hiisukun

He's the only one on the couch. The only one at the sports game. The only one at the movie theatre.

At the office, it was nice to see him put the glasses down and shake hands with the person who rocked up. If that person had arrived 'in VR' I think I would have been completely turned off.

I guess if you want to be alone, it's a good device -- but the best times for me with modern technology have been when it brings me closer to other people. Online games were better on LAN. Couch co-op as a genre is one of the best console experiences I think. Meeting people in real life, who I spoke to on IRC -- again, a great moment.

I'm not anti-tech, and the device form factor sure looks amazing -- but I can't imagine any moment I would use something like this at home while anyone else in my house was here.

This exact issue was the final straw for me ditching google photos! I had previously been using syncthing to sync & backup the photos, same as other files on my phone and laptop.

I now use Immich [1] (mentioned elsewhere in this thread but without the proper link), having purchased a single-payment lifetime family licence. There is, as I understand it, no benefit to me to purchase it. After a month of use it was clear this was going to stay in use for quite a while, and the author(s) have done a fantastic job. So feel free to give it a shot, alongside google photos app on your phone, and see how you feel.

It's not for everyone though, as I have an old computer at home running as a 'server' that can host immich. There's a certain nerd level requirement (that this forum should be full of) to get it set up. For users though? It's so far seamless -- my partner uses the app on her phone and likes it just fine. The backup works for her and there's a single button to click to clear space on her phone that just deletes things immich knows are on our home server already. Very useful.

I still open google photos app to edit videos occasionally -- it's better at that, and I do still use the google built in 'camera' app, so I'm kind of using google photos while I take pictures if that makes sense.

[1] https://immich.app/

They probably should at least update it -- I don't think a government should recommend free VPN services. Too many of them are a form of botnet, malware, ddos, etc.

I think the target of the anger here should be (at least in part): OneDrive.

My understanding is that a modern, default onedrive setup will push all your onedrive folder contents to the cloud, but will not do the same in reverse -- it's totally possible to have files in your cloud onedrive, visible in your onedrive folder, but that do not exist locally. If you want to access such a file, it typically gets downloaded from onedrive for you to use.

If that's the case, what is Backblaze or another provider to do? Constantly download your onedrive files (that might have been modified on another device) and upload them to backblaze? Or just sync files that actually exist locally? That latter option certainly would not please a consumer, who would expect the files they can 'see' just get magically backed up.

It's a tricky situation and I'm not saying Backblaze handled it well here, but the whole transparent cloud storage situation thing is a bit of a mess for lots of people. If Dropbox works the same way (no guaranteed local file for something you can see), that's the same ugly situation.

In the sci-fi film Arrival (also based on a short story), humanity are kind of like irresponsible young students. If we get past our focus on war/conflict/us vs them perhaps we can learn new things from the aliens.

I think that breaks the style a little of 'humans bad for aliens' enough, right?

Either way I enjoyed Arrival (and the short story).

It's not new, and some people would disagree on some minor elements -- but a good place to start was regularly this blog from approximately Matasano/NCC Group members, called Cryptographic Right Answers [1]. It's very clear, gives straight forward answers in clear fashion -- and with multiple opinions often aligning.

It was updated a few times, I wonder if the equivalent exists for PQ?

Edit/Update: Found the PQ one @ [2], definitely check it out!

Maybe I'm mis-remembering, but perhaps the most controversial element was the regular recommendation of AES-GCM. It certainly has excellent security properties, but also a certain brittleness re: nonces.

[1] https://www.latacora.com/blog/2018/04/03/cryptographic-right... [2] https://www.latacora.com/blog/2024/07/29/crypto-right-answer...

It doesn't need a small number -- rather it relies on you being able to find a pairing amongst any of your candidates, rather than find a pairing for a specific birthday.

That's the paradoxical part: the number of potential pairings for a very small number of people is much higher than one might think, and so for 365 options (in the birthday example) you can get even chances with far fewer than 365, and even far fewer than ½x365 people..

I view this a little like those Nigerian prince email scams. True or not, once upon a time I heard that they deliberately did not fix the obvious spelling and grammatical errors in the scam emails -- they acted as an excellent first pass filter to exclude scam effort against targets who wouldn't fall for it anyway.

When Microsoft allows local accounts via more complicated loopholes, or activation via massgrave, or the removal of bloat/ad components via scripts or cmdline processes -- they lose little. But what they can gain by having an account for all the 'regular' users is a share of that giant ad revenue pie mostly dominated by google (and more recently a few other companies) in the last 20 years. And if you bypass those processes anyway? Probably worth being filtered out to Microsoft: you likely install an ad blocker later, change your search engine, browser, et al.

Knowing what their users do, being their search gateway, their default AI system (eventually..) and generally having an eye on their whole user experience gives Microsoft a formidable profit line in the future. And maybe the present too, I don't know.

It is a distasteful feeling to have installed windows 95 (or win7 or whatever your favourite flavour) and then try and install windows 11. But for the majority of their customer base (corporate and residential) this isn't relevant.

N=1, but this week my family member asked for advice on a new laptop and their only specification was that it could not have windows on it. They don't have any Apple products but are happy to shift, or use Linux.

This is a good comment! But I'll add that many classical learners use tab, and I think there's absolutely no shame there. The music is what counts, and I think rarely would someone look down on a learner.

Guitarists love other ppl learning or playing guitar!

I watched the lecture and did not find it compelling. It was a very literal interpretation, discussed alongside the evidence presented in the text of what was and wasn't more or less traveled by.

There was an interesting series of points made about American culture, and their sense of need for an affirmation / self-deception -- but I don't find his actual critique of the poem's words particularly enlightening.

So if you are interested in American cultural thought, involving over-rationalisation of choices, the lecture might have value. If you are particularly interested in the poem itself outside of that context, I don't recommend viewing.

I would love a way to regularly discover and watch some top, 'hit' TV shows or movies from outside of America or Australia (my home country), or sometimes England. I have no issues watching things with subtitles, but it is quite difficult to organically find things to watch, that perhaps have 'not English' as their primary language.

For example, I will now look up the UFO Sweden show to see if I might like to watch it -- because I discovered it through here.

I have tried subscribing to a few different regular streaming services, but none seemed to work even if I pointed them in the right direction. I'm really not particular about which country of origin the production has, so long as it's "the best" or "very popular" in recent times from that place, it's worth me checking the genre and style to see if it piques my interest.

Any advice on this? [ nb. I have a similar issue with podcasts! ]

I'd love for a half half solution here.

Where the phone collects notifications silently for an hour, then if there are any meeting the "alert" bar, it just buzzes or tones on the hour. Or whatever interval I choose.

I think a few times a day is plenty for my notifications, except for a couple of close friends and family -- but they're all in the same bucket. An app I installed yesterday who's messages I need but are not urgent, and a lifelong friend? Same value to the phone OS.

I'm thankful for the star contacts on Android working through dnd, but would love an aggregate/timed system for bulk stuff.

I clicked this by accident, but then read the full thing after noticing the author was Matt Levine! I'm sure there are other readers here who might appreciate his knowledge and writing style, so I mention it.

[ To those who post opinion pieces: Is it against the site rules to have the author listed after the actual title? It would help me in this case and others ]

Lovely design. Just a quick note to say that here in Australia, people are coffee crazy and would probably find a home for your kit. That includes individuals at home, but also cafes and hotel foyers etc.

Might be worth considering an AU plug as an option (we run off 240v).

Maybe this isn't the best place for feedback, but I was inspired to give this a go. Sadly it didn't work out. First error was:

  sh: line 1: Application: command not found

By visiting https://new.phoenixframework.org/test-elixir-app, I could see the proper output:

  Application name must start with a letter and have only lowercase letters, numbers and underscore

So I changed to test_elixir_app, and got this output:

  downloading https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/releases/download/v1.17.3/elixir-otp-27.zip
  fedora is not supported

This was a spur of the moment thing, so maybe I'll try from an Ubuntu machine or something another time, but the friction was unfortunate. Grats on the launch though, the demo gif of using the project installer looked great.

I do enjoy some of the podcasts mentioned in this thread, but struggle to find good non-American ("foreign"?!) podcasts to listen to. Similarly to finding good quality non-US film and television, it can be hard to locate but I greatly enjoy it.

If anyone has suggestions for podcast collation sites that are for non American content that would be fantastic.

It's interesting how this (and other css?) means the website is readable in a phone in portrait, but the text is tiny in landscape!

I recently bought a TV (HiSense) after a very quick bit of research about the dimensions and the fact that it had GoogleTV as the OS.

Unfortunately for me, the operating system for many TVs is region specific! Once the product appeared on Hisense's Australian page it did mention having VIDAA instead of GoogleTV, but this was after I had purchased it. I can confirm that VIDAA is quite bad, demanding agreement to several fairly ad-driven user agreements before you can use any smart features. "Enhanced Viewership Program" or something, which in the text says that VIDAA will monitor what you are watching on the screen, then use that information to display relevant ads. Yuck.

Fortunately it does switch to HDMI when you turn it on, but I've got to decide what system I get to drive that HDMI port. I wanted not to have to bother with an additional device, but that's how it is I guess.

As a bonus comment, VIDAA's kid-mode- content includes a very large number of purported TV programs - but they are actually Youtube playthroughs of video games, cut into "episodes" and presented as a "season".

I've been on the third side of this story -- the emergency responder side. Just wanted to say, thanks for looking out for your friend and housemate and making a difficult decision. No one can truly say whether it was the right or wrong thing to do, that's just not how life works.

But I can say with certainty that I've turned up to situations like you have described, and while it's not a pleasant thing, much worse is turning up because someone has died by suicide. And in that situation it might be someone like me calling his family rather than you. Everyone in that situation wishes they had said, or done something, or seen something, or had the opportunity...

So, though I am entirely uninvolved, thank you.

I'd love for this thing to be feature-flexible enough to use it for the exact opposite: running TV/screen/videogame timer for the kids!

Looks great, love the dial/switch big button combo, and the opportunity to buy something attractive that's a "hackable screen with buttons" is very high for me.

Another likely use is to be a controller for audiobooks or music in our rumpus if I ever get a hold of one. Again, drivable by kids and oldies who visit is a huge plus.

In addition to the appendix, my go to example of this is my friend's favourite organ: the Thymus [1]! If you've heard of "T-Cells" you indirectly know about it.

The interesting thing is that it is in a human when they are born, grows until puberty, then gets smaller and smaller until it can be quite small and difficult to detect in a grown adult.

I can imagine medical explorers cutting open dead 40 year olds in the year 1900, probably not finding any obvious organ there -- while perhaps cutting open dead children may have been a lot less common (and perhaps distasteful). If you did find something there, you would not assume an important organ present in a child and essential for their immune system would shrink and almost go away.

It would be more likely to be labelled nothing, an abnormal growth, or even a cause for death or illness (pressure on the heart/lungs!).

One thing that strikes me about this work, and Hokusai's other very popular wood block prints, is that he was a total perfectionist.

He would get things juuuust right, with the colour and the production process, with each copy made, then score/scratch the original so further prints could not be made to a different fashion/standard.

For him to be alive and see bright and garish "Great wave" socks, jumpers, room rugs, key rings and the like would probably cause him such a great conniption he'd drop right back dead again.

But such is the life of popular art work -- it survives its creator and lives by new rules over time.

My open tabs constitute a much smaller percentage of my total browsing than the history, even though there's useful stuff in both.

Speculating (extrapolating?) for someone who keeps a lot of tabs open: tabs represent desired history, closed tabs represent stuff they might specifically want to ignore.

It's almost useful to think of creating two "close tab" buttons -- one that sends the tab to the searchable service, and one that just ditches it.

I guess for those not sure of the context: The user Jia Tan added exploit code to the 'xz' tool as part of a larger deal. Wikipedia has a page on it here [1].

In this post, they are discussing some changes to print code specifically for the libarchive project, and some notable personalities in the security community chime in, including Colin Percival (Tarsnap among others) and Taviso (Google project zero among others).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor

That's an incredible idea -- I should chase down the 3 or 4 libraries near me and see if they have a 3d printer. If they have one, the staff there are probably quite keen for visitors to print a file.

I do wonder about longer prints and how that might go, but that's a problem for another day.

Re: 3d printing as a service, when I googled it here in Australia it was plentiful, expensive, and mostly focused on higher quality materials - for prototyping serious gadgets, it seemed. There were generic websites that seemed to be based overseas, but the options (and therefore my guess at quality) were behind a wall of lingo and technologies. I would have needed several hours I think to google, ask LLMs, etc, before understanding which to choose. And then? They were still not particularly cheap -- I expected to spend less on the case than the screen.

I love these projects but when I have had a need for a display at home, I struggled to find a case! Small displays complete with a case, that was also slim and of decent material, seemed incredibly elusive.

I suppose the modern workflow is to 3d print one: but perhaps other consumers, like me, buying a $20 SBC and a $20 display have not outlayed for a 3d printer... Or purchase a 3d printed one to spec? Unfortunately I don't yet have the confidence in the quality of materials of a purchased 3d printed item, nor enough familiarity with the materials and process to choose from the many options online. They also did not seem particularly cheap.

Most recently, I ended up finding a 2nd hand (refurbished) small tablet, and simply used that as the display for a small system. It pulls the display content over wifi and displays it in a browser, which is incredible overhead for such simple content. But it is slim, has a touch screen, comes complete in a case, and was cheaper than purchasing a similar waveshare or other unnamed-brand display with a matching case (where one could even be found!)

In Australia in 2022, a very large institution had a breach of private records [1]. That same year they made $590 million profit.

Today the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has taken penalty action -- a rarity. This opens the door to rather large fines imposed by the Federal Court, up to $2m per contravention.

More info likely to be updated in other news [2] publications.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-01/medibank-data-leak-ha...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-05/medibank-taken-to-fed...

Just for example: It could be stored encrypted with the user's credentials. So when you want to browse "Recall" it might pop-up requesting a fingerprint, password, token etc.

Then it decrypts, presents to the user, and closes the handles when you're done. In this way, the "key" isn't present -- the user has it!

That's quite a different security situation to it just sitting around in plaintext on disk. Certainly there's a number of Windows and MacOS features sitting behind authentication already, from a UX perspective.

"Large" is doing quite a bit of work here: the engineer who found it had disabled turbo boost and was, by at least a little serendipity, quite performance focused at the time rather than being busy on other elements of their release target.

I noticed this most recently when having selected "restart and update" for a system upgrade, and seeing the white apple on a black background with a progress bar, I bumped the play/pause key.

Sure enough, music.app launched in the background somehow and started playing!