• 6 Posts
  • 148 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2023

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  • OP is on OpenWRT (a router distro), and Alpine. Those distros don’t come with very much by default, and perl is not a core dependency for any of their default tools. Neither is python.

    Based on the way the cosmo project has statically linked builds of python, but not perl, I’m guessing it’s more difficult to create a statically linked perl. This means that it’s more difficult to put perl on a system where it isn’t already there, and that system doesn’t have a package manager*, than python or other options.

    *or the the user doesn’t want to use a package manager. OP said they just want to copy a binary around. Can you do that with perl?


  • Not quite a scripting language, but I highly recommend you check out cosmo for your usecase. Cosmopolitan, and/or Actually Portable Executable (APE for short) is a project to compile a single binary in such a way that is is extremely portable, and that single binary can be copied across multiple operating systems and it will still just run. It supports, windows, linux, mac, and a few BSD’s.

    https://cosmo.zip/pub/cosmos/bin/ — this is where you can download precompiled binaries of certain things using cosmo.

    From my testing, the APE version of python works great, and is only 34 megabytes, + 12 kilobytes for the ape elf interpreter.

    In addition to python, cosmopolitan also has precompiled binaries of:

    • Janet 2.5 MB
    • Berry 4.0 MB
    • Python 34 MB
    • Php 11 MB
    • Lua 2.1 MB
    • Bash 5.1 MB

    And a few more, like tclsh, zsh, dash or emacs (53 MB), which I’m pretty sure can be used as an emacs lisp intepreter.

    And it should be noted these may require the ape elf interpeter, which is 12 kilobytes, or the ape assimilate program, which is 476 kilobytes.

    EDIT: It also looks like there is an APE version of perl, and the full executable is 24 MB.

    EDIT again: I found even more APE/cosmo binaries:







  • Google put an API into Chrome that sends extra system info but only to*.google.com domains. In every Chromium browser.

    Only vivaldi caught this issue. Brave had this api enabled, most likely on accident.

    But the problem is, that chromium is just such big and complex software, when combined with development being driven by Google, it’s just impossible for any significant changes or auditing to be done by third parties. Google is capable of exteriting control over Brave, simply by hiding changes like above, or by making massive changes like manifest v3, which are expensive for third parties to maintain.

    Brave can maintain 1 big change to chromium, but for how long? What about 2, 3, etc.

    My other big problem with brave is that I see them somewhat mimicking Google’s beginnings. Google started out with 3 things: an ad network, a browser, and a search engine.

    Right now, Brave has those same three things. It feels very ominous to me, and I would rather not repeat the cycle of enshittification that drove me away from chrome and goolgle.


  • Disabling javascript increases security, and offers a little bit of privacy. Those are both separate from anonymity, but people conflate the three often.

    For example, javascript can be made to do arbitrary websoccket or http connections to any ip/hostname your computer has access to — even local networks or localhost.

    I use the browser extension Port authority to block it.

    Of course, port scanning is used by ebay to scan users computers, and discord.

    Disabling javascript prevents websites from tracking exactly what you do on each site, or what local ports you have open. This is definitely an increase in privacy, as it relates to hiding what you’re doing. However, you noted it comes at the cost of anonymity, as you become uniquely identifiable.




  • Anyway the centralized nature of Revolt Chat makes it no very appealing for me.

    I agree with this. I will probably stick with either matrix or xmpp due, to their federated nature, and strong E2EE. Matrix is a better discord replacement, as it has more features, is more standardized, has a better web client, and has “spaces”, which are somewhat analogous to discord servers.

    Xmpp however, is much more lightweight on both servers and clients than matrix, and it’s E2EE works more reliably (none of that "failed to decrypt nonsense), and makes a better E2EE messenger.




  • https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Graphics_tablet

    The Arch Linux kernels include drivers by the linux-wacom and DIGImend projects. linuMLx-wacom supports Wacom devices, while DIGImend supports devices from other manufacturers. Both projects publish a list of supported devices: linux-wacom, DIGImend

    Due to how many devices are supported, your best bet is to simply go to your nearest store that sells them and then checking if Linux supports it against those two lists, which there is an extremely high chance it does.

    Then you should also check reviews, to make sure you get a good one.

    I have a Wacom Intuos CTL-4100WL, and it’s served me well for math notes using Xournal++ (app for handwritten notetaking), but I truly have no idea how good it is for actual drawing related applications, as I don’t do it for that at all.