I hate the fact that none of the big names support CalDAV natively. DAVx5 is cool and all, but app developers really need to step up their shit and support CalDAV already. Not just Microsoft Exchange and Google Calendar but CalDAV as well. It’s not like they need to rebuild their apps from scratch.

At this point you might just be better served using a web app instead of a native mobile app. Maybe K-9 Mail transformation into Thunderbird Mobile might bring some good news, but I’m not holding high hopes.

Maybe we should, under the EU’s DMA, force anyone that bundles a calendar/note app with their phone OS to support CalDAV as well as any proprietary protocol of their choice.

Yeah I believe this to be a fallacy. If all your contacts use WhatsApp, they still haven’t grasped the concept of installing two applications side-by-side. Or they don’t fully understand why people are using signal over WhatsApp. If you fail both of those, congratulations, you’ve failed to be a self-aware tech user and you’re now demoted to a braindead consumer.

I know, mind blowing right? Point is, society in general should not accept others forcing you to keep the WhatsApp monopoly in tact, which is exactly what’s happening here.

It will take some time but eventually adoption will spread, even among your contacts. It’s just a matter of critical mass, and there are some pretty compelling features within Signal that make it a worthy replacement.

I think it depends on the adoption of Linux on the desktop. When more people get a taste of what freedom of software brings, they are going to want that for their phones as well.

That or we might just be years away from the next big thing where everyone walks around with AR glasses and the cycle starts all over again with companies competing for a duopoly, and we’re just fucked.

Others in this thread have covered most of the points already, but it is mainly software support for certain key things I want to do using my phone, such as online banking.

I realise most of this is just anxiety about taking the plunge and seeing what it’s like, so if I have money to burn I might just buy a second phone just to see if it’s a viable option for me.

But yeah, I wish mobile Linux was popular enough for there to be support from key service providers. Though it might be a long shot since “desktop” Linux is still growing and we haven’t yet seen the support shift.

It was a big mistake by Google to base the Android Framework entirely on Java. Pivoting to Kotlin because you’ve discovered that working in Java produces nothing but garbage does nothing to fix the situation either.

Can’t wait for generic Linux phones to be a (more popular) thing so we won’t have to deal with this clown world nonsense anymore.

Honestly that probably goes for any interpreted programming language that supports imports.

Many Javascript frameworks just put their configuration into -.config.js files in the project root. Which is a pretty elegant solution that does not require custom parsing. Just import the config and go nuts.

Compiled (and by extension bundled) software obviously requires a different approach, but at that point you should probably consider storing your config in some kind of database.

Maybe there just isn’t a right answer to the config conundrum if all the general solutions are janky in some way.

Yeah not a fan of YAML either. I simply don’t see the benefit of getting rid of delimiters and replacing them with indentation. Yes, it does save several bytes, which might be important if you measure space in kilobytes I guess. It does provide cleaner files which may or may not be more readable.

It does not provide any advantages in parsing complexity. It does not provide any protection against typos.

I guess the same can be said of python, which forces indentation and therefore readable code formatting. Which is a problem that does not exist since the invention of code formatters and linters.

I like python for what it does but delimiters are actually useful in terms of readability. They provide an extra hint that the text you’re about to look at conforms to a specific structure.

The python community would like to have a word with you.

It’s a simple and elegant way of covering 95% of document structuring needs, while being as close to readable plaintext as possible.

The vast majority of documents currently written in MS-word could just be markdown. The vast majority of web content could just be markdown. This would save the modern world petabytes of XML bloat.

If you need something fancier, either use a vector format or do fancy client-side styling.

That was awesome, thanks for sharing.

I fully get what you’re saying and I think I know a thing or two about how lifestyle branding consumes people’s lives to the point where they’re fully absorbed.

Social media platforms seem to be by far the worst offenders of stimulating this kind of addiction (let’s just name it for what it is).

Coming from a background of designing products, as opposed to selling them I tend to be focused on product representation, rather than selling an idea. Which is not actually the route to making stupid amounts of money.

You’ve convinced me that marketing is definitely part of the problem. Here in the Netherlands they’ve recently (about two years ago) relaxed some legislation on online gambling (gambling itself is legal, just the ads weren’t) and since we’ve seen a surge of ads on television and social media featuring sports icons and influencers. The result has been a giant increase in profits, which directly corelates to figures of increased debt, prevalent mostly in young adults. I firmly believe this is toxic and needs to be fixed asap.

If you do decide to host a Q&A I’ll be sure to have a look for more cool insights.

Interesting take, mind if I dig a little deeper?

The key part of Apple’s success is that they make idiotproof devices for people who want something to “just work” (insert linux desktop memes here). The way I’ve come to understand it in the last couple years (having relatives who’ve drank the cool-aid and are starting to spot the cracks in the facade), is that they have been pulled in by values way up high in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. They are locked into the ecosystem, believing that their current solution is somehow ideal and they seem most of all afraid that anything else will completely turn their world upside down. The weird part is that Apple manages somehow to convince people they are the only ones capable of providing an experience that will cover those needs.

The thing is: Being convinced that there is no greener grass elsewhere puts up a barrier to entry into the unknown. I really do wonder if the solution there is cracking down on marketing, as it would require broad sweeping legislation that would likely defeat the purpose.

Sure, companies will put forth the occasional blatant lie, misrepresenting their product, but oftentimes the heavy lifting is done by the established brand image. I would not know where to begin preventing such an image from forming in the first place without community pushback.

And that is where my original point comes in: If we push back by ridiculing the userbase we’ll have a culture war on our hands. The trick is to be smarter than that and actually show them that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Every time the consumer gets fucked over by corporate greed, it is because we’ve let it happen by accepting the slippery slope brought upon us. (Publicly traded) companies will only listen to financial consequences from their actions, which means we have the power to stop their bullshit by not buying into it. Doing so requires a large enough group of people to start spending money elsewhere.

Problem is: The current market is affected by Apple’s shenanigans (though examples of the same pattern are also found in other industries). Which means other manufacturers are copying all the anti-consumer design decisions and you’re not left with much of a choice.

This is where legislation comes in. By providing basic consumer protections like in the proposed right to repair bills, we can at least be sure to have the option of choosing our own repair provider.

Though I’m curious if there is an additional angle we need to explore as consumers. Having said all the above, would you still disagree that educating our peers in a respectful manner will lead to people changing their behaviour, and if so, why?

Agreed, they’re usually influenced by their emotional attachment to the Apple brand (or [insert fashionable electronics manufacturer here]). And my hunch is they respond to valid criticism with a defense along the lines of “they obviously know what they’re doing” or “tech is hard/dangerous/intellectual property, we can’t have just anybody working on it”.

The reality is, they often fail to see the bigger picture because they’re blinded by what they’ve convinced themselves is the truth. This unfortunately also means that clowning on them is counterproductive, as they won’t see the light without being eased into it.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t judge people for believing soldering an SSD to the motherboard is somehow innovative and progress, but it is hard to accompany our laughter with the patience to actually explain to them in a respectful manner that this is not the way.

It takes a hard reality check in the form of their data being gone when their SSD inevitably dies someday, and recovery not being an option “because you should have paid for an iCloud subscription”. Or it takes a way for “them” not to see “us” as the enemy when we’re advocating for Apple and competitors not to pull us further into a dystopian technological hellscape where devices are single use. Try convincing a cultists that they’re in a cult and they’ll see you as a threat. We have to make sure this doesn’t escalate into polarizing tech culture war any further than it already has.

We need repairability and sustainability to be the basis for consumer electronics going forward. Corporate profits don’t justify wasting resources on single-use electronics.

Seconded, depending on what your goals are with transcoding, you might want to reconsider your strategy.

Hardware encoding (with a GPU) is mostly useful for realtime transcoding applications like streaming video. There are definitely some caviats that come with the realtime performance, and you’ll find that NVENC encoded video is almost always inferior to the slower equivalent software encoded variants.

So let’s talk codecs: While h.265 might seem like the holy grail, it is way more computationally intensive than h.264 is. In some cases the difference in encoding time will even be as high as 3-5x. Not really worth it if all you’re gaining is a slightly lower filesize.

Your results will vary by the media you’re encoding, by your encoder quality settings, tuning and encoding speed. As a rule of thumb: slower encoding speeds equal more efficiently compressed video (a.k.a. relatively higher quality for lower file size).

Handbrake is my choice of software for encoding video. It includes pretty much everything you could ever want if you’re not looking for niche codecs and exotic video formats.

I find myself mostly using x264 because it is relatively fast and still provides awesome results. My encoding speed is always set to “slow” or “superslow” (not much difference for my setup). I usually set the quality by making use of the preview function in handbrake, which transcodes just a short section of the video which I use for pixel peeping and checking for any major artifacts that would ruin the content. The resulting file also provides an estimate for how large the final transcoded file will be. If you’re happy with the quality setting, you can opt to mess with the encoder tuning. There are different presets for film, animated content and such. I usually do use film tuning if transcoding live-action media.

All this generally leaves me with pretty compact file sizes for 1080p media. And transcoding usually happens at a rate of 60-75 fps depending on the resolution. Going up from “slow” to “medium” improves fps by about 25% and increases file size by about 10%. The ideal balance is up to you.

Advanced tips: try using VMAF (objective video quality analysis algorithm developed by Netflix) to score and compare your different encoding settings. VMAF is neatly integrated into FFMetrics, which is a GUI for FFMpeg and a couple of video analysis algorithms. I also use MPV (open source media player) with FFMpeg command line arguments for playing videos synchronized in a 2x1 or 2x2 matrix. This helps compare the results for quality.

While this is very much welcome news, I am a little skeptical because this might still be a PR stunt.

Apple has shown they have the engineering capacity to design their devices to be virtually unfixable, all while still technically being compliant with this proposed piece of legislation.

Nonetheless, this show of support might finally be a means for us to end the ongoing culture war on repairability. It has been too much of a polarized debate lately, where opponents seem to be under the impression that a lack of repairability is a good thing for everyone, when it is really just having a choice that matters most.

Now that Apple has officially put in writing it’s support for repairability of consumer electronics, we can finally stop debating wether or not repairability is a good thing, and instead how we’re going to ensure the new situation works for everyone involved. Hopefully.

You might want to consider setting up a VPN tunnel to your own network. Main benefit is that you can access your home network as if you were connected to it locally. Which makes switching between mobile data and WiFi a non-issue.

This requires some sort of VPN server and usually a single port-forwarding rule for the protocol which your VPN software of choice uses. For the simplest default configuration of OpenVPN this means setting UDP port 1194 to point to your OpenVPN server.

Generally, keeping things simple, there’s two types of VPN you can set up:

• split tunnel VPN, which gives you access to your home network but accesses the internet directly.
• full tunnel VPN, which sends all of your traffic through your home router.

It is a little more complicated than that, and there’s more nuance to it, such as wether to user your own DNS server or not, but all that is best left to some further reading.

I’ve setup an OpenVPN server myself, wich is open source and completely free to mess around with. (Save for maybe some costs for registring your own domain or DDNS serviced. Those are all optional though, and mainly provide convienience and continuity benefits. You can definitely just setup a VPN server and connect with your external IP adress)

I agree, reddit gets most of their traffic from the engagement surrounding the latest shitposts and low-effort memes. (Or just genuine community content if you prefer)

Months old posts are hardly relevant to large scale user engagement and it’s unlikely that the one user trying to solve a problem by visiting a years old thread is going to have much of an impact.

If people are going to move away from the site in a healthy manner, they need to realise for themselves that it’s time to move on. Better to have a bunch of hopeful and curious people looking for new opportunities rather than bitter and resentful users which are going to vent their frustration elsewhere.

Wow that’s a cool setup, I’ll definitely steal some ideas.

I’m used to slinging lots of data around and one of the more helpful tools for general purpose automation has been n8n. Though it might have limited use if you’re not trying to glue all kinds of services together. I also host actualbudget to keep track of finances. Both are running comfortably in their own little docker containers.

I’m currently looking into setting up Nextcloud and experimenting some more with presence detection for Home Assistant. I’m considering CO2 sensors, which will either tell me my home is ventilated properly, or which rooms are occupied.