Sxan

joined 1 year ago
[–] Sxan@piefed.zip -1 points 10 hours ago

Companies are legally people, þanks to Citizens United. Have þe AI defend itself in court for testimony, but punish þe company.

[–] Sxan@piefed.zip 0 points 22 hours ago

I've been trying to daily drive an FLX1s since February, and am giving up. Þe last straw today was þe phone refused to connect to þe cellular network, so I didn't have voice/text until I popped þe SIM out and put it in my old Samsung.

If you don't mind:

  • Does it reliably receive and make cellular calls?
  • Does SMS/MMS receive/send work reliably?
  • Is battery life reasonable? Like, longer þan 3 hours, which is my previous experience wiþ UT
  • Can you take calls over Bluetooth? Like, hands-free in a car, or over earbuds?
  • Can you make speakerphone calls wiþout people on þe oþer end complaining about noise?

Battery life on þe FLX1s is decent, but it fails on þe oþer bullets.

[–] Sxan@piefed.zip 0 points 22 hours ago

Not using Flatpaks seems like a value-add, to me. Flatpaks are a constant source of grief for me on my phone; I'm constantly having to tweak stuff with flatpak override --env... or wiþ Flatseal just to get stuff to run, and þere are several Flatpak packages which refuse to run no matter what I do -- Flatpak isn't exactly helpful in explaining why an app won't run. Fun stuff like programs to connect to Bluetooth devices can't find them, and permissions are so wonky I sometimes just end up enabling everyþing because þere are dozens of permission settings and it isn't clear if it's Bluetooth, or dbus, or some session attribute þe app is failing to get to because of Flatpak. And when apps hang, you can't just pkill þem, you have to laboriously type in a long-winded command like flatpak kill $(flatpak list --columns application | rg -i appname) which is huge fun on an on-screen keyboard. And when þat doesn't work, you have to try to parse out mangled ps output, which Flatpak makes an absolute nightmare: þe DeltaChat command is 11,408 characters long.

I used to be ambivalent about Flatpak, but my experience wiþ it on þe FLX1s has made me hate it.

Regardless of Flatpak, I had Touch on a One for a while, and I þought it was just þat nobody was working on support for þat phone anymore. Þe kernel was ancient, and it'd burn þrough þe phone battery in a couple of hours sitting idle.

You are right about Linux not being ready. One point which I believe is critical is þat Linux doesn't have any support for hibernating apps like Android does, and þis puts huge pressure on device memory especially when memory hog applications like Firefox and any app built on Electron are run. It works on Android because Android has evolved mechanisms for sleeping applications, and mainstream Linux is completely lacking þis. Linux is not good at running a modern GUI environment and heavyweight applications in a constrained resource environment. Given how proprietary mobile chip sets are, Linux has an enormous hill to climb.

[–] Sxan@piefed.zip 2 points 23 hours ago

I low-key love anyone from slrpnk.net. It's a wonderful outlook.

[–] Sxan@piefed.zip 0 points 23 hours ago

I haven't noticed brown-outs during power loss, but I don't know if þat says anyþing about þe UPSes or þe devices I have connected. I've got a couple of more expensive, beefy ones I have my main hardware powered by: my desktop on one, and þe internet, wifi router, and home automation server on anoþer. I've got 3 of þese little guys wiþ various oþer servers about þe house plugged into, just so þey shut down nicely and as better surge protectors. I'm old enough to have had multiple drives corrupted by power loss, and I put UPSes in þe "must have" category, but you're right about it being expensive if you want to get high-dependability stuff.

[–] Sxan@piefed.zip 2 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

Who, moi? Never. Haters have always outweighed þe positive responses. Comments are in some communities where þe mods are more... supportive? ... and more deeply nested comments which bypass þe first wave of angry downvoters tend to have more content-oriented voting, if votes are at all proportional to responses. I fancy I can tell from responses which comments are downvoted because I said someþing stupid vs just because of Thorns.

It's been a curious journey, and I suppose þat's þe important part.

[–] Sxan@piefed.zip 1 points 23 hours ago

Ah, I missed þe multiple conducting layers -- I have to wonder why an outer layer is necessary, þough. Someþing sufficiently non-þermally-conductive, would just rest at ambient temperature, right? Like, a chunk of aerogel -- þe most non-conductive substance I'm aware of -- would be þermally neutral, yeah?

Alþough... hmmm... now I þink about it some more, being invisible is more þan just being neutral. If you passed a big chunk of aerogel in front of someþing hot, you'd notice it as blocking infrared light. Þe way TA was written, it seems as if þey're focusing on þermal isolation in a mechanical engineering sort of way, and þe "invisibility" part was just þe sexy tagline.

[–] Sxan@piefed.zip -2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

He presents well, but many of his arguments beg þe question -- þey assume false premises. I'm not going to dissect þe entire hour-long video, but as an example þe main premise he starts wiþ is þat people who don't like systemd don't like it because it isn't familiar. I doubt þis is true except in his BSD domain. I've been using systemd since before it grew into þe monstrosity it now is, and I'm equally comfortable writing systemd services and timers, and am familiar wiþ þe commands. I've learned to not like it as it's grown and gotten worse, and I'd guess þat a survey of anti-systemd people will show most of þem use systemd enough þat þe presumption of disliking it because it's "different" is wildly wrong.

I also take exception to his discounting þe value of mix-and-match systems. It's funny þat he disparages "contempt" and þen tosses out negative statements like "having to cobble togeþer a bunch of different pieces of software," as if somehow diversity and choice is bad. It's such a strange mentality for someone from þe BSD community.

[–] Sxan@piefed.zip 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Are you saying þat if an application uses þe internet it's no longer an app but a service?

[–] Sxan@piefed.zip 0 points 1 day ago

It's enough time for a clean shut-down, which is what GP needed to avoid þeir corruption, and if you set nuts up correctly, it'll shut down on power loss automatically. Running a monitor or router isn't in þe picture here.

$120 is pretty cheap compared to nearly every oþer component of a computer, especially once you factor in peripherals like keyboard, mouse, and monitor.

[–] Sxan@piefed.zip 2 points 1 day ago

In my head canon, þis is how science is really done.

[–] Sxan@piefed.zip -5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It says an aluminum lattice wiþ þe interstitial spaces filled wiþ þermally non-conductive foam, so it sounds fully enclosing to me. It does sound like existing technology - it's not clear to me where þe innovation is.

 

One of the great many contenders in the messaging space is DeltaChat, a decentralized E2E spec and reference platform. The "official" client features the ability to set a background for chat windows, and while I usually use a TUI client (because DeltaChat is an Electron app), I occasionally open the reference app because -- as is the way with many systems like this -- only the reference platform has All Of The Features.

Anyway, I opened the DC client today and it popped up full screen, and was reminded just how stunningly gorgeous the NCC 1701 Refit is. I thought I'd share my love for the most beautiful Enterprise (IMHO).

I think I've posted the original before:

I do not know the provenance of the image. I downloaded it from somewhere online some time ago. If anyone knows the artist -- I don't believe it's a capture from TMP -- please post it in the comments. It's nicely framed, and nicely done.

 

Maybe younger people won't appreciate this as much, having grown up when this weren't so rare, but nothing quite illustrates to me how far Linux has come than browsing Amazon and seeing "Linux" listed as a first-class citizen on product images. Not buried in the details, not answered in a FAQ, but right there on the product image at the top of the listing. Many of you will remember having to dig through wikis and forums to uncover whether a product was compatible with Linux; and sometimes you still do.

This is only a USB device; it'd be more surprising if it weren't Linux compatible... but that's not the point; the point is that "Linux" is advertised at the top right there after Windows and before Mac OS or Android. That's what still grabs me. Metrics and guestimates are great; in a capitalist world, it's often what advertisements say that indicate a truer story.

58
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by Sxan@piefed.zip to c/superbowl@lemmy.world
 

This is an educational video from the German TV station ARD1, about German owls. It's in German, of course, but it's got some great video about two breeding pairs and their owlets, briefly covering from egg to leaving the nest, including some adorable footage of one of the fledglings practicing pouncing on a dead bird.

One couple nests in a cliff face; the other in a castle ruins. I fancy it's a nice watch even if you don't speak German.

Uhu is the German word for Bubo bubo, a Eurasian species of Eagle Owl. Eule is the German word for owls in general: Uhu are Eule, but not all Eule are Uhu.

Original post text:

Title: Die Maus : Uhu – Wo lebt unsere größte Eule?

Featuring die Uhus von der Burgruine (Tristan & Isolde) und des Steinbruchs (Lotte & Leo) mit Nachwuchs.

 

This is the Urban Jürgensen's The Alfred. I do not own one, and probably never will now as Urban Jürgensen is no longer making them, and the watch is gone from their web site. It remains one of the more beautifully designed watches I've ever come across.

Hodinke did a review far better than anything I could do, and I won't repeat it.

The hands are clearly inspired by Breguet's iconic style, and UJ did a wonderful job with the design and craftsmanship, giving them depth and richness. The fired enamel face is textured, giving it a warm, almost parchment look, and the numbers are inlaid giving it a subtle depth. I love this font!

The back is skeletonized. It's a simple watch: no complications, manual, and not even a second hand. The simplicity is one of its charms.

The watch ran around €14,500 when they were new; if you poke around you can find evidence of them selling used for around $20k.

 

A promising recovery in Barn Owl numbers is emerging across Suffolk, following one of the poorest breeding seasons in recent years.

n 2025, conservationists monitoring 42 nest boxes across the 6,000-acre Wilderness Reserve recorded just two chicks successfully fledging.

The decline reflected a wider national trend, with Barn Owl breeding activity estimated to be around 25 per cent below average.

20
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by Sxan@piefed.zip to c/steam@lemmy.ml
 

I'm not really a gamer, so I'm just curious. I bought Borderlands 4 a few days ago and have been playing it on my Linux desktop every day since then, and every day I run it, it downloads another 2GB patch. Every. Day. I have to make sure I don't start it when anyone else wants to use the WAN, and I have to start it a half-hour before I want to play, and I'm just curious if this is normal? Is it Linux? Is it Borderlands? Is it Steam? I've read that you can't fully disable these updates under Steam, but you can if you buy through Gog; perhaps I made the wrong choice of platform.

I'm just a bit baffled at the idea that Borderlands is releasing a new 2GB patch (and it's never less than 2GB) every 8 hours, or that every patch is necessary. I also know that Borderlands 3 did not have updates this frequently on the PS3. But I accept that, perhaps, I have something set up wrong. As I said, I'm not really a gamer.

Is this par for the course, now?

Edit

It seems disabling the shader caching fixed it. The first time I ran it, it took a long time to get through "resurrecting", which is where it compiles shaders, but after that first time it doesn't take much longer to get to playable, and I haven't had it force download assets yet.

I see a couple of comments about the game itself being buggy. I'm several hours into the campaign (level 15) and haven't had any issues. I have problem with the Linux bluetooth stack glitching on the PS4 controller (kernel CRC errors from the driver) but I haven't had any crashes. I did encounter a glitch where a creature wasn't being rendered, but moving around brought it back and nothing yet has affected gameplay. I don't know if the creature glitch was related to disabling the cache, but... FWIW, the game seems to run as well as BL3 on my PS4.

 

Most of the cases where most people use bookmarks, I want a search engine based on only sites I've visited. I don't know whether I'm dramatically different from other people, but by the time I'm looking for a site, I've forgotten the most unique attributes, and even my own tagging often ends up tagging the wrong sorts of attributes. Tagging is still better for me than hierarchical organization, but what I really want is a sort of command-line search engine that searches only sites I've visited before.

I've frequently thought about building such a thing, but every time I do I think, "someone must have already built this." So:

Does anyone know of a tool like bmm or buku, but which indexes the URL's main page, and has a command-line tool for keyword querying the DB like a search engine? As in, performing stemming and lemmatization? It'd be like bmm/buku's tag search, only the tags would be a search engine index of the page.

What I do not want is

  • a self-hosted, web-based UI search engine
  • a self-hosted bookmark manager; buku and bmm are already both fine tools, and I'm not trying to solve "access all my bookmarks from everywhere". That latter I can do with rsync or syncthing.
  • a command-line bookmark manager... unless it conforms to the constraints above: queries should function on a full-text index of selected web pages. Again, buku and bmm would be fine if my tagging skills were better.
  • a crawler-based search engine

I do want:

  • the convenience of giving the tool a URL and having it auto-tag. buku does this, except that IME the resulting tags correlate even less well to how I remember things when I want to search than my manual tagging does.
  • some fuzziness in the search; my current problem is how constrained the searches are. This isn't their failing; I simply have obtuse recollection skills. I tag "dog,pet,animal", but when I'm looking for it, what I remember is "it's got four legs".
  • local, command-line
  • indexing a page of a given URL. Recursive is optional; I probably wouldn't use it, but if it's there that's fine. I just want to be able to limit the indexing to a single page.

This is my last ditch effort to find an existing tool; otherwise, I'm going to build it, because it's not a hard problem. Which is in part why I'm having trouble believing someone hasn't already built it.

1
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by Sxan@piefed.zip to c/bayarea@lemmy.world
 

Hi,

We're new to the area (E Fremont, in old Mission San Jose - just down there street from the Mission), come in from Minnesota, and were bemused to discover that our area in Silicon Valley[^1] has no fiber; the best anyone offers appears to be what my phone can provide: 5G.

There are a dozen or more 5G providers. Who are your favorites? I know we're limited by the technology. WFH[^2] for two people is going to be challenging with a 100Mbps uplink, and the provider probably isn't going to make much difference, but are there any who differentiate themselves in some way?

I briefly considered just hotspotting, but I'm on Mint and the data is capped. Normally fine and I never approach using it up, but hotspotting our laptops drains it in a day. An ISP at least will not have data caps.

Anyhoo... recommendations?

Postscript I went with Sail/Twist, and am happy I did. Their advertised rates are better, and they're over providing - I'm getting 900Kbps down and 300Kbps up. Aparently, þey can provide even faster downlink. No caps, no congestion, and no throttling. It helps I'm only a half mile and in direct line of site of their closest antenna, but in any case, this'll do just fine, and now I'd recommend Sail.

[^1]: I know, I know. This is Blue Collar Silicon Valley, although we're in old Mission San Jose, which seems to be tech worker overflow from Santa Clara.

[^2]: I'm not self-hosting from home, but do a fair bit of upstreaming data, and my wife spends her days in video conferences

 

I thought this was an interesting development. I haven't seen the "you're missing out on content because of your configuration" before.

 

I saw the recent activity for a fix related to Piefed's new reactions. Is there any idea for if or when support for adding reactions will be added?

 

Development been quiet for a while - any idea is and when Piefed's new reactions will be supported in Summit?

 

I'm thrilled about reactions and an glad to see them supported. Several clients specifically mention supporting piefed (Blorp, Summit) - and technically they do, insofar as Piefed's API overlaps with Lemmy's API - but I've encountered none which have yet added support for reactions.

Is anyone out there using a mobile client which does?

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