CalcProgrammer1

CalcProgrammer1 , 17 hours ago

I just donate by whatever means the project offers. Sometimes it's paypal, sometimes patreon, sometimes GitHub sponsorship, sometimes something else like OpenCollective. Read the readme or homepage of the project to see what options they take.

CalcProgrammer1 , 1 day ago

Honestly, Mozilla has been peddling adware for a long time now. The writing has been on the wall. It started with putting sponsored links to Amazon on the Firefox home screen, then the shitty Pocket acquisition and the stupid featured stories/recommendations garbage, then the full screen Mozilla VPN ads...Firefox has been adware for a while. Use a fork that removes the bullshit. Switch to LibreWolf.

CalcProgrammer1 , 7 days ago

Mozilla is going to absolute shit lately. Partnering with a fucking ad network? You've got to be kidding me. Firefox is still the better browser, but it's time to abandon Firefox proper for forks that get rid of Mozilla's bullshit. I have been using Librewolf for a while and unlike Firefox, it's not adware.

CalcProgrammer1 , 9 days ago

Both. I like the customizability and power of a desktop, but I like the portability of a laptop. If you can afford both, why not have both. I often have my laptop set up next to my desktop for browsing/chatting while gaming and I also often just take my laptop to game when I go to friends' places. Also, they're both PCs.

CalcProgrammer1 , 19 days ago

I like having a gaming laptop as it's easier to grab and go to game at friends' places. Sometimes I do like to bring my desktop and set up for a good old fashioned LAN party, but other times I want something quick. I also like having a laptop for working on projects on the go, connecting to devices for projects without having to relocate my desktop, etc. Traditional smartphones are too limited for most work and are only good for web browsing and communication tasks. Linux phones are too experimental to rely on but are getting better and better. I have done quite a bit of coding on my Linux phones but their use there is still somewhat limited. I also have a Steam Deck and it is better for gaming on the couch, on the go, or in bed, but it's not really suitable for keyboard and mouse FPS gaming and it's not convenient to do work (such as programming) on without external peripherals.

CalcProgrammer1 , 25 days ago

I mean, if GPUs launch with perfectly optimized drivers then driver UPDATES don't matter, but drivers literally translate foreign nonsensical (to the GPU) shader code into instructions the GPU understands. Without them, your GPU is as useful as a brick. The driver situation is not there yet especially for NVIDIA GPUs. There's a reason I run mesa-git, driver improvements absolutely do matter.

CalcProgrammer1 , 1 month ago

Mixes spaces and tabs in the same line

CalcProgrammer1 , 1 month ago

GitLab has gone downhill over the past several years to the point I cannot recommend it anymore. Requiring a credit card is a kick to the face of younger devs wanting to get their feet wet in open source. The CI minutes that free accounts and FOSS projects get is insultingly pathetic. Their open source program that you have to apply for is intentionally annoying, requiring you to manually get re-approved yearly and the benefits only work for FOSS projects under a group, not a personal account. It's tolerable if you self-host your own runners and forget their shit excuse for a managed CI exists, but I'm also running into this super annoying issue where I get signed out of Gitlab almost daily and have to re-login and enter a verification code from my email. I have my project mirrored to Codeberg and if Codeberg had better CI I'd move completely, even if it were self hosted. Gitlab has gone way downhill since I moved to them after MS bought Github.

CalcProgrammer1 , 1 month ago

I don't want to move my project to a group, which is the only way to use those minutes. It used to be that any public project with a FOSS license got access to the FOSS minutes but now only the ones they approve do, and as I said, there are restrictions like having to have the project under a group. At least gitlab-runner is self hostable, but it's a depressing mess compared to what it used to be.

CalcProgrammer1 , 1 month ago

Hopefully this knocks down Tesla's dominance in the charger ecosystem honestly, we need competition to take over that aren't tied to a single vehicle manufacturer. Yes Tesla was going to open their network up to third party cars but they're taking their sweet time in doing so. I hope competitors were able to swoop in and hire talent and take over broken contracts on abandoned charging station projects.

CalcProgrammer1 , 1 month ago

I would love to see gas stations putting in EV chargers, especially gas stations known for their food and snacks or travel stops that have restaurants because of the additional time taken to charge an EV vs. fill a gas car. Also it would be nice to see established companies run EV chargers that just let you pay with card at the "pump" like you do for gas rather than this app and account bullshit that all the mainstream networks have.

CalcProgrammer1 , 1 month ago

Recommendations and App Promotions sound an awful lot like ads to me. Showing me things I didn't ask for that you wish to sell me....that's called advertising and I don't care what dumb name you call it, they're still ads. Show me only what I actually want to see - the stuff I explicitly choose to pin to my personalized Start menu.

CalcProgrammer1 , 1 month ago

I enjoyed my 1080Ti as much as I could, but NVIDIA drivers are trash and Pascal got the shit end of the stick with reclocking aince it doesn't use GSP firmware like newer cards do. Turing and newer are getting FOSS drivers which will only get better over time but while these drivers technically work with Pascal, the lack of GSP means no reclocking. Pascal was a great piece of hardware but it's been kneecapped by bad firmware and driver nonsense.

CalcProgrammer1 , 1 month ago

Dating apps are garbage these days but I am an indoor person. Tinder can be viable for real relationships. I met my girlfriend on there and we're a perfect match. I had in my profile that I was a gamer and played Overwatch and within 10 minutes of chatting we were playing online and in voice chat. She messaged me first. Now we're spending most nights and weekends together. Unfortunately what I did was pay the stupid troll toll that Tinder takes to have unlimited swipes and then just swipe right on literally everyone. Women tend to be more choosy on online dating than men, and having both parties have to choose each other is just another layer of shit to get through before having a conversation. It's shitty but that's how modern dating apps operate. The apps of 10 years ago were so much better than this shitty instagram picture first RNG powered gacha game bullshit we have today but you can still find truly amazing relationships with them.

CalcProgrammer1 , 1 month ago

Any dating app where both people have to "like"/"swipe right" each other should allow either side to initiate tbh or at least opt out of the stupid matchmaking system and accept all incoming matches.

I was on the dating apps last summer after having been out of the dating pool for 6 years and the current crop of apps are pretty awful for men (amd probably women as well, maybe for difderent reasons). When I used dating sites in the early/mid 2010s most sites let anyone initiate a conversation so you didn't need to worry about the (usually paywalled) "like" system. These days literally everything is a Tinder clone and the only interaction you have with the app is like or dislike. I get why they did it because women receive so much bullshit from unsolicited messages, in my experience it devolved into just mashing the Like button over and over again blindly because it's a shitty numbers game and the odds aren't in your favor. There's no sense reading through detailed profiles and making thoughtful decisions when it's rare to get a match anyways. Easier to like every single profile and then be the one to filter out matches once they come in. If the harassment is going to primarily target women and women are the ones who need to be more selective in their matches, the dating apps should let women be the ones to pick matches, or better yet give each and every user a toggle that lets them accept matches from anyone, because that makes it easier to get over the hurdle of not receiving any matches at all.

I eventually gave in and paid for the Tinder upgrade that lets you like an unlimited amount of times. I just mindlessly mashed the like button until the queue was empty every day. Before long, matches were actually happening. Two months into that nonsense I actually got a perfect match (she sent the first message) and we've been together for 6 months now. I absolutely love her and I'm glad it worked out, but damn was dating on Tinder, Bumble, OKCupid, and POF a horrible experience all around. All owned by the absolutely dreadful Match.com now of course. The prospect of your perfect match being hidden behind a stupid loot box RNG style gacha system is absolute insanity, because that's what it is. You have a limited number of likes and the profiles you get to see are seemingly picked at random.

CalcProgrammer1 , 1 month ago

CentOS good (after they betrayed open source) but Debian bad (even though they remain one of the more independent from corporate influence distros and also serve as the upstream for over half the list)? What even is this nonsense? I agree Ubuntu and its official derivatives maliciously bad and Manjaro completely pointless but that's about all I agree with.

CalcProgrammer1 , 1 month ago

Range anxiety isn't about your daily commute, it's about the few times a year road trip you make across multiple states to see family on holidays. Having to stop and charge every 150 miles (as I wouldn't trust letting it go below 50) sucks if you're trying to go 500+ miles. Owning a gas car taking up space in your garage and costing you taxes and registration just to use a handful of times a year is wasteful. Renting a car is an option, but it's cumbersome and if you plan to stay a while, expensive. I would not want an EV with less than 300 miles range. You have to factor in worst case scenarios as well, sometimes it gets dreadfully cold and windy in the winter. When it's -10F and the wind is howling you're cranking the (usually resistive) heat and driving head first into the wind kills your efficiency. These are real scenarios I have had to drive in my current car (Volt, so plug in hybrid) and my battery range can be halved (from 35+ miles under 20) in these worst case scenarios, but at least I can fall back on gas. I want to go EV for my next car but if I can't reliably make it to and from my parents' house 300 miles away on a bad winter's Christmas break then it's just not a feasible option yet, even if my drive to work is maybe 15 miles round trip. Also, charging station density is an issue. I would need to go half way to their house, 150 miles, to reach a charging station. You can't just stop anywhere to recharge if you have a low range EV.

CalcProgrammer1 , 2 months ago

While I'm not a fan of advertising or marketing in general, brands having a presence on the Fediverse would be great for Fediverse adoption, and sometimes complaining about a brand on social media is needed to get proper customer service in this world of AI and bot controlled customer service channels. I can see this being a good thing, and there are some brands/companies I would likely follow. I already do follow a few who are on Mastodon, such as Framework, Pine64, and Raspberry Pi.

CalcProgrammer1 , 2 months ago

As a user and not as a government agent, why should I care? If anything, having a foreign government hoard my data and spy on me is better than the government that actually has jurisdiction over me. If I were posting things critical of my own government I would rather have a foreign government hoard that data than my own government. There's a lot more of a chance that US data hoarding leads to action against US citizens than Chinese data hoarding.

I don't see how this benefits average Americans in any way. This helps the government and corporations.

CalcProgrammer1 , 2 months ago

The domestic social media companies are at the whims of the billionaire class which I would argue is just as bad for voter influence. Neither side wants you to vote in your best interest.

CalcProgrammer1 , 2 months ago

Watched this the other day, great documentary! I played Oregon Trail 2 in school in the 90's and we ended up getting it for our home PC. Nice to learn the history behind the game in such detail.

CalcProgrammer1 , 2 months ago

In college I was on the robotics team. We used several different controllers to drive various robots. I made a little tank steering robot that was remote controlled from a PC with an Xbox 360 controller. I later rebuilt it to use a Raspberry Pi and added a pan/tilt mount for the camera controlled from the controller's D-pad. We also used a Wiimote to control our competition robot, using the accelerometer for steering which was pretty cool. This was in like 2010 when motion controls were still a relatively new and cool thing.

CalcProgrammer1 , 2 months ago

Why support closed source software that hassles you when 7-zip is open source and works great?

CalcProgrammer1 , 2 months ago

Doesn't really matter as long as the jack exists in the first place.

CalcProgrammer1 , 2 months ago

I prefer the USB port to be on the bottom, but very few phones (at least in the smartphone era) even tried to move the USB port. Headphone jacks were frequently on top. I like the USB port on the bottom in the center so it can sit on a stand with a cutout in the center (which are pretty common).

CalcProgrammer1 , 2 months ago

It's not just 32 on 64 bit, new Macs use ARM64 processors so x86/x86_64 code is effectively obsolete on Mac. I would love to see Valve pour resources into a cross platform x86 on ARM64 emulation layer though, it would benefit Linux as well.

CalcProgrammer1 , 3 months ago

Hopefully they can find a new home. I am ashamed of GitLab. I used to love it but they get worse and worse by the day. Maybe Codeberg would be a better home. Nintendo can't kill this, there will always be new places to host software and it's open source.

It's absolutely ridiculous they took it down even though Nintendo didn't DMCA the Suyu project directly. Shitty corporate cover-our-ass behavior at its finest.

CalcProgrammer1 , 3 months ago

I just set up a bedroom "TV" which is just an old monitor and Raspberry Pi. I installed Kodi and some addons for TV sources. Works OK, just wish there was an easy way to turn the monitor off from the Pi on command so I don't have to walk over to it and shut it off manually.

CalcProgrammer1 , 3 months ago

I'm just using a Dell PC monitor (21" 1080p) from like 2010. It supports HDMI but I don't know about CEC. Either way it could just put the monitor to sleep and that would be fine, doesn't require CEC. I just am not sure of a way to trigger this manually when I'm done using it.

CalcProgrammer1 , 3 months ago

Both sides suck here but I have to side with Reddit over patent trolls. Nokia, what a disgrace you are these days if you have to resort to patent trolling. You used to be cool. That said, if this hurts Reddit's IPO then I'll be happy anyways.

CalcProgrammer1 , 3 months ago

I really got into the Internet in the mid-00's and I would say the early days of YouTube, Digg, and most things still being pre-social media with forums being widespread was my favorite era. However, my second favorite era is going on right now. I always wished open source services would be more popular and even back then there were issues with corporate controlled services screwing over their users (see the Digg Migration). I'm so glad to see the Fediverse finally taking off, with self hosting options and no centralized entity who can shut the whole thing down at the flick of a switch. Leaving Twitter and Reddit behind has been very refreshing.

CalcProgrammer1 , 3 months ago

If their birthday is really % 80 then they reset to a newborn after age 79.

CalcProgrammer1 , 4 months ago

Nice review. I agree with others here that this phone is borderline scam for the price and with all the delays people had in receiving them. Performance seems on par with the $200 original PinePhone which I had a similar experience with.

The one good thing that came out of Purism/Librem 5 is Phosh. It's a pretty good phone shell/UI for other more capable Linux phones to use. I particularly like Phosh for its on-screen keyboard Squeekboard which allows for custom keymaps.

CalcProgrammer1 , 4 months ago

GitLab used to be awesome when it was the place to go after MS bought out GitHub. They had premium access for all public projects under a FOSS license and top-tier CI. Then as time went on, they began pulling support for various functions in a very Microsoftian EEE sort of way. First requiring credit cards fir new users to access the CI, then taking away the CI almost entirely except for a practically useless monthly allotment, then taking away the premium access for public FOSS licensed projects. If I were migrating today I would not have chosen GitLab, but it is where I settled after leaving GitHub and my projects have grown to depend on GitLab CI even if I'm now forced to run my own runners due to the extreme nerfs they've done to the hosted CI. I mirrored OpenRGB to Codeberg, but since the CI pipelines depend on GitLab I don't see Codeberg becoming the main hub anytime soon unless they can execute GL CI configs. Sad to see how far GitLab has fallen though, it is unrecognizable from what it used to be as far as support for FOSS prohects goes, especially given how GitLab itself started as a FOSS project.

CalcProgrammer1 , 4 months ago

Leo's covers are the best, been following him for years.

CalcProgrammer1 , 5 months ago

I still left my old and unmaintained projects on GitHub but I moved all my active projects to GitLab and any new projects go there too. I have them auto mirrored back to GitHub though as the more mirrors the better. I also recently set up a Codeberg mirror for some of my projects, though GitLab's CI is what is keeping me on GitLab even though they nerfed the shit out of it and made it basically a requirement to host your own runners even for FOSS projects a year or two back. Still hate them for that and if Codeberg gets a solid CI option, leaving GitLab would make me happy. They too have seen quite a lot of enshittification in the years since Microsoft bought GitHub.

CalcProgrammer1 , 4 months ago

Drastically nerfed the quotas. FOSS projects with a valid license used to have GitLab Premium access to shared runners and now even FOSS projects with a valid license get a rather useless 400 minutes. They also require new accounts to add CC info just to use that paltry sum which means FOSS projects can't rely on CI passing on forks to ensure a merge request passes the checks before merging, as even if you have project specific runners set up forks don't use them and neither to MRs.

I wish companies didn't offer what they can't support from the beginning rather than this embrace, extend, extinguish shit. I guess in GitLab's case there was no extend, it was just embrace FOSS projects and let them set up CI pipelines and get projects depending on the shared CI runners as part of merge request workflow for a few years and then extinguish by yoinking that access away and fucking over everyone's workflow, leaving us scrambling to set up project side runners and ruining checks on MRs.

CalcProgrammer1 , 5 months ago

Interesting, though I question why a battery backed RTC is seen as so critically important. Of all the features I can think of wanting in a router, a battery backed RTC doesn't even begin to make the cut. A device that is powered up 24/7 and connected to the Internet can just get NTP time whenever it boots up and keep time using the OS. What is so necessary about an RTC here? I get that time is used for certificate verification and other security stuff, but again NTP and always powered. Are they concerned that NTP could be an attack vector?

I'm interested in a new OpenWRT router as my WRT1900ACS is getting older and the WiFi driver on it never had amazing support. Right now the Banana Pi R4 looks promising as a WiFi 7 OpenWRT supported router as it looks like most off the shelf WiFi 7 routers do not have OpenWRT support.

CalcProgrammer1 , 5 months ago

I've used Raspberry Pis since the first model came out and other SBCs and the lack of RTC has never really been an issue. The Pi syncs time by the time it makes it to the desktop. I can see it being useful for early boot timestamps but the most useful such log (dmesg) is just elapsed time since power on anyways. I can also see it being useful for devices doing data logging without Internet or regular power supply like a remote sensor logging device. I guess I just don't see it as a crucial component of a home router. I agree it's a cheap and useful addition though, just not maybe the most essential of one.

CalcProgrammer1 , 5 months ago

Hacker's Keyboard is a good Android keyboard for doing terminal stuff. It adds a lot of the keys you need to efficiently work in terminal. Only Android keyboard worth using.

CalcProgrammer1 , 5 months ago

I'm in the middle and I don't always like it. 100% coverage is mandatory for the industry I work in though. I get that module testing is important but it can be such a chore to work on. I got pulled in to help write tests for another project this month and that is somewhere between watching grass grow and watching paint dry in terms of level of excitement.

CalcProgrammer1 , 5 months ago

Does this change run the 32-bit .exe using x86_64 instructions? From the description it just sounds like it allows 64-bit Linux libraries to be used in place of 32-bit ones, but that the Windows layer still operates in native 32-bit mode. This means there is still a need to emulate 32-bit x86 instructions which I don't think box64 can do at this time (x86_32 translates to arm32 with box86, x86_64 translates to arm64 with box64). If box86 could translate x86_32 to arm64 then this might work as Wine would handle the conversion between 32 and 64 bit addressing and argument passing into the libraries but I'm not familiar with the inner workings there.

CalcProgrammer1 , 10 months ago

Ubuntu - It was my first distro and I loved it for many years after 6.06. However, it slowly shifted from a very community focused distro ("Linux for human beings" was the original slogan) to a very corporate distro with lots of in-house bullshit, CLAs, and partially-closed projects that seems to focus on profit and business over actual human beings. I correlate this move to around the time when it became purple rather than brown. Snap sucks, Mir sucks, Unity sucks, integrating Amazon and music store paid bullshit sucks. Just no. Move to Debian.

Manjaro - It's Arch, but with incompetence!

Red Hat - Do you enjoy paying licensing fees for a Linux distro that very likely violates the open source licenses it uses? RHEL is for you! Just remember not to share the code! Sharing is most certainly NOT caring!

CalcProgrammer1 , 10 months ago

The project maintainers repeatedly forget to renew their certificates, causing package upgrades to fail.

The project maintainers, in multiple past instances, have misconfigured their package manager resulting in essentially a DDoS of the AUR.

The packages are out of date vs. the upstream Arch ones, which often causes AUR packages intended for upstream Arch to break on Manjaro. Yet they consider the AUR a supported resource.

Project has had problems with mismanagement of funds in the past.

Despite all this, they seem to heavily focus on marketing, merch, and trying to sell preinstalled systems. Manjaro is in it for profit, not to make an awesome distro.

CalcProgrammer1 , 10 months ago

If that were true then none of this would be news. The CentOS Stream code is available to the public on git, but not the RHEL code. If the RHEL code was available to the public the outrage would have no reason to exist.

Even if paying customers have access to the RHEL code via git, they are forbidden from redistributing it (which is allowed by the FOSS licenses that code is under) or else the customers lose their license. This does not qualify as the code being available in my opinion, and in the opinion of the vast majority of the FOSS community.

Saying everything is fine and dandy in the RHEL world is FUD.

CalcProgrammer1 , 10 months ago

Ooh, look at this beautiful vast open world! Let's go explo-YOU DIED

YOU DIED

YOU DIED

YOU DIED

CalcProgrammer1 , 10 months ago

Elden Ring was the correct answer, but I don't disagree. I just played BOTW and am now playing TOTK. Up until you get a few heart container upgrades it might as well be Legend of Zelda: Darkness of the Souls.

Once you get to the second row of hearts, it's a much easier game though.

CalcProgrammer1 , 10 months ago

Unlockable bootloader, removable battery, headphone jack, being assembled with SCREWS rather than GLUE.