zevon

Interesting. I stand corrected and thanks for the links! Seems I didn't look hard enough at my USB-C cables. Now I'm curious - like the person I responded to, I always felt that Lightning is more tactile and more consistent than USB-C (including Apple's own USB-C cables) and I wonder why that is. Maybe the Lightning spring is beefier or something?

That's not crazy at all. If you look at a male lightning connector, you can see detents at the sides that snap into a (spring-loaded) retaining mechanism on the female side. USB-C doesn't have anything like that which results in less tactile satisfaction.

Does anybody know how they actually do it without a fan and a defined volume around it? The marketing fluff says "It applies sophisticated algorithms to measure the PM2.5 concentration directly in free space, without requiring a fan", so I assume the main difference to traditional PM sensors is the software?

I think it's perfectly valid to consider this as problematic (the GrapheneOS team certainly seems to think this is not ideal, for example). However - somewhat counter-intuitively - it's also valid to consider Pixels as among the most secure and most appropriate Android phones for something like GrapheneOS.

They write about their reasoning and criteria for device support here, for example: https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-device.

I've also heared good things of this island called Audiobookbay (and there's also this useful service called Bugmenot where you can find all sorts of login credentials...)

And even if it's a bit of a hassle, I always check if there is an option to buy books/audiobooks as directly as possible from the author (in some cases you can buy content directly on the author's website, for example).

The other way round. They named the Star Trek character after a real-world mycologist.

Not really. At least not in the past and probably also not in the future if they are already in the country legally. These things a) take a lot of time (especially in Germany) and b) all the right-wing pandering of the current government is relatively new and will probably be moderated drastically by court decisions.

edit: As to your other points - I would argue that stuff like the Böhmermann affair is a good example that free speech more or less works in most parts of Europe. Yes, there were - very old - laws about insulting royalty and heads of state. However, a state-financed comedian was able to push on those issues enough for those paragraphs to be changed/struck (as far as i remember, at least) - and he's still state-financed, still has his head and his freedom and still happily insults important people.

edit2: It's not really correct to state that the phrase "from the river to the sea" is forbidden, specifically. There are no legal means to ban specific phrases on a whim in Germany. There are, however, blanket bans on using phrases/slogans of organisations that are unconstitutional such as terrorist groups. The argument has been made that "from the river to the sea" is a Hamas-slogan but as far as I've kept up with the discussion, there are different legal oppinions on that and there's no final court decision yet.

How do you come up with such stuff? Free speech is as protected in Germany as it supposedly was in the US with a few Nazi-exceptions. So no - a doctoral student would not be grabbed of the street and put through dehumanizing detention experiences is most European countries as a matter of "normal procedure"?!

I'm happy Matrix exists and I've been a user in deployments at more than one university (where - fortunately - Teams, Slack and all the other externally hosted stuff isn't even an option).

I would personally rank a traditional iPhone home button sensor and the backside sensors on certain Android devices as equally great for unlocking while sliding the phone out of a pocket and general convenience.

Side button sensors work OK, too but I have much more misses on my supposedly more "modern" side button sensor phone than I ever had on old Pixels or any old iPhone with a home button sensor. I assume this is due to the size and general shape of a side button in comparison to an iPhone-style home button or old-Pixel-style back sensor which are bigger, indented and finger-guiding.

Question you and do research on you on the open web as well as on whatever other data they can access / request. You can get selected for some form of in-depth questioning and research on you at a border for many reasons. At that point, it's certainly still possible that they miss some information about you but in times of big data collection by governments, "better" systems to make sense of the data and permissive legislation, it becomes less likely. Especially if you did not prepare in advance (for example: most people who post some hateful or threatful shit probably do not take the greatest care possible to make themselves as untraceable as possible).

I once got detained for about four hours or so at my destination airport. There were multiple rounds of questioning by persons who seemed rather intelligent and based on what they asked, they did some research about me in the meantime (or wanted to achieve that effect - no idea what tactics those people use). There could have been a few reasons why I was questioned in-depth - maybe it was because of a random spot check, maybe because they considered some stuff in my luggage unusual, maybe because I had work affiliations with people who are routinely questioned when entering some countries due to their work. Who knows.

This was many years ago, so I assume they had to do a lot of their research by hand and there would have been limited other data sources available. I imagine this is rather different today.

Can I ask what you mean by "having music playlists clutter up my video playlists? I use YT music (along with my local music library) specifically because it uses YouTube content - which means that all sorts of live / niche / otherwise hard to find music is there. However, my YouTube music playlists are not visible on "regular YouTube".

There is a lot of humanity in the web. Small blogs, niche forums, personal websites, art and so on - all those things still exist. They may have become harder to find among a lot of trash but using, for example, a mix of different search engines and, more recently, treating LLM output like a first-semester-student's literature review, they can be found. Personally, I also just don't use Instagram, Facebook, Discord or whatever the closed platform du jour currently is.

When I learned how to use the web, google and Facebook were not around. I remember switching search engines as well as adopting and adapting search strategies multiple times. Then, there was a relatively long era of google (as in: It was simply the best and fastest way to find what you were looking for) - but as giants get too big, they inevitably fall, so keeping ready to continue adopting and adapting is - IMO - always a good idea.

None specifically. I pay for the local library to have access to most national newspapers in electronic form. Most (big) international ones, I could theoretically access through work - but that requires VPN and sometimes other authentications, so I honestly mostly rely on the "Bypass Paywalls Clean" Firefox extension.

Hard to speculate, but again, I would assume that many people who show others "incredible kindness and inspiration" accept neurodiversity instead of expecting some sort of apology for it (and might even be willing to talk about such things).

As others have indicated: I think many people who show others "incredible kindness and inspiration" would value you doing the same for others more than anything you could probably do for them. However, simply telling them "you were incredibly kind to me and you are a big reason for me trying to be kind to others" might just make their day.

Maybe of interest to some people given the discussions in this thread: https://sciebo.de is an example of a successful "let's roll our own collaboration infrastructure" project at scale (aimed at about half a million users) based on Nextcloud with Collabora Office (= live document collaboration) and more integrated applications (calendars, contacts, tasks, forms, those kinds of things).

All hosted and maintained at German universities, with federation between them, with support for guest users and whatnot.

Quite nice and back when it started, it was very important for us because it enabled us to get a huge chunk of sensitive data back from Dropbox, Google Drive and the other cloud providers.

There's not too much English documentation around but https://wwuit-sys.zivgitlabpages.uni-muenster.de/sciebo/docs... is good.

Have you ever actually worked in a large org or government IT department? :D

Commendable ideas, but they do not translate to reality. Even taking the OSS discussion out of the equation: Understanding and integrating user requirements in development processes is a hard problem in general. It gets worse when we are talking about resource-constrained contexts (like government IT)

Live collaboration is not an MS Office native functionality either (needs OneDrive / SharePoint as a backend). If your org uses traditional file shares or some cloud storage/sync tool that is not MS, you're out of luck.

There are tools like Collabora (built on LibreOffice) that work very similar to what you would get from MS. Collabora, for example, can also be integraded with Nextcloud and Owncloud.

Yes, I have left a job because there was immoral and violent behavior going on against vulnerable co-workers and due to long-established power structures, change wasn't really possible.

On a broader level, I've made a choice long ago to try and not work in domains I consider morally questionable.

Does anybody know if all the Apple remote connection things happen on the MacOS level? I'm mostly using Asahi on my personal Macbook these days instead of MacOS and I'm curious if that cuts off everything or just many things.

Are you referring to interfaces for complex tools (such as those for making 3d things) in general or do you have a program in mind that employs "three-dimensionality" in its interface in an especially clean way?

People dont' use Finder? "File system power users"? Are we talking about MacOS or iOS here? Seriously, I think that's an interesting take - that does not relate even a little bit to most work domains I ever was in contact with.

Bootcamp doesn't really exist anymore but you can use tools like UTM or Parallels to run the ARM build of Windows 11 in a VM - and that build includes an X86 emulation layer, so you can run X86 Windows applications in a double virtualization/emulation whammy. Works surprisingly well, in my limited experience.

Nice work! Are you aware of https://sensor.community ? They have sensor designs as well but I mainly mention them because they have open infrastructure to aggregate sensor data on a public map.

I've had pretty good success with https://3dscannerapp.com - it's mostly intended for people with access to iDevices with LiDAR and an Apple Silicon Mac and in this combination can work completely offline by capturing via the iDevice and doing the processing on the Mac (using the system API for photogrammetry). AFAIK, there are also options for using just photos without LiDAR data and for cloud processing but I've never tried those.

No, you are not wrong. Alibaba is a platform for business to business transactions. The $495 may end up being your price (before all other charges) for a machine if you buy a few shipping containers full of the things. If you want to buy a single one, it will be much more expensive and it will require you to convince the seller that you are planning to set up a business and require a sample or something of that sort.

edit: If you don't want to build a machine, you can find vendors through the PP Bazar[1]. Even fancy ones with CE and made from wood somewhere in Austria :D [2]

[1] https://bazar.preciousplastic.com/

[2] https://www.plasticpreneur.com/

Are you seriously somehow annoyed by other people volunteering and working together on something they care about because of moral and/or other reasons and talk about it? How much time of your day do you spend in a bad mood about churches, the red cross, volunteer firefighters, your desktop environment of choice or all those other contexts where humans do that?!

And if you really insist on continuing with the metaphor: Whenever I lived in certain big cities, the situations before and after football matches most definitely had a more drastic impact on daily life than a slightly soggy straw.

I look at the PP machines like I would at a traditional toolroom mill or a standard desktop 3D printer: Middle-ground compromises with relatively sharp upper limits (that can often be worked around by putting in way more work). I've actually been in contexts where even the standard PP-machines were too big.

However, I'd also like to have a bigger shredder and the approach of simplifying it an making it from available resources sounds great. Do you know if concepts like hacking leaf springs have been tried out in the PP project or in another context and if there are machines/blueprints available?

Btw: As far as I know, a lot of the design of the PP-machines has evolved by way of largely self-taught and more or less chaotic experimentation. So, it seemed to me that most of the development work on the machines is actually much closer to the contexts you refer to than it is to fibre lasers and specialized metallurgy.

From what I've seen of the Precious Plastic project and its offshoots over the years (mostly from afar, though), I think would find quite a few people asking similar questions and having intense discussions about such subjects there. ;-)