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Posted on 21-02-06, 23:39 in I have yet to have never seen it all. (revision 1)
Dinosaur

Post: #901 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
Last view: 4 hours
Tesla Motors is now showing the market that if you don't get a new car every year, You're Doing It Wrong™:

"Our fancy touchscreens were meant to last only 5-6 years!"
https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1131184_tesla-recalled-touchscreens-were-meant-to-only-last-5-6-years
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows-why-automotive-grade-matters

Using laptop-grade parts ON A FREAKIN' CAR (including "industrial-grade" displays, which are not good enough for the hostile environments you can find on the average car, and also consumer-grade eMMC flash with not the greatest of endurance), plus buggy software (which quickly wears down said consumer-grade eMMC!) straight from the Valley equals very expensive bricks. But it's all good, because you can always get yours serviced for the low, low price of ~$1350!
The regulators eventually had to intervene and force Tesla to recall all those defective touchscreens ("butbutbut that pesky gub'mints! They're interfering with our profits! What do you mean that cars have to pass safety standards!?"). In the meanwhile, Elon "When will be the day the SEC will forcibly get me banned from Twitter?" Musk is too busy pumping up buttcoins and memecoins on his Twatter.

Please please pretty fucking please do NOT let Silly Valley to "disrupt" our trains and airplanes too! We already have Boeing (MCAS NEVAR FORGET!), Airbus (have you powercycled your A3x0 this month yet?), and the CCP for that, thanks!

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 21-02-10, 23:48 in Computer Hardware News (revision 1)
Dinosaur

Post: #902 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
Last view: 4 hours
And in Soviet Venezuela, the commies just did a s/Trump/Biden/ over its regurgitated party line discourse and moved on. In the meanwhile, nobody cares~

Anyway, speaking about USA! USA! USA! and bleeding-edge semiconductor fabs, it seems not only TSMC is looking to protect the supply chains of its customers by building a PRO GEAR SPEC fab on American soil, now Samsung is about to do the same:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16483/samsung-in-the-usa-a-17-billion-usd-fab-by-late-2023

If this fab finally comes to life, nVidia and Qualcomm shouldn't be found themselves fighting for scraps against the crApple 5nm monopoly for long. As a bonus, this should double as a quite expensive insurance against fatass Kim nukes directed to the other Korean peninsula half.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 21-02-12, 04:47 in I still HATE smartdevices (revision 1)
Dinosaur

Post: #903 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
Last view: 4 hours
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH GOOGLE!!!

So, I managed to save enough money to upgrade the storage on my shitty Alcatel - from the old 32GB card from my ol' RAZR to some $10 64GB noname (the actual brand says "TeamGroup") microSDXC card. After checking that indeed this cheap slowass card (the UHS-1 marking is a lie, just like every UHS-1 card I've ever owned, even SanDisks!) is not made of fake flash (the 6456GiB are legit, albeit SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW to fill), I decided to put that storage to good use. See, this shitty Alcatel by AT&Turds has 8GB of internal storage, but of course all of that AT&Turds preloaded bloatware takes over half of that, leaving like less than 3GB of actual user storage (and without custom ROMs or even a way to root this thing, that's what I have to work with and nothing else). After installing the few applications I use, I end with less than 500MB for pictures and other media.

With my 32GB card that was no problem since the card was packed to the brim with music, but since I don't intend to fill this one too (yet!), I decided that it was time to do what I used to do with every dumbphone I've ever owned: save my photos and videos to the goddamned memory card instead of the already scarce internal memory. And of course, things other than files generated by the camera(s) of my handset, like maps (OsmAnd+ surprisingly has marginally better maps for my city than Google Maps, but they're offline only!), or PDFs. Of course, things are anything but simple with smartturds, because they're severely crippled computerizers at heart, and it doesn't help that starting with Android 5 (Marshmallow), Google considers that every and each application trying to WRITE to the SD card is malware, so they have to jump flaming hoops made of angry cocaine-soaked cobras if you expect them to be able to store your user-generated media there! Welcome to hell, here is your T-shirt.

My card is too slow for being used as "internal storage" (under Google's makeshift "adoptable storage" or whatever bullshit) - it got stuck at 60% during formatting (but not without warning me that my $10 card is $10 junk because it tries to encrypt the entire 64GB of it... which I guess it would be an overnight operation which I'm not willing to afford because I have no need for it!), forcing me to power down the phone, pull the card, boot to Windows, clear the two partitions it created, create a new (dummy) unformatted partition, assign a drive letter, and only then SDFormatter would see the card and let me reformat it back to exFAT (because fuck M$ too), and start over. "Portable storage" it is.

Anyway, here are my workarounds:

- VLC: It doesn't care as it only consumes media! Protip: the 3.3.x series is BLOATED GARBAGE (the very latest version even completely fails to find my music!). Stick to the more orangey 3.2.x series instead.

- Total Commander: After fooling the Google Cops, it never asks again to have total control over your SD card. Whew!

- OpenCamera: The worst loser here. My favorite camera application (because the AlcatelTCL preloaded one is too barebones) is crippled by decree under the law of Google. There are some ways you can get it to actually save your photos and videos to the SD card:
1) Use the Storage Access Framework. This lets you pick any folder on your SD card, but for whatever bizarro reason, this makes my photos (but not my videos) unreadable over MTP (which means I have to fall back to wireless whenever I want to backup my photos OH FUCK NO!)
2) Don't use SAF, but it means the only possible place I could use for my photos is the completely unintuitive /sdcard/Android/data/net.sourceforge.opencamera/, which is hidden by default. Thankfully, Simple Gallery lets me add arbitrary directories to the gallery, including this nonsense (what the fuck is this, a BREW dumbphone?!), and that one folder is actually fully accessible over MTP, instead of yielding empty JPG files.
3) Root your phone. Yeah, of course!

- OsmAnd+: I had far better luck with this one: just tell it that I want to store my maps and stuff on the SD card, and it will ask nicely if I want to move the already downloaded maps to the card. Do it please, and thank you~!

- Firefox: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAno. There is no official way to change the downloads directory, other than tampering with about:prefs. A more user-friendly way might be coming up Soon™... on Fenix, which means downgrading your UI. Yeah, not happening in this lifetime.

- The few apps I have would have to remain living on the cramped internal storage for now, until I can afford better gear (in other words: not for the foreseeable future)


So much insanity, because smartdevices are insane by design and I'm deviating from the One True Phone Path™®: "Memory cards!? Removable batteries!?!? HEADPHONE JACKS!? Butbutbut that's for dinosaurs, why that meteorite is taking too long to extinguish you!?"

Bonus: This is also my first rodeo with exFAT on anything. If you're using kernel 5.4 or later, you already have a native exFAT driver in your kernel (made by Samsung, no less!), so do yourself a favor and purge the exfat-fuse driver if you value your time! This is of course the default on Debian Buster because it still ships with kernel 4.19 on stock installs, and you have to enable the backports repository to bring in some of the hotness (we're now stuck at 5.9 because The Freeze™ is near).

UPDATE: Now copying my music over MTP. Surprisingly it's copying at a more decent rate (~7MB/s), instead of the sub-2MB/s rate I had when testing the card with F3, maybe because my Ricoh PCI SD card reader chipset was made before UHS or SDHC, and can only drive those cards at the worst possible rates.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 21-02-15, 02:21 in Games You Played Today REVENGEANCE (revision 3)
Dinosaur

Post: #904 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
Last view: 4 hours
Gameloft Classics: 20 Years

Remember when in the Dark Ages of cellphone gaming, Gameloft games used to be freakin' everywhere? I spent a good deal of money on its BREW versions (and even some more on the J2ME port of Block Breaker Deluxe 2 - I paid thrice for that game in the end: 176x220 BREW on a V3m, QVGA BREW on a VE20, QVGA J2ME on a V9x, is it that good for a cellphone game~), but it's quite sad to learn that most of those never made the cut to the modern buttonless glass slabs that we dare calling "smartdevices". Ah, the good old times, where a single, one-time payment was all you needed to have fun while waiting on a bank queue, or during blackouts...

Someone at Gameloft was old enough to remember too that life was better prior to the iPhone and the IAP mess we have today, so in a incredible act of goodwill they've released Gameloft Classics: 20 Years sometime last year, preserving 30 of their old dumbphone games for the new generations. Best of all, it's completely free as in beer (no ads, no mandatory accounts/social media whoring, and no obvious tracking/spy bits). But since every coin has two sides, not everything is perfect, so here goes my analysis:

- Most of the games are shovelware. Thankfully (for me) it has not only Block Breaker Deluxe 2, but also its sequel (hope it doesn't have the game-breaking bug present on the original BREW version that made the game impossible to continue after the 5th stage boss!). Of course, there are 27 other games you might like/made you feel the nostalgia/whatever, so YMMV.

- Localizations! Each game I've tested so far seems to be available in a bunch of languages, including BBD2 that was only available in English until now! While Gameloft actually was generous with translations back in 2009, most games released until then never got updates of this (or any) kind. Nice touch, I appreciate it.

- At a first glance, it looks like these are emulated J2ME versions (on BBD2 the graphics are a exact match, plus there is a "support.txt" inside the APK enumerating both standard JSRs and proprietary OEM extensions, but that's a red herring), but don't expect to pull the original .JARs from it: while each game assets are there on its original format (more or less), the actual game code is native Android, so technically these are ports (and it explains why they used the J2ME versions instead of the superior, much faster and prettier looking BREW ports... which were done in C++ as mandated by Qualcomm!)

- Speaking about emulating the J2ME experience... ugh, that's where the Achiles' heel of these ports shows its ugly colors: they emulate a weirdass hypothetical GameBoy-esque phone (with a D-pad and ABXY gamepad layout, but also L/R softkeys) with a QVGA screen. The latter is important, as you're likely to run these games on much MUCH larger displays, and while keeping the postage stamp sized display helps ensuring pixel-perfect graphics, they also become quite unplayable for those of us with poor eyesight. A better approach would have been to allow display scaling options (like any half-decent J2ME emulator does), but alas, this is not the case here.

- That ABXY gamepad layout is odd for dumbphone games, and you are not offered any option to remap controls (which is silly, considering that most games don't even use X/Y - on the original phone versions all they relied on was on the D-pad and fire key, which usually was the "5" on your numpad). Plus these come with obnoxious, distracting "clicky" sound effects each time you "press" them, and you can't mute those :/ ONE MORE THING! The controls may get "jammed" every now and then. This is not a big deal on a pool game, but on BBD, this quickly becames a game-breaking bug!

- While most games were updated to change numpad references to ABXY, they forgot to do that on some games, like Midnight Pool (why they didn't put the sequel instead for that one?), so gameplay quickly gets confusing where you're supposed to press "3" on a gamepad that doesn't have a 3 key!?

- Since these are straight Android ports of J2ME games, it means they do have another Achiles' heel, but this one comes with the platform: touchscreens simply don't work with games requiring fast reflexes and focusing on quick action on screen! Case in point: Block Breaker Deluxe, again. These games were already challenging but very playable on those ancient phones with actual physical keys, but they're on the verge of unplayability on touchscreens! On other games (say, Cannon Rats, Midnight Pool), this is not that bad as the action is slow-paced on these and you can easily get away with touchscreen controls only, but for the two ACTUAL games I want from this collection... ugh. Mind you, this is not really Gameloft's fault: I have the original, paid release of J2ME BBD2 installed on J2ME Loader, and it exhibits the same problems with the emulated keyboard controls (but at least I can scale the screen on that one!). Touchscreens SUCK for action games, and there is no fix for that... except for a physical keyboard that you are not likely to find on your next cellphone :/ (FWIW it doesn't seem this Gameloft collection doesn't work with Bluetooth gamepads, but I can't test as I have no suitable hardware)

Veredict: Nice to see a longstanding cellphone game studio rekindling the flames of nostalgia (and completely free, to boot!), but uh... touchscreens and a barebones UI fell short of expectations :/ Still, well worth the 74MB download, so if you miss your dumbphone, this is the SECOND next best thing. Fix your "sticky buttons", add display scaling options, key remapping, and you've got a winner here.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 21-02-17, 01:06 in Mozilla, *sigh* (revision 4)
Dinosaur

Post: #905 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
Last view: 4 hours
News from Team Seamonkey:

- NPAPI is dead, buried, and starting with 2.53.7, gone for good. Let's hold a minute of silence for the fallen souls in the quest for enhancing the web experience... enough. If your organization is dumb enough to still rely on Java applets or Flash content for its internal appliances, get your favorite weapon and start leisurely "upgrading" hardware!

- There have been a few, very annoying instances of severe CPU hogging on the 2.53.x line. In my case, I've been bitten by two of them: one that specifically affect MercadoLibre product listings (but nothing else on their bloated mess of webshit) but which goes away after closing the tab (it even happens in safe mode on a clean profile!)... and another one hitting the "Socket Thread" subprocess - this one is nasty as it happens at random, and it even causes the entire process to stay there eating a entire core even after closing all windows, requiring to bring in the SIGTERM/SIGKILL troops. These have been a PITA to debug (I've been helping the guys at #seamonkey with straces and countless experiments... and still going!), but it seems these flaws may even come from upstream Firefox. There are no clear clues on this yet, aside of some timers suddenly missing their deadlines and therefore becoming infinite, which often leads to CPU hogs.

- Google started today treating Seamonkey as a cellphone: the search pages turned out from desktop to mobile view across my entire Seamonkey fleet, with no way out to even tell them nicely that these are NOT cellphones! Apparently, either Google is punishing me for disabling Javascript (which actually I haven't done!), or I just became a victim of their stupid A/B experiments. So far, the only effective workaround I've found is to spoof my user agent as recent Firefox to regain the desktop view. So yeah, time to burn down Silly Valley. Nope, I'm not switching to DDG or whatever nerd-friendly search engine is in vogue these days - as much as evil has Google became, their search engine is still the best in town, sadly.
UPDATE: Here are the magic strings to please Google... for now (yes, this shit is not new and will keep pestering you when you least expect it!):
general.useragent.override.google.com = Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:61.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/61.0
// or for Linux: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:61.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/61.0

That is, take your current Seamonkey user agent string as the base, bump the reported Firefox version just a bit (SM 2.53 = FF 60), and get rid of the Seamonkey token, just in case.
But the real solution is to just embrace Google Chrome as your One True Browser™, of fucking course!

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 21-02-19, 22:25 in Misc. software (revision 1)
Dinosaur

Post: #906 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
Last view: 4 hours
UXTARDS ALERT: VLC 4.0 is fully embracing The Cellphone Way™, even on desktop ("Mooooooom, what's a file?!").

VLC is officially FUBAR if this shit comes to fruition as-is (the current version for cellphones, on which 4.0 for desktop is being modeled, is so broken that as soon as I figure out how to tell F-Droid to ignore further updates to VLC, I'll pretend it has been abandoned upstream just like Firefox/Fennec). And since this is how software is done nowadays... guess I'll need to git gud with mpv :/

God damn it, is there any sanity left in software/UI design these days!?
*reads Hacker News*
...nope. That's why we got COVID-19, I guess.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 21-02-27, 03:10 in Mozilla, *sigh* (revision 1)
Dinosaur

Post: #907 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
Last view: 4 hours
"Remain Calm: the fox is still in the Firefox logo"

While stupid memes are stupid (and another reason of why places like Twitter and Reddit are among the biggest mistakes of mankind), who is fool enough to still trust in Mozilla's PR machine these days?
Firefox is NOT a brand, it's a browser, FFS!!!

Enjoy your fox while it lasts, because one day you will wake up and it will be no more, no matter the underlying reason.

Speaking about stupid memes... oh Mozilla, you didn't?! Why yes, you DID IT!!
(spoilers: look at the logo)

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 21-02-28, 14:28 in Instant messaging (cr)apps (revision 4)
Dinosaur

Post: #908 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
Last view: 4 hours
Since this brave new world where we live in is severely screwed up as is, we're expected not only to carry a cellphone of the "smart" variety (with all the vomit that comes with mobile UI/UX), but also to rely on a specific IM application as phone calls, text messages, and emails are considered to be "old-fashioned, ugly, unattractive, and non-frictionless" (to not mention that our mobile networks are anything but reliable!). Oh, and if you aren't in the network, don't expect to be accepted as a fully functioning member of our modern society!

Just like most countries around the world, Soviet Venezuela people chose the worst possible option: the Facebook-owned-and-operated WhatsApp. Needless to say, I've resisted it as hard as I can, although I'm paying a heavy price in exchange (like "my family won't talk to me", or "I can't interact with most non-food/banking commerce over here"). And despite the recent events related to the ever-privacy-unfriendly policy changes now being enforced by the application ("Share your data with Facebook OR ELSE!") which have led to a (reduced) exodus of users to the competition, noone seems to give a fuck on Soviet Venezuela. Seriously, I'm seriously pissed off when someone (be it a person or a retailer) gives you his/her/its phone number, just to also hear "Please, WhatsApp only/do you have WhatsApp?" next to it - this is why I don't even participate on our local neighbors' association, as they exclusively meet over WhatsFuckingCrapp :/

Anyway, it seems you MUST be a member of one of those society-mandatory clubs, otherwise I hope you enjoy implicit (and sometimes explicit!) ostracism since composing a email or dialing a phone number is simply Not Done These Days™ by most people (most likely including your family, friends, and corporations). Look, I'm not opposed to IM networks (even proprietary ones!) - I've had accounts in MSN/WLM, ICQ, and even AIM, but that was back when having one was little more than a curiosity, basically something that only young people would do (I wasn't a heavy WLM user, but I spent most of my time talking to people there, from local classmates to Estonian console hackers and Spaniard Sonic fanfiction writers).

Then Skype and Whatsapp happened, and everything went to hell. First there was the total ban on 3rd-party clients (while the former networks of yesterday didn't liked people using anything but their bloaty clients, they didn't went around with elaborate obfuscation, mandatory cellphones, and instabans), then the rise of the smartphone led to our current state of affairs.

But enough ranting! Here is what I'm looking from a IM network nowadays:

Must have:
- FREE. For as long as I live in Soviet Venezuela, I'm afraid I couldn't afford anything priced on foreign/hard currency due to obvious reasons.
- Open-source clients, including the official one!
- Allow 3rd-party clients, instead of banning users for using reverse-engineered less sucky/compatible clients.
- Clients for both Real Computers™ (including Linux) and cellphones (I guess that means Android)
- Lightweight, NATIVE clients for all applicable platforms. Leave the hundred-megabyte Electron abominations far away from my eyes, please. Memory is scarce and VERY EXPENSIVE, and so is bandwidth, so a web view is inadmissible too!
- Actually, a Pidgin/libpurple plugin (based on a native web API, not a fragile HTML/JS scraper) would be my ideal PC setup.
- Local backups. Like: "push button, generate backup, done". (Or, if in PC: "browse to $PATH to find your unencrypted message dumps")
- Message synchronization between multiple devices, because I'll want at least two installs (phone+PC). This also implies that I must be able to use the same account on whatever devices I want at the same time (unlike WhatsFuckingCrapp)
- No ads, EVER. I know that running successful messaging networks costs $LOADS_O_DOUGH, but "monetization" has become a cursed word that I don't want to listen anymore in my life.

Nice to have, but can live without:
- A way to turn off emojis. Yes, I'm serious - emojis are worse than COVID!
- End-to-end crypto. Look, I get that everybody spies on everybody, but I don't believe that "moar crypto" can fix society, and I'm not one of those paranoid nutters that believe that the NSA/CIA/FBI/KGB/FSB/CCP/GCHQ/$NATIONAL_SECURITY_AGENCY/Jeff Bezos' secretary is watching every single keystroke you send. Plus, for insecurity theaters I already have banks! Still, if it has E2EE, I want to be in control of my own goddamned messages, thanks (ever tried to dump your WhatsFuckingCrapp messages from your own devices without having to jailbreak/root them?)
- Audio/Video calls.
- A web client (that does not require Google WebComponents® junk so it can actually work on non-Chrome browsers, or being tethered to a cellphone), for those emergency cases.
- Not be tied to a cellphone. If I could register with a email address instead of a phone number (that can change or stop working at any time without notice), and only add the phone as a extra security factor, that would be ideal.
- Open protocol.
- Open-source server software.
- I know this is a very long shot, but if I'm going to use your official client(s), I want a non-braindamaged UXtard-free experience, please?
- Federated network (like email and XMPP has been since forever)


Here are the popular alternatives I hear mentioned every time the IM situation topic is discussed around the Internet (+: good, ~: unsure, -: bad):

1) Telegram
+ Open-source client.
+ The official Android client is available on F-Droid (albeit with noticeable delays when compared to official releases, as upstream is SLOW to release the sources).
+ 3rd-party clients explicitly allowed.
+ Governments around the world hate it!
~ Made by a couple ex-Soviet dudes, headquartered on the UAE. Doesn't inspire me so much confidence but it's creator is on Putin's kill list, and I hate Putin for many other reasons, so the enemy of my enemy is my friend?
~ Has E2EE, but it's not enabled by default (you must explicitly start a "secret chat" for that, which is not a straightforward procedure). Group chats are in the clear!
~ Has been gaining traction very slowly over here, mainly among lefties chavistas (yet even those already are on WhatsApp due to inertia), but I know of a few commercial places that offer it as an alternative contact channel. At least one of my uncles is aware of Telegram and may already have an account.
- The dreaded "M" word is being flaunted over: there are talks about adding ads to the official clients later this year!
- Server software not open-source.
Veredict: this one might stand a chance. Might.

2) Signal
+ Open-source client and server software, so you can even run your own private servers.
+ WhatsApp uses the same protocol, so we know it's secure (bar Facebook backdoors)
+ E2EE by default.
- It spams your phonebook contacts with messages telling them that you're now on Signal, which is a big no-no if you actually care about privacy!
- Led by a massive, well-known asshole, Moxie Marlinspike. As a general rule of mine, I avoid using software made by massive, well-known assholes. This guy seems to be as obnoxious as Moonchild, JWZ, or your average Mozilla: for example, he considers "federation" to be a bug and not a feature!
- Speaking about why Moxie is a cunt, third-party clients are explicitly discouraged, even if built from the official sources. You're free to use the sources, as long as you use the resulting binaries to connect to your own servers, and not to the main Signal ones. This is also the reason of why the official Android client will never be available on F-Droid, because Moxie is strongly opposed to have any alternative .APK distribution points outside Google Play (while you can now download the .APK from the official Signal website, that's a very recent development, and Moxie really wants you to not sideload for the sake of "updates"). I could care less about paranoid nutters considering Signal the most secure app ever if you can't even bring your own client because Moxie is an asshole, so those recommendations are worth even less than the Sovereign Bolivar, basically.
- "Backups? Why do you even want that?! Messages are a liability, y'know". Our asshole-in-chief and its followers consider that keeping the history of your own goddamned messages (that for some of us are not disposable) is antagonist to what Signal represents... despite being heavily promoted as a WhatsFuckingCrapp replacement, which does (encrypted) backups! You can't even make this shit up. Sure, you can come up with a compatible 3rd-party client that supports backups... oh wait, Moxie doesn't want YOU using that in the official network, because he knows better than you.
- Nobody you care uses it, zero user base over here.
Veredict: OH HELL NO! I don't install assholeware on any of my devices (other than systemd, of course), sorry.

3) Threema
+ Swiss-based.
+ No cellphone (or even a email) required.
~ Recently opensourced?
- Nobody you care uses it, zero user base over here.
- Not free ($3)
Veredict: Nobody outside Switzerland and Germany cares.

4) Element (Matrix)
+ Fully open-source, from client to server.
+ There is no such a thing like an "official client" (so every client is 3rd-party by design), but having said that, Element (formerly riot.im) seems to be the most popular client (to the point that it's considered the reference client), and it's even available on F-Droid.
+ E2EE is now the default (since May 2020)
+ A cellphone number doesn't seem to be mandatory (or even allowed these days, if the Element site is to be believed), you can register with a lowly email address instead.
+ Federated by design.
+ Can have bridges to other networks (from IRC to, -yes- WhatsFuckingCrapp)
~ Setup may not be straightforward. Technically there is a official server (matrix.org), but its use is not mandatory. Creating a new account can generate, y'know, "friction", so it fails the granny test. On the flip side, you can run your own servers and have your group use those instead.
- Nobody you care uses it, zero user base over here.
- Element is made on Electron (so it's already disqualified), hence another client is to be preferred.
Veredict: All you can expect from a nerd-friendly network. Too bad normies (i.e. the people you want to talk to) will never even learn that it exists :/


So... ugh, looks like I'll be trying Telegram in the not-so-distant future, and miserably failing to convince everybody (starting with my family) to fuck the Zuck and use something else. All other networks might as well not exist, and Signal is dead to me.

...or I can continue doing what I'm currently doing: talk to nobody and live at the margin of society :/

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 21-03-02, 02:41 in I still HATE smartdevices
Dinosaur

Post: #910 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
Last view: 4 hours
Following the ongoing Googlectomy on my shitphone, I got sick of Gboard, the keyboard formerly known as Google Keyboard.

Sure, it's simple... and bloaty. And tries to push emojis at you if you're not careful enough to disable them. And sends all your keystrokes to the NSA/CIA/FBI/KGB/FSB/CCP/Jeff Bezos' secretary. And its autocorrect often tries to outsmart you. And it's BLOATY! So... off to F-Droid to find a suitable replacement, which I will hate for a few days until I get used to it.

Enter AnySoftKeyboard (which for some screwy reason it's listed as "BB Codes for ASK" on my F-Droid store, and as "Classic PC Theme" on F-Droid's website - the correct app ID you want is "com.menny.android.anysoftkeyboard" in any case). At first it looks like a lame replacement keyboard... but HOLY SHIT, the customization options on this thing are like a nerd's fantasy come true! Or quite close to it, to be fair. A few minutes dicking through the many, MANY settings screen on the configuration app lets you configure the keyboard to suit your particular tastes. No emoji crap, please (switch to a different generic lower row). Haptic feedback length tunable (which you want to do, as it comes to a insanely low duration, which on my phone effectively equals to "no feedback"). Sure, the default styles are in the "ugh" category, but I didn't liked Gboard that much either (and you can download a few extra styles from either F-Droid or Play Store). Best of all, the install footprint is much lower than Gboard!

Don't forget to pick the extra language APK for your locale if yours is not The One True English Language (in my case, the Spanish langpack adds another 1.5MB to the download).

I'll be giving ASK a good try for the next few days, and if I get used to it, hasta la vista, Gboard~!

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Posted on 21-03-02, 14:46 in I have yet to have never seen it all. (revision 6)
Dinosaur

Post: #909 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
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Our least-worthless (but still memey) banknote, from A to Z... quite literally!

(worth USD ~$0,0265 as of the timestamp of this post)

No, I'm not missing letters - these are literally all the series that have been issued so far, so blame our central bank for this mess (this is not even their first time skipping entire series: the VES 2 bill missed series L, while the gap on the one-of-a-kind VES 200 bill between the two issues [A, M-R] is so large you can literally park a few cargo 747s full of cash in there).

But there is more to this story beyond letters and gaps:

- For starters, since 2017 a full series run goes up to 100M notes minus one (?00000001 - ?99999999)
- Series A (full) and B (lower ~25M notes), and its replacement Z's were printed at our national mint, which can barely print anything at all these days.
- Series E (upper ~50M), H (full) and K (lower ~10M) are the Soviet Goznak bills. As for that X... apparently somebody at the BCV forgot to tell Goznak that Venezuela had standardized on the Z series for our replacement issues since 1998, so their replacements came under that non-standard series instead (but it's not the first time our country has used the X for replacements). This also means a little increase on difficulty to have a complete set for this specific note, because who doesn't love challenges?
- If you want to build your collection only with uncirculated notes right now without going broke... it's now kinda late: stocks of uncirculated A-series notes are basically exhausted since late '20, so it's very very VERY unlikely you can go to your nearby bank branch/ATM and get a few mint-grade notes for that one. UPDATE (2021/03/02): So today I went to my trusty bank for my daily withdrawal of COVID-free cash. Guess the uncirculated series for today? FUCKING A! Guess today is a good day to start a collection then~. As for all other four letters, the distribution has been so messy that you can literally go to the same branch every day and get all four in the same week if you're lucky - shipments of series B and K have ramped up since mid-February after being basically stalled since their introduction last year in the middle of lockdowns, while series H is by far the easiest to find.
- As for replacements... did I've said you love challenges? Remember, we now only have not one, but TWO prefixes! For the Z-series, based on serial counts it's estimated that about 18000 replacements exist, out of a population of ~125M notes, or one replacement every ~7 bricks (1000 notes), although in real life, you may go through thousands of bills without ever seeing a replacement, while someone at the other side of the country gets several consecutive pieces (!!!). As for the X-series... that one is even more messy: each printer has its own ideas about how to count replacements, and while our handy catalog estimates are in the vicinity of ~48000 notes, as you can see on the picture, my particular specimen has a serial well past the known range! So... uh, good luck. Hope you don't want them uncirculated too! (auction prices start at $40 for a UNC-grade Z-series note last time I bothered checking!)
- Notice the very visible downgrade on the security thread on the Soviet-printed bills: it has more windows... but the holograms, magnetic surfaces, text cutouts and UV printing are now gone on the thinner plastic strip :/

Sidenote: That catalog is crowdsourced and the data is publicly available. Since our central bank is not the BEP (where they even document their ranges of issued replacements, how nice of them~), and the numbers they publish are beyond useless, collectors had to git serious and bring the scanners and cameras to actually know what the hell we are collecting (now you know what I've been doing in the last few months with every banknote I get in my hands). The only vaguely similar project I've seen is EuroBillTracker, albeit that one has a very different purpose: literally surveying the tracks around the world of every printed Euro bill they can get!

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 21-03-02, 16:16 in Board feature requests/suggestions
Dinosaur

Post: #911 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
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So, I've noticed that when I modify a post (most likely the last reply on a thread which happens to be my post), it bumps the whole thread to the top, like I had posted a new reply! This is kinda weird. Is this by design?

Like, I could force a thread to stay to the top by just editing a reply over and over, but most likely this is not international.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 21-03-03, 01:58 in Board feature requests/suggestions
Dinosaur

Post: #912 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
Last view: 4 hours
Posted by Kawa
Yeah I think it is in fact meant to do that.

I'd prefer you didn't since editing a reply over and over puts yet another copy of the whole freakin' thing in the DB but yeah.

Wait, what?!

So, six edits to correct, say, a couple words on a 1000-word wall-o-text creates... six wall-o-texts on the database!?

Man, and I thought I had it hard with at $FORMER_JOB with those historic checkpoints (which is basically the same junk, but more fragile because raisins). Wonder if it is possible to save an actual diff instead of a whole copy on each edit.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 21-03-03, 19:57 in Board feature requests/suggestions
Dinosaur

Post: #913 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
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Yeah, usually my edits are quick spelling corrections and stuff. Very rarely, I do larger edits (and only when the last post on a thread is mine, so to avoid double posts (although I've seen other board software which can auto-merge posts on said cases, usually at the discretion of the mods.

I agree that there are good reasons to preserve edit history (even if not accessible to the actual posters themselves), but in my case, feel free to nuke my edit story then.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 21-03-06, 00:32 in I have yet to have never seen it all.
Dinosaur

Post: #914 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
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...here we go again!
http://www.bcv.org.ve/etiquetas/cono-monetario-2021

Sweet, sweet, neverending hyperinflation!

Yes, they can't afford all those zeroes so they instead spell the quantities in letters.

The photos are of the actual production notes (all zeros serial numbers = samples), the real deal. Based on my appreciations and in the quality of the resident Sovereign Bolivar Connosieur of the bBoards, I can ensure you that the 200K ($0.10) and 1M ($0.50) notes are being printed here... while surprisingly our buddies at Goznak got awarded the contract to print the 500K ($0.25) bill.

We're also skipping denominations again, there will be no revival of the 100K note!

On a happier note, enjoy the latest fad on airplanes: facemasked airplanes!
https://simpleflying.com/garuda-a330neo-mask-livery/
https://simpleflying.com/cargolux-747-mask-livery/
The Cargolux 747 is especially cute with that "NOT WITHOUT MY MASK" motto, and yes, the new Airbuses (all the Neos and the A350) also wear racoon masks on the windshield due to technical reasons (it improves thermals around windshields and supposedly makes replacing those easier)


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Posted on 21-03-06, 14:36 in Computer Hardware News
Dinosaur

Post: #915 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
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Remember the SMR HDD debacle, where every single HDD manufacturer secretly conspired against you, the consumer, by swapping ho-hum CMR HDDs with SMR junk unsuitable for anything but data hoarding?

Well, a bunch of slimy lawyers hit Western Digital (the biggest liars on this SMR saga) with a lawsuit, and they want your input if you fell into this scam:
https://www.hattislaw.com/cases/investigations/western-digital-lawsuit-for-shipping-slower-smr-hard-drives-including-wd-red-nas/

Too bad we all know the outcome of this: if they win the lawsuit, WD will have to pay millions, 90% of it that will end into said slimy lawyers' pockets, and the victims (that's you and me!) will get at best a $5-off coupon for another SMR HDD, and maybe a free download for some shitty backup software. Or simply a coupon for the latter.

But it's the principle that matters. Hurt Western Digital plenty, pretty please!

Oh, and don't forget to BACKUP YO SHIT, people!

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Dinosaur

Post: #916 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
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Kernel 5.10 (which is now available for us Debian Stable plebs via the magic of buster-backports) breaks TRIM on NTFS partitions mounted via ntfs-3g (what else?):
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211167

Workarounds:

- Boot to kernel 5.9 when you need to TRIM your NTFS partitions.
- Revert the offending patch as seen on the bugreport, then build your own kernel.
- Consider migrating away from NTFS, if possible.
- Wait for the next kernel release.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 21-03-16, 15:32 in Mozilla, *sigh*
Dinosaur

Post: #917 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
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Chasing for that MercadoLibre CPU hog on Seamonkey has been one of the weirdest experiences in my personal life.

Thanks to the help of a SM contributor (buc), we've been trying pretty much everything but the kitchen sink:
- Clean profiles, to rule off the usual addon tampering
- Checking on old upstream FF versions (the hog does not happen at all on <=FF54 or >=FF57, very hard to reproduce on FF55, easily reproducible on FF56 on which SM2.53 is based off... but only with e10s off!)
- Trying with countless obscure preferences
- Using specially hacked builds of various components, including a custom debug build of Firefox made off the SM source tree (yes, you can build vanilla FF from an ordinary SM tree) - this explains why they don't distribute symbols for the official release builds (libxul.so on this one is over 1GiB!!! Attaching GDB to it for taking stacktraces requires some muscle)
- Disabling JavaScript: we got our first clue there, as turning off JS made the hog go away... and of course, it broke the entire site. And half of the Internet because JS is the new cross-platform language of choice :/
- Testing launching the page from the urlbar, via commandline (I got interesting results there), and combinations of those (on FF the hog never happens if you launch the page via commandline, for whatever screwy reason)
- Saving the page, then load that
- Start dropping random HTML/JS snippets from the saved page. Our second powerful clue popped up here: near the end of the page, there is a rather huge ~100KiB blob of raw JSON which is basically a duplicate of the page contents, because MercadoLibre coders are a bunch of stupid monkeys. That unhealthy blob of JSON was triggering the hogs somehow!
- Once I relayed all that info to buc, he also discovered that if you scroll to the page footer, the hog went away. Yup, that simple: scroll away until the pain reliefs!
- He also figured out that disabling Chatzilla and using some userChrome.css hax for messing with the throbber unveiled some possible obscure bug soup that led to hogs like the MercadoLibre case. Yes, hacking the throbber graphic (which is some ancient animated GIF) made a positive impact on browser performance. WTF. Oh, that means double WTF for me as I have removed the throbber from my customized classic FF UI, yet changing the (still hidden) throbber nuked the hogs for good.


There is still not an official cause established, much less an integrated fix, but at least I now have a set of reliable workarounds (scroll fast, or userChrome.css hax) to stop turning my poorly-cooled laptop into a furnace, because modern webdevs are a bunch of incompetent "ooooh shiny Macs!" morons :/


In other news, have some AssholeMoon drama for today, involving our dear Seamonkey:
https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=26341
Wonder if Tobin will even learn the very valuable skill of "put the keyboard away"... Nah.

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 21-03-18, 13:53 in Internet numbers bragging thread
Dinosaur

Post: #918 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
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Connection has been flaky for the last hour, where the phone line dropped dead about 30 minutes ago.

Right now it seems to be back up:

...but I can see some shitbag from the CANTV Mafia stealthy reminding me for the bi-yearly payola :/

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Posted on 21-03-23, 23:40 in (Mis)adventures on Debian ((old)stable|testing|aghmyballs) (revision 2)
Dinosaur

Post: #919 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
Last view: 4 hours
Posted by wertigon
Posted by tomman
Kernel 5.10 (which is now available for us Debian Stable plebs via the magic of buster-backports) breaks TRIM on NTFS partitions mounted via ntfs-3g (what else?):
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211167

Workarounds:

- Boot to kernel 5.9 when you need to TRIM your NTFS partitions.
- Revert the offending patch as seen on the bugreport, then build your own kernel.
- Consider migrating away from NTFS, if possible.
- Wait for the next kernel release.


Wait, people still use NTFS on anything other than their Windows OS partitions? Didn't Windows get native file system support for ext4 a while back?

Many of us still dual-boot.

MS never released EXT2/3/4 support, instead there are many 3rd-party drivers for it (my choice is Ext2fsd). But those are kinda useless if you want to store native Windows executables there, as UAC will not let run any executable not stored on any of the "blessed" filesystems: FAT/exFAT/UDF/ISO9660, and of course, NTFS. The list is hardcoded, so no chance to expand it, and your only other option would be to be fool enough to shoot yourself at your foot turn off UAC. I tried with UDF years ago, and sadly no OS really fully supports UDF for anything other than read-only optical media (I had written a long thread on the topic years ago on the long defunct bBoards)

At least I can get POSIX file permissions on NTFS under Linux, but it's a minor hell on itself (suddenly you also have to deal with executable permissions under Windows too!), which is another hard requirement for me. But then, exFAT is supposedly a first class citizen under Linux these days (mostly thanks to Samsung), so I'll have to revisit the whole "filesystem interoperability" topic someday. Nevermind, it sounds like exFAT can't do file permissions at all, so I guess I'll be stuck with NTFS(-3G) until the day democracy comes back to Soviet Venezuela :/

Licensed Pirate® since 2006, 100% Buttcoin™-free, enemy of All Things JavaScript™
Dinosaur

Post: #920 of 1282
Since: 10-30-18

Last post: 4 days
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Hmmm... I hadn't learned that Paragon is opensourcing their kernelmode NTFS driver for Linux. Even better: they're trying to get it included in the mainline kernel!

https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/08/paragon_ntfs_linux/

If this dream comes true, I can pretty much forget about the crippled mess of exFAT/UDF/whatever, also get rid of the massive performance hit of FUSE junk, and this will cement NTFS as the most useful cross-platform filesystem (at least for dual-booters), leaving ideological concerns aside (I don't care about those - I just want something that WORKS).

Here are the things I need for a cross-platform filesystem, in recap:

- POSIX permissions (the "rwx" model): NTFS-3G can emulate those through native NTFS ACLs, but it requires a mapping file (.NTFS-3G/UserMapping) to be created beforehand. They will screw up things a bit under Windows (you need to manually set your .EXEs as executable under either Windows or Linux, which for me is a nice security bonus)
- Symbolic links: NTFS supports those natively, but for some reason, NTFS-3G instead relies on the long-gone Interix symlink format, which is alien to NTFS.
- Large files (>4GiB): basically anything but FAT can do that nowadays.
- Reliable filesystem checking tools: Sadly NTFS-3G is lacking those, but at least I get the option to reboot to Windows and use good ol' CHKDSK. Much better than my miserable experience with UDF, where Windows XP had no write support at all, while Windows 7 would turn the whole drive read-only if it found something weird, and their CHKDSK UDF support would completely REFUSE to even recognize UDF partitions on a 1TB drive! And Linux got nothing at all after all those years, because the "U" in UDF is for "Useless on anything that is not an ROM optical disc".
- Kernelmode drivers: not an option for NTFS under Linux... but not for long?
- Play nice with UAC: This one is on Microsoft - why in the hell they had to come up with a HARDCODED "approved filesystem list" to decide if you could run executables from any media?! This is the kicker that keeps me locked in to NTFS :/

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