For jpg’s, no they will not get smaller. Maybe even a smidge bigger if you zip them. Usually not enough to make a practical difference.

Zip does generic lossless compression, meaning it can be extracted for a bit-perfect copy of the original. Very simplified it works by finding patterns repeating and replacing a long pattern with a short key, and storing an index to replace the keys with the original pattern on extraction.

Jpg’s use lossy compression, meaning some detail is lost and can never be reproduced. Jpg is highly optimized to only drop details that don’t matter much for human perception of the image.

Since jpg is already compressed, there will not be any repeating patterns (duplicate information) for the zip algorithm to find.

There’s nothing wrong with Mint, it’s solid. If it works for you don’t stress about it

The only thing is that it’s based on Ubuntu LTS so it’s packages can be a bit old. Doesn’t really matter much unless you have very new hardware and need the hardware support. Then something Fedora based like Bazzite would be better.

For getting newer software you can use flatpak/Flathub.

Bazzite is also “immutable” which makes it harder to break on a system level, but also harder to tinker on a system level. Mint is a “normal” distribution in that regard. Mint does have Timeshift for taking system level snapshots, on the off chance that an update or your tinkering breaks something. Its worth checking that Timeshift is set up for automatic snapshots

Also its probably a lot easier to handle for performing testing on equal conditions through the tests for all their cards. Sounds like ideally they want to freeze all their versions for at least a quarter of a year or more

I think Mint does this out of the box, but check if Timeshift is set up for automatic backups. It’s meant for system-level snapshots (basically everything outside the HOME-folder), so you can easily revert if an update or something breaks the system.

Also consider some form of periodic external backup of her files and documents in the home folder, to protect against hardware failure.

While a blow to the Fediverse community, Rochko’s decision is understandable.

This looks more like healthy sustainable growth than “a blow” . Reducing the risk of burnout of the project lead, and transferring ownership of trademarks from an individual to a non-profit are good things for the long term

Oh good point, these are modern times, exFAT is a thing now.

I remember years ago having issues that Ubuntu could mount exFAT, so avoided it ever since. But that was many years ago, with an old kernel.

Word of warning on “Safe removal” of external harddrives: You really want to click “Eject” or “Safe removal” every time before unplugging. This is much more important than on Windows, due to the way Linux handles buffers and caching. A copy operation will be “finished” but still live in the write-cache and not securely written to disk.

NTFS is no problem (But as mentioned earlier in the thread the permission system is different). I usually format all my external devices with NTFS so they’ll work on both Linux and Windows machines without any fuss.

On the other hand, seeing this symbol more and more on other random videos outside that bubble does give a very nice sense of “I am not alone”. It does more for users to find eachother than it does damage to big corpos.

But choice of the symbol itself is questionable… Why use a big tech symbol to protest big tech? -__- And not just any big tech, but super evil 90s monopolistic giant Microsoft

There’s a nice cartoon in this thread we’re clippy is if he could have, he would have harvest all your data.

Did you look in to Zim Desktop Wiki? https://zim-wiki.org/

It stores articles in zim (plaintext) files rather than .md (plaintext) files, but otherwise it’s an excellent FOSS cross platform

Edit: never mind, zim also doesn’t have an Android client. The closest is https://github.com/gsantner/markor which understands Zim syntax

Learning KiCAD is worthwhile, it’s sorta becoming the Blender of PCB design. Fully open source, gaining more and more traction and getting more and more development.

For fabrication check out https://oshpark.com/ who make PCBs at hobbyist volumes. Like 3 per order. Lead free.

PCBWay / JLCPCB also looks like a decent service for fabrication, but last time I looked all their cheapest offers were not lead free. And their lead free option cost around the same as oshpark.

Good luck and Happy soldering :)

No and kinda yes. Duckduckgo has its own webcrawler, but also adds in results from other sources including Bing, Yahoo and others.

Checks out. But also Military Industrial Complex.

Which brand is this? So I never have to go near it…

I have a Samsung TV from a few years ago, never connected it to the TV, so when I turn it on it just goes to the last used input (HDMI1 in my case). The bootup isn’t even that slow , maybe 5 seconds or so. Not great, but not terrible…

The apps are Flatpak’ed, so they update independently of the system.

But yeah why did Flatpak update them when Flatpak has unsatisfied dependencies? (To be fair the apps still work, it’s mostly a ergonomic and cosmetic regression)

PSA about mini PCs: They might not come with adequate cooling for RAM, leading to potential data corruption.

(I’m in the middle of troubleshooting/fixing overheating RAM causing memory errors, will post on /c/selfhosted when I have more conclusions).

TLDR: Bought 3 Minisforum HM90 mini PCs (for Proxmox), equipped them with 64gb (2x32gb) RAM, with a different brand RAM in each PC. All 3 give sporadic errors in Memtest86. The RAM overheats due to the 2 SSDs mounted in the lid blocking natural airflow. With the lid off, or an extra fan installed, there are no errors. The errors were very sporadic: 1 PC gave errors after 1-2 passes, then almost 24hours. Second PC gave errors after more than 24 hours and some cases more than 48 hours between errors. The last PC gave hundreds of errors on the first pas. To be fair, memtest is a synthetic test and the RAM is unlikely to see 100% utilisation in real life, on the other hand the two adjacent SATA SSDs and the NVMe SSD are completely idle during memtest, and will generate extra heat during production use.

OnlyOffice is also available as a (offline) desktop office suite, so as a user it’s more like LibreOffice than Collabora.

My wife prefers OnlyOffice over LibreOffice, as it’s feels closer to MS Office. Also it’s compatibility with MS Office formats is better than LibreOffice.

I still use LibreOffice for desktop, but I’m not a heavy user. Haven’t tried out Collabora or hosted OnlyOffice for NextCloud yet.

Sudden culture shock from a Norwegian:

Still open is the transition of heat and cars to electricity…

Almost all electricity used by Norwegian homes goes towards heating (including cooking and hot water), and charging cars. So counting heating separate from electricity suddenly makes the electric transition sound less impressive. (And the transition away from nuclear more baffling). It’s still impressive to see Germany really follow through on renewables though. 60% renewable electricity is still a lot

Is there a plan to transition away from burning fossil fuels for heating?

Zim really is amazing, its the perfect balance with its simple plain text files in folders data structure, but powerful search and back linking. And I love linking to other files on the local file system.

How do you do the LUKS volume upload to cloud? Is it for syncing between devices or just backup? Personally I use (self hosted) NextCloud to sync my Zim between devices.

FlowLauncher looks neat, like KRunner for Windows. Thanks for sharing

This happens when a small project has 12 developers each scratching their own itch in their own time, not a team of 120 developers getting paid to work on the same itch 8 hours a day.

In the case of FreeCAD they’re actually starting to reign in and focus more now, and there are more contributors.