dan
@dan@upvote.au
Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
Developer at Meta.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
d.sb
Mastodon: @dan@d.sb
- Comment on 463 games, probably only played 1/10th of them 1 day ago:
I miss playable demos, where you could play part of a game to see if you like it. I played so many shareware games and demo CDs when I was young.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
I once worked in a team that had both an Aaron and an Erin, and it was confusing for the Americans since they pronounce both names very similarly (in Australia we pronounce them differently). I think Aaron ended up being referred to as “A A Ron”
- Comment on Don't tell me that you all don't have the same issue 1 day ago:
This is why I’m glad my TV has some inputs on the side. When wall mounting it, I ran HDMI cables for all the inputs on the back, to avoid having to go back there again.
- Comment on relatable 1 day ago:
If you’ve been in bed for 45 minutes and haven’t been able to fall asleep, you should get up and do something boring/uninteresting until you get tired. If you stay in bed, you’ll associate being in bed with not sleeping, and it’ll just get worse.
If it happens a lot, it’s worth considering CBT-I (cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia) and getting a sleep study done (to see if you have sleep apnea).
- Comment on Is this accurate, Canadians? 2 days ago:
I’m not your buddy, friend
- Comment on Quality TV 2 days ago:
You shouldn’t wrap potatoes in foil when baking them. It makes them soggy. If you want to keep them warm then wrap them in foil after cooking.
- Comment on I'm sorry it has to be like this 3 days ago:
Those are some real late 2000s hinges on l the laptop in the photo.
- Comment on Men wanna be me, women wanna be with me. 6 days ago:
Yes! All the wheels turn! It’s nice.
- Comment on Men wanna be me, women wanna be with me. 6 days ago:
I don’t understand why so many American shopping carts have back wheels that don’t turn. It’s weird. All four wheels turn on Australian shopping carts (or “trolleys” as we call them) so you have full 360 degree motion.
- Comment on Worst day of the year 6 days ago:
I occasionally work on some dare/time libraries we use at work, so I’m going to add this meme to the code base.
- Comment on Worst day of the year 6 days ago:
And if the other country is in the opposite hemisphere, they’re adjusting the clock the other way. Daylight saving just started in California, but it ends next month in Victoria, Australia. The two states are either 17, 18, or 19 hours different depending on the time of year.
- Comment on MemeID: 421856901 1 week ago:
Out of all the shitposts in the world, this is certainly one of them.
- Comment on Which wiki software to host 2 weeks ago:
Mediawiki does have a WYSIWYG editor, but it’s a separate extension: www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:VisualEditor
The benefit of Mediawiki is that anyone that’s edited Wikipedia before will know how to use it. It’s a pretty heavy piece of software though, and the learning curve is relatively high if you’ve never hosted it before.
I used Dokuwiki at my previous job, maybe 15 years ago. It worked well. It doesn’t need a database as it stores all wiki pages as plain text files on disk. I don’t know if it has a WYSIWYG editor though. I’ve never used it on a public-facing site so I’m not sure how authentication works (at my previous job, we hooked it up to Active Directory for auth).
BookStack and wiki.js are two newer ones that have good reviews, but I don’t have any experience with them.
- Comment on The duality of search engines 3 weeks ago:
They have a free trial account that lets you do 100 searches. It’s worth trying out at least.
- Comment on The duality of search engines 4 weeks ago:
Have you tried Kagi?
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
That’s essentially how the Roman calendar was named for six out of the 10 months:
- Martius: (Mars)
- Aprilis: (from aperire, “to open”)
- Maius: (Maia, goddess)
- Junius: (Juno, goddess)
- Quintilis: (Fifth)
- Sextilis: (Sixth)
- September: (Seventh)
- October: (Eighth)
- November: (Ninth)
- December: (Tenth)
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
While we’re changing the calendar, can we rename September through December so they’re not off by two?
Septem, Octo, Novem and Decem are the Latin words for 7, 8, 9 and 10 respectively, but they’re actually the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th months of the year. This is because the calendar was originally only 10 months, but Julius Caesar added two new months without renaming the last four.
Maybe the oldest tech debt in existence - the calendar was changed in 45 BC.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
This. Sunday is part of the weekend, not the weekstart.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
Practically everyone should know SI. It’s the international system of units - the standard system of measurement used in most of the world. It includes base units for time (seconds), distance (meters), mass (kilograms), electric current (amps), temperature (Kelvin), amount of a substance (mole) and intensity of light (candela), plus a bunch of units derived from these.
- Comment on A new quest appears... 1 month ago:
If you get a Zigbee smart switch (or smart bulb) and a Zigbee remote, you can pair the switch/bulb and remote directly so it works like you said, while still retaining the ability to control the light using Home Assistant (eg automatically turn it on or off based on something).
- Comment on Bungee jumping 1 month ago:
Ah, the ol’ switcheroo.
- Comment on Student Parking 1 month ago:
The way a lot of students solve this in Australia, at least in Melbourne where I’m from, is by taking the train (or a tram) to university. The university I went to was adjacent to a train station.
Students from low-income families and that are independent get money from the government which can be used for anything, including public transport passes.
- Comment on Anyone have a favorite NAS (for normies)? 1 month ago:
Ohh… I forgot about this. If they’re still doing that then I wouldn’t recommend them.
For less tech-savvy users, I usually recommend some off-the-shelf hardware, so they have someone else to go to in case of issues with either the hardware or the standard built-in software.
Synology used to be the best for that, but maybe not any more. A lot of brands have gotten into NAS hardware over the last year or two so I’m not sure what’s the best now!
- Comment on Micron to boost DRAM output with $1.8bn chip fab buy 1 month ago:
PSMC sounds like a bootleg TSMC lol
- Comment on Anyone have a favorite NAS (for normies)? 1 month ago:
I’d probably just get a Synology and install Immich on it.
- Comment on ChatGPT to start showing ads in the US 1 month ago:
I think you’re right - people using the paid ones want to get their money’s worth. Even on the expensive plans like Claude Code’s $100/month subscription, people often end up using the equivalent of thousands of dollars worth of API usage, which doesn’t even cover the full cost of providing the service.
- Comment on ChatGPT to start showing ads in the US 1 month ago:
As far as I know, this is only for the free version of ChatGPT. It costs a lot of money to run, and they’re still not profitable, so it makes sense that they want to monetize the free version. The other option is to completely shut down the free version and only have the paid one.
- Comment on ChatGPT to start showing ads in the US 1 month ago:
They’re unaffected as they pay for the OpenAI API (they don’t have a free API). This change only affects free users of ChatGPT.
- Comment on Need advice for buying first hardware 2 months ago:
Do you mean 12600K, or do you really mean 2600K? These days, I wouldn’t use anything older than 9th gen.
See if there’s any e-waste recyclers in your area. A lot of companies are throwing out systems that don’t officially run Windows 11, so you can sometimes find systems with 8th and 9th gen Intel Core processors for very cheap.
- Comment on New Year's broadcasts behind paywalls 2 months ago:
I didn’t realise they have unprotected streams 👀