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rdschouw

159 karma · joined September 9, 2010

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rdschouw··on Credit Card Rewards Became a $9.2B Wealth Transfer
Ex-European here. It is very common to overdraft your bank account in Europe. The overdraft interest fees are very similar to the credit cards here in the US. It is basically the same service but with a different execution.
rdschouw··on Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation
Also let us not forget the rootkit malware Sony BMG distributed on their audio CDs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

rdschouw··on Roku LT Operating System open source distribution
Why not disconnect your smart TV from the internet and use [insert favorite streaming box]?

I use Apple TVs on all my smart TVs and none of them have ever been connected to the internet. No ads with consistent interface across TV brands.

rdschouw··on Simplenote is no longer in active development
Standard Notes is in the same position as Simplenote was 10 years ago. Automattic acquired Simplenote but never really did anything with it. Standard Notes was acquired by Proton last year and development has slowed to bug fixes only. I would be wary to migrate to Standard Notes.
rdschouw··on Simplenote is no longer in active development
The clients are open source but the server is not.
rdschouw··on Backblaze Drive Stats for 2025
Do you have MacOS by any chance?

MacOS does not support S.M.A.R.T over USB.

rdschouw··on Does our “need for speed” make our wi-fi suck?
I got 28 online right now according to my Eero. 3 people, with smartphones and laptops. Several game consoles, a few Apple TVs and music streaming devices, Ring camera, Zwave Hub, printer, washing machine, garage opener, Ring doorbell and an assortment of Echo dots.
rdschouw··on Don't squander public trust on bullshit
You can turn them off.

I used to live in NJ and they sent these types of alerts all the time. AMBER alerts in the middle of the night, "Flash Flood" alerts after two drops of rain. It made no sense and I turned them all of off.

I live in IL now and I turned them back on because tornados are actually a thing here but also I haven't received any other irrelevant alert.

rdschouw··on US sues eBay for allowing sale of emissions defeat devices
How do you mean? Here in Illinois they are free. It was also free in New Jersey.
rdschouw··on The glass at McCormick Place in Chicago is a lethal obstacle for birds
I had a robin nest in my backyard close to my French doors. Every day one of them would pass by the doors, see their reflection and then attack it. Apparently they like to keep out competitors when they're nesting. They would at it for hours until I obscured the lower half with some potted plants.
rdschouw··on Raspberry Pi 5
Power consumption is a consideration though depending on your use case and setup. A Pi 4 draws about 3W on light load and these G3 Minis take 10-12W.

Of course if you deck out a Pi 4 with a SSD and a fan, it'll come much closer to the G3 Mini in terms of power consumption.

rdschouw··on Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Win11 to get people to ditch Chrome
Yea or Google's prompt to choose a web browser on their IOS apps when I click a link in their Gmail app for instance.
rdschouw··on Giving up the iPad-only travel dream
3 devices? I usually have 4 devices. I bring my Iphone 13 Mini, iPad Mini, Macbook 12-inch and Steamdeck (and before the Switch). The iPad is for content consumption. I can watch 8 hours of TV on it without breaking a sweat about battery life. The laptop is to work and the phone is to communicate. Steamdeck is just for play.

I do try to buy the lightest and smallest version of every device. The steamdeck is honestly the most unwieldly device I carry around. Everything else fits without a problem in my messenger bag.

rdschouw··on Amsterdam to use “noise cameras” against too loud cars
Here in the US Mid West suburbia it is a problem as well. Same applies to insane subwoofers. What's up with that?

I always say to my wife that I can't wait until all cars and bikes are electric. In a decade or so this problem will go away by itself.

rdschouw··on StarLite 12.5-inch Linux tablet
I am using a Surface Go 2 with Arch / Wayland / Gnome. I use the Linux surface kernel and all of the hardware works except the IR camera and webcam. Overall, it is a good experience. I love using it as a notebook with the pen and Xjournal++. Battery life is 7 hours or so.

The OSK pops up when I need to. There is a Gnome extension to make it work better like adding ctrl, alt and cursor keys for instance.

I also use Gnome extension to force apps to open maximized.

I use it primarily as a tablet at home and a travel laptop for work. I am quite enamored with it.

rdschouw··on Threads users down by more than a half
Based on my own old Twitter circle, I see that:

A. Attention-seekers have gone to Threads or stayed on Twitter

B. People who are into niche interests and not part of group A are very active on Mastodon.

Mastodon to me very much feels like early-days Twitter. I truly I hope it stays like this. Threads might even be blessing in disguise for Mastodon network when it develops into a network similar to Instagram (content creators, brands, attention-seekers).

rdschouw··on Amazon Allegedly Tricked Users into Prime and Sabotaged Their Attempts to Cancel
Yea it's pretty awful. They also by default select a faster shipping method which costs $6.99 (most of the time per item, sometimes multiple shipping charges for the same order). Every checkout I have to go through:

1. no, I do not want a prime membership for $1.99 for 1 week

2. no, I want free shipping on these items (careful check if the order is split up in multiple shipments)

3. no, I want free shipping on this item.

8 out of 10 orders my stuff arrives earlier than the paid shipping option offered during checkout.

rdschouw··on Lemmy stats (users, posts, nodes, comments)
You mean this? https://lemmy.world/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sor...
rdschouw··on Show HN: Quadratic – Open-Source Spreadsheet with Python, AI (WASM and WebGL)
Any chance you have a docker-compose.yml you can add to your repository? ;-)

Great concept! Congrats on your launch!

rdschouw··on Over 16k people still use a Pebble smartwatch
Good actually. It still has 2 days life time but I tend to charge it daily for 15m to keep it running forever. When I am wearing my Pebble Time Steel, I make sure that it has 50% charge before switching it off. This tends to keep the battery level between 20 and 80% between charges. I think that's the sweet spot.
rdschouw··on Over 16k people still use a Pebble smartwatch
I use my Pebble Time Round or Pebble Time Steel daily on IOS using the official Pebble app.

Every major IOS release I think this is the time my Pebble app stops working but it is still going strong on IOS16. Safe for another year. :)

rdschouw··on The deception of “buying” digital movies
An Apple TV 4K with Infuse app does all of this without problems and supports many kinds of storage backends.
rdschouw··on Google's most ridiculous trick to force users into adding phone number
I just gone through this process myself. You can add another 2FA method later and THEN delete your phone number. That's what I did.
rdschouw··on People don't want to run their own bank
Huh? Crypto is great as a transfer of value network and store of value among other things. You can still use a bankequivalent like Coinbase.
rdschouw··on Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web?
Yikes! Just checked and I have emails going back to 2000 (imported, account is from 2007) in my Gmail. It is a workspace account though.
rdschouw··on Ask HN: Gmail account security
Yea it is odd that not all Google accounts are the same.

My favorite is that I cannot migrate my Nest account to a Google account because it does not support Google Workspaces accounts. I use it with my own domain and it is my private Google account.

rdschouw··on Reading Hayek in Holland
As Dutch born but moved to US 10 years ago, this article sums up everything I don't like about The Netherlands. He speaks about all the positive notes but there are plenty of downsides to it as well.

The biggest one is that if you don't fit the Dutch mold, it feels like having an overbearing parent at your back at all times. If you do fit the Dutch mold, it is the greatest country to live in.

Some more negative aspects. There are limits to parking spots per home. There are neighborhoods were you can only have a single car per family. There are no more parking spots. Expecting visitors? Sorry.

The Dutch government prefers people to take public transportation which generally is excellent but they make owning a car expensive and complicated (like parking example above).

You need building licenses for almost any change to your home - outside or inside. You want to create an extra bathroom?Apply for a license. Want to remove a tree from your yard? Well good luck with that.

The Netherlands is one of the most beautifully urban-designed places in the world for sure but it comes at a price. Some people love it and some people do not.

rdschouw··on 1Password 8 will be subscription only and won’t support local vaults
No he means that Bitwarden's extension does not remember state. When you go back and forth between the form and opening the extension window, you always start at the default page. It does not remember you had an item open before. This happens with your credit card for instance which is typically not linked to a particular url.
rdschouw··on The 'Fuck You' Pattern
The same happens when you use Linux as your desktop OS together with an ad-blocker. I guess it trips off some anti-bot rules.

My favorite is Google's captcha where they let visitors solve their machine learning classification problem by asking them to classify images.

rdschouw··on Moving my home media library from iTunes to Jellyfin and Infuse
I have ripped close to 1,000 Blu-Ray and DVD discs with MakeMKV and never encountered audio sync issues. It’s not a thing anymore.

There was a time I used handbrake to reduce the file sizes by encoding to x265 and that never resulted in any audio sync issues either.

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