Nina Kalinina
nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt
<p>This profile is not managed by Terraform.</p><p>Or, as my "professional" email signature says, "IT expert and mixed media artificer". Proud to be an LLM hater.</p><p>A late millennial, yet I grew up with a ZX Spectrum and used an i486 as my main PC well into 00s. I have a degree in electrical engineering, but somehow ended up building massively distributed computer systems. I learned a lot during my long-ish career, and this knowledge makes me sad and keeps me up at night sometimes.</p><p>I never post here in a "working adult" capacity, and wouldn't dare to speak for my current or past employers. Instead, I engage in playful shitpost and creative exploration of technologies that have no commercial applications.</p>
Posts
-
View post
Me: it's still hard for me to accept that big tech did "embrace, extend, extinguish" of Linux ๐ Bae: it's worse, they did "embrace, extend, extinguish" of Linus ๐ซฉ
-
View post
If you somehow still considered uploading your face/ID to Discord, here's one more reason not to: Peter Thiel seems to be the lead investor in the service that implements the age check. And, oh, the service page says they will store our data on their side (at least for a little while). https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/oh-good-discords-age-verification-rollout-has-ties-to-palantir-co-founder-and-panopticon-architect-peter-thiel/
-
View post
Every time I see cw "latex" it's a gamble: will the toot be NSFW or simply not screen reader friendly
-
View post
It looks like there are very few, if any, left-handed gamepads. Huh. No Switch joy cons for left-handed people, either. Which would have been almost trivial to make ๐ค something tells me that it might be giving unfair advantage to right-handed people
-
View post
Today I've been thinking about ways an open source project would be able to accept donations (that they absolutely need, in many cases) without compromising on the ethics and the project values. Let's say you're making a cool important thing, and a megabucks corporation offers you a million (or ten, or two hundreds) USD a year in exchange for a link to their website somewhere in your PR materials (website or the thing itself). I think being open to such offers will likely have negat...
-
View post
RE: https://tech.lgbt/@nina_kali_nina/117441043503225633 The new policies for the Linux kernel make it more or less impossible to support a slop-free fork of Linux, so if you're worried about the reliability of your system level software, or have ethical concerns about LLM usage on your computer, the time to act is, well, now. If you have time this weekend, I recommend you to try one of the slop-free systems: NetBSD, 9front, HyperbolaBSD, Haiku, or OpenBSD. If you're adventurous, you c...
-
View post
#netbsd install party this weekend, anyone? ๐
-
View post
Wow that's a cool band name
-
View post
I grew up in a relative poor environment, and a big part of my entertainment was flipping through the pages of pop-sci magazines from the 80s that my dad used to have. All of them were subscription-based, e.g. all issues of Radio 1985, all issues of Technics for Youth 1989, and so on. All but one: a single issue of the Modelist magazine, kept separately from all the other magazines. Flipping through the pages of it, I found an article describing a cool video game for an obscure DIY personal com...
-
View post
@techokami@woof.tech please take it easy! I wonder if the phone's not connecting in the right mode anymore ๐ญ @plzupgrademe@fedi.txw.ca @netbsd@mastodon.sdf.org
-
View post
RE: https://tech.lgbt/@nina_kali_nina/117184991521312864 There's no new "life with NetBSD" report due to my semi ongoing health issues, so I'm going to boost the previous one. I'm thinking, when I have time and energy, about a personal project related to surviving in the era of collapse of personal computing. Likely it'll be just a blog about making things cozy for me and my partner, where we would be exploring topics like: building offline-only Debian workstation b...
-
View post
A new progress report on living with (Net)BSD, with some artistry, too. This original illustration is succubus daemon. Installed by running pkg_add succu, and can be started with default settings with /etc/rc.d/succu onestart. She's a bit wonky and rough around the corners, and she looks more like a ghost than a succubus. But she's highly configurable, and her ~source code~ incantation spell is written by a human being and can be understood by a human being as well. The illustration i...
-
View post
While we're at it, have you seen "Permacomputing 101"? https://100r.co/site/permacomputing_101.html
-
View post
NetBSD gaming after work: got VA-11 Hall-A and PCSX2 work under Wine. Both have laggy sound, but otherwise are playable. I suspect it might be related to the timer provided by the kernel (I remember vaguely reading about it somewhere). I had to install NetBSD 10.1 for i386 and then replace /libexec/ld.so_elf from the latest builds of NetBSD 10 to get Wine working in principle, and from there I have to keep track of DLL names, because Wine somehow thinks that oleaut.dll and OLEAUT.DLL are differ...
-
View post
A weird idea for a retro-style game: finishing a level uncovers a password for the next level, but the passwords are valid Win9x product keys
-
View post
Trying to learn from manga, still work in progress, redrawing a frame from "Uesugi-kun wants to stop being a girl". Trying to take long breaks to notice mistakes and fix them
-
View post
Reading untranslated manga to my bae is one of the happiest things in my life, ever
-
View post
I miss unhinged phone designs, like this Nokia 7280 (for people much younger than me: no, it's not fake, I've seen this model with my own eyes)
-
View post
When I was young, there was a joke among computer people: "sorry, I'm posting here from my coffee maker" (or a fridge, or a washing machine, or a kettle). It was very fun to think about such ways of computing. I was reminded of the joke last month, when I've had an interaction with a coffee grinder at the office. The coffee grinder refused to grind any beans; it was running a modern Android as an operating system, got a wireless software upgrade, and lost the WiFi connection i...
-
View post
My favourite local computer scavenger found a new toy for me: original eeePC 900. I don't think I've held one in my hands in the last 15 years. The laptop had a broken Windows 7 install on it, but it is too underpowered for this. We're boasting a single-core Celeron M running at 900 MHz, with 2 GB of RAM (upgraded from 1 GB), and Intel 910GM instead of a GPU. I wish it as eeePC 900a with Intel Atom; then I wouldn't need Spectre mitigations. NetBSD installs well on it, but doesn...
-
View post
Good news, everyone! It looks like FreeDOS decided to ban AI writing the code for FreeDOS: https://www.freedos.org/about/ai/ They used to have a few LLM authored commits, so I was worried things will deteriorate/bit rot. Hopefully they will not!
-
View post
Oooh, I just realised: oneko's kitten is chasing your mouse cursor
-
View post
Imagine turning 16, watching your first show ranked "16+", getting to the Episode 83, and seeing: This program contains graphic content, adult themes and violence that may not be suitable for some viewers and is inappropriate for children. The content is intended for mature audiences only. "Oh no, I have to wait 2 years now!" probably said no 16-year-old watching Attack on Titan ๐
-
View post
Did you know that on Unix-like systems it is generally possible to search across man (manual) pages with a command apropos? E.g. apropos wifi on my freshly installed NetBSD finds me documentation for the available network drivers, and a very helpful page afterboot that explains, among other things, how to connect to WiFi (and then install software from binary packages).
-
View post
I'm learning how to use a dip pen for comic making. Today's practice is focused mostly on using a "maru pen", also known as "mapping pen" for backgrounds, architecture and frames. Most comics have frames, and among comics that have frames, most are drawn with some sort of a ruler. Who doesn't know how to use a ruler? I didn't know how to use a ruler! Turns out, using a ruler with a dip pen, especially a G-pen (graphical?), is a very different from using it w...
-
View post
Oops, the video driver (i915) is unexpectedly glitchy!
-
View post
Today I've experienced an unfortunate type of a wardrobe malfunction where a bottled drink in my handbag became just a drink in my handbag. I only had glasses wipes, band aids and a film camera in there. I hope the film in the camera isn't going to be ruined after being submerged in Coca Cola (but I expect there at least will be artefacts)
-
View post
I just realised that "motorcycle" means "motor cycle". Motor.... Cycle. ๐ญ
-
View post
I've been trying to understand the reason I'm so tired on most of the days, for quite some time. Got some tests done, test results were mildly abnormal. Convinced the GP that the results can't be discarded with "ah that's because you had a cold recently" because I haven't had a cold recently. GP got me more tests, and finally one of them - indicating a group of diseases closely matching my symptoms - returned very abnormal. Now the fun part! The NHS guidelines say...
-
View post
On the topic of Ubunchu (it is a comic from 2009 about the joys of Ubuntu): I really empathise with Akane prez nowadays. I find it incredible that the comic is licensed under CC-BY-NC and at the same time was actually published by a major publisher (ASCII). I imagine this is an exceptional event (sadly).