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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • thefartographer@lemm.eetoSelfhosted@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    I just reported a question, not because of the content of the question but because the buttons were formatted strangely and clocking on them caused the question to refresh. It was about cassettes vs CDs.

    Other than that, this is pretty fucking legit. What a simple, fun, useful tool! And I mean simple as in “easy to explain,” not “easy to make.”

    Thank you for sharing!!!

    ETA: I just got served either the same question twice (with a different question between each time), or found duplicate questions. If the same question twice, I’d be concerned about individuals skewing results. If a duplicate question is being submitted, it might be helpful (albeit slower) to run word matches against strings and then check the IP address of the submitter (if you record that) on anything with over 90% match and then let that user know they’ve already submitted this question.



  • Just from the handful of OSs I’ve tried, I’d suggest Ubuntu desktop again.

    As for docker, I’d say to get docker and docker compose setup. Once you’re running in docker compose, adding machines is often as simple as editing some markup in a text editor.

    But my final suggestion is to crawl before you walk before you run. Start slow in the terminal. Instead of using your file explorer, navigate directories using the terminal and then open the directory you need into the file explorer using the terminal.

    Want a new file? Use touch. Want a new directory? Use mkdir. Eventually, it’ll become annoying to open a file from your explorer when you could just open it from the terminal. Then, you’ll get annoyed with text editors and want to reduce your context switches by using vim.

    Also, --help is your best friend when trying to figure out commands. You got this! Feel free to send me a message if you wanna chat and have any questions when you’re ready to start dipping your toes. I’m far from an expert, but I’ve made some progress of my own and eventually we might learn a thing or two together.


  • Gimp has been alright for me and (I hate to admit it) Illustrator is unparalleled when it comes to intuitive vector design.

    I love Photopea and was an early-adopter/small-donor, although I’ve mostly moved to Canva for my design needs.

    No, I’m looking for a solution to Lightroom and Camera Raw. I’ve tried Darktable and Rawtherapee, but, especially in Rawtherapee, I find that I quickly destroy my raw images and end up with something somehow simultaneously washed out and with crushed blacks. I’m sure it’s primarily user-error, but on my deadlines, I haven’t had a chance to learn these new platforms.



  • I have the 14 pro and my sister recently got the 16 base model. I don’t know why, but the pictures from her newer phone looked like a major leap backwards in quality. Also, the latest OS does feel like its features were written in crayon and that its waiting to kick off its training wheels. I can’t fully describe it: it’s not clunky or clumsy, it just feels like something is missing from the experience. I’ve never really felt this way from a phone version upgrade before.


  • While I’m still struggling to find an appropriate replacement for my photo editing apps, I’m happy to report that support and usability for most popular Linux distros have improved to the point that I now find Linux not only more stable, but easier to navigate than Win 10 was even at its best.

    The amount of noise associated with Windows, generally due to people answering questions about the wrong version of windows or the wrong application, searching for any help topics is like trying to run through mud. It’s literally quicker now to learn a totally new skill on Linux than to try to update your knowledge base on Windows.


  • I switched to iPhone from Android because I was tired of Google making changes to their security and APIs that were killing my macros I’d write for my phone. I was also tired of Google sending everything good to the graveyard. Finally, I hated that Google would promise features or support for x number of years and then pull the rug out from under me (although, lack of support was usually caused by the manufacturer)

    Before spending $1000 on my iPhone, I told my wife that it was a good investment because of Apple’s proven history of supporting devices with 5 years of updates; so we agreed that I’d keep this iPhone as my daily driver for 5 years because of the exuberant cost.

    Well, my wish came true and here we are. I’ve got a phone that doesn’t respect my privacy, doesn’t respect my settings, has a frustrating UI/UX, and has low compatibility with most of my existing infrastructure. I gotta admit, though, my experience is far more consistent now, but not in a good way.












  • Okay, I’m gonna try my best here, but first a disclosure:
    I am not a scientist nor engineer or whatever. I’ve been recognized and won some awards for a class I created teaching about solar panels to young kids, but this is with no formal background. I’m going to make some assumptions about the new technology being discussed, which could be wrong. I’m going to make some comparisons to photovoltaics, which could also be wrong. I’m trusting that the researchers who told me that I explained solar cells correctly weren’t lying to me.

    I apologize in advance if this comes off like an elia5, but that’s the youngest age I taught this shit to, so I’m just falling back into old habits.

    Solar cells, while relying on a lot of really cool molecular properties can be broken down into over-simplified kinetic mechanisms. Solar cells at their most basic three components are: a material which is relatively negatively charged, a material which is relatively positively charged, and a material that allows for the flow of electrons under the right conditions.

    Electrons are these tiny parts of the stuff that makes up everything. They’re like a dot in space, sometimes attached to atoms, sometimes just flying around looking for something to attach to. They’re negatively charged and try to find places or things that are more positively charged than themselves kinda like how the negative pole of a magnet tries to find the positive pole of a magnet.

    To make a solar cell generate electricity, you have to hit it with the right kind of light. Light is one of those tricky things that can exist as both a particle and a wave. Particles of light are photons, and photons are a lot like electrons in that they’re a dot in space, just flying around, looking to crash into stuff! Sometimes they crash into a surface, or bounce off and then crash into. your eyeballs and that’s how you see things.

    If you could imagine photons and electrons as steel marbles, you can imagine what would happen when a photon hits an electron: it can cause the electron to move! But electrons don’t really like to move unless they have somewhere to go. If you roll one marble at another, you’ll never get the second marble moving quicker than the first. But consider that the electron marbles don’t love being close to each other, just like when you hold the same poles of two magnets next to each other. So, when you hit your first negatively charged material with photons, you can get some electrons to fly off of it! Especially if you hit it hard enough.

    But if you put that negatively charged material inside of something that makes it a little bit harder for the electron to move, when it gets hit by a photon, it might move a little, but it won’t actually leave because moving is hard and it has nowhere to go. Now, if you add a relatively more positively charged material to this setup, any electrons that move a little have somewhere else to go! So, if you hit the electrons just hard enough, they’ll fly off the negative material and shoot at the positive material!

    What’s really cool is that because the electron is kinda stuck on the negative material, but attracted tot he positive material, you can actually get the electron to move with quite a bit more energy than you’d expect! Even cooler than that is if you have something near the materials that conducts electricity, like a wire, you can get the electron to hit other electrons in the positive material and that pushes a chain of electrons forward just hard enough that you generate a voltage!

    If you’d like to see this for yourself, here’s a really cool experiment you can do at home:

    1. Get some copper flashing and cut two pieces of it.
    2. One of the pieces, leave it just as it is. The other piece, heat it on an electric stove top at high temperature. I mean really heat it. Let it cook until it turns deeper red and even beyond that until it gains a black film. Keep going a little longer until some of the black film start to flake and jump off of the copper flashing. That black film means you’ve oxidized the copper and made it more negatively charaged than regular copper.
    3. Now, wash your oxidized copper with soap and water, trying to scrub off as much of the black film as possible without scrubbing off the red stuff underneath it.
    4. Fill a clear container with VERY salty water, then place each piece of copper on opposite ends of the container.
    5. Attach alligator clips jumper wires to the pieces of copper and read the voltage with a voltmeter. You’ll notice a very very small charge!
    6. Shine a really bright light on your setup and you should see the voltage go up a little. Try taking the setup outside into direct sunlight and see it go up a little more! Congratulations, you’ve made a rudimentary photovoltaic cell!

    Finally, let’s equate this to the new technology:
    On a dry day, try wearing socks and rubbing them on some carpet and then touch a doorknob—you should feel a shock! This is static electricity. Rubbing the socks on the ground builds up extra electrons in your body just like the negatively charged part of a solar panel. The doorknob is like the relatively positively charged part. The air is like the salt water or material that only lets electrons flow under the right conditions. In this instance, the right conditions are touching the negative and positive parts to each other. This is a very different setup, but similar concept to how photovoltaics works.

    It sounds like this new technology works like this but on a much smaller scale. Your movements causes part of the material to build up static electricity and become negatively charged. Once you’ve built up enough extra electrons and (I think) bend the technology in the right way to get the relatively positively charged side close to your static electricity side, the extra electrons jump from one material to the other, generating a charge!

    In a really really REALLY roundabout way, it’s all exactly the same as solar technology except that all the parts are different, there’s a different catalyst, your energy input and voltage differentials are completely different.

    You know what? It’s not similar at all, but I think I get what they’re going for.