pixiemagic (u/pixiemagic)

pixiemagic commented on SimSig: Railway Signalling Simulations simsig.co.uk/... · Posted by u/untilted

This still doesn't allow train spacing of less than the braking distance. Braking distance of trains is large (due to high uncertainty in track friction), which still means trains are typically 1 minute or more apart when moving fast.

As long as you have comms with the trains around, it's clearly possible to safely go less than the braking distance, as long as you can be sure of the behaviour of the train ahead, even in the case of an equipment failure (ie. in case of a power failure, it will not slam the brakes on, but decelerate at X m/s^2).

pixiemagic · a year ago

What happens if there's some other reason to brake, such as an unreported fallen tree on the line ahead?

pixiemagic commented on A forged Apple employee badge cabel.com/2024/05/16/the-... · Posted by u/ecliptik

serf · 2 years ago

'guy'/'guys' is used without a gender context in certain regions, more like synonyms of 'folks '. I hear "hey guys" routinely in SoCal said without intention of labeling people.

pixiemagic · 2 years ago

Only in the plural form though, right? I'm in the UK, where the usage you describe is common too, but reading "this guy" like in the comment above, I would assume they're talking about a man.

pixiemagic commented on ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance tomverbeure.github.io/202... · Posted by u/picture

sandreas · 3 years ago

Unfortunatly, they contain too much sensitive information to provide them online and I don't have the time to make them nice and clean (it all started with a 50 lines bash script). But there are plenty of users providing macOS RICE / dotfiles...

Just a short search:

https://www.lotharschulz.info/2021/05/11/macos-setup-automat...

https://gist.github.com/bradp/bea76b16d3325f5c47d4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFlnqSqkTas

pixiemagic · 3 years ago

Understandable, thanks for the links.

pixiemagic commented on ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance tomverbeure.github.io/202... · Posted by u/picture

smcleod · 3 years ago

Why would I need to pay any money to get my data back using Timemachine, Borg, Duplicity etc… though? That doesn’t really make sense.

pixiemagic · 3 years ago

I think they're maybe alluding the fact that if you have a backup system which fails when you need to use it (e.g. your Time Machine backup turns out to be corrupted, which quite a few people in the comments seem to have experienced), you'd wish that you'd paid money to have a backup system which worked instead.

pixiemagic commented on ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance tomverbeure.github.io/202... · Posted by u/picture

bartvk · 3 years ago

Seconding Arq.

It's incredibly freeing to be able to dump your remote backups wherever you have space. Right now, the best for me is to send them to a virtual Linux box where I have enough space left.

It supports Amazon Drive, AWS, Backblaze B2, Dropbox, Filebase, Google Cloud, Google Drive, OneDrive, SFTP, SharePoint, Storj, Wasabi, network share or some other random S3-compatible server.

It's a native, let me repeat that, NATIVE Mac app and behaves exactly like one. Incredibly satisfying. Unlike Time Machine, it'll tell you what went right and what went wrong. I have a lifetime license.

pixiemagic · 3 years ago

It looks great but I suppose the downside, like a lot of nice native Mac apps, is that it seems to be Mac-only. So if you also want to back up non-Mac systems (e.g. to make off-site backups of NAS or server data), you'll need to set up, maybe pay for, and grok 2+ backup systems.

pixiemagic commented on ThinMachine – A $25 thin client macOS Time Machine appliance tomverbeure.github.io/202... · Posted by u/picture

sandreas · 3 years ago

I don't trust Time Machine any more. Years ago I wrote some shell scripts that help me mostly automate my complete system setup (with brew and friends). From time to time, I wipe my entire system and restore it with these scripts. Sometimes I have to adjust them, but mostly, they work without changes.

For my data backups, I use restic. Big advantage is, that I can read my backups even when I don't have a macOS system present (e.g. my only macOS system had a hardware issue and my Time Machine Backup was pretty much useless until I got a new one).

I know, this solution is not for everybody, but Time Machine corrupted my backups more than 5 times now and it feels so slow compared to restic, that I don't even think about retrying it after a new macOS release any more - even if my solution is a bit more work to do.

pixiemagic · 3 years ago

Would you be able to share those scripts? Or if not, an obfuscated/abstracted version of them?

I use brew but even with brew and brew cask, I find there's plenty of GUI apps that require manual installation, which will also have their own config spread out in various places, plus whatever CLI or background stuff I've installed myself (mostly hidden files/directories in my home folder so probably easier), system settings, etc. I don't know how I'd reasonably automate a restore of all of that stuff without having a Time Machine-style backup (essentially a disk image).

pixiemagic commented on Apollo will close down on June 30th old.reddit.com/r/apolloap... · Posted by u/timf

jhugo · 3 years ago

It's clear that they don't want any of the third-party apps to pay them a cent. They want the third-party apps gone, and the users to move to the official app where they can be directly monetised by Reddit. There was never going to be a deal; if Reddit was interested in one they would have approached this differently.

pixiemagic · 3 years ago

Then why not just shut down their public API?

pixiemagic commented on Boeing’s last 747 is rolling out of the factory cnbc.com/2022/12/06/boein... · Posted by u/sebastian_z

eCa · 3 years ago

It certainly does. Not a knock on Boeing[1], but my least comfortable flight ever was on a Virgin 747 from London to New York. At 194 cm (6”4) I’m tall, but not insanely so. I got a middle seat in the middle section where it was physically impossible to fit my legs. Thankfully, before even taxiing out I was able to move to a bulkhead seat in the family row. Since then I insist on picking the seats (emergency exit row ftw) when travelling with someone.

[1] Though I believe that aircraft manufacturers should require some minimal level of comfort on planes they make.

pixiemagic · 3 years ago

Ultimately they're making planes for the airlines to buy though. If the airlines say they'd rather fit in 300 people by making most of the rows cramped together than 250 people with more legroom, the aircraft manufacturers will make sure they account for that in their design.

pixiemagic commented on Boeing’s last 747 is rolling out of the factory cnbc.com/2022/12/06/boein... · Posted by u/sebastian_z

eastbound · 3 years ago

What astonishes me is that they built the 747 first, before the small planes. It’s like Airbus’s birth was initiated with the Concorde, then the mass-passenger planes. All with negative timestamps, since we were before 01/01/1970 (joke).

Leaders of that time knew they had to start with the grandest project before cascading for a full range of smaller products; whereas leaders today roll out an MVP and try to grow from there.

It truly was another epoch, the epoch of mass amounts of money and resources, not little optimizations.

pixiemagic · 3 years ago

I don't think that's true. Pretty sure the 707 and 727 were launched and in service before the 747 even started development. The 737 was certainly in development as well, and was in service before the 74.

So by the time the 747 was flying with airlines, they already had the 707, 727 and 737 flying.