Conscientious spectre making a home in the threadiverse.

I also toot as @tojikomori.

  • 12 Posts
  • 37 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Apparently not in Windows settings:

    If the BIOS says it supports Modern Standby, Windows takes it at its word and completely disables the ability to enter S3 sleep (classic standby). There’s no official or documented option for disabling Modern Standby through Windows, which is incredibly annoying.

    Side note: for a while, there was actually a registry setting you could change to disable Modern Standby on the Windows side. Unfortunately, Microsoft removed it, and to my knowledge, has never added it back.

    I’m not a Windows user, so I can’t confirm one way or the other, but toward the end of the end of the article the author gives vendor-specific instructions for disabling the S0 Low Power Idle capability from BIOS.






  • From the title I was hoping for an investigative piece on Apple’s payment model and whether it treats classical musicians any better, but it’s just a comparison to other streaming services padded with trademark New Yorker bloviation.

    tl;dr: they don’t like Apple’s editorials, prefer Idagio’s search results, and everything invented after the phonograph was a mistake.







  • Just tried the demo yesterday. The tutorial’s integrated into the gameplay in a way that didn’t feel obstructive to me. It’s less like an old-school sandbox tutorial and more that the game makes it obvious what you have to do for the first mission. And it seems to focus on the new mechanics since the basic stuff is already made obvious by overlays showing the controls.

    There will be people who have no capacity for nuance and see this as a boolean thing, and for them: the tutorial’s not skippable, no. But for most people, it shouldn’t be an issue.



  • It’s surprising that Apple isn’t listed (among those backing the scheme) given that the company designed the HomeKit standard with security and privacy as key objectives.

    I think that’s the conflict: Apple has its own certification programs. From Apple’s perspective, a successful government-backed trademark would compete with Apple trademarks for consumer mindshare and the certification would add new overhead to Apple’s own product launches.

    Other brands backing this program have more to gain than lose from it, e.g. because their own certifications aren’t as well marketed, or because it simplifies product screening, or sets up new hurdles for competitors. Apple’s in a unique position where none of those benefits are relevant. It only sees the costs.




  • Priced at $1,599, the ViewFinity S9 has the same price tag as the Studio Display from Apple, but Apple charges an additional $300 for Nano-texture matte glass and $400 extra for a tilt and height adjustable stand.

    A lot of Apple users feel the Studio Display’s overpriced, so it’s interesting that Samsung isn’t competing on price.

    If I were deciding between the two, and it didn’t come down to unique features like portrait mode, then I’d want to see them side by side in a brightly lit room. The regular (non nano-texture) Studio Display handles most reflections decently well, but if the ViewFinity does much better then I can see that being a plus for an office setting where you have lights or windows behind you. I’m sure the nano-texture does better yet, but it has some trade-offs and cleaning requirements that make me very reluctant to recommend it. (I don’t like that the wording above suggests nano-texture is a regular matte glass. It’s not. It’s better in many ways, but it’s not for everyone.)


  • I use offline maps a lot. The article mentions a major reason: traveling, especially abroad, with limited or no data. It also comes in handy when we drop out of cell service, which happens more often than I’d expect outside of major cities in the US. My favorite app for those use cases is Organic Maps, which lets me download maps by city, state, or country.

    I use offline maps for hiking too, but it’s such a different use case that I find I want an entirely different map type and UI – one that focuses less on roads and directions and instead surfaces tools for route-planning and managing tracks and waypoint markers. Gaia’s long been my favorite app for that.



  • This later article makes it sound like the issue was with websites using UA sniffing:

    For instance, after applying the RSR updates on an iOS device, the new user agent containing an “(a)” string is “Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 16_5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/16.5.2 (a) Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1,” which prevents websites from detecting it as a valid version of Safari, thus displaying browser not supported error messages.

    I hope Apple’s use of the Rapid Security Response system here was mostly an infrastructure test. I would be miffed to learn that a patch for some zero day was fumbled because Facebook didn’t get the decades-old memo not to use UA sniffing for feature detection.




  • I only had occasional luck with this even on Reddit. Some smaller subs for hobby stuff had genuinely good advice, but a lot of times it’d just be people repeating the same brands and products with a shallow recommendation. And there was a lot of astroturfing. Over the years I’ve learned to ask elsewhere:

    For major appliances, the best approach I’ve found is to find a local business – a well reputed one that’s been around for years, and does service as well as sales – and simply ask the salespeople what they recommend. If the shop’s willing to warranty it, it’s probably good enough.

    For gadgets I tend to start looking at recognizable review sites that are easy to skim (RTINGS is especially useful, but Ars, The Verge etc. all have decent reviews) and then expand out to YouTube for the products I’m most interested in. Sometimes it’s a good idea to look up the company itself for anything that might change your mind about them (Western Digital’s unlabeled change to SMR drives is a recent example).

    Shoes and clothes are the hardest thing to get good advice on. The most useful advice I’ve received has been very general stuff about what to look for in fit and quality. I’ve also found that high ethical standards from a clothing company tends to go hand in hand with quality and longevity.

    Cars are an area where Reddit was still helpful. YouTube can be helpful here, but not so much typical car review channels: the most helpful YouTube videos are often from people who’ve owned a particular model for a year or so and can speak with experience about its quirks.

    Finally, and most of all, I’ve learned to check the instinct to look up reviews. It’s worth spending some time to research stuff between you and the ground, or that you’ll use daily, but I’ve wasted too many hours comparing details that really don’t matter. Make sure it’s something you legitimately care about before you reach for other people’s opinions.