Author: Dmitry Brant

Brain dump, September 2023

I finally did something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time: get the final version of the ftape driver to work on a Linux distro that I can use in my data recovery workstations. This is for the purpose of using Linux to dump the contents of QIC-80 and similar tapes, using “floppy tape” drives, i.e. tape drives that connect to the floppy disk controller on the motherboard.

Up until this point, I’ve been using an old version of Ubuntu that has ftape pre-packaged into the kernel. The problem with this is that this version of ftape is not the latest. Development of ftape seemed to continue independently of the version that was included with the kernel. And the “last” version of ftape that is available (version 4.04a, from around July 2000) contains many enhancements over the version that was in the kernel, which seems to be 3.04, specifically compatibility with parallel port tape drives such as the Iomega Ditto 2GB.

This meant that I needed to compile the driver from source. Sounds simple enough; the driver is just a couple of loadable kernel modules. However, I would need to compile it for a version of the kernel that can boot nicely on my workstation. Browsing the source code of the driver, it appears to be intended to be compiled for kernel version 2.4.x. As an amateur kernel hacker in a previous job, I knew that even patch version changes (the third version number) in the kernel can break compilation of custom kernel modules. So, I tried to find a Linux distro that uses the earliest possible patch version of the 2.4 kernel, and still runs well on my workstation.

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CentOS 3.5 to the rescue! I was able to find ISO installation media that I used to install CentOS 3.5 flawlessly onto my recovery workstation. It uses kernel version 2.4.21, which still turned out to be “too new” for compiling ftape successfully. I got a number of compilation errors, but thankfully they were all errors that were comprehensible and easy to remedy by an amateur. After just a few hacky modifications, I got the driver to compile into a loadable module!

And would you look at that – it’s able to communicate successfully with all of my floppy tape drives, as well as my parallel port Ditto 2GB drive!

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Here’s my repository on GitHub that has the source code for the ftape driver, with my modifications for getting it to build in CentOS 3.5.

In other news, I found and restored an old ThinkPad X131e, which came to me as a Chromebook, i.e. with ChromeOS installed. In order to remove ChromeOS and install a regular Linux distro, I had to overwrite it with custom firmware that allows installing other operating systems. And in order to overwrite the firmware, I had to disassemble it and flip a physical write-protect switch that allows the firmware to be written. Why do they do this?! Anyway, with the latest version of the lightweight Xubuntu installed, this tiny thing works beautifully, and can now have a second life.

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LK-99: an unintentional social experiment

Whether they intended it or not, the South Korean team that published a preprint describing a room-temperature superconductor kicked off a social experiment that was fun to observe.

In hindsight, the claims surrounding LK-99 had all the hallmarks of pseudoscience. The mechanism for making the superconductor seemed too good to be true: combine a few seemingly boring compounds, heat them up in an oven, and presto – you’ve got a superconductor. The preprint that was published by the researchers had numerous red flags, including a plot of resistivity that was too coarse by many orders of magnitude for demonstrating superconductivity, among other amateurish blunders. When other labs around the world were trying and failing to replicate the superconductivity in LK-99, the reason given was that their process was not quite the same as the process used by the original South Korean team. In other words, only they have the true LK-99, but for some reason they’re not sharing their sample with any other lab. The red flags keep piling on from there.

But the social media storm was not abated. People were latching onto any scraps of validity about LK-99, including dubious replication attempts by anonymous Twitter trolls.

There were a number of videos that circulated, claiming evidence of superconductivity by demonstrating “levitation” properties of LK-99. However, all these videos used a generous definition of “levitation” that doesn’t really mean levitation, where the material is still standing on one corner and not quite fully levitating.

There were indeed videos that were claiming full levitation, but those turned out to be fake. I even contributed to the noise effort of dispelling the hype surrounding LK-99, by creating a fake video of my own, where a chunk of “LK-99” levitates over a neodymium hard drive magnet:

I originally posted the video on Twitter, with the intention of demonstrating how easy it is to fake such videos. The response to the video was very entertaining, and very telling. There were numerous people who immediately assumed the video was real (despite the text of my tweet that explicitly said it was fake). There were people who were genuinely mad at me for getting people’s hopes up, just by posting anything at all about LK-99. This speaks volumes about the average social media user’s attention span, and the user’s lack of willingness to seek out any context surrounding a random video that appears in their feed.

The most satisfying result of my fake video was Sabine Hossenfelder (one of my favorite physics/science YouTubers) using a clip of it in one of her own videos about LK-99, to echo the warning about the ease of producing such fakes.

In general, it seems that the social media fervor over LK-99 reveals that a lot of people are hungry for a scientific breakthrough, and I don’t blame them. There is a growing mood that progress in fundamental science, particularly in physics, has stagnated, and that the rapid-fire achievements in physics that happened in the first half of the 20th century was somehow a unique golden age that won’t be repeated. It is true that fundamental breakthroughs are much more difficult today than they were 100 years ago, simply because the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and the two theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity explain virtually everything in our world with staggering accuracy, despite being wholly incompatible with each other.

Nevertheless I believe there’s still plenty of space for a small team, or even a single person, to make a significant discovery. It’s just that we need to be extra careful about extraordinary claims made on the web, especially claims that play into our expectations of a breakthrough, and then manage our emotional response to those claims accordingly.

Thoughts on UFOs

Seeing the congressional hearing about UAPs was a fun diversion. I prefer to use the original name “UFO”, because switching to “UAP” is clearly an attempt to dodge the stigma that “UFO” has accumulated, and I don’t think “UAP” deserves to get away with it so easily.

What’s funny about the current UFO discourse is just how unimaginative it is, even after all this time. We’re well into the 21st century, but UFO evangelists are still stuck in the 1950s Hollywood conception of UFOs, i.e. a literal flying saucer piloted by aliens that are basically humanoid with long limbs and an enlarged head. Oh sorry, it’s not a flying saucer, it’s a “tic-tac” now:

And, sorry, it’s no longer a saucer, but a “black cube inside of a clear sphere.” A huge improvement, to be sure.

I’m not an expert in aeronautics, and I don’t claim to have an “explanation” for the tic-tac footage, but I am an expert in bullshit (giving it and taking it), and can offer a rough guideline for inoculating yourself against these UFO claims:

  • Take the probability of extraterrestrial vehicles being able to travel interstellar distances and reaching our planet.
  • Multiply by the likelihood of them looking and behaving exactly like we’ve always wanted them to.
  • Multiply by the likelihood of them proceeding to clumsily float in mid-air, enough to be considered an airspace hazard by the military pilots who have “seen” them, but never seen by commercial pilots or anyone on the ground.
  • Multiply by the likelihood of them being clumsy enough to crash occasionally, so that their “biologic” tissues could be collected, without anyone else noticing.
  • Multiply by the likelihood of the U.S. government being competent enough to cover up anything related to these phenomena, for an indefinite amount of time, in a culture that’s desperate for these claims to be true.
  • And now, consider how powerful, how incontrovertible, how convincing the evidence for such a UFO would need to be, to make up for the infinitesimal likelihood of each of the above points. But what do we have instead? Verbal testimony, hearsay, and grainy sensor footage (of course!), in an age of ubiquitous smartphone cameras, quadcopters, and satellites.

This is why I’m squarely in the Michael Shermer camp of capital-S skepticism regarding UFOs. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and telling everyone that “We know people who have seen things!” doesn’t quite meet the Sagan standard, even if it’s told under oath to Congress.

Brain dump, April 2023

Did you know: If you want to buy SD cards that have enhanced longevity (e.g. for use in a dash cam or any device with a lot of write cycles), do not purchase plain old SD cards that are readily available on Amazon, even if they are marketed as “high endurance” cards. These are merely marketing terms, and these SD cards still use MLC (multi-level cell) technology that packs more data at the expense of performance and longevity, making the cards cheaper. Instead, if you have the budget for it, you should splurge on industrial-grade SD cards, available from electronics suppliers like Mouser, which use SLC (single-level cells). These cards are quite a bit more expensive, but worth the peace of mind.

I’ve been watching a lot of Russian media lately, and been enjoying many long-form conversations (such as Tell Gordeeva on YouTube), many of which have an anti-war sentiment. Katerina Gordeeva has recently been labeled a “foreign agent” by the Russian government, which is what happens to any prominent figure who is critical of Russia’s actions in Ukraine (or Russia’s actions in anything, really), regardless of whether it’s a YouTube host, television personality, actor, artist, politician, and so on. Gordeeva is now legally required to preface her videos with a disclaimer that she is indeed a foreign agent, and now very likely has cause to fear for her safety. For all the faults of our life in the U.S., the First Amendment is something to be thankful for. I have also actively tried to seek out long-form content that speaks in defense of the invasion, but haven’t been able to find anything that isn’t rooted in the same propaganda and revisionist history as what Vladimir Vladimirovich himself lays out in his speeches.

Homeowner’s log, March 2023

I finally installed an outdoor spigot on the far side of the house for watering the garden, which is something I’ve been meaning to do for months, and needed to finish before the start of this year’s gardening season. I’ve never done proper “plumbing” before, and was fully preparing for the hassle of soldering copper pipes, but then stumbled on a much simpler solution: SharkBite connectors!

I located a cold-water supply line in the basement that was perfect for splicing into:

  • It’s close to my desired location of the outdoor spigot.
  • The pipe is totally exposed, which makes it perfect for experimenting with SharkBite fittings, in case something goes wrong, or it starts leaking, etc.
  • There are shutoff valves nearby on either side of the spot where I want to splice into, meaning that I won’t need to drain the water from the whole house.

SharkBite fittings don’t require any soldering, and simply slide over the pipe, securing themselves with a rubber o-ring inside the fitting. This seems almost too good to be true, which is why some professional plumbers seem to be distrustful of SharkBite fittings. But from what I can tell, as long as they’re installed properly, they’re every bit as reliable as regular soldered copper joints. Since the pipe on which I used these fittings is exposed, I’ll be able to monitor it for any problems in the future, and will report back if there is any leakage.

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For the length of new piping that leads to the outdoor spigot, I used PEX tubing, which is a lighter, cheaper, and more durable alternative to copper. The only new tools I needed to purchase were a pipe cutter for cutting the copper pipe, a special tool for cutting the PEX pipe, and another tool for crimping the connectors that join together the different segments of the PEX tubing. The overall total cost of all the tools and materials was about $100, and the total installation time was no more than one hour! This is an enormous savings over hiring a professional plumber, and while I encourage everyone to hire local professionals to do jobs that are beyond your comfort level, if you’re considering doing simple plumbing work that doesn’t impact “critical” portions of your house, then SharkBite fittings and PEX tubing are great options.