I’m not one to buy Apple products, but I keep hearing amazing things about their M4 devices. Most of them come with quite some dealbrealers compared to the competition, such as soldered RAM across the board, and Apple proprietary storage on the Mini (which they just have to tack an Apple tax onto).

The iPad’s pretty much the only thing they make where the competition shares most of the same drawbacks (especially if either self-repair is proven to work, or parts pairing gets banned in enough jurisdicitions). Most of the reason that I don’t want one is that I don’t want to move into yet another proprietary ecosystem.

So, ever since learning about the fact that Asahi Linux exists, I’ve been dreaming about an iPad that can run arbitrary OS’es just like the Macs. Imagine running something like Plasma Mobile or Phosh on an iPad, with full desktop apps being ready should you need them. I hope I get to see something like that someday, whether through an exploit, legislation or just Apple finally coming around.

Crap, I’m fresh out of hopium

Learn of YouTube, go to youtube.com and there’s content.

Learn of Mastodon, ask “where’s that?” and be told to go to joinmastodon.org. When I did this, you had to pick an instance. mastodon.social was full, you had to find something else. So you look at every instance there is in the list, and try to filter for moderation rules as you’re told this is best practice. Don’t worry, all of Mastodon can see everything posted by everyone on every instance! Picking an instance is really choosing where your values are best aligned, nothing more. So you spend the effort, make an account, get asked a reason why you’re signing up (though I might be mistaking this memory for when I signed up to Lemmy), have to wait for approval, get an account, and sign into the official app…

… and there’s no content. The only way I ever managed to get content was to learn of Mastodon accounts outside of Mastodon and manually look them up. So I ended up following a whopping 3 accounts, one of which being some EU governmental account, another essentially being the XDA RSS feed. Needless to say, I didn’t stick around.

I don’t know if things have improved since then, or how Bluesky does things. But I’d imagine a platform supposedly started by the people who founded Twitter, built from what supposedly was once an internal test of modifications to Twitter, to have an easier onboarding experience than whatever Mastodon did back when I tried it.

I’m excited, even though the odds of me buying the new one in the near future are slim. Between all the Xenoblades, the new X remaster, Prime 4 and my other backlog I already have lots of games I can play on what I own. I’ll wait on the inevitable 3D Mario, and only consider the thing when a new Xenoblade or Metroid launches (or if there’s a day-one exploit, my current Switch is objectively the worst one they made 'cause it’s patched but still with the bad battery life).

That said, the fact that more details regarding backwards compatibility even can be announced is worrying. You’ve already said it plays Switch software, anything added to that can only mean asterisks, right?

Bit of a tangent, but this pains me every time I read this in threads.

I wanted to join Lemmy after the Reddit exodus, found out that ml was “the main one” made by the devs and joined it. Last time I carefully tried to pick an instance was Mastodon, and I hardly ever found any content. Decided to check back in the other day, and every account except for the admin’s (like less than 50) was removed for inactivity.

I’m not some far-right or Russian troll, but because most of them are on that instance everyone on it gets this reputation.

Signed, European who’s afraid that the far-right movement on his continent will turn into an ultra-far-right turbo-movement now

Oh boy, does this also hold for people who don’t like any pets?

I installed a KDE latex math tool that came with texlive as a dependency. Shit’s awful when doing updates.

I ended up uninstalling the tool and texlive, and installed tinytex instead. I then tabood texlive and reinstalled the tool from software.opensuse.org as the YAST GUI allows you to ignore dependencies.

It works in the KDE tool and in one note taking app with latex math support, but I haven’t tried adding new packages yet. I don’t know how good of a solution this would be if you use latex outside of just rendering a couple of equations, but it could be worth a shot

There already exists a “Google Play licence check” permission apps can use to verify whether or not the app has been bought on a Google account that’s present on the device.

If people can crack the app to remove this (which is a thing for some of the popular apps), they’ll also figure out how to patch this out. This is strictly useful for free apps, and only serves to make it unviable to distribute verifiably clean apk’s outside of Google Play (so rip APKMirror)

It isn’t. I’ve personally had it happen where a relative who went to some country that bans video calling and VoIP (except for the unencrypted/honey pots of course) and used Signal to call people back home (only because I told them it would be unblocked due to censorship circumvention). Despite everyone in my household being familiar with WhatsApp, I was the only who did video calls with them and had to share my device so others could also call them. Even when I’d set up Signal on one of their devices, they still complained it was to difficult to use, insisted I’d uninstall it when the trip was over and used it a grand total of once.

I honestly think it’s partly to do with the nerd factor. This same relative turned out to also have installed the backdoored unencrypted app to chat with others, but hid it from us due to me being vocal about not using that. These other households, also WhatsApp based, managed to install, sign up and use that just fine. They also couldn’t be bothered to set up Signal for some reason, yet gladly accepted the suggestion to use the honey pot.
I think that these people in my circle don’t care about security at all and only care about the platform. If it’s “secure”, “private” and “censorship resistant” and they haven’t heard of it until I, the “techie”, explain the technological benefits of it, they’ll think it’s a niche “techie” thing they’re not nerdy enough to understand. If I get them to use it, they’ll keep thinking this whenever something is slightly different than WhatsApp and be frustrated. Meanwhile they can get behind the honey pot because “WhatsApp doesn’t work there, this is just what people in that country use”. It appears normal because “normal people” use it all the time, and they’ll solve any inconvenience themselves because “normal people (can) use this, and I’m normal too”.

My grandpa had developed the habit of falling out of his bed. The first time I was afraid that he was gonna die on the spot as I’d heard it, but it eventually became such a “regular” occurrence that I didn’t think of immediate death anymore. This particular day, he’d fallen twice. They brought him to a nearby hospital to get a check-up. I was worried sick that this time something was actually wrong, or that he might’ve broken a bone or something. Turns out he was fine! No broken bones or anything. Just one teeny tiny minor issue…

When he was brought to the hospital, he was accidentally placed in the area with people who were brought there with covid. I hadn’t been able to see him in months because of the restrictions, and even when I did go the months prior it was always with far distance, masks and in short bursts. I did everything I had been told to do to “keep him safe”, “ease up the workload in the hospitals” and all those government campaigns and all that, only for him to die because of this (seeming) serious neglect from medical professionals.

I’ve checked the Github when I read this to see whether they’re having trouble as well, and currently it appears that YouTube will block your IP if you use it too much

It could’ve been. You and me probably would’ve blocked ads regardless of their content for various reasons, but I’d imagine that Google wouldn’t have reached this critical mass prompting this scheme if their ads were properly vetted.

The technologically literate capable of installing ad blockers are the minority, and those who’d do it out of principle are a smaller subset of those

Firefox is looking to implement Manifest V3 to keep extension feature parity with Chromium, but their version will not ban the one API that adblockers use. So Firefox will eventually be V3 compliant

This is what I (a non coder who only knows git “download the Yuzu repo before they nuke it” and git “give me all the updates”) want to do when I get to write a paper. How much git did you have to learn to do this?

Idk why, but this is the hardest I’ve laughed at an internet post in a long time

zypper dup

I remember Duo and Allo coexisting at some point in time. Duo had always been about video calls, and Allo had always been about chatting (unless it had a secret video callcall feature I forgot about).

Still a good joke though

On my Android 13 device browsers save in sd card/Android/data/com.my.browser. This folder can only be accessed on the default, hidden file manager or on a PC. Not even read-only access, but straight up nothing. At this point I just don’t bother directly downloading to my sd card anymore, I just download to internal storage and move it all to sd card/Downloads every so often

98% of people I see leaving Twitter are headed for BlueSky, not Mastodon

I always do this and your comment specifically made me realize how that could look to other people.

At least sometimes they get to see a flash of a Word document when I’m half a second too late

Somehow, KDE Connect treats a media stream happening on a connected device the same as if it’s playing on your local device. If you’re playing a video on your laptop in Firefox it will add one of those “music player” things in your phone’s notification shade, allowing you to control the video from your phone.

Android automagically pauses everything it deems to be “media playback” until the end of your call, thus also pausing that Firefox video on your laptop.