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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • In 1999 when the entire town was on dialup, I set up this relatively small PC with FreeBSD 3.3 and eggdrop, and hid it in the school library. That way I had an IRC bot that worked while I was offline. After a while I also set it up to automatically grab files from FTP servers for me, but getting these out from the “server” offline was tricky due to 1.44MB floppies being the only removable storage I had available.

    Back then internet carried dialup charges per minute for me, so this was a huge time and money saver.














  • Norway - Similar to many European countries, owning a gun requires a certifiable reason to do so, which basically means hunting or target shooting. Loads of guns here, as there's a lot of moose and deer. Obtaining and owning a hunting rifle requires skill tests and a theoretical exam, and you need to be part of a hunting group.

    ARs are banned for obvious reasons. The only exception is for people who are army reservists who are (were?) allowed to store their service weapon at home, if they have proper secure storage options available. This may have changed since I was a reservist myself, but those were the rules in 2007 at least.

    Pistols are legal for target shooting, but with strict background checks and so forth. Plus you have to be part of a target shooting club. Getting a pistol is generally harder than a rifle, as a means of preventing pistols from ending up on the streets. Gun voilence happens, but it is extremely rare, and mostly tied to gangs and/or organized crime. Except from this asshole in 2011.

    Carrying permit for guns is pretty much none existent. To/from hunting or shooting range.

    Self defense is not a valid reason for obtaining and carrying a gun. You don't really need it either. The only exception is Svalbard where is is possible due to polar bears. And even then, you can't be an idiot about it; a few years ago this dumbass got permanently banned from the Svalbard territory after intentionally provoking a polar bear, then shooting it, claiming self defense.


  • I've had plenty of rants about Norwegian broadband (or lack thereof) over the past 25 years. It's a bit of a long story, but the gist of it is that during the 90's there was this one company (Telenor) which had practical monopoly on telecom (it was the private remnant of what used to be part of the government), and of course they didn't want to develop broadband 8nfrastructure as the made shitloads of money by selling ISDN at the time. Broadband was available in the biggest cities only, and even there it was limited. And the punchline of that joke was that when I was on dialup I had to pay by the minute. During that time, hearing about not having to pay by the minute in the US sounded like paradise to me.

    But luckily competition happened, and Telenor realized they had to allow modernization or be left out of the market entirely. Small communities could sign up to have broadband "delivered", and once enough people had signed up for an ISP to considet it profitable, digging would start. Today, twenty years later, I'm pretty satisfied with how it turned out. I live practically in the middle of nowhere, in a tiny industrial town sqeezed to fit into the terrain, where three of the cardinal directions are blocked by mountains and the fourth being a fjord. And I have 1gbit both up and down.


  • Ouch, I was not aware of that. Here in scandinavialand we have a few local or regional ones in each area, plus a few big ones that cover the entire country.

    Once the fiber is in the ground, "any" ISP can use them, regardless who buried it. I think it's a remnant from 20ish years ago when the default was ADSL over copper, and the telecom cables were considered public infrastructure.



  • @vettnerk@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlSell Me on Linux
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    8 months ago

    I have exactly zero experience in what work a law office does, but I would think it's mostly paperwork and email? If so you can do that at no startup costs.

    Pick a distro (pop, mint, whatever), and install libreoffice or one of its many variants for offfice integration.

    A common misconception is that linux involves a lot of coding. Sure, it can if you want to - all the hooks for programatical access are there, for example if you want to build shell scripts for automation. But you don't need to. It's just an option many linux users, myself included, like to take advantage of.

    When it comes to convincing you, all I can say is this: It costs you nothing to try.