I was asked yesterday if I could remove the background distractions from this photo. The gallery app on my phone did a really good job. It made the driveway look wider than it is, though.
SideParty 0.81! Upgrade NVGT. Adjust pan and volume step. Remove the experimental older buggy occlusion. Somehow, it had become even more broken than it already was. Replace with newer occlusion code. Potential fix for door switch sounds playing at the wrong spot. Add note in readme about potential choppy audio. masonasons.itch.io/SideParty
I have an idea for immutable desktop-focused Linux distro/OS projects, like the various immutable versions of Fedora. The OS consists of multiple root filesystem layers (like the layers in an OCI container image): an irreducible core, plus layers for drivers, localization packs, assistive technologies, and desktop environments. The user selects the layers they want, and can change that selection by editing a file, copying layers to their boot media if needed, and rebooting. 1/?
The OS layers are loaded into RAM on boot. That means the individual layers need to be minimal enough and fine-grained enough that the user can load just what they want. Once the layers are loaded, the boot media isn't needed for the system to keep running. Then for applications, when a Flatpak-packaged app is launched, the necessary Flatpaks are loaded into RAM, and kept resident while the app is running. This part is handwavy because I don't know enough about Flatpak. 2/?
The point is that on a machine with only one SD card slot, the system can boot from SD card, then the user can swap cards if needed, like we did with floppies on early personal computers. 3/3
As I think about it, though, I think current desktop environments might be too tied to the single OS installation on fixed storage, with /etc and $HOME always available, to allow persistent storage to be swapped while the system is running like we did on early personal computers. But the Macintosh was a GUI desktop environment that originally booted from floppy and then let you swap the floppy, so I guess it could be made to work again.
The reasons people had to swap floppies was because of the limitations of storage. They were so small that you couldn't really fit much useful software on them.
The operating systems also didn't do multitasking, so it really didn't matter if the backing data for any app disappeared when you swapped programs because they couldn't coexist anyway
Storage is still effectively infinitely larger than the RAM in your machine too. So you're just gonna run out quickly
@AdrianVovk Fair points. I guess what I was thinking was one should be able to copy stuff from one SD card to another, and especially to set up a new bootable SD card, on a computer with only one SD slot. Though depending on the availability of USB ports or a uSB hub, one could attach a USB SD card reader.
@AdrianVovk The thing I've been obsessed with lately is the idea of personal computers booting solely from removable media, RPi-style, with no internal/fixed persistent storage. As much as I disliked swapping floppies when I was a kid, on my family's Apple IIGS with no hard drive, I also didn't have to worry about wrecking the family computer; I could do whatever I wanted on the floppies that I used for playing around, as long as I didn't touch the ones with important software or data.
All right, time for me to put up or shut up. Before the year is over, I will switch to Linux as my primary desktop OS, Firefox on Linux as my primary browser, and Orca as my primary screen reader. Then I'll see what I need to fix to make that combo pleasant for me. I'll run Windows in a VM only as necessary for my work.
@vol4life8657 Haven't decided yet, nor which desktop environment, though for the latter I'm leaning toward GNOME, so I can do things that scale (blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2020/…) rather than retreating into my own super-custom environment.
There was a point in my life when I ran Arch, had an elaborate personalized terminal prompt, and my own custom icon theme. I stopped doing all these things at various points for different reasons,...
How can I talk about wanting kids, blind or otherwise, to have unlocked general-purpose computers where they can "hack everything without fear" (see this old blog post by Drew DeVault: drewdevault.com/2018/03/17/Hac…), if I'm not willing to do the work to switch to such an environment as my own daily driver? I'm sure I have the technical skills to make it work for me, and hopefully make it work for others in the process; I just have to set aside some time.
That's really cool to hear. I've tried it a couple times, but could never really make it work for me. Random sites wouldn't work, or strange bugs got annoying, or the distro I chose turned out to have a version of Orca way behind the latest. Nothing ever felt comfortable. If things improve, I'll happily try again. I mostly need a solid browser, VSCode, email, terminal, and a good text editor.
my *hope* is that you will find great success here and come back with stories of how this might be accomplished.
my *prediction* is unfortunately that you will discover a laundry list of reasons why this is currently technically impossible a paired social, structural list of reasons that none of those issues can ever be fixed.
as I have said several times recently I wish I were more often happy and less often correct
How about building a pure console environment, using Fenrir as screen reader, and use GUI applications only where there are no alternatives, e.g. the web browser?
This is a repository of apps to be used with your F-Droid client. Applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly Github, GitLab, Codeberg).
All i've heard at work for the last fortnight is 'iPhone release'. I thought I had escaped it off the job, too. But it seems that even checking out my groceries I am pursued.
a #ChatControl update (shared on the ISOC "Global Encryption Coalition" mailing list):
"The good news is that the blocking minority held. Members states raised concerns about privacy and cybersecurity as reasons for their opposition. Even countries that are officially in support of the proposal asked questions along these lines for the first time – showing that they are facing increased pressure back home.
The bad news is that #Denmark is moving forward even though they did not receive full support. They are keeping their plan to take this proposal to the Justice and Home Affairs Council meeting on October 14th.
After discussing with partners, we understand this as a strategy from Denmark. They are not making progress at the working level (the meeting today) and therefore will try directly at the political level (justice and home affairs). During these coming four weeks they will try to convince some of the blocking member states to reconsider their position.
What this means for us is that we need to keep up the pressure. We should be thanking the blocking countries for their position and encouraging the undecided or supportive countries to reconsider. We should keep up pressure in the media at the same time."
They need to make a Kitchen Nightmare style show called Datacenter Nightmares and the person yelling at them for doing things badly can by Bryan Cantrill
Oppo, Honor, Xiaomi, and more are using silicon-carbon batteries to slim phones down without compromising on battery, but the biggest players in the US are yet to catch up.
I have access to a Linux machine with 64GB of RAM, of which about 1.2 GB is currently in use. How very sad. I need to find more silly memory using things for this box to do.
@vick21 I'm still running one of my PiHoles on an old rPi2 model B with 1GB RAM. Still works fine for that. I dunno, turn it into a small NAS or something?
Is there an open source software you'd recommendfor NAS? I mean, I could certainly just use it to back up with an attached disk, but I'd love something more powerful. :)
We should definitely keep track of the private companies firing people over their personal social media comments re: Kirk's death. Fight fire with fire.
Did any of these companies fire one single employee when they made comments about violence toward, or murder of, democrats?
Only hypothetically. We can't even get people in this country to support unions, they're not going to support mass boycotts of many different companies and media outlets simultaneously.
e.g., Target has been weathering their boycott since what, January? Yeah they're hurting a little but not enough. Their CEO just swapped chairs to another board position.
Are enough people willing to hold the line for possibly years at a time for them to finally cave in? This government can crush their ability to do business *immediately*, but the public pressure will always be so much slower for them to feel
I haven't seen this on fedi yet, but allegedly Robinson's roommate (gf? partner?) is trans and that's who he contacted on Discord to go retrieve his gun in the woods. If this is true, and Kirk was shot while about to spew some nonsense about the threat of trans mass shooters, it's quite an amusing 🤌 footnote in history, like if a white dude in love with a black woman shot a racist spewing garbage about blacks during the Civil Rights movement
Kirk would go down as a footnote for being an agitator, and Robinson would be remembered as one of the greatest defenders of the trans community.
On corporate social media, using euphemism and indirect phrasing (maybe) evades censorship. On the fediverse, doing so evades the filters that other fedizens have set up. If you want to talk about a current distressing topic in the news, if you're not going to CW, *use unredacted, specific keywords*
I wonder if government-mandated surveillance and censorship are going to come to the fediverse too, making euphemism and indirect phrasing unavoidable. Or maybe they'll just outlaw the fediverse altogether. At least the instance you're on is outside of US jurisdiction, unlike the (way smaller) instance I'm on.
@matt Fedi would probably need to get 100x as big before we have to seriously contend with this level of regulatory scrutiny, and there are sadly no signs of significant growth at the moment.
my wife used to work for the best gluten free bakery in the country (not my claim, it was the customers) and they shipped to every state. It was a good business with perfected recipes, but my wife didn't enjoy the limitations of gluten free baking. When the owner retired they took us out to dinner and handed us papers offering to sell us the business but we were still too young and really not interested.
New owners predictably destroyed the business, I think it's gone now.
RIP to the Silly Yak bakery; it was a treasure while it lasted.
(God their gluten free pumpkin scones in the autumn were so good)
"Do Universities Investing In Technology Transfer Via Patenting Lose Money?"
This study reaches a conclusion I've believed to be true since seeing how tech transfer offices work. The paper calls for closing tech transfer offices and instead open sourcing all innovations. ttb.sk/clanky/do-universities-…
It's an excellent read, with lots of good advise, including having a public "hello" profile and another unpublished chat profile for private chatting. #deltachat apps have pervasive multi-profile support (and multi-device support) so it's pretty easy to establish such a two-profile setup.
Loops is now ready to self-host, and a few instances have appeared already 🥳 Stay tuned, we have a lot more exciting news to share! joinloops.org #loops
I have finally moved over to Linux as my primary platform. In many ways it is like coming home, as I loved working on UNIX machines in the past. Of course, I have been using Linux as a secondary OS for a long time, but I finally made the switch. Microsoft cancelling Windows 10 and the direction Windows 11 is going was just too much for me.
@ruario helped the transition, by making it easy for me to work with multiple concurrent @Vivaldi installs. That is a must for me as I test a lot of builds at the same time.
Dear GitHub users. Forgejo exists (and is the software behind Codeberg). Radicle exists. Sourcehut exists. You’re welcome to join! And with forgefed we also have a federated approach. We were building all of that while you were sleeping ;) Maybe you are now ready to help us build a better, more decentralised code sharing future?
Internet before: “Never share your personal information online.”
Internet now: “We require that you fully dox yourself on every single website you visit and service you use so we and our 1729 tracking companies can stalk and build a profile on you across the web. Oh, and by the way, your personal info on something you used once two years ago just got breached and is for sale on dark web forums.”
There was a toot that went around a few years ago that I wish I had bookmarked. It said something like, and I'm badly paraphrasing from memory, "When you consider the usability of your software, think about what it will be like for an elderly person, like Margaret Hamilton, who worked on the software for the Apollo 11 guidance computer and would be dismayed at how modern applications require megabytes just to display a button." Does anyone know the one I'm talking about and have a link?
Protip:
When designing a user interface, imagine some old woman using it, say Margaret Hamilton, and she's clicking your app's buttons and saying to you, as old people do,
"Young whippersnapper, when I was your age, I sent 24 people to the ACTUAL M…
I see from the Wikipedia article about #MargaretHamilton that she's still alive, now 89 years old. I wonder what she thinks about what the industry that still calls itself software engineering (her term) has become. I should do some more searching and find out if she has talked about it in recent years.
Why I'm thinking about #MargaretHamilton today is a long story. But basically, I remembered how Steven Levy portrayed her in _Hackers_ (chapter 5, "The Midnight Computer Wiring Society"), knew she deserved better, and wanted to learn more.
Found a three-hour oral history interview of #MargaretHamilton recorded by the Computer History Museum in 2017. Here's the part where she talks about the incident I mentioned from _Hackers_ chapter 5, and the MIT hackers in general. youtube.com/watch?v=6bVRytYSTE… The annotated transcript of the whole interview, unfortunately in PDF, is here: computerhistory.org/collection…
I've retracted my boost of the toot that I was referring to at the start of the thread, because I now don't think it's a good idea to use a real, living person as a rhetorical device to make one's own point. The link is still in the replies if anyone wants it.
Daughter took an Uber to go 'out'. Out is a nebulous term to teens which has for ours generally meant the park and possibly to pick up something to eat with a friend. She got stood up and ended up sat in the rain for 2 hours. There's been about 8mm of rainfall in the last hour alone, so she is not a happy child.
Meanwhile, 3 of our sets of wall outlets and 2 lightswitches had to be chased in yesterday so when the room is re-plastered they are all neat and tidy. More brick dust. More noise. The old dog flap was also bricked-up ready for the plasterers. Our patio doors used to be a window back in the mists of time, so we had to infill a great hole in the floor, too, before the new carpet can go in.
it's been a weekend of noisy, messy jobs, and that's before the chimney even starts coming down. Up again twice in the night with the Great Whale, so today's been a bit of a failure too as we're all exhausted.
Oh boy, too bad that she was stood up. I hope, the next time she makes plans of that type, I hope she has second thoughts of making plans, especially, if those who stood her up, make plans with her again.
Thanks yep doing well, my mother drove down Friday to stay at our house with our daughter who had been with the fiance's father since thursday morning,. My father drove the, motorhome down today as they were already planning to come down for a few weeks starting today to be nearby.
ok y'all some are asking why I got XBOX and not Playstation considering TLOU and such. Here's the thing. On PS5, there's no developer mode. There's no tinkering. There's no sideloading apps, like how XBOX can sideload UWP ones. So if you want my reason, that's why. Sony are exclusivity brats to the core, and that bugs me so bad. Not that MS hasn't done that with some XBOX Studios titles, but still, like, Sony are worse. Nope. Also after those WH-1000XM6 headphones being made so cheaply do I really want another Sony product? Ugh I really am hating them sorry y'all.
one of the (many) problems with telling people who've lost their careers in middle age to just retrain is that you can't live on an entry-level salary anymore. people in their 20s are supposed to have roommates and parent subsidies. you enter a new career in your 40s and you're expected to deal with all the financial obligations of middle age with a salary that doesn't even cover the rent.
Perhaps the proper framing of Christianity isn’t to argue that Jesus of Nazareth was God (and therefore must be worshipped) but rather that the actions and words of Jesus reveal plainly what God has been doing all along, starting in Genesis and through the Revelation.
Reading some AI criticism. I have my divergences with it, but that's neither here nor there.
But someone appealed to Searle. The substrate is magic Searle. The "it's implausible that a system may do something if I can't imagine it" Searle. The "computers do simulated addition" Searle.
Really?
It's fine to dislike AI (whether the entire research programme or the current incarnation that has taken it over by synecdoche) but because brains are made of meat and meat is magic? Seriously?
There's two new upgrades in the Bose Quiet Comfort Ultra gen 2 that might be worth it to some: Lossless audio and a 30-hour gbattery with ANC, so a night's sleep or so added. Lossless audio should mean that when you plug your bose into the USB-C port, they'll continue to work and show as a soundcard. In theory. Oh, and they're saying stronger ANC, until Sound Guys does something on them. (interesting read though: soundguys.com/bose-qc-ultra-2-…) I forgot the only single advantage Bose comes with on their cans: Adjustable ANC levels. I don't know why neither Sonos nor Sony see this as a competitive advantage they're getting beat on. With Bose, I can make a "relax" profile which puts ANC at 5 or 6, leaving some sound in. Not so with my other ANC cans. ARGH.
🤌 footnote in history, like if a white dude in love with a black woman shot a racist spewing garbage about blacks during the Civil Rights movement
Hubert Figuière
in reply to Alexia Starling • • •Also
"we have money to pay people to find vulnerability."
"please fix it for free and quick, or we'll shame you. Sorry we have no money for that."