I know they're supposed to be good for the environment but... God I hate those caps.

None of what follows is new. I know this stuff happens all the time. And yet somehow this insignificant thing shocked me and it's been gnawing at me for the past few days. And today was the icing on the shit cake.

So my wife ordered a a foot massage machine. $50, typical el-cheapo thing made in China. The thing was shipped to our home out in the boonies in less than 48 hours. Wow!

My wife opened the box, got the device out onto the floor and... she couldn't fit her feet inside. She's not big, but apparently the device was designed for customers in the Shire. Unusable.

So she emailed the distributor who told her to cut the cord, send them a photo proving the destruction and throw it away herself. Not return the device. Not pretend to return the device and the device is thrown away behind her back. No no: this time, the distributor told her in no uncertain terms that it's cheaper for them to let her destroy the thing herself.

And then it hit me: here is a device that was born in China, put together by some underpaid workers in a nondescript factory, designed by someone who didn't give a shit, made out of materials that probably came out of the ground somewhere in Africa and in Saudi Arabia - probably involving child labor at some point or other - put on a boat, shipped halfway around the world, then put into a truck, only to be landfilled here.

It didn't even see a single second of use. This is utterly absurd and completely depressing.

I'm not compatible with that. When I buy something, the thing has value and I want it to have a decently useful life. It's not about ecology or money: it's just basic respect for the resources and the human labor that went into this thing. The value of the object is what it cost the Earth and the people who toiled to make it and ship it to me. When I use my things, I show respect for those who made them and it justifies the use ot the materials they're made of.

But here I was looking at that poor thing across the room, unloved and unlovable, whose sole purpose as an object was to be landfilled without ever seeing any use. It consumed resources and someone worked to make it, yet somehow it never had any value for anybody.

And the most depressing thing about it is, its very existence from Chinese factory to my local landfill is totally absurd and makes no sense at all, yet all the invididual steps that contributed to it being fabricated and ultimately landing on our doorstep were a series of perfectly rational economical decisions: someone found added value in designing and building a shit foot massage machine, my wife found it worth buying sight unseen, someone figured there was money to be made shipping it here, and the distributor decided to outsource its destruction to the customers because it's cheaper than destroying it themselves - let alone shipping it back to Shenzen or wherever. And yet when you string everything together, the net result is senseless waste and production of things that have no inherent worth. How crazy is that eh?

I couldn't throw it away. So I replaced the cord and I gave it to the local Red Cross store yesterday to give to someone in need or sell it for pennies. Today, I passed by the shop on my way to work and saw the damn thing in their garbage container behind the store. In the box. Unopened. I guess it will be going to the landfill after all...

That really put the final damper on my day today...

Sorry if this is the wrong venue, but I really needed to vent.

I've never been super-impressed by Rob Braxman. I mean he's never truly wrong in what he was saying in his Youtube videos, but his explanations are over-simplistic, a bit of a shortcut (but fair enough to reach a wide audience I guess), and mostly designed to sell his meh deGoogled cellphones and equally meh privacy services. But all in all, he's somewhat watchable and sometimes informative after I'm done watching all the new videos from the other, more interesting channels I follow.

But lately, his videos seem to have shifted markedly toward unhinged rants and sensationalist conspiracy theory. His latest video for instance is utter nonsense:

Skynet 2024: The Infrastructure is Complete!

I mean yeah, okay, technically he's talking about a real thing. But Skynet? And doomsday Terminator imagery from 1984? Really?

I'm pretty sure the man doesn't have all his fries in the cone anymore. This can't possibly be a conscious strategy to win more Youtube subscribers: this sort of video is going to lose him the part of his audience that has a genuine and technically-informed interest in privacy, and I doubt he's ever going to become a favorite of the sort of crowd who likes conspiracy theories.

Either that or Youtube is a lot stupider than I thought and he noticed an uptick in subscribers when he makes videos like that. At any rate, I really hesitate to click on any of his new videos now.

I haven't been able to update my cellphone anonymously with Aurora since January. Every time I try, Aurora errors out with "Oops, you are rate limited".

This isn't the first time Google plays at making non-normies' lives difficult. So I tried the usual tricks, updated Aurora, tried the nightly build, waited, tried again... for months - to no avail: Google just won't play ball this time.

Last week, Signal stopped working and demanded to be updated. Fortunately, Signal offers the APK as a normal download without having to get it from the hateful Google Play store.

Today, my home banking identificator app did the same thing and stopped working. I needed to make a payment right now, and I had no way to update the app: "Oops, you are rate limited". And my bank sure doesn't offer the APK outside of anything but the goddamn Google Play store.

So I relented and created a Google account. Which of course entailed giving Google a phone number. I sure didn't give them mine, so I phoned a friend abroad who doesn't care to ask him to receive the verification SMS on his phone and read out the code to me. Which worked long enough to set up 2FA and do away with phone numbers altogether. And finally, after an hour of fucking around, annoying other people and compromising their phone number, I could update my banking app and make my payment at last.

All that because Google has decided they want to control my phone.

Fuck Google.

Seriously, how they are allowed to hold the Android world hostage like this without getting their monopolistic ass Sherman'ed AT&T-style, I'll never know. It's long overdue.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/13880246

I have a terrible el-cheapo 14" HP laptop that I bought from a big-box store a few years ago as an emergency replacement for a laptop that died on me on the road while visiting a customer. I literally went to the store 5 minutes before it closed, bought any laptop they had, loaded Linux on it at the hotel and transferred my files from the dead laptop overnight, then did my presentation the next morning.

The trouble is, that laptop is VERY Linux unfriendly. I've put up with it for years because I don't like to throw things away, but I just can't stand the regular AMDGPU driver crashes and the broke-ass wifi-cum-bluetooth Realtek chipset anymore.

So I'm on the market for a good Linux laptop. I'm not a demanding user - I use that HP laptop to edit videos and do CAD and I'm okay with it - I'm very comfortable with anything Linux and I can code my way around problems.

I'm really tempted to get a MNT Reform laptop: I like the LiFePo4 battery cells a lot, it's solid, it's open hardware, it has a trackball and I love trackballs, it's highly hackable, and I'd like to support the MNT Research guys. And I'm old enough and the kids have been out of the house long enough that money is no object.

But a couple of things are holding me back. Maybe there are MNT Reform owners here who could shed some light on the following questions:

• I don't know much of the ARM ecosystem, and what to expect from what processor / SoC. So I'm thinking of going with the highest end RK3588 32GB / 256GB CPU module offered by MNT. Would this at least match the performances of my stupid HP laptop's Ryzen 5 CPU in terms of real-world performances?

  Or put another way: should I expect to take a hit when encoding my videos or doing big CAD models compared to this already slow laptop, or can I reasonably expect the MNT Reform to at least not be a regression.

  Side question (yes, I know it should be obvious, but asking is better than guessing): I assume the "32GB / 256GB" in the CPU module's denomination is for 32GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard flash. Meaning I'd have that much disk space without needing to add a NVMe SSD card. Correct?

• The keyboard layout looks all shades of terrible. I'm flexible with anything but not keyboard layouts - and especially those keyboard that don't put the left SHIFT and CTRL at the bottom where they belong, or have a split space bar.

  The Reform's keyboard ticks all the wrong boxes for me in that respect: I can tell rightaway that it's going to fight my typing muscle memory all the time and forever, because I sure ain't gonna get used to it.

  Can I remap the keys so I can at least I can swap CTRL and whatever that key is at the bottom left, and make the 3 buttons that replace the space bar act as a space bar? Then it's just a matter of putting a sticker on the keys and gluing the space bar keycaps together somehow.

• I seem to recall some years ago that if the laptop was left off and unplugged for long enough - like 2 weeks IIRC - it would drain the cells and kill them because there was no under-voltage protection. Less dramatically but equally annoyingly, you couldn't leave it unplugged for a few days and expect to find it fully charged when you needed it most.

  Does it still do that? Or has the hardware been fixed - or maybe there's a "Turn really off" option in the little side computer that runs the mini OLED display?

  Mind you, I can always drill a hole and add a physical switch to disconnect the cells, but I'd rather not do that.

• Is there an option to limit the charge? Keeping Li-ion cells constantly at 100% (or worse, charging all the time) when the laptop is plugged in isn't ideal. I'd rather it kept the cells charged around 80% . And I mostly use my laptops plugged in.

• Can I remove the cells and use the laptop plugged in? I might eschew the cells altogether, because I really never need them: I'm plugged in at home, I'm plugged in on the train, I'm plugged in at the hotel, I'm plugged in at the customer's. I can't remember a time when I needed to run this particular laptop on battery. If I can use the laptop as a luggable computer, I wouldn't need to carry the weight of the cells around.

• Has anybody tried to install Cinnamon? Does it work well on Debian ARM? I see no reason why it shouldn't, but maybe there are issues.

Well that's pretty much it. Sorry for the long post 🙂 There's precious little information about the MNT Reform out there - probably a good indication that there are precious few such machines in the wild, sadly - so I would welcome any real-world user feedback!

I have a terrible el-cheapo 14" HP laptop that I bought from a big-box store a few years ago as an emergency replacement for a laptop that died on me on the road while visiting a customer. I literally went to the store 5 minutes before it closed, bought any laptop they had, loaded Linux on it at the hotel and transferred my files from the dead laptop overnight, then did my presentation the next morning.

The trouble is, that laptop is VERY Linux unfriendly. I've put up with it for years because I don't like to throw things away, but I just can't stand the regular AMDGPU driver crashes and the broke-ass wifi-cum-bluetooth Realtek chipset anymore.

So I'm on the market for a good Linux laptop. I'm not a demanding user - I use that HP laptop to edit videos and do CAD and I'm okay with it - I'm very comfortable with anything Linux and I can code my way around problems.

I'm really tempted to get a MNT Reform laptop: I like the LiFePo4 battery cells a lot, it's solid, it's open hardware, it has a trackball and I love trackballs, it's highly hackable, and I'd like to support the MNT Research guys. And I'm old enough and the kids have been out of the house long enough that money is no object.

But a couple of things are holding me back. Maybe there are MNT Reform owners here who could shed some light on the following questions:

• I don't know much of the ARM ecosystem, and what to expect from what processor / SoC. So I'm thinking of going with the highest end RK3588 32GB / 256GB CPU module offered by MNT. Would this at least match the performances of my stupid HP laptop's Ryzen 5 CPU in terms of real-world performances?

  Or put another way: should I expect to take a hit when encoding my videos or doing big CAD models compared to this already slow laptop, or can I reasonably expect the MNT Reform to at least not be a regression.

  Side question (yes, I know it should be obvious, but asking is better than guessing): I assume the "32GB / 256GB" in the CPU module's denomination is for 32GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard flash. Meaning I'd have that much disk space without needing to add a NVMe SSD card. Correct?

• The keyboard layout looks all shades of terrible. I'm flexible with anything but not keyboard layouts - and especially those keyboard that don't put the left SHIFT and CTRL at the bottom where they belong, or have a split space bar.

  The Reform's keyboard ticks all the wrong boxes for me in that respect: I can tell rightaway that it's going to fight my typing muscle memory all the time and forever, because I sure ain't gonna get used to it.

  Can I remap the keys so I can at least I can swap CTRL and whatever that key is at the bottom left, and make the 3 buttons that replace the space bar act as a space bar? Then it's just a matter of putting a sticker on the keys and gluing the space bar keycaps together somehow.

• I seem to recall some years ago that if the laptop was left off and unplugged for long enough - like 2 weeks IIRC - it would drain the cells and kill them because there was no under-voltage protection. Less dramatically but equally annoyingly, you couldn't leave it unplugged for a few days and expect to find it fully charged when you needed it most.

  Does it still do that? Or has the hardware been fixed - or maybe there's a "Turn really off" option in the little side computer that runs the mini OLED display?

  Mind you, I can always drill a hole and add a physical switch to disconnect the cells, but I'd rather not do that.

• Is there an option to limit the charge? Keeping Li-ion cells constantly at 100% (or worse, charging all the time) when the laptop is plugged in isn't ideal. I'd rather it kept the cells charged around 80% . And I mostly use my laptops plugged in.

• Can I remove the cells and use the laptop plugged in? I might eschew the cells altogether, because I really never need them: I'm plugged in at home, I'm plugged in on the train, I'm plugged in at the hotel, I'm plugged in at the customer's. I can't remember a time when I needed to run this particular laptop on battery. If I can use the laptop as a luggable computer, I wouldn't need to carry the weight of the cells around.

• Has anybody tried to install Cinnamon? Does it work well on Debian ARM? I see no reason why it shouldn't, but maybe there are issues.

Well that's pretty much it. Sorry for the long post 🙂 There's precious little information about the MNT Reform out there - probably a good indication that there are precious few such machines in the wild, sadly - so I would welcome any real-world user feedback!

I know they're supposed to be good for the environment. But... Holy smokes they drive me up the wall. They really do!

I had no trouble adapting when aluminum can pull-tabs got replaced by push-tabs, because it was pretty much the same movement, and I could see the immediate advantage of not getting cut by a pull-tab.

But the tethered cap is fighting decades of muscle memory in me: I'm used to taking the cap off with one hand and keeping it there while taking a swig with the other. Now I unscrew the cap with one hand, but I still have to hold the cap so it's out of the way. It feels like drinking in handcuffs each and every time...

So unlike the pull-tab, the tethered plastic bottle cap is one of those compulsory eco solutions that constantly make you feel ever-so-slightly more miserable all the time, and I hate that because ecology only works when it brings something of value both to people and to the environment.

I (still) don't own an EV for various reasons, but I'm still interested. One question that keeps popping up in my mind is this one:

Where I live way up north, many people drive EVs - mostly Teslas apparently. A solid third of the parking lot at work is filled with EVs. The one thing that always strikes me when I leave work around the same time as everybody else is the sheer amount of noise of all those Teslas warming up their batteries before their owners come out to drive home make in the winter: it's like dozens of heating cannons running at the same time.

Each time, I wonder how much juice is used just to prime the battery before use vs. actual miles traveled.

If you leave in a cold country, have you worked out how much energy you burn simply keeping the battery alive in the winter? Is your EV still more energy efficient than an ICE in the winter for your particular use pattern?

My company offers 3 days of unjustified sick leave for things like colds or minor health issues that don't really require seeing a doctor.

And sure enough, that guy - always that guy - got sick on Monday, then took a day off on Thursday, and now he's sick again on Friday. Strangely, his company car reports being at a ski resort 200 miles away.

Because you know, when you're bedridden, at least you should have a nice view out the window...

Hey everybody,

I'm following up on this post. I've brought myself up to speed with free-as-in-libre CAD software - which was easy, since I have years of experience in CAD - and now I'm learning Blender, as I said I would 🙂

So I've followed a few tutorials. But as always, I've found them useful only up to a point, because I need to do stuff myself to remember. Also, I need to do something useful to me otherwise I get bored. Sorry that's just how I work.

So now I'm modeling the enclosure of one the devices I work on professionally. Nothing super complicated: it's a 100-ish x 60-ish x 30-ish aluminum enclosure with a raised lip at the front, a bezel, some cooling fins on top, 4 triangular pockets at the back for screws and filleted edges all around.

So far I've modeled most of what's square, and the triangular holes. I figured I'd look into the finer details and the filets later (and if I started out wrong, I can always start over, no problem).

My questions are these:

• Most of my difficulties seem to come from trying to replicate the dimensions of features accurately. I want this model to be exact to within 0.1 mm, but essentially Blender seems to be making it excrutiatingly difficult every step of the way.

  I'm slowly discovering tools and developing a workflow to make my life easier, but more or less 80% of what I do is calculating the absolute position of individual vertices and making edges and faces out of them. Because however hard I look at the tools available, I can't seem to find any that I could use in any way to make it easier to dimension things or position them with respect to other things. It's really, REALLY tedious.

  I'm fairly certain half of the problem is that Blender isn't a good tool for what I'm trying to do, and I'm sure if I keep at it, I'll find cleverer ways to achieve what I want (and like I said, the process of figuring this out itself IS my way of learning, so I'm not complaining).

  Still, I'm roughly 15 hours into this and I reckon I'm modeling at 1/10th the speed I would with a traditional parametric CAD software. In other words, what would be a quick one-hour job in SolidWorks takes me 10 hours in Blender.

  Does it get easier? 🙂

• Speaking of parametric modeling: is there any way to make Blender parametric? It reminds me furiously of AutoCAD 25 years ago: I add more and more features to my model, I refine it, and I dread the moment someone will walk into my office and tell me "It's nice, but this dimension here is wrong" - and bad luck, it's one of the main dimensions and I have to spend half a day redoing everything, where a parametric modeler would let me change the dimension and would recalculate all the other dependent features.

  Is there any way to "record" the building steps I do in Blender and replay them on intermediate meshes that I could go back to and modify?

  Although mind you, I'm asking this but I have a feeling I'm approaching Blender entirely the wrong way here as well...

• Finally, a colleague of mine uses this gizmo in SolidWorks / Windows. He swears by it. I've been using a Kensington Expert Mouse trackball for decades, but sadly Blender turns out to be exceptionally awkward to use with that trackball. No matter how hard I try to get used to clicking the wheel button to spin the 3D view, it's just really uncomfortable and it's driving me up the wall.

  So I think I'd like to get one of those 3DConnexion devices and give it a whirl. But before I crack out the credit card, does anybody know if it works in Blender in Linux? I know it works in Blender because the manual says so, but I'm not too sure about Linux - and if it does work, how well it works.

I'm playing with OpenSCAD, which is a text-based parametric 3D modeler. It comes with its own built-in editor, but you can also open the source file in your favorite editor and when the file is saved, OpenSCAD recompiles and re-renders the model.

I know it's nothing particularly novel, but it's kind of awesome to type :w and see the 3D object immediately show what you just typed. There's even a degree of rendering control from within the editor: for example to highlight a feature, like an subtracted volume, simply type # in front of the corresponding operation, :w and hey-presto, the feature appears in the model.

And sure enough, there is OpenSCAD syntax highlighing for vim. How cool is that!

If someone had told me 40 years ago that I'd be doing 3D modeling in VI one day, I would never have believed it 🙂

Hello everybody,

I’d like to get into Blender, with a view to possibly do CAD with it because I see it’s now - at least partially - a thing.

I used to work professionally with SolidWorks in 2008. Then I changed jobs entirely. But I’ve always liked doing CAD: I love making complex working mechanical models that move accurately.

I’ve also always wanted to do animations - something SolidWorks could do back then, but not very easily. I tried to get into Blender many years ago, but it was… let’s say a steep learning curve, to be kind.

Fast-forward to today:

My company bought a Prusa 3D printer. That thing is fascinating. 3D printing is also something I’ve wanted to get into for years, and this too seems to have matured into a really good, mostly trouble-free technology.

And then I watched a really interesting video yesterday from one of my favorite Youtuber, Animagraffs, in which he shows in details how he uses Blender to create his marvellous animations. In his video, Blender looks sooo much better and so much more stable and complete than what I tried years ago.

Finally, I’m almost exclusively a Linux user. I could swallow - barely - the cost of a SolidWorks license, but I’ve always hated to have to use Windows to use SolidWorks. That’s mostly what kept me off of using it again since I changed jobs.

After all those years, it seems like all those technologies have matured enough that a reasonably clever but not exceptionally bright dude like me can actually hope to create animations, model printable parts and possibly do 2008-level parametric CAD in Blender.

And so I think it’s time I finally invest the time to learn Blender. I feel it’s one of the essential generic skills a well-rounded computer user should possess, like editing photos, audio or videos, and it seems like I could build on Blender skills to finally get into 3D printing and do CAD again, all in my favorite OS. And even if I can’t do CAD with it yet, it seems that it’s not too far off.

How woud you recommend I go about learning how to use Blender? I don’t want to do complicated things, just learn the basics properly and build solid foundations.