@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

danielquinn

@danielquinn@lemmy.ca

Canadian software engineer living in Europe.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

I quite like Thunderbird for this.

(Constructively) What is your least favorite distro & why?

I’ve been distrohopping for a while now, and eventually I landed on Arch. Part of the reason I have stuck with it is I think I had a balanced introduction, since I was exposed to both praise and criticism. We often discuss our favorite distros, but I think it’s equally important to talk about the ones that didn’t quite hit...

danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

Ubuntu. They’ve managed the worst of both worlds: like Debian, everything is old (though admittedly not as old), but unlike Debian, everything is broken/buggy/flakey. It’s the old-and-busted distro that I’m routinely told is “the only Linux we support”.

danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

It’s an interesting idea, but the differences between copyright and contract law present quite a hurdle.

Either you release something publicly, licensing it under certain conditions (you can use it this way, but not that), or you cut a contract with a 3rd party for them to use it a certain way – something that only makes sense in a context where the wider public doesn’t already have those rights, otherwise a contract would be unnecessary.

You see it in some Free software projects: they’re licensed under something aggressive like the AGPL, but for a few you can buy a proprietary license. This of course limits community participation though, as to contribute, you must agree to these terms. I think React does something like this, forcing you to sign a contract to submit a patch.

He points out a number of problems that I’d like to see solved, so I’d love to hear his ideas, so long as they’re similar in spirit to the goals of the FSF.

danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

What exactly is the appeal of Docker Desktop on Linux? I can run docker just fine without it, so what’s it doing for me?

danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

Wait, when is Windows 10 hitting end of life? If Windows 11 doesn’t support devices without aTPM, that’s a huge swath of insecure machines.

danielquinn, (edited )
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

GNOME has one built in. Just hit the “print screen” button and it should appear.

danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

The easiest way to confirm this would be:

  1. Find out how to list the metadata from a PDF.
  2. List the metadata from a known-to-have-stuff-you-don’t-want PDF.
  3. “Print” the new PDF from the old one
  4. List the metadata from the new PDF.
danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

I always wondered about this. I have the same TV series as local MP4 files: one with English audio, and another with Greek. I thought I could just extract the audio tracks and use them to build an MKV file with multiple audio, but it always ended up with an audio sync error. One track would always be in sync at the beginning, but 20min in could be out of sync by as much as 5seconds.

How do people build multi-audio files if the audio tracks aren’t part of the original source?

danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

DNS is hierarchical majesty.

danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

Great, do whatever you want. Just shut the fuck up about it, nobody cares.

You should really take your own advice on this one. That “article” was juvenile.

danielquinn, (edited )
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

JetBrains ran aground of this years ago when they introduced a subscription model for their (excellent) software. People (rightly) lost their fricking minds when they heard that if they cancelled their subscription, they’d lose the ability to continue using the software they’d already paid for.

So JetBrains went back and reworked their system so that a cancelled subscription would continue to have the rights to install all the software that existed up to the day of cancellation. Effectively meaning that if v3 came out the day before you cancelled, you can still install and use v3 10 years later.

danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

I was both surprised and impressed with Kdenlive.

danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

Just fixing the link.

danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

I never understand the whole thing around “fast” terminals. How can a terminal be “slow”? Surely the terminal you’re using has no effect on the programs you’re calling, so what’s being measured here?

danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

Isn’t most of what’s in there just filters downloaded from the internet? Python packages, browser cache, etc? Your system confirms you to redownloading everything all the time, no?

danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

It’s actually not as crazy as you might think:


<span style="color:#323232;">$ du -sh .Maildir/
</span><span style="color:#323232;">13G	.Maildir/
</span>

That’s going back to 2000 1995, both sent & received. The first email I have in there is from a friend of mine offering to send me an MP3 she downloaded.

danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

I still have every email I’ve ever received, going back now more than 20 years. My solution isn’t terribly fancy, but it gets the job done.

I have a Synology here at home running a mail server. You don’t need a Synology specifically, just a simple mail server with access to a lot of disk space. The server isn’t on the Open web or anything and doesn’t support SMTP. It’s just running IMAP to serve the local mail around the house.

I connect to it from Thunderbird on my various machines. I also use Thunderbird to connect to my actual mail servers to do my day-to-day mail stuff.

Every six months or so, I move old mail messages from my actual mail servers over to the archival one. Generally, I keep the mail on the archival server in folders; one per year, that keeps the loading time to a minimum. For example, come January 1st 2024, I’ll be moving mail from January 2023 - June 2023 to the /2023 folder on the archive.

Searching is done via Thunderbird just like you search any mail account, and on my desktop machine, I let Thunderbird keep copies of the mail locally for quick searching. On my laptop though, I ask it to not keep copies to save disk space.

Z-Library Blog: "Unprecedented seizure of our domains with books on rare languages" (z-library.se)

Today we are forced to share some sad news - yesterday many of our domains were seized again. We should highlight that the majority of the seized domains were not mirrors of the Z-Library website. Instead, they were separate sub-projects, containing only books in rare languages of the world, and their blocking is perplexing. For...

danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

Given that domain seizure is becoming such a common tool for this sort of thing, maybe we need a work around for DNS?

For example, we could distribute z-library name/IP pairs in the form of a hosts file via torrents and then write little wrapper programs for each OS that would just crawl the DHT for the latest version to update your local hosts file.

A more extreme option would be to build a pirate browser that has a bunch of name/IP pairs baked into it. People could just launch the browser and visit websites as usual without DNS being an issue.

I’m aware that using Tor is also an option, but there’s a bunch of problems there with usability like installation and setup (for non-technical people). Onion URLs aren’t easily discoverable either, and much of what you find in there just kids cosplaying as digital freedom fighters posting links that load really slowly… at least that was my experience the last time I tried out a TOR browser.

danielquinn, (edited )
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

You know what? Insulting people isn’t helping. I’m just going to block you.

danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

I don’t use the dock or a system tray really.

  • Each app is opened on its own workspace and it’s always the same workspace. Slack on 1, Thunderbird on 2, Tilix on 3, IDE on 4, Firefox on 5, etc.
  • Each workspace gets its own key mapping: Ctrl+F1 for 1, Ctrl+F5 for 5, etc. so switching is quick and easy with no mouse needed.
  • To open a new program I just hit Win followed by the first 2 or 3 letters of the name and Enter.

I use the following extensions:

  • Burn My Windows
  • Pure Perfection
  • Clipboard indicator (for clip history)
  • System Monitor (to keep an eye on resource use)
danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

I use this chart when teaching Linux. I think it does a great job of showing Linux’s “bazaar” vs. Windows’ “cathedral”.

danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

Related: a website that lets you listen to radio stations all over the world just by spinning a globe around.

danielquinn,
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca avatar

Honestly, because I didn’t know (a) that ff2mpv even existed, or that (b) mpv could play YouTube URLs directly. So thanks! I learnt two things today :-)

It was still a fun project though 'cause I learnt how to write a Firefox extension and get the browser to launch programs on-click, so not a waste of time!

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • localhost
  • All magazines
    •
    Loading…
    Loading the web debug toolbar…
    Attempt #