well today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is a bit bittersweet.
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well today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is a bit bittersweet.
Back at the beginning of the month, I plotted all the projects on my remind(1) calendar, grouping various categories together. Two days ago, lynx¹, yesterday was Dillo², and today it was supposed to be #Firefox. Yet this week has been full of sad Firefox news, with them ignoring users' desires to keep AI rubbish out of the browser (or at least relegated to an optional plugin)
The browser that I started using as Netscape, grew to be Communicator, that kinda became Phoenix, then shed the non-browser functions off to Thunderbird (already got mentioned³) and became Firefox. Despite the rise of Chromium/Chrome, I still use Firefox as my daily driver web-browser for the modern web (rather than the *pleasant* web where lynx & Dillo serve me much better).
What used to be a "User Agent" has become something that no longer puts the *user* first. 😢
So in this time of wishes and gifts, I wish that the Firefox leadership team would take a strong look at what they're doing and change their course.
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¹ https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@gumnos/115735221496156078
² https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@gumnos/115740808963678498
³ https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@gumnos/115684337296307283 -
undefined stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe shared this topic
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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@gam3 we are not
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@gilmae that's interesting! Elaborate. What happened in 1959?
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@bert_hubert @vitaut also it should be kept in mind that the ZX Spectrum was released before the IEEE-754 standard, and the standard itself was developed *because* the were a lot of incompatible and some honestly frankly horrid systems around, not just Sinclair's stuff.
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@quinn you do your professional writing on bbedit?
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Building a Multi-Channel Pipette for Parallel Experimentation
One major reason for the high cost of developing new drugs and other chemicals is the sheer number of experiments involved; designing a single new drug can require synthesizing and testing hundreds or thousands of chemicals, and a promising compound will go through many stages of testing. At this scale, simply performing sequential experiments is wasteful, and it’s better to run tens or hundreds of experiments in parallel. A multi-channel pipette makes this significantly simpler by collecting and dispensing liquid into many vessels at once, but they’re, unfortunately, expensive. [Triggy], however, wanted to run his own experiments, so he built his own 96-channel multi-pipette for a fiftieth of the professional price.
The dispensing mechanism is built around an eight-by-twelve grid of syringes, which are held in place by one plate and have their plungers mounted to another plate, which is actuated by four stepper motors. The whole syringe mechanism needed to move vertically to let a multi-well plate be placed under the tips, so the lower plate is mounted to a set of parallel levers and gears. When [Triggy] manually lifts the lever, it raises the syringes and lets him insert or remove the multi-well. An aluminium extrusion frame encloses the entire mechanism, and some heat-shrink tubing lets pipette tips fit on the syringes.
[Triggy] had no particularly good way to test the multi-pipette’s accuracy, but the tests he could run indicated no problems. As a demonstration, he 3D-printed two plates with parallel channels, then filled the channels with different concentrations of watercolors. When the multi-pipette picked up water from each channel plate and combined them in the multi-well, it produced a smooth color gradient between the different wells. Similarly, the multi-pipette could let someone test 96 small variations on a single experiment at once. [Triggy]’s final cost was about $300, compared to $18,000 for a professional machine, though it’s worth considering the other reason medical development is expensive: precision and certifications. This machine was designed for home experiments and would require extensive testing before relying on it for anything critical.
We’ve previously looked at the kind of miniaturization that made large-scale biology possible and some of the robots that automate that kind of lab work. Some are even homemade.
youtube.com/embed/2TTu-Lkz2Eo?…
Thanks to [Mark McClure] for the tip!
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@impermanen_ I think I lost 20% of my hearing just looking at the image. ;-)
Must have been pretty loud for whoever took the photo!
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Apache OpenOffice lists download information here, for everyone who is interested:
https://www.openoffice.org/stats/downloads.html
They say there have been about 390M downloads total. From the stats, I'm estimating somewhere in the low tens of thousands of downloads per day.
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@evan I used Word most recently on Friday, working on a proposal.
But on the other hand I used Jupyter -> LaTeX -> Emacs -> pdf on Tuesday, a publishing system that gave me much more pleasure. Not something that my colleagues will realistically repeat though.
