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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • Ah HP printer drivers, my favorite form of self-inflicted malware.

    My favorite HP sucks story happened many a year ago. The boss’s shitty HP multi-function POS died, and we got him a nice Brother instead, and then went to uninstall the drivers.

    Somehow, and the reason for this is totally unknown to anyone other than HP engineers, the driver ‘uninstaller’ decided that today’s hilarity would be that it was going to uninstall… everything.

    After about 15 minutes of the drive churning away I got concerned, rebooted it, and found that nearly 75% of everything on it had been deleted by the uninstaller.

    No fucking idea, but that was a fun thing to explain and then fix.



  • Yeah, for sure. SCSI died when SAS emerged, and that’s been basically 20 years now.

    Any SCSI stuff left laying around is going to be literally a decade+ old and yeah, unless you have a VERY specific need that requires it (which really is just trying to get another few years out of already installed gear), it’s effectively dead and shouldn’t be bought for anything other than paperweights or for a coffee table.




  • Do you have a credit card?

    If you do, Oracle offers a shockingly generous free tier of stuff. 2 little baby EPYC VPSes, a 4-core 24gb ARM instance, and a bunch of other sundries including 10TB/month of data transfer.

    You can run a LOT of fediverse services on those free Ampere instances, and even something like GoToSocial will run on the little baby EPYCs.

    And to just cut off the incoming dudes: yes, Oracle is a shitty awful company with shitty awful policies run by a shitty awful billionaire, but that’s no reason to not take free shit from them.

    (And to the next group of people: I’m closing in on 4 years of free Oracle shit and they haven’t banned me, so I’m inclined to think all those stories are incomplete and they were doing something - mining, portscanning, hosting questionable shit, torrenting stuff, running a vpn that was abused - more than “nothing”.)


  • Universiality, basically: almost everyone, everywhere has an email account, or can find one for free. As well as every OS and every device has a giant pile of mail clients for you to chose from.

    And I mean, email is a simple tech stack and well understood and reliable: I host an internal mail server for notifications and updates and shit, and it’s rapid, fast, and works perfectly.

    It’s only when you suddenly need to email someone OTHER than your local shit that it turns to complete shit.