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https://s3.toot.io/system/media_attachments/files/112/083/108/258/969/535/original/cf02bbf3c28436a5.png


Safi

Electrical engineer | My interests are in nature, history, literature, psychology, technology and open source software.

From Lahore, Pakistan


I usually try not to talk about politcs on Mastadon/Fediverse but in a short summary all the politicians say sacrifice your life for us and fight with each other so that we could come in power and then we will think about you as well. Very few among them if any say that let us all unite for a greater good and stop fighting and solve all our common issues.


Thankfully there are guest drivers for Virtual BOX for OS/2 and it derivatives and they work fully on OS/2 including mouse integration, folder sharing and clipboard sharing which makes live much easier. of course you have to manually copy files and then enable the drivers in config.sys and startup.cmd which i guess is the autoexec.bat of OS/2 .. autoexec.bat also exists but its for the compatibility with the DOS and Windows 3.1 side of things.


OS/2 and its distros like ArcaOS and Ecomstation are like old school.. You add device drivers by adding stuff in the config.sys like DOS... No plug and play auto detection.. At least the drivers by Windows 95 had changed quite a lot... The config.sys still existed but it was only meant to mostly handle the DOS side of things.


ArcaOS file manager as what I call it is awful and ancient.. Its Windows 3.1 level ancient... literally no drag and drop...

ArcaOS is more like a distro of OS/2 Wrap 4.52 rather than anything new.


Pinterest is actually not a bad search engine.. its a good place if you wanna search images and stock photos..


Aaa! Yes ArcaOS the alternate reality Windows where IBM still collaborated with Microsoft rather than being a Linux company.

https://s3.toot.io/system/media_attachments/files/111/187/521/438/465/277/original/bd6b1ca3b3ff4e52.png


The good thing about opensource software is that the critical bugs will eventually gets fixed and if they are not fixed its source code is available and its so vital for you then you can take up the front seat and fix those bugs and become the new maintainer. This does not happen in closed source software unless you have lots and lots of resources the bug fixing process is very slow and if the software abandoned then those bugs will never get fixed. and you have to reverse engineer it to do it.


nostr:npub100tfdsq0h23ayntnqwands9w8xslx4d2t72kk2jhf376g2tatx6qnv6cuy they always make half ass projects then leave them mid way.. many of them had been great idea but they does not have focus on it.. a fork of firefox os was made into this by a hong kong based company its hybrid open source and closed source but its actually successful... if only mozilla had worked hard enough on the idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS


nostr:npub100tfdsq0h23ayntnqwands9w8xslx4d2t72kk2jhf376g2tatx6qnv6cuy as long as it is open source and they stick to it and do not abandoned it i don't think anything wrong in it.. i don't think there is anything wrong in diversifying... they tried to do so before with Firefox OS but then abandoned its closed source fork kaios is actually successful.


What is the closest languages to English on mainland Europe?

Its the West Frisian language in the Netherlands but of course it was close to Old English and not the modern English which is heavily influenced by French and Latin.


Cats are better hunters than humans

"Studies have shown that cats are more successful hunters than humans. For example, one study found that pet cats were successful in killing their prey 60-70% of the time. Humans, on the other hand, are only successful in killing their prey about 10-20% of the time."

https://s3.toot.io/system/media_attachments/files/111/176/730/108/108/184/original/24196b784d80908e.webp


Bigger does not always means better and ultimately everything depends upon the requirement of the application if for example a natural sounding voice is need then of course neural TTS are the choice otherwise simpler rule based TTS like espeak are the better choice.


I was thinking about it that while modern deep learning text to speech can produce natural sounding voice but they require a huge amount of computational power including a powerful GPU.. compared to them espeak even though it produces robotic sounds can convert text to speech with far fewer resources and support like 100 different languages.


In video games for example its not a good idea to use LLMs and rather rely on more simpler traditional rule based AI techniques..


espeak in its very nature follow the Unix philosophy do one thing and do it better or the KISS principle i.e Keep it simple and stupid.


Today I tried espeak to read urdu text and interestingly it does that.. of course you can never do natural language processing on urdu text with 100% accuracy bcz of the nature of the language but it is still good enough.... I was thinking about it despite the fact espeak voice is robotic but espeak as a tts is quiet utilitarian.. its voice despite being robotic is comprehensible and it support a wide range of languages and require very few resources.


Who were the ancestors of domesticated cattle?

Those were the Aurochs.. We killed them all to extinction through various means or domesticated them a long time ago... the last population which survived in pockets around the surviving forests of Europe went extinct in the 17th century.


Regarding one of the applications where LLMs like ChatGPT, Google Bard, etc are good at is Spell Checking, Grammar Checking, etc

Just put in the text and tell them to correct it and they would.


All i do these days is post memes from one social media to another...


The precursor of text adventure games and interactive fiction and probably the entire genre was this program called SHRDLU made in 1968.. It was written in LISP

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU


I like the new Pi 5.. There are some good things about it like a PCIe slot, built in RTC and everything is faster but do I want it right now... no... nor I have spare money to buy one... I have literally no use of it... Its an incremental upgrade of course.

The power consumption of the new Pi 5 also jumps from 15 watts for Pi 4 to 25 watts minimum for a Pi 5..

Though that Broadcom SOC they are still using Urgh! move to a more FOSS one.. But overall its OK

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5/


This is the reason why people are angry at Hollywood and western video games as all they care about data mining everything and providing the type of stories which they get high rating on the stats they collect rather than the story being an artistic vision of someone

https://youtu.be/1Rq2oErDEmA?si=HWGv0AdhvBhEKifx


Usually the stories the people on one end of the trade route ended up getting of the other end of the trade routes were fanciful and exaggerated stories as rarely any one traveled the entire length of the trade route. people just traded with their neighbors and they traded with their neighbors and so on.


This was IBM's E editor.. It was a replacement of MS Edit.. It was bundled with PC DOS and OS/2... It was actually quite a powerful text editor for its time... Its modern descendants and clones still exist.. Though most of them are proprietary.

https://s3.toot.io/system/media_attachments/files/111/102/678/105/749/521/original/aff62d574954d684.png


nostr:npub1wz4y030t6a7lkh2lm3t0tasfjvtgg9wtr8kleqwhpul5x6k66m9qucxuw0 nostr:npub1cuscsrz6efq99ptktk26x58v4yqy9y46ytp8xw4rjjwq0wlt6znst66789 But the biggest issue with Raspberry OS is that it won't get the updated Debian base until several months... last time it remained stuck to Debian 10 for several months until finally it updated to Debian 11 base... Same now in the case of Debian 12. It won't be officially updated for some time.


nostr:npub1wz4y030t6a7lkh2lm3t0tasfjvtgg9wtr8kleqwhpul5x6k66m9qucxuw0 nostr:npub1cuscsrz6efq99ptktk26x58v4yqy9y46ytp8xw4rjjwq0wlt6znst66789 For desktop use Raspberry OS is the most optimized and best in my experience... not even Ubuntu .. Manjaro I tried it was straight awful as most of the apps in AUR are for x86_64 CPU.


nostr:npub1wz4y030t6a7lkh2lm3t0tasfjvtgg9wtr8kleqwhpul5x6k66m9qucxuw0 nostr:npub1cuscsrz6efq99ptktk26x58v4yqy9y46ytp8xw4rjjwq0wlt6znst66789 Pi 4 can do 1080p at 30 fps but it cannot do 1080p at 60 fps... I generally keep it at 720p at 60 fps.


nostr:npub1wz4y030t6a7lkh2lm3t0tasfjvtgg9wtr8kleqwhpul5x6k66m9qucxuw0 nostr:npub1cuscsrz6efq99ptktk26x58v4yqy9y46ytp8xw4rjjwq0wlt6znst66789 I generally overclock my raspberry pi 4 to 2GHZ and the GPU to 750 MHZ for a smoother web browsering experience... I use my Pi4 as a second screen and a media center... beyond 2GHZ my RPI 4 which is an older model from 2018 becomes quite unstable... Because of that it easily overheats in its case without a heat sink and a tiny fan... I generally provide it with a 5 volt 3 amp supply... basically a fast charger. But not all fast chargers work and for many Pi complains undervoltage.


nostr:npub100tfdsq0h23ayntnqwands9w8xslx4d2t72kk2jhf376g2tatx6qnv6cuy the official YouTube app drives me nuts with all the ads I have started using NewPipe instead.


nostr:npub1wz4y030t6a7lkh2lm3t0tasfjvtgg9wtr8kleqwhpul5x6k66m9qucxuw0 nostr:npub1cuscsrz6efq99ptktk26x58v4yqy9y46ytp8xw4rjjwq0wlt6znst66789 ok fine heating is not a common issue if raspberry pis don't do any demanding work.. lol but power is a very common issue.


nostr:npub1wz4y030t6a7lkh2lm3t0tasfjvtgg9wtr8kleqwhpul5x6k66m9qucxuw0 nostr:npub1cuscsrz6efq99ptktk26x58v4yqy9y46ytp8xw4rjjwq0wlt6znst66789 Generally a bad power source is the number 1 reason behind a malfunctioning raspberry pi... it has to have 5 volts of power if it falls below that it can malfunction including corrupting the SD card... Not all mobile USB chargers provide exactly 5 volts of power...


nostr:npub1cuscsrz6efq99ptktk26x58v4yqy9y46ytp8xw4rjjwq0wlt6znst66789 yeah they do all the time.. that is the weakest point of a raspberry pi.. mine gets corrupt every few months when there is too much power outages in my 3rd world country... But of course Raspberry Pi 4 and CM4 has USB3 ports and they can do USB boot hence they you can use faster USB drives and SSDs.. This one looks like a Raspberry Pi 1 so no option other than SD card.


Do talking trees exist? And what do they talk about?


Unity is going down.. My decision to learn Godot instead of Unity was a right one I guess... My decision was out of my repulsion towards dot net framework and anything Microsoft but seeing Unity now falling apart after they put unjustifiable installation fee on Unity made games I think my choice was correct one.


Essentially the Wordpad has been replaced in favor Free Microsoft Office Web Apps.

https://s3.toot.io/system/media_attachments/files/111/075/060/070/123/432/original/2d80e3728077de83.png


SSH was not always the de facto remote login standard on Unix and Unix-like OSes... before SSH we used to have these r-commands but they weren't encrypted that is why SSH was developed in the 1990s to replace the r-commands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_r-commands


"How Pyramid Complexes Improved AFTER GIZA"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw4aXNMEXeU


When I started learning game development.. I had a choice of Unity game engine or Godot game engine.. I eventually choose Godot.. There were two prime reasons a) It was FOSS and not  b) Its main scripting language was not C# but rather a python like language gdscript.

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/sep/13/unity-seeks-to-clarify-new-game-engine-charges-amid-outrage-from-developers


Yeah use FOSS Godot

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/12/23870547/unit-price-change-game-development


So early text adventure games like Zork were written in a dialect of LISP called Zork Implementation Language (ZIL)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine


Generally the packages on the official repos of a distro are optimized for the distro and it is advisable to use them rather than from any 3rd party repo including distro agnostic repos like flatpaks, snaps and many others.


I saw just a few seconds of Thunderf00t's video and instantly figured out that the carbon catching train breaks the 1st law of thermodynamics and the law of conservation of energy.... it's a f***ing perpetual motion machine and ASAPscience f***ing call themselves a science channel... lool it's grade school physics and chemistry... lol

https://youtube.com/watch?v=5VT9WAxh0iI&si=RgK6jK8YLS7r9Bqr


It is genius for Whatsapp to associate accounts with Mobile phones... my mum is dead... She tragically died last month from double pneumonia... Her tablet got stolen during the day of her funeral.. Her phone number no longer works... how do I recover her account 🤔


😱

https://s3.toot.io/system/media_attachments/files/111/032/868/684/688/347/original/84990ff33520da8b.jpg


Pakistan as a country is the size of American state of Texas yet it is the 5th largest country by population.. Even then Pakistan at national level Pakistan is less densely populated than Japan or the Netherlands... Most of the population of Pakistan still lives in rural areas around 62% of the population in overpopulated mega villages which could be the size of small towns in other countries. The big cities like Karachi or Lahore are more densely populated though.


nostr:npub100tfdsq0h23ayntnqwands9w8xslx4d2t72kk2jhf376g2tatx6qnv6cuy i just wanted to archive my old CDs so I bought a chepo refurbished laptop dvd rw drive.. i guess so i overlooked the connector its slim sata.. lol


nostr:npub100tfdsq0h23ayntnqwands9w8xslx4d2t72kk2jhf376g2tatx6qnv6cuy i'll go to the 2nd hands computer market some day in the city when its not so hot and buy the sate to slim sata cable from there..


nostr:npub100tfdsq0h23ayntnqwands9w8xslx4d2t72kk2jhf376g2tatx6qnv6cuy yeah indeed


nostr:npub100tfdsq0h23ayntnqwands9w8xslx4d2t72kk2jhf376g2tatx6qnv6cuy the only way to buy stuff from international websites is through visa card, master card or the Chinese union pay cards... or when receiving money only payoneer works or direct swift... paypal and other payment systems don't work here.. we have local payment systems also but they don't work internationally.


nostr:npub100tfdsq0h23ayntnqwands9w8xslx4d2t72kk2jhf376g2tatx6qnv6cuy We have the localized version of Aliexpress its called Daraz... I mostly buy stuff from there and there is local seller also from which i mostly buy electronics stuff like microcontrollers, different chips and stuff like that


Next time you buy sh*t online safi keep your eyes open as to look at what you are buying as the connector on the dvd drive is not a standard sata connector.. its some weird dell connector.


Arch is way more stable than Debian Testing or Debian Unstable.. Debian Testing and Unstable always break in my experience.. I don't what kind of people there are who give advise that those are really stable distros.. if you are willing to mark shittons of packages not to update and make backups then sure.. lol


nostr:npub14vz8a8ttgdxnmrdf022gvc9l5t26u0ygxwhfmf2aftc82w9v9g6qvq6glm me too.. lol

https://s3.toot.io/system/media_attachments/files/111/026/859/352/310/347/original/0590b93cb549f094.png


Libreoffice is more than enough for most of your office needs.. The only issue with Libreoffice is file compatibility and for that the free Microsoft Office Webapps is could be a solution.


I haven't used Microsoft Office for years.. If I have too then I use the free Microsoft Office Web Apps.. But I haven't used them either in years.


"Your car collects information on your sexual activity and you consented to it"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYcmF9IAJbU


lool

"AI david attenborough narrates a documentary about my cat..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTb-7Gn-63o