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bdavbdav

899 karma · joined April 13, 2023

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bdavbdav··on Study: Schoolwide phone bans show no significant impact on mental health
I’m not sure there’s any real convenience and comfort to it for school kids through the day. For coordination of pickups etc yes, but the rest is just dopamine chasing.
bdavbdav··on Show HN: Auto Dismiss Mac OS "Allow <app> to find devices on local networks?"
Doubly annoying as it asks for the widget separately.
bdavbdav··on Show HN: Encarta 95 Web
Didn’t this have a splash screen with a load of sound clips playing? (“I have a dream…”) - was disappointed that didn’t happen! (Or was that ‘98?)
bdavbdav··on New iMac with M6
I suspect this isn’t for you. This is for (x) who has disposable income, wants something that you can buy retail and just works, and looks great on a desk with just a single wire, and will use it for general tasks for 5-7 years.

If my mum or dad asked me “should I get one of these?”, given how long they used their old iMac for (about 6-7 years), I wouldn’t hesitate to say yes. Would I buy one? No, perfectly happy with an MBP docked to a trio of dell ultrasharps (ignoring the notable lack of MST…)

bdavbdav··on New iMac with M6
I have a few Huawei Mateview 27 monitors. No branding facing you, brushed Alu, slightly higher that 4k (as they’re 16:10 not 16:9 - bonus), very accurate and beautifully designed - as if they were made for the Mac.

Real shame they discontinued them.

bdavbdav··on Raspberry Pi Zero 3W and Pi 4 Model A spotted in device trees
The full size Pi has less and less of a niche. GPIO / low power edge? ESP32s are great. Signage? The pi isn’t really all that great, and is expensive, get a cheap N100/150. Hacking on Linux? Literally anything else.
bdavbdav··on Reviewers rarely talk about reliability. Owners bring it up twice as often
It’s not quite a full long term review, but I always liked when car mags did the “live with it for 3 months” section across a load of people. Average reviews don’t have that behind them typically.

I could take my car from the dealer and drive it for 30 minutes and learn not a lot. I could live with it for a month, and learn that it doesn’t make the wagon cover go back and forth automatically like the old one, the infotainment restarts twice as often, I can’t have X and Y visible at the same time in the digital dash, the armrest is a bit of a pain to reposition up and down if there’s a coffee in the holder, the coins rattle in the coin bin…

The “I’ve had this a year” review is always a lot more helpful.

bdavbdav··on New 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6
Key is held on a separate chip unfortunately
bdavbdav··on Amazon’s “digital pacifier” for toddlers
YMMV.

The abundance technique wouldn’t work so well with my Labrador…..

bdavbdav··on Amazon’s “digital pacifier” for toddlers
Exactly the same deal here. She can crush hours on a plane, but it’s a n-times a year thing, not a habit.
bdavbdav··on Amazon’s “digital pacifier” for toddlers
Have a 5yo daughter.

Day to day, no access to a tablet or whatever. TV time In the mornings at weekends so we can get a bit of sleep (sometimes a bit in the evening at weekend while we cook). No TV through week. If we do watch at other times, it’s all of us watching a movie or Gladiators or whatever together as a group activity.

Flights are the only time for us she gets extended tablet use. A stack of hours in isolation 4-6 times a year isn’t going to do any real harm. Putting babies and toddlers in front of tablet / coco melon on tv for a couple of hours a day all day every day will.

Going a step further, We’ve got friends who let their similar aged child free roam of YouTube. That pushes all kinds of dark things…

Conversely, I get that we have a large house with garden, lots of toys, not great but OK family support, and jobs that aren’t sucking it out of us energy wise. I imagine many have a much tougher time and are in need of respite too.

bdavbdav··on Proton hosts Flock map revealing over 300k cameras, defying cease-and-desist
This is the same legal basis cartographers / mapping providers sit on. You could reach exactly the same result, but the process cost them, and the resultant IP, even if derivable from publicly available info (surveying streets, surveying camera locations) isn’t. They can’t come after people mapping cameras they can see, they can come after people scraping their DB / breaking TOS / accessing systems for which they do not have access rights.
bdavbdav··on Jailbreaking the Switch 2
Is codex better at this? Claude won’t let me do anything vaguely near the line. Even security testing on my own code often.
bdavbdav··on Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe
I love the idea of load shifting, and it makes a huge amount of sense, but I worry it’s going to open us jo to a lot more of this.
bdavbdav··on JetBrains reported a net financial loss first time in its tracked history
Why? Revenue still up. Investment.
bdavbdav··on JetBrains reports revenue growth, net financial loss for 2025
All the death knell comments - Is no one looking at the revenue line? Revenue still trending the same. Costs presumably haven't skyrocketed. They've invested in something big. Thats probably a good thing, and often needed to evolve.
bdavbdav··on cp: -r or -R?
Exactly - and I always get it wrong first time.
bdavbdav··on Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS
I didn’t realise screensavers were still a thing… straight to off.
bdavbdav··on cp: -r or -R?
This always get me. I instinctively -r, until chown which of course doesn’t take it.
bdavbdav··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
Yep fully appreciate that , being slightly glib- it’s probably a fraction of what it would have been spread out though, and probably feels like more of a binge due to infrequency / age than it actually is!
bdavbdav··on California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops
Late 30s. Used to drink a fair amount of wine/beer. I Drink a lot less now.

- Getting older, it affects me for longer. I don’t want to write off feeling tip top the next day. Too high a price to pay. - I try and train (exercise) hard most days - I can’t train anywhere near as well after alcohol. - Kids - when you’re trying to fit work, hobbies, training, learning / self development and kids / family in, there’s not much room for slack. (Which could be considered a bad situation in itself…)

Has just become not worth it regularly. Fortnightly binges work better!

bdavbdav··on Nokia Design Archive (2025)
Loved my N95. Had one at the same time as the original iPhone. Ended up using the Nokia. 3G, better camera, native Spotify, and still had navigation.
bdavbdav··on 9 Ads per Minute: FIFA Cup 26 – "the price of the beautiful game"
Yep. US World Cup ruined it for the rest of us :(
bdavbdav··on 9 Ads per Minute: FIFA Cup 26 – "the price of the beautiful game"
Not at all true. There’s a whole industry around measuring this (e.g. https://www.edo.com). A massive amount of money is spent on advertising for large companies. McD spend ballpark $3bn across the parent and franchisees, they want to make sure they get value.
bdavbdav··on Heretic removes restrictions from language models
pipx / uv
bdavbdav··on macOS 27: Workaround to avoid downloading AI models and save storage
Not ideal, but their disk space recovery thing in settings can do I believe.
bdavbdav··on ZuckOff is a free app that sees Meta glasses before they see you
This is fantastic.
bdavbdav··on Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side
At least we get cmd and control as separate keys still, which makes copy/paste/… in a terminal a breeze, without either needing to sacrifice terminal control keys, or remember to use different c/p sequences in different scenarios.
bdavbdav··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
Because you watch as you type. You may not find it useful, I very much do for apps with colliding names.
bdavbdav··on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
I always assumed that was intentional to save you arriving through options. I find that behaviour quite useful as I can hit anything beginning with CHE just by typing more letters.
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