psy-q

Android TV now also comes with forced ads (since rebranding to Google TV).

I was pretty upset when the very expensive Android TV gadget I bought (Nvidia Shield TV) specifically to have an external device without ads suddenly had them. They take up the upper third of the home screen.

Were there significant downsides to the laptop solution?

I have a similar setup with a NUC mounting storage from a small ARM-powered NAS, but I was thinking of changing this to an old ThinkPad X230 with just internal storage and offsite backup.

https://www.reddit.com/r/accidentallyliberian/

Oooo! Depending on your taste you're in for either a very boring movie or the experience of a lifetime. Complete with an associated rabbit hole of mystery surrounding the director: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Room

If you do end up watching and liking it, there is book and a film about the filming of the film to enjoy :D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Disaster_Artist

I took it as a reference to The Room. Isn't it? :|

I think in this case it's more like you've bought a truck but you put a lawnmower engine in it.

It's a big step between esoterics and "please don't use the cheap shitty DAC that was integrated into your monitor to satisfy a feature checklist".

The amp part will matter a lot the more impedance the cans have, and many of the better headphones are high(er)-impedance. Might as well spring for a headphone amp + DAC combo just to see how it sounds. It's not that expensive, FiiO has some for under 80 bucks, for example.

I see your HDMI cable and raise you a USD 1000 audiophile Ethernet cable complete with esoteric review https://audiobacon.net/2019/11/02/the-jcat-signature-lan-a-1...

They were the ones opposed to this sale. The sale was basically not a sale but a hostile takeover, and the former staff have now created a non-profit organization under Swedish law to hold the new network so that this kind of thing can't happen again.

This does not apply to state events. I still had hundreds of MBs of those after purging :( I think it's not impossible to manage this, just a pain in the ass :D

Yeah, it worked fine for me a bit later.

Running a Matrix homeserver is still quite a pain in the ass, especially because there is no real automatic way to purge old history. Join a busy room once and pay for it in megs or gigs of text stored in your DB forever.

Just using a matrix.org account instead is antisocial at this point because of the resources you're taking from the project, whereas paying for a hosted homeserver might not be something everyone can afford. IRC instead only requires a bouncer in the worst case, and even if you stay on channels for years you won't accrue as much history as a Matrix room can generate in a few days. I find that easier to maintain and store.

I do run my own Matrix homeserver and I intend to keep doing that and paying for it, but Matrix has more rough edges than IRC at the moment IMHO.

Edit: Ah, sorry, this was actually meant in reply to parent. But gonna leave it in.

That's horrible. I just looked at some farming methods. Man, all the evils of humanity...

Caging has been illegal in Switzerland since 1992, that probably makes part of the price difference. So egg collection can be automated easily in a U.S. process (in states where cages are legal) but is harder to automate here. I would guess they still use nest boxes so there could theoretically be an automatic method from the nest box to a conveyor belt. I'll research if Switzerland hand-collects things, then the wage difference of whoever does that plus vastly more expensive land could explain the rest of the price.

Wow, U.S. egg pricing seems crazy to me. It's US$ 9.90/dozen in Switzerland at a normal nationwide store vs. US$ 5.90 at Aldi Suisse (both selling free-range Swiss eggs).

This can't be explained just by purchase power differences. Considering the conditions even for Swiss free-range chickens aren't good, are they particularly terrible for chickens laying 5 cent eggs? I couldn't find any information (not even pricing) on the Aldi US site.

Doesn't mean the German versions can't be good :) In Switzerland they usually import from Italy, but I couldn't tell the difference between a German, Swiss or Italian one blindfolded.

Consider seeing if the particular pieces of software you use have their own donation system, then donate there. A donation to a smaller project could have a very large impact on its future.

The Linux Foundation is carried by billion-dollar companies and that's also the interests it serves, from what Icm hearing. I wouldn't worry about its survival.

I'd suggest adding sources of fat or protein to their snacks: https://www.thespruce.com/good-bread-for-birds-385833

Microsoft explicitly warns people in big red letters never to open any WSL files from Windows. I'm not sure if that will ever be possible.

under linux it creates minilags

Samsung 840 series? Well-known bug in their firmware. Update your firmware.

Indeed, and if they'd spent their time creating a standard protocol for "modern" chat and implementing a native app per platform they could perhaps be the harbingers of the world's best new chat protocol with a host of good clients competing to see who's the best.

But that would encourage competition and open up the market, something that web 4.0 companies never want.

I think that's not really fair, only a few bundles a year are actually labeled "Humble Indie Bundle", and those do usually fit the bill and check all three boxes.

There were 13 Humble Indie Bundles since 2010 and 94 other types of bundles (not counting the Weekly Bundles). And those other types often include audiobooks, ebooks, comics etc. that one could claim are at least indie, or some indie games sprinkled in with the AAA titles.

There was also extremely commercial stuff such as the 2K bundles, but hey, it's always labeled as such.

It has rows and WIP limits, but does it have the rest?

I've been with them for over a year now as well and not a single issue. The interface is a bit cumbersome in some ways, it's a customized OpenXchange, so some mailbox.org-specific settings are done outside of the rest of the more general OpenXchange settings.

What you get with mailbox.org that you don't get with ProtonMail:

  * IMAP and SMTP
  * Support for hardware 2FA dongles like Yubikey
  * Ability to use your own GPG keys
  * Very capable mail filter config tool
  * Calendaring and contacts (with nice URLs so it's easy to use on Android via DAVdroid instead of Google's stuff)
  * File storage
  * Web-based spreadsheet, word processor and presentation tool

The fact is ~99% of Mac switchers like me previously owned Windows boxes and ran mostly proprietary Windows software

And now it's mostly proprietary macOS software. As you mention, the hard hitters in Apple's lineup are proprietary (Time Machine, Photos, iTunes, etc.) and the average user doesn't care that they can use BSD utilities on the command line. It's not dissimilar to the PS4, Switch etc. not being OSS consoles despite running a BSD kernel. Just because they use some FOSS parts for their OS, a FOSS ecosystem doesn't automatically appear.

I also think there's very little to no real community around Apple's FOSS, at least for their homegrown projects, not counting e.g. CUPS or KHTML/WebKit where they got the community for free when they took over or adopted the project. Note that even that didn't go without problems (e.g. with the KDE project) and Apple first had to learn how to behave as a good FOSS citizen.

Other community bits weren't as successful. OpenDarwin for example has shut down and PureDarwin needs a release still. Swift might be an exception and maybe we'll see more of that. I may also be very wrong here, I don't follow their projects too closely.

To even develop on macOS "officially", you need Xcode, thus an Apple ID, thus there is forced registration. You're transmitting your personal details to a US company and you agree to their terms and conditions, which can already be a problem. Are Iranian developers excluded? Cuban ones? Oh, it depends on the whims of the current US administration, you say? The GPL for example does not tolerate such limitations.

I don't know, but I think the atmosphere on macOS today is more like FOSS is present, but not really encouraged by the platform owner, and that's important. It's not like it was when macOS was still OS X and everyone was all "ooo, look, Ruby comes preinstalled!". Now that they managed to attract some critical mass of developers for macOS to be viable, they don't seem to care that much about FOSS anymore.

I see it advertised a lot and the biggest kiosk chain in Switzerland accepts it. But I don't know anyone who uses it apart from some overheard conversations on the tram. Totally anecdotal, though. I don't think Apple releases numbers.

It's interesting that they worry about lock-in from Tencent and Alibaba in China while not mentioning the same lock-in and issues for Google, Microsoft and Apple in the rest of the world.

People who don't want to get a Google account already get a degraded product when using Android phones, and I'm not even sure an iPhone works without an Apple ID. That Google Wallet flopped is just a happy coincidence in this regard, but Apple Pay so far hasn't, and then we have the same situation there as with e.g. Alibaba.

Some nations like Switzerland at least have a unified national mobile payment platform (Twint in this case) carried by an alliance of banks. This doesn't put all the power with just one or two privately owned US or Chinese companies, and it brings banking regulations into the game. Maybe that approach should be copied, but it only works in countries that have those regulations and banks willing to cooperate.

The PC market is devolving into something where you can't do any of that anymore either, with non-upgradeable devices like the Apple MacBooks or quite sealed things like the Microsoft Surface products. And average users don't seem to mind.

Maybe it's a subjective thing, but it feels to me like we've actually taken several steps back in the last 5 years or so.

Yes, and you have to swallow the whole blob as soon as you need any single one of the services. Just want "cloud" messaging for your app? Force anyone who uses your app to install the whole blob. Want just assisted GPS? Too bad, you still force anyone who uses your app to install the whole blob.

If Google had made the services modular, it would probably be easier to replace them with homegrown ones, but they made it a blob because that gives them more power. There are efforts to replace this blob with other manufacturers' blobs (like the one Yandex is working on, or microG) but it looks like this is not easy and it's not going quickly.

We also probably get a typical reverse-engineering situation where Google's services will always be several steps ahead of anything anyone else can offer as a drop-in replacement, so the alternative looks less and less enticing to the average consumer and they'll probably go with the blob :(

Don't forget that the proprietary Google Play Services are required by more and more apps and that Google is doing everything it can to push these services to the largest number of devices by weaving some sort of web of interdependency.

I always hoped for a more 30%/30%/30%/10% distribution, with two big proprietary players, one FOSS one and a bunch of other more experimental or niche systems. Guess that hasn't happened so far. The only place in technology where I remember three big and roughly equally powerful players was the console market, but only for a while.

Would be interesting to find out details about these dynamics.

Wow, thanks for the explanation. That's a ball-of-yarn-shaped collection of problems :(

Here, if you don't pay your insurance premiums, the insurance company still has to cover for any damage you cause, until you return your plates (deregister the car) and I think you face a nice fine if you have unpaid premiums at that point.

This means insurance companies have a great incentive to hunt you down like hounds if you don't pay. I could see this working in the US, but I think the next part is also required for the trick to work:

Not paying is hard. If the insurance company goes to court against you, it can do things like demand that a part of your wage be seized in order to pay for your debt. There are cantonal registers of previous enforcements against someone (you get an entry there for any situation where a creditor requested and enforcement of payment). Having any entries in the register is social suicide because you'll have a much harder time finding an apartment (almost all landlords demand a copy of your entries).

So if you have no assets, you won't be driving a car for long, removing you from the pool of people who can cause damage. Plus, we don't put people in jail too easily (we only have capacity for ~7000 people nationwide, and about 6900 people out of a population of 8 million are in jail right now: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/crime-crimin...

I can't imagine the stereotypical American we know from bad TV to be in favor of so much government involvement, but I think the system works well. Of course it's ridiculously hard to get by in the (non-urban) parts of the US without a car, which again changes the whole perspective.

It's interesting that the two systems in place here produce such different results.

Vehicle regulations are not uniform even in Switzerland, by the way (e.g. in Zürich you don't pay tax on electric vehicles, in St. Gallen you pay by weight (!!!) for your heavy Tesla). But the insurance rules are the same for everyone.