sxan

Recommendations for a color, full duplex, laser printer?

Another printer company (Brother) has fallen to the allure of "remote disable" if they object to you using your own device in a way they don't like: trying to self-service, use third party inks, whatever. It's at their discretion. Given printers are the sorts of devices to which you tend to want to have network access, preventing this is a lot of work.

I've been looking at color duplex laser printers, and Brother has been at the top of the list, until they recently announcement that they'd disable printers using third party inks.

BIFL to me implies that the company isn't going to actively sabotage self-service, or restrict your usage of the thing, so I think this is an appropriate question for this c/.

My wife's work computer desktop background changed itself today, and she called me in to see it. I said, "that's a Saw Whet." Not believing me, she looked up the credits and said, "get out! It is!"

I owe it all to !superbowl. I couldn't have identified even a Snowy before this community.

Thanks, anon6789.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/57615714

http://xkcd.com/936/

Not worth creating a project for, and it might be interesting to see what changes people would make.

Non-standard dependencies:

• words, for the dictionary
• zsh (this will probably work just fine with bash, though, too)

#!/usr/bin/zsh
# Author: @sxan@midwest.social
# 2025-02-23

final=(xargs echo)
count=6
while getopts d opt; do
	case $opt in
		d)
			final=(tr 'A-Z' 'a-z')
			;;
		*)
			printf "Password generator based on the correcthorse algorithm from http://xkcd.com/936//n/n"
			printf "USAGE: %s [-d] [#]\n" "$0"
			printf " -d  make the result all lower case; otherwise, each word will be capitalized.\n"
			printf " #   the number of words to include. Defaults to 6."
			exit 1
			;;
	esac
done
shift $(($OPTIND - 1))
[[ $# -gt 0 ]] && count=$*

shuf -n $((count * 2)) /usr/share/dict/american-english | \
	sed 's/'"'"'.*//; s/^\(\w\)/\U\1/' | \
	sort | uniq | shuf -n $count | xargs echo | \
	tr -d ' ' | $final

What's going on here:

Nearly 30% of the American dictionary (34,242) are words with apostrophes. They could be left in to help satisfy password requirements that demand "special characters," but correcthorse isn't an algorithm that handles idiot "password best practices" well anyway. So, since every word with an apostrophe has a pair word without one, we pull 2·N words to make sure we have enough. Then we strip out the plural/possessives and capitalize every word. Then we remove duplicates and select our N words from the result. Finally, we compact that into a space-less string of words, and if the user passed the -d option, we downcase the entire thing.

Without the user options, this really could be a 1-liner; that's how it started:

alias pony="shuf -n 12 /usr/share/dict/american-english | sed 's/'\"'\"'.*//; s/^\(\w\)/\U\1/' | sort | uniq | shuf -n 6 | xargs echo | tr -d ' '"

So, obviously not a real owl, but germane.

This was taken in Paris, in one of the side streets around Sacre Coeur, in 2010. It is a decoration set into a wall; the alcove was probably around 30cm high, so the owl figurine is small. I have no idea how long it'd been there, or why it was there; there was no plaque or other marking, and no other decorations on the wall.

I do recall that I took it from across the street and without telephoto, so this is massively cropped and this is the best resolution I have. The paint was more white and it was a brilliantly sunny day; I made it more warm in post-processing.

Sadly, this was before digital cameras came with GPS to stamp locations; I'm not sure if I could find this anymore.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/55039423

The title sounds horrible. Maybe the concept is, too. But bear with me.

BLUF: A server extension that allows servers to replicate and relate user profile social scores, as defined by the community.

Caveat: I'm wiring from an essentially democratic values POV. Libertarians, anarchists, and fascists will disagree with some of my premises for differing reasons.

An idea I've had knocking around for years is that regulating all behavior is a bad idea. We want as few laws covering personal behavior as possible while still ensuring safety and basic harmony. Laws covering rape, theft, and assault I think most of us can agree are good. Laws covering how people dress, what music they listen to, the books they read are bad laws. Laws covering hate speech and noise in public spaces are in a gray area.

But this doesn't mean there's historically not been regulation for social behavior; it's just been done by peer pressure. Someone using racist language might not be illegal, but that person might be ostracized or booed, and that might affect their behavior. That can be good social pressure. A goth might also get dirty looks from people, and this might cause them to change how they present in public; this could be bad social pressure. However, I argue that there is a role for social pressure that starts where the law ends and helps preserve polite society. Of you disagree, then you probably disagree with this idea, and can stop reading.

What if, for every profile, servers maintain metadata about the profile that the profile owner does not control. This would be a set of labels assigned by other members of communities - arbitrarily, and without moderation. The metadata would be a label and a score, the score being a simple count of the number of users who agree or attach that label to the profile. This metadata would be communicated by servers when profiles are shared; we could imagine a central server hosting the data, but this is a federated ecosystem, so the data would also be federated.

The impetuous for this idea was the increase of troll accounts as Lemmy becomes more popular. A story might go:

I see a post, and a response which leads to a conversation. It appears to me that one of accounts is acting like a troll, so I mark the account "troll", giving it a "troll:1" score. Maybe several other people agree, and separately also add "troll;" eventually, through this and other interactions, the account eventually ends up with some high "troll" score.

Clients can handle this data in various ways. They could annotate the account in user views. Users could set thresholds, such as "hide comments by users with troll value > 100". They could ignore simple refuse to do anything with the data.

Ignoring the difficulty of implementation details (how do you ensure each user only gets to increment a value one time? Who defines the labels? Is it an arbitrary set, and if so, how can servers filter for offensive labels? How do you prevent bad actor servers from assigning their own, fake scores?), I wonder whether this would be a net benefit or net negative.

Honestly, while I am not interested in building an echo chamber, I have no interest in reading the opinions of pro-Nazi fascists. I do not enjoy watching the pass-time of trolls trying to foment arguments. And I'm happy to crowd source the evaluation of people's behavior to filter this content. A good troll can waste a lot of time by appearing to argue in good faith, only becoming obvious after a long series of exchanges that they're just being contrarian with the only goal of making people upset.

This was really more of a shower thought, except it occurred to me on the couch when I was reading a thread where one person was obviously arguing in good faith, and the other was obviously trolling.

I think it could balance itself if there were both positive, negative, and neutral labels. Maybe we all troll a little, at times; maybe we have bad days, or make poor judgments in our replies. But I think this tally idea would work if it's thought of and used as thresholds. Maybe an account has a "troll" rating of 50, but also "reasonable" score of 400. Maybe someone with a "communist" score of 1000 would be proud of it, while fascists consider it a negative and filter those accounts.

Mostly, I think it'd hurt troll-like behavior, agent provocateurs, and shill/advertisement accounts whose success relies on subterfuge and misrepresentation.

I have no doubt that this will be a controversial idea. I'm not sure that I love it or think it's a good idea, myself. But I had the thought, and now it's out there.

Despite the click-bait tite, I am thinking about a couple of factors. First, the context I'm considering is specifically about inviting well-known/published authors to an AMA. I'm posting this question here, because most authors write in one or maybe two genres, and the authors I'd like to see answer AMAs are fantasy and sci-fi authors. I haven't yet come across any "big name" AMAs in any community yet, but I'm impatient.

1. Reach: the largest subscriber size I see is !books@lemmy.world. The issue there is that the topic is rather broad, but to make an AMA worthwhile for the author, I'd think the larger the audience the better.
2. Moderation. Doing an AMA well is significant work. There's advertisement to reach people who may not be subscribed but who may be interested; there's reaching out to the author and coordinating the details; and then there's moderation to prevent it from being overrun by trolls.
3. Interest. I haven't been on Reddit in a couple of years now, but something thing I miss is AMAs from authors I'm reading. Some, like Scalzi, had a Reddit account and both did AMAs and also responded directly to random posts aimed at him. I'm aware that it's possible I'm in a minority and the Lemmy community at large isn't interested in AMAs, and while I doubt that, it's still something that'd need to be cleared with whichever community hosted the AMA
4. Adjacently, I wonder how many authors lurk on Lemmy, and how would one find out? Is there a channel where authors could express willingness?

I feel a hole here, and I'm not going to fill it with Reddit. It's an area where I think a federated platform like Lemmy may be at a disadvantage to a platform like Reddit: with Reddit, it's pretty clear who might host any given AMA, and Lemmy's decentralized -- and often redundant -- communities complicate matters.

I've been on a Miles Cameron binge lately, and have a couple of questions I'd like to ask him; I could write him through his publisher, but I find AMAs to be much more interesting.

Is Lemmy ready for AMAs?

First, a caveat: I'm not running pure DD-WRT, but a GL-iNet router that has some UI shim (and possibly other stuff) running on top of DD-WRT.

The issue I'm seeking help on is that I am seeing odd behavior with client resolution, where sometimes lan device names will resolve, and sometimes they won't. When they won't, there's a thing I can do in the UI and it'll start working again for a while, until it doesn't.

The other variable is that I've got all outbound traffic going through a VPN, and DNS servers configured by the VPN. This does, and always has, worked, and DNS tests always confirm that external DNS requests are going to those servers.

The issue is that I want all LAN hosts to resolve using the leases. And sometimes this works, but sometimes it stops working and LAN hosts don't resolve. I can fix this by toggling the "DNS Server Settings" between "DNS Proxy" with the IP of the router as the proxy, and "Automatic" (which, it appears to me, just sets resolution to the VPN settings). Toggling in either direction works, at least temporarily. Although I can't replicate it at the moment, there was a time where I'd toggle in one direction (to "Proxy" probably) and LAN resolution would work but no WAN domain names would resolve until I switched it back to "Automatic."

Oh -- one other oddity: I disabled the "Allow Custom DNS to Override VPN DNS" which made things behave better, in general -- it may be why I can no longer reproduce the "external domains don't resolve" issue.

The behavior makes me suspect a couple of things:

1. Applying the switch is restarting some service -- probably masq -- and possibly temporarily changing the configuration thereof.
2. I have dns-masq misconfigured s.t. it's not falling back to the VPN-configured servers

I had a third thought, but it's gone now.

So, my question really boils down to how I need this configured such that my .lan hosts resolve via leases, but everything else goes through the VPN DNS servers. I avoid going in and changing things via the shell, but I'm not afraid to; I just prefer to have it done through the UI.

In the UI, there are three toggles, all off: rebinding attack protection; override DNS settings for all clients; and allow custom DNS to override VPN DNS. Then there's the "Mode" with options "DNS Proxy," "Automatic," "Encrypted DNS," and "Manual DNS." I have only used Automatic and Proxy. Finally, when Proxy is enabled, there's a proxy server address which, as I've said, is set to the LAN IP of the router.

I think I need to be on "DNS Proxy" as I'm using dns-masq. But to ensure dns-masq is using whatever current VPN DNS configuration setting is active, do I need to configure something in dns-masq? I randomly choose a new VPN exit node once a day, which probably doesn't change the DNS configuration (they don't have that many DNS servers), but does restart the network when it happens (although, I do not think the restart triggers the issue).

I normally go for odroid for these sorts of things but have had a bad run recently.

What I want is a bare minimum computer I can hook to some externally powered speakers and run snapclient on. That's it; nothing else will run on it. It's part of a project to get audio casted into every room.

Arch, because I'm most comfortable with Arch; I don't have to learn any new peculiarities; Alpine would also work. deb and rpm-based distros aren't options.

It needs WiFi, or the ability to take a module. And of course an RCA out jack for the audio plug.

Cheap would be nice.

I have no experience with Pis, but there's a bewildering variety of them with varying capability; many don't come with WiFi, and some not even with audio out. It's frankly hard to tell what's the minimum Pi I can get away with for my use case, and what components I need to add on. I don't want to have to become a Pi expert just to get one device for this.

IME getting Arch running on odroid is a bit of work, and Mint or whatever they sell on the micro SD cards may be the worst distro I've had to deal with in recent years.

I'd love to try a RISCV board, but I feel like that's just asking for a whole different level of protracted tinkering to get what I want.

Basically, if I could get a plug-and-play Arch SBC with WiFi and audio out, even if I had to boot it first on ethernet the first time to set it up, for a good price, that'd be ideal.

What are good options here? So many Pis are for tinkering or as project components. Odroid seems like they're only half-heartedly doing business. RISCV is bleeding edge and still sounds fussy and iffy except for very specific problem domains. Micro PCs like Trigkey or Beelink are full desktop replacements and are both overkill for my use, and too expensive.

What do y'all advise?

This is an opinion. Not even a shower thought, but something that I just realized I could express succinctly.

I'm a TUI/CLI person. I look first for CLI programs, and only if I don't find a way to do it in a shell do I look at GUI alternatives.

I'm also a tiling WM person. I used i3 for several years, and then bspwm for a hot minute, and for nearly a year now have been in herbstluftwm. I'm at a point where hlwm not running on Wayland is the main reason I'm not on Wayland.

But at one point, before discovering the joys of tiling, I was a big KDE fan. So it's been interesting to find myself skipping Qt apps in favor of GTK apps when I have to use GUI apps; and just now I realized why:

When you pull a GTK app, only rarely does it link in a bunch of Gnome dependencies; when it does, it's usually pretty obvious in the name or description... "X for Gnome" or some such. But Qt apps are really bad about hooking in and pulling a bunch of KDE dependencies, launching KDE services, and generally trying to turn your WM into KDE, that I've learned to just avoid them. There's no reason for them to, unless it's because the KDE libraries provide so much functionality that isn't in the core Qt libraries.

Anyway, it just occurred to me why I have such a negative knee-jerk reaction to apps with Qt dependencies; I literally just filter them out as I'm scanning package lists.

I like Qt; I don't like that most Qt apps also depend on KDE libraries.