could make a fully mechanical hot water heater that burns no fuel and uses no electricity. He would just have to make a mechanism to disengage a clutch at the top temperature.








  • I’ll piggyback on this one. I’m personally more partial to Lenovo if money and lead time isn’t an issue, but Dell Latitude is the budget business brand. On site repair support is roughly the same, they contract 3rd parties in whatever area you are in to do onsite repair.

    I can reliably get Latitude 5500 series laptops with i5, 16gb, 256gb, and fingerprint reader for less than $1000 shipped, and that includes a 5 year on-site accidental included warranty with keep your drive. You drove over your laptop? Ok, here’s a loaner, let me try to pull the storage, and try not to do it again.


  • If you’re American, your credit score affects a whole lot more than your creditworthiness. A bad, or even not as good score can affect your chances at getting a job, getting a place to live, and more commonly, how much you pay for car insurance.

    We give a lot of shit to China over their social credit score, but we’ve had ours for years, we just pretend it’s only for creditworthiness. When your job does pre employment checks, they can also do a credit check. Many apartment complexes do the same. Hell, even utility companies can check your credit and decide you are a risk and ratchet up your deposit.

    It’s not a guarantee that anyone does this, but it is a possibility. Be on your best behavior, citizen, the credit bureaus are watching.




  • I’ll tack on just a bit from here, and maybe someone can correct me if I am wrong.

    • VMware’s HCI clustering is far better than proxmox + ceph/other.
    • VMware’s NSX network virtualization enables their fancy HCX site orchestration.
    • Even without NSX/HCX, Site Recovery Manager makes for a slick redundancy/fail over option.
    • VMware’s EUC option, Horizon, beats the absolute pants off of Citrix. And that was Citrix’s whole game.
    • The vGPU option first lived in EUC, but turns out scalable GPU sharing is just plain useful.
    • And then there is the orchestration management, allowing for power savings, automatic balancing, and more.

    Basically, every high level solution they had on their platform was without a true parallel, and was built on a rock solid foundation. Even if their support is shit(it is), the platform is so ubiquitous and approachable that you could just use their support as an insurance of sorts, and it gave upgrade rights through the years.

    Broadcom knows who uses those high level features, and knows they’re stuck. Our options are a full cloud migration, loss of features, or pay up. They’ll disregard every customer small enough to not need any of that, and they will milk every customer that’s too big to go anywhere else.

    If you’re one of the small folks, I’d say look into proxmox, openstack, xcp-ng, or have a path to cloud in mind. If you’re one of the big folks, I recommend Balvenie, Macallan, or Johnnie Walker, cause you might as well enjoy a good drink if you’re gonna get fucked.