social.solarpunk.au

social.solarpunk.au

vidak | @vidak@social.solarpunk.au

# LOCATION

The unceded, stolen land of the Wadjuk people of the Nyoongar nation. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land!!

# QUOTATIONS

You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. ~winnie-the-pooh

Libreboot T480 coming to Minifree very soon. Also, Libreboot 20241205 is compiling.

Ghouls 'n Ghosts

🏒 Capcom
πŸ“… 1988
πŸ–₯ Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Arcade, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Master System, Mega Drive, PC Engine SuperGrafx, Sharp X68000, Wii...

Ghouls 'n Ghosts Screenshot Ghouls 'n Ghosts Screenshot Ghouls 'n Ghosts Screenshot

Person with over 1,000 followers: I don’t want to go to Bluesky but I don’t know if I’ll find enough people to engage with here.

Dude, what do you want, meaningful conversations or a fan club?

(I was as perfectly happy when I had a literal handful of people I was engaging with here eight years ago as I am now. Remember the Dunbar number, people. Remember quality over quantity. Small is beautiful and all that.)

How Insurance Works

(reposting because I can't find the original post.)

4-panel comic from pizzacake comic describing how insurance works. 

Woman (looking at viewer): Today we're going to learn about insurance!

Woman (looking at insurance): Hey insurance, I am injured and need some of that money I gave you in case I get injured.

Woman representing insurance, wearing top hat, diamond necklace, gold chain, holding a cigar, and surrounded by money bags: No

Woman (looking at viewer): And that's how insurance works!

I'm experimenting with hand-drawn traces. I'm trying to find that classic pre-CAD PCB look with digital tools. The process isn't too onerous. I exported some layers from KiCad in SVG format and loaded them in Inkscape. From there, you can just draw another layer of hand-drawn copper, save that, then reimport it into KiCad as a graphic on the copper layer. You can even DRC check it!

I just freehanded some lines and simplified them, then adjusted manually. But stylistically, it still looks a lot like I drew some lines in Inkscape. You can see down on the connection between R6 and D5 I drew the teardrops. Even with janky teardrops that small variation in trace width looks a lot more legit. Would be nice to find some way of automating that, but I'm probably way outside the normal use case on both KiCad and Inkscape.

A PCB render. The traces are all smooth lines, which looks hand drawn but in a modern, digital way.

It's interesting how what started as semantic markup to occasionally write stuff and share it with the world on the internet now evolved to a prominent means of money-making, and for a good lot of us, what we are spending most of our time on each day.

Enough 1:6 scale models of old computers I want a 6:1 scale Packard Bell

when you take a 30 minute nap and woke up 4 hours later confused af

whoa I finally got Debian powerpc64 installed and working on my POWER720

trick: install Debian 11 from CD, manually update /etc/apt/sources.list to sid, apt upgrade the world

granted I had to temporarily disable gpg checks for apt because installing from *just* the CD didn't install the proper keyrings

but hey the system is up!

screenshot of debian sid on my POWER7 machine

uname: Linux tendi 6.11.10-powerpc64 #1 SMP Debian 6.11.10-1 (2024-11-23) ppc64 GNU/Linux

It occurred to me yesterday, as I waited the usual three or four minutes for Word to open my document, that the basic tasks most people use PCs for (browsing file systems, opening documents and working on them, email) have barely improved or changed since the early 2000s. And have not sped up or become in any way more productive

Surprising that more dynamic programming languages don't have Common Lisp's (and also Python's IIRC?) thing of just automatically promoting integers to larger machine sizes and then to bignums rather than forcing them to be a fixed size and then raising an exception or letting them overflow. I guess they instead insist on taking from Javascript and just using floats for everything so instead you get really hard-to-debug float precision issues when reaching large enough integers instead.

kinda feels like i should become a hermit and shut myself off from most of the world

people are not listening, and i am tired of being hurt

I made U-Boot purple.

New Libreboot release soon!

Alper Nebi Yasak gave me the idea. Just hardcode that memset; see video_fill() call in the terminal window in expo_render(). Just hardcode the RGB value in that call.

A bit hacky but it works.

Again, 's continued stance on 11 means there's going to be LOTS of e-waste coming in about 10-20 months from now as still perfectly good computers are going to be unnecessarily discarded for no good reason.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-tough-hardware-requirements-for-windows-11-are-non-negotiable

I know smart people are going to use some variation of , but most of these people are just going to discard them and get a Copilot+ PC which is going to be sad as hell.

Dragon Warrior

🏒 Chunsoft, Bird Studio, Armor Project
πŸ“… 1986
πŸ–₯ Game Boy Color, MSX, MSX2, NES

Dragon Warrior Screenshot Dragon Warrior Screenshot Dragon Warrior Screenshot Dragon Warrior Screenshot

Today, I invite you to the crazy place that is the XMPP Railway Yard!

This / channel has a wide variety of people from all over the world, from geeks to fanatics to everyday folks who just think trains are cool.

https://xmpp.link/#trains@conference.jabjab.de?join

(Warning - brain damage!)

As before, if you're new to XMPP, this guide has everything you need to get started.
https://contrapunctus.codeberg.page/the-quick-and-easy-guide-to-xmpp.html

look, IRL, where i'm from, if someone like gargron had been the leader of something and fucked up so badly like this repeatedly we would have deposed him already.

and yeah, that's an option we have. a quick and easy solution is to take him down.

the problem is, if i say 'back to web forums', or 'back to USENET' a lot of people here would ignore me or call me some sort of luddite

which is pretty revealing. tells you just how much self awareness the average user actually has here on the fedi

personally i'd say the worst things about this place is the gossiping and cancel culture of the most powerful mastodon accounts. the reverse of this is the sycophantism and enabling a lot of mastodon users show to these same accounts

i think in many ways our problem in this community is that we thought we could take the concept of social media and participate in it at all

Just a reminder: LLMs aren't A.I.

IT'S NOT A.I.

IT'S JUST AN OVER-CLOCKED, OVER-HYPED MARKOV CHAIN GENERATOR WITH A FEW FILTERS BOLTED ON, AND TRAINED ON STOLEN CONTENT. 

IT DOESN'T CREATE ANYTHING.
IT JUST VOMITS PLAGIARISM.

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