I remember a really smart, very nerdy family friend telling us about Linux around 1997/98 and this was the experience he described. It sounded interesting but also like a crazy amount of work.

Thank you!

As someone who has done no programming since taking C++ in high school more than 20 years ago, what do you mean by safer language?

I really need to try to learn Resolve. There just seems to be so much effort required to make a good NLE and such a relatively small market that it’s just not conducive to a robust FOSS project.

Wow! I’m paying 10.5¢/kWh for electricity at home here in the US; it’s a little below the national average but not dramatically.

I can’t comment on Linux, but IIRC SMB was best for situations needing both Mac and Windows, so I’d guess that’s the choice. Totally off memory, though.

Are you just changing the password or have forgotten it and need to reset it? If it’s the latter I’m guessing you can’t reset without losing these things; basically you’re losing the encryption key.

I’m still confused on what happened with OpenOffice. Is it not good now that it’s with Apache?

Wait, this app is free, has no ads, and does not give any info to the developer? It seems like it’s basically a hobby, created by a guy who wanted the app and decided to learn how to code so he could write it himself?

I would think something that sends text messages would be hard to implement as self hosted

I’m not understanding what you or the dev are wanting to do, but I also wouldn’t be in a position to fix this even if I understood 🤷‍♂️

Yes, that’s why I thought this article was odd that they seem to be making a big deal out of it

To be clear, I wasn’t thinking Microsoft was sabotaging Linux; if they’re contributing officially I assume it’s because they’re also using it or want to increase adoption of something they’re creating by making it widely available.

I’m using Namecheap but I have had this suspicion that they’re the ones holding it this time. If I could confirm that it would definitely have me looking for another registrar. That feels like it should be against ICANN rules.

The article is making a big deal that he works for Microsoft but also says he’s been doing this back since his days working at Google. It never says that this work is part of his official job at Microsoft, though, and I don’t know if we could even know that unless it’s part of his job title. Do we know that Microsoft hired him to do this or could it just be this has been his longtime passion project and he’s doing it outside of his work responsibilities, and he just happens to currently work for Microsoft as his day job?

I accidentally let my personal domain expire because I was using PayPal with my registrar but they couldn’t use that for auto renew. Someone else bought it but they’re not doing anything with it. I can’t see who owns it because they’re doing a private registration with the same registrar I used, so as far as whois is concerned it’s the same registration it’s always had. This happened once before to me years ago and the people who bought it that time put up a fake YouTube clone in French but I just waited them out and they abandoned it a year later. This has been going on two years now and it still hasn’t been abandoned. It’s not critical to have but it’s annoying that someone’s squatting on it hoping I’ll pay a premium to get it back. It’s not that valuable to me.

Why would a backup not help with a bot net? Shouldn’t rolling the computer back to its state before installing the malware remove it? (This is a genuine question; I’ve had very little exposure to actually using Linux but am interested and will probably install it on a machine someday)

WARNING: Global themes and widgets created by 3rd party developers for Plasma can and will run arbitrary code. You are encouraged to exercise extreme caution when using these products.

On the one hand, if any commercial store put out a statement like this and did no vetting of submitted applications people would (rightly) be up in arms. But on the other, this is pretty much the standard with FOSS, right? Unless you’re paying for a supported commercial license from someone like Red Hat, everything is as-is, without warranty, caveat emptor. The power of open source is that anyone can review the code and look for problems or malicious behavior, but also (especially with smaller projects) there’s no guarantee that anyone else has looked at the code. So is it a best practice with Linux and FOSS to run a system backup before installing any software or update? I mean I guess that’s technically true for any OS, but especially for open source?

This is new to me but looks interesting. It looks like their transparency report hasn’t been updated since Q1 2023, though, where it previously shows updates for every year. Is that a concern?

Are you looking to measure draw for one specific device or across circuits in your whole home. I’ve been considering two systems: IoTaWatt and Lantern Power Monitor. Both are open source and open hardware.

IoTaWatt uses entirely custom hardware for the actual device but serves its own webpage that can be accessed easily at home from any device and if you’re technically savvy can pass to other services. My reservation with it is if at some point in the future the hardware dies, how easy will it be to recreate if the main project goes dormant, even with the hardware open source? What if a chip manufacturer goes out of business or discontinues a part?

In contrast, the Lantern Power Monitor runs on Raspberry Pi with a relatively basic custom board you can solder yourself with minimal skill; I suspect you could even make it work with a breadboard. Recent shortages notwithstanding, Raspberry Pi seems to keep their models pretty available for a long time, so that inspires a little more confidence. On the flip side, the software primarily runs on a mobile app. There is an iPhone app but it doesn’t have as many features as the Android app. But what happens if the project is abandoned and the app is no longer updated to stay compatible with newer phones or operating systems? And the app by default sends the data to an outside server maintained by the main developer. He doesn’t charge for the hosting and it makes it easy to access from anywhere, but some people might have concerns about that. You can also configure it to self-host from the Raspberry Pi but then you need to have the know-how to make it accessible outside your home (if you want). Underneath it also relies on some other open source data analysis components and I assume if you really know what you’re doing you can pass it out to other software.

Of course, in the end I don’t have the budget to do either project right now.