• 8 Posts
  • 182 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: February 27th, 2024
  • doubtingtammy@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Is GPS private?
    7·
    3 months ago

    Anecdotally, my phone without Google Play services has a horrible time obtaining a GPS fix, so I suspect without GPlay it’s only using raw GPS, but I’ve not bothered to actually dig into it.

    If you look at an app that shows satellites being recieved, it’s pretty cool to see how sensitive the GPS signal is to objects. Inside, maybe I’ll get one or two satellites near a window. But then I step outside, and see the list rapidly grow. I think my degoogled lineageos still has an assisted GPS option, though I haven’t tried it

  • doubtingtammy@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.ml•Alternatives for Photoshop?
    5·
    4 months ago

    I started using Krita, which is amazing and does lots of things I do, but the text editor when I try to resize text, it just ruins it and gets blurry sometimes. Then I found inkscape, which was good for, text and everything else worked fine, but not much of photo editor.

    Inkscape is like Adobe illustrator. It’s for vector graphics and text. it’s not great for photos/pictures/pixelated things. Like, you can add those as objects to a document. But you want to edit the images somewhere else. Maybe a krita --> inkscape workflow could work for you?

    I also use kdenlive for video editing, and rawtherapee for DSLR photos editing.

    If you’re also just kinda exploring software for fun, I recommend trying to play around with blender for more specialized video editing. Like, if you want to add complex effects, or motion track/stabilize, whatever. It’s an extremely powerful piece of software (best to look at tutorials, idk if anyone can figure that shit out on their own). All I’ve done with it is stabilize some video (which I then used in a kdenlive project), and I absolutely haven’t even scratched the surface.

  • doubtingtammy@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.ml•Can you use Linux today without the terminal?
    4·
    4 months ago

    The allergy to CLI is always strange to me.

    I get it. Every single other application a GUI user has used in their life: Ctrl-C = copy, and Ctrl-Z = undo. Open the terminal, and now Ctrl-C is an interupt, and Ctrl-Z is like a pause. Every terminal emulator has the option to change these keymappings. But doing that has a bunch of consequences once you start running more than basic file operations and nano. I think this is usually the first big hurdle to get over. It’s muscle memory that needs to be suppressed.

    And then there’s the documentation aspect. With a GUI, you can visually look around to see what can be done in a program. With the CLI, there’s options that you just kinda have to know. There’s -h or --help, then there’s the man pages. But even just navigating the man pages brings up the previous problem of unfamiliar/unintuitive keybindings. so you could also install tldr for faster help, but the vast majority of the time, it’ll be faster to just search online.

    All that being said, I prefer the CLI for pretty much everything, and think it would be interesting if there was a sort of pedagogical distro to teach the command line. Imagine a file browser that displays the underlying utilities/commands being used. Like, when you open your home folder maybe there’s a line showing ‘ls -al /home/me | grep [whatever params to get the info being displayed]’. Or, when you go into the settings, it shows you the specific text files being edited for each option. Something that just exposes the inner workings a little more so that people can learn what they’re actually doing as they’re using the GUI

  • doubtingtammy@lemmy.mltoClimate@slrpnk.net•China Helped Indonesia Build One of the World’s Biggest, Youngest Coal Fleets. It’s Still Growing.
    2·
    7 months ago

    While this buildout was driven by Indonesian leaders, and Japan and South Korea have provided significant financing, too, no foreign nation has played a larger role than China.

    “China is a good friend for all the presidents to fulfill their campaign promises,” said Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat, director of the China-Indonesia desk at the Center of Economic and Law Studies, a research and advocacy group in Indonesia. Where lenders from other countries have pledged money without delivering, Rakhmat said, Chinese enterprises provided financing quickly and with few requirements.

    Today, Chinese companies are continuing to build new coal plants in Indonesia, despite a 2021 pledge by China’s president, Xi Jinping, that Beijing would end such financing.

    In an ironic twist, many of the new Chinese-backed coal plants are powering operations that Indonesian leaders say will help transition the world to cleaner energy. These so-called “captive” coal plants are not connected to the grid but instead serve as dedicated power sources for new industrial parks refining nickel, used in electric vehicle batteries, or manufacturing solar panel components. The projects are backed largely by private Chinese companies rather than state-owned enterprises, and their status as captive power plants appears to allow them to flow through a loophole in Xi’s 2021 pledge.

    Beyond these captive plants in Indonesia, China has largely stuck to that promise—only a few other Chinese-backed coal units were newly planned last year, in Kyrgyzstan, Zambia and Zimbabwe, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, an independent research group based in Finland.\

    It’s a good article. You should read it instead of just assuming it confirms all your anti-china bias. Don’t get me wrong, I think building new coal plants is bad even if it’s for nickle that goes into an electric car. IMO the CPC should stop private capital from investing in those “captive” plants as well.