metasaval

Hey! I guess I'll get some conversation started, this interests me too and I've been doing the same the last few years. I added a page to my site [0] to keep updated with all the tech I use so I'll do some copy-pasting of some standouts. Note that I use Linux and Android, no Apple products here.

- EndeavourOS - easy to install arch-based linux distro

- KDE - desktop environment

- Framework 13 - repairable laptop

- Pixel 9 Pro Fold - my fancy phone cause I like reading books with pictures

- Firefox - web browser (but shoutout to zen browser)

- Kagi - search engine

- BitWarden - password manager

- Dark Reader - dark mode for any site

- Indie Wiki - redirects to non-fandom wikis (cause fandom is cancer)

- AppFlowy - workspace tool (eg. open source notion)

- Notesnook - encrypted note-taking app

- GitLab - open source code hosting platform

- SourceGit - my git gui of choice - Godot - game engine

- Zed - rust-based code editor

- Claude Code - anthropic's ai coding assistant

- REAPER - daw of choice

- OBS Studio - streaming and recording

- Astro - the static site generator that built my site

- Cloudflare Pages - site hosting

- Ghost - used when a family or friend needs a simple site or blog

I tried to use Thunderbird as my email client but I kept defaulting to webmail, but that seems like a good option as you're looking for an email client.

[0] https://suarez.fm/tech/

Edited to fix formatting.

Every time a new iPhone comes up people on hacker news pine for a new mini, which I understand. But everytime someone has to bring back up that the 12 and 13 minis were the worst selling sku two gens in a row, with at one point the 13 mini only attributing to 3% of 13 sales [1].

I'm sorry, but the market has spoken. And there's Android phones in that form factor if you really want it.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2022/04/21/iphone-13-mini-unpopula...

I'm no Google apologist (I use ecosia personally), but did you try using searching in quotes? That should force the search to only find specifically your query directly as spelled. Just curious if you did try it and there was still that "fuzziness."

I've kept TB Beta installed but still go back to FairEmail. But I'm not an email power user, I really only stick to it because the widgets are better. No dark mode for the K9/TB widget is a dealbreaker. And even then FairEmail goes beyond that in allowing transparent widgets.

Will keep checking back in over time.

In this case I had completely missed the bad smell, so I appreciate the comment cause it prompted me to look up the whole situation. yikes. I was already planning on moving to another fork soon since I wasn't using most of floorp's power features, so this just expedited that.

Also from your language it sounds like you're a Waterfox dev? If so thanks for all your hard work on open source software! I haven't tried waterfox in years, I will definitely give it a go after uninstalling floorp.

also just realized that waterfox does have an android version [1], if you want you use the same fork on desktop and android

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.waterfox.a...

FYI, you can use a desktop fork and mobile Firefox with Firefox sync.

source: I do that with floorp and Firefox for android.

nobody pays for premium so ads get worse.

Ignore the dissenters, I agree. people will pay $15 for Netflix and use it once a month but won't pay $11 for YouTube that they use every day. the insistence that YouTube should be a service that just houses all of our videos for free in perpetuaty never made sense to me.

I sorely wish this was the case. I have a W11 install now but always have an extra SSD for a Linux install (right now EndeavourOS with Cinnamon), but there's little things that keep me away from using it fulltime. The majority of them are gaming related, but there are other reasons. Last hiccup I encountered was trying to watch something with a friend over Discord, only to find out audio sharing is nonexistent. There seemed to be a way to pipe all audio through Pipewire mic input and have it work that way, but then I'd lose the noise threshold functionality. Ended up just booting into Windows anyway.

I'm really hoping with SteamOS, the Steam Deck, and the Linus daily challenge videos, the Linux desktop can get more love, but it's just not there for the majority of people yet.

I'm on W11 as well and enjoy it over W10 for a variety of reasons (mostly gaming and HDR related), but instead of adding to that noise I just wanted to point out that this change is in Windows 10 as well. From the link, last sentence in the second paragraph:

"As it turns out, Microsoft slipped the update into the final patch Tuesday of 2021 for both Windows 10 and Windows 11."

The first thing I did when I got my ATV4K was change the TV button to go to the home screen instead of the TV app and have not used the app for anything. A far cry from ads being on the home screen itself.

It's a basic one, but learning an instrument! Namely, the drums. I've tried guitar and bass before, but neither stuck. I'd been thinking of getting a e-drum kit for a while now, and the quarantine gave me a good excuse. I'm loving it so far, just playing along to songs I like, but since I'm self-learning I can already tell my technique and drum kit setup is off. I keep having to adjust the drums, the snare especially, and haven't found the optimal position for everything yet. But it's grabbed me more than any instrument before, and I'm having a blast.

The kit I got for those curious: https://www.guitarcenter.com/Alesis/Nitro-Mesh-8-Piece-Elect...

Throne: https://www.guitarcenter.com/ROC-N-SOC/Nitro-Throne-Tan-1500...

FYI, Credit Karma has their own tax filing tool [0], which I'm using this year after using TT the last two years, and I find it more understandable for my simple returns.

Honestly, what I'm worried about is that CK's tool disappears.

[0] tax.creditkarma.com

I also use Google Fi, albeit the $10/gb plan, so my monthly bill is usually around $50-$60. The real reason I stick with it, even though I could get slightly cheaper plans elsewhere, is for international travel. I don't even travel internationally often at all, and I don't consider myself a foodie or world traveller or anything like that. But work is sending me to Taiwan in a couple weeks and it's nice knowing that I'll be able to land and have the same data and text rates as back home. Same for when I went on a cruise to Mexico with my family earlier this year. We landed, Google Fi sent me a text saying "give us a sec." And then a few minutes later I was online, without me having to do anything. Most cellular companies make you pay out the ass in international roaming costs, or if you have an unlocked phone you can get a local sim. The closest company to match this policy is T-Mobile, but their international data is capped at 256kbps unless you pay more.

For me, personally, I just play way too many games to have running Linux as a daily driver a viable option. I've tried multiple times to move (Manjaro with Lutris was the closest I've gotten, but to be fair I haven't tried Steam Proton yet), but it's never stuck. Yea I could dual boot and just keep Windows around for gaming, but I'm lazy and flip-flop between coding and gaming too often. For my uses, I've been able to use Windows as a decent dev environment with no major issues, but WSL2 would make things even better.

Note: this is all for personal projects on my home desktop, my work laptop is Windows and I have no problems with it for my current position.

Unrelated question: what resources did you use to write your CHIP-8 emulator? I've also been wanting to write one in Python for educational purposes, but haven't found any great resources yet in Python. Granted there are a few in C that I could try to translate over, but I'm curious to know what you used.

Just fyi, unifying Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram is something they mentioned a while back [0], and is something that they're moving foward with now [1]. Although it's looking like they're just going to get the underlying architecture the same so you can message people across apps and less that there is going to be 1 app for everything.

[0] https://www.slashgear.com/whatsapp-instagram-facebook-messen...

[1] https://www.slashgear.com/facebook-messenger-f8-2019-desktop...

Just to add my two cents, I worked at a Best Buy Mobile (the ones that were in the mall) for 3 years during college, between 2014-2017.

1. I had no issues with not being allowed to leave on time. Of course we were incentivised to sell GSPs with as many products as possible, I was never not allowed to leave on time if I didn't sell enough.

2. Never had to give up a sale just cause I didn't attach GSP or accessories.

3. Agreed here.

Unfortunately, I think you had bad management. With my manager, I never felt like I had to resort to scummy practices to get decent numbers. And maybe it was a district-wide thing, cause all my friends at other Best Buys (whether big box or mobile), had the same perception.

I still have many friends who work there, and to this day recommend it to people who are looking for a part-time job.

My high school friends and I used it up until we switch to Discord last year (so ~2013-2017). We all had Mumble and TeamSpeak installed for when we needed it, but all through high school we had a Skype group chat that we always used. It was a admittedly a bit of a hog, but it was free, looked nicer, and had a few more useful features then Mumble or Teamspeak.

I guess it's possible if Apple got a hold of pre-release materials on the Essential phone. But a company the size of Apple gets the design ready months, possibly a year, before release. The Essential Phone was officially shown off May 30, 2017 [0], so that's the earliest Apple could have seen the design without getting pre-release renders. The iPhone X was announced on September 12 of that same year. That means that, if Apple were to copy them, they would have to completely pivot their design, change manufacturing plans, get new displays, etc, in just over 3 months. I find that unbelievable personally, especially considering things Apple did to make the display work even better, like eliminating the chin by folding the OLED panel in on itself [1]. I don't believe it's possible that they got that working in 3 months. And I guess it is possible Apple obtained pre-release renders of the Essential, but even if they got it, say, 2 months before Essential's announcement, 5 months is still not a lot of time to pivot a phone's design.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/30/15711170/essential-phone-...

[1] https://www.redmondpie.com/why-most-2018-smartphones-have-ch...

The issue, specifically, is that the display ribbon to connect it to the board needs to go somewhere [0]. For years, it was the bottom. So when it comes to removing a chin, you need to find a place for that ribbon. Apple achieved this by folding the screen at the bottom, so the screen isn't technically ending at the bottom. This is why it's easier to stretch out screens to the sides and the top.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/28/17152840/oneplus-6-notch-...

They started pretty similar, and have traded in expensiveness depending on the year and which size phone you're comparing. These are all base storage size prices in USD, ordered from cheapest to most expensive.

2016: Pixel -> $649; iPhone 7 -> $649; iPhone 7 Plus -> $749; Pixel XL -> $769

2017: Pixel 2 -> $649; iPhone 8 -> $649; iPhone 8 Plus -> $749; Pixel 2 XL -> $849; iPhone X -> $999

2018: iPhone XR -> $749; Pixel 3 -> $799; Pixel 3 XL -> $899; iPhone X -> $999; iPhone X Max -> $1099

Correct. And since the time between the two phones was so short, there's no way Apple copied Essential here. It's just a case of two companies trying to tackle a new problem and coming up with similar solutions. But it would be fair to say that Apple popularized the notch.

It does go into Objective-C later, but it starts with C. You can see that if you go to Disassembler Pt 1.

Was the item shipped and sold from Amazon? I admit they don't make this distinction very clear on their product page, and they make it way too easy to be a third-party seller on their site, but it makes a huge difference. Chances are you were talking directly to a third-party seller and not Amazon. I have had nothing but great experiences dealing with Amazon directly.

GOG is trying to alleviate some of this with their Steam Connect stuff, where you can connect your Steam account and gain access to some of those games on GOG, but it'll never be 100%.

Activision has historically released their games on Steam, but their last PC release, Destiny 2, and their upcoming game Black Ops 4, are both only on Battle.net (Blizzard's client). Looks like they'll be releasing their games on Battle.net from now on.

In instances like those, they'll refund you. I haven't had to do it myself, but I understand that to be the case. Since they sell a lot of old games, some of which they have to actually use cracks to disable the DRM on, they don't always work on newer machines unfortunately.

A few reasons:

1. Because it gets people on their system, who will then buy more games when the fad does eventually die out (which let's be clear won't be anytime soon). If someone playing Fortnite on PC asks their XBoX friends to download and play with them, now a bridge has been formed between the Fortnite only PC player and the XBoX player. It's only a few conversations away from "Hey, I got a 4K TV, let me get an XBoX so that I can keep playing Fortnite and all these other games with my friends."

2. Because it garners good will. Within the last few years, more and more companies are realizing that doing good by the consumer can still be profitable. Sony's the dominant platform now, but that can change within a year. If Microsoft is over here saying that their games are going to be backwards compatible forever and the consumer knows, through history, that Microsoft allows you to play with your friends no matter where they play, that's a substantial incentive to get the next XBoX over the next Playstation.

3. Because, and this is the simplest reason, why not? The work is already done, all Epic has to do is flip the switch. It requires no extra work on Sony's end, just willingness to allow their console to talk to other consoles. The way this is going, this is going to be net profit negative in the long run, with more people jumping to XBoX if they know Microsoft plays well with others.