i3 Window Manager ExtremeDullard • 3 days ago • 83%

If you need to run commands as root regularly with Rofi, you may find this useful. So let's say you want to run [usb-creator-gtk](https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/usb-creator/) to create a bootable USB stick. You have write access to the USB stick's block device but it's not enough: you need to become root. You can of course open a terminal and run `sudo usb-creator-gtk`. But it's kind of tedious if you need to do that more than once. If you want to permanently run that command as root, do this: - `sudo visudo` to edit the `/etc/sudoers` file. - Add the line **yourusername ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/usb-creator-gtk** - Confirm that you can now run the command as root without being asked your password: `sudo usb-creator-gtk` should pop the USB Creator window rightaway. - Create a desktop entry in your home directory that will override the system-wide one: `cp /usr/share/applications/usb-creator-gtk.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/` That way, when Rofi looks for available applications in drun mode, it will find your local usb-creator-gtk.desktop file before the system-wide file of the same name and will use the local one and ignore the system-wide one. If you'd like Rofi to list both, rename the one in your local directory to a different name from the system-wide one. - Edit ~/.local/share/applications/usb-creator-gtk.desktop: - Modify **Exec=usb-creator-gtk** to **Exec=sudo usb-creator-gtk**. - Modify **Name=Startup Disk Creator** to **Name=Startup Disk Creator (sudo)**, so you know Rofi picks your local desktop file over the system-wide one, or you can tell the sudo version apart from the normal version if you want to keep both listed. And that's it! Start Rofi, type "startup" and the autocompletion should list "Startup Disk Creator (sudo)" - and of course, selecting it should pop the window rightaway.

i3 Window Manager ExtremeDullard • 4 days ago • 100%

My preference is [Diodon](https://github.com/diodon-dev/diodon) - especially with the **Add images to clipboard history** option enabled. And if you enable the **Application Indicator** plugin, it lhappily stays as an icon in your system tray. The perfect clipboard for i3.

i3 Window Manager ExtremeDullard • 5 days ago • 100%

I use Remmina all the time to access remote computers through RDP and VNC. But it's annoying in i3 to open the main window, select a profile, then close the main window to leave just the remote session window. Remmina does have a command line option to dock into the system tray using appindicator (the `-i` option, i.e. "start as a tray icon") and right-clicking the icon does provide a quick access to saved profiles. However, there's a problem with it: when the last window closes, Remmina exits instead of staying docked in the systray- Unfortunately, the Remmina folks [won't fix it](https://gitlab.com/Remmina/Remmina/-/issues/2588) - and in fact plan of killing the systray icon altogether. There's always the possibility of making a small shell script that restarts Remmina each time it closes. The problem with that approach is, it a Remmina process doesn't terminate cleanly and stays in the background for some reason (it happens, especially if i3 is closed unexpectedly) then you have to open a terminal and kill the rogue remmina process, which is kind of a pain. Not to mention, if / when Remmina stops providing a systray icon, it'll stop working. So instead, since I use [Rofi](https://github.com/davatorium/rofi) as a launcher in i3 - like most everybody I believe - and Rofi supports custom scripts, I made a small script to parse saved Remmina profiles and add them to Rofi as a special mode, to provide quick access to them. As a bonus, when you're not using Remmina, it's not running and eating up memory for nothing. You can find it here, along with instructions to install it: https://github.com/Giraut/rofi_remmina_profiles_menu Kind of trivial, but I figured I'd share it in case someone else finds it useful.

politics ExtremeDullard • 1 week ago • 100%

If you remember Steve Ballmer as CEO of Microsoft, you probably remember him as a buffoon with his foot more often in his mouth than in his shoe, a disgusting ultra-billionaire and a general dirtbag. So I was properly surprised to watch his [interview with Jon Stewart](https://youtu.be/PdX3nOo7BCQ): he's created a website called [USA Facts](https://usafacts.org/) that actually seems to provide a genuine, much needed public service to this country, and against all expectations, the man really has interesting things to say for a change. Although, Ballmer being Ballmer, he also managed to make a really cringy Twin Towers comparison on 9/11. Because Ballmer... You can't polish a turd. Still, I encourage you to watch this interview: it's surprisingly interesting and a lot more profound than whatever you might think of Ballmer might have you expect. Unlike Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer might actually turn out to be somebody worthy of respect later in life after all.

i3 Window Manager ExtremeDullard • 2 weeks ago • 100%

Here are a few bindings in my i3 config file that I find super useful (bear in mind that I use a [Kensington Expert Mouse](https://www.kensington.com/p/products/ergonomic-desk-accessories/ergonomic-input-devices/expert-mouse-wired-trackball3-1/) and `Button8` is a suitably unusual but still easily clicked button on that trackball, so you may want to change it to something more suitable to your preferred pointing device): ``` # Clicking the title bar with the upper-right button closes the window (regular default binding, just different button) bindsym --release button8 kill # Scrolling over any window title bar controls the volume bindsym button4 exec pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ +5% && $refresh_i3bar bindsym button5 exec pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ -5% && $refresh_i3bar [...] bar { [...] # Clicking the empty space in the bottom bar with the upper-right button opens the launcher bindsym button8 exec "rofi -modi drun,run -show drun" # Scrolling over the empty space in the bottom bar controls the volume bindsym button4 exec --no-startup-id pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ +5% && $refresh_i3bar bindsym button5 exec --no-startup-id pactl set-sink-volume @DEFAULT_SINK@ -5% && $refresh_i3bar } ``` I find those bindings useful because unless a window is open fullscreen - which I rarely do personally - then there's always a window title bar at the top and the bar at the bottom. As a result, when I quickly want to lower the volume - when the missus yells at me in the middle of the night for example 🙂 - I can slam the trackball up or down and quickly scroll the volume down. Similarly, I can move the pointer all the way down and open the launcher with my unusual trackball button, and move all the way back up and close a window by clicking on the appropriate title bar with the same button, so that I don't really have to hit the keyboard most of the time for opening and closing simple stuff. Anyhow, I thought I'd share.

Louis Rossmann ExtremeDullard • 2 weeks ago • 66%

I love Louis and I've been following his videos for a long time. What he does is supremely important to our messed up society. But here's the thing: for the past few months, I've had the distinct feeling than each of Louis' videos is slightly more unhinged than the previous one. I mean I'm fully aware Louis' videos are not mainstream, and until recently, I've always felt there was a clear method to the randomness. But lately, it¨s been more randomness than method for me, and it's reached a point where I feel it's doing a disservice to the causes of right to repair and sovereign ownership. Am I the only one who feels this way? I really hate to come out saying this, but I really think there's something going on with Louis, and beyond the causes he fights for on our behalf - and goodness knows I'm eternally grateful for what he's achieved - I'm honestly a bit worried for him.

Linux ExtremeDullard • 2 weeks ago • 98%

Apparently I installed that thing in 2006 and I last updated it in 2016, then I quit updating it for some reason that I totally forgot. Probably laziness... It's been running for quite some time and we kind of forgot about it in the closet, until the SSH tunnel we use to get our mail outside our home stopped working because modern openssh clients refuse to use the antiquated key cipher I setup client machines with way back when any longer. I just generated new keys with a more modern cipher that it understands (ecdsa-sha2-nistp256) and left it running. Because why not 🙂

i3 Window Manager ExtremeDullard • 3 weeks ago • 100%

I still use the old - and last - official Linux .deb package for Teams and sure enough, it doesn't behave properly in i3: Teams starts and shows up in the systray but the window is fullscreen and won't close. I have to keep a workspace around just for Teams. I suspect Electron of course. Electron doesn't integrate well with any Linux desktop environment. Just wondering if someone knows if there's a trick to make it close in i3.

Linux ExtremeDullard • 4 weeks ago • 99%

I got into computers when there was no GUI. Then years later I got a Win95 PC and I found the Windows GUI pretty good - although the rest of the OS was not. My personal Linux PC running Slackware 96 came with FVWM95 wich was a good approximation. So I switched to that. That was just for graphical utilities of course - of which there weren't very many. I spent the rest of my time in the Linux console or in xterm using screen for convenience. Fast-forward to today: I still do that. I still like the Win95 UI paradigm, so I run Mint / Cinnamon. But most of what I do with it is open a Gnome terminal, blow it up and start tmux - like screen but better. And, ya know, for almost 3 decades, whether it's Mint or anything else I used, that's pretty much what I've been doing: running screen in a terminal in a Win95-like GUI. And it works fine for me. I recently ordered a laptop that comes with Debian / Wayland and the Sway window manager installed by default. I learned a long time ago that it's often better to go with whatever is installed by default than try to reinstall everything and fight a system that wasn't designed for it. The laptop will take a few weeks to get here. So to prepare for when it lands on my porch, I decided to get into Sway on my current machine, to get used to it. I figured even if I don't like it, at least that way I'll be comfortable with it, and I'll know whether it's acceptable as it is or whether I should spend the time installing something more Win95-like. But my current machine doesn't run Wayland, just plain Xorg. 2 minutes of searching revealed that Sway is in fact i3wm for Wayland. Great! I promptly installed i3 on my Linux Mint box, switch to it, fucked around with the config file for a few hours and... I love it! That's pretty much exactly what I do with Cinnamon anyway but quicker! And just like that, I switch to i3. I felt right at home with it from the get-go. The whole Win95-like UI was just a familiarity: in fact, what I've always wanted was a tiling window manager. And yes, I did spend a few hours - almost half a day really - configuring the thing exactly how I like. But if I'm honest, I probably spent just as much time with Cinnamon way back when I switched to that too. So it's no different really. So the takeaway here is: even if you have decades-old die-hard habits and you don't want to change, you should expose yourself to change every once in a while: you might just get surprised 🙂

Linux ExtremeDullard • 4 weeks ago • 97%

I'm about to [step into the wonderful world of ARM Linux](https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/21290189). I work with ARM32 as an embedded developer profesionally (Cortex-M3 specifically) so I'm not a complete newbie. But I've never used ARM64, and I've never used it with a desktop OS. So I'm doing my research, as one does, to know roughly what I'll be dealing with. I have a few questions regarding backward compatibility and architecture-naming. Maybe you specialists out there could shed some light. From what I could find, I understand the following: - arm64 and aarch64 are the same thing: the former is what Linus likes to say while the latter is what ARM calls their own stuff. - arm64 / aarch64 really mean "compatible with ARMv8" as a least common denominator, meaning ARMv8.x-y (*x* being the extension, *y* being A for application or R for realtime) will run it, just without taking advantage of any extension or realtime instructions. - ARMv9.x will run arm64 / aarch64 kernels and applications, as it's (supposedly) backward-compatible with ARMv8, just without taking advantage of the ARMv9 ISA. - If I want to create arm64 software that takes advantage of this-or-that extension or realtime instructions, I have to compile it in explicitely. I'm not sure if gcc handles special instructions, I haven't checked yet, but I suppose it does since it knows about the Thumb mode for instance. Do I understand correctly? If I do create some software that relies on extended ARMv8 or ARMv9 features and I want to release my software as a package, how should I name the package's architecture? Is there even a standard for that? Will it get rejected by the package managers of the few ARM distros out there, or will it be recognized as a subset of the wider arm64 / aarch64 architecture?

Libre Hardware ExtremeDullard • 4 weeks ago • 100%

You might recall that I was considering a [MNT Reform laptop](https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-reform) to [replace my crappy HP laptop](https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/13880246) a few months ago. Well, I got no answer or information of any kind anywhere (not just here on Lemmy), but the idea kept going round and round in the back of my head. And now, 5 months later, I find myself having to upgrade Mint to Wilma on my hateful HP laptop soon, and I already dread rebooting to the console because Xorg is dead *again*, having to downgrade to a working version of the kernel *again*, fighting the AMDGPU driver *again*, making the super-flaky and completely terrible wifi-cum-bluetooth Realtek 8821CE adapter work halfway decently *again*... I hate this laptop. In fact, I hate it so much that I finally pulled the trigger on the MNT Reform laptop. Hopefully it'll get here before the need to upgrade becomes too pressing. Stay tuned 🙂

FreeCAD ExtremeDullard • 1 month ago • 100%

Hey everybody, After a few months without using FreeCAD (but keeping up with the daily updates) I need to model a quick something today. And I realize there seems to be a new feature in the 0.22.0-dev version that prevents me from orbiting around the model when I'm in the sketcher: I use OpenSCAD-style 3D navigation, which means I left-click to rotate the model. In the sketcher, left-clicking is used to do a rectangular lasso selection, and that prevents me from orbiting around the model. I tried with shift, ctrl, alt and all combinations thereof, but there seems to be no way to disable that selection feature. Fortunately I also use a 3DConnexion Spacemouse, so I'm not completely stuck, but it's kind of annoying to have to use that thing when I'd rather not move my hand away from the keyboard. Anybody knows how to disable the lasso thing?

VIM - Vi IMproved ExtremeDullard • 2 months ago • 100%

When I was a student a few decades ago, everybody I knew pronounced it as "vee-eye". Then in the late nineties / early aughts, I heard the first people pronounced it as "vie" in a different city I had found employment in. It sounded odd to me, and it seemed to come from people who in fact didn't use it much. But the pronounciation I was used to still applied, mostly. Nowadays, I almost never talk about VI to anyone anymore, nor do I hear anyone say the name. It's become mostly a typed thing for me. But - coincidence? - this week I heard three people talk about it (younger, non VI users) and they all said "vie". And now I'm watching [this video](https://youtu.be/BOeku3hDzrM) from the reasonably famous and definitely not young and not VI newbie [NCommander](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ncommander) and he too says "vie" in the video. I'm beginning to worry that I'm the one who's been saying it wrong all this time because of my misguided college buddies and teachers way back when 🙂 So I'm curious: how do YOU say it? VEE-EYE or VIE?

Privacy ExtremeDullard • 2 months ago • 69%

After their shameless Synology shilling a couple of weeks ago, today Techlore is trying to sell me Proton Pass. Is Proton Pass a bad password manager? I don't know. It seems okay, but I have no opinion. What I do know is that Techlore is affiliated with Proton, which makes their newest 10-minute video - in which they reveal the affiliation only at the last minute - 10 minutes of my life I'll never get back. Unfortunately, In the business they're in, the merest hint of a bias kind of invalidates any advice they give. As the saying goes, when you point out other people's body odor, you'd better make sure you took a shower yourself. Unsubscribe...

networking ExtremeDullard • 3 months ago • 98%

Yesterday around noon, the internet at my company started acting up. No matter, slowdowns happen and there's roadwork going on outside: maybe they hit the fiber or something. So we waited. Then our Samba servers started getting flaky. And the database too. Uh oh... That's different. We started investigating. Some machines were dropping ICMP packets like crazy, then recovered, then other machines started to become unpingable too. I fired up Wireshark and discovered an absolute flood of IGMP packets on all the trunks, mostly broadcast from Windows machine. It was so bad two Linux machines on the same switch couldn't ping each other reliably if the switch was connected to the intranet. So we suspected a DDOS attack initiated from within the intranet by an outside attacker. We cut off the internet, but the storm of packets kept on coming. Physically disconnecting machines from the intranet one by one didn't do a thing either. Eventually, we started disconnecting each trunk one by one from the main router until we disconnected one and all the activity lights immediately stopped on all the ports. We reconnected it and the crazy traffic resumed. So we went to that trunk's subrouter and did the same thing. When we found the cable that stopped all the traffic, we followed it and finally found one lonely $10 ethernet switch with... a cable with both ends plugged into the switch. We disconnected the cable and everything instantly returned to normal. One measly cable brought the entire company to a standstill for hours! Because half of the software we have to use are cloud crap or need to call their particular motherships to activate their licenses, many people couldn't work anymore for no good technical reason at all while we investigated the networking issue. Anyway, I thought switches had protections against that sort of loopback connection, and routers prevented circular routes. But there's theory and there's reality. Crazy!

Open Source ExtremeDullard • 3 months ago • 99%

You might recall [a few weeks ago](https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/18026563) that I requested from a well-known large and somewhat litigious company the source code of the modification they made to a certain GPL debugger, and that they grudgingly agreed after a long time. So I set out to work on the pile of code they sent me and managed to extract their modifications and port them fo the latest version of that GPL tool... apart from one driver for their debug probes that we use throughout our company: the cunning bastards left a stub in the open-source debugger (I have the code for that) and that stubs talks to the rest of the driver in the form of a closed-source TCP server. It's a blatant trick to go around the GPL by taking advantage of the grey area surrounding linking in the GPL - i.e. the question of whether a closed-source program can be linked to GPL code and not become GPL itself, which still hasn't been tested in court to my knowledge. If I recall correctly, the FSF is of the opinion that anything that dynamically links to GPL code becomes GPL too, but that's just an opinion. And of course, here in this case, the aforementioned company added one degree of separation between their closed-source driver and the GPL tool that uses it by making it a server, so whatever argument against linking to GPL code becomes even weaker. Anyway, as you can imagine, I'm disappointed: my work is 90% there, but I still don't have that one driver and their closed-source faux-server is half-broken and dog-slow because of the time it takes to spawn the server and communicate with it through TCP, and I can't fix it. And I'm 100% certain that if I asked them to send me the source code for that, they'd tell me to suck eggs. But here's what happened: I got so tired of their shenanigans that I started investigating other debug probes I could use instead of their proprietary junk. And after quite a lot of investigation, I found one solution based on open hardware and open software that, with some careful configuration, works 2x to 3x faster than their proprietary debug probe. Wow! I didn't even know it was possible, and I probably wouldn't have researched it if I had had all I needed to make what we already own works. Long story short: I proposed that my company replace all our existing proprietary debug probes with the open hardware one and my boss agreed. That's like 20 probes in total, between R&D, testing and production, and at the tune $266.99 per probe for the original proprietary one, that's $5339.80 the egregious GPL-violating company won't get from us. Not to mention renewal of the license for their IDE that we've been using for almost 2 decades, because finally, at long last, after over a month of solid work, I finally managed to free up our source code from their vendor lock-in and make it compile, debug and flash using open-source tools from start to finish! So yeah, I didn't get what I originally wanted from that company. That's the bad news. But in the end I ended up better off without it, and that's the good news 🙂

Privacy ExtremeDullard • 3 months ago • 92%

I like Techlore (https://www.techlore.tech if you don't know) and I usually regard them as one of the most impartial and most trustworthy Youtubers out there. But for the past few months, I couldn't help noticing their somewhat heavy bias towards some of their video sponsors. Still, everybody has to eat right? This time though, it looks like Synology flew them over to Taiwan, and if you watch their [video at the event](https://neat.tube/w/5exwnrrBZbvZmBkcDwECcR), it's wall-to-wall Synology shilling. I'm really disappointed.

VIM - Vi IMproved ExtremeDullard • 3 months ago • 100%

So I'm very happy with vim, and have been for the past quarter century (I used [Elvis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_(text_editor)) before that. Remember Elvis? It was awesome! - But I digress...) I have to admit though, while I pity the fools in my company who use VSCode and mock me for using vim in the terminal, yet in fact produce code much slower than I do, I envy their IDE that suggests function and variable names in other project files. So I've been looking for a nice, easy-to-install solution to get some of that goodness in vim. Nothing fancy, just autocomplete suggestions to avoid having to grep names I forgot or having to yank/put text manually to prevent typos. And mostly easy, because for some reason, I'm properly allergic to any sort of vi configuration - be it vim or any other vi flavor. So I gave Neovim a shot. My plan was to ensure Neovim was at least as good as Vim, then try to install Treesitter. But that plan [immediately went south](https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/18253296), then kept on being a proper pain in the ass until I finally realized this was going nowhere fast and I didn't want to spend countless hours configuring that awful thing, so I gave up. I wasn't asking for much but Neovim totally failed to deliver. And then I found the solution I was looking for all along: [YouCompleteMe](https://github.com/ycm-core/YouCompleteMe?tab=readme-ov-file#user-guide). It's as simple as installing the handy vim-youcompleteme .deb for my distro (Linux Mint), running vam to install it and voila: a working autocompleter that actually works in 3 minutes flat and doesn't get in my way.

Neovim ExtremeDullard • 3 months ago • 100%

I'm normally a straight vim user (just out of habit, no particular preference) and I'm giving neovim a spin. So far I like it but... For the love of all that's holy, how do I disable automatic indentation? I have noautoindent set, nosmartindent set, filetype indent off, but neovim keeps inserting indentations. The only thing that works is setting paste on, but that's not the right solution to this problem. Please help. This is driving me nuts!

Electric Vehicles ExtremeDullard • 3 months ago • 95%

I have a very old diesel that I maintain religiously to make it last as long as possible, and whenever possible, I ride the bus. It's not that I wouldn't like a new car - and particularly an EV, those cars are attractive for a lot of reasons - but they all spy on their users nowadays and that's a big no-no for me. For that reason and that reason alone, I've refrained from buying a new car for years. But now I have a good reason to buy an EV: my employer has installed solar panels on the company's roof, is in the process of installing charge points on the parking lot, and is offering all the employees free charging. So I'm on the market for a small electric econobox to commute roughly 30 miles per day. I don't want anything fancy: just an honest-to-goodness little car with a steering wheel, an accelerator, a brake pedal and doors that lock. That's it. I don't care about creature comfort, I don't care about radio, GPS or anything else. I just want *a car*. And of course, of upmost importance to me, I want a car without telemetry, that doesn't spy on me and doesn't report to the mothership. So far I think the best option is to buy one of the first gen EVs with a 2G or 3G connection that plain doesn't work anymore, and have it overhauled. The problem is, I might want to buy a more recent, possibly more efficient vehicle. Also, good luck finding someone competent to service a battery pack in my area. If I went for a newer vehicle, what would be the best make/model to disable the internet immediately after purchase without any side effect? I've read that some models report a fault until the internet connectivity is restored, so those would be out of the question. And of course, if the antennae / SIM / 4G PCB or whatever needs to be disabled are super-hard to find, it wouldn't be ideal either. Any way to convert a modern car into an honest vehicle, or should I keep riding the bus and give the opportunity offered by my employer a pass?

Open Source ExtremeDullard • 3 months ago • 99%

So this very large company who shall remain nameless distributes a proprietary software development environment that includes a patched version of a certain, well-known open-source debugging tool. The patch is to make said open-source tool support their products. It's not even hidden or anything: the binary is sitting right there in the installation directory, it's called the exact same thing the vanilla debugger is called and when I run it on the command line, it clearly says "patched for xyz". The tool in question is distributed under the GPLv2 and I need to modify it for my own project. So I sent an email to the company to request the source code for their modification, but they refuse by playing dumb and pretending they don't understand the question. They keep telling me the source code to their IDE is not public. I keep telling them I don't want their IDE but the source for the modified GPL backend tool they bundle with it. But no: they claim it's part of their product and they won't release it. Anybody knows the best course of action to deal with this? It's the first company I've dealt with that explicitly refuses to honor the GPL. I don't even think it's malice: I'm fairly sure the L2 support guy handling my ticket was told to deny my request by his clueless supervisor who didn't bother escalating it. But it's also a huge company that's known to be aggressive and litigious, whereas I'm just one guy and I'm not lawyering up over this. I have other hills to die on. Who should I pass the potato to? The FSF?

Finland ExtremeDullard • 4 months ago • 100%

It's attractive, it looks friendly, it's genuinely good, yet for no good reason, it tries to convince you it's not really that great 🙂

Flipper Zero ExtremeDullard • 4 months ago • 95%

github.com

It's based on the latest firmware (0.101.2) so you get all the latest drivers. And if you maintain Flipper Zero software, you can finally let uFBT use the latest SDK instead of 0.99.1. The update went without a hitch on all my Flippers and as far as I can tell, it works very well. Here's a walkthrough of the intro, the Momentum app and some of the desktop assets: https://pixelfed.sdf.org/p/ExtremeDullard/695363484725132104

Mildly Infuriating ExtremeDullard • 4 months ago • 81%

toobnix.org

I know they're supposed to be good for the environment but... God I hate those caps.

Flipper Zero ExtremeDullard • 4 months ago • 93%

Remote control your Flipper in a text terminal

Mildly Infuriating ExtremeDullard • 4 months ago • 99%

None of what follows is new. I know this stuff happens all the time. And yet somehow this insignificant thing shocked me and it's been gnawing at me for the past few days. And today was the icing on the shit cake. So my wife ordered a a foot massage machine. $50, typical el-cheapo thing made in China. The thing was shipped to our home out in the boonies in less than 48 hours. Wow! My wife opened the box, got the device out onto the floor and... she couldn't fit her feet inside. She's not big, but apparently the device was designed for customers in the Shire. Unusable. So she emailed the distributor who told her to cut the cord, send them a photo proving the destruction and throw it away herself. Not return the device. Not *pretend* to return the device and the device is thrown away behind her back. No no: this time, the distributor told her in no uncertain terms that it's cheaper for them to let her destroy the thing herself. And then it hit me: here is a device that was born in China, put together by some underpaid workers in a nondescript factory, designed by someone who didn't give a shit, made out of materials that probably came out of the ground somewhere in Africa and in Saudi Arabia - probably involving child labor at some point or other - put on a boat, shipped halfway around the world, then put into a truck, only to be landfilled here. It didn't even see a single second of use. This is utterly absurd and completely depressing. I'm not compatible with that. When I buy something, the thing has value and I want it to have a decently useful life. It's not about ecology or money: it's just basic respect for the resources and the human labor that went into this thing. The value of the object is what it cost the Earth and the people who toiled to make it and ship it to me. When I use my things, I show respect for those who made them and it justifies the use ot the materials they're made of. But here I was looking at that poor thing across the room, unloved and unlovable, whose sole purpose as an object was to be landfilled without ever seeing any use. It consumed resources and someone worked to make it, yet somehow it never had any value for anybody. And the most depressing thing about it is, its very existence from Chinese factory to my local landfill is totally absurd and makes no sense at all, yet all the invididual steps that contributed to it being fabricated and ultimately landing on our doorstep were a series of perfectly rational economical decisions: someone found added value in designing and building a shit foot massage machine, my wife found it worth buying sight unseen, someone figured there was money to be made shipping it here, and the distributor decided to outsource its destruction to the customers because it's cheaper than destroying it themselves - let alone shipping it back to Shenzen or wherever. And yet when you string everything together, the net result is senseless waste and production of things that have no inherent worth. How crazy is that eh? I couldn't throw it away. So I replaced the cord and I gave it to the local Red Cross store yesterday to give to someone in need or sell it for pennies. Today, I passed by the shop on my way to work and saw the damn thing in their garbage container behind the store. In the box. Unopened. I guess it will be going to the landfill after all... That really put the final damper on my day today... Sorry if this is the wrong venue, but I really needed to vent.

Privacy ExtremeDullard • 5 months ago • 77%

I've never been super-impressed by Rob Braxman. I mean he's never truly wrong in what he was saying in his Youtube videos, but his explanations are over-simplistic, a bit of a shortcut (but fair enough to reach a wide audience I guess), and mostly designed to sell his meh deGoogled cellphones and equally meh privacy services. But all in all, he's somewhat watchable and sometimes informative after I'm done watching all the new videos from the other, more interesting channels I follow. But lately, his videos seem to have shifted markedly toward unhinged rants and sensationalist conspiracy theory. His latest video for instance is utter nonsense: [Skynet 2024: The Infrastructure is Complete!](https://youtu.be/9xPjIfJI5Jk) I mean yeah, okay, technically he's talking about a real thing. But Skynet? And doomsday Terminator imagery from 1984? Really? I'm pretty sure the man doesn't have all his fries in the cone anymore. This can't possibly be a conscious strategy to win more Youtube subscribers: this sort of video is going to lose him the part of his audience that has a genuine and technically-informed interest in privacy, and I doubt he's ever going to become a favorite of the sort of crowd who likes conspiracy theories. Either that or Youtube is a lot stupider than I thought and he noticed an uptick in subscribers when he makes videos like that. At any rate, I really hesitate to click on any of his new videos now.

Flipper Zero ExtremeDullard • 5 months ago • 97%

I just discovered this repo: [Mitsubishi AC remote](https://github.com/achistyakov/flipperzero-mitsubishi-ac-remote). I have a reversible Mitsubishi AC. Cloned the report, ufbt-launched it, and hey presto! I now have a second AC remote to fight my wife over the temperature in the living room with 🙂 Thanks Anton!

Flipper Zero ExtremeDullard • 5 months ago • 95%

And now I have a Flipper Zero weather station: [](https://toobnix.org/w/kz1KQEWAWRduCbtMGFnRUG) Two years ago, I bought a cheap [Denver WS-520](https://denver.eu/products/denver-ws-520/c-1024/p-3520) weather station. The head unit's LCD display turned out to be bad that I quickly shelved the device and bought another one. But I forgot the temperature sensor outside on the wall. Today I was goofing around with Flipper and I started the [weather station app](https://lab.flipper.net/apps/weather_station) just to see what it did. And lo and behold, after a few seconds, it unexpectedly beeped and reported a temperature! Then I realized the temperature sensor was still outside, still alive and is in fact a rebranded [ThermoPro TX-4](https://buythermopro.com/product/tx-4/) supported by the app. I'm glad I didn't resell or junk the weather station. Now I can use it again. This is awesome!

Flipper Zero ExtremeDullard • 6 months ago • 94%

I coded my first "serious" app for the Flipper Zero this week, and it's the first time in my 30-odd years as a programmer that coding something felt slightly weird for two totally silly reasons: - Each time the Flipper crashes, the dolphin makes a sad face. I know it's just an animation but... somehow it bothers me each and every time 🙂 - Most of the API calls start with Furi-something. And each time I write one, I can't help but think of [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Max:_Fury_Road). Also, there's nothing furious about cute dolphins - apart perhaps when I keep clubbing them with null pointer dereferences... And yes, I know its stands for Flipper Universal Registry Implementation. Yet my brain can't help conjuring up images of cute dolphins being clubbed in a post-apocalyptic desert. Call me weird I guess...

DeGoogle Yourself ExtremeDullard • 6 months ago • 96%

I haven't been able to update my cellphone anonymously with Aurora since January. Every time I try, Aurora errors out with "Oops, you are rate limited". This isn't the first time Google plays at making non-normies' lives difficult. So I tried the usual tricks, updated Aurora, tried the nightly build, waited, tried again... for months - to no avail: Google just won't play ball this time. Last week, Signal stopped working and demanded to be updated. Fortunately, Signal offers the [APK as a normal download](https://signal.org/android/apk/) without having to get it from the hateful Google Play store. Today, my home banking identificator app did the same thing and stopped working. I needed to make a payment right now, and I had no way to update the app: "Oops, you are rate limited". And my bank sure doesn't offer the APK outside of anything but the goddamn Google Play store. So I relented and created a Google account. Which of course entailed giving Google a phone number. I sure didn't give them mine, so I phoned a friend abroad who doesn't care to ask him to receive the verification SMS on his phone and read out the code to me. Which worked long enough to set up 2FA and do away with phone numbers altogether. And finally, after an hour of fucking around, annoying other people and compromising their phone number, I could update my banking app and make my payment at last. All that because Google has decided they want to control my phone. Fuck Google. Seriously, how they are allowed to hold the Android world hostage like this without getting their monopolistic ass Sherman'ed AT&T-style, I'll never know. It's long overdue.

Open Source ExtremeDullard • 6 months ago • 90%

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/13880246 > I have a terrible el-cheapo [14" HP laptop](https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c06885663) that I bought from a big-box store a few years ago as an emergency replacement for a laptop that died on me on the road while visiting a customer. I literally went to the store 5 minutes before it closed, bought any laptop they had, loaded Linux on it at the hotel and transferred my files from the dead laptop overnight, then did my presentation the next morning. > > The trouble is, that laptop is VERY Linux unfriendly. I've put up with it for years because I don't like to throw things away, but I just can't stand the regular AMDGPU driver crashes and the broke-ass wifi-cum-bluetooth Realtek chipset anymore. > > So I'm on the market for a good Linux laptop. I'm not a demanding user - I use that HP laptop to edit videos and do CAD and I'm okay with it - I'm very comfortable with anything Linux and I can code my way around problems. > > I'm really tempted to get a MNT Reform laptop: I like the LiFePo4 battery cells a lot, it's solid, it's open hardware, it has a trackball and I love trackballs, it's highly hackable, and I'd like to support the MNT Research guys. And I'm old enough and the kids have been out of the house long enough that money is no object. > > But a couple of things are holding me back. Maybe there are MNT Reform owners here who could shed some light on the following questions: > > []() > - I don't know much of the ARM ecosystem, and what to expect from what processor / SoC. So I'm thinking of going with the highest end RK3588 32GB / 256GB CPU module offered by MNT. Would this at least match the performances of my stupid HP laptop's Ryzen 5 CPU in terms of real-world performances? > > Or put another way: should I expect to take a hit when encoding my videos or doing big CAD models compared to this already slow laptop, or can I reasonably expect the MNT Reform to at least not be a regression. > > Side question (yes, I know it should be obvious, but asking is better than guessing): I assume the "32GB / 256GB" in the CPU module's denomination is for 32GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard flash. Meaning I'd have that much disk space without needing to add a NVMe SSD card. Correct? > > []() > - The keyboard layout looks all shades of terrible. I'm flexible with anything but not keyboard layouts - and especially those keyboard that don't put the left SHIFT and CTRL at the bottom where they belong, or have a split space bar. > > The Reform's keyboard ticks all the wrong boxes for me in that respect: I can tell rightaway that it's going to fight my typing muscle memory all the time and forever, because I sure ain't gonna get used to it. > > Can I remap the keys so I can at least I can swap CTRL and whatever that key is at the bottom left, and make the 3 buttons that replace the space bar act as a space bar? Then it's just a matter of putting a sticker on the keys and gluing the space bar keycaps together somehow. > > []() > - I seem to recall some years ago that if the laptop was left off and unplugged for long enough - like 2 weeks IIRC - it would drain the cells and kill them because there was no under-voltage protection. Less dramatically but equally annoyingly, you couldn't leave it unplugged for a few days and expect to find it fully charged when you needed it most. > > Does it still do that? Or has the hardware been fixed - or maybe there's a "Turn really off" option in the little side computer that runs the mini OLED display? > > Mind you, I can always drill a hole and add a physical switch to disconnect the cells, but I'd rather not do that. > > []() > - Is there an option to limit the charge? Keeping Li-ion cells constantly at 100% (or worse, charging all the time) when the laptop is plugged in isn't ideal. I'd rather it kept the cells charged around 80% . And I mostly use my laptops plugged in. > > []() > - Can I remove the cells and use the laptop plugged in? I might eschew the cells altogether, because I really never need them: I'm plugged in at home, I'm plugged in on the train, I'm plugged in at the hotel, I'm plugged in at the customer's. I can't remember a time when I needed to run this particular laptop on battery. If I can use the laptop as a luggable computer, I wouldn't need to carry the weight of the cells around. > > []() > - Has anybody tried to install Cinnamon? Does it work well on Debian ARM? I see no reason why it shouldn't, but maybe there are issues. > > []() > Well that's pretty much it. Sorry for the long post 🙂 There's precious little information about the MNT Reform out there - probably a good indication that there are precious few such machines in the wild, sadly - so I would welcome any real-world user feedback!

Libre Hardware ExtremeDullard • 6 months ago • 93%

I have a terrible el-cheapo [14" HP laptop](https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c06885663) that I bought from a big-box store a few years ago as an emergency replacement for a laptop that died on me on the road while visiting a customer. I literally went to the store 5 minutes before it closed, bought any laptop they had, loaded Linux on it at the hotel and transferred my files from the dead laptop overnight, then did my presentation the next morning. The trouble is, that laptop is VERY Linux unfriendly. I've put up with it for years because I don't like to throw things away, but I just can't stand the regular AMDGPU driver crashes and the broke-ass wifi-cum-bluetooth Realtek chipset anymore. So I'm on the market for a good Linux laptop. I'm not a demanding user - I use that HP laptop to edit videos and do CAD and I'm okay with it - I'm very comfortable with anything Linux and I can code my way around problems. I'm really tempted to get a MNT Reform laptop: I like the LiFePo4 battery cells a lot, it's solid, it's open hardware, it has a trackball and I love trackballs, it's highly hackable, and I'd like to support the MNT Research guys. And I'm old enough and the kids have been out of the house long enough that money is no object. But a couple of things are holding me back. Maybe there are MNT Reform owners here who could shed some light on the following questions: []() - I don't know much of the ARM ecosystem, and what to expect from what processor / SoC. So I'm thinking of going with the highest end RK3588 32GB / 256GB CPU module offered by MNT. Would this at least match the performances of my stupid HP laptop's Ryzen 5 CPU in terms of real-world performances? Or put another way: should I expect to take a hit when encoding my videos or doing big CAD models compared to this already slow laptop, or can I reasonably expect the MNT Reform to at least not be a regression. Side question (yes, I know it should be obvious, but asking is better than guessing): I assume the "32GB / 256GB" in the CPU module's denomination is for 32GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard flash. Meaning I'd have that much disk space without needing to add a NVMe SSD card. Correct? []() - The keyboard layout looks all shades of terrible. I'm flexible with anything but not keyboard layouts - and especially those keyboard that don't put the left SHIFT and CTRL at the bottom where they belong, or have a split space bar. The Reform's keyboard ticks all the wrong boxes for me in that respect: I can tell rightaway that it's going to fight my typing muscle memory all the time and forever, because I sure ain't gonna get used to it. Can I remap the keys so I can at least I can swap CTRL and whatever that key is at the bottom left, and make the 3 buttons that replace the space bar act as a space bar? Then it's just a matter of putting a sticker on the keys and gluing the space bar keycaps together somehow. []() - I seem to recall some years ago that if the laptop was left off and unplugged for long enough - like 2 weeks IIRC - it would drain the cells and kill them because there was no under-voltage protection. Less dramatically but equally annoyingly, you couldn't leave it unplugged for a few days and expect to find it fully charged when you needed it most. Does it still do that? Or has the hardware been fixed - or maybe there's a "Turn really off" option in the little side computer that runs the mini OLED display? Mind you, I can always drill a hole and add a physical switch to disconnect the cells, but I'd rather not do that. []() - Is there an option to limit the charge? Keeping Li-ion cells constantly at 100% (or worse, charging all the time) when the laptop is plugged in isn't ideal. I'd rather it kept the cells charged around 80% . And I mostly use my laptops plugged in. []() - Can I remove the cells and use the laptop plugged in? I might eschew the cells altogether, because I really never need them: I'm plugged in at home, I'm plugged in on the train, I'm plugged in at the hotel, I'm plugged in at the customer's. I can't remember a time when I needed to run this particular laptop on battery. If I can use the laptop as a luggable computer, I wouldn't need to carry the weight of the cells around. []() - Has anybody tried to install Cinnamon? Does it work well on Debian ARM? I see no reason why it shouldn't, but maybe there are issues. []() Well that's pretty much it. Sorry for the long post 🙂 There's precious little information about the MNT Reform out there - probably a good indication that there are precious few such machines in the wild, sadly - so I would welcome any real-world user feedback!

Mildly Infuriating ExtremeDullard • 7 months ago • 87%

I know they're supposed to be good for the environment. But... Holy smokes they drive me up the wall. They really do! I had no trouble adapting when aluminum can pull-tabs got replaced by push-tabs, because it was pretty much the same movement, and I could see the immediate advantage of not getting cut by a pull-tab. But the tethered cap is fighting decades of muscle memory in me: I'm used to taking the cap off with one hand and keeping it there while taking a swig with the other. Now I unscrew the cap with one hand, but I still have to hold the cap so it's out of the way. It feels like drinking in handcuffs each and every time... So unlike the pull-tab, the tethered plastic bottle cap is one of those compulsory eco solutions that constantly make you feel ever-so-slightly more miserable all the time, and I hate that because ecology only works when it brings something of value both to people and to the environment.

Electric Vehicles ExtremeDullard • 7 months ago • 96%

I (still) don't own an EV for various reasons, but I'm still interested. One question that keeps popping up in my mind is this one: Where I live way up north, many people drive EVs - mostly Teslas apparently. A solid third of the parking lot at work is filled with EVs. The one thing that always strikes me when I leave work around the same time as everybody else is the sheer amount of noise of all those Teslas warming up their batteries before their owners come out to drive home make in the winter: it's like dozens of heating cannons running at the same time. Each time, I wonder how much juice is used just to prime the battery before use vs. actual miles traveled. If you leave in a cold country, have you worked out how much energy you burn simply keeping the battery alive in the winter? Is your EV still more energy efficient than an ICE in the winter for your particular use pattern?

Malicious Compliance ExtremeDullard • 7 months ago • 66%

My company offers 3 days of unjustified sick leave for things like colds or minor health issues that don't really require seeing a doctor. And sure enough, that guy - always that guy - got sick on Monday, then took a day off on Thursday, and now he's sick again on Friday. Strangely, his company car reports being at a ski resort 200 miles away. Because you know, when you're bedridden, at least you should have a nice view out the window...

Blender ExtremeDullard • 7 months ago • 100%

Hey everybody, I'm following up on [this post](https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/11572803). I've brought myself up to speed with free-as-in-libre CAD software - which was easy, since I have years of experience in CAD - and now I'm learning Blender, as I said I would 🙂 So I've followed a few tutorials. But as always, I've found them useful only up to a point, because I need to do stuff myself to remember. Also, I need to do something useful to me otherwise I get bored. Sorry that's just how I work. So now I'm modeling the enclosure of one the devices I work on professionally. Nothing super complicated: it's a 100-ish x 60-ish x 30-ish aluminum enclosure with a raised lip at the front, a bezel, some cooling fins on top, 4 triangular pockets at the back for screws and filleted edges all around. So far I've modeled most of what's square, and the triangular holes. I figured I'd look into the finer details and the filets later (and if I started out wrong, I can always start over, no problem). My questions are these: - Most of my difficulties seem to come from trying to replicate the dimensions of features accurately. I want this model to be exact to within 0.1 mm, but essentially Blender seems to be making it excrutiatingly difficult every step of the way. I'm slowly discovering tools and developing a workflow to make my life easier, but more or less 80% of what I do is calculating the absolute position of individual vertices and making edges and faces out of them. Because however hard I look at the tools available, I can't seem to find any that I could use in any way to make it easier to dimension things or position them with respect to other things. It's really, REALLY tedious. I'm fairly certain half of the problem is that Blender isn't a good tool for what I'm trying to do, and I'm sure if I keep at it, I'll find cleverer ways to achieve what I want (and like I said, the process of figuring this out itself IS my way of learning, so I'm not complaining). Still, I'm roughly 15 hours into this and I reckon I'm modeling at 1/10th the speed I would with a traditional parametric CAD software. In other words, what would be a quick one-hour job in SolidWorks takes me 10 hours in Blender. Does it get easier? 🙂 # - Speaking of parametric modeling: is there any way to make Blender parametric? It reminds me furiously of AutoCAD 25 years ago: I add more and more features to my model, I refine it, and I dread the moment someone will walk into my office and tell me "It's nice, but this dimension here is wrong" - and bad luck, it's one of the main dimensions and I have to spend half a day redoing everything, where a parametric modeler would let me change the dimension and would recalculate all the other dependent features. Is there any way to "record" the building steps I do in Blender and replay them on intermediate meshes that I could go back to and modify? Although mind you, I'm asking this but I have a feeling I'm approaching Blender entirely the wrong way here as well... # - Finally, a colleague of mine uses [this gizmo](https://3dconnexion.com/fi/product/spacemouse-compact/) in SolidWorks / Windows. He swears by it. I've been using a [Kensington Expert Mouse](https://www.kensington.com/p/products/electronic-control-solutions/trackball-products/expert-mouse-wired-trackball/) trackball for decades, but sadly Blender turns out to be exceptionally awkward to use with that trackball. No matter how hard I try to get used to clicking the wheel button to spin the 3D view, it's just really uncomfortable and it's driving me up the wall. So I think I'd like to get one of those 3DConnexion devices and give it a whirl. But before I crack out the credit card, does anybody know if it works in Blender in Linux? I know it works in Blender because [the manual says so](https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/getting_started/configuration/hardware.html), but I'm not too sure about Linux - and if it does work, how well it works.

VIM - Vi IMproved ExtremeDullard • 8 months ago • 100%

I'm playing with [OpenSCAD](https://openscad.org/), which is a text-based parametric 3D modeler. It comes with its own built-in editor, but you can also open the source file in your favorite editor and when the file is saved, OpenSCAD recompiles and re-renders the model. I know it's nothing particularly novel, but it's kind of awesome to type `:w` and see the 3D object immediately show what you just typed. There's even a degree of rendering control from within the editor: for example to highlight a feature, like an subtracted volume, simply type `#` in front of the corresponding operation, `:w` and hey-presto, the feature appears in the model. And sure enough, there is [OpenSCAD syntax highlighing](https://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3556) for vim. How cool is that! If someone had told me 40 years ago that I'd be doing 3D modeling in VI one day, I would never have believed it 🙂

Blender ExtremeDullard • 8 months ago • 94%

Hello everybody, I’d like to get into Blender, with a view to possibly do CAD with it because I see it’s now - at least partially - [a thing](https://www.blendernation.com/2022/04/28/cad-sketcher-free-cad-addon-for-blender/). I used to work professionally with SolidWorks in 2008. Then I changed jobs entirely. But I’ve always liked doing CAD: I love making complex working mechanical models that move accurately. I’ve also always wanted to do animations - something SolidWorks could do back then, but not very easily. I tried to get into Blender many years ago, but it was… let’s say a steep learning curve, to be kind. Fast-forward to today: My company bought a Prusa 3D printer. That thing is fascinating. 3D printing is also something I’ve wanted to get into for years, and this too seems to have matured into a really good, mostly trouble-free technology. And then I watched a really [interesting video](https://youtu.be/T7Hb8kRUHEI) yesterday from one of my favorite Youtuber, [Animagraffs](https://animagraffs.com/), in which he shows in details how he uses Blender to create his marvellous animations. In his video, Blender looks *sooo* much better and so much more stable and complete than what I tried years ago. Finally, I’m almost exclusively a Linux user. I could swallow - barely - the cost of a SolidWorks license, but I’ve always hated to have to use Windows to use SolidWorks. That’s mostly what kept me off of using it again since I changed jobs. After all those years, it seems like all those technologies have matured enough that a reasonably clever but not exceptionally bright dude like me can actually hope to create animations, model printable parts and possibly do 2008-level parametric CAD in Blender. And so I think it’s time I finally invest the time to learn Blender. I feel it’s one of the essential generic skills a well-rounded computer user should possess, like editing photos, audio or videos, and it seems like I could build on Blender skills to finally get into 3D printing and do CAD again, all in my favorite OS. And even if I can’t do CAD with it yet, it seems that it’s not too far off. How woud you recommend I go about learning how to use Blender? I don’t want to do complicated things, just learn the basics properly and build solid foundations.

sdfpubnix ExtremeDullard • 8 months ago • 94%

I created [this post](https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/11570529) on !mechanicalkeyboards@lemmy.ml: if you go [directly to the instance](https://lemmy.ml/post/11413315), it shows twice as many comments, and a lot more upvotes than on the [SDF view](https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/11570529).