I finally have an appointment to get my problematic residual phalanges taken care of. The hospital created an account for me into their fancy-shmancy "My Recovery Path" online system, in which they told me I'd find messages about my care, imaging results, appointments and the likes.

So I logged in to check it out, and I found my first automated message in the inbox - a 5-page PDF that went something like this:

> Welcome to your My Recovery Path account! > > You've been referred to the Foot & Ankle team for RESIDUAL TOES REVISION. Before your first appointment for RESIDUAL TOES REVISION, here are helpful documents to help you deal with common toe problems. > > - Best footwear for bunions > - Avoiding blisters on hammertoes > - How to care for diabetic toes > - Trimming ingrown toenails safely > - Reducing hallux rigidus pain > - ...

Like... Really?

Clearly the word "toe" in my referral triggered the sending of this boilerplate.

I realize whoever programmed this system means well, and the hospital means well too. And I can see this system is convenient as a one-stop shop to get information about my problem and communicate with the doctors. But the automatic "helpful" advice is a bit depressing...

Exoneo makes 2 prosthetic feet: the Mahi for moderate to high activity levels and the Upya for low activity.

Both have a spring block under the heel and spring-loaded "metatarsals", which helps push-off when walking:

https://youtu.be/YeZNaM0NaNc

You can even assemble and size them yourself:

https://youtu.be/XjdDyo69JJU

More interestingly, it seems the company has a lot of customers in developing countries, meaning there's a very good chance those feet are affordable. Sadly, I couldn't find prices and I didn't want to request a quote for nothing.

I did find an independent review of the Upya foot (in French here, automagic translation here, accompanying video here), so at least it's not like all the information I could find comes solely from the manufacturer.

The reviewer confirms that the foot was competitively priced: although he doesn't disclose how much he paid for his foot, he does say it's "a prowess considering the price at which it's sold". That bodes well.

So I've been exploring the fabulous word of additive manufacturing for a few months now with my company's 3D printer - a Prusa Mk4 - that we employees are welcome to use for our own personal use when it's not busy printing tooling for work of course.

I've gotten really good at squeezing the most performance out of that thing: some of the functional parts I made with it at scales that are pushing the boundaries of what regular PLA out of a 0.4-mm nozzle can be coaxed into becoming, I'm properly proud of.

And I'm having a lot of fun finding ways to overcome the limitations of FDM. I don't really want a more precise printer: half the fun is witnessing a part that shouldn't exist come out of a printer that doesn't really have any right to be this good. Pushing the envelope... It's the spirit of hacking in the world of 3D printing and I love it!

But now I'm wanting a printer of my own. The company's printer is fine and all but when it's doing work-related things, I can't use it. And I have to wait to go back to work the next day to print something I modeled the evening before.

So I'm on the market for a good fast FDM printer that can print prints with different filaments at the same time, because I'd like to experiment with stretchy materials but keep using rigid and cheap materials for the supports, and also to play with colors. And I think I want a core XY printer because I've run into problems with big heavy prints with the company's bed slinger.

And finally, something that's really important for me: I want something as open source as possible that doesn't phone home, and ideally not made in China.

Money is not tight. The kids are out of the house and I have a well-paid job. I set my budget to 5k - dollars or euros.

So with those requirements in mind, from what I read, the best option for me is to stick with Prusa: it's more expensive for what it does but it's not sketchy Chinese spyware. Also, I know the brand already and I've been nothing but happy with it so far.

And in the Prusa line, I'm tempted by the XL with an the bells and whistles - namely 5 heads and an enclosure.

But here's the thing: I hear this machine has problems. Is it true? Would you have a better suggestion? Possibly another brand that I should consider?

I had new progressive lenses made, but the old ones are still fine and don’t have a scratch. They’re just a bit weak at near distance, but otherwise perfectly serviceable.

So I made new frames for them because I don’t like to throw away things that work.

All assembled, the frames weigh 3.5 grams, and 14 grams with the lenses mounted.

This was printed with a Prusa Mk4 and regular PLA at 0.15 mm layer height. The hinges use simple 10x1 pins - and I worked my magic to print the holes horizontally to the final dimension with interference fit, so no reaming or drilling is necessary. These glasses are straight out of the printer with zero rework.

I think they look pretty good as they are. If anybody notices they’re 3D-printed, I’ll say I’m gunning for that particular style 🙂

The front of the frames prints in 11 minutes and both temples in 12 minutes. I could break and make a new pair every day for the rest of my life and it would still be faster and cheaper than going to Specsavers only once.

This did not make it here.

I had new progressive lenses made, but the old ones are still fine and don’t have a scratch. They’re just a bit weak at near distance, but otherwise perfectly serviceable.

So I made new frames for them because I don’t like to throw away things that work.

All assembled, the frames weigh 3.5 grams, and 14 grams with the lenses mounted.

This was printed with a Prusa Mk4 and regular PLA at 0.15 mm layer height. The hinges use simple 10x1 pins - and I worked my magic to print the holes horizontally to the final dimension with interference fit, so no reaming or drilling is necessary. These glasses are straight out of the printer with zero rework.

I think they look pretty good as they are. If anybody notices they’re 3D-printed, I’ll say I’m gunning for that particular style 🙂

The front of the frames prints in 11 minutes and both temples in 12 minutes. I could break and make a new pair every day for the rest of my life and it would still be faster and cheaper than going to Specsavers only once.

It's that time of the year again.

It happens to me once or twice a year: all ten toes itch like a mofo. It comes at random, but usually around fall and spring. It might have something to do with large temperature changes, but no matter what I wear, I still haven't found out how to prevent it happening.

I've tried a massage, hot mud pads, cold gel pads, icy-hot balm, going to the sauna, painkillers (the non-addictive kind), and I'm nearing the bottom of this small bottle of bourbon because it's driving me insane.

If anybody has any suggestion, I'm all ears.

Hey y'all,

I have a problem: sometimes I find a cool video on Youtube and I want to post it in a community I moderate. So I create a post, put the Youtube link in the URL field, and several options get added to the form:

• Copy suggested title: <whatever title the video has on Youtube>
• archive.org archive link
• ghostarchive.org archive link
• archive.today archive link

I click on the first one to copy the title, no problem. And usually that's it: I post, the post's preview shows a snapshot from the video and clicking on it sends me to the Youtube video. Great!

Now here's my problem: I would prefer not to link to Youtube directly So I tried replacing the direct link with any of the 3 proposed links, and it doesn't go all that well:

• The archive.org link seemingly never works
• The ghostarchive.org link works but no preview image is generated, which makes the post a bit boring
• The archive.today link redirects to a archive.ph link which is account-walled

Does anybody know how to create a post with a preview image that links to a Youtube video archived someplace else?

And yes, I'm aware that I could also report the video on my PeerTube. The problem is, SDF only has limited resources and I'd rather not upload huge videos there. They don't need the burden.

What a fabulous passive articulated foot!

It's very light - about half the weight of a real foot - and it looks easy and cheap to manufacture, so that everyone could afford one. In fact, it looks simple enough that most parts could be 3D-printed.

More information here: Introducing SoftFoot Pro: a cutting-edge motorless, flexible and waterproof artificial foot

From the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genoa in collaboration with the Centro E. Piaggio of the University of Pisa.

Earlier this week my company bought a LIDAR from Ouster. The LIDAR is a network device: it has an ethernet interface, it gets its IP from a DHCP server and then it talks to whichever machine runs the Ouster application.

The engineers and the marketing guy in charge of evaluating it installed the software on a Windows 11 laptop and tried to make it work for 2 days, to no avail. The software simply wouldn’t connect.

So they came to me, the unofficial company “hacker”, to figure it out. And I did: the culprit, as always, was the Windows firewall. Because of course…

But here’s the twist: because it’s Windows, you need some sort of additional antivirus on top of it. Our company uses WithSecure, which is phenomenally annoying and intrusive, and constantly gets in your way when you try to do any work in Windows that isn't Word or Excel. And of course, WithSecure wouldn’t let me punch a hole in the Windows firewall, because of course…

Anyhow, after trying to work around Windows and the hateful compulsory antivirus, I called IT and told them I needed WithSecure disabled, at least temporarily. They told me to fuck off because they’re not letting an unsecured Windows machine on the intranet.

Fine. I pulled another, older Windows laptop without any antivirus, connected it to an air-gapped router, configured DHCP in the router, connected the LIDAR to the router, launched the Ouster app and… it didn't work.

After 3 hours trying to figure out what was wrong, I finally found the problem: the stupid app is an Electron app built with an older version of Electron that had a bug in node.js that prevented it from working if it couldn’t resolve some internet address.

Sigh… Electron… Because of course…

This was getting too painful and annoying with Windows. So I blew away the Windows partition, installed Linux Mint on the laptop, configured the ethernet interface as a private interface, installed the DHCP server so I could do away with the router, connected the laptop to the guest wifi so the stupid Electron app could resolve whatever it needed to resolve to work, installed the Linux version of the Ouster app, and hey-presto, it worked rightaway.

So I made an account for the guys in Mint and handed them the laptop. They played with the LIDAR for a few hours without any problem, pulled records and files out of the machine on USB sticks without any problem, viewed some Excel files in Libreoffice without any problem.

Eventually the marketing guy asked me:

“So what was the problem then?” “Windows of course” I said. “What else?” “Wow. That Linux stuff is really good. We tried so hard to make this work but we never could. But it worked rightaway in Linux. That’s slick!” “Well yeah, I keep telling you guys Windows is crap. There are reasons and this is one of them.” “Yeah I can see why you don’t like it. And that Linux desktop is really nice actually. I might give it a spin at home.”

So hey, I managed to impress a marketing guy with Linux 🙂

It shows how polished Linux has become, if ordinary computer users can be convinced this easily now. It wasn’t like that for a long long time and it feels kind of rewarding to know you bet on the right horse all along and you're vindicated at last.

Apparently I installed that thing in 2006 and I last updated it in 2016, then I quit updating it for some reason that I totally forgot. Probably laziness...

It's been running for quite some time and we kind of forgot about it in the closet, until the SSH tunnel we use to get our mail outside our home stopped working because modern openssh clients refuse to use the antiquated key cipher I setup client machines with way back when any longer.

I just generated new keys with a more modern cipher that it understands (ecdsa-sha2-nistp256) and left it running. Because why not 🙂

I got into computers when there was no GUI.

Then years later I got a Win95 PC and I found the Windows GUI pretty good - although the rest of the OS was not. My personal Linux PC running Slackware 96 came with FVWM95 wich was a good approximation. So I switched to that.

That was just for graphical utilities of course - of which there weren't very many. I spent the rest of my time in the Linux console or in xterm using screen for convenience.

Fast-forward to today: I still do that. I still like the Win95 UI paradigm, so I run Mint / Cinnamon. But most of what I do with it is open a Gnome terminal, blow it up and start tmux - like screen but better.

And, ya know, for almost 3 decades, whether it's Mint or anything else I used, that's pretty much what I've been doing: running screen in a terminal in a Win95-like GUI. And it works fine for me.

I recently ordered a laptop that comes with Debian / Wayland and the Sway window manager installed by default. I learned a long time ago that it's often better to go with whatever is installed by default than try to reinstall everything and fight a system that wasn't designed for it.

The laptop will take a few weeks to get here. So to prepare for when it lands on my porch, I decided to get into Sway on my current machine, to get used to it. I figured even if I don't like it, at least that way I'll be comfortable with it, and I'll know whether it's acceptable as it is or whether I should spend the time installing something more Win95-like.

But my current machine doesn't run Wayland, just plain Xorg. 2 minutes of searching revealed that Sway is in fact i3wm for Wayland.

Great! I promptly installed i3 on my Linux Mint box, switch to it, fucked around with the config file for a few hours and... I love it! That's pretty much exactly what I do with Cinnamon anyway but quicker!

And just like that, I switch to i3. I felt right at home with it from the get-go. The whole Win95-like UI was just a familiarity: in fact, what I've always wanted was a tiling window manager.

And yes, I did spend a few hours - almost half a day really - configuring the thing exactly how I like. But if I'm honest, I probably spent just as much time with Cinnamon way back when I switched to that too. So it's no different really.

So the takeaway here is: even if you have decades-old die-hard habits and you don't want to change, you should expose yourself to change every once in a while: you might just get surprised 🙂

I'm about to step into the wonderful world of ARM Linux. I work with ARM32 as an embedded developer profesionally (Cortex-M3 specifically) so I'm not a complete newbie. But I've never used ARM64, and I've never used it with a desktop OS. So I'm doing my research, as one does, to know roughly what I'll be dealing with.

I have a few questions regarding backward compatibility and architecture-naming. Maybe you specialists out there could shed some light.

From what I could find, I understand the following:

• arm64 and aarch64 are the same thing: the former is what Linus likes to say while the latter is what ARM calls their own stuff.
• arm64 / aarch64 really mean "compatible with ARMv8" as a least common denominator, meaning ARMv8.x-y (x being the extension, y being A for application or R for realtime) will run it, just without taking advantage of any extension or realtime instructions.
• ARMv9.x will run arm64 / aarch64 kernels and applications, as it's (supposedly) backward-compatible with ARMv8, just without taking advantage of the ARMv9 ISA.
• If I want to create arm64 software that takes advantage of this-or-that extension or realtime instructions, I have to compile it in explicitely. I'm not sure if gcc handles special instructions, I haven't checked yet, but I suppose it does since it knows about the Thumb mode for instance.

Do I understand correctly?

If I do create some software that relies on extended ARMv8 or ARMv9 features and I want to release my software as a package, how should I name the package's architecture? Is there even a standard for that? Will it get rejected by the package managers of the few ARM distros out there, or will it be recognized as a subset of the wider arm64 / aarch64 architecture?

Before I go see another doctor about this...

One of my residual phalanges has developed a small bone spur over the years, and another is too long - always has been - and hurts my skin from the inside.

I need to have the bone spur taken care of at some point, and I'd like to have the other residual phalange trimmed a quarter inch or so.

One doctor I saw about this a couple of years ago proposed full surgery, complete with general anaesthesia and more stitches than I really want, and I declined at the time because it seemed like a lot for so little.

My neighbor - who has all his limbs but is at the age when this sort of thing happens - had a bone spur on his heel taken care of, and he told me it was a simple, half-hour, local anaesthesia keyhole surgery with just one stitch and a week of easy recovery.

Does anybody know if that's also an option for small residual extremities bones and whether I should shop around to find a more competent surgeon?

When I was a student a few decades ago, everybody I knew pronounced it as "vee-eye". Then in the late nineties / early aughts, I heard the first people pronounced it as "vie" in a different city I had found employment in. It sounded odd to me, and it seemed to come from people who in fact didn't use it much. But the pronounciation I was used to still applied, mostly.

Nowadays, I almost never talk about VI to anyone anymore, nor do I hear anyone say the name. It's become mostly a typed thing for me. But - coincidence? - this week I heard three people talk about it (younger, non VI users) and they all said "vie".

And now I'm watching this video from the reasonably famous and definitely not young and not VI newbie NCommander and he too says "vie" in the video.

I'm beginning to worry that I'm the one who's been saying it wrong all this time because of my misguided college buddies and teachers way back when 🙂

So I'm curious: how do YOU say it? VEE-EYE or VIE?

After their shameless Synology shilling a couple of weeks ago, today Techlore is trying to sell me Proton Pass.

Is Proton Pass a bad password manager? I don't know. It seems okay, but I have no opinion.

What I do know is that Techlore is affiliated with Proton, which makes their newest 10-minute video - in which they reveal the affiliation only at the last minute - 10 minutes of my life I'll never get back.

Unfortunately, In the business they're in, the merest hint of a bias kind of invalidates any advice they give. As the saying goes, when you point out other people's body odor, you'd better make sure you took a shower yourself.

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Yesterday around noon, the internet at my company started acting up. No matter, slowdowns happen and there's roadwork going on outside: maybe they hit the fiber or something. So we waited.

Then our Samba servers started getting flaky. And the database too. Uh oh... That's different.

We started investigating. Some machines were dropping ICMP packets like crazy, then recovered, then other machines started to become unpingable too. I fired up Wireshark and discovered an absolute flood of IGMP packets on all the trunks, mostly broadcast from Windows machine. It was so bad two Linux machines on the same switch couldn't ping each other reliably if the switch was connected to the intranet.

So we suspected a DDOS attack initiated from within the intranet by an outside attacker. We cut off the internet, but the storm of packets kept on coming. Physically disconnecting machines from the intranet one by one didn't do a thing either.

Eventually, we started disconnecting each trunk one by one from the main router until we disconnected one and all the activity lights immediately stopped on all the ports. We reconnected it and the crazy traffic resumed.

So we went to that trunk's subrouter and did the same thing. When we found the cable that stopped all the traffic, we followed it and finally found one lonely $10 ethernet switch with... a cable with both ends plugged into the switch. We disconnected the cable and everything instantly returned to normal.

One measly cable brought the entire company to a standstill for hours! Because half of the software we have to use are cloud crap or need to call their particular motherships to activate their licenses, many people couldn't work anymore for no good technical reason at all while we investigated the networking issue.

Anyway, I thought switches had protections against that sort of loopback connection, and routers prevented circular routes. But there's theory and there's reality. Crazy!