giobox

This for me is one of the last great unsolved problems on the internet. I've yet to find a book recommendation site/algorithm/social thing/whatever that actually works well enough for me to trust it and invest my time in logging my own reads to improve the results etc.

I've had far more success personally in growing my reading list with books I ended up loving by following a few people on Instagram who share their reading groups choices. Similarly, anytime anyone whom I vaguely trust recommends me a book I just order it immediately on Amazon and add to the input pile.

It's vitally important for me to keep the next read pipeline well stocked - I get through a lot of books, and if I run out for whatever reason it can take me weeks to get the habit going again.

Virtually every other form of media, I can find a recommendation system that works well enough, even if it's not perfect. Books have always been an outlier for me personally.

I was genuinely curious to see what the legally mandated calorie/ingredient content labelling was in 1991 on a UK Mars bar, but sadly no pictures of the underside.

While I've no doubts shrinkflation explains a great deal of this, it would be interesting if increased mandatory food content reporting on packaging had even a small effect on reducing the calorie content of confectionery over time, as consumers could more easily compare etc and market responded with products in portion sizes to better fit preferences.

You can even see in the article photo, the more recent modern Mars bar has the calorific content printed on the front, in addition to the big label all UK food has on the rear. The 1991 example does not.

> Enable cloud tunnels so you can access your apps on other devices (paid feature)

It's not much extra work to do this technique (tunnel to publicly accessible domain name from locally or privately hosted setup) with cloudflare tunnels. It's also completely free, all you need is a domain name managed by cloudflare (~10 bucks a year).

You just throw up a cloudflared container (can be part of your local docker compose stack), it will serve whatever you like from that local system at the public domain name - no port forwarding, no IP configuration, just works, over private VPN tunnel.

I use this all the time for personal projects:

> https://developers.cloudflare.com/tunnel/

Unlimited cloud tunnels for 49 dollars a month is not that great - you can have up to 1000 tunnels on the free cloudflare plan, which I'm realistically never going to max out. Once you've done it once, it's a handful of lines to paste into any future compose stack with your Cloudflare API key to use again, it's incredibly simple to use, and will do the same automatic HTTPS setup.

KOReader is widely known to be less energy efficient than Nickel (the native reader on Kobo devices). It's a commonly observed issue.

It still lasts a long time! It's just not as efficient as Nickel on the same hardware.

Personally I prefer Calibre + Nickel over KOReader on Kobo devices (its trivial to convert DRM-free eBooks to formats Nickel will open, Calibre will do it automatically if you plug a Kobo in), although on Kindle devices I would still jailbreak and use KOReader.

This is correct, the 256gb is substantially slower as uses fewer physical memory chips - less ability to read/write in parallel. The 512gb or larger models have substantially higher read/write rates, and typically performs 50-100 percent faster in benchmarks than the 256.

Was a primary factor in me buying a 512gb M4 Mac Mini, even though I planned to use large external SSD - I wanted faster spec boot volume.

My only real complaint with KOReader is that the book browsing UI is file and folder based by default, while virtually all other ebook readers support some kind of cover based library view you can sort 20 different ways based on metadata rather than filenames etc.

It's not a huge issue, but I find just browsing my collection to find a read a lot more enjoyable on other ebook readers. IIRC there are plugins to add this feature, but it's not present out of the box.

On the few Kobos and jailbroken Kindles I've used it on, it also drains the battery significantly faster than the stock reader app, although not enough that I couldn't last at least a few days. On stock software I can go weeks between charges.

I almost never see it now, but twenty to thirty years ago when there where far more cars on UK roads with no air conditioning, you would very occasionally see someone leave the window slightly open to try and keep cabin temps a little more sane in summer. In the 90s/early 2000s there where a lot of cheap cars (Ford Fiestas, Corsas etc) sold in volume on UK roads with no AC, and on hot days those things would turn to ovens if parked in the sun with the windows up. I used to have to do this occasionally myself with a crap Ford Ka I owned with no AC. It was a pretty normal thing to do back then!

I'm not even sure if it's possible to even buy a new mass-produced car with no AC anymore in the UK, or pretty much anywhere else for that matter.

I genuinely wondered the other day how long before we see some country try to regulate the new self-hosted radio mesh messaging solutions like Meshtastic etc. Eventually some crime group somewhere is going to be busted using a homebrew encrypted radio system for messaging - they are so plentiful and easy to build with dirt cheap ESP32s etc, and it's so easy to deploy repeaters to extend range.

> https://meshtastic.org/

Since the dawn of USB-C iOS devices (iPhone 15 onwards), you can plug any old usb card reader into an iPhone or iPad without an adapter and it works.

I think this is going to be a much more common sight in most major western economies - many of them have a rapidly growing aged retired population and a declining young working segment etc.

The effects of this change are definitely being felt, good and bad, in many countries already.

If Wikipedia is to be believed, Ultima Online and Everquest would have had circa 500k-1m subscribers between them by 2003. Ultima Online had 100k subscribers as long ago as 1998.

I don't think I'll ever stop pressing ctrl + s/cmd + s every 5 minutes, the habit is too deeply ingrained at this stage!

They are beautiful things, but the last few I rode on with BA were absolutely starting to show their age inside prior to BA retiring them in 2020. I think the last passenger models were produced in 2011 and most of BA's 747 fleet was from the mid-90s. The experience was probably better on other carriers towards the end.

All of them pre-exist Swift, so I think it's perfectly fair to compare. Swift wasn't made in a vacuum.

I'm always surprised as well when new languages targeting widespread use launch without an official one. Dotnet/C#, Go and other languages that come batteries included with the package manager built into some kind of compiler/SDK binary, make the out of the box experience so much smoother, and the community hasn't fragmented nearly as much as say Java, Python and JS have into competing third party package management and project build tools.

Everyone in the Go community more or less uses the same Go modules support built into the SDK binary, much like how almost the entire DotNet community uses the NuGet package manager support built into the dotnet SDK binary. There are no extra dependencies to grab your project dependencies and build it.

My experiences in those langauges is that there is so much less debate over tooling, and people just get work done. No one in DotNet is waging an equivelent holy war about Gradle vs Maven etc...

I'm all for choices, but the languages who have made package management a first class citizen in their SDKs tend to be the languages I've enjoyed working in the most. I think package management tooling is a critical piece of developer ergonomics.

People used to joke a lot about how JS has a new framework every week, but I feel that way about Python build tooling! I've now had to use uv, poetry, pipenv, hatch...

That seems low for a Frigate setup with a Coral and suggests something else isn't right. Im running ~20 1080p cameras on two Corals right now. The general rule of thumb is 8-16 cameras per Coral, but it all depends on frequency Frigate is having to pass frames to the detector. Inference time per frame portion passed to the coral is about 10ms (100 detections a second), which is fast enough to cover a good number of cameras.

Worth noting most of the time the Corals sit idle in many setups, as Frigate only wakes them up if it detects motion with simpler algorithms on the CPU first. You gain capacity for a further 100 detections/sec for every Coral you add essentially. The corals are not sitting watching every single frame from every camera, which I think is a common misconception about Frigate.

It's worthwhile to spend some time with the docs - the mistake I always see made is folks passing a full fat 4k stream for detection at some silly FPS, which generally doesn't make the detection work any better and greatly increases processing costs.

If your six cameras really are generating enough events (100 a second) to saturate a coral, I'd be looking at what else I screwed up!

> https://docs.frigate.video/frigate/camera_setup/#choosing-a-...

Sony have admitted to selling the PS5 at a loss during the first 8 months of sales. Even when they announced the $499 disc drive SKU was no longer selling at a loss, they admitted the $399 SKU still cost more to make than it sold for. Things are no doubt different today, but Sony absolutely subsidized the PS5 at launch.

> https://www.pcmag.com/news/sony-says-499-ps5-no-longer-sells...

Sony have admitted to selling the PS5 at a loss during the first 8 months of sales. Even when they announced the $499 disc drive SKU was no longer selling at a loss, they admitted the $399 SKU still cost more to make than it sold for. Things are no doubt different today.

> https://www.pcmag.com/news/sony-says-499-ps5-no-longer-sells...

Their camera system isnt awful, but I would still pick Frigate over it (I have the option for both at home and have ran each). Frigate is nice in that it works with any old RTSP IP camera - many features in Unifi's NVR support only work with their own over-priced cameras. High quality PoE cameras are extremely cheap nowadays. If you connect a non-Ubiquiti branded RTSP cam to their NVR software you lose a ton of features.

> https://frigate.video/

> with basically no AI product to speak of?

I don't use Meta products regularly, but they've crowbarred the "Meta AI" feature into everything - FB Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram... There's even a standalone website to chat with the Meta AI model similar to chatgpt:

> https://www.meta.ai/

I'm certainly prepared to agree that they don't have a huge amount of traction or marketshare, but they absolutely have already built AI products and they exist.

Outside of their own consumer products, there's the family of llama models too etc.

It's never been explicitly forbidden, just heavily discouraged in virtually every version of the spec. In the current 9110:

> "A client SHOULD NOT generate content in a GET request unless it is made directly to an origin server that has previously indicated, in or out of band, that such a request has a purpose and will be adequately supported. An origin server SHOULD NOT rely on private agreements to receive content, since participants in HTTP communication are often unaware of intermediaries along the request chain."

"Content" is what the RFC calls a request body. The simplest argument against IMO is it makes caching more complex, as now the request body would have to be part of any cache keying etc, you can't just blindly key off the request + URI params for every single GET. There are plenty of other reasons to not do it.

The spec expects responses to GETs generally to be cacheable:

> "The response to a GET request is cacheable; a cache MAY use it to satisfy subsequent GET and HEAD requests unless otherwise indicated by the Cache-Control header field (Section 5.2 of [CACHING])."

It's also a two line Dockerfile to add wget or curl to almost any pre-existing container image. This is a fun idea though.

It's interesting that this is a brushed design. In the RC car community, brushless motors are generally regarded as superior, but those of course have the rare earth magnet problem.

Technically the brushes can wear out, although there are claims they are good for 150,000-250,000 miles it seems.

Similar situation, one thing I like the with the Pis design is you can throw PoE hats on them and build a whole home infrastructure system where the only thing that needs battery backup for power cuts is the main ethernet switch - all of the essential services, switches and wifi APs are powered downstream by their ethernet ports over PoE.

Makes making your key network services (VPN, firewall, DNS, NTP, home assistant etc) on battery backup very easy, as just one plug to the primary switch to keep powered, and my wifi/internet stays on when the power cuts.

I could use other devices, but 5 pis with PoE hats rack mount very cleanly in a single 1U row and passively cooled with no fan noise etc.

And GPIO support for your used office equipment is often just a cheap USB adapter away too, GPIO support is not some Pi exclusive thing, even if its 40 pin layout is widely used now etc.

The APIs in iOS that turn feature flags on/off as you travel now have gotten insanely complex. Some are on time triggers, some change instantly, some depend on where your iCloud account was setup, AFAIK there isn't a black and white answer as to what happens when you move a non-EU iPhone through Europe anymore, "it depends". It's similarly vague in the other direction.

Apple themselves have claimed recent EU compliance has led to over 600 new or changed APIs in the OS.

I've spent a fair amount of time with my iPhone in both the EU and the USA, have local cell service registered in both regions. its nothing as simple as a geo-location check anymore. It's a problem that has grown more complex over the decades too, as more and more countries implement their own slightly differing legislation.

I know a few folks who work in FTC compliance roles at Meta. I don't think the wider nerd-sphere appreciates the extent to which the FTC regulates Meta following the consent order after their privacy scandals of the 2010s, or the sheer number of roles within Meta now working only on FTC related compliance. I'm sure Zuck is no doubt desperate to ramp it down.

> https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/07/...

Boxer was wonderful in its day, I think it also became the basis of the official GOG Mac DOS game releases for a while too:

> https://www.gog.com/forum/general_archive/mac_dos_game_editi...

I've hoped for years someone would pickup the source and get it going again, it's essentially abandonware right now, no changes in nine years. The website is like a time machine back to the peak skeuomorphic mac app era. It still has the nicest UX of any of the DosBox variants I've tried. In this era of agentic rewrites, modernizing this app is probably the cheapest it has ever been too...

> http://boxerapp.com/

> https://github.com/alinebee/Boxer

There was definitely usecase overlap due to the presence of the GPIO, but huge numbers of Pis ended up doing things a microcontroller can't - stuff like the PiHole and Retropie projects, and never used their GPIO pins at all.

Thinking of any of the early Pis as microcontrollers ignores a huge amount of the ways in which actual end users interacted with the thing, and even the way it was sold and marketed. Upton was trying to replace early hacker-friendly home computers like the BBC Micro/Apple II, for a new generation.

> It was a "microcontroller" you could program in Python with a friendly Linux environment and is now an expensive, power hungry, hot computer with a microcontroller hanging off of it

The Pi project was never originally a microcontroller - it was always a full-blown SBC you could program any way you want with some GPIO pins attached. People literally used them as (slow) home computers.

The company didn't sell its first microcontroller until years later in 2021 with the Pico, by which point we already had Pi 4. I do though think its a real shame prices for the SBCs have risen as they have.