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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Definitely dislike MS, generations of my workstations have small, yellow “Microsoft Free Workstation” stickers on their monitors, but VSCodium (in my case) is not really bad.

    Also I really like the Xbox360 console and (as a hacker and maker) still love the first Kinnect. The Kinnect is an excellent piece of sensor-hardware, was rather cheap when purchased in used condition and it works very well with Linux.


  • You can start with The Uber files, which “is a global investigation into a trove of 124,000 confidential documents from the tech company that were leaked to the Guardian.”

    Summary

    Uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments, leak reveals

    Some examples:

    • The cache of more than 124,000 internal Uber files lays bare the ethically questionable practices through which the company barged its way into new markets, often where existing laws or regulations made its operations illegal, before lobbying aggressively for those same laws or regulations to be altered to accommodate it. Read here
    • Senior executives at Uber ordered the use of a “kill switch” to prevent police and regulators from accessing sensitive data during raids on its offices in at least six countries. Read here
    • Two of Barack Obama’s most senior presidential campaign advisers, David Plouffe and Jim Messina, discussed helping Uber get to access leaders, officials and diplomats. Read here
    • At least six UK government ministers, including the then chancellor, George Osborne, and the future health secretary Matt Hancock, did not declare secret meetings at which they were lobbied by Uber. Read here
    • The inside story of how Uber used its connections to the Conservative party to lobby Boris Johnson in a rearguard effort to stop Transport for London introducing new regulations. Read here
    • One of Uber’s top executives quit amid questions for the company about whether its European operations were structured in a way that avoided tax. Read here
    • Uber secretly hired a political operative linked to Russian oligarchs allegedly aligned with Vladimir Putin in an attempt to secure its place in the Russian market, despite internal bribery concerns. Read here

    […]

    As Bonus some older articles about their overall ethics and practices:




  • If you are unhappy with suggested XSane, but only want an OSS solution, I do not know a good alternative.

    Possible non-OSS solution

    Although I am an open source enthusiast, there are few application where I use commercial, even non-OSS solutions on Linux. One of this exceptions is for scanning.

    Background: I “administrate” some legacy Epson scanners used with my family’s Linux boxes and got them all to run with a software called VueScan, with the following restrictions:

    • Perfection 3490 worked out of the box, no drivers required
    • Perfection 3170 requires Epson drivers (iscan_2.10.0-2_i386.deb, iscan-plugin-gt-9400_1.0.0-2_i386.deb), but only runs on 32bit Linux
    • Perfection V30 requires Epson drivers (scan-gt-f720-bundle-2.30.4.x64.deb.tar.gz) and simply works on 64bit Debian

    As you see, it might be a bit of luck, if a device works out of the box or not.

    Unfortunately your Epson Stylus SX435W seems not to be listed under the supported Epson devices (click red button “All drivers” to see all supported Epson scanners).

    If you happen to find no solution, I suggest to use the trial version of VueScan and check if your Epson simply runs or not.

    EDIT: sorry, I forgot to mention. that the VueScan GUI has plenty of those processing options you are searching for.




  • Let the religious shell wars begin … again

    Only right answer is of course TCSH. Not much documentation and support, ancient but still receives new bugs in 2021 (on Debian), but attackers hate it! (I love it)

    My real suggestion is to learn zsh and fish (and bash). Try using them for all your purposes and in the end you will automatically find the one (or more of them) that suits you best and that you like most for your daily tasks.