ridgered4

I've been pretty dismayed that sometimes when I buy products elsewhere the seller often just buys them off amazon and then ships them to me, basically defeating my whole effort.

And you don't have to fill out a bunch of paperwork whenever you do or change anything.

My LG TV actually had support for control by serial communication, provided I plugged in a USB to serial converter. It allowed me to move volume control to my HTPC and largely dump the remote.

I kind of doubt an air conditioner has the same feature though.

Me as well. It has steadily gotten more aggressive though, recently becoming so bad I finally switched to using teddit.

I've noticed most people seem to be under the impression that Microsoft suffered some big loss from the antitrust case, and use it as evidence that Apple or Google will soon be taken down a peg too. Looking back they just built the lobbying arm they were missing and then the problem pretty much went away. Sure, there were some browser choice pre-load things in Europe and Korea but those things never came to the US and came well after the benefit had already been achieved in the browser war.

Also if your product is adware, full of dark patterns or generally hot garbage it might be really frustrating to use!

pavlov suggests companies now just sell the high value ad-free users data so they can be targeted by ads elsewhere in their lives while the source service remains (technically) ad free, which makes a sickening amount of sense.

I thought the bag banning was the wrong thing myself. I always reused my grocery bags as trash bags, now I have to buy trash bags...which seem like they use more plastic. But maybe most people don't use them that way.

That's why the enterprise shift is so key. Those users don't get a choice!

For now. Facebook didn't demand my phone number and a scan of my drivers license when I first signed up either.

It doesn't seem like fastmail is free, just a free trial.

Unfortunately this only gives you a single unchangeable mask number.

Yeah, I'm a little confused on the use case for this. I guess I could put all of the annoying services that demand a phone number for totally-only-security purposes-trust-us into a "bucket" number. It doesn't sound like it is a feature but I'd prefer that calls and texts to that number just be outright ignored unless I've turned the number on temporarily for verification. But since they have started rejecting VOIP numbers for verification, and now even prepaid phone numbers (!) for verification I feel like this probably won't work for that either.

I personally only use prepaid cards so a service that makes them appear like post paid might be useful on its own though.

The fact that you only get one number and you can't change is seems to blunt some of the utility. Ideally you'd want a separate number for each service and to have them all turned off, to block identifying you as the same user of different services. Not quite as easy to do with finite numbers as with email address suffixes.

I wonder if you could use this like 5sim or other shady text verification services by just remaking a monthly account. I suspect that is not the idea here and probably forbidden, otherwise they'd let you change numbers.

Not sure it helps now, but I believe there's a (buried) setting to keep a game from updating in steam. Of course the vestigial Origin launcher may not really respect it. And you can force a specific proton version.

I actually kind of loath constantly updating single player games. It usually breaks my working install.

This is indeed a real sore spot for qemu/kvm. VMware has good tech here as well.

One thing you may be able to do is use GVT-g to use a time slice of your Intel iGPU and pass that through. But it doesn't work on all Intel iGPUs and will never be available on newer Intel hardware.

Vmware has the best implementation of a paravirtualized GPU IMO, and has for probably a decade. Somehow this rarely comes up, but VMware itself seems to only begrudgingly want to sell their workstation products at this point.

It also creates a perverse incentive for the justice system to incarcerate people so there is more forced labor.

IIRC some king had this system for taxing cargo in the holds of ship in port. The crown always had the option of purchasing the cargo at the self selected price.

K-mart just got dinged for using facial recognition to track shoppers, they claim for loss prevention.

The only email provider I'm aware of that still doesn't require a phone number during sign up is protonmail. Maybe tutanota but IIRC they wouldn't let you sign up over a VPN.

> I can definitely understand not realizing that you could lose access to your account if you lose your phone number. But once it happens the first time, could you not pick any free email that does not require 2FA, and warn fellow homeless to avoid gmail?

Almost every free email service I've tried now requires a phone number to setup. Even protonmail required it for a brief while, although they now are back to captcha and a stern warning. I actually can't think of another free service besides protonmail that this isn't now true for.

An annoying trick some of them use is to allow you to setup the account and then lock it some time later. I've seen on immediate login (irritating waste of time) or after you've used it for awhile (what you used the account for is now held hostage unless you cough up a phone number).

My 2012 car supports reading mp3s off a CD which greatly improved the utility for me.

I kind of prefer it over the AUX jack since I hate messing with a touchscreen phone while driving. The radio has actual buttons and since it only does one thing it doesn't need to be messed with much to begin with.

Is there a reason you didn't go with M-disc?

How they even id the user for the cap? Some kind of system signature? Requirement of a MS account?

I'm of the opinion that all the telemetry is used to identify the remaining parts of Windows users can still rely upon and so they can be 'improved' by a PM looking to redirect an existing user base onto some new-crap.

In this way, users have nowhere to hide. Any refuge from the new UI changes will be tracked, identified and targeted for termination.

I gathered all the pieces of the Windows7 calculator and transplanted them into Windows 10 because of these stories and after seeing how slow it loaded. Speed to load is a critical feature of a PC calculator IMO.

My first PC was a Tandy1000RL. It was used and fairly obsolete by the time I got it, but I squeezed every drop I could get out of that thing. I learned DOS on it, and learned to reinstall DOS and deskmate after I accidentally blew away the OS with a misplaced deltree command. I spent quite a bit of time trying to make games in QBASIC.

I played a lot of old games on it, mostly purchased from corner stands in the super market and the occasional box title from Ames department store. They just sold the disk in a sleeve with a short description of what I was purchasing. I was constantly frustrated by my lack of VGA graphics, sound blaster and sometimes available conventional memory. Tandy graphics (which I learned later was really just a souped up version of CGA) were not that commonly supported so I was often stuck playing games in 4 color CGA mode. I eventually upgraded the RAM from 512KB to 768KB, which cost me $75!

The annoying double density 720K floppy drive was a non stop hassle requiring me to learn pkzip and zip spanning to split the contents of the then common high density disks on a school PC so I could then get the contents onto my hard drive. I had to go to my uncle's house if I wanted to get data off a 5.25" disks, and when he did the copies as a favor for me he usually returned a high density 3.5" that I still couldn't use directly.

I have no idea why I have such fond memories of that thing but I do.

> Google's I think were announcements for services, etc. tied to a Workspaces work account.

That kind of sounds like spam to me!

I seem to recall the wire covers being on the IBM XT power supply so I think they are the OG.

It sounds good for stopping attackers, but if I am the real user and enter a bad password it is going to be pretty infuriating spending time troubleshooting the 2FA not working problem that doesn't actually exist. I suspect your service will get a reputation for completely unreliable 2FA which may have unintended consequences.