exFAT, PoS, HAMR, Huawei, Tor, Drone, PS, Fish

  • It happened again, dismounting exFAT volume on Linux (Ubuntu 18.04 64bit) completely froze and there's no easy way to resume from that. It also prevents proper system shutdown. I would call this pretty clear serious bug. That has been happening earlier, I mean shutdown problems, but I haven't isolated the problem. Now the exactly same happens when you'll just umount from CLI.
  • Proof of Stake (PoS) - Nothing new. But just checked out the Proof-of-Stake again. As we all know that PoW is just hugely expensive way of creating a simple lottery. I've always deeply disliked wasteful systems which are inefficient or extremely in efficient like in this case.
  • HAMR Seagate vs MAMR Westerdn Digital Hard Disk Drive (HDD) future storage technologies, I mean if you're looking for new 40 TB drive. Actually MAMR is also HAMR technology, because just the way how the disk surface is being hated is different. In HAMR technology LASER is being used and with MAMR microwaves are used to heat up the disk track for writing. Just wondering if that can be combined with Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR).
  • Huawei, more bugs... Change PIN for SIM2 screen shows change SIM PIN1. Interestingly the Change PIN for SIM1 shows change PIN for SIM. That's very confusing for non-nerds. Why not then just refer to SIM1 PIN1 and SIM2 PIN1. Why they just need to be so inconsistent on everything?
  • EMUI 9.0.0 update removed lock screen timeout, how annoying is that. Well, it's option which isn't "secure" to begin with, but it's still annoying. Combination of lock immediately using power button + timeout was a nice combination. Even if not stated anywhere, they've probably replaced it with smart lock, which detects if you're not holding the phone anymore. Also Samsung Smart Stay was really nice, where the screen timeout was also removed as long as you were looking at the phone.
  • Studied Tor Onion services v3 documentation, features and implementation. Utilizing SHA3, ed25519, curve25519. All this makes the onion services more secure and the addresses a lot longer (56 characters long) when excluding the TLD .onion part.
  • Also reminded my self about BLAKE2sp which is designed for parallelism, as example 7-zip uses this as one optional hashing algorithm.
  • Drone defence thoughts. People claim that it's easy to electronically disturb drones. Is it? You don't need RF link for control, drones can be fully autonomous. You don't need GPS for navigation, inertial navigation works nicely for limited duration. Devices can be RF energy hardened, so that's not easy way to bring those down either. Sounds like "direct energy weapons" are the only option. For protection from visible light and infrared you can make the drone highly reflective. But those don't sound too safe alternative either, during peace time at airport. Laser, microwave, shrapnel shells, missiles, nets, hunter drones or birds, and os on.
  • After spending a few days working with PowerShell scripts, even if I don't like the syntax of PowerShell. Many of the features of it are extremely powerful and handy. All that project piping, filtration, sorting, etc. It's actually much nicer than with bash and most of Linux tools. And all the same questions as whenever programming. Should I just try doing something which probably fails, and catch it, or pre-check conditions and only try doing it if it's known to be safe, and so on.
  • Wrote some fish shell scripts. I like fish scripting, because my bash (esac) scripting isn't strong, i find fish script syntax much user friendlier. Sure I can get the job done, but it's not fast nor trivial. Requires the classic read documentation, try and retry until working as required approach.
  • Something slightly different? Watched Iridium NEXT satellite launch live. Anyway, there are expensive projects and then there are really expensive projects, like global mesh satellite networks.

2020-03-29