pathartl

I've been on an extended getaway trying to escape Wisconsin winters, so I brought my Steam Deck. I installed a 1TB SSD and created a 300GB Windows partition. At the end of the work day I can unplug my corporate laptop and plug in my Steam Deck. I'll do some .NET programming for a bit on a side project, and then jump on Valheim with friends. At the end of the day when I just want to sit on the couch or lay in bed I can undock and reboot into SteamOS.

It's not a perfect experience. Some of the Windows drivers could use some work. I would rather be running Visual Studio on my desktop at home. Performance in games like Valheim is maybe around 40FPS average... but I would seriously ask the question what other $400 device with a $150 SSD upgrade could product the same results.

It's worth noting that article is from 2007 and is not fully representative of text rendering in modern Windows.

No, I don't care. If an Apple user signs up for Find My on their laptop, then their laptop is stolen and they don't try to use Find My to recover it... I don't know man. It's a "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" situation. Meanwhile it provides the benefit where if you're sold a machine and the original seller can't be contacted to unlock it, it gets automatically unlocked some timespan later. It's not perfect, but it's better than the current situation.

So the answer to thwarting crime is just to have every device lucked and make the machines completely useless? Which just indirectly makes transferring the device to legitimate next owners harder?

I get it, people are conditioned to vendor lock in because of cell phones. In reality it's incredibly wasteful. I'm still not convinced the current way of doing things is best for the consumer.

Apple has no problem building features assuming people have more than one Apple device. Hell, AirPods can't update unless someone has an iPhone.

Nah, send it out via notifications on other macOS or iOS systems. Have it available in Find My.

I feel like there's some sort of middle ground here. If a device is still registered to the original owner, notify the original owner and give them a grace period where they can permanently lock down the device. After that grace period, the device automatically unlocks. Having to provide the sale receipt feels more like vendor lock in than actual security.

I really don't understand the argument for this situation. The drives are encrypted, right? Why can't the drive just be formatted and the system reused? The data is the thing that's important here, no?

My biggest gripe is when people don't document fixes. This whole rabbit hole started because Hasselblad removed the software downloads from their site and the rest of the community doesn't really have a clue when it comes to software preservation. Flat CMS's are important to the process as well. It looks like Archive.org picked up on the page because of this post and made a couple snapshots: https://web.archive.org/web/20230126040120/https://pathar.tl...

Yep, totally understand. I'd thought about refurbing these as a side business since there seems to be quite a bit of scratch to be made.

I mentioned this in another comment, but sometimes people who are dealing with these systems just don't dive in far enough either. I was able to get my FlexTight scanner working on Windows 11 64-bit by modifying the INF for some existing 64-bit drivers. For some reason nobody had tried this before, or even just documented it. Even if there were no 64-bit drivers I've gotten it to work on a Windows 10 32-bit install.

Especially in the photo world there's so much tech being used, but not a lot of people that understand the implementation/engineering of it. Not faulting them, but I can't tell you how many people I know that just work off external drives. No NAS, no backups, just originals spread across fragile external hard drives. Hell, I knew some people that up until ~2011 still stored originals on ZIP disks and never managed to move them to something a bit more stable.

Going back and working on older Macs is an absolute pain. Now there's four separate architectures that may or may not have the right software/driver at varying levels of implementation. It's amazing how often the answer is "just use Windows". Not that it's perfect, but at least you weren't dumped like last week's spaghetti.

My dad used to produce prints in the 90's with a hybrid digital/film workflow. Scan with a FlexTight -> post in Photoshop -> write back to 4x5 with a LaserGraphics film recorder -> darkroom printing. Using this process he did up to I want to say 40x48 prints.

They might have a patent on this particular setup, but the FlexTight system produces worse results compared to traditional drum scanning. Due to the way it uses a lens between the CCD sensor and the drum also means that you get some quality issues around the edges of larger frames. It also means you can't scan large formats like 8x10. It's cool tech and it is a shame that it's stuck behind patents, but it's not like there's not other options out there.

Also the hardware is funny. IIRC they didn't iterate on the actual components much, and the move to FireWire basically just integrated a SCSI->FireWire adapter into the case. I haven't seen the inside of an X1/X5, but I'd be interested if these could be repaired by using a different SCSI adapter of some type.

Hey! I took a dive into the FlexTight scanners late last year and actually got my FlexTight Precision II to work on 64-bit Windows 11: https://pathar.tl/resources/flextight https://pathar.tl/resources/flexcolor

Through various driver discs and archived files online I was able to compile some resources and threw them up on Archive.org (available on the FlexColor page of my site).

Let me know if you have any questions!

You can revert back with a registry change. Not ideal I guess, but it's still doable.

How is it trying to be macOS? Because they centered the start bar?

It's not some magic bullet. It helps a ton with trying to give names to obfuscated function and variable names, but you have to be intelligent enough to know what the code's actually doing. It probably helps RE teams a lot, but until it can easily run across an entire codebase it's just another tool in the toolbox.

I've been using it paired with Ghidra to give me a better idea of what's going on. It helped me create a no-CD crack for an old game.

I think for me most of it is the UI upgrade, because it's really taking 20 years of UI/UX and updating/unifying it.

I'm in the minority I think. I love Windows 11. It's the biggest refresh since Vista without the stability issues.

I moved my personal blog to Grav a couple of years ago:

https://pathar.tl/

https://getgrav.org/

There are plugins for WordPress to generate markdown files from your posts and then you can import that into Grav. I self-host this in Docker and find it much more pleasing to actually write things. Statamic is another similar markdown-based CMS that I've been eyeballing.

We've been on iTextSharp 5 for a decade for this reason.

Using HTML/CSS for PDFs really just isn't a good idea in my experience. It makes layout extremely cumbersome. If you just need to spit some data out onto a page, sure it works I guess. However, doing more complex page layout with an actual design element often introduces scenarios where a markup language just can't work.

Coming from the web dev space into backend on a project that heavily relies on PDF generation, I would say that something like a PDF often cannot be expressed with just markup and a stylesheet. There's a large difference in something like the web (it must be expressed with some fluidity of layout) compared to a very static document like a PDF. Page breaks, readability, print supply, watermarks, paging, etc all has to be considered.

> On the other hand I appreciate the hackability, and it is your data.

I really think this is the wrong attitude and the result of boiling frogs. Having access to data on our devices should be a given. To me it makes me think of the non-touch iPods of yesteryear. Music files were obfuscated on the device by shoving into human-unfriendly folders and filenames. The argument that this was to avoid music piracy is laughable since we originally had DRM'd music for downloads. The database was proprietary and undocumented which meant the only real way to get music on the device was through iTunes. It also meant that unless your ID3 tags were really good and you went through the process to copy all the tracks off and rename them, your music was locked to your device.

Even then, at least you _had_ a way of getting your music back. I'm not going to say E2EE isn't good or that the security protocols put into place for modern OS's isn't important, but imo it's eroding ownership of data and killing third party businesses. Everything has to be done through a web API now, which means your data has to exist in the cloud. This isn't good.

That's still not access to the data. That's limited access to data that Apple allows. I remember when Tinder stored their messages in a local unencrypted SQLite database. I wanted to save the conversations between my GF and myself, but I had to get an Android phone and extract the db manually as I couldn't do that with my iPhone at the time.

Certainly, there needs to be an entry for Visual Studio

I would assume it's rolled into the iCloud subscription after two years

Yep, this is too little too late. In my opinion it's like Apple making lightning open. Sure the form might be slightly more attractive, but there's limitations that just can't be overcome.

.NET Core 2 to 3 definitely had this feeling that their vision for the framework wasn't complete. Going from 5 -> 6 -> is pretty painless.

We are also preparing for a move from .NET Framework 4.7.2 to .NET 6/7. It's going to be quite the project.