Lacking a “what are you sysadminning” thread, today has involved:
and I have to say, I love doing this stuff.
My technological tussles today concern playing Dolby Atmos audio, which I thought would be easy enough to try out. My Mac, iPhone and iPad, along with earphones, are all apparently capable of playing Atmos files (or “Spatial Audio” in Apple Speak), and I have a few Atmos mixes on Blu-Ray editions of XTC albums I’ve bought… but actually transferring the files across to the computer and then playing them turns out to be a real headscratcher.
The reason, of course, is that everyone (particularly Apple) expects us to be subscribed to a streaming service these days, making it surprisingly hard to research ways to listen to downloads. I don’t want to Enable Spatial Audio on Apple Music, I want to hear it on music I own.
Anyway, slow progress on getting this to work, but progress nonetheless. With my luck I expect that when I do get to hear it at last I’ll find that I don’t particularly enjoy the effect 
I like the reaction function in outlook.
This is grim reading:
I can vouch for it – I’ve been active on that network for 16 years and, in the past year, in my spheres of interest, the once-busy volume has dropped to virtually nothing at all.
I used to advocate the “Stack Overflow method” of continual learning, whereby you just kept an eye on the questions, picked ones you found interesting, and figured out how to answer them – a series of little projects which would cause you to dig into some area you wouldn’t otherwise have looked at, provide some motivation to see it through, and then reinforce what you learned in the process of writing the answer.
I only contributed at the very start. later i never felt competent enough.
There is a lot one could say about the site but knowledge there is open and accessible. and that counts for a lot in my book
I have a server that I’ve owned since 2010. It’s a quarter-depth 1U server that I owned before I even owned a rack (which I do now, but that’s a different story). It’s been running my home network for over 15 years without issue.
A couple of weeks ago, I received a notification that the hard drive was getting “pre-failure” warnings on the daily SMART tests. Fair enough; everything in this tiny thing is 15 years old and a good ol’ fashioned spinning-disk drive is bound to fail eventually.
I sourced a reasonably-priced replacement harddrive with the intention of installing a fresh Ubuntu system. 15 years ago, this server had started life as a Ubuntu-based distribution called ISPConfig because I wanted something that could offer a web-based dashboard that I could use instead of relying solely on SSH. I scrapped most of the “ISPConfig” stuff almost immediately after realizing just how much I actually didn’t need this particular flavor of dashboard, but there are some remnants still lurking deep in the bowels of this tiny system.
As part of the process for installing a new system, I wanted to get a bootable USB drive attached with the ubuntu-server installer. Unfortunately, inserting a USB drive into either of the rear USB ports resulted in no device detection. I opted to try the internal USB port, thinking that maybe 15 years ago, I disabled the rear-panel USB ports on purpose (I honestly don’t remember).
No good deed goes unpunished. What should have been a quick 3 or 4 minutes to unmount from rack, remove 4 screws to remove the top of the case and insert the USB drive turned into an hour of troubleshooting because, as I came to find out, the power supply appears to have failed.
So on top of the $25 new HDD, I now have a $25 replacement PSU on its way. At least the parts are cheap. I also picked up another 2GB of RAM, to bring it to the max of 4G, for about $15.
In the meantime, I built a VM on my proxmox cluster that is temporarily handling all of the services the dead server normally provides- and in the process remapped those services onto floating IPs that are dynamically activated by my L3 switch (ip sla-based static routes, which I never had the option to use before until I got a new switch a few months back)
Nerd.
I say this with love. 
What I got was tech thingy does X, for unknown reasons, then tech thingy no work, then more tech thingy fail, now colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
“And when I woke up, my wallet and kidneys were gone.”
I’ve never been more confounded and simultaneously profounded by a statement.
It’s Chomsky, an exemplar sentence that is syntactically correct, but semantically meaningless. That describes lots of technical discussions for a listener who is not in the field.
Clive James wrote a rather fine poem with that as the title, I suspect to prove that it could be given semantic meaning.
Today I discovered that my phone hasn’t been notifying me of incoming calls. I don’t know how long it’s been doing that. The last time I received a call was a month ago. During this period outgoing calls have been working perfectly.
As a result I missed an important call a week ago. Fortunately today I called someone who mentioned they’d phoned me last week but it went straight to voicemail.
Took me a while to figure out what settings needed to be reset but now things seem to be working properly.
Actually swallowing phone calls is … making life easier. I wish Skype would also not notify me of incoming calls. My life really would be so much easier.
I have this problem too but then outgoing calls don’t work either. But it takes me a while to realize the problem is me and not other people not being available.
A restart always helps.
I was surprised as in the last couple of days I’d updated to the most recent Android version. That didn’t fix it.
For reference:
Skype is still in use?
I switched over to Discord years ago, because my engineer and computer scientists friends assured me that Skype was now a direct extension of Satan himself and if I made use of it in any way, I would be ushering in his Age of Dominion o’er the Earth, when Hell itself would empty of devils, and humanity would be tortured for untold eons upon the blasted hellscape of what remained.
Either that or something about inefficient use of computing resources. In any case, I remember it was something extremely sinful, to them.
Discord has its own share of that, of course, not to mention deceptive marketing (they talk about “your own server” when they just mean “your account on our centralised system”). Also I remember IRC, and IRC did IRC better.
So I run this place, and a Jitsi server for videoconferencing.
Teams supplanted Skype on one of our networks a couple of years back. Though Teams has somehow been hamstrung so that most of the features aren’t available.
We’ve still got Skype on one of our other networks as the only way of chatting.
it’s at work where they have an on-prem installation and no idea what could replace it. I work for a rather paranoid place.
