bpye's comments

On: Reverse-engineering the UniFi inform protocol

[bpye]

I would love to have some way to configure the USW Flex Minis without the controller software. I can't find any other small PoE powered switches for a similar cost.

On: My Homelab Setup

[bpye]

You can definitely get PCIe on some micro PCs. I have a Lenovo m920q that I use with a Mellanox NIC as my router.

You could certainly install a SAS or SATA controller, the issue would be having somewhere to mount the drives, and a way to power them. External SAS enclosures are not cheap.

[firecall → bpye]

> External SAS enclosures are not cheap.

Sadly this is what I discovered.

I'd hoped there would be cheap external drive bays to mount HDDs in and connect to the mini PC over SATA.

But alas there isnt really.

It makes more sense to just use a PC Case and mount the drives that way.

On: Plasma Bigscreen – 10-foot interface for KDE plasma

[bpye]

I run it on my RK3588 based MNT Pocket Reform. I have to force the GL ES 2 backend because of, presumably, Panfrost bugs, but otherwise it runs well despite the fairly weak CPU and GPU.

On: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

[bpye]

They did improve this in more recent generations, but you need a W series chipset to use it.

On: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

[bpye]

There are 16" laptops with ECC, you can get a ThinkPad P16 with it for example. I've yet to find any 14" devices with ECC though.

[tombert → bpye]

Interesting, I actually have a thinkpad p16s, surprised I didn’t notice ECC availability.

On: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

[bpye]

Similar experience. I played with overclocking the DDR5 ECC memory I have on my system, it would appear to be stable and for quite a while it would be. But after a few days I'd notice a handful of correctable errors.

I now just run at the standard 5600MHz timing, I really don't find the potential stability trade off worth it. We already have enough bugs.

On: 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips

[bpye]

I believe caches and maybe registers often have ECC too though I'm sure there are still gaps.

On: Does that use a lot of energy?

[bpye]

50W average doesn't seem absurd, peak power is going to be an order of magnitude higher, but computers are often running pretty close to idle...

On: MacBook Neo

[bpye]

Are the instructions missing, or does iOS just not run the hypervisor?

I suppose we'll find out pretty soon, supporting virtualization would be important if they wanted to sell these to CS students that need eg. Docker.

[kokada → bpye]

So my observation comes from the fact that UTM webpage: https://getutm.app/faq/#what-are-the-limitations.

Now this webpage may be out-of-date, so take my claims with a grain of salt.

On: MacBook Neo

[bpye]

A bootloader exploit at that, and we haven't had one of those in years.