• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The most important risk you face is if somehow mains voltage ends up contacting somewhere you get electrocuted and die.

    There are 2 purposes of an earth ground: First it can be used as a reference for certain signals, such as microphones. Second, it can be used to protect against turning yourself into a sparker.

    There is a clear separation between mains voltage and system voltages so it’s typically not going to be a problem, but if a little wire ends up contacting the power supply case it can become energized and things start to get really bad.

    Most of the electrical code where I live focuses on grounding as “Bonding”, which is purely safety related for giving dangerous voltages a safe place to go.





  • I’ve got a 2013 MotoX, and it’s been many a moon, but I’m pretty sure I was able to get LineageOS onto it. It’s a small, thin phone with voice recognition built in. Quite distinct looking from any Moto Gs we’ve bought. Took Motorola forever to port Android M to it, and then the port was actually really shitty, so it was nice to eventually find a port.

    I think I found the good version on xda. OTOH, I don’t think it was a cdma phone. I think the one I had supported LTE


  • I’m running nova, and the thing that sets it apart from rootless (as I recall, it’s been a while) is that you can set up whatever search engine for the search bar you want. I don’t use google, I only use my own searx instance on brave, and nova let me set everything up exactly the way I wanted it. Most other launchers assume you want google, and I think they assume you want chrome too.


  • I always debloat my phone, the difference is too massive to ignore.

    My last 2 phones were a Galaxy S9 and a Galaxy S10, and I really found the samsungs to be insufferable at first, but with a strong debloat removing a bunch of ‘features’ nobody asked for and redundant apps, as well as changing the launcher (I use novalauncher, but rootless is also great and also FOSS) had a notable effect on the feel of the phone. I recall that some of the “features” specifically slow down responsiveness to button pushes because for example it ends up waiting on a home button press to see if you’re going to do a double or triple press.

    If you mess it up too much, a factory restore will undo everything you did anyway, so don’t worry too much about it.

    I’ve used the same technique on a number of different phones as well. My dad loves his LG phones, but it comes with a bunch of stuff he didn’t want, so we were able to disable it. His latest phones are rugged china phones, and he swears by them, especially once we were able to get rid of a bunch of stuff they added that you really don’t need.







  • I’ve been using a number of different tools which I interface to my nextcloud.

    My main nextcloud has a llm plugin which was really easy to install, you just install the plug-in, make sure that you are configured properly with python in your path, and then run an OCC command to download one of a few models.

    https://localai.io/

    I also hosted localAI, which was a little bit more involved, but the website did a decent enough job of explaining exactly all the things that you needed to do in order to get all the different types of AI model working. Besides LLMs, it also supports text to speech, speech to text, and image generation.

    Two things that are important: first, if you are server doesn’t have a pretty advanced video card then you’re going to be using the CPU exclusively for AI, and that’ll be pretty slow. Second, I found it very quickly that the amount of RAM you have is critical. My main server is a core i5 4th gen, and so I put AI software on another one of my servers which is a core i5 7th gen. You would think that the latter would work a lot better, but it had half the ram, and it basically wasn’t even able to get started.

    Besides hosting ai, if you have a desktop computer or gaming laptop you can run local AI models. There’s a fantastic piece of software called Faraday that works pretty well on my laptop. You can get more and more sophisticated models depending on how much memory you have.

    https://youtu.be/aLy_vVLUHZk

    Krita has AI dal-e support for image generation available as a plug-in. I haven’t used it yet because I just got it started downloading last night before I went to bed, but the installation process has defined in the video seems accurate and was extremely easy and mostly automated.

    https://youtu.be/AU8NDSBIS1U







  • I’ve tried aether, and I presently run a nostr node and satellite instance, but I’ve found both of those solutions have a problem due to relying on the local client. Many networks are locked down, so I find many places I can’t really participate in nostr or aether on the go (the latter is desktop only anyway), while I can hop into any of my activitypub related instances.

    I know of one project to create a nostr client that I believe will handle the communications stuff at the server end, but we’ll have to see – you never know if projects actually get off the ground, or if they’re actually worth using until they get up and running for real.