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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • If you want a preview of an uncaring and anti-consumer Valve, look no further than the company’s efforts on Mac.

    Valve never updated any of its earlier games to run in 64-bit mode… Apple dropped support for 32-bit applications in 2019

    Funny enough, the only platform with a 64-bit Steam client is Mac.

    I don’t disagree with concerns about monopoly, but the author’s key example is Macs. And from the example, it sounds to me like Apple disregards backwards compatibility (dropping 32-bit support, moving to ARM chips) and Valve isn’t investing to keep up. Meanwhile, Windows has a heavy backwards-compatibility focus, and Linux isn’t too bad either, so no wonder they still get Valve’s attention. So who is being “anti-consumer” in this example, Valve or Apple?





  • None of the included experiments look to be exactly what you need. For characterizing your isolator, the included Acceleration Spectrum is close, though it records continuously, making it difficult to use to record impact response. For evaluating actual train vibrations, the user-defined Integrated Acceleration might be a start, but it doesn’t include the filtering needed to get good information. You could define your own experiments, but that’s probably even harder than analyzing the CSV data on your computer. At least on your computer you can change your analysis freely and immediately see results, rather than re-running the experiment every time.



  • I work in railway noise and vibration mitigation, and @scrion@lemmy.world has given you a great starting point. When we build rails and want to mitigate ground-borne noise and vibration (typically up to ~200 Hz), we generally mount the rails on soft pads and add extra mass to isolate the rails from the surroundings. The exact same approach will work at your computer. We don’t typically use tuned mass dampers for ground-borne vibration, so I think that will be overkill for you, but you can try if you like.

    I wanted to suggest that, in addition to the feet/foam/plywood, you can also add a big chunk of something heavy to help with isolation. Like put a heavy rock on top of the foam, and your computer on the rock. The trick is this: if k is the stiffness of your foam, and m is the mass of everything on top of the foam, then your isolating frequency is at √(2k/m). All frequencies above the isolating frequency will by mitigated (the further above, the more they’re mitigated), while all frequencies below will be amplified.

    (Quick aside if you actually want to calculate frequency with √(2k/m): check that your units for k and m are compatible, you should end up with a result in units of 1/s, which is actually radians per second, then multiply by 2π radians per cycle to convert to Hertz).

    When it comes to measuring results, since your problem is in low frequencies, you can probably use your phone’s accelerometer assuming it reads fast enough (the sample rate must be at least double the highest frequency you care about). Mount it as rigidly as you can to your computer, since if the connection is soft, the phone will be in its own isolating system. The quickest way to test your isolator would be to hit close to the base with a hammer; impacts excite a wide range of frequencies equally, so in the frequency domain you should see vibration amplitudes following a shape something like these.

    But as @scrion@lemmy.world notes below, you don’t really care about your isolator’s response, you care about what trains are doing to your computer. However, he said one thing I disagree with: it’s not the amplitude of the acceleration that you care about, it’s the amplitude of energy, and therefore velocity. This article gives a good introduction to ways you could analyze that. But now we’re getting way in to the weeds on what should be a simple project!

    One last aside: if the vibrations in your building are bad enough, you could raise it as an issue with the metro operator. The US Federal Transit Administration sets standards that are commonly followed even outside of the US (see Table 8-1 in their Noise and Vibration Manual); if your measurements show vibration exceeding those limits then they might pay me to fix it :D.


  • At a glance, it looks like Aegis generates standard TOTP tokens, which means there’s a lot of software that can do the same thing, so you don’t need to emulate Aegis. I use pass-otp (an extension to pass), but that’s command-line-only, and a lot to deal with if you’re not already using pass. From a quick search, it looks like Keysmith and OTPClient are decent graphical alternatives. From another quick search, OTPClient is available in Ubuntu 23.10.

    Edit: Re-reading your post, your issue is that you don’t like logging in on your phone, right? But Aegis just provides the code, you should be able to use the code from your phone to log in on your computer. TOTP codes are only affected by the secret values and the current time, so the code generated on your phone can be used on any device.




  • I’m an engineer, and I make it a point to teach young engineers that “a ton” can mean any one of three things:

    • Short ton = 2000 lb
    • Long ton = 2240 lb
    • Metric ton = 1000 kg = ~2204 lb

    And which is being used is often not spelled out, but is just known from context, and usually should be clarified. I once nearly got in trouble by thinking a measurement was in short tons when it was actually metric tons.

    So my own act of rebellion is to use “Mg” when I’m writing my personal notes.


  • From a quick search, a MATLAB student license is $50 (USD, probably), which is less than most textbooks but still not nothing. Whether piracy is justified or not, I just want to point out that this is how they get you. Microsoft gives cheap Office licenses to schools and Adobe turns a blind eye to amateur piracy of Photoshop because they know that getting you comfortable with their software early means you’re more likely to pay to keep using it professionally later. I don’t know if MathWorks had a hand in the MATLAB requirement (I would bet it was just a prof who wants to stick with what they know), but good on you for trying to push for alternatives and testing against Octave.