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Can You Use Linux Without the Terminal? (How to Geek article)
  • Can you satisfy a woman without learning how to use the clitoris?

    not a clickbait article dot asp dot html

  • Software for remote desktop with phone confirmation to use on untrusted machines
  • If you're RDPing from a malicious client, how do you know what you're seeing is real? How do you know that your viewer didn't show the same screen for just a little too long while the host popped up a cmd, curl, run, close, continue in the background? How do you know that closing your session isn't "forwarding it to someone else for a bit, but they'll close it when they're done"? One time you start a session, verify it with your phone, waiting waiting waiting, an error occurred try again. Did it fail, or did it go to someone else?

  • Needle therapy
  • There's another patient who didn't get the toe amputation, and gangrene spread to where he lost the entire leg and 80% of his kidney function. This one did not thank acupuncture for his outcome.

    This one very famous case of a guy who got very lucky, and ended up alive and uncrippled and didn't have to take time off from perpetual dialysis treatments to smile for magazine covers maybe doesn't represent what generally happens to people in his situation.

  • Does any distro read through 100% of the source-code of a package before adding it to its repo?
  • Tim Cook reads every single LOC submitted to his OS.

  • Moving to a Linux distro for dev
  • Use Trixie instead of Sid. With Sid you're getting new packages right as they come out of the oven. If Sid users don't get burned too badly, the packages go into Trixie two weeks later.

  • Disk imaging
  • pv. It's just cat, with a progress meter.

  • Handbrake/ffmpeg: What free video codec to use for 720p videos?
  • I believe h.265 has particular handling for "film grain". And it has hardware decoding on just about every chip out there. And you probably already have a hardware encoder, so you can do something like QSV in a reasonable time frame.

    300MB for a half-hour is a pretty reasonable bitrate, for one and a half hours it is quite dire.

  • Tips/tricks for beginners
  • sl is the single best utility, hands down

  • Caps lock is slow on linux
  • The fix is to make it a Ctrl key.

  • [News] GuliKit will be releasing their Hall Effect Joystick upgrade for the OLED deck this month
  • Kinda wish that Valve would just make hall-effect the stock part. My left stick only lasted about a year, while the Gulikit shows no signs of stopping.

  • [Resolved] After updating through both APT and the Software Store, I can't play mp4 videos with VLC anymore. The screen goes blank for a second or two then the audio starts playing without the video..
  • First, it never hurts to reboot. There could be some dumb state going on in your display server. Or kernel DRM. Or in some little bs microcontroller in the video card.

    Next, read the arch wiki on hardware video acceleration. Contemplate the note(2) at the very bottom of the page and boggle at all the PPANAPAPPI acronyms bouncing around in there.

    VLC has two major sides to its video settings, the (Video)output method and the (Input/Codecs)hardware-acceleration. You are on the VDPAU acceleration API, so give VAAPI a try for a bit. Remember you have to restart VLC before any change takes. VLC should be smart about choosing a good Automatic option, but it can't do much about "looks like an API's there, but it's broke".

    Try mpv. Try VLC, but from Flatpak (which brings its own version of a lot of the acceleration libraries).

  • Which file system do you recommend for Linux?
  • Btrfs. Just format as one big partition (besides that little EFI partition of course) and don't worry about splitting up your disk into root and home. Put home on its own subvolume so that root can be rolled back separately from it. You can have automatic snapshots, low-overhead compression, deduplication, incremental backups. Any filesystem can fsck its own metadata, but btrfs is one of the few that also cares if your data is also intact.

  • Game difficulty
  • There should be exactly one game allowed to keep its "fuck your accessibility, git gud nüb" difficulty, and its name is Zadette.

  • It all makes sense now
  • I haven't seen many toll booths in the air. A lot of weird routing comes down to stuff like "there's a military base there, they get big mad if anything goes near them", or noise abatement over populations, or not stranding a single-engine plane out over the water. Plenty of "air highways" to implicitly deconflict traffic without the need for ground control. Lots of technical and political considerations, not so many billing based ones.

  • why cant we connect 2 computers using USB
  • The reason you can't is "because Intel deliberately designed it that way". Back when USB was just a notion, PDAs were a really cool thing. There was apparently concern at Intel that someday these little things might be all that someone might own. You might connect your PDA directly to the printer, rather than syncing it to your Intel Desktop and printing from there. You might connect your PDA to the modem and collect electronic mailographs directly, instead of syncing with a PC. If you could do enough without the PC middleman, you might even skip on buying an Intel computer altogether.

    So, Intel baked into the protocol anything they could think of to make peer-to-peer communications impossible in USB, make life easy for the singular PC communications master, and put a timing onus on devices that forced them to be dumbed-down state machines instead of computers in their own right.

  • why cant we connect 2 computers using USB
  • Professional accreditation is such a racket lol. I've seen plenty of tax courses with "the last tax year that so-and-so was relevant was 1988, NEVERTHELESS this will be on the test." Zero effort goes into updating the material, just keep on reselling the same crap to a captive audience forever.

  • why cant we connect 2 computers using USB
  • And if you want to get really funky, Intel also does their JTAG over USB. They are quite secretive about it, your bios should have turned it off, but it is there.

  • why cant we connect 2 computers using USB
  • I think that the Deck is able to connect as a device (MTP or CDC?), but there has been trouble with that so the current OS disables it.

  • why cant we connect 2 computers using USB
  • I'm quite sure that all gigabit+ ethernet auto-negotiates. There is no shared ether, there are no dedicated tx/rx pairs anymore. It's all point-to point and constantly negotiating to make the most of every wire it's got.

  • How to create a bootable Linux USB drive
  • A dumb little stick is fine for the occasional "fix something up" or "take a snapshot of a Windows drive because dd is objectively better than anything that Windows itself could do". A live iso distro precludes me from adding a handful of other useful tools.

    Late breaking edit : What I ended up doing was formatting a stick as small EFI / 5GB btrfs / rest exfat. Chattr +c the btrfs, and debootstrap in there. Put rEFInd on the efi and tell its conf file about the stick (or maybe it'll detect). Put non-free-firmware & stable-security into apt's sources.list. In a chroot shell, apt get live-task-non-free-firmware-pc gdm3 systemd-timesyncd linux-image-amd64 locales gnome-terminal. Add other tools to suit taste. Fix up the fstab, make /tmp tmpfs, make the exfat mount nofail. With btrfs compression, I can have a gnome environment inside of 2.5GB. It would be even more smol if I could figure out booting directly into Weston.

  • rotopenguin rotopenguin @infosec.pub

    aka @rotopenguin@mastodon.social

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    Comments 361