edent

The silver bullet is caring.

There must be someone working on that app who notices those pain points.

"The turtoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over but it can't, not without your help. But you're not helping."

Why is that?

Perhaps they're incentivised not to care. Perhaps the job is just a paycheque. Perhaps they mirror those around them.

Either way, the end result is the same. They don't care and their users suffer.

Yes. It offers cryptographic proof that you physically have the passport with you. It also gets a digital copy of the photo and other biometrics held on the NFC chip. From a user point of view it reduces the number of typos entered.

They even called it "Physical Web". It was a lovely concept - even if it did abuse Bluetooth beacons somewhat.

NFC reading is one. That's why lots of Governments publish apps - it's a reliable way to check your passport if you need a visa etc.

It might be coming to the web - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_NFC_API

It literally says:

> Want to buy a licence-free PC directly? Search for your nearest Linux-friendly shop on LinuxSi! (Italian-only).

> This is generally understood and appreciated

I don't think that's true. For example, nowhere on the blocking interface does it tell users that their blocks are public.

https://bsky.app/profile/edent.tel/post/3l4rjxx32br2j

Looking at my spending in the UK, about 90% goes through Amex. Even the small corner shop takes it.

In the UK (which broadly follows the same rules), I get 0.25% with a Visa and 1.25% with Amex. Sometimes there are introductory offers for a few months.

> Right, but there's still an addressable set of display units that convert an RGB signal to actual glowing lights, right?

Yes. But those glowing lights aren't little squares in a neat horizontal and vertical rows.

The square pixel is useful in logical contexts - like an SVG or bitmap graphic. But when it is turned into a physical display, those pixels aren't displayed as little squares. The RGB elements are arranged in dozens of different formations depending on the display technology.

The author (hello) doesn't really have an opinion about Egypt and the situation in 2011.

Regarding attribution. As you can see from the linked images, the messages all have the sender "Vodafone". While they may genuinely be from the armed forces, the reader has no way to verify that. If you received a message saying "The armed forces requires you to pet a cat today" would you immediately believe it was from the army?

Regarding the government's unpopularity. I think you might be inferring something I didn't imply. All I've done is link to contemporary news stories and quote from press releases. I haven't expressed any thoughts on the situation at the time, because I wasn't there and am not a scholar of modern Egypt.

The point isn't about the Arab Spring per se - it is used as an example of when a network was forced to send messages to their subscribers. Regardless of whether the Government was right to do so, I think we can both agree that compelling speech through violence is not an ideal scenario.

But that doesn't bring down the PM personally.

The last VONC to pass was in 1979, and Callaghan continued to lead Labour (albeit to defeat) in the General Election.

The UK has no constitutional method to remove a PM.

The USA does have a constitutional method to remove a President.

Nevertheless, in living memory all Presidents have survived their impeachments. Whereas (with the exceptions of Major, Brown, and Sunak) all UK Primes Minister have been removed while in office.

It makes an interesting study in the effectiveness of a written and inflexible constitution.

I overheard a conversation between someone on the Pixel Watch team and a woman I know. He was quizzing her at a party about what features she used - which were pretty much step counter and payment. He somewhat dismissively sneered, "Well, you're not exactly a power user, are you?"

I'm trying to imagine what being a "power user" of a watch is like. Can anyone enlighten me?

I think smart-watches are much like Alexa. What the user wants to do with it is almost totally at odds with what the company is selling. Alexii are mostly kitchen timers, song players, and light switches. No one is a "power user" constantly installing skills and using it for anything which increases the product team's engagement metrics.

The same is probably true of watches. Alerts are nifty - but cumbersome for replies. The health stuff is useful - but only for a subset of users. Seeing the time is great - but if the battery lasts less than a week, who wants to keep that screen on?

I literally was trying to equate the two.

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Because they point foo.example.com to AWS. They then let whatever the CNAME is pointing to lapse. Then an attacker registers the lapsed AWS and can now put their content on your trusted domain.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/threat-tactic-spotligh...

(AWS have since fixed this problem, but it exists on other services.)

The boring answer is that infrastructure costs money.

You either use taxes from everyone to pay for it or you take money from the people using the thing.

I was looking for a poop bike.

(This is not my domain.)

Because I can put it next to my bed at night and have it cool me. Not all of us travel with a punkah-wallah.

What's banal to you is exotic to me.

I've seen tourists in London marvel at the most commonplace thing - and I think that's delightful.

In the UK I've never seen a train open its doors directly to the tracks. We also have lots of warning not to cross the tracks except by bridge or tunnel.

How do you handle seat reservation refunds? That was our most annoying experience with the Interrail app - a booking fee on top of the reservation, but little support when those trains were delayed or cancelled.

Yes. The app makes it really easy to do that. In our last trip we did it a few times.

But, as you get older, there's a certain joy in making plans in advance.

No, I just imagined the trip…

Yes, very much still a thing. We saw Interrail travellers of all ages. Lots of students going on a big adventure - but a decent number of more experienced travellers seeing the sights.

The passes were about €500 each for first class. Each reservation was €3-€15. The overnight ferry was about €100 each.

There's no such thing as a "legal name" in the UK. For example, Boris Johnson's first name isnt actually Boris - that's just what he goes by.

I had thought to use homographs. Sadly, all the models I tried were able to decode something like:

"ﾌㄖ乇ㄚ ᗪㄖ乇丂几'ㄒ 丂卄卂尺乇 千ㄖㄖᗪ"

However, I have noticed that voice assistants have a hard time understanding homonyms. Saying "bow" (as in to bow one's head) is often stored as "bow" (as in a bow and arrow). I wonder if there's a sufficiently complex sentence which is intelligible to humans but not to machines?

If you shut down, I want to still be able to run the software.

OK, if you're running something with a cloud component, I might not get all the functionality. But if you decide that you don't want be in the app business any more, I still want to use what I paid for.

OSM does have a pictures layer.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Panoramax

I use https://mapcomplete.org/ to add images of artworks to OSM objects.