Just some Internet guy

He/him/them 🏳️‍🌈

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • They’re just examples of things you could pipe curl into, but no not really. If the download fails you end up with an incomplete file in your tmpfs anyway, and have to retry. Another use I have is curl | mysql to restore a database backup.

    If the server supports resuming, I guess that can be better than the pipe, but that still needs temporary disk space, and downloads rarely fail. You can’t corrupt downloads over HTTPS either as the encryption layer would notice it and kill the connection, so it’s safe to assume if it downloaded in full, it’s correct.

    With downloads being IO bound these days, it’s nice to not have to read it all back and write the extracted files to disk afterwards. Only writes the final files once.

    That’s far from the weirdest thing I’ve done with pipes though, I’ve installed Windows 11 on a friend’s PC across the ocean with a curl | zstd | pv | dd, and it worked. We tried like 5 different USBs and different ISOs and I gave up, I just installed it in a VM and shipped the image.


  • I’ve had to use that flag.

    --silent is useful when you don’t want the progress bar or you’re piping curl into something else. I like to do curl | tar -zxv to download and decompress at the same time, I’ve even tar -zc | curl to upload a backup taking no disk space to do so.

    The problem however is it’s really silent: if it fails, it exits with a non-zero code and that’s it. Great when you don’t want debug info to interfere, annoying when you need to debug it.

    So you can opt-in to print some errors when in silent mode, but otherwise be silent.


  • The BIOS does a lot less than you’d expect, it doesn’t really have an impact on gaming performance. For what it’s worth, I’ve been gaming in a VM for years, and it uses the TianoCore/OVMF/EDK2 firmware, and no issues. Once Linux is booted, it doesn’t really matter all that much. You’re not even allowed to use firmware services after the OS is booted, it’s only meant for bootloaders or simple applications. As long as all the hardware is initialized and configured properly it shouldn’t matter.



  • I miss the simplicity and the focus on the information due to the technical limitations.

    Websites just had the information, well presented. None of that blog spam with a massive story on how error code -21 could suck and seriously impact your business and that you should hire professionals. But anyway here’s a command copied from a 10 year old StackOverflow answer that hasn’t worked for 5 years and isn’t actually related to what you were Googling at all, but now you’ve viewed 3 advert videos, scrolled through 10 sponsored ads and closed 2 popups. Here’s the next article on error -22.

    Also, downloads were “here’s the link to it on our FTP server”, none of that guess which download button is the real one, waiting 30 seconds for the download to prepare and having to sign up for faster download speeds.