Sometimes I will use something and realize I’ve owned it forever. It’s a nice change in our throwaway reality. I think my personal record is a bicycle multi-tool I got for one of my first bikes, ~25 years ago. Still have it, still use it. When it comes to electronic devices I have a Panasonic mini Hi-Fi from ~2005. Never...
My dad had a little leather zipper pouch with two or three nail clippers and files/blades in it; a small pocket sized nail care set.
I used it weekly when I was a kid (every time I’d visit his place), probably from 9-17 years old, and then he gave it to me when I moved out on my own, so I’ve probably used it weekly non-stop for about 30 years at this point.
Electronics are tougher as they just don’t last as long; I used a Dell 24” LCD from 2006 all the way until 2022, so 16 years? It even failed around 2015 or so (power supply died) and I ordered a replacement PSU, resurrecting it. That monitor was my PC monitor and TV in college, and just kept kicking.
I consider myself a difficult person to target ads at because usually if I need something I’ll do a deep dive and research the fuck out of it before narrowing down my options. For example when I bought a cordless vacuum recently I checked wirecutter and project farm on YouTube before eventually settling on a brand I’ve never heard of based on the project farm video and the performance in that video.
Now, where this broke down for me and I started to question reality was a few years ago when I had a Yamaha street bike (FZ09) and I was coming up on my first oil change interval. I did what I usually do; deep research dive, checked forums, reviews, Reddit, etc.; what’s the best oil for this bike, do people usually use the 1st party “Yamalube” oil or do they go for something different?
It’s important to note that at the same time I had been watching the back catalog of motoGP races from the 2015-2019 era and enjoying a couple of those races each day.
Anyway, all of my research on the right oil for my bike’s next oil change led me to a couple of forum posts where I decided that “Motul 7100” oil was the best option for me, the climate I ride in, and my bike. I ordered it on Amazon and moved on with my week.
Later that week I realized that in the background of several of the race tracks where these motoGP races were taking place were massive trackside ads for… literally Motul 7100.
Now, sure it’s normal for motor oil companies to sponsor motor sports, but it freaked me out. It couldn’t just be coincidence! “I researched this thoroughly and made up my own mind!” I told myself.
Why didn’t I end up choosing Shell or Bel-Ray or Penzoil instead? Is it because I subconsciously conditioned myself to be willing to receive recommendations for that oil brand? Was it because of other people being advertised to who then recommended it?
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how it happened… but I bought the very same oil that was advertised to me even after trying to be as resistant to advertising and brand loyalty as I could be.
After that realization I’ve just come to the conclusion that advertising is bigger than any of us individuals. It’s almost not possible to resist it, because at some level, somewhere along the line, it’ll get you. Or it won’t 🤷🏻♂️
They can leverage these terms if they want to. For example you’re also only allowed to have one account per person.
Wasn’t it the Terraria dev who got his account locked and they used that as an excuse as to why he was locked out of his account? They said he had too many accounts or something?
Yep, the new Bravias with Android TV or whatever give you a choice as a part of the first time setup that essentially disables all the smart features. I had the same experience.
Why are so many mobile browsers at least 100, if not 200 megabytes in size? Even Firefox Focus which is supposed to be small and, you know, focussed is 85MB big....
No it’s worse than that. All iOS browsers need to use a Safari (WebKit) web view as far as I understand. So any browser on iOS is literally just barebones Safari with a different UI and possibly a different user agent.
In fact, until recently this was even worse as Safari on iOS enjoyed some accelerations/optimizations that the web views did not get to leverage; so for a while all iOS browsers were not only Safari, but they were slower Safari.
Cutting Edge Engineering is one of my favorites. Basically an Aussie couple that runs a machine shop where they do very large repairs on parts for heavy equipment. Loads of lathes, milling, boring, welding, all explained and filmed perfectly.
I bought it as a kit directly from The Key Company. It’s a modernized version of the Cherry 1800 and it runs QMK. I have Box Pinks in mine at the moment.
I just had two people take my order in a drive thru. They alternated every question. First person welcomed me and asked what I wanted. The next person asked what size and drink I wanted. The first person came back on and asked if I wanted any cheese sauce then the second person came back on and told me the price. When I got up...
Sometimes the operator is in another state! There was an article I read a while ago about… maybe it was Carl’s Jr.? but they were saying that the drive thru operators were in call centers in states with a lower labor cost.
Not exactly uplifting, but “yay capitalism” I guess.
I eat Taco Bell occasionally and I do like their system. Order on the app, use Apple Pay/Google Pay to actually pay for it in advance; roll up to the drive thru and give your name; drive forward and get food.
It’s the most frictionless fast food experience I ever had ever had.
So at least on an iPhone (I think Android does this too if I recall from when I had my Pixel 3XL) the payment uses a one-time use card number if you use Apple Pay; I didn’t have to sign up for an account, and the Taco Bell app only has my email & first name (pretty sure you can give a fake email too as it asks you to enter name/email each time if you have no account), and that’s it. The friggin’ Taco Bell app has less of my data than most apps actually.
I actually installed it as a joke (my wife hates Taco Bell), and ended up liking the ordering process, go figure… it’s fun for a once in a blue moon fast food order.
Ahh yes, myQ; the service that is randomly up and down when you need it the most.
I had a Chamberlain myQ garage door opener and I hated it. I hated everything about it. It was slow, unreliable, the button doesn’t use a simple open/close contact for triggering the door (so you can’t easily DIY a solution with a relay board); and it just didn’t work half the time because “the cloud!”
$129 for 3 years? For what? For < 10 API requests per day? That’s insane.
Don’t most modern cars (the type that have CarPlay in them) also have programmable garage door buttons on the rear-view mirror?
Nothing about this story makes sense; you’ve asked a great question. Isn’t CarPlay/Android auto usually manufacturer agnostic when it comes to the features included? Wasn’t that the whole point of it?
Let me clarify: We have a certain amount of latency when streaming games from both local and internet servers. In either case, how do we improve that latency and what limits will we run in to as the technology progresses?
For most of us, there is no difference though; you get what you get.
I live in a nice neighborhood but I won’t ever get fiber… we have underground utilities and this area is served by coaxial cable. There’s no way in hell they are digging up miles of streets to lay fiber; you get what you get.
My ISP latency is like 16-20ms but when sim racing it just depends on where the race server is (and where my competitors are). As someone on the US west coast, if I’m matched with folks in EU and some others in AUS/NZ, the server will likely be in EU and my ping will be > 200. My Aussie competitors will be dealing with 300-400.
It’s not impossible to share a track at those latencies, but for close racing or a competitive shooter… errrr that just doesn’t work.
The fact that I’m always at around 200ms for EU servers might be improved if we could run a single strand of fiber from my house to the EU sever (37ms!) but there would still be switching delays, etc. so yeah the speed of light is the limit, but to your point, there’s a lot of other stuff that adds overhead.
Unless I’m mistaken, don’t HomeKit compatible devices need to be local-first too? I remember reading that if I switch my Ecobee thermostat to HomeKit (via HomeAssistant’s bridge), it will use local control instead. It’s on my todo list but I just haven’t done it yet.
I used Plex for my home media for almost a year, then it stopped playing nice for reasons I gave up on diagnosing. While looking at alternatives, I found Jellyfin which is much more responsive, IMO, and the UI is much nicer as well....
Blender is really amazing. The last 3 years have been really good to the project. I forced myself to learn/use Blender 2.79 as an alternative to Maxon’s Cinema4D which I had been a long time user of. It was… tough, but after dozens of hours of tutorials it got easier, then fun, then powerful. Then the 2.8-3.x updates started to roll out! I love Blender now.
It has an amazing real time renderer in Eevee, the Cycles renderer is quite amazing too; Geometry Nodes can do some crazy stuff, but the UI; man has the UI gotten so much better.
If you’ve tried Blender in the past but felt it was awkward, give it another shot.
I’ve used it on and off over the years; ever since 2004/2005 or so.
Firebug was amazing for web development back in the days when it was just IE, Firefox & Safari.
I recently built a couple of sites (for a sim racing community) and one of my users mentioned a Firefox bug. I fixed the issue but then realized I need to be more aware of Gecko specific rendering issues. I decided to use Firefox for a week on my iPhone (yes I know, still technically Safari) and my desktop, and I forgot how much I like it.
I also don’t love the choices Chrome has been making recently.
Firefox’s market share is so low lately when compared to Safari and Chrome that it honestly feels like the battle is already lost.
I share this perspective. I’m often told that I’m smart, but I’m really just normal I guess.
The more people I meet, the more I realize there’s a bunch of knowledge out there I have zero clue about and I realize it’s not about being smart or dumb; we just all have different strengths.
It seems like many of the “users” in this virtual world are kids. This makes sense to me as they are just “playing with dad’s VR thing while he’s at work” or something like that, they ain’t switching accounts or anything. There are a few adults in there, but yeah… watch the video; it’s rough.
I understand what you’re saying here, but I want to let you know that it just sounds like “sour grapes”.
It sounds like this provider is allowing something that could put Plex in legal hot water; why would they allow this and potentially jeopardize everything for all Plex users?
Mine is playing AOE2 in easiest (or standard if I want a bit of challenge) mode against 3 bots. I just build my economy, wall up (and laugh at the enemy soldiers attacking my walls in vain), reach imperial age and attack once my army reaches the population limit. I also send 104 in the chat so they don’t surrender and I can...
Watching YouTube videos of people making things in machine shops. It switches my brain off and just lets me focus on the work happening on screen. It’s so rewarding to see the process and the finished product.
I absolutely hate “smart” TVs! You can’t even buy a quality “dumb” panel anymore. I can’t convince the rest of my family and friends that the only things those smarts bring are built-in obsolescence, ads, and privacy issues....
Sony Bravia models now give you an option to make it a dumb TV as part of the out of the box experience. It’s the first question they ask you when you power it on.
My X950H does not give the option (although there is a hidden dev/“pro mode” that allows you to turn it into a dumb screen I think) but my newer A80J model does give the OOTB option to disable the smart features.
The Bravias with Google TV are at the absolute limit of what I will tolerate from a smart TV. Suggestions/tailored stuff on the Home Screen, but no invasive ads. Anything further and I’d turn them into dumb TVs and use an Apple TV or Google TV dongle instead.
Exactly. This app has been dead for years. You could technically still rent or “buy” stuff from it for smart TVs and such, but it would also show up in your YouTube library.
This is just them actually announcing the app going away and making it official.
Notice that the diagonal stripe goes from the top left to the bottom right, unlike most other flags with a diagonal line (DRC, Namibia, Republic of Congo, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Solomon Islands, Tanzania). Brunei, however, also has the stripe in this direction....
Just finished building a TT02 for my kid and one for myself; so fun! We are waiting for our local track to reconfigure from buggy jumps to touring car flat track.
Agreed. I have been working so hard to get my young kids to understand file systems, directory structures, keyboard shortcuts, etc; all that stuff that just never gets learned anymore with all the iOS/Android interactions.
I’m building a new PC for myself in the next few weeks and if they want to continue playing Genshin/Starcraft2/BeamNG/Trackmania on my older PC as it becomes the “Family PC” they will need to sit with me and learn how to reassemble it, install Windows, attaching peripherals, and setup a few basic things.
That’s the price and that’s the reward.
Many of us grew up in a world where you had to figure this shit out or simply not have a working computer/piece of software.
“Background playback” is behind the premium paywall; NOBODY gets YouTube PIP support on iOS; such a shame.
I repeat, even if you pay for premium you simply can’t do PIP using the official app. You can however use a browser and use PIP that way I think (there used to be some weird workaround but I’m not sure if it still exists).
Edit: I was (happily) wrong! I see now, they added it halfway though 2022 and I needed to go into settings and explicitly enable it. I’m a happy camper now! Thanks for the correction
My initial experience is that it was missing, then tested, then removed again.
Since you don’t have premium and can still use the feature on iOS, that means they were forced to make it available in general to iOS users. It was off by default for me though, so maybe they made it work but just didn’t turn it on by default?
Someone else above was saying that Apple has rules about this, and another poster was saying that on Android you need premium for PIP. So maybe iOS did without it for years and then they were forced to add it for all iOS users regardless of the premium sub.
For example, I’m sure the average joe doesn’t know just how expensive calligraphy pens can be, or how deep the rabbit hole goes on video game speedruns.
It seems that everything turned into scams, aggressive self marketing and just click bait irrelevant content. I liked finance videos, but every creator sounds like “the world will end soon” or “my secret method to make 1 million per week day trading stocks/forex/crypto.”...
I’m trying to find a good method of making periodic, incremental backups. I assume that the most minimal approach would be to have a Cronjob run rsync periodically, but I’m curious what other solutions may exist....
I’ve used restic in the past; it’s good but requires a great deal of setup if memory serves me correctly. I’m currently using Duplicati on both Ubuntu and Windows and I’ve never had any issues. Thanks for sharing your experience though; I’ll be vigilant.
Oof I think this service is only worth it if you have a family plan and everyone helping. That is how I personally make it reasonable in terms of pricing.
Well said. I’m in a similar situation with the Sim Racing stuff. Also my daughter plays Genshin Impact and my son is just getting into StarCraft 2;
SC2 works flawlessly under Proton apparently, but Genshin not so much (anti-cheat stuff it seems). So if you share a gaming PC the question becomes even trickier to answer.
What item have you been using on a daily basis for the longest amount of time?
Sometimes I will use something and realize I’ve owned it forever. It’s a nice change in our throwaway reality. I think my personal record is a bicycle multi-tool I got for one of my first bikes, ~25 years ago. Still have it, still use it. When it comes to electronic devices I have a Panasonic mini Hi-Fi from ~2005. Never...
Hints are so yesterday. Pro tip for Xmas if your loved ones aren't privacy nerds (twitter.com)
Google Announces to Delete Inactive Accounts, All You Need to Know (samrome58.substack.com)
Google decides to delete any account that has two years of inactivity. See how they decide to go about it.
Looking for a 4k tv without smart functions
Hey do anybody know where you get a tv that supports 4k and does not have that locked up smarttv shit?...
Why are (mobile) browsers so big?
Why are so many mobile browsers at least 100, if not 200 megabytes in size? Even Firefox Focus which is supposed to be small and, you know, focussed is 85MB big....
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What was your best purchase?
Why does the drive thru operator change back and forth during my order?
I just had two people take my order in a drive thru. They alternated every question. First person welcomed me and asked what I wanted. The next person asked what size and drink I wanted. The first person came back on and asked if I wanted any cheese sauce then the second person came back on and told me the price. When I got up...
Honda and Acura add garage door control to Apple CarPlay, Android Auto (www.autoblog.com)
What is the fundamental limit on game streaming?
Let me clarify: We have a certain amount of latency when streaming games from both local and internet servers. In either case, how do we improve that latency and what limits will we run in to as the technology progresses?
iPhone users, what app do you use to browse Lemmy and what is the main reason you like it over others?
The Man Amazon Erased (www.tabletmag.com)
A man who got kicked off a service because of an alleged remark.
What are some FOSS programs that you think are a far better user experience than their counterparts? (sh.itjust.works)
I used Plex for my home media for almost a year, then it stopped playing nice for reasons I gave up on diagnosing. While looking at alternatives, I found Jellyfin which is much more responsive, IMO, and the UI is much nicer as well....
Why do you use firefox? (upload.wikimedia.org)
Are you really smart? Are you really dumb? Are you average? How did you come to your conclusion?
Meta’s Horizon Worlds social platform is finally coming to mobile and the web - The Verge (www.theverge.com)
cross-posted from !meta
Plex will be blocking access from at least one VPS provider (imgur.com)
Appears to be Hetzner for now, wouldn’t be surprised if all VPS get affected eventually.
What is your comfort activity (like comfort food)?
Mine is playing AOE2 in easiest (or standard if I want a bit of challenge) mode against 3 bots. I just build my economy, wall up (and laugh at the enemy soldiers attacking my walls in vain), reach imperial age and attack once my army reaches the population limit. I also send 104 in the chat so they don’t surrender and I can...
The smart(shit)ification of TVs pisses me off.
I absolutely hate “smart” TVs! You can’t even buy a quality “dumb” panel anymore. I can’t convince the rest of my family and friends that the only things those smarts bring are built-in obsolescence, ads, and privacy issues....
Google is killing Play Movies & TV, will only have three video stores left (arstechnica.com)
Today it's 62 years since Trinidad and Tobago become independent and adopted this flag. (upload.wikimedia.org)
Notice that the diagonal stripe goes from the top left to the bottom right, unlike most other flags with a diagonal line (DRC, Namibia, Republic of Congo, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Solomon Islands, Tanzania). Brunei, however, also has the stripe in this direction....
What is a hobby you enjoy, but seems too quirky or obscure to bring up in most conversations?
Mine would be creating pen and paper ciphers for my made up secret communication needs.
Microsoft Finally Realizes Nobody Wants Its Windows 11 Preinstalled Bloatware (www.pcmag.com)
Twitter/X removing the block feature (lemm.ee)
Whats a hobby/craft that you wouldn't expect that has an incredibly high ceiling either monetarily or in sheer skill?
For example, I’m sure the average joe doesn’t know just how expensive calligraphy pens can be, or how deep the rabbit hole goes on video game speedruns.
Do you still watch YouTube? Who do you follow?
It seems that everything turned into scams, aggressive self marketing and just click bait irrelevant content. I liked finance videos, but every creator sounds like “the world will end soon” or “my secret method to make 1 million per week day trading stocks/forex/crypto.”...
As badly described as possible, what is your favorite video game?
How do you all go about backing up your data, on Linux?
I’m trying to find a good method of making periodic, incremental backups. I assume that the most minimal approach would be to have a Cronjob run rsync periodically, but I’m curious what other solutions may exist....
Google raising price of YouTube Premium to $13.99 per month (9to5google.com)
Oof I think this service is only worth it if you have a family plan and everyone helping. That is how I personally make it reasonable in terms of pricing.
Hey selfhosters, what are you selfhosting?
https://chatsubo.hiteklolife.net/pictrs/image/c786875e-7455-4f5b-8e56-d1af5f1e0cfa.png...
Those who tried Linux and went back to Windows, what caused you to go back to Windows?
Additionally, what changes are necessary for you to be able to use Linux full time?