• 0 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 5th, 2023

help-circle


  • Definitely dislike MS, generations of my workstations have small, yellow “Microsoft Free Workstation” stickers on their monitors, but VSCodium (in my case) is not really bad.

    Also I really like the Xbox360 console and (as a hacker and maker) still love the first Kinnect. The Kinnect is an excellent piece of sensor-hardware, was rather cheap when purchased in used condition and it works very well with Linux.


  • You can start with The Uber files, which “is a global investigation into a trove of 124,000 confidential documents from the tech company that were leaked to the Guardian.”

    Summary

    Uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments, leak reveals

    Some examples:

    • The cache of more than 124,000 internal Uber files lays bare the ethically questionable practices through which the company barged its way into new markets, often where existing laws or regulations made its operations illegal, before lobbying aggressively for those same laws or regulations to be altered to accommodate it. Read here
    • Senior executives at Uber ordered the use of a “kill switch” to prevent police and regulators from accessing sensitive data during raids on its offices in at least six countries. Read here
    • Two of Barack Obama’s most senior presidential campaign advisers, David Plouffe and Jim Messina, discussed helping Uber get to access leaders, officials and diplomats. Read here
    • At least six UK government ministers, including the then chancellor, George Osborne, and the future health secretary Matt Hancock, did not declare secret meetings at which they were lobbied by Uber. Read here
    • The inside story of how Uber used its connections to the Conservative party to lobby Boris Johnson in a rearguard effort to stop Transport for London introducing new regulations. Read here
    • One of Uber’s top executives quit amid questions for the company about whether its European operations were structured in a way that avoided tax. Read here
    • Uber secretly hired a political operative linked to Russian oligarchs allegedly aligned with Vladimir Putin in an attempt to secure its place in the Russian market, despite internal bribery concerns. Read here

    […]

    As Bonus some older articles about their overall ethics and practices:



  • Looks like a really nice and useful initiative.

    Suggestion to the owners of the SFD webpage

    I would appreciate the SFD initiative even more, if on the SFD webpage you would “live by your own words”.

    Facebook and the blue bird are by no means free software, also not according to your definitions “free to study [how the program works]”, “free to distribute [copies]”, “free to modify [the software]”, “free to access [the source code]”.

    So why not at least show the benefits and use FOSS social media alternatives in action?
    If you need the momentum of the unfree social media, you still could do this additionally.








  • MetaGer is a German meta search engine (utilizing several search engines in the back). UI and results are of course available in many languages.

    https://metager.org | https://metager.de

    From their About page:

    What makes MetaGer special?

    MetaGer is different from other search engines. This is reflected not only in our public good orientation and focus on privacy, but also through some unique features:

    • Possibility of creating a personal blacklist
    • Function of the search in the search
    • Advertising-free search possible
    • Integration of search engine projects like YaCy
    • The only German search engine that combines results from several large web indexes
    • And much more…

    What We Stand For

    Guaranteed Privacy

    Data protection and privacy are important to us. That’s why we don’t track or store personal data and offer several services to protect your privacy, for example our anonymizing proxy (“Open Anonymously” feature).

    Non-Profit Association

    MetaGer is a project of the non-profit association SUMA-EV, Association for Free Access to Knowledge. SUMA-EV is primarily committed to promoting media literacy.

    Diverse and Free

    MetaGer produces diverse results because it is a metasearch engine. We have explained exactly what this means in our transparency statement. By publishing our source code, we show that free access to knowledge is important to us. Our source code is free and open source.

    100% Renewable Energy

    Sustainability and resource consumption is also a big issue for us. Therefore we pay attention to the energy consumption of our services and only use electricity from renewable energy sources.


  • If you are unhappy with suggested XSane, but only want an OSS solution, I do not know a good alternative.

    Possible non-OSS solution

    Although I am an open source enthusiast, there are few application where I use commercial, even non-OSS solutions on Linux. One of this exceptions is for scanning.

    Background: I “administrate” some legacy Epson scanners used with my family’s Linux boxes and got them all to run with a software called VueScan, with the following restrictions:

    • Perfection 3490 worked out of the box, no drivers required
    • Perfection 3170 requires Epson drivers (iscan_2.10.0-2_i386.deb, iscan-plugin-gt-9400_1.0.0-2_i386.deb), but only runs on 32bit Linux
    • Perfection V30 requires Epson drivers (scan-gt-f720-bundle-2.30.4.x64.deb.tar.gz) and simply works on 64bit Debian

    As you see, it might be a bit of luck, if a device works out of the box or not.

    Unfortunately your Epson Stylus SX435W seems not to be listed under the supported Epson devices (click red button “All drivers” to see all supported Epson scanners).

    If you happen to find no solution, I suggest to use the trial version of VueScan and check if your Epson simply runs or not.

    EDIT: sorry, I forgot to mention. that the VueScan GUI has plenty of those processing options you are searching for.





  • marv99@feddit.detoMemes@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    You can use the same Windshield in winter and summer (I did many years). When it is used from outside, it helps even more against the temperature.

    It is a bit more fun though, to use one with big eyes to be positioned inside and make your car look like from Cars movie. Example on Pinterest

    We have the red version (strangely ours was much cheaper here in Germany than what I just found on Walmart website) in our little red Toyota and aside from keeping the car cooler it is looking really cute.


  • Let the religious shell wars begin … again

    Only right answer is of course TCSH. Not much documentation and support, ancient but still receives new bugs in 2021 (on Debian), but attackers hate it! (I love it)

    My real suggestion is to learn zsh and fish (and bash). Try using them for all your purposes and in the end you will automatically find the one (or more of them) that suits you best and that you like most for your daily tasks.