zarenki

zarenki, 29 days ago

and it’s free

This is very uncommon in the US. Most major banks (I’m not aware of any exceptions) charge a fee for each outgoing wire transfer, usually $25-$30. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chase, and PNC for just a few examples I’m aware of, plus every credit union that has local branches in my area. Some of those banks even add a second fee at the recipient’s side for incoming wire transfer.

They often encourage customers to rely on third party services like Zelle instead for small transfers to friends and family. Many banks’ sites/apps can also handle transfers between two accounts that both belong to the same bank for free too.

zarenki, 1 month ago

A standard called SystemReady exists. For the systems that actually follow its standards, you can have a single ARM OS installation image that you copy to a USB drive and can then boot through UEFI and run with no problems on an Ampere server, an NXP device, an Nvidia Jetson system, and more.

Unfortunately it’s a pretty new standard, only since 2020, and Qualcomm in particular is a major holdout who hasn’t been using it.

Just like x86, you still need the OS to have drivers for the particular device you’re installing on, but this standard at least lets you have a unified image, and many ARM vendors have been getting better about upstreaming open-source drivers in the Linux kernel.

zarenki, 1 month ago

To the contrary, I would expect the sample to skew more towards people who have a heavily customized X session and strong opinions about window managers while drastically underrepresenting average GNOME users who stick with the default Wayland session. Someone who likes their custom setup can still be waiting for a Wayland equivalent while casual Ubuntu users have been defaulted to Wayland on new non-nvidia installs since early 2021.

zarenki, 1 month ago

I tried to do this a while ago with a GNOME system, setting GDM to automatically log me in, but I ended up always getting prompted for my password from gnome-keyring shortly after logging in which seemed to defeat the point. If you use GNOME, you might want to look at ArchWiki’s gnome-keyring page which describes a couple solutions to this problem (under the PAM section) which should be applicable on any systemd distro.

zarenki, 2 months ago

In 2014, MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 were released under a Microsoft shared-source license (Microsoft Research License) which forbids redistribution

In 2018, both versions were published to GitHub and relicensed as MIT, making them properly open-source

Today, MS-DOS 4.00 was added to that repo, also under MIT.

zarenki, 2 months ago

For years I’ve been using KeepassXC on desktop and Keepass2Android on mobile. Rather than sync the kdbx file between my devices, I have each device access it through the network. Either via sftp, smb, or nfs, but regardless I need to connect to my home’s VPN to access it when away from home since I don’t directly expose those things to the outside world.

I used to also keep a second copy of the website-tied passwords in Firefox Sync, but recently tried migrating that to Proton Pass because I thought the PIN feature might help, then ultimately decided to move away from that too and start using the KeepassXC-Browser plugin instead. I considered Bitwarden too but haven’t tried it out yet, was somewhat deterred by seeing people say its UI seems very outdated.

zarenki, 2 months ago

There’s only one case I’ve found where Wi-Fi use seems acceptable in IoT: ESPHome. It’s open-source firmware for microcontrollers that makes DIY IoT sensors and controls accessible over LAN without phoning home to whatever remote server, without trying to make anything accessible over the Internet, and without breaking in any way if the device has no route to the Internet.

I still wouldn’t call Wi-Fi use ideal even there; mesh can help in larger homes and Z-Wave/Zigbee radios tend to be more power efficient, though ESP32 isn’t exactly suited for a battery-powered device that’s expected to run 24/7 regardless.

zarenki, 2 months ago

Stylus/handwriting oriented note taking. Stuff like Samsung Notes or Goodnotes (or OneNote, though it does a lot more) in the Android space, or e-ink options like Remarkable’s stock software.

If I just want to use a keyboard for everything I have great FOSS options like Joplin and Standard Notes, but when I want to use a pen instead it feels like no other freedom-respecting option seem to even remotely approach the usability of just sticking with real ink and moleskine-like paper notebooks.

Even someone willing to pay an upfront fee for proprietary apps will struggle to find good options that allow syncing and reading (let alone editing) your notes on other devices/platforms without resorting to a monthly subscription.

zarenki, 2 months ago

Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll give it a try sometime.

zarenki, 2 months ago

if the featureset is not clear enough at first glance

My experience as someone who has barely dabbled in Matrix, tried comparing clients, and knows a lot of people who stick to Discord: a lot of Discord users heavily use custom emotes, voice chat, and screen sharing. It’s not even easy to figure out which Matrix clients support each of those features without installing everything and trying it out. There’s a clients comparison on matrix.org that mentions Voip but not stickers or video.

For stickers alone:

• Element is widely considered the go-to Matrix client but uses a strange integration system for predefined sticker packs instead of the MSC2545 stickers that more closely resemble what users coming from Discord would want.
• Cinny seems to have the best support for stickers/emotes but its site doesn’t mention them at all. It supports uploading and managing sticker packs at either a channel or user level, provides a nice picker UI to send any picture from those packs as either a large “sticker” or a small inline “emoji”, and allows using them for reactions.
• FluffyChat mentions stickers on its site and has the second best sticker support, with all of those except reactions and a graphical sticker picker for inline emoji (need to type them as shortcode).
• SchildiChat, Nheko, and NeoChat have some sort of limited support for custom stickers/emoji. NeoChat is the only one of those that advertises stickers on its main site. Nheko mentions them in a GitHub readme.

Being able to freely use custom emotes without paying for a Discord Nitro subscription nor server boosts would be a great selling point but it’s not something most users would be able to figure out before signing up. The limited client support isn’t great; e.g. Fluffy is the only Android client that supports sending custom stickers but some people may dislike the chat bubbles style UI.

zarenki, 2 months ago

I have configured custom Android kernel builds to enable more USB drivers, enable module support, and tweak various other things. For one tangible example of the result: I could plug in a USB Wi-Fi adapter and use it to simultaneously connect to another Wi-Fi network with the internal NIC while also sharing my own AP over USB. On an Android device of all things. I have also adjusted kernel builds for SBCs (like Pi clones) to get things working at all.

I have never seen any reason to configure a custom kernel for my own desktop/laptop systems. Default builds for the distros I’ve used have been fine for me; if I’m ever dissatisfied with anything it’s the version number rather than the defconfig. The RHEL/Rocky kernel omits a few features I want (like btrfs) but I’d rather stick to other distros on personal systems than tweak a distro that isn’t even meant for tweaking.

zarenki, 3 months ago

Not every work environment is the same.

When I first started with my current employer I was given a system with RHEL preinstalled and I replaced it with Fedora on my first day. I was told to use LUKS and given a normal OpenVPN profile but otherwise they don’t control or monitor anything about my workstation. No matter how many years or decades I stay at this company, it’s extremely unlikely I’ll ever touch an OS that isn’t Linux-based during work time.

Every previous job I’ve been at also had me use Linux for my primary workstation, because my field of work more or less requires it, but some have needed me to access a separate Windows system/server/VM on rare occasions.

zarenki, 3 months ago

I recommend giving dnf the -C flag to most operations, particularly those that don’t involve downloading packages. The default behavior is often similar to pacman’s -y flag and so the metadata sync ends up slowing everything down by orders of magnitude.

zarenki, 3 months ago

I’ve long known about it. I don’t seriously use it, but I would if only my Wi-Fi router was fully supported. It’s an Asus one (that I got for free from T-Mobile a decade ago) so I installed Asuswrt-Merlin on it instead.

Following the recommendation of homelab communities, I got into OpnSense (a BSD-based firewall system for x86 hardware only) last year, still keeping my Wi-Fi router as a dedicated AP. In hindsight I somewhat regret that choice and probably would’ve been better off buying a new OpenWRT-compatible router and using it to handle firewall/routing/AP all in one device instead of wasting the power draw of another separate N100 system. I like having wireguard and vnstat in my router now, which Merlin didn’t offer, but I know OpenWRT has those too and I don’t have any other needs that warrant a higher-power router.

zarenki, 3 months ago

I’ve been using it since it felt usable enough in GNOME to me. Around 2015-ish, give or take a year. GNOME leading on Wayland support is a big part of why I switched to it from Xfce back then. Nowadays KDE and others have plenty good Wayland support too (better in some ways like allowing server-side decorations and global shortcuts) but I just haven’t felt like trying to properly experiment to see what I like.

I’ve always avoided Nvidia on my desktops. Stuck with either radeon or intel and never had any exceptionally big issues with them on Wayland. Though other things like hardware accelerated video decoding have had a history of being spotty on some drivers/GPUs.

zarenki, 3 months ago

Nonfree media codecs like HEVC/h265 are affected by US software patents. Distributing them from US servers without paying license fees to MPEG LA can put the host at risk of lawsuit. VLC, deb-multimedia (Debian), and RPM Fusion (Fedora) all avoid that by hosting in France, but even with those sources enabled patent issues can break things like hardware acceleration. Free codecs like AV1/VP9/Opus avoid all these problems.

Microsoft is US-based and can’t avoid those per-install fees. They could cut the profit from every single Windows license but apparently chose not to.

zarenki, 3 months ago

You joke, but it really exists: the company that acquired uTorrent 17 years ago now sells an ad-free version of their current torrent client as “BitTorrent Pro” for USD$20/year, or alternatively as part of a VPN service bundle for $70/year.

Needless to say, stick with FOSS clients like qBittorrent/Deluge/etc instead.