thevoidzero

joined 1 year ago
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What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good? in c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

Problem with MS word is you can't really put vector images in it externally without it being weird. I think that's why people are used to drawing it in the software.

The CVE program for tracking security flaws is about to lose federal funding in c/cybersecurity@sh.itjust.works
[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Let's name it CVE-2025, no id, just year so that we can recognize it immediately. The vulnerability of the vulnerability database being like this.

The German university KIT provides almost 30 free and open-source privacy-friendly Android apps. Example: A QR Scanner in c/buyeuropean@feddit.uk
[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Wait poppler-utils can do a lot of pdf related things. Haven't tried rearranging but it has tools for separating pages and uniting them. And pandoc can covert between a lot of document formats. But it doesn't do it from pdf, can use pdftext, inkscape, graphicsmagick etc based on what you want to extract (text, vector graphics, raster graphics) etc.

The German university KIT provides almost 30 free and open-source privacy-friendly Android apps. Example: A QR Scanner in c/buyeuropean@feddit.uk
[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Didn't even know about the org, but that's the QR scanner I have been using.

Many people accept ad, or online website to do simple things like QR code, file conversion etc way too easily.

Credit to Sarah Andersen Comics in c/comicstrips@lemmy.world
[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 133 points 1 week ago (3 children)

"It squeaks"

Translation: It makes noises like an animal at distress or about to die when you are tearing into it.

You cannot learn without failing. in c/science_memes@mander.xyz
[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 26 points 1 week ago

I'll keep saying it. Let's have a journal system for negative results and replication studies. Give partial credits for it relative to journal papers with novelty.

So if you have an idea you can search there, see if someone has tried it and failed, and how they failed. You can also search a certain paper and see if people have replicated the study.

It'll help everyone immensely.

Measles outbreak in Texas hits 481 cases, with 59 new infections confirmed in last 3 days in c/news@lemmy.world
[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

It's https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikram_Samvat

(calender), it could be 2081 or 2082 now. So your calculations just made me think of that.

What If We Made Advertising Illegal? in c/mildlyinteresting@lemmy.world
[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah. I didn't want to do immediately after the trip. But now I don't see the option to do it from the history of trips.

Measles outbreak in Texas hits 481 cases, with 59 new infections confirmed in last 3 days in c/news@lemmy.world
[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 0 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Does it say 2080 is the end anywhere? Because in the calendar we use in my country it's 2081 right now, we're a hindu major country.

What If We Made Advertising Illegal? in c/mildlyinteresting@lemmy.world
[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 31 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

I was on a car from ride sharing app recently, and there was a tablet in front of me playing ads continuously for the whole ride. Asked the driver to turn it off and he said, "I have to keep it on". I know it's not the requirement from the app, so honestly how dystopian is it?

The way things are going people can't afford anything and will have ads blasting in front of them for discounts.

Tech CEOs who grinned behind Trump at inauguration lose billions in wake of tariffs in c/usa@lemmy.ml
[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Drop in valuation doesn't matter as much. It's the relative portions they have. If everyone is poor by 10%, poor people will lose a few (hundreds) dollars and they'll lose trillions. If they lose 5% and everyone else lost 20%, they're winning. They're richer than they were. Numbers might make it seem like they're worse. Don't buy into it.

ggplot2 is love. ggplot2 is life. in c/science_memes@mander.xyz
[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 11 points 2 weeks ago

There's inkscape plugin to make barplots and piecharts. Why don't we add for more? Honestly we could even make it just take r code or python code.

49
Looking for Mentor (for a PhD Candidate) that works with open source (lemmy.world)
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/22266569

Looking for Mentor (for a PhD Candidate) that works with open source and Rust

TLDR: Searching for person holding professor position to officially act as a committee member on a US PhD defense

Hi all,

I'm in a non CS field. I'm doing PhD in hydrology and I'm good at Geospatial Analysis, data analysis, visualization, modeling and such. I really like programming and have been making open source programs, contributing to open source programs and such. And have been learning rust for last 2 years.

For my PhD dissertation I'm doing a project where I'll be using Rust to make a program with compiled plugin system that can do generalized river related tasks including data analysis and visualization. I have professors in GIS and hydrology to guide those aspects, but I don't have anyone on software side to ask questions, or to look at my work. I tried emailing some people I have seen with open source projects on GIS+rust, but no response.

I'm ideally looking for someone that holds a professor position for my committee who is good with either rust, GIS related algorithms development, and programming languages. However, it woud also be helpful to just have someone woth knowledge about such things. In either scenario, credit and authorship will be given.

I appreciate any response even telling where i could find someone matching the above description. :)

Edit: I can also provide my previous projects in GitHub, websites and such before you decide in messages.

11
[Discussion] Acrobat PDF forms support (lemmy.world)
 

TLDR: I recently found out there is "deprecated" XFA format that acrobat still uses in their programs, and government forms have those for dynamic contents in the form that we cannot fill using other softwares. Looking for solutions.

This has been a problem since a long time. Back in 2020 I had dual boot because I needed acrobat to fill PDF forms, but after finding xournal++ program I nuked windows partition. Windows update messing up grub was one of the reason I decided to nuke windows and looking at the posts recently it's still a huge issue.

So the problem I recently encountered is that even the government issued PDF forms need acrobat reader (which is free software for PDF, but only available in windows and mac). Which I didn't think would be an issue and just filled the form in Firefox.

Turns out that was problematic as the PDF forms has fields that are automatically filled, calculated from other fields, only made available when certain checkboxes are checked, etc. and Firefox doesn't support that. Even trying to install the acrobat reader snap (which uses wine) in a VM and opening the PDF on it didn't work. The UI makes me think it's a really old version of the reader.

So without searching for other devices (and filling a PDF with my sensitive information) what solution is there? Installing windows is a hassle even in a VM, and it will use up precious SSD memory. But that's the only solution I can think of.

I also found masterpdf or something like that which the Arch wiki says has support for that, but it didn't work. It says XFA forms are converted to acro forms, and the dynamic part doesn't work. There are websites that promise to work for such forms, but I'm not going to be putting sensitive info on web apps.

47
[Help] How do I word my grant application to keep my software FOSS? (lemmy.world)
 

Hi everyone,

I'm hoping there are people here who work on FOSS and have applied for grants to support their software financially. I am applying for a grant opportunity that is asking for a software from US gov agency.

My requirements:

  • I want to publish it under Open Source Licenses like GPL (not MIT) so other corps can't take this to use on their product,
  • The grant agency will get the source code, they can do whatever as long as the license is held,
  • I will develop the features they want, and request during the duration of grant,
  • I will want to continue development independently after the grant, or apply for more grants from other organizations,
  • To clarify the previous point, I do not want to give them the final product so they own it, and I can no longer do anything on the program.

So, if anyone has done similar things, please give me advice on this. Their requirement says "a web repository" should be provided at the end, so I think I can apply with the intention of giving them the software code while keeping the rights. But I don't want to make a mistake in application/contract and lost the rights to the program, I want to develop a lot further than just the features they want for their use case.

Or at least dual license to protect the Open Source Side while giving the grant organization rights to take the code for their other programs because of the money they spent.

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