CosmicBagel

Bought my kindle in 2012 or 2013, still works fine.

I put it into airplane mode years ago, and just never turned wifi on again. I use Calibre to add books to it. (I use a little usb-c to micro usb adapter).

There are places and ways to get books without DRM and still pay the authors. It's a faff first figuring things out, but once you do it a couple of times, and discover the treasure troves of standardebooks.org and the gutenberg.org, it really just becomes routine you don't even have to think much about.

In my experience it's a better device without the internet, no device updates, no weird book updates (books updating is an oddly unsettling concept to me).

Also battery life got way better, I get a few weeks of battery life as long as it's in airplane mode. (Sometimes a couple of months if I'm using it lightly.) Granted I usually leave the backlight off, there's sunlight and lamp light, you don't need backlight.

I've forgotten about it for years at a time, charged it up, and it kept working just fine.

eReaders that are really just eReaders (and not an android device with apps and nonsense) are a rare case of buy it for life devices. The best kind of device. Kinda like a good watch, I now expect an eReader to work for a decade or two. I would also expect battery replacement as a part of long term ownership, though I haven't had to replace my battery yet.

Anyways, you don't need Amazon to enjoy a kindle. Hek, it honestly gets better without Amazon meddling with it at random, and the device phoning home or w/e nonsense background traffic it runs over wifi.

Much love for Calibre!

user8 and ratfactor should have a coffee (or tea) together and chit-chat

https://ratfactor.com/ascetic-computing

I rarely comment on HN threads, but in this case big respect for coming out and owning the mistake, keep that shit up.

If more people from MS had the guts to actually talk to their users, I'd probably have a lot less to complain about at work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hopefully there's some good lessons to improve the process, not just feedback for this single incident.

Location: Canada (UTC-6)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: It depends

Technologies: Rust, C#, C, some C++, Python, Vue/React, MySQL, Docker

Résumé/CV: https://www.cosmicbagel.com/Resume2023.pdf

Email: [email protected]

Projects: https://www.cosmicbagel.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/snwhiteley/

GitHub: https://github.com/CosmicBagel

- Recent grad, comp sci major (security focus), business minor

- Interested in Rust and C++, graphics, game engines/tooling, and cloud infrastructure, but open to all work.

- Have prior professional work experience, both before and during university, including a full-stack summer job.

- I've participated in CTFs including NCL Spring 2022 where I placed 30th of 6010 contestants.

- Interested in learning C++ as it lets you build applications that no other language lets you build, but man its hard to stay away from Rust once you've had a taste of the cargo build system and reliable intellisense.

As someone who uses this off an on amount, I was really disappointed when I opened the app to the new web app. It was slow, janky, required me authenticating multiple times (biometric then username and password). I'm now looking for alternatives because "as fast as possible" is an important feature for me. I keep the app on my android home row, not because I use it a lot, but because when I need it, I need it instantly. Massive downgrade for the user imo, this only benefits the developer.

I'm not formally diagnosed with ADHD, but I find myself able to relate with the struggles.

There's this place at the back of my university's library in the silent section, I think it's below a large HVAC fan motor or something. There's always a deep 'brrrrrrrrrr' sound going, and it is an absolutely sublime place to work. (https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteNoiseGenerator.php?l=... this sounds pretty close to it).

Earplugs help, but for some reason the deep 'brrrrrrrrrrr' is very relaxing. A quiet environment with the 'brrrrrr' is preferable to pure silence (though I'll still take ear plugs over one of those horrific open office environments).

Moving off topic a bit, but other things I do to help focus:

- Redirect bad habit sites (like HN tbh) in the `hosts` file to 127.0.0.1 as a site blocker

- Turn off cell phone, and place well out of arms reach

- Kill & block discord, telegram, ect

(Fortunately, I'm at a place in life where no one really needs to contact me on short notice)

---> The goal being to give my brain literally nothing else to do besides the work <----

(Not perfect since I tend to daydream a lot, but I'm almost graduated uni, so I guess it's working well enough)

If I'm really struggling to get work done, I'll set a countdown timer to create artificial external pressure.

During my internships, and side gigs, I find myself setting up "real work" periods where I (try to) block the world out, and communication periods. (I get along with people too well and chit chat too much otherwise).

In general, if the day-to-day work environment requires just a whole lot of "raw willpower" it's not going to work out. Willpower is for losers anyways, better to remove the distractions / change the environment. (Also fuck MS for constantly trying to weasel more ads into its OS, their new widgets panel in Win11 is literally useless to me for mandatory news ads)

Oh, but MS Edge's read aloud is a god send, it has the best text to speech voices I have access to, and I can use it on any html or pdf article easily. MS giveth, and MS taketh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Unfortunate that zlib died. MS Edge TTS only works with html and pdf, zlib basically let me have any textbook I needed in school read aloud to me as a pdf (janky, but it gets the job done). In particular it really falls apart with math textbooks, but eh.

~ I've rambled too much, back to homework now ~

Oh great notepad of the lake, what is your wisdom?

"Social media does not make people stupid. It just makes stupid people more visible."

In my experience, interesting ringtones are mostly just used for alarms & reminders. A classic being Chop Suey by System of a Down as your wake up alarm.

Here's the thing, where I live (Canada) spam calls have become so bad that (unless you're in my contacts already) I almost never answer the phone. The scams aren't even in English most of the time :/

Actually it's filtered so that only 3 or so of my contacts get through the dnd.

*Scheduled calls / expected calls from specific companies are my one exception.

Ran butter smooth on my old pixel 2 phone using Firefox.

They cleared up this concern in their blog post: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/01/10/our-response-to-improba...

Does anyone know of any cases where this new clause was used to shut down existing games using the unity runtime in their servers? This ToS change has been around for about a month so I figured that there might have been previous activity.

I have a hard time believing these troll accounts had a significant impact on anyone's voting decions. Dumb meme, but seems like an over reaction.

For some reason this was also a breaking point for me. I've switched to Firefox and Duck Duck Go. It's a small thing, but boy do you start to feel like a second rate citizen fast. The state of extensions on Firefox is a mess. I can get the usual privacy extensions easily enough, but things like using media keys to control videos playing in the back ground. Or how in the phone app of Firefox you need to pull up the side menu to refresh instead of just pulling the page down. It's all small stuff, but it adds up.

But despite this, and the lower quality search results of DDG, I'm still going to push forward with degooglifying my stuff. But I'm in deep. Drive, keep, Gmail, photos, hell I'm even typing this on a pixel 2. It's gonna take a while.

It's been surprisingly difficult finding a good replacement for keep. If anyone has suggestions I'm open. I'll probably make the shift to protonmail to replace Gmail. Not sure what do to about drive at this time.

The issue is that Google's stuff has always been very reliable and performance (well performant enough). For example I'll often ping Google.com for a network test. Google.com is never down, it's always my hardware, or my ISP, never Google.

Im just rambling at this point, but I think somewhere in there is a point about reliability, ease of use, and security that makes Google's products so compelling. Hence why they'll be able to get away with privacy issues like this.

Market is EXTEMELY saturated for many genres. Metroidvania games are one of the most saturated right now. Feel bad for the guy, but I think he should take his existing tech and experiment with different game modes, or game mutators and see if he can discover some cool experiences that will make his game stand out from the crowd. I'm not saying this will guarantee success, but staying the course on such a saturated genre and not doing something radically different seems like a bad strategy.

I'm mostly indifferent, but would like point out that MS has managed their dev products decently well. (At least the ones I use)

I prefer mailbird anyways

Gifs in the sidebar, 10/10