Onno (VK6FLAB)

Anything and everything Amateur Radio and beyond. Heavily into Open Source and SDR, working on a multi band monitor and transmitter.

#geek #nerd #hamradio VK6FLAB #podcaster #australia #ITProfessional #voiceover #opentowork

  • 30 Posts
  • 384 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • I think that the missing link for the fediverse is the user interface that most users see.

    This is oxymoronic given that the original Reddit looks eerily similar to Lemmy today, but it’s not just looks I’m talking about.

    Moderation and usability tools, bots, blocks, filtering and spam control need to go through several iterations before we can actually grow this community.

    Search is another issue, as is post deletion. Right now a post vanishes, but all the stuff hanging off it is still there. This makes for a complex user experience.

    Finally, Lemmy appears to be run by developers who appear to be interested in their own issues and regularly appear to dismiss issues raised by users. This is not sustainable.

    I consider myself a user of the fediverse before I’m a Lemmy or Mastodon user. We have a way to go before this settles down.


  • At one point, before we virtualised everything, I had a custom desk built in an L-shape. Instead of a desk and a return, I had the refurbishment team put together a desk with two desks instead. It gave me two sets of drawers, two computer cubby holes and the gap was too small for the horrible keyboard adjustable shelf that kept hitting your knees, so they replaced it with a fixed surface instead.

    People laughed.

    Colleagues sniggered.

    Then they wanted one too.

    Now I have a mobile lectern with an iMac clamped to it. Height adjustable, wheels, enough space for keyboard, trackpad and USB hub. I move around my office as the mood or light takes me.


  • I am part of the Reddit exodus. I’m here because I have no interest in promoting or supporting the atrocious policies that now govern Reddit.

    The pace here is different, but the interactions feel more measured.

    Based on being online since 1990, I’m comfortable with being an “early adopter”, even though I’ve only been here for a few months and Lemmy is five years old.

    Will Lemmy survive? Who knows. The horse and buggy didn’t, neither did Yahoo!, MySpace or Google+, but here we are nonetheless.

    I like it here.







  • Whilst I agree with your opinion, it continues to astonish me that the majority of non-technical people using a search engine have absolutely no idea just how bad the search landscape has become.

    I suppose my question did probably exclude that part of the population, but old habits die hard.

    I still use + and - to exclude search terms until I remember that Google+ broke that and I forgot just how ad infested the internet is until I accidentally click on a piece of empty space in an article that would have an ad, were it not for the pihole in my network.

    So, yeah. Point taken.



  • I’m going to answer your points below. Not because I want to tell you to move to Linux, but because the information you state is incorrect. Linux is not for everybody. It works for millions of people and it works for me, but that doesn’t mean it will be what you’re looking for.

    In order:

    1. There are no .exe files. Neither are there any on MacOS, iOS, Android, or anything else that isn’t Windows/DOS. To start software requires that it’s on the search path in exactly the same way that Windows requires. You can see what that is with the command: echo $PATH. Most Linux distributions have a graphical user interface which features icons and menus, but if you don’t want that, you don’t need to install it.

    2. You absolutely can, but it doesn’t work the same way as Windows, because it’s not Windows. You can for example login to Linux because the login manager started at system startup. You see a desktop after logging in because there’s a startup system for your account. The printer works because the software driving the print queue is started.

    3. Wine is a tool. It’s not a replacement for Windows. It’s not intended to be. It’s intended to help users and developers make Windows software work better on Linux.

    4. LibreOffice is one of many office suites. I have been using it as my productivity software for 25 years in my company and I’m not at all disappointed to have escaped the Microsoft Clippy, Ribbons, Office365 abominations.

    5. I have used Libre Calc for most of my numerical analysis processes. I used real tools like R and gnuplot when I was analyzing terabytes of data.

    6. The terminal is a tool. I use it daily. At any time there’s a dozen of them open. Not everyone needs a terminal, but there are plenty of things that you can only do in a terminal. A random example, list all the files in your account, group them by extension, then add up how much space each extension takes. In case you’re wondering:

    find ~ -type f | egrep -o "\.[a-zA-Z0-9]+$" | sort -u | LC_ALL=C xargs -I '%' find . -type f -name "*%" -exec du -ch {} + -exec echo % \; | egrep "^\.[a-zA-Z0-9]+$|total$" | uniq | paste - -

    Source: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/457241

    Linux is not Windows. It never was and it never will be, neither is any other operating system. The community around Linux is helpful, the ecosystem is vibrant and it’s free. If you want to pay for support, you can. If you don’t, there’s plenty of opportunity to do your own thing.

    If you want it to be like Windows, you’re going to be very disappointed.






  • I found that it didn’t all come off on the first attempt. I used a cool shower and washed it off. Soap didn’t seem to help, but if I recall, it was a few years ago, sorbolene did help wash it off.

    Ultimately it’s likely still in your pores and causing grief. I was still pulling hairs off days later.

    I didn’t need an immediate result, so not quite the perilous journey that you are experiencing.

    Good luck.


  • As a young and naive teenager I hitchhiked from Enschede to Breda in the Netherlands.

    At one point I was dropped off at the flyover intersection between two freeways in the middle of nowhere - inasmuch as that is actually possible in the Netherlands.

    I stood there with my thumb up for quite a while and looking around me considered just how much humanity had interfered and interacted with the landscape, roads, lights, fences, dikes, pastures, crops, all around as far as the eye could see.

    In stark contrast, I now live in Australia and you can drive between where I live in Perth and an inland city, Kalgoorlie, about 600 km away. Pull over on the side of the road between towns and walk 50m off the road and there’s a good chance that you’re the first person to stand there in a century, if not a millennium or ever.





  • It’s a package management system in the same way that Flatpack, yum, apt-get, snap and dozens of others are.

    If you use MacOS and Linux, it’s not inconceivable that you might want to use the same package management system across both.

    I’ve used it, didn’t particularly warm to it and didn’t install it on my most recent MacOS install after it shat all over itself on a previous installation.

    I didn’t know that it was available for Linux. Not tempted to try.

    I’m a firm believer in apt-get and failing that, Docker with side journeys into podman.