farhaven

My setup was a Compaq Armada M300 laptop with a keyboard that was missing a few key caps, a battery that was shot to all hell and held only 5 minutes of charge, and a HDD that was completely broken.

I used a 128 MB USB stick for settings and my home directory, and had a Knoppix disc in the CD drive at all times.

It did indeed run pretty well, at least well enough for me to play around with it as a 14-15 year old kid and until I had finally saved up enough money to get me a new (used) 20GB HDD on eBay.

Good times. I kinda miss it.

doctors/hospital strongly prefer it.

Seems to depend a lot on the hospital. We (partner is pregnant with a high risk pregnancy) were at a level 1 prenatal care center in Germany a few weeks ago where they very much insisted that in her and the child's condition, a c-section is pretty much her only option.

We're now in a different, also level 1, prenatal care center, also in Germany (though a different state), where the prevailing medical opinion is "natural birth should work perfectly fine for you. We're not ruling out a c-section in case things go sideways, but natural birth is very much our preferred option in your case."

The first center seems to be quite keen on using as many cases as possible for training their staff in c-sections, even where it's not strictly necessary/beneficial. At least that's what we've heard from other parents in similar situations.

If you're looking for a similar event, you might want to check out GPN - Gulaschprogrammiernacht (https://gulas.ch).

It skews a bit more German, but it's essentially a smaller "summer congress" that used to have free attendance until this year (tickets now cost 10€ to cover the breakfast, IIRC). A lot less people there, but the general vibe is very similar.

Congress has become a radical leftist politics playground.

I don't know which past Chaos Communication Congresses you have attended, but it always was. If that's not for you, then that's too bad.

The one thing you cannot ever do is go to CCC and express any idea that isn't very far left. That is a very certain way to get thrown out.

Opinions that people get thrown out for are not "I love my country" or "hey, maybe immigration should be handled differently". They're things like "Hitler was ok, actually". And IMO if a conference doesn't throw you out for _that_, it's not one worth attending.

OpenBSD is a lot faster in some specialized areas though. Random number generation from `/dev/urandom`, for example. When I was at university (in 2010 or so), it was faster to read `/dev/urandom` on my OpenBSD laptop and pipe it over ethernet to a friend's Linux laptop than running `cat /dev/urandom > /dev/sda` directly on his.

Not by just a bit, but it was a difference between 10MB/s and 100MB/s.

Two cells was probably selected for one of: Voltage to avoid boost converters, capacity to avoid having to do extensive power optimization to make it run the whole event, balance to make it hang even off your neck.

It's likely not voltage because they're connected in parallel.

Well they can still be a conductor, even if they're not a resistor. Actually they'd be a pretty good conductor. A super-conductor, if you will.

Others have already told you that talking to a lawyer is still a good idea. If I may offer a personal story that illustrates that that is _really_ a good idea:

While I did my Bachelor's in CS, I was employed by a university (not the one I attended, but one that the project I worked on moved to after the Prof in charge switched universities) as a "student worker" type deal. My job was essentially a Jr. SWE.

A friend of mine also worked on that project, but he was ahead a bit further in his studies, so he already had a BSc degree, while I hadn't. Universities being universities, this meant that his hourly pay was a tiny smidge more than mine (think 50 cents/hour or something like that). Neither of us was paid very well, we both came out to about 10-12 €/hour.

After 6 months my contract was up for renewal. Along with the renewal, they included a modest pay raise to my friend's level. I naively thought that that meant they appreciated my work or something like that. All went well until the _next_ renewal was up.

The HR person responsible for student workers noticed that my "raise" had been in error because they assumed I had gotten my degree as well. None of their paperwork that I signed originally mentioned that. As "proof" that I "should have known" that the raise was in error, they sent along a scanned copy of a copy of a copy of an internal "wage schedule" that I somehow should've been aware of.

Their solution was to hand me a "new" backdated contract with lower hourly wages and told me to sign that to "just quickly fix this error" and told me to just pay back what I had "erroneously" received (signed contract stating the contrary nonwithstanding).

I politely declined because that's not how I think employment works. As a response they said "ah well, don't worry, we'll just take it out of your next pay check", which they did (without me signing anything).

At that point I called my mom and told her the full story. She immediately went "Alright, how do you want to play this? Should we talk to them or do you want to pull out the big guns?". I was sufficiently pissed off that I told her I want the big guns, she told me the info for my families' "lawsuit insurance" (The German term is "Rechtsschutzversicherung", basically cheap-ish insurance to help you pay for a lawyer in cases like this) and called them after we talked.

I called up a lawyer in town that specialized in employment law, had an appointment with him to tell him the story, he went "I can see roughly 4 or 5 reasons that they can't take that money from you, let me write a letter to them and we'll see how it goes".

The end result was that the university in my next paycheck included the amount they had initially reduced my previous check by, my higher-wage contract was renewed, and we never spoke of any of that again. I didn't get an apology or anything from the HR admin who had clearly messed up my contract and was probably trying to cover her ass, but that's fine with me.

Point being: talk to a lawyer, even just to get some advice or to have them write out a nice letter as to why what they're doing is not OK.

"Alright ma'am, you claim this here device contains encrypted data? If you don't mind, we'll keep you here until you provide us with the password."

and meanwhile in an alternate universe

"So you say that this device just happens to contain a bunch of random data? That sounds mighty suspicious. We'll keep you here until our technicians have taken a look at it. Get comfy, it'll be a while."

This is very cool!

Can you share the technical background you've used for creating the 3D reconstruction? Like software packages, or algorithms used.

Are we looking at the result of packages like OpenSfM here, or COLMAP?

I have a CF-33 that I got used for about 600€ (plus something like 120€ for a replacement battery).

I use it as my "outdoor/garden/workshop" laptop that I can display CAD drawings on and stuff like that without worrying about getting wood splinters in it, or as a juke box/internet lookup-thing/spreadsheet when I work on a semi truck I sometimes drive (not for work though, purely for fun).

It does also double as my backup laptop in case the XPS13 I use for freelancing ever falls off the table or something, but I don't really see that happening anytime soon.

Granted, most of this I could just as well do with an old T-series Thinkpad, but there's something to having a carrying handle on the thing and being able to pull it off its keyboard base. Also, COM ports.

So Microsoft gave the Wine project the software equivalent of a stained mattress?

The British are doing good stuff as well with EMF.

I mean, I'm pretty sure rats also have a theory of mind. My data point is exactly one of the little buggers who used to be my pet. Whenever he was running around my room, he'd peek around to see if I was looking at him before jumping on the couch. If he couldn't see me, he'd jump. If he could, he wouldn't.

Alternatively, open a brokerage account and go through their process to enable options trading (essentially mostly a short quiz on how options work to make sure you're not an obvious liability).

Then either buy put options that are currently barely in the money (and will go further into the money once the stock comes tumbling down), or sell call options that are out of the money (or very slightly in if you can tolerate that risk) and will go further out once the price of the underlying goes down.

As with shorting stock, the risk for selling calls is technically unlimited (even though IMHO it's extremely unlikely that GME will go to the moon again the same way it did last time). With buying puts, your risk is the money you spent for the option. If the stock price is higher than the option at expiry, you'll have lost all of it. If it's lower, you can pocket the difference between strike price and stock price, minus the cost of the option.

And apparently, sometimes, when you want to return to that walled garden, your keys to the front gate just don't work anymore.

In this case, that won't help, because `.box` is already a TLD and `fritz.box` has been registered by someone. Compare these two, the first is from my laptop connected to a Fritz!Box, the 2nd. one is from a server that's not connected to any sort of Fritz!Box:

Expected result, resolved by the box itself:

    $ host fritz.box.
    fritz.box has address 192.168.178.1
    fritz.box has IPv6 address fd00::e72:74ff:fece:6656
    fritz.box has IPv6 address 2a02:908:616:a8c0:e72:74ff:fece:6656

    $ host fritz.box.
    fritz.box has address 45.76.93.104
    fritz.box has IPv6 address 2001:19f0:6c00:1b0e:5400:4ff:fecd:7828

Does configuring a custom DNS server (like Cloudflare one) on your local computers solve it?

No. If anything, that'd make it worse. The issue reported in TFA is that Fritz!Boxes by default resolve the domain `fritz.box` to themselves for their admin interface, even if that domain has been registered on the public internet by someone else. If you configure cloudflare, you'll prevent that, which will _always_ get you the potentially attacker controlled DNS results.

On an account I pay for?

On an account that you pay _Drew_ for. Do you also complain because someone renting you a garage doesn't want you running a strip club out of there?

This rings true. I remember the wooden toy biplane my dad made in his wood shop when I was a kid a lot more fondly than all the other bought plastic toys that came after it.

I use `aqbanking-cli` for grabbing transactions from my banks' FinTS/HBCI API and generate a CSV out of that. That CSV then goes through a bit of Python that splits up the entries into transactions. Those get rendered out as `beancount` transactions (but `ledger` works as well, I used that before I switched to beancount) and appended to my actual ledger.

I then use `fava` (a beancount web UI) to fix mistakes, and have another piece of code (this time written in Go, but could be Python/whatever as well) that takes transactions that are generated from my brokerage account and enriches them with data parsed from my brokers' PDF reports (since the FinTS/HBCI info doesn't contain stuff like ISINs or taxes/fees separately).

This is for my personal finances, but I used the same system (minus the brokerage stuff) when I managed the finances of a hackerspace in the middle of Germany for a few years.

OCaml can definitely do it (for example, you get a compiler error if you pass the wrong arguments to a `printf` where the format string specifies, say a number, but you pass in a string).

Rust can very likely do it by leveraging their `build.rs` stuff to parse and validate call sites of the registration and parameters.

Zig can probably do it with their comptime stuff.

In theory, Go could do the same (but that would mean special-casing the `net/http` handler registration in the compiler). At least `go vet` is smart enough to yell at you about wrong format string arguments.

If you use Acme from plan9port, you can use Ctrl/Alt (on PCs) resp. Command/Option (on Macs) to simulate chording. That's what I use when I'm on a laptop without my external mouse anyway. At some point, you get very very used to it and start attempting to use the mouse chords in other text entry boxes (such as the browser).

My solution to _that_ is to just write text in Acme always and copy/paste it into the destination when I'm done :)

Heh, I built something similar for my partner and myself: https://wine.unobtanium.de/ It's not very sophisticated (as we're not sophisticated wine people), but we've sometimes found ourselves standing in front of the wine rack in the super market (as I said, not sophisticated) wondering which of those we already had tasted and how we liked it.

There's not that much in it because it was put on a bit of a break owing to a broken server a while ago, but it's back up again :)

That reminds me of one of my childhood PCs.

It was a hand-me-down K6-II with (I think) 233 MHz clock rate. The thing had a tiny fan on top of the cooler that was roughly 4x4cm (if even that). The poor thing generally worked quite nicely, but had stuck bearings so it required a little nudge to spin every time the machine was turned on. I didn't have the side panel on because that was just too much of a hassle and usually would just reach in and start the thing blindly.

I forgot that one day and the machine had been running for about an hour (low load, so nothing too bad). I reached in and promptly gave myself quite a nasty burn blister because I touched the cooler instead of the fan.

I think that's "feature" as in "property", not "feature" as in "good thing to put in an ad for this".

Edit: if it somehow supports passing functions (or function pointers) as parameters, the Y combinator can be used to add recursion even if it's not natively supported otherwise.

Element feels a lot like Slack/Teams/Discord. It has a few distinct features (federation and such), and a few are, as far as I'm aware, missing or "different enough" such as Slack's whole "We'll replace Email, why don't you write your longer documents in here as well"-thing.

So essentially they've built an average 10th grade highscool student.

I think Terry would be happy that people want to tinker with what he built even after his death. I mean, he explicitly built it as a sort of throw-back to the early home computer days.

Yes. There's [acme-lsp](https://github.com/fhs/acme-lsp) for providing language server integration and things like "jump to definition", "show hover-help" and so on.

I personally use `autokey` on Linux and `sxhkd` on macOS for adding a key binding for `acme-lsp`'s `Lcomp` command which performs completion.

There's also [Watch](https://pkg.go.dev/9fans.net/go/acme/Watch) for monitoring a directory of files for changes and running a command in a persistent Acme window. I use that for continuously running unit tests while I edit some piece of code, or for automatically running `go generate` and such.

For your REPL needs, there's the `win` command that implements a basic dumb terminal as an Acme window. This provides a few goodies like letting you edit the terminal buffer with Acme's `Edit` command and its embedded Sam command language, as well as adding "snippets" that can be executed with one click of the middle mouse button.

Acme by itself is already plenty useful (`win` is part of the "standard distribution" so to speak, in that it is part of the various Plan9 forks and of plan9port), and a lot of extra stuff can be built rather quickly by hooking into its 9p interface:

For example, my tool to add commonly used tools to the tag (the blue line at the top of each text window that contains the file name and commands that act on the window) is a handful of lines of shell script that parse entries in acme's `acme/log` file and select the appropriate tools to add based on the name of newly opened files.

My Git integration is a thin wrapper around `win` and `git commit --interactive` that pops open a window that allows me to author a Git commit similar to (but a lot simpler than) magit for emacs and fugitive for Vim work.

Even if you're not in Plan9 (or one of the forks), I encourage you to give [plan9port](https://github.com/9fans/plan9port)'s Acme a spin.

(FWIW, this post was written in an Acme window because it's a lot more intuitive to use after some getting used to than regular ol' GTK text boxes used by Firefox.)