Storage, IM, Networking, Sandboxing, Data Recovery, OONI

1. Seagate started shipping 30 TB HARM storage drives (@ extremetech.com). Very nice indeed. All data can be stored for later decryption. The drives are using second generation Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) (@ Wikipedia).

2. Improved a few features with my SimpleX - Matrix - WebClient bridge. Now the communication between the processes is much more efficient and communication latency is around one second due to expensive launch of matrix commander to send messages. But otherwise it's now very good and reliable. Using correct transactional design, there are no message loss issues, even if service would be down or overloaded. This also solves the very slow and expensive to run on mobile SimpleX groups problem, because now the groups can be efficiently accessed using Matrix or a web page.

3. Links & QR codes and UX in general: Android WiFi Hotspot got this exact issue. But even worse. You can generate QR code and share it. But you can join using QR code with camera or QR code image. Garbage tier UX guaranteed. It was easier to enter 20+ character random password than utilize the QR code. Many apps have similar problems with the links the application generates. There's no way to use the links in the app. One of those really badly engineered apps is actually Twitter. Twitter generated links won't work in Twitter app at all. Pasting the link to the search box always says that content can't be found. Go figure. Chain on ActivityPub (@ pleroma.envs.net). kw: quick response code, QRcode

4. Upgraded my backup connection to unmetered fast 5G. With 4G latency was averaged around 22 ms. With 5G latency (NSA) is around 12 ms. But 5G SA should drop that to around 5 ms.

5. Updated friend's banking laptop with latest Lubuntu 22.04 LTS and SSD. It's funny that the laptop got T3000 CPU and 2 GB of ram. But it's just fine, when you boot system and only start the web browser of your preference and access bank. It's just enough, to be highly efficient at that task. There's no lag or bad UX at all. Who said you'll need a "fast system" or lots of RAM?

6. Configured Session App Desktop AppImage to run with Bwrap (bubblewrap) application containment. So much joy. Now it works. First time I've setup it for AppImage / GUI app, so it took almost two hours to figure out everything required. But now it's also easy to run multiple parallel Session profiles, yet of course each of those requires independent Session instance.

7. Friend had a media with some corrupt files. He couldn't copy and recover those corrupt files due to "data / IO errors". I wrote a small Python program that copied the files, by reading as much data as possible, and then just seeking forward, if data is completely unreadable. Now most of the data in large files is readable, even if there are of course around 1% of blanks in the data. But that's still 99%  data recovery!

8. Some strange problem causes SimpleX chat agent thread to crash, leaving the UI dead in water. UI works, but it can't communicate with the (local) backend data data at all over internal API.

9. I've run OONI tests on multiple networks, and I don't ever find anything blocked. I guess it's good for Finland and EU with good freedom of communication.

10. People trying to figure out anonymous remailers just 30 years later, sigh. Yawn. Really new tech-eeeh. Email shouldn't be used at all anymore.

11. SQL optimization. Executing stuff really fast with T-SQL Microsoft SQL Server 2022, using pyodbc with fast_executemany, prepared statements & stored procedures, conditional updates with exception handling, triggers and delayed transaction durability. Well over 100x performance gain compared to the previous implementation, doing exactly the same task.

12. Identity - I really hate platforms which link user identity to some other legacy system. Worst examples are as example: email and or phone number. Sure, it can be provided as additional metadata for searching accounts. But it shouldn't be the primary key identifier. Even worse, some services then use this external reference, email address or phone number as immutable identity. You can't even change it, the only way to change identity is to register a new account. - I've got no positive words for this.

2024-04-21