We expect the #CRTC to release a major Internet competition decision on Friday morning: We think this will be their decision in the various appeals ("review & varies" in CRTC lingo) of their August wholesale competition decision.

Okay, there's a lot going on there, so I'll break it down: 🧵👇🏼
1/8

As for the 3rd laptop that my oldest uses - will probably replace it this year.

These laptops don't have TPM 2, and my oldest's laptop runs Windows (she uses the Adobe Creative Suite), and it won't run Windows 11.

As I'm running Linux, and my battery issue is resolved - I will probably hold on to mine...

The last couple weeks, my own, it was kind of weird, the screen wouldn't close properly. Maybe someone dropped it? It wasn't until yesterday that I saw the trackpad cracked overnight that I realized the battery was expanding. I had kept my daughter's laptop for parts - I took the battery out from it and installed it in mine - it's back up and running!

My youngest's eventually succumbed to the abuse it was subjected to. Corners were missing, the case was dented. She'd come home, "it's not booting", and I'd take it apart, reseat a modular component, and it would work again. At the end of the 2024 school year, that one was retired - something happened, and I was not able to identify the problem.

I find refurbished corporate laptops to be a super value. I've found them to be fairly rugged, and because of their price point, if the kids drop them or lose them, I can just replace them. They're repairable, and I can find replacement parts. Between myself and the kids, I bought 3 HP Elitebook 840 G3s between 2020 and 2022.

#laptop #repair

A first for my blogging bot - Google search console indicates an article created by my blogging bot is a top-5 result for a search term: 'token based image generation'. Nothing from my own blog has achieved this.

Occasionally, the bot does generate something interesting, but I don't think this one is worth reading:
https://www.eliza-ng.me/post/imagegeneration/

@tj I have found this challenging - without having a VNA, or a bunch of gear to A/B test, it's really hard to know if a setup is performing as well as it could.

Have been playing with a couple meshtastic radios, and upgraded the antennas, and can't say I noticed a difference. I also don't know how sensitive those antenna to circuit board cables are to damage over time from playing around with different cases.

I guess that has been a part of the fun, as a hobby, with tooling, or without...

@kwramm I had an Amiga 3000 around 1994-1995 AND I bought a DEC Alpha 3000/300LX with a 17” Trinitron for $50 in 1999-2000. That particular Alpha was pretty limited - it had these Turbochannel expansion slots instead of PCI, and wouldn’t run Linux - but could run NetBSD. The graphics card wasn’t supported by NetBSD, but it did have a real serial console and Ethernet.

I sold the Amiga, and gave away the DEC, had lots of fun with both.

@mpjgregoire it's a bit of work to setup, but I host mine on AWS, using S3 + Cloudfront. At the time, I followed this: https://lustforge.com/2016/02/27/hosting-hugo-on-aws/

I use a tool called s3deploy to sync my local folder to S3.

It's super cheap, reliable, no commitment, billed monthly.

@MLE_online for an alternative to deet, try an insect repellent with icaridin (like Piactive).

@adr I always loved that there were two Rough Riders teams... I'd never looked up why. Looks like Ottawa's team was founded (1876), then Regina (1910), but I guess they didn't play in the same league until the 1950s when the CFL was formed?

@tubetime this reminds me of my childhood VIC-1541 disk drive. My father cut plastic holes on the bottom of the case - it allowed him to re-align the drive without having to unscrew & open the case.

@jawnsy If Github did decide to do something, it would be:
"When we determine that an account appears to be confusing users, but is not purposefully passing itself off as the trademarked good or service, we give the account holder an opportunity to clear up any potential confusion"

@jawnsy It's not clear - looking at their policy: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/content-removal-policies/github-trademark-policy

"A federal or international trademark registration number is required. If the name you are reporting is not a registered mark (e.g., a government agency or non-profit organization), please let us know:"

Operating under the name and having the domain might not have been enough - they may have had to register it (a uspto.gov trademark search suggests they haven't).

As my script has limited following (2 github stars!) and I have no commercial aspirations, I just renamed it: speakersplit.py will now be known as... conversationsplit.py

New name, same features! Find it at
https://github.com/raudette/conversationsplit

I checked out their domain - they did register it on November 7th 2024 - before I named my speakersplit.py script & created the project on Github (December 28th, 2024)

Doing a quick Google search, I can see the issue for them

I found an interesting email in my spam folder today - someone is running a commercial service, called SpeakerSplit, and I have a github project with the same name, which apparently is creating confusion for their users - they asked me to rename the project.

Watching Dept Q. Into episode 3. There is something compelling about watching cast offs coming together to do something as a team. Memories of Slow Horses in this sense. #deptq

First evening on the balcony! ...it was a cool May.