Software Engineer, Linux Enthusiast, OpenRGB Developer, and Gamer

Lemmy.world Profile: https://lemmy.world/u/CalcProgrammer1

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  • 40 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2021

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  • Get some HDMI to VGA adapters, the kind that screw into the VGA port and then have an HDMI port. I have a bunch of old VGA monitors I use with Raspberry Pis and as test displays when working on PCs and never have to deal with the annoyances of VGA since they’re basically HDMI displays now.


  • I usually put up my Christmas lights at the end of September if I can. Programmable RGB lights so I can use them for Halloween as well as Christmas. I turn them off between Halloween and Thanksgiving usually, but now I’m seeing tons of Christmas lights already on in my neighborhood and I didn’t actually put my lights up this year. Probably will just go without putting them up this year as I hate going up on the ladder, but I have some RGB spiral trees to put up in the yard at least that I’ll still put out probably after I get back from Thanksgiving break.





  • Linux phones should allow for much higher longetivity than Android or iOS devices as Linux phone OSes update more like desktop OSes than mobile, in that the device-specific parts are relatively small instead of having the entire OS image be custom made for a specific device. As long as your device has mainline Linux support it will continue to receive updates pretty much forever, or until Linux drops the architecture (unlikely any time soon for ARM, especially ARM64).

    People praise Apple for 6 years of updates but my 2010 desktop build runs Windows 10 flawlessly still and will run fine with updates until 2025. Windows 11 arbitrarily ends support officially, but it would still work fine. Linux works flawlessly too and will continue to do so. 6 years is shit, but the entire mobile industry is even shittier on average so 6 years ends up looking decent.



  • Instead of just stating this as the inevitable future, why not join us in realizing that this is a problem and push to do something about it? We all realize that physical media and ownership of content is going away, but we can push back by not buying into subscription models and buying what physical or at least one-time-purchase digital content we can while it is still around.

    Your new car may not have a CD player, but external disc drives are still readily available. Buy up a CD collection (of lossless, DRM-free music I might add) and rip them all to FLAC files and keep them on today’s dirt cheap giant hard drives. Now you can play them on your phone, car, laptop, Steam Deck, retro iPod, smart fridge, etc.

    Same goes for DVDs and Blu-Rays. You have the option to convert them into whatever format is needed for the device you want to play them on because YOU OWN THE MEDIA and can do what you want with it.

    Be the change you want to see. Cancel Netflix and Spotify. Buy CDs and DVDs/BDs. Build a local collection and have DRM-free content on all your devices that will be available to you for the rest of your life rather than for the rest of the month.



  • ARM UEFI exists, it’s just not very common like it is on PCs. Technically, every x86/x86_64 PC has its own custom bootloader that describes the peculiarities of the given hardware/motherboard, it’s just that the standard has been that every x86 machine ever made (barring a few Android Atom tablets) comes with a BIOS/UEFI bootloader built in that standardizes the boot process.

    On ARM, it is possible to UEFI boot (and some ARM bootloaders provide varying degrees of UEFI boot support - Tow Boot on the PinePhones uses UEFI for instance, there is one available for RPi 4 as well). However, since ARM devices are mostly phones and tablets running Android or single board computers (often provided with no software at all) they usually don’t come with a UEFI compatible bootloader. Hopefully this will change, or at very least second-stage UEFI capable bootloaders become more widely available to add UEFI capabilities to devices with Android bootloaders. U-Boot does have some UEFI capabilities and is commonly used for single board computers that don’t have a built in bootloader.





  • I hate Google too, but if they are proper open specification formats and aren’t encumbered by patents, why does it matter that Google created them? Open format is open format regardless of its creator.

    Do these formats have some DRM capability or other nefarious reason to avoid them or is it just because they were created by someone we don’t like?


  • 5 years is shit. People have been conditioned over the past 10-15 years to think that the mobile way of doing this is the correct way. Before that, your PC was an open system that you could upgrade and update until it was incapable of running the latest software due to hardware limitations (not enough RAM, GPU API level, processor extensions, etc). These days the mobile companies have convinced people that none of that matters. The software is so intrinsically tied to the hardware that even if the hardware is not much different to the new hardware, the new software won’t work.

    A 15 year old PC can still do a lot of work on a modern OS these days. Why can’t a 6 year old phone? Because the people who want you to buy a new phone said so.