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Nina Kalinina

nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt

<p>This profile is not managed by Terraform.</p><p>Or, as my &quot;professional&quot; email signature says, &quot;IT expert and mixed media artificer&quot;. 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 &quot;working adult&quot; capacity, and wouldn&#39;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

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    @techokami@woof.tech please take it easy! I wonder if the phone&#39;s not connecting in the right mode anymore 😭 @plzupgrademe@fedi.txw.ca @netbsd@mastodon.sdf.org

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    RE: https://tech.lgbt/@nina_kali_nina/117184991521312864 There&#39;s no new &quot;life with NetBSD&quot; report due to my semi ongoing health issues, so I&#39;m going to boost the previous one. I&#39;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&#39;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...

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    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&#39;s a bit wonky and rough around the corners, and she looks more like a ghost than a succubus. But she&#39;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...

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    While we&#39;re at it, have you seen &quot;Permacomputing 101&quot;? https://100r.co/site/permacomputing_101.html

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    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...

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    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

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    Trying to learn from manga, still work in progress, redrawing a frame from &quot;Uesugi-kun wants to stop being a girl&quot;. Trying to take long breaks to notice mistakes and fix them

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    Reading untranslated manga to my bae is one of the happiest things in my life, ever

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    I miss unhinged phone designs, like this Nokia 7280 (for people much younger than me: no, it&#39;s not fake, I&#39;ve seen this model with my own eyes)

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    When I was young, there was a joke among computer people: &quot;sorry, I&#39;m posting here from my coffee maker&quot; (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&#39;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...

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    My favourite local computer scavenger found a new toy for me: original eeePC 900. I don&#39;t think I&#39;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&#39;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&#39;t need Spectre mitigations. NetBSD installs well on it, but doesn...

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    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!

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    Oooh, I just realised: oneko&#39;s kitten is chasing your mouse cursor

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    Imagine turning 16, watching your first show ranked &quot;16+&quot;, 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. &quot;Oh no, I have to wait 2 years now!&quot; probably said no 16-year-old watching Attack on Titan 😅

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    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).

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    I&#39;m learning how to use a dip pen for comic making. Today&#39;s practice is focused mostly on using a &quot;maru pen&quot;, also known as &quot;mapping pen&quot; 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&#39;t know how to use a ruler? I didn&#39;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...

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    Oops, the video driver (i915) is unexpectedly glitchy!

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    Today I&#39;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&#39;t going to be ruined after being submerged in Coca Cola (but I expect there at least will be artefacts)

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    I just realised that &quot;motorcycle&quot; means &quot;motor cycle&quot;. Motor.... Cycle. 😭

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    I&#39;ve been trying to understand the reason I&#39;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&#39;t be discarded with &quot;ah that&#39;s because you had a cold recently&quot; because I haven&#39;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...

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    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).

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    I want to print on B4 JIS paper, but the only printer I have that can do it is a dot matrix. This is the &quot;draft&quot; quality, it can do better, as far as I can tell.

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    Midnight; time to think about a business plan for a manga cafe. I wonder how many regulars are needed to keep such a place afloat (in South Wales)

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    RIP, can&#39;t find my copy of a book on shojo manga history that I&#39;ve gotten second hand in paper precisely because a digital copy is $100 or more (which isn&#39;t uncommon for academic books😭)

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    My SO has been prescribed antimemetics, now it&#39;s impossible to rickroll her

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    Ed Sheeran is on the radio, and for the first time ever I&#39;m listening closer to the lyrics of &quot;Shape of you&quot;, for the first time realising that the song is depressing (to me) as heck. Ew.

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    Go go go go, c&#39;mon, crash already https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/micron-sk-hynix-stocks-sink-as-ai-chip-sell-off-deepens-125622548.html

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    As a lover of old computers, I&#39;ve heard this question way too many times. It&#39;s kinda ugly but it is #originalart; drawn in ink P.S. Metrovick 950 can run Lunar Lander (I wrote the game last year): https://git.sr.ht/~nkali/mv950toy/

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    Fun read today: &quot;Evolution of the ASTIA automated search and retrieval system&quot; from 1961 - https://archive.org/details/DTIC_AD0252000/mode/2up tl;dr In 1951, US Department of Defense had a massive library of documentation that was growing at a rate of 30,000 documents per year. The agency responsible for the library, called ASTIA, considered migrating to a mechanised or a computerised system for document search and retrieval, but time and again discovered that humans were more efficie...

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    OH: &quot;a GET endpoint that is meant to never return the same value twice? REST in peace&quot;