Something Random

sedrosken said:
Got woken up by an emergency alert, an Amber Alert from Tennessee. I had my phone set to silent except for my alarm, and the tone used for emergencies is rather spooky if you're half asleep and don't know what the tone is for. So, despite the fact that for the first time in a while I'd gone to bed at a decent time, I still slept like I had gone to bed at four in the morning.
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I hate those and other stupid alerts. I thought they were off, but somehow return.
I had to pull the battery one time to stop. Them
 
In other news, my hard drive is failing. Yes, the 2TB one I just bought a few months ago. SMART says all the attributes are either in the "old age" or "pre-failure" state. And what makes me think it's right is that after leaving it on long enough, I get I/O errors. No backups, either, nor do I have anything to backup to... Thankfully everything really important (read: school assignments) is saved to my OneDrive, among other things.

EDIT: ...maybe disregard this? SMART's extensive testing isn't coming up with anything... maybe this is how SMART just is, and the I/O errors is something else wrong?

EDIT2: I'm an idiot, I'm looking at the column that shows the importance instead of the value of the field. Looking at the raw and regular values, comparing them to the threshold and worst values, everything seems to be alright, but then that doesn't explain my I/O errors. Going to be extra careful.

These values are what concern me -- the seek error rate in particular has me worried. Anyway I think I've pretty well demonstrated my incompetence when it comes to working with SMART...

Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 080 064 006 Pre-fail Always - 103986862
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 098 097 000 Pre-fail Always - 0
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 949
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 036 Pre-fail Always - 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 069 060 045 Pre-fail Always - 77459976151
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jtr1962 said:
Hopefully they'll go after all the other telescammers next, starting with the ones claiming your computer has a virus. Sad to say it, but telescamming seems to be a cottage industry in India.
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Yup. Cops here aren't the brightest bulb (problem starts with the recruiting stage).

The head guy behind this scam apparently has made USD 75M.
 
Unfortunately, with most telescammers being overseas from the targets, make it so much harder to track down and prosecute the people behind it.

It's become a big problem here as well, we get calls calling to be from Telstra (the primary telco here), ATO (Aus Tax Office, aka IRS) or from Microsoft.

I even had one the other day claiming to be from my ISP, and that I had been hacked and that my PC was being used for torrenting... they immediately wanted to show me event viewer with all the errors, and gain remote access... pity I run Arch Linux on my stuff, and our router blocks torrents and has upnp off... I played along for a few minutes, but saying I had no errors in the event viewer, and wanted them to show the application from procmon that was causing the traffic... they then got the shits and hung up on me...

The one prior said I was a lier, that there is no such thing as a Sun Ultra 27 and he had never heard of Solaris 11... So I asked him to go to google, and search for it... Basically the response was "you f**ker, don't f**k with me" and a hung up call...
 
Sorry sed, but failure rates tend to follow a bath-tub curve (high failures within 6 months, low failure between 6-36 months, then high failures there after) with HDDs.

Get your data off it, try the manufacturers diagnostic tool and get an error code, and return for replacement...
 
mubs said:
In other news, more and more websites are refusing me access because I have Ad Blocker. This has become very aggressive lately. Grrrrr.
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sedrosken said:
I use uBlock Origin and I don't think I've had a single website flat-out refuse to serve me in a few years now. Obviously I've only switched to uBlock recently, though. It tends to be lighter than Adblock or Adblock Plus/Edge.
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Mercutio said:
The current state of affairs seems to be that we need an Anti-Anti-Adblock. There's a Greasemonkey script that handles it.

Also, there's nothing particularly better about uBlock Origin in my experience, except that you don't have to un-tick the box to disable acceptable ads. Otherwise it uses more or less the same subscription lists. The people who are whining about Adblock Plus are the sorts who were whining about Linux distros having "Commercial" software for including Firefox a decade ago. I recommend ABP for consistency (it's available for all major browsers including Edge and IE, and not just Chrome/Firefox) and because, as a commercial entity, it seems to be the only large organization being actively antagonistic to online advertising services. I approve of that.
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I've been using uBlock Origin for a while now and I've encountered several websites that block me because I use that plugin. I simply don't view their page.

I chose uBlock Origin because it's focused to be pro-user vs pro-monetization like ABP has become as they've sold out to provide a white-listed version of what they consider acceptable ads. One of the main reasons I don't want ads is because of the issues with malware taking hold of the 3rd party advertisement sites. Even just a few days ago this happen to those who may use the free version of Spotify. I still find it worthy of switching from ABP to uBlock Origin for these reasons even if there may be some inconsistency. There are also claims of uBlock origin being more efficient and faster but I don't have solid numbers on hand to back up that claim.
 
Mercutio said:
I'll write up something later. Greasemonkey is something you should have installed if you browse the web regardless. The issue is that you need the blocker-blocker outside your ad blocker because that's what they're testing for in their hostile scripts.
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I have Win 7 still with something blocker, but I don't know what. It seems like the newer blockers are for other systems. What you would use for Win 7 anti blocking help.?
 
Handruin said:
I chose uBlock Origin because it's focused to be pro-user vs pro-monetization like ABP has become as they've sold out to provide a white-listed version of what they consider acceptable ads.
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Once again, you can turn off the acceptable ads. It's one check box. You un-check it. Since everyone using any ad-blocker is probably using two or more subscription lists, this is hardly any greater burden.
And if it works and they're getting money to hit more obnoxious companies over the head with, or to fight the lawsuits they're dealing with, I still think that's OK.

I primarily use Adblock Latitude since I'm primarily a Palemoon person at this point, but having the consistent branding for user education is also important. Remember that it's Adblock Plus that's available for stuff like Edge and IE, since I know for sure that I can't keep people from clicking on them.
 
Chewy509 said:
Sorry sed, but failure rates tend to follow a bath-tub curve (high failures within 6 months, low failure between 6-36 months, then high failures there after) with HDDs.

Get your data off it, try the manufacturers diagnostic tool and get an error code, and return for replacement...
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The problem here is that I have nothing to move it to, unfortunately -- didn't have the money to spring for a backup solution, and when I did I had more important stuff to deal with. Like I said, the stuff that's really important is on my OneDrive (not a perfect solution either, but I trust their service more than I trust my hardware at the moment) and the rest is just stuff that would be a pain to have to get again.
 
sedrosken said:
The problem here is that I have nothing to move it to, unfortunately -- didn't have the money to spring for a backup solution, and when I did I had more important stuff to deal with. Like I said, the stuff that's really important is on my OneDrive (not a perfect solution either, but I trust their service more than I trust my hardware at the moment) and the rest is just stuff that would be a pain to have to get again.
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How much space do you need to borrow? I could give you some temporary space via Crashplan on my NAS. You encrypt with your own key. An alternative would be to sign up for the Crashplan trial service and backup there (or both) until you can get this resolved.
 
I have enough space for my music and pictures, I can lose the setups without caring much (with the stuff that's impossible to replace being easily backed up) and my movies (I think) are actually already backed up to my old 1TB I have in cold storage. Just had to think more about it -- I think I should actually be good, this time, thankfully. Unfortunately it will be a while before I can replace the 2TB so until then I will be using a 320GB I have in my desk at home. Might turn my P4 into a NAS box with the 1TB and maybe some other drives I can try to scrounge up. Might also take a look at what I have spare and build a NAS server out of spare parts, I think I have a couple LGA 775 boards with more than enough SATA ports.
 
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UPS is dumber than a sack of rocks. If you're getting multiple packages delivered in a single day they explicitly tell you on their website that if you authorize the release of any package being delivered that day they will leave them all. After you authorize the release of any of them they will all show they're released, and you can't do anything more to release them. However, the driver only leaves the package that you explicitly issued the release for. The other packages that received the implicit release by association are not delivered and show up as recipient not available in their tracking and stay on the truck.
 
I think it depends if they are all part of a single shipment from one supplier. If that is not the case, each supplier may have different rules including some that override any option to authorize release.
 
mubs said:
Yup. Cops here aren't the brightest bulb (problem starts with the recruiting stage).

The head guy behind this scam apparently has made USD 75M.
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Is there a lot of police and government corruption? I always assume there is for large criminal operations to thrive for long periods.
 
LunarMist said:
Is there a lot of police and government corruption? I always assume there is for large criminal operations to thrive for long periods.
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In most countries the police and gov't corruption is well known and understood. The typical US police department and gov't makes the overseas folks look like pikers in terms of corruption, but here they pretend to be as clean and pure as the wind driven snow.
 
So on my Cloudbook occasionally I'll have weird networking issues, and because I'm lazy I take the quick and easy way out that is stopping and restarting the networking service and applet. I have a shell script set up to do this, here it is:

#! /bin/bash
sudo systemctl stop NetworkManager
killall nm-applet
sudo systemctl start NetworkManager
sleep 2
nm-applet &
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Now the problem with this is that nm-applet refuses to come back up as part of the script, I always have to use the run dialog or a terminal specifically to do the "nm-applet &" command there at the end. I believe that this is because the terminal closes when the script finishes, taking the instance of nm-applet with it -- but I'm not sure how to make it persist.
 
For some reason I can't edit my post. It just sort of hangs trying to load the "edit" block or whatever it is.

Fixed my script. Changed nm-applet & to nohup nm-applet & and added another two second sleep timer at the end to give nm-applet time to start.
 
So I've begun looking for another job. I never should have taken the one I'm at now. I had ample warning from seeing first hand how similar companies based out of that geographic region operated, but I believed the spin they were selling and figured they must have been the exception rather than the rule. Oh well... Live and learn.
 
Stereodude said:
So I've begun looking for another job. I never should have taken the one I'm at now. I had ample warning from seeing first hand how similar companies based out of that geographic region operated, but I believed the spin they were selling and figured they must have been the exception rather than the rule. Oh well... Live and learn.
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Are you moving to another region?
 
Stereodude said:
No, I guess I was too vague and not to the point. I work for a Chinese company and the nicest way to say it is that it's a total mess.


Hopefully another FAE gig.
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I see. Somehow I thought that all the companies in your field would similarly be undesirable in the region. :lol:
 
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