manyxcxi

I couldn’t find the exact specs in the post, but it’s most likely unable to run Steam because of the processor in use. If you’re not familiar the screen shots are of a very popular emulation front-end called Emulation Station.

Related, a few years back I got in the hobby of building Raspberry Pi (Zero, 3, and 4) into Gameboy (original gen 1) shells. Economies of scale sure are nice, because even the raw materials for building one cost me more than $80.

EDIT: I found the specs (or someone quoting specs) and it looks like it is comparable to Raspberry Pi Zero and does not have wireless. That would make things like Steamlink a non-starter.

I have iCloud turned on but it’s set to only sync Notes or something trivial like that that I don’t even use- I can’t recall ever having been badgered for more.

Maybe I got to that state because I was being badgered? It’s been long enough though I can’t recall.

Might be worth a shot if the risk is acceptable enough to you vs the badger.

I’m not an apologist or shill, but as a user I feel like I understand what I’m giving to Apple (or Microsoft/Google/$OS_VENDOR) when I am using their OS _AND_ enabling any kind of cloud sync. Maybe they’re taking more or less than I expected, but if I’m syncing my entire contact list I just have to assume now they have my contact list- and I accepted that when I enabled the functionality.

Some feature flags/settings across all the OSes get hidden, are non-obvious, on by default, or are flat out using dark patterns (looking at you Win10) but in general I assume the default state (for all OSes) is a combination of reducing support incidents, easiest on-boarding, and trying to push some corporate strategic objective summed up as keep the average user happy enough to stick around and possibly give us more money.

Any app I install on said OS, may want to access this information but without all the permissions explainers I have no idea what it’s going to want or why.

Again, I assume the OS has access to all of this because it’s the OS it either needs it or is the manager of the info and access broker.

To sum up my thought, I guess I agree that there’s a double standard but disagree that it’s necessarily bad or shady- but that’s because I already had a double standard in mind when I think about OS vs App.

Specific to ad-tracking and Apple: I have no proof for my belief but I believe Apple who primarily wants to sell me hardware and has made public acknowledgements of the importance of privacy, including making noticeable improvements to their OS, is significantly less likely to abuse my privacy than any other OS vendor out there.

I’m not saying this as a whataboutism, I just base it on my perceptions given all the things you just flat out can’t turn off in Win10 and that Google literally makes their money off of getting ads to your eyeballs and Android’s permissions are a dumpster fire nightmare for privacy.

I feel (again, no real proof) that the Apple eco-system is providing me the best _mainstream and low-effort_ steps to privacy protection vs the others, but I concede that it’s probably not good enough in many ways.

Yes. The Kotlin DSL helps immensely- probably mostly because the IDE can actually autocomplete the various closures and attributes.

A few things get a bit more verbose/ugly but mostly it’s similar.

Not to invalidate the way you feel about that interaction, but putting myself in their shoes- I’m not sure my response would be much better.

Running a booth at a conference is EXHAUSTING. Also, that was your first interaction with them and you were at peak excitement. That might’ve been the thousandth time they had heard similar and their spark may have faded by the time you got there.

I get it though, we feel the way we feel. It sucks when your enthusiasm goes un-matched. I’ve written off companies for interactions a more objective bystander might charitably forgive.

BTW- I’ve got no relation to the company or product. I’m just a happy customer who’s run a booth or two in my day and also felt the same way as you about other companies too.

Yeah but CAN bus is all about the various electronic modules talking together. The parking brake assembly has a switch on it to detect if the pedal is depressed, IE the parking brake is applied. I could understand not detailing those too much, because even the knowledge won’t help you when your “entertainment module” AKA radio is VIN locked and you HAVE to go to the dealership to deal with it.

There was no mention of the parking brake, the cables, or the fact that the parking brake is tied to the rear brakes in the entire manual.

It was honestly the first time I’ve ever been disappointed with a manual. Then again, all my old books prior to ‘01 are a Chilton which are IMO more technical and precise. Of 8 books, only two are Hayne’s. And Hayne’s bought Chilton some time ago, so I’d be interested if Chilton is more like Hayne’s these days.

The first thing I used to do when getting a new (used) auto would be to go buy a repair manual- for some reason I didn’t do that for my wife’s when we bought it.

I (this week) just bought a Hayne’s for my wife’s car as it’s finally getting to that age (5 years old) and I needed to put a new parking brake pedal in.

I couldn’t believe how little detail was in it. I’ve still got my Hayne’s and Chilton’s hanging around for cars I don’t own anymore (all US autos from 1988-2010) and this book is by far the thinnest.

On top of that, there was NO INFORMATION on the parking brake assembly at all. My buddy, a Ford mechanic, broke the bad news to me, the entire lower side of the dash had to come off. This wasn’t some niche model either, it’s an Explorer, which remained largely unchanged from 2011-2018. The documentation for the dash disassembly was basically three pictures, no exploded diagram of the half dozen trim pieces that all interlock, nothing.

Maybe they packed it in a while ago?

Assuming the cost of the batteries were the exact same, that means that Apple is charging an extra $60-$100 for the battery install. If it took all of 30 minutes, that’s a labor rate on par (or better) with most automotive/mechanic/trade shops in my area.

I would love to be able to pay Apple just for the battery and do it myself, but I don’t know many people that want to learn how (even though it’s very simple).

This is where I get torn about how angry I should be...

I feel like Right to Repair laws should (exist in the US in the first place...) require that wear items be made available on their own. Not as an expensive assembly, not requiring authorized repairs when out of warranty, and not being DRMed. I think that certain classes of items should always be considered wear items- batteries, for instance.

However, at a certain point regulation (in the US at least) tends to either be SO broad or specific as to become regulatory capture for the incumbents or basically toothless.

On the other hand here, Apple is giving users a viable, quality option at what could be deemed a reasonable price.

To be clear, I’m not patting them on the back- I’m sure lawsuits forced their hand, they’re still making money, and they’re protecting their brand.

I guess the point I’m trying to get across is that it sucks that my options are battery of unknown origin which can have literal catastrophic implications or paying a non-inconsequential amount of money to repair a piece of equipment that is likely important to one’s daily life.

I live in Oregon and none of this surprises me. They’ve had some pretty big software/vendor blunders over my adult life (38yo), but I don’t imagine they’re that different from any other state/federal organization with big software projects.

To put it bluntly, government contracts under pay for the complications they provide, are never straightforward, have too many competing stakeholders, and huge changes will be required mid-way through every project.

On top of that, only certain companies that have been vetted and approved to be a vendor can even apply, which effectively weeds out most potential companies. What you wind up with is Oracle selling a one-size fits all “platform” to one state for DMV, and the next state for Electronic Medical Records.

Additionally, the FTE pay scale is shit compared to the private sector so they will never have any chance at getting, let alone retaining, any decent talent.

I’ve had a Wink hub since the firmware was pre v1.0 (about 7 years) and not only is it still physically working, Wink has maintained support for it. I’ve got another, newer hub, and have dabbled with some of their other hardware over the years.

The subscription announcement did seem very rushed, and oddly toned- kind of felt like “this is our last option and we’re probably going under without it”.

Here’s the thing, I believe they should’ve been charging it all along. Backend infrastructure isn’t free and hardware doesn’t usually have amazing margins (though maybe consumer IoT is better than some areas).

There’s a difference between Google and Wink though, Wink actually offers product support AND they’ve continued to upgrade their offering through the years instead of killing it off every 9-18 months.

Maybe Wink has changed (it’s been a long time since I interacted with anyone) but there was a time early on where I was on the phone with product support (who arranged for and called ME vs a 1-800 hold) with a pot (as in cooking) over my Wink Hub in the front yard with an extension cord trying to complete a firmware upgrade that had a very particular bug.

Later on, I was given an API key to create my own integration, just by asking for one.

I had gone years with them and all the money they ever had gotten from me was the $49-$99 (can’t recall) for the first Hub I purchased and all they did was continue offering a reliable service quietly.

I don’t ever recall them touting “forever free”, but I’m sure they mentioned no subscription somewhere in their advertising over the years.

Luckily the Replicator 2 and 2X were when MakerBot was still trying (or pretending) to be open source. The hotends were standard-ish MK8 (or 10). Everything was pretty serviceable on them as long as you didn’t need to fix the motherboard.

The printers after that switched to the new hotends that are not user serviceable. It boggles my mind why any home user or tinkerer would ever sign up for that crap.

BUT...

My brother in law teacher, who teaches various middle school classes and groups use them. I asked why they would waste so much money and he had a response that made it all make sense to me. He doesn’t have time to keep them all running all the time (like we had to do with the old ones) and when one goes down he gets replacement parts from MB at a discount, slaps it in, and they’re up and running again. Apparently the latest ones are fairly reliable and it doesn’t happen all that often either.

So I guess I would sum it up as not for me, but I could see why some would.

I got into it specifically because you can get good printers cheap. There is a manufacturer that offers an open source based printer that was better than it had any reason to be for less than $300.

My printer today looks nothing like the printer I started with, I’ve switched boards, recompiled my own firmware, the whole bit. I was confident in hacking on it for two reasons:

1) It was open source based

2) Replacement parts are inexpensive

I originally started with a Makerbot 2X which was closed source and $2500 (8+ years ago). Mind you, I didn’t have one at home- we had a couple at work for prototyping.

The slicing software was atrocious, the ability to fix it was hampered by what parts they sold, and the replacement parts were generally very expensive.

My $250 printer was better in every objective measure out of the box than the MakerBot was after years of practice and tuning.

This year my friend’s 2X died and a replacement motherboard was going to be almost as much as the cost of my printer new so he just gave it to me and bought a new printer.

With my newfound confidence from my “cheap” printer, I gutted the 2X and installed an open source motherboard and completely rewired it.

It all started with a printer good enough to be liked by the community and open enough to be modifiable.

Though it’s technically _not_ Java, Kotlin has been a breath of fresh air for us in the last year. We tried it on a few smaller projects and it took off like wildfire throughout our team.

I write a lot of JavaScript (typescript included) and I have found it to be a very nice combination of things I like from both Java/JavaScript.

Admittedly I have been primarily writing Java for the last 15 years and consider JavaScript a second language for me, you may find Kotlin gives you a good reason to come back to the JVM (where it makes sense to of course).

For a client we added support for some synonymous Azure services to the AWS ones we use and I’ll be honest, the amount of garbage the Azure SDK created in our JVM codebase was quite annoying.

Now, I fully understand a Java SDK isn’t going to get quite the same love as their bread and butter, but everything about their Java SDK feels like, just copy the .NET SDK and make it work in Java.

I assumed the telemetry traces (or attempted traces) I was seeing, even with every configurable telemetry config flag EXPLICITLY set to disabled was just more of their bad choices of log levels, leaky internal log messages, and just generally not doing things “the Java way”.

Now I’m starting to wonder if there’s just flat out no way to turn all the telemetry off. Originally we built with the AWS and Azure SDKs and the cloud providers were configurable at run time. I was getting so annoyed with the garbage that MSFT was leaving in our logs even when disabled and running in AWS that we eventually bifurcated our build and re-organized the project.

We spent about a week adding abstractions we previously didn’t need, and another week testing, for what we were assuming was just an annoyance. Turns out maybe we were doing our other clients a solid and didn’t even know it.

Funny, even though Conductor isn’t designed to be- this is exactly how we use it. In a Kotlin and Spring Boot codebase nonetheless!

Having switched from 80% Java (20% about 5 other languages) to probably 75% Kotlin over the last year, one of my absolute favorite things named arguments.

When you name your arguments, simply supplying them will use the default if one has been specified. If one hasn’t been specified then you must provide it when calling and your compiler/IDE will definitely let you know.

I used to go out of my way with method overloads, JavaDocs, argument @annotations, and Builder classes in order to get this same level conciseness and cleanliness in my Java code. It is extra work (even with Lombok) but I personally can’t stand when I don’t keep it clean like that. Understandably a lot of other developers on my teams don’t always go to the same lengths.

I honestly haven’t ready the details on PHP’s plan for this, but with Kotlin’s names arguments I’ve found almost no need of method overloading anymore- most of those input variations are now covered (except for when you’ve got different types coming in, which usually can be handled with a common interface or base class).

Over the last few years I’ve come to this exact realization as well. I used to think about it as a couple devs sharing a keyboard for interminable stretches and it made my skin crawl. Watching someone “drive” fumbling for buttons in the IDE and not using shortcuts makes me want to shoulder them out of the way and take over.

However, for short bursts (10minutes to max about 90) that are focused on a particular goal makes me feel both re-invigorated and more satisfied with the completeness of the ideas.

The re-invigoratation (for me) comes from not having to run my brain at 100% for the duration. In auto racing terms, my partner and I can take turns drafting off each other’s thoughts, increasing our mental efficiency.

When differences arise I love hearing their thoughts and finding ways to merge the best of both ideas- or completely tossing my own because theirs are better. I’ve heard it (no clue where or from whom) described as idea sex. I’m very okay with my ideas being promiscuous and having lots of better little idea babies.

I still haven’t figured out how to keep my skin from crawling watching people fumble around their UIs though...

I used to live in Renton (by Boeing) and commute into downtown Seattle (5th and Union) and found the light rail in was a good way to deal with it. Over time I found myself using my motorcycle more because I could use the HOV lanes and adjusting my work schedule to get in around 6 and leave by 3:30 (in theory) which went from a guaranteed hour each way to as little as 25min in the morning and about 40 in the afternoon.

Spent a lot of money on REALLY good rain gear and averaged almost 8K mi a year for the four of the five years we were up there. As long as I wasn’t stopped in traffic I felt even more relaxed getting a good motorcycle ride in every morning and being actively zoned out (focused on now instead of life) vs taking the train and being passively zones out with media.

Now that I’m 4mi from my office, come home a few times a week and say hi to the wife at lunch, etc. I will also never go back to anything resembling a commute.

My kids are 3, 5, and 7. I feel your situation exactly. Luckily, I’m an early riser and have my creative bursts before most people are even in the office. I’ve learned to make my “me” time a priority but early enough that even on the weekends I’m still present and helping carry my share of the load around the house.

I’m usually up around 4:30 and have the dog walked by 5:30.

Summer in the Pacific Northwest means I’ve got plenty of light by 6 and I go hit the archery range or take the dog for a longer hike through the woods.

In the winter it’s pitch black til 7 so I go to the office earlier.

Go to my office between 5:30-7:30 where I’m going to focus on learning something new, side project, hobby project, etc. til 9:30.

Gym at noon (most days), home by 5:30. I don’t even try and do mentally taxing work after we get the kids to bed (around 7:30). Usually it’s helping cleanup, hanging with the wife, TV, and asleep by 9:30ish.

Because life is life, some mornings I’ve got the dog walked and am in the office by 5, sometimes I’ve got a meeting at 8, or have to take kids to school.

On weekends I do the exact same morning routine except I’ll be on the computer at home and usually no gym.

There are plenty of times where I’ve got a good flow going and my alarm buzzes at 5pm and I just have to tear myself away and get home.

Traveling is what kills me. My morning routine sets up my whole day and gets my head where it needs to be. When I’m traveling for work it’s not so bad because I hit the hotel gym and usually get even more morning time to myself. Traveling with the family (like over the holidays when I’m staying at the in-laws) leaves me jumping out of my skin without the physical and mental exercises I’m used to. I haven’t cracked that nut yet, but I’m really trying to not be such a dick about it to the wife this year.

EDIT: I forgot to mention the most important part! I’m definitely still working on this, myself. I found that really jumping in and ACTUALLY participating with the kids is a salve for that mental itch that seems to not be getting scratched when I am obsessing over something in the back of my mind. Building LEGO, kicking ass at Guess Who, etc. can still be pretty fun if we just get over ourselves and let go. Or if I REALLY still want to take the dog in the woods, bring the kids with and it’s a whole new adventure.

Primarily, it’s because I don’t know many. Most attempts at networking come from body shop style companies in very spammy ways.

Second to that is the time zone issue. I’m on the US West coast, I’m an early riser, but it’s still rough.

National Geographic did a documentary called “Mission to The Sun” on the launching of this mission that was really interesting. I stumbled across it on Disney+ of all places, not sure where else it’s available. I would definitely recommend watching it.

The gist is that the agency is going to demand a fee for bringing you in. A lot of times it’s a percentage of your offer. Thus, you get a smaller offer to offset or reduce the cost.

I can vote for the people (at every level) that I think will spend the taxes I am legally obligated to pay in a way I agree with and I can follow up with successively vociferous concerns (letters < community organization < protest, etc), but at a certain point my freedom (or life) can be threatened.

Employers can’t (yet) do the same. I’m under no obligation to them to do what I morally disagree with because I can always quit playing their game.

All I can do to quit my country is uproot from everything I’ve ever known, including my family, to another country that I agree with more that will also let me in.

They’re completely different situations and I’m pretty sure we all recognize that, but I’ll add my own personal anecdotes:

Employer

I don’t like the idea of software patents or generic business patents that can be summed up with “... do it on a computer”. I created some really awesome things for an employer many moons ago that were essentially revolutionizing how people in this very particular niche could more efficiently do their jobs. What did I really do though? I put together some open source tools completely foreign to this niche, glued them together with some nifty ideas and code that I wrote, put a decent unified UI on it, and packaged it up as a virtual machine appliance for our people in the field. My company wanted me to sign the invention away so they could patent it, and were going to put in 5 different applications. It was sign on the dotted line or walk, I walked at significant financial penalty.

Government

My dad’s from Libya. I lived there for a while growing up, and all my dad’s family is still in Tripoli. They all hated Gadaffi, and with the Arab spring uprising- things were getting bad. I joined in some protests across the US asking for intervention. Welp, we got what we asked for but not what we wanted. Turns out governments and geopolitics are tricky.

They can if given permission to. For certain apps in iOS it’s usually an application asking for location permissions without a real good reason for it, that’s why (in my opinion) it seems like weather apps are some of the worst offenders for this stuff, as it makes sense to give it location permissions. There are other permissions that can be abused as well, but location is the dead give away.

I can’t speak to Android as it’s been a long time, but iOS is pretty strict about what you can and can’t do in the background. There are certain events that will “wake up” an app, even one that is killed. You’re not necessarily safe if you have a bad app installed and kill it. I usually just recommend avoiding free apps that seem super heavy on ads. Because the ad framework is likely abusive, even if the developer didn’t intend it.

Having done some proof of concept work for a couple of very large retailers using BLE/beacons I believe most of the scumminess isn’t on the retailer side but the 3rd party API/framework.

The requests we were fielding was for better ability to find things in the store, floor maps for every store with wayfinding, and the ability to use the app to get more contextual info on demand.

For those not completely in the know on beacons: they are broadcast only and it is the apps running in the background on your phone that shuffle off the data on your phone. If you were running a device free of the offending apps, your privacy is fine on that front. The WiFi tracking is a different story though.

I like pho, and the standard noodles on it. But you know what’s even better? Pho but with ramen noodles instead.

Lots of places that do pho and wonton noodle soup (the style where they use ramen/egg noodles AND put the wontons in) will do it for you.

I was officially diagnosed at age 32. This wasn’t some pill mill diagnosis either. I worked with my psych for 3 months before we tried any meds, it would’ve been longer but I had accidentally discovered most of the practical methods for dealing with it on my own.

Two great reliefs came from the diagnosis:

1. I’m not a lazy, unmotivated person

2. Meds, at the right dose, are amazing. When my Vyvanse kicks in, it’s like walking away from an outdoor block party in my brain and getting into a sound proof booth where I can hear only the noise I want (or have) to.

Things I lived with my whole life that were both positive and negative depending on the circumstances:

- I can’t even stand the thought of a task, class, or activity I’m not interested in, but if I’m even slightly interested I can go deep fast and keep going with no loss of zeal until I’m satisfied. Basically, I can get super obsessed with stuff for short or long periods of time. My hobby background is ridiculously all over the place.

- I think and iterate my thoughts faster than most people can keep up, and I iterate my thoughts externally, if I’m on a roll good luck getting a word in between breaths. My psych “classified” me as a second order thinker and I run lots of what-if permutations and shave and shape creative solutions very fast. It also means I must be extremely cognizant of letting other be heard, especially those that like to ruminate on an idea and bring it to light more fully formed.

- My leg never stopped bouncing, helpful when I played music to keep time, annoying to anyone near me.

- I’m quick to temper and just as fast back to moving on.

- Little to no patience for bullshit or things I just am not interested in. Don’t tell me a detailed story of how to get there, just give me the highlights. I do t care about how you feel about some objective thing, just give me the facts and let’s keep moving.

Lots of other stuff, but basically I coped, unknowingly by creating rituals that allowed me to not forget or have to waste time finding things:

- Get home, keys and wallet go in the exact same place every time

- Todo list for next week created at the end of every Friday, revised at the end of every week day, and reviewed every morning

- The thing I want to do least is the thing I force myself to do first, and nothing else until it’s done

- Organize my schedule in a calendar, if it’s not in there it doesn’t exist and I won’t remember

- Just remembered to put that thing in the car for tomorrow and I’m laying in bed? Get up RIGHT NOW and go do it.

- Can’t forget your coat if your car keys are always in them

- My working area is spotless. No bobble heads on the desk or stacks of papers. Desk is completely clear, cables neatly organized, zip tied, and hidden.

Here’s the thing, maybe you do have ADHD. Maybe you don’t. The rituals you focus on and make so habitual you don’t even have to think about them will still work for you.

I don’t know about best, as there are lots of trade offs between various projects. I’ve reviewed and worked with a lot of Java based ones, top of mind:

- Airflow

- jBPM

- Enhydra Shark

- Activiti

- Netflix Conductor

Most of those are more workflow engine than pure orchestration.

A few years back, we searched high and low and I was generally unhappy with the commercial offerings so we wound up building around Netflix Conductor (after a disastrous run with Joget, which is built on Enhydra Shark).

Since then I’ve been pretty happy with Conductor, submitted numerous PRs and accidentally became one of the people keeping the MySQL backend implementation going forward.

I got sick and tired of cables fraying and breaking and finding the cable after it falls off the top of my night stand. It’s also easier to put my phone on the charging pad in the dark than fumbling with finding the cable and getting it plugged in.

I’m not really pro-union (though I used to be unabashedly anti-union), but wanted to let you know that I appreciate your courage to fight for what you believe is right.

I’m a little annoyed that using the word courage made me twitch for a second because of how much “bravery” and “courage” everyone is getting commended for these days, but I think you’re an example of what every day courage can look like.

You knew what the repercussions could be, I doubt you were so independently wealthy that losing your salary meant little, and you publicly stood for what you believe in for the greater good of those around you.

Even after all the crap you’ve probably had to deal with, I hope you feel positively about your efforts.

Time and perspective are a funny thing... Coming up as young adult and professional engineer I saw unions as a relic that definitely served for positive change (way back in dinosaur times), grew fat and complacent (if not even complicit), and did more harm to the market in general than they did to benefit their members today.

Now I site here (still relatively young, thank you) at 37 with young family, having co-founded a company that employs dozens, losing sleep over how much things like health insurance cost for my employees, and my stance on unions has softened up quite a bit.

Markets and investors have perverted corporate incentives to a degree that moral leadership can be considered downright mismanagement. I’ve heard managers and other founders complain that “if I pay to train them, they’re just going to walk out the door”, etc. My little sister is in year 3 of her software development career and I can’t believe some of the crap I have had to tell her to watch out for, or worse, how to handle as it’s happening to her.

I read about things like the IBM layoffs of “old” workers, then see people I used to work with struggle to get hired (totally not because of their age, of course!) when I know how capable they are and my blood boils.

I still don’t know if unions are the answer. Maybe they’re part of it, but I believe we’ve got a generation (or two) of spineless and/or immoral corporate leadership to survive before things get back on the right track.