View on GitHub

Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

Facebook owns Instagram, and notes on the history of the Internet

quorten

2018-09-05

Categories: tour-de-force   random-software  
Tags: tour-de-force   random-software  

Instagram is owned by Facebook, right? Yes, indeed it is.

20180905/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram

Instagram was a separate company that was acquired by Facebook. Interestingly, Facebook previously had the bad business practice associated with Microsoft of taking too much control after the acquisition and ruining the product.

The WhatsApp acquisition closed at a steep $19 billion; more than $40 per user of the platform.

That means WhatsApp has 475 million users. In other words, as of 2018, there was one Raspberry Pi sold for every 24 WhatsApp users.

So how many users are on Facebook? It has more than 2.2 billion monthly active users as of January 2018. In other words, there are over 110 monthly active Facebook users for every Raspberry Pi sold, as of 2018.

20180905/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Facebook

Read on →

Restoring literal HTML content from the Wayback Machine

quorten

2018-09-05

Categories: misc   reiterate  
Tags: misc   reiterate  

Again, I reiterate, because this is important! How do you retrieve literal copies of HTML files from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine? Use this nifty trick. Append “id_” to the date of the page you are looking to download. This will give you the “identity.” i.e. identical, version of the page.

20180904/https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Restoring

Updates on ad blocking

quorten

2018-09-04

Categories: random-software   reiterate  
Tags: random-software   reiterate  

Again, I reiterate, because this is important! Ad blocking? Yeah I already looked at this before, but what does Wikipedia have to say about this now?

20180904/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_blocking
20180904/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Adblocking_growth_according_to_pagefair.svg

Oh, now this is interesting.

In a high-profile case, malware was distributed through advertisements provided to YouTube by a malicious customer of Google’s Doubleclick.[22][23] In August 2015, a 0-day exploit in the Firefox browser was discovered in an advertisement on a website.[24] When Forbes required users to disable ad blocking before viewing their website, those users were immediately served with pop-under malware.[25]

Reference source article is this one.

20180904/https://www.engadget.com/2016/01/08/you-say-advertising-i-say-block-that-malware/

Read on →

Raspbian `debian-installer` command line or network installer

quorten

2018-09-02

Categories: raspberry-pi  
Tags: raspberry-pi  

Wondering how to get a good old debian-installer network installer experience for the Raspberry Pi? Look here for starters.

20180901/DuckDuckGo raspbian network command line installer
20180901/DuckDuckGo raspbian debian-installer

Obsolete, don’t use. Use replacement raspbian-ua-netinst instead.

20180901/https://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianInstaller
20180901/https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=50310

Well, that’s good enough for me, I guess. Sure, it would be nice to have a traditional debian-installer experience, but I guess it makes sense considering the Raspberry Pi I’m setting up won’t have a display and keyboard attached to it. Serial console over USB is still an option, though.

Testing my new MicroSD card for fakes

quorten

2018-09-02

Categories: raspberry-pi  
Tags: raspberry-pi  

Okay, so I got my new 128 GB MicroSD card for only $30. Sure, I made sure to go with a MicroSD card from the official vendor on Amazon, and I went with Samsung rather than SanDisk to evade the worst of the counterfeit fakers, but I still have reason to be suspicious that even this card is a fake, given recent reports from the year 2018.

So, I decided to go about testing for fakes like this. Rather than using a program that writes pseudo-random data to the card, I decided to copy from some real, photographic data sets to fill up the card. Then I used a binary diff command to compare that files on disk were identical to the known good data. But… ut oh. I got disk I/O errors? Fake? FAKE??? FAKERS??? FAKE, FAKE, FAKE!!!

Wait, hold on here. Upon a closer analysis, it appears that the problem wasn’t quite as bad as I thought it was. Doing a more rigorous analysis, it turned out that actually most of the card was readable and had identical digital data to the known good copy. However, at the very start of my copy, I had a few bad blocks written. Unfortunately this also meant that the root directory entry of my filesystem got corrupted, which meant that when I unmounted and remounted my disk, none of my files but the first directory showed up, and the disk capacity still showed as nearly full. Ut oh… filesystem corruption. How to fix this?

Read on →

Popular Mechanics and Home insulation

quorten

2018-09-01

Categories: random   home-network  
Tags: random   home-network  

Popular Mechanics? Yeah, we already know what Wikipedia has to say about them: not much. Okay then, let’s do a web search and go to their website.

20180831/DuckDuckGo popular mechanics
20180831/https://www.popularmechanics.com/

Wow, now this looks like an interesting article. But… when I read into it, the biases are clear. Sure, Popular Mechanics is about mechanics, but this list of 100 skills everyone should know are clearly slanted toward that bias. Especially, vehicles, and cars in particular. I only skimmed this list, but I’ve found one reference of “manly,” another bias if it needed to be stated that way.

Beyond the bias, there are a few clearly agreeable important skills in there:

Read on →

Whiteboarding and other notes on interviews

quorten

2018-08-29

Categories: random  
Tags: random  

Whiteboarding?

20180829/DuckDuckGo whiteboarding interview

Oh, this is a really interesting article that covers the history of how we got to “whiteboarding.”

20180829/https://www.forbes.com/sites/vivekravisankar/2015/05/04/the-rise-and-looming-fall-of-the-engineering-whiteboard-interview/#7265ba471c82

Now, this is a really interesting GitHub project that aims to list companies that interview without whiteboarding.

20180829/https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
20180829/http://they.whiteboarded.me

Now, we know that whiteboarding interviews are bad, but what about behavioral interviews? Well, well, the picture here looks like this: we know they’re “bad,” but because so many people practice it we make up training materials to get good at it anyways.

20180829/DuckDuckGo behavioral interviews

But now, reading about behavioral interviews, the whiteboarding was done because interviewers thought they could outdue the shortcomings of the behavioral interview.

20180829/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_interview#Behavioral_questions
20180829/https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2014/03/04/why-i-hate-behavioral-interviewing/

Battle of the giants, competition between Amazon and Google

quorten

2018-08-29

Categories: misc  
Tags: misc  

What information can we find in Google’s billion dollar Android business.

Failed search.

20180829/DuckDuckGo google android billion dollar

No, no, no. We should be asking a different question. Amazon has their own modified FireOS based off of Android that they are using. How is the competition between Google and Amazon going?

20180829/DuckDuckGo google android amazon competition

Wow, now this is interesting. About Amazon’s FireOS fork. They didn’t entirely want it to be that way, they wanted to license Android a little bit more like Google, but Google’s licensing restrictions on their official apps were too restrictive, so they were booted out of the hardware market they wanted to get into and left to sell only their own devices. Then that’s how FireOS became a flop, because of lack of good hardware.

20180829/https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-fireos-fire-phone-google-android-eu-margrethe-vestager-2018-7

Read on →

"Donut rings" no longer on modern motherboards, and other interesting hardware notes

quorten

2018-08-29

Categories: raspberry-pi  
Tags: raspberry-pi  

Modern motherboards don’t contain very many “donut rings” on them anymore, but if you look inside the Ethernet port of the Raspberry Pi 3 B+, you’ll find that there are indeed some “donut rings” inside there. Yeah, these are called “toroids” in more formal terms. What does Wikipedi have to say about these? Basically, these are more efficient inductors. They’re more compact, lighter weight, and generate less electromagnetic interference, which is why they became so popular on 1990s PC motherboards.

20180829/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toroidal_inductors_and_transformers

But, the fact is that modern ultra-compact smartphone chargers do not use any “donut rings” inside them, they only use solid-state voltage converters, I believe. So, how exactly do those work?

Failed search.

20180829/DuckDuckGo how do modern ultra-compact power supplies work

Read on →

Libre 802.11ac 5 GHz Wi-Fi?

quorten

2018-08-29

Categories: home-network  
Tags: home-network  

I’m still determined. Is there a libre solution for 802.11ac 5 GHz Wi-Fi? Well, well, if you ask like that, there is a compromise you can make. You can make use of so-called “Wi-Fi repeaters” that contain both a Wi-Fi and an Ethernet interface on them as a means for you to connect your libre computer to the 802.11ac 5 GHz network.

Note that 802.11ac is only specified for 5 GHz. 2.4 GHz is provided as a fallback on 802.11n. Also note, despite the fact that 5 GHz has a lot more bandwidth per-se, it is much more heavily regulated than 2.4 GHz in the interest of avoiding interference with radar devices. So it turns out that the usable bandwidth on 5 GHz is not as great as you would think on first thought.

20180829/DuckDuckGo 802.11ac libre 5 ghz
20180829/http://lifeinide.com/post/2017-05-08-linux-5ghz-wifi-with-no-drivers-problem/
20180829/https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-features/31694-why-80211ac-will-kill-the-5-ghz-wi-fi-band
20180829/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ac

Multi-user MIMO is another nice feature that 802.11ac provides.

20180829/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user_MIMO