For those that didn't use it, Xfire was basically a combination of messenger, voice chat, and a server browser for games back in the day.

As far as I know, it was also one of the earliest ways to stream your gameplay for others to watch. I remember trying it out years before Twitch was around.

Vultr posted their response to the concerns here - https://www.vultr.com/news/a-note-about-vultrs-terms-of-service/

The portion of the ToS that people were worried about had been in place for years and had nothing to do with server intellectual property. They are removing it to avoid future confusion.

I don't disagree that it was poorly worded, but the amount of people jumping to the worst possible conclusions on this is concerning. What happened to Hanlon's Razor?

On a related note... I went to cancel a membership a few weeks back, and the site displayed a message "you don't have an active membership to cancel". I thought it was strange, so I checked out the network requests being made, and turned out the cancel API call was getting blocked for "security reasons". Nothing else on the site was blocked for me, just the cancellation endpoint.

I opened a ticket, and it took them nearly 2 weeks to respond, and there was zero acknowledgement on why cancellation would be blocked.

Not sure if it's a purposeful dark pattern, but it sure seems like it!

I use this installable web app for cleaning extra parameters from links - https://linkcleaner.app/

Adds a share target to Android once you install it as well, makes it easy to send links to. Open source too!

Ah yeah, I forgot about Hamachi! It was great for games that only supported LAN multiplayer.

I'm a huge fan of Netdata, very configurable and monitors just about anything you could want. Great interface and alerts too - https://www.netdata.cloud/

Thanks for your work on converting Sync to use Lemmy! I've tried just about every App for Lemmy, and Sync seems to certainly be the most feature-filled one so far.

As far as pricing goes, I don't see a problem with experimenting on price and seeing what people are willing to pay. To the people saying $20 is too much... we are talking about removing the main source of revenue in the app, forever. That's a pretty tough thing to figure out the 'right' price for, and might take some experimentation. If I was the developer, you can bet I'd start the price high though, rather than too low.

Kurzesagt themselves made a video breaking down where their funding comes from as well, worth a watch - https://youtu.be/1x-i9z617z4

For what it's worth, they claim one of their conditions for receiving money is complete editorial independence.

Sounds like what you want is some form of webhooks that your customers can sign up for, that will send out when the reports are complete.

There are quite a few ways to do that. One I've looked at recently is Convoy, for setting up a user-facing webhook Dashboard -

https://getconvoy.io/

By using webhooks for delivery, then your actual configuration / viewing of schedules just becomes standard API calls.

An ultralisk was the first thing that I thought of.

Interesting article, thanks for sharing!

I've run a (nowhere near as popular) public API for just about 10 years now. Definitely relate to the bit where he mentions people simply retrying the same request when they get an error. 😂

I get a lot of students using the API for learning projects, which is great! But it also means my rate limiting is more often protecting my server from accidental infinite loops, rather than anything purposely abusive.

You could then call a friend or family member and ask them to check on it.

This is exactly what I had in mind.

Fridge is probably one of the few things I'm hesitant to put on a smart outlet, just because chance of something going wrong with it.

I'm actually blown away by how good of a 3D Printer you can get for ~$200 now. Huge improvement from just a few years ago.

I can never tell if comments like this are a joke. Starfield has tons of issues, don't get me wrong, but I'm still playing it because I'm having fun. Why put 80 hours into something if you aren't enjoying it?

Personally if I'm not having fun in a game, I'd just stop after a few hours.

Worth noting that this should not affect you if you are only using tunnels (no DNS entries / open ports).

Started reading Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. I really like the style of writing, so much detail into the main character's mind.

It is also impressive just how relevant the topics are today, for a book written back in 1993 (climate change, wealth disparity, etc.). It's really fascinating (scary?) to see what the author thought the U.S. would look like in 2024 and onwards.

I was thinking of something that would be considered futuristic to an average person today. So, maybe something uncommon, with impressive capabilities, but still affordable?

Not sure if many items fit that criteria, but was curious if any!

Right? When I was a kid I would specifically enjoy the "challenge" of trying to beat something over and over. Nowadays though... I just like playing a game for the experience. I still like feeling "progression", so things go from difficult to easy as my character advances. But having to repeat something multiple times? Eh... just not my jam anymore.

It was definitely ahead of its time! Not really sure why it faded away, I guess pressure from Steam (pun intended), and games moving to private in-game server browsers? Along with many other options for voice chat.

Love the swipe actions! This might already be planned, but one thing I've seen with other Apps is haptic feedback during swipe, as you go from no action to action #1 to action #2.

Keep up the great updates!