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CaptSpify

I don't have video/audio working on this install, so I'll try to get that set up later and make a video.

I do have a video of the wifi in action though: https://tmp.thekyel.com/month/wifi.mp4

I reached out to them a couple of times, and they asked if I had rfkill installed, I told them no, but it shouldn't matter if it was a hardware switch.

They told me that they would look into it, and then never responded after that.

Those switches are software under the hood though, at least as far as I can tell. I installed freebsd on my purism laptop, and it no longer shuts off the camera/microphone.
Re:Firefox Profilemaker on Monday December 03, 2018 @03:13PM (#18592465)
I think it adds a lot to the conversation. It's an obviously poor argument, which points out how poor it is when Mozilla uses it to make obviously poor choices.
Those two are far from mutually exclusive
Re:Why doctors hate their computers on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @03:34PM (#18394685)
> Compounding the problem of enterprise software is customization.

That's kind of the same-but-opposite of my experience.

When software tries to control how it's going to be used, it fails spectacularly more often than not, ime. The best software that I've used always leans into the problem: They let me access it via a dump. Then I can manipulate it as I need, then upload it back in.

But when those that don't understand the workflow try to tell developers how to design software, it usually ends up in a big mess of workarounds just to get the basic use-case to work correctly.

Re:Why doctors hate their computers on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @11:12AM (#18392245)
This isn't isolated to doctors sadly. You see this in any medium to large organization: schools, cities, companies, etc. The problem, the way I see it, is that management is the one really being sold to.

The actual people who do the day to day work have no real say in which software systems they use. Only management has any real say, so sales people tailor their pitch towards management. Unfortunately, managers only have a high-level overview of what the people below them actually do, and no understanding of software, so they have no idea what they need their software to do.

And situations like this are where sales people shine brightest. Sure, the new "cloud-based, totally-super-secure, widget producer 9000" won't actual be useful at anything, but it sure looks cool to management.

Look at companies like Oracle, and Microsoft for good examples: Their actual products are awful, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that their sales team can sell a shit product.

Re:The End Is Near for Mobile Apps? on Monday November 05, 2018 @01:42PM (#18384737)
> it's possible for apps to make the experience better in meaningful ways.

Now if we could just get app designers to realize that!

IME, apps are usually just poor front-ends for the website, where companies think it's OK to shove stupid things like unblockable ads, notifications, data-harvesting, etc.

Re:How hustle culture took over advertising on Monday November 05, 2018 @01:12PM (#18384497)
alternatively: don't send them the referrer
Re:Why I'm Ditching Android on Saturday November 03, 2018 @11:27PM (#18374010)
Canonical only gave this a very half-assed attempt though. The purism 5 should be coming out relatively soon, and it looks like they work hard to make their laptops work decently. I hope that translates over well to the phone.
> Honest question: does this actually help you get what you're after faster?

For me, yes! Absolutely!

Having worked in a call-center before, there is a large amount of undeserved trust in their routing. I'm usually going to be transferred two or three times if I follow the phone-tree or not, skipping the phone tree just lowers my latency to those transfers.

Re:JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google on Thursday November 01, 2018 @11:25AM (#18354810)
Thanks!

I've looked at nextcloud, but IIRC, you have to have the whole suite installed, right? I'd love a way to just use the calendar function.

Re:JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google on Thursday November 01, 2018 @10:34AM (#18354218)
Which self-hosted calendar do you use? would you recommend it? I'm in the market for a new one, but the current offerings that I've seen aren't great.
Re:JavaScript is now required to sign in to Google on Wednesday October 31, 2018 @10:01PM (#18350921)
Because unfortunately, way too many of us depend financially upon poor security practices.
Yeah, I did, which is why I'm asking. I never saw anything saying that women were inferior to men, or that "his co-workers are biologically incapable of doing their jobs"

Can you point it out?

> that spelled out that his co-workers are biologically incapable of doing their jobs, because...

Can you point me to where it said that? I don't remember reading anything like that in his paper.

Re:Show HN: Websites in 2018 on Thursday October 25, 2018 @02:19PM (#18303183)
Ah, I apologize for misunderstanding you.

I can't point to any specific trigger, but I notice that I get drawn to certain creators. If I start to recognize their name/brand, and I look at their past work, I get a sense of "I want to support that".

A good example is Complexly: https://complexly.com (sorry that their website is awful)

I started getting videos sent to me by friends, and recommendations on youtube. After watching a few, I looked through their catalog, and relatively quickly and easily saw what they were creating, and I thought "I want more of that in the world".

They had a Patreon link readily available, and mentioned in the videos that Patreon was one of the ways that they funded themselves.

I know that's not a great answer, but everyone's trigger will be different.

I think for me it boils down to a few variables:

Do you have a good product that I would pay for, but aren't forced to? Am I excited for your next product, even if it ends up vastly different from your other products?

Do you consistently put out good material? (and by this I include: is your product full of ads/tracking?)

Is your income transparent?

Do you encourage people to share your work, even if you aren't going to directly make money off of every fan? Do I get the impression that you'd rather me share it with 1000 people who won't pay, or 5 people who will pay?

Do you make it easy for me to pay you, in whatever form is convenient to me?

Nobody ever fits all of this criteria perfectly (I can criticize Complexly all day long), but they have a solid product that they give to everyone, and have relatively low friction for taking my money.

As a Linux user and advocate, it's really frustrating to see these types of comments being down-voted. Linux still has a ton of issues OOTB, and disregarding negative experiences like this won't make them go away.

I wish that instead of preaching Linux when it clearly isn't ready, we'd spend more time making it ready.

*should

My experience is that it does not.

Re:Show HN: Websites in 2018 on Wednesday October 24, 2018 @07:57PM (#18297516)
Something can be a "dark pattern" and an industry standard at the same time.

I agree that the consumers should change their behavior, but there aren't a lot of options for supporting good news. I can't say I've ever seen a news site that was good enough that I'd actually pay money for.

Re:Show HN: Websites in 2018 on Wednesday October 24, 2018 @07:54PM (#18297495)
I don't know why you are asking me what you should sell. If it was easy to come up with a service/product to sell, everyone would do it. That's the challenging part of running your own thing.

I love Creative writing, journalism, etc. In fact, I've paid quite a bit of money via Patreon and Kickstarters for creative pursuits. The creators didn't sell anything to me. I'm not sure what you mean by this.

And if your only method for asking your users for donation money is buttons/links, then you should change it up. Plug it in your media, in your speeches, etc.

Re:Motorola and iFixit partner to sell phone repair kits on Wednesday October 24, 2018 @07:45PM (#18297442)
But you don't need to be a battery engineer to understand statistics. If these batteries are dying early, then either Apple didn't do enough testing, they did and ignored the results.
Re:Show HN: Websites in 2018 on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @03:24PM (#18286574)
> What ideas do you have for publishers to actually monetize their content?

How about either:

A) A traditional product or service, where you can skim some money off the top.

B) User donations: Patreon, Kickstarter, etc

I'm open to more ideas, but these are already in the wild, and are already working just fine.

Re:Motorola and iFixit partner to sell phone repair kits on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @02:48PM (#18286247)
Because we saw the evidence: The batteries they shipped started dying early. I'm willing to believe that they did do proper testing and ignored the results, but I'm not sure that's better.
Re:Motorola and iFixit partner to sell phone repair kits on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @12:56PM (#18285134)
Apple's mistake was really that they didnt do proper load testing on their batteries. Had they shipped a battery that was capable of keeping up with the phone, this wouldn't have been a problem to begin with.

Instead, they pushed their users to buy new phones, or pricey fixes for a manufacturing mistake

Re:Helm: Personal Email Server on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @12:59PM (#18241031)
Probably because Gmail isn't the only email provider that lets you search. I run my own email server and can search them just fine.
Re:Helm: Personal Email Server on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @12:48PM (#18240912)
I've run my own email server out of att, comcast home, comcast business, and centurylink. All I've ever had to do was call them up and ask them to open the ports.
Re:Helm: Personal Email Server on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @12:44PM (#18240870)
I do this all the time. I'm sure some people have issues, but my experience is that this is largely overblown
I personally looked around and couldn't find much, so I built my own with a raspberry pi running Motion. It cost ~$100 iirc.
Re:Interface Hall of Shame – QuickTime 4.0 Player (1999) on Monday October 15, 2018 @05:41PM (#18224065)
This, imho, is the biggest reason people don't update their software. They've caught onto the fact that the term "updates" is misleading, and it would be better call it an "anti-feature delivery mechanism".

This is why we need two separate channels for updates: One for security, and the other for features.

I'm legitimately curious as to why you only learned this only today. We've known that governments have been taking data like this from companies for a long time. All access that Google has is pretty much up for the government to grab.

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