SirEDCaLot
@SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net
- Comment on Security expert reveals surprising way to make your password stronger: use emojis 1 year ago:
Cryptography. As in, using encryption and encryption keys to authenticate me, rather than just a password.
- Comment on Security expert reveals surprising way to make your password stronger: use emojis 1 year ago:
Last week or two I’ve been learning more about passkeys, and it makes threads like this seem ridiculously out of date. Given the choice between emojis and passwords and hard crypto, I’ll take the crypto.
- Comment on Has HP printers always been this bad? 1 year ago:
Then get yourself a basic black & white laser printer. Brother is usually pretty good for that. The cartridges don’t expire and it’ll be ready instantly when you need it, whether that’s tomorrow or next year.
- Comment on Has HP printers always been this bad? 1 year ago:
IT person here. Avoiding HP is a good idea. But a better idea is don’t buy shitty cheap consumer level inkjet printers from any brand. Most of them have this sort of bullshit, although not usually as bad as HP does. Instead I suggest buy it for life. Get a nice color laser machine, spend a few hundred bucks, and you will have a printer that lasts until you die. I like the Canon MF743CDw, it’s a little on the pricier side but it scans both sides of the paper in one pass. Also does color duplex printing.
If you don’t want the extra size or weight of a color laser, get a black and white laser. How often do you really need color? And if you must get something cheaper, get one of the newer inkjet printers that use refillable ink bottles rather than cartridges, like there is an actual ink tank on the printer and you refill it with a squeeze bottle rather than replacing the cartridge.
- Comment on Largest Farm to Grow Crops Under Solar Panels Proves To Be A Bumper Crop For Agrivoltaic Land Use 1 year ago:
Yeah I think indoor farming / vertical farming is going to be the ultimate answer. Much more efficient in every way, including resource use, water, pesticide, etc.
- Comment on Any good alternatives to Home Assistant? 1 year ago:
Try HomeSeer. I ran it for years before switching to HA.
- Comment on Am I? Who knows 1 year ago:
Yeah Twilight Zone is an apt comparison. It’s been a long time since I saw it but I remember there were a few pretty good ones. I’d give it a watch…
- Comment on Am I? Who knows 1 year ago:
There was an episode of The Outer Limits (7x08 Think Like a Dinosaur) that dealt with this exact question.
In that episode, humans are maybe-given a teleportation tech that creates a perfect copy somewhere else, but the aliens need to trust that we will ‘balance the equation’ (destroy the original) every time. That’s easy when the human in question is immobilized for transfer. Only one transfer goes wrong- the person being transferred is woken up before the transfer is confirmed, and then the transfer gets confirmed. So now you have the original human, who’s already been copied, and the transfer operator still has to ‘balance the equation’…
- Comment on US government issues first-ever space debris penalty to Dish Network 1 year ago:
Nice in concept.
In practice this is useless- a $150k fine when removing the satellite will someday cost millions.
It’s also worth noting that de-orbiting was never the plan here. Geosynchronous satellites are too far up to make that practical- at 22,000 mi altitude, the amount of delta-v necessary for a deorbit is gigantic. So instead the satellite ‘boosts’ up to a ‘graveyard’ orbit about 300km above the geosynchronous ring.
Dish only boosted it 122km above the geosynchronous ring. Thus the fine. In practice this satellite will probably cause nobody any problems. - Comment on DOJ finally posted that “embarrassing” court doc Google wanted to hide 1 year ago:
Ah how three mighty have fallen.
I remember the days when Google was optimizing their page to save 1/10th of a second of load time, when they publicly stated their goal was to get people off of Google as quickly as possible and on to whatever they were looking for. That was back in the ‘don’t be evil’ days. Those days appear to be long gone. - Comment on Microsoft ends free upgrade from Windows 7 to 11 1 year ago:
Just updated a Windows 7 box to Windows 10 the other day. So apparently this only applies to Windows 11. No idea if it lets you use Windows 10 as a stepping stone between 7 and 11 but don’t care. I have no plans to use Windows 11 anywhere anytime soon, so as far as I’m concerned if this means it will stop nagging me to upgrade, so much the better.
- Comment on The US electrical grid is in desperate need of upgrades, watchdog warns 1 year ago:
Interesting. Do you have any sources on this or more reading material behind it? I have yet to really see any things suggesting utilities are asking to do CapEx on infrastructure improvements but are being told no.
- Comment on Largest Farm to Grow Crops Under Solar Panels Proves To Be A Bumper Crop For Agrivoltaic Land Use 1 year ago:
Small tractors are easy. The issue is efficiency. The big tractor is big because the tool it pulls behind it covers ~10 rows per pass. You can easily build a small tractor that does 1-2 rows per pass, but that means you need a lot more passes, which means doing anything takes a lot longer.
- Comment on Do any of you use Raspberry Pi’s ? 1 year ago:
I assume by “Raspberry Z-Wave module” you mean the RaZberry, and I couldn’t agree more. I tried to get that thing going with another home automation package and gave up after a few hours of fucking with it.
That said, these days I’m using Home Assistant on a RPi with a Nortek z-wave/zigbee combo radio USB interface and I couldn’t be happier. If you’ve never used HA it’s worth trying out; used to require a lot of scripting but now it’s a beautiful and polished system that has all the tweakability a nerd wants with a nice high-WAF GUI. They have a plugin that does exactly what you’re doing and makes a virtual alarm system out of existing sensors.
I also agree block connections and use a VPN to access it, I do the same thing.
- Comment on Do any of you use Raspberry Pi’s ? 1 year ago:
Very interesting. So you basically have an alarm system in software then? What do you use for software? Do you have an arm/disarm function?
- Comment on The US electrical grid is in desperate need of upgrades, watchdog warns 1 year ago:
Of course it is.
We have more energy consuming stuff than ever. But do you ever see NEW substations being built? NEW long range power lines? I don’t.
Around here, the utility has a deal- they will sell you a top of the line $400 color touchscreen WiFi thermostat that talks to Alexa and displays the weather report and does a bunch of other shit, for $10 (not a typo). In exchange, you let them remotely shut off your AC if the grid gets overloaded.
Why do they do this? Because a few truckloads of thermostats (with a bulk discount) are a fuckton cheaper than actually upgrading the grid.
And so we hear about grid overload days and possible brownouts and incentives to shut stuff off as if this is the way it’s supposed to be. But the reality is these problems only exist because utilities don’t keep ahead of necessary upgrades. After all, why spend the money when there’s shareholders to answer to?
- Comment on Do any of you use Raspberry Pi’s ? 1 year ago:
security? For surveillance or something more?
- Comment on Largest Farm to Grow Crops Under Solar Panels Proves To Be A Bumper Crop For Agrivoltaic Land Use 1 year ago:
This is harder than it looks.
See those rows of crops? On most farms, you need to be able to drive a tractor through them. I don’t mean a riding mower, I mean a giant thing that pulls a tool that’s working on 5-10 rows at a time doing things like tilling, seeding, fertilizing, harvesting, etc. If there’s big metal pillars every row or every other row, that tool can’t be used.
Thus, as pictured, those kinds of panels can only be used on a farm that’s not using large multi-row agriculture machinery. That means it’ll work for small family farms but not the large ag operations where this sort of tech could really kick ass.What I would really love to see is more solar over commercial parking lots. That means a million little projects instead of a few huge ones, but think about how much surface area that is overall. It’s huge.
The key to doing that is twofold- 1. create a few cookie-cutter designs for the frameworks that can be tweaked for individual projects, and 2. remove red tape from their implementation.
It should be possible for a business to buy off the shelf plans for such a thing, have a local engineer tweak them for the project specifics, and then have a local contractor do the installation, and have this happen in under 6 months.As it stands, building anything above where humans will be involves a nightmare of engineering and insurance and liability, making it cost-prohibitive for most companies. That needs to get easier. I believe every parking lot should have solar above it- that not only will produce a ton of power, but it’ll keep the cars cooler in summer.
- Comment on A new smartphone again? Rethink unhealthy culture of frequent upgrades 1 year ago:
The key is make them easily removable.
If it’s ‘removable’ but it requires heating the edges of the phone up to 120F and then prying apart a sheet of hair-thin glass without breaking it, then most people won’t bother.
If it’s 4 Philips head screws then you’ll find a lot more people doing it.
Unfortunately, the economics for device manufacturers are clearly in the adhesive category- cheaper to assemble, and they’d rather a user buy a new device than service the old one so they DGAF how hard it is to service.
The only exception is companies like Fairphone catering to a niche audience of nerds who value repairability. Most people don’t even consider how hard something is to fix when buying it.
Sadly I think legislation is the only way to fix this. You have to legislate either a. that the battery be removable and replaceable without tools or ‘with standard fasteners and not adhesive’ or something like that.
The only way to really fix this is to stop gluing phones together.
- Comment on Apple's new iPhone 15 is an underwhelming 'slap in the face,' say disappointed fans 1 year ago:
Oh don’t get me wrong, I love the idea too. I remember back in the early 00s there was a watch that was like 3-4" wide, only single strap, but had a big display that, while segmented, still showed a lot of stuff. I just don’t think most ‘normies’ would go for it though.
- Comment on Apple's new iPhone 15 is an underwhelming 'slap in the face,' say disappointed fans 1 year ago:
I dunno. I think it’s the same issue with Google Glass, AR kits, and Bluetooth headsets. The vast majority of people aren’t interested in being quite so openly nerdy as to wear that constantly, and then a lot of the people who do wear it act like douchebags so then nobody else wears it because they don’t want to look like douchebags. That happened to Bluetooth headsets- what SHOULD have been an easy ‘wear always’ thing became a ‘I’ll act like a douchebag and yell into my headset in public places’ thing and then nobody wants to wear one when not on a call lest they be grouped in with the douchebags.
I like the concept of a 2-strap watch/phone, but I don’t see it having common appeal. That will also be heavy, and even a basic phone’s current weight will be felt a LOT more on the wrist than on the belt / in a pocket. Plus a watch gets exposed to a lot more damage as the user goes about their day so it will need to be a lot better armored (increasing bulk and weight) and also easy to repair.
You may though be right about the device makers wanting us to have two gadgets rather than one…
- Comment on Apple's new iPhone 15 is an underwhelming 'slap in the face,' say disappointed fans 1 year ago:
Screen and battery weren’t there for it. Still aren’t I don’t think unless you significantly increase the size of the watch to either be a real hockey puck, or more likely stretch it out to be both thicker (probably about 1/2" to 3/4" thick) and wider (I’m thinking 3-4") it’s gonna be an option anytime soon.
- Comment on Unity issue an apology on Twitter for "confusion and angst" over the runtime fee policy. 1 year ago:
Trust is hard to build and easy to break and even harder to rebuild.
To truly rebuild trust, they’d need to commit to never doing this again. That would mean 1. a change to the legal TOS that a developer who licenses for a project at a certain pricing level may remain at that price level for that project / that generation of Unity for as long as they wish, 2. a public commitment to never require per-install pricing, and ideally 3. the resignation of whoever came up with this brain dead idea.
- Comment on Unity issue an apology on Twitter for "confusion and angst" over the runtime fee policy. 1 year ago:
Yeah, this 100%.
To truly restore trust, it should be ‘we’re sorry, our mistake, it won’t happen again, our new TOS will guarantee the right to remain at a current license price structure for a given generation of the engine, we hereby promise to never ever require per-install pricing, and the person responsible for this change is no longer with the company’.
- Comment on Plex Will Block Media Servers at Abuse Prevalent Hosting Company 1 year ago:
And that really bugs.
I keep all my media sorted in folders (old school I know). I went to try Plex once a few years back. It launched right into making an account and setting up remote access. Never was clear what if any access Plex mothership has to my media library- does that include filenames, file contents, everything? Sorry but do not want. I VPN back home, don’t need the cloud BS. - Comment on Apple's new iPhone 15 is an underwhelming 'slap in the face,' say disappointed fans 1 year ago:
Yeah I agree. It seems brain dead- you’re making a $1200 book-flip phone that opens up like a laptop to a giant screen, so you have tons of space for ports, and you can’t re-add the headphone jack? Seems overly focused on profits rather than usability.
- Comment on Apple's new iPhone 15 is an underwhelming 'slap in the face,' say disappointed fans 1 year ago:
Very cool idea. Yeah real holographic projection is still a ways off, especially from a portable emitter. AR however is much closer. There’s an increasing focus on AR tech and making it smaller and cheaper- I saw a glasses the other day for $400 that projects a real 1080p screen onto your field of view and can talk to a phone. That stuff will only get better. The key is making it lightweight, have a long battery life, and fashionable. You also need some kind of separate input device, if you assume the phone remains in the pocket as a compute module. Or for those willing to accept a larger watch, perhaps the watch becomes the phone rather than an accessory to one. There’s of course issues of size, weight, battery life, etc; but as tech improves those will get better. And in theory, the main reason you don’t have the watch as the main phone is lack of screen size; if an external AR display was common that problem goes away.
- Comment on Apple's new iPhone 15 is an underwhelming 'slap in the face,' say disappointed fans 1 year ago:
Interesting. Personally I was planning to buy a phablet for my next phone but they’ve gone out of style it seems and been replaced with folding phones.
I would be interesting to see something with a rolled up slide out display like the Global communicator from Earth: Final Conflict, basically a slim stick of a phone with a larger display rolled up inside that can be pulled out as much as necessary for the desired screen size.
- Comment on Apple's new iPhone 15 is an underwhelming 'slap in the face,' say disappointed fans 1 year ago:
phone design has pretty much been perfected now and the only room for innovation is going to be on the software side of the UI and a better camera.
Strong disagree.
Phone design in one form factor has been mostly perfected, but even there room for innovation exists. More ports, more features- remember how the early Galaxy phones had IR blasters and headphone jacks? That could make a comeback. Or maybe make the phone 2mm thicker and put a battery that will last for days. Or make the phone 5mm thicker and put rubber padding around it so it’s indestructible even without a case. Or do like the old Compaq iPaq and make dockable modules that add significant functionality (week long battery, small projector, full HDMI/USB suite, etc).There’s a bit of innovation happening with other form factors- foldable screens are being used in the most boring and basic ways possible. I want to see something more like the Global Communicator from Earth: Final Conflict- little stick of a device that has a pull out video screen that can be pulled out to various sizes.
I think there IS room in the market for innovation, it just requires companies that are willing to a. take the risk and b. commit to better software support than Samsung.
- Comment on Unity issue an apology on Twitter for "confusion and angst" over the runtime fee policy. 1 year ago:
Stupid voice typing… fixed :{