I won a new grant (yaay!) and dipping my toes in the role of PI in my university. For now, I will have a PhD, a post doc and a couple of masters students in my team.

In all my previous labs, everything was on paper and very poorly documented (...don't ask). I myself used to use LaTeX to keep a "neat" labnote. Obviously, it is not easy to collaborate and work with others.

Any researchers here who have experience hosting their own e-lab book in their labs?

I am in the EU. I want to help make the TOR network more robust by contributing a relay node. I have one of three hardware options: a raspberry pi zero W, raspberry pi 4B, or ThinkPad T470s.

In your practical experience, which of these computers would be the best for the network? As I understand, beyond a point, the CPU power doesn't matter unless massive traffic loads go through the node.

P.S: Not sure if this is relevant, but I currently have a pihole hosted in a separate RPI zero. I plan to host this at home. I do not have a separate connection line. My router doesn't support vlan.

Add: Thank you for the kind replies. Based on the feedback, it think I'm currently not setup to help the network. I will instead continue with my annual contribution.

I will look into hosting a node on a VPS and just pay a monthly subscription fee or something.

You will see that I have posted about this before asking for suggestions on which software I can use to convert PDF to docx/odt.

I am a teacher. During my time as a researcher I wrote a lot of documents and regularly draw upon them to teach my students. I often have to take the text, modify them, or build upon them. A lot of my material is bound up in PDFs. Sometimes, I have grant applications to write where a previous draft I wrote was stored as a PDF. Converting them to text has become the bane of my life.

I am forced to use online tools because none of the software I have seem to do the trick. Lot of people keep saying pandoc. Pandoc does not convert PDF to any other format. It can only be the output format.

Is there a magic open source solution that I have missed out?

I have a thinkpad lying around. I have used Linux over the last 5 years and I an NOT a power user. I use Mint and it gets the job done for me.

Lately though, the whole libre software bug bit me and I want at least one machine that is libre compatible through and through. I have heard some stuff like Parabola and GNUIX or something like that, but thought it best to ask around first before even thinking about something like this.

My work essentially involves writing documents (LaTeX and LibreOffice), doing statistical analysis, and making lectures. I access emails via Thunderbird. That's it.

Does anyone here daily drive a fully libre laptop?

I moved away from MS Windows a long while back and have ported everything EXCEPT presentations. I still use a friend's laptop just for PowerPoint.

I have used LibreOffice Impress and it is quite poor in design and the templates are very unprofessional.

I have used LaTeX beamer a lot and I am now tired of fighting it to make simple transitions look good, quickly customise a slide, etc.

Are there alternatives that I can use which are libre friendly as well as user-friendly?

I came across the Silphium plant that went extinct around 64 AD. It is believe that emperor Nero was to have eaten the last known stalk!

It surprised me that such a valuable plant was not cultivated through agriculture.

Are there other plants that we know to have literally eaten out of existence?

I always believed that problems around technocratic broligarchy could’ve been solved if the software ecosystem using GPLv3 was strong. So when I suddenly see a flurry of articles stating that the EU is trying to come up with its own spin of Linux to boycott monopolies by US companies, I think it is either a waste of time or self defeating because the ultimate power of computer codes isn’t the code itself, but the license attached to it.

Is there something that I have missed in this matter because I barely see anyone talking about the need for more libre software. I find the latest transition from GLP to MIT license for rust-based coreutils to be concerning because we’re basically adopting “doormat” licenses that will enable companies to easily embrace, extend and extinguish the freedoms we cherish so much in this space.

I love the fact that fediverse was built from the ground up to be free, federated and interoperable. I have two questions that may come from my lack of expertise / knowledge, so I apologise in advance if they are dumb.

1. Bots can disrupt smaller instances:

What is stopping corpos from scraping everyone's posts and stuff from the fediverse and train their AI? What's stopping them then, to create loads of not accounts and spam / disrupt smaller communities? When an instances quality drops, the users may be more incentivised to migrate to bigger instances and go there. It's safe to say most Lemmy users are not going to spin their own instance and start communities from scratch. Meanwhile, the onslaught of bots can overwhelm these budding communities and instances.

2. Corpos can flood the fediverse with ads and crap:

Threads comes to mind on this point and how many instances have chosen not to defederate with them. Besides, they can create bridges, and have repost bots in all instances to flood major them with ads. With generative content, it is so much easier to make a seemingly casual post about a product and mask it as an advertisement.

I've seen previous posts about people wanting to come because of their opinion about how certain countries behave. I feel the true evil are the corporates.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25519139

Gut health gone wild