Hacker News Reader

corinton Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers

It's what you get when you smush internet radio and a virtual globe together. I really enjoy exploring different parts of the world and listening to their music.

corinton Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers

Does Google 2FA still have the option to telephone the code through to a phone? If you have a direct-dial number to your desk phone would that not work? Or any service that lets you read your text messages remotely; Pushbullet or anything offering the same functionality?

corinton Spotify will now suspend or terminate accounts it finds are using ad blockers

Yes; with pinning music offline it's still encrypted & within the Spotify app. The app needs to be connected to the internet at least every 30 days to ensure that your subscription is still current (and, presumably, that all those tracks are still permitted to be on your device).

I've suffered the same, as content agreements have changed, tracks have been made unavailable in playlists.

There's a setting in Spotify to see this; you can disable "hide unplayable tracks in playlists". You'll then see all the affected songs return, but greyed out.

corinton Jabra: we know our Bluetooth headsets don’t work with laptops

I'd think that if the reseller sold the device as being capable of working with bluetooth v4 and the A2DP profile, only for that not to be the case, then you absolutely have the right to take it up with them.

Surely by their not advertising the dongle limitation, that's a problem of their own making & they should honour your return. If they've a problem with that, they take it up with Jabra but leave you out of it.

After all, you've got a device that speaks Bluetooth so you've got something that the product declares it'll be compatible with, and the product just.. Isn't!

corinton A new predictive model for more accurate electrical grid mapping

What prevents those details from being mapped by volunteers though? Consider openinframap, for most western nations that looks to be pretty spot on?

corinton Solar Farms Shine a Ray of Hope on Bees and Butterflies

Absolutely agreed, I am struggling to think of many downsides. Maybe some wasps or bees start a nest near a panel meaning it's difficult to clean the panel? Hopefully the nest gets left alone & the efficiency lost is tolerated, to let the bees/wasps live.

corinton New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking

I'm now trying to use OSMAnd wherever possible. If there's a location I can't use it to find, I'll revert to Google Maps (and click 'no' to the opt in nag). When home, I'll make sure to update OpenStreetMap to make their map more useful.

I'm convinced that open data is the better option. Certainly, I'm happy to volunteer my time and effort to contribute to things like OSM (and Wikipedia), but I'm loathe to part with my personal data for 'free' to a huge advertising behemoth.

corinton Ode to the 767

Perhaps overall it's dubious, but I was once overtaking a large lorry on a 2-lane section of motorway, so I was between the central crash barrier and the lorry. As I drew level with the front of the trailer / the back of the tractor, the lorry started to drift into my lane.

Braking, I'd have had to avoid all of the trailer, but stamping on the accelerator got me out of his way before the driver realised and corrected to stay in lane.

I'm not saying that power is always the solution, but it's handy to have it in some circumstances.

corinton Hurricane Electric 3D network map

Please forgive my ignorant question, but if they're already peering with a lot of networks, why would those networks change to paying for transit from them? Or do you think they'd start to steal paying transit customers away from some of the larger T1 networks?

corinton Archiving C64 Tapes Correctly

That's what I was thinking as well; I wonder if it would be as simple as recording all of them, aligning them in Audacity and playing back the resultant mix? Any dropouts on one tape would be largely overruled by the (strong) signal from all the good tapes?

corinton Tracking leaks on NDA beta Xbox 360s by embedding serial number on-screen

For Sky TV in the UK, the Sky TV satellite boxes occasionally display the subscriber number in a faint font just above the channel logo in the top-right. If you've simply hooked up the satellite decoder to a video capture device with a view to streaming sports content, then your subscriber number just gets occasionally shown on the stream too. So no doubt there's a specific "when" for the subscriber number being shown, and it's a case of finding & watching as many streams as possible to see how many of them feature the subscriber number. Gotcha!

corinton The life and death of a laptop battery (2015)

That's excellent - thank you! I use my macbook at my desk quite a lot, and so usually it's plugged in and sat at 100% charge for hours (days?) at a time. So the ability to hold it at around a 40%-70% SOC is really useful