My recommendation for some time gas been get the best value smart TV and don't connect it to the internet. Use devices you trust to play content. Problem solved.
... But this. Is crazy, but has been possible for some time. Years ago I plugged a spare mouse at office in, and it happened to be Razor branded. Within a few seconds I had razor software popup on my screen (at least) asking me to click a button to install their suite. I was horrified.
While I can't speak for other states (though I'd be surprised if they were different), power bills in Victoria are split into supply and usage. Eg each day costs 90c, then 30c per kw/h.
So you could eliminate the usage costs, but not the supply charge.
The whole reason for this is Australia's power grid is a market, where suppliers put in bids for how much they can produce, and at what price. And AEMO then selects the cheapest way to meet demand (paying the marginal price), but also expects residential rooftop solar a given.
As a result we often have an excess of power driving wholesale pricing into the negatives.
The free power is a way to increase usage at times when we're most likely to have negative pricing, and encourage use of high energy appliances like dishwashers etc to be run during that period to reduce demand the rest of the time.
I really liked the land usage discussion. That (for the US) if you took the land currently being used to grow crops for ethanol based motor fuels. Turned them into solar farms you'd cover 80% of current grid demand.
I was already pro renewables for a myriad of reasons. But that put the scale into a much better perspective.
This is something I've never understood. If consent is remaining on the line after a message "this call may be recorded (for training and quality purposes)", the simple answer is in places where you have to have consent have the phone send a similar message.
I'm now at the point I research parts to see where the LED control is stored.
My keyboard LED is controlled internally without software. My mouse requires software to set, but there is open source rgb control software that was trivial to install and set once, uninstall and forget.
The only one I got wrong was my GPU, which apparently isn't rgb but just has a strip of coloured light beaming at all times.
Thankfully my case isnt mesh everything, so most light is kept inside.
> Leave your phone on silent permanently, setup your emergency contacts like partner and kids to ring on silent, and turn off all notifications except email and SMS/WhatsApp. That’s the key to a simple life. You won’t miss anything important and that realization is the most freeing
This is pretty similar to my setup. Always on do not disturb. Typically my family and close friends communicate through a chat app, that doesn't make sound but if it's time sensitive an sms or call will make sound for starred contacts.
Back on the day when phones had notification LEDs I'd setup apps to have specific colours. These days with always on OLED displays I use an app aodNotify to setup a a little spinning circle on the screen. Purple is family/friend chat app, blue is a call, green sms etc.
Everything else I periodically poll for information. ie I go out of my way to check emails etc
I had a perfectly functional Galaxy A71 this time last year, still had great battery life, etc.
I had to replace it because it only has 5 years of support. Samsung offers 7 years of support but only on their top tier phones.
Google offer 7 years, even on their A series phones so I chose a pixel 9a. It's fine, I don't love it or hate it, but it's not doing anything I care about better than my last phone.
Mine is so slow to become initially responsive. It (thankfully) comes on to whatever source / channel it was on when turned off, but it takes a good 15 seconds till you can change a channel, closer to 30 seconds to change input source. And when it does accept inputs it frustratingly drops inputs for another 10 seconds or so.
Recent switcher to macos. I can't find a way to separately set mouse acceleration and scroll wheel momentum.
I use a trackball for RSI reasons, in order to get across the screen in a single flick means high sensitivity, mouse acceleration is absolutely needed to be able to make small movements. This makes my scroll wheel useless because a single scroll moves the page about 1/10 of a line
Great post. And if you want some control support for your cronjobs perl App::Cronjob[1] can provide features such has exclusive locking, so a job won't run if the previous run is still going, or provide a timeout, and some options for sending mail on success or failure
> I think this is incorrect. Specifically the Windows ARM support. Official hardware support page indicates that the Windows version requires x64. I unfortunately don’t have the hardware to confirm for myself. But Blizzard is the kind of company that would have made a blog post about that.
It has been around for a while, circa 2021. They made a forum post when they released it.
> There's something to be said for the restrictions of an environment when you're learning how to operate in a domain that seems to shape future thinking.
When at University the academic running the programming language course was adamant the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis applied to programming language. ie language influences the way you think.
Didn't Microsoft drop 16 bit application support in Windows 10? I remember being saddened by my exe of Jezzball I've carried from machine to machine no longer working.
This is an aside. Yesterday I was in a shopping centre (ie a mall) and a bunch of kids ran through the food court, maybe 10 of them all around the 9-12
A grumpy lady shouted at them "kids you shouldnt be running!"
I turned to whom I was eating with and our discussion could be summarised as "kids should be running. The problem isn't they're running, the problem isn't even directly where they're running. Where they're running is a symptom of them having no where else to run"
You joke. I still use an old winamp 2.81 on my windows machine.
About 15 years ago I came across some plugin dll files that added flac support.
The only issue I ever run into is some non ascii characters in ID3 tags make that file unplayable. But winamp is perfectly capable of editing them.
It's even pretty good in the high dpi monitors because Ctrl-D enables "Double size" mode on the main window and equaliser. And the playlist window has customisable font sizes.
That's similar to me, I started using FreeNAS back in the 9.x days.
At the time the FreeNAS documentation recommend installing to a usb drive. This proved unreliable, but dedicating a drive to it was silly given it couldn't be used for anything else. I had all the things I needed but I wanted to peel back the layers and this seemed like a good excuse
So I threw in a drive and installed freebsd 10 and spent a few days familiarising myself with everything, learned how to configure samba myself, learned how to setup jails with iocage (the old shell version), and finally imported my pool.
... But this. Is crazy, but has been possible for some time. Years ago I plugged a spare mouse at office in, and it happened to be Razor branded. Within a few seconds I had razor software popup on my screen (at least) asking me to click a button to install their suite. I was horrified.