• 68 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure what you want a source for. You mean a vendor who will sell one? XO-4 Touch was apparently the last model. I just had a look at laptop.org and the site looks useless now. It used to be full of wikis with copious details about the hardware and software of the OLPC.

    There are (or were) a variety of NGOs who worked on getting OLPCs into impoverished schools. One of them was https://unleashkids.org/. They are not in the business of selling them but ~15 yrs ago they were kind enough to sell some. The idea was that teachers and developers would need them to help support the OLPC project. I suggest touching base with them and see what they say, since they seem to still be around.

    The XO-4 Touch came with “Sugar”, a foss OS just for kids. It was easy to make it boot into Gnome instead (underpinned by RedHat). And someone made an Android OS that could be flashed onto an SD card and booted in the OLPC. I should mention that the OLPC was never 100% FOSS. The usual shit-show of blobs for some of the hardware drivers. I mainly just used it as an e-reader on Gnome.

    I’ve always been baffled that these FOSS e-ink laptops did not make it onto the general marketplace, while at the same time there were no commercial makers of anything like it. There was a “Pixel QI” dual-mode screen that could be bought bare and installed in Thinkpads and other machines, but for some reason that never took off either.




  • From the PDF, one of the EU’s concerns is:

    However, much of the value generated by open-source projects is exploited outside the EU, often benefiting tech giants.

    When tech giants use FOSS, it’s a shame they can extract wealth without compensating the contributors. OTOH, if the baddies become dependent on FOSS, that’s favorable anyway. It means they might contribute code to the projects which otherwise would not happen.

    The PDF does not cover public schools specifically. They need to be told that public schools are the most important place to deploy FOSS. Consider a university in Denmark pushes commercial software on students (sadly, they provide that software on a campus webpage improperly titled “Free Software” b/c it is gratis for students). The damage is of course that Denmark educates people to be dependent or clung-onto closed-source software like MATLAB, not GNU Octave. That negative training means the young generations are being conditioned to favor non-free software.

    FSFE does not know about this?

    The FSFE has a newsletter for “public money → public code”. They have not mentioned this /have your say/ page. Strange.

    Downvotes?

    I get why the OP was downvoted here… this is a bit off-topic for BuyFromEU. But !ETS@europe.pub has 4 silent down votes. WTF? I’ve seen that before. ETS seems to be heavily read by opponents of ETS.















  • Cooking wine is indeed cheaper and lower quality. But more importantly it is shelf-stable. You can open a bottle of cooking wine and keep it in the cupboard. The stuff is labelled “cooking wine” in the US so that it is treated as such. It probably gets around some of the tight liquor controls there.

    Europe does not seem to have a product with preservatives specifically for that purpose. So you would use substandard wines for cooking. If champaign goes flat because an open bottle sat out overnight, it’s still good for risotto. But I would still chill it if I weren’t making risotto the next day. In the case at hand, I don’t want to be keeping a bottle of sherry in the fridge.

    When using a whole bottle in a day, then of course there is no issue. But it takes me a year to get through a bottle of Sherry.











  • so the strange thing about flixbus is that it runs a bunch of routes that take you between the same places as the trains can, in a less comfortable vehicle, and absolutely fucking hilariously slower.
    For example gothenburg-stockholm is 3-4 hours by train and flixbus takes 6-7 hours.

    Brussels to Amsterdam and back:

    • 2h45 each way by Flixbus (about 5 min longer each way than the slow train, which has more stops)
    • <€20 on Flixbus; >€40 by train
    • Flixbus allowed Tor users to see schedules and fares until just recently. Now both Flixbus and Train vendors block Tor. The train ticketing sites are still a more shitty experience, at least in Belgium.
    • Buses are more reliable than trains. We never hear about road works disrupting the trip. But back when I used the train it was a regular shit-show of delays and cancellations because you cannot easily route around maintenance on the tracks.

    So you pay at least €20 more to get there ~5 min faster. Or you can pay even double the slow train fare if you want to shave off ~30min using the fast train.

    The buses often have Wi-Fi and power. Do trains? IIRC, it was quite rare for trains to have either.


  • Indeed usb3 is very useful for disk i/o. I wouldn’t treat it as a deal breaker though. USB 2.0 is good enough for OS installations, especially if you do a Debian netinst which uses minimal disc input (although USB 2 is perhaps still faster than your WAN uplink). For backups, it depends on the volume you are dealing with. USB 2 is good enough for small data and incrementals but if you have to transfer 500+ GB then you would want one of:

    • eSATA
    • NAS storage (over ethernet), or
    • USB 3

    All of those buses can be added to a pre-USB 3 machine. But if it’s a laptop, the usb 3 expresscards may be hard to find locally because they never really got popular.




  • I don’t know the Belgian case, but I think it’s the same thing in many member states; the publishing of laws online is done by private for-profit companies, and comes with weird restrictions.

    Belgium has an open data law obligating the state to make available to the public generally all information that the state has, with some reasonable restrictions w.r.t private info about individuals. Legal statutes themselves would obviously have to be openly accessible under that law. That law was even used to force publication of train routes and schedules. I’ve not read the law but I guess it’s likely sloppy about what constitutes “open”, because the state’s own website is access restricted (e.g. Tor IPs are blocked).


  • If a resource blocks certain IP addresses, that is not open access. It is access restricted. It is a deliberate blockade against a demographic of people.

    “Open data” has different meanings in different bodies of law, so your comment is meaningless without context. But in any case, we can call shenanigans whenever an “open data” legal definition fails to thwart access restrictions in an Emporer wears no clothes type of attempt.

    IOW, you cannot claim that an access restriction ceases to exist on some emotional plea that you believe the access restriction is just, appropriate, or necessary. An access restriction is an access restriction. “Open” implies open to all people, not some select demographics.