• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The good things:

    • It really is an advantage over normal USB, that I don’t have to trun the plug three times while trying to connect it, as it can be plugged in either way.
    • I find the extra protection also cool, so in case you accidentally try to plug in something you are not supposed to, it just simply won’t work instead of, I don’t know, supplying too high voltage or something.

    So far it caused a lot of headaches though:

    • Way too often I found myself in a situation, where I couldn’t use some devices, because I didn’t have the necessary adapter. This issue should be temporary though, so I’m not complaining.
    • Some cables are not compatible with some devices, and it can be really confusing. Before I knew this, I was certain that a monitor and a laptop of mine weren’t compatible for a long time, until someday I read about this and tried it again with a different cable.
    • In most cases this is not an issue, but rarely I find that the USB type-c plug is not as robust as a micro USB for example. On my girlfriend’s Samsung S8 it always slipped out, so the contact was terrible, while a micro USB plug does have some clamps to properly attach. Again, in most cases the type-c plug is clicking in properly, so it’s not an acute problem.

  • No need to tell me all this; I’ve been using Linux for more than 15 years and I don’t freakin’ care what’s happening to Windows.

    Now either you haven’t read properly what I said, or my wording was not clear - apologies in the latter case. Either way, I’ll try to explain what I meant.

    1. It’s pointless for Microsoft to make Recall (or anything) unremovable, since someone will find a solution to it pretty quickly. So those who use Windows, most likely will still have the option to continue to use it without Recall, in my opinion.
    2. I also highly recommend everyone to just use a usable operating system instead.
    3. Telling the average user to use a better operating system is one thing. That’s fairly doable nowadays, I don’t see basically any obstacle to that, and I wouldn’t even mention it, because you just tell them the facts, and the smarter ones will listen and think it through, the rest of them will do whatever they want, it’s their problem. What I find very problematic, is industrial environments. There are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of workstations, terminal computers, controllers in companies of varying sizes, where it’s absolutely not cost efficient to switch from Windows to something else (well, at least not until they get into their first data breach attributed to Recall or other shady Microsoft services). They have highly specialized tools complete with documentation and support and everything made for the one specific platform they are operating on, and it’s certainly not easy to change that, especially without halting production. If there’s one IT advice I could give to those companies, it would be to start creating a strategic plan to drop their Microsoft dependencies, and then execute their plan. It would take probably years, but they gotta start doing it like ASAP. And along the way, while porting their toolchains, they could as well do it the smart way: make it highly portable, so whatever platform they switch to, wouldn’t be the only option. Should that platform go south just like Windows did, they’d have the option to switch again to something else, just much easier this time.
    4. According to my experience, customization tools to remove bloat (including Recall) are not permissible in work environments, and spyware (such as Recall) are not (supposed to be) tolerated either. If this doesn’t make them switch to a better platform, nothing will.

  • Just because Microsoft makes Recall “unremovable”, doesn’t mean anything to me. We’ve seen debloater tools, alternate start menus, someone even ported explorer from Windows 7 to Windows 10/11.

    I’m pretty sure there’s gonna be a solution for this in no time.

    That being said, just use a better OS ffs. I get it, some companies cannot easily switch from Windows because of tools specifically built for Windows, or due to strict policies or regulations or software support, but damnit, somewhere you have to draw a line and start a migration process to an alternative system. And maybe learn from this, and make your tools portable next time.

    Having spyware on your system is certainly a big no-no at companies, and probably the aforementioned debloater/customization solutions as well.


  • helmet91@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldYoutube or Spotify?
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    2 months ago

    I’m using Deezer, because its Duo plan’s T&C doesn’t require couples to live in the same household. (Fuck Spotify because of their shitty plan.)

    Unfortunately Deezer’s Android app sucks, because it never reaches the server. Sometimes songs are just restarting or stopping, and you have to press the “add to favorites” button hundreds of times to finally successfully add it to your list. It’s horrible. But in the browser it’s smooth, there’s no problem with it. I even find songs I would never expect to find there (much more than on Spotify). Also you can create playlists together with others, even if others are using a different streaming provider.

    If your only choice is between YouTube and Spotify, I’d go for Spotify because fuck Google, and also Spotify app is smooth, and has the ability to control your music from your phone even when the music is playing on another device. (This is possible to do with 3rd party apps with any music player, but Spotify has it built in.)




  • They say, nowadays nearly any laptop you could get is garbage due to insufficient cooling. Maybe they look promising at first, but you cannot use them for longer than 2-3 years, because the components simply get cooked inside. The only ones worthy of spending money on are the business-grade laptops, but they’re crazy expensive (for a good reason). Therefore you should probably look for a used one, maybe from a company dealing with refurbished devices. Sometimes it’s possible to get one that had been used for like 6 months, and you still have a number of years of warranty on it.

    My personal favorite is the ThinkPad T, P or X series. Those are quality products, and there are official video guides, spare parts for self repair. I’ve also read about bad experiences about a T580 (I think) here, on lemmy, but the circumstances were unclear to me. They wrote about a bending motherboard issue, when you pick up the laptop holding only at the corner.

    Framework laptops are also recommended a lot, but I’ve never gotten my hands on one, I don’t know their build quality.


  • Do you remember 9gag? Some of you certainly do. Anyway, during those times they created another app called 9chat, later renamed it to Cookie, and later renamed it back to 9chat again.

    Well, we met there, on 9chat/Cookie.

    There weren’t an insanely huge amount of people there, and there was a section for newcomers to upload their selfie and/or introduce themselves. And I found this gorgeous girl there, started to text her, and to my surprise, she actually replied and didn’t even ghost me.

    We had a nice conversation there, and we continued on WhatsApp, and three months later we met in real life too. This was 7 years ago, and sadly we’re still in LDR, but the most important thing is, we have each other.








  • Well, I tested both modules, and one of them turned out to be faulty. The other stick works, I can use my PC with it for now. And Corsair’s customer support turns out to be really handy; they can send a replacement first for a deposit, and after I receive it, I can send the faulty one back. And once they receive it, I can get the deposit back.

    So it’s all (kinda) good now, regarding my PC.


  • I’m pretty freakin far from okay.

    My girlfriend has been mad at me for almost a week now; who knows if she ever even wants to talk to me. She hates me at this point.

    And this is my first day of vacation, I have more than 10 days off. I decided to work on one of my hobby projects, and sometimes take a break for gaming. Guess what! My PC broke, Memtest shows more than 3000 RAM errors, so at the moment I’m sitting here testing each module in every slot.

    And then once I figure it out whether I have to send the RAM or the motherboard back, I’ll have no PC for at least a month (I expect longer than that). So I cannot make any progress with anything, now that I have some free time.

    I’m especially pissed off, because it was quite an expensive build, specifically for reliability.



  • Once a friend asked me to buy him cigarettes while I went into the store to buy some food for myself and he was waiting outside. I did it, but I hated every single second of it. The fact that the cashier, and anyone around me could potentially think I was a smoker… utterly terrifying. The humiliation was even greater when the cashier asked for my ID (I was around 20 that time, I looked young enough for them to assume I was underage). Disgusting, horrible experience. Never again.

    There was another case, where my best friend actually didn’t really ask for help, but it was a really serious case. Her mom got into jail as a victim of someone else’s attempt to clear himself in a corruption case. I helped her with my savings (a thousand dollars or so) to get her out of jail. Well, this was another horrible experience, but in a different way. I would do it again if such a situation arises, but luckily her and her entire family have managed to move to a better country since then.



  • Manjaro, because it’s rolling release and it’s built on Arch, only the necessary stuff is installed (including a desktop environment), you can set it up with just a few clicks, and it works out of the box, and even proprietary GPU drivers are easily installable with mhwd. Stable and reliable.

    In case anything breaks, there’s quick help on their forum, which (when it happened to me once) outperformed customer support of proprietary software.

    It’s been my daily driver for almost 8 years without any major issue.

    So in short, robustness, rolling release, simplicity, community.

    Edit: I have to add, my use case is for a desktop PC for software design/development + a little gaming.