PurpleTentacle
@PurpleTentacle@lemmy.world
- Comment on Post your Servernames! 6 months ago:
Bob
- Comment on Louisiana lawmakers vote to remove lunch breaks for child workers, cut unemployment benefits 6 months ago:
That’ll never pass … without some moderate lobbying effort.
- Comment on ‘Front page of the internet’: how social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit 10 months ago:
I’m able to see any news that would be relevant as quickly as any other social media,
That’s not what I use Reddit for and that’s sadly the only Reddit (and other social media) thing Lemmy mimics successfully.
I’m using Reddit mostly for the niche and special interest communities. For specific tech advice and troubleshooting. For all the stuff that once used to be home on newsgroups and bulletin boards and can now only be found in subreddits and, even worse, Discord communities.
And a lot of these smaller tech communities were super motivated to move to Lemmy, but Lemmy’s complete inability to surface anything but the most popular posts in the most popular communities (there’s still no equivalent for multireddits and there was no weighted popularity until 0.19) rapidly killed and suffocated virtually all of them.
That’s the reason why you can type “obscure technical problem Reddit” into Google and almost always get a relevant answer, while that will likely never be the case for Lemmy.
- Comment on ‘Front page of the internet’: how social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit 10 months ago:
Lemmy is very much a viable alternative
Oh, how I wish that were true. Alas, stats keep showing that Lemmy is not continuing to grow, on the contrary. There is close to zero activity in anything but the most main stream communities and Lemmy is only now making very, very slow and tentative steps to actually surface more niche communities after effectively burying and suffocating them in every release up to and including the current stable.
- Comment on HP raising Instant Ink subscription pricing significantly 10 months ago:
Also evil now. Latest firmware (~2020) outright blocks third party cartridges or, even more evil, accepts them and then secretly and intentionally, prints like crap:
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
Everything until ~2019 is awesome, though. Just disable firmware updates.
- Comment on HP raising Instant Ink subscription pricing significantly 10 months ago:
Here too, just don’t update your firmware (and turn off auto-updates). Brother went evil around 2020, too.
- Comment on HP raising Instant Ink subscription pricing significantly 10 months ago:
Euuhh does nobody realize Brother has existed for like 20 years and doesn’t pull all this HP shit?
You were right until around 2020 when Brother, too, started to roll out firmware updates blocking third party toners or even worse, making the printers intentionally print like crap with third party cartridges:
- Comment on HP raising Instant Ink subscription pricing significantly 10 months ago:
Do not update its firmware and disable auto-updates:
- Comment on HP raising Instant Ink subscription pricing significantly 10 months ago:
epson.com/…/epson-ink-pads-reset-utility-faqs
For “North American users” Epson now offers a tool to increase the self destruct counter one, single, time.
There are third parties now, that offer a reset of the software destruct counter, for a fee.
The fact that a printer sold as “Eco” has a software self destruct that the user requires an unlock key to reset - an occurrence frequent enough to make it a profitable business for third parties to sell such keys - should tell you all you need to know about these printers.
There appear to be higher end models without this self destruct, but most consumer models have this limitation.
- Comment on HP raising Instant Ink subscription pricing significantly 10 months ago:
Until the software counter decides that the waste ink pad is full and the thing blows a software fuse.
Epson’s official solution to a full pad is to throw out your printer and buy a new one - literally a printer with a self destruct timer. Not very “eco”.
- Comment on HP raising Instant Ink subscription pricing significantly 10 months ago:
The Epson printers with the non-serviceable waste ink pads and the software self destruct timer? Not sure how user friendly or “eco” those are.
Great idea, atrocious execution.
- Comment on HP raising Instant Ink subscription pricing significantly 10 months ago:
Inkjet is pretty much terrible for anyone printing very little (more ink wasted on cleaning cycles than actually printing, high chance that the ink dries up regardless) and very much (stupidly expensive and unreliable).
If you don’t need color, get a cheap b/w laser printer. Brother used to be one of the last good ones until they, too, decided to block third party cartridges via firmware updates last year.
If you can get an old, used, Brother laser printer for cheap, go for it - they were borderline indestructible and would print with any cheap toner.
- Comment on It's never been a better time to switch to Firefox 11 months ago:
Why? Mozilla isn’t a threat to open web like Google has shown that they are and they certainly can use all the support they can get.
- Comment on Google Chrome will limit ad blockers starting June 2024 11 months ago:
On mobile I’m using DDG as primary browser.
Don’t get me wrong, DDG’s app is a massive step up in privacy, but it’s hardly a browser, it’s simply a WebView frontend. You’re pretty much still using Chrome.
- Comment on Google Chrome will limit ad blockers starting June 2024 11 months ago:
Google’s proposed “Web Integrity API” browser-DRM was probably the biggest attack on the open web since its conception. I don’t think they have fully given up on that idea and they’ll likely sneak it in more gradually and slowly. Manifest v3 is just a small baby step in this direction of taking away user control.
- Comment on Which privacy-focused search engine are you using? 1 year ago:
I’m using an Ad-, Tracking- etc blocker in all my devices, so I’m not too worried about using Google or Bing when I do.
But I’m hosting my own instance of SearchXNG and that’s often simply the most powerful and flexible search engine.