ExtremeDullard

So I'm very happy with vim, and have been for the past quarter century (I used Elvis before that. Remember Elvis? It was awesome! - But I digress...)

I have to admit though, while I pity the fools in my company who use VSCode and mock me for using vim in the terminal, yet in fact produce code much slower than I do, I envy their IDE that suggests function and variable names in other project files.

So I've been looking for a nice, easy-to-install solution to get some of that goodness in vim. Nothing fancy, just autocomplete suggestions to avoid having to grep names I forgot or having to yank/put text manually to prevent typos. And mostly easy, because for some reason, I'm properly allergic to any sort of vi configuration - be it vim or any other vi flavor.

So I gave Neovim a shot. My plan was to ensure Neovim was at least as good as Vim, then try to install Treesitter. But that plan immediately went south, then kept on being a proper pain in the ass until I finally realized this was going nowhere fast and I didn't want to spend countless hours configuring that awful thing, so I gave up. I wasn't asking for much but Neovim totally failed to deliver.

And then I found the solution I was looking for all along: YouCompleteMe. It's as simple as installing the handy vim-youcompleteme .deb for my distro (Linux Mint), running vam to install it and voila: a working autocompleter that actually works in 3 minutes flat and doesn't get in my way.

I'm normally a straight vim user (just out of habit, no particular preference) and I'm giving neovim a spin. So far I like it but...

For the love of all that's holy, how do I disable automatic indentation?

I have noautoindent set, nosmartindent set, filetype indent off, but neovim keeps inserting indentations. The only thing that works is setting paste on, but that's not the right solution to this problem.

Please help. This is driving me nuts!

So this very large company who shall remain nameless distributes a proprietary software development environment that includes a patched version of a certain, well-known open-source debugging tool.

The patch is to make said open-source tool support their products. It's not even hidden or anything: the binary is sitting right there in the installation directory, it's called the exact same thing the vanilla debugger is called and when I run it on the command line, it clearly says "patched for xyz".

The tool in question is distributed under the GPLv2 and I need to modify it for my own project. So I sent an email to the company to request the source code for their modification, but they refuse by playing dumb and pretending they don't understand the question. They keep telling me the source code to their IDE is not public. I keep telling them I don't want their IDE but the source for the modified GPL backend tool they bundle with it. But no: they claim it's part of their product and they won't release it.

Anybody knows the best course of action to deal with this? It's the first company I've dealt with that explicitly refuses to honor the GPL. I don't even think it's malice: I'm fairly sure the L2 support guy handling my ticket was told to deny my request by his clueless supervisor who didn't bother escalating it. But it's also a huge company that's known to be aggressive and litigious, whereas I'm just one guy and I'm not lawyering up over this. I have other hills to die on.

Who should I pass the potato to? The FSF?

I haven't been able to update my cellphone anonymously with Aurora since January. Every time I try, Aurora errors out with "Oops, you are rate limited".

This isn't the first time Google plays at making non-normies' lives difficult. So I tried the usual tricks, updated Aurora, tried the nightly build, waited, tried again... for months - to no avail: Google just won't play ball this time.

Last week, Signal stopped working and demanded to be updated. Fortunately, Signal offers the APK as a normal download without having to get it from the hateful Google Play store.

Today, my home banking identificator app did the same thing and stopped working. I needed to make a payment right now, and I had no way to update the app: "Oops, you are rate limited". And my bank sure doesn't offer the APK outside of anything but the goddamn Google Play store.

So I relented and created a Google account. Which of course entailed giving Google a phone number. I sure didn't give them mine, so I phoned a friend abroad who doesn't care to ask him to receive the verification SMS on his phone and read out the code to me. Which worked long enough to set up 2FA and do away with phone numbers altogether. And finally, after an hour of fucking around, annoying other people and compromising their phone number, I could update my banking app and make my payment at last.

All that because Google has decided they want to control my phone.

Fuck Google.

Seriously, how they are allowed to hold the Android world hostage like this without getting their monopolistic ass Sherman'ed AT&T-style, I'll never know. It's long overdue.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/13880246

I have a terrible el-cheapo 14" HP laptop that I bought from a big-box store a few years ago as an emergency replacement for a laptop that died on me on the road while visiting a customer. I literally went to the store 5 minutes before it closed, bought any laptop they had, loaded Linux on it at the hotel and transferred my files from the dead laptop overnight, then did my presentation the next morning.

The trouble is, that laptop is VERY Linux unfriendly. I've put up with it for years because I don't like to throw things away, but I just can't stand the regular AMDGPU driver crashes and the broke-ass wifi-cum-bluetooth Realtek chipset anymore.

So I'm on the market for a good Linux laptop. I'm not a demanding user - I use that HP laptop to edit videos and do CAD and I'm okay with it - I'm very comfortable with anything Linux and I can code my way around problems.

I'm really tempted to get a MNT Reform laptop: I like the LiFePo4 battery cells a lot, it's solid, it's open hardware, it has a trackball and I love trackballs, it's highly hackable, and I'd like to support the MNT Research guys. And I'm old enough and the kids have been out of the house long enough that money is no object.

But a couple of things are holding me back. Maybe there are MNT Reform owners here who could shed some light on the following questions:

• I don't know much of the ARM ecosystem, and what to expect from what processor / SoC. So I'm thinking of going with the highest end RK3588 32GB / 256GB CPU module offered by MNT. Would this at least match the performances of my stupid HP laptop's Ryzen 5 CPU in terms of real-world performances?

  Or put another way: should I expect to take a hit when encoding my videos or doing big CAD models compared to this already slow laptop, or can I reasonably expect the MNT Reform to at least not be a regression.

  Side question (yes, I know it should be obvious, but asking is better than guessing): I assume the "32GB / 256GB" in the CPU module's denomination is for 32GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard flash. Meaning I'd have that much disk space without needing to add a NVMe SSD card. Correct?

• The keyboard layout looks all shades of terrible. I'm flexible with anything but not keyboard layouts - and especially those keyboard that don't put the left SHIFT and CTRL at the bottom where they belong, or have a split space bar.

  The Reform's keyboard ticks all the wrong boxes for me in that respect: I can tell rightaway that it's going to fight my typing muscle memory all the time and forever, because I sure ain't gonna get used to it.

  Can I remap the keys so I can at least I can swap CTRL and whatever that key is at the bottom left, and make the 3 buttons that replace the space bar act as a space bar? Then it's just a matter of putting a sticker on the keys and gluing the space bar keycaps together somehow.

• I seem to recall some years ago that if the laptop was left off and unplugged for long enough - like 2 weeks IIRC - it would drain the cells and kill them because there was no under-voltage protection. Less dramatically but equally annoyingly, you couldn't leave it unplugged for a few days and expect to find it fully charged when you needed it most.

  Does it still do that? Or has the hardware been fixed - or maybe there's a "Turn really off" option in the little side computer that runs the mini OLED display?

  Mind you, I can always drill a hole and add a physical switch to disconnect the cells, but I'd rather not do that.

• Is there an option to limit the charge? Keeping Li-ion cells constantly at 100% (or worse, charging all the time) when the laptop is plugged in isn't ideal. I'd rather it kept the cells charged around 80% . And I mostly use my laptops plugged in.

• Can I remove the cells and use the laptop plugged in? I might eschew the cells altogether, because I really never need them: I'm plugged in at home, I'm plugged in on the train, I'm plugged in at the hotel, I'm plugged in at the customer's. I can't remember a time when I needed to run this particular laptop on battery. If I can use the laptop as a luggable computer, I wouldn't need to carry the weight of the cells around.

• Has anybody tried to install Cinnamon? Does it work well on Debian ARM? I see no reason why it shouldn't, but maybe there are issues.

Well that's pretty much it. Sorry for the long post 🙂 There's precious little information about the MNT Reform out there - probably a good indication that there are precious few such machines in the wild, sadly - so I would welcome any real-world user feedback!

I know they're supposed to be good for the environment. But... Holy smokes they drive me up the wall. They really do!

I had no trouble adapting when aluminum can pull-tabs got replaced by push-tabs, because it was pretty much the same movement, and I could see the immediate advantage of not getting cut by a pull-tab.

But the tethered cap is fighting decades of muscle memory in me: I'm used to taking the cap off with one hand and keeping it there while taking a swig with the other. Now I unscrew the cap with one hand, but I still have to hold the cap so it's out of the way. It feels like drinking in handcuffs each and every time...

So unlike the pull-tab, the tethered plastic bottle cap is one of those compulsory eco solutions that constantly make you feel ever-so-slightly more miserable all the time, and I hate that because ecology only works when it brings something of value both to people and to the environment.

I (still) don't own an EV for various reasons, but I'm still interested. One question that keeps popping up in my mind is this one:

Where I live way up north, many people drive EVs - mostly Teslas apparently. A solid third of the parking lot at work is filled with EVs. The one thing that always strikes me when I leave work around the same time as everybody else is the sheer amount of noise of all those Teslas warming up their batteries before their owners come out to drive home make in the winter: it's like dozens of heating cannons running at the same time.

Each time, I wonder how much juice is used just to prime the battery before use vs. actual miles traveled.

If you leave in a cold country, have you worked out how much energy you burn simply keeping the battery alive in the winter? Is your EV still more energy efficient than an ICE in the winter for your particular use pattern?

My company offers 3 days of unjustified sick leave for things like colds or minor health issues that don't really require seeing a doctor.

And sure enough, that guy - always that guy - got sick on Monday, then took a day off on Thursday, and now he's sick again on Friday. Strangely, his company car reports being at a ski resort 200 miles away.

Because you know, when you're bedridden, at least you should have a nice view out the window...

I'm playing with OpenSCAD, which is a text-based parametric 3D modeler. It comes with its own built-in editor, but you can also open the source file in your favorite editor and when the file is saved, OpenSCAD recompiles and re-renders the model.

I know it's nothing particularly novel, but it's kind of awesome to type :w and see the 3D object immediately show what you just typed. There's even a degree of rendering control from within the editor: for example to highlight a feature, like an subtracted volume, simply type # in front of the corresponding operation, :w and hey-presto, the feature appears in the model.

And sure enough, there is OpenSCAD syntax highlighing for vim. How cool is that!

If someone had told me 40 years ago that I'd be doing 3D modeling in VI one day, I would never have believed it 🙂

Hail Mary question here, in case someone somewhere knows something:

In the late 90s, I lived in the UK in Hampshire. One weekend, I went to a local computer show in Portsmouth or Southampton. You know, a few tables in a community center with people selling all kinds of computer bits.

A small UK company had a booth there and sold a really interesting keyboard. It might have been the manufacturer, or a local importer. I don't remember. But the keyboard had a UK layout. I bought one.

The keyboard was a folding full-size beige 102-key mechanical keyboard with a chunky coiled cable and an AT interface. It was built like a tank and had really good clicky switches. Basically imagine a slightly lighter model-M sawed in two with a mechanical hinge in the middle, allowing the keyboard to fold in two, with the keys on the inside facing each other.

It was a great keyboard, and while it didn't fold into a particularly compact package and wasn't light by any stretch of the imagination, it fit great in a small suitcase and protected itself naturally by sandwiching the keys in the middle. And it folded with a loud, satisfying clunk 🙂

I loved that keyboard, but I lost it in a move 20 years ago. I've been trying to find out who made it and what it was for years, but I was never able to find anything at all. The only hits that come up when I search for folding mechanical keyboards are those awful miniature battery-powered bluetooth keyboards for cellphones.

Does anybody know what that keyboard might have been?

I'm not a true mechanical keyboard enthusiast. I mean I like a good keyboard for typing code, so I rolled with model-Ms in the 80s and 90s, then some expensive Cherry keyboard I only recently retired because it was utterly spent (and it was PS/2), and now I happily use a Wooting Two HE.

I'm so glad the mechanical gaming keyboard scene has developed so much: it means there's a plethora of really excellent keyboards for the rest of us who don't play games.

But something utterly baffles me: why are high-quality keyboards getting smaller?

There's a lot more keyboards without the numpad and the block of middle keys - whatever they're called - or with the middle keys reduced or squashed up awkwardly on the side, than full-size plain old 102- or 104-key layout keyboards. What's wrong with the numpad? Isn't more keys generally better?

Back in the days, I bought the original Happy Hacking keyboard because it kind of made sense to maneuver around in our server room with a small keyboard that took up less space. Typing on it drove me up the wall but it was convenient to carry. And I guess it was also good option for going to LAN parties with a smaller backpack. But other than that, for a keyboard that never leaves your desk, I don't get it.

Are there other advantages to smaller keyboards? Genuine question! I'm not dumping on smaller keyboards: to each his own and if you're happy with yours, more power to you. I'd just like to know why you prefer smaller.

I'm considering buying an EV to replace my aging diesel. I live in a very cold country where temperatures regularly dip below -30C in the winter.

I understand that EVs lose range in cold temperatures and that they need heating to use and charge without damage.

My question is this: if I plan on not using my car for several weeks, can I leave it unplugged and/or tell it to stop managing the batteries' temperature to save energy and not damage the batteries?

I'm okay with spending half a day preheating it when I plan on using it again regularly, but I don't want it to draw current all the time for nothing when I'm away on long missions.

For some reason, I can't seem to find out if it's safe to keep a fully unpowered EV in the cold for a long time...