Skip Navigation
Skull giver

Giver of skulls

Posts
2
Comments
1,211
Joined
102 yr. ago
  • Offtopic, but: what bloat is on Samsung phones these days? Last I checked they didn't come with much, maybe a calendar or a clock app. They don't even ship their own email app these days, that's all Gmail and Google now.

  • I've seen a coworker use one of those Remarkable tablets and they're easily the best device I know of for taking notes. It won't show you Netflix or Youtube, but the e-ink makes its battery last ages, the texture on the screen is excellent, and the responsiveness is pretty great.

    I find them a bit expensive, though. I think there are a few Remarkable knock-offs around these days, maybe those will deliver a better bang-for-the-buck, you'l have to look for reviews.

  • Welcome to Lemmy, also known as "reddit for communists and people with a favorite Linux distro"!

    Any comment regarding Windows or macOS will inevitably bring out the Linux fanboys. Even as someone who runs Linux everywhere I can, it's kind of exhausting.

  • Notepad is little more than a wrapper around Microsoft's text box control (and I suppose some AI API these days). It's not part of notepad, it's part of Windows itself. A great feature for most users, in my opinion.

    The corrective part is in Settings > Time & Language > Typing > Highlight/Autocorrect misspelled words. You can download an alternative to Notepad and hope that it doesn't integrate with the spelling API, but any update to that software might bring back autocorrect.

    You might want to leave the highlight feature on so you get instant feedback on what words you misspell.

    As for learning a language, there is scientific evidence that information sticks better in your brain when writing down things on physical paper than when typing. If you're learning a language through random exercise, you might want to consider going back to pens & paper.

  • Time for a fediverse alternative for 4chan! /s

  • I have a lot of apps on my phone. Several government and banking apps require to be updated at least weekly or they're locked out for security reasons. Sure I could interrupt my 2FA login flow to update the app (assuming I have fast Internet available) but why bother? Google Play should be updating those things in the background while the phone charges. Same with F-Droid, though that's buggy and gets stuck all the time.

    My Android devices are nothing compared to my Linux installs, anyway.

  • Having worked for a software company that needed translation services, I can confirm that translation software is indeed very necessary.

    People would notice when the word "date" is interpreted as "date on a calendar" in one file and "romantic event" in another, but AI sure doesn't.

    Even Google's apps have broken Dutch translations by reusing existing strings for different contexts that don't mean the same elsewhere. "Search" gets translated to different words depending on if it's used a noun or a verb, for fucks sake!

  • Hey, if Valve gets to wipe home directories in released software, developers should get the chance to do it in their test code.

  • Local folders are traditionally meant for protocols like POP3, where the standard procedure for email is to get downloaded and deleted from the server. IMAP is designed to keep email on the server, like you'd expect in most cases.

    You can copy mail to local folders as a backup, but the problem you encountered is that the protocol was technically right, but you didn't know about the details of migrating email providers. This problem should only happen in two scenarios: when your email vendor seriously fucks up, or when you migrate mail servers without first copying all the email over. As long as you keep backups for the first scenario, and remember to copy over email first during the next migration, you should be in the clear.

    You can use your email in whatever method you prefer, of course. I prefer to keep email centralised around my server. If you're going local-first, you could consider using the older POP3 protocol instead, which is more local-oriented.

  • I quite regularly see installation stall on older and cheaper phones. One single app install is fine, but when five or ten apps update all at once the phone becomes sluggish for minutes.

    With Android consisting mostly of what, four instruction sets, this problem should've been prevented years ago in my opinion. Precompile for the most common platforms, leave the current slow processes for instruction sets nobody uses in practice, like MIPS and RISC-V.

  • Tap on an app there. There are three settings. "disabled" for basically freezing apps once they're no longer in the foreground, "enabled“ for doing things like occasionally checking for content updates j the background and playing music while other apps are on the forefront, and "unlimited" for the setting you're thinking off, which badly designed apps often need to not be killed when they keep hitting the CPU in the background while the user hasn't interacted with them for ages.

    Other manufacturers have even worse appp killers.

  • If you have your client configured for IMAP, Thunderbird will synchronise with the new server.

    If you did not transfer your emails from your old server to your new server, that means the new state is "empty inbox" and synchronising means "removing everything that's available locally".

    To fix this, either do a server-to-server transfer from the old email provider to the new one (there are tools to do that, like imapsync), or try importing emails from a backup into Thunderbird after synchronisation succeeds, so that Thunderbird will upload the messages. It's possible that you will need to use a tool to rewrite the message IDs so that Thunderbird treats the messages as new items.

    If you have already cancelled your old server provider (so a server-to-server transfer is not possible), restoring from backups may be your only solution.

    If you don't have any backups, your email may not be lost. The first thing you need to do is copy Thunderbird's data folder to a backup location, just in case Thunderbird tries to do maintenance on the file while you're performing recovery. Then, use a tool like Thunderbird Reset Status (I can't quickly find a more up to date tool but they probably exist) to unmark the emails in the Thunderbird mail store as deleted. Then set up backups for your new mail server.

    If you use the trick above and Thunderbird starts deleting emails again, repeat the trick but break the email account settings first. Then, set up a second connection to your email account, drag over all the undeleted emails so they get uploaded to the new server.

  • Mastodon is just one of many applications that uses AP for their own custom purposes. MissKey and derived software has some kind of emoji response feature to posts that's basically unimplemented anywhere else. Lemmy's boosting trick to make comment sync make interoperability with timeline based social media a spamfest.

    Maybe I should check again, but last time I looked into it there were no commonly used ActivityPub compliant servers. Everyone does their own thing just a little different to make the protocol work for their purposes. Even similar tools (see: MissKey/Mastodon, Lemmy/Kbin) took a while to actually interoperate.

    As far as I can tell, the idea behind the original design, where servers are mostly content agnostic and clients decide on rendering content in specific ways, hasn't been executed by anyone; servers and clients have been mixed together for practical reasons and that's why we get these issues.

  • It's very useful in sealed devices (smart watches, ear phones). Much better than pogo pins on your skin; whatever metal they pick, someone is going to be allergic. Things like active pencils (Apple Pencil, but als the Windows open standard ones) also make a lot of sense to charge like that.

    I also use a wireless charging stand for my phone. Most phone stands have an opening for a cable, but for some reason that opening is always at just the wrong space, or not right for the cable. K They're also useful when using your phone for navigation in your car. I find a cable sticking from the bottom of my phone quite a handful to manage, especially as the USB ports are all so close to my gear shifter.

    For those still sporting lightning iPhones, it also provides a universal charging option.

    Oh, and then there's the edge case of "I want to plug something into my phone and also charge it". Tiny flash drives, 3.5mm converters, you name it. Most phones only have one USB port, so using it for anything but charging usually means not being able to charge unless you go wireless.

    Still, wired is the way to to moet of the times. Wireless is just a nice backup, and maybe a fun gimmick in certain furniture.

  • Building trust is hard. It's easier to trust a few companies than to trust a million unknown servers. It's why I prefer Wikipedia over amazingnotskgeneratedatalltopicalinformarion.biz when I'm looking up simple facts.

    Furthermore, Facebook isn't selling data directly. At least, not if they're following the law. They got caught doing and fined doing that once and it's not their main mode of operation. Like Google, their data is their gold mine, selling it directly would be corporate suicide. They simply provide advertisers with spots to put an ad, but when it comes to data processing, they're doing all the work before advertisers get a chance to look at a user's profile.

    On the other hand, scraping ActivityPub for advertisers would be trivial. It'd be silly to go through the trouble to set up something like Threads if all you want is information, a basic AP server that follows ever Lemmy community and soaks up gigabytes an hour can be written as a weekend project.

    Various Chinese data centers are scraping the hell out of my server, and they carry referer headers from other Fediverse servers. I've blocked half of East Asia and new IP addresses keep popping up. Whatever data you think Facebook may be selling, someone else is already selling based on your Fediverse behaviour. Whatever Petal Search and all the others are doing, I don't believe for a second they're being honest about it.

    Most Fediverse software defaults to federation and accepting inbound follow requests. At least, Mastodon, Lemmy, GoToSocial, Kbin, and one of those fish named mastodonlikes did. Profiles are often public by default too. The vulnerability applies to a large section of the Fediverse default settings.

    I'd like to think people would switch to the Fediverse despite the paradigm shift. The privacy risks are still there if there's only one company managing them, so I'd prefer it if people used appropriate tools for sharing private stuff. I think platforms like Circles (a Matrix-based social media system) which leverage encryption to ensure nobody can read things they shouldn't have been able to, are much more appropriate. Perhaps a similar system can be laid on top of ActivityPub as well (after all, every entity already has a public/private key pair).

  • I don't believe you can do it natively. However, I have managed to convince my phone to swap from slow 2.4GHz to 5.2GHz by using the Fritz! Wlan app, which exposes some more WiFi control.

    I can imagine recent Android versions having patched that out, though. WiFi permissions are usually only granted to system apps these days.

    I believe there's also an ADB command line way, but I don't remember it. Furthermore, you could try looking into developer options to see if there's a toggle in there, or perhaps a method to select the WiFi country so you can pick one that won't connect to your 5.2GHz band.

    As long as the SSID and password are the same, and both are routed to the same network, IoT apps shouldn't struggle to connect, though. You can try temporarily disabling 5.2 GHz in the router but I kind of doubt that it'll fix your problem unless you have a really uncommon setup. Even with my weird guest network setup, cheap tuya IoT seems to connect just fine. Tuya all goes through the cloud anyway.

  • I don't think dansup was in the wrong here. Yes, it's a security issue I suppose, but the problem lies within the underlying protocol. Any server you interact with can ignore any privacy markers you add to posts, you're just not supposed to do that.

    Whether this is a 0day depends on what you expect out of the Fediverse. If you treat it like a medium where every user or server has the potential to be hostile, like you probably should, this is a mere validation logic bug. If you treat it like the social media many of its servers are trying to be, it's a gross violation of your basic privacy expectations.

  • This is exactly why ActivityPub makes for such a mediocre replacement for the big social media apps. You have to let go of any assumptions that at least some of your data remains exclusive to the ad algorithm and accept that everything you post or look at or scroll past is being recorded by malicious servers. Which, in turn, kind of makes it a failure, as replacing traditional social media is exactly what it's supposed to do.

    The Fediverse also lacks tooling to filter out the idiots and assholes. That kind of moderation is a lot easier when you have a centralised database and moderation staff on board, but the network of tiny servers with each their own moderation capabilities will promote the worst behaviour as much as the best behaviour.

    But really, the worst part is the UX for apps. Fediverse apps suck at setting expectations. Of course Lemmy publishes when you've upvoted what posts, that's essential for how the protocol works, but what other Reddit clone has a public voting history? Same with anyone using any form of the word "private" or even "unlisted", as those only apply in a perfect world where servers have no bugs and where there are no malicious servers.

  • The market runs Windows, so it would entirely depend on how well Windows runs on them. If you're buying an Apple chip to run macOS, you're already getting the best deal out of Apple anyway.

    Given the history of Exynos I doubt Samsung will ever make anything high performance. If you want high performance ARM, you'll probably want to go for something like Ampère, like the workstation that System76 is selling right now.

    The modern Snapdragons seem more than fast enough for most desktop use. They have PCIe capabilities so in theory you could just hook up a GPU and use them in a gaming rig. The most power efficient gaming rig could hilariously be a Qualcomm CPU paired with an Intel GPU. Qualcomm's media encoder/decoder is also leagues ahead of the desktop competition, so streamers may get an edge there if OBS can take advantage of the hardware acceleration. Unfortunately, from what I've seen on reviews, some games don't like to run on ARM. Performance is just fine (very impressive for laptop GPUs!) but without stability, you're not attracting many gamers.

    If Qualcom targets the desktop market, I expect them to go all in on Apple Mini style computers. Their Snapdragon chips inside those ultra thin desktops Lenovo sells pack a surprising punch and they're more than good enough for most desktop use. Taking the fight to gaming seems like picking an uphill battle for no reason.

    Unfortunately, modern ARM designs all seem to go the same route as Apple, with unified memory for both CPU and GPU. You can run the CPU on swappable DIMMs, but the GPU needs more bandwidth than that, so you'll need to get soldered RAM. I was hoping LPCAMM2 would fix that, but Framework and AMD tried and couldn't get their new AMD chip to work without soldering the memory for stable performance, so I'm thinking the days of swappable memory are coming to an end.

  • ActivityPub has a feature where most post objects can actually have different language representations within one item. On a protocol level, MissKey/Mastodon/Lemmy can have the same message in different languages, and the client can pick the one to display. Unfortunately, I've never seen anyone make use of it. Seems like a waste. If used, users with their display language set to German/Japanese will see the "machine translated:" post first, and people with English as a language will see the original. English first, and good implementations would allow the user to switch languages to compare.