sxan

sxan, 1 year ago

All the aid that Isreal lets through, which is almost nothing.

sxan, 1 year ago

Depends on the tools. If they’re statically compiled, it should be fine. If they aren’t, it might still be fine if the distro and versions are similar. But what you want is statically compiled binaries.

It’ll need to be the same architecture (ARM -> ARM good, AMD -> ARM bad), and check each tool on your working computer with ldd; the fewer lib dependencies, the better.

Scripting languages are probably not worth messing with. Even if you have a running interpreter on the broken machine, scripting languages tend to lean heavily on third party libs, which may not be installed. The exception are ba/sh scripts, which have a good chance of using only commonly installed commands (why else use bash?).

sxan, 1 year ago

Half of he internet is shit, so - again - I personally would not lament its loss. My mom, who lives in games like Farmville these days, probably would, but she’d probably be healthier and happier if she took up knitting again.

sxan, 1 year ago

The entire fucking web worked with no ads for literally years. I do not feel bad, and won’t lament if companies can’t afford to pay people to cram even more JavaScript into web pages.

Sorry, web developers. Your masters are making you do evil things. It isn’t your fault, but I hate your jobs.

sxan, 1 year ago

I feel as if this would have worked even better with “Database.”

sxan, 1 year ago

Just a data point: OP is looking for a desktop solution, and Rust Desk may be fine for that; I was pretty impressed with it. However, I caution about using it to share out on Android. I traced down random crashes and reboots into safe mode to Rust Desk running on a Pixel. It took me a while to figure out which app was causing it; it seemed to have no correlation to use, time, or anything else I could discern. They only went away after I completely uninstalled Rust Desk (which is why it took so long; I couldn’t correlate it to running Rust Desk, so I didn’t suspect it).

The reboots into safe mode turned me off to it on mobile - I had no issues at all running the desktop client on Linux. Android aside, it’s a really nice bit of work, and I fancy even nicer than VNC, which for me is saying a lot.

That said, on a fast network, I still prefer a good old X client over ssh to VNC, if for no other reason than easier per-app windows - but I like the L&F and performance of X on a fast pipe.

sxan, 1 year ago

Well, don’t let me put you off of it; Rust Desk is pretty nice, and user friendly. Just… keep any eye on it if you run it on your phone. Maybe you won’t have any problems, but if you start noticing reboots, you’ll have an idea of why.

sxan, 1 year ago

Weird. Me too.

sxan, 1 year ago

If your goal is absolutely no GNU Linux, Chimera Linux is your jam.

If using a single program makes a distro part of that program’s organization, then Linux’s name gets really long.

sxan, 1 year ago

I’m starting to like Thumb Key. It may have the hardest learning curve I’ve ever seen, but it’s highly configurable, the developer is super active, and it has a ton of nicely implemented features. I feel as if it’ll be like vim: hard to get up to speed on, but once the muscle memory takes hold, I’ll be extremely productive with it.

sxan, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Years ago, I worked for a company that provided phone location for emergency services (fire, police, medical) to the big 3 cellular companies in the US. It required cell providers to install special hardware; back then, GPS was less ubiquitous, but it (still) suffers from accuracy in urban environments; it doesn’t take much to block GPS signals. Also, you don’t need access to anything more than the service provider’s logs to do trilateration; it’s harder to get GPS data from a phone without having software on the phone. In any case, Google pioneered getting around that by mapping wifi signals and supplementing poor GPS with trilateration, and it was good enough. Even back then, our lunch was being eaten by the cost of our systems, and work-arounds like wifi mapping.

Anyway, fast forward a decade and I’m working for a company that provides emergency support for customers who are traveling, and we’re looking at ways to locate customers’ business phones to provide relevant notifications. One of the issues was that there are places in the world where data connections are not great, and it was not acceptable for us to just ignore clients without data connections. One of the things we explored was called zero-length SMS. It’s what it sounds like: an SMS message with zero-length does not alert the phone, but it does cause a ping to the phone. It was an idea that didn’t pan out, but that’s not relevant.

Cell phones have a lot of power-saving algorithms that try to reduce the amount of chatter – both to reduce load on cell towers, but because all that cellular traffic is battery-intensive. So, if you’re a government trying to track a phone, and you’re working with a cell provider, and you don’t have a backdoor in the phone, then you will be able to see which cell tower the phone last spoke with, but that probably won’t give you very good location data and it may not update frequently. This is especially true in rural environments, where there’s low density and a single cell tower might have a service radius of 3 miles – that’s a lot of area.

If you’re tracking someone by phone, a normal cell connection may not be granular enough. Sending SMSes to a phone can force the phone to ping the tower and give you more data points about where the phone may be, how it’s moving, and so on.If you’re lucky, you can get pings from multiple towers, which might allow you to trilaterate to within a dozen meters.

Push notifications use data, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some of that going on, too. It says “through Apple and Google’s servers” which means they’re talking about the push notification servers and not the phones. Android phones are constantly sending telemetry back to Google, so if that is what they’re doing sending push notifications is probably more useful to them for Apple phones.

The article is light on details, but that’d be my guess. Forcing traffic to get more frequent cell tower pings and more data points for trilateration.

sxan, 1 year ago

That makes sense, too. So it’s not that they’re using push notifications, but the server data.

sxan, 1 year ago

XPS make great Linux machines, but I find their batteries have a noticable drop after a year or so.

My next machine is going to be a FrameWork, so that I can easily replace the battery.

sxan, 1 year ago

Why?

sxan, 1 year ago

Some of the Yubi keys have fingerprint sensors, and they have good Linux support.

sxan, 1 year ago

If you’re trying to make a statement about Palestinian sympathizers, you’re off the mark. Few people are defending Hamas’ attacks, but there are a lot of people criticizing Israel’s war crimes.

sxan, 1 year ago

Awesome execution.

sxan, 1 year ago

And it shouldn’t be. Sure, there are some new features you may want to take advantage of, but it’s lamentable that GTK doesn’t try harder to maintain backwards compatability.

You know who does major version changes well? Go. Excellent backwards compatible over a decade of very active development, and when there are recommended or required changes, the compiler provides tooling to update source code to the new API.

sxan, 1 year ago

What’s “futanari,” uncle Joeldebuijn?

sxan, 1 year ago

But

https://midwest.social/pictrs/image/8ecbe896-f498-4403-9011-ee6f4d76a1b0.jpeg

sxan, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

That’s weird. I’m using uBlock Origin with a large filter list, and I neither see this message, nor ads.

sxan, 1 year ago

Daily desktop use; I’d like to eliminate the repetitive stress and time it takes to move my hands off the home row, use a pointing device, and re-acquire the home row.

Also, I think Factorio would be fantastic if I could use both hands for hotkeys.

Headsets are probably not going top work for what I’d like to accomplish; a remote bar-style (some look little more than web cams, although I can’t imagine how they track without wide-set binocular cameras) that doesn’t require wearing a device would be optimal.

sxan, 1 year ago

It even looks like there’s software thay lets it run on Linux. Was it accurate enough for, like, desktop use? Did he have to hold his head still?

It wouldn’t take much to make it impractical: being fussy enough that you have to think about using it while you are would defeat the purpose. Any inaccuracy, or not being granular enough, or requiring you to hold your head still, not working with glasses, or lag… those would all kill it.

sxan, 1 year ago

That’s awesome, thanks!