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cricalix

Frontpage on Linux, backed by file storage on Netware. That was hell to support (student home pages).
Re:The Curse of Soldered RAM on Monday October 26, 2026 @05:03AM (#50241043)
I'm looking to replace my "eats batteries inside 4 months" (set to charge to no more than 90%, health is 60% in 4 months after less than 20 cycles) second-hand Carbon, and urgh, so many soldered RAM or memory on package designs. Some of Lenovo's 14 inch laptops are still SODIMM or LPCAMM2, but most appear to have gone the non-maintainable route.

Tried a Tuxedo laptop, lovely 120Hz display, but keyboard layout and I disagree. Turns out I really like the older ThinkPad inverted T with pgup/pgdown bracketing, and the 4 keys to the right of the F keys. Problem is, that locks me to ThinkPad/Lenovo, as everyone else seems to use the split up/down cursor with Fn to get page keys. Also really prefer physical mouse buttons over the trackpad, and the Tuxedo was haptic only.

The upgrade cost on the LP RAM though.. 940 EUR for 32 -> 64. Sure, 23% is VAT, but damn the hardware costs hurt right now. At least SODIMM is still cheaper.

Re:Bitwarden Dual License Model on Saturday October 10, 2026 @12:28PM (#50034464)
1Password has the whole thing of providing money to Omarchy's foundation. For some, that is a hard blocker.
Re:Barcodes are about to go extinct on Thursday October 08, 2026 @12:48AM (#50001885)
Because of interference between cables. Consider how flag labels will interact with each other when there are 72+ connected in a space that's 19 inches wide and 1RU tall, and they all need to be dressed neatly and not snag on each other.

Then consider things like pulling cables along cable trays. The smoother the cable the better.

Re:What is going on with ceiling fans on Saturday October 03, 2026 @11:14AM (#49945012)
Obligatory Tech Connections video?

https://youtu.be/_KWdCqpXB7A

Re:Barcodes are about to go extinct on Saturday October 03, 2026 @07:09AM (#49943175)
If someone works out how to print a 2D code that can be read when wrapped on a 2mm diameter cable (with a single scan, no rolling/twisting of the cable as it's fibre optic) I'll be interested. For now, regular Code128 style codes are the only ones that work reliably on cables that small.
Re:Barcodes are about to go extinct on Saturday October 03, 2026 @07:07AM (#49943160)
Urgh. Yazio. Use it for basic calorie tracking and the camera support. Could do without the gamification. Could really do with "scan barcode, OCR the nutrition table". Manual inputs by the other users has led me to find multiple foods where the kj value was supplied as the kcal value..
Re:Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal on Friday August 28, 2026 @01:49AM (#49474812)
PayPal is, unfortunately, not dead. It's used by RMV in Germany for a start - only way to pay for a bus ticket in the app/website. No credit or debit card, straight up PayPal account.
Slow Mo Guys have a Phantom that rocks up around 1.5 million FPS. They've used it to show how glass cracks etc. when you get to that speed though, you need a LOT of light, and a very low resolution.
Re:I'm a USB-C Maximalist on Tuesday July 14, 2026 @05:15PM (#48913044)
Change the device? It works fine. The cable is labeled. I know where to find it. I'm not throwing away perfectly otherwise-good hardware because of that.
Re:I'm a USB-C Maximalist on Tuesday July 14, 2026 @04:58PM (#48912867)
Sometimes it's not the cable. Sometimes it's the sodding device. I have some IP60-something speakers for the shower. Write up says USB-C power. Brilliant says I, I've got plenty of good ones I use for charging laptops and other USB-C form factor accepting devices.

Sodding things only charge with their special USB-A to USB-C cable. They're in the bag labeled "cursed usb-c charge cables".

Re:New Lifetime Plex Pass Pricing on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @11:01AM (#48194276)
I have content in mkv and mp4, SDR and HDR, 264 and 265. I stream from a Jellyfin container with an onboard Intel GPU passed through for transcoding as needed. The client is a 8 series NUC on gigabit using the Flatpak Jellyfin app on a Fedora 44 install. I've yet to encounter any issues with any of my library.

Anecdotes aren't data and all that.

Re:Wiki Builder: Skill to Build LLM Knowledge Bases on Wednesday May 06, 2026 @02:22AM (#48032916)
Looking at the name that keeps showing up on the linked site, I suspect a collision is most likely (to be charitable).
I get the name, but for a moment I thought someone had made a RPG IV or similar interpreter/compiler in Rust..
Re:LibreOffice Writer now supports Markdown on Monday March 09, 2026 @02:56AM (#47305607)
And potentially get fired for using unauthorised software on a corporate machine. Or find out tha USB storage is disabled (which is better than getting fired).
Re:Indefinite Book Club Hiatus on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @03:03AM (#47244504)
Physical letters do not obviate scams, nor is the cost that prohibitive. I remember actual 419 scams on blue airmail all-in-one letters back in the 80s. And that was international post too.
12‽ I'd swear the Slackware I downloaded was closer to 30+. On dialup. Via a VAX. Using FTP to go from internet to the VAX box, then Kermit from the VAX to the DOS PC using Procomm Plus. Write it all, start the install sequence, find out that the 18th disk was bad. Reboot. Rinse. Repeat.

X disks were X11. There were also the A,B, C etc disks.

Then there was the Coherent install, with massive manual on ultra thin paper with the shell on the front.

Re:Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle on Monday February 02, 2026 @05:19AM (#46854376)
UnRaid does a variant of this; license is tied to the serial of the USB drive. It barely writes to the drive, so wear isn't meant to be much of an issue.
Re:Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle on Monday February 02, 2026 @01:47AM (#46853165)
Tangential to this was the existence of California Software Product's "Baby/36" software. My father was a 36/400 programmer and sysadmin, and in his spare time used Baby/36 to write software for local businesses. I have vague memories of parallel port dongles being involved back then too. Don't think he mandated their use, was more a "framework" requirement.
For me, in Ireland, tacking "-ai" on the end of Google searches disables the hallucination engine. For now at least.
Re:Always Bet on Text on Saturday December 27, 2025 @05:32AM (#46400731)
I poked this - the 96 installer from Archive didn't play nice with wine. However, dosbox plus win3.11 and some ingmount commands worked just fine. So yes, you could export to plain text or similar.
Re:Commodore 64 Ultimate on Sunday December 21, 2025 @04:22PM (#46348628)
Someone's first impressions on the new version from Commodore International.
Re:Wolfram Compute Services on Saturday December 06, 2025 @09:10AM (#46173493)
On the note of Jupyter notebooks and version control - there was a talk at this year's Pycon Ireland about using a built in cleaner for notebooks when committing the JSON (discard the cell results), and then dropping the whole lot into a CI system utilising remote execution (and Bazel or similar) to run and cache the outputs. Was a talk from CodeThink. No video up yet though. Scenario was reproducible notebooks for processing data from a system under test.
Re:The Differences Between an IndyCar and a F1 Car on Thursday December 04, 2025 @03:06PM (#46152263)
Tangentially related would be Adrian Newey's memoir "How to build a car"; he talks about both F1 and Indy cars he worked on. ISBN 9780008196806
Re:Orion 1.0 – Browse Beyond on Tuesday November 25, 2025 @03:28PM (#46050349)
> How many times a day / week / month do you launch your browser from scratch ?

Every morning / day across multiple machines. I don't leave them sleeping or hibernated.

Don't think I'd notice a slightly faster browser start; a 50% faster start would be nice though.

scoot, you may find the current mini-series by the podcast Unexplainable to be interesting. It's on sound, and one episode is about tinnitus and research into it.

https://www.vox.com/podcasts/467048/unexplainable-hearing-au...

Re:WebDAV Isn't Dead Yet on Sunday October 26, 2025 @03:20AM (#45709758)
They also support FTP without the SSH transport, and it's not FTPS either. Various IP cameras still support FTP as a way to write files out periodically; I use this to provide a "stream" from a camera (8 seconds per frame because reasons) to the world. Actual streaming via RTSP is also available, but I could never get a stable stream to a video host (like YT or Twitch) from the camera (partially because of a poor quality network connection that can't be upgraded easily). So, FTP + credentials -> walled off directory that's not under the web root -> PHP script in web root -> web browser.
Re:WebDAV Isn't Dead Yet on Saturday October 25, 2025 @05:02PM (#45706930)
"FTP is dead" - shared web hosting would like a word. Quite a few web hosts still talk about using FTP to upload websites to the hosting server. Yes, these days you can upload SSH keys and possibly use SFTP, but the docs still talk about tools like FileZilla and basic FTP.

Exhibit A: https://help.ovhcloud.com/csm/en-ie-web-hosting-ftp-storage-...

Re:How older parents divorce affects their adult children on Sunday September 14, 2025 @03:46PM (#45242675)
Anecdotally, this rings true for me. Father walked out on mother essentially, when I was in my early 40s. Rocked my world thoroughly, hadn't seen it coming. Several years of therapy to come to terms with it.

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