hendrik

I think so as well. The computer isn’t really good to “use” it. That’s more the category for experiments. Or teach people how to install Linux. Or a computer museum corner and you put vintage games on it. Or just recycle it.

And a box with RAM sticks collecting dust isn’t useful either. Put whatever is compatible into other computers, and then try to sell and recycle them. Seems 4GB DDR3L RAM modules still sell for 1 to 4€ on eBay?! So maybe you can make a few bucks to invest in other projects for the kids.

We have a few platforms who do souvereign tech and Matrix funded by donations. For example https://tchncs.de/ or https://systemli.org/ or https://hostux.network/ I think rollenspiel.monster is also used by quite some people.

Not sure how they all compare regarding privacy.

I found some info here: https://ageverification.dev/

But that’s difficult to read, very technical. And mostly written from the user perspective. It looks to me like they’re (for once) trying to come up with a proper solution. Everyone can be an Attestation Provider, Relying Party or repurpose the white-label App. At least in theory. It’s all specified and in the open. And then the European Union contributes some list of trustworthy Attestation Providers (governments, banks, mobile network providers…)

I think due to the project structure, it’ll be more like the Covid-Certificate App, which could be customized by every member state and it’s theoretically possible to use it as one uniform solution.

So unless there’s some certification for “Relying Parties” which I missed while skimming the documentation, I’d say in theory it’d be possible to use it on a technical level. Of course it’s still a preview so the EU has lots of opportunity left to mess it up.

HDDs have plenty failure modes. You might get SMART warnings. Or maybe you don’t and fails a bit more spontaneously. I had harddisks do that nasty clicking sound because something’s wrong with the heads. And sometimes I could still read data from the other areas of the disk. Sometimes it would refuse to read anything. And sometimes a HDD just works and the next moment it won’t spin up again, or the controller is dead.

I think the only reliable method is backups.

Does the App allow random platforms to do verification? Or do we need to be some registered business, do contracts, likely pay for the service…? For the App to speak to our instances?

The Arch Wiki has a comprehensive article on Data rescue: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/File_recovery

And there’s more in the Ubuntu Wiki: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery

What I do is run ddrescue and scrape all I can get from the disk. Into an image file on another disk. Then I’ll unplug the broken disk. If that’s enough data, I’ll run testdisk to recreate the partition tables, extract files… And if that fails, we have software like photorec.

Not sure if ddrescue is able to do anything in your case. Sometimes a harddisk will just fail entirely and there’s nothing to be done, except swap controllers or other broken components in a clean room.

I think you need some Agent software. Or a MCP server for your existing software. It depends a bit on what you’re doing, whether that’s just chatting and asking questions that need to be googled. Or vibe coding… Or query the documents on your computer. As I said there’s OpenClaw which can do pretty much everything including wreck your computer. I’m also aware of OpenCode, AutoGPT, Aider, Tabby, CrewAI, …

The Ollama projects has some software linked on their page: https://github.com/ollama/ollama?tab=readme-ov-file#chat-interfaces
They’re sorted by use-case. And whether they’re desktop software or a webinterface. Maybe that’s a good starting point.

What you’d usually do is install it and connect it to your model / inference software via that software’s OpenAI-compatible API endpoint. But it frequently ends up being a chore. If you use some paid service (ChatGPT), they’ll contract with Google to do the search for you, Youtube, etc. And once you do it yourself, you’re gonna need all sorts of developer accounts and API tokens, to automatically access Google’s search API… You might get blocked from YouTube if you host your software on a VPS in a datacenter… That’s kinda how the internet is these days. All the big companies like Google and their competitors require access tokens or there won’t be any search results. At least that was my experience.

Thanks! I didn’t know about these. I was just aware of Apertus from the Swiss National AI Iniative. But from my experience, they weren’t great. Might look into Olmo 3, then.

We got open-source agents like OpenCode. OpenClaw is weird, and not really recommended by any sane person, but to my knowledge it’s open source as well. We got a silly(?) “clean-room rewrite” of the Claude Agent, after that leaked…

Regarding the models, I don’t think there’s any strictly speaking “FLOSS” models out there with modern tool-calling etc. You’d be looking at “open-weights” models, though. Where they release the weights under some permissive license. The training dataset and all the tuning remain a trade secret with pretty much all models. So there is no real FLOSS as in the 4 freedoms.

Google dropped a set of Gemma models a few days ago and they seem pretty good. You could have a look at Qwen 3.5, or GLM, DeepSeek… There’s a plethora of open-weights models out there. The newer ones pretty much all do tool-calling and can be used for agentic tasks.

Not sure how easy it is to sample a digital signal that fast. The specs say it’s 350ns - 800ns. So my calculator says that’s about 3MHz. I don’t think noise etc will be an issue. And an opendrain input should be fine and not mess with the bus. You’ll likely have to find a good approach to read at that speed. Or find a suitable peripheral.

The correct tool might be an oscilloscope / logic analyzer.

But maybe have a look at some projects like “micro logic analyzer for RP2040”, seems it’s possible to sample digital signals up to 100MHz. There’s several projects like that out there. But I think the correct search term is “RP2040 logic analyzer”.

I don’t think a lot of people “sniff” some WS2812 bus. You can have a look at other project’s code to generate all sorts of effects.

Yes. Thx, I forgot about that. Especially the insides. You probably want to have a look inside, if the outside already looks that dirty. And the case / outside is probably fine with some light zapping. It went through ESD testing and certification. And should be able to deal with electrostatic discharge in some way. But the (individual) components on the inside are way more delicate and not made to withstand it.

Too long for Lemmy’s attention span. People start down-voting again, without reading all the later parts where she realizes she’s been turned into a Tamagotchi?!

Air blower, Q-Tip, Toothpick? And Isopropanol is the cleaning fluid of choice for electronics. I’ve also used my vacuum on Thinkpads before. But beware the vacuum. If anything is just tucked in, it’ll dislodge it and suck it in. And you get to spend the next 20min trying to find some tiny part in a pile of dust and hairballs.