Sad news for open source and open hardware enthousiasts Arduino has been acquired by Qualcomm. Press release from Qualcom While Arduino is known for its openness with hardware and software, Qualcomm is the exact opposite. This applies to both their virtually nonexistent free documentation and hardware support, where they only provide binary blobs for drivers until they don’t. ...
Stirling-PDF a Swiss army knife for pdf-handling
Stirling-PDF is the Swiss army knife for handling PDF’s. And it is free for small users and for selfhosted instances. A commercial subscription and enterprise service with support are also available. For most users it will replace commercial pc software completely. Easiest way to run it, besides a free account on Stirling-PDF, is with a Docker instance on your local pc or on a intranet server. Behind a proxy server with basic authentication on the internet will do if you want to use it from other locations too. ...
To Snap or not to Snap
that is the question. Snap is a software packaging and deployment system developed by Canonical for Ubuntu, allowing applications to be distributed in a self-contained format that can work across various Linux distributions. Because Flatpak and AppImage already existed and have more or less the same goals it was probably a Not Invented Here move. And although it is available for other Linux distributions you will not find many outside of Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distro’s. Big exception is Linux Mint, they do not support Snap applications by default due to concerns about centralized control and potential issues with package management. ...
Why language models hallucinate
A great research project by Georgia Tech and OpenAI (see paper on arxiv.org). According to this line in the abstract the main cause of hallucination is: “We then argue that hallucinations persist due to the way most evaluations are graded – language models are optimized to be good test-takers, and guessing when uncertain improves test performance. ...
Federation with Gotosocial
After ditching Writefreely federation and integration with Mastodon had gone. Not a big deal but it was from an admin viewpoint nice to see flowing my posts into federated instances. So I took the time to integrate Hugo with Gotosocial. Not a easy task and not completed either but the first steps has been set today.
Why I ditched Writefreely
Writefreely is nice looking microblog system with Fediverse integration which main purpose is to attract you to host your microblog on Write.as. You can selfhost it though and I did. And experienced difficulties you do not expect from commercial grade software. Like a problem with not existing tables in the SQLite database. Annoying but after finding some solution (on internet not in the Writefreely documentation) it worked well. Until the next upgrade. Upgrading the db ended in an error and the upgrade got stuck. Restoring the db and trying upgrading again in a clean environment, no deal. ...
Debian's usrmerge
Debian has decided quiet a while ago they do not want to support different mountpoints other than /usr/ in the booting process anymore. From the origins of Unix you had the option on boot to mount /bin, /lib and /sbin) to different drives. Which made sense because disksizes where limited. Nowadays this is hardly a problem but with a history of decades it would hardly be a problem to keep it this way too. ...
Sorry about that! Something went wrong, but we are making it right Microsoft Store error
Annoying message which always occurs when you are in a hurry. Best method so far I have found is in a commandline or powershell: wsreset.exe
Spamhaus.org and open resolvers
Spamhaus does not like open resolvers like Google, Cloudfare and Quad9. By using these they cannot determine if you should use the commercial package. The first 100.000 requests are free but after that you are supposed to have a paid subscription. In your mail.log you will see something like: Server error: ‘554 5.7.1 Service unavailable; Sender address [MYEMAIL@HOST.COM] blocked using dbl.spamhaus.org 8; Error: open resolver; DNSBL Error Code - Open/public resolver - The Spamhaus Project ...
Dovecot following the enshittification handbook
Dovecot new version 2.4 is a breaking change from 2.3 and deliberately so. With version 2.4 the paid Pro version does have all functionality and some from 2.3. The new Community Edition is only usable for a single server without high availability or cluster functionality. To make sure you break everything the config files from 2.3 and 2.4 are not (backward) compatible. And to make this move even more profitable you will not find a pricing scheme anywhere, you have to ask a quotation for your specific configuration. ...