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smaccona

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Apple is definitely not the worst in this regard, but the most recent version of iOS to support the iPad 3rd generation (the device we are discussing which is being used as a PDF reader) is iOS 9.3.5 (a security/bugfix release on August 25, 2016 which supports the WiFi-only version of the iPad 3rd generation) or iOS 9.3.6 (also a bugfix release on July 22, 2019 which supports the WiFi+cellular version of the same device - specifically, this was a fix to keep GPS working).

The iPad 3rd generation was released in 2012, so the 2016 9.3.5 iOS release gave 4 years of security/bugfix support for the WiFi-only version of that device.

I use an iPhone, and my Messages app is using 72GB at the moment (and it would be a lot more if I hadn’t lost all my history about 5 years ago). The issue is that extended family members send a lot of media (mostly family photos / videos) via group messages, and although there is a way to expire messages older than a certain age, there isn’t a way to only expire media from messages older than a certain date and/or automatically bulk export media from messages (you can do it manually, but we’re talking a LOT of media here). I guess I just haven’t been disciplined enough or had enough time to export media I wanted to keep and then remove it from Messages as time went on.

In any case this feature wouldn’t benefit me, because I don’t think any of my extended family would want to use it.

Am I wrong in thinking that checkboxes/tickboxes/whatever-one-calls-them are ubiquitously understandable across cultures from both an interpretation and interaction perspective? If so, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve made this assumption/mistake so I’d be happy to hear about it!

If not (and I am right in thinking these are globally understood), then there’s a clear advantage of the checkbox over the switch in that it doesn’t depend on any color recognition to convey the current state. This is a huge win - I have definitely encountered UI controls where the current state was not at all apparent.

I happen to use an iPhone, and haven’t personally had any issues interpreting the “switch” state nor the checkbox, but what if you’re color blind or from a culture where the color doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it does?

Edit: clarify intent

What I do is buy a smart TV, never connect it to the network (thus making it a dumb TV), and plug an Apple TV (or other devices) into it. So far, this has worked - I haven't seen any ads from the TV itself (the apps running on the Apple TV are another story), and it can't phone home about what I'm watching or otherwise doing with the TV.

Penn & Teller did an episode years ago where they tried to debunk the claim that there was any difference between tap and bottled water. They colluded with a New York City restaurant where the waiters told customers that the restaurant was trying out several new waters and asking customers to taste test each one before deciding which one they should ultimately go with. They made up fake bottle labels such as "Arctic Mist", "Himalayan Snow" and similar (I can't remember the actual names), and in reality Penn and Teller were filling the water bottles from a garden hose in the back of the restaurant with New York City tap water (though admittedly NYC water is very good).

Not only did the customers like the waters, many of them claimed that one was much better than another, expressed a preference, and justified the preference with comments along the lines of "I can really taste the difference in this one, it's more XXX". There was even one customer who refused to believe Penn and Teller when they revealed that all of the bottles contained NYC tap water, and insisted that the waters were different from each other. A true testament to how the mind can fool itself.

The episode in question used to be available on YouTube, but now appears to be paywalled by Paramount+ unfortunately.

I Hate MFA 3 years ago

They tackled the subject for sure, but my takeaway from that blog posting is not that storing your TOTP tokens in 1Password is “as good as” having separate hardware devices for password storage management and TOTP management, but rather that storing your TOTP tokens in 1Password (or any password manager) is better than not using OTP at all. This of course is definitely true, and a definite improvement in security. I think a sibling referred to it as “1,25x” as secure, which feels about right (on some non-linear scale where 2.0 represents two unique factors).

I don’t use a KeePass or similar device, and I do have my TOTP tokens on my phone (using the great OTP Auth app, no affiliation), but I do most of my work on a computer so I toyed with completely removing password management from my phone and just having the OTP app there. I haven’t committed to that that yet though. Another option is to use a cheap device such as an iPod Touch for OTP, though those are probably more expensive than a dedicated OTP device (I just happen to have one lying around unused).

Where I live (New York), plumbers, carpenters, electricians and other contractors absolutely expect to be tipped. I’m not originally from the US, but I don’t get the impression that this is a new practice.

AT&T 4 lines (2 adults 2 kids) x $40 each + taxes = ~$200 per month, $2400 per year. This is unlimited data, text, minutes - we used to have a data cap, but the worry about the kids exceeding it when out and about was not worth the savings. We could probably ditch the unlimited minutes for at least the kids lines. We also sometimes have an upgraded phone on the bill at 0% interest over 24 months - there is generally a pretty significant discount compared to the device vendor, with the downside that AT&T does lock the device to its network for those 24 months (unless you pay off the discount you got).

This sort of thing is not limited to Chevy/GM. The new 2023 BMW i7 (starting price ~$120K, fully loaded ~$160K) comes with options for a massive fold-down widescreen cinema in the back seat, and the back seat can turn into a recliner for the ultimate movie experience (I am paraphrasing)[1][2]. My daughter looked at a couple of reviews and said something along the lines of "it's like they thought of every amazing thing they could put in a car, and then went and did all of them". And indeed, the video reviews look very impressive. Then I saw the one from Car Guide[3] in which he mentions that not only when the cinema screen is down in the back, the driver can't see out of the rear view mirror (obvious when you think about it), but also when the back seat is in recliner mode, it folds the front passenger seat forward, and then the passenger headrest completely obscures the passenger wing mirror, so that the driver then has no idea what's going on around the car.

It's clear how superficially impressive the car is looking at the video and from my daughter's reaction (she's a teenager, but I don't think being impressed by this stuff is limited to teenagers, and I confess to a "wow!" moment myself when watching the same video). But the car is failing at its basic functionality: being a car that's safe to drive. Like BMW or not, I don't think this sort of stuff would have happened in the past. It feels like they have lost their way.

From my own perspective, I really dislike the touch-sensitive user interfaces in new cars. Anything that distracts me from looking at the road is bad, and there is really no tactile element to these interfaces (when I rented a Jeep recently, I found myself having to examine the touchscreen when stopped at red lights to learn where the various controls were - granted this can happen in any car, where you have to learn where things are, but at least there aren't usually multiple nested levels of menus - but still having to at least glance at the screen to see where to put my finger, whereas in older cars once you learn where things are you can locate controls by touch and activate them without having to take your eyes off the road).

[1] Review from The Verge with pics of the screen https://www.theverge.com/23686915/bmw-i7-xdrive60-review-pho...

[2] Video review showing all the crazy features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwQvZaqpwDk

[3] Car Guide video review, link to discussion of screen and mirror issues: https://youtu.be/VsvrQSpl-5U?t=497

Does anyone else have an undismissable ad obscuring a significant portion of the screen on mobile, making reading the text very irritating if not borderline impossible? It’s worse when you increase font size, as I often do. iOS 16.4.1(a) on an iPhone 14 Pro Max, so not exactly a physically small screen.

Yes, but as a designer/developer, it would be useful to know if there’s a CSS/HTML/Javascript solution when your target audience includes a significant number of iOS users who will use the default browser on their device, namely Safari.

By default, clicking the power/side button 5 (not 10) times starts a countdown to dial emergency services. If you don’t cancel the countdown, it calls emergency services for you. Either way, biometric unlock is disabled until you re-enter your passcode/PIN. This can be disabled in settings.

Holding the power/side button and either volume button for a couple of seconds (just pressing them together and letting go creates a screenshot) presents a menu allowing you to power the phone off, display your medical ID, or call emergency services. You can also configure settings to have this action do the countdown as described above instead. Either way, biometric unlock is disabled until you re-enter your passcode/PIN.

Either option is pretty easy to do unnoticed with your phone in your pocket.

We use RQ[0], it has Redis as a dependency. It’s pretty straightforward and we’re very happy with it. If you are using Django you may want to look at Django RQ[1] as well. RQ has built in scheduling capabilities these days, but historically it did not so we used (and still use) RQ Scheduler[2] which I think still has some advantages over the built in stuff.

[0] https://python-rq.org/ [1] https://github.com/rq/django-rq [2] https://github.com/rq/rq-scheduler

This article finally made me do today what I've been putting off for no good reason: buy Sublime Text licenses for all our devs that use it. We've been talking about switching to VS Code for ages, and indeed I tried switching myself several times, but always found myself back in Sublime Text for one reason or another. It really is a great editor. My thanks to the (small!) team that develops it!

I do not live or work in SV, but it's kind of interesting to me that this comment has no responses. Is that because what the parent states as being true is not actually the case, or is there some other reason why there are no responses to this comment? From my own experience with startups many moons ago (albeit on the East Coast, first Philadelphia and then New York) the parent comment rings true: it was my experience that startups totally helped each other out with (as examples) required documentation (e.g. regulatory stuff that's base-level, non-negotiable for specific spaces), tech-type things (e.g. you will probably encounter this question/problem, here's how we handled it) and other stuff too. Granted, this was in situations where the "helper" was not a direct competitor to the "helpee", but often they were at least in the same general market, otherwise the help being offered wouldn't even apply.

Edit: clarification

My grade school daughter’s actual time to eat lunch, at a public high school in an affluent area, after lines/outdoor time/etc (I have not been able to ascertain what eats up so much of the ~30 minutes lunch period allocation) varies between 3 and 7 minutes. She always has a packed lunch, so none of her time is spent waiting in line for actual food. This is staggering to me. I didn’t go to school in the US, but my wife did and says it was not like that in her day at a public school. Needless to say, she doesn’t have time to eat her lunch, so it inevitably comes home every day in its entirety except for quickly consumed items like yogurt and hummus. I have been considering experiments to try to figure out what’s going on, because the school administration denies this is the case but other parents confirm that their kids report the same thing. Any ideas for a good investigative method?

We bought an Instant Pot two years ago because everyone seemed to be raving about them, but we only used it a handful of times - we tried recipes that came with it, recipes online, recipes from friends who had one. They were all hugely underwhelming. The one pot roast we tried was dry and flavorless. It didn’t seem to matter what seasonings we tried, the result was subpar.

We do have a couple of other crock pots / slow cookers which we use to make great dishes like pulled pork etc. It’s just the Instant Pot which hasn’t worked out for us.

Other Instant Pot users: what am I missing? Is the main advantage supposed to be that you can prepare meals fast because it’s a pressure cooker? Or should I pull it out and give it another shot?

This is staggering to me for a different reason. Having a single tree cut down (and removed, which I guess they didn’t do) in our neighborhood costs in the vicinity of $4000-$10,000.

I don’t believe you can depend on support:

“The Replace Short Message feature is optional for the ME and the SIM but if implemented it shall be performed as described here.

For MT short messages, on receipt of a short message from the SC, the MS shall check to see if the associated Protocol Identifier contains a Replace Short Message Type code.

If such a code is present, then the MS will check the associated SC address and originating address and replace any existing stored message having the same Protocol Identifier code, SC address and originating address with the new short message and other parameter values. If there is no message to be replaced, the MS shall store the message in the normal way.

If a Replace Short Message Type code is not present then the MS will store the message in the normal way.”[0]

[0] https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_gts/03/0340/05.03.00_60/gs...