Onno (VK6FLAB)

Anything and everything Amateur Radio and beyond. Heavily into Open Source and SDR, working on a multi band monitor and transmitter.

#geek #nerd #hamradio VK6FLAB #podcaster #australia #ITProfessional #voiceover #opentowork

  • 8 Posts
  • 256 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • It goes well beyond bother.

    In my opinion, the biggest issue is that software with a GPL licence is not permitted to be distributed without making the source code available, which Red Hat restricted to only paying customers, and in doing so added a licence restriction which is not permitted by the GPL.

    They are now profiting off the work of every developer who ever contributed to the software they’re selling and none of those people are getting paid.






  • I use Debian for anything that matters. The release cadence means that stuff just works and keeps working. You cannot beat the documentation and I’ve been using it for 25 years.

    I’m not touching anything Redhat / Fedora with a barge pole.

    Not sure what the attraction to Mint is.

    Never used OpenSUSE.


  • Black Friday is a marketing exercise to get you all riled up about the massive savings you will receive if you buy something RIGHT NOW.

    Suffice to say that the actual bargains on the day are far and few between.

    If you actively track pricing you’ll discover that the price goes up before the event, then drops to the same or slightly lower pricing on the day. The “bargain” is notional at best.

    Then there are the “pre Black Friday” sales, and the “Cyber Monday” ones afterwards. It’s all just marketing.

    If you want an actual bargain, find what you’re looking for, set a price watch on it and track it for as long as you have patience. When you’re ready, buy it from your preferred supplier and get them to price match the amazing price.

    As far as refurbished goes, ask yourself what is the upside for the supplier to give away any bit of return on their spend to refurbish the item in the first place?






  • The thing about free speech is that there’s a whole lot of legislation surrounding it. At the moment, every single fediverse instance is run by( a small group of) people, many of them are run by individuals who are legally responsible for the content that’s posted on their site.

    In addition, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, better known as the DMCA and the General Data Protection Regulation, the GDPR, have requirements for people who own and publish data, like the people who run instances, not to mention privacy acts and myriad other provisions and laws.

    Non compliance is very easy and costly, so instances who are aware of this are cautious in what they allow on their instance.

    Finally, many instances want to create a community with a social cohesion and associated standards that they, depending on the level, encourage or enforce.

    Why any instance bans something at any one time can generally be traced back to these reasons.

    Of course there are also instances where it’s completely open season. Don’t expect these to stick around once lawyers get involved.








  • You didn’t mention audio.

    I particularly love the feature where you can only listen to music by turning off “Do Not Disturb”, because that way my morning walk is guaranteed to be interrupted by some random caller wanting to tell me that Bill Gates personally wants to give me money, rather than listening to the music I had queued up as I walked out the front door.

    Oh, also, the predictive keyboard is brilliant, it forgets common words after about a week, so then you are forced to spend extra time typing the same thing again and again, which is great for finger dexterity training. Speaking of which, I absolutely love the autocorrect which changes words completely out of context, even if you spelled the word correctly, not to mention that adding an “s” to a long word to get a plural requires that you type the entire word.