Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Software Freedom under siege: A Call for Community Action
In the early 2000s, the future of software freedom seemed bright. Governments worldwide were actively promoting Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), with initiatives like Germany’s LiMux project moving entire cities to Linux, and Brazil mandating open source solutions in public administration. The European Union was discussing interoperability and open standards, while countless public institutions…
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Checking if a PDF is in CMYK color space under Linux
Typical instructions to check if a PDF file is in the CMYK color space, require Adobe Acrobat to be installed. The Adobe suite isn’t available under Linux, and more importantly, it’s not Free Software. At first glance, it seems hard to figure out if a document is in the CMYK-color space. Why CMYK is relevant…
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Stories of origin
Nearly every culture or religion in the world, created a story about the origins… the origin of the world, the origin of humanity, or how their group came into existence and plays a special part in this world. While they are often interpreted as attempts to explain how things came into existence, there is a…
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The Gospel of John by ChatGPT
So the magic of language models lies in using the right prompt. And with that information (and the vast collection of data in his language model), it chucks away spitting out bits and bytes that render value to us mortal humans. So I fed ChatGPT the first verses of the beginning of the Gospel of…
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Why RTFM is not the answer
No matter if it’s on social media, in a product forum or even during the family Thanksgiving meal… You certainly have bumped into those questions where you thought: come on! That’s so obvious, it’s page two of almost every tutorial! You might even be tempted to just point that person to the manual… possibly reducing…
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Ironclad passwords in 5 steps
Step 1: cater to the brain Let’s quickly skip through the basics: the biggest challenge for a password is not for you as a user to make it impossible to remember a password. The challenge is to make it impossible for a (bunch of) computer(s) to guess the password. The famous XKCD cartoon explains this…
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Some video primers on Inkscape
A few years ago, I recorded a handful of tutorials for Inkscape. Some of them were nicely worked out – other ones were merely quickies in response to a question in some Facebook group. Basics: Layers, Objects and paths To understand Inkscape, the first thing you’ll need is to understand the basic concepts of the…
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Giving back to Inkscape
I’ve been using Inkscape for about fifteen years now. With every new release, I’m happy and grateful for all the efforts done by multitude of volunteers. The last five years, I tried contributing by helping out people in the Inkscape Facebook channel and on my youtube channel. With the implementation of multipage support in the…
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Creating a multipage poster in Inkscape 1.2
Inkscape 1.2 is equipped with some great improvements. Not only is there the unified object-layer view and the new icon set, the dark theme and the advanced export to different file formats… there finally is multipage support in Inkscape. The feature is currently still in its infancy and will probably go through many improvements in…
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