Please tell your friends about federated social media site that speaks several fediverse protocols thus serving as a hub uniting them, hubzilla.eskimo.com, also check out friendica.eskimo.com, federated
macroblogging social media site, mastodon.eskimo.com a federated microblogging site, and yacy.eskimo.com an uncensored federated search engine. All Free!
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was transported by ambulance on Tuesday to a hospital in Washington, DC, after an allergic reaction, the Department of Homeland Security said.
You would have to train new AI models to recognize and ignore other AI content. But that would be an admission that AI content is useless and can't be trusted.
Palantir threatened to call police on a WIRED reporter and kicked out other journalists from a recent conference following reports of the data analytics firm’s work with the Trump administration.
With those tipping screens now seemingly everywhere, Americans think that the practice has “gotten out of control,” according to a new survey.
At least 63 percent of US residents now having a negative view of tipping, up from 59 percent last year, according to Bankrate, a financial publisher and comparison service.
Yet, the number of Americans who have gotten used to tipping has gone up since the COVID-19 pandemic, when it slipped. There have not been significant declines in tips for service providers, the survey noted, particularly for hairdressers and restaurant servers.
Have never worked a job that earned me tips, but it seems to me that everyone who holds a full time job should not be required to rely on kindness of strangers for their livelyhood.
Regulations should be such that they mandate all employers to pay a liviable wage.
If that causes places to shutdown, let them greedy bastards shutdown. The market will correct itself.
Continuing as it is today is bad for everyone but the employers and capitalists.
Unfortunately tipping in North America is a wage subsidy paid by patrons. Employers can get away with paying employees less as there is an expectation that the public will supplement the difference. It wouldn't be enough to just stop tipping, a change to employment practices is necessary.
So fucking tired of tipping. I’ve read recommendations of 30% these days. That is absolutely insane. The prices for everything has increased substantially already, and we are expected to tip proportionally to it? Not to mention, the tip screens on POS systems are showing up at regular businesses now. So fucking annoying.
There's a massive difference between people saying they wouldn't mind paying more if it meant not tipping and people actually being willing to pay more. The difference between a 20% markup on prices and being asked to voluntarily tip an amount that isn't specified is pretty minimal. Having worked in a job that relied on tips for over a decade, I can't tell you how many times someone who didn't tip complained about the price without a tip. Would they pay it anyway? Maybe. Is it probably a good idea? Maybe. But I don't know many situations in which a 20% hike on prices translates into a 20% increase in wages.
There are definitely a lot of people who would benefit from just making a living wage rather than being paid below minimum and having to supplement that with tips. Often that person just ends up not making minimum wage at the end of the day, and there are definitely companies that exploit that pay arrangement to get people to do work that shouldn't have to rely on tips regardless. There's a small burger place around here that literally hires counter help for tipped wages, but then also makes them do dishes, clean bathrooms, and even help make some of the food. They're basically being paid less than minimum to do two to three jobs, only one of which even legally qualifies for the reduced pay rate.
But would the patrons of that restaurant really not complain if they had to pay an extra $3-4 for a burger? I'm not so sure.
One thing I've learned about people is that many of us find complaining to be cathartic. If it wasn't tipping, it'd be the prices or the service or something else. A lot of the time it's already all of those things.
In the mean time, though, it's probably better to push back against unfair labor practices by trying to pass local laws rather than by just stiffing your server.
(There are no subreddit rules banning "political propaganda" or "character assassination." Nor does this comment appear to rise to either of those accusations: other non-removed comments back up the removed one.)
I don't even know if this is allowed here but frankly, I don't care. I have seen conflicting guides on how to play cracked games. Some say to use lutris/wine, some say to use proton with steam and add the cracked games to steam though that carries a significant risk of a ban. So to all Linux pirates, how do you do this?
I can't stand this asshole and don't understand how he keeps nailing acting roles in top movies of genres I love. Anytime I see him cast in a movie I'm interested in, it just deflates my anticipation to almost zero.
30 Second to Mars used to be top tier like 10-15 years ago, but after seeing him about 5 years ago I've lost all respect for him in all aspects of his career. He took the stage dressed like Jesus and proceeded to spin around for 3 hours while the entire crowd sand his songs for him. Absolutely abysmal show.
Hopefully this is the last we need to hear and see of this jackass, but time will tell.
Ukraine’s drone attack on Russian airfields on 1 June probably damaged about 10% of Russia's strategic bomber fleet, German Major General Christian Freuding has said.
Source: Freuding in a podcast, as reported by European Pravda, citing Reuters
Quote: "According to our assessment, more than a dozen aircraft were damaged, TU-95 and TU-22 strategic bombers as well as A-50 surveillance planes."
Details: According to the general, who coordinates Berlin's military assistance to Kyiv and works closely with the Ukrainian Defence Ministry, the A-50s, which have a similar function to NATO's AWACS aircraft in providing air surveillance, were probably not in working order.
"We believe that they can no longer be used for spare parts. This is a loss, as only a handful of these aircraft exist," he said.
"As for the long-range bomber fleet, 10% of it has been damaged in the attack according to our assessment," Freuding added.
The United States estimates that the daring Ukrainian drone attack hit up to 20 Russian warplanes, destroying about 10 of them, two US officials told Reuters. Experts say it will take Moscow years to replace the affected aircraft.
Despite the losses, Freuding sees no immediate reduction in Russian strikes on Ukraine, noting that Moscow still retains 90% of its strategic bombers, which can launch ballistic and cruise missiles in addition to dropping bombs.
"But there is, of course, an indirect effect as the remaining planes will need to fly more sorties, meaning they will be worn out faster, and, most importantly, there is a huge psychological impact," he said.
Freuding said that Russia felt secure in its vast territory, which also explains why the aircraft were not well protected.
"After this successful operation, this no longer holds true. Russia will need to ramp up the security measures," the general said.
Ukraine’s drone attack on Russian airfields on 1 June probably damaged about 10% of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet, German Major General Christian Freuding has said.
“But there is, of course, an indirect effect as the remaining planes will need to fly more sorties, meaning they will be worn out faster, and, most importantly, there is a huge psychological impact,” he said.
YouTube pulled a popular tutorial video from tech creator Jeff Geerling this week, claiming his guide to installing LibreELEC on a Raspberry Pi 5 violated policies against "harmful content." The video, which showed viewers how to set up their own home media servers, had been live for over a year and racked up more than 500,000 views. YouTube's automated systems flagged the content for allegedly teaching people "how to get unauthorized or free access to audio or audiovisual content."
Geerling says his tutorial covered only legal self-hosting of media people already own -- no piracy tools or copyright workarounds. He said he goes out of his way to avoid mentioning popular piracy software in his videos. It's the second time YouTube has pulled a self-hosting content video from Geerling. Last October, YouTube removed his Jellyfin tutorial, though that decision was quickly reversed after appeal. This time, his appeal was denied.
You know, that technically, when he violated his oath of office the first time, he resigned from his position. Once you violate your oath of office you no longer hold that office. You can do whatever you want to him, worse case scenario you have to wait for a pardon
If anything, the interpretation of "official acts" by the Supreme Court explicitly shields him. He cannot be held legally responsible for any decision carried out as president, which is terrifying.
With this little review I wish you a merry Christmas! Have fun, but don’t overdo it with the lights. The tree should not start to burn at any time! 😉
Summary
When the Wurkkos TS10 was released in mid-2022, only few might have imagined what a great success this flashlight would become. Compact, playful, great light and also affordable. Over time, different colors and materials such as titanium, brass and copper were added.
The Wurkkos TS10 SG is a successful update of the classic TS10. With the new optics and the Luminus SFT-25R, the throw has been significantly increased. Otherwise everything has remained the same. There’s a reason the TS10 has enjoyed great popularity for years.
With this little review I wish you a merry Christmas! Have fun, but don’t overdo it with the lights. The tree should not start to burn at any time! 😉 When the Wurkkos TS10 was released in mid-2022, only few might have imagined what a great success t…
If anyone cares, this light was on sale for $10 last week (not any more) and I got one along with an H25L. The TS10 SG is great, smaller than I expected and a terrific value at $10. I will EDC it for a while. For some reason I thought it came with a USB-rechargeable 14500 but it's the TS10 Max that comes with a USB cell. It's ok though. I will probably get a D3AA sooner or later but this will do me for now.
I also got an HD10 a while back and I like that a lot too. Unfortunately it's being discontinued, maybe in favor of the non-Anduril HD12. So we'll again be in a situation of having no available Anduril headlamps with USB charging. Meh.
Firefox is messing around with AI, changed their TOS on user data and now the google monopoly case. Basically Im wondering if there is a good firefox alternative?
Shoot a thief that stole part of your life by denying you Healthcare? Terrorist
Plot and carry out a plan to kill people due to their political beliefs during a time you know you could have reason to be around them and use shady online services to help plan things in order to coerce political change?
.......... checks every possible definition to find a loophole
Not terrorism? poker face
10/10 government we have, just the best people, I'm super duper thrilled to be trapped in this shit hole country
I dunno that 'like' is an accurate description; I don't 'like' my wrench, but it's useful for turning bolts. AI is the same. I'm working on a novel project and I've been using ChatGPT and related tools to help with things like worldbuilding, naming, formatting, structure, grammar, etc, basically everything but the actual writing itself. It's been a big help, but I can also see the concerns of people whose jobs/livelihoods/etc are threatened by it; that wrench also works pretty good as a blunt object to chuck at peoples' heads.
I was actually developing a crude form of AI, for graphics processing, between 2009 to 2017.
When I realized that my algorithms could be repurposed to the point of cloning someone else's voice, if I just had enough RAM and processing time, nobody believed me back in 2017.
Chucking 8 years of work seems like a drastic step, especially since others were (and now have) surely developed similar algorithms and are a lot less scrupulous about how they train and use them. Why did you feel like you had to step away from the field altogether after such a big time investment? Not that I'm judging, I'm just curious at the motivations involved.
My original algorithms were specifically designed to help artists perform nearly perfect color matching, based largely on text inputs. It started off as a single purpose application, but totally human driven.
The more I used and tested my own software, it taught me more than I even expected to learn about photochromatic processing. More than I even designed it to do even.
I was already also studying acoustics around the same time. I saw how well my chromatography software was working, and just barely started adapting the algorithm to process acoustics.
I quickly realized that I didn't have nearly enough RAM or processing power to do anything meaningful in any sensible timeframe, but I could already see that it was possible to go as far as changing one's voice with the voice print of someone else.
I announced that with online friends at the time, around 2017, and nobody believed me. Probably because I couldn't quite prove it yet. But I knew it.
The more I thought about that, the more I thought it would only contribute to fraud. So, I just fucking stopped, slammed on development brakes, and said fuckit.
I don't want to be part of the problem, I just wanted to design a better color filter/processor system.
Fair enough, although I'm not sure why you turned a color filter/processor into something that could process acoustics if that's all you wanted, but I get not wanting to be part of the problem.
I admin a Facebook group with just about 30k people in it. It used to be great, and over the past few years the enshittification has been too much. Lately there is an out of control Facebook AI bot posting constantly pissing everyone off that we can't seem to turn off. I only use FB for the group, and don't have their spyware - I mean, app - installed and wont. Admin abilities are severely limited on the webapp.
I'm stepping down as admin cuz I'm tired of this mess. But I'd like to offer an alternative community to members who are ready to jump ship. Is a Lemmy community the best option? It's a photo heavy group so when Pixelfed launches groups that will be great, but I haven't seen an ETA on that. I've read that Piefed has better mod controls. It can/should be public and accessible across platforms.
Thoughts? And before anyone points it out, I know most folks won't bother switching. But I also miss when it was smaller and had more chill vibes so I can live with that.
@JustOneMoreCat If all accounts are on Lemmy, all images are also federated. But in the communication between Lemmy and the rest of the Fediverse there are still some restrictions regarding pictures in replies. A #Friendica forum would probably be more suitable. Here is an insight into what this could look like: peertube.stream/w/p/4K4MWYXMEY… (an older version of Friendica is shown here, but in principle it is currently similar)
Pixelfed won't launch groups anytime soon unfortunately, I've followed closely and it seems it'll be out about the same time as Tesla's full self driving.
I think the best way would be choose yourself piefed or Lemmy, and then you offer mastodon or pixelfed as places for your users to join and subscribe. So it's a little more natural to them.
While your goal is noble, reality is that I would expect a very small percentage of people to migrate. Less than one maybe even. I think that even a few hundred more people joining the fediverse here is a great idea, but I don't want you to be discouraged when it doesn't turn out the way you hope. People love their platforms. (I also just read your last paragraph after writing this, my bad, glad you're in the right headspace 😀
Mit dem Fahrrad durch die Stadt: Vor allem Großstädte haben laut dem ADFC ihre Radfahrtauglichkeit verbessert. Kleinere Kommunen und der ländliche Raum können noch mehr für sicheres Radfahren tun – und Münster steigert seine gute Note erneut.
If one of the possible answers to your question is "yes, I am indeed armed, and committing a felony by impersonating a law enforcement officer", you should reconsider your most recent life choices. In particular, asking them that question.
Observe from a safe distance, and call 911. What on earth do you hope to gain by going up to them for a chat?
excuuuuuuuse me. Are you actually taking people hostages? Or is this some kind of publicity stunt? Hellooo?! Are you really shooting at me? That's just, like, so rude.
I have cautioned people to be thoughtful about their actions when opposing the ruling class. I have also told people that if ICE shows to your door, it's best to just consider yourself already cornered and soon to be dead, so fight and kill as many of them as you can.
You're making shit up.
You are far more likely to be dealing with ICE than someone impersonating them. Acting like you're the next potential target for a political assassin is a bit weird.
Stop telling people to assume that active criminals are law enforcement. If they refuse to identify themselves they aren't law enforcement, and should be immediately detained, or if necessary put down.
The civil servants need to be reminded who their bosses actually are.
I said detain, and kill only if necessary. ROE must be followed. Arrest these criminals that refuse to identify, and if they resist then meet their violence with the greater violence that a crowd can muster. They are breaking the law. Therefore they aren't law enforcement, and should be treated as such.
If I lose my life because I am sick of their shit, so be it. They are actively killing us every day, so my rhetoric isn't getting anyone killed. It may just wake some of the people up to the fact that the cops are rioting, and threatening to kill us nationwide.
And again you are hearing what you want to hear and changing the meaning of the words I used. That is called lying.
Stumbling through getting a proper backup regime in place. I have an unraid system running a proper array, and am trying to setup backups for two separate machines (one windows one debian). I've successfully setup a file share, and have duplicati running. Are there disadvantages to just setting the network folder as the destination for the backup? It seems a little hamfisted (and the data rates are terrible).
It seems like there's probably a better way to do this...
I know this probably comes up a lot and is liable to spark some debate, but I'm curious what the good options are for terminals. I've skimmed some reddit/lemmy posts about it and looked at a few options and I dunno how to decide between them because they all seem like they're too narrowly focused on some particular use case. I'm just using it for general terminal stuff, nothing terribly fancy. I'm aware that there's not one terminal to rule them all or anything, so I'm curious: what do you folks use, and more importantly, why do you use that over the (many) other options available?
Personally I've just been using konsole since it's what came with kde and it seems nice and all, but I feel like I'm missing out on features I don't even know about. One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such where i'm doing the tinkering instead of constantly tabbing out to duck.ai or w/e.
I use Xfce and Cinnamon, but I always install Gnome Terminal regardless (you don't need all of Gnome desktop to use it). The main reason I like Gnome Terminal is that it is very simple, and it lets you save your own terminal themes and switch between them from a context menu. Xfce terminal is nice and simple, but doesn't have this really handy theme switching feature.
That said, the terminal emulator I used most often is the Emacs built-in terminal emulator (term-mode), because it integrates flawlessly with other Emacs tools. But its rendering and theming isn't as nice as Gnome terminal, so I only recommend it if you are an Emacs user.
I like guake, or yakuake.. they are inspired by the console in Quake. F9 drops it down and hides it. Works for what i need it to. I'm just a guy who recently ditched windows, not a power user.
The one that comes with your DE is generally just fine, unless you're a serious terminal user.
One feature that might be nice is some kind of local LLM integration so I can get help on how to tinker with settings and such
I think that's a quick way to nuke your install, LLMs are generally wrong about what commands to run and don't understand enough to know when something is dangerous. All it takes is changing one wrong file and everything breaks.
I'm using st with tmux. It's in written in c, simple configuration can be done by editing the header file(s). More complex customization (such as visual bell or transparency) can be done via patch files.
Not the most beginner friendly terminal but super light weight and fast.
I was tinkering with ollama+deepseek and trying to integrate it into my bash functions, but gave up, because i could not supress that stupid "thinking..." prompt. Found it easyer to just have a browser window open (switching windows can become muscle memory in tiling wms like i3/sway or dwm).
If you want features, I suggest you try Kitty. It is probably the terminal with the most features. I personally prefer Alacritty because it is quite bare and doesn't have all that fancy stuff that I don't need (and that takes up cpu cycles).
The sharp uptick of crap flown around 2.6 piques my interest. As does someone's introduction of 'retard' into the vocabulary shortly prior. Must have been popcorn times.
This seems contradictory. On the one hand you're saying that these works are wrongly locked behind paywalls, but on the other you're saying that scraping them is an "assault on the cornerstones of our public knowledge." Is this information supposed to be freely viewable or not?
IMO the ideal solution would be the one Wikimedia uses, which is to make the information available in an easily-downloadable archive file. That lets anyone who wants the whole thing to have it without having to "hammer" the servers. Meanwhile the servers can be protected by standard load-balancing and DDOS prevention systems.
so every single repository should have to spend their time, energy, and resources on accommodating a bunch of venture funded companies that want to get all of this shit for free without contributing to these repositories at all themselves?
Was Aaron Schwartz wrong to scrape those repositories? He shouldn't have been accessing all those publicly-funded academic works? Making it easier for him to access that stuff would have been "capitulating to hackers?"
I think the problem here is that you don't actually believe that information should be free. You want to decide who and what gets to use that "publicly-funded academic work", and you have decided that some particular uses are allowable and others are not. Who made you that gatekeeper, though?
I think it's reasonable that information that's freely posted for public viewing should be freely viewable. As in anyone can view it. If they want to view all of it and that puts a load on the servers providing it, but there's an alternate way of providing it that doesn't put that load on the servers, what's wrong with doing that? It solves everyones' problems.
If someone did an Aaron-Schwartz-style scrape, then published the data they scraped in a downloadable archive so that AI trainers could download it and use it, would you find that objectionable?
That suggestion is exactly the same as what I started with when I said "IMO the ideal solution would be the one Wikimedia uses, which is to make the information available in an easily-downloadable archive file." It just cuts out the Aaron-Schwarts-style external middleman, so it's easier and more efficient to create the downloadable data.
I don’t understand why the burden is on the victims here.
They put the website up. Load balancing, rate limiting, and such go with the turf. It's their responsibility to make the site easy to use and hard to break. Putting up an archive of the content that the scrapers want is an easy and straightforward thing to do to accomplish this goal.
I think what's really going on here is that your concern isn't about ensuring that the site is up, and it's certainly not about ensuring that the data it's providing is readily available. It's that there are these specific companies you don't like and you just want to forbid them from accessing otherwise freely accessible data.
That is absolutely ridiculous. The pressure AI scraping puts on sites vastly outstrips anything people built for, as evidenced by the fact that the systems are going down.
Yes. Which is why I'm suggesting providing an approach that doesn't require scraping the site.
"In the USA" and "by large portions of the capitalist class" are the answers to your question, I think the previous commenter was just a bit too incredulous because this topic came up in the news lately and they'd expected it to be common knowledge even outside the U.S. since much of the "AI Industry" is involved with U.S. tech companies.
I am once again begging journalists to be more critical ~~of tech companies~~.
But as this happens, it’s crucial to keep the denominator in mind. Since 2020, Waymo has reported roughly 60 crashes serious enough to trigger an airbag or cause an injury. But those crashes occurred over more than 50 million miles of driverless operations. If you randomly selected 50 million miles of human driving—that’s roughly 70 lifetimes behind the wheel—you would likely see far more serious crashes than Waymo has experienced to date.
[...] Waymo knows exactly how many times its vehicles have crashed. What’s tricky is figuring out the appropriate human baseline, since human drivers don’t necessarily report every crash. Waymo has tried to address this by estimating human crash rates in its two biggest markets—Phoenix and San Francisco. Waymo’s analysis focused on the 44 million miles Waymo had driven in these cities through December, ignoring its smaller operations in Los Angeles and Austin.
This is the wrong comparison. These are taxis, which means they're driving taxi miles. They should be compared to taxis, not normal people who drive almost exclusively during their commutes (which is probably the most dangerous time to drive since it's precisely when they're all driving).
We also need to know how often Waymo intervenes in the supposedly autonomous operations. The latest we have from this, which was leaked a while back, is that Cruise (different company) cars are actually less autonomous than taxis, and require >1 employee per car.
edit: The leaked data on human interventions was from Cruise, not Waymo. I'm open to self-driving cars being safer than humans, but I don't believe a fucking word from tech companies until there's been an independent audit with full access to their facilities and data. So long as we rely on Waymo's own publishing without knowing how the sausage is made, they can spin their data however they want.
edit2: Updated to say that ournalists should be more critical in general, not just about tech companies.
to amplify the previous point, taps the sign as Joseph Weizenbaum turns over in his grave
A computer can never be held accountable
Therefore a computer must never make a management decision
tl;dr A driverless car cannot possibly be "better" at driving than a human driver. The comparison is a category error and therefore nonsensical; it's also a distraction from important questions of morality and justice. More below.
Numerically, it may some day be the case that driverless cars have fewer wrecks than cars driven by people.(1) Even so, it will never be the case that when a driverless car hits and kills a child the moral situation will be the same as when a human driver hits and kills a child. In the former case the liability for the death would be absorbed into a vast system of amoral actors with no individuals standing out as responsible. In effect we'd amortize and therefore minimize death with such a structure, making it sociopathic by nature and thereby adding another dimension of injustice to every community where it's deployed.(2) Obviously we've continually done exactly this kind of thing since the rise of modern technological life, but it's been sociopathic every time and we all suffer for it despite rampant narratives about "progress" etc.
It will also never be the case that a driverless car can exercise the judgment humans have to decide whether one risk is more acceptable than another, and then be held to account for the consequences of their choice. This matters.
Please (re-re-)read Weizenbaum's book if you don't understand why I can state these things with such unqualified confidence.
Basically, we all know damn well that whenever driverless cars show some kind of numerical superiority to human drivers (3) and become widespread, every time one kills, let alone injures, a person no one will be held to account for it. Companies are angling to indemnify themselves from such liability, and even if they accept some of it no one is going to prison on a manslaughter charge if a driverless car kills a person. At that point it's much more likely to be treated as an unavoidable act of nature no matter how hard the victim's loved ones reject that framing. How high a body count do our capitalist systems need to register before we all internalize this basic fact of how they operate and stop apologizing for it?
(1) Pop quiz! Which seedy robber baron has been loudly claiming for decades now that full self driving is only a few years away, and depends on people believing in that fantasy for at least part of his fortune? We should all read Wrong Way by Joanne McNeil to see the more likely trajectory of "driverless" or "self-driving" cars. (2) Knowing this, it is irresponsible to put these vehicles on the road, or for people with decision-making power to allow them on the road, until this new form of risk is understood and accepted by the community. Otherwise you're forcing a community to suffer a new form of risk without consent and without even a mitigation plan, let alone a plan to compensate or otherwise make them whole for their new form of loss. (3) Incidentally, quantifying aspects of life and then using the numbers, instead of human judgement, to make decisions was a favorite mission of eugenicists, who stridently pushed statistics as the "right" way to reason to further their eugenic causes. Long before Zuckerberg's hot or not experiment turned into Facebook, eugenicist Francis Galton was creeping around the neighborhoods of London with a clicker hidden in his pocket counting the "attractive" women in each, to identify "good" and "bad" breeding and inform decisions about who was "deserving" of a good life and who was not. Old habits die hard.
Your feedback is frustrating because it seems like you almost have it, but then you fall back on technosolutionist logic.
The fact we can even say that human drivers are "negligent" is a very good thing. That means we are aware that human drivers are accountable for their (in)actions.
"Autonomous" vehicles cannot be called negligent. It wouldn't make sense to do so. It might be the case that their makers cannot be called negligent either. Perhaps every person involved puts every effort into making the vehicles safe, but they turn out not to be. That is a very bad thing. It is (meta)negligent to set up a system like this, where people can be severely harmed or killed and there is no one who takes responsibility. I dare say it is sociopathic to do so.
The last point does not hold. Spanish people I know eat dinner at 11 PM and breakfast at 7 AM. And they live outside of Spain, the timezone issue does not apply here. Idk when they sleep (Siesta? Siesta in Sweden/Germany?) Please explain.
Hello, everybody. I have a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 that I'd like to install some Linux distro on to use as an eBook reader. Does anybody have any experience or recommendations for a distro that's touchscreen-friendly? Thanks in advance!
Edit: I'm using Linux Mint on my main PC. I like it, but haven't tried it on the Surface yet.
Just this weekend I took an old Gen 1 Surface Go and put the latest Fedora on it and it's amazing, very intuitive for touch screens. Tried Mint before and it gave me enough issues that I didn't use that Tablet at all for almost a year.
Edit to clarify, I run Mint on my desktop and love it, just didn't really work well on my old Surface Go.
Just wanted to chime in and say I personally found Gnome thoroughly underwhelming for a touch screen. Like you'd think it's a good fit but it's just janky in practice. I've had much better success with KDE. In the Plasma 6.4.0 changelog they specifically mentioned that they have touch based devices in mind. I feel like with Gnome it's more of an afterthought.
So, I'm not that understanding of linux. But I guess I can't call myself "new" anymore. I've been using linux since December. Although to be fair, I'm barely ever home. "Using" linux at this point mostly consists of opening firefox, and watching youtube.
I know "sudo" is "super user" "apt" is some kind of repository command, and then you type "install (program)"
But I've really taken to flatpack. I hate hate HATE the terminal. All I ever do is screw things up in there. I don't know what I'm doing. I just follow commands. "Just copy/paste this exact set of text". And then I have an error.
It's kind of like knowing 4x4=16. And all you do is memorize that line, as opposed to knowing that 4x4 is the same as 4+4+4+4. And knowing what 4 is. If you memorized 4x4=16, but get presented with 4x4-2, and you don't understand the core concept of numbers, you wouldn't know how to adjust 16 to 14, and know WHY it's 14. I'm just copy/pasting someone elses instructions.
That's probably complete jibberish in terminal, but it helps you (the experienced linux user) understand how terminal feels/looks to me. If I had a problem, and troubleshooting told me to copy/paste that to solve my problem, I would. That to me looks as legitimate as any other jibberish that would actually work.
Ok. Rant aside, lets start a civil war in here! I've been using ZorinOS, and I kind of like it. HOWEVER, I did spend a considerable amount of time tweaking it. It's finally how I want it, so I'm not messing with it. So I've never experienced KDE. I've only experienced GNOME. And quite honestly I don't know what that means. I know it has to do with the desktop environment.....but I don't know what would be different if I used another desktop environment.
But that brings me to a question I was told you just can't ask the linux community without blood being shed.
Nah just kidding. What happens is that you use enough different OSes and DEs for enough time and you start to see through the matrix. You realize they're all just visual wrappers for the underlying systems that do the real work, and the DEs don't really matter. All the major ones are good enough. And when they don't work, that's when you use command line. Then eventually, after doing that enough times, you say "fuck it all, get this GUI out of my way" and just start using CLI for everything.
I’m a newbie to Linux and am still figuring everything out. I posted here a few days ago and you fine folks helped me with a problem. Now I’m in need again.
I decided to distro hop a little bit just to see what I like best, and am currently testing out Bazzite since I mostly use my PC for gaming at the moment and heard that one’s a good one for gaming. I’m using a laptop hooked up to an external monitor right now. After installing Bazzite I was asked what I wanted to do with the external monitor. Since I never use my laptop screen, I chose the option to only display on the external monitor. Unfortunately that didn’t seem to play nice, and now my laptop screen is black (obviously) but the external monitor is saying no input anymore. It accepted the input up until making that choice. Now I can unplug the monitor and use the laptop screen just fine, but my setup makes that quite annoying, plus I want to use my monitor obviously. The biggest problem is I can’t adjust the monitor settings without the monitor plugged in, and I can’t see anything with the monitor plugged in. Does anyone know of a solution to this problem? I’ve never faced it before in my years of using windows, and I didn’t have this problem in Mint either. I don’t really want to reinstall, but I will if I have to. If anyone knows of a solution without reinstalling I’d appreciate it. Thanks in advance.
You can press the Super+P (Win+P) keyboard combination to bring up a menu to choose which screen to display on. Keep pressing P while holding the other key to move forward in this list, then press enter. If you keep doing this, eventually you should end up on an option that includes your laptop screen. Alternatively, you can make Bazzite forget about your monitors by deleting the file it stores screen profiles in, then rebooting: ryan.himmelwright.net/post/res…
Hello, I yet again come, hat in hand, for assistance from those wiser in the ways of the Linux. I’m having a bit of an issue downloading Jellyfin on my ElementaryOS laptop. I’ve tried all the guide on the first few pages of ddg only to receive errors after entering the comman “ sudo apt-get update “. I get ERR:3 https//repo.jellyfin.org/debian circle Release 404 Not found.
If someone can point me the way I’d be most appreciative
Install docker, grab the official docker compose file, then docker compose up -d.
Details: Look up how to install docker on elementary (I guess it's sudo apt install docker), than you don't have to care about the distro after that, docker works the same way everywhere. You can find countless tutorials on this, and they should work
Find jellyfin related file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d, edit it as root and try replacing „circle” with „bookworm”. After that apt update and retry. If it doesn’t work you can also try replacing it with „noble” but the you might also need to replace debian -> ubuntu, but that’s just my guess
I'm not even sure if this is satire or not, but is that even doable? I mean I've tested both FreeDOS and ReactOS before, but do they play well together somehow?
Side note, I've also tried KolibriOS before, amazing project for its tiny size, still have it on physical floppy disk right now even.
Hey, there actually are NTFS drivers out there for MS-DOS/Win3.11, I've used that for data recovery when neither Windows NT nor Linux could access the partition.
Very little surprises me anymore, and I have no idea what all tricks FreeDOS and ReactOS have up their sleeves.
Reddit is launching a new feature for advertisers, called “Conversation Summary Add-ons,” that slots positive posts from Reddit users right under their ads.
"dynamically integrates positive content from Reddit users directly below an advertiser’s creative, putting community conversations front-and-center in the user experience and blending AI-driven efficiency with real human perspectives".
the company is also introducing a “scalable, AI-powered social listening tool. [...] Informed by proprietary metadata, it provides precise, real-time insights that help marketers confidently plan campaigns, validate creative ideas, and make smarter business decisions"
I wonder how much they had to pay a business major to come up with those sentences, or did they just use ChatGPT ....
I tried testing a movie from my home server in plex through firefox and repeatedly got this message, even after reloading.
I knew that they had paywalled the apps on mobile and streaming from outside the network but now they have also blocked watching your own movies through your own hardware.
I do get the point that making software should be able to sustain people but I dont see the move of plex as a fair thing to do. Yes, they have made great software but taking your home server hostage feels like the wrong move.
Even a pop up that says "we need you to donate please" would have been fine. make it pop up before every movie, play donation ads before any movie but straight up disabling the app is kinda cruel.
Anyway, i have switched to jellyfin and it is insanely good. please give it a try. you can run it alongside plex with not issues (at least i had none) and compare the two.
In any case, good luck. Let me know if you need help.
Jellyfin is great, but in defense of Plex, they announced that remote streaming would require one of the two parties to have a Plex pass was coming back in March so I don't know if it's fair to say they are holding anything hostage.
I started down the Jellyfin path after they made that announcement. It's super easy to install, and in many ways the UI is nicer than Plex. But I ran into challenges getting my server safely accessible for users outside my LAN. And I haven't had the time to look into that further.
Would be great if there was a clean, easy way to set up the webserver portion so it's as easy to share content entirely as Plex. But I get they are a volunteer project with a lot on their plate.
Palestinian citizens of Israel are having to fend for themselves amid ongoing missile strikes by Iran, with the beleaguered community lacking access to shelters and safe rooms due to discriminatory building policies.
First: I've tried Tailscale, for some reason it works awful for me so I'm avoiding that option if possible.
I am trying to have a single server that has a VPN port exposed to connect to it, but routes traffic through a comercial VPN (mullvad ideally) to privately share my linux ISOs. So far I haven't been able to achieve this, it sees I can't use the VPN server (wg-easy) + VPN (mullvad gui), only the one that start first work.
Microsoft plans to end support for Windows 10 security updates on October 14, 2025, even though the operating system remains the most widely used desktop platform. This...
The website failed, went to an error page, and then charged my credit card the wrong amount of $64.70. I received a confirmation email saying I’ll receive a confirmation when my order has been shipped, but I haven’t provided a shipping address or paid the full $499 price tag. It is the worst experience I’ve ever faced buying a consumer electronic product and I have no idea whether or how I’ll receive the phone.
I look forward to learning more about how terrible these phones turn out.
Reddit is launching a new feature for advertisers, called “Conversation Summary Add-ons,” that slots positive posts from Reddit users right under their ads.
I’m all-in on the Fediverse as the best way to own my own data and network. It’s based on an open standard (ActivityPub), loosely-coupled and open source services, and everyday people (and, it isn’t subject to the whims of lying, narcissistic billionaires). You can think of it as the next iteration of the open web, with social features baked in.
I’ve got a number of accounts that correspond with content that the different networks are good at – posts on Mastodon, photos on Pixelfed, reading habits on Bookwyrm. If I post something on one that I think my followers on a different network may like, I can boost it directly for them to see; or, folks can follow me on whatever platform they choose. My WordPress blog has federation switched on, too, so you can if you like follow @andypiper, and read my blog posts directly in your Fediverse platform of choice. (of course, RSS remains another excellent way to follow my blog).
By the way, if you’re curious what the buzz about the Fediverse is all about, I recommend Elena Rossini’s newsletter The Future is Federated – in the edition that was published today, she did a great job of explaining some of the interoperability between federated networks, from the perspective of, you know, just actually, using them, rather than from a deep technical angle. Worth following!
One of the other services I’ve been using is PeerTube, a federated alternative to YouTube. Up until now I’ve been on Diode Zone. However, that instance recently started to run into some storage issues, and also switched off the live broadcast feature that I’d occasionally used to stream some 3D printing and pen plotter content (this is straightforward to configure in OBS, by the way). I really appreciated my time on Diode Zone, but I’ve chosen to move across to MakerTube, a relatively newer instance dedicated to “makers, musicians, artists and DIY content creators”.
One of the core elements of the Fediverse is data ownership, and some form of portability. When I first joined Mastodon I started out at mastodon.social/@andypiper – if you visit that profile page now, you’ll find my posts starting in November 2016 and ending in November 2022, when I moved over to my current home, macaw.social – there’s a large message that points you at my current location if you look at my original profile. When I switched instances, my whole follower network went with me, seamlessly – unlike, for example, Twitter, where I lost everything when I deleted all my accounts; or Facebook, which heavily relies on its lock-in – read Cory Doctorow‘s excellent book The Internet Con to understand what’s happening there.
The current state of portability is absolutely not perfect – in the case of Mastodon, there’s a process which enables to you to migrate from one server to another, and that automatically resubscribes you to your network, and your followers to your new account, but it’s currently not technically possible to take the past posts with you (there is a W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group taskforce that is working on a more complete set of specifications for data portability that may help to improve this in the future).
Here is how I moved from Diode Zone to MakerTube:
Requested an account on MakerTube. They want to know who is part of the community, their content intentions, etc. I explained that I’m a maker and I also may plan to use the streaming feature.
Requested an export of data from Diode Zone.
this was technically a little bit frustrating, as it got stuck the first time (likely because I had requested it when there were earlier storage issues), but the instance owner was really kind and helped to clear the stuck process.
it was also a bit annoying because of the size of my export including the videos, which was a lot of gigabytes; so I ended up having to run a script that kept running wget with a resume flag to get the data in chunks.
Setup the basics of my new account on MakerTube.
Imported the export from the other instance.
Modified a few places that were pointing to Diode Zone, such as my links page, and also updated a few embeds that were loading videos from my previous account, such as some of the Fedidevs.org meeting recordings.
… while I was doing that, I thought I’d take advantage of PeerTube’s multi-channel capability, and created a specific channel for Fedidevs content, which you can now follow @fedidevs from other Fediverse platforms.
There were a couple of slightly rough edges, but nothing very significant:
Unlike Mastodon, PeerTube does not run a process to tell your followers that you have moved, and to resubscribe them to your new account. In my case I didn’t have a huge number of followers, but I will be posting a video there to say that I moved, and I also updated my profile information to point to the new instance. It did re-follow the accounts I had followed, but didn’t do the other side of the process.
The new instance imported my playlists, which was great – but some of them were playlists of my own videos, which I tend to create for curation and organisation, and of course, they still pointed at the videos on the previous instance. This was fairly straightforward to fix, just removed and re-added the videos on the new instance.
So there you are. You can follow my entire MakerTube account, my main channel, or the Fedidevs channel, if you like. I also have it set up to import future content that I may choose to post to YouTube, so that it has a free and open backup that Google can’t delete if I ever lose my account there.
I’m still frustrated that WordPress doesn’t seem to have a good integration for PeerTube content yet – I can paste a YouTube link here and get an embedded video, that’s less easy for PeerTube – but, I’m hopeful that will improve in the future.
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In November last year, I abandoned my Twitter account – I set it to private, did not visit, did not interact, ignored any direct messages, etc. It was simply too painful to watch friends and coworkers suddenly and systematically being fired, the company culture destroyed, and the developer communities that I supported for 9 years, finally cut off without support or API access. It has been a heartbreaking time.
Today, I took the last step in going back through my password manager vault and deleting all of my X/Twitter accounts. I’ve watched the shambolic rebranding over the past week, and frankly, I wish it had all happened far sooner – rather than seeing my beloved bird being dragged down, and the brand and memory ruined, piece by piece.
There are a few accounts that I share access to with others (for podcasts, sites or communities) that remain, but over the past hour or so I deleted 15 accounts, four of which had associated Twitter Developer Accounts.
Why so many?
Of course, I had my main account, @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url], which was first created after hanging out with my friend Roo Reynolds in his office at IBM Hursley, and hearing about Twitter, just starting to gather buzz from events like SxSW. Created February 21, 2007. The title of the blog entry I wrote that day seems accidentally prophetic (although, in truth, I do not regret it at all).
my jobs at VMware / Cloud Foundry in 2012, and at Twitter from 2014, were both direct results of being on Twitter, sharing my knowledge, interacting with different communities, and doing my work on the platform.
I’ve made countless friends through being on Twitter, and I’m grateful for that. It truly changed my life to be there.
Back at the start, those heady times of 2007-2009, it was not unusual to have a few accounts for fun, so certainly there were a few of those that just went away.
There were the super-sekrit accounts I had for testing features, such as the original internal test for ten thousand character Tweets (yes, this nearly happened, a long time back), the customisable Tweet Tiles we would have launched at the developer conference that was cancelled at the end of last year, and so on.
Finally, it’s time to say goodbye to my main @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url] account. Twitter is not Twitter any more, it is X – and I never signed up for X. In the near future, I’ll upload a searchable archive of my Twitter content, likely using Darius’ Twitter Archive tool. For now, it’s all done. I’m very happy elsewhere (personal sites and links here and here), and I will not be sad that X is out of my life.
… apart from the laptops that they still have not collected!
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I had this idea that I’d love a shirt like that, with the names of the Fediverse platforms I use most often (referring back to my post about moving PeerTube instances, you’ll know I use quite a few). So, I designed one; Heidi typeset and kerned the design and vinyl cut it for me, using the Cricut Maker and heat press in the studio; and, eventually, I’d had enough expressions of interest that we went ahead and put a printed version up on our studio shop.
I’m really happy with the way this came out. I’ve also designed a few other shirts (albeit, not Fediverse-related), so those may hit the shop in the future.
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I’m all-in on the Fediverse as the best way to own my own data and network. It’s based on an open standard (ActivityPub), loosely-coupled and open source services, and everyday people (and, it isn’t subject to the whims of lying, narcissistic billionaires). You can think of it as the next iteration of the open web, with social features baked in.
I’ve got a number of accounts that correspond with content that the different networks are good at – posts on Mastodon, photos on Pixelfed, reading habits on Bookwyrm. If I post something on one that I think my followers on a different network may like, I can boost it directly for them to see; or, folks can follow me on whatever platform they choose. My WordPress blog has federation switched on, too, so you can if you like follow @andypiper, and read my blog posts directly in your Fediverse platform of choice. (of course, RSS remains another excellent way to follow my blog).
By the way, if you’re curious what the buzz about the Fediverse is all about, I recommend Elena Rossini’s newsletter The Future is Federated – in the edition that was published today, she did a great job of explaining some of the interoperability between federated networks, from the perspective of, you know, just actually, using them, rather than from a deep technical angle. Worth following!
One of the other services I’ve been using is PeerTube, a federated alternative to YouTube. Up until now I’ve been on Diode Zone. However, that instance recently started to run into some storage issues, and also switched off the live broadcast feature that I’d occasionally used to stream some 3D printing and pen plotter content (this is straightforward to configure in OBS, by the way). I really appreciated my time on Diode Zone, but I’ve chosen to move across to MakerTube, a relatively newer instance dedicated to “makers, musicians, artists and DIY content creators”.
One of the core elements of the Fediverse is data ownership, and some form of portability. When I first joined Mastodon I started out at mastodon.social/@andypiper – if you visit that profile page now, you’ll find my posts starting in November 2016 and ending in November 2022, when I moved over to my current home, macaw.social – there’s a large message that points you at my current location if you look at my original profile. When I switched instances, my whole follower network went with me, seamlessly – unlike, for example, Twitter, where I lost everything when I deleted all my accounts; or Facebook, which heavily relies on its lock-in – read Cory Doctorow‘s excellent book The Internet Con to understand what’s happening there.
The current state of portability is absolutely not perfect – in the case of Mastodon, there’s a process which enables to you to migrate from one server to another, and that automatically resubscribes you to your network, and your followers to your new account, but it’s currently not technically possible to take the past posts with you (there is a W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group taskforce that is working on a more complete set of specifications for data portability that may help to improve this in the future).
Here is how I moved from Diode Zone to MakerTube:
Requested an account on MakerTube. They want to know who is part of the community, their content intentions, etc. I explained that I’m a maker and I also may plan to use the streaming feature.
Requested an export of data from Diode Zone.
this was technically a little bit frustrating, as it got stuck the first time (likely because I had requested it when there were earlier storage issues), but the instance owner was really kind and helped to clear the stuck process.
it was also a bit annoying because of the size of my export including the videos, which was a lot of gigabytes; so I ended up having to run a script that kept running wget with a resume flag to get the data in chunks.
Setup the basics of my new account on MakerTube.
Imported the export from the other instance.
Modified a few places that were pointing to Diode Zone, such as my links page, and also updated a few embeds that were loading videos from my previous account, such as some of the Fedidevs.org meeting recordings.
… while I was doing that, I thought I’d take advantage of PeerTube’s multi-channel capability, and created a specific channel for Fedidevs content, which you can now follow @fedidevs from other Fediverse platforms.
There were a couple of slightly rough edges, but nothing very significant:
Unlike Mastodon, PeerTube does not run a process to tell your followers that you have moved, and to resubscribe them to your new account. In my case I didn’t have a huge number of followers, but I will be posting a video there to say that I moved, and I also updated my profile information to point to the new instance. It did re-follow the accounts I had followed, but didn’t do the other side of the process.
The new instance imported my playlists, which was great – but some of them were playlists of my own videos, which I tend to create for curation and organisation, and of course, they still pointed at the videos on the previous instance. This was fairly straightforward to fix, just removed and re-added the videos on the new instance.
So there you are. You can follow my entire MakerTube account, my main channel, or the Fedidevs channel, if you like. I also have it set up to import future content that I may choose to post to YouTube, so that it has a free and open backup that Google can’t delete if I ever lose my account there.
I’m still frustrated that WordPress doesn’t seem to have a good integration for PeerTube content yet – I can paste a YouTube link here and get an embedded video, that’s less easy for PeerTube – but, I’m hopeful that will improve in the future.
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I’m at Homecamp at Imperial College in London today – learning about home automation and energy monitoring. There’s an amazing group of people here. Follow the Twitter stream or watch it on uStream.
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I was pretty actively commenting from the event and taking part in the live uStream channel… others have written up some of their experiences and thoughts, so I don’t propose to say much here. My main contribution was to make a (shaky!) video of Andy Stanford-Clark’s talk towards the start of the morning – a half hour overview of his home automation projects. I’ve posted it on Viddler, and if you are interested you are very welcome to comment on it, embed it in your own sites, or add annotations on the video timeline.
[viddler id=e4676600&w=400&h=267]
The nice part about Viddler over, say, YouTube is that it let me post the whole thing as a single video rather than having to chop it up into 10 minute chunks. I’ll try to post some notes on how I went about producing the video at some stage soon.
Some very general comments on the day:
Well-organised, well-run, great venue, nice to have wireless access – thanks to everyone involved in the logistics!
A brilliant, exciting array of skills, talents and interests. It was kind of funny to realise just how many of the folks I knew of as we were doing introductions at the start, and great to find that it wasn’t only a bunch of IBM hackers – this movement is really building momentum.
I’m at Homecamp at Imperial College in London today – learning about home automation and energy monitoring. There’s an amazing group of people here. Follow the Twitter stream or watch it on uStream.
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IBM’s Chairman and CEO, Sam Palmisano, has been speaking to the Council of Foreign Relations in New York today. He’s been discussing how the planet is getting smarter:
These collective realizations have reminded us that we are all now connected – economically, technically and socially. But we’re also learning that being connected is not sufficient. Yes, the world continues to get “flatter.” And yes, it continues to get smaller and more interconnected. But something is happening that holds even greater potential. In a word, our planet is becoming smarter.
In the speech, Sam talks about how the world has become instrumented, more interconnected, and devices more intelligent. And he talks about how the current world crises – ecological, financial, and others – represent an opportunity for change. The next step for the globally integrated economy is a globally integrated and intelligent economy and society.
Some of the problems and solutions that are being mentioned are interesting.
67 per cent of all electrical energy is lost due to inefficient power generation and grid management… utilities in the U.S., Denmark, Australia and Italy are now building digital grids to monitor the energy system in real time.
Congested roadways in the U.S. cost $78 billion annually in wasted hours and gas… Stockholm’s new smart toll system has resulted in 22 percent less traffic, a 12 to 40 percent drop in emissions and 40,000 additional daily users of the public transport system
This is exciting for me on many levels. Let me step up through them.
As regular readers will know, I’ve become increasingly interested in pervasive computing and home automation. The little “Current Cost craze” that has swept through my group of friends at work could be seen as a mark of the individual interest in applying technology in a smarter way. I’m excited that this has widened out to a group of folks who are supportingChris Dalby’s Home Camp idea in London later this month.
First on stage were hosts Brady Forrest [http://radar.oreilly.com/brady/] of
O’Reilly Media [http://oreilly.com/] and Jennifer Pahlka
[http://blog.pahlka.com/] of TechWeb [http://www.techweb.com/home].
The buzz There’s a bit of a buzz going on at work at the moment – a bunch of us from “the Hursley crowd” have started playing with Current Cost meters. These devices are intended to enable consumers to see exactly what their energy usage is and, hopefully, modify behaviour to save electricity accordingly. The idea, simply, is that it provides real-time information about energy consumption.
The product The device itself comes in two parts. The unit that goes inside the house is a wireless LCD display which shows the current usage in watts, the current estimated cost per day assuming that usage is maintained, a bar chart with yesterday’s usage, overall KWH in the past day and month, and the time and temperature. The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.
Update: I should point out, given some comments, that we’re using an early batch of the meters and I’m not certain when they will be generally available.
One of the other features of the device is that it can be plugged in to a computer, and the data can then be captured and analysed over time. We are using some homebrew software to do this, pulling the data from the serial port (most of the meters use 9600 baud, it turns out that mine is set to 2400 for some reason).
It’s kind of scary to see some of the spikes in the graph, and just watching this has certainly made me adjust my behaviour in terms of switching things off and unplugging chargers and so on when they are not in use. We’ve all got our meters hooked up via a Microbroker, and this has been my first opportunity to really play around with MQTT technology… I’ve obviously been aware of it for a very long time, but it’s nice to have something tangible to hack around with. It has also led me into a bunch of interesting discussions about home automation, tweetjects and low-power servers. Fascinating stuff.
The ideas
I have a bunch of thoughts about this. I have it hooked up to an old Linux box, but I’ve also successfully attached it to my Macbook Pro and a Windows Thinkpad. Currently the software is sending the MQTT data to a Microbroker and a Java app is drawing the graph shown above, but it would be fairly straightforward, for example, to squirrel the data locally and do some interesting analytics using Project Zero (aka WebSphere sMash) and some AJAX-y Google Chart goodness. I can also capture ambient temperature over time. It’s all just a matter of finding the hacking opportunity!
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The buzz There’s a bit of a buzz going on at work at the moment – a bunch of us from “the Hursley crowd” have started playing with Current Cost meters. These devices are intended to enable consumers to see exactly what their energy usage is and, hopefully, modify behaviour to save electricity accordingly. The idea, simply, is that it provides real-time information about energy consumption.
The product The device itself comes in two parts. The unit that goes inside the house is a wireless LCD display which shows the current usage in watts, the current estimated cost per day assuming that usage is maintained, a bar chart with yesterday’s usage, overall KWH in the past day and month, and the time and temperature. The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.
Update: I should point out, given some comments, that we’re using an early batch of the meters and I’m not certain when they will be generally available.
One of the other features of the device is that it can be plugged in to a computer, and the data can then be captured and analysed over time. We are using some homebrew software to do this, pulling the data from the serial port (most of the meters use 9600 baud, it turns out that mine is set to 2400 for some reason).
It’s kind of scary to see some of the spikes in the graph, and just watching this has certainly made me adjust my behaviour in terms of switching things off and unplugging chargers and so on when they are not in use. We’ve all got our meters hooked up via a Microbroker, and this has been my first opportunity to really play around with MQTT technology… I’ve obviously been aware of it for a very long time, but it’s nice to have something tangible to hack around with. It has also led me into a bunch of interesting discussions about home automation, tweetjects and low-power servers. Fascinating stuff.
The ideas
I have a bunch of thoughts about this. I have it hooked up to an old Linux box, but I’ve also successfully attached it to my Macbook Pro and a Windows Thinkpad. Currently the software is sending the MQTT data to a Microbroker and a Java app is drawing the graph shown above, but it would be fairly straightforward, for example, to squirrel the data locally and do some interesting analytics using Project Zero (aka WebSphere sMash) and some AJAX-y Google Chart goodness. I can also capture ambient temperature over time. It’s all just a matter of finding the hacking opportunity!
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For a while now I’ve wanted to be able to check my CurrentCost meter‘s graphs on my iPhone.
Up until now I’ve been hooked up to the “Hursley mothership” and been publishing my data to a central dashboard. Unfortunately, although that draws some pretty graphs, it runs in Java and therefore isn’t supported in Mobile Safari on the phone.
This is still a work in progress, but with a combination of Ubuntu running on a Viglen MPC-L, rrdtool for gathering and graphing the stats, and the iWebKit framework for creating the user interface, I now have a simple iPhone-optimised web application which lets me view the graphs. All that’s happening here is that the data from the serial port is being dropped into rrdtool and graphs generated; and then Apache / PHP is serving up an optimised dashboard for looking at the graphs.
I just mentioned about three different topics I really should blog about in more detail (MPC-L, rrdtool, and iWebKit) but that will all have to wait.
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The buzz There’s a bit of a buzz going on at work at the moment – a bunch of us from “the Hursley crowd” have started playing with Current Cost meters. These devices are intended to enable consumers to see exactly what their energy usage is and, hopefully, modify behaviour to save electricity accordingly. The idea, simply, is that it provides real-time information about energy consumption.
The product The device itself comes in two parts. The unit that goes inside the house is a wireless LCD display which shows the current usage in watts, the current estimated cost per day assuming that usage is maintained, a bar chart with yesterday’s usage, overall KWH in the past day and month, and the time and temperature. The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.
Update: I should point out, given some comments, that we’re using an early batch of the meters and I’m not certain when they will be generally available.
One of the other features of the device is that it can be plugged in to a computer, and the data can then be captured and analysed over time. We are using some homebrew software to do this, pulling the data from the serial port (most of the meters use 9600 baud, it turns out that mine is set to 2400 for some reason).
It’s kind of scary to see some of the spikes in the graph, and just watching this has certainly made me adjust my behaviour in terms of switching things off and unplugging chargers and so on when they are not in use. We’ve all got our meters hooked up via a Microbroker, and this has been my first opportunity to really play around with MQTT technology… I’ve obviously been aware of it for a very long time, but it’s nice to have something tangible to hack around with. It has also led me into a bunch of interesting discussions about home automation, tweetjects and low-power servers. Fascinating stuff.
The ideas
I have a bunch of thoughts about this. I have it hooked up to an old Linux box, but I’ve also successfully attached it to my Macbook Pro and a Windows Thinkpad. Currently the software is sending the MQTT data to a Microbroker and a Java app is drawing the graph shown above, but it would be fairly straightforward, for example, to squirrel the data locally and do some interesting analytics using Project Zero (aka WebSphere sMash) and some AJAX-y Google Chart goodness. I can also capture ambient temperature over time. It’s all just a matter of finding the hacking opportunity!
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One of the first Hursley-related things I wrote about here and on the eightbar blog back in 2006 was how much I enjoy helping with our annual schools event for National Science and Engineering Week in the UK – Blue Fusion (the event website has gone AWOL at the moment but here’s a link to the press release).
This year was no exception, and referring back to my old blog entries it turns out that this is now the fifth year that I’ve been a volunteer. Unfortunately I only had room in my schedule to spend one day helping this time around, so I chose to host a school for the day rather than spending all day on a single activity (that way, I got to see all of the different things we had on offer).
So, yesterday I had the pleasure of hosting six intelligent and polite students from Malvern St James School and their teachers – they had travelled a fair distance to come to the event, but despite the early start I think they did really well.
I won’t go into too much detail and spoil the fun for people who might read this but have not yet taken part in this week’s event, but I think we had some great activities on offer. I twittered our way through a few of them. My own personal favourite was a remote surgery activity. You can’t see much in this image (it was a dark room) but the students basically had a “body” inside a box with some remote cameras to guide their hands around and had to identify organs and foreign objects.
There was also some interesting application of visual technology / tangible interfaces – a genetics exercise using LEGO bricks and a camera which identified gene strands, and an energy planning exercise which used Reactivision-style markers to identify where power stations had been placed on a map (sort of similar to what we built in SLorpedo at Hackday a couple of years ago). We also had some logic puzzles to solve, built a, err… “typhoon-proof” (ahem) tower, simulated a computer processor, and commanded a colony of ants in a battle for survival against the other school teams.
Things I learned
Facebook (not Bebo) is now where it’s at.
If a tornado is coming, get out of the way or into a safe room.
Girls are much better than boys at listening to multiple streams of conversation (actually I think I worked this out a long time ago!).
A now, some notes just for my team…
Here are links to a few of the other things we talked about during the day:
Home Camp, the home automation and green energy event (next one is at the end of April).
And most importantly, here’s the evidence that we started off in first place 🙂 and I think you were an awesome team throughout. Well done, it was brilliant spending the day with you.
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For a while now I’ve wanted to be able to check my CurrentCost meter‘s graphs on my iPhone.
Up until now I’ve been hooked up to the “Hursley mothership” and been publishing my data to a central dashboard. Unfortunately, although that draws some pretty graphs, it runs in Java and therefore isn’t supported in Mobile Safari on the phone.
This is still a work in progress, but with a combination of Ubuntu running on a Viglen MPC-L, rrdtool for gathering and graphing the stats, and the iWebKit framework for creating the user interface, I now have a simple iPhone-optimised web application which lets me view the graphs. All that’s happening here is that the data from the serial port is being dropped into rrdtool and graphs generated; and then Apache / PHP is serving up an optimised dashboard for looking at the graphs.
I just mentioned about three different topics I really should blog about in more detail (MPC-L, rrdtool, and iWebKit) but that will all have to wait.
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i want to explore the various way we can highlight content.
Currently, on the threadiverse, we use vote to show our approval, discontent...and we can couple it with a bot for moderation. Or hide post below a certain score...
Some instance completly removed downvote as Beehaw. Piefed is experimenting private vote. On other fediverse software, mastodon, iceshrimp, there is no downvote and we use emojis to express our feelings.
You also have website as slashdot.org/ where you can tell that comment was insightfull or a troll, or funny...
There is also also website that compare software or video as tournesol.app/
Do you think vote sould be private ? Public ? And why ?
Are you sastified with the current voting system ? And why ?
What other interesting software/website that tried something different do you know ?
What way do you imagine to highlight content and improve search, discoverability ?
Do you think vote sould be private ? Public ? And why ?
Making them private is absolute idiotic. People participating in a discussion forum are willing to engage in a public conversation, if you are not willing to respond in public, then don't respond at all. And if you think that the original comment is in bad faith or harmful to the community, report it and move on.
Are you sastified with the current voting system ? And why ?
"Votes" are not real votes. It's just a terrible misnomer for "Liking" and "Disliking". I think we should get rid of votes altogether and use the real vocabulary.
I'd also would like a system where users could define their own scoring algorithm, and I would like to assign different weights depending on the person and the topic/community. I for one think that downvotes (dislikes) should only be counted if you are a member of the community and if you have made a positive contribution to the discussion.
What way do you imagine to highlight content and improve search, discoverability ?
I'd like to be able to follow people just to see what they are liking/commenting on. Also, given that this is a discussion forum, I wonder whether we could build a wiki-like system where people could annotate parts of a comment/post and challenge/elaborate/investigate specific parts of an statement. This could be used either for a "Change My View" style of discussion or even full-on adversarial collaboration projects.
Do you think vote sould be private ? Public ? And why ?
Public. Lots of downvotes is information that could indicate that the commenter is lying, or just saying something unpopular. But either way, it's information. Before youtube started hiding downvotes, it was easy to tell that a video was full of it based on downvotes. Now clickbait dominates the platform.
Are you sastified with the current voting system ? And why ?
No. I agree that the slashdot method with more than just upvote/downvote is better. In a perfect world I imagine we could have every emoji be a reaction option, and then you could sort by putting an emoji in a bar at the top. In reality I imagine this would be a challenge from a backend perspective, but maybe like the top 5 or 10 emoji reactions could be an option for selection.
What other interesting software/website that tried something different do you know ?
I'll do the opposite and say - please do not remove downvotes like Twitter/Bluesky/mastodon etc. Downvotes are super important. People need to be able to boo, the only place people aren't allowed to boo are in church or at cult rallies. And that's why those platforms are especially bad for misinformation, hyperbole, and overall depravity.
What way do you imagine to highlight content and improve search, discoverability ?
Remove all as a forced/default option on the main page. Back in the day before reddit had r/all, communities were much more diverse and niche, and this helped separate communities flourish in their own way. When r/all was added, the content started to resemble twitter, if not just becoming screenshots of twitter, on just about every sub. This actually improves discoverability because it would force users to branch out and look at subs instead of just looking at what's on all.
I’m in San Francisco today for the launch of a new company – Pivotal.
Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like PivotalHD.
Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like Pivotal HD.
What we’re announcing today delivers on that promise and our vision – the consumer-grade enterprise, enabling organisations to create new applications with unprecedented speed. The cloud – infrastructure clouds, IaaS like Amazon EC2, VMware vSphere, OpenStack, CloudStack, etc – can be thought of as the new hardware. It’s like buying a beige server box back in the 90s – the IaaS layer gives you a bunch of CPU, network, and storage resources, and for your application to use them, you need a layer in between – an operating system, if you like. We’ve spoken of our ambition for Cloud Foundry as “the Linux of the Cloud”, and it already runs on all of those infrastructures I’ve listed above – in the future, hopefully more.
Why is that important? Why should developers care about this Platform (PaaS) layer? A development team shouldn’t have to go through an 18 month delivery cycle to deliver an app! We’re putting an end to the whole cycle of calling up the infrastructure team, having new servers commissioned, operating systems installed, databases configured etc etc just to get an application deployed and running. When you first push an application to Cloud Foundry, and can then bind data services and scale out with simple individual commands, it really is a liberating experience compared to what traditionally has been required to get your application running. We’re making it quicker and easier to get going – a friction-free, turnkey experience. You should just be able to write your code and make something amazing.
We’re also delivering choice – of runtimes and languages, data services, and also importantly, a choice of “virtual hardware”. When Comic Relief ran in the UK this year, in order to avoid any risk of hardware failure (we all know there’s a risk that Amazon might go down), the applications were deployed on Cloud Foundry running on both Amazon EC2 with geographical redundancy, and on VMware vSphere – no lock-in to any cloud provider, and the developers didn’t have to learn all of the differences of operating different infrastructures, they just pushed their code. We’re happy to know that it was a very successful year for the Comic Relief charity, and that Cloud Foundry helped.
Pivotal One also includes some amazing data technologies – Pivotal HD (a simple to manage Hadoop distribution) and Pivotal AX (analytics for the enterprise). We recognise that as well as building applications, you need to store and analyse the data, so rather than just shipping a Cloud Foundry product, we roll up both the elastic scalable runtime, cutting-edge technologies like Spring.io, and and our big data offerings. That’s different from many of the others in the same market. We’ve been running our own hosted cloud, now available at run.pivotal.io, on AWS for over a year now, so we’ve learned a lot about running systems at scale and Pivotal One can do just that.
Above all, I wanted to say just how excited I am to be part of this amazing team. It is an honour to work with some incredibly talented engineers and leaders. I’m also personally excited that our commercial and our open source ecosystems continue to grow, including large organisations like IBM, SAP, Piston … it’s a long list. We took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal to thank them. I also want to thank our community of individual contributors (the Colins, Matts, Davids, Dr Nics, Yudais… etc etc!) many of whom, coincidentally for me, are in the UK – check out the very cool Github community where some of their projects are shared.
I’m convinced that this Platform is the way forward. It’s going to be an even more exciting year ahead.
A small selection of other coverage, plenty more to read around the web:
Today, Pivotal announced the availability of Pivotal CF, an enterprise cloud platform based on Cloud Foundry, along with a number of Pivotal One services such as an Apache Hadoop and Analytics service
I’m in San Francisco today for the launch of a new company – Pivotal.
Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like PivotalHD.
In late 2011, I was contacted by a very charming, smart and persuasive French gentleman who spoke of clouds, platform-as-a-service, and polyglot programming. It took him and his team a couple of months to get me thinking seriously about a career change, after 10 great years at IBM. I’d spent that period with “Big Blue” coding in Java and C, and primarily focused on enterprise application servers, message queueing, and integration – and yet the lure of how easy vmc push[1] made it for me to deploy and scale an app was astounding! Should I make the transition to a crazy new world? Over Christmas that year, I decided it would be a good thing to get in on this hot new technology and join VMware as Developer Advocate on the Cloud Foundry team. I joined the team early in 2012.
The Cloud Foundry adventure has been amazing. The day after I joined the team, the project celebrated its first anniversary, and we announced the BOSH continuous deployment tool; I spent much of that first year with the team on a whirlwind of events and speaking engagements, growing the community. The Developer Relations team that Patrick Chanezon and Adam Fitzgerald put together was super talented, and it was brilliant to be part of that group. Peter, Chris, Josh, Monica, Raja, Rajdeep, Alvaro, Eric, Frank, Tamao, Danny, Chloe, D, Giorgio, friends in that extended team… it was an honour.
A year after I joined, VMware spun out Cloud Foundry, SpringSource and other technologies into a new company, Pivotal – headed up by Paul Maritz. I’ve been privileged to work under him, Rob Mee at Pivotal Labs, and most closely, my good friend James Watters on the Cloud Foundry team. I’ve seen the opening of our new London offices on Old Street, welcomed our partners and customers into that unique collaborative and pairing environment, and observed an explosion of activity and innovation in this space. We launched an amazing product. James Bayer heads up a remarkable group of technologists working full-time on Cloud Foundry, and it has been a pleasure to get to know him and his team. Most recently, I’ve loved every minute working with Cornelia, Ferdy, Matt, Sabha and Scott (aka the Platform Engineering team), another talented group of individuals from whom I’ve learned much.
Over the course of the last two years I’ve seen the Platform-as-a-Service space grow, establish itself, and develop – most recently resulting in my recent talk at bcs Oxfordshire:
Last week, we announced the forthcoming Cloud Foundry Foundation – and one could argue that as a community and Open Source kinda guy, this was the direction I’ve helped to move things in the past two years, although I can claim no credit at all for the Foundation announcement itself. I’ve certainly enjoyed hosting occasional London Cloud Foundry Community meetups and drinks events (note, next London PaaS User Group event has 2 CF talks!), and I’ve made some great friends locally and internationally through the ongoing growth of the project. I’m proud of the Platform event we put on last year, I think the upcoming Cloud Foundry Summit will be just as exciting, and I’m happy to have been a part of establishing and growing the CF community here in Europe.
Cloud Foundry is THE de facto Open Source PaaS standard, the ecosystem is strong and innovative, and that has been achieved in a transparent and collaborative way, respectful to the community, in a good-natured way in the face of competition. Rest assured that I’ll continue to watch the project and use PaaSes which implement it (I upgraded to a paid Pivotal Web Services account just this past week, I tried BlueMix, and I’m an ongoing fan of the Anynines team).
There are many missing shout-outs here… you folks know who you are, and should also know that I’ve deeply enjoyed learning from you and working with you. Thank you, Pivotal team! I do not intend to be a stranger to the Bay Area! In my opinion, Pivotal is positioned brilliantly in offering an end-to-end mobile, agile development, cloud platform and big data story for the enterprise. I look forward to continuing the conversations around that in the next couple of weeks.
[…]
What happens after “the next couple of weeks”? Well, this is as good time as any (!) to close that chapter, difficult though it is to leave behind a team I’ve loved working with, on a product and project that is undoubtedly going to continue to be fantastically successful this year and beyond. So, it is time to announce my next steps, which may or may not be clear from the title of this post… 🙂 Joining Twitter! I joined Twitter as a user on Feb 21 2007. On the same day, seven years later, I accepted a job offer to go and work with the Twitter team as a Developer Advocate, based in London.
If you’ve been a long-term follower of mine either here on this blog, or on Twitter, or elsewhere, you’ll know that Twitter is one of my favourite tools online. It has been transformational in my life and career, and it changed many of my interactions. True story: between leaving IBM and joining VMware I presented at Digital Bristol about social technologies, and I was asked, which one I would miss the most if it went away tomorrow; the answer was simple: Twitter. As an Open Source guy, too, I’ve always been impressed with Twitter’s contributions to the broader community.
I couldn’t be more #excited to get started with the Twitter Developer Relations team in April!
Follow me on Twitter – @andypiper – to learn more about my next adventure…
Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like Pivotal HD.
What we’re announcing today delivers on that promise and our vision – the consumer-grade enterprise, enabling organisations to create new applications with unprecedented speed. The cloud – infrastructure clouds, IaaS like Amazon EC2, VMware vSphere, OpenStack, CloudStack, etc – can be thought of as the new hardware. It’s like buying a beige server box back in the 90s – the IaaS layer gives you a bunch of CPU, network, and storage resources, and for your application to use them, you need a layer in between – an operating system, if you like. We’ve spoken of our ambition for Cloud Foundry as “the Linux of the Cloud”, and it already runs on all of those infrastructures I’ve listed above – in the future, hopefully more.
Why is that important? Why should developers care about this Platform (PaaS) layer? A development team shouldn’t have to go through an 18 month delivery cycle to deliver an app! We’re putting an end to the whole cycle of calling up the infrastructure team, having new servers commissioned, operating systems installed, databases configured etc etc just to get an application deployed and running. When you first push an application to Cloud Foundry, and can then bind data services and scale out with simple individual commands, it really is a liberating experience compared to what traditionally has been required to get your application running. We’re making it quicker and easier to get going – a friction-free, turnkey experience. You should just be able to write your code and make something amazing.
We’re also delivering choice – of runtimes and languages, data services, and also importantly, a choice of “virtual hardware”. When Comic Relief ran in the UK this year, in order to avoid any risk of hardware failure (we all know there’s a risk that Amazon might go down), the applications were deployed on Cloud Foundry running on both Amazon EC2 with geographical redundancy, and on VMware vSphere – no lock-in to any cloud provider, and the developers didn’t have to learn all of the differences of operating different infrastructures, they just pushed their code. We’re happy to know that it was a very successful year for the Comic Relief charity, and that Cloud Foundry helped.
Pivotal One also includes some amazing data technologies – Pivotal HD (a simple to manage Hadoop distribution) and Pivotal AX (analytics for the enterprise). We recognise that as well as building applications, you need to store and analyse the data, so rather than just shipping a Cloud Foundry product, we roll up both the elastic scalable runtime, cutting-edge technologies like Spring.io, and and our big data offerings. That’s different from many of the others in the same market. We’ve been running our own hosted cloud, now available at run.pivotal.io, on AWS for over a year now, so we’ve learned a lot about running systems at scale and Pivotal One can do just that.
Above all, I wanted to say just how excited I am to be part of this amazing team. It is an honour to work with some incredibly talented engineers and leaders. I’m also personally excited that our commercial and our open source ecosystems continue to grow, including large organisations like IBM, SAP, Piston … it’s a long list. We took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal to thank them. I also want to thank our community of individual contributors (the Colins, Matts, Davids, Dr Nics, Yudais… etc etc!) many of whom, coincidentally for me, are in the UK – check out the very cool Github community where some of their projects are shared.
I’m convinced that this Platform is the way forward. It’s going to be an even more exciting year ahead.
A small selection of other coverage, plenty more to read around the web:
Today, Pivotal announced the availability of Pivotal CF, an enterprise cloud platform based on Cloud Foundry, along with a number of Pivotal One services such as an Apache Hadoop and Analytics service
I’m very excited to announce that, from April 10th, I will be joining the Developer Relations team for Cloud Foundry at VMware.
This is a thrilling opportunity for me for a number of reasons.
from a technology perspective: Cloud Foundry is very, very, very cool. In my opinion, it really comes from a different set of thought processes than the other Platform-as-a-Service offerings out there, which make it unique and compelling.
the operating system stuff gets out of the way (why should it matter?), but multiple language runtimes and backend resources are available for easy scaling. Seriously, the first time I walked through the command-line tutorial and scaled a Ruby app to 6 load balanced instances with a single command, I was instantly impressed.
it is Open Source. The code is on Github. You can run your own cloud if you like. You can add support for your own languages and frameworks, much as AppFog have done for PHP, Tier 3 and Uhuru have done with .NET in Iron Foundry, and so on. This provides a huge amount of flexibility. Oh, and of course mobile and cloud go hand-in-hand, so last week’s announcement of FeedHenry providing tools to develop HTML5 apps to deploy on Cloud Foundry was really significant, too.
you can take your cloud with you using Micro Cloud Foundry – so the development and deployment model remains the same whether you are online or offline. I love this idea.
for me, personally: it’s a natural evolution of much of the work I’ve been doing over the past few years – focusing on developer communities and promoting technology adoption, as much as top-down solution selling. As my good friend James Governor is fond of saying and as his colleague Steve O’Gradywrote, developers are the new kingmakers – and with trends like mobile, cloud, and devops, nurturing those communities is more important than ever. You don’t impose technology on a community – you explain it and earn your place and reputation.
I’m looking forward to more speaking, more writing, more mentoring, and more online community building. These are things I’ve grown to enjoy (and in the case of the latter, appear to do naturally).
I’ve followed Patrick Chanezon, the Senior Director of the team, since he was setting up the developer advocacy programme back at Google – I have a lot of respect for what he’s achieved and the way he operates, so I’m delighted to have the chance to work closely with him. I’m excited to join everyone in the team, of course – I have spoken with most of the group already and I’m really looking forward to learning from their diverse range of experiences and backgrounds.
Between now and April 10th, I have a few things planned including a vacation (!), heading to EclipseCon to talk about MQTT and M2M topics, and some other speaking engagements. After I start the new role, I expect I’ll join in on the Cloud Foundry Open Tour and start to meet folks. I’ll also be on the team for the GOTO conference in Aarhus in October – exciting times ahead!
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In November last year, I abandoned my Twitter account – I set it to private, did not visit, did not interact, ignored any direct messages, etc. It was simply too painful to watch friends and coworkers suddenly and systematically being fired, the company culture destroyed, and the developer communities that I supported for 9 years, finally cut off without support or API access. It has been a heartbreaking time.
Today, I took the last step in going back through my password manager vault and deleting all of my X/Twitter accounts. I’ve watched the shambolic rebranding over the past week, and frankly, I wish it had all happened far sooner – rather than seeing my beloved bird being dragged down, and the brand and memory ruined, piece by piece.
There are a few accounts that I share access to with others (for podcasts, sites or communities) that remain, but over the past hour or so I deleted 15 accounts, four of which had associated Twitter Developer Accounts.
Why so many?
Of course, I had my main account, @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url], which was first created after hanging out with my friend Roo Reynolds in his office at IBM Hursley, and hearing about Twitter, just starting to gather buzz from events like SxSW. Created February 21, 2007. The title of the blog entry I wrote that day seems accidentally prophetic (although, in truth, I do not regret it at all).
my jobs at VMware / Cloud Foundry in 2012, and at Twitter from 2014, were both direct results of being on Twitter, sharing my knowledge, interacting with different communities, and doing my work on the platform.
I’ve made countless friends through being on Twitter, and I’m grateful for that. It truly changed my life to be there.
Back at the start, those heady times of 2007-2009, it was not unusual to have a few accounts for fun, so certainly there were a few of those that just went away.
There were the super-sekrit accounts I had for testing features, such as the original internal test for ten thousand character Tweets (yes, this nearly happened, a long time back), the customisable Tweet Tiles we would have launched at the developer conference that was cancelled at the end of last year, and so on.
Finally, it’s time to say goodbye to my main @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url] account. Twitter is not Twitter any more, it is X – and I never signed up for X. In the near future, I’ll upload a searchable archive of my Twitter content, likely using Darius’ Twitter Archive tool. For now, it’s all done. I’m very happy elsewhere (personal sites and links here and here), and I will not be sad that X is out of my life.
… apart from the laptops that they still have not collected!
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I am by no means the only blogger to propose that this is a good way to avoid being locked-in or censored by commercial “Big Tech” or other interests. It turns out that George Peretz had posted something along the same lines as me only a few days earlier (How the Labour Government, and others, should respond to Musk); I was unaware of that post until I ran into it via Seize The Means Of Communication!1 on the Lightly Seared blog much more recently.
Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz went on to cover my post on their For Immediate Release podcast, and in particular Neville asked for me to share more about what I know in relation to existing government or state owned-and-operated Mastodon instances. I’m happy to do so!
Für die vielen neuen Menschen hier gibt es nochmal ein paar aktualisierte Informationen von uns, die wir anheften können:
1. Eine Übersicht über alle Accounts unserer Instanz gibt es unter: social.bund.de/directory (Filtereinstellungen nicht vergessen) 2. Pixis gibt es kostenlos hier: bfdi.bund.de/DE/Service/Publik… 3. Merch verlosen wir immer mal wieder hier oder verteilen es auf Veranstaltungen.
I’m curious to learn of more of these, let me know in the comments if you are aware of others.
If you are interested in managed support for this kind of instance, the team at Mastodon gGmbH would be happy to hear from you to discuss how we can help.
A case for Brazil
Finally, I want to talk briefly (but, only because I must) about X.
We talked about the events of the end of last week, when Brazil’s courts chose to block access to X in that country, on episode 3.19 of the TechGrumps podcast that was recorded this weekend, and should be released any moment.
Along with Musk’s direct personal attacks on the UK Prime Minister and his efforts to spread dangerous misinformation, this is yet another example of Musk, specifically, demonstrating his untrustworthiness, and lack of willingness to be bound by the rule of law – national or international. According to the media, there has been a swift take-up of Bluesky by many Brazilian users; it is difficult to measure Mastodon or other Fediverse instance signups because there are many individual instances that comprise the network, but we know that there was a significant surge of interest at the end of last week.
A lot of people who are up in arms over Brazil banning Xitter aren’t acknowledging the fact that the country cast off a military dictatorship in 1985 and Elon’s openly allied with the neofascist who tried to restore it, with help from Elon Social, just two years ago. Pretty unique situation.
That judge may well have a beef with Musk because of his intransigence but the stakes are much higher than that.
Whichever directions users migrate, the important thing is that more people must leave X as a platform, and disempower Musk’s efforts to disrupt the law.
As I typed this blog entry, my friend Evan Prodromou posted
So, who is in the Free/Open Source software community in Brazil, advising the government on how to move to the Fediverse? And how can I help you?
I don’t speak Portuguese, but add my name and voice to this offer of support!
@evan I am somehow surprised that the actual Brazilian government still doesn't have an instance of some software compatible with activity pub.
Before leaving Brazil, I was part of a group engaged in open government data and civic hacking. I really hope these groups are still strong as they were a few years ago!
By the way, in 2011, I was advocating the City Council of São Paulo to have an identi.ca server, instead of Twitter. This didn't work, but at least I could open up some government data.
… a title which is delightfully reminiscent of Cory Doctorow’s book The Internet Con, subtitled How To Seize The Means Of Computation, which I think about a lot. And obviously, as an historian, I’m very aware of the original quotation from which both of these derive. ↩︎
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[T]here is an obvious thing that government could do now and that requires no legislation and costs no money: government could simply shift all the material it currently puts out on X to another platform or platforms
He goes on to mention both BlueSky and Mastodon as obvious contenders.
I certainly agree that governments — and any organisation that values its reputation, for that matter — should be moving away from X, but simply moving to another platform amounts to a sticking-plaster solution at best.
The problem with being on someone else’s platform is that you are giving that someone else control over which messages you see and which of your messages are seen. Indeed, the EU’s Digital Services Act recognises this by identifying Very Large Online Platforms, and imposing additional requirements on them around areas such as transparency and disinformation.
Federated technologies, such as Mastodon (andmanyothersexist) resolve the problem of ownership far more effectively by allowing you install and run your own instance. Many governments — and even the European Commission — already use these solutions, thus putting themselves in control of their own communication and ensuring that individuals can access these communications without putting themselves at the mercy of commercial priorities.
Obviously, there are both costs and challenges associated with running your own instance, but none of these are insurmountable and if organisations truly want to ensure that their communications remain free (as in speech) they really should be investing in the already existing infrastructure that allows them to do so.
Any organisation should be taking steps to protect the integrity of it’s communication. This is especially true in the case of governments, political parties and campaigners, for whom free and open discussions are essential.
Elon Musk's use of his X platform to promote murderous voices of hate is unacceptable. One way of fighting back would be to try to break the co-ordination problem that underpins X's power.
Today, I received some fun post from some lovely people in New York City. Those in the know, may recognise these stickers as the logos of Glitch and Fastly.
I’ve been using Glitch to write and host web apps for quite a few years now – it is super helpful when working in a role like developer relations, needing to rapidly spin up demos, examples, or to demonstrate new features. A couple of years ago, Glitch came together with Fastly, and in the past couple of months their new developer platform vision really started to come together.
If you haven’t been keeping up with what they have been up to, and were not able to be at their recent special developer event in NYC (don’t worry, I couldn’t get there either), there’s a helpful ~6 minute video that summarises the announcements. I’m particularly interested and excited about this because I know and respect the folks involved – Anil Dash, Jenn Schiffer, Hannah Aubry, many others across their teams – and I know that they get and they care about developer experience, Open Source, and the free and open web. I’m talking about the big stuff, the infrastructure, the stuff that needs to invisibly just work in order for the web to run; and also the smaller things, the quirky indie little pieces, the fun and new experiences, helping people to learn to code and to be creative. It’s no exaggeration to say that Fastly’s Fast Forward program is a massive supporter of Open Source, open standards and the Fediverse. All of these things are reasons why I love Glitch & Fastly.
[ if you’re curious about the sorts of things I’ve been building or working on from a code and web perspective, I’ve also spruced up my GitHub bio, and I have a more general gallery page on GitHub that has links to the source and deployments of different projects – some of which are links to those Glitch apps above ]
Thank you for the stickerage, Glitch friends! And, congratulations on the new Fastly Developer Platform! I’m looking forward to continuing to use your cool technologies 👍🏻
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Resources page for Andy Piper's talk on the history of Computer Art, pen plotters, and more. Explore further with links to exhibitions, contemporary artists, tools, and reading materials.
@andypiper@Stickman Hook Don’t underestimate the “tiny” sound effects in Stickman Hook. Every swing, every bounce or collision has its own effect, combined with the gentle background music, helping you feel more relaxed and still excited when playing.
The writing trigger today was largely prompted by reading the latest edition of Tedium, specifically, commenting on the Patreon situation with the App Store.
[…] it is also reflective of a mistake the company made many years ago: To allow people to support patrons directly through its app. Patreon did not need to do this. It was just a website at first, and for all the good things that can be said about the company, fact is they built on shaky land. To go to my earlier metaphor: They built their foundation on quicksand, perhaps without realizing it, though the broken glass wasn’t thrown in just yet. […] That shaky land isn’t the web, and if Patreon had stayed there, this would not be an issue. It’s the mobile app ecosystem, which honestly treats everyone poorly whether they want to admit it or not.
Look at that – hyperlinks between content published freely on open platforms, that can be read, studied, accessed around the world, and discussed, all within minutes and hours of publication. Mind blowing! Thank you, Sir Tim Berners-Lee!
I spend a bunch on apps, and in apps, and with Apple, directly and indirectly. They have a good ecosystem, it is all convenient (but spendy) to me as a consumer… but, I don’t think this whole situation with them milking creators and creatives is OK at all. The trouble is, that the lines are all kinds of blurry here – if they carved out a new category and set of rules around apps that sell subscriptions for creators that had, say, a zero or just a lower fee than other categories, then you’ll get into situations where others try to find ways into that category to avoid the higher fees.
The closed ones make me increasingly sad and frustrated.
The open ones can take more tinkering and effort, but I get a lot back from them. They need sustaining. They don’t come for free. They need us to contribute, and to find ways to pay to support the creators and makers and builders and engineers.
Today, I received some fun post from some lovely people in New York City. Those in the know, may recognise these stickers as the logos of Glitch and Fastly.
I’ve been using Glitch to write and host web apps for quite a few years now – it is super helpful when working in a role like developer relations, needing to rapidly spin up demos, examples, or to demonstrate new features. A couple of years ago, Glitch came together with Fastly, and in the past couple of months their new developer platform vision really started to come together.
If you haven’t been keeping up with what they have been up to, and were not able to be at their recent special developer event in NYC (don’t worry, I couldn’t get there either), there’s a helpful ~6 minute video that summarises the announcements. I’m particularly interested and excited about this because I know and respect the folks involved – Anil Dash, Jenn Schiffer, Hannah Aubry, many others across their teams – and I know that they get and they care about developer experience, Open Source, and the free and open web. I’m talking about the big stuff, the infrastructure, the stuff that needs to invisibly just work in order for the web to run; and also the smaller things, the quirky indie little pieces, the fun and new experiences, helping people to learn to code and to be creative. It’s no exaggeration to say that Fastly’s Fast Forward program is a massive supporter of Open Source, open standards and the Fediverse. All of these things are reasons why I love Glitch & Fastly.
[ if you’re curious about the sorts of things I’ve been building or working on from a code and web perspective, I’ve also spruced up my GitHub bio, and I have a more general gallery page on GitHub that has links to the source and deployments of different projects – some of which are links to those Glitch apps above ]
Thank you for the stickerage, Glitch friends! And, congratulations on the new Fastly Developer Platform! I’m looking forward to continuing to use your cool technologies 👍🏻
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Resources page for Andy Piper's talk on the history of Computer Art, pen plotters, and more. Explore further with links to exhibitions, contemporary artists, tools, and reading materials.
Over the past week, there’s been a noticeable shift away from X in the UK, and it feels long overdue. According to Bluesky’s PR, the platform has seen a surge in new users and activity from the UK. I’ve personally noticed more people finding my profiles on both Threads and on Bluesky, and I’ve seen a significant number of “I just deleted my X account” posts on Threads. However, due to the algorithm, these posts often appear in bursts, sometimes delayed by a day or two.
My friend Neville Hobson wrote a piece today titled “Finally, the Unravelling of X,” where he discusses this migration, the reasons behind it, and the pros and cons of choosing between Bluesky and Threads. Neville touches on the idea of a “more respectful, decentralized web,” (to quote him on the Fediverse), and even highlights something I said on Threads yesterday. In response to a question about where politicians should go in a post-X world, I suggested that governments should own their own social platforms: I wanted to expand on what I meant by a “sovereign owned/operated Mastodon instance” for the UK Parliament, and why I believe this is important.
One of the major tensions between Big Tech and national governments over the past 15 years has revolved around platform ownership and control. The European Union has even labeled several tech companies as “gatekeepers” in the Digital Markets Act. This term is telling—these companies essentially gatekeep the digital rights, data, and access of national citizens.
If governments are concerned about the dominance of privately-owned online platforms, they have a responsibility to run and own their own. At FOSDEM in Brussels this February, we noticed growing interest in Fediverse platforms and technologies like Mastodon from several national governments and the EU itself. Many of these institutions are already running their own social media instances and actively encouraging their politicians to use them. In the EU, there’s no reason to switch to Threads since Meta has restricted the platform’s availability in the bloc. Moreover, Threads doesn’t allow users to run their own instances, unlike Mastodon or even Bluesky, which, while less common, does technically support setting up a external ATProto instance (I don’t think that’s really happening though? happy to be informed and to learn otherwise – I’ll readily admit that it has not been at the centre of my attention).
For years, governments, newsrooms, and other organisations have protested the idea that private companies should control and limit their messages. A logical response would be for these entities to run their own instances of software like Mastodon—or any Fediverse-compatible, ActivityPub-based service. This would allow them to own their content, domain, and user verification, ensuring greater control and independence.
The UK is lagging behind in this area. While the EU has embraced Mastodon, and in the US, many organisations have moved to Threads, the UK has yet to take similar steps. For example, I follow @POTUS@threads.net and @whitehouse@threads.net from my Mastodon account, because they’ve enabled Fediverse sharing. Even though Threads is owned and operated by Meta, it’s positive that their content can reach into the wider Fediverse. Ideally, Threads will eventually fully integrate with the ActivityPub network, offering a two-way interaction and allowing for account, network, and maybe content portability—hence why I said, “in principle, with federated social accounts, the location does not matter so much, as long as they can be discovered and followed.” Owning the network and identity allows for broader discoverability and avoids corporate chokeholds.
Running digital services requires consistent investment and maintenance.
Discovery isn’t always straightforward, and organisations seek reach and measurement—areas where Fediverse platforms currently fall short.
Deciding who qualifies for an account on a sovereign platform is tricky. While it makes sense for current MPs to have official accounts on a national Fediverse server, it’s harder to justify the inclusion of political parties or other entities on the same platform. This is an area where we need to improve data and account portability as the Fediverse grows.
These are important discussions that we need to be having. Politicians and the media should advocate for greater decentralisation and digital sovereignty to protect the freedom of democratic institutions.
Update 16/08/2024 – my friend Stefan Bohacek reminded me that he put together a useful resource on this same topic several months ago, Fediverse: an overview for government agencies. Well worth sending to your representatives, or sharing with your network if asked.
Update 27/08/2024 – the conversation continues in episode #425 of the For Immediate Release podcast (discussion starts around 13 min into the show). I appreciate Neville and Shel talking about my post here. Take a listen, if you want to hear how they expanded on and debated this idea – available wherever you get your podcasts.
Update 09/09/2024 – I wrote a second piece expanding on this and listing existing governments that are already in the Fediverse.
Update 13/09/2024 – I was reminded of this piece from IFTAS, Open Social for the Common Good, that is also excellent on this topic.
Finally – if you’re leaving X – congratulations – don’t look back.
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The desire to stand out has declined significantly over the last 20 years, according to a new study. That has serious implications for society, business, and communicators.
The writing trigger today was largely prompted by reading the latest edition of Tedium, specifically, commenting on the Patreon situation with the App Store.
[…] it is also reflective of a mistake the company made many years ago: To allow people to support patrons directly through its app. Patreon did not need to do this. It was just a website at first, and for all the good things that can be said about the company, fact is they built on shaky land. To go to my earlier metaphor: They built their foundation on quicksand, perhaps without realizing it, though the broken glass wasn’t thrown in just yet. […] That shaky land isn’t the web, and if Patreon had stayed there, this would not be an issue. It’s the mobile app ecosystem, which honestly treats everyone poorly whether they want to admit it or not.
Look at that – hyperlinks between content published freely on open platforms, that can be read, studied, accessed around the world, and discussed, all within minutes and hours of publication. Mind blowing! Thank you, Sir Tim Berners-Lee!
I spend a bunch on apps, and in apps, and with Apple, directly and indirectly. They have a good ecosystem, it is all convenient (but spendy) to me as a consumer… but, I don’t think this whole situation with them milking creators and creatives is OK at all. The trouble is, that the lines are all kinds of blurry here – if they carved out a new category and set of rules around apps that sell subscriptions for creators that had, say, a zero or just a lower fee than other categories, then you’ll get into situations where others try to find ways into that category to avoid the higher fees.
The closed ones make me increasingly sad and frustrated.
The open ones can take more tinkering and effort, but I get a lot back from them. They need sustaining. They don’t come for free. They need us to contribute, and to find ways to pay to support the creators and makers and builders and engineers.
Hum, don't know if this is a pipewire issue or if the DeskMini has too bad shielding (then again, DAC is outside vua USB-C). But each time i have slightly huge CPU load, audio starts glitching with crackling to the point of failing altogether until restart of the audio server.
But how do you dry the dishes once the dishwasher is done? Do you leave them in the dishwasher to dry, which mean that you can't add new dished until it's all dry and you've emptied it? Do you let them dry on a counter? But in that case where do you find enough space? Or do you put the wet dishes in your cupboards even though it'll trap moisture in there? Or do you manually wipe the dishes with towels like some crazy people do?
Good dishwashers have a heating element on the bottom. . It turns on and dries the dishes in a cloud of steam. There is also a button on mine that's for high heat (sanitize) that I leave on. This ensures that the dishes get completely dry.
Really? Everytime I go to family or friends who have a dishwasher and help with emptying it, the dishes are always at least a bit wet... Maybe everyone I know just has cheap dishwashers 😅 Sanitizing on high heat seems like a great feature to have
I wanted to put a rack for those dishwasher trays into a regular cupboard, so that we could have basically a real dishwasher for dirty stuff, and a cupboard for clean stuff so that we never have to empty it.
My husband Veto'd it, because "that's the epitome of laziness". Which I think is exactly the point, but whatever. It's his job to empty the dishwasher now, which solves the problem too.
Ooh that some clever design! I know some people who just put dishes in regular cupboards before they are fully dry and it always feels like a moldy disaster waiting to happen.
That would be so convenient! Sanitizing pots and bottles in boiling water is a pain. THEY FLOAT. Plus the water is so hard here that after a long bath of boiling water you can barely see through the glass, they are clean but look so dirty 😡
WhatsApp is rolling out ads. In an update on Monday, Meta announced that it will now show ads from businesses through its Stories-like status feature.
Meta says it will tailor the ads to your interests by using “limited” information, including your country or city, language, the channels you follow, and how you interact with ads on the platform. You can also change your ad preferences from Meta’s Accounts Center.
This isn’t the only change Meta is making to WhatsApp. The company will also start showing promoted channels when you click on the Explore button to find new ones to follow. It’s also rolling out the ability to subscribe to channels to “receive exclusive updates” as well.
Joy-Con joysticks use a potentiometer to read the voltage at a wiper that slides across a strip of resistive material. That material wears down over time, or plastic and dust can dirty the sensors.
Stick drift is a huge problem with other Switch models. One survey found that 40% of Switch owners had problems with their Joy-Cons drifting, and things didn’t get any better with the Lite or OLED editions. After a bunch of lawsuits, Nintendo’s president even admitted it and apologized, setting up a free repair program for customers in some parts of the world.
And the deluded fucks still charge more than US$250 for their half-a-console. It's got good processing power and stellar shell construction, but charging the same price Xbox and PlayStation do for their full entertainment consoles, for a handheld main with the same defect-prone joysticks, tiny battery, stickers for the Joy-Con socket decal, plastic screen and 1080p display? In 2025?
Funny you should mention that actually! At work, I'm just finishing up a website for two companies that are merging. One is English speaking, but the other required multiple languages to be available for the whole site.
We used a system that uses DeepL. None of the non-English speakers (across 8 separate languages) say that the result is satisfactory. I know they might be being difficult etc but I was genuinely a bit surprised that entire swathes of the site is so poorly translated by DeepL that they've delayed the launch to go through and manually translate lol
The neat thing about that is, your hard drive can be ejected very easily. And a new one inserted. It also has a spot for a slave drive that can do the same thing.
Right now, I'm using ZorinOS as my daily driver. I don't know how exactly I became a Linux user, but, I guess at this point I've been using it daily since the week of Christmas 2024. Which was like 6 months ago now.
Anyways, self realizations aside, I have an idea. I've installed Lutris on this install, and I have run out of room for my games. I also have an 8TB hard drive I'm not using.
My plan is to use the 8TB hard drive to do nothing but install games to. Then have Lutris look for the games on the slave drive. Now here's where it gets interesting.
What if that 8tb drive gets filled too? Well, I could buy a SECOND 8TB drive!
What if I install Game 1, Game 2, and Game 3 on SSDSlave1 and then I install Game 4, Game 5 and Game 6 on SSDSlave2.
So now, I'm playing Game 2. But I want to play game 6. So I just turn off the PC, swap slave drives, and turn it back on. And now, it's ready for me.
Oh, but we're not done yet.
I'm using SSDMain1 with ZorinOS with Lutris installed. What if I swapped hard drives to SSDMain2 with Mint with Lutris installed? Then whichever hard drive is inserted is what dictates what games I can play. Like an old school NES except now for modern systems.
So, recap. Slot 1 should be able to swap between OS's,
And slot 2 would be able to swap between games.
With any combination working, since they'd both have Lutris installed.
Can someone recommend some decent bike lights? I have a front one that attaches with the rubber band type thing that's pretty good except it turns on in my bag every time so it's always dead when I go to use it.
Needs be removable from the bike easily.
I would prefer USB C over micro USB. Or maybe rechargeable AA battery which I already own.
Also the rear light is gonna be attached to milk crate on the back rack.
It's for a city just to be seen so I don't need 7150 lumens.
I mainly use this rear light. It comes with a bracket so you can mount it to the back of your rear rack. Then you just clip it in. I hate the rubber band lights.
Illuminate your night rides with the ROCKBROS Bicycle Front Headlight RHL800LM. This high-brightness bicycle light provides up to 800 lumens, ensuring excellent visibility and safety.
I use simple technology when I ride. My timer is...
When I need to catch my breath
When I need water or shade
I don't usually care much how long I rode, but the few long rides I've timed myself on were around 1:40 or so, with only like 2 breaks in between, around 36 miles total, one way.
I'm in need of a CAD program with an easy aproach for someone with zero experience on this type of software.
3D printing is not a concern
I intend to draw the blueprints for my house. The building is old, no blueprints exist for it, and I intend to make renovations to it, so having blueprints to work on to plan the renovations will be a huge help.
Onshape has a free tier, though all the cad files you make in it are publically available. That being said, it's easy to use and, since it's browser based, completely comparable with linux
FreeCAD is the most common solid FOSS modeler. I do not think any solid modeling system is that simple. They tend to need training and continuous use. That was my experience with SolidWorks and NX anyway.
FreeCAD is pretty capable but it's openly 3D focused and doesn't make for a great 2D only solution. However, for some simple work with remodeling, it might be fine.
Sketcher is used as the first step for an extrusion iirc but draft is what he wants. It is just more built for 3D models to be turned into drafts rather than making a draft from scratch.
I’m in need of a CAD program with an easy aproach for someone with zero experience on this type of software.
If you have zero experience with CAD, but some experience with programming languages or things like LaTeX, JSON, XML, HTML, etc., I'd suggest giving OpenSCAD a try. While it is definitely for more advanced users, it managed to instantly click with me, in contrast to FreeCAD and others I just couldn't get into (or rather back into, since my AutoCAD lessons back in school). That it allowed me to work work on CAD drawings in Emacs helped too...
I've been doing amazing stuff in FreeCAD. It has a lot of power that lets me do things I never thought I would be able to do. It's also riddled with bugs that will make you want to throw your computer out the window.
My success with FreeCAD comes from extremely strict version control and years of use. I've learned to live with a few specific bugs. For example, external geometry doesn't work and hasn't for 14 months. Don't believe the forum when they say it works. It does not. In any given sketch, you will be able to make is 0 or 1 external link work properly without breaking your drawing. If you have more than one external link, even if you aren't using any of them, it will give you a "wire not closed" error when trying to pad or pocket.
Oddly, the subshape binder works perfectly and it is the illegitimate brother of external links. It even uses the external link tool to define import links from the binder object. Using a master sketch and the subshape binder is absolutely brilliant and wildly productive.
It comes down to having several tools to do any given thing but only one or two may be working.
There is a decent architectural plug-in for FreeCAD. I think Yorik wrote it, some time ago, but it's brilliant. I've used it for doing exactly what you describe on several house projects and it's helped quite a bit with renovations.
SweetHome3d is also a decent app but extremely primative and it's not going to create professional looking blueprints for anyone. It's really just a toy but can be extremely useful for mocking up a design or room layout. I have used it for years with great benefit. It's simple, quite powerful, and a brilliant visualization tool.
Honestly, if you want to create real blueprints to give to a builder, you're going to need Windows or OSX and one of a handful of applications, preeminently AutoDesk REVIT. REVIT is probably over specified for your purpose but it's the adult table. At least know it's there if you find linux apps have too many shortcomings.
Look at QCad. They have a paid ($40), and a free version that is fully functional and open source. It's the most autocad-like app out there, so learning that has the advantage of learning the UI of autocad too.
LibreCad that others suggested was forked from Qcad about 15 years ago and hasn't moved much in terms of features. While QCad has. So in my opinion, it's the best solution.
Then there's Freecad, but that's more about 3D cad, and it's more complicated overall.
Sorry, this is going to come across as a newbie rant... mostly because I just switched a few months ago. I'm not completely unfamiliar with Linux. I had to use Unix in college for some projects. I've dual-booted with Windows before. I use a Mac at work. I'm reasonably comfortable in the console, though I'm certainly no expert. I feel like what I'm about to talk about shouldn't be so confusing/unintuitive.
I'm running Kubuntu on an older laptop. I have a burnable DVD disc that may or may not be blank. The disc is old, scratched, and unlabeled, but I would like to see if anything is on it.
I press the eject button on my laptop's disc drive. The tray comes out. I insert the disc and close the tray. The system gets busy trying to read the disc, but eventually stops spinning. Nothing pops up. Dolphin doesn't show my disc drive in the "Devices" panel, or that there's anything in the drive. VLC says it can't read the disc.
Ok, fine. The disc is probably either empty, or it's too scratched to read and needs to be trashed, so I would like to remove it from my system. I push the eject button again, and... nothing happens. It's the same button I used to open the tray to insert the disc, but now it's unresponsive. I open Dolphin and confirm that it doesn't show that I even have a disc drive in the "Devices" panel (presumably because nothing's in it). I open the "Discs and Devices" section in the Notification tray, and the most I can get it to show is my hard drive. It's like my computer doesn't believe the DVD drive exists.
So, what do I have to do? I can open MakeMKV, and it has an Eject button that opens the tray. I'm sure plenty of other software has similar functionality. I can also open the terminal and type "eject", and the tray pops right open. Clearly, my system knows that there's a DVD drive, and it has the ability to open the tray.
Why doesn't the eject button work? Why doesn't Dolphin just always show the DVD drive? Why do I have to google "How to eject a dvd kubuntu"? What am I missing?
Most drives have an emergency eject function built in, totally independent of the operating system. Some work differently than others, but try something along these lines..
Hold the eject button for 5 to 10 seconds
Then tap the eject button multiple times
Usually works for me.
Edit: Most drives also have an emergency eject hole near the eject button, just push a straightened paperclip in when the drive is powered off and it should eject.
I did try holding the eject button for up to 15 seconds when I first noticed this issue, but that was ineffecive. I just tried it again so that I could try tapping the eject button afterward, but it didn't work, either.
I used the paperclip in the past. That works because it's mechanical.
It's been a little hit/miss for me at times as well, I totally feel your frustration when dealing with scratched discs. Still, at least with my drives, spamming the eject button seems to eventually work.
I absolutely love spicy food, and it's never affected my gut. I was actually confused when I read about people getting the shits after a curry and wondered if it was a joke. I've had curries so hot it caused people to recoil into a coughing and sweating fit after they dipped their finger in and had a taste and I have one every other day. I feel the burning in my mouth, my face turns red, my forehead sweats, my esophagus feels weird, but (tmi I know lol) when I go to the toilet I'm completely fine. no gut pains either.
I'm talking about games that you still like but you had no idea were criticized so much.
The perfect example for me is Sonic Unleashed.
I admit that the game has its bad things, but I would have never imagined that it was so hated at the time... Although, that could be extended to the entire Sonic franchise, since for many years I was not aware at all of that "Sonic was never good", "Sonic had a rough transition to 3D" nonsense.
Mine was final fantasy 12. I played that game so hard, really enjoyed it and if was released in the time of trophies I would have platinumed it. Even did the grinding for Gilgamesh to spawn for a sword or something. But I was hated at the time.
Now everyone is saying it was one of the best and I was proved right all along.
Sure the story was star wars and the main character wasn't, but the combat system was really fun, way better than 13.
It appears that the Nintendo Switch 2 has a new safety feature disabling rumble after prolonged use, something that wasn’t included on Nintendo Switch. According to multiple user comments, th…
Truth is, to get right to the point, the fact that Matrix was accompanied by a for-profit entity, funded by venture capital was the biggest mistake that Matrix as a project has ever made.
It’s really convoluted and, in this case, not really the fault the developers. Microsoft presents everyone with a high-end console, the Series X, but studios like CD Projekt Red can’t make use of its full potential because they’re forced to target the lower-end Series S first.
However, every game on Xbox Series X also has to work on Series S, meaning every game is sort of chained to the limitations of that console to a degree. With that said, some developers have voiced frustrations with developing for the Xbox Series S and it was even reportedly an issue when bringing Black Myth: Wukong to Xbox.
The buzz
The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.
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