On the flip side, you’ve probably met someone who has saved a person’s life.

I had a friend who wasn’t very technical who had some issue where he couldn’t boot into his OS (Windows) and bought a new computer, but wanted the files off the old computer. So he asked me for help. I remember bringing a Knoppix live CD (remember Knoppix?) And when I was there, I realized I had a severe lack of general networking equipment. (I didn’t have a switch, so I couldn’t plug both computers into the network so they could communicate with each other and the internet.)

So I started up the old computer in Knoppix, plugged it into the network, and installed a bunch of networking packages like a DHCP server and such. And then I used the Ethernet cable to plug the two computers into each other, letting the Knoppix box give the new Windows machine its IP. And then I installed Putty on the Windows machine and used it to SCP the files from the old machine to the new one.

The whole thing went way smoother than I’d have expected, never having attempted that before. But I felt like such a hacker that day. Lol.

It is so refreshing to see a post title like this one and find out it isn’t about blockchain bullshit. And then on top of that, the article even talks about GNU Taler. Anything that spreads awareness about GNU Taler makes me happy.

I haven’t seen the one by Jabroni Mike, but Fredrik Knudsen has a good breakdown too.

“If it works, it ain’t stupid.” ;)

Huh. Only 11 days on the Raspberry Pi I’m using as a “desktop system” right now. (Arch Linux Arm, btw… though Arch Linux Arm sucks now-a-days.)

Let’s check my RPi-based NAS:

[tootsweet@mynasserver ~]$ uptime
 19:56:07 up 212 days, 18:43,  4 users,  load average: 0.16, 0.04, 0.01

Also not as long as I’d have guessed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f92hKbz5Eo

What a glorious time to be alive.

I’m not a professional Wall Street analyst, but even just connecting the dots myself (with the help of Gemini)…

God dammit, Philippe.

Right? How TF did this come out of Ron Desantis’ head?

Out of curiosity, I went and found the OrcaSlicer ticket where they’re working on adding the bricklaying feature to OrcaSlicer. Seems like they’re just hoping it doesn’t attract Stratasys’ attention.

Even if they have to remove the feature, it’ll still be in the history of the repo and it should be relatively easy to unrevert and rebuild personally on one’s own computer if necessary. Until the codebase changes enough to make it harder to maintain the fork.

Stratasys still has a patent on it

That’s putting it generously, isn’t it?

This video from a year ago goes into why the patent they have today isn’t valid. (Short answer: prior art. They patented it in 1995 and that expired in 2015 in the U.S. and 2016 in Europe. Then they re-patented it in 2020, which isn’t really something they can do, but the patent office granted it anyway, probably unaware of the prior patent. There’s kindof a “new claim” in the later patent, but there’s prior art for that as well in the form of a 2019 feature request on PrusaSlicer’s Github.)

I get that Stratasys has lawyers and money and might theoretically be able to win even a case with as little merit as a patent case regarding that 2020 patent would have. But I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say they have a (valid) patent.

Hmm. I wonder if “work profile” functionality like what the “Shelter” app provides might mitigate that.

“This instance” being lemmy.world?

A song for you.

Follow Scrum, Lean / Kanban, or eXtreme Programming to the letter, and let your team focus on the product.

This.

But invest in learning how to do it right. Hire agile coaches to help and listen to them. “Agile theater” helps no one and only breeds hostility to any attempt at improving the process.

🙄

I want to hear the album for which this is the cover art.

How long is this kind of shit going to go on before we start having a serious conversation about making “limit dependencies” a widely-agreed-upon fundamental security practice? Right along with “validate your inputs” and “encrypt sensitive data” and such.

If you’re a software engineer, memorizing an ASCII table (particularly the hex numbers of each character code) is definitely helpful. If for no other reason than so that you can read things that are randomly written in binary without having to consult a table.

Something not really otherwise terribly useful that nonetheless helped me keep my sanity: learn how to convert to base64 in your head. At work, we had really boring 8-hours-a-day training for a couple of weeks. To pass the time, I came up with random strings to base64 encode in my head. “Hat is 48 61 7a. The first six bits are 010010 which in base64 is an S. The next six bits would be 000110 which in base64 is G.” Etc. I’d write down the base64 strings character by character as I derived them and then check my results for errors when I got back to my desk.

How to convert various units of measurement. (Including between imperial and metric.)

2.54 centimeters in an inch. Degrees Fahrenheit is nine fifths of degrees Celsius plus 32. Stuff like that.