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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • How to look it up:

    M-x org-mode RET
    

    That’s “Meta-X” (Alt-X), then “org-mode” and Enter, switches the major mode of the current buffer to org-mode so that we have the org-mode keybindings active.

    C-h k C-c C-x C-l
    

    C-h, Control-H, is the “help” prefix. “C-h k” is describe-key, tells you what a given key sequence runs. C-h k C-c C-x C-l will say what C-c C-x C-l does. It gives the following output:

    C-c C-x C-l runs the command org-latex-preview (found in
    org-mode-map), which is an interactive native-comp-function in
    ‘org.el’.
    
    It is bound to C-c C-x C-l.
    
    (org-latex-preview &optional ARG)
    
    Toggle preview of the LaTeX fragment at point.
    
    If the cursor is on a LaTeX fragment, create the image and
    overlay it over the source code, if there is none.  Remove it
    otherwise.  If there is no fragment at point, display images for
    all fragments in the current section.  With an active region,
    display images for all fragments in the region.
    
    With a ‘C-u’ prefix argument ARG, clear images for all fragments
    in the current section.
    
    With a ‘C-u C-u’ prefix argument ARG, display image for all
    fragments in the buffer.
    
    With a ‘C-u C-u C-u’ prefix argument ARG, clear image for all
    fragments in the buffer.
    




  • tal@lemmy.todaytolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldSuperior ping
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    5 days ago

    IPv4 has some other features too.

    $ ping 0x8.02004010
    PING 0x8.02004010 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data.
    64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=116 time=22.8 ms
    

    That’ll be Google’s root DNS server, using hexadecimal and octal representations.







  • I’m not familiar enough with Cloudflare’s error messages — or deployment with Cloudflare — to know what exact behavior that corresponds to, but I’d guess that most likely it can open a TCP connection to port 443 on what it thinks is your server, but it’s not getting HTTPS on that port or your server isn’t configured to serve up the right certificate for that hostname or the web server software running on it is otherwise broken. Might be some sort of intervening firewall.

    I don’t know where your actual server is, may not even be accessible to me. But if you have a Linux machine that can talk to it directly – including, perhaps, the server itself – you should be able to see what certificate it’s handing back via:

    $ openssl s_client -showcerts -servername akaris.space IP-address-of-actual-server:443
    

    That’ll try to establish a TLS connection, will send the specified server name so that if you’re using vhosting on the server, it knows which site to return, and then will tell you what certificate the web server used. Would probably be my first diagnostic step if I thought that there was a problem with the TLS handshake on a machine I was running.

    That might provide enough information to you to let you resolve the issue yourself.

    Beyond that, trying to provide much more information probably isn’t possible without more information about how your server is set up and what actually is working. You can censor IP addresses if you want to keep that private.








  • As @papertowels@mander.xyz said.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_noise_control

    Historically, if you were in a noisy environment, you could get closed-back, circumaural headphones — headphones that fit around your ears and had a lot of sound-absorption padding — to help soak up the sound. I still use decent non-ANC circumaural headphones at home.

    There are also some people who are more-willing to tolerate discomfort than I am who get in-ear buds, which block noise in their ear canal, and on top of that, fit ear protectors intended for industrial use, like 3M X5 Peltor ear protectors, which have even more passive sound absorption stuff than current circumaural headphones do, and are even larger.

    That sort of thing works well on higher frequency sound, but not as well on low-frequency stuff, like engine noise, large fans, stuff like that.

    ANC basically has microphones in your headphones, picks up on what sounds are showing up at your ear, and then tries to compute and play back a sound that produces destructive interference at your ear. That is, if you look at the sound waves, where the environmental sound is low pressure, it plays back high pressure signal, and when the environmental sound is high pressure, it plays back low pressure signal. It’s not perfect, or it could make environmental sound totally inaudible. But high-end ANC headphones are pretty impressive these days. I have a pair of Sennheiser Momentum 4 headphones — good, though not the best ANC out there in 2025, and I don’t personally recommend these for other reasons — and when they kick on, the headphones are designed to have the ANC fade in; same thing happens in reverse, fades out when you flip the ANC off. It sounds almost as if fans and the like around you are powering up and down when that happens, very eerie if you’ve never experienced it before. Even the sounds that it doesn’t do so well on, like people talking, it significantly reduces in volume.

    And ANC does best with the other side of the spectrum, the side that passive sound absorption doesn’t — the low-frequency stuff, especially regular sounds like fans. So having both a lot of passive sound absorption and ANC on a given pair of headphones let the two work well together.

    People often use cell phones in noisy environments, with a lot of people around, and ANC makes it a lot easier to hear music or whatever without background sound interfering. I think that it’s very likely that people will, long term, mostly wind up using headphones with ANC (short of moving to something more elaborate like a direct brain interface or something). It’s not really all that important if you’re in a quiet environment, and I don’t bother using ANC headphones on my desktop at home. But if you’re in random environments — waiting a grocery store line, in a restaurant with music playing over the restaurant’s speakers, on an airplane with the drone of the airplane engines, whatever — it really helps to reduce that background sound. ANC isn’t that new. I think that I remember it mostly being billed as useful for airplane engine noise back when, which they’re a good fit for. But it’s gotten considerably better over the years. For me, in 2025, good ANC is something that I really want to have for smartphone use.

    The problem is that in order to do ANC, you need at least a microphone, preferably an array, and somewhere you need to have a model of the sound transmission through the headphones and be running signal processing on the input sound to generate that output sound. In theory, you could do it on an attached computer if you had a fast data interface, but in practice, ANC-capable headphones are sold as self-contained units that handle all that themselves. So you gotta power the little computer in the headphones. That means that you probably have batteries and at least for full size headphones (rather than earbuds) you might as well stick a USB interface on them to charge them, even if the user is using Bluetooth for wireless connectivity. And if you’ve done that, it isn’t much more circuitry to just let the headphones act as USB headphones, so in general, ANC headphones tend to also be USB-capable. My Momentum 4 headphones have all of Bluetooth, USB-C, and a traditional headphones interface, but…I just haven’t really wound up using the headphones interface if I have the other options available on a given device. Might be convenient if I were using some device that only had headphones output. shrugs


  • I mean, there were legitimate technical issues with the standard, especially on smartphones, which is where they really got pushed out. Most other devices do have headphones jacks. If I get a laptop, it’s probably got a headphones jack. Radios will have headphones jacks. Get a mixer, it’s got a headphones jack. I don’t think that the standard is going to vanish anytime soon in general.

    I like headphones jacks. I have a ton of 1/8" and 1/4" devices and headphones that I happily use. But they weren’t doing it for no reason.

    • From what I’ve read, the big, driving one that drove them out on smartphones was that the jack just takes up a lot more physical space in the phone than USB-C or Bluetooth. I’d rather just have a thicker phone, but a lot of people wouldn’t, and if you’re going all over the phone trying to figure out what to eject to buy more space, that’s gonna be a big target. For people who do want a jack on smartphones, which invariably have USB-C, you can get a similar effect to having a headphones jack by just leaving a small USB-C audio interface with a headphones jack on the end of your headphones (one with a passthrough USB-C port if you also want to use the USB-C port for charging).

    • A second issue was that the standard didn’t have a way to provide power (there was a now-dead extension from many years back that is now dead, IIRC for MD players, that let a small amount of power be provided with an extra ring). That didn’t matter for a long time, as long as your device could put out a strong enough signal to drive headphones of whatever impedance you had. But ANC has started to become popular now, and you need power for ANC. This is really the first time I think that there’s a solid reason to want to power headphones.

    • The connection got shorted when plugging things in and out, which could result in loud sound on the membrane.

    • USB-C is designed so that the springy tensioning stuff that’s there to keep the connection solid is on the (cheap, easy to replace) cord rather than the (expensive, hard to replace) device; I understand from past reading that this was a major reason that micro-USB replaced mini-USB. Instead of your device wearing out, the cord wears out. Not as much of an issue for headphones as mini-USB, but I think that it’s probably fair to say that it’s desirable to have the tensioning on the cord side.

    • On USB-C, the right part breaks. One irritation I have with USB-C is that it is…kind of flimsy. Like, it doesn’t require that much force pushing on a plug sideways to damage a plug. However — and I don’t know if this was a design goal for USB-C, though I suspect it was — my experience has been that if that happens, it’s the plug on the (cheap, easy to replace) cord that gets damaged, not the device. I have a television with a headphones jack that I destroyed by tripping over a headphones cord once, because the headphones jack was nice and durable and let me tear components inside the television off. I’ve damaged several USB-C cables, but I’ve never damaged the device they’re connected to while doing so.

    On an interesting note, the standard is extremely old, probably one of the oldest data standards in general use today; the 1/4" mono standard was from phone switchboards in the 1800s.

    EDIT: Also, one other perk of using USB-C instead of a built-in headphones jack on a smartphone is that if the DAC on your phone sucks, going the USB-C-audio-interface route means that you can use a different DAC. Can’t really change the internal DAC. I don’t know about other people, but last phone I had that did have an audio jack would let through a “wub wub wub” sound when I was charging it on USB off my car’s 12V cigarette lighter adapter — dirty power, but USB power is often really dirty. Was really obnoxious when feeding my car’s stereo via its AUX port. That’s very much avoidable for the manufacturer by putting some filtering on the DAC’s power supply, maybe needs a capacitor on the thing, but the phone manufacturer didn’t do it, maybe to save space or money. That’s not something that I can go fix. I eventually worked around it by getting a battery-powered Bluetooth receiver that had a 1/8" headphones jack, cutting the phone’s DAC out of the equation. The phone’s internal DAC worked fine when the phone wasn’t charging, but I wanted to have the phone plugged in for (battery hungry) navigation stuff when I was driving.