Luc

Wow. It apparently took me 32 years to notice The Count has more than one meaning o.o Thanks for making that point clear to a fellow Dutch speaker xD

Age of Empires 1 is old enough, but does one “use” it?

It’s got a unique co-op feature where you actally control the same people and can divide tasks (not like other RTS where you can play in a team but still need to do everything yourself, with any resource sharing being a manual (or even taxed) action in a menu somewhere), so my gf and I are sticking with this game. I think it’s the only game we’ve been playing consistently for our 10 years together. Crap, did I say playing? I meant using! It’s a relationship tool. Try it today! xD

I let them know that I was cool with transcription software being used as long as it was installed locally on their machines, but I did not want a third party online app having access to recorded sessions for the purposes of transcription. They didn’t take issue with it.

A cynical part in me thinks they’ll just have it “locally installed” in the same way that Firefox is locally installed (doesn’t mean the meaningful part runs locally), and that no third party has access because the servers just don’t show stuff from other tenants even though the server operator could theoretically see all. It’s not like the medical people necessarily know better if their vendor answered the concerns in this manner

One way to find out for lay people might be to turn off WiFi, or disconnect the network cable, and see if it still works — in case you’re in a position where the doc might seem willing to do such a 30-second experiment (if they haven’t already tried this in the past themselves). Doesn’t mean it doesn’t get uploaded when internet is reconnected (e.g. for backups), but that is much harder to check, and if the vendor already made sure the processing is all local then it’s probably okay and not being sold off as training or insurance data

Kudos for reading the terms of service and raising your concerns with them! So long as some of us keep doing that, the privacy of people who don’t know about this sort of thing is also better-protected. Thank you :)

“I’m not sure”

It’s rarely all bad. Then that would be simply the answer. The problem is that it’s often complicated (not the emotional capacity of a teaspoon, for those who get that reference) and idk how to summarise that into a single feeling so I literally don’t know what the answer is and so that’s when you get an idk from me

If it’s just a pleasantry by some english person (in my language this isn’t a standard question a stranger or customer support will ask you) then I’ll probably pick a random euphemism

From Germans I’ve learned that they say “muss”, meaning must. Like, you must get on with life but not because you seek out what you’re going through but because life doesn’t stop. At least that’s my working understanding of this deceptively simple word

bit niche but as a big streetcomplete fan I should have tried SCEE much sooner. So for any Openstreetmap contributors still holding out, that’s a small recommendation https://f-droid.org/packages/de.westnordost.streetcomplete.expert

Breezy Weather is so pretty! I didn’t know we had such beautiful FOSS software out there https://f-droid.org/packages/org.breezyweather

WebLibre I’m just trying out still, but I love that someone is extending Firefox on mobile https://f-droid.org/packages/eu.weblibre.gecko

Germans might appreciate Bahn Vorhersage. It’s not magic, it won’t know when your train will actually be there, but it helps planning trips on unfamiliar routes by giving you a much better idea of how much buffer time to plan. I actually prefer the webapp version here: https://bahnvorhersage.de/ (shout-out to @AskewLord@piefed.social downthread ;) )

I recently rediscovered UsageDirect for seeing how much time I spend in different apps. It’s not really focused on this “spend less time on your phone” thing (you’re old enough to decide that for yourself), it just shows you data that Android already collects anyway — and I love data! https://f-droid.org/packages/godau.fynn.usagedirect

Most of these, I discovered via f-droid’s new feed, so that’s also a rec! Even the Bahnvorhersage website I found that way via their app ^^. I just love “more free stuff”! https://www.stickycomics.com/computer-update/ :)

Be sure you didn’t miss @jtrek@startrek.website’s Too Good To Go recommendation downthread. It’s about as commercial and nonfoss as it gets, but the end result is cheap food that would otherwise have been thrown away (I sometimes ask the store people what happens with the rest, only rarely is there some partial collaboration with a food bank type of place). Used to simply be a website to match people and restaurants iirc when I used it in Finland; now it requires an american credit card and anti-fraud algorithms magic to get anything but… still worth it

So share some webapps!

I wasn’t meaning for it to be calling out so much as attempted humorous way of misunderstanding / literally interpreting your post 😅

I’m still not fully sure what you mean though. Does “root” mean VPS here (a system which you have root access to), and “tld” a domain name or even the DNS server for it?

Thank you! I’m going to take a look :)

Which root server letter did you get assigned?

The Martian is my favorite book and the movie was surprisingly close! Very well made.

Do you have recommendations for a fellow fan? I haven’t seen the middle two you mentioned, are either of them similar in style? Like in the nerdy, clever ideas, positive vibes, collaboration, and plausible physics type of way

I have Toothless on a t-shirt and so few people recognise it it’s crazy. Not even the kids these days! I love that character so much

Primer. Twice before and once after reading an explanation

Fuel, electric

I’ll also take autonomous. No, a horse with umbrella doesn’t count!!

You might be interested in this guy’s reviews (sorry for the big tech link, I’m not aware that the information is available anywhere else): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChNWxrTlmh4IRSevon1X93g “The quantified scientist”. Posts a lot of videos but these kinds of devices, comparing them against each other or between versions sometimes

E.g. Whoop MG 5 vs 4 heart rate tracking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SzUDTBK-i0

My school’s motto was “think bigger”

Who said anything about just one bird? :D

Having a school of birds lift you off to work on Halloween would be a thing I’d splurge on

How can you test drive a stick shift without knowing how to drive one? Didn’t you have a driver’s license?

I have no idea besides that was a stick shift with 4 wheels. Is this something people normally care about?

It’s not trying to constantly charge though. Look at the power draw of any phone, there’s a cut-off point where the battery management system says “enough is enough”. I recently noticed in own testing that this lies beyond 100% for a few phones that I tried, but it’s very clear when it e.g. drops from drawing 0.2A to 0.03 and it scales with things like turning on the screen or running a game. It isn’t charging then, it’s just driving the device. If the charger isn’t sufficient, it’ll draw from the battery and, when that gets below BMS’ threshold, will charge again. Many modern phones can also be set to 80% to reduce battery stress further. The types of batteries in smartphones cannot safely go without a BMS

One would have to actually do a study to know for sure but it works the same in laptops and there we know people leave them on chargers routinely, sometimes also for the decade that they use the device. My experience with that is that some batteries degrade rapidly, others seem good as the day they were created, seemingly not correlated with how you treated them. But my sample size is too low; of course from science we know that it does matter. Just not so much that it’s a matter of months (much less weeks) before it fails. The odds of it failing in your pocket in the 3 years before are not much lower than it failing in the 3 years subsequently on a charger, especially if you don’t let it get hot (good ventilation)

Eight-axis Milling Rig?