gerowen 1 month ago • 100%
I don't understand how people do things like shopping on their phone. I mean if you're only buying one or two items, sure, but if you're doing grocery pickup at Walmart or something how do you even function on a screen that small? You can't do any kind of comparison without flipping back and forth between multiple tabs.
Mobile is fine for reading articles, instant messaging, etc., but there are a lot of things that are absolutely better on a laptop.
gerowen 3 months ago • 100%
I've thought about it; but with a wife and two kids it would be difficult if not impossible to pick up and move somewhere else and start all over.
gerowen 3 months ago • 88%
They are regulated, but there's a lot of breakdowns in the system. People passing background checks who shouldn't, prior offenders passing background checks because local cops didn't report them to the feds, etc. The DC Navy Yard shooter years back literally had fired a weapon into his neighbor's apartment before and still passed a background check to buy the weapons he committed the shooting with. I also think if you're a parent and you leave your weapon accessible by your children, and they go shoot up their school, you should be held at least partially liable. As somebody who is former military, the civilian population gets away with a hell of a lot with regards to firearms. No federally mandated training standards, concealed carry licenses are haphazard and go state by state, and not all states recognize other states' permits, no federally mandated storage requirements, etc. When I was in the military, if I wanted to go target practice on base with my personal weapons I had to register them with the provost marshal on base, keep the weapons and ammo separate in locked boxes out of my reach while driving to the range, etc. And if one weapon went missing the entire base was locked down; gates closed and nobody in or out until it was located. Civilians get by with way too much.
I think a lot of our problem is loose or missing standards at the federal level, which leaves each individual state to kind of make things up as they go along and not communicate properly with feds when things go wrong.
gerowen 4 months ago • 100%
Because they're not the "default". Most folks stick with whatever comes on their device by default; Edge on Windows, Safari on MacOS/iOS, Chrome on Android, etc. Anything beyond just picking it up and turning it on requires forethought and effort, which most users don't care about.
gerowen 6 months ago • 100%
Just one or two, and it's been quite a while. One of them, I don't remember which, it was because of some anti cheat that caused the issue.
gerowen 6 months ago • 100%
If I can't get it working on Linux I get a refund. For the past two years my Steam year in reviews have showed 100% of my play time was on either Steam Deck or desktop Linux.
gerowen 6 months ago • 100%
Fedora got hit too.
gerowen 6 months ago • 100%
I remember that! I had Unreal Tournament 2004 and it technically had a native Linux version but it wasn't on the CD. You had to extract most of the files from the CD and go download the Linux executable file from the unreal website to drop into the installation folder.
gerowen 6 months ago • 100%
Proton is just Wine from Valve. They add their own fixes and patches and whatnot and have an "experimental" branch you can try with games that don't work right away, but it's just Wine. Everything Valve does to Proton eventually makes it way back upstream to Wine proper. One reason Valve may not make it available for MacOS themselves is because they're basing their SteamOS on Linux, and while MacOS and Linux are both Unix "like", MacOS was/is more based on BSD, so the system calls may not always line up or work exactly the same when translating them. I do think however that Proton, or a modified version of it at least, is what Apple's game development kit thingy leverages.
gerowen 6 months ago • 100%
After Steam officially released its native Linux client I played Half Life 1, 2 and "Brutal Legend" because they all had native Linux ports before proton was a thing. Before that I remember playing games like Sauerbraten (quake like fps), Battle for Wesnoth (my wife and I still play this together), Frozen Bubble, LBreakout2 and several other Linux native games.
gerowen 6 months ago • 100%
I'm using CalyxOS and it's pre-installed as a system app, so this seems like something that's being built in at the AOSP level of development.
gerowen 8 months ago • 100%
The general consensus I've always heard is that if you have a deficiency, taking a vitamin supplement can absolutely help. If you're eating a balanced diet and blood work looks good at the doctor, then vitamins won't do much because you'll just pee out all the excess.
gerowen 8 months ago • 100%
Edited my original comment for accuracy.
gerowen 8 months ago • 100%
If I go to a buffet style restaurant like Golden Corral where there's a long table full of precooked items, I'm gonna go up to that table and rummage around and fill my own plate, 😜
gerowen 8 months ago • 100%
Thanks for clarifying. I hadn't actually used that particular feature so I must have misunderstood the way it was worded in the app.
gerowen 8 months ago • 100%
For most of my shopping, which takes place at our local Walmart (I live in the US), I actually really like using the self-checkout. Now when we make a big grocery run, having a person there makes things easier because they can scan and bag, I can unload things onto the belt and my wife can pull bags off the little turnstile thing and put them back in our cart, but most of the time I'm just running in to grab a handful of items so when I leave I can just walk up to the kiosk, scan my stuff, scan the QR code with the Walmart app on my phone and walk out the door. It'll auto pay with the privacy card I attached to my Walmart account and give me a digital receipt to show if somebody wants to see it at the door. They even have a thing now where you can pay a monthly subscription for "Walmart+" where you can scan and pay for your items as you shop.
gerowen 9 months ago • 66%
Governments should not depend on social media for vital communications, period.
gerowen 9 months ago • 90%
Google may not be showing an "AI" tagged answer, but they're using AI to automatically generate web pages with information collated from outside sources to keep you on Google instead of citing and directing you to the actual sources of the information they're using.
Here's an example. I'm on a laptop with a 1080p screen. I went to Google (which I basically never use, so it shouldn't be biased for or against me) and did a search for "best game of 2023". I got no actual results in the entire first screen. Instead, their AI or other machine learning algorithms collated information from other people and built a little chart for me right there on the search page and stuck some YouTube (also Google) links below that, so if you want to read an article you have to scroll down past all the Google generated fluff.
I performed the exact same search with DuckDuckGo, and here's what I got.
And that's not to mention all the "news" sites that have straight up fired their human writers and replaced them with AI whose sole job is to just generate word salads on the fly to keep people engaged and scrolling past ads, accuracy be damned.
gerowen 9 months ago • 100%
I'm on my laptop so I thought I would elaborate on my first comment to give you things to watch out for if/when you update. I've been hosting mine with the zip file manually installed with my own Apache/PHP/MySQL/MariaDB setup for ages now without issue. It's been rock solid except for, like I said, the occasional changes required to take advantage of new features such as adding new indices to the database or installing an additional php addon. Here's the things that I noticed with updating to 28.
- The 3 dot/ellipses menu was missing in the web interface and was replaced with dedicated buttons for "Download", "Add to Favorites" and "Delete". Shift clicking was also broken. This meant that when I, for example, take a lot of photos for a holiday, I can't use the web interface to select a large range of multiple files and then move them all from "InstantUpload" into a more permanent album. I either had to use the mobile app, or do them one at a time. The ellipses menu, along with the options to bulk "move/copy" have been added back since then with the *.1 update, but shift clicking in the web interface to select a range of files is still broken.
- The "Retention" app, which is listed as a "Featured" app doesn't function any more. I used it to automatically delete backups of my Signal messenger, files in the "InstantUpload" folder that were over a year old, etc. You can enable it, but it doesn't actually work and just throws errors in the log file, which is now reported in the "Overview" portion of the "Administration" page with a note of "X number of errors since somedate", and prevents you getting the green checkmark. It's probably safe to assume that other apps will also have issues because I had half a dozen get automatically disabled with the update.
- Occasionally when I use the web interface to move or copy a file, I'll get an error message that the operation failed. Sometimes this is true, sometimes it's not and the operation actually succeeded. If it ends up being true and the move did actually fail, doing it again results in a successful move.
It seems like they've made some substantial under-the-hood changes to the user interface that shouldn't have been shipped to the "stable" channel. It's not completely broken, it "is" usable, especially after they restored my bulk move/copy button, but I still can't use the Retention app, at least last time I looked, so I've literally got daily cron scripts to check those folders for old files and delete them, then trigger an occ files:scan of the affected directories to keep the Nextcloud database in sync with the changes. This however, bypasses the built-in trash bin so I can't recover the files in the event of an issue. I actually considered rolling back to 27 for a bit, but decided against it, so if I were you, I would stick with 27 for a while and keep an ear to the ground regarding any issues people are having that are or aren't getting fixed in 28.
gerowen 9 months ago • 93%
While the individuals have a responsibility to double check things, I think Google is a big part of this. They're rolling "AI" into their search engine, so people are being fed made up, inaccurate bullshit by a search engine that they've trusted for decades.
gerowen 9 months ago • 100%
I've hosted mine for years on my own bare metal Debian/Apache install and 28 is the first update that has been a major pain. I've had the occasional need to install a new package to enable a new feature, or needed to add new/missing indices to the database, but the web interface literally tells you how to do those things, so they're not hard.
28 though broke several of the "featured" apps that I use regularly, like "Retention". It also introduced some questionable UI changes that they had to fix with the recent .1 update. I'll get occasional errors when trying to move or delete files in the web interface and everything. 28 really feels like beta software, even though we're a point release in and I got it from the "stable" update channel.
gerowen 9 months ago • 95%
I've been using DuckDuckGo for years now and it works surprisingly well for me. 9 times out of 10 I find exactly what I'm looking for in the first couple of results. Brave Search is another independent alternative you might look into.
AI generated garbage seems to be cluttering up places like Google.
gerowen 9 months ago • 90%
They're beginning to federate with Mastodon, though at least so far it's only developers and employees at Meta. If it becomes an issue later though I'll just block that whole domain from appearing in my feed.
gerowen 9 months ago • 100%
I think a big part of it, here in the US, is besides all the post WW2 sentiment, a lot of folks here in the bible belt literally think they are God's chosen people, and so whatever they do is right by God, no matter how terrible. I recently showed up for jury duty and was speaking to a lady there about her son who had joined the Marine Corps. and thought he might get deployed, and she said, I shit you not, "At least he'll be fighting for God's people".
I've seen antisemitism. I've been in online communities that slowly devolved into rat caricatures and conspiracy theories about how Jews are out to destroy the world. So I know that modern antisemitism persists and is a thing to watch out for. But it's not antisemitic to admit that Zionist Israel is butchering innocent people because they want to claim all of Palestine for themselves, and that the west is too weak willed to do anything about it for fear of being called antisemitic, or going against "God's chosen people". That's not antisemitism, it's an objective, observable fact.
gerowen 9 months ago • 100%
I'm not particularly familiar with Unifi products, but I'll throw out some thoughts in the hopes that they are useful.
What I do for Wireguard access to my home network is I have a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian and I used "PiVPN" to set up my own Wireguard server. It automatically sets up all the appropriate firewall rules and everything.
On the note of you being able to access one feature but not another after disabling remote access, it could be that your Wireguard clients are being detected as "remote" clients based on their IP scheme. For example, my LAN IP scheme is 10.1.1.X. My Wireguard clients however, aside from being routed through my PiHole, have a different IP scheme of 10.208.192.X . Therefore, even after setting up PiVPN with the proper firewall routing, I had to adjust the firewall rules on my other devices to allow incoming connections from that IP range. You may have to do something similar.
gerowen 9 months ago • 97%
We're all paying attention, the problem is that those who vehemently support him just literally don't care and will vote for him anyway. He wasn't wrong when he made the comment that he could shoot somebody in the middle of the street and get away with it. He literally orchestrated and attempted coups and got people killed because he threw a temper tantrum and couldn't stand the thought of not getting his way.
gerowen 1 year ago • 87%
Signal set the industry standard for encryption and privacy, and it's what I tend to point people towards. The one down-side is that it is still tied to your phone number, so solutions like Element/Matrix or XMPP with OMEMO might be a little better for some use cases. My wife, kids and I use Conversations(.)im for our intra-family chats and use Signal for talking to everybody else.
gerowen 1 year ago • 100%
She straight up admitted that she was essentially a sock puppet CEO and would offer no friction to anything Musk wanted.
gerowen 1 year ago • 100%
He's impulsive and doesn't know when to shut up. I got the distinct impression that, initially, he was absolutely not serious about buying Twitter. It was a joke/jest. BUT, because his antics affected their stock price he actually got forced into the purchase and now he's desperately trying to figure out how to make the purchase worth what he actually paid, which is fine and all, except he seems to be leading by impulse, not by consensus or logic. He wakes up in the morning, has some random ass idea and implements it without any oversight. Even his new CEO straight up admitted that she is basically a straw man CEO who will offer no friction to anything Elon wants to do.
gerowen 1 year ago • 100%
I hate phillips. It seems like their only purpose for existing is to strip out so that you can never remove them.
Personally, any time I have a project, I always opt for torx (star). The screwdriver bits for them are not tapered so they don't push themselves back out of the screw-head (unlike phillips), so they tend to stay in place and grip much better. It's a lot harder to screw up a torx screw or bit than a phillips one.
gerowen 1 year ago • 95%
Not sure about what carrier you use or what device you use, but I'm on AT&T using a Pixel 6a with CalyxOS, which is just de-googled Android, and on Android if you accidentally swipe away an amber alert notification you can find it again by going to:
Settings -> Safety & emergency -> Wireless emergency alerts -> Emergency alert history
But your point still stands, governments and public institutions really need to stop relying on privately owned and operated social media platforms for posting stuff like this. If they want to use a social platform to publish alerts, they would be much better off standing up their own Mastodon instance that is "just" for those alerts. People could follow those accounts if they want, and those institutions wouldn't be subject to the whims of overpaid unpredictable man children.
gerowen 1 year ago • 100%
Well for one Lemmy is open source and federated. It's not one site, so even if the developers get tired of fooling with it, the servers don't depend on them and other people could take over development without express permission from the original developers.
gerowen 1 year ago • 100%
I had one a while back and it was literally just a round of antibiotics. It's not some invasive, complicated procedure that only affects women. That insurance is stupid.
gerowen 1 year ago • 100%
I've been running Debian stable for years now on everything. My laptop runs it, my home server runs it headless with no GUI installed, my gaming desktop runs it and even my kids run it without issue. If we need a newer version of some desktop app I just get the Flatpak. It's pretty great and the good thing is that it's predictable. Once it's up and running I don't have to worry about things breaking because of an update.
gerowen 1 year ago • 100%
My home server started as an HP Pavilion P6803w desktop PC. A decade later it has a better case, better power supply, more RAM, better CPU, more drives and runs Debian instead of Windows 7. The only original part is the motherboard.
gerowen 1 year ago • 100%
Forwarding a port only forwards traffic to the device you specify. Be prepared for plenty of port scans though. If you have internal system email set up your Fail2Ban will be sending you daily messages. I get 5 or 6 a day from automated port scans triggering Fail2Ban.
gerowen 1 year ago • 100%
I am gonna buy it and I've used Bottles to set up the Blizzard game launcher. I already use it to play Overwatch so I'll just install Diablo the same way.
gerowen 1 year ago • 100%
I'm using CalyxOS's default launcher, but on regular Android I pretty much always use Nova launcher.
gerowen 1 year ago • 100%
Less than 10 minutes.
Facebook is a cesspool. I run a small "tech news and tips" page that local friends/family follow and where I'll post little tidbits. Today I made a post about "compartmentalizing" your online life and I didn't think and included the word "hack" in the post. It's just comment after comment of crap like this.