steltek

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

I like "heat pump". It's a very nice ELI5 name. It's a pump for heat. A water pump takes water and forces it to where it wouldn't go naturally. A heat pump does the same.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Pebble Time Steel should have been the "standard". Maybe I'm the wrong audience but the Moto 360 is a big miss for me. A smart watch for me needs to have:

  • Always on, sunlight readable display
  • "3 day weekend" battery life
  • Basic smarts only: notifications, alerts, calendar
  • Durable, waterproof
  • Compact size
  • Fitness tracking

I don't care too much about "premium materials" once some basic durability is satisfied. I don't have an opinion about round vs square.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

A few years ago, I used crypto-as-in-cryptography in conversation with another engineer and they seemingly derailed into talking about Bitcoin and Ethereum. We were both really confused and annoyed with each other.

It had a nostalgic feeling of what does "hacker" mean with some added irritation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

But you're not researching, hiring, and scheduling a contractor to fix it. You don't need to become an expert in long term planning and anticipate problems. You're not mentally cataloging basic maintenance tasks like when you last painted the siding or mowed the lawn.

Home ownership vs renting goes beyond equity and I know a lot of people who were happy renting because it gave them a huge chunk of free time back for trips, hobbies, etc.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's a modern take on the Pidgin concept. Pidgin ran locally on one computer and didn't sync anything between any of your other Pidgin installs. Also, your login details for every account were usually in plaintext on disk. In practice, it feels

Beeper (really Matrix + bridges) is a network service that you can access with a browser, mobile app, whatever.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

Amethyst. Focusing on empty workspaces makes everything stop working. Certain window types (dialog popups, arguably that app shouldn't be using popups) are "invisible" to it. System preferences is untouchable (fair) and shows up under all other active windows.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Using more than one monitor was the first "Why would you want to do that?" moment. Window management on Macs is awful but adding screens makes it way worse. Coming from i3 and sway, with rich hotkeys and fast, straightforward window manipulation, it felt like someone forgot to finish writing the OS. It seems most people use only the laptop screen or have a single external monitor as an auxiliary? They just genuinely didn't know why or how you use multiple monitors.

Tiling in macOS can be polyfilled with apps but there are tons of edge cases where it fails and the app's hotkeys don't flow well from the a handful of native keys, so it feels disjoint and bodged together. Also, if you "bump" a window, it'll stay dislodged because it's a poor mimicry of the real thing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (4 children)

Ugh, sounds like some of my coworkers and MacBooks. Then you discover that MacBooks are seriously crippled compared to the Linux machine you were using and you get told one of:

  1. "What do you mean by $feature? I've never heard of that."
  2. "Why would you want to do that?"
  3. Run a badly performing Linux VM in a janky hypervisor to do that
  4. Pay $10 for this little 3rd party app to fix the problem

Throw in some serious RSI pain from that tire fire of a keyboard and yeah, I have no idea why I switched.

Edit: Work machine. No way I'd pay for Apple with my own money.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

A quick search says Amazon is 37% of online commerce (depending on which sketchy result you want to trust enough for a Lemmy thread).

If Amazon is problematic, then Apple is a serious issue.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (4 children)

You can install some app that lets you override the Netflix button. I forget the name but I've set mine to be a mute toggle.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I don't know how tech savy you are but I selfhost Matrix and almost exclusively use bridges to talk with friends. I feel comfortable breaking e2e on a system I control and the all-in-one-place messaging is pretty sweet, like Pidgin used to be.

If you are already comfortable self-hosting other services, Matrix doesn't really impose any additional complexity IMO and the bridges I use seem to be very stable.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

Nexus 7 was such a great tablet. I came across it in the Drawer of Old Things, long since broken but kept around regardless. It's hilarious how it's only slightly bigger than some phones. I can even stuff it into my pocket.

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