Cognex Barcode Scanner is not open source but it is the best. It’s basically just a demo frontend for a commercial barcode programming library so they are not trying to monetize the app itself. It supports everything! Not just QR code but every kind of barcode. I used to work in logistics and I used it to scan all the different barcodes on shipping labels.

When you scan a barcode you can choose to open, copy, share. Open launches your default web browser. If the barcode isn’t a URL, it all give a search option and you can configure your preferred search engine. It can scan images from your gallery or use your camera. But the important part is it won’t do anything with the scanned data until you tell it to.

It makes more sense when you realize he’s negotiating not on behalf of the best interests of Ukraine or the USA but on behalf of Putin.

Jammie Thomas had to pay over $9000 per song she shared on Kazaa and that was like 15 years ago. Inflation + millions of shares should mean billions of dollars owed to the publishers… Plus obviously deleting or forfeiting ownership of all the models trained on that data, naturally.

I once fully updated a Gentoo system that hadn’t been touched in 4 years. That was an adventure in troubleshooting.

Nice! I’m jealous.

Even using Wi-Fi in my house, it constantly drops connections. I was hoping to use it to basically VNC to my desktop but it is so slow and disconnects constantly. There’s some speculation that some of the antennas were not soldered properly or something like that.

Mine also has large black dead spots in the bottom corners of the screen, seems like it was over tightened during manufacturing. Maybe that’s also what broke the antenna!

Mine has been collecting dust. The signal is so bad, even on Wi-Fi, it’s nearly useless. I’d feel guilty selling it. And i paid around $800 USD…

The keyboard’s the star here, and it has all the important keys for terminal use (though it’s a little too wide for my hands, I’d prefer a 4 or 5 inch screen version)

Aside from the keyboard it is like a 2018 era generic Chinese android phone with no support or updates.

Physically I feel the balance of the phone is a bit top heavy, with the curves it’s very slippery to hold onto especially using while lying in bed etc.

Sadly the phone’s mother (fxtec) died in childbirth, so to speak. And the whole “XDA phone” thing was a dud, XDA was a ghost town by the time this thing was in our hands.

Big thanks to the guy keeping lineage working on it!

Despite all that i said, the OLED special editions were very tempting!

I had a fairly opposite experience. I bought a Steam Deck when it first came out and had to return it during the refund period because of a software bug making it basically unusable with my account.

A year later, the bug was finally fixed and I rebought. And… I like the fact that it runs Linux and the efforts done to make windows games playable in Linux in general. But I’ve found that i actually don’t enjoy the form factor of the Steam Deck at all.

I find it to be too big and heavy to hold comfortably without resting it on something. The buttons are tiny and too close to the edge. The d-pad sucks, at least on mine. Staring at the little screen gives me a headache and text/icons are too small in a lot of games. The Wi-Fi is really slow (at least in the original LCD model) and downloading/installing takes absolutely forever. I’ve literally spent more time installing games and downloading updates than actually playing games in it.

It has been months since I last turned mine on. In hindsight, it was a poor purchase for me.

I do still like it as a concept and an happy to see it is successful. I welcome the new Linux users. I follow the steam deck communities and read the news.

… But it’s just not for me, apparently.

I still have my Dual Standard one somewhere, was 16800 i think and upgraded the board in it a couple times to bring it up to 56k eventually. It was a beauty. I think it was like $800? An insane amount of money in hindsight, but worth every penny at the time.

Wow, that is a startling shift over a relatively short period.

Consumers aren’t gonna be happy when all their Amazon and Temu no-name made-in-china garbage becomes dramatically more expensive.

I’ve been using solid black desktop background since the 90s!

Heliboard for normal communication (glide typing) and Hackers Keyboard for shell/remote desktop/programming type usage. Generally i find the keys too small and typing on a touch screen is slow and annoying, so i use a real computer to type whenever i can.

My typing accuracy is much better with gboard, but I don’t use it because google…

I have never used voice to text nor voice controlled assistant etc. as I have no interest in doing that. My phone is muted 99.9% of the time, I prefer to operate in silence…

I had a 256GB phone and after 1 year had used less than half the space, without ever deleting anything, so when i upgraded this time I saved money and got the 128GB model. I sync my photos/videos to my NAS so can purge those from my phone at any time to save space. That’s really the only thing that takes up any significant storage.

Gentoo. Literally the entire system is a build environment. Imagine a single environment that’s capable of compiling thousands of different packages and managing dependencies etc.

I have pixel 7 and it always takes 3 or 4 taps in the corners for it to register my touch

I have a bunch of different old consoles and vintage computers (not “444” of course) and used to try to have them all hooked up, it was such a miserable rats nest of wires. I eventually settled on just using one at a time (I am only human, after all).

Whatever I’m playing gets the prime hookup spot in front of the TV, everything else gets stored neatly on a shelf or in a box. Cables and controllers are in individually labelled zipper storage bags, in bin drawers, out of sight until they are needed…

Of course, hooking them all up is a hobby itself… It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole of scalers and SCART switches and RGB mods and then you suddenly find yourself a couple thousand dollars poorer.

When IBM killed OS/2

And more money, too

Funtoo is dead after this month

https://forums.funtoo.org/topic/5182-all-good-things-must-come-to-an-end/