Onno (VK6FLAB)

Anything and everything Amateur Radio and beyond. Heavily into Open Source and SDR, working on a multi band monitor and transmitter.

#geek #nerd #hamradio VK6FLAB #podcaster #australia #ITProfessional #voiceover #opentowork

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • Yes there is.

    OSS exists in society and contributes to society and is developed by individuals who need to get paid.

    OSS is not volunteerism, it’s a legal framework to ensure that everyone benefits from the communal effort.

    Billionaires have made trillions of dollars off the back of that and still those same developers are struggling to eat.

    So, no. I disagree strongly with your assessment and the inventor of OSS does too, Bruce Perens is attempting to address this inequity with his Post Open project.

    See: postopen.org








  • I think that those moments exist throughout your life, some personal, some shared. As you get older, more seem to happen more often but the emotional drama seems to reduce.

    For example in no particular order, here’s a few:

    • The day my grandfather died
    • The first space shuttle launch
    • Challenger exploding
    • Leaving my birth country
    • Returning to it over a decade later
    • Becoming unemployed for 18 months
    • September 11
    • COVID
    • Brexit
    • Trump being elected the second time
    • The Berlin wall coming down
    • Deepwater Horizon
    • Getting a medical diagnosis
    • Asking my partner to travel around the country
    • Getting paid a wage the first time
    • Standing in the bathroom of the first house I lived in on my own






  • I started using Linux every day in 1999 and I’m glad I did.

    Managing a Linux server is no different from managing a Linux desktop. If you were to consider the GUI nothing more than a display layer over the top of a server, you’d have a good mental map of how things work.

    To get started, use the same desktop distro as your server and use their preferred or default windowing system.

    Once you’ve familiar with it and the pitfalls it comes with, you’ll know which questions to ask for your next choice, but you will be able to build on what you already know.


  • The first thing to bring to the process is curiosity. Linux is not Windows and doesn’t operate in the same way.

    What you think of a normal Windows behaviour, is unlikely to work in the same way under Linux.

    In Linux everything is represented within the filesystem. This means that you’ll find USB ports, soundcards, hard drive devices, mouse, as well as running processes, open files, memory and even the CPU as well as everything else to run a modern computer represented inside the filesystem directory structure you’re presented with.

    The Linux kernel is the heart of every system. Each flavour or distribution (distro) of Linux package up their ideas for the best way to use the kernel, offering different ways to install applications, drivers, user interface, etc. The variety is endless.

    Note that within each distro are multiple versions. Each distro is distinct and unlikely to do things in the same way, so instructions found online for one might not apply to another.

    The vast majority of software available is packaged from source by a distro and made available to you as a package.

    You can compile anything from source, but that is a very deep rabbit hole, something you’d want to shy away from for the first year at least.

    Packages have dependencies which most package managers attempt to deal with. This works fine if you use the same distro, but has a very high chance of breaking things if you start pulling packages from other distros or versions.

    Much can be achieved with a GUI, but the real magic happens on the command line.

    To get started, set aside an old machine, or build a virtual machine on your Windows PC and start learning.

    I’ve been using Linux daily since 1999, and I’d recommend that you start with Debian. It’s stable, highly compatible, has a massive package collection and is properly documented.

    Other distros like Ubuntu are (loosely) based on it.

    Whatever you do, take it slow, make regular backups of your data and ask questions.


  • Onno (VK6FLAB)toFlippanarchy@lemmy.dbzer0.comPurely for educational purposes.
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    16 hours ago

    I’m not a concrete expert, but a tonne of concrete is less than half a cubic metre.

    A concrete truck carries 10 cubic yards, or nearly 18 metric tons of concrete.

    If this “educational fact” is true, then that amount of sugar might cause an issue with a piece of sidewalk, but it’s unlikely to get noticed on anything being built with concrete, unless you bring a metric shit ton of sugar to the party.

    As it happens, sugar appears to be added to concrete on purpose, specifically to increase the working time at the potential cost of weakening the structure, but research into that is ongoing.

    Source: https://concretecaptain.com/what-does-sugar-do-to-concrete-mix/

    In other words, this post is bollocks.

    Edit: After it was pointed out to me by @Lupus@feddit.org that my link was slop, which I agree after reading more than the first two paragraphs, I went looking for better information and found this actual research:

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221450952030036X

    Interestingly during my search for information in relation to sugar added to concrete, my results appeared overwhelmingly generated by LLM, like the top link I found initially.

    Also, adding sugar appears to increase the compressive strength and that might be more significant than the increased work time.


  • It appears to be an attempt to monetize open source software, something which should in my opinion be applauded, given the trillions of dollars made off the backs of software developers who contributed to OSS without ever getting compensation, something that’s required to have a roof over your head and food to eat.

    Another approach being attempted in this space is by Bruce Perens (of Open Source fame).

    He’s calling his efforts Post Open: https://postopen.org/

    Disclaimer: I contributed to the community conduct document.