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scblock

2,397 karma · joined January 14, 2009

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scblock··on MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch
You're correct, I misclicked on the specs page. Thanks.
scblock··on MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch
It looks like it went from a 100 Wh battery to 72.6 Wh battery. That will definitely reduce the weight.

Edit: I was incorrect, I thought I had clicked the 16" spec page but had not. The 16" MacBook is still at 100 Wh.

scblock··on Notational Velocity and nvALT, classic macOS note-taking apps, are back
I used to use nvALT extensively, and I waited and waited for nvUltra to come out of beta, but it's been Coming Real Soon Now for more than 5 years, and I don't even use macOS as my primary OS anymore.

Fortunately, we are spoiled for high quality note taking and knowledge management apps these days, and many of those either support markdown syntax in writing (e.g. Outline, Trilium) or are directly markdown based (Obsidian).

scblock··on CorridorKey 2.0
https://github.com/nikopueringer/CorridorKey2.0
scblock··on PHP2Shell dropped, so we had agents replace a client's Drupal site overnight
"Instead of patching and updating software we vibe coded some crap to replace it with minimal testing."

I'm sure it's fine and certainly doesn't have any bugs that could be exploited.

scblock··on It Took GNOME's CoCC over 8 Months to Realise Reports Went into /Dev/Null/
Highly editorialized take on a spam filter configuration issue. If any link was to be shared here it should be the gnome report at https://blogs.gnome.org/conduct/2026/09/29/announcement-miss... and not this site.
scblock··on If approved, Project Taurus will use more electricity than Colorado Springs
Title is misleading. It would have a load of about 50 MW, substantially more than any single other customer of Colorado Springs Utilities (next listed is about 10 MW), but not more than "Colorado Springs."
scblock··on [dead]
Underground conductors for wind and solar plants are typically aluminum with copper concentric neutrals. Ground wires are often copper, but copper-clad aluminum is becoming more common.
scblock··on Walmart and Target are watching you. I saw the "lab" for myself
Utterly breathless, in the "OMG these loss prevention people are amazing!" sort of way. Awful to read, truly awful. No discussion of privacy, of whether this kind of stuff is overly invasive, nothing. The closest it got was noting that the "studies" the corporations refer to are highly suspect. Overall, this is just corpo-friendly garbage.
scblock··on Badger Badger Badger Video Officially Preserved by British Film Institute
The original SWF file can be played by Ruffle (https://ruffle.rs/). Depending on your criteria for preservation a simple web page may be sufficient.
scblock··on Show HN: Can you really detect AI writing from human writing?
It's an ad.
scblock··on Googlebook
KDE does that by default. Handy sometimes, funny sometimes.
scblock··on Fixing Markdown Syntax Is a Nightmare
Most of this writeup is not about Markdown, per se. It's about interoperability issues with extensions to the base syntax that are not implemented consistently in all renderers. The exception is blockquote formatting.

These include: LaTeX math (not Markdown), mermaid diagrams (not Markdown), github callouts (not Markdown).

The rest is a call to action to use a paid service they developed. It's an ad.

scblock··on Nintendo announces price increases for Nintendo Switch 2
"The vast majority of the screen is upscaled."

I have bad news for you, friend. You just described AAA gaming on anything less than a 5090 (and not even then, at all times). Without DLSS or FSR many modern games won't run smoothly at 4k on typical hardware (such as a 5070, which costs more than a Switch 2, or a 5060, which costs about the same).

scblock··on Your phone is about to stop being yours
RCS can be hit or miss on GrapheneOS, but they have made significant progress recently. It requires using Google Messages rather than any other messaging app, and may require enabling an ICC authentication option that is disabled by default. And it may depend on your carrier. RCS is kind of a pain in the butt but the messaging improvements over SMS are substantial which is why I wanted it.

When I first tried last fall I had it working for a few weeks then it stopped entirely delivering messages and I fell back to SMS only. After the recent system updates and enabling the ICC option it has been working well for me.

The official page explains briefly, https://grapheneos.org/usage#rcs

There is a very long discussion threat going back several years that is now considered resolved, which seems to be the case for me. https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/1353-using-rcs-with-google-...

scblock··on An update on recent Claude Code quality reports
A valid choice, a moral choice, is none of the above.
scblock··on 3.4M Solar Panels
The odd looking circular example shown is not solar PV. It is the Ivanpah solar thermal generating station, and those are mirrors rather than solar panels, or modules.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility

Solar thermal can't really compete economically with photovoltaics.

scblock··on SilverBullet introduces desktop app in beta
I was curious since this is a different link than the main SilverBullet site (silverbullet.md). Looks like it's built by the same developer, but as a closed-source wrapping of the MIT licensed open source core of that project, as a desktop application.

It's definitely interesting. Though SilverBullet itself never stuck strongly with me - not enough to replace Obsidian anyways - I still run an instance because it's handy for quick notes. And doesn't rely on anything more than signing into a web site from whatever computer I happen to be using.

It could be a very nice addition to the personal notes space, though macOS only (at least for now) is very limiting.

scblock··on Kindle to end store downloads and registering for 1st-5th gen kindles in May
It was a good compromise, including for Amazon. DRM is immoral when you're "selling" books, because that means I don't own the actual book. I still bought plenty of them when I could easily strip the DRM. But now I'm done, never buying another DRM encrusted book from Amazon.
scblock··on OnlyOffice kills Nextcloud partnership for forking its project without approval
Of course Collabora is also upset because LibreOffice resurrected their LibreOffice Online project (https://www.neowin.net/news/collabora-clashes-with-libreoffi...).

These projects seem to be really struggling with the Freedom part of Free Software.

scblock··on Why You Hate Your Weather App
Am I missing something? This piece starts out with a discussion of how weather is hard to predict and highly variable (true, though our powers of forecasting are far better than they used to be). Then it quotes a couple developers of apps I am not familiar with, then it describes some of the weather sources used.

That's great, but it certainly doesn't address "why you hate your weather app." And "sometimes the forecast isn't perfect" is not a reason I've ever had. Poor behavior, ad bombardment, poor design, bad visibility, and more are all reasons I've had in the past, but never "the forecast isn't perfect."

I got fed up with several things in Apple Weather but they appeared to be lack of care and attention to design, rather than underlying data sources. One was the lock screen widget not showing current conditions and showing "severe weather" instead. The severe weather was air quality alerts. Less than useless. Another was NWS alerts coming up with generic data rather than the actual information, so I often got recommendations along the line of "execute a pre-planned activity". Useless again.

Perhaps that is because I work in renewable energy and am very familiar with the weather data models and sources and experienced with the variability, but surely we've all experienced weather's unpredictability before.

By the way, I like my current weather app, Breezy[1], which uses a number of sources including Open Meteo[2].

[1]: https://github.com/breezy-weather/breezy-weather

[2]: https://open-meteo.com/

scblock··on Our commitment to Windows quality
This is vague lip service with little substance, as far as I can tell. That is unsurprising consider it's from Microsoft and it's about Windows. It addresses (in cheap words) a few real pain points, but completely fails to address the dozens of either incredibly painful and stupid decisions MS has made.

On the subject of what they address, I have thoughts and many doubts.

> Integrating AI where it’s most meaningful, with craft and focus

Just don't, bro. Don't do it. I don't want copilot icons in all the system apps. None.

> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions

This feels like it's too little, too late. They redesigned the UI in yet another toolkit and in the process broke something had worked for decades. Perhaps they could add a 147th different UI toolkit with a different look instead, just to change things up.

> Reducing disruption from Windows Updates

Would be welcome, but I have my doubts. MS has shown clearly they don't care.

> Faster and more dependable File Explorer

See comment on task bar above.

> More control over widgets and feed experiences

Get out of it. If I see one more stock ticker on a screen share from someone I know does NOT track the stock market I'll know you for the lying liars you are. Don't promise "more control" just stop being so invasive and annoying.

On the subjects they didn't address, I have feedback:

- Remove advertising from the start menu, the system, apps, everywhere. Just remove it forever.

- Remove invasive telemetry. Again, forever.

- Respect user choice. Stop trying to force things to open in Edge, ignoring my default browser. I am a Firefox/Zen user, keep a single (other) chromium-based browser around for sites that don't work right (another rant for another time), and try not to touch Edge if I can help it.

- Stop turning the bundled native apps into crappy web apps. "New Outlook" is a real tire fire.

- Make the default Edge page ANYTHING but the advertising and nasty "news" summary that shows up. Why not a simple search page, like when Google was new.

- Stop making start menu searches return web results instead of local apps

- Make start menu searching actually search in a useful way. Why does QGIS not show up when I type GIS? Because it doesn't start with Q? That's garbage. Make it work how users would expect it to work.

- Let people say no, fully and completely, to OneDrive. You can make adding it later easy at user discretion, but don't ask to set it up automatically. Don't use fear mongering like "your files are not backed up" to try to trick people into signing up for it.

- Local accounts should be easy, not a nasty workaround with a moving target for instructions.

scblock··on “Your frustration is the product”
I mean there kind of is: https://lrclib.net/
scblock··on CachyOS Is Now the Most Popular Desktop Distro on ProtonDB
I'm using it on my gaming laptop because it's the only distro I tried that handled the hybrid NVIDIA/AMD graphics out of the box without user configuration beyond occasionally explicitly setting which GPU to use. Normally I run Fedora.

I'm familiar with Arch at least so system management is fine. So far 3 months in it seems great.

scblock··on Malus – Clean Room as a Service
Presumably this is a joke, based on the "Success Reports" and the footer, among other things.

"This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services."

scblock··on YouTube ads are about to get even longer and they'll be unskippable
There are already minutes of unskippable ads when watching YouTube on a device like an Apple TV. And they come fast and furious, as bad as or worse than network TV.

And the best part is that many of the ads that show up are literally scams. YouTube has no ad standards that I can tell.

scblock··on RFC 454545 – Human Em Dash Standard
What's to stop an LLM from using this? Nothing, obviously. A "MUST NOT" in an RFC won't stop an LLM. They don't care about copyright why would they care about RFCs.

The instructions for how to decide whether to enter these additional unicode codepoints are also highly suspect.

Performative, but not helpful.

scblock··on MS Authenticator will crack down on jailbroken/rooted iOS and Android phones
For basic 6-digit codes sure. But MS authenticator uses push notice based approvals for many corporate SSO accounts including mine.
scblock··on United Airlines can permanently ban passengers who don't wear headphones
Airlines can permanently ban passengers at their discretion. The specifics of behaviors they may consider disruptive aren't that important particularly when they are reasonable (not wearing headphones while listening to audio content could be considered disruptive to other passengers, after all).
scblock··on GrapheneOS: Microsoft Authenticator does not support secure Android OS
There isn't much here beyond speculation. No technical analysis, certainly.

GrapheneOS is neither rooted nor jailbroken in any technical sense, and Authenticator certainly works today, as do Work Profiles and Intune Company Portal (with a little wrangling). Would be nice to know if this is real or not since I am forced to rely on the app even though I don't want to.

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