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You're going to be blown away when you hear about DRM free eBooks and LibGen...

benbristowon Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers

They usually protect the whole DNS record so it makes sense it would cover robots.txt as well, even if it's a bit silly.

benbristowon Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

If you want to use Visual Studio Code the 'DevKit' extension which provides essential features (language server) is proprietary and requires a Visual Studio licence regardless of platform.

Also I find since C# is an 'enterprise' language developers take the p--s in what they want to charge for, as enterprise will pay as a 'cost of doing business'. Recently FluentAssertions, a freakin test assertion library decided they wanted to charge for newer versions. You don't get that in other languages like Python/Ruby etc.

https://youtu.be/ZFc6jcaM6Ms

Don't get me wrong, C# is my dayjob and I love the language but for personal projects where I don't have the money I'd be hesitant to touch it.

benbristowon Bitwarden introduces mandatory 2FA for new devices

Same here, mine got pickpocketed. My mates laughed at me because they thought I was an idiot not be able to login to my accounts.

Was easily solved though, got a new SIM card from my network from the local store when I got back and recovered my Authy account via SMS which I can then generate 2FAs for my password app through. Was always a backup method I had up my sleeve. My browser keeps logged in as well so was able to get into most stuff through my PC once I got back.

benbristowon We're bringing Pebble back

Same on Mac (Firefox)

benbristowon Das Blinkenlights

Hearing 'blinkenlights' reminds me of the still very much up 'towel.blinkenlights.nl' telnet server which plays an ASCII art rendition of Star Wars if you dial into it.

There's a joke if you have IPV6 connectivity where if you use IPV4 it says it has full colour support but if you do... well, it doesn't!

benbristowon Piracy in the UK: the failed war on illegal content

Don't forget the 3PM Saturday blackout in the UK where you can't watch any football matches on TV, even if you pay for Sky Sports/TNT/Amazon Prime...

... unless you have an IPTV subscription where you can stream all the games from a foreign TV channel with English commentary.

The idea with the blackout being that it encourages you go to physical games but Premiership games good luck getting tickets for those (even if you do they're extortionate) or go to local games which you might not be as interested in.

benbristowon AirTags on Android, Sorta

Website doesn't support SSL?

Have you looked into Lets Encrypt? https://letsencrypt.org/

benbristowon ChatGPT Pro

Thought this was relating to Nova AI at first which confused me as it is just an OpenAI wrapper - https://novaapp.ai

I see you mean Amazon's Nova - https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/amazon-nova-artificial-...

benbristowon Musk could use the 'Department of Government Efficiency' for self-enrichment

Considering The Guardian have discontinued their X account recently it's evident they've got a chip on their shoulder about Musk and the recent election. I'd expect anything to come out of them to be a hit piece.

benbristowon Humans have caused 1.5 °C of long-term global warming according to new estimates

We keep getting told the average Joe is to blame for eating meat and taking flights whilst large corporations/industry laugh at us. Make it make sense.

benbristowon Humans have caused 1.5 °C of long-term global warming according to new estimates

The whole topic is political.

What do you think the fix is? Because the only 'solution' seems to be adding more and more taxes to the average Joe whilst endless e-waste/junk gets shipped over from China via AliExpress/Temu day to day.

benbristowon Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

Valve can't count to 3!

benbristowon I couldn't find a free, no-login, no-AI checklist app–so I built one

So now you need another URL-based bookmark service to remember the URL.

benbristowon I couldn't find a free, no-login, no-AI checklist app–so I built one

How else are you going to sync your list across devices? It's Microsoft, be very surprised if you didn't have an account for any of their services.

benbristowon I couldn't find a free, no-login, no-AI checklist app–so I built one

https://to-do.office.com/

Free with Office 365 / Microsoft account. Decent desktop & mobile apps too and integration into Outlook/Teams. API available via the Microsoft Graph and integration with PowerAutomate if you want IFTTT/Zapier-like functionality.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/todo-o...

benbristowon ChatGPT Search

I thought this would be more like an actual search engine (like Google with ChatGPT built in). Microsoft have been doing similar with Copilot since it's inception, albeit they seem to have removed the web search functionality with the latest update.

benbristowon Drasi: Microsoft's open source data processing platform for event-driven systems

Not like Microsoft to name things well...

benbristowon macOS Sequoia is available today

One you could probably fry bacon on whilst the battery drains in an hour...

benbristowon macOS Sequoia is available today

I meant more the drag to snap, but good point!

Not sure if MacOS has had that in the past though...

benbristowon macOS Sequoia is available today

Nice that it can still be supported. Couldn't go back to Intel though personally!

benbristowon macOS Sequoia is available today

Windows 7 only had that since 2009... better late than never I suppose!

benbristowon Learn Git Branching

Don't git describe in anger, I heard you say.

benbristowon Mapping 20k ships that sank during WW II

Battleships: Hardcore Mode

benbristowon DuckDuckGo for Mac is now open source

We have taken steps to update our terminology and remove words with problematic racial connotations, most notably the change to main branches, allow lists, and blocklists. Closed issues or PRs may contain deprecated terminology that should not be used going forward.

TIL blacklist and whitelist are racist. Even though if you look at the etymology they're not. Meh.

benbristowon Dokku: My favorite personal serverless platform

I think I was respectful enough to word the original comment I made to the difference between Dokploy & Dokku, not just saying one is better than the other. I've used both successfully and think both are great products - just wanted to share my experience. There seems to be an umbrella recently of self-hosting tools like Coolify/Dokku/Dokploy etc. so wanted to contribute to the discussion in that way. Dokploy is also an open-source project so thought the exposure might be positive on a high ranking HN post.

benbristowon Dokku: My favorite personal serverless platform

I have actions on my projects to build & publish container images to GitHub's container registry. The deploy trigger from the workflow makes Dokploy get the latest image from the registry and run it.

benbristowon Dokku: My favorite personal serverless platform

I've been enjoying using Dokploy recently.

https://github.com/Dokploy/dokploy

It's similar to Dokku but has a nice web UI, makes it easier to deploy Docker/Compose solutions and auto LetsEncrypt functionality is built-in by design (not as a separate plugin).

I've also built a GitHub Actions workflow to trigger off a deploy to apps hosted on it (basic cURL command but works well). https://github.com/benbristow/dokploy-deploy-action

And put together some pre-configured Compose files you can deploy for various apps. https://github.com/benbristow/dokploy-compose-templates

benbristowon Official proposal for Type Unions in C#

Bing is well known for being Microsoft's 'dogfood' candidate for new versions of .NET.

https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2018/08/22/bing-ne...

https://www.bing.com/version

benbristowon Taco Bell is going all in on artificial intelligence

It's a Yum brand so explains it. KFC used to be finger lickin' good but the quality is awful now, makes me feel sick every time I dare to give it another chance. Not particularly cheap either.