Generally AMD had a poor reputation so indeed AMD chips ended up in budget product lines. But the tables have turned retrospectively because no one realised from 2008 to 2013 that AMD unwittingly had a pro-consumer privacy advantage, however accidental.

Unfortunately nobody ever put AMDs APUs into actually good laptops,

The CPU is part of what makes a machine “good”. You could say Thinkpads were good for their repairability, upgradability, and stability of design across models – exactly the factors that Apple is the poorest at. If good means /rugged/, then in fact there are some ASUS, Acer, and non-thinkpad Lenovos that had a stainless steel chassis (with pre-spychip AMDs).

Good is also relative. And now we know that having a spychip not so good. So they put a piece if shit spychip in an otherwise good machine, thus dragging down the goodness of those machines. Conneseurs of the time would not care to track the various models of perceived junk. But retrospectively it started making sense to do so – once knowledge of the spy chips was well established. But this is a very niche community who gives a shit about spy chips. Masses of normies just care about specs and performance which is who we would rely on to document the hardware.

sdf is the host. The same that hosts my acct. It’s not a fed issue. But the fed could compensate for the problem because hosts other than SDF can see the whole timeline.

by active. Now it’s 5 months back. Maybe just a temporary issue.

Probably rare that I would opt for a lossy text version, but I’ll consider it in some cases along the same lines as my response to the w3m suggestion.

I usually want to archive a page that can be faithfully reproduced, sometimes for borderline forensic purposes. I usually don’t have time during a browsing session to inspect the results of a saved page for quality. If I pop into a public hotspot I want to save and go.

But later on when I’m reading and managing the offline content, I might decide the graphics on a page are unwanted. So perhaps it would be useful to do w3m -dump "$my_local_GUI_page.html" > lean_capture.txt && rm $my_local_GUI_page.html". I’ll have to try that.

(update) I works to run w3m -dump "$my_local_GUI_page.html" > lean_capture.txt but strangely the file:// scheme is not understood. E.g. this does not work: w3m -dump file://./"$my_local_GUI_page.html".

(update 2) If the webpage is MIME-formatted, w3m does not handle it and just dumps the base64 blobs.

Looks great! It’s a shame it’s not in the Debian official repos. I wonder why. I have to say I’m tempted to try it because at least there is an unofficial Debian pkg so we need not use an obscure or language-specific pkg manager.

Glad to see it’s in the official Debian repos. That encourages me to try it and fiddle around with it.

The landing page says: “It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet”, which gives the feeling of a 1990s project. Which isn’t bad… It suggests the dev is probably not keen to use silly modern day bloaty garbage like JS, npm, electron, python, and awkward pkg managers. And indeed it’s in C.

Although I had to wonder how it notably differs from wget -c -E -H -k -K … Then I saw the --single-file option. So that pretty much settles it – I must check it out. This may be the perfect tool. Thanks for the tip!

(update) I installed it. Looks promising.

(update 2) Superficially i love the design… the way it has a server and remembers sessions. A lot of thought went into the design. But I can’t get it to work. There is a config for “proxy”; does not say whether it’s an HTTP proxy or SOCKS. It does not indicate if an URL is expected or just a hostname. My proxy setting does not stick. And no data is fetched in the end. Hard to know if respect for robots.txt is hindering it.

well if you shoot off part of his ear just 1 cm or so from the brain and that does not motivate stepping down, then it’s not gonna happen.

I did not think that curl could interpret HTML and fetch all elements needed to render a webpage. What would be a sample commandline for curl?

GIMP

You deskew it in GIMP? Sure, you want automation, but…

GIMP is for image processing not document manipulation. When loading a 4-page PDF, GIMP tries a hack of importing each page as a separate layer to a single image. To change pages, in principle that should be a matter of changing layers (page-up and page-down according to the menu, but it had no effect). GIMP automatically presented page-4, which is a bit odd. And I could not change layers.

Luckily page 4 happened to be the page I needed to deskew. But the rotate tool has no mechanism to fix a line that underlines a line of text followed by a mechanism that rotates as needed to make the line horizontal. We must resort to grabbing and dragging until it looks right. Eyeballing that is much more prone to human error than drawing a straight line under a line of text on the page.

When exporting the result as PDF, we can specify that each layer in the image become a page in the PDF output. And it seems to work though I did not get the impression that the page I deskewed remained in the A4 geometry that it started with because there was some kind of extra gap between the edges and the frame. Since GIMP is not designed for documents, it would not likely have a concept of A4 paper which would then need to be preserved.

ImageMagick – perhaps

The other tool I can think of would be ImageMagick. It’s also not meant for documents but it looks like there is potential for this to be a solution. I ran display $image_of_a_page, selected the rotate transformation, and was able to draw a straight line which then became the baseline for rotation. This may be the answer but I have to fiddle with it more. ImageMagick often fails the principle of least astonishment. E.g. if you feed it some 600dpi images and simply instruct it to montage them, the result is extremely blurry. Makes no sense. The fix is that users must determine the resolution of the input images, do the math, and then explicitly specify the expected output resolution in order to have non-lossy processing. It’s bizarre how ImageMagick arbitrarily picks a fixed default resolution regardless of the input unless a user micro-manages that. So I’m not sure what kind of side-effects ImageMagick might have in this case.

Unpaper

How is unpaper “The FOSS tool to deskew” when it “often” fails to do just that?

Because it’s the only FOSS tool that even attempts to offer a deskewing function for documents (AFAIK). It seems to be the one (and only) tool for this. Everything else is hacks intended for loose images – with functionality called “rotate” because it has no expectation of textual content. (Note that PDF is not an image format, it’s actually just a container of images and other things which can be quite dicey when working with tools not made for PDF manipulation).

The various --deskew-* options seem well explained to me.

Glad to hear you understand it! So, here are my questions:

 -dn { left \| top \| right \| bottom },...; --deskew-scan-direction { left \| top \| right \| bottom },...
         Edges from which to scan for rotation. Each edge of a mask can be used to detect the mask's rotation. If multiple edges are specified,  the
         average value will be used, unless the statistical deviation exceeds --deskew-scan-deviation. Use left for scanning from the left edge, top
         for scanning from the top edge, right for scanning from the right edge, bottom for scanning from the bottom.  Multiple  directions  can  be
         separated by commas. (default: left,right)

The opening sentence is ambiguous to readers (who don’t know how the algorithm works). What is the meaningful difference between scanning from the left and scanning from the right? Why would the scan direction make a difference? What is a mask in this context? A mask is generally used when you want to limit a function to operation within (or outside of) a specified area. But that would not seem to make sense here. Why would the default be left,right and not left,down,right,top, for example? Is top and bottom meant for landscape documents that are not rotated upright?

 -ds pixels; --deskew-scan-size pixels
         Size of virtual line for rotation detection. (default: 1500)

What is the “virtual line”? I might guess that it is the width of a line of text, but I can only guess because it is not explained. What are the algorithmic consquences of this value being too long, or too short? When deskew fails to rotate a page, how would I determine what the virtual line size should be?

  -dd ratio; --deskew-scan-depth ratio
         Amount of dark pixels to accumulate until scanning is stopped, relative to scan-bar size. (default: 0.5)

An accumulation is typically measured as a total quantity not a ratio. We can expect input docs to have an all-white left margin which has nearly zero dark pixels. So this dd ratio seems to be incomplete. We might expect there to be a certain concentration of dark pixels before we start counting the vector length. And likely a certain concentration to continue scanning, and a certain concentration to stop scanning, which I suppose would be the same as that of starting the scan. Without knowing what the scan bar size is, how can we determine what this value needs to be? And if we know the scan bar size, how is the ratio calculated? If it’s the qty of black pixels over the qty of whitespace starting from the left edge of the paper, I don’t suppose a ratio of 50% (the default) would generally be reached.

 -dv deviation; --deskew-scan-deviation deviation
         Maximum statistical deviation allowed among the results from detected edges. No rotation if exceeded. (default: 1.0)

What is a “detected edge”? Is that a line of text or an edge of the paper? I can’t tell from the man page how many edges there might be as we don’t know how the algorithm works. If It scans with a --deskew-scan-range of 5° and a --deskew-scan-step of 0.1, this seems to imply that it scans 100 times to find a single edge. Or is it finding multiple candidate edges from the same starting point and counting each of those as an edge that would then be compared for this deviation? From there, it seems unclear how many starting points it would attempt. I see no parameter for the distance between each starting point. If each starting point yields an edge, are all the edges for the whole page being considered for this deviation value? Or is it a deviation of candidate edges for just one line of text? If it’s the latter, how many lines of text are being processed?

apt search deskew returns ocrmypdf and pagetools, no idea if that all goes back to unpaper or not.

No results on oldstable but maybe Trixie has more. I often use ocrmypdf after deskewing because I thought it could not deskew. But your finding prompted me to look at the man page for ocrmypdf which reveals a --deskew option. So I will have to experiment with that.

That’s something different. The PSP is separate and runs in parallel to (and independent of) the TPM. The two coexist because they serve different purposes. “As of 2025, a TPM is provided by nearly all PC and notebook manufacturers in their products.” So 12 years following the introduction of the PSP, the TPM is still in play.

I thought the TPM was relatively innocuous for those not running oppressive software. But perhaps I should revisit this, considering this from wikipedia:

“In 2015, Richard Stallman suggested replacing the term “trusted computing” with the term “treacherous computing” due to the danger that the computer can be made to systematically disobey its owner if the cryptographical keys are kept secret from them.”

RMS specifically condemns TPM version 2.0. Not sure what version motherboards for the Trinity CPU use.

I previously thought TPM had no remote relationships. But remote attestation is certainly an anti-feature if the hardware can talk to the cloud without the control of users on a FOSS platform. Is that the concern that you have? I need to get to the bottom of this. Unlike the PSP, the TPM is open source. So the TPM should be well understood. The fact that the PSP is closed-source is in itself a problem. Obviously PSP is something to avoid.

Perhaps you need uMatrix to go far enough to trigger their protectionism.

Fun, but €60 is a bit steep. I recently got a 2nd-hand USB DAB stick for <1/10th of that price. If the Raspiaudio were integrated with MythTV and complete with schedules and recording, then I’d pay €60. But I guess we aren’t there yet.

Querying for isitdown yields:

🏰lemmy.world🌩|isitdown “Is this Instance Down?”
↑ Kingdoms under the imperial Cloudflare empire ↑
⚠lemmy.ml/c/isitdown “Is this Instance Down?”
🗽☯infosec.pub/c/isitdown (147/28) “Is this Instance Down?”

The infosec.pub instance is the only free-world variant. The lemmy.ml community is not Cloudflare, but it’s too big to be considered decentralised. Apparently feddit.de no longer exists.

Only works if the phone is modern enough to have usb-c plus you must buy some hardware from Amazon (or pay much more, I suppose). Fuck that.

If you have a FOSS router laying around, you can simply put it into wifi bridge mode which inverts the wi-fi so it’s used to connect to the uplink, while the ethernet ports serve up the cloud. No need for a phone.

If you have a spare non-FOSS router w/USB and phone, the router may be able to usb-tether to the phone. E.g. a Fritzbox would likely work for that.

The community is the first of its kind. There is nothing in the fedi with the same name, past or present.

Nor would it matter if it did exist. The Lemmyverse db shows lots of communities with the same name across different instances.

Try it. Create “lkjsdfcjai9frej09frfe4trj”, which is just some random string that would not exist anywhere. It gives “that community already exists”.

(edit) I see that you have not created any groups since 2023.

The BBB dodgy indeed but it’s not really relevant to this community. The Secretary of State for Washington state is at issue here. The SoS is a gov entity and their websites are exclusive. Access is restricted.

It’s also a trend. Many state secretaries in various US states have become exclusive access. They tend to block Tor and/or impose a CAPTCHA. They also tend to ignore postal mail requesting the needed info, which makes them truly exclusive.

Anything made in that period is inaccessible from our local instance,

Why would it be? It makes no sense that age matters. I just arbitrarily searched for a community that was newly created on one instance from another instance, and it was found. I had to wait around 3 seconds because the check is done in realtime.

E.g. !Google@thelemmy.club was created just 1 week ago. Yet it’s found in just a few seconds by other instances.

There are close to 3 people in the world that compose them the way you describe.

Luckily anyone can join the club if they want their faxes to have over-achieving quality. There is no law against it.

Also you have to have a fixed phone line

Not at all:

1. There are 3rd party fax services who can send it for you.
2. Fax over VOIP works if you select the right algo and have reasonable latency.

Side note: “fixed lines” are just an illusion. You can subscribe to a POTS line but unless you are in a quite primitive region it will just be a VOIP service that is hidden from you at the end of your street.

Fax doesn’t work for the vast majority of people for multitude of reasons.

There are only 2 credible obscure corner cases that yield a fax failure. Countless things break email. Email is broken as shit:

Good for you, I’m glad you’re enjoying them. As I was saying, I care more about my privacy and the true ownership.

If you care about your freedom and privacy, then you should realise that other people preferring e-books is a threat – assuming you live under capitalism. As most of the population foolishly suckers for the Tyranny of Convenience, the wiser demographic shrinks and gets marginalised. Copyright holders are not going to print a book for a tiny fringe market.