For the context, the previous post was about Citizen PMD56-2951 I still haven't got, but I have got a Pixel Tablet and the first thing I did was installing GrapheneOS on it. Luckily, this is the instance where there's no IMEI to change and where rooting isn't so relevant for me.

"Aren't you afraid to experiment with such expensive things?" "No. I'm afraid to have them and not be able to experiment with them"

Halving-shmalving. Your privacy has been cut in half, then again in half, then eaten and shat out a long time ago. How much more arrests, seizures and restrictions before people switch to privacy-first cryptocurrencies once and for all? But of course, sheeple will continue using their #1 fiat in disguise (removed from its original vision as far as possible) and think that it makes them free to any extent.

For any open social platform to get on par with the proprietary ones, a simple change is necessary: people need to start talking less about the platform itself and more about real life.

Those who view the time on their phones, by the way, represent a pre-wristwatch era of pocket watches, only now they are much bulkier, less reliable and allow their manufacturers, governments and various third parties to track their owners.

Damn it, they really are trying to reinvent what I just mentioned: mailing lists. View quoted note →

Today was the first time in my life I had ever mailed anything physically. Ever. I'm not a merchant, and prefer giving things in person, especially valuable ones.

Let's get real. Notes == PGP-signed emails\*. Relays == mailing list servers. Feeds == filtered views on those servers. What's new here, besides all this json/websocket/ecc bloat and cryptobro-hype? Everyone can run a mailing list server. All this stuff has been around since 1990s. #NIHsyndrome is so NIH. \* (offering much more signature options)

I'm still genuinely stunned with the amount of effort some people put into constantly creating problems for themselves and then heroically overcoming them. It gets, however, much worse if others have to be involved in this too.

Today, I've lost a nice text. Yes, that happens. But the key takeaway from it is: don't blame the FOSS model itself for how it's being used nowadays by the people two generations away from the people who started the movement. Also, even if you have a public repo with an OSI-approved license but all you think about is to how sell yourself with this, then you're not a FOSSer, you're a slut.

Orange Pi Zero + quality Bluetooth adapter + Bluetooth speaker + BlueALSA + mpd = nice Internet-enabled jukebox.

When you see that the libtinfo6 package is being updated and your brain automatically appends "il" to "libtinfo", it's time to reevaluate something in your life.

To the people asking why I have a collection of 8 Victorinox knives while only using two of them on a daily basis: don't worry, I also use one calculator out of 7, one fountain pen out of 9, one watch out of 31 and three phones out of ~60 at any given moment. That's, like, the whole point of a collection: being able to rotate your tools.

JFYI, I'm not anti-bitcoin. I'm anti-propaganda.

Cyberpunk not cyberdead. #DWB5600

Ported my BLE-enabled Casio watch synchronizer from JS to Python.

README - rcvd-py - Python 3 port of RCVD project

Planned for this for almost two years but it took half a day. The protocol is a canonical example of how not to design protocols if you don't want the devs to curse you. Don't get me wrong, it's still cool but far from elegant. Do you know which watchmaker made an elegant sync protocol? Timex. With their first Datalinks. They were purely optical. That's what I call elegant. No additional hardware required from the PC side. And yes, the protocol is now out in the open (along with other repos from the same author):

GitHub

GitHub - synthead/timex_datalink_client: Write data to Timex Datalink devices with an optical sensor

Write data to Timex Datalink devices with an optical sensor - synthead/timex_datalink_client

Many years later, Longines tried to replicate this optical calibration in their Conquest VHP line. As a result, they made a total mess. And instead of opensourcing the effort, they just abandoned it, and now you can't even install the app on newer Androids. Some research is ongoing, but of course such watches are much more scarce and short-lived. Thanks, I'll stick to my BLE Casios instead for the time being.

Bare Linux installation on the same VPS. RAM consumption. Debian 12: 111 MB, Alpine 3.19: 47 MB. Guess which one I had to install manually via VNC?

As much as I dislike Perl, I still need a Nostr client that can run on Perl 5.8.8. Or on Regina (Rexx). Or anything else that runs on DOS. #asknostr