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hommelix

279 karma · joined February 26, 2022

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hommelix··on Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundary Himalayan basin 2022
It is supposed that such an event happened, when the land between continental Europe and England got flooded. This was as well during a warmer period when glacier melted. And there was human population on that land.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland

hommelix··on Water system controllers don't belong on the internet, says ex-NSA chief
> The best thing they could do to new PLC's would be to have the src code live alongside the firmware inside. So any new person would be able to open it and reason about it.

This is already the case. Some PLC allows you to store and retrieve the source code of the programmed directly in the flash of the PLC. Sometimes this feature is behind a higher access level or password.

hommelix··on Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard
Great look! Do you plan ISO layout as well (German, French, etc)?
hommelix··on I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux
I'm happy with my Fairphone FP4 with LineageOS, but that just one datapoint.
hommelix··on I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux
Currently Google is planning to lock down the Android platform to only Google Play store software repository. See https://keepandroidopen.org/ for more info.
hommelix··on Replacing the Kobo Libra H2O Battery
The H2O model is water tight. Is there anything about seal on the outer shell to take care of?
hommelix··on Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped
> - I'm itching at the chance to build my own phone operating system, and there must be thousands of others who want to do the same.

Maybe look into contributing to existing alternatives like PostmarketOS.

https://postmarketos.org/

hommelix··on SQLite should have (Rust-style) editions
The oldest `editions` idea I know of, is with Perl. For 20 years it was already common to write `use 5.18` to activate multiple options.

https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/use

hommelix··on Our Amish Language
I've often read on church in Flander "onze lieve vrouw", but I had read that there is no word in Dutch for love. Instead, one would say "ik hou van jouw" which I translate as "I'm attached to you". Could it be in Pennsylvania Dutch a similar situation, due to some lineage between the languages?
hommelix··on 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero
Come now to south of Germany. We are in the middle of a 10 days heatwave at 35 degC on average.
hommelix··on SMTP Relay with Web Dashboard
For this very simple relay, there are lightweight alternative like msmtp.

https://packages.debian.org/trixie/msmtp

hommelix··on Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly
I've read some people replace notepad with Notepad2e [1]. I personally use vim as my text editor.

[1] https://github.com/ProgerXP/Notepad2e

hommelix··on Your ePub Is fine
> This is patently false, the latest Kobo Libra Color is using secure boot which completely locks out custom development: > > https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=363175

Thanks for the link on mobileread. I was not aware of current development in direction of secure boot / chain of trust.

Not OP, but when I was looking for an e-reader, I looked up the Pinenote. I could not find easily a lot of information on its software state. I could find a lot on Kobo hacking. I notably found https://anarc.at/hardware/tablet/kobo-clara-hd/ and this motives me to get a second hand Clara HD for less than 100$. It was way cheaper than starting with 400$ and unknown software state.

hommelix··on Build Adafruit projects right from Firefox
Now with Webxxx, the user needs to make sure that it is the right URL, not a fake teanns instead of teams, so he is unsure every time he has to use it. Some random download, once it works, can be reused and you have more trust that it works after the trial was positive.

And if it is open source, you can review the code before compiling. I can't review the code of some random server, as my browser only receives a random wasm binary for example.

hommelix··on Reviving old scanners with an in-browser Linux VM bridged to WebUSB over USB/IP
Sane works out of the box on Linux (at least in my limited experience). There are front ends for Windows and MacOS [1]. No need for a browser in the loop. The browser is becoming more and more Emacs... An operating system that happens to be a browser.

[1] http://sane-project.org/sane-frontends.html

hommelix··on Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
> SEPA Instant Payments also solves that.

Even more than now there is a QR code format for SEPA Instant Payments. Some invoice have a QR code and when it is scanned with a bank app, the fields for a bank transfer are prefilled. IBAN, amount, etc...

We just need an app to generate this QR code for the amount one wants to request.

hommelix··on Claude for Small Business
In that video over Madagascar, the lowest tier jobs on AI tagging is at 1 €/3h of tagging, beating the Kenyan price.
hommelix··on Claude for Small Business
Oh no! The ones working at 120€/month are the happy few. This is above mid range income in Madagascar. I just wanted to point out that this is not all automated running on GPUs. There are people involved, more than I thought before viewing this video.
hommelix··on Claude for Small Business
By coincidence, I've looked yesterday a small documentary [1] about the people tagging all those invoices to train theses models. For 120 €/month they are reading about 1000 to 4000 invoices per day and check and tag them for AI training.

[1] https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/126831-000-A/arte-reportage/

hommelix··on SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites
There is already some trash flying around in space from decommissioned satellites. Reentering the atmosphere needs some energy to initiate the process and that was/is not always planned for. The combustion during reentry is producing CO2. This CO2 emission will scale up when the number of satellites is scaled up.

The alternative of collecting debris in space is discussed by some space agencies. I really don't think it is a good behavior from SpaceX to put more trash in space and let public money take care of the cleanup later.

hommelix··on Docker 29 has changed its default image store for new installs
> Docker Engine includes an experimental feature that can automatically switch to the containerd image store under certain conditions. This feature is experimental. It's provided for those who want to test it, but starting fresh is the recommended approach.

How bad did we fall with the ship often, ship early and fix later idea? Make a major change, release it and the migration feature is experimental and not recommended.

hommelix··on Filing the corners off my MacBooks
Older Thinkpad were made without the sharp edge. I love the edge on the X230 and I've been wondering why no designer has taken a look at these to make new laptop.

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

hommelix··on 12k Tons of Dumped Orange Peel Grew into a Landscape Nobody Expected (2017)
At some sites, the methane is burned in gas engine to generate electricity. Some sites build a CHP and resales the heat for district heating. The engines may need more maintenance due to silicate in the gas.
hommelix··on Fatbikes are wreaking havoc in Sydney's wealthy beach suburbs
Great story, and I believe you. I go through similar slope to work, 5 to 15%, 120 m altitude difference. Doing it daily since Covid has improved my fitness a lot. I fully believe that doing something like you in my teenager days would have shaped me differently.
hommelix··on Topological Naming Problem
The wiki page explains that as from Freecad 1.0, the work done by Realthunder in the topological naming problem has been merged into Freecad. Not that everything is solved. Just to mention that the work of Real thunder was not lost.
hommelix··on Topological Naming Problem
This is described in the wiki page, at the section solution.
hommelix··on Show HN: Simple org-mode web adapter
An alternative proposed on orgmode website would be organice. https://organice.200ok.ch/
hommelix··on France's homegrown open source online office suite
Visio here is most likely a shorted "visioconférence", the French word for video conference, or online meeting.
hommelix··on Pong Cam – My ESP32S3 Thinks It's a WebCam
It reminds me that I want to get one of these ESP32 Sense module with a camera, to build a rear view camera for my bike rack behind the car.
hommelix··on De-dollarization: Is the US dollar losing its dominance? (2025)
Thanks for sharing this except of the book.
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