Messages

1

General Software Discussion / Re: Chat app recommendations

« on: October 14, 2025, 02:42 PM »

IRC? 

2

Living Room / Re: I am getting a lot of connection timed out errors on here

« on: March 23, 2025, 04:01 PM »

There are other DDOS protection services out there. Maybe Mouser could look into them.

-Zero3K (March 22, 2025, 07:51 AM)

Cloudflare is one of the biggest and best on the market.  Checking you are human is quite a normal process for it and the service is trusted by practically every major enterprise that exists.

It will happen until the attack has stopped.

It's a momentary inconvenience for you, but one that allows the site to stay online.

3

Living Room / Re: I am getting a lot of connection timed out errors on here

« on: March 18, 2025, 10:12 AM »

It was another traffic attack on DC. This has been mitigated with Cloudflare protection and should make things a bit more stable now

4

N.A.N.Y. 2025 / Re: NANY 2025

« on: December 19, 2024, 02:28 PM »

Ok, then I am appealing to mouser on this.
Mouser can you please take note and force-change his irreverant picture of the Man Jesus Christ.
If he disrespected Him, it is worse than disrespecting my own mother or father.
He has stated that he will not change it.
He has disrespected God Himself, Jesus the Son, Christianity, Islam and any other person who holds Christ in high regard.
Thank you,
Jim Kinsman

-relipse (December 16, 2024, 02:47 PM)

This is not a relevant discussion for here and you absolutely can't dictate that another user change their profile picture based on a highly subjective opinion of it.  This is not a website to dictate your religious beliefs or impose them on other people.

Tuxman has had this profile picture for as long as I can remember, and your "outrage" suddenly came after not getting an answer that you wanted (which, by the way, nobody said no, they just said it might be better to just mention it in NANY, and post about it elsewhere on the forum to highlight the freemium nature of it.  It might be helpful for you to take a second look at mousers answer, linked here: https://www.donation....msg455026#msg455026 - relevant quote added below.)

By all means, share it on DonationCoder, even mention it in the NANY thread, and don't feel bad about creating commercial software.  Even make a post linking to it in the NANY section.

Since this thread has become what it has, I will lock it.  Feel free to make another (not related to this discussion) thread in the NANY 2025 section, or elsewhere.

5

Living Room / Re: AI Coding Assistants (Who uses them and which)

« on: December 06, 2024, 02:58 PM »

The reason we limit to 200 per month is because:

A: We are the lowest price for unlimited
B: We allow use of Claude 3.5 Latest (the best model on the market) and GPT4o 

-KynloStephen66515 (December 05, 2024, 02:40 PM)

A. Perhaps, but as a free user, it doesn't affect me.
B. And so does Codeium. As I said, you can use GPT-4o/Claude 3.5 Sonnet, you're limited to 20 chats per day for free.

If you're a paid user or part of a large team, Cody AI might make sense (considering it's cheaper), but as a free user, I haven't found anything better than Codeium.

-GrumpyCoder (December 06, 2024, 12:04 AM)

Honestly, if you love Codium, it's worth the upgrade to paid just for access to Windsurf - it has its downsides but nothing that I imagine won't be fixed fairly quickly with updates!

6

Living Room / Re: AI Coding Assistants (Who uses them and which)

« on: December 05, 2024, 02:40 PM »

I've been trying out Windsurf recently and it has huge potential to be a great product, but it's not quite there yet.  Between the constant issues with Codium hitting their usage caps with Anthropic, and tool_use errors, it still has some way to go.  That being said though, I have enjoyed it so far (even if the "oopsie" errors are half way through it editing a file it refuses to elaborate on so you don't know what it broke).

I do mainly use Cody AI (by Sourcegraph), which is the one I work for, mainly, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy seeing what other tools are doing 

-KynloStephen66515 (December 04, 2024, 07:04 AM)

I haven't had the chance to test Windsurf yet. Normally, I use Codeium through the web browser, or in VSCode. I mostly use it for small tasks (regex, snippets, SQL optimizations..etc).
I never tried Cody AI, but considering that the free tier only offers 200 chats per month, it feels limited compared Codeium.
Codeium free tier offers unlimited chats if you use their Base model (Llama 3.1 70B), and if you switch to GPT-4o/Claude 3.5 Sonnet, you're limited to 20 chats per day.
For my use case, I rarely use anything other than the Base model, though.

-GrumpyCoder (December 05, 2024, 12:06 PM)

The reason we limit to 200 per month is because:

A: We are the lowest price for unlimited
B: We allow use of Claude 3.5 Latest (the best model on the market) and GPT4o 

7

Living Room / Re: AI Coding Assistants (Who uses them and which)

« on: December 04, 2024, 07:04 AM »

I've been using Codeium for quite some time now.
It can be used in the browser directly, as an extension for VSCode/VStudio, or through their own editor Windsurf.
Best of all, it's completely free. They do have paid subscriptions with more features, but I never felt that I needed to upgrade.

PS: I'm not affiliated to Codeium in any way.

-GrumpyCoder (December 02, 2024, 11:53 PM)

I've been trying out Windsurf recently and it has huge potential to be a great product, but it's not quite there yet.  Between the constant issues with Codium hitting their usage caps with Anthropic, and tool_use errors, it still has some way to go.  That being said though, I have enjoyed it so far (even if the "oopsie" errors are half way through it editing a file it refuses to elaborate on so you don't know what it broke).

I do mainly use Cody AI (by Sourcegraph), which is the one I work for, mainly, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy seeing what other tools are doing 

8

Living Room / Re: AI Coding Assistants (Who uses them and which)

« on: October 27, 2024, 06:30 PM »

Raspberry Pi Pico W's onboard LED

-Deozaan (October 27, 2024, 03:32 PM)

Not to stray too far off-topic, but you seem to be correct, as per: https://forums.raspb...ewtopic.php?t=358964 and https://forums.raspb...ewtopic.php?t=336836

9

Living Room / Re: AI Coding Assistants (Who uses them and which)

« on: October 27, 2024, 08:20 AM »

Thanks Kynlo. While I was adding these to my bookmarks, I decided to try out LobeChat's hosted version. It went something like this (highly paraphrased):


Q: Does the onboard LED of the Raspberry Pi Pico W support PWM to adjust its brightness?

A: Yes, it does.

Q: Can you show me some example code that will fade the LED?

A: This code will do that for you.

[ 15 minutes trying to get the code to work ]

Q: The code isn't working. What might be wrong?

A: Try these troubleshooting steps.

[ 15 minutes trying all the troubleshooting steps ]

Q: Are you absolutely sure the onboard LED supports PWM?

A: My apologies. The onboard LED does not support PWM.

Q: Can you show me example code to simulate PWM to adjust the LED's brightness in software rather than hardware?

A: This code will do that for you.

[ It works! ]

Pretty helpful when it doesn't lead you on a wild goose chase with wrong information.


I'm surprised there hasn't been a movie made yet about a group of people with a robot/AI companion who all end up stuck in a cavern and they ask the robot/AI
to help them find a way out and it unintentionally states incorrect information as fact and based on that information (and future queries to the robot/AI that don't challenge the initial assumption) the humans travel through a treacherous path where many people are injured or die until finally someone asks "Are you sure this is the best course of action?" and then the robot/AI says "My apologies. We can just take the ladder near where we started."

-Deozaan (October 26, 2024, 05:55 PM)

What model did you use for this?

I'd highly suggest only using Claude-3.5-Sonnet-Latest, for coding-related work, as it's the only one that's actually any use.  GPT4o isn't terrible, but given that it has a knowledge cutoff in 2023, it has absolutely no idea about anything more recent.


This is the output I got using Claude (albeit, with a tuned system prompt for coding):

Yes, the Raspberry Pi Pico W's onboard LED (GPIO 25/"LED" pin) does support PWM! I'll show you both hardware PWM and software PWM approaches.

1. Hardware PWM Solution: Here's a complete example that fades the LED up and down using hardware PWM:

[Select]

from machine import PWM, Pin
import time

# Setup the onboard LED with PWM
led_pwm = PWM(Pin("LED"))  # GPIO 25
led_pwm.freq(1000)  # Set PWM frequency to 1000Hz

def pulse_led():
    while True:
        # Fade in
        for duty in range(0, 65535, 1000):
            led_pwm.duty_u16(duty)
            time.sleep(0.01)
           
        # Fade out   
        for duty in range(65535, 0, -1000):
            led_pwm.duty_u16(duty)
            time.sleep(0.01)

try:
    pulse_led()
except:
    # Clean up PWM on exit
    led_pwm.deinit()

2. Software PWM Solution (if hardware PWM isn't working): This simulates PWM using software timing:

[Select]

from machine import Pin
import time

led = Pin("LED", Pin.OUT)

def set_brightness(brightness):
    # brightness should be between 0 and 100
    cycle_time = 0.001  # 1ms cycle
    on_time = (brightness / 100.0) * cycle_time
    off_time = cycle_time - on_time
   
    led.value(1)
    time.sleep(on_time)
    led.value(0)
    time.sleep(off_time)

def pulse_led():
    while True:
        # Fade in
        for brightness in range(0, 101, 5):
            for _ in range(10):  # Multiple cycles per brightness level
                set_brightness(brightness)
       
        # Fade out
        for brightness in range(100, -1, -5):
            for _ in range(10):  # Multiple cycles per brightness level
                set_brightness(brightness)

try:
    pulse_led()
except:
    led.value(0)  # Turn off LED on exit

Key differences between the approaches:

Hardware PWM:

• More efficient
• Smoother fading
• No CPU overhead
• Uses dedicated hardware

Software PWM:

• More CPU intensive
• May show slight flickering
• Works on any GPIO pin
• Useful when hardware PWM isn't available

To run either example:

[Select]

mpremote cp main.py :main.py

[Select]

mpremote reset

The LED should start fading in and out in a continuous loop. The hardware PWM version will give you the smoothest results, but both approaches work to demonstrate LED brightness control.

10

Living Room / Re: AI Coding Assistants (Who uses them and which)

« on: October 24, 2024, 04:35 PM »

For API Usage:
Mistral have an extremely generous free tier (1 billion tokens per month, 500,000/minute)
Gemini is free with a huge context window (2 million on pro, 1 million on flash models)
Groq (not Grok) is also free (but has heavy usage limits that might not suit everybody, but has EXTREMELY fast output speed)

Also try OpenWebUI, as it's capable of "plugging in" any model from the above list.  Another really good web-ui with a lot of extra features, that can also run locally, is LobeChat (They also have a hosted version)


I don't wanna shamelessly promote the company I work for (We have a very generous free tier for our VSCode/JetBrains/WebUI, AI coding assistant) so if you wanna know about that, drop me a DM here or discord and I'll let ya know (and can hook you up with a month of free Pro tier, too).

11

Official Announcements / Re: New server/OS update

« on: August 06, 2024, 05:44 PM »

ok so, based on those examples, that's 4 outages since 2019, totalling 246 minutes ( a little over 4 hours).

I'm by no means defending those outages, but it's a little hard not to find the following sentence a little dramatic "Clownflare tends to be the reason for sites to be completely unavailable", when it was the reason for only slightly over 4 hours, in 5 years. 

Anyway, this has absolutely nothing to with the thread.  The issue was a traffic attack, which Cloudflare mitigated within minutes of turning on Attack Mode, so regardless of your feelings on it, the service provided the desired outcome for what DC needed. /shrug

12

Official Announcements / Re: New server/OS update

« on: August 05, 2024, 02:41 PM »

Clownflare tends to be the reason for sites to be completely unavailable:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/outage

But you do you, I guess.

-Tuxman (August 05, 2024, 05:17 AM)

Only a single one of those posts has anything to do with Cloudflare being the issue.  The rest are just informative posts about widespread internet outages across the world.

13

Living Room / Re: AI Coding Assistants (Who uses them and which)

« on: August 03, 2024, 08:44 PM »

Well, if you want any suggestions for good tools, let me know as I have a list! (Unbiased and based off of personal experience with the tools in question) XD

-KynloStephen66515 (August 03, 2024, 06:09 AM)

I'm interested in seeing a list, because my experience has left me with the impression that AI models aren't yet fully baked, and rarely give me truly useful results.

-Deozaan (August 03, 2024, 06:16 PM)

Are you interested in IDE based plugins (think GitHub Copilot), or standalone/web-verions (ChatGPT, etc)?

14

Living Room / Re: Is mouser on vacation ?

« on: August 03, 2024, 12:26 PM »

https://discord.com/invite/GmtpKNNaA4

15

Living Room / Re: Is mouser on vacation ?

« on: August 03, 2024, 12:26 PM »

He's alive on discord! 

16

Living Room / Re: AI Coding Assistants (Who uses them and which)

« on: August 03, 2024, 06:09 AM »

Which assistants have you tried

-KynloStephen66515 (August 02, 2024, 04:50 PM)

None, opinion based on the crappy 'examples' / 'answers' that ppl posted in (another) forum.

Basically, I'm sitting out the storm, to see what eventually rolls out without the world crumbling to pieces. (Must be related to my age/experience and somewhat conservative approach to 'the latest hype')

-Ath (August 03, 2024, 03:36 AM)

Well, if you want any suggestions for good tools, let me know as I have a list! (Unbiased and based off of personal experience with the tools in question) XD

17

Living Room / Re: AI Coding Assistants (Who uses them and which)

« on: August 03, 2024, 06:07 AM »

Which assistants have you tried, because I personally know quite a few (and even work for one) that are actually incredible (especially for autocomplete, but also for quickly getting code snippets, answers, bug fixes, code smells, etc)

-KynloStephen66515 (August 02, 2024, 04:50 PM)

Not assistants per se, but I have been using a tool: 'LM Studio' to run 8 LLM's locally. This tool provides an easy way to download LLMs, use one or more of those in the provided chat screen and allows you to run one or more models (at the same time) as a server, which you can access via an API that uses the same form as the OpenAI API.

Right now I'm most impressed with model 'bartowski\StableAI Instruct 3B'. It doesn't take up that much RAM and responds surprisingly well in CPU-only mode, even on a i3 10100F CPU. You can also set it to use the available GPU (NVidia/AMD) if that has enough memory to offload one or more models into. And it allows you to play with quite some model-specific settings for the LLM's you load into memory. LM Studio is freeware.

Sometimes I verify the results bij filling in the exact same prompt into ChatGPT (v3.5, I think that is the free one) and the locally running StableAI model. ChatGPT answers show up faster and usually have a lot more words to convey the same message.

Basic script generation works quite well in both, but ChatGPT can deal with a bit more complexity. Still, for my purposes, the StableAI model hasn't been too far off ChatGPT or too slow in comparison.

The thing I am looking for is a relative easy way to train the StableAI model I have with company-specific documentation, our script language and documentation portals. For that purpose, the open source tool 'LlamaIndex' appears to be very interesting.

Once I can train the LLM I have, turning my local AI instance into a proper personal AI Assistant shouldn't be too much of a problem.

-Shades (August 03, 2024, 03:25 AM)

You might be better suited with RAG than a fine tuned model (much quicker to set-up, and vastly easier to keep up to date with ever changing information)

18

Living Room / Re: AI Coding Assistants (Who uses them and which)

« on: August 02, 2024, 04:50 PM »

Do you mean the quality of the code? The LLMs themselves? or am I missing something

-KynloStephen66515 (August 02, 2024, 02:45 PM)

Any example I've seen so far seems to be a garbage answer, unusable or totally unfit to what it's supposed to be tailored to. I'll wait and see what's left after the dust of this hype settles

-Ath (August 02, 2024, 04:23 PM)

Which assistants have you tried, because I personally know quite a few (and even work for one) that are actually incredible (especially for autocomplete, but also for quickly getting code snippets, answers, bug fixes, code smells, etc)

19

Living Room / Re: AI Coding Assistants (Who uses them and which)

« on: August 02, 2024, 02:45 PM »

Simple: Nope. To me that's garbage in, garbage out.

-Ath (August 02, 2024, 02:27 PM)

Not sure what you mean here. 

Do you mean the quality of the code? The LLMs themselves? or am I missing something

20

Living Room / AI Coding Assistants (Who uses them and which)

« on: August 02, 2024, 02:06 PM »

Hey guys,

I'm curious to see who on the DC forum uses AI coding assistants in their IDEs or CLIs to enhance their daily coding workflow.

If you do use them, which one did you pick, and why?!

21

Official Announcements / Re: New server/OS update

« on: July 23, 2024, 06:49 AM »

Now all forum feeds (such as https://www.donation...type=rss;action=.xml ) are under Cloudflare Turnstile ... which make them unreachable by feed readers...

-Jedi (July 22, 2024, 01:20 AM)

This is a temporary measure to mitigate an attack that was happening, causing the site to become completely unavailable as soon as it came back online.

22

Living Room / Re: [Important] Known DC Issue

« on: July 20, 2024, 12:22 PM »

Looks like we narrowed it down to an attack. No clue why, but Cloudflare is now doing a good job of keeping things online!

I'll update if I find out more

23

Living Room / [Important] Known DC Issue

« on: July 20, 2024, 11:59 AM »

Just a quick update to let everyone know that it's known that DC is currently extremely unstable. The issue has not been fully tracked down but the whole website is being moved to a new host which will resolve everything currently happening.

If you wanna stay up to date, join us on Discord!

https://discord.com/invite/GmtpKNNaA4

24

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Kynlos Python Portable/Cross Platform Web Server

« on: May 20, 2024, 07:34 AM »

Repo: https://github.com/K...nlos/KynlosWebServer

Kynlos Python Web Server with PHP Support

This is a Python-based web server that supports serving static files, executing PHP scripts, file uploads, rate limiting, IP whitelisting/blacklisting, HTTPS using self-signed certificates, CORS support, custom error pages, static file caching, Gzip/Brotli compression, basic authentication, virtual hosts, URL redirects, graceful shutdown, browser auto-open, email verification, and SQLite database integration for user management. The server is highly configurable via a `config.json` file.

Features

• Serves static files from the `htdocs` directory
• Executes PHP scripts using the `php` command
• Supports file uploads via POST requests to `/upload`, with uploaded files saved in the `htdocs/downloads` directory
• Provides a file download page at `htdocs/download.html` for accessing uploaded files
• Rate limiting to prevent abuse (configurable requests per minute and burst limits)
• IP whitelisting and blacklisting for access control
• HTTPS support using self-signed certificates with configurable certificate details and renewal options
• Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) support
• Serves custom HTML pages for different HTTP error codes (configurable via `config.json`)
• Implements caching for static files to improve performance (configurable cache size and TTL)
• Gzip and Brotli compression for improved transfer speeds
• Basic authentication with configurable authorized users
• Virtual hosts support for hosting multiple websites or domains
• URL redirects for redirecting users from old or outdated URLs to new ones or external websites
• Customizable entry point (default: `index.html`)
• Logging of requests to a log file
• Graceful shutdown on Ctrl-C
• Opens the entry point in a web browser on server start
• Email verification for new user registrations to prevent spam accounts
• SQLite database integration for managing user accounts and enabling user registration and login

Requirements

• Python 3.x
• `php` command available in PATH (for PHP script execution)
• `OpenSSL` Python library (for HTTPS support)
• `sqlite3` Python library (for SQLite database integration)

Configuration

The server can be configured using a `config.json` file in the same directory as the script. The following options are available:

• `port`: The port number to run the server on (default: 80)
• `entry_point`: The default file to serve when accessing the root URL (default: `index.html`)
• `use_https`: Whether to enable HTTPS using a self-signed certificate (default: `false`)
• `certfile`: The path to the certificate file for HTTPS (default: `cert.pem`)
• `keyfile`: The path to the private key file for HTTPS (default: `key.pem`)
• `rate_limit`: The maximum number of requests per minute per IP (default: 10)
• `rate_limit_burst`: The maximum number of burst requests allowed (default: 5)
• `log_file`: The path to the log file for request logging (default: `server.log`)
• `whitelist`: A list of IP addresses that are allowed to access the server (default: [])
• `blacklist`: A list of IP addresses that are blocked from accessing the server (default: [])
• `htdocs_dir`: The directory to serve static files from (default: `htdocs`)
• `downloads_dir`: The directory to save uploaded files to (default: `htdocs/downloads`)
• `cert_config`: Configuration options for generating the self-signed certificate
• `key_size`: The size of the private key in bits (default: 2048)
• `subject`: The subject information for the certificate
• `C`: Country (default: US)
• `ST`: State (default: California)
• `L`: Locality (default: San Francisco)
• `O`: Organization (default: My Company)
• `OU`: Organizational Unit (default: My Organization)
• `CN`: Common Name (default: localhost)
   
• `serial_number`: Serial number (default: 1000)
• `valid_days`: Number of days the certificate is valid for (default: 3650)
• `signing_algorithm`: The signing algorithm to use (default: sha256)
• `cert_renewal_days`: The number of days before certificate expiration to renew (default: 30)
• `cache_max_size`: The maximum size of the static file cache in bytes (default: 10485760)
• `cache_ttl`: The time-to-live (TTL) for cached files in seconds (default: 60)
• `enable_gzip_compression`: Whether to enable Gzip compression (default: true)
• `enable_brotli_compression`: Whether to enable Brotli compression (default: true)
• `enable_basic_auth`: Whether to enable basic authentication (default: false)
• `auth_users`: A dictionary of authorized usernames and passwords for basic authentication
• `enable_virtual_hosts`: Whether to enable virtual hosts support (default: false)
• `virtual_hosts`: A dictionary of virtual host mappings, with each key representing a domain and the value specifying the `htdocs_dir` and `entry_point` for that domain
• `enable_custom_error_pages`: Whether to enable custom error pages (default: false)
• `error_pages`: A dictionary mapping HTTP error codes to custom HTML pages
• `redirects`: A dictionary of URL redirects, with each key representing the old URL and the value specifying the new URL or external website
• `enable_email_verification`: Whether to enable email verification for new user registrations (default: false)
• `smtp_config`: Configuration options for sending verification emails via SMTP
• `host`: SMTP server hostname
• `port`: SMTP server port
• `username`: SMTP username
• `password`: SMTP password
• `use_tls`: Whether to use TLS encryption (default: true)
• `from_email`: The email address to send verification emails from

Usage

[list=1]

• Clone the repository or download the `main.py` file.
• Create a `config.json` file in the same directory as `main.py` with your desired configuration options.
• Place your static files and PHP scripts in the `htdocs` directory or subdirectories.
• Run the server using `python main.py`.
• Access the server in a web browser at `http://localhost` (or the configured port).
• Upload files via the `/upload` endpoint and access them from the `htdocs/download.html` page.
• Register new user accounts and verify email addresses to enable user-specific features.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! If you find any issues or have suggestions for improvements, please open an issue or submit a pull request.

License

This project is open-source and available under the MIT License.

Repo:

https://github.com/K...nlos/KynlosWebServer

25

Kynlo's Software / Login Script with PHP and SQLite

« on: March 13, 2024, 10:37 PM »

Login Script with PHP and SQLite

This repository contains a simple and secure login script implemented in PHP with an SQLite database for user authentication. The script offers features such as:

User registration: Users can create new accounts by providing a username, email, and password.
User login: Registered users can log in using their credentials to access their dashboard.
User dashboard: After logging in, users are redirected to their personalized dashboard where they can view their profile information and submit messages.
Message submission: Users can submit messages through a form on their dashboard.
Public messages: All users can view the public messages submitted by other users.
User messages: Users can view and manage their own messages, including editing and deleting them.

Requirements

• PHP 7.0 or higher
• SQLite3 extension enabled
• Web server (e.g., Apache, Nginx)
• Python 3.x (for running the database creation script)

Setup

• Clone the repository to your local machine.
• Run the cr_db.py script to create the SQLite database file.
• Configure your web server to serve the PHP files.
• Access the login page (index.php) in your browser and start using the script.

Usage

• Navigate to the login page (index.php).
• Enter your username/email and password.
• Click on the "Login" button.
• Upon successful authentication, you will be redirected to the dashboard page (dashboard.php).

Security

• Passwords are securely hashed using PHP's built-in password_hash() function before storing them in the database.
• User input is sanitized and validated to prevent SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.
• Sessions are used to manage user authentication and maintain logged-in state.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.

GitHub Repository

Visit the KynlosLoginScript repository for more information.

Contributions

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open issues and pull requests to suggest improvements or report bugs. Donations towards the project are also HIGHLY welcomed!