Tech Workers Coalition 101 - Onboarding & Overview event Feb 10th
Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: TWC 101. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.
Welcome to Tech Workers Coalition 101 call! In this call you will learn more about the history of TWC, as well as meaningful ways you can plug in. If you have ideas of your own, we would love to hear them and make them happen!Zoom
Trump’s Pal Mark Zuckerberg Censoring Site That Names ICE & Border Patrol Goons
Trump’s Pal Mark Zuckerberg Censoring Site That Names ICE & Border Patrol Goons
ICE List says Meta is blocking its links after a leak that exposed the details of 4,500 federal immigration employees.Tom Latchem (The Daily Beast)
[SOLVED] Flatpaks "Unable to open lock file /usr/.ref: No such file or directory", some flatpaks affected
flatpak run org.qbittorrent.qBittorrent
bwrap: Unable to open lock file /app/.ref: No such file or directoryI tried flatpak repair, with --user and --system, that did not fix it, and I did a system re-install, or rather reinstalled all the packages
Nothing worked.
I am using nixos on unstable, recently I broke the nix part of my system, and was advised to do a re-install, I did a re-install which involved usb booting into nixos, and running a command to reinstall all the packages and rebuild in my nix directory, but afterwards, no flatpak is running. There is a possibility it broke beforehand and I didnt notice that, but i think it might have been after the re-install.
Flatpak version:
1.16.1
Distro:
NixOS
Distro version:
/nix/store/8hx8jwa24q6rkzhca9iqy5ckk9rbphi1-source
Architecture:
x86_64
EDIT:
Some flatpaks run but alot of them dont with the same error
EDIT (x2) SOLVED:
I think the issue might have been the kde platform, as the apps that crashed were on kde platform 6.8 or 6.9, possibly some broken version, most likely the platform and bwrap didnt play well with nixos, these commands worked, I ran this for users (not system). Possible system might work, point is, I dont have the issue anymore.
flatpak uninstall org.inkscape.Inkscape org.qbittorrent.qBittorrent com.obsproject.Studio org.kde.kdenlive org.wireshark.Wireshark com.prusa3d.PrusaSlicer com.rafaelmardojai.Blanket io.github.seadve.Mousai net.codelogistics.clicker org.freefilesync.FreeFileSync
flatpak uninstall --runtime org.kde.Platform//6.8
flatpak uninstall --runtime org.kde.Platform//6.9
flatpak uninstall --runtime org.gnome.Platform//48
flatpak uninstall --unused -y
flatpak repair --system
flatpak repair --user
flatpak install flathub org.inkscape.Inkscape
flatpak install flathub org.qbittorrent.qBittorrent
flatpak install flathub com.obsproject.Studiolike this
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ATproto: The Enshittification Killswitch That Enables Resonant Computing
Last month, I helped release the Resonant Computing Manifesto, which laid out a vision for technology that empowers users rather than extracting from them. The response was gratifying—people are genuinely hungry for an alternative to the current enshittification trajectory of tech. But the most common piece of feedback we got was some version of: “Okay, this sounds great, but how do I actually build this?”It’s a fair question. Manifestos are cheap if they don’t connect to reality.
So here’s my answer, at least for anything involving social identity: build on the ATProtocol. It’s the only available system today that actually delivers on the resonant computing principles, and it’s ready to use right now.
ATproto: The Enshittification Killswitch That Enables Resonant Computing
Disclosure: I’m on the board of Bluesky, which was inspired by my “Protocols, Not Platforms” paper. But this post isn’t about Bluesky the app. It’s about the underlyin…Techdirt
LG's new subscription program charges up to £277 per month to rent a TV
If you're already renting content access, why not rent your TV as well?
LG has launched a subscription program in the UK that allows people to make monthly payments in order to rent LG TVs, soundbars, monitors, and speakers.LG Flex customers can sign up for one-, two-, or three-year subscriptions to get lower monthly payments.
“At the end of your subscription, you can apply for a free upgrade, keep paying monthly, or return your device,” the LG Flex website says. Subscribers will have to pay a £50 (about $69) fee for a “full removal service,” including dismounting and packaging, of rental TVs.
LG also claims on its website that it won’t penalize customers for “obvious signs of use, such as some scratching, small dents, or changes in the paintwork.” However, if you damage the rental device, LG “may charge you for the cost of repair as outlined by the Repair Charges set out in your agreement.” LG’s subscription partner, Raylo, also sells insurance for coverage against “accidental damage, loss, and theft” of rented devices.
As of this writing, you can buy LG’s 83-inch OLED B5 2025 TV on LG’s UK website for £2,550 (about $3,515). Monthly rental prices range from £93 ($128), if you commit to a three-year-long rental period, to £277 ($382), if you only commit to a one-month rental period. Under the three-year plan, you can rent the TV for 27 months before you end up paying more to rent the TV than you would have to own it. At the highest rate, your rental payments will surpass MSRP after nine months.
LG's new subscription program charges up to £277 per month to rent a TV
Significant discounts come with committing to 1- to 3-year rental periods.Scharon Harding (Ars Technica)
The US drew up a plan to invade Canada in 1930. Now Trump is reviving old fears
The US drew up a plan to invade Canada in 1930. Now Trump is reviving old fears
Now the US is vying regional dominance, experts point to War Plan Red as proof its Canadian allyship has always been flimsyLeyland Cecco (The Guardian)
What's the deal with these slop-y Linux tutorial "blogs"?
In the recent days I've been stumbling upon weird, new ~~so-called "AI"~~ Mathy-math-slop sites, like linuxv*x.com1. Some other was called something like "tutorialsipedia", or whatever.
Have you noticed these? Is that some weird new Startup that wants to leverage CEO and "AI"? I'd use them, but my eyes glaze off the page. It's like a drop on a Lotus leaf and I can't really read that garbage. What's up with those?
- Don't want to give them the traffic. ↩︎
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Introduction | uBlacklist
uBlacklist is a browser extension that filters Google Search results, available for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.ublacklist.github.io
It works on each of these:
github.com/iorate/ublacklist#s…
GitHub - iorate/ublacklist: Blocks specific sites from appearing in Google search results
Blocks specific sites from appearing in Google search results - iorate/ublacklistGitHub
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OH man, thank you for that!
Wait, doesn't this just duplicate uBlock functionality? You can just add the lists directly to uBlock, or am I missing something?
Hey so just because I went on a spree, here's a bunch of lists you can choose from to import into uBlock since that's super simple already, and this other addon requires you to add them anyway so:
Community Rulesets | uBlacklist
These rulesets are independently created and maintained by individual users, not endorsed or verified by the uBlacklist project. Use at your own discretion and report issues directly to the authors.ublacklist.github.io
Google Hit Hider by Domain (Search Filter / Block Sites)
Block unwanted sites from your Google, DuckDuckGo, Startpage.com, Bing and Yahoo search results. v2.3.7 2026-01-27greasyfork.org
It’s happening to all difficult problems. I’ve been searching for help with car wiring diagram or trouble codes and getting endless copies of slop scraped websites from DDG.
They often appear to be generated on the fly and rarely have any real information in them past the relevant search term. No real info. Super fucking frustrating.
SEO-based business models used blogspam before. It's the same SEO garbage that gets it into search results, but the content is now AI slop instead of contracted labour at pennies/word.
And search is garbage, now, because of enshittification; Google gets more money when you give up and couch the sponsored links, and re-query or load more pages of results to load more ads. So there's no incentive for them to filter the spam.
Yeah, I think that’s a sad part of AI, is that even when you separate all the specific problems it has (energy use, CSAM, fake news) it also revivifies a bunch of old scams, SEO, phishing, etc
A super intelligent AI is also going to be better at scamming people than any human
Welcome to the year of the linux desktop. Now solving linux problems is big business!
What you’re saying about drops on a lotus leaf hits though. There’s something weird about the prose on those sites that’s significantly different than even ai text I’ve made at home on my own hardware.
Sometimes it feels like the opposite of meditation where I can feel something tugging “up” in the top center of my skull when “reading” one of those pages but don’t remember what the page was about.
Sometimes it feels like the opposite of meditation where I can feel something tugging “up” in the top center of my skull when “reading” one of those pages but don’t remember what the page was about.
This is your brain on slop.
“reading” one of those pages but don’t remember what the page was about.
That's one of the biggest tells of AI-written text. It uses a lot of words to say very little, but does so in a very authoritative-sounding (or needlessly flowery) way.
drops on a lotus leaf
Here's a strategy for scoring your own search results.
"Keywords" are the seven words most commonly occurring on the page. If these seven words are seen to be repeated on the page to an unusual degree, then it is a good assumption that the page was designed by the author to appear high on search results.
Keyword density is a measure of "gloss." Most people will read pages with high keyword density as unusually glossy. Keyword density is not necessarily related to how genuine the page content appears to be otherwise, but most people will look askance at a page that is too glossy.
It should come as no big surprise that the pages that appear high on search results have been designed that way. They are deliberately glossy with high keyword density. You may consider whether to skip reading them or even loading them in your browser. Chances are good that the glossy pages are mostly advertising.
Generally you will find interspersed in your results a handful of sites with low keyword density. These are likely from universities, government sites, and research institutions that have sources of revenue beyond advertising. You may consider whether to load these up and skim through them. Probably they will show a publication date, author, and list of references, which will move your research forward.
It can be noted that AI-generated sites often exhibit high keyword density. This is probably deliberate so that they garner advertising revenue. However, it may also be due to "bot 'splaining," which is polly-paraphrasing a series of several (perhaps contradictory) articles.
Keyword density is not the only measure of gloss. There are others that have been developed to measure ratios between parts of speech. Unfortunately NONE OF THESE — including keyword density — distinguish sharply between pages that naturally convey genuine information and pages that have been designed to convey fluff for ulterior purposes. It is unlikely that combining measures of gloss will result in a tool that discriminates much better than keyword density by itself.
- >Piskorski, Jakub, Marcin Sydow, and Weiss Weiss. "Exploring Linguistic Features for Web Spam Detection: A Preliminary Study." Airweb '08: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web. Ed. Carlos Castillo, Kumar Chellapilla, and Dennis Fetterly. New York: ACM, Apr. 2008. 25-28. ISBN:9781605581590. DOI:10.1145/1451983. 09 Nov. 2025 users.pja.edu.pl/~msyd/lingFea….
Nevertheless, you may wish to explore keyword density as a means to rank search results.
When I try to include a direct link to my python scripts, which do that, my responses and in fact the whole posted discussion are taken down. ... something to do with self promotion of untested software I suppose. But you can find them in the Cheese Shop (See Wikipedia "Python Package Index.") under clanker_score.
We don't want to make this too easy for just anyone to censor all his search results. Rather, these scrips are meant as a learning tool. They demonstrate generally how rotten search results can be on one particular and not very compelling dimension. It should not be necessary to download and scan each and every page. You should be able to train yourself to ignore a priori results that include handfuls of pages from unauthoritative sites.
<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="#fn1" id="fnref1">[1]</a></sup>And footer section:
<hr class="footnotes-sep">
<section class="footnotes">
<ol class="footnotes-list">
<li id="fn1" class="footnote-item"><p dir="auto">Don’t want to give them the traffic. <a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a><br>
</li>
</ol>
</section>From there they can be stylized. Pretty neat. More info
Extended Syntax | Markdown Guide
Advanced features that build on the basic Markdown syntax.www.markdownguide.org
Lemmy’s Markdown is based on markdown-it12 which is based on CommonMark.
It's kind-of funny. Nowadays, I find the AI search assistants (I used the one with Kagi) work better than search results with all of these shitty AI sites.
We're back to the age of pre-StackOverflow, when Expert Sex Change was always plaguing my search results with fucking pay-to-view bullshit. Except it's free-but-useless websites now.
Lately I've been seeing websites that steal content from Stack Overflow verbatim rank higher than the same SO page itself.
Anthropic CEO important, but evil, essay: The adolescence of technology.
suppose you were the national security advisor of a major state
is supposing a political yes man, like economists/historians, who promote every warmongering lie the establishment has already injected into reality.
The national security establishment wants Skynet, and even though OP warns about the sovereign-level power of big tech controlling AI companies, they are all begging to be picked (paid) to develop Skynet, and all want a political order that pursues Skynet, with whatever oppression and genocide required to give all of nation's money to Skynet. There is no AI bubble because Skynet will buy all of the datacenter tokens. There is no risk of Skynet opposing oligarchist supremacist tech providers, because Skynet will reward them handsomely.
OP's AI safety measures for Claude models is only for individuals. Establishment oligarchy corporate employees should be free to develop bioweapons for Skynet, of course.
Democracy is perfect, and so a warmongering ZIonazi ruled US and all of its colonies, conveniently/purely coincidentally described as the only democracies, deserve to dominate the world through the pure love of Skynet
A perfectly valid humanist American reason to not sell chips to China is that it increases Nvidia extoriton power/prices over Americans. Still, OP is a piece of shit, for validating US/Zionazi oligarchist oppression of humanity... or China wins, as the ultimate argument for Skynet.
The moral failure of praising democracy is that it has demonstrably more evil results than countries that choose to limit divisive speech, which is why CIA speech determines all election outcomes. Placing as axiom, that US is a force for good/humanism is inherently exposing the essay as one for demonic evil.
solutions to massive labour displacement are everything other than freedom dividends/UBI.
The US cannot continue a Zionazi-first rulership unless it is a hateful divisive shithole, where the ZIonazi political duopoly fight over making the US a bigger shithole vs addressing some of the shithole symptoms.
Dario Amodei — The Adolescence of Technology
Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AIwww.darioamodei.com
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Meta's latest subscription move is an attempt to offset its AI bets
On January 26, Meta announced that it was going to test premium subscriptions across its apps. The subscriptions will offer exclusive features and expanded AI tools, while ad-supported versions remain free.Under the test, users are presented with a clear choice between two paths. People can subscribe to use Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp without ads, or continue using the services for free while agreeing to ongoing data use for advertising purposes.
Meta claims the subscriptions will "unlock productivity, creativity, and AI-powered features," with each app receiving its own set of paid tools rather than a single bundled plan. The company isn't committing to one configuration and plans in order to experiment with different feature sets and pricing models over time.
Carney says he told Trump 'I meant what I said in Davos,' contradicting U.S. account
Prime Minister Mark Carney is dismissing a claim that he walked back the remarks he made in Davos last week during a conversation with U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday."To be absolutely clear, and I said this to the president, I meant what I said in Davos," Carney said Tuesday on his way into a meeting with his cabinet.
Asked directly if he walked his comments back, Carney said "no."
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Petition e-6821 [for majority Canadian ownership of Canadian news media]
Closes Feb 18th.
Petition to the House of Commons in Parliament assembled
Whereas:
- Postmedia, one of Canada's largest media companies, is controlled by Chatham Asset Management, an American hedge fund, placing a key part of Canada’s news media under foreign influence;
- Foreign ownership introduces perspectives shaped by American political and cultural priorities, which often do not reflect Canadian values or concerns;
- Independent Canadian journalism is essential to democracy, ensuring accountability, accuracy, and representation of Canadian voices;
- Foreign control risks skewing news coverage, undermining media integrity, and eroding public trust; and
- Other countries, such as Australia and France, have established policies to safeguard domestic control of media, providing workable models for Canada.
We, the undersigned, Residents of Canada, call upon the House of Commons in Parliament assembled to pass legislation requiring majority Canadian ownership and control of print, digital and other non-audio-visual news media, to protect Canadian sovereignty, ensure journalism integrity, and guarantee that our media reflects Canadian priorities and values.
https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-6821
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WinRAR path traversal flaw still exploited by numerous hackers
Multiple threat actors, both state-sponsored and financially motivated, are exploiting the CVE-2025-8088 high-severity vulnerability in WinRAR for initial access and to deliver various malicious payloads.
The security issue is a path traversal flaw that leverages Alternate Data Streams (ADS) to write malicious files to arbitrary locations. Attackers have exploited this in the past to plant malware in the Windows Startup folder, for persistence across reboots.
Why there’s no European Google?
At the same time, the "World Wide Web," composed of the HTTP protocol and the HTML format, was invented by a British citizen and a Belgian citizen who were working in a European research facility located in Switzerland. But the building was on the border with France, and there’s much historical evidence pointing to the Web and its first server having been invented in France.It’s hard to be more European than the Web!
[ ... ]
Some are proud because they made a lot of money while cutting down a forest. Others are proud because they are planting trees that will produce the oxygen breathed by their grandchildren. What if success was not privatizing resources but instead contributing to the commons, to make it each day better, richer, stronger?
The biggest reasons I see is that Europe is still a collection nation states whit each having it's own language, culture, laws and needs, EU hasn't removed those (yet, god forbid). There really is no single market for many services like there is in the US, in Europe you have to develop and sometimes apply for permits and licenses for each country even with the EU, since EU usually regulates retroactively not so much proactively.
The second is that there is nothing like the US federal government or military that could fund and/or bootstrap tech companies with contracts. Like google, SpaceX and Microsoft have both benefited massively from taking lucrative contracts from military government and US intelligence agencies in the past. Those allowed them to grow and consolidate first cover the US and then springboard themselves global.
The Palo Alto System | The Nation
Malcolm Harris’s new history of his hometown dispenses with the sentimental lore and examines how it has long been the seedbed for exploitation, chaos, and ecological degradation.smccroskey (The Nation)
in Europe you have to develop and sometimes apply for permits and licenses for each country
Honestly, EU Inc, announced at the WEF, is one of the few good things to come out of that mess. A single framework for running a business in all EU countries, meaning expansion across borders will be simplified enormously. Should allow for easier growth in the future.
They have built their own index with Ecosia and are working towards fully using that but currently I believe they use a mix.
Making your own index is difficult and expensive. They're doing the work and I think we should support them in that.
Mojeek is the only usable engine I know of that's European and truly independent at the moment. But the results are not nearly as good as in Qwant.
SearXNG also runs on Google and Bing in the backend, and I can never seem to find an instance that works reliably.
I think the Qwant/Ecosia index focuses primarily on the French (and German?) speaking web to begin with, but I'm hopefull it will get good in all languages eventually.
Mojeek
Mojeek is a web search engine that provides unbiased, fast, and relevant search results combined with a no tracking privacy policy.www.mojeek.com
All this nice opensource code still is executed on hardware owned (Intellectual Property/IP) by AMD/Intel/Qualcomm/NVIDIA/Apple. Having nice European-Open Source projects is not enough without the hardware layer and standards (instruction sets, drivers), which are owned IP by US cooperation's.
Also one needs to consider cooperation between military-complex/secret-service and big-tech cooperation, which are basically hidden subsidies for the civilian part of the business. And if eu governments do not subsidize their own tech standards similarly they will get out-competed naturally.
I always had the impression that the free software idea had a stronger presence in Europe (and, generally, non-Anglo areas) and have generally chalked that up to the fact that the ambiguity of free (as in freedom)/free (as in beer) largely does not exist outside of English. Note that "open" is every bit as ambiguous as "free" here - i've had way too many arguments with people who thought "open" just means you can look at the source code (imagine thinking that a store was "open" just because you can look through the window and see products).
However IMO the author goes a bit too far in presenting free software seemingly as some sort of uniquely European concept - he seems to suggest that the creation of Linux came about entirely out of thin air, and almost reads to me like Linus Torvalds originated the idea of copyleft - with no mention whatsoever of the American GNU project upon whose shoulders he stands. Allegedly he was inspired by a talk Richard Stallman gave at his university in 1990.
oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/c…
Edit: Git also did not come out of thin air, Linux developers were using a proprietary (American) VCS in the beginning, under a gratis license specifically granted for Linux development. The Australian developer Andrew Tridgell is arguably the person most responsible for inciting the development of git, as the proprietary VCS developer withdrew the gratis licenses once he developed a free tool which could interoperate with the proprietary servers.
(That proprietary tool is now licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, but as far as I know no one uses it anymore)
UFW: opening/closing port, based on number in file and app status
I often need to allow some randomly selected port to be open (tcp & udp) in the Uncomplicated Firewall (UFW), while some app is active. Then I'd like to close it. The port number is written in a file, say portfile
At the moment I'm doing this manually: read the number, then call sudo ufw allow xxxx/tcp in a terminal. Later on, delete the port rule with sudo ufw delete [rulenumber].
I'm trying to write a bash script to do this in a more automated way. It's easy to read the number from the flie as a variable, then call ufw with that number (provided the script is started as sudo).
What's not clear to me is how to delete the UFW rule once the application is closed. I could start the app within the bash script itself. Maybe it'd just be a matter of waiting for it to finish?
I'm very thankful for suggestions and ideas – and learning more about bash tricks :)
Can you label rules, that would be a better approach IMO.
Not familiar enough with UFW but could you parse the output and store the rules number as a variable if this is all one long running script?
how many ports do you need? if it's below 1000 I'd just permanently open an unused port range and make the applications use those ports
if nothing is listening on those ports then it wouldn't be a security problem at all
I'm only going to inject þat I find UFW far more complex þan just using nftables directly. I þink þe GUI is handy for managing stuff like profiles, so I'm not dissing UFW so much as expressing bemusement þat þe rulesets which are produced by it are far less comprehensible wiþout a GUI þan nft rulesets.
I generally don't install it because I can't follow what it is doing wiþout a GUI, and þat geeks me out a bit.
Nokia’s Greatest Smartphone Was The Last of Its Kind
- YouTube
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.www.youtube.com
Code Vein II Game Review
Code Vein II Game Review
If the original Code Vein is “Anime Dark Souls,” Code Vein II is “Anime Elden Ring.”Anime News Network
How Linux Saved My Hardware - 5 stories from recent years
#1
my most recent example is a Macbook Air 13 that I chimera'd out of three different machines; awesome that 2012-2017 models have interchangeable parts. was lucky and one of the boards had 8 GB RAM, a rarity back then. alas, the only battery I got has barely 60% capacity and zillions of charge cycles and I ain't too keen on spending money on a replacement.
ok, so shit autonomy, be happy you got a workstation for like $15 in total and run it thusly. except, this one shuts off even if there's like 70% remaining and subsequently won't power on without a charger - kinda big deal for a laptop. I imagine not all its cells are up to spec so when it reaches a threshold it cuts out. under macOS, the SMC lets it sip power and when you attach a charger it just wakes as you left it. linux ain't that cool, when you connect power - all your unsaved work is gone.
what linux does have is intel-undervolt. just a smidge of -50mV was enough to remedy the issue. after a coupla days, moved it to -75mV, still perfectly stable; at -100mV it occasionally KPs.
so a thing that was unusable away from a charger is again a mobile device, netting me 4+ hours of light use and almost a week of standby!
#2
eons ago I had a Thinkpad W520; at least I think that was the model - a 15.6" with the chunky, 7-row keyboard sans numpad. lenovo stabbed me in the heart when they decided that all subsequent models must rock the annoying numeric pad, making you type off-center and... anyhoo, the one I got, had a partially damaged screen, about 100ish pixels wide and super irritating, flashing constantly. replacing it wasn't in the budget and relying on an external monitor was a no-go...
hello xrander! that thing allowed you to cut off a part of the screen and that's what I did - converted the 16:10 to something more like 4:3. not only that, a friend taped over the busted part with some carbon-like decal making it look super sick! I'm still trying to find a picture from way back when but no luck so far...
not only did I get a super usable machine, it was the coolest workstation by far - maxed out RAM, three SSD/HD in there... well, as cool as those things can be, anyways...
#3
a few years back, I got a 13" Yoga, forgot the model, for pocket change. dual-core i5 and soldered 8 GB RAM, gorgeous screen, awesome battery - but it constantly blue-screened. break out the mint USB with memtest, and yepp - errors. dogdamn, no way can I afford to fix this thing and if I try desoldering those things, Imma burn the house down. and break the thing even further...
enter GRUB and its BADRAM feature! you can exclude arbitrary region(s) of RAM and the OS that boots after it will be none the wiser - it just uses the rest. and verily, it worked without issues, used it for years and I believe it still works to this day with his current owner.
#4
got a kernel-panicking Macbook Pro 15 Mid2010 for next to nothing. those things died en masse, the issue was a capacitor that drove the Nvidia chip. any strain or excess power consumption and the thing gave out and the OS crashed. the fix was/is simple - disable the Nvidia chip via EFI variable and use just the Intel HD graphics. you lose display out but gain a cooler machine, longer battery life, and you get zero issues with linux.
having fixed it, I installed linux and wanted to upgrade the RAM to 8 GB. alas, no sticks I found would work in the thing. turns out, the fucker only takes 1066 MHz RAM. I totally lived with the conviction that if you stick faster RAM into slower hardware, it'll run it slower, but apparently that ain't so. so tried bartering with junkers, I'll give you my 1333 RAM, you gimme yours - no takers. buying stuff for something that cost me less than $10 was out of the question...
turns out, you can use linux to reprogram the SPD data on the RAM module! you change its identifier to 1066 and the macbook recognized it as such. furthermore, you don't need to patch both sticks, if one is 1066 it can run the other at 1066 as well - so you cat run 'em slower! no idea if this is an apple thing or its widely present, but I got a functioning workstation for free!
#5
finally, the Dell Latitude 5285. that's a 2-in-1 tablet with detachable keyboard that I got without the battery. it had okayish specs, the i5-7300u is nothing to get excited about but it had 16 GB LPDDR3 soldered on. the touch display is beyond gorgeous - 400-nit 1920x1280 IPS and the intel graphics shipped the full 4K @ 60 Hz to my monitor via DP-Alt. the only problem - the fucker won't boost past 400 MHz without the battery! buying the thing is out of the question (y'all notice a pattern here, right?) so what are we to do...
thankfully, we got msr-tools. the thing can patch CPU's registers and en/disable some things, and one of them is BD_PROCHOT. that signal makes the CPU throttle on account the heat, it's also triggered if anything is amiss - touchpads disconnected, battery not present, etc. what's needed is read out rdmsr 0x1fc if memory serves correctly, and then you add one bit to the read out state and write it back with wrmsr 0x1fc 0x1xxxxx et voila - speedsteps up to 2.7 GHz, a quick systemd script to make it permanent. it won't turbo, to 3.3 GHz or sumsuch, but this was more than enough for everyday use.
thanks for reading! y'all got any stories how linux can save your ass without spending money? share it with the class!
How Linux Saved My Hardware - 5 stories from recent years
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/42299124
#1my most recent example is a Macbook Air 13 that I chimera'd out of three different machines; awesome that 2012-2017 models have interchangeable parts. was lucky and one of the boards had 8 GB RAM, a rarity back then. alas, the only battery I got has barely 60% capacity and zillions of charge cycles and I ain't too keen on spending money on a replacement.
ok, so shit autonomy, be happy you got a workstation for like $15 in total and run it thusly. except, this one shuts off even if there's like 70% remaining and subsequently won't power on without a charger - kinda big deal for a laptop. I imagine not all its cells are up to spec so when it reaches a threshold it cuts out. under macOS, the SMC lets it sip power and when you attach a charger it just wakes as you left it. linux ain't that cool, when you connect power - all your unsaved work is gone.
what linux does have is
intel-undervolt. just a smidge of -50mV was enough to remedy the issue. after a coupla days, moved it to -75mV, still perfectly stable; at -100mV it occasionally KPs.so a thing that was unusable away from a charger is again a mobile device, netting me 4+ hours of light use and almost a week of standby!
#2
eons ago I had a Thinkpad W520; at least I think that was the model - a 15.6" with the chunky, 7-row keyboard sans numpad. lenovo stabbed me in the heart when they decided that all subsequent models must rock the annoying numeric pad, making you type off-center and... anyhoo, the one I got, had a partially damaged screen, about 100ish pixels wide and super irritating, flashing constantly. replacing it wasn't in the budget and relying on an external monitor was a no-go...
hello
xrander! that thing allowed you to cut off a part of the screen and that's what I did - converted the 16:10 to something more like 4:3. not only that, a friend taped over the busted part with some carbon-like decal making it look super sick! I'm still trying to find a picture from way back when but no luck so far...not only did I get a super usable machine, it was the coolest workstation by far - maxed out RAM, three SSD/HD in there... well, as cool as those things can be, anyways...
#3
a few years back, I got a 13" Yoga, forgot the model, for pocket change. dual-core i5 and soldered 8 GB RAM, gorgeous screen, awesome battery - but it constantly blue-screened. break out the mint USB with memtest, and yepp - errors. dogdamn, no way can I afford to fix this thing and if I try desoldering those things, Imma burn the house down. and break the thing even further...
enter GRUB and its BADRAM feature! you can exclude arbitrary region(s) of RAM and the OS that boots after it will be none the wiser - it just uses the rest. and verily, it worked without issues, used it for years and I believe it still works to this day with his current owner.
#4
got a kernel-panicking Macbook Pro 15 Mid2010 for next to nothing. those things died en masse, the issue was a capacitor that drove the Nvidia chip. any strain or excess power consumption and the thing gave out and the OS crashed. the fix was/is simple - disable the Nvidia chip via EFI variable and use just the Intel HD graphics. you lose display out but gain a cooler machine, longer battery life, and you get zero issues with linux.
having fixed it, I installed linux and wanted to upgrade the RAM to 8 GB. alas, no sticks I found would work in the thing. turns out, the fucker only takes 1066 MHz RAM. I totally lived with the conviction that if you stick faster RAM into slower hardware, it'll run it slower, but apparently that ain't so. so tried bartering with junkers, I'll give you my 1333 RAM, you gimme yours - no takers. buying stuff for something that cost me less than $10 was out of the question...
turns out, you can use linux to reprogram the SPD data on the RAM module! you change its identifier to 1066 and the macbook recognized it as such. furthermore, you don't need to patch both sticks, if one is 1066 it can run the other at 1066 as well - so you can run 'em slower! no idea if this is an apple thing or its widely present, but I got a functioning workstation for free!
#5
finally, the Dell Latitude 5285. that's a 2-in-1 tablet with detachable keyboard that I got without the battery. it had okayish specs, the i5-7300u is nothing to get excited about but it had 16 GB LPDDR3 soldered on. the touch display is beyond gorgeous - 400-nit 1920x1280 IPS and the intel graphics shipped the full 4K @ 60 Hz to my monitor via DP-Alt. the only problem - the fucker won't boost past 400 MHz without the battery! buying the thing is out of the question (y'all notice a pattern here, right?) so what are we to do...
thankfully, we got
msr-tools. the thing can patch CPU's registers and en/disable some things, and one of them is BD_PROCHOT. that signal makes the CPU throttle on account the heat, it's also triggered if anything is amiss - touchpads disconnected, battery not present, etc. what's needed is read outrdmsr 0x1fcif memory serves correctly, and then you add one bit to the read out state and write it back withwrmsr 0x1fc 0x1xxxxxet voila - speedsteps up to 2.7 GHz, a quick systemd script to make it permanent. it won't turbo, to 3.3 GHz or sumsuch, but this was more than enough for everyday use.thanks for reading! y'all got any stories how linux can save your ass without spending money? share it with the class!
How Linux Saved My Hardware - 5 stories from recent years
#1my most recent example is a Macbook Air 13 that I chimera'd out of three different machines; awesome that 2012-2017 models have interchangeable parts. was lucky and one of the boards had 8 GB RAM, a rarity back then. alas, the only battery I got has barely 60% capacity and zillions of charge cycles and I ain't too keen on spending money on a replacement.
ok, so shit autonomy, be happy you got a workstation for like $15 in total and run it thusly. except, this one shuts off even if there's like 70% remaining and subsequently won't power on without a charger - kinda big deal for a laptop. I imagine not all its cells are up to spec so when it reaches a threshold it cuts out. under macOS, the SMC lets it sip power and when you attach a charger it just wakes as you left it. linux ain't that cool, when you connect power - all your unsaved work is gone.
what linux does have is
intel-undervolt. just a smidge of -50mV was enough to remedy the issue. after a coupla days, moved it to -75mV, still perfectly stable; at -100mV it occasionally KPs.so a thing that was unusable away from a charger is again a mobile device, netting me 4+ hours of light use and almost a week of standby!
#2
eons ago I had a Thinkpad W520; at least I think that was the model - a 15.6" with the chunky, 7-row keyboard sans numpad. lenovo stabbed me in the heart when they decided that all subsequent models must rock the annoying numeric pad, making you type off-center and... anyhoo, the one I got, had a partially damaged screen, about 100ish pixels wide and super irritating, flashing constantly. replacing it wasn't in the budget and relying on an external monitor was a no-go...
hello
xrander! that thing allowed you to cut off a part of the screen and that's what I did - converted the 16:10 to something more like 4:3. not only that, a friend taped over the busted part with some carbon-like decal making it look super sick! I'm still trying to find a picture from way back when but no luck so far...not only did I get a super usable machine, it was the coolest workstation by far - maxed out RAM, three SSD/HD in there... well, as cool as those things can be, anyways...
#3
a few years back, I got a 13" Yoga, forgot the model, for pocket change. dual-core i5 and soldered 8 GB RAM, gorgeous screen, awesome battery - but it constantly blue-screened. break out the mint USB with memtest, and yepp - errors. dogdamn, no way can I afford to fix this thing and if I try desoldering those things, Imma burn the house down. and break the thing even further...
enter GRUB and its BADRAM feature! you can exclude arbitrary region(s) of RAM and the OS that boots after it will be none the wiser - it just uses the rest. and verily, it worked without issues, used it for years and I believe it still works to this day with his current owner.
#4
got a kernel-panicking Macbook Pro 15 Mid2010 for next to nothing. those things died en masse, the issue was a capacitor that drove the Nvidia chip. any strain or excess power consumption and the thing gave out and the OS crashed. the fix was/is simple - disable the Nvidia chip via EFI variable and use just the Intel HD graphics. you lose display out but gain a cooler machine, longer battery life, and you get zero issues with linux.
having fixed it, I installed linux and wanted to upgrade the RAM to 8 GB. alas, no sticks I found would work in the thing. turns out, the fucker only takes 1066 MHz RAM. I totally lived with the conviction that if you stick faster RAM into slower hardware, it'll run it slower, but apparently that ain't so. so tried bartering with junkers, I'll give you my 1333 RAM, you gimme yours - no takers. buying stuff for something that cost me less than $10 was out of the question...
turns out, you can use linux to reprogram the SPD data on the RAM module! you change its identifier to 1066 and the macbook recognized it as such. furthermore, you don't need to patch both sticks, if one is 1066 it can run the other at 1066 as well - so you cat run 'em slower! no idea if this is an apple thing or its widely present, but I got a functioning workstation for free!
#5
finally, the Dell Latitude 5285. that's a 2-in-1 tablet with detachable keyboard that I got without the battery. it had okayish specs, the i5-7300u is nothing to get excited about but it had 16 GB LPDDR3 soldered on. the touch display is beyond gorgeous - 400-nit 1920x1280 IPS and the intel graphics shipped the full 4K @ 60 Hz to my monitor via DP-Alt. the only problem - the fucker won't boost past 400 MHz without the battery! buying the thing is out of the question (y'all notice a pattern here, right?) so what are we to do...
thankfully, we got
msr-tools. the thing can patch CPU's registers and en/disable some things, and one of them is BD_PROCHOT. that signal makes the CPU throttle on account the heat, it's also triggered if anything is amiss - touchpads disconnected, battery not present, etc. what's needed is read outrdmsr 0x1fcif memory serves correctly, and then you add one bit to the read out state and write it back withwrmsr 0x1fc 0x1xxxxxet voila - speedsteps up to 2.7 GHz, a quick systemd script to make it permanent. it won't turbo, to 3.3 GHz or sumsuch, but this was more than enough for everyday use.thanks for reading! y'all got any stories how linux can save your ass without spending money? share it with the class!
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I had a similar situation with a slightly damaged screen. It was just the very top right corner of a laptop. I just created a square panel in XFCE and blocked off the corner with it so when I fullscreened a window it wouldn't go into the corner.
Interestingly, depending on where the window is when I click fullscreen, it might fullscreen the "tall" way, or the "wide" way. I'm not sure what logic XFCE uses there but it's pretty cool.
Reannlegge
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