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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 5th, 2023

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  • I have tried freecad a number of times to replace solidworks as a critical piece of closed source software in hardware development toolchains. I have always struggled. Yesterday someone spent an hour with me at a makespace saying… “FreeCAD has a different way of doing this/try realthunder branch/use symmetry condition/delete all conditions that coincide” … it has been worth years of trying alone. When I started solidworks the reseller gave me a week of training - this is often why complex FOSS software gets a reputation for being clunky, because alone you will spend ages hunting a GUI button in a complex interface.

    TLDR: Go outside, go to makespace or a FREECAD conference - meet other people who use open source software - its much easier to use/learn from others than alone.


  • Nobody uses cinnamon? Honestly - I really like using cinnamon with Debian. I heard that they promised not to fuck with the UI for no reason unlike… everyone! @Mwa Cinnamon is a fairly nice, easy to use desktop - I don’t really care which is better, but if they change it, you have to re-learn it. Top tip for UI design - don’t think that your users want to re-learn how to interact with your UI - they might go outside, or elsewhere.



  • Sorry this is a late reply. I can see that mentioning molten salt was a bit left-field, However, it is one of the more realistic ways to store the huge amounts of power needed to fuel an economy for a couple of weeks (which you need in northern europe if you want to use solar/wind). Here’s a link about it:

    https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cite.202000137

    I am pro nuclear, but if we are going to descend into this renewable hell, then we need to actually think about how you store terawatt-hours of power. I really think that this kind of storage might be the nearest we have to a solution. we’ll only need it once we try to turn off the gas turbines, of course. It is fascinating that so many smart people don’t see that the whole jigsaw is missing vital pieces.



  • This is not tangental - I am heartened, my hope is that this would become normal. Despite my moan, it isn’t that bad and I’m sure I would have had different IT headaches on windows - security comes to mind.

    I still use proprietary android software on my phone, but I try not to do anything secure on my phone (this is also getting harder as banks are insisting that I convert to apps)




  • It works on chromium, not firefox. I guess I should be more flexible. It is likely that the bug is in the bank’s site, so I wasn’t sure about putting in a bug report. The website pauses on the ‘loading’ animated icon, when you try to navigate away, it tells you ‘Your session has expired’. It hasn’t been fixed by changing the user-agent (assuming I got it right). I don’t know if the bank would give them a dummy account for testing, but I’ll file a report anyway.


  • I’m not worried about privacy, it’s a business not a person. If the government want to look through my business’ data, they just need to arrange an audit. I like good security, but am a small target.

    It’s about free as in freedom.

    My worry is that if linux is allowed to become just a hackintosh of steamdeck, rather than an actual operating system. It will go the way of hackintosh.

    [edit: apostrophe, edit2: added last paragraph]







  • Sorry - What?

    You said Denmark had converted to green energy. I pointed out that they haven’t done anything like that. You are now moving the goal posts and saying “where is the comparative essay defending nuclear power”…

    If you must, France turned completely green in the 70s. So they’ve provided 50 years of clean energy. Its a classic story and not as simple as I’m going to make out, but still. Look at the map link in the last post - any area that stays green is either using hydro or nuclear. Hydro is great, but you need mountains and water.