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JustEnoughDucks

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JustEnoughDucks ,
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Times have changed. I used to be excited 10 years ago when new android versions came out with cool new features, often better performance, and a lot of gimmicks that sometimes were useful.

Now it is: "Oh I wonder what feature they are taking away this time, what freedom they are stepping on now, what they have enshittified now, and how they are adding additional surveillance to sell to Palantir..."

And what they advertise is literally "Location Indicator is slightly darker". "Settings menu had very slight spacing change" and "brightness icon is mirrored"

Somebody is getting a promotion for those extremely minor changes

JustEnoughDucks ,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

This is theoretically something sodium batteries would be good at right?

Aren't they not as sensitive to storage voltages? They are almost a perfect lead-acid replacement. Plus a UPS is a great usecase because it doesn't matter if it is 33% bigger to achieve the same capacity.

JustEnoughDucks ,
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I think Frigate also works well with standard video cards nowadays?

JustEnoughDucks ,
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I have made laundry lists in the past of things that either you can't do with windows, or you need to regedit and hack around it. Literally basic as fuck things.

Hell, until a year or two ago, you couldn't open the location of a file from a file search, and it obscured (and still does) the full path of the file in the search pane. Not to mention how bad the search is in general.

Don't get me started on the "modern sleep" bullshit lol

JustEnoughDucks ,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

OpenSCAD would like a word lol

JustEnoughDucks ,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

In Belgium, it is legally required to put a sign up if you have cameras, you can't point them at a place including public properties IIRC, and you can force them via the local government to move the camera if they are pointing at your property (at least in theory).

Lasers. Blue lasers are what you can do. https://www.reddit.com/r/Ring/comments/wqxkdq/what_is_this_person_doing_to_my_camera/ (hate to link to reddit but it is a good demo)

JustEnoughDucks ,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

Probably because it is all portable and in markdown, the devs are widely available and it is open enough that community, open source plugins can be easily made which allow you to make custom workflows that simply aren't available in any alternatives.

Linking is significantly easier and better than any alternative I have tried which significantly lowers the effort of documentation which is the largest hurdle for most people. As all social media shit apps have taught us, ultra low-effort beginning of a habit is the key to consistent use.

And if the dev enshittifies, all of your notes are safe in plaintext markdown and not a proprietary format and can be imported and cleaned up in your choice of new editor and fix the linking.

JustEnoughDucks , (edited )
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

Clickbait title in the OP, but they mean the methods coming out for tracking people without any electronic device on them at all via heavy filtering and pattern recognition to make 3D space snapshots due to the distortion in the WiFi transmission reflections.

What you are talking about are all surveillance devices based on compromising a specific device and using it to surveil an electronic device. The closest one of those device comes is the TAWDRYYARD which just communicates a position with light.

Though there is 0 doubt that this tech has been discovered and used by the NSA/mossad and other government intelligences already.

JustEnoughDucks ,
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Even the creator of the open source initiative has said that open source has failed and we need more restrictive licensing because open source simply is too permissive and has been aggressively exploited at the expense of the people, who it was meant to empower.

For me, source available licenses that are open source except specifically restricting for profit hungry, exploitative companies and corpos are with something like non-commercial clauses are fine for an end product. I use CERN OHL S v2, but I can't fault people for going noncommercial like the entirety of the art and 3D printing world pretty much already are to protect themselves.

JustEnoughDucks ,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

Lol now corpos are trying to monatize and monopolize walking.

What do they want our bodies and minds so frail using bionics and AI everywhere that without paying a subscription, we literally couldn't leave the house?

I was quite out of the loop, but it sems like TeamSpeak 6 is now a full fledged self-hostable Discord alternative? TeamSpeak 6 Is Back: New Design, Screen Sharing, and More ( www.tech2geek.net )

Discover the exciting new features of TeamSpeak 6, including a complete redesign, screen sharing capabilities, and community server management, all aimed at improving user experience in gaming communication.

JustEnoughDucks ,
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I have heard from tons of people, especially here on Lemmy who have tried to move people and communities over that it is often abandoned due to a huge amount of fundamental and UX problems that make it a huge pain to deal with and admin for and keep updated without a bunch of things breaking.

JustEnoughDucks ,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

Also not very searchable on engines, especially due to fediverse server name differences, you can't !lemmy because many of the communities don't have Lemmy in their domain or titles or however that works. At least I have only gotten Lemmy results for like 25% of my searches.

JustEnoughDucks ,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

I think it is because 90% of company sustainability is simply greenwashing.

Fairphone also had the whole "fairbuds" thing where they released tws earbuds (and then removed the headphone jack) and supported them for under 2 years before throwing them away and they are completely non-repairable, then acted like they didn't exist.

The new fairbuds are 10x better though, but I have heard the sound on both of their headphones is mediocre at best.

JustEnoughDucks ,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

We use Belgian Bancontact, not visa/MasterCard here

JustEnoughDucks ,
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Yes, many of my childhood best friends live a 9 hour flight away.

JustEnoughDucks ,
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They also have a batshit judicial culture and women apparently never get justice and most courts are a kind of semi-scripted kangaroo court.

Ace Attorney was specifically made as a parody of Japan's courts IIRC.

Do you like working from home? Yes or no, gimme some reasons.

I've never had a WFH job and I generally don't think I'd personally want/be successful with one. My sister is fully remote and she actually hates it, but I think its more the job she doesn't like than the WFH aspect. She says its lonely and isolating on top of disliking her daily tasks. I'm not anti WFH for others at all, to ...

JustEnoughDucks ,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

As an engineer, hybrid works best for many of us.

Design phase can be wfh with some in-person idea sessions or important meetings because I have yet to be at an online idea session that was as productive as in-person being able to draw things out and visualize better, and people tend to not speak up or just check out and agree at the end in online meetings.

Testing phase has to be mostly in person for lab tool access and collaboration on physical things.

I have worked with a contractor that did everything from home and had a whole home lab, but it was a big time sink and cost shipping parts back and forth 5 times and you couldn't physically probe behaviors together which leads to slightly different setups and sometimes different results.

Socially I moved to a place where I had no friends so I like getting social contact at work since in Belgium, it is extremely difficult to make new friends after you are done with school because of a culture of not talking to anyone else unless people are obnoxiously drunk lol. I like wfh on overwhelming days and in-person on days where I want more social contact.

That being said, I work 100% in office now because I live a 12 minute bike ride from work, so very easy.

JustEnoughDucks ,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

This is also why people should seriously think about if they are ready to have a kid or want to have a kid.

Millions or tens/hundreds of millions of kids have parents that never really wanted them and just gave in to the biological clock and/or social pressures and the kids have a shitty childhood. It sucks to be unwanted, and kids can really feel it.

Statistics for Strava, a self-hosted, open-source dashboard for your Strava data.

I built Statistics for Strava, a self-hosted, open-source dashboard that gives you fun and detailed stats from your Strava activities. You can track any workout over time, visualize trends, and get new insights. All while keeping your data private on your own server. ...

JustEnoughDucks ,
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Something like endurain?

JustEnoughDucks ,
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Axon tried to recruit me to make payload drones that definitely won't be used to drop grenades and "definitely" won't be sold to US police and paramilitary to drop chemical weapons on civilians because it is "against their company values" (the company that tazes each other as an initiation rite).

I was debating on doing it to try to make everything work as badly as possible and learn how to make civilian countermeasures, but I ended up telling them to go fuck themselves and that they were liars, in no uncertain terms.

JustEnoughDucks ,
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That's literally how much they cost now, or even much more and they last 10 years or maybe 15

JustEnoughDucks ,
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And there were tons of ones back in the day that didn't cost that much either.

Surprise, cheap stuff existed then too, it just didn't survive like the expensive appliances.

The difference is now the expensive stuff ALSO barely lasts at all.

JustEnoughDucks ,
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Yes but they hide that as much as possible.

  • No longer warranty
  • No specs that indicate longevity
  • also has bullshit WiFi/touchscreens because it is so cheap to integrate for them

If you are extremely lucky, there is a review for that model somewhere that isn't just paid advertising, but outside of the US with less-used models, that is pretty much a fantasy.

For example, even on the most expensive 1400€ Series 8 models Bosch (traditionally one of the best quality washers in the EU) now instead of a drum with bolts and a gasket, plastic welds their drum covers so it doesn't last as long, breaks at the seam, and is almost impossible to repair correctly.

And their specs say the size, capacity, programs, and a few useless features like automatic dosing, lighting inside, and "led display" , and that is it.

JustEnoughDucks ,
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Kopia is great for this. Choose your encryption, built in support for different provider storage tyoes in the GUI to choose where to go, dedupe, folder structure scramble, etc...

But their flatpak hasn't been updated in ages...

JustEnoughDucks ,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

I have yet to use a consumer ADF scanner on a printer that didn't feed the paper at an angle until they are crushed and folded, doesn't matter if the guides are perfectly set for A4 either. It has never worked for me.

JustEnoughDucks ,
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Switching my electronic component choices for PCBs to STM, NXP, Nordic & ublox (these 3 have the best MCUs), Wurth, and Infineon. Then as second choice Rohm, Toshiba, Panasonic, JST.

Sadly, only american companies currently make new AFEs, especially biomedical.

Nextcloud/OneDrive Files-only Replacement

I currently have Nextcloud running, and it's stable, performant...no issues whatsoever. But it's also a LOT more than what I need, and stores files in an "unusable" state if I want to look at them outside of Nextcloud. The real kicker is that the linux client wants to download the entire cloud drive, which simply doesn't work ...

JustEnoughDucks ,
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Opencloud is a fork from Owncloud Infinite Scale just as nextcloud was a fork from the old Owncloud version.

Apparently much much simpler and more performant than nextcloud in almost every way. It also has a secure file sharing link feature.

They are also based in Germany.

I am about to spin up opencloud behind traefik and authelia hopefully this week or weekend.

JustEnoughDucks ,
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But who is seriously looking at the sudo code at every update. I would bet a lot of money that the vast majority simply trust him and gloss over it maximum.

The chain of trust has to exist otherwise distrobox maintainers would spend 24 hours a day reviewing code changes and only update once every 6 months.

JustEnoughDucks ,
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Yes, but people are forgetting how it was discovered.

It was discovered because there was a visible performance impact by running benchmark tests on other, time-critical software.

Do you know how it was not discovered? By maintainers looking through changes of the software and looking through the code, exactly the way that the commenter and you and others are saying things would be caught.

If the attacker hadn't been so eager and only set it to start working after a time delay a year later or multiple updates later? It would have infected almost every server in the world, even if it got noticed immediately, it would have been a giant problem that would have reaped the benefits for the malicious party before it could be regressed and changed.

JustEnoughDucks ,
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TPM chips are not a mythical thing that only Google makes.

STM makes the ST33 series of TPM that I would trust a hell of a lot more than google to not have a dozen government backdoors.

Microchip, Analog Devices, Infineon, NXP, and onsemi also make TPM chips of varying security levels. Infineon is the premium TPM maker with the highest security if I remember right, a German company.

The issue is they are 3-10€ for the chip alone, which is a significant BOM cost, and it takes a lot of very specific knowledge in firmware and software to actually implement and google probably keeps the android integration methods very hidden. It is very much an intentional vendor lock out.

JustEnoughDucks ,
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It is literally no more secure than any other email. Almost all emails support E2E encryption with passphrase, and any email that can use IMAP can through clients too.

The problem is that 99.99% of emails (not counting deltachat) have no way of utilizing that, so it is just as insecure on Tuta as anything else, just better marketed.

JustEnoughDucks ,
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Oh yeah I was quite annoyed with bazzite initially with embedded toolchains... The default arch distrobox also runs vscode variants horribly with tons of freezing for some reason. I had to create a new arch distrobox.

Also Saleae Logic2 has a Fedora bug where it takes between 2 and 10 minutes just to open because of logfiles and errordumping and timeouts that is very annoying.

Also menu shortcuts for distrobox only work like for 20% of programs (luckily code-oss is one of them)

And don't get me started on running a VM that can see the local network...

After you get a setup going though, then it is breezy though.

JustEnoughDucks ,
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Sodium companies closing is incredibly painful because also if you look at the reasons, outside of Northvolt, it is literally all startups where their investors pulled out and screwed them because lithium prices dropped and they wanted to recoup their costs with 30% market share on week 1 of launch (exaggeration of course)

Proving yet again that rich fucks are complete and total idiots who can't look any further at all than 4-8 quarters.

China sodium is luckily going strong, so we have a fallback when lithium prices inevitably spike yet again.

JustEnoughDucks ,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

Alright I can answer this because with all the shit there have also been a ton of cool tech that isn't fascist, and ton of instances of the community building something awesome:

**Commercial things: **

  • Sodium Batteries (I have a 18650 shipment on the way for my custom charger)

  • Solar panels have dropped in price so dramatically that they are viable for hundreds of millions of people

  • Prusa and Bambu have made 3d printing not just a hobby, but very functional and practical. Now people themselves can replace broken parts, create new functional parts and tools without having to make their entire hobby and personality trying to fix and optimize their 3D printer

  • MCUs have blasted off the past 10 years. nRF has revolutionized the Bluetooth space with nRF52 and newer. ESP has brought WiFi to literally everyone in any device they want with whatever processor strength with no antenna design. STM is very friendly to hobbyists and has everything for motors, and NXP makes performance beasts (and all non-US companies doing the great things of course) and they have all become so much more dramatically efficient.

  • Multiple MCU companies have switched to open source toolchains that are inter-compatible, more portable, and transparent, making embedded development much less relying on shitty half-baked manufacturer libraries that are incomplete for different offerings.

  • FOC motor control and bringing it to the masses have created a huge step in motors and have made implementing efficient servos actually viable for open source projects

  • RLCD is an up and comer that gives epaper-like reduced eye strain and outdoor visibility while having an update rate of an LCD.

Maybe older, but still great:

  • open source hardware companies like adafruit, sparkfun, olimex, etc... Have made electronics so much more accessible to actually do useful things with.

  • epaper displays being widely available for power savings in small devices

**Community Projects: **

  • HomeAssistant has gone from an enthusiast system 10 years ago, to literally the best, and easily customizable automation system that supports every

  • Meshtastic and Meshcore bringing community location services and communication to everyone for a very cheap price

  • Docker and Podman. They have revolutionized the server space.

  • The leaps and bounds made in self hosting software in general is incredible and taken self hosting from a quite risky and very very complicated technical endeavor to do safely to a medium difficulty hobby project that is 100x less of a time sink. Not only that, but commercial software has genuinely good replacements Traefik/caddt, crowdsec, docker, immich, paperless-ngx, jellyfin, mealie, syncthing, nextcloud/opencloud, *arr suite, etc...

  • The fediverse, still in early stages, but I don't need to explain the impact

  • Gadgetbridge, turning smart wearables spying on you and selling your biometric data to insurance companies to just plain useful local devices for looking after yourself

There is more, but this is already long

JustEnoughDucks ,
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We have heat pumps at my job for our factory.

They are literally useless around of below freezing in the experience here.

They exchange heat so they blow out air colder than outside air, then their entire radiator gets completely covered in ice, then it has to switch off and then the entire factory cools off while they have to turn on the resistive heaters to defrost themselves, then they turn themselves back on and because they are covered in water from defrosting, very quickly freeze again and the whole cycle repeats while the factory is very marginally warmed up during the cycle.

JustEnoughDucks ,
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I agree.

Also, Health Connect now is integrated as of 2026 which is absolutely huge for actually allowing app interoperability.

JustEnoughDucks ,
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So I am in the designing of the circuit and PCB stage right now.

The usecase is for Meshtastic/Meshcore nodes because those sit outside in a tree or in a high place outside year-round and are solar charged. I am designing it as a RAKwireless Wisblock power module that will be charged by 2, 5V, 200mA small solar panels in series. The whole project will be released on Codeberg like all of my home projects.

Later I can copy the circuit over to other PCBs for more general formats. One of my future projects is going to be an 8S pack BMS for driving a 12V water pump for off-grid rainwater collection barrels.

I am targeting 2S systems now because then the entire sodium cell can discharge if the system voltage is set to 3V and I don't need any buck/boost, just a buck which is significantly cheaper and easier on the batteries.

I am using an STM32C011 as a custom BMS + buck charger because my original idea of using a very cheap, small mixed signal FPGA (greenpak SLG47105) wouldn't work well for sodium because it didn't have enough comparators to have a soft constant voltage region (gradually increasing CV voltage from 3.8V per cell to 4V along with the natural current decrease to prolong charge cycle life), it will have overvoltage/over current protections, 1A or 2A max current, resistive battery balancing, and some safety features and an I2C readout.

(Sorry, wall of text)

Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft ( www.theverge.com )

Software engineers at Microsoft are now expected to use both Claude Code and GitHub Copilot and give feedback comparing the two, I’m told. Microsoft sells GitHub Copilot as its AI coding tool of choice to its customers, but if these broad internal pilot programs are successful, then it’s possible the company could even ...

JustEnoughDucks ,
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I don't know, that is about all Mistral can do too.

That and python scipy is like a 50/50 for relevant code snippits.

It had never once output compilable embedded code, even when I have tried to directly lead it there.

JustEnoughDucks ,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

I don't have a deck, so maybe this is a dumb question, but why doesn't Firefox/zen/etc... With ublock origin work? I have used that for a decade on my desktop with no problems

JustEnoughDucks ,
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I'm quite surprised by Fallout NV. It is older and also not geared towards the deck right?

Maybe because of the fallout show? But it is definitely an old game that I didn't think was as popular as Fallout 3 (even though it is much better in my opinion).

JustEnoughDucks ,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

It's technically possible by water fasting for 2 months, but that is pretty dangerous for so long and you would need a strict vitamin and salt intake to even have a chance of doing it safely.

Definitely not a good idea, certainly not without doctor supervision.

JustEnoughDucks ,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

Also, THC drinks are all over the US now and very popular. Most of my (young millennial) friends there barely drink alcohol and have swapped them with gummies and seltzers.

JustEnoughDucks ,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

They can prosecute you for that in many places as destruction of evidence.

(Which is weird because if they fail to convict you for whatever BS they are going for then it is the Goose meme of "evidence for what???")

JustEnoughDucks ,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

No because she evidence is stille their, they just don't have access to it (legally if they use certain tools, apparently all phones outsider of the newest pixel and most grapheneOS are exploitable and unlockable).

So that is the reason, that they would kever have access tot it when erased, as opposed to possibly getting a court order for the data in the future or nowadays just paying for an unlock tool illegally (depending on location)

JustEnoughDucks ,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

They do these types of things, a lot more often than open source projects actually.

Thread Group:

  • ARM
  • NXP
  • Samsung
  • Qualcomm
  • nest labs (google)
  • Apple

I will list more that for example google and/or apple are a part of, but not the involved companies to not make a wall

  • OpenID Foundation
  • FIDO Alliance
  • AOMedia (AV1)
  • CSA (formerly ZigBee alliance)
  • Bluetooth SIG
  • Apache Foundation
  • Unicode Consortium
  • WiFi alliance
  • LLVM Foundation

Not to mention smaller groups that collaborate to discuss strategy over activies like golf or dinners.

The downside is that very very often, the collaboration involves how best to fuck over consumers and the general public for more profit margin.

JustEnoughDucks ,
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correct, the real mesh internet replacement is HaLow, that can get a whopping 4Mbps or something.

JustEnoughDucks ,
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Bancontact/payconiq uses it is the background now, apparently

So all of Benelux and a lot of France and Germany use it for webshops as bancontact/payconiq is integrated into webshop payment platforms using shopify🤢 and others.

Mollie directly can use and accept Wero and is also an option that many webshops use as a middleman and is fairly web builder-agnostic

Do you have a plan for your self-hosted data if you die?

This question is mainly for those that have family/friends depending on their self-hosted services/data. Does anyone have a plan for the worst case scenario in terms of data access/passwords/making sure your services are kept running if people depend on them? I know I sure don't, it's just a strange curiosity my brain thought up ...

JustEnoughDucks ,
@JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl avatar

And this is why I try to recommend to every single person starting their smart home to plan it so that if everything dies, their internet, their router, power gets restarted, and their HomeAssistant gets corrupted, and you die, at the same time, that everything will work exactly as expected, because with MANY smart home systems they will just stop functioning or be stuck in a bad mode until your family hires someone to fix it.

That's why I lean hard towards KNX