I have tried freecad a number of times to replace solidworks as a critical piece of closed source software in hardware development toolchains. I have always struggled. Yesterday someone spent an hour with me at a makespace saying… “FreeCAD has a different way of doing this/try realthunder branch/use symmetry condition/delete all conditions that coincide” … it has been worth years of trying alone. When I started solidworks the reseller gave me a week of training - this is often why complex FOSS software gets a reputation for being clunky, because alone you will spend ages hunting a GUI button in a complex interface.

TLDR: Go outside, go to makespace or a FREECAD conference - meet other people who use open source software - its much easier to use/learn from others than alone.

I am 99% sure that film was called “Lise Meitner”

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Nobody uses cinnamon? Honestly - I really like using cinnamon with Debian. I heard that they promised not to fuck with the UI for no reason unlike… everyone! @Mwa Cinnamon is a fairly nice, easy to use desktop - I don’t really care which is better, but if they change it, you have to re-learn it. Top tip for UI design - don’t think that your users want to re-learn how to interact with your UI - they might go outside, or elsewhere.

Its not the ‘eat the rich’ that I was hoping for… Might be the one we deserve.

Don’t pay this! You just reinforce their predatory practices. How renewals at much higher prices are allowed - no clue!

Something similar happened to a company I know - it expired and was immediately bought by domain squatters, when they found them they were told that it couldn’t be sold back because the squatter had paid $XXXX for and had big plans (I assume it was BS, just a premise to get paid - no site was ever put on the domain)

Solution: they bought the .org version and bought the .com back a year later.

edit:grammar

Surprise! :D The project was called ‘making tax digital’ it was expressly to remove paper forms for VAT.

Sorry this is a late reply. I can see that mentioning molten salt was a bit left-field, However, it is one of the more realistic ways to store the huge amounts of power needed to fuel an economy for a couple of weeks (which you need in northern europe if you want to use solar/wind). Here’s a link about it:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cite.202000137

I am pro nuclear, but if we are going to descend into this renewable hell, then we need to actually think about how you store terawatt-hours of power. I really think that this kind of storage might be the nearest we have to a solution. we’ll only need it once we try to turn off the gas turbines, of course. It is fascinating that so many smart people don’t see that the whole jigsaw is missing vital pieces.

This is interesting, and meets my needs. I tried Gnucash, but the double entry bookkeeping was a bit to advanced for my small-business’/smooth-brain needs (amortising my stock of utility bills seemed a bit excessive! - though I am sure I was doing it wrong)

This is not tangental - I am heartened, my hope is that this would become normal. Despite my moan, it isn’t that bad and I’m sure I would have had different IT headaches on windows - security comes to mind.

I still use proprietary android software on my phone, but I try not to do anything secure on my phone (this is also getting harder as banks are insisting that I convert to apps)

yes it is. I have tried messing with user agent now. Chromium works on linux, not firefox. :(

Which is?

It works on chromium, not firefox. I guess I should be more flexible. It is likely that the bug is in the bank’s site, so I wasn’t sure about putting in a bug report. The website pauses on the ‘loading’ animated icon, when you try to navigate away, it tells you ‘Your session has expired’. It hasn’t been fixed by changing the user-agent (assuming I got it right). I don’t know if the bank would give them a dummy account for testing, but I’ll file a report anyway.

I’m not worried about privacy, it’s a business not a person. If the government want to look through my business’ data, they just need to arrange an audit. I like good security, but am a small target.

It’s about free as in freedom.

My worry is that if linux is allowed to become just a hackintosh of steamdeck, rather than an actual operating system. It will go the way of hackintosh.

[edit: apostrophe, edit2: added last paragraph]

I don’t know if the UK is worse than anywhere else (?)

This sounds smart

Thanks - I had not thought of this. I’ll give it a go… [edit: no dice :(] It works in chromium, so there is a solution… its just tiring to remember which browser to use for which site.

Also, please feel free to answer if you aren’t based in the UK, I assume this isn’t a UK only problem, but I’m based here.

Sorry - What?

You said Denmark had converted to green energy. I pointed out that they haven’t done anything like that. You are now moving the goal posts and saying “where is the comparative essay defending nuclear power”…

If you must, France turned completely green in the 70s. So they’ve provided 50 years of clean energy. Its a classic story and not as simple as I’m going to make out, but still. Look at the map link in the last post - any area that stays green is either using hydro or nuclear. Hydro is great, but you need mountains and water.

That is actually very impressive. Thanks! I remain a bit skeptical as its only 1/5th of what they need and it’s only one region of one (rich) country. Still, 10GW of lithium battery would be one hell of a fire ;-)