• 0 Posts
  • 41 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 1st, 2023
  • jaredj@infosec.pubtoErgoMechKeyboards@lemmy.world•When you moved to a reduced ergomech, how long did it take for you to adapt to layers?
    2·
    1 month ago

    It took me a couple months to stop thinking about layers.

    My first move toward ergonomics was a Keebio Fourier 40%. It had been a few months before that when I started using Colemak on my laptop keyboard; I did that using Windows keyboard settings, and I was taking notes in meetings, so whenever I couldn’t keep up, switching back to QWERTY was a hotkey away.

    After switching to the Fourier, and iterating many times on the QMK settings, that was the month or two where I had to think through all the control keys, symbols, and function keys I was typing. I didn’t quit typing on other keyboards, although I typed on my Fourier as much as possible; and I have not ended up forgetting anything I learned before.

    I’m now on the precipice of moving from a 4x6 Dactyl Manuform to a 4x5 Splaytyl (if I can find those dang parts and get the thing built!) and that’s too small to have things like Tab, Enter, or the backslash on the home layer. I’m nervous. I’ve tried making a 4x5 layout for the DM, but haven’t ended up sticking with it. I couldn’t really get used to keys that are physically there, not doing anything.

  • jaredj@infosec.pubtocybersecurity@infosec.pub•apps .. repo or not
    2·
    3 months ago

    A name I’ve seen in connection with this issue is Obtainium. From a cursory look, it appears this just streamlines checking for and getting apk’s from GitHub release pages and other project-specific sources, rather than adding any trust. So maybe it just greases the slippery slope :)

    Security guidelines for mobile phones, and therefore policies enforced by large organizations (think Bring-Your-Own-Device), are likely to say that one may only install apps from the platform-provided official source, such as the Play Store for Android or the Apple App Store for iOS. You might say it’s an institutionalized form of “put[ting] too much trust in claims of authority.” Or you might say that it’s a formal cession of the job of establishing software trustworthiness to the platform vendors, at the mere expense of agency for users on those platforms.

    People are not taught how to verify the authenticity and legitimacy of software

    Rant: Mobile computing as we know it is founded on the rounding off of the rough corner of user agency, in order to reduce the amount users need to know in order to be successful, and to provide the assurances other players need, such as device vendors, employers, banks, advertisers, governments, and copyright holders. See The Coming War on General Computation, Cory Doctorow, 2011. Within such a framework, the user is not a trustworthy party, so the user’s opinion of authenticity and legitimacy, however well informed, doesn’t matter.

  • jaredj@infosec.pubtoretrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org•Using vintage laptops in 2024: How do you make it work?
    2·
    3 months ago

    I’ve got a Thinkpad 600X (Pentium III, 256MB RAM). I put Debian 12 on it, and the OS is not quite small enough. (NetBSD couldn’t drive my particular CardBus Wifi card, sadly, and 9front couldn’t drive the NeoMagic video properly.) Just Emacs on the console, no X, and eww for web browsing (to your question) and elpher for poking around Gemini. I’m not familiar enough with Thinkpads to know if that’s a useful data point for you.

    Nobody’s mentioned https://www.haiku-os.org/ yet, so I will. I can’t remember what happened with it on my Thinkpad. There are several graphical browsers there, with a range of capabilities, as well as a port of Emacs.

    I guess my real answer is: don’t handle today’s internet with all of its heavy websites? Use the web for documents, and use native applications rather than web apps for other purposes, such as chatting and email.

  • jaredj@infosec.pubtoFreeCAD@lemmy.ml•How would you make this tray?
    4·
    3 months ago

    Use the Part Design workbench (you probably are already, but no one’s said it yet). Sketch a rectangle for the top of the whole tray, not the surface. Pad it down 40mm. Add a draft to set the angle of the sides. Use the thickness tool to dig out the middle of the top face - to a thickness of your exact choosing, which will be consistent everywhere. Now you have a trapezoidal bin.

    Then how do you make the separators. Um, draw a sketch with the tee on the inside bottom and pad it… and then the separators don’t reach the angled side walls. Oo, how about this: on the inside bottom, draw a sketch of the small square of material at the junction of the tee, and pad this tiny pillar up to the top of the tray. Then start a sketch on a side wall, External Geometry the near sides of the pillar in, and they’ll be projected onto the angled side wall. Then loft the two rectangles together. Yeah? Yeah? No. That didn’t work. The projection was normal to the angled wall, not to the side of the pillar.

    HAHAHA ok. Select a side of the pillar. Pad it, select Up to Face, and pick the angled inside . Presto!

    Then stick the lip on top and the grippy bit and that.

    I hope this was helpful and entertaining.

  • jaredj@infosec.pubtoretrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org•Is there a precedent for a really delay-tolerant command line interface? (A bit off-topic)
    3·
    4 months ago

    Secure Scuttlebutt is (was?) a protocol for high-latency communication between occasionally-networked humans. Pro: https://scuttlebutt.nz/; con (not read in detail): https://derctuo.github.io/notes/secure-scuttlebutt.html. I think it was supposed to be able to spread messages over Bluetooth, assuming a sufficiently connected web of nodes between person A and person B. Public keys were identities, and were bound to devices; unfortunately people may have multiple devices, or change devices over time, so this was a hindrance.

    IPFS was supposed to be the Interplanetary File System. I think that was just because whatever pieces of content you ask for, you also cache, as part of the design: you keep a copy on the near side of the small high-latency pipe. But that’s mostly about file transfer, not interactivity.

    UUCP was definitely made in a time where a latency of days for delivery of email or netnews was common.

    In the early days of CGI, the Web was just one way people imagined interacting with applications; another way was email. RFC 3834 has some recommendations for people who are going to automate email responses. There used to be services you could email a URL to, and receive the web page back as an email.

    Using ed (in my experience) involves looking up the screen, or up the roll of paper on your teletype, to see what the lines of your file were, and imagine what they are now, given the changes you’ve wrought to them since they were printed, and then turn them into what they should be. With Mars rovers you have a simulation that you issue your command to, before sending it off to Mars. With correspondence chess you might keep a physical chessboard for each game you have going, and/or send a form back and forth that keeps track of several moves.

    People used to do computation at universities and businesses by writing programs at their desks, submitting them to be typed on punchcards, and receiving printouts some time later. They would “desk check” their programs before sending them in, because each compute job took a couple days to come back.

    I mention all these because, in an extreme censorship environment, any local state (session history on paper, an app on a smartphone, an odd device) might not be good to have around. So usability may require reducing the total amount of state that a command carries. The current working directory at the time a command is run changes the meaning and outcome of the command; you may not remember that directory in a day or two. The vocabulary and syntax of command-line switches are easy to look up in online manuals - but are there offline manuals? I don’t know if this avenue of inquiry helps you, but it’s interesting to think about for a moment.

  • jaredj@infosec.pubtoErgoMechKeyboards@lemmy.world•Long term ergo-mech keyboards reviews
    3·
    4 months ago

    I’ve been using a tshort dactyl manuform 4x6 for 5 years now, having never planned to use it for even 1 year. I only commonly use the two innermost thumb keys; I didn’t think I would like the thumb cluster from watching a video of someone typing on it, and I indeed don’t like the thumb cluster. The switches are Kailh Brown; one of them started to stutter and I replaced it with … a TTC Brown or some such.

    I’ve printed, but not finished, a Splaytyl. I think it’s going to feel nice, but it’s only 4x5, and I’m nervous about not having Tab and Enter on the base layer.

  • jaredj@infosec.pubtoFreeBSD@lemmy.ml•How could I get started with BSD?
    2·
    4 months ago

    I have heard that there is some arrangement whereby you run FreeBSD on your hardware, with Linux in a bhyve virtual machine; you hand your physical wireless card into the VM, where LInux’s drivers can talk with it; and route packets from the main system through it. – Ah, https://blog.desdelinux.net/en/wifibox-the-project-that-allows-you-to-use-linux-wifi-drivers-in-freebsd/

    To try to set up such a thing as your first entry into a BSD might be frustrating, but if you kept on until it worked, you would definitely have dived deep. (Dove? Doven? Diven?)

    I’m a long-time Linux user now using FreeBSD on my home server. The first few times I looked at BSDs, they seemed old and stale, like nothing was happening there, and the coreutils were less comfortable to use because they were missing some switches. But what I’ve learned is that FreeBSD builds incrementally, without undermining itself, and my own understanding of it can do the same. What I’ve learned about previous versions of FreeBSD is more likely to still be true about the next version of FreeBSD.

    BSD people often mention how the BSD in question is built as a whole, not cobbled together as a distribution. This difference can be stated far more quickly than it can be fully understood: like a culture, of which you gather a nuanced understanding from a broad survey of its literature, rather than a movement, whose goals are painted in broad strokes by a manifesto.

    Anyway, welcome! My experience has been that #freebsd on libera.chat is more lively during US daytime hours than later at night. The Handbook is definitely your first documentation stop. ZFS, with its snapshots and replication, seems to be the most-hailed feature of FreeBSD; DTrace didn’t even make the top 10, but when I didn’t understand why NFSv4+Kerberos was failing, it was indispensable. Have fun!