dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️ @ dual_sport_dork @lemmy.world

Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is "column" the rig

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I personally do not trust ISP provided routers to be secure and up to date, nor free of purposefully built in back doors for either tech support or surveillance purposes (or both). You can expect patches and updates on those somewhere on the timescale between late and never.

Therefore I always put those straight into bridge mode and serve my network with my own router, which I can trust and control. Bad actors (or David from the ISP help desk) may be able to have their way with my ISP router, but all that will let them do is talk to my own router, which will then summarily invite them to fuck off.

Likewise, I would not be keen on using an ISP provided router's inbuilt VPN capability, which is probably limited to plain old PTPP -- it has been on all of the examples I've touched so far -- and thus should not be treated as secure.

You can configure an OpenWRT based router to act as an L2TP/IPSec gateway to provide VPN access on your network without the need for any additional hardware. It's kind of a faff at the moment and requires manually installing packages and editing config files, but it can be done.

Niko, cousin! Let's go bowling!

You can even skip step 2 by using one of the IoT editions (either Win10 or Win11) which come minus the prepackaged bloatware.

Microsoft is mostly interested in making everything bullshit for home users. If you convince them you're an enterprise customer, preferably by running up the old Jolly Roger, suddenly your life is a lot easier.

Not really, surprisingly. The "tab" terminology is a hangover from the typewriter days, when pressing the tab key would move your carriage to the left (i.e. sending the typing position towards the right) to the point where the tab stop was, which may or may not have been user configurable depending on the age or fanciness level of your typewriter. On mechanical models this involved sliding a little arrowhead shaped mechanical dingus up at the top over the carriage, a skeuomorph that's still present in basically every computer word processing application even today.

This was to allow operators to easily write tabular data, i.e. tables or columns, which would be inset from the left margin by a consistent amount, and typically much further inboard than the indent at the beginning of a paragraph would be. The latter was usually accomplished with a small number of spaces instead. And this is why the key is called "tab" and not "ind" or something.

This got carried over to word processors and then to computers kind of by default. But interestingly (if you're the right kind of nerd to be interested by that sort of thing, anyway) early 8 bit microcomputers that were not envisaged with word processing or a typewriter-esque paradigm in mind conspicuously lacked a tab key. The Commodore 64 and Vic 20, TI-99, Acorn Electron, and certainly the ZX Spectrum all leap to mind.

But the original IBM PC definitely had a tab key, which was almost certainly carried directly over from IBM's Selectric typewriters. So we've had it ever since. The notion of there being a "tab character" of some greater-than-space width lent it to being used for first line indents for a while, but the prominence of HTML and its dogged insistence on collapsing whitespace -- especially at the beginning of lines -- eventually put a stop to that and caused practically everybody to switch to double line breaks to separate paragraphs instead. Except for writing code, which can involve a whole bunch of indentation to many, many levels of depth.

Indenting the starts of paragraphs was an even older hangover from printing presses, and that's another whole damn rabbit hole anyway.

You would be amazed in the industrial world. There are tons of large and incredibly expensive special purpose machines that are operated by super antiquated PC architecture computers running geriatric operating systems, sometimes still even DOS or Windows 3.x.

Think industrial CNC mills and lathes, presses, pick-and-place machines, specialty lab testing equipment, electron microscopes, etc.

Process control, i.e. production line automation, is usually driven by dedicated PLCs. But the user interfaces connected to them are almost invariantly some old ruggedized panel mounted PC running Windows. An absurd number of them in my experience are still on 2000 or XP. NT4 is pretty easy to find, too.

Granted often these are not networked, and in cases where they are they're not connected to the internet, or may even talk to other workstations via RS-485 serial (!) or some other gimcrack method that is unlikely to be a vector for modern malware.

What Microsoft probably expects you to do is get your management to buy new computers that support Windows 11 and/or whatever the hell their current server OS is, and in the process give them and their hardware vendor partners a lot of money.

What you can do instead is switch to Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC which is what I did at my workplace recently. It's supported until 2032 with security updates. Not feature updates, but I suspect that business users probably don't care about those much. In fact, most people would probably treat that as a benefit. It also comes with basically no bloatware (except goddamned Edge), which is surprising. No Copilot, no Cortana, no Recall. None of that shit.

We have a fleet of machines that "can't" be upgraded to Win11 because of hardware shortcomings, at least without overriding the requirements with Rufus or similar. Unfortunately we also rely on a small but important spread of proprietary Windows-only applications which have no open source or Linux replacements, and at least two of them absolutely will not run in Wine. Believe me, I tried.

The only wrinkle with this is that you cannot upgrade or license swap in place. You have to do a full reinstall, which for us is not a problem because we have a modest number of computers and I have physical access to all of them. None are bricked up behind a wall or anything.

PC operating systems are, at least to a broad degree, generic. That's because a huge amount of backwards compatibility is built right into the PC architecture, much to the delight or chagrin of everybody depending on who you ask. There's silicon on your processor's die right now that's doing fuck-all except ensuring that if you were struck by the perverse urge, you could boot MS-DOS 1.0 onto it even though it's virtually guaranteed that you never will.

Phone operating systems absolutely are not generic, because each phone model is basically unique unto itself in terms of what hardware is in it, and backwards compatibility is not in any way a design goal. Furthermore, the entire package has to be rolled into a single unified ROM image.

There are proprietary core components in phones, notably their SoCs (systems-on-a-chip) and modems (which are often built into the SoC) which their designers jealously guard and are loaded down with patents and other IP restrictions. This hardware requires closed source drivers which must be updated or at the very least recompiled for new kernel versions if the OS is to be updated. That's for Android, anyhow. It's even worse for Apple devices, because they're entirely closed and Apple is in total control of both the hardware and the software. At least they bother to support their own devices with updates for quite some time, but even they're not absolved of fuckery -- see, for instance, the deliberate slowing-down-with-updates scandal from a few years ago.

If nobody is providing source code or compatible binaries for the core hardware your phone needs in order to work, at minimum it's going to be impossible to update your device beyond the kernel version that was last supported on it, even with a custom ROM. And all of this is before getting into locked bootloaders and other chicanery that prevents you from running your own code outside of user space on the hardware even if you had the code to run.

At the end of the day: The hardware vendors are absolutely not interested in providing driver support to end users or source code to anyone, and the handset makers and most especially the cell service carriers, at least in the US where the majority of people buy or lease their phones from said carriers, literally have a vested interest in dropping support as soon as they can get away with it. That's because rolling out updates to oodles of individual phone models costs money to do, but they only make more money off of you by selling you a new phone.

Just yesterday I created !printmything@lemmy.world for this very purpose, so I'll plug it again. Well, not miniatures specifically, but rather a place for people who haven't got printers to ask for help from people who do.

I'm not in Oz so I figure shipping to you would be quite prohibitive. But you might be able to connect with someone in your country, who can ship printed stuff to you more cheaply and -- importantly -- without having to fuck around with customs.

The go-to wisdom is that detailed miniatures are best printed with a resin printer. You can do it with a traditional FDM (filament) printer but it's harder to get the small details reproduced, and FDM printers can't print in midair so you either have to be very careful to take that into account with your design or do a lot of work with removing and doing the finish work around printed supports. So you probably want to find somebody with a resin machine.

Yes, that part specifically is a bit braindead.

It's probably because they can't be arsed to figure out who has the rights and who doesn't, so they just loaded up the ban shotgun.

Yeah, I just winged it based on a hazy recollection of a block puzzle I'm pretty sure I saw once. I'm sure the puzzle in question was not mathematically rigorous both so it could look nicer (with the same or similar solution to what I doodled, there) and also so it could be like, you know, actually manufactured.

There are oodles of commercial 3D printing services that will run off whatever you send them for a price. Craftcloud, Shapeways, Xometry, etc.

Or printathing.com, if you'd like to get hooked up with a private(ish) person to do it for you.

Or just ask at any of the innumerable online spaces where people talk about 3D printing (like right here) and someone can probably do it for you, too.

My exception is not to people printing things for others for a specific purpose if asked to. It's against stealing other people's work and cynically trying to turn it around for a profit, without putting any effort into it and probably implicitly passing it off as if it were your own work in the process. Likewise, I don't object to someone designing their own thing and selling their own thing on Etsy. But just to put it into perspective I imagine most people would also rank it as Not Cool to go on Etsy and start trying to sell, say, just printouts random stuff you downloaded from DeviantArt.

The rub with this design is that the length of the sides of the little squares is not an even integer division of the length of the sides of the big square, though.

Doing it the naive way, i.e. keeping all the edges parallel, you can only fit 16. However it's trivial to fit 17 in there without it looking like a warehouse accident, like so:

Or, a slightly easier to follow rendering:

This may correlate with #17 on your linked list, but I was not rigorous with the math. (I.e. I just traced this off of the screenshot.)

I'm positive I've seen this as a 3D printed puzzle somewhere at some point...

Pretty much all of those are characters from franchises that quickly jumped to consoles, or had the intention of multiplatform releases from the very start. I'm not sure any of them are very fitting.

So on that note, the least nonsensical mascot for PC gaming in particular I can think of is that dwarf, whoever he is, from the box art of World of Warcraft. Or possibly the orc from the alternate version. WoW is earth-shatteringly popular and has basically defined the entire private lives of a depressing number of people, not to mention it's the sole and singular thing even non-gamers think of when you mention MMORPGs. And it has only appeared on home computers. Never consoles. Other Warcraft properties have, but not WoW.

Define "long." I disagree with the Doomguy proposal explicitly, because Doom appeared on the Sega 32x in November of 1994 which was barely a year after the initial PC release. One of the defining aspects of gaming in the mid '90s was the monumentally cynical gold rush of trying to cram Doom onto any damn fool console as fast as possible, in a vain attempt to capture part of the lightning and make those sales. And until the Playstation and arguably the N64, every attempt failed spectacularly in various ways.

The definitive Doom experience remaining locked to the PC for those few years was absolutely not for a lack of trying. Every greedy video game exec on the planet wanted Doom on their system. id themselves assisted with several of these ports in various ways and they had absolutely no intention of leaving Doom only on PC, either, if they could help it.

Awesome. I fully approve of this. If you want to sell 3D printed stuff, sell it on an appropriate platform and for fuck's sake, sell things that you actually have the rights to print and sell.

Next, let's crack down on the hordes of losers on Etsy who just drop-ship crap from Alibaba for a 6000% markup while boldfadedly claiming it's "hand made" in the hopes that everyone is too stupid to notice. (But people must be, because apparently that's still working.)

Former professional driver here (and current avid rider of motorcycles):

Driving absolutely isn't for everyone. Some people can't drive. Some people -- arguably a lot more people than is currently the norm -- shouldn't. And that's okay.

If at the end of the day you can get to where you need to go regularly without driving, go for it. Nobody should be pressuring you into driving if you are not comfortable or prepared to do so. It's not a "basic skill." It's a massive privilege, and one that most of the population of the world does not have access to. And it's also a big responsibility with the potential, as you have observed, for injury or death of yourself or others, and property damage. That's a responsibility that has to be taken seriously and the maddening fact is that most people don't treat it with the respect that it's due.

If you don't want to drive, don't. And don't let other people try to dictate that you should. Or if you want to get back to it later, other people don't get to dictate your own timeline for that for you.

Also not true for HP's "Instant Ink" subscription service, which I can tell you from experience will brick the perfectly full cartridges already in your printer as soon as you cancel, even if you have not yet reached the next billing date.

I'll echo the GPD sentiment already on display here. I have a GPD Win Max 2 and it's not exactly pocket sized per se, but it is just about as small as you can make a traditionally laid out (more or less) laptop while still keeping it usable. It's also tiny little gaming monster which is neat, but might be overkill for purposes. I carry it around in a pistol case rather than a laptop bag, just to be an asshole.

If you want to go smaller you can try the GPD Micro PC which is roughly the volume of an OG Nintendo DS although its proportions are a little different.

If you want cheaper and don't need the horsepower, one of my coworkers actually bought one of those little N100 based 8" micro laptop thingies, akin to this one, and I have some hands on experience with it. They're sold under a myriad of non-brand names and I believe internally they're all the same. It's got about the footprint of a paperback novel although it's much thinner, and could conceivably be put in a pocket if you wear Jncos, or possibly in a jacket. I was surprised at the build quality but the performance is rather dire, and using its little capacitive mouse nubbin for any length of time is an exercise in frustration.

All of these are truly x86 compatible, i.e. real computers, and come with Windows by default. They can certainly be bullied into running some flavor of Linux if that's what you prefer.

It can indeed, but Notepad++ is explicitly Windows only.

There are some clones for Unixlike platforms, and I guess you could run the genuine article in Wine if you really felt like it. But don't go looking for an official Linux build, because there isn't one.

I'd doubt this is anything approaching universal, but where I am there definitely were three digit signs in the early aughts, which now appear to have all been replaced with two digit ones. I don't know if this was for cost purposes or the proposed "high score" reason.

There was one right in front of the police station in the town I lived in back in the day, which was a full dot matrix display and didn't even have discrete digit slots. It could display other messages if it wasn't in speed readout mode. I passed it at about a buck twenty one night and discovered that it topped out at 99. It's the first one I recall seeing that didn't have a third digit, but then they became the norm pretty shortly thereafter.

The ones that are popping up like mushrooms around here now fit within the footprint of a normal speed limit sign and they have a dual color LED matrix that flashes a frowny face at you if you're 0.01 MPH over the specified speed...