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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • In germany - I think - blood and plasma donations are most commonly done with the DRK (German Red Cross). I might be wrong, but DRK is not a for profit organization, but “gemeinnützig”. Organizations with that status get controlled by the government for it, so they are non-profit. I think the 25€ are an incentive to come and donate, just as the chocolate and drinks and the small goodies, that you get there. And you only can get the money, if you go to one of the fixed DRK locations. If the DRK comes to somewhere near you (as they often do with churches, town halls, schools and universities) you don’t get any money. I can at least believe, that these two are monetarily similar for the DRK. If you come to them, they don’t need to pay for getting the equipment and people to you. And providing incentives for donating blood is in effect a good thing, as they are working, thus we have more blood to save lifes.

    Ofcourse actors later in the chain are probably profit oriented. Though there I would see the discussion disconnected from the donation. It is more about if we want profit oriented actors in healthcare.

    And - as always - the US healthcare system seems to do the worst thing possible every time. Sorry, americans, don’t want to bash you, but capitalism…


  • An interesting customer base might be small communal organisations. At our local scouts troop I had a discussion with a friend, who is also in IT. His idea (not fleshed out) was to provide small local organizations with a stack of already configured open source software to support the typical needs of such organizations (like a wordpress website, a nextcloud for file storage and common calender, limesurvey for surveys and event registration, mailman3 for mailing lists,…). Depending on the needs you could sell the initial setup process (your personal work in setting up and skill transfer) or ongoing support. Though such organizations normally don’t have much money to give away. So probably its not really worth your time financially (though probably really appreciated in the community).





  • It was a friend who helped me install ubuntu 8 on my PC in dualboot when I was like 14/15 years old. Was already a computer nerd, though my friend was way more into everything Linux related. I got hooked there, though at that time it was a real pain in the ass to use wifi in ubuntu. I wouldn’t call me obsessed, but I really don’t like using Windows. I have to for work and I despise it.



  • Thanks for your answer!

    Actually I already have the entries in a proper JSON format. I build my django API endpoints to get a batch of entries with all their details, including URLs for the actual media. Only the visualization is not how I would like it to be. I already have a visualization, that is list-like and looks good, but is not suitable for the mass of entries the endproduct will have to hold. Thus a zoomable timeline.

    I know about TImelineJS’s events, but that didn’t really help me. One of the problems I encountered was with stacking or not stacking the elements, when zooming out. Maybe I need to dig more in CSS to dynamically size each entry based on … what exactly? Zoom position? Collision with other entries? Somehow calculated density of entries? You see, I’m very much confused and overwhelmed. I don’t want to invest much time in a direction, that will not lead to the right place.

    I will have a look at the tutorial and vueuse. Previously I followed a 4h tutorial on youtube, which was about vue and django in conjunction. Maybe after that tutorial I understand, how I might build the timeline myself.

    EDIT: Ok, I did go through the tutorial now. Almost all concepts where not new to me, but I definitely learned a bit about reactivity (used it unknowning of the concept through the data function of a component). Though I still don’t know how I would start building a Timeline. I can create and use components in Vue (already using that in my app), but I have problems handling the low level visual part, which is not just some HTML objects nested, like my list of entries.






  • One big problem that I see with the current system is, that - like everything in capitalism - it works with the attention economy. Big projects with many functions (like computing platforms) get much attention, especially from companies, who donate and contribute for their own good. But there are many small projects, often small libraries, that are developed by single persons for free, but used everywhere. If I remember correctly the disaster with log4j was such a case. Real developers surely know even better examples. The funding of such widely used software can effect the security of our whole IT stack.


  • The average user only uses what is already in their devices or very easily obtained and already known by them. On PCs you got Windows and Microsoft of course pushes their products (Edge, MS Office, OneDrive,…). On Smartphones you have Apple and Google controlling the devices way more than with PCs and being Gatekeepers through their appstores and preinstalled apps. Why would the average user try to research to find FOSS alternatives in that big pile of proprietary and monetized apps or jump through hoops to actually use them (keeping things FOSS is not easy on smartphone due to policies from google and apple)? The big players are controlling the market and they try to only allow FOSS when it benefits them.