dear #DIYverse,
does anybody know how long #wheatPaste takes to dry and to cure?
i.e. how long should I keep the pieces under weights, and how long should I wait until covering it with waterproofing material
I'm assuming somewhere between overnight (~8 hours) and a day (~24 hours) for the first part, is it wildly off?
right now the specific application is gluing together 4 layers of corrugated cardboard approximately B3 sized, but generic guidelines are welcome for the future
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E come anticipato ieri sera: questo è quello che ho trovato in cantina:
la propaganda stampata su cartoncino di #FerrovieNord, prima dell'unione in #Trenord, con cui speravano di tener buoni i pendolari mentre i treni nuovi non si facevano vedere (ricorda qualcosa? :D ), e qualcuna delle copie ha pure l'etichetta con il mio indirizzo, perché lo spedivano pure a casa agli abbonati! (questa cosa non me la ricordavo, onestamente)
a qualcuno interessano? io non ho posto per tenerli, quindi se a nessuno interessano mi tocca farli finire nel riciclo carta
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Elena ``of Valhalla'' likes this.
Project manager: "What's technical debt? Explain it to me like I'm 6 years old"
Devs:
(source: "Richard Scarry's Storybook Dictionary" : archive.org/details/1scarryRic… )
Storybook Dictionary Richard Scarry'sInternet Archive
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Intanto su #trenord varesenews.it/2025/12/un-cervo…
(consigliata l'apertura con ad blocker, che altrimenti il sito è inguardabile)
Il maestoso esemplare si si è inoltrato nella trincea della ferrovia Varese-Porto Ceresio, spingendosi fino alla banchina. Ritardi sulle linee transfrontaliere e per Porto CeresioRoberto Morandi (Vareseweb Srl)
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Elena ``of Valhalla'' likes this.
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After 15 months of hard work, my dad has finished this impressive model of Minas Tirith! It is 1.4 m high and entirely hand-made out of wood. One of the most time-consuming parts was manually engraving the bricks on all walls and buildings, but this was key to properly convey the huge size of the city. Everything was painted by hand, adding some wear and tear. For a behind-the-scenes look at how he built this check out this video: youtube.com/watch?v=Z1Ywlc8ojj…
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.www.youtube.com
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meanwhile, I've just used another bit of the flour that has been around the house for, I don't know? three years? after suffering a bit of delivery mishap that made it not really something I'd trust for eating.
It looked like flour, it didn't smell bad, currently the forbidden budino smells like lavender oil
nobody will ever know how it tastes (hopefully not even the bugs)
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e intanto ho usato ancora un po' di quella farina che è rimasta in giro per casa per, boh, tre anni? dopo aver subito traumi durante il trasporto che l'hanno resa non proprio adatta all'uso alimentare.
aveva l'aspetto di farina, non aveva cattivi odori, al momento il budino proibito odora di olio essenziale di lavanda
nessuno saprà mai che sapore ha (spero neanche gli insetti)
rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua reshared this.
I've just realized that all of my yogurt is in the fridge downstairs.
also, I haven't set the timer for my tea
this breakfast isn't starting right :D
Oblomov reshared this.
I’m happy to announce the 12th annual Holiday season Conversations giveaway. 🎄☃️
The federated instant messaging client is now available for free on Google Play until New Year’s Eve. 🧨🎆
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays. Enjoy #39C3.
play.google.com/store/apps/det…
#XMPP #Jabber #Conversations_im #DigitalSovereignty #Fediverse
Federated instant messaging for your mobile device (Jabber, XMPP, Snikket)play.google.com
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I've seen a few people post on Mastodon about how they would love a model railway, but can't, cos of space limitations. What if I was to tell you that you can enjoy model railways, even if you live in a tiny apartment.
This is a thread about standards and community.
1/n
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@LaVi @Yaku 🐗 @Rapita dagli alieni se ne parlava l'altro giorno: questa è un'agenda giornaliera formato A5 stampata su carta da stampante (circa 75 g/m²) e rilegata
Il lato con la rilegatura è alto 37 mm, di cui 10 mm sono le due copertine, il lato con solo i fogli sono 27 mm in tutto (e lavorando un po' di martello di gomma lo si potrebbe probabilmente arrotondare e abbassare anche il lato con la rilegatura)
non è un quadernetto snello, ma neanche inusabile, secondo me
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I'm making a simple project in circuitpython that should remain running for a few hours, but at times just freezes.
I'm considering putting an except Exception around the main loop
should I write the exception to a log file on the SD card that I will never look at, or just pass?
wrong answers only :D
Oblomov reshared this.
sto facendo un progettino in circuitpython che dovrebbe rimanere in funzione per qualche ora, ma a volte si pianta.
sto meditando di mettere un except Exception attorno al main loop.
meglio scrivere l'eccezione su un file di log sulla scheda SD che poi non leggerò mai, oppure metterci solo un pass?
solo risposte sbagliate, grazie :D
Oblomov reshared this.
@rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua purtroppo sto usando un adalogger che non ha il wifi, altrimenti potrei vedere se il sito delle poste ha un'api che si possa usare da microcontrollore per inviare il file error.log via posta ogni volta che il dispositivo passa da una rete alla quale riesce a connettersi
sarebbe comodo, no? :D
rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua reshared this.
We tracked like 17 million train arrivals last year to see where delays happen, and this is the result 🗺️
Find out the best and worst stations, routes and times of day in our 2025 Wrapped overview: chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped
(on that note, we have a new website so check that out too)
Find train journeys with the lowest chance of delays, cancellations and missed transfers.chuuchuu.com
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One thing I wish folks knew better about "Linux" that the annoying evangelists never seem to care to mention.
One of the most important differences from other platforms if *how you get your software*.
You don't download it from the author/publisher who might be (these days, is) bundling malware.
You don't get it from a walled garden with commercial incentives to let publishers hurt you.
You don't have to fumble around Google trying to find if the site offering it is reputable.
You get it from a party, usually made up of dedicated volunteers, who believe in the platform and who are vetting all the software they build and package for you. Usually the same one you got your base system from.
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@James Widman @maco @Cassandrich and they don't care if what is uploaded to the repository is user-hostile, as long as they aren't financially responsible for it
even *moar* innovation! /s
@Cassandrich Yes, and this is certainly better than other alternatives, but these volunteers really don't have the resources to thoroughlly vet every single package that goes into their repositories.
Nothing is bulletproof. It's just probably the safest option we currently have.
Filed under: self-induced problems
Years ago, before I read a bit about the producer, I was looking for an ink in a specific shade of blue, and I bought a bottle of Noodler's Eternal Polar Blue #fountainPen ink.
And it's *perfect*, it's exactly the shade I wanted.
And also, it's *crap*, it feathers and bleeds even on decent paper and using my extrafine nib pens.
I had to add gum arabic to make it vaguely usable (with nib pens), but if I add enough to make it behave it's no longer the smoothest writing experience.
And now I have the best part of a whatever 3 oz is in real units bottle and I want to use it, but I also don't want to use it, and if I keep writing with my usual thin nib pens it will take forever!
(edit: I wrote the ink name wrong)
Nella categoria: problemi auto-indotti.
Anni fa, prima di leggere cose sul produttore, stavo cercando un'inchiostro da #stilografica in una sfumatura precisa di blu, e ho comprato una bottiglia di Noodler's Eternal Polar Blue..
Ed è *perfetto*, esattamente la sfumatura che volevo.
Ed è una merda che spiuma e trapassa anche su carta decente usando un pennino ad intinzione extrafine.
Ho dovuto aggiungerci abbondante gomma arabica per renderlo usabile (coi pennini), ma così l'esperienza di scrittura non è più così piacevole..
E adesso mi rimane una buona parte di una bottiglia da qualunque cosa siano 3 oncie in unità di misura vere, e lo voglio usare, ma non lo voglio veramente usare, e se continuo ad usarlo coi pennini fini mi dura per sempre!
Uooops, missà che qualcuno ha fatto una scelta del nome poco felice, se per caso dovessero scoprirlo gli italiani e/o i veneti :D
Mona 7 is available now 🎉 getmona.appMona for Mastodon
Mona is a highly customizable Mastodon app with VoiceOver optimization and native design. Available now on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.Mona for Mastodon
Oblomov reshared this.
@rubecula non dimentichiamo il Vinculo per Arduino.
Poi vai a sapere magari quanti nomi e sigle nostre fanno ridere in Asia, per carità.
Elena ``of Valhalla'' likes this.
I want things that are above my reading level, that's how I get better at reading 🤔😁
@reading @bookstodon @books @humor@fedigroups.social @humor@lemmy.world @aiop
#ReadingMemes #Memes
#ReadAllTheBooks #Humor #Humour
#Reading #Readers #ReadersOfMastodon #ReadingCommunity
#Book #Books #Novel #Novels #Fiction
#Bookwyrm #Bookworm #Bookstodon #BookLove #FantasyBooks #ReadingLevel #Level
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Per chi prende le linee #trenord che passano da Gallarate:
“Si informa la Gentile Clientela che, dal 26 dicembre 2025 al 5 gennaio 2026, per lavori di potenziamento infrastrutturale a cura di RFI, la circolazione dei treni è sospesa tra le stazioni di Gallarate e Rho; per questo subirà variazioni il servizio delle seguenti linee: a.mktgcdn.com/f/3714691/aKy1DA…
Maggiori informazioni su https://casoratesempione.ils.org/2025/12/05/mezzora-damicizia-fpga/Italian Linux Society - Video
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George Clooney is an actor.
Put him in the role of a surgeon in front of a camera, and he will do and say things the average non-surgeon viewer will agree are surgeonish. After an hour of that, we are, as average non-surgeon viewers, satisfied and entertained.
Put him in an operating theatre, and the patient will fucking die because he's not a surgeon and knows nothing about really doing surgery.
This is a post about LLMs.
Hypolite Petovan likes this.
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Why do schools have dances? Why do many high schools host parties, sometimes inter-school parties at the school?
A school isn't just a machine that puts knowledge into people's brains, it's an organization of people. And those people will want to celebrate together from time to time. This WILL happen. "official" events can be more inclusive.
But also for young people it's a part of social education, providing some baseline for how you interact with other people.
1/
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I realize this isn’t about the social aspect, but I do wish that the music at dances wasn’t at literally deafening levels. I’m fairly certain a good percentage of my hearing loss is from attending high school dances where my ears were left ringing afterwards. My two kids who attended one during their middle school years both refused to go to a second one because the decibel level was painful for them.
We don’t need to harm kids’ hearing for them to have a good time together.
Yeah I never got that. The kids at the school where I work don't like loud music but it's a very nerdy school.
I think some people like it for some reason, though. Extroverts need to be studied.
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does anybody know whether getting hurt while doing a feudal corvee counts as work-related injury for insurance reasons?
asking for a friend who just hit the back of her ankle with a metal door just after feeding the Marquess (before breakfast, because of course you have to harvest your lord's field before your own).
(I'm fine, it's just a small scrape)
Oblomov reshared this.
per caso qualcuno sa se infortunarsi mentre si sta svolgendo una corvee feudale conta come infortunio sul lavoro e va denunciato all'INAIL?
chiedo per un'amica che si è tirata una porta di metallo sulla caviglia subito dopo aver dato da mangiare al Marchese (prima di colazione, perché ovviamente si deve fare il raccolto sui campi dei signore prima del tuo).
(è tutto a posto, solo una sbucciatura)
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Have I just tried to tell the Marquess (a.k.a. #notOurCat) that we have just had solar panels installed, and as soon as they'll get actually connected I'll change the time when I wash my laundry, and thus the time when he sees me putting out the laundry to dry?
Did he understand one single word of what I was telling him? I only implied, but didn't say “and give you kibbles”.
"I find your lack of understanding that my kibbles are obviously NOT subject to puny human thingies like time... disturbing"
- his grace the Marquess
Elena ``of Valhalla'' likes this.
yesterday I've spent the evening with a low-grade worry that I was forgetting something
this morning I woke up realizing that the bread rolls I was supposed to cook yesterday after dinner had not been cooked
5 minutes ago I had a slice of freshly baked flat loaf :D
Oblomov reshared this.
ieri ho passato la serata con un vago senso di stare dimenticando qualcosa
stamattina mi sono svegliata ricordandomi che i panini che avrei dovuto cuocere ieri dopo cena non erano stati cotti
5 minuti fa ho mangiato una fetta di pagnotta bassa appena uscita dal forno :D
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Magari a @LaVi interessa sapere che ho appena restituito retebibliotecaria.provincia.va… ed è in viaggio per tornare in quel di Saronno
(è un libro del 1978, con riproduzioni delle stampe dell'ottocento)
Album di costumi lombardi / presentazione di Giorgio LiseRete Bibliotecaria della Provincia di Varese
rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua reshared this.
@LaVi beh, lettura è parola forte, visto che c'erano 4 pagine di introduzione e tutto il resto erano stampe di personaggi lombardi, tipo
però indubbiamente interessante
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🎉 Some important #CrossBorderRail news! 🎉
After thinking about the idea for more than a decade (yeah, this is later than a DB train!) I am finally starting to plan building a railway organisation for lobbying work, and @patrick @partim & @redjives are in from the start. We're sort of soft launching today
Details 👇
jonworth.eu/european-rail-pass…
It has been something in the back of my mind for more than a decade: how could railway passengers be better represented to campaign for improvements in international rail? Here's a piece I wrote in 2014 about the topic.Jon Worth
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Ada Palmer likes this.
Huh. Just chatted in person with someone who's been on #mastodon for a while, now, who honestly thought that all the Mastodon domains were run by Mastodon. And having a different domain was, like, just a vanity thing to look cool. It only came up because they were complaining about an issue they were having, and they were on a smaller server (not naming it for anonymity), so I suggested contacting their server admin about the problem. I was surprised when they answered "Dude nobody at big companies reads those reports. It just all goes to AI or whatever." It took some actual convincing to get them to believe that the server they're on does, in fact, have a living breathing human admin who can be talked to.
Anyway, folks, support your #fediverse server admins and moderators. With money, where you can. They're almost certainly getting messages from users who think that reporting things to an admin here is exactly like reporting stuff to Facebook or Google. IE: screaming at a giant faceless entity who's never going to care or do anything about whatever your problem is.
Hypolite Petovan likes this.
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1684: Leibniz “Novo methodus”
1687: Newton “Principia”
But can we solve the calculus discovery controversy with a cookie tiebreaker?
1891: Leibniz cookies invented en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz-…
1891: Fig Newtons invented en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newtons_…
Unbelievable. STILL TIED.
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* they make Leibniz cookies with chocolate (they are the only variants that we get here in Italy)
* Leibniz notation is much clearer and easy to extend than Newton's
to me there is a clear winner
molly clare likes this.
@valhalla you'll get no argument from me, fig newtons are nasty and really do not deserve to be called a "cookie".
(They are actually named after Newton, Massachusetts rather than Sir Isaac. Details)
Elena ``of Valhalla'' likes this.
Is this the day when we¹ all² talk about our writing tools obsessions?
When I'm home, most of what I write is written using #dipPens, including vintage ones that were in use in the schools of Italy up to the 1950s and modern ones.
AMA :)
¹ flipping.rocks/@inherentlee/11…
² craftgoblin.club/@silhelm/1156…
Ho aggiornato "Cinque & Cinque" alla versione 1.4. E sto preparando un'espansione con le razze e classi classiche di D&D, anche loro rivisitate in chiave toscana umoristica, e semplificate.
Chiunque abbia voglia può contribuire con un proprio disegno (di una razza o classe standard di D&D). Ovviamente accreditato con link e tutti i crismi.
Altrettanto ovviamente, gratis, essendo gratis tutto il progetto.
Come il resto, l'espansione sarà CC BY-SA.
billeboo.itch.io/cinque-e-cinq…
Versione facile, rapida, flessibile di D&D 5 basata su Microlite, in italiano, open sourceitch.io
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Immagino che tutta #puntarella si starà rallegrando di questa notizia:
ilpost.it/2025/12/04/atac-risa…
(cinque interi euri! pure #trenord riesce a fare di meglio!)
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dear virt-manager,
when I try to create a virtual machine that uses a network that is not currently active you conveniently provide me with a button to activate it.
*why* don't you do the same when I try to *start* a virtual machine?
*why* do I have to start the network somewhere else???
(Could I add a whishlist bug? yes. Do I want to bother? eh.)
rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua reshared this.
caro virt-manager,
quando cerco di creare una macchina virtuale che usa una rete attualmente non attiva mi fornisci un comodo pulsante per attivarla.
*perché* non fai la stessa cosa quando cerco di far *partire* una macchina virtuale?
*perché* in quel caso devo far partire la rete da un'altra parte?
(Potrei aprire un bug whishlist? sì. Ne ho voglia. meh.)
Working on a spinning project, goal of a single pair of socks. I decided to do Best Case math, dedicated to anyone who says I should "just" sell my handspun &/or knitting to make money while I'm out of work…
2 hr wool prep
20 hr spinning singles
6 hr chain ply prep
2 hr plying
20 hr knitting
------
50 hr work
x $16.30/hr (minimum wage in my state)
------
$815
+ $18 for wool (on Big! Sale!) = $833
$833. For socks. Before profit. 🤔
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Though a bit niche, my #FreeSoftwareAdvent today is ed(1). As the goofball behind @ed1conf, I certainly play it up, but I certainly use it more than the average Unix/BSD/Linux user.
A while ago I wrote up list of reasons¹ why one might use ed, and some are more obscure/improbable reasons (though I've encountered all of them in that post), there are a couple of those that drive me back to ed regularly:
• I can still see the output of previous commands on the screen while I edit, where a full-screen editor would obscure that output that I need to incorporate in my edit
• it's just darn fast for a quick edit, changing a variable name or adding/removing an entry in a list, etc. No startup costs for a honkin' huge $VISUAL with dozens of plugins and language-server processes and GUI rendering
• very usable on low-bandwith/high-latency connections like I sometimes get when I remote into machines (less of a problem now, but I still experience sessions where I'll SSH in, invoke ed, make the change, write & quit, and exit the shell, in a couple seconds, while the screen repaints things oh-so-slowly
• and most importantly, there's quality geek-cred for using it in front of others 😆
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Today I learned that NASA has a collection of free ebooks that can be downloaded as pdfs or ebub format.
The science books even include a children’s section with fun activites and coloring books!
science.nasa.gov/multimedia/sc…
#nasa
From Earth and the other planets in our solar system, to supermassive black holes and the distant galaxies that contain them, explore NASA science and imagery through our library of e-books.Colleen Kaiser (NASA Science)
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let's make a greeting card go on an adventure!!
here's the guidelines so far for #siblinghoodOfTheTravelingGreetingCard
poke thy holes, rascals ❤
welcome to the siblinghood of the traveling greeting card.Lee Cattarin (hello hello)
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Free Software that I rely on. One per day, I guess.
Okay.... Day 1....
Inkscape
A vector graphics editor (edits SVG documents).
I use this in a lot of different ways whenever I need a drawing:
* Presentation slides
* Graphic illustrations/diagrams
* "Decal" graphics for 3D textures
* Layout of images or other graphics
* Video poster/cover graphics
* Book design
Also included in most desktop Linux distributions, I believe.
Inkscape is professional vector graphics software which runs on Linux, macOS and Windows desktop computers.inkscape.org
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Free Software that I rely on. One per day, I guess.
Day 2:
Gnu Image Manipulation Program
Known as #GIMP or as #GnuIMP by those who don't like the other name.
This is my go-to tool for basic image processing of photos and images for publication. It's a pretty common workflow for me to crop and/or enhance photos in Gimp and then load the output into Inkscape for layout work.
Also, FWIW, I learned it before I learned Photoshop, which frankly seemed kind of like a backward step to me, particularly in the way that Photoshop filters never seemed to have any controls (at the time -- this was 25 years ago and I haven't used Photoshop since then).
Which fuels my general belief that terms like "more intuitive" or "more powerful" are mostly a function of what you are familiar with.
It's one of the earliest graphics creation software packages I learned on Linux, and so it's become so much second nature that I hardly think about it anymore.
These days I use it all the time to crop and rescale screen captures, so I've attached one of cropping a screencap of itself.
Free Software that I rely on. One per day, I guess.
Day 3:
Krita
I think it's particularly important to mention Krita in the context of Inkscape and Gimp to differentiate them. For a long time, I basically thought of Gimp and Krita as competitors, but they serve different goals:
Gimp is, as the name says, for "image manipulation", whereas Krita is a DIGITAL PAINTING application. It is more focused on creating the art in the application than on tweaking existing elements. And while Krita and Gimp have limited vector art capabilities, they come nowhere near Inkscape in that category.
Since I'm not much of a digital painter, though, I have not really put Krita through its paces, nor trained myself extensively on it.
My daughter HAS, and she creates a LOT of character art using it. So she is the real Krita expert in the family. The "KitCAT" logo below is one I commissioned from her as a studio mascot.
But it has some other useful features for me -- the one I use the most is that it can open 16-bit graphics I use for some backdrop textures in Blender and also the Multilayer EXR files generated from Blender. This makes it the easiest way for me to check them (the attachment below shows a recent "Ink" render, including masks for "billboard extras").
Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone.Digital Painting. Creative Freedom.
Anban Govender likes this.
Anban Govender reshared this.
Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 4:
Papagayo NG
This one fills a very important niche in my pipeline. It is a tool to make it much easier to line up lip movements to speech.
This is not an AI tool and does not do the alignment for you, but it makes it much it easier to do.
We used this extensively in "Lunatics!", particularly for the long dialogues in the Press Conference.
Morevna Project maintains this program, which is a fork of the original "Papagayo" with some enhancements. Hence the "NG":
morevnaproject.org/papagayo-ng…
I've attached the 2015 "2-Min Tutorial" in which I briefly explained how to use the program.
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #Papagayo #PapagayoNG #Lipsync #Animation
The follow-up tutorial explained how to import the file exported from Papagayo into Blender:
tv.filmfreedom.net/w/jSp1opgLK…
#Animation #Lipsync #Blender3D #PapagayoNG
In this 2nd tutorial on lipsync with Papagayo for Blender, I explain how to import the MOHO .dat lipsync file into Blender for animation. Direct link to the download page for the script on our site...Film Freedom PeerTube
"...on our production website..."
I guess that's another thing I need to find and upload.
I've also got a language patch for Japanese for Papagayo... SOMEWHERE. 
Ah well. I think Morevna has a copy of the Blender extension, too.
Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 5:
Wordpress
Here's a program I regularly use at least once a month when I write up my project summaries. And I've been using it for a little over ten years now.
It is both a blogging platform and a content management system, which makes it a very good hub for my site.
At current count, I have published 386 articles and 3537 images on this site. I think I'm getting my investment back on this one.
I currently get the program via YunoHost:
apps.yunohost.org/app/wordpres…
That page includes links to the upstream sites if you'd rather install it some other way. There are MANY options.
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #Wordpress #Blogging #Writing #Illustration
Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 6:
Audacity
Another old one! I think I've been using Audacity for about 25 years, now.
It is a "destructive audio editor", which means it is kind of the audio equivalent to a bitmap editor in graphics -- you are actually changing the values of the samples in the recording when you make changes, rather than applying filters on top of them as non-destructive editors do.
This makes Audacity particularly good at constructing sound effects from recorded sources.
I do most of my audio processing in Audacity, but even if I do involve a non-destructive "DAW" platform, I would probably continue to use Audacity for creating effects and recording voices.
It is an excellent tool for recording audio directly or reviewing and selecting audio from field recordings.
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #Audacity #Audio #DAW #Sound
Audacity is the world's most popular audio editing and recording app. Edit, mix, and enhance your audio tracks with the power of Audacity. Download now!www.audacityteam.org
Suggestion: make a custom #hashtag for each of these series so that it's easy to find/read them all, once you have read one of them.
It could be something as simple as #TerryHancockFreeSoftwareAdvent
Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 7:
ImageMagick
This is actually a small suite of tools that can be used from the command line, although it also has a GUI interface. Pretty old school software; been around for ages; still very handy.
Not as powerful as Gimp or Krita for manipulating a single image, but with ImageMagick and a bash script you can make changes en masse ("convert" and "mogrify" -- which does the job in place). You can quickly check the format and size of images from the command line ("identify") or simply pop up the image with "display".
Finally, with "compose" you can make an image combining multiple images in many different ways, including making a grid with or without labels.
I don't use it as much as I used to, but it is still the simplest way to check image content from the command line. And it's really the only option when you need to change a whole lot of images at once.
Also often used on server back ends to manipulate images for display in web applications.
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #ImageMagick #Graphics #FreeSoftware #OpenSource
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Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 8:
Blender
This one's a gimme. Blender is the single most important free software tool in my project toolbox.
Weirdly, I still use Blender 2.79, because I built my project on the "Blender Internal" render which they removed in 2.8 (more about that in a comment). Meanwhile Blender is on at least v4 now.
I'm sure you've heard of it, but you may not realize Blender's full scope. It is designed to be a complete 3D animation suite in one package:
* 3D surface modeler
* Materials editor, shader, rendering engine
* 3D armature & shape key animation
* 2D annotations
* 2D "grease pencil" animation tool
* video clip editor with rotoscoping and tracking for VFX work
* video sequence editor for editing clips together
It is pretty complete, and many people have made animated films entirely in Blender, although it can also be integrated into a pipeline with other tools, as I've done on Lunatics Project.
It's popular with indy film makers and Hollywood alike.
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #Blender3D #Blender #Animation #FreeSoftware #OpenSource
We built Lunatics around the Blender Internal renderer, which was removed along with the game engine when they went to v2.8. Switching rendering engines would be too big an ask, so we just stuck with 2.79 (for now).
There IS a fork of the program, called "UPBGE" that incorporates both BI and the Game Engine (also removed with 2.8).
Later Blender includes the "Eevee" renderer, which I understand was based on the previous "viewport renderer" (that's also when "annotations" became separate from "grease pencil").
And the "Cycles" renderer, which is meant to be more photorealistic was retained.
But they junked "Blender Internal". I understand it had a lot of "technical debt". And the Blender Game Engine I think was considered to be out of scope and not competitive with other game engines, so they dropped that.
There are also 3rd party renderers. I haven't tried them, myself, but I hear good things about them from time to time.
One of particular interest to me is "BEER" the "Blender Extended Expressive Renderer" which is explicitly designed for NPR3D work, and it's successor (I think), called "Malt".
I might give those a go before long. Maybe next year.
It occurs to me to wonder if UPBGE or some other package of BI can be used for rendering from later versions of Blender? 🤔
UPBGE:
upbge.org
BNPR - BEER & MALT:
github.com/bnpr
Yes. Eevee is pretty good. There are some trouble spots, and in any case, adapting existing models represents a significant amount of work.
Not to mention loads of "look testing".
My top options (for future episodes) are:
* Adapt to Eevee
* Adopt BEER or Malt engines
* Keep on keeping on with Blender 2.79
* Find some way to plug BI in as a 3rd party renderer, perhaps via UPBGE..?
* I might even consider Cycles, though I doubt it
Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 9:
YunoHost
This is technically more of a distribution than an individual software. There's a portal, and a large volunteer packaging effort to create apps for it. And a large catalog of applications already packaged.
I definitely rely on it. So I'm counting it.
YunoHost is how I have Wordpress (which I've already mentioned) installed -- along with other software I haven't got to yet.
It is based on Debian Linux: a particular install with applications already configured to work on it, pretty close to "plug and play". It's like the packaging systems for Linux desktop systems -- but for the Internet.
It makes managing a web application site SO much easier. I decided to adopt it as the basis of my "virtual studio" instead of trying to write something new.
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #YunoHost #Debian #FreeSoftware #OpenSource
YunoHost is a system that installs itself on a server and allows you to install and maintain - with very little technical knowledge - digital services (apps) that you control.yunohost.org
Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 10:
Open Camera
I'm stuck on my phone today, so today's free software is an Android smartphone app from the F-Droid repo: Open Camera.
I use it to record the "real life" parts for my daily logs. A particularly useful feature is the "photo stamp" so I have the date and time on screen.
Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 11:
Seafile
I like Seafile, it's simple. It does one thing well, which is make it easy to share files between different machines. It reminds me of Google Drive before they junked it up.
And if you run your own Seafile server on your LAN, this is totally secure, without your data ever having to leave your control at all.
It's weird that that has become a luxury, but such is 21st century corporate-platform computing.
Anyway, none of that with Seafile running on your own LAN. I run it on my household file server, with clients on my phone and my workstation.
For several years, this has been my go-to solution for transferring photos and note files from my phone to my workstation, where I edit my logs.
manual.seafile.com/latest/
seafile.com
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #Seafile #FileSharing
Seafile is an open source, self-hosted file sync and share solution with high performance and reliability. Sync, access, and collaborate on files on your own server or private cloud.www.seafile.com
Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 12:
Gwenview
For this list, I've been trying to focus not so much on the most exciting applications as the ones I use so often I forget they exist -- and Gwenview definitely fits in that category. I literally use it every day.
It's an image/multimedia browsing utility. Ostensibly for KDE, although I routinely use it in XFCE.
In any case, it's very low-maintenance and the fastest way for me to check out a tree of images -- whether they're PR collections or a series of frames in a PNG stream. Helps a lot when I'm looking for an image and can't quite remember what I called the file.
I've tried some other image browsing apps, but this is the one I keep coming back to.
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #Gwenview #Images #Graphics #FreeSoftware #OpenSource
Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 13:
VideoLAN Client, a.k.a. VLC
Some distro maintainers apparently hate it. It is very customizable, which results in multiple and frequent UI changes.
But damn is it useful! I MUST have it.
I have found very few video formats that VLC won't play, at least if you install all the codecs (some of which are non-free, which is why you have to install them later -- but that's not VLC's fault).
It is my usual music player, and video player. I use it to check my newly-edited videos.
Somewhere in there is a way to edit metadata in files -- I know I've used it, though not in a long time.
And if I go to "Media -> Convert/Save", it can convert video formats, which can be a life-saver.
If my computer should shut down suddenly, my screenlogging script will produce a corrupted video. VLC can read it and convert into a corrected format that other programs can read. Handy!
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #VLC #VideoLan #MusicPlayer #VideoPlayer #Multimedia
VLC: Official site - Free multimedia solutions for all OS!www.videolan.org
Elena ``of Valhalla'' likes this.
Well, Ubuntu Studio decided to abandon the Debian installation, requiring use of the sandboxed Snap distribution, which would be one of the top reasons I switched to AV Linux.
They were trying to push some other video player as default -- I've forgotten the name, now. It's been a few years.
EDIT: It was "Parole", perhaps because I was using XFCE..?
en.ubunlog.com/parole-the-xfce…
For example.
Parole is a modern simple media player based on the GStreamer framework and written to fit well on the Xfce desktop ...Darkcrizt (Ubunlog)
Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 14:
FFMPEG
Under the hood, most open-source multimedia application software relies heavily on ffmpeg -- either the core libraries, or its scriptable command-line interface.
The man page is HUGE. Why there are so many GUI front-ends!
For daily use, I wrote a 75-line Python script that calls FFMPEG to record my whole virtual screen at 1 FPS to log my workdays.
It sends something like this to FFMPEG:
`/usr/bin/ffmpeg -report -loglevel quiet -f x11grab -draw_mouse 1 -framerate 1 -video_size 5760x2160 -i :0.0+0,0 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:v libx264 -preset veryfast -q:v 1 -s 5760x2160 -f matroska /worklog/capture sintel-2025-12-13_13-37-37.mkv`
Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 15:
Vokoscreen
I use my special script for daily screen recordings, but I started by using Vokoscreen, and I still use it when I want to make a more intentional screen recording (often at a faster rate like 10fps).
Vokoscreen gives me the flexibility to choose what part of the screen I want to record, frame rate, whether I want to record audio from microphone or output from the system. Which is what I need.
There is also OBS Studio, which I know some people love, and which has more options for live-streaming. But I don't do that. I record, and then I edit. So it's just more complexity than I need.
Upstream:
linuxecke.volkoh.de/vokoscreen…
But I just get the Debian package:
packages.debian.org/trixie/vok…
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #Vokoscreen #Video #Multimedia
easy to use screencast creatorpackages.debian.org
Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 16:
Kdenlive
I'm pretty sure this is that rarity among modern software package names -- an *actual* acronym for (I think): "K Desktop Environment Non-Linear Interactive Video Editor".
Well, in any case, that's what it is, so it fits.
This is a pretty featureful video editor and it is my choice for editing everything from my daily screen logs to my animated project, "Lunatics!"
It's difficult to overstate the importance of this one to me.
The only notable flaws are that it does crash more often than I would like (but it recovers very well), and it might be on the slow side for rendering. Definitely good to use "proxy workflow" for high-definition projects. Which I do.
I'm using v22.12. I believe the most recent is v25.08 stable or v25.12 testing.
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #Kdenlive #Video #VideoEditor
Kdenlive is the acronym for KDE Non-Linear Video Editor. It works on Linux, Windows, macOS, and BSD.Kdenlive - Free and Open Source Video Editor
Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 17:
Kate
Hang around Linux and FOSS circles long enough, and you will encounter the Editor Wars, in which the battle of the ancient superpowers of Vi versus Emacs continues to burn in the dulled flames of their Cold War.
But some of us like cocoa, with sprinkles! 
✨
My favorite text editor is (horrors) a GUI application: Kate. 
The "KDE Advanced Text Editor".
It's an excellent general purpose tool, whether you want to write in plain text, Markdown, HTML, CSS, or code for any of several dozen programming languages.
It lacks IDE-like features, such as test-runners or compilers, although you can add scripts to trigger from the "Tools" menu, so it could be used as an IDE with a little tinkering.
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #TextEditor #Kate
Kate is a modern text editor built on the KDE Frameworks and Qt.Kate - Get an Edge in Editing
Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 18:
MKVToolNix
This is a tool kit of utilities, including a GUI front end, for manipulating Matroska streaming multimedia files (usually "MKV" or "MKA" files).
The Matroska container format allows for multiple audio, video, and text streams, which means you can encode a video with multiple options for audio and subtitles (as well as alternate video tracks).
It also supports setting up "Chapter" marks.
A must-have for authoring and checking complex videos for streaming and download use.
Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 19:
PeerTube
PeerTube is the main federated video publishing platform, with an interface similar to YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, etc.
Videos are federated like other posts on the Fediverse, as are comments.
It supports many channels and playlists per user.
Discoverability is still a little weak, and the total volume is small compared to the corporate behemoths, but we do have Framasoft's "Sepia Search" service, and the PeerTube universe is growing.
Our PeerTube server is probably the 2nd most important web application I'm running on our server. This has become my primary publication point for both "Lunatics!" and "Film Freedom".
joinpeertube.org
sepiasearch.org/
Our own server:
tv.filmfreedom.net
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #PeerTube #Video #Publishing #Fediverse
A free software to take back control of your videos! With more than 600,000 hosted videos, viewed more than 70 millions times and 150,000 users, PeerTube is the decentralized free software alternative to videos platforms developed by FramasoftJoinPeerTube
Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 20:
Nextcloud
Primarily thought of as a file-sharing solution, but actually, via plugins can be used as an entire office suite, much like Google Office, but with you in control of your own data and features.
I am currently involved in re-engineering this part of our site, so it's not currently up, and will be a stub for awhile until I can move to a larger server.
But this is a screen capture of our production folder from our testing server last Spring. The plan is for us to have our primary production sources integrated in Nextcloud via an "external folder".
We also have Nextcloud installed via YunoHost:
apps.yunohost.org/app/nextclou…
It's very easy to install, although there's a lot to do after with customization and plugins. The "external folder" part I described is fairly intricate to get right, especially in how you want it to appear to users.
It took awhile for me to follow the conceptualization of virtualized "shares" versus a file system, and external folders are tied to the file system.
Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 21:
DVD Styler
When I want to master my own DVD, with menus and easter eggs and all the other goodies, DVDStyler is my tool of choice.
It provides a grapthical front-end for DVDAuthor, and supports most of the features you'd expect to be able to create on a DVD (I think there may be a few gaps, but I haven't found them limiting).
The program does have simple default templates which makes it easy to whip up a simple DVD for your home movies, but I usually want something more complex and original, so I start from scratch.
sourceforge.net/projects/dvdst…
Also see DVDAuthor, the backend:
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #DVDStyler #DVD #Video #Publishing
Download DVDStyler for free. A cross-platform DVD authoring application. DVDStyler is a cross-platform free DVD authoring application that makes possible for video enthusiasts to create professional-looking DVDs.SourceForge
Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 22:
LibreOffice Calc
Behind the scenes, I have found a lot of uses for Calc spreadsheets (which I refer to as my "odious spreadsheets", because they're in "ODS" format).
In the screencap below from a doc, I was using it to establish the finishing state of various 3D assets.
I also use it every year for accounting for income taxes.
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #LibreOffice #Spreadsheet #Calc #FreeSoftware #OpenSource
Free office suite – the evolution of OpenOffice. Compatible with Microsoft .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx. Updated regularly, community powered.www.libreoffice.org
Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 23:
Pelican (and Pelican Importer)
While I use Wordpress for my live Production Log, I also keep annual offline permanent archives on M-Disc media. For these, I need a static HTML site that I can read offline with a browser.
There are a number of static site generators, but I use Pelican. Partly because I'm partial to stuff written in Python, and partly because it has a really good import utility to get the content from Wordpress's XML export.
I also like that I can add articles in HTML, Markdown, or reStructuredText formats.
getpelican.com/
github.com/getpelican/pelican
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #Pelican #Python #Static
Static site generator that supports Markdown and reST syntax. Powered by Python. - getpelican/pelicanGitHub
Pelican's importer is not a completely automated solution for me. I've often found that I had to edit the articles to fix various unsupported features (the WP "galleries" didn't work).
And since the videos were embedded on other sites, especially our PeerTube, I wrote a script to download and replace them, although it isn't really flexible enough, so it misses a few.
Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 24:
Firefox
I've been using Mozilla-based browsers since Netscape, and I still do.
And a LOT of my time is spent using the browser, whether socializing on the Fediverse or managing my server.
Despite the current kerfuffle over Mozilla incorporating opt-out AI features that no one wants, I think they are still the best option. Perhaps I'll have to tinker with my settings, or perhaps I'll use one of the several available forks -- but it'll still be Mozilla underneath.
Also, I think it is critical to retain an ecosystem of multiple browsers, rather than a single approved one. We saw the dangers of that with Internet Explorer, and we see it now with Chromium dependencies.
firefox.com
mozilla.org
firefox-source-docs.mozilla.or…
#FreeSoftwareAdvent #FireFox #Mozilla #WebBrowser
Firefox is a free web browser backed by Mozilla, a non-profit dedicated to internet health and privacy.Firefox
Were Chromium and Blink not owned/controlled by Google, I might trust them more. I'm still willing to use them, but I feel there is great danger in developing a dependency on a vertically-integrated hydraulic monopoly.
Google is that already. Mozilla might be trying for it, though I'm skeptical, but in any case, they aren't there now.
I would welcome a 3rd major codebase for browsers -- a hard fork of one of the above, perhaps. But as others have mentioned, it's a substantial project to actually make that work. I know it's not going to be me doing it, though I'm happy to test.
I have used some of the independent browsers. I am quite partial to "w3m" as a terminal-based HTML browser.
But I know that a lot of the web isn't going to work properly on those. The standards-compliance work is an arms race with corporate site developers constantly trying to push the envelope with new Javascript features -- especially now that so much of the web is actually JS web applications, rather than documents.
A small indy project can't seriously hope to keep up in that race, though they can embrace a "small web" approach and stick to basics.
Free Software that I rely on. One per day.
Day 25:
K3B
My head-canon is that it stands for "KDE Burn Baby Burn". I may have heard that somewhere, but not sure. 🤔
In any case, it's my favorite software for ripping and burning optical media: CD, DVD, Blu-Ray. Or you can just create the ISO image.
This is the final stop for me for authoring a DVD release.
And it's the final stop for my list.
Wishing you a Happy Holiday!
BTW, we have PeerTube installed via the YunoHost app. Very easy to set up:
YunoHost is officially a derivative distribution of Debian, and now follows the Debian versioning system -- so "YunoHost 12" is based on "Debian 12", etc.
YunoHost is exclusively a server-oriented distribution. It has no desktop environment -- you interact via command line or web.
If I had to, I could get a desktop environment running on the same machine as YunoHost, but I can think of several reasons why that's a bad idea.
FWIW, I currently run AV Linux on my desktop workstation.
i see! Well, i have a kinda broken laptop that i want to transform in a server, maybe YunoHost can be an option. I like the idea of Debian but never used it due to the necessity of non-free drivers, especially on wifi, one day i´ll make this step forward!
I never heard about this AV linux btw! looks interesting!
AV is derived from MX which is derived from Debian. It's a multimedia focused distribution.
It provides both Systemd and Sys5Init boot modes, uses XFCE as the default, relies on APT (.deb) packages, and provides support for a wide range of multimedia applications (some are AppImages that were converted to DEB packages).
No Snaps, which was my main complaint about Ubuntu Studio (which is otherwise quite good for multimedia, IMHO -- I used it for years).
Support is a bit thin -- I think it's mostly one guy. So I am a little concerned about future stability, but it's a good place for me now at least.
I don't really want to try to adapt Debian to my needs from scratch (then I would be the one guy!).
I don't like the sandboxing.
I don't like the enforcement of system folder structure.
Linux Standard Base is great for Linux distributions -- and as the name suggests, it's a good *base*.
But for a production environment, there are good reasons to manage projects on separate high-level disk mounts. And if other people don't like that, that's fine -- but when they try to dictate that to me, that's an overstep. I won't put up with it.
And the sandboxing system makes a horrific mess out of the output from "df" with all the loopback devices. I literally had to get in the habit of filtering out loopback devices with grep to see the status of my real disk mounts.
I found this infuriating, and the Ubuntu commitment to Snaps was an irreconcilable difference for me. So I left for a distro that didn't do this to me.
AppImages don't do this stuff. I don't have experience with Flatpak. But I also don't really get what's wrong with just using APT.
Perhaps this makes me a curmudgeon? 
🤷♂️
@Space Catitude 🚀 @JoannePaixa my guess is that using APT it's harder for people to sell you their proprietary apps
I'll just keep using APT from the distribution repository, thanks, and yell at those youngsters
@alexisbushnell
Well, I think the Russians part is a myth. 🤭
What happened was that, starting in v3 or so, the new management wanted to make it a default that the program would report metrics back to the project -- i.e. "phone home". The motivation being that this is helpful for development.
This is very upsetting to most open-source folks, who are pretty hostile about this kind of privacy issue.
However, it was easy to turn off, and also any version built by a distro team (e.g. the Debian package) would simply have this feature turned off by default. It's a build issue.
I suspect the project probably backed off, though I haven't followed up. I always used a version that did not have this issue, so it was never an issue for me (or Linux users in general).
On Windows, of course, the culture is very different and a lot of software has "phone home" features, so Audacity would not particularly stand out by having this.
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Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla'' • •Caro Fediverso #FaiDaTe,
qualcuno ha idea di quanto tempo impieghi la #colladiFarina per asciugare?
ovvero per quanto tempo devo lasciare i pezzi sotto pesi, e quanto tempo devo lasciar passare prima di fare dei trattamenti che rendano il pezzo resistente all'acqua
immagino che sia qualcosa tra le 8 e le 24 ore per la prima parte, o sono totalmente fuori strada?
al momento sto incollando quattro strati di cartone ondulato più o meno grande come un B3, ma per il futuro sono utili delle linee guida generiche
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rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla'' • • •Per esperienza personale posso dirti che la colla Pritt stesa tra due fogli plastificati NON asciuga (resta come se fosse dentro allo stick) nonostante varie decine di kg appoggiati sopra.
Una soluzione potrebbe essere una serie di forellini nelle corrugature, in modo che la colla entri e faccia funghetto con quella fuori, ma credo non ci siano studi a riguardo (però per saldare l'acciaio funziona).
Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua • •rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua reshared this.
rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla'' • • •Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua • •@rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua quando son scesa nel pomeriggio qualcuno, probabilmente il gatto, aveva appena spostato i pesi, e sembra attaccato bene
per andare avanti a farci cose aspetto domani o dopo, a seconda degli impegni, comunque
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