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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Typewriters.

    They had bars that needed to physically move, and so staggering them helped them not collide and get jammed.

    If you imagine a bar coming from the center of each key towards your screen, you can see how the staggering was helpful. For instance, M misses J and K above it, naturally, but it also slightly misses I and the 8 above that.

    It’s a great solution for a nonexistent problem in keyboards.



  • Completely agree.

    The only reason the relative had it at all was because of those old fears. As soon as I learned that they had it bundled with the computer (hate that. Malware’s gotta get in somewhere though I guess), I knew why it was being slow.

    I hold this up as an example because even their own troubleshooting website and a program dedicated to the purpose above and beyond the usual uninstaller couldn’t do it though. Avast doesn’t even know its own malware.

    Also this nonsense got me the chance to put mint on their computer, but the “switch to Linux” argument isn’t constructive in this particular spot. They didn’t end up sticking to it because a required-for-school piece of software for tests just doesn’t do Linux at all. Couldn’t get it to run in wine or even a virtual machine either, and they’re not great at the whole computer thing so I didn’t wanna be tech support for dual booting.


  • Here’s an example. I removed avast via the uninstaller on a relatives computer, it made it laggy as hell. I restart after as the uninstaller demands, but it was still there.

    Searching, I find this official support option. https://support.avast.com/en-us/article/10

    The official Avast Uninstall Tool, the tool to use when the included uninstaller didn’t work.

    The official uninstall tool didn’t work either. I ran it in safe mode, like it said. Didn’t work, either, but it removed some stuff, and finally let me delete some things manually. Ran it again in safe mode after that, finally seems to have removed everything.

    Anyway it’s a great example of if a company doesn’t know what they’re about, windows has no process to recover from that. Window’s process is identical to a Walmart employee saying. “I dunno, man, contact the manufacturer.” Genuinely, its usually enough, but when its not, there’s absolutely no recourse.


  • Another vote for “well-written”. I have read both, and both are good if they’re done well. Besides, I don’t usually have the option when I find a book, the summaries rarely tell me and I’m not gonna dig through the middle of the book for the answer to this question.

    What I care about is being able to connect with the characters. If I can connect to someone in a realistic relationship, great. If I can connect to someone and they get that idealist treatment, great. If I can connect to someone and it seems like a romance but it’s abusive and the book becomes a realistic horror novel, that’s also great, I’ll feel the fear and desperation.

    I never have wanted to read a book to have a specific experience, is my point. If your experience was well-written, it would be good.


  • Well they still have a finite life and are less replaceable than a battery. Even if it quadrupled the lifespan (which is a reasonably generous estimate given OP’s 4-year duration and wikipedia telling me supercapacitors last 10-15 years), it would still eventually need to be replaced and that would generally require resoldering it.

    I think a much better solution is 2 battery slots, one to be a backup battery, unused, and then when needed, an LED on the mobo can be turned on. Honestly OP could jury-rig up a similar system if he wanted to, although it’d be a bit ugly and anytime something is jury-rigged I don’t really think of it as reliable.




  • The right app could make it into a security camera or a WiFi remote. A quick search suggests you could jailbreak it, although I’m not up to date on what that would offer you.

    I’m not sure what prevented Delta from working, since it says it supports iOS 14 or later on an iPod touch. Maybe a factory restore or similar would let you take that route anyway?


  • It’s a bit different because of the stated values though.

    Raspberry pi’s foundation is focused on making computers available broadly, while this new organization is focused on making privacy widely accessible.

    While both can be commercialized, the pi’s foundation has no fundamental problems with selling out privacy or focusing on money to achieve those goals. Proton would have a much harder time arguing that profiting from sale.of private data supports privacy.

    This is relevant because it means even if the remaining shares end up on the stock market, the foundation can use its majority ownership to veto any privacy concerns.

    Time will tell. I could also have missed something


  • A company with a public offering basically cannot refuse a large enough buyout because with a public offering comes a financial responsibility to the shareholders. Public stock is a contract saying give me money and I’ll do my best to make you money back, and it’s very legally binding.

    You can avoid this by never going public, but that also means you basically don’t get big investors for expanding what you can offer. A public offering involves losing some of your rights as owner for cash.

    When the legal goal becomes “money above all else”, it is hard to justify NOT selling all the data and violating the trust of your customers for money, customer loyalty has to be monetizable and also worth more.

    Proton has given a majority share to a nonprofit with a legal requirement to uphold the current values, not make money. This means that the remaining ownership can be sold to whoever, the only way anything gets done is if this foundation agrees. It prevents everything associated with a legal financial responsibility to make money, but still allows the business to do business things and make money, which seems to be proton’s founder’s belief, that the software should be sold to be sustainable.


  • Seems solid.

    It doesn’t change a ton, but the point was basically them putting their money where their mouth is and saying “now we can’t sell out like everything else.”

    If you liked them before, this is great. It means google or whoever literally can’t buy them out, it’s not about the money. If you were iffy already because they’re not FOSS or whatever other reason, this doesn’t change that, either, for better or worse


  • In mint I can right click in a folder and reopen the folder with elevated privileges. That’s my primary, I assumed it was standard but if it’s not common I guess it’s a cinnamon thing. If so, maybe cinnamon is the desktop of choice for avoiding the terminal.

    I didn’t do my full diligence to the samba GUI thing, apparently. That’s a good catch.

    To salvage my argument, yumex has a GUI and extends yum, so while the instructions expect the terminal, I think it’ll be optional.

    I still recommend it to nobody, but someone who set out to avoid the terminal doesn’t have to fail.

    yumex, pip-gui, and aptitude give yum, pip, and apt GUI’s, respectively, so most anything that expected the terminal should be doable without it. All it costs is a bunch of effort troubleshooting GUI things or finding out one doesn’t display error messages and logs them weirdly or whatever.


  • Well if i double-click a file I’ve made executable, it will ask if I’d like to run it, and most software will have a github or downloads page that will give you direct downloads to the software.

    In other words, I can successfully install things like a windows user, I just have to go the extra step to open the file’s properties and make it executable with the GUI first.

    Apt is faster, and it’s also faster to do a direct download, make it executable, then execute it in the terminal, too. But I CAN do it.

    Config files can be edited in the GUI text editor, it’s just slower.

    To test my claim and prove your third point, this link is the repository for a samba GUI, found at https://www.samba.org/samba/GUI/. Specifically, it’s SMB4K, the first one.

    Convenient? No. Would it update automatically? No. Do I want to do it this way, or recommend it? Still no. But it does function.



  • If the security camera has alerts like a decent baby monitor, then I see no need to change.

    If you already intend to have security cameras, being able to have one that works as a baby monitor but is completely integrated into a real security system just seems like the best of both worlds.

    If you currently use the camera to spot check your baby, with no real alert system for issues, then I’d jump straight to a security system that’s capable of that to reduce price over time.

    I had a security camera with a built in mic, a cheaper one, and besides getting some false positives, it worked perfectly until my kid didn’t need one anymore. I got an alert on their app when it detected sound and I opened the camera, it wasn’t straight audio, but all I needed was a notification to check it myself.