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I don’t care about THEM knowing anything but I do object to commercial apps getting and selling MY data without my permission. Truecaller seems to come with other baggage I don’t want that goes poling around within my storage e.g. a ‘space usage’ analyser. — huh!
January 11, 2018 at 3:07 pm in reply to: 5~30% CPU speed reduction to your Intel CPU forecast #15534Sorry about the link screw-up it should have pointed to this Verge article.
Intel Haswell ot older chips are the ones affected most by a slow-down.
January 11, 2018 at 10:07 am in reply to: 5~30% CPU speed reduction to your Intel CPU forecast #15525Microsoft have detailed how their Meltdown fix impacts badly on older PCs. They state “most users will notice a decrease in system performance” for older machines. link
Although my 5+ years old i7 falls into that bracket, I did not notice a slowdown but I did notice a significant increase in power consumption as the cpu speed ramped up – I’m not a typical user in that I use VMs for most everything and they are well known i/o hogs sp perhaps my experience will not be reflected in that of others.
What I DO notice is that many Internet sites are a lot less responsive.
It was for a very similar reason (but involving CCTV cameras) that I turned off Windows Update. Of course this now requires me to be far more disciplined about updates. For me the old system worked perfectly, but the new one is broken.
As mentioned SD Cards in Pi service are very fragile. A software shutdown and electrical disconnection should be done before even removing a card. I suspect the frafility has something to do with Linux write-behind mode coupled with the usual housekeeping required to perform a normal Linux shutdown.
Dan’s NAS question was appropriate for all the wrong reasons! Apparently Dlink weirdly shares the same opprobrium with any WD MyCloud NAS, all have or had a hard-wired backdoor with the same access path just ready to exploit..
The backdoor, detailed in the ElReg report, lets anyone log in as user mydlinkBRionyg with the password abc12345cba.
If you use MyCloud you should check if you are vulnerable, if so look for a firmware update.
I cannot answer the first but the accepted target for the second is a 10000 minimum number of paces over an entire day. Not really that much as it is only about 4-5 miles, and it is based on little scientific data. Its in the same category as 5/day. A good but fairly meaningless target. Exercise has been shown to have a lot of beneficial aspects with latest research showing it changes the makeup of the bugs in the gut which may have larger long-term health benefits.
I’d be more worried about you going TT, it is a scientific fact based on a lot of evidence that moderate drinkers have a lower death rate than people who are TT. In fact one small glass of red wine/day has been scientifically shown to reverse type 2 diabetes in 80% of the population. The Government and medical profession hate publicising this data in case the population think that more is better!
Switch to Green Tea – much healthier and a VERY different flavour. You can even get a Yorkshire Green Tea and just to add before anyone sneers, you need a different tea mixture for the varying degrees of hard water around the country. It affects how much flavour/caffeine is extracted by the water.
If you do not like the taste of Green Tea try a ‘red’ tea such as Roobos (drink without milk).
PcWorld have produced a very readable guide to Intel’s Meltdown Backdoor, while M$ have issued a PowerScript check for vulnerabilities. I have not linked the latter as unless you know what you are doing PowerScript can be a bit like handing a box of matches to a kiddy. In any case the M$ script is not much use, unless you have installed the Intel firmware update it will only show the Windows Slowdown status. Getting the firmware update is going to be a problem unless Intel break their usual policy and issue it via M$. The advice apparently is that your vendor should supply it – good luck with that!
I have bookmarked my link to the appropriate Intel i7 update release page for my own system and await this week’s developments.
[edit] Dave was correct my system has not slowed down but the power management on the chip shows a clock-rate speedup – this will cost me money!
Dan, unless you want things to look pretty an enclosure is not needed. Strip out the hdd and buy one of these.
Thanks BL – my bad!
Just to emphasise the Pi3 is picky about getting enough power. If you have a good 2.5amp power supply for the Pi, according to this thread you can run a spinner in an enclosure without a powered hub, apparently the key is to use quality 1 foot (or less) usb cabling for the hdd power lead. (I have obviously been lucky with my choice of powered hubs!)
Great thanks!
What Blue Bar? No Blue Bar on my FFox!
On a Pi I would not bother about redundancy, its only a tiny beast so really hard work over an extended period can stress it to failure in areas other than the drive. A decent back-up regime is far more important. (Imaging the main drive and boot sectors are the best route). If you are really going to stress it over a long period, I’d recommend adding heat sinks to your pi (works better if you add a fan)
There are lots of Pi uses detailed on line – this person seems to have similar ideas to yourself which may be a good starting point. From memory I believe Drehzda may also have done something similar.
I should have added that there is also a hybrid sd card pre-boot mode. The steps should be straight-forward to a Linux guru such as yourself but are set out here if you are lazy like me.
Obviously you could extend this to fit in with BLs suggestion or any other USB drive. If you have an old redundant SSD you can use something like this to operate it with the Pi. (lots of options, but make certain that your power supply is up to it I use a powered hub in the latter case). A usb caddy for your spare 1TB drive might be a way to explore – I’d certainly use a hub to power it and pi in this latter case.
Dan, I got a bit frustrated yesterday with trying to respond so unlike BL I did not respond to the nub of your question! Building on BLs reply just use a 64GB USB as your main drive (OS+media) and only boot off an SD. This not only gives you most of what you want quite cheaply, but vastly improves the reliability of the Pi.
This article shows how to do it.
I found that in my media application I had a lot of r/w going on and the usb ran darned hot. I’d recommend buying a metal cased usb stick and superglue a heat sink to the top of it! If you need more than 64GB then bigger sticks are available but the price goes up 150-200%/GB
Apparently the experimental usb boot mode is picky with usb sticks. I used the linked one and it works.
El Reg reports that major CPU makers already have fixes for the ‘Meltdown’ back door. The Spectre flaw is currently unfixable at chip level.
The general details of how Spectre works are now available. Over-simplifying this is a side-channel attack that uses timing and training the CPU branch predictor to prefer one code branch over another then at a specific time slipping in a malign branch in its place. Apparently some Internet interfaces such as Chrome randomise timing results to make this harder – good work unfortunately completely undone by html5’s web-worker!
If you look up the HomePlug tech papers you will see they are far from ‘dumb’ devices (i.e. not just an ethernet wire plus simple switch equivalent). Most of the stuff is driven by communication security and tests to make sure that the recipient plug is on the same ‘network’, and has the same encryption key. I guess when the Router end gets mangled it sometimes mangles up its connection to the ‘primary’ plug (i.e. 169’s it) and this has to have a hard reset to clear it which in turn I further guess stuffs up the ‘slave’ plugs handshaking and needs a hard reset at that end too.
All total speculation based around bitter experience and frustration!
Ditto
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