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roywashere

1,134 karma · joined March 25, 2020

meet.hn/city/52.1594747,4.4908843/Leiden

Socials: - mb@x14.nl - codeberg.org/michielb/ - mastodon:fosstodon.org/@mwb - https://tildeweb.nl/~michiel/

Interests: Networking, Open Source, Programming, Technology, Web Development

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roywashere··on Series of posts on HTTP status codes (2018)
Also, it is slightly outdated as it does not incorporate RFC9110 which renames some status codes which previously were WebDAV-only:

https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/117611

roywashere··on A receipt printer cured my procrastination
My company also uses MS auth + 2fa for everything. Even signing into corporate G-suite :-). But I do not like the Microsoft Authenticator - I previously had issues where it would not show the number - and I was able to switch to a different TOTP provider. It’s a bit buried in the menus but possible
roywashere··on Firefox OS's story from a Mozilla insider not working on the project (2024)
It’s a balance. I guess they needed to target low end because they were 4 years too late. If they did this around the time of Android 1.5 or even 4, those phones were not so expensive and they could have targeted that or similar hardware.

I guess around 2012 I bought a Firefox OS phone from a Spanish company for I believe 150 euros, which was quite reasonable. FirefoxOS was unusable though. Plus it lacked WhatsApp so I could not use it as a daily driver. In 2025 I would also need to have a banking app on mobile so it’s impossible to use an “alternative” phone OS for me

roywashere··on Writing your own CUPS printer driver in 100 lines of Python (2018)
Pretix is a very interesting piece of open source software for selling event tickets. It’s nice to see them venturing out to writing printer drivers for ticket printers! All the best for them.
roywashere··on US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]
If Chrome would need to be sold off, or Android, or Maps, those can only become even more pressured to be monetized for user data, I’m afraid
roywashere··on What went wrong with wireless USB
What car do you drive? Then I make sure to not buy it
roywashere··on Joining Sun Microsystems – 40 years ago (2022)
In this case, the Lyons were not providing each other jobs. But they shared insights into which companies had cool tech. And they inspired each other with the nice work stations! Much different. And not really 'nepotism'.
roywashere··on Fosstodon might get blocked on Mastodon instances
Fosstodon, the popular instance that hosts many FOSS open source software developer accounts, might get blocked by multiple Mastodon instances because of an alleged alt-right moderator on their instance. This sucks and I'm unsure what to think about this
roywashere··on Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life
Clone meant, at least back in the day, that it was compatible with software written for the IBM XT. There were many clones with more ram, 3.5” disk drives, or better CPU (NEC V20) than the original IBM XT but they all ran MS DOS and WordPerfect and Accolade Test Drive and any other software you would expect so they were considered ‘XT clones’
roywashere··on I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)
That reminds me on the time the FSF moved, they changed their address, and the open source product I worked on had to change their address in the license notices in our product:

https://github.com/moritz/otrs/commit/e845575e1848fd0124fb8d...

And of course, as happens more often, this issue was raised to us by Debian developers, who care a great deal about 'correctness'

roywashere··on Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life
I'm not even sure why you would point this out.

I'm also quite certain there were also no USB flash drives, SD card support, Wifi networking and e-ink displays in the early 1990s. It's not a replica in any way, it does not claim to be that. Just a cool compute device!

roywashere··on I gave up on self-hosted Sentry (2024)
Just for transparency, are you by any chance a member of this self-hosting team or a sentry employee? Is it a coincidence that your keybase name is georghendrik according to your profile, and the painter _Georg Hendrik_ Breitner painted a picture called "Sentry"? https://www.demesdagcollectie.nl/en/collection/hwm0055
roywashere··on GPD Pocket 4 Speaker DSP: Configuring PipeWire so laptop speakers sound better
The Air is going to be a very different product because it is produced in much higher volume. And it will have many more engineering hours spent on it to make things ‘smooth’, including having the speakers sound OK by applying DSP as this post discusses. The GPD will be much more hackable but have worse performance as a trade off
roywashere··on Xkcd: Notifications
Awesome, really great & fun. Would recommend actually setting up the notifications even though it still seems a little bit buggy
roywashere··on I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad
I definitely know that people have complained that modern ThinkPads are not as good as before, and they have been doing that for ages, just as Socrates back in the day already was complaining about modern kids and their behaviours ;-)

In this case I was referring to post-T480 ThinkPads which have soldered memory, and no longer have hot-swappable batteries or on-board Ethernet.

roywashere··on I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad
My new company of about 100 persons uses ThinkPads as their 'standard issue' laptops. Which I guess is great. I have a T480 privately. But modern ThinkPads are not as great as before, and I was just thinking about if the Framework might make a nice 'standard issue' laptop for the company. I guess it might be just fine!
roywashere··on I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad
Oh man, the MNT Reform looks _so_ awesome!
roywashere··on Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water
Somewhat related, as a teen in the 90s I worked at McDonald’s in The Netherlands. Because of the diet in the US, the bread used for hamburgers contained extra calcium to be more ‘healthy’, because many people did not get enough calcium intake. In The Netherlands, where people drink much more dairy products, especially back in the 90s, people would get plenty of calcium so there was no need to put extra in the bread. But because a hamburger should be a hamburger no matter where you buy it worldwide, the Dutch McDonald’s hamburger bread still had the added calcium
roywashere··on The little book about OS development
There is an active fork here: https://ordoflammae.github.io/littleosbook/
roywashere··on Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg
> Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos...

People amassing more money than entire countries just should not happen. "Eat the rich"!

roywashere··on My stupid noise journey (2023)
Big and loud cars are antisocial and should be forbidden to drive as a private person. CHANGE MY MIND
roywashere··on Firmware update bricks HP printers, makes them unable to use HP cartridges
I think it depends on the brand of printers you buy. I bought a Brother and had trouble getting AirPrint to work. Only to find out after a year that there was an update of the firmware I had not installed, which had been available all along, that fixed the AirPrint issue immediately.

Please just stop buying HP and Canon printers!

roywashere··on A technical history of Acorn Computers
I bought an Atom second-hand, it was my first 'own' computer. My father first had a TRS-80 model III and then an IBM clone XT. So the Atom was definitely less capable, but it was my own. I read all the accompanying manuals front to back and I read the computer magazines that came with it and this is how I learned English. I was 9 years old at that point. It came with schematics and of course I opened the case. I could not get the thing to load or save data on my dad's tape recorder. And it was only so much fun trying to type in a program from a listing which I could not save, especially taking into account my limited typing skills at the time and the fact that I had to do this while the Atom was attached to the TV in the living room. Still, it was a worth wile and forming experience and surely worth my pocket money.

Later on in life, end of 90s, I was re-wiring the building of my students union, with a friend. Many amps main board, 380 volts, 40 circuits or so, kind of big install. We had to create plans and supply them to get approval from the city or the utility company or the architect or such. For this we used the Archimedes of some guy that helped us. At this point the Archimedes definitely was dead as a platform, Windows 98 was just out. But it was still possible to use it to create drawings and schematics and quite capable.

roywashere··on Why fastDOOM is fast
In the 90s my student union ran a computer network mainly for gaming with DOS PCs and netware running on a Linux server with MARS. This was before they had internet access but it was great for lan gaming: command & conquer, doom, or quake. All games were started from network mounts. Fun times.
roywashere··on Windows NT for GameCube/Wii
There was also Windows NT for Alpha and RISC, neither were popular. And now we have yet again Windows for ARM. Everything old is new again :-)
roywashere··on Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything
I think it is very ironic that we chose to use PDF in many fields to archive data because it is a standard and because we would be able to open our pdf documents in 50 or 100 years time. So here we are just a couple of years later facing the challenge of getting the data out of our stupid PDF documents already!
roywashere··on The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE
In turkey this has been the other way around! Us does not look so much different now
roywashere··on JavaScript Temporal is coming
While this is true, most often if you want to do "now plus a month" you'll mean "at the same time on the local clock", and disregarding timezone changes, while most often if you want to do "now plus four hours" you'd actually mean four real hours, and you want to calculate in the DST changes to make sure you have four actual hours in your duration
roywashere··on Building a T1D smartwatch for my son from scratch
PineTime is nice and cheap and does a little BlueTooth. It's easy to flash your own firmware to it; I think it might have been an option.

That said, Pine64 does not do a whole lot of work on their platform and I guess a lot of people are wanting _more_. It's a simple watch and for what it does and costs it's great. If you think you'll get an open source Apple Watch, you're going to be disappointed.

roywashere··on "We're building a new static type checker for Python"
I still hope they build a Heroku alternative. I think their work on uv might be some of the building blocks they would need?
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