dan

@dan@upvote.au

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Day one and done⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I always wondered the same thing when I was younger, since my monitor had an Energy Star logo on it even though it was an American thing but I was in Australia. Being Energy Star approved just means the product is more efficient relative to others in the same category.

  The Energy Star site is useful since they list all the available rebates for energy efficient appliances (federal, state, county, electricity company, etc)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Day one and done⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Chest freezers don’t actually use a lot of electricity. They’re a big insulated box that’s closed most of the time, and since they open from the top rather than the front, the temperature doesn’t change much when opened (since hot air rises, while cold air stays lower).

  In the USA, Energy Star estimates 215kWh per year for Energy Star certified chest freezers (open from the top) and 395kWh per year for certified upright freezers (open from the front): www.energystar.gov/products/freezers

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Choose your difficulty⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  One of the reasons stuff costs more in Australia is that there’s significantly more consumer protection. Steam originally didn’t allow refunds at all, and were fined AU$3 million as a result: pcgamer.com/valve-posts-a-notice-about-australian…

  In Australia, it’s illegal to say “no refunds” or only exchange or refund as store credit both for physical and digital goods, and customers are always allowed to get a repair, refund or replacement if the product has issues. In the case of a game, that would be things like:

  • Game breaking bugs or bug that significantly affects the experience but don’t completely break the game
  • Changes that make the game behave significantly differently to how it was originally described on the site or in the documentation
  • Games that initially support Linux but the company dropped Linux support later on, etc.

  Steam’s policy of only refunding a purchase within 14 days of purchase and less than 2 hours of play time is also not legal in Australia. They have a separate refund policy specifically for Australia which excludes the 14 day / 2 hour limits.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Capitalists hate competition, especially when it comes to wages⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  These are usually recruitment agencies. They don’t want you to know the company since then you could just apply directly to the company, and they won’t get their cut. Recruitment agencies often take a percentage of the salary, at least for the first year, as payment for referring a successful applicant.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So close. Once again missed the mark by a mere 1%. I was at 68% at this time last year.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I miss when custom ROMs were easier. Practically every phone with Windows Mobile supported custom ROMs. I tried a lot of custom Windows Mobile 5.0, 6.0 and 6.5 ROMs back in the day. It was pretty straightforward on older Android, too.

  These days, it seems like so many phones are locked down, for example with a locked bootloader. It’s so dumb. If I paid for my phone, I should be able to do whatever I want with it. Why even some tech-savvy people are comfortable with being limited in terms of what they can do with their expensive devices, I’ll never know.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So close. Once again missed the mark by a mere 1%. I was at 68% at this time last year.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My wife used Mint Mobile from 2018 until 2022 and really liked it. We moved in 2022 and unfortunately our new place had very poor T-Mobile coverage so we had to switch, otherwise we’d still be using them. She switched to US Mobile which give you a choice of using T-Mobile or Verizon.

  They’re QCI 7 rather than QCI 6 though, which basically means they’re considered lower priority on the T-Mobile network. If there’s congestion (not enough network bandwidth for everyone that wants to use it), customers on QCI 6 are given priority. Every MVNO except for Google Fi is QCI 7, while Google Fi and most plans directly through T-Mobile are QCI 6.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A bad influence⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If it’s just a wrapper around the browser version, why not just use the browser version directly? Chrome (and probably other browsers) let you “install” sites so they have their own desktop and launcher icon, and launch it in a separate window.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A bad influence⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The “new” version isn’t even a native app… It’s just the web version. It’s missing a whole heap of features from regular Outlook, like support for native add-ins. It doesn’t feel like a native app; the UI doesn’t follow the design standards of any desktop OS.

  Also, if you want to use it with an IMAP or POP email server, you have to connect it to Microsoft’s cloud, and they store a copy of your email! …microsoft.com/…/0e17ab6b-48f2-42dc-9e61-f219f752…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I wish to give this many fucks⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s likely the date the article was written, not the date it happened.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How's my favorite noise machine today?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  older 1u units with LOUD fans when they get going)

  1U servers tend to have loud fans regardless of age. Small fans that spin. very quickly (to get decent airflow) will do that. They’re also designed for use in data centers where noise is less of a concern.

  Sometimes you can replace server fans with Noctua fans, but the small Noctua fans generally have less airflow than the stock ones (usually made by Delta) so you’d have to check they’d be sufficient for your use case.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I want to keep using self-signed certs (my server is only reachable internally and I do not want to expose it to the internet). And the new server they use (I forgot which) didn’t really have that option.

  If you have your own domain name, you can get Let’s Encrypt certificates for internal servers by using DNS challenges instead of HTTP challenges. I use subdomains like whatever.int.example.com for my internal systems.

  Of course, it’s possible that the Ansible playbook doesn’t support that…

  Thanks for the note about Python and the Debian packages. That’s a good point. I’ll definitely use the Docker containers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Just tried out that playbook to set up a staging server, and it works pretty well.

  I feel like it’s a bit too magical though. I like knowing how all the software I’m using is installed and configured, and introducing another layer of abstraction makes that harder. I have particular ways things like my web server (Nginx), database servers, Let’s Encrypt (certbot), etc are configured and want to keep things that way. I think I’ll just use the Ansible playbook for the staging server, and set up the real server using the Docker containers directly, based on documentation from the upstream projects (Synapse, etc)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple users "don’t know what is going on": New study shows that Apple's default apps collect data even when supposedly disabled, and this is hard to switch off⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Of course Apple collect data. The reason they wanted to prevent other apps from collecting data was so only they can use their data, and their ad network could have an advantage over the others.

  Yes, they have an ad network, and want to significantly expand it: proton.me/blog/apple-ad-company, forbes.com/…/apples-ad-network-is-the-biggest-ben…, digiday.com/…/apples-expanding-ad-ambitions-a-clo…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ahh… Interesting!

  Do you know how much RAM it needs? I have a spare VPS with 9GB RAM - is that sufficient? I could run it in a VM on my home server instead, too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  most people are on discord

  There’s a lot of people on Discord (around 200 million monthly active users) but it’s still the smallest out of all the major messaging services. Telegram has over double the number of users, for example.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks! I’ll have to see if there’s Docker containers available. Ansible is definitely doable too, but I prefer Docker. I’ll stick it on the same server I’m running Lemmy and Mastodon on :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve never tried Matrix but I’ve heard good things about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In order to make it into a Discord or Zoom competitor you would need to solve far higher bandwidth things like HD video and low latency audio, and both of thouse are fundamentally very different things for a server to handle as compared to high latency short text messages.

  Integrate into something that already exists, like Jitsi? Instead of trying to build one single app that handles everything, maybe it would be nice to have a suite of apps that all work together and can all use the same login.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If it's not broken...⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Wow, interesting. I don’t think we had those in Australia. I was born in the very early 90s but my mum had a TV from the 1960s and it had a regular plug (like the one I linked to) for the antenna. Those prongs don’t seem user-friendly :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If it's not broken...⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  the prongs on the uhf/vhf inputs feet

  Prongs? I had to look that up since I hadn’t heard of a VHF/UHF connection with prongs before. That doesn’t seem very friendly compared to just using a regular plug? In Australia we used these connectors: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling-Lee_connector

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If it's not broken...⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  IIRC, back in the day, there were even composite-to-vhf adapters

  I had something like that for my Nintendo 64. My TV only had an antenna plug, no composite. In Australia, we used these connectors even on very old TVs: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling-Lee_connector whereas the USA seems to mostly use BNC these days.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  now to begin the slow search for another private community for the friend group to very slowly migrate to.

  Just don’t pick another proprietary platform again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I genuinely don’t understand why some open source communities rely so heavily on Discord.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  one point registration for multiple communities,

  Federation, or at least some form of single sign-on with arbitrary providers (like we used to do with OpenID), is a better way of solving this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why did they move the comments to the right⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  ReVanced used the proprietary app, but it patches out a bunch of stuff. I like it because it still works like the regular app.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why did they move the comments to the right⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  On Android you can use LibreTube, NewPipe or a fork of it called Tubular.

  Or SmartTube on Android TV.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fixing a failing retaining wall in St Albans⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey I used to work with the guy that wrote this post (Marcus Wong).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Waiting in a queue to see a Web site⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah I’m sure the Raspberry Pi sitting in a manager’s desk drawer is a totally sufficient server. His nephew that’s “good at the computers” even said so!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Waiting in a queue to see a Web site⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Somehow I don’t think the DMV (or equivalent) would receive the same amount of traffic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Adobe putting spam in notification tray on Windows⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The abbreviation for Firefox is “Fx”, not “FF”. :)