Foone🏳️‍⚧️

Hardware / software necromancer, collector of Weird Stuff, maker of Death Generators. (she/they🏳️‍⚧️)

Public Key

npub135xx0y770mwjtvlxln7jun5mxqwwctr72aafmnczglny6lpuwdlqlkgtu7

NIP-05 Address

foone@digipres-club.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsg6rr8j008ahf9k0n0elfwf6dnq88v93l9w75aeupy0ejd0s78xlspz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43qz4nhwden5te0wfjkccte9ehx7um5wghxyctwvshkuur4vgck56p5w96nyee4v56rjumewfmksv3exdcnsufexpux26mvwej8sdphwphx5dtk093kzvn5ddkx5etyxqu82uesvd6x5dnty4shhl

Publishing to

relay.mostr.pub

relay.nostr.band/npub1jh4qu2g5e49syrwh293q8q90xeklvdx47pnj5vyca2tkljed08us0ctj6k

Author Public Key

npub135xx0y770mwjtvlxln7jun5mxqwwctr72aafmnczglny6lpuwdlqlkgtu7

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Last Notes

2025-05-22 05:50:47

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TDS meter: select different letters by adjusting the water quality

2025-05-22 05:50:16

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laser + a bunch of sensors and several mirrors. just rearrange them to select the key

2025-05-20 23:16:08

I'm looking at a programming manual for some hardware, and it says the thing runs a $FOOBAR123 processor.
I google it, and get two results:
that PDF I was looking at, and... the japanese translation of that same PDF

2025-05-19 00:21:01

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@nprofile…j44p I think it was relatively easy to port DOS games to the FM-Towns, because of how it's nearly a PC-compatible. Just a guess, though

2025-05-18 22:42:30

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there's also apple II, macintosh, amiga, fm towns, and windows 3.x versions. like most broderbund games, it got ported to a bunch of things.

2025-05-18 22:40:31

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there's two copies on the internet archive that are 2-disk:
https://archive.org/details/20240119_20240119_0659

2025-05-18 22:40:05

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also, it looks like only some versions of the game have 3 disks. Some (even 360kb versions) only come on two disks.
I imagine this is for sound support: this game came out 1989-1991, when sound cards were evolving rapidly.

2025-05-12 20:20:23

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@nprofile…vrvm is the way "switch to linux"?

2025-05-10 14:40:54

T-shirt idea:
The only "binary" I believe in is x86 machine code

2025-04-24 23:20:27

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(I only get one of the planes)

2025-04-24 23:20:15

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ugh, with a 640x480x16 fucking-planar mode, I can't just easily do a memdumpbin a000:0 10000 to get a copy of the current screen's VRAM

2025-04-24 23:09:21

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@nprofile…uacs strange. I think my firefox might just be broken

2025-04-24 23:08:59

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this set of FIDBs helps with that, btw. Real handy if you regularly reverse engineer 16-bit dos applications.
https://github.com/moralrecordings/ghidra-fidb-dos-win16

2025-04-24 23:06:33

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oh good, I just missed how putimage/getimage was being compiled.
It's at least using BGI's slow blitter, rather than manually plotting every pixel through BGI's slow pixelplotter.

2025-04-24 23:05:52

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(I'll make a real version once I have a chance to install print studio onto my PC with a dot matrix printer)

2025-04-24 23:00:42

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> LOOK
There is a sign on the wall
> LOOK SIGN
The sign reads "It has been zero days since x86's segmented addressing has made foone's day harder"
The sign has no way to increase the number: it's a static unchanging piece of paper.

2025-04-24 22:58:03

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address 3000:4c2e in DOSBox maps to 2C03:0E2E in ghidra.

2025-04-24 14:58:01

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it seems playable on chrome, but firefox barely lets you move the mouse where. that's a shame

2025-04-24 14:40:16

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I put it on the internet archive but it seems to be unplayably laggy in-browser:
https://archive.org/details/mahjong_soup

2025-04-23 13:52:22

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The creator of this one is truly an evil person
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/114/387/602/353/017/813/original/6c0e367e7c534064.png

2025-04-23 13:39:33

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that's Carol Alt, Cheryl Tiegs, and Christie Brinkley.
thanks to @ann3nova@corteximplant.comm

2025-04-23 13:35:37

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who thought this tileset was a good idea? because they were very wrong.
it's tiled "Carol, Cheryl and Christie" and I have no idea ho those women are.
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/114/387/535/288/676/045/original/ed065541468b16b1.png

2025-04-23 10:26:48

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Reverted back to plain DOS colors
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/114/386/795/559/289/090/original/6ab0033cb06859b1.png

2025-04-23 09:36:02

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@nprofile…37uv that's the working! it just fails to actually load the file completely, so it's kinda gibberishy

2025-04-23 08:07:29

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The cool thing about this game is that there's a ton of user-made tilesets for it that have been preserved on old BBS-shovelware CDs.
And it's all this lovely amateur pixelart so naturally I gotta collect it.
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/114/386/241/981/886/738/original/b3873fcd2c604a1e.png

2025-04-23 08:05:03

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This isn't to be confused with Mah Jongg by Nels Anderson.
I'm also hacking that one, but not in THIS thread.
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/114/386/236/192/826/514/original/93f2407db275aa25.png

2025-04-23 08:03:46

So I'm hacking on Mahjongg VGA by Ron Balewski.
Like you do.
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/114/386/230/687/555/656/original/cecbfc3ed22e422d.png

2025-04-19 23:03:25

"Chat-GPT said my random number generator had enough entropy"
Man, the future is gonna have some wild security issues

2025-04-07 19:22:21

Playing games on my original-software IBM 5150 PC and calling it "ms-dos gaming" solely to bait the kind of nerd who will "well actually..." about how it's actually PC-DOS gaming

2025-04-06 01:31:20

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@nprofile…2lws sigh, computers taking jobs away from hard working K/S shippers

2025-04-05 21:13:52

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@nprofile…vrvm I think I'd need to do a modified PCB, so that won't help, but thanks!

2025-04-05 20:41:53

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@nprofile…vrvm that looks like exactly what I need

2025-04-04 23:29:15

I want an NEC V20 (an 8080 clone) on a USB stick. This doesn't exist, so I'm gonna have to make it

2025-03-31 11:41:33

Happy Transgender Day of Visibility, from VGAPride!
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/114/256/857/509/744/117/original/a345f581a7f2e52c.jpg

2025-03-28 22:59:24

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amusingly enough time has passed that in between when After Dark Windows was released, Windows added and then removed their own screensaver functionality. So we're back to how After Dark worked, where it was a program that just idled in the background

2025-03-22 20:42:16

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also you see that floppy disk on the left? that's a 3.5" disk.
THE SHARP X68000 USES 5.25" FLOPPY DISKS

2025-03-22 20:42:01

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where did you even find this model, game developers?

2025-03-22 05:15:13

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I am at neptune
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/114/204/375/431/170/540/original/2d7d109dffcf0439.png

2025-03-16 23:17:49

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@nprofile…rp8q I've got one of those. I loaned it to my roommate

2025-03-15 22:11:33

Arg. I'm trying to hack an atari 7800 game (did you know they are cryptographically secure? in 1986?!) and it turns out my rom has no header, which means my emulators has to grab the header info from the gamedb. except I'm editing the ROM, making the hash not match the gamedb!
so now I gotta add a header, but I don't know what settings it needs, because that's grabbed from the gamedb

2025-03-10 19:27:12

I wonder if there's a native powerpc windows Doom port

2025-03-09 23:06:08

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@nprofile…3zm9 I looked into that, but before then I needed to install some support files to enable treble to work properly, and those are per-device. and there's not one for my device

2025-03-09 22:54:22

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@nprofile…3zm9 yeah but I don't yet have a boot.img to use magisk to patch.

2025-03-05 21:10:43

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@nprofile…w64h
it finally loaded!
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/114/111/875/452/047/257/original/db91fc0676f59b44.png

2025-03-05 21:04:58

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it works! I'm on the web!
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/114/111/852/068/712/612/original/e4543b3aa68c0499.png

2025-02-28 23:32:07

When I win the lottery and become a billionaire I'm gonna set up an organization for one purpose and one purpose only:
To ensure the availability of cheap 5v microcontrollers

2025-02-26 20:35:42

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Going by the wikipedia pinout, pins 1,3,4,5 are connected directly (on both ports) as you'd expect from a keyboard splitter.
pin 6 is connected too, which doesn't make sense (that's clock data for a mouse on a splitter. there's no mouse here)
and pins 1 and 2 are commoned together. That's keyboard data and mouse data (splitter), which makes no sense.
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/114/072/087/913/791/795/original/a7d6403144965e2c.png

2025-02-23 20:31:17

I just opened up DOSBox-X and tried to take a screenshot that I could only do while holding down a key, only to find that my screenshot key is set to F13

2025-02-22 22:32:40

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All keys work. I didn't fuck up any wiring!

2025-02-22 22:02:57

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I finished soldering it together. It's impossible to focus on with my camera (it's tiny and thin!) so here's a blurry photo
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/114/049/792/814/383/623/original/70372dd7b6c0fa65.jpg

2025-02-22 21:11:30

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Arg I have no solder paste. This is going to be a pain to solder

2025-02-22 01:40:02

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PCBs & parts arrived! Everything looks good. I'm gonna attempt to solder it together sometime this weekend

2025-02-21 00:46:16

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I assume, at least. I'm using this computer remotely (it's in my office & I'm currently bedridden), so it's possible if I go and check it I'll find a drive dangling from a data cable, amidst the shattered glass of the case

2025-02-21 00:45:20

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thankfully it wasn't able to shove a spinning-rust disk out of my case

2025-02-17 21:04:24

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Something not entirely unlike this.
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/114/021/251/138/311/443/original/258077874863fab1.png

2025-02-13 02:06:31

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I mean, compatibility as well. Enhanced, the previous version from 1990, supports like 7 graphics standards and almost as many soundcards. it'll run on basically anything but the original IBM MDA card, and that card can't even do graphics.
the 1992 Deluxe release? It needs a CD-ROM drive, one of 5 sound cards, and you need VGA.

2025-02-13 01:39:25

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it's also the era where everyone was so excited that we could FINALLY include digitized speech that every game added it and very few of them had subtitles.
So it was a massive backslide in accessibility, something DOS was never that great about in the first place

2025-02-13 01:34:04

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the core gameplay is intact (Carmen Sandiego is not a franchise known for innovation) but they've made everything take 20 times longer in order to show off they have 640 megabytes of storage space and by god they're going to use it. We're lucky we don't have FMV of flying between each of the cities

2025-01-18 20:56:19

Do you ever spot technical inaccuracies in your dreams, while you're still in the dreams?
Last night I booted windows 95 off an 8" floppy disk and saw a nuclear explosion with only a single flash, and in both cases I was like "no, that's not right. You can't do that"

2025-01-17 07:57:16

I idly looked up how to disable an internal laptop keyboard on windows 10, and the solution people have come up with is very silly:
you go into device manager, find the keyboard, and switch it to a driver that doesn't work.

2025-01-15 03:54:33

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I now have an HTTP proxy for my keyboard. You just hit http://localhost:5000/65 and it'll send the UDP for you, so it types an "A"

2025-01-15 03:40:45

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okay I made instead a keyboard that listens for UDP packets.
if you send it a single byte UDP packet, it types that key. there is no authentication. you just need to know that you have to send it to port 8365

2025-01-15 03:10:50

well, I accidentally made a keyboard backwards. that's a new thing.
I needed a USB keyboard that responded to BT Serial commands. I accidentally made a BT keyboard that responds to USB serial commands

2025-01-14 00:50:41

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it's semi-infinite library containing one 3.5" floppy disk for every possible combination of 11,796,480 bits (1.44mb).

2025-01-14 00:49:36

The Floppy Disk drawers of Babel

2025-01-12 11:37:53

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I bought and installed this game before I turned 18. So even if there was a shrink-wrap EULA with the game discs, I couldn't agree to the contract.

2025-01-12 11:33:38

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guess I'm finding my old CDs instead of clicking this button

2025-01-12 11:33:27

oh cool, a game I bought in 1997 and 2013 just recently updated to make you agree to a Disney EULA when you download it, one that tells you not to reverse engineer it!

2025-01-09 08:21:14

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@nprofile…fwxr actually from what I've read, it's a letter in the mail these days. It had switched to BT Telemessages a while back, but since that service no longer exists (just like UK telegraphs), it's just a letter.

2025-01-09 08:09:14

an annoying thing about being an archivist/retrotech geek is that search engines all assume you mean the modern thing that's named after the old thing, not the old thing itself.
Surely in 2025, no one is thinking about actual telegrams, right? they mean the app?

2025-01-07 17:04:19

The human eye doesn't move smoothly, but in short quick moves with pauses between them.
The reason is to prevent the CGA snow that would result if the VRAM was being accessed at the same time as the image is drawn

2025-01-01 00:36:45

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I think my game is being eaten by some linux
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/113/750/297/812/068/059/original/3299f6e2552062b6.png

2025-01-01 00:34:20

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now I've got a script moving all the boring ones into a separate folder.
boring is defined by "has a perceptual hash equal to the control image"
perceptual hash is defined as "I cropped it to the viewport and stuffed the raw RGB into md5sum"

2024-12-29 15:14:59

if anyone ever says old computers are just fun and games, you show them this image so they can understand the struggle
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/113/736/761/195/141/725/original/66ce362576af9d35.png

2024-12-28 03:30:53

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Ghidra: I support disassembly of 16-bit DOS programs!
also Ghidra: WHAT THE FUCK IS "DS"? all segment-relative poitners are aimed at segment 0000, right?

2024-12-28 03:18:58

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ahh. so it's got a string in the EXE that's A0.ARE.
Then it has another string that's 0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.
So when it wants to load area N, it indexes into the Nth item of the second string, then shoves it in over the 0 in A0.ARE and opens that file

2024-12-22 13:56:01

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@nprofile…z8a3 I know it will!

2024-12-22 13:55:48

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@nprofile…wtwk yikes and OW

2024-12-22 13:11:47

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just ONCE I want be like "time to fix this Expensive Thing" and I open it up, spot the fuse has blown, swap it, and it works. Done, fixed in a couple minutes.

2024-12-22 13:11:10

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The last time I can recall having to replace any fuses was in an S100 machine, and the fuses hadn't even blown: The thing had been moved roughly and some thin glass from the 70s had been shattered by a spare circuit board stored in the case

2024-12-22 13:10:10

Fuses disappoint me. They're good idea and all, but...
I've been repairing electronics for over two decades, and it's just never a fuse. I'm always opening up broken shit and there's a big fuse right there and it's fine. It's always fine!

2024-12-22 02:32:59

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I've also thought about making the numpad modular: Yank it out and install a trackball/trackpad

2024-12-22 02:32:39

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The other possible purpose of that USB host port is mouse support. It'd be nice to be able to support mice as well, since a lot of old computers also need mice with weird protocols. That might be something to look into for a Ultimate Bench Keyb 2.0

2024-12-22 00:44:27

so I've been idly designing a "ultimate workbench keyboard", a sort of keyboard that's designed to be usable with anything from bluetooth/usb/ps/2/xt/etc with easy software-defined additions for new protocols, right?
It's got a small screen for configuration and such, but I recently thought it might be handy to put TOTP/HOTP support, and have it just type out the codes for you.
But I thought of a worse use: a sim slot, for receiving SMS messages. THE ULTIMATE 2FA KEYBOARD!

2024-12-21 04:32:10

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elegance is for designers, I just need a thing that works

2024-12-21 04:31:55

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I might just end up duct-taping a small laptop to a keyboard

2024-12-21 02:51:15

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yeah I think Cl*udfl*re has something to do with this. Today and yesterday I've hit sites that do the "just a moment while we verify you're human" interstitial with the checkbox, but when I click it, it spins for 5 seconds, and then reloads the page to the same "verify you're human" page. I can do it repeatedly and get nowhere

2024-12-19 08:49:44

I saw a job listing that said they're looking for someone who is up to date on "modern technologies" and then mentioned a database from 1996
I should apply from my Windows 95 machine, to prove I am up with the times

2024-12-19 06:27:42

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@nprofile…fnwg I did a medieval fps set in space for a gamejam, so I'm sure it's doable!

2024-12-18 18:02:03

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This thing was definitely hand-soldered. With one possible exception they look fine, though.
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/113/675/133/446/434/548/original/19cf999148dab51c.jpg

2024-12-18 17:58:56

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So the way this thing is broken is odd: You plug it in, and you can turn it on (yeah this landline has an on/off switch, which is itself weird) and the LED comes on, but that's it. You CAN hear it clicking when you pulse-dial, but nothing otherwise

2024-12-18 17:53:15

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The IC is an HM9102D. That's a Hualon Microelectronics TONE/PULSE SWITCHABLE DIALER WITH REDIAL

2024-12-16 01:06:25

mechanical keyboardists first went wrong when they decided the model M was the best keyboard ever made and the new ones ""don't count"
but the second way they went wrong is by calling a full keyboard "100%", so they can make smaller ones and call them 60% or 40%. That's wrong. They're going in the wrong direction

2024-12-14 01:03:08

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It's about material conditions and trauma, no one is born wanting to commit this kind of evil against their fellow man. We can help these people. We can reach them. We can save them from themselves.
https://digipres.club/system/media_attachments/files/113/648/476/639/521/640/original/a22f1da158ad5be0.jpg

2024-12-14 00:59:08

when I am queen the people who design hardware that hides screws under little rubber pad will be first into counseling so we can find out what went wrong with their live and help them improve so that they never commit such horrid anti-social acts ever again

2024-12-13 00:22:33

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(according to the FSF, sticking a GPL-EULA in your installer is wrong but not illegal to do, because it's legally meaningless)

2024-12-13 00:22:06

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which is not required for GPL. You don't need to agree to the GPL to use GPL software: "agreeing" grants you no extra rights. You already have a right to run GPL'd software.

2024-12-13 00:21:34

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and the other reason is that installers often have a "license page" template, which is intended for commercial software that uses a EULA you have to agree to before installing it.

2024-12-13 00:21:05

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what's happening here is that there is a requirement to alert the user that the code is GPL-licensed: You want them to know they have extra rights!
But you just need to tell them. You can say "hey this is GPLed, read LICENSE.TXT for more details" on the front page.

2024-12-13 00:20:23

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the GPL grants you redistribution rights with conditions: You don't need to "agree" with it, you either aren't affected (you aren't redistributing it) or you have to obey its rules (or you lose your rights to redistribute it).
At no point are you asked to "agree" to the GPL. It's not that kind of license