Messages

1

DC Gamer Club / Re: Free Game on Humble Store

« on: August 07, 2020, 08:49 PM »

F1 2018 is free on Humble Store for the next few days. It redeems on Steam.

https://www.humblebu...re/f1-2018-free-game

2

Developer's Corner / Re: TempleOS - A Constructive Look.

« on: August 05, 2020, 09:48 AM »

Whenever he's not cuffed in a straightjacket anymore, my fully respect owns him. 

-KodeZwerg (August 05, 2020, 09:18 AM)

He died in 2018.

3

Developer's Corner / Re: TempleOS - A Constructive Look.

« on: August 05, 2020, 08:46 AM »

I'm resurrecting this old thread because I just came across this video Linus Tech Tips did last month on TempleOS. It's a relatively short tour of the OS and its capabilities.

4

Living Room / Re: Thoughts on cryptocurrencies

« on: July 30, 2020, 10:49 PM »

In my opinion, mining with high powered hardware is a fool's errand. You have to have a lot of money to buy a lot of powerful hardware to earn anything. And then you're spending a lot of your earnings on cooling/electricity, hardware maintenance, or just buying more powerful hardware to keep up with the ever-increasing hashrate. I have a hard time imagining that your mining hardware isn't practically obsolete if you've had it for a couple of years. In my opinion, the competition in Proof of Work (PoW) chains is too fierce to earn anything worthwhile unless you're already very rich or you just get very lucky on an up-and-coming coin that (1) is dirt cheap and/or easy to mine when you first discover it, (2) increases significantly in value, and (3) doesn't totally tank and lose most/all value (at least before you sell and get rich off of it).

It may be worth looking into Proof of Stake (PoS) chains, where you don't need (very) powerful hardware. Rather, the number of coins you have staked act similar to raffle tickets entered into a pot from which you can randomly be chosen to process a block and earn rewards from it. But because there's no rush or competition for the work, you don't need super powerful/expensive hardware running at full speed 24/7. I haven't been paying close attention to Ethereum (or much of any crypto) this year, but last I heard, they were trying/planning to migrate their chain away from PoW to PoS.

Alternatively, instead of doing the mining yourself, some PoS chains have something similar to a mining pool, in which you can delegate your coins to a miner or a pool which will make regular payments to you every few days from the earnings they get using your stake. Minus their fee, of course. Keep in mind that your coins are always under your own control (if the blockchain is doing it right). You're only delegating your voting/staking/mining rights to someone else, not transferring your coins to them. That way you don't really have to do any of the work but you can still earn a little something extra along the way. There can be a bit of a waiting period while you wait for your first payment after you delegate, but after that it can be fun to see little payments going into your account every few days.

As for cryptocurrencies that will be long-lived, here are a few that seem likely to be around for a while, in my opinion:

Bitcoin ("blockchain 1.0")
Ethereum (touted as being "blockchain 2.0")
Cardano and/or Tezos (touted as being "blockchain 3.0")

BTC is obviously a PoW coin, and I believe that ETH is still PoW for now. Cardano (ADA) has just launched PoS on their mainnet in the past day or so, and Tezos (XTZ) has been running their PoS blockchain since their mainnet launched two years ago.

There are others that I like or that interest me, but these are probably my top picks for what I think will be around in some form or another in the long term.

Full disclosure: I own or have owned a little of all four of these.

And of course, be warned: Do your own research and never spend/invest more than you can afford to lose.

5

Living Room / Re: Cyph - A potential Keybase alternative

« on: July 29, 2020, 10:05 PM »

Cyph’s source code is 100% public. Our openly accessible GitHub repository includes all client and server code, with the layer that handles releasing Cyph as a native app available here.

[...]

Portions of Cyph are fully open source under permissive licenses such as BSD and MIT. That being said, the full Cyph application doesn’t comply with the OSI’s Open Source Definition. In addition to the patents, our source code is licensed under Ms-RSL, which is effectively a read-only license; this means that third parties can’t fork and modify our code or deploy their own instances of Cyph without our permission. We believe that this is a fair compromise to allow us to develop Cyph as a commercially viable startup without ignoring a necessary aspect of its security.

-https://www.cyph.com/blog/open-source

6

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Affinity offers 90-day free trial/50% discount on all software

« on: July 27, 2020, 10:43 PM »

one way of seeing if you qualify for these (or maybe other) free vector brushes --
Enable the welcome panel via menu: Help >Welcome and scroll through the images/advertising/tips

-tomos (July 26, 2020, 11:20 AM)

Thanks! Looks like I qualify.

7

Living Room / Re: Cyph - A potential Keybase alternative

« on: July 22, 2020, 10:59 PM »

I just discovered they also have an encrypted "burner" chat. No account required and it allows you to send messages, files*, or even have video/voice chat. Kinda cool.

Just go to https://cyph.im/ to get a link and share the link with whomever you want to chat with. Then, when your chat partner loads the link, it will start an encrypted session and you're good to go. But it doesn't appear to support chats with more than 2 people.



*up to 512 MB on desktop, 20 MB on mobile

8

Living Room / Cyph - A potential Keybase alternative

« on: July 22, 2020, 10:49 PM »

In response to the news that Keybase was acquired by Zoom, I got an unsolicited email from a Keybase competitor called Cyph which I'd never heard of before. It seems they're looking through public PGP keys on Keybase and sending emails to the associated email address letting people know that they're somewhat of an alternative to Keybase.

The unsolicited nature of the communication is a little off-putting, but they say they haven't added me to any mailing list and will not contact me again if I ignore their email. But I figured I'd at least check out their blog post they linked to in the email and see what they were all about.

Here's a quote of and link to the blog post, which seems to contain most of the same information in the email I received, plus a little more:

One of our major competitors, Keybase, was acquired by Zoom last month.

Many Keybase users are now looking for alternatives as a result, primarily due to a lack of trust in the new ownership to maintain high privacy standards, as well as speculation that the service is now doomed to ultimately be shut down. However, no single solution has so far stood out from the crowd; instead, users are faced with the prospect of setting up a hodgepodge of independent solutions.

Keybase is great, but a full alternative is clearly needed. That’s why we’ve spent the past month building new features to make Cyph more of a direct replacement.

Cyph’s features and general architecture are similar in many ways to Keybase, plus/minus a few features:

• On the plus side, our features include voice/video calling (with group support), Bitcoin, and social networking (like Twitter, but all posts are signed + optionally encrypted for a subset of your contacts).
• On the minus side, Keybase offers some awesome niche features (like encrypted git repos) that we currently do not.
• And now, with our latest release, we’ve built out a set of PGP key management and utility features to make Cyph more immediately useful for users coming from Keybase.

Additionally, the architecture of Cyph yields some significant broader advantages:

• Full web support
• Whereas Keybase splits up its features between the web UI, the CLI, GPG, and the native apps, thanks to WebSign Cyph is able to provide a consistent experience across all platforms. The full functionality is available regardless of whether you use https://cyph.app or the desktop and mobile apps, with no need to worry about degraded security on the web.
• Automatic strong public key authentication for all users
• No need to verify keys or usernames out of band, meet up in person to compare fingerprints or “Safety Numbers”, etc.
• Quantum-resistant cryptography
• Post-quantum encryption, key exchange, and signing algorithms are used throughout the application (in combination with classical crypto such as elliptic curves). Whereas others are still planning long-term migrations to post-quantum crypto, Cyph was built with it in mind from the start, meaning that your private data is theoretically protected from future QC attacks today.

We encourage you to submit a response to our poll to vote on the missing features you’d like us to add. And if you’re a Keybase user, just include your username and email address to skip the line and get a free invite to the Cyph beta!

-https://www.cyph.com/blog/cyph-pgp

I also noticed that they're offering a "special offer for Keybase users: $100 Lifetime Platinum upgrade! (Usually $48/mo.) Adds 1 TB storage, BTC wallet, and more."

I'm not necessarily recommending Cyph since I have no real experience with them, but I it's worth looking into and I will be creating an account to see for myself how it works.

9

Developer's Corner / Re: Wanted: Recommendations for learning WPF (with C#)

« on: July 22, 2020, 02:01 PM »

I wasn't sure how far into reading the text tutorials I'd have to go before being ready for the MVVM concept, so I decided to watch the next two videos by AngelSix since they build upon each other and the last of which is a video introducing MVVM. In it, he writes the MVVM from scratch rather than using something like Caliburn.Micro, which is what Tim Corey uses and recommends.

C# WPF UI Tutorials: 03 - View Model MVVM Basics

It definitely seems a lot simpler to me than what I recall from the Tim Corey MVVM video which I watched in January. And maybe it's close enough to what you had in mind, wraith808, that it will save you the trouble of having to write up your example project on GitHub.

10

Developer's Corner / Re: Wanted: Recommendations for learning WPF (with C#)

« on: July 22, 2020, 11:54 AM »

I'll try to write something simple I can put on github that illustrates how I do it.  No promises on the timeline though... unfortunately, I have a lot on my plate right now.

-wraith808 (July 22, 2020, 07:50 AM)

If you can manage it, great! If not, no worries. My foray into WPF is mostly to satisfy my curiosity or learn a new skill as a hobby than for anything immediately important.

One other thing I'll say, and I'm not sure that most of the tutorials recommend it though it's the way I've started writing my XAML in most cases - make liberal use of DockPanel and StackPanel.  They make organizing your controls a lot simpler, IMO.

-wraith808 (July 22, 2020, 07:50 AM)

The first video in the above AngelSix WPF UI Programming playlist says he thinks of virtually everything in terms of either Grid or StackPanel. I'm unfamiliar with the DockPanel, but I'll be sure to learn more about it to see how it can be useful. Thanks for the tip!

11

Developer's Corner / Re: Wanted: Recommendations for learning WPF (with C#)

« on: July 21, 2020, 11:58 PM »

I'm not necessarily tied to Desktop, and there's a part of me that kind of likes the idea of being able to access the information from various devices or even collaboratively with others. But I have no idea how to do any of that, aside from making it web-based, and I don't really enjoy making web front-end stuff, or back-end server stuff for that matter. I suppose I could just write it in Unity, which I'm familiar enough with the UI system and it has built-in cross-platform build support. But it seemed like a waste of computing resources to use a 3D game engine to run what is (or should be) a simple, lightweight GUI application. So I'll be happy to settle for a "portable" desktop app I can run and maybe sync via Dropbox if I need to access it across devices or share it with others. Hence my foray into WPF. If I get really serious about the idea of running it on mobile devices at some future time, then maybe I'll try porting the code back into Unity or come up with some other plan. I'll cross that bridge when/if I ever get that far.

So, thanks for the links, wraith808! I'll start looking through them.



In the meantime, here are some other resources I've looked at, in case it helps others who may come across this thread in the future.

At the beginning of this year, I wanted to clean up a GUI app I had hacked together for (NANY 2018) using the visual editor when I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, so I searched for some tutorial videos on YouTube and came across Tim Corey's channel. I watched a few of his videos, including:

Intro to WPF: Learn the basics and best practices of WPF for C#

I found the above video to be a good primer on WPF. It, too, recommended typing in the XAML manually rather than using the visual editor. After I finished that one, I wanted to learn more and the next suggested video from his channel was:

WPF in C# with MVVM using Caliburn Micro

I don't think I finished watching all of the above video, mostly because I was such a noob a lot of it was going over my head, and it seemed like a lot of time and effort to learn about MVVM when all I really wanted at the time was to fix a few relatively minor issues with my hacked together GUI on my older program.

With both of those videos being over an hour long, I was afraid of asking for more video tutorials here because I didn't like the idea of spending 40-60 hours watching a video course/tutorial to learn. But I thought that perhaps other tutorial videos could exist that didn't require such a time commitment or at least divided up the content into relatively more bite-sized chunks. So today I did another search looking for comprehensive, but short(er) videos. What I found appears to reinforce my initial suspicion that video tutorials will require a fairly significant time investment. For example, I found this 45-video playlist by AngelSix on YouTube, where each video appears to be approximately 1 hour long on average.

WPF UI Programming

I did watch that first video in the series and it also recommended writing the XAML manually for similar reasons. Video #3 in the playlist will cover some MVVM basics as well, so that means three out of three sources so far have recommended writing XAML directly and using MVVM.

12

Developer's Corner / Wanted: Recommendations for learning WPF (with C#)

« on: July 21, 2020, 08:00 PM »

I'd like to make a program with a UI. The content of the UI will not be static, but will change based on input from the user. What I mean by that is that the number of things shown can increase or decrease based on what the user does. For example, a to-do list might only show a few items, or it may show many items.

I'm thinking that since I program in C# I should use WPF for the UI. If anyone here is experienced with making GUI applications in C# and can tell me why I shouldn't go with WPF, I'd be glad to hear your reasons why and what alternative I should use.

Otherwise, I'm looking for recommendations on good resources for learning how to use WPF to make GUI applications. Free is preferred. And I think I'd prefer the information in written/image format (e.g., a book or website) rather than video format. But I'm open to hearing any useful suggestions or recommendations of learning materials people here have found useful.

Thanks in advance!

13

Living Room / Re: Animal Friends thread

« on: July 20, 2020, 09:32 AM »

This video is a couple years old, so maybe it has already been posted in this thread. But I didn't feel like scrolling through all the posts to check.

Charlie the hippo and Makhosi the rhino are an odd couple:

14

DC Gamer Club / Re: Latest GOG Giveaway

« on: July 18, 2020, 08:21 AM »

Warhammer 40,000: Rites of War is free for the next ~24 hours:

https://www.gog.com/...r_40000_rites_of_war

15

Post New Requests Here / Re: Show brief message on screen

« on: July 15, 2020, 02:57 AM »

Do any notifications work for you? From anything? If not, make sure you don't have Focus Assist enabled, as that will also disable notifications.

I manually toggled it on near the beginning of the year (thinking it would automatically disable after my configured "quiet hours" ended) and forgot about it for months before realizing why I hadn't been seeing any notifications at all on my system during that time.

16

DC Website Help and Extras / Re: DC website is "Not Secure" when viewing threads?

« on: July 14, 2020, 09:09 PM »

I just remembered this was a problem and can verify it is fixed. Not sure how long ago you fixed it, but thanks for doing so!

17

General Software Discussion / Re: Brave: A new browser with built-in adblock and payment solutions

« on: July 09, 2020, 08:28 PM »

Brave Browser Fork Makes a ‘Bold’ Move Citing Legal Pressure; another potential fork incoming:
https://cointelegrap...iting-legal-pressure

-panzer (July 09, 2020, 03:21 PM)

In summary: The Brave fork created last month is changing its name from "Braver" to "Bold" and in the future will be based off Chromium rather than Brave.

In other words, the Brave fork won't be a Brave fork much longer.

18

General Software Discussion / Re: Brave: A new browser with built-in adblock and payment solutions

« on: July 09, 2020, 08:08 PM »

I learned about it from Brave, and not from an ad but within the browser when I was checking my BAT settings, so I don't know.

-wraith808 (July 09, 2020, 07:50 PM)

Looking into it further, tapnetwork.io seems to be a 3rd party white-label gift card/rewards service. So perhaps Brave have started using that service as you suggested. I haven't seen any mention of it in my version of the browser, and again, no mention of it on their blog that I saw.

19

General Software Discussion / Re: Brave: A new browser with built-in adblock and payment solutions

« on: July 09, 2020, 03:02 PM »

They've also released a way to convert BAT into gift certs.

-wraith808 (July 09, 2020, 09:03 AM)

That's not officially affiliated with Brave as far as I can tell.

Then they'll do as in China and oblige all info to be handed over to the FED, NSA, DHS... 

-dantheman (July 09, 2020, 07:26 AM)

I understand your cynicism in this regard, but FYI here's their claim on how they handle the data:

Brave Together is a private video conference tool that you can use to call with your friends and colleagues. Nothing that you say or type in the service is logged or saved. See data processing detail.

Note: Your IP address is available to your Internet provider. If your Internet provider requires the use of a TURN server, then your IP address will also be available to a company called 8×8, which operates the TURN server. The content of your call is encrypted between your browser and the Brave server, so your audio and video stay private from intermediaries.

To avoid scams: For the avoidance of phishing attacks, note that we at Brave never contact Brave Browser users in a Together call.

-https://brave.com/privacy/#brave-together-learn

20

General Software Discussion / Re: Brave: A new browser with built-in adblock and payment solutions

« on: July 08, 2020, 10:23 PM »

I'm not sure when this happened, since I see no mention of it on their blog, but Brave has launched private, encrypted video chat (similar to Zoom or Meet):

https://together.brave.com/

21

General Software Discussion / Re: How to create a web FORM, with several questions, and get back email replies?

« on: July 08, 2020, 01:23 PM »

In PHP you can use the mail function:

Code: PHP [Select]

1. mail("[email protected]", $subject, $message);

If you need more control you can also manually set the email headers. More details here: https://www.w3school...p/func_mail_mail.asp

22

General Software Discussion / Re: How to create a web FORM, with several questions, and get back email replies?

« on: July 08, 2020, 02:55 AM »

Have you considered using Google Forms?

23

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« on: July 05, 2020, 05:54 PM »

In the year 2026...

Apple: Our new iPhone costs only $300 and the battery lasts 30 days!

Consumers: Wow! Amazing!

Apple: It also can't be recharged. That's right, we're so courageous.

24

Living Room / Re: HAPPY 4TH OF JULY!

« on: July 04, 2020, 10:34 PM »

I hope everyone has a safe and enjoyable time.

25

DC Website Help and Extras / Re: DC website is "Not Secure" when viewing threads?

« on: July 04, 2020, 12:00 AM »

When I right-click an emoji and click "Inspect" to view the page source, they are using HTTP and not HTTPS.