SuperDicq on Nostr: James-PE (Starnix) Mario 🔒 I have some interesting stories about using low spec ...
James-PE (Starnix) (npub1kfe…fnvf) Mario 🔒 (npub1sxe…vx9p) I have some interesting stories about using low spec hardware and free software only while surviving university.
For example I had one class where we were supposed to make a videogame in Adobe Flash using ActionScript. Instead I made my game in Blender using Python and the Blender Game Engine (rip).
This was around 2014 so Blender still ran completely fine on my X200, modern versions of Blender no longer work on my X200 unfortunately because it requires OpenGL 3.5 now.
The teacher gave me a 9 out 10, the game I developed was excellent but he subtracted one point for not using Adobe Flash as instructed.
Another example comes to mind with a data analysis class that I had. We were supposed to use some proprietary tool that I can't remember the name of that was used to generate graphs and charts from a mysql database.
Instead of using whatever tool they wanted me to use I did my graphs and analysis tasks using, believe it or not, PhpMyAdmin. PhpMyAdmin actually has amazing tools to generate graphs and piecharts and stuff, it's really underutilized I think.
Outside of proprietary stuff that doesn't run on GNU/Linux there was one class where my system's specs was the actual issue and not a freedom issue.
I did a machine learning class where we were supposed to write a machine learning using the TensorFlow. Unfortunately the TensorFlow library doesn't run on my X200 as it does not support AVX CPU instructions (On Intel systems AVX got introduced in Sandy Bridge, on AMD it got introduced with Bulldozer). This wasn't a huge problem however as my server happens to be a Bulldozer CPU that does support AVX, so I simply trained my models using my server remotely instead.
For example I had one class where we were supposed to make a videogame in Adobe Flash using ActionScript. Instead I made my game in Blender using Python and the Blender Game Engine (rip).
This was around 2014 so Blender still ran completely fine on my X200, modern versions of Blender no longer work on my X200 unfortunately because it requires OpenGL 3.5 now.
The teacher gave me a 9 out 10, the game I developed was excellent but he subtracted one point for not using Adobe Flash as instructed.
Another example comes to mind with a data analysis class that I had. We were supposed to use some proprietary tool that I can't remember the name of that was used to generate graphs and charts from a mysql database.
Instead of using whatever tool they wanted me to use I did my graphs and analysis tasks using, believe it or not, PhpMyAdmin. PhpMyAdmin actually has amazing tools to generate graphs and piecharts and stuff, it's really underutilized I think.
Outside of proprietary stuff that doesn't run on GNU/Linux there was one class where my system's specs was the actual issue and not a freedom issue.
I did a machine learning class where we were supposed to write a machine learning using the TensorFlow. Unfortunately the TensorFlow library doesn't run on my X200 as it does not support AVX CPU instructions (On Intel systems AVX got introduced in Sandy Bridge, on AMD it got introduced with Bulldozer). This wasn't a huge problem however as my server happens to be a Bulldozer CPU that does support AVX, so I simply trained my models using my server remotely instead.