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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)AC
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491
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2 yr. ago
  • I heard it on a BBC radio interview yesterday. The original creators were angling to create a way for Craiglist personal adds to have videos of people pitching themselves to potential dates. It turned out to be a flop, so they steered it toward general videos of any kind.

    (edit) found it

  • Buy it for Life @slrpnk.net
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    Accidental nearly BiFL goods; tracking prolonged static design consistency and parts compatibility -- Thinkpads & Whirlpool vs. short-lived competitor designs

    IBM Thinkpads have a cult following in part due to not just a good design out of the gate, but the fact that the original designer refused to bend to pressure to change the design every year. The parts are interchangable to large extent between models spanning what, 3—5 years? The guy was under constant pressure; was told to give consumers something fresh by changing up the design. Luckily wisdom prevailed and he disregarded such reckless advice by responding with the mantra: ”if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

    I’m happy to buy Thinkpads over 15 years old, often sold for ~$10 on the street, because if something is broken or breaks it can still be used for parts to fix other models of Thinkpads from roughly the same decade.

    Lenovo acquired Thinkpad from IBM and gradually fucked it up around the T410 or T450 models as they gave in to the demand of consumers giving a shit about shaving off every gram of weight possible at the expense of ditching rugged rollcages and ditching features

    Bug reports on any software @sopuli.xyz
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    OSMand loses addresses when favourites are edited

    If an existing point of interest is on the map and you add a favourite with the POI highlighted, the address field is automatically correctly populated with the street address. But when the favourite is later edited for any trivial reason (e.g. to change the name or description), the address information is lost. The field is cleared.

    deGoogle @discuss.tchncs.de
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    How to support your national postal svc w/out spending your own money -- deGoogle & fend off surveillance advertisers (Danes move along; this won’t work for you; perhaps not Americans either)

    cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21474120

    Tl;dr: deliver snail-mail by hand

    Most corporations and gov agencies have outsourced email service to a highly unethical corporation (Microsoft). Every time you send an email to a recipient who uses MS for email service, you feed profitable data to a surveillance advertiser who snoops on email payloads for profit. You also reveal to the recipient your email address which they can use to feed profitable data to the surveillance advertiser beyond your control for an indefinite time.

    It’s baffling how many people think this is a good idea.

    As a Microsoft boycotter, I have naturally reverted back to old-fashioned snail mail. If the recipient is in my city, I personally hand-deliver the letter to their mailbox. Costs me nearly nothing. The recipient who is typically a gov agency or corporation is generally forced to respond using the national postal service (as I withhold email addresses from the correspondence). And rig

    degoogle @europe.pub
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    Repairers face an ultamatim: lick Google’s boots or create e-waste. How can local govs fix this problem?

    cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21474523

    Youtube was originally a match-making/dating site. Sadly it expanded beyond that into a technofeudal fiefdom that takes 45% of ad revenue from contributors. YouTube has amassed a rich collection of repair videos, both general repair and specific repairs to specific problems on particular appliances. It guts me that a protectionist unethical surveillance advertiser has exclusive control over repair information that they have jailed, restricted access to, and held hostage from all but their boot-licking pawns (3 billion of them). Google has recently locked down the platform to prevent the Tor network for fetching the content while also going around with a stick to swat the Invidious nodes that make fetching videos possible.

    Google’s assault on user freedoms has ensured (for example) that I cannot go to the library (which has an uncapped Internet connection) and download videos covering how to repair my appliances so that I can

    zerowaste @slrpnk.net
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    Petitioning for local govs to open up junk yards

    cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21474632

    All my local junkyards accept e-waste but they bounce anyone who shows up with a screwdriver. Once a machine is dumped, it becomes the property of the junkyard who sees repairers who remove stuff as a threat to their bottom line, which comes from the melt value of the metals. I cannot even pay for the parts even if I wanted. I have been kicked out of junkyards enough times that the whole staff recognises me now. It’s really fucked up that the shitty melt value of the metals is prioritised above consumers will to repair.

    The disposal chain goes like this:

    1. consumer dumps appliance waste (sometimes straight to the dump, sometimes to an org in step 2)
    2. some org that decides if the thing is broken or not
    3. if it works → goes to a charity to resell
    4. if reparable → goes to a charity to fix and resell
    5. if “non-repairable” → broken down for proper disposal

    That last step uses scare quotes because they are p

    zerowaste @slrpnk.net
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    Should local govs establish a centralized DB to track discarded appliances and notify repairers?

    cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21474636

    If I have a Whirlpool machine model XYZ, broken or not I should be able to add a record to a DB that says notify me if a machine of that model is disposed of so I can pick it up for parts or come and just remove a part that I need.

    Yes, this means staff in the e-waste disposal services would need to look up the model of every item disposed to see if a repairer wants to be contacted. Is that too much to ask?

    Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ @lemmy.dbzer0.com
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    We need a piracy exception written into law for service manuals and wiring diagrams -- and we need repair pros to share the docs. How can local govs make this happen?

    cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21474519

    Not sure if a local gov could get away with this. Is it sensible to ask the local gov take formal actions to declare copyright as unenforcable on things like service manuals and wiring diagrams, which product makers protect almost like trade secrets? It’s not likely enforced anyway, but a formal step would be needed before leaked service manuals could be distributed by public libraries.

    In the EU, manufacturers must share repair docs with third-party /insured/ repair professionals (not consumers) for some specific products like washing machines.

    Using a stick

    Would it be sensible for a local law to require those professionals who have privileged access to repair docs to share whatever they obtain in the course of their work with a public library?

    using a carrot

    Would it be sensible for a policy to compensate professionals who have privileged access to repair docs for sharing whatever they ob

    Right To Repair @midwest.social
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    What right to repair policy/actions can be implemented LOCALLY? What should go into an R2R petition sent to city council?

    Right to repair laws are very slowly emerging at state, national, and international (EU) levels -- to a paltry and nearly useless extent, I must say.

    The question is, what can be done by regional/local governments who seem to just be passively sitting on this? What should we petition for locally, as the state/national/intl efforts continue to be a shit show? Small local govs would not likely have the power or influence to twist the arms of product makers. But it seems we should be demanding they do something.

    My brainstorm so far, captured as a link farm:

    Right to be Offline / Analog / Unplugged @sopuli.xyz
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    How to support your national postal svc w/out spending your own money -- while fending off surveillance advertisers (Danes move along; this won’t work for you; perhaps not Americans either)

    Tl;dr: deliver snail-mail by hand

    Most corporations and gov agencies have outsourced email service to a highly unethical corporation (Microsoft). Every time you send an email to a recipient who uses MS for email service, you feed profitable data to a surveillance advertiser who snoops on email payloads for profit. You also reveal to the recipient your email address which they can use to feed profitable data to the surveillance advertiser beyond your control for an indefinite time.

    It’s baffling how many people think this is a good idea.

    As a Microsoft boycotter, I have naturally reverted back to old-fashioned snail mail. If the recipient is in my city, I personally hand-deliver the letter to their mailbox. Costs me nearly nothing. The recipient who is typically a gov agency or corporation is generally forced to respond using the national postal service (as I withhold email addresses from the correspondence). And rightfully so. It’s an extra perk that they pay a built-in postage pena

  • I would love to find a proper app for Lemmy, ideally non-graphical. I tried Neonmodemoverdrive and it was broken out of the box. I think I heard there is an emacs mode for Lemmy but didn’t keep track of it. I would love to find something that maintains a local copy of threads of interest and which synchronises with the server whenever I am online.

  • I was forced to use Alexandrite for quite a long time because the stock client was unusable on Ungoogled Chromium. But in the past couple months the stock UI has been working again with the exception of this thread. But that’s fixed as well, today at least.

  • Meta (slrpnk.net) @slrpnk.net
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    UI missing icons/actions.. e.g. no up/down vote, reply, etc. Did a recent Lemmy release try to do something fancy?

    Something broke. I think there was no problem when I last visited a couple days ago. Today all posts have only a down arrow for the spillover actions, no icons. If I move the mouse above where the icons /should/ be, the pointer turns into a finger. So the actions are still available but just invisible.

    (edit) when I use Firefox and enable displaying images, only then can I see icons. I normally use Ungoogled Chromium with images disabled (images dramatically increase my Internet costs). So I wonder if someone tried to get fancy and install images instead of icons from fonts.

    zerowaste @slrpnk.net
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    wisdom of button batteries -- anyone think they are a good idea?

    cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21299422

    My kitchen scale is powered by a cr2032 lithium button battery. Yes, it was sloppy of me to buy the scale without seeing how it was powered. I only use the scale once or twice per month, yet these shitty button batteries only last a few months. It seems like I only get about ~6—12 measurements before the battery is dead.

    WTF? This seems to defy physics. The scale automatically powers off. Of course it must always have some power because there is no ON switch. The scale detects capacitive touch taps or weight before turning on the display.

    Digital calipers use a button battery which also only gives a dozen or so measurements before the battery is dead. It seems the calipers power on when the case is snapped shut. Maybe the rattling causes it to power on since it’s very touchy. Turns on with the slightest movement.

    My bicycle helmet takes a cr2032, which only lasts a few months. Perhaps because it’s hard to remember

  • Did you try it? When I print the Pancake Corner menu page to PDF, it produces 10 pages of web junk and only one of those pages is the menu. The one page that is the menu only shows the cover of the menu (even if I have turned the page in the interactive application).

    I could perhaps inspect the code and work out a way to hack around the obsticles, but let me give some context: when planning to visit a city for which I do not live for a short time (maybe just 1 day), I do some searches on the kind of cuisine I would like and get a list of URLs to ~20—30 restaurants. The goal is to quickly accumulate a local copy of many menus which can be used not just in advance planning but to have them on my offline phone for on-the-fly decisions. Spending all day planning out a day is a bit impractical for the benefit. PDFs from HTML contain a lot of junk, not just the menu, which then has a purpose-defeatingly-poor UX for trying to quickly see a menu on a tiny phone screen while running from one attraction to the next.

    So in reality @Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe’s scenario plays out: the restaurant might lose my business because I cannot be bothered to go through all their hoops to get a menu in my local storage. Restaurants with easily reached PDFs have a business advantage because they are better exposed to get more of my attention. The other restaurants still have a chance if no menu seems enticing but they are a 2nd resort and may get lucky from my blind arbitrary selection.

  • your interpretation of my quote is incorrect

    Your words, quoted here again as proof that you have defined “repair” so narrowly as to exclude taking actions to restore a product to put back into service:

    I wouldn’t consider “hacking” a drive to continue using it when you shouldn’t a repair.

    What is your mother tongue that is so far from English?

    All I’ll say is I’m glad you have nothing to do with making the specifications for this sort of hardware and that it’s left to competent and educated engineers.

    You are really lost here. We actually agreed on the engineering decision (which was the decision to have a fail safe trigger). Again, the point of contention is the management decision to block property owners from control over their own property after they recover their data -- the management decision that forces useful hardware to be needlessly committed to e-waste after the data has been migrated. It is because you think the profit-driven management decision of a private enterprise is “engineering” makes you profoundly incompetent for involvement in engineering specs. But you might be able to do marketing or management at a company like Microsoft. Shareholders would at least love your corporate boot-licking posture and your propaganda rhetoric in framing management decisions as “engineering”.

    But plz, stay away from specs. Proper specs favor the consumers/users and community. They are not optimized to exploit consumers to enrich corporate suppliers and generate landfill.

  • Asshole Design (web edition) @infosec.pub
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    Dutch restaurant makes their PDF menu unfetchable in order to animate page turning

    I just don’t get why this shitty practice of embedding a JS PDF app in a web page seems to be proliferating. It’s not just restaurant menus. It’s store catalogs of all kinds, and community newsletters that are doing this stupid shit.

    They make their PDF menu undownloadable in order to present some fancy page turning animation that only works in some subset of browsers.

    I just visited websites of 19 Dutch restaurants hoping to download menus for offline use. Results:

    • 3 had downloadable PDFs
    • 2 had images that could be saved That’s it. The rest either had completely dysfunctional websites or interactive HTML or interactive PDF that could not be easily downloaded. HTML could be saved but that’s a shit show overall.. a disaster when trying to create an MHT file then try opening that from a smartphone.
  • Me providing an example of a repair is not me claiming it is the only method of repair.

    Luckily I quoted you, which shows that you have defined “repair” so narrowly as to exclude taking actions to restore a product to put back into service.

    Except, again, you aren’t making it useful again,

    Of course it’s useful again. To claim writing to a drive is not useful is to misunderstand how storage devices are useful.

    you’re attempting to bypass a fail safe put in place by engineers.

    No I’m not. The fail safe should remain. That much was well done by engineers and I would be outraged if it were not in place. I WANT my drive to go into read-only mode when it crosses a reliability threshhold. The contention is what happens after the fail safe -- after recovering the data. No one here believes the drive should not fail safe.

    The first paragraph quoted (and the article as whole) cover reads, different between different drives (including different specs for enterprise vs consumer) and how the values are drawn.

    Yes I read that. And? It’s immaterial to the discussion whether it’s an enterprise or consumer grade. Enterprise hardware still lands in the hands of consumers at 2nd-hand markets.

    10k is for intel 50nm MLC NAND specifically. Other values are presented in the article.

    And? Why do you think this is relevant to the nannying anti-repair discussion? It doesn’t obviate anything I have said. It’s just a red herring.

    It isn’t arbitrary as you’ve attempted to hand wave it as.

    Yes it is. Read your own source. They are counting write cycles to get an approximation of wear, not counting electrons that stick.

    It doesn’t matter how sophisticated the software standard is, the oxide on the drive will eventually wear down and is a physical problem.

    This supports what I have said. Extreme precision is not needed when we have software that gives redundancy to a user-specified extent and precisely detects errors.

    it doesn’t pass for right to repair imo.

    Denying owners control over their own property s.t. they cannot put it back into service is an assault on repair. Opposing the nannying is to advocate for a right to repair.

    It’s risking data loss to wring an extra 12 months (or likely, less) from a dying drive.

    You’re not grasping how the tech works. The 12 months is powered off state maintenance for reading. Again, you’re missing the reading and writing roles here. I’m not going to explain it again. Read your own source again.

    For every 1 person like you that its an annoyance for it saves multitudes more that are less savvy pointlessly risking data loss.

    This is a false dichotomy. It’s possible to protect the low tech novices without compromising experts from retaining control over their own product. This false dichotomy manifests from your erroneous belief that the fail safe contradicts an ability to reverse the safety switch after it triggers.

  • In this case it’s an “Apacer” drive.. some no name brand. It seems unlikely that I would be able to track down a responsive customer service worker. Seems like really a long-shot because even if I reach someone they will consider it a waste of their time and money that they are even talking to someone well after a warranty period is over. And from there, anything that enables someone to put a product back into service rather than buy a new drive is probably treated as a trade secret. Perhaps some social engineering could be used to reach an employee disgruntled enough to help.

  • I didn’t claim as such

    Luckily I quoted you, which shows that you have defined “repair” so narrowly as to exclude taking actions to restore a product to put back into service.

    and replacing a faulty or damaged module wouldn’t return it to factory condition.

    I never said it would. But more importantly, this is a red herring. I don’t accept your claim that it wouldn’t, but it’s a moot point because this is not the sort of repair I would do and it’s not likely worthwhile. The anti-repair tactic that I condemn is the one that blocks owners from hacks that make the device more useful than the read-only state.

    I wouldn’t consider “hacking” a drive to continue using it when you shouldn’t a repair.

    (emphasis mine) This is the nannying I am calling out. If someone can make a degraded product useful again, it’s neither your place nor the manufacturers place to tell advanced users/repairers not to -- to dictate what is appropriate.

    As far as I’m aware it’s to comply with JEDEC standards.

    It’s over-compliant. Also, we don’t give a shit about JEDEC standards after the drive is garbage. The standards are only useful during the useful life of the product. From your own source:

    In the consumer space you need that time to presumably transfer your data over.

    I need a couple weeks tops to transfer my data. It’s good that we get a year. Then what? The drive is as useful as a brick. And needlessly so.

    I just don’t see how using a drive into the period where it’s likely to fail and lose data,

    That’s because you’re not making the distinction between reading and writing, and understanding that it’s writing that fails. The fitness to write to a NAND declines gradually with each cycle. Every transistor is different. A transistor might last 11,943 cycles and it sits next to a transistor that lasts 10,392 cycles. They drew a line and said “10k writes is safe for this tech, so draw a line there and go into read-only mode when an arbitrary number of transistors have likely undergone 10k writes”.

    The telemetry on the device is not sophisticated enough to track exactly when a transistor’s state becomes ambiguous. So the best they could do is keep an avg cycle count which factors in a large safety margin for error. So of course it would be an insignificant risk to do 1 (or 5) more write cycles. Even if the straw that breaks the camel’s back is on the 1 additional write operation on a particular sector, we have software that is sophisticated enough to correct it. Have a look at par2.

    against specification,

    It’s not “against” the spec because the spec does not specify how we may use the drive. Rightfully so. The spec says the drive must remain readable for 1 year after crossing a threshhold (which BTW is determined by write cycle counts not actual ability to store electrons).

    is a good idea.

    Bricking by design is a bad idea because preventable e-waste and consumerism is harmful to the environment. I write this post from a 2008 laptop that novice consumers would have declared useless 10 years ago.

    Let alone a right to repair issue.

    Of course it’s a right to repair issue because it’s a nannying anti-repair tactic that has prematurely forced a functional product into uselessness. I am being artificially blocked from returning the product into useful service.

  • Hard drive passwords are removeable. The nuts and bolts of it is performing a change password operation where the new password is the NULL char.

    If it were true that a password is required to write to the storage medium in the event of corruption, that would imply that it’s required for every write event.

    Consider how OPAL drives have passwords just to get read access. You only have to enter the password once when the controller first powers up the drive. It does not have to send the password with every read operation because the drive remains unlocked until it powers off.

    But I have to say I’m hand-waving because I only heard speculation that a password is used for write-access gate-keeping to begin with. Certainly it’s feasible that the ATA standard could have included a separate password for write access, but my question is whether that’s actually the case.

  • I don’t think this is right to repair tbh. You can’t repair the SSD in this state?

    “Repair” does not necessarily mean returning to a factory state. If a machine/appliance/device breaks and the OEM parts are no longer available, and you hack it to serve your purpose without restoring the original mint state, that’s still a repair. My bicycle is loaded after-market parts and hacks in order to keep it in service. The fact that the parts function differently does not mean they cease to repair the bike.

    In the case at hand, the drive is crippled. To uncripple it to get back some of its original functionality to some extent is to repair it.

    Which click “ignore” after not reading the message informing them

    That’s not how it works. Though it would be feasible for an OS creator to implement such a click-through hack, that’s on them. ATM it does not exist. It’s unlikely that OS suppliers would want that liability.

    A good majority of users aren’t anywhere near as tech savvy enough to understand what’s going on.

    Nannying those who do know what they’re doing is not a justified propoposition when low-tech users can still be nannied nonetheless. Anyone who implements a one-click automatic dialog as you suggest would be at fault for low-tech users getting stung. Publishing an ATA password for hdparm users gives a sufficient hurdle for the tech illiterates without nannying advanced users.

  • The IT Department @infosec.pub
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    SSD forced itself into read-only mode -- how can this be reversed?

    cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21033639

    The background is here. In short, an SSD with the “Apacer” brand froze itself into read-only mode, presumably due to reaching a point of poor reliability.

    The data on the drive is useless. It was part way through installing linux when it happened. I would like to reverse that switch to make one last write operation (to write a live linux distro), which thereafter can be read-only.

    I have heard some speculation that the manufacturer uses password to impose read-only mode. If true, then the password would be in the drive’s firmware. Does anyone know what Apacer uses for this password?

    Passwords @infosec.pub
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    Apacer SSD forced itself into read-only mode -- how can this be reversed? Anyone know what pw Apacer uses?

    cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21033639

    The background is here. In short, an SSD with the “Apacer” brand froze itself into read-only mode, presumably due to reaching a point of poor reliability.

    The data on the drive is useless. It was part way through installing linux when it happened. I would like to reverse that switch to make one last write operation (to write a live linux distro), which thereafter can be read-only.

    I have heard some speculation that the manufacturer uses password to impose read-only mode. If true, then the password would be in the drive’s firmware. Does anyone know what Apacer uses for this password?

    Information Security @infosec.pub
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    SSD forced itself into read-only mode -- how can this be reversed?

    The background is here. In short, an SSD with the “Apacer” brand froze itself into read-only mode, presumably due to reaching a point of poor reliability.

    The data on the drive is useless. It was part way through installing linux when it happened. I would like to reverse that switch to make one last write operation (to write a live linux distro), which thereafter can be read-only.

    I have heard some speculation that the manufacturer uses password to impose read-only mode. If true, then the password would be in the drive’s firmware. Does anyone know what Apacer uses for this password?

  • That indeed makes sense from a purely practical PoV, if you neglect right to repair. But the drive maker (Apacer) is effectively denying users their right to repair through the nannying. Your approach is good for repair avoidance but still supports anti-repair suppliers in the end.

  • Right To Repair @midwest.social
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    Solid State Disk drives (SSDs) have a short life and worse: manufacturers nanny users after blocking write access to old drives

    cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/21031468

    SSDs can only tolerate a certain number of writes to each block. And the number is low. I have a 64gb SSD that went into a permanent read-only mode. 64gb is still today a very useful capacity. Thus the usefulness is cut short by hardware design deficiencies.

    Contrast that with magnetic hard drives which often live beyond the usefulness of their capacity. That is, people toss out working 80mb mechanical drives now because they’re too small to justify the physical space they occupy, not because of premature failure ending the device’s useful life.

    Nannying

    When an SSD crosses a line whereby the manufacturer considers it unreliable, it goes into a read-only mode which (I believe) is passworded with a key that is not disclosed to consumers. The read-only mode is reasonable as it protects users from data loss. But the problem is the nannying that denies “owners” ultimate control over their own property.

    When I tr

  • I don’t quite follow the connection between retailer size and planned obsolescence. Do you have a Cliff’s Notes? Youtube has become a shitshow since Google now treats Invidious and Tor with hostility. We can no longer consider YT videos to be openly reachable. I am essentially blocked from YT.

    (edit) I was able to find a rarely working invidious instance and fetch it. will watch it later.

  • BoycottUnitedStates @europe.pub
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    Boycotting the US is silly. Boycott shitty corporations and you are already boycotting the US anyway, in effect. Nothing changes here.

    You should be boycotting these companies already because they support extreme right politics by their ALEC membership:

    • FedEx
    • UPS
    • Motorola
    • Anheuser Busch
    • American Express
    • Bose
    • Chevron
    • Marlboro
    • Sony
    • Texaco
    • Boeing (fly on Airbus instead, see how to boycott Boeing)

    You should be boycotting Amazon for many reasons.

    If you oppose private prisons, then you already boycott these banks:

    • #BankOfAmerica (#BofA)
    • #FifthThird
    • #JPMorgan #Chase
    • #PNC Bank
    • #Suntrust
    • #USBank (#USBancorp)
    • #WellsFargo

    Don’t think they are out of reach to Europe -- many European small banks that you assume are ethical actually outsource their investments to JP Morgan. Also, BofA uses different branding outside the US.

    If you like transparency with food labeling, then you endorse labeling of #GMO food, in which case y

    Is this Instance Down? @infosec.pub
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    (shell) st0rage.org down for good

    They have given gratis shell access going back well over a decade. Shame to see it end.

    OpenStreetMap + App = OsmAnd! @lemmy.ml
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    Editing favourites on a PC is rough-going. Updates to favourites.gpx inconsistently take effect

    This command transfers the favourites from OSMand to the PC:

     undefined
        
    $ adb pull storage/sdcard0/Android/data/net.osmand.plus/files/favourites.gpx
    
    
      

    That much works as far as making a backup copy. But then I wanted to expand descriptions so that e.g. restaurants would have a detailed description of the food. The favourites.gpx file has MSDOS carriage returns, so I piped it through dos2unix and edited in emacs. Then I ran the file through unix2dos before pushing it back to the device while OSMand was not running:

     undefined
        
    $ adb push favourites.gpx storage/sdcard0/Android/data/net.osmand.plus/files/
    
    
      

    Most of my edits were to simply add a descrption with the <desc> tag. Some of my changes involved color modifications to the icons by simply changing the hex inside the tags like this:

     undefined
        
    <wpt …
        <extensions>
          <osmand:color>#10c0f0</osmand:color>
        </extensions>
      </wpt>
    
    
      

    None of my description changes had any affect. OSMand remembered the previous favourites. This means t

    Buy it for Life @slrpnk.net
    activistPnk @slrpnk.net

    New community to track non-BifL goods

    We can’t always find BifL products for everything. So it’s at least interesting to steer clear of the utter garbage known to be the opposite of BifL. I just created this community for that purpose:

    !unsustainable_products@slrpnk.net