jonpurdy

Running a 2012 Mac Mini as a HTPC. It's been wonderful for anything h.264 and has no problems even playing 4K files (h.264, it chokes on 265 of course).

But YouTube is increasingly becoming unusable to the point where I just youtube-dl what I want to watch in advance.

I hired a Tesla Model 3 for a week last summer and it was fantastic. But overkill for our needs: we've achieved that dream with a used Spark EV. Far less range than any Tesla (130 km EPA new rating), but more than adequate for our needs. We charge it once a week at home overnight and go about 30-60 km/week around town. Living in the Bay Area means we've got access to DCFC everywhere we want to go outside of SF as well.

Even inexpensive 1st gen EVs are more than ready for most people to use as a city car or second car, and most people would have no need for a petrol car at all if they had a Tesla or Bolt or any modern long range EV. I can see the lack of maintenance being very disruptive to car dealerships in the long term.

I used to feel the same way, and still do about how good they are relative to my previous choice from 2005-2019 (wired Etymotic passive isolating buds). I bought them on day 1.

But I'm on my third pair of replacement buds now and still experiencing issues. They no longer have the random squeaking issue that the first two pairs had, but still have issues with Bluetooth connectivity, failing to connect 10-20% of the time, dropping their BT connection during Zoom calls, etc. I'm sure some of this had to do with BT itself, but I was hoping that I'd see no pairing issues at all due to the W1 chip.

I still use them all the time, and I presume I'd have way fewer issues if I used them with a single device. I'd actually buy a second pair if I only had a Mac and iPhone, but with work + personal Macs, iPhone, iPad, and HTPC Mac Mini I'd still be dealing with issues on most of my devices.

I accidentally discovered this a year ago. I found that listening to the audiobook and reading along with the ePub was a great way to ingest the material even when in a tired state (since the audiobook keeps playing. Having the ePub also meant I could highlight and export my highlights as usual.

I did try this with iOS built-in TTS but found it was worth the effort to find the audiobook when possible.

OP here. I finally ditched Evernote when they made the Mac app Electron. I've tried Obsidian but it didn't stick (and it's Electron), but hear very good things about it.

I decided on DevonThink since it closely resembled what I used Evernote for but ditched it after just a month due to to bad iOS apps, weird default formatting issues, hostile developers (license covers max 2 computers, and refusal to support a few basic things).

Stumbled upon Ulysses and I've been using it since then. Excellent plain text/Markdown support (you can turn off the markdown formats you don't want to use), sensible default fonts and such, fast and native Mac app, great iOS apps, etc.

This is a great explainer on how and why Notion is so powerful, and certainly helps explain why it doesn't feel like the fastest tool (because it's inherently more complicated and more powerful than most).

I've tried using it for personal notes but it's speed and lack of offline prevented me from migrating to it. But I think it's the best choice for any organization that needs a collaborative docuement/wiki/Confluence-esque tool.

Not to mention that I think it has the best default fonts, spacing, and general aesthetic of any tool I can think of.

I've found that half the time whatever site I'm trying to order with doesn't work, either due to Safari, adblock, or whatever. Sometimes doing it in Chrome helps, but not always. Even if it works, I need to create an account and set up another email aliases for the site (since every site gets it's own alias).

I've learned to just call orders in these days.

Totally agreed. Just because a feature is used by 2% of users doesn't mean it should be killed. That feature (plus others) could be critical to the workflow of those users.

It seems the telemetry-driven product development in the past decade has made significantly worse apps than in previous decades. There are definitely a higher quantity of apps on a wider variety of platforms, but it seems harder to find apps that are powerful enough to allow a wide variety of users to do all the things they need.

Agreed. I work for a remote first company and it’s night and day compared to previous employers’ policies. Life is just easier when one doesn’t need to justify their reasons for remote work.

As an aside, I’ve got a ADB Wombat from BMoW and it’s just awesome. Allows me to easily use my 1993 Apple Adjustable Keyboard with my modern Mac.

Edit: forgot to mention that it also works great for using a USB mouse or keyboard on older Macs.

Thanks for the clarification; that's exactly what I was referring to. I'd like to see fibre included in that since it's likely to be the physical medium that will last a century or more, regardless of the protocols on top of it.

What I am interested in: a single entity responsible for trenching/fibre infrastructure, then allowing providers to resell access to it. Requiring each ISP to run their own fibre makes no sense to me. Let ISPs compete on price and quality of service, not on having billions in the bank to roll out the fibre (or take subsidies and not roll it out, like in many places in USA).

Even worse in condos (like in Toronto) where the condo board has signed an agreement with a provider and not allowing occupants any choice.

Huge shoutouts to Beanfield (Toronto) and Sonic (SF) for actually providing symmetric gigabit for cheaper than the incumbents with lower, asymmetric plans. If all companies were like them I wouldn't be advocating for municipal broadband.

I avoided replacing my 2015 MBP until 2020 because of the arrow keys (when they finally fixed). Not great to seem them still clinging to that asymmetric design.

I use Safari + AdGuard for most things due to the native Mac interface and reduced power consumption. And Chromium + uBlock Origin when I need to use sites that don't work with anything other than Chrome.

I agree; they shouldn't be called podcasts if they don't conform to RSS and don't work in standard podcast apps.

They're time-shifted audio shows sure, but not podcasts.

Numerous times in the past couple of years I’ve briefly tried Firefox, or considered trying it again.

Stuff like this just keeps coming up completely souring it’s reputation.

At least anecdotally speaking, they’re shooting themselves in the foot and I’ll put off touching FF for another few months until I forget about this.

These anecdotes mesh with what I remember. A friend in high school around 1999 had a Pentium 133; it could play MP3s without stuttering but it couldn’t do anything else while it did that.

Thanks for that input. My AP AC Lite has been absolutely rock solid so I wouldn't want reduced reliability; it's the reason I went with Unifi in the first place. Not that it matters; no chance I'll be going with Unifi in the future.

I was considering replacing my AP AC Lite with whatever 6E equivalent comes out when 6E is approved. I considered picking up a NanoHD for the extra MIMO speeds, but in the meantime I keep seeing problems with reliability, the 6.x Unifi version, UDM needing to be rebooted, etc.

Even if Ubiquiti was as good as it was pre-2019, if they pulled this advertising stunt then I'd not consider upgrading. There's now no chance I'll be sticking with Ubiquiti for my 6E upgrade.

Shout out to Feedbin! It was created shortly after (I think) Google announced the Reader deprecation. I signed up around the first day and have been a subscriber since then. It even has a well-documented and supported API. I hope Ben keeps running it for many years to come.

Some anecdata: located in SF. I rarely order non-Prime items. But I did recently order a desk grommet mounted USB hub (not charger) that was only available from China. Originally predicted to take a month, it took slightly longer at five weeks.

I was wondering about why SwiftBar existed when there was already BitBar, and a lot is explained in this thread on Github: https://github.com/swiftbar/SwiftBar/issues/95

TL;DR: BitBar stopped working well in Big Sur and the old code base was increasingly hard to update and build.

This sort of thing drives me crazy. It's so pervasive that it's impossible for users to keep up with opting out of everything.

All one can really do is treat corporations adversarially and assume the worst. It's crazy that I need to run a VPN from my home since my own ISP would use deep packet inspection (aside from logging DNS entries) to profile my household for advertising purposes.

Recommendations: - Mullvad: they take cryptocurrency, account ID is a randomly generated number that can't be recovered, no logging, support Wireguard, reasonably fast, works well on mobile - Cloudflare WARP: centralized corp but they don't sell customer data and aren't incentivized to do so (disclaimer: for now), really damn fast since you're probably hitting Cloudflare sites from your ISP anyway, they use Wireguard (but in a custom setup), works really well on mobile

I basically stopped playing games around 2008 when I graduated uni. This was a time when I found other interests, didn't have time for games, and when mobile devices started taking over the world.

If nothing in my life changed, I'd have been driven from gaming anyway by IAP and micropayments.

The piece is obviously sarcastic but has some grains of truth (I personally see more than just grains...).

I think that it's important to remove any sort of misogyny, racism, and any other toxic things from technology. I just don't see how this piece has any of that.

I had just posted in the duplicate thread complaining about 1Password (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26154324). I've been a user since 2007 and it seemed to get significantly worse with version 7.

Despite its increasingly major flaws (no exact URL matching, slow UI, no way to trigger a sync), it seems like it is still the best option for someone who wants a native Mac/iOS interface. Though if it keeps getting worse at the same rate, hopefully other options will catch up.

I've been on 1Password since 2007. Unfortunately, software quality seems to have taken a nosedive since version 7 came out (disregarding the subscription issue). Random beachballs and slowdowns, annoying 2FA and duplicate password warnings, and decoupling of stored files from login entries.

I have been considering a replacement but haven't found anything up to the ease of use and Mac/iOS integration of 1Password yet.

You are 100% correct. This is why Acceptance Criteria are a thing: so the person working on the ticket knows exactly what it means to be "Done". If they're unclear, they must be made clear (by questioning as you did).

Often, unclear description or Acceptance Criteria means that the ticket hasn't been though out properly and needs to be clarified (or scrapped).

No worries; there’s always a balance between being overly verbose and not covering every edge case.

The core point of your article was still clear, and as a result generated interesting discussion and follow up for an update.

Top parent here. I originally deleted the word “influencer” but put it back in with quotes since it was the best word to use.

You’re totally correct in your assertions and the understanding of the intent and meaning of my post.

Anecdata: Trello and Jira both have free plans that I used that caused me to recommend them for paid usage at multiple companies I’ve worked with. Those free plans resulted in $xx-$xxxx monthly subscriptions.

Asana has a paid plan with a 5-user minimum limit. I never bothered to even try it since I wouldn’t have the extended time to play with it. As a result it never even got mentioned to companies I’ve worked with.

So, it’s important to have a free plan (or at least very cheap paid plan as the article recommended) for “influencers” to get heavily involved with.