This just in, Google will he deprecating their phone app fart button in 18 months for the new and improved Android Poots button.

Wait, we're just now getting word that in 7 more months, Android Poots will be replaced with Google Toots. All 3 buttons will be active at the same time while Google works on feature parity.

You'll never believe this, insiders are telling us that 4 months after Google Toots, Google will be introducing Google Farts to replace Google Toots. Google Farts will be different than the original Fart button, not sure how but we are expecting it'll be a worse experience.

And finally, 6 months later, after hundreds of millions of dollars spent, somehow none on marketing, and after generating a healthy user base that defied all odds, Google will begin to shutdown all 4 buttons and lay off all the teams that worked on them.

Google has a Google problem. Seemingly no one is steering the ship. They have a bunch of internal teams doing their own thing. How many messaging apps have they killed now, 3, 4? Allo was great. It worked on Android and iOS. I had all my friends on it and then Google canceled it. All they had to do was add sms fallback for android users, spent some money on marketing, and it could have rivaled iMessage by now. Before that, it was hangouts and regular people didn’t know about it. How many times do they think they can burn customers before people catch on?

Their pixel phones still don’t get the same amount of updates that iPhones do and iPhones retain their value for a lot longer than Android phones. Financially, it makes more sense for a parent to buy an iPhone. They can pass it down to their kid when they upgrade and know it’ll still get updates for a long time. Yes, Google can patch and update parts of the phone from the play store but good luck explaining that to regular people.

I have a lamp with two smart bulbs in it and I can’t combine them into 1 light in the google home app. The light bulbs are controlled independently. It’s infuriating.

I could rant for a long time but I’ll end with this; I don’t enjoy using iOS but my only other option is death by a thousand papercuts.

I could probably tolerate Windows 11 if:

• the start menu search didn’t search the web and just searched my system.
• the widget panel wasn’t just a wrapper for their shitty news aggregator that seems to only gather celebrity news
• If I have windows pro, I don’t want notifications to use Edge or see TikTok, Amazon, Candycrush, etc. in the start menu (I know they aren’t downloaded but what “pro” wants any of that shit)

I work at a small company and one of my many hats is “the only IT guy”. I promise you, you don’t want to self host email. You will always be in spam filter hell and you’ll never really know if the email you sent actually made it to the destination until it’s too late.

Buy a domain, pay for an email provider, and hook them up. If you ever get upset with your email provider, find a new one and switch out the connections. That way, your email address never changes but where it’s stored can be.

If you were using it to get facts to form an opinion, I would say it wasn't the best but then again, that style of research is difficult even without reddit.

Agreed. But if you wanted human opinions on say, a specific brand a vacuum, 👌

The article has a report from at least one person claiming they can’t find the airtag even with the alerts.

There’s also videos on YouTube that show you how to remove the speaker so without the UWB chip, I could see scenarios where people genuinely can’t find them.

I’m not making the argument either way, just saying that a problem is there. Whether it’s Apple’s responsibility or not is up to the court

Great, now partner with Microsoft and merge it with Windows so the majority of Android users might finally stop emailing themselves, or sending files through their messaging app of choice

For all of Apple’s faults, their Apple TV is pretty decent. A home screen with apps on them; no ads. It’s great

This is definitely a personal preference thing but I think if you want to search the web, you go to the web browser. And if you want to search for a folder or file on the system, windows search should fulfill that purpose.

At the very least, it should be a toggle. The current implementation of Windows search feels like it’s only there to force people to use Edge

None of my friends have a Meta Quest (or any VR headsets for that matter). On the extremely few occasions the headsets are brought up, all the conversations are the same; “it’s kind of cool but it’s made by Facebook”.

I wonder how many people would be in the market for a relatively cheaper headset like the Meta Quest if it wasn’t a Mark Zuckerberg project

Someone else correct me if I’m wrong but it works similar to PGP.

Background info:

• Your device generates two keys, a private key and a public key
• The public key can be given to anyone and the private key stays with you
• The public key is used to encrypt data and the private key is used to decrypt it

Usage:

1. You sign up for a service with all the normal info minus a password and click submit
2. In the background, a private key is generated and stored in iCloud Keychain, Google Passwords, or a 3rd party password manager (so all your devices can access it). A public key is also generated and given to the service
3. Now you try and login. You enter your username and click login
4. In the background, the server encrypts a challenge, token, or some piece of data and sends it to your device
5. Your device decrypts that piece of data with the private key associated with the website
6. At this point, your device either sends the decrypted data back to the server in exchange for an access token or maybe you decrypted the access token (not sure exactly how that will work. If it’s the former, the data would still be encrypted via ssl so only you and the server would see it)
7. Now you are logged in

Closing:

So, it’s supposed to be more secure because every time you login, you never type in a password that gets transferred to the server for verification. The server is sending your device data to verify so that it can then verify you. This mainly prevents phishing and the reuse of passwords but I suppose if someone hacks into your iCloud account or whatever, they have the keys to the kingdom 🤷‍♂️

I’ve been skimming through the listed page numbers so maybe I missed it but where in pg 545-581 does it talk about “[ending] marriage equality”? That whole section seems to be talking about the FBI and DOJ

I always forget. Can we do a release upgrade to this or do we have to wait until 24.04.1?

Edit: Nvm. You can update today

sudo do-release-upgrade

• fish
• tmux
• sshfs
• htop
• nmap
• distrobox (haven’t tried this yet but looks amazing)
• zfs (and any utilities that go with that)
• sanoid
• syncoid
• tailscale
• snapper (if using btrfs)

As far as config files go, I haven’t gotten around to automating those so I usually search my nas for old ones and copy/paste what I need

Would it be bad practice?

No, it's fine. Especially for people who self host. Use what you have available to you as best you can

Why would it be bad practice?

Depends on your use case. A gigabit connection and hard drives are fine for something like a personal media server or simple file storage but if you wanted to edit video or play games from the NAS, you might look into upgrading to SSDs and getting a faster connection to the PC

I'm glad my bitterness can bring joy

Anti-cheat is still a major issue. Even in a VM with GPU pass-through, anti-cheat will still prevent some popular games from running.

gPodder

I did it a few years ago, although I had an AMD GPU.

It works surprisingly well but games that require anti-cheat software (ex. Valorant) won’t work.

The only other good solution that wasn’t mentioned in your post is to just buy and maintain a dedicated windows box. Short of that, GPU passthrough is a great option

I have one pi (rpi 4b) that I still use. I have it in an Argon One V2 case for the daughter board that lets me boot from an M.2 SATA SSD. I got tired of the corrupted SD cards. It’s actually reliable now.

Anyway, I mainly only use it because in the event of a power outage, as soon as power is restored, it automatically turns on. If I’m not home, I can SSH back into my network and send a WoL packet to my actual server to turn it back on.

The pi also runs:

• Scrypted so I can view my ring cameras in the Apple Home app and so I get the “someone is at the door” notifications on my Apple TV
• Pi-Hole
• Pi-VPN

Pi 5 w/ 8GB - $80
Pi 5 Case - $10
Pi 5 Charger - $8*
UHS1 Micro SD - $5**

Total - $103

That’s pretty steep. I can get a Beelink with an N95, 8 GB of memory, and 256 GB of storage on Amazon, right now, for $127. Comes with intel quick sync, I can upgrade the RAM later if I want, and the SSD isn’t going to corrupt anytime I sneeze.

The Pi Pico and Pi Zero 2 W are still great but their high end Pis don’t make sense anymore. Form factor and/or that 6ish*** watt difference between the Beelink and Pi 5 have to be really important

* based off pi 4 charger
** based off Microcenter website
*** quick google search of both devices’ power consumption under load

Sort of. I still haven’t been able to snag the top of the line CM4 (WiFi, 8gig ram, 32 gig emmc). I’ve seen a handful of CM4s with different configs that I don’t want. But for the 4B, yeah they can be bought now.

Edit: haven’t been able to snag one in my region*

Pretty sure you don’t need one. I’ll look into it later tonight and get back to you though

Edit: tried resetting my Apple TV with a throw away account not linked to other Apple devices. Worked fine

Microsoft is also working on the next Surface Laptop Studio…, which targets a similar late 2025 release window.

Fuuuuck

I’m more confused than anything.

I didn’t have a lot of money as a teenager. My family had 1 computer we all shared. I couldn’t tinker with it, what if I broke it? Cheap Pis were the gateway to my lifelong computer hobby. Because of that hobby, I was able to get a job where part of my role is full-stack web dev. I don’t know what I would be doing now if I didn’t have access to cheap Pis when I was younger.

Especially in this economy, those prices just make me sad :/

Hangouts was dope. With a Google voice number, you could also send text messages from your computer which was pretty novel for Android users at the time

Plex

At the time, Windows was updating and restarting whenever it felt like it which would stop my Plex server from running until I logged back in. Windows and Macs are now just thin clients that allow me to connect to all my Linux servers.

Why choose OpenBSD over FreeBSD? Any noticeable differences? I know it’s supposed to be a more security focused BSD but I hear it has fewer maintainers? The idea of a BSD appeals to me but the hardware compatibility holds me back. Just curious what your experience is like

but it wont ever give you the unbiased best answer on those recommended threads.

I completely agree. Don’t trust everything you see on the internet

It might be useful to make sure you arent buying trash

This was the main goal. Mad people are likely to be vocal people and they are the ones that go to Reddit and complain about how the latch that releases the waste container on a vacuum broke after a few months.

Reddit wasn’t the only place to go for research on infrequent purchases but it was always a good starting point

I've seen some youtubers recommend OnShape. It's a browser based CAD app so it should work fine.

Hardware. I do all my work on a laptop and those Apple M series processors have been amazing for performance and battery life. I’ll stick with a Mac until those Qualcomm X Elite CPUs start getting shipped in Windows laptops next year. After using this Mac for the past year, I think I prefer Windows and WSL over MacOS or Linux. This whole post only applies to laptops though; Linux on desktop and servers for life.

Does Cromite have support for auto-filling from 3rd party password managers? When I last used Bromite, it couldn't so I never ended up using it as my main browser

I’ve been trying actual page numbers since those are what matched up at first

Edit: I haven’t extensively gone through it all yet. Are they mixed between page numbers and pdf page numbers?

I'm pretty sure their headphones and watches are just aliexpress junk

Their sub-brand “CMF by Nothing” for sure is junk rebranded.

Presumably, you’ve had one of their Nothing phones. What specific issues have you experienced? Is it graphical glitches or like, show stopping bugs?

I’ve been interested in Nix for a while but haven’t devoted any time to it. What do you like about it? What problems does it solve? Why learn the Nix way of doing things when I could make a container using LXD and just transfer the container around?

It sounds like you didn’t set up gpu passthrough

I have ports open for Wireguard and Plex. So far, no issues that I’m aware of. Time will tell

I hear what you are saying but what if I want to use the app because I’m trying to be quiet and not wake anyone?

What if I only want to turn on the lamp and not other lights?

What happens when I tell Google Assistant to turn on the lamp and for some reason, only 1 light bulb turns on?

What do mute people do if they can’t speak to the assistant?

You don’t have to answer any of that. My point is that, sure, there are workarounds but none of them really solve the issue and it ends up being just another papercut. For all of Apple’s faults, of which there are many, it feels like their engineers actually use their phones.

SATA is 6 gigabits per second, not gigabytes.

Oh shit. I misread the Amazon description. Thanks for catching that and thanks for your response

• Google creates a cross platform iMessage competitor
• Only nerds know about it because Google didn’t market it
• Google gets upset that no one is using their cross platform iMessage competitor
• Google cancels their cross platform iMessage competitor
• repeat

For me, Allo was the last straw. Hangouts before it. Google Voice before it. Google talk before it.

fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again