Spyke

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android

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Sync for Lemmy is now available for everyone

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I left Reddit because Spez is an asshole and he killed third-party API access (which, btw, impacted more than just clients - many useful bots/scripts died too as a result of this change).

For many of us, Sync was Reddit, and killing Sync basically killed Reddit for us, but now that Sync is back (for Lemmy), many of us are more than happy to pay a subscription to support the dev, instead of supporting Reddit. ljdawson is an awesome developer who actually listens to his users and updates his apps regularly. If you don't want to support him and/or use a different app, that's your call of course, but for fans of Sync, it's like coming back home after a long time and getting that feeling of "there's no place like home".

privacy

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Got tracked down for my school reunion

I have a Google Alert set up, so I get notified in case my name pops up on the web. A month after I joined a new company, I got an alert - turned out that their internal directory page was exposed to the public web. I was pretty livid - all this time I was proud of maintaining good anonymity, looking up my name never returned anything meaningful on Google. So I complained to my boss about this, and he said it was actually a bug/misconfiguration - which they were already aware of, but didn't bother fixing it because no one complained. I was super pissed and made it very clear that it was a violation of my privacy and I wanted it taken down ASAP. Thankfully my boss was understanding and got it fixed. Then I had to report the page to Google. It took a while, but it was finally gone from the search results.

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Who else foresees environmental problems with this later down the line?

Microsoft are looking at putting datacenters under the ocean

Um, no they're not. That article you linked is from 2018, and the experiment concluded in 2020. They pulled the data center out, and concluded that whilst the experiment was successful, several challenges still remain (such as around repairs and maintenance, physical security and energy supply reliability), so they haven't toyed around with the idea since then.

Basically, Microsoft have no plans at all currently to put data centers under the ocean - unless you've got some insider knowledge.

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Linus Torvalds suggests disabling AMD's 'stupid' fTPM to solve a persistent stuttering issue | The problem affects Ryzen-based PCs running both Windows and Linux

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The thing is, Windows 11 doesn't even need TPM - it's just an arbitrary flag the installer looks for - which can easily be bypassed using a registry key - but MS have conveniently decided not to make a GUI for this, nor publicize that it can be bypassed by the end user.

All of this is just a conspiracy by Microsoft and it's OEM partners (mainly Intel) to generate more sales.

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"...is not supported in this browser", fuck you Discord

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Because Firefox is like a democracy, they prioritize work based on number of votes on issues/feature requests. The AudioEncoder API has literally just one vote, and the overall WebCodecs API that it's a part of only has five votes. This shows that there's very little demand for it, meaning very few sites actually use this (that or the vast majority of Firefox users don't use/need this feature). Why bother focusing your efforts on implementing something that most users don't care about? The higher priority things that most Firefox users care about is stuff like performance, and Mozilla have been making some good progress too on that front.

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Where can I find a signed Windows 7 image for VirtualBox?

Have you tried installing MTGO using Lutris? Apparently it works fine, but you'll need some tweaks. The key is to use windowed mode, disable music and card animations:

Runner options: -Use the latest version of lutri-proton if it's not the default. -Use windowed (virtual desktop) mode and the display resolution of whatever device you are playing on. This was the biggest fix of most problems for me with stuff related to proper rendering of windows. -All else is default from Lutris install

System options: -Uncheck restrict number of cores -Disable desktop effects -All else is default from Lutris install

In-game options: -Disable or silence music and Uncheck play client startup music -Disable card animations(summoning sickness and foil treatment)

I've also found that it is always better to close the program using the Stop button on Lutris, there's a bug where sometimes if you close out of the game via the Close button in the window, it will not properly stop the game, and will prevent starting the game back up again. I also tend to start the game in Lutris instead of via a desktop shortcut.

https://old.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/101262d/psa_mtgo_on_steam_deck/j9bqck9/

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The World’s Last Internet Cafes

Here in Wellington, New Zealand, we have a very successful and bustling cyber café called Respawn, which is one of those rare cyber cafés that actually also offers food - and some pretty decent food at that (they're even on Uber Eats!). In addition to PCs, they have all the major consoles, racing rigs and even VR gear too, so there's plenty of reasons to go there since not everyone has the room (or budget) for a racing rig or VR at home. They also host regular events like mechanical keyboard meetups, eSports tournaments and so on. And although all my friends have a decent PC/console, we're now spread all over the country, so whenever we have a get-together, we meet up at cafés like Respawn and have a LAN party like the good ol' days. My friends and I are grateful cafés like this still exist.

Respawn's success shows us that cyber cafés still have a place and can make it work, they just need to diversify and offer reasons for folks to come back.

android

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Is Tidal/Deezer worth it?

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And even if you have the equipment, whether your ears can discern the difference is debatable. And even if you can discern the difference, whether it's a noticeable improvement is another matter. And even if is a noticeable improvement, that doesn't necessarily mean your enjoyment of the music is any higher - sure, you may be able to make out some additional instruments or some nuances you didn't pick up before, but that doesn't mean the emotional response that's invoked in you is any higher. At least in my case, I found that in the end, it didn't really matter - the enjoyment that I got from listening to lossless audio via audiophile gear wasn't really much different from the enjoyment I got from HQ streaming music via regular gear. At least, the inconvenience wasn't really worth the gains.

IMO, music is about emotions and mood. Some of my fondest memories of music can be traced back to crackly radio on a cheap 2-in-1 set and making mixtapes, or catching the FM waves whilst driving and discovering some legit good tracks, many of which are still part of my regular playlists.

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How to get past a paywall to read an article ...

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I've never come across a single paywalled news site that was worth subscribing to. Pretty much 100% of the paywalled content I've ever come across were all some random links I found via Google or Reddit (and now Lemmy). It wasn't like I was particularly trying to visit that site and read all of their articles or something. Also, just so we're clear, I'm not saying that I don't to pay/donate/subscribe to stuff - I subscribe to Spotify because I use it daily and it's worth it, I subscribe to Sync because I use it daily and it's worth it etc.

But most of these paywalled news sites (or some random scientific paper published on some random science journal) isn't something that I'm really interested in pursuing a subscription for, just because I stumbled upon some random link out of curiosity - so if they think that I'll subscribe just because of one random article... that's just shitty business.

Ideally, they should just let me view that random article for free and set a cookie (could be server-side) and say "hey, your IP address has viewed three articles on this site already, so we think you like our stuff so, you should really consider subscribing if you want to read more content!". I mean, that makes sense. I'd then go, "yep, this site has quality content and the type of content I'd like to read, so it's worth subscribing to".

But no, instead they're like "heeey random visitor, you just stumbled upon this random link and hey guess what, you need an entire subscription just to read one ducking article! Of course, asking you to pay for a whole month's worth of subscription makes total sense, and isn't going to put you off, right?"