Thanks. I’ll have a look at some of those approaches.

The staff at the shop I use the most did not know. But the self-service printers are different than the printers used by the staff. They might know for the printers they use, which is naturally more costly.

Creating something with symbols going all the way to edge seems like a good idea. I would not want any spacing between the symbols though, so I guess it would be non-trivial code.

I could flood the page with color, then place a white box on top of that that covers all but 20mm around the border knowing that the unprintable region would not be bigger than that.

What I had in mind was many lines terminating at many positions around the border, each line marked with how much gap it leaves. Then the first line to not go as far as the others would be the penultimate one. Your idea sounds a lot easier. But ideally the ideas could be combined if the doc were to be published for many to use for that purpose.

Art.3 has this definition:

(5)‘audiovisual media services’ means services as defined in point (a) of Article 1(1) of Directive 2010/13/EU;

which leads to:

1. For the purposes of this Directive, the following definitions shall apply: (a) ‘audiovisual media service’ means: (i) a service as defined by Articles 56 and 57 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union which is under the editorial responsibility of a media service provider and the principal purpose of which is the provision of programmes, in order to inform, entertain or educate, to the general public by electronic communications networks within the meaning of point (a) of Article 2 of Directive 2002/21/EC. Such an audiovisual media service is either a television broadcast as defined in point (e) of this paragraph or an on-demand audiovisual media service as defined in point (g) of this paragraph;

(ii) audiovisual commercial communication;

(e) ‘television broadcasting’ or ‘television broadcast’ (i.e. a linear audiovisual media service) means an audiovisual media service provided by a media service provider for simultaneous viewing of programmes on the basis of a programme schedule;

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2010/13/oj/eng

So perhaps not… though strictly speaking audiovisual ≠ ‘audiovisual media service’, so it’s left undefined. Perhaps one could argue that DAB has JPEG album art and therefore delivers both.

Note as well that the spirit of the accessibility law is to push suppliers to provide information and access in multiple different formats so that some impaired demographics are not unnecessarily excluded.

My version is older than 120.

It’s very repeatable, so exit node would not be at issue. I guess the user agent string is being rejected.

I’ve seen it consistently fail using ungoogled chromium over tor. But when I just now tried Firefox over tor, no issue. I know that U/C is fussy about timing, but the response time seems quick when I use firefox, so I don’t think it’s a problem of lagging.

I am not really satisfied with any radio receiver because none of them attach to the LAN as a server. I got a bit spoiled with a terrestrial broadcast TV tuner that attaches to ethernet and is compatible with MythTV, which is an open source DVR. It pulls the schedules from the air (thus requires no Internet), and gives you way to prioritise programs you want recorded. It’s great in particular for unplugged folks. It even cuts out commercials – if there are any… none where I use it.

Radio has nothing comparable. But it is somewhat cool that some DAB radios have an LCD that shows album art and text info like the track and program that is playing, and time and date set automatically by the air waves.

still down for me. Maybe it’s a tor-hostile node. My machine only works over Tor.

Thanks! I would be installing linux instead of MacOS, but it does look like the hardware is compromised by this. The page you link specifically mentions these as having the feature:

• All Mac computers with Apple silicon
• MacBook Pro computers with Touch Bar (2016 and 2017) that contain the Apple T1 Chip

It does not say /all/ macbook pros. So I wonder which MacBook pros do not have that T1 chip.

I also somewhat distrust that /all/ mac computers w/Apple silicon. Surely the really old hardware like G3 wouldn’t?¹

The most interesting would be old 2nd-hand hardware that is free from this secure enclave, but still new enough to run recent MacOS if I want to occasionally boot MacOS for hardware testing purposes. I heard the next couple generations of MacOS will require at least an M1 chip. Guess I need to research where that stands w.r.t secure enclave.

(edit) The T2 chip page lists:

• MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2018, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports)

I think the macbook pros that feature non-x86 MacOS would run on were described as having Four Thunderbolt 3 ports, so I guess that rules out macbook pros. IOW, no macbook pro is spychip-free and simultaneously capable of supporting the next MacOS.

¹ I assumed Apple Silicon referred to Motorola chips, but the wikipedia page says Apple Silicon refers to arm chips.

One of the reasons I use no apps but use websites: most of the time there is a way to save the page as something that will work offline.

I suppose by “Apps” you have phone apps in mind. But when I wrote about severe lack of offline apps, I meant in the specific context of communication. E.g. to use Lemmy, we are forced to use a web app. We are often led to think a website is a static document of sorts, but if JavaScript is used, that’s really an app. And it’s a crippled app because JS apps do not generally have a means to access your hard drive. Rightfully so, but it means we cannot read and write Lemmy posts offline and then synchronize as we briefly pass through a hotspot.

Part of the problem is “apps” on phones are simply just browser replacements, which is the worst of both worlds because it’s even more limiting. But a well designed FOSS app can theoretically serve us best by keeping a local DB which is then sync’d, like usenet news was back in the 90s. Short of that, it’s useful to save webpages with something like this:

wget -E -H -k -K -p "$url"

And when I use digital anything, I do my best to not us GAFAM-controled services instead giving my money to smaller & non-US companies.

It’s a good policy. I’ve gone as far as to stop emailing gmail and microsoft recipients. That step certainly causes waves around me. It useful because other people are forced to respect my choice to not have GAFAM in the loop. It forces people to think about their choices.

And the enjoyment of using analog tool too, but that one is really subjective.

I love writing letters with LaTeX. It turns a writing task into a coding task, but then when I print the letters on paper, the end result is analog. It brings me great satisfaction to play with LaTeX. The shame is that this world is lost to most people who can’t see past the perception of inconvenience.

I also made it a rule that, beside messages from my spouse, I will always wait to be back at home to answer a message or to listen to my voice mail (nothing is that urgent that it can’t wait a few hours, or more).

There was a bit of a parallel revolution on that in Australia (IIRC). Masses of people working from home during the pandemic led to bosses expecting staff to be available 24/7. But I would draw a line around 6 hrs day, 5 days/week, and still require the boss to have the luck of reaching me in a home office… not when I’m on the go. I think Australia passed some kind of law giving people a right to be unplugged in their off hours.

I would like to try out Dab, but have not yet managed to find a radio set that offers the same level of comfort than my old FM radio (the same number of quick access buttons to my favorite stations, as I don’t want to use menus). So, I keep using FM which is fine as it should be available at least up 2033, here in France.

I can tune ~25 FM stations. When I bought a DAB radio, it found 75 digital stations, some of which were quite important. Some were a mirror of an FM station, but usually better quality. In one case, the DAB station and identical FM station were both low quality, in which case FM was better because when a DAB signal is weak, it cuts out, which is much worse than a bit of static.

Privacy and ownership is also the reason why we don’t use streaming services anymore. CDs and DVDs are more then enough for us to enjoy music, a movie or a series.

Indeed, streaming is all about tracking. Your smart TV watches you watching it. I’m back to popping into the library for media.

Thanks! My 1st thought when seeing this:

“It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, ”

is that the tool must be ancient to be spelling out www like that. But it’s apparently still being maintained enough to be in the Debian official repos, so I will be checking it out for sure. I appreciate the tip.

I think you may be confusing “licenses” with “software keys”. Any big name retail computer would have been sold with an OEM license of Windows.

Indeed it’s not a legal problem, but the software does not know that.

On later machines the software key was written to the BIOS of the machine, so you wouldn’t even have to prompt to install it and activate Windows.

I did not know about that, but I don’t suppose anything I have would be recent enough to have that. And in any case, the machines are never dumped with their installation source CDs. The dodgy versions of Windows I have come across also do not prompt for a product key, but not because they found a legit key – they have just been hacked well enough to relieve the user from dealing w/key entry.

For machines that don’t have that, install the trial version of Windows (of whatever era your machine is) you won’t be able to activate it, but you don’t need to for the couple of hours you’ll be doing your hardware testing.

I’ll keep that in mind but I doubt MS still ships trial versions of s/w they no longer sell (xp or win7). I could put a dodgy version on, but then there is the problem that various tools complain about not having a recent enough service pack. A lot of Windows drivers and hardwre support tools are fussy about service packs, .net versions, directX, etc.

Why are you buying copies of Windows?

I’m not. Hence the problem.

If you’re dealing with old windows boxes anyway, the OEM license is still on it. Further, you can just install the Trial versions of windows for the short time you need to do your hardware eval. No purchase needed.

I would be most tempted to do a multi-boot.

I did not buy any of the hardware. I rescue PCs from curbside dumps and have not bought a PC in over 20 years. The machines all have Windows stickers (mostly XP, win7, and vista). The s/n on all the stickers is rubbed off. All of them. Those stickers really do not hold up over time or abuse. Most of the dumped hardware has a drive w/Windows already installed, but that’s typically in a rough state… someone else’s data, someone else’s language (not English), and sometimes passworded. So if I am going to install Windows on it, it won’t be legit.

This is on hardware that came out of the trash, on your isolated DMZ network. What possible information could it spew that could hurt you?

Let’s not confuse the PC with the peripherals. It all came from the trash, the PCs and also whatever it is that I am testing. Some of the salvaged PCs have popups saying that the Windows copy installed is illegit (just as it would be if I install a new copy of Windows). I do not trust whatever Windows would send over the wire generally, legit copy or not.

I don’t know much about the trial versions you mention, but I think that’s a new option since win10, no? Can I get a trial version of XP or win7, for example? I kinda doubt it. I suspect there are likely only blackmarket copies of those versions at this point.

I understand not wanting old/unpatched Windows OS sharing the network with your other systems, but why not set up a NAT with a DMZ that would allow the Windows machines you’re testing to reach out to the internet to download whatever drivers it needs without those Windows machines being able to access your primary network?

I am not enthusiastic about buying 3+ different retail versions of Windows in order to put them safely online without worrying about whatever anti-piracy signals they send, along with whatever else those dodgy black boxes spew. It’s not inbound attacks that would concern me b/c they are mostly powered off test boxes anyway. I could setup egress firewalls that block everything outbound (as I do for printers), but then I would need to mitm my own machine and detect where the drivers and legit tools try to connect so I could put holes in the f/w.

Thanks for the tip. I installed it and first thing I tried was to save the weasyprint documentation on their website to a PDF (and I was surprised they did not create their own docs as a PDF). The result looks bad with text overlapping text. When their own website docs do not save well into a PDF, that seems like quite a signal for where they are.

Anyway, I’m glad to have a 2nd option which could be viable in some cases… something to cling to when wkhtmltopdf ultimately dies.

Oh, right! Indeed, I forgot there was a language specifier for the post itself. That fixed it. Thanks!

What a piece of shit software.

thanks for the tip, but it seems to make no difference. I changed it from browser default to english. Is that the right setting? The screenshot does not render for me.

I simply tried to add the word “needed” to the end of the title, and it said “language not allowed”.

Please report any spam you find to the mods by hitting the “create report” flag under the ellipse (“…”), and explain why it is spam (please read the rules and cite the broken rule so the mod does not have to guess). They will remove it if it is non-conformant or irrelevent to the topic.

Indeed minipage would be a decent workaround in this scenario. It’s effectively very similar to what I settled on (paracol). I just updated the OP to reflect this.

With both the minipage approach and the paracol approach, we give up the ability to have text flow from one column to the other. But for the doc I am working on at the moment, it’s perhaps best to control the flow anyway.

That would work if dates are not reused. But if you have a block of \DTMsavedate variables in the preamble and then refer to those dates throughout the doc by the variable name you assign, the spreadsheet would be more trouble than it’s worth because you would have to copy-paste all the dates into the spreadsheet, choose the new format, copy them back, and risk the update anomaly in the event that you revise a date in the preamble. Could be useful for some situations though. But I guess I would still rather replicate \DTMsetdatestyle{default}\DTMsetup{datesep=/} in every cell that needs it.