hendrik @ hendrik @palaver.p3x.de

A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I'm usually a chill

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4 yr. ago

I don't think there is a way to forward cellular phone calls. You'd need a phone provider which provides that feature, like a Voice-over-IP provider. Or a SIM card in your computer. Plus the right phone contract.

Kdeconnect can forward a lot of other things though, like SMS, files...

I wish there was a way to hook into calls. But as far as I know they're deliberately keeping that closed.

EDIT: Actually, I've just tried Bluetooth (since someone suggested that) and that does just about that. I've used the standard Bluetooth pairing within the GNOME desktop, and now my Android phone lists the computer in the audio options of a call (where you can choose if it's phone, handsfree or via a bluetooth device... And I can click on my computer name there, and it'll then use the computer's mic and speakers.

8FE62A

Some people do it. For example we have this solar-powered website: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

You'd need an energy source like a solar panel, a battery and some computing device. Like a single board computer (Raspberry Pi) you can also run webservers on smartphones, or even a microcontroller. The server part works without an internet connection. But you obviously need some way to connect to it. A wifi (router) or a computer connected via an ethernet cable.

The tech isn't too complicated. Just install nginx if you have a raspberry pi, open a wifi and put your website on it. If you choose a phone, try Termux and a supported webserver. Both Linux and smartphones are designed to even work without an internet connection ;-)

Not really. I could use some good selfhosted search engine. I mean all the existing projects (which is just YaCy, to my knowledge) are a bit dated. Nowadays we only got metasearch engines and we're relying on Google, Bing etc.

But I don't need any chatbot enhancements. That's usually something I skip when using Google or Bing because it doesn't work well. The AI summaries tend to be wrong, and it's bad at looking up niche information, which is something I need a search engine to be able to find. The AI just cites the most common slop, or at best the Wikipedia article. But I don't really need any fancy software to get there... So for me, we don't need any AI augmentation.

And I think the old way of googling was fine. Just teach people to put in the words that are likely to be in the article they want to find. That'd be something like "Rust new features 2023" or "homelab backup blog". Sure you can strap on a chatbot and put in entire natural language questions. But I think that's completely unnecessary. We have brains and we're perfectly able to translate our questions into search queries with little effort... If somebody teches us what to type into the search bar, and why.

Yes. Plus the turing machine has an infinite memory tape to write and read. Something that is in scope of mathematics, but we don't have any infinite tapes in reality. That's why we call it a mathematical model and imaginary... and it's a useful model. But not a real machine. Whereas an abacus can actually be built. But an Abacus or a real-world "Turing machine" with a finite tape doesn't teach us a lot about the halting problem and the important theoretical concepts. It wouldn't be such a useful model without those imaginary definitions.

(And I don't really see how someone would confuse that. Knowing what models are, what we use them for, and what maths is, is kind of high-school level science education...)

It's a long article. But I'm not sure about the claims. Will we get more efficient computers that work like a brain? I'd say that's scifi. Will we get artificial general intelligence? Current LLMs don't look like they're able to fully achieve that. And how would AI continuously learn? That's an entirely unsolved problem at the scale of LLMs. And if we ask if computer science is science... Why compare it to engineering? I found it's much more aligned with maths at university level...

I'm not sure. I didn't read the entire essay. It sounds to me like it isn't really based on reality. But LLMs are certainly challenging our definition of intelligence.

Edit: And are the history lessons in the text correct? Why do they say a Turing machine is a imaginary concept (which is correct), then say ENIAC became the first one, but then maybe not? Did we invent the binary computation because of reliability issues with vacuum tubes? This is the first time I read that and I highly doubt it. The entire text just looks like a fever dream to me.

I have it role-play for my amusement, bounce ideas and regularly ask it to give me 5 ideas about something, if I'm not creative myself. I also use it for translation. Either copy-paste an entire text or help me phrase things.

I've also fooled around with image generation, music, tried to program a website, had it rephrase my emails... But all of that wasn't super useful to me. At lest not for my everyday tasks.

Other AI things I use (occasionally) are: Text-to-Speech, Speech-to-Text and text recognition.

Yeah, seeking support is notoriously difficult. Everyone working in IT knows this. I feel with open-source, it's more the projects which aren't in a classic Free Software domain, who attract beggars. For example the atmosphere of a Github page of a Linux tool will have a completely different atmosphere than a fancy AI tool or addon to some consumer device or service. I see a lot of spam there and demanding tone. While with a lot of more niche projects, people are patient, ask good questions and in return the devs are nice. And people use the thumbsup emoji instead of pinging everyone with a comment...

I feel, though... I you're part of an open source project which doesn't welcome contributions and doesn't want to discuss arbitrary user needs and wants, you should make that clear. I mean Free Software is kind of the default in some domains. If you don't want that as a developer, just add a paragraph of text somewhere prominently, detailing how questions and requests are or aren't welcome. I as a user can't always tell if discussing my questions is a welcome thing and whether this software is supposed to cater for my needs. Unless the project tells me somehow. That also doesn't help with the beggars... But it will help people like me not to waste everyone's time.

I've also printed a few thingies for the car and my experience is, PLA deforms on the first hot day and you can throw it out. PETG lasted 2-3 years for me until it became brittle and broke.

There are no tags as of now. Everyone is running the main branch from Git. I suppose that's going to change at some point when PieFed deems itself ready.

I feel that's a lot more common in the USA than in other countries. Google says in Germany where I live it's 10%. And worldwide it's 30% and in the USA it is 70%. I mean there are worse things out there but to me it is just weird to mess with infants like that.

Uh, thanks. That really doesn't look good. Usually copyright infringement is a civil matter. And I believe we had sufficient laws to handle that in European countries. I haven't read the cited new law, but I guess that "shortcut" just does away with everyone's privacy. Plus it's going to swamp the courts with cases. I'm not sure if they're bored or anything.... But either they just hand out fines without checking properly... Or, if done properly, this is just a lot of additional work for the justice system. To the benefit of the copyright industry. And either way, it's just bad for the people.

Edit: I believe this is the mentioned government gazette. The copyright changes are in Chapter 2: https://www.e-nomothesia.gr/kat-arxaiotites/n-5179-2025.html

Do you have some source for this IP thing in the EU? I wasn't aware of any new privacy laws.

Rnote, Skype, Teams and Televido (Live TV stream). Since they're not in the repo or I needed sandboxing. I mean I don't need any help or anything. That laptop has enough storage and a beginner distro on it.

Interesting. I have 4 tools installed as Flatpaks and that makes 4.4 GB

I'd go with the Full Disk Encryption. You can be sure everything is encrypted that way. Any additional complexity adds ways to mess up and compromise security. Entering the password is a bit cumbersome. But that's part of the deal. I just carry my computer keyboard to my NAS and enter the password each time I need to reboot. Which doesn't happen that often. There also used to be some tutorial somewhere on how to put a Dropbear SSH server into the initrd so you can enter the password over network.

I think Nobara is the other most(?) popular choice by gamers.

I don't have much experience with gaming distros. I just think whatever it is, a computer shouldn't bee too locked down for a kid so they can also install other things, try other tools like an office suite, video editing or content creator stuff and maybe even have the experience of messing up. Within limits of course.

Uh, a Reddit link 😅 I think you have more than one Stockholm syndrome...

Last time I checked, Waydroid was one of the more common ways to launch Android apps on Linux. I mean you can't just package the bare app file, since you need all the runtime and graphical environment of Android. Plus an app could include machine code for a different architecture than a desktop computer. So either you use some layer like Waydroid, or bundle this together with some app in a Linux package...

Android includes lots of things more than just a Linux kernel. An app could request access to your GPS, or to your contacts or calendar or storage. And that's not part of Linux. In fact not even asking to run something in the background or opening a window is something that translates to Linux. An Android app can do none of that unless the framework to deal with it is in place. That's why we need emulation or translation layers.

That's right. I don't think there is a good way to do it. I just take whatever link is provided by the small Fediverse icon. But I don't think it matters that much for your audience, they're spread over several instances and it'll be an external link for some of them, no matter what you do. I'm not sure whether we have the ambition to solve this. I don't see anything the user could do. Either this gets handled in some way by the software, or it is how it is.