• 0 Posts
  • 47 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Two issues.

    First of all a lot of websites show times in your current timezone. Beehaw for example says you wrote your post “2 days ago”. Depending what timezone my browser is in, that could display 3 days or 1 day. When I hover over it, it shows the exact date/time in my timezone. Which is handy.

    Second it doesn’t actually achieve the intended goal. Even if you use a VPN chances are you’ve set it to give you a public IP address close to you to have good performance. And if your IP address is in Proton’s London datacentre but your timezone is UTC+0 when everyone else is UTC+1… well you stand out like a single black sheep in a flock of white ones and ad networks are absolutely fingerprinting you with that.




  • Photographers use real cameras

    They are real cameras. Have you seen the photos and videos people create with phones? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8qFTgcRV6w

    Yes, there are some situations where an iPhone won’t get you a great photo… but that’s true of any real camera too. You don’t take a several hundred thousand dollar Sony HDC-4800 to a wedding for example. Professionals use the right tool for the situation and these days that is often a phone.

    journalists, business men, programmers, don’t type their shit on a 1 inch touch keyboard.

    I’m two of those, I type constantly on my phone. Yes - I also have a nice mechanical keyboard and I always use it at my desk, but I’m not always at my desk.


  • Since at the very least the release of Dell XPS 13 we can have “just-works” machines that run Linux.

    Uh. No. I love Linux, use it every day, but you need to know what you’re doing.

    I’ve worked with devs who refused to run docker on their machines because they said they battery got destroyed

    How much power a docker container uses depends on the container. Obviously if the container pegs all eight CPU cores at 100% utilisation then yeah - battery life is going to suck. But with commonplace server side software running in the container I’m able to keep docker running all the time on my Mac and get about 18 hours on battery… and that’s with a battery quite a bit smaller (therefore lighter) than the battery in the XPS-13.

    Unless you work with iOS development there is no real, practical advantage

    I have done iOS development in the past, but these days all of the software I write is for Linux. I think a Mac is the best way to develop Linux software - the Mac window manager is so much better than Gnome or KDE and it has really nice integration with other hardware (for example I’m typing this on a keyboard connected to my desktop Mac, but have the browser window open on a screen connected to my laptop Mac… you can do that on Linux, but it’s just two clicks to enable it on a Mac and requires installing/configuring/troubleshooting third party software on Linux)

    I have Linux installed on my Mac - and it works perfectly… if it was better I would be using it.


  • Threads was launched before it was finished to capitalise on one of Musk’s more brain dead decisions - and the Threads website was initially almost unusable (it’s still missing a lot of things - such as federation with Mastodon).

    The requirement to use a phone app, if it still exists, wasn’t nefarious, it was just the best they could do without delaying the product launch.

    As for “the account they already apparently created”… AFAIK threads runs on Instagram’s infrastructure. So if you have an Instagram account then, yeah, “signing up to threads” is basically just enabling threads on your existing account. If you don’t have an Instagram account I’m pretty sure they create one when you sign up for Threads (but disable Instagram on your account unless you “sign up” over there).




  • I would question wether “good” and “inexpensive” are possible at all on a wrist tracker. Measuring your heart rate from the wrist is technically difficult - it’s just too far from your heart and requires expensive sensors, a large battery, and even then a massive R&D budget (as in hundreds of millions) to get the software algorithm right.

    Get yourself a chest strap - those are technically much easier to implement. You’ll need to look at your phone to view your heart rate, but it should be accurate unlike most wrist trackers.

    Even thousand dollar wrist fitness trackers (like the high end Apple Watch models) are often paired to a cheap chest tracker and those watches generally will trust your chest tracker over their own measurements - because even with billions spent on the best wrist tracker possible they still can’t be as good as a $30 chest strap.

    Look for one that supports the “ANT” standard. They will allow you to view your heart rate in real time on a variety of other devices (phone, watch, gym equipment, etc). ANT trackers just use bluetooth, so they won’t send anything to the cloud (unless you pair them to a phone app that does that).




  • Yes there’s software for this, but I think you can keep it simpler than that.

    Just tell them to create a new spreadsheet every day (possibly by creating a copy of yesterday’s spreadsheet). Obviously name the files by date. With a new directory for each month.

    Also, it sounds like they don’t have good backups. Help them with that.


  • When someone posts on Discord, they will often get an answer within seconds. I don’t recommend or use Discord, however I absolutely do recommend every project use a realtime chat service of some kind.

    With GitHub or a forum it’s likely to be overnight if you get a response at all. That fundamentally changes the type of content people are willing to post.

    Projects should eventually have a website and an issue tracker and a chat service and an email address and a mastodon account. But you don’t need to create all of them at once…

    And a chat is always where I start. In fact I usually start discussing my idea in a chat room of some kind before I’ve even decided to start work on the project at all. 99% of the time the discussion ends with me deciding it’s not a good idea.